Arriving in the Hot Place

It was a ten hour flight, in two legs, broken in the Middle East. When we touched down there, nearly everyone got off. I waited for the new people to get on, but only two or three of them did. When the plane took off again it had about fifteen passengers. On an Airbus A321.

 

About halfway through the second leg, I thought sod it, I'm having a drink. I wasn't going to, as the Hot Place is also dry. But there was a drawer full of wine, and nobody else to drink it, so I had one. The stewardess was happy to have something to do. 'All alcohol must be consumed on board', she said. 'Right you are,' I said. 'Can I have another?'.

 

We 'deplaned' in no time, obviously, down the steps into a hot moist night and onto a bus. Three fat men sprawled across the only seats, under a sign which said 'Seating reserved for women and children'. I decided not to make a point. It was a short and badly lit journey to the terminal, past big white UN planes that loomed suddenly out of the darkness.

 

I'm far from the world's worst flyer, but there's always something to worry about. Will they remember my vegetarian meal? (They did on the first leg, but not on the second, but they kindly picked the sausage off the pizza for me). Will my luggage arrive? (Yes, it did -- it was strangely comforting to see my bright pink case emerge, I'd imagined it being flung around an empty hold, scattering pants and instant noodles all over the place). Will there be anyone there to meet me?

 

Er, no. There wasn't. Now *that's* never happened before, and I didn't particularly want my first experience of it to be after midnight in a near deserted entrance way populated by a few rangy taxi drivers and a few mangy cats. And a man asleep on a bench.

 

Thanks to a roaming mobile and good paperwork, I could call the duty driver. His English wasn't up to much but I got the impression that he was 'coming'. Thanks to half a bottle of red wine, I didn't get scared. I just sat down away from the sleeping man, ignored the taxi drivers, got out my Moleskine and pencil and started writing this.

 

joella

Shape shifting

I am packing for the Hot Place. It is very difficult. I have been to hot places before, though not this one, and I have been places before where women need to cover themselves up. But I have never been to a hot place where women need to cover themselves up *and* look on the tidy side of presentable.

'Hot and smart?' I said to the person briefing me. That might be a challenge. You just wait, she said. Everyone looks immaculate all the time. I don't know how they do it.

Normally, I would take baggy-ish T-shirts. But these won't do. Most of my T-shirts feature holes, paint splatters or political slogans, and I sense that none of these will be acceptable. Man-made fibre is also not recommended, because of the heat, which rules out my super-easy-care travelling shirts. I try one on anyway, but my bosom is clearly discernible. This is also bad form.

So I have gathered together every flowing cotton garment I can find. I don't know if I can 100% avoid elbow and decolletage exposure, but I think most bases are covered.

joella

My dreams are so unoriginal

I don't really like remembering them, they are always anxious. It's a miracle I've got any teeth left at all.

Usually it's a relief to wake up thinking 'it's all right, I didn't really kill him'. But this time, I just told everybody he'd died. It seemed the only way out of the situation.

But it became unsustainable, because he was actually still very much alive. His mum was all upset, and it was my fault. There were job complications. Tax returns. He wasn't going to stay not-dead.

So he went home, and I went round wearing a bright orange T-shirt which said, Wire-style, MY BAD. *This * morning, it was a relief to wake up thinking 'it's all right, I didn't really not kill him'.

My *real* day went downhill from there. Let's just say I'm almost looking foward to spending the next fortnight in a place where the weather forecast looks like this:



joella

Stories from the lake #2: getting the hang of things

Shot plus sky plus lake
Originally uploaded by joellaflickr.

This is one of those stories best told with a photo.

joella

Stories from the lake #1: Team Antinranta

The weekend before we went away, I read an article in the Guardian about how you should never, ever go on holiday with your friends. I began to worry.

We were:

• Me: first most likely to sauna au naturel, eighth most likely to eat blood sausage and jam*.
  
• M, braver of cold lakes, lighter of fires, cooker of breakfasts. Usually in that order.
  
• Mr B, who has all the moves, including the ones that make the boat go in a straight line. He was oarsome.
  
• H, who brought glamour and intrigue: her continued presence was decided by Turkey's Constitutional Court.
  
• K, aka Sauna Girl. Löyly, vihta, implausible bikini, vodka. Repeat to fade.
  
• Dr A, researcher of indigenous foods and expounder of obscure philosophies.
  
• L, growing fast to fill the space where the Old Testament stops and pear cider starts.
  
• J, half boy, half biscuit. All about the show that must go on.
  

Me, Mr B and Dr A were all at university together. K was there too, though my orbit and hers never intersected at the time. There are few people I have known and loved for longer. What a ridiculous thing to jeopardise, I thought, while wading through mucus the week before we left. What made me think that a fortnight in rural Finland with *other people* and *other people's children* was ever going to be a good idea?

I don't know what made me think it, or even if it was me who thought it first, (though I seem to remember that alcohol was involved) but having done it, I say shame on you, Guardian Family Section. Find the right people and set them by the right lake in the right Scandinavian country, and you will have just about the best holiday imaginable.

joella

* This is not a Germaine Greer-style euphemism. That, I'd be much higher up the list for.

So far so good

Everything here works. Nobody is rude and there is a ridiculous amount of space. There are rollercoasters in lakeside woodland and gherkins with every meal. Also vodka. Ace. joella

Offline alert

I'm going to be quiet for a bit. Not that I've had too much to say recently. I *am* feeling better though, and look forward to letting thoughts settle like leaves and form new things to say. Shortly. With maybe some photos too. Meanwhile wherever you are I hope the weather is clement and the gods are smiling.

joella

Big is... um

I share several significant dimensions (not height, sadly) with the first 'big girl' to reach the final of Miss England. Not sure how I feel about this. Anything that means fewer teenage girls (or indeed grown women) hate their bodies has to be good, so I salute her role model curves. And she's only seventeen -- and wants to be Miss England -- so it would be unfair to expect her to have too much in-depth awareness of body fascism.

But the bit about beauty coming from within is squidged rather breathlessly into the last five seconds, like someone mouthed it at her from behind the camera. Maybe I should send her a copy of the Beauty Myth. With a Post-it note pointing out not to feel bad if she never reads it -- the beauty myth is harder to shake off than Catholicism. Heroin has nothing on it.

joella

In which I emerge from the gloom of sinusitis...

... with an increasing sense of smell, a reducing Kleenex consumption, and a gradually recovering ability to take an interest in anything beyond the end of my nose.

Two such things as examples:

1. The over 60s nationwide bus pass. What a wonderful initiative. My parents came at the weekend and we got the bus into town with them. My mum got out her bus pass, and it worked! In Oxford! All the way from Lancashire! I couldn't get over it. My dad also has a bus pass, but he hadn't actually been on a bus since 1969 so he hadn't brought it with him.

2. Freecycle. One of the best things the internet has ever made possible. M managed to blow up the food processor. There were flames coming out of it and everything. We got a new one (it was a Kenwood and he'd always secretly wanted a Magimix, what with them being French. They hum more discreetly and chop more stylishly). So we had a million attachments for a lump of melted plastic, but I couldn't bear to throw them out. So I put them on Freecycle, and someone replied within about three minutes, and was round to pick them up within half an hour. I initially figured she must be taking them to sell as spares on eBay -- not that I would have minded, better that than landfill -- but it was a much lovelier story. Turned out her mum had died three years ago, and ever since she'd had her mum's Kenwood food processor in the cupboard *with no attachments*. She just happened to log on as my message came up, in fact her husband had recently said she should get rid of the base as it was taking up space and she was coming round to agreeing with him, but feeling sad about it. So I made her very happy, and she made me very happy. And M is making Thai curry paste like there's no tomorrow, so everyone's a winner.

I hold these small things up as proof that the world gets better in some ways even as it melts down in others. Somewhere in between there's a DRM free music download site that will sell me Enter Sandman.

And so to bed.

joella

10 reasons why it doesn't pay to check your blog stats

1. You find out that you are the top hit on Google for the phrase 'aubergine insertion babe'.

Actually, I don't need any more reasons than that.

joella

Smell-o-vision

A long, long time ago I had one of my first proper attacks of the munchies. I sat in a corner on my own, stoned out of my tree and working my way carefully through a packet of chicken flavour crisps.

Every now and again I would look up and say 'but they're so... *chickeny*!' Nobody was listening to me, they were all listening to Frank Zappa instead. Or possibly Captain Beefheart. I had a lot of nights like that a long, long time ago.

I was reminded of the chicken flavour crisps yesterday, when I got out of the car at the New Building (I have been going to work, but I have not been cycling there, I am exhausted at the end of the day as it is). Just before I got out of the car I gave my nose a good blow, then I cleared up the resulting mess -- there is still a ridiculous amount of it -- and set off across the car park. Halfway to the door there was a gust of wind, and it stopped me in my tracks.

I could smell the air! It smelt amazing! Salty and damp and fresh and amazing. I leant against the wall and breathed and breathed and breathed. Then I went inside and I could smell even more things, toast and carpet tiles and printers. Sadly, by the time I got my coffee, my sense of smell had gone again, but it comes back sporadically, in brief bursts. I get to smell the inside of a tissue. Or the ends of my fingers. Things that don't normally have a smell. While food, perfume, wine, flowers are still largely lost to me.

It's the weirdest thing. I was in olfactory heaven in a car park by a ring road. Who knows what the seaside would have done to me.

joella

For those about to rant, we salute you

I've been too ill to do any ranting of late, though as soon as I get to post 'Jo woke up and smelt the coffee' as my Facebook status I intend to get straight back to it. It can only be a matter of days now, I got a hint of Vicks Vaporub last night and a tiny burst of sandalwood this morning. The second course of antibiotics is maybe taking hold. Either that or my sinuses have been served with an Asbo and decided to turn themselves around.

Meanwhile, may I recommend Jeremy on the Guardian on wasting food, and Ben on various Christian factions on women bishops. I was hoping for a good one on this pile of wank, though he's done a fairly good job of digging his own hole.

joella

Even more too much information

Yes, it's still all about me. I did in the end burden the NHS, and am now on my second course of antibiotics, as the first lot didn't do anything except give me the runs. Around the same time, I came on, and the first tears of self-pity rolled down my cheeks. I didn't have enough hands to staunch all my flows. If my ears start leaking, I said to M, I really will be losing stuff from every orifice.

Also, I am slightly worried that, like the dog with no nose, I must smell revolting. Do I smell of poo? I asked. Well, he said, it's hard to tell, since you've been honking of fish for a week.

I threw a box of tissues at his head.

joella

Teething problems

Sight is the only one of my facial senses that is currently working properly. As a result I am still utterly miserable and have nothing of interest to say, except that I went to the dentist (which is an interesting experience when you can't breathe through your nose) to get my canines built up. This was one of the alternatives offered to having braces -- the idea is that if my canines are bigger and fatter they deflect the grinding that my inner fury otherwise inflicts on my increasingly fragile incisors.

I was impressed with the results -- basically, this is what celebrities get done, though for aesthetic rather than existential reasons. It's like Botox for teeth. But the left one did not even survive two days: there was an ominous crack upon its first encounter with a packet of Walkers smoky bacon, and half of my celebrity tooth fell out.

I haven't even got the bill yet. Arse.

joella

Farewell feminine mystique

I was lying in bed this afternoon, surfing the web for mucus management strategies. I tried a bottle of Otrivine that I found in the bathroom cabinet, but it tastes (and burns) a bit like speed when it hits the back of your nose, and that can't be good for anyone. I tried a little acupressure: nada. Then I came across nasal irrigation. I am a fan, nay evangelist, of at least one other kind of irrigation, and I wondered, frankly, why it hadn't occurred to me before.

I don't have a neti pot, which seems to be the accessory of choice for those who wish to wash their noses out. The other suggested approach involved a 10 ml syringe "without needle" (like, duh). None of those either. I put the bath on, and then headed downstairs in search of inspiration.

About half an hour later, M walked into the bathroom and yelped. I hadn't warned him that I would be leaning naked over the sink with a turkey baster up one nostril.

I made a terrible mess (I figured I would, that's why I didn't have any clothes on): I don't think anyone needs the details -- M is still recovering -- but let's just say I did not come across nearly as elegant as the nice lady who does the neti pot demo on YouTube. But it did clear my nose, kind of. I briefly had dual nostril function, and have had it sporadically since.

But I can't smell a damn thing - I made sardine and chilli pasta for dinner, and got not the tiniest hint of fishiness. I'm beginning to wonder if normal nasal service will ever be restored. Is this what it's like having hay fever? Shit, have I got late-onset hay fever?

Still, it's meant I have been able to spend the weekend on the sofa watching Glasto entirely without guilt. I got ninety nine problems but the mud ain't one.

joella

Mucus Pocus

I was wrong about the To Do list. I left my desk on Wednesday evening covered in tiny post-it notes about the most urgent things for Thursday, and I haven't been back to it since. I have barely been downstairs since. It turns out you can avoid all sorts of things when your brain stops working.

I don't believe in going to the doctor for a cold, or even flu. I was brought up by a nurse to take a couple of aspirin, sweat things out and see them through. Very grateful I am too: I know people whose childhoods were antibiotic-and Vicks-nasal spray heavy, and my immune system sees theirs off every time. The exception is my tonsils, which flare at the first hint of trouble, but I see them as a sort of early-warning system.

However I can only remember one cold as bad as this in my entire life. I was at university and supposed to be writing an essay about Thatcherism (which we were still enduring at the time). The words ran off the page. Instead I spent days wrapped in my big towelling dressing gown drinking hot chocolate and Cup A Soup in front of the electric bar heater, looking at people as if down a long tunnel and wondering if my ears would ever unblock.

Colds like this, you begin to wonder if actually you *are* at death's door and should be doing something more about it than lying in charity shop pyjamas turning your head from side to side occasionally to hear the gunk unstick itself from one side of your skull and stick it to the other.

So this morning I rang my mother about my phlegm, which has now changed colour.

She asked me a few questions and then said 'that's not phlegm dear, that's mucus'.

I resisted the temptation to say 'whatever', and she asked me a few more questions. Yes, I had swollen tonsils, but they've gone down now. No, I don't really have a cough. Yes, I have sinus pressure, but no, it doesn't really hurt. Yes, I have had a bit of a temperature, but nothing feverish. Yes, my nose is really really sore. Brown, mostly.

No, she said, you don't need to burden the NHS. The colour is blood, because I have been blowing too hard. I should take some antihistamine to reduce the inflammation, and I should stick some Vaseline up my nose to, well, you're an adult, you know what Vaseline does. And then I should get back to drinking plenty of fluids and staring at the ceiling.

That's what I thought. It's good to know I have internalised *some* useful healthcare advice over the years.

I have asked M to pick up supplies of Ribena, Vaseline and OK magazine. The only person I feel more sorry for than myself is Kerry Katona, so I could do with the wider perspective.

joella

Eternal phlegm

I was supposed to be fixing the toilet at my hairdresser's this morning (now there's a job where I shouldn't have to supply my own old towels...), but instead I am lying on the sofa with a tissue stuffed up each nostril, a bubbly ear and a brain as fuzzy and distorted as a 1970s television with its magnets on the blink.

I am just ill enough not to be able to do anything today apart from get bored, drink Ribena, and generally feel sorry for myself, but just not ill enough to avoid going into the office tomorrow.Short of full-blown influenza, there's no avoiding that To Do list, but I will be grumpy as hell and heavily Lemsip-dependent all the way to the weekend. I've been here before, I know how it goes. It's a waste of sunny term-time... the outdoor pool will soon be full of pesky kids all day long. I am also not painting walls or planting crocosmia. I am just lying here, one day closer to death, producing fluids that serve no purpose in staggering quantities.

The only bright spot on the horizon is The Wire Series 2, which plopped onto the doormat this morning. It was £8 cheaper to buy it online, but the wait nearly killed me. I am wondering what's the earliest time one can decently start watching TV when one is a bit ill? Six o'clock?

joella

In the wars

We were both awake at five am. This doesn't happen very often.

Are you all right? I said to M.

As long as I don't move, he said. How about you?

As long as I don't swallow, I said. Or breathe.

He put his back out yesterday shifting a bag of garden mulch. I have a bunged up head and mega tonsils. So prosaic but so debilitating.

Still, it makes for guilt-free Womans Hour listening...

joella

Show me epic

This week I have consumed (among other things) the following:

• Too much alcohol. Plumbing S and I independently came to the conclusion that our low-level aches and pains and high-level misanthropy could be attributed to end-stage liver disease. More likely, as it has resolved into snot and a sore throat, it's just a bug, but still.
  
• Last week's Mark Haddon piece in the Observer. I commend it to this house. And every other house.
  
• The beginning of an article about John McCain in this week's Observer. I read the first quarter or so, and then a the phrase "no retreat, no surrender" sent me walking to my vinyl as if in a trance, to search out Born in the USA. No one expects me to be a Springsteen fan, but I am.
  
• A fair bit of Neutral Milk Hotel, whom I think I knew on vinyl in a previous life, and have fallen for again since last.fm played me The King Of Carrot Flowers Pt One. Wikipedia tells me it's in a major key. I find this hard to believe.
  
• The second half of Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple. He writes well, though, while offering some analysis of the situations he witnesses (much of which analysis I would dispute, but still), he offers, as A&K pointed out when they lent me the book, very little by way of alternative 'underclass management'. The poor, it seems, will always be feckless. I have more to say on this, but it's incubating.
  
• Wait Until Spring, Bandini, by John Fante . A sort of Dalrymple antidote, but not chosen for that reason. Chosen for its Catholicism, really, I find Catholic literature much easier to relate to than Jewish literature.
  
• More gherkins than usual, having stocked up on my favourite kosher pickles at my favourite Asian grocers. What holds for literature does not hold for food.
  
• The end of series 1 of The Wire. Surely, and I do not say this lightly, this is the best television ever made by anyone ever. We are not worthy.

joella

Any colour you like, as long as it's black

I was talking with a friend about the creative inspiration that constraints can provide. It started with her asking about my photos of toilets. I explained that I am collecting them, possibly, for a Pecha Kucha night that Oxford Improvisers are organising in November.

I love the idea that nobody can go on for more than 400 seconds, so there is no danger of that awful feeling you get in meetings or at conferences when someone is still on slide four ten minutes in, and you surreptitiously check the handouts to see how many slides there are, and there are 48, and you think maybe it would be preferable just to die now.

But I also love the idea of the freedom that comes with the format -- as the audience knows what's fixed, they are more likely to get involved with what is changing, and enjoy the ride.

Even so, 20 blurry photos of the toilets of Oxford's pubs and restaurants, with plumbing-obsessed commentary, might be a bit much. So I might not go there. But that wouldn't change the fact that I like constraints. They can make the unapproachable approachable.

For example, I choose my library books by deciding, while walking up the stairs, on the letter that the author's surname will begin with. One year I decided to buy all my Christmas presents on Cowley Road. It worked a treat. I looked hard in shops I never normally go into, and I found some really interesting things.

And currently, I have a rule that (apart from underwear) I will only buy clothes that are either second hand or less than two thirds their original price. They also have to broadly align with the best shopping advice I ever heard, which was from that scary American Vogue woman whose name I forget... she said "if it's not perfect for you, it doesn't matter how much of a bargain it is, don't buy it".

"Perfect" is not a concept I have in clothes, as I just don't have that sort of body, but there are things you put on and think, well, I don't really like it, but I need a new X, and it only costs £3, and I'm not going to think about why it only costs £3.

I don't buy those things anymore. I probably do buy things made by children in Chinese sweatshops, as it's practically impossible to avoid them, but I try not to. I read labels. I look for ethical trading statements on websites.

So last week I found myself, as I do several times a year, looking at the Fat Face sale rail. It covers all the bases. I came home with a strange dress (all dresses are strange, but this one is particularly strange as it rather suits me), and a shirt and some cut-off trousers. I know short people aren't supposed to wear cut-off trousers but really, sod it.

I showed my new clothes to M when I got home. I like it, I said, when I buy clothes that look like I've always had them. I find it reassuring.

I feel a bit like that about girlfriends, he said. I wasn't sure how to take that.

joella