I am a little freaked out after visiting Boots today. There are really big posters of a mother and daughter hanging from the ceiling. The mother's face is obscured and the daughter is smiling into the camera. I had to look twice to confirm it but it's true -- the girl looks almost exactly like me!
I was in the fifth floor kitchenette at work, watching Dave fill up his plastic cup of water. When he finished he turned to me, expectant and uncertain. Clearly, he sensed the 'I want to say something to you' vibe of my loitering.
Indeed, there was something I wanted to ask. I have spent the past year watching people fill up plastic cups of water in the kitchen. People would take a plastic cup, fill it, drink from it, then very conscientiously place it into the plastic recycling bin. Meanwhile, two shelves of perfectly reusable ceramic mugs hovered above the filtered water tap.
My company is full of environmentally friendly people, yet despite recurring requests, the stacked column of plastic cups continues to be replenished.
I wanted to ask someone about this. Today was my lucky day because Dave is a nice Englishman and probably wouldn't be offended.
'Dave,' I said. 'Is there some reason you use a plastic cup instead of a mug? Is it...' I paused, '...a cultural thing?'
Dave looked surprised, then lifted up his cup of water and gazed at it for five seconds.
'I don't know,' he began. 'I guess I wouldn't drink water from a mug. I never thought about it.'
So he thought about it. 'I think it is a cultural thing. I feel like I need to drink water from a clear cup.'
Now this was something that hadn't occurred to me! I had speculated to myself that there was something wrong with having a handle on the cup, or that mugs were too big for water.
'Oh! Thank you for that,' I said.
Later, I tried to corroborate my findings with Chris, another Englishman.
'I use a mug for water,' Chris said. 'But I can see why others might not want to. I think it's because mugs are sometimes stained. When you have tea or coffee, then you don't mind because you can't see. But because water is transparent, the staining probably puts people off.'
I got into the lift with two men from my office floor. The lift went down a level and two other men got in. Looking idly around, I noticed with a start that all four men were wearing pink shirts.
'Gee!' I thought. 'This fashion for pink shirts really has become a permanent fixture.'
As the lift neared the ground floor, I was mollified when I figured out that one of the men was actually wearing a white shirt. It had only looked pink because of the pink light being reflected off our colleagues.
Celebrity sighting!
I was having lunch at a Mediterranean restaurant when I spotted Jamie Oliver crossing Goodge Street. He didn't see me, so I'm in the lead.
My bus home was going thankfully quick at the tail end of peak hour. Then luck ran out -- we hit a traffic plug five minutes from home. Another red double decker bus (with the same route number as my bus, in fact) had stopped diagonally across the road and was choking traffic.
I went back to my newspaper but was then disturbed by passengers leaning over me to look out my window. I looked up at them, then followed their eyes out the window too. There, lying in the middle of the road was a cyclist and a bike. His fluorescent yellow jacket was splattered with blood.
As we inched past the unmoving man and the cops, I saw that there were still people on the immobile double decker. They, too, were gaping out their windows onto the road.
When I arrived at work this morning, there was something wrong about the three lifts that take people up and down our seven-storey building.
'You’ll have to wait a while if you want the lift,' the concierge said. 'We’ve called the maintenance staff. They should be on their way to fix it.'
Above the center lift, the arrow was flashing and the number 19 popped up.
'What’s floor 19?' the man next to me exclaimed.
'Well, they were doing a lot of building last night,' said the concierge.
There are at least two interesting things in Melbourne.
A giant ball of Calvin Klein denim jeans at Chadstone, the fashion capital.
Liquid kiwifruit. Need I say more?
Damjan and I went to the British Museum on Saturday and also saw the musical Fame.
Damjan liked these teacups. No, we are not at Ikea -- these are procelain cups from China, made hundreds of years ago!
Our London eating style is called 'grazing'. When we see something that looks tasty, we buy a bit and eat it. Here I am at Leicester Square ('Lester') eating a pork bun from nearby Chinatown.
Fame was interesting enough. It had no plot, just some shallow characterisations of about eight students going through four years of high school at the New York School of Performing Arts. Once I let go of all expectations of a plot line, I enjoyed it more. The dancing was goodish, although not of the standard you should expect from a West End production. Maybe this is what you get from performers who are musical theatre generalists, rather than dance specialists.
There were three girls in front of us who were too enthusiastic with the cheering and the dancing and the clapping. I think they knew one of the performers.
This evening, I went for a walk through Midsummer Common. I walked through the warm summer air and light breeze, and felt peaceful and comfortable. The old Victorian buildings seemed hyperreal against the blue sky. The cloud streaks were white when I left home and soon, were tinged with the orange of sunset. I took a photo of all this with my mind.
Midsummer Common is dotted with oak trees. There is an especially expansive one near the river. As I walked towards it on the path to the river, something shimmered at me from its branches. I didn't have my glasses on so for the half minute it took for me to get near it, it was a shimmering, shiny red globe. Finally, when I was five metres away, I saw that someone had hung a red tinsel wreath from a slim looping branch.
It looked so pretty.
I took another mental photo.
Then it was time to go home.
I was thumbing through some careers materials and found this in a job ad: "We are particularly interested in individuals working towards a Bat Licence."
You can find the same Big Issue seller outside Sainsbury's in town almost every day. He keeps up a stream of drawling chatter, spruiking to a constant flow of shoppers who walk by without making eye contact. 'Big Issue, someone, anyone, buy your Big Issue here, only thirty to go, help out your fellow man, I've got thirty more copies then I can go home...'
With his experience, he could work as a spruiker for any retail store.
One weekend, Damjan and I were had popped into Sainsbury's for fruit. It was getting late and the Big Issue seller's monologue was still going: 'Only six more copies, buy your Big Issue, I need money to get drunk, I wish I didn't but it's true, buy your Big Issue, six copies to go...'
See Mike's Bikes in this photo? I was walking past the store on Wednesday at about 3 PM in the afternoon. Strangely, it was dark and quiet. When I reached the front door, the CLOSED sign was up. Very unusual.
A piece of white lined paper taped to the door explained it all. In black marker scrawl, the note said:
"Haven't been paid on time AGAIN. I'm going home. 1 PM."
It was 9 PM when Toria came into the lobby. The girls had assembled to discuss our evening plans. 'Hi girls,' Toria greeted us. 'You know, the boys are downstairs in the pool. In the jacuzzi, in fact. It looks very funny.'
'Really?' I laughed. 'Anyone got a camera? We should take a photo.'
Toria handed me her compact camera and we trooped downstairs to ogle.
We found Ian C, Abdel, Chris, Eskandar, Yap, Owen and Joe in a ring at the perimeter of the round spa. Duane was smack bang in the middle, like the hub of the strange bubbling wheel of engineering man-flesh.
I giggled like a schoolgirl and snapped two photos.
While Toria and I were loitering at the door to pool, Kiki rushed in.
'D5 to E7,' she called.
Duane rose a little out of the spa. He considered her announcement briefly, then said, 'H8 to E8.'
'H8 to E8,' Kiki repeated. She rushed back out. Toria and I followed her as she mumbled 'H8 to E8' all the way to the bar, where Arun and Markus were waiting in front of the chess board.
'H8 to E8,' Kiki told them.
'Ah! Told you he'd do that!' Arun exclaimed, as he shifted the piece.
'Tell Duane F4 to G5,' Markus said to Kiki.
She was about to run off when Arun said, 'Hold on! Let's think about this...'
I shook my head in amazement. I knew Duane was the National Jamaican Chess Champion and had already crushed the best chess players in Cambridge, Oxford and London. But playing chess through Kiki-graph while lounging in a jacuzzi? That is truly boggling.
Near my house, there are two hairdressing salons. They look very similar, with the same minimalist white and silver decor, fluorescent bottles of hair product in the window, skinny and stylish female hair artists waiting to do your bidding.
The difference, though, is that one salon is often full, with customers content to wait in line. The other one is almost always empty. The empty one only opened a month or two after I arrived in Cambridge in September.
Whenever I walk by the new salon, I feel sorry for it. They don't seem to have done anything wrong (after all, they are copying a successful recipe). Will it survive? Will it fail? I will monitor the situation and let you know.
I went to the TLC Ball at Winchester Guildhall 2007 on Saturday night. There were three rooms, one each for salsa, swing and Argentine tango. Besides feeling terrified about asking people to dance and feeling guilty about being scared, I quite enjoyed the ball (I used to be more confident but I haven't danced in a while).
But I do need to say this about the ball: I have never seen so many badly dressed women in my life. Everything was too tight and too shiny. Cleavage threatened to escape their alotted space. There were dress and trousers (!) slits in the wrong places. One girl I'm thinking of would have looked been fine -- if only she had stopped before wrapping her grandmother's aquamarine woollen shawl around her waist.
People say that the English have little sense of style. Was it any worse than I've seen in Australia? It must have been. I'm not much of a fashion watcher so I wouldn't have noticed unless there was evidence of extraordinary bad taste.
To be honest, it might have been an 'older women at a dance party' phenomenon and my pattern observations were skewed by a few badly dressed young women.
I was waiting for a friend in the surgery waiting room. Beside me, a mother was reading to her daughter on her lap. It must have been a kid's science book or something. I heard mum say 'lightning', 'space' and 'plants'.
The mother read, "Sometimes, after when it rains, there is a beautiful rainbow in the sky." The little girl bounced up and down. Mum asked her, "Do you know how rainbows are made?"
"Oh! Oh! I know this, I really do!" The girl was excited. She concentrated. "Mmmmm...I do know... After lots of rain, God made the rainbow to promise that it would never rain lots again!" She looked at mum, triumphant that she had remembered her lessons.
Mum laughed. "Er...yes. That's... one way to say it. Another way is that sunlight can be split up into lots of colours. Did you know that?"
"No!" the girl cried.
Mum ploughed on. "The light gets split up in the raindrops... But I wonder why the rainbow is curved?"
The look on the little girl's face -- it was like she had just been told Santa didn't exist.
I was sitting in the car at an intersection. There was a group of eight young people mucking around at the corner. One guy had a girl by the waist and swung her around. Some were chasing each other around, while others chatted.
They wore normal teenage clothing -- jeans, t-shirts, jumpers -- but it struck me they were all wearing the same shade of grey. It might have been a coincidence, that the eight of them were wearing white, denim blue, black and that grey. But there were no other colours.
Then I saw one of them bouncing a big yoga ball. It was the same shade of grey too.
There was an under-13 hiphop troupe dancing to 'My Humps' by the Black Eyed Peas. It's a catchy song with obnoxious lyrics. It was also very popular at Crown this year. This would have been the tenth time I'd heard it.
Something was badly wrong with their CD, though. It kept skipping. The girls were fantastic. They just kept going and even when it jumped a bar or two ahead, they readjusted their dancing to keep up.
Everyone was horrified at how badly it was going -- and the fact the DJ kept it going. It was torture. Usually in these situations, the DJ will stop the CD, clean it or find an alternative version, and put it back on so that the troupe can start again. But these girls kept ploughing through.
At the end, everyone cheered and clapped. It was the roar of sympathy and respect. The girls, so young and so professional, bowed and left the floor. Many of them were crying. It was the biggest competition of the year and their one chance to perform was ruined by something they couldn't control.
Later in the night, it was time for the under-16 hiphop event. According to the program, there were eleven troupes in this section. However, after the final troupe had danced, they announced a late-registered twelfth item. The under-13 troupe with the skipping CD had been allowed to dance up a level. They had a second chance!
Everyone cheered when they came onto the floor. The music streamed out clearly and they began their routine. One minute later, inexplicably, the music stopped. I whipped around to look at the DJ, shocked. This was the last thing this troupe needed. What was going on?
The girls paused, uncertain. But, from the sidelines, without skipping a beat, their friends from the dance studio were singing. They continued from where the song had stopped. 'My Humps' was the song of the month, everyone knew the lyrics. Hell, after hearing every fifth troupe dance to it, even the most pop-clueless in the room knew the lyrics.
The singing swelled as people joined in. Encouraged, the girls started dancing again. They danced the rest of the verse and a chorus before the DJ restarted the track. It was the greatest audience participation I had ever seen in a dance competition.
It was raining today and I saw something I had never seen before: someone was walking around with a shower cap on!
It was pink!
I thought it was a beret!
But it was a shower cap!
I got onto the train and sat down in front of a couple with their three year old daughter. She was a cute chubby little girl with blonde curls. No wonder the parents cuddled her so.
She was eating something. It looked like a slice of ham, one of those pink circle pieces. She finished it and made a small noise. Mum peeled back the lid of the clear plastic container in her lap and gave her daughter another piece of ham.
After one or two minutes, the child had finished her ham again. "More!" she said. Mum took another piece of ham out, gave it to her and continued talking to dad.
At this point, I looked at mum and dad thoughtfully. They were both quite overweight. The toddler wasn't overweight -- yet. I started feeling a little anxious.
The toddler finished her ham and gestured urgently for more. Mum paused and said, "What do you say?"
"Please," the girl mumbled. Mum smiled indulgently and gave her another piece. When that one was finished, the girl, of course wanted another. Mum exclaimed, "Don't they feed you in daycare!" And gave her another piece.
By this time, I was quite distressed. Every time I thought mum would put the tub away, she acceded to another demand for ham. Are these people clueless? How can you live in modern society and not understand the basics of healthy eating? What about moderation? Processed meats for a child! Okay, one or two or even three pieces. Maybe more in a sandwich, even. But as a never ending food pacifier? Do you know how much salt and fat is in processed meat?
I usually give people the benefit of the doubt. I considered, "Maybe the kid hasn't eaten all day. Maybe the ham is lean and organic. Maybe the ham is an alternative to her usual chocolates and chips."
But in the end, nothing I could imagine could excuse the sight of parents blithely handing over a whole tub of ham, sliver by sliver, to a kid who should have the healthiest start to her life.
I wanted to say something. I wish I had some grapes to offer them. Why aren't people licenced to be parents?
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