Characters for my novel

1. Cynthia: 19 year old black South African with a head full of dreams and a burning desire to make something of herself. Works as a pizza waitress in Pretoria, wants to get a work permit to work in London so she can earn enough money to go to college. Agencies in South Africa want to charge her a fortune for a ticket and a 'job', so she looks for people who live 'over there' who might be able to help her.

Sounds good, no? The thing is Cynthia is a real person. She works at an Italian restaurant in Hatfield, Pretoria, attached to the hotel where I stayed before and after Zambia. She is the single most charming waiter/waitress I have ever encountered. She made me feel that eating alone was normal, she chatted to me as she passed by, she complimented me on my English good manners (understandable in a country where many people are shockingly rude to waiters/waitresses), and remembered my eating (calamari) and drinking (dry red wine) preferences after a whole month - and I hadn't even told her I was coming back.

It was only on the second visit that she told me she wanted to come to the UK. I asked her why. I said the weather was miserable, the tips were miserly and she might be better off in the States. She said 'yes, but everybody wants to earn some pounds'. I said 'Well, I don't know why', but knew as I said it that this was said with the unconscious arrogance of one who has always been paid in hard first world currency.

She never quite went so far as to ask me to help her out (though the first night I was there she very clearly explained to me how it was custom in South Africa to tip 10%). I think about her quite a bit and somehow feel that I should. If I ever do write a novel, she'll be in it. So maybe I should see if I can do anything for her in return.

joella

Revenge of the tonsils

I did feel a bit shit on Monday, but I put it down to post-Glasto fatigue. But by Tuesday it was apparent that I had something altogether bigger and badder.

Possibly I did get it at Glasto: it's hard to do adequate personal hygiene when you have a period in the mud and you're drinking out of whatever bottle of water comes to hand while you're working. But I did use plenty of Antibacterial Hand Gel, so it could just be that my little immune system has decided it needs a few days resting up.

So it inflated my tonsils and chucked a few logs on the fever fire, and as a result I seem to be spending an average of 18 hours a day sleeping and the rest imbibing Lemsip and finishing The Line of Beauty - a wonderful book in a bleak sort of way, and thus one which is a great poorly read.

Today I have made it down to the sofa. While I still have huge tonsils I am less feverish, and in the perfect state (compos mentis but nothing better to do) to indulge in Sudoku -- which arrived in a big way while I was in Zambia and which I am only just discovering. My dad has already won a Times Sudoku competition though, and I am very proud of him.

I also don't know why joella's layout seems to have gone a bit wonk, but I am still too poorly to deal with that one.

joella

Giving it some welly

Collected random Glasto snippets which I couldn't be bothered to blog at the time (blogging by WAP may be possible, but is tedious in the extreme).

1. As the thunder and lightning on Friday morning entered their third hour and I sat gratefully drinking the coffee which M had manfully hunter-gathered on the way back from his even more manful trip to the car to get the wellies, I wondered if it was really safe to be drinking from a tin mug in a tent in the middle of a thunderstorm.

2. Weather forecasts are useless. The only way to be safe is to be prepared for every single weather permutation and combination.

3. She-Pee urinals are the future. I got it wrong twice (once to embarrassingly comic effect as I had wee stains down both trouser legs for the next three hours) but this was more than made up for by the seven times I got it right.

4. Overwhelming: standing in six inches of mud to watch the White Stripes on Friday night. Brian Wilson yesterday. Van the Man's Brown-Eyed Girl encore.

5. Glad I bothered: campaigning for Make Poverty History. Catching the end of the Ozric Tentacles. New Order (but no Blue Monday - why?!). The Midnight's Carnival performance art ghost train. Every trip to the hot spicy cider bus.

6. Wish I hadn't bothered: trying to get back to the Pyramid Stage for Bob Geldof's 'big moment' - got stuck in the mud by the Other Stage and it was miserable.

7. Sorry I missed (too much mud to get there / shift clashes precluded getting there): Tori Amos, Rufus Wainwright, Billy Bragg, Lost Vagueness.

8. Quote of the weekend: Goldie Lookin' Chain saying 'make sure you're here at four o'clock, Bob Marley's going to be on stage making poverty history'.

I had a great time, and I have new respect for my wellies. But god, was it hard work, and I have never been so pleased to take anything off my feet in my entire life...

joella

This train... is coming like a ghost train

The Midnight's Carnival ghost train opens at, er, midnight. We are in the queue. gotta be better than Coldplay... mobile joella

Day 2

Scorchio all day, now sitting by a fire watching Fight Club. Boys are weird. But they can wee standing up, which I have always envied... so I was right up for Water Aid's She Pee Girl's urinals. they come with a kind of cardboard funnel. It's the strangest of experiences... and sadly not one of my most successful. i will try again tomorrow... mobile joella

Build up

It's finally dark and - better - it's finally cool. The gang's all here, there's a massive harvest moon hanging in the sky, and there are Mexican waves of cheers echoing round the farm. Now if only I didn't have to get up at 7 tomorrow... mobile joella

Post-exam litter

 


joella

Glasto double-blogging extravaganza

Tomorrow I am off to Glastonbury, where I will be variously campaigning for Make Poverty History, hanging out in the Green Fields, eating, drinking, sleeping, and catching some tunes.

In preparation for this I have finally worked out how to blog from my mobile phone. My mobile phone is quite old and the Orange website is utterly impenetrable, so this did take many hours of frustrating research and I did nearly give up. But last night I spoke to someone called Craig, who activated my GPRS, told me I would have to use WAP as I don't have POP3 capability, and pointed me at OrangeWorld. I *still* can't use OrangeWorld but I have worked out how to do it via Hotmail.

It's a bit of a shag as you have to log in every time and you can't compose offline (just like real Hotmail, in fact) but hey, it works. Go me!

I had already offered to blog for Generation Why, but it turns out that would require trekking to a laptop held in a safe in a field I am not campaigning in, so I've got them into mobile blogging also, and I will send to both.

I realise that I am probably the only person remotely excited by the prospect of being able to spend ten minutes composing 20 words in a field and have them appear here, but there you go. My little inner geek is feeling groovy.

So. Let's hope it doesn't rain.

joella

Wahey moblog!

This is a test and if it works I will be so impressed with myself... mobile joella

We anoint our gods with Evening Primrose Oil

Still lardy, still premenstrual and it's still too hot, but I do feel better. I put some of this down to having finished a few things off today that had become oppressive, but I also put some of it down to upping my intake of the precious oil of the sacred Evening Primrose.

Next year, I'm gonna grow some.

joella

Scorchio

I am so not into this heat. S'funny, it was this hot for a month while I was in Zambia, and I was fine. But hot countries have lots of shade. And this country doesn't.

I'm also feeling pretty lardy, pretty premenstrual and pretty apprehensive about being off to Glasto this week. I know it will be great once we get there, but everything's just such a huge enormous shag when it's this hot.

Whinge whinge bloody whinge, that's all I ever do at the moment. I think I will shut up before I start boring myself.

joella

We're all slaves to Hallmark and I hate it

It's Father's Day tomorrow, that glorious creation of the greetings card industry that causes those who have lost their fathers to miss them even more than normal, and those fathers who don't live with their children any more to miss them even more than normal. It's a great example of corporate greed increasing the sum of human misery. Nice work.

And those of us who *do* have fathers have to dash out of all day meetings at lunchtime, write cards leaning on litter bins in Cardiff city centre, scrounge stamps from colleagues and search forlornly for postboxes.

My dad is *great*, knows I think so, and has never said that he would be hurt if he didn't get a Father's Day card, but I suspect a tiny irrational part of him would be. So I always try and send one, even though I am disgusted by the whole business and the fact that every single card features a football, a golf ball, a teddy bear or a joke about Dad's wallet. Gack.

I also noted a new trend yesterday, that of the 'you're like a Dad to me' card. This, presumably, has been introduced so that kids with a dad and a stepdad will buy *two* cards, and a whole new cohort of men can be mildly disappointed when there isn't an envelope next to their Frosties tomorrow morning.

I bought the teddy bear card and wrote in it 'Dad, you're like a Dad to me'. Made me laugh, anyway.

joella

Gloomed

Came home from work today in a *vile* mood. For those as are interested, this was mainly because I am supposed to move stuff forward that I don't have the power to move forward, and all the persuasion in the world doesn't make my overloaded colleagues do what I need them to do. It's not that they don't think it's worth doing, it's not that I don't know how it should be done, it's just that what I want them to do is never, ever going to be a priority without a three line whip. And that's not there. So it doesn't happen. And I'm really bored with feeling like that. And I've only been back two days. So the prognosis is not great. On a macro scale, it's like trying to reduce global warming. Hell, handcart, etc.

Try not to care. Try not to care.

Settled in to watch the first episode of Cutting It in advance of second episode tonight, which R had taped for me *without even me even asking* (what a woman). Doorbell rings. It's a woman doing market research on financial products. Do I shut the door? No, I invite her in, and spend the next half hour saying 'no, haven't got one of those', 'no, haven't got one of those either'. Do you meet people who *do* have these things, I ask. Oh yes, she says, this takes twice as long in North Oxford.

So I am now gloomy and also underprepared for what may be imminent financial catastrophe. Great.

But hey, Cutting It. Is Gavin the perfect man or what? (Not counting Zubin Khan).

joella

Bad but not horrid

I am very happy about the Michael Jackson verdict. Clearly he's not a guy you'd ask to babysit, but that's because he's a screaming freak, not because he's a paedophile.

Other uber-celebs, like Victoria Beckham, are not much less screaming freaks, IMHO, but they escape similar persecution because they have Family Values on their side. For now, anyway. In fact, in the hypothetical world where I am looking for a babysitter, would I rather have MJ or VB? I'd probably see if Michael Portillo was free before calling either of them. Though I'd rather see either of them eating my sandwiches and drinking my pop before I'd let Martin Bashir in the house.

joella

Give us a D! Give us an I! Etc.

Cowley Road Carnival is about 'celebrating diversity'. And I was just in the mood for it. Well, except for my mid-afternoon sleep on C's bed, but he lives right on Cowley Road, so it was a bit like going for a little lie down in your tent at Womad.



Spidergirl tries a bit of samba

joella

Struggling with re-entry

I've rediscovered rioja, caperberries, parmesan, hair products, perfume, hot baths, the Guardian, Radio 4 and BBC1.

I've been out to Modern Art Oxford and the Ovada Gallery to look at and listen to art and exhibits about regeneration and the future of the city.

But I haven't slept in my own bed, as it is covered in everything that was on the floor in my bedroom, carefully put there by M while I was away in a lovely tidying the bedroom gesture that just didn't quite reach completion.

I also haven't yet managed to empty my rucksack, I haven't attached my house keys back on to my other keys, and I am still using my travelling purse, with its useless 20 kwacha notes and no stamps in it.

I feel a little bit wobbly in the evenings. I feel like there are some huge feelings lurking in the corners of my mind, but I haven't quite got the energy or the direction to drag them out into the light.

From here, I am heading back to the sofa, to lie under a blanket and watch videos of Doctor Who, and not think about places where there are no sofas and no videos and no blankets.

joella

home again home again

Tell you what, I am *gutted* to have missed both my poppies and my peonies. Remind me to go away in winter next time.

Otherwise, it feels ok to be back, in a will feel better after some sleep sort of a way. Been looking at my safari photos -- lots of animals in the distance, some of them blurred. This is because I am not American and therefore don't have a thousand dollar camera. Hrumph. As the elephant said to the bishop.

joella