Last week I received an e-mail from a nice researcher working for The Listening Post, a tv show broadcasted on Al-Jazeera english. She had read my blog entry about Sarkozy and the media and wanted to know if I was interested in talking for a few minutes about his influence on the French media. I said I was of course interested in principle, but when she phoned back the next day and had me spend 10 minutes blabbering away about my hate for the president, I thought she’d never call back. Too often, I am an embarrassment to no one but myself (see also: Bicycle Mark’s podcast).

But I was asked back today and said I would spare the team the commuting pain and pay them a visit in person. As it happens, the show shares a building with CBC Canada (droll), and I was welcome by a lovely and very interesting intern and a very funny cameraman/producer, who was in panic because he forgot his pregnant’s wife wedding anniversary. We chatted for a few minutes and they told me to speak for a couple of minutes, in front of the camera, about my opinions. And how do I put this? I am horrible at being interviewed for podcasts, and even worse on camera. I was thinking about the poor editor who would have to work on the footage, deleting my ‘errrs’ and my awkward pauses, and I ) blushed 2) wanted to stab myself in the eye. I profusely apologized but they both said it was absolutely fine and what they were looking for.

As I left, she said she’ll let me know when the footage is online. I thought, fuck me, I hope I’m so bad it never airs.

Lesson learned: stick to blogging.

In Angel

The HIV data is horrible, but seriously - they totally got this ad wrong.

I would love to have a boat similar to these.

My dear friend.

Well, if you ask me she may sound like a nutter novelist, but her remarks are fair enough:

I don’t mind paying my tax, I want hospitals and schools, and police and firemen, and street lighting and rubbish collection, but I minded funding the Iraq war, and I mind funding fiscal incompetence. We are getting to the point where we can’t afford the things we need – like schools and hospitals and social care, because all our money is being spent on buying bombs and bailing out banks,
That’s masculinity gone mad – get the girls in as fast as possible.

Lord help me – I have reverted to capital letters and BOLD. A sure sign of the nutter at the typewriter.

A while ago Jeanette Winterson wrote a good editorial for the Guardian food - defending organic products, local farming, etc. More interestingly, she not only talked about quality, but proximity: little shops are a pleasure to shop at, a trip to while Tesco is not really stepping in smiles-and-friendship land. Winterson owns a deli in Spitalfields -near my own neighbourhood- and I still have yet to go there. Maybe that will be my week-end plan.

Saturday afternoon was spent doing touristic activities.

Tomorrow will be spent looking for a job, waiting for a very intimidating interview on friday.

Life in London has been hard technology-wise: one cell phone, two ipods and two laptops -of which one was brand new- were stolen from me. But fortunately, I still have one of my most-cherished possession: my bike (and I hope I am not bringing bad luck to myself by mentionning this).

There is no question about that, purchasing a bike was definitely the best idea I have had in a year. Painful 35-40 minutes bus or tube commuting journeys magically turned into brisk 20 mns bike journeys, I discovered parts of the city I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and my body is certainly thanking me for the exercise. And don’t even get me started on the astronomical amount of money I am saving every day.

I bought my hippy-looking rusty blue bike off Gumtree for 60 pounds. Granted, the process itself was complicated and led M. and I to travel quite far away towards East London to pick it up. On a tuesday evening we hopped in the tube towards East Ham, got lost for a good hour in the beautiful park surrounding the neighbourhood, and finally found the flat. The bike owners were weird to say the least, and spent an hour bragging about their happy financial fortunes (they were quite well off) before even letting me try to ride the damn thing. But two hours later we took the tube back home, bike in hand.

[note] There is where I decide not to write extensively about the emails that followed from the owner, asking me to take him for coffee and calling me ‘honey’ even if I went to his house accompagnied by my boyfriend. Ugh. [/note]

A couple of months later I was talking to one of my co-workers who’s a huge cycling enthusiast (she once cycled from London to Brighton and swears that once one wears lycra to bike, there’s “no way back”) when she made a very poetic remark about bikes: that what she loved most about it was the effortless work between man and machine. How simply they worked together, but how efficient it was.

Spot on, I thought. Bikes are great.

Now - my only profound aversion to cycling these days steams from the dirty looks I get from men who think that a woman wearing a (always medium-to-long, I might add, so there’s not much to see) skirt + bike= free license to wink, stare, stick their tongues out or even scream obscene comments (it did happen). And as much as I would like to refrain from writing stereotypical comments such as “well, what can you do, men can be pigs”, their attitude only allows me to do it without remorse.

Fucking let me go to work in peace, thank you and good night.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking home though Shoreditch when I heard a voice beside me:

“Jess! Heey-ohh Jess!”

I am not used to have my name called in the streets - let alone in London: I usually have my headphones on and I’m quite oblivious of the world surrounding me when I do. And of course, being relatively new to this city (under one year still makes you a newbie, or so I hear) I don’t have many acquaintances. But, being headphone free this day, I quickly turned around and saw my ex colleague/ buddy Anamik:

“This great to see you.” I said. “Especially since I think you’re the first person to ever call my name in London! This feels like a landmark”.

He had some time to kill before going to an exhibition at Rich Mix to see Gavin Hernandez’s cool photographic series, so we decided to have a quick drink in a pub nearby. His friend joined us a couple of minutes later, and he introduced me by pointing out that I had just gained my official Londoner title. The friend, a tall and chatty guy talking quite fast, laughed:

“What a strange coincidence. I usually never see people I know in the street, but I just bumped into my ex-girlfriend before joining you”.

He then told us about the first time he bumped into someone in the capital: like me, almost a decade ago, he had decided to London and had been trying to call London a home for months. One day, and for the first time in his entire life, he decided to enter a sex shop. While reaching for the exist he walked through the gay section of the store, and bumped into one of (gay) his classmate. Apparently the conversation went like this:

“Hey!”

“Hey…”

“Uhm… Weird to see you here… Do you want to go for a drink?”

“Sure”.

And so they left. I must admit I enjoyed the anecdote immensely. From what I gathered from the story, they never mentioned this encounter again, except for a couple of years ago when he threw an allusion in a coversation:

“Hey, do you remember this time….”

“(hastily) Yeah, I remember the time”.

Sometimes big cities are tiny places indeed. I could tell you about the time I bumped into my Canadian friend from Victoria/Toronto in Piccadilly Circus in the middle of summer, and how it turned out that we had rooms on the exact same floor of the same hostel, but I think I already mentioned it elsewhere (very last post on the page - I guess I didn’t know what permalinks were at the time of posting).

Question. You walk to work in the morning minding your own business, absorbed in your thoughts but not really sulking (just slowly waking up). Passing by a couple of professional drivers and courriers, one of then looks stares at you and say “C’mon girl, smile!”. Should you:

A. be annoyed that someone would order you to smile because hell, you don’t feel like being nice and let’s be honest there’s no way in hell I would be ordered to change my facial expressions if I was a 6 ft. pumped male athlete walking the streets?

B. just smile?

This morning I chose both options. I smiled first -the guy was trying to be nice- then got annoyed that I did. But maybe this is just because I’m bitter, miserable and acting like a “real monster” every day of the year from 7 to 11 o’clock.

And well, you might remember that I have a problem with pictures/smiling.

Eternal Life is now on my trail
Got my red glitter coffin, man, just need one last nail
While all these ugly gentlemen play out their foolish games
There’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names - Jeff Buckley

In a brave move to save the environment save myself from the nightmare of the London underground I tend to walk to and from work everyday. It’s only a brisk 40 minutes promenade. Every so often I go through Bunhill Fields. It is an amazing secret lost in the heart of the City - a public open space which used to be a cemetery for dissenters and non-conformists. According to this page, it’s the last survivor of London’s once numerous small burial grounds.

And it’s the most heartbreakingly lovely place to walk through: on a couple of acres are hundreds of really old graves and tombstones surrounded by all kind of animals, and old people who feed them. I have seen squirrels numerous times, as well as cats, magnificent crows and what I still maintain to be a dove (and not a white pigeon). The birds are usually silently meditating on top of the grave, napping on top of human flesh and decay.

People walk their dogs there - today a young man was walking with Niki, his adorable 12 weeks husky friend who, he said, had been “very naughty” recently. I know because I was ear-dropping on his conversation with an older woman while pretending to pet the little furry animal.

Two weeks ago daffodils started to bloom and I can’t wait for them to be all over the green space. On the benches there’s always people napping, eating breakfast and chatting, and right next to it there’s a green space where little kids from the next-door school take their supervised recreational breaks. I’ve always found it quite weird, to see all the kids playing in a burial ground, those people sipping StarBucks, those couples cuddling under the shade - all of them surrounding by, well, corpses.

But see, that’s the interesting thing about this place: it is not gloomy or frightening at all. On the contrary, I would go as far as saying that it’s one of the prettiest and most enjoyable places I’ve found in the city so far.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that William Blake is buried there? Even if I am more a Baudelaire type of person, a touch of poetry is always welcome.