On Conserving Energy

I began this entry on my charged-up laptop in the darkness of Earth Hour, having had a bath in the dark because I couldn’t find the candles, then staggering around trying to find my PJs without any light. Fortunately, one of the few advantages of deafness is a heightened sense of touch, which clearly proves useful during Earth Hour, as I was able to locate said PJs. Given that the bureaucratic bastards at the British Embassy have given me six weeks to pack up my life instead of until the rest of the year, my head has been in an unpleasant spin lately. I have found myself saying that my life feels like a deck of cards thrown into the air, and I don’t know which way they’ll land. I have to decide which city in Oz to live in, what kind of job to get and how I’m going to fit in my writing around everything without getting so stressed that I give up on it completely.

Everything in my life is geared towards creating enough time for writing. This means as much space and quietness as possible. It means I have to have a job that is part-time, doesn’t stress me out and yet also keeps me mildly stimulated. It means I can’t make myself tired by drinking too much or eating chocolate. It means I would rather stay in and write or read than go out (although dancing for hours in high-heeled boots or sparkly shoes, preferably in a gay bar, is always permitted). It means I must run in the mornings to make myself sit still and write for the rest of the day, or to swim in the afternoons to help myself unwind and unknot problems. Some would argue that it’s an ascetic life, but it’s one that allows me to write, and therefore keeps me satisfied.

Consequently, my decisions for the future are to be guided by the need to maximise time and money to write my current novel. Of late, I’ve begun to realise just how firmly writing and money are yoked together. Because the former is drying up, I am desperately thinking about how to sustain the latter. The only job I could consider doing full-time would be to teach creative writing, as this would allow me to develop my craft as I crammed my practice into any spare corners of my life. Failing finding one of these, I’d have to get a crappy admin job to cover the bills. And thus I have finally reached the realisation that I am never likely to be wealthy, but rather that I will fall into the cliché of the struggling artist, who only lives for their art. Sometimes this worries me, because of my addiction to shoes and frocks, but at other times I can dismiss my fears for I’ve realised that I was put on this earth to write, and as long as I can sustain myself for long enough to do that, money doesn’t matter quite so much.

Moments like Earth Hour (despite the naysayers’ grumbles about its uselessness) are important for reminding us of the need to conserve energy and to reassess our obsession with materiality. As I stumbled in the dark, feeling my way through soft cashmere and fiddly bits of silk lingerie until I reached the sensible flannel of my PJs, I realised that luxury was nothing if I could not write.

On the Lack of a Stamp

I’m back in London, working through three months of mail (largely cashmere catalogues and bank statements: a delightful incongruity), drinking cup after cup of coffee to stay awake until the evening (mandatory for overcoming jetlag) and contemplating my cankles.  The house is empty, as H has flounced off to the West Country and I don’t know where the other two boys are. Almost all Holiday Objectives have been achieved (you know you’re a workaholic when even your vacations have agendas), as I am tanned, lithe, reasonably fit and dying to get back to work, however dull my job is.

I had intended to stay in the UK until December, but this was on the condition of getting a working holiday visa, or Youth Mobility Visa as they are now termed.  It shouldn’t have been difficult: I had a reliable job, enough money in the bank and I hadn’t yet turned 31.  However, the application was rejected because the bank statement I sent in, which mum had printed out for me at the bank, lacked an official stamp.  You’d think the embassy could have contacted me – after all they had emailed me about my student visa four years before, and it takes two minutes to pick up a phone – but no, they sent it back, and kept their 250AUD application fee for the pleasure of it.

Under ordinary circumstances I would have reapplied, even if this meant forking out an additional $250.00.  However, because I turned 31 while they had the application, reapplying was impossible.  Instead, I had the statement stamped at the bank, indicating that, at the time I sent it in, the funds were in my account, and appealed the decision.  I was also tempted to say that I could probably kickstart the English economy with my shoe, cashmere and handbag proclivities, but instead I argued that the stamp didn’t constitute additional evidence (which wasn’t allowed).  Rather, it was a verification of what had been an accurate statement.  They didn’t allow this, and maintained that the tiny red stamp, 10mm in diameter, represented additional evidence.

On finding that my application had been rejected, I burst into tears, but then M said that given I was the most relaxed I’d ever been in the last four years, and that I wanted to get my life underway, what was the sense in coming back to London?  I recognised she had a point, but it wasn’t until I began working out options and calculating how long I could afford to stay on a holiday visa that I threw down my pen and gave up.  I’m sick of being in penury, and of constantly scraping and budgeting, all for so little reward.  I’ll be broke back in Australia too, but at least I’ll have sunshine, my family and friends and the outdoors to compensate.  I’m tired, too, of constantly saying goodbye, and packing up my things, and never having enough room in my suitcase for all the shoes and frocks I want to wear.  I’m fed up with the dreariness of London and its unhappy people; I’m just not designed to flourish there.  I need sunlight and space, and as if in evidence of this, most of the poems I’ve written since being back home have been about light.

Also, my detestation of British bureaucracy is reaching hitherto unimaginable proportions, particularly as, when I came through Immigration today, the rejected visa was like a red flag to the Immigration Officer and I was grilled in detail about my intentions in the UK.  It seemed that he was trying to trip me up and wasn’t really listening to what I was saying.  I didn’t get flustered because my student visa doesn’t expire until the end of April, but it was an unpleasant experience all the same.

More and more it seems to me that England is becoming a dystopia from an Atwood or Ishiguro novel, and although, when I stepped out of the Tube at Tower Hill and waited for the bus, I felt a sense of satisfaction of coming back to a home and a routine, I’m uneasy about staying in a place that treats its inhabitants with such suspicion.  I have never felt safe or relaxed in London, and I’m tired of being on my guard, and being so oppressed.  So I think that, after four years of unremitting, intellectual and emotional hard work, it’s finally time to go home.

On Megafauna

Having just been stung by some unidentifiable insect that crawled down my t-shirt, I have realised that no account of life in Australia would be complete without reference to the crawlies that populate our land.  However, as everything in Queensland is bigger, the nasties here approach the size of megafauna.

Taking my niece and nephew for a walk one afternoon, we passed a grasshopper sitting on a fence.  Most grasshoppers I have encountered are about 3 cm long.  This one was 10cm long. 

'Wow, look at that,' Nephew said.  'Can you make it jump?'

'No,' I said firmly.  'We're not going to touch it.'

We walked on.  A few houses down, he spied an enormous web stretched between a fence and a tree.  In the middle of it was a spider, twice the size of my hand.

'Wow, look at that Auntie Jess.'

'That,' I replied, 'is disgusting.'

 Nephew is always transfixed on seeing these creatures and so, coming back from the corner store with the dog one morning while he was at daycare, I saw a stag beetle (6cm long) in the middle of the footpath.  After I had ascertained that it was dead, I gingerly picked it up in the dog's (unused) droppings bag and conveyed it home, then shook it out onto the kitchen bench without touching it.  It lost a leg, but Nephew was still so pleased that he took it to day care for show-and-tell the next day.   

Aside from grasshoppers, spiders and beetles, I have also seen enormous cockroaches that fly around the kitchen while I cringe and cover my head, and last night Nephew emerged from the bathroom proudly holding the biggest mosquito I have ever seen (3cm long), which his mother had killed. 

'That's revolting,' I told him. 

Much nicer are the white Indonesian geckos that skitter across the ceiling in the evenings.  Nephew found a tiny baby gecko climbing the wall the other day and pulled off its tail in his enthusiasm to catch it.  Having shown it to all interested parties, he put it back on the wall, and poked it to make it move.

'You've frightened it,' I explained.  'It's in shock, and you need to leave it alone if you want it to move.' 

He didn't, and it died.  

Otherwise my life of relaxation and procrastination continues apace.  I swim, run, cook, read, attempt to write, and stagger out of bed at some Godforsaken hour to walk my niece to school in the mornings.  I don't miss London much, although I do miss my brother, and my Pashley Princess, and the drama of snow.

On How Not to Tan

You know you've turned into a Pom when you fail completely and utterly at your attempts to render yourself a sophisticated, svelte golden young woman, instead burning yourself horribly in strips so that you become, initially, like a piece of red-and-white striped candy cane and then, when you brown and flake, like a cicada crawling out of its skin.  Yeah, it's bewdiful.

Or perhaps I was always a Pom in terms of sun-sense.  Last year in Thailand, having spent two weeks rigorously applying sunscreen, I was just as white near the end of the holiday as I was when I stepped off the plane, so at Railay I decided to dispense with sunscreen and sit on the beach for an hour.  Bad move.  By that afternoon I was burning up and had to go to bed draped in wet towels, and by the time I got back to London I was, once again, shedding my epidermis.  A few years before that I sat on the beach in Oz at midday for two hours, also sunscreenless, read Harry Potter, and got so burnt I couldn't sit down.  You'd think one would learn, wouldn't you?

This time I have.  The ignominy of being a peeling piebald, together with the horrifying melanoma ads currently on TV, have ensured that I will 'embrace the whiteness' as my sister suggests.  My only consolation is that Brother H has been pretty much as useless as I.  This year he also baked himself, but instead of having strips created by the failure to apply a second layer of sunscreen, he missed an egg-shaped section between his pecs.  He also roasted himself in Thailand: I have photographic evidence of him standing in the sea kitted out in snorkling gear, as red as a brick.  I'm keeping it for his future husband.

So, aside from undertaking radical dermabrasion, I have removed myself to my sister's in Brisbane.  It is very hot, to the point of being debilitating so that I am required to take post-lunch naps to remain sentient, but I am the happiest I've been in a long time because I can write. 

My sister's kids are also a constant source of entertainment, not least because they can be teased, confused, and thrown about a room.  My niece begins school next week but already has her aunt's perspicacity (and good taste, having appropriated auntie's Prada sunglasses), for she asked me at dinner last night, 'Auntie Jess, why do you need another pair of shoes when you already have so many?'

I was briefly flummoxed, then replied, 'Well, a girl can never have too many pretty things, and besides, the shoes under my bed are only a small selection of the shoes I own.'

Her brother, meanwhile, is a charming little fellow, and shares his mother's delight in watching me stagger out of the bedroom in the mornings and struggle to raise my consciousness to a functioning level.

'Mummy, Auntie Jess is AWAKE!' he broadcasts to the world.  I grimace and make myself a cup of tea while he prattles on, and it's at times like these that I'm truly glad I'm deaf.

On Being Alive Again

Well, I made it through, although the angel fish didn't.  While I endured three months of unremitting hell, Andromeda made revolutions of her tank that became slower and slower.  Eventually she sank to the rocks at the bottom, her eyes disturbingly dark, and H buried her in the garden.  He then bought me four more fish to cheer me up, but three of them died too.  I am relinquishing my dreams of having a wall-length aquarium; I think a beagle called Basil will be a safer bet.

So, the thesis has been submitted and I am enjoying the unsurpassed delight of waking up and realising I don't have to go to the British Library.  I have the leisure to read for pleasure not for study, to have a social life that involves going out more than once a month and also permits alcoholic beverages, and to contemplate, heaven forbid, finding a bloke who isn't intimidated by my possession of four degrees, including an (almost) doctorate.

I rewarded myself with a trip to San Francisco, and shopped my little heart out in Anthropologie, and stocked up on skin products and Benefit makeup.  At a friend's recommendation I took the boat to Alcatrez, which I hadn't visited though I spent a year on exchange in Berkeley in 1999.  I confess to enjoying the aloe garden more than the prison, which had an interminable audio recording (which I couldn't hear well) of men attempting escape by digging themselves out with spoons.  I also stopped by Coit Tower and enjoyed the smell of eucalyptus in the morning heat.  Then I went across the bay and stayed with a friend in Berkeley, though the poor boy had his orals the following week and I was anxious about disturbing him.  

It was odd to be back in Berkeley.  I visited the cafes I used to sit in and read, walked over the beautiful campus which was at its loveliest in the dying afternoon light, and contemplated visiting my old boss at Bancroft Library but decided against it as I couldn't think what to say to him.  I also met up with my friend K and it was lovely to see him again, and he kindly drove me to the airport.  On the flight home, which was half empty, I read Nam Le's The Boat which was one of the best things I've read all year.  All of his stories, bar one, were flawless, and I fought with my usual feelings of jealousy.   

I flew into Brisbane and was surprised, as I always am, by the friendliness of the people at immigration and customs.  The latter even cracked a joke about rescuing my Pimms as it went through the X-ray machine.  My sister and the kids met me, and over the next few days I attempted to sort out my jetlag.  I met SP and the gorgeous boy bought me a bottle of champers and took me to dinner, though we were both exhausted and frayed.  On Friday I flew to Sydney for L's 30th birthday.  I stayed with Cousin A, and had emailed him previously to check that he was in possession of an iron.  I was impressed to find, on arrival, that he had cleaned his flat, and he whipped out the iron, but unfortunately it leaked all its water over my Sacha Drake silk maxi dress.  I was going to use it again the next day but found it, to my amusement, in pieces beside the kitchen sink.  

It was pissing with rain as I stepped out, and the traffic in Sydney appears to be much worse.  At Hyde Park I gave up and got out of the bus, but couldn't walk the rest of the way to Circular Quay because of my stupid (but pretty) stiletto sandals, so I had to catch the train for just one stop.  Although I was furious by this point, I enjoyed the drama of gathering up my masses of black-and-white silk skirt and tottering across the road.  Finally I made it to the Opera House bar and said Happy Birthday to L and caught up with H, whom I hadn't seen for two whole weeks.  He was sick with the flu and had no sympathy for my rage at the traffic, but I ranted regardless.  We caught taxis back to Kingsford for dinner at an Indonesian restaurant, and were overjoyed to see R.  We made so much noise that L's father came and told R to quieten down, so H and I started telling 'My sister's deaf!' stories at the top of our voices.  At the end of the evening we found we had overpaid the bill so L began distributing the change and R attempted to stuff $10 down my cleavage.  I burst out laughing, and H later said to R that he was impressed he'd got that far.  'I'm mellowing, R,' I told him.  'Yeah, right,' he replied.

I caught the train home to mum and dad's to save on carbon emissions, which entailed an 8.5 hour journey, as opposed to one hour by plane, which cost just the same.  I didn't mind it that much, despite being stuck next to a young mother with two wriggling kids, as I always like watching the landscape pass by.

Currently, I am writing fiction, enjoying the summer and drinking too many of the aforementioned alcoholic beverages, which is necessary to endure the cabin fever brought on by the descension of relatives at Christmas, the unbearably high energy levels of my sister and the kids and my family's complete inability to register any comprehension of the concept of privacy, which means that four people invariably walk in on me when I try to shower in the mornings.  Yesterday everyone except mum and I went to a nearby amusement park, where they looked at a museum of taxidermed two-headed cows and lamb corpses found in ewes struck by lightening (yes, only in Australia) and played on water slides built with scant regard for health and safety regulations.  I had a most pleasant day in the peace, fixing a short story and taking the dog for a walk to the video store, although said dog shat outside said video store and I forgot to bring a plastic bag, so I walked on unheeding.

In a few days we go to the coast for my birthday, whereupon I shall attempt to do something about my fluorescent skin, and continue to catch up on my three-month deficit of sleep.  It is strange to believe that, after four years of dislocation and stress, I can finally have a life again. Bring on 2009, I say.