Greetings, dear reader, from the Court of the Crimson King!
Calypso and I moved in a few days ago, and I've been blogging on my laptop. This means, until we aquire an internet connection, you'll be recieving sporadic flurries of updates, so save them and read them slowly.
Our first task was to sort out the bins. In Guernsey, you have one bin - if you want to recycle, you've got to drive it down to the plant yourself. Nothing could have prepared me for the English system of bins - one for dry recyclables, one for biochemical waste, one for radioactive deposits, one for bad books...it's clearly a better system than Guernsey (30% of Ealings recycle, according to the local paper), but is still requiring some time to get my head around.
This is all crippled by my crippled sense of smell. It's not like I don't have one - I can taste, obviously, and I do occasionally catch whiff of some things. In particular rotting celery and banana. Aside from that, I won't notice the smell of a smoker unless it's pointed out, I never notice perfume, and I definitely can't smell flowers. You don't miss what you've never had, and personally I think I'm better without it. People around me get so bothered by vomit or rotting lettice - I do, but only on an ideological level. Can't smell it, you see. Do I have a problem cleaning up vomit? No, not really. It's gross but according to Castellanne (Friend 3, at least, has a proper name now) the smell is the foulest part. I always figured I was just to lazy to smell, but Friend 4 has a clever theory. Sinesthesics have tangled neurons in their brains - so, for example, hearing a sound might be experienced as colour. What if my sense of smell is just being redirected, sent to the wrong area of the brain and therefore not interpreted? It makes a sort of sense.
In any case, Calypso is insisting on having the food waste outside - an act I'm not going to argue with, even though it smells fine to me. You've got to line it with newspaper paper, which proved a bit of a chore, so I'm adapting the traditional origami box so it fits more efficiently. I've also made thick origami newspaper "cones" for kitchen use, so you can put waste in them while cooking and then transfer it outside when done. According to Cherry Darling in Planet Terror, there's a time when every single one of your useless talents saves your life. I think origami has had its time.
By this time it was late and we were starving, so on the verge of death, we departed for Asda - the Domain Of Things What Are Only £1. I took great joy in finally dressing up again, and we went outside.
Can you remember the end of
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when there is a single house just waiting to be destroyed? Or in
Neverending Story, when the nothingness is coming to get them? Or Utopia, where humanity are stranded on the last undestroyed planet and are trying to escape? Our row of houses looks all nice and suburban, like anywhere in London, but it juts out into the M1, into an industrial complex of huge warehouses and empty urban boxes. Horn Lane is marked with a London roadsign, like they sell in tourist shops - go one block left or right, and the street names are sponsered by some company or other. We are at the point London ceases to be London, like an island at the end of time.
Like Platform 1 or the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, being on the brink of annihilation has its aesthetic benefits. Look out of the front door or windows and the vista is huge - we get one row of houses then sky in all directions. We crossed the three huge roads that, one day, I am going to get killed on. Past Acton Cemetery - very pretty, particularly the church itself which was split in two by a huge arch through the centre. Past rows of garages, past a water-filled gravel pit which was screaming out for a climactic gunfight, complete with exploding water tower. I tend to see potential gunfights everywhere I go - a product of too much cinema - maybe I should move to America? Past Cullen Lane! Past the Tower of Light centre and next to it, Mountain of Fire ministries, in a huge building that reverberated like a keep-fit gym. We have to pass it every time we go shopping, so Calypso wisely pointed out we cannot bait and infiltrate them - but it's a shame, because they have free (religious) films night once a week, and also all-night prayer sessions. It wasn't terribly clear what religion they were even representing, though I bet on Logar, God of the Mountain of Fire in
Planet of Fire. Acton: it's Trion's Australia.
About ten minutes away, Asda sits over the landscape like a sow with young - the queen of the industrial boxes. Everything costs a pound. Marvellous! By this time, Calypso and I had committed the ultimate wrong - gone food shopping while hungry, so a few strange things made their way into the trolley. How could we not when Divine dark chocolate is only 50p?! I remember my first weeks in Hampstead, as everyone else under the Auspices of the Dude reeled from the shock of how pricey London was. I was amazed by how cheap it was. My only severe extravagance was a small first aid kit, which I figured may just come in useful (and not merely because it resembled the med-kits off
Blake's 7...) It cost one pound fifty. Oh man, breaking the bank already!
It was dark when we walked back, and far quicker too. From the back garden we get stars. I identified Jupiter and Wilwarin - sorry Casseopiea. The Quenya and Sindarin names for stars is pretty much the only Elven I remember. If you look right, we have a very picturesque row of brick houses, windows and washing lines. To the left, a building gutted by fire, and behind it a hotel seemingly made of lego blocks - bright red and bright white plastic bricks into the sky. I feel further from Central London here than in Hampstead, though possibly it's because I'm tired and don't feel like going anywhere.
We ate like students! Dinner was pasta plus tomato and spices. We haven't quite worked out how we are going to divide food costs fairly, though I imagine when uni starts again much less communal eating will be happening. After tea, we sorted out the junk mail. Non-junk was kept, junk was binned, serious junk we laughed at. Including a particularly pointless leaflet from Hungarian dentists inviting us to Hungary to have our teeth looked at, and a strange Conservative party leaflet bearing the slogan "vote for change". Ealing is a Conservative area, so we also got a copy of the Conservative newsletter.
We didn't get around to plugging in the telly. No television? No internet? We're going to go crazy and oestromaniac, and when they find us I'll be dead, Calypso will be incurably insane, Spirita will be found bricked in behind a wall (with a beard of cobwebs...) and both of Vapilla's legs will have been amputated. Instead, we are doing readings. I'm told Vapilla was working on her rhetoric last time she was here, and I am much looking forward to it. Calypso read me part of a short book written by feminist Socialists. It was a great little essay, complaining about how the sexual liberation movement has got it all wrong, and how wearing playboy tee-shirts or going to lap dancing clubs is not actually empowering. A phrase I particularly liked was:
"Commercial sex, whether it is porn or lap dancing, is like fast food. It is a
horrible soulless version of something good which capitalism sells back to us
after stripping us of the time and well being which would allow us enjoyment of
the real thing."
We need to find a better name for Kings Sexual Politics society. Effectively, it's the Kings Feminist society - but we don't want to put men off joining, as men can be feminists too and awesome ones at that. But Sexual Politics sounds like such a drag - we need something catchy, which also expresses what we do. I think that's get hot under the collar about oppression, and then do something about it. But also, Sexual Politics ran the lecture on transpeople.
Any ideas?We then had hot chocolates using the last of the chocolate powder I saved from last year, and it was all rather blissful.
