Why I am an iron woman

Reason 1
This evening I put on the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon then ironed three weeks of shirts!

Reason 2
Again, I tried going to the gym but it was closed (I have a gym flyer that clearly states that it is open 8am-8pm on public holidays). As there was a Sainsbury’s superstore next door, I went shopping instead. Usually, my clothes are already daggy by London standards. I was slightly more embarrassed, shopping in a duvet jacket, 3/4 length tracky-daks and scruffy sneakers.

Despite my desperate lack of fashion, on the way home two people smiled at me and said, ‘Happy new year!’ It felt really nice.

I deposited my groceries at home, which brought me great joy, as signposted in my blog profile. Then I prepared to go for a walk around the local park. On an impulse, I asked Neo:

‘Hey, I’m going to the park. Do you want to come with me?’

Neo’s eyes widened and he smiled a hopeful smile. ‘Let me check with dad. I want to come.’ He rushed off to the bedroom.

Ten seconds later, Damian came out and said to me, ‘Did you ask Neo if he wanted to go to the park or did he invite himself?’

‘No, I asked him. I’m going to do a circuit before it gets dark. Neo’s welcome.’

‘Well, that’s great! Neo will get his coat on, then.’

At the park, Neo turned into my personal trainer — I sprinted after him, whenever he declared a race to the next rubbish bin. He also made me struggle up a rope jungle gym identical to this one I photographed in Cambridge. He then insisted we jog laps around the block before going home.

For the first time, I realised what it must be like to own a large dog and having to exercise its energy away every day.

Exterminate

Today, I looked after Neo for a few hours. We started the day by baking Dalek biscuits.

Compare them to the original:

Not bad, eh, except for us using Cheerios for some of the brass buttons.

In the afternoon, we went to the cinema to watch Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. It was 95 minutes of not very taxing viewing. I overdosed on popcorn.

I went to the gym to undo the damage caused by eating too much popcorn. Despite it not being a public holiday (and me being forced by work to take annual leave), the gym was boarded up closed.

I could have jogged around a park. I could have jogged the 0.8 km home with gusto, instead of doing it half heartedly. But it is now dark and I am a fundamentally lazy person. So now, here I am, blogging instead of exercising.

Banks: doing you a favour

Getting a bank account in the UK is an ordeal.

I was warned of this at the WORKgateways website:

“If you think of the bank as doing you a favour by allowing you to keep your money with them, you will be a step ahead in understanding the system, and less bewildered after your UK bank encounters.”

For the privilege of setting up a basic account, you need one or more of: passport, visa, utility bill, proof of at least three months of income and good credit history. This, mind you, is just for a current (everyday transaction) account where you park your money — no overdrafts, no loan.

I don’t understand the rationale. If anything, the bank can steal your money (because you’ve given it to them to hold) and you can’t take any from them. So what’s the risk to the bank?

When you are a newcomer to the country, it is hard to get an account because you don’t yet have a permanent address. Even if you do have a place to stay, you have to set up a phone/gas/electricity service in your name (making sure you get paper statements, not e-statements!), then wait the month or three before your first bill comes in — then you can set up an account.

I was able to skip some of this bureaucracy because as a student, I got my college to write a ‘letter of introduction’. Even then, the bank would only give me a student account. This student account came with a Solo debit card, which is some kind of ‘training’ card that students and people with bad credit histories are given. Solo cards aren’t accepted by many websites and at crucial services, like train stations.

As a student, I also couldn’t get a chequebook. This is a effing nuisance in a country where people still use cheques for amounts as smiddling as £5. When services insisted on being paid by cheque, I had to ask someone to pay for me, then pay them back.

As you might understand by now, one of the things I was most excited about when I started work was that I could finally get a ‘grown up’ debit card. In the first week of work, I went to my bank to request an upgrade. I was told that the standard procedure was that they had to wait until there were three months income in my account before they could upgrade me.

Well! I thought: If they’re going to be like that, I’m taking my business elsewhere!

So I applied for an account with the Co-operative Bank, which is well known for its humanity, fairness and social consciousness.

A week later, a humiliating rejection letter came in the post.

I JUST WANT A BANK ACCOUNT! Twice already I had to ask my workmates to pay for my train tickets.

My final plan was to get a credit card. In Australia, credit companies practically throw themselves at anyone. I wasn’t poor, I wasn’t a student. They should want my money.

REJECTED!

Furious, I went back to my bank armed with my passport, work permit, work contract, first payslip, a perfect UK credit history, and a steely determination not to leave without a real debit card.

I left with a Gold account. Within two weeks, the bank posted me my debit card and chequebook. The bank has also offered me a credit card and high interest savings account.

However, I only knew they were truly repentent when this arrived in the mail last week.

A handwritten Christmas card from my bank branch! This must be an unwritten perk of being a Gold account holder.

Christmas in London and Cambridge

As I said in my last post, I had a three-part Christmas, reflecting the main parts of my life now. These are ‘home and housemates’, ‘work’ and ‘former Cambridge life’.

(The Damjan part of my life is in Melbourne right now.)

So, Christmas started with our house Christmas dinner.

Andrea cooked a delicious roast chicken with vegetables. I have never had such tasty carrots and brussel sprouts before.

Damian made that beloved New Zealand dessert, the pavlova.

We had a living Christmas tree. An array of Neo’s toys held on for dear life. Every now and then, one of them would commit suicide by throwing itself off the tree.

Headgear quickly got silly. It’s inevitable when you have Christmas crackers. For those not aware, Christmas crackers always have inside them a paper crown, a bad joke and a toy.

Now, onto Christmas at work. It started with an exchange of Secret Santa (Kris Kringle) presents. We had to buy something a person could wear for less than £5. I was given a pink sequined cowgirl hat and a gigantic red feather boa. There are pictures so I might be able to post it on here later. Other people got checkered bow ties, reindeer antlers, helium balloons and snowman masks.

We all put on our silly gear and caught the train to St Paul’s. In the tube, Londoners laughed and pointed. We crossed the Millenium Bridge with the sun setting over the Thames. Lunch/dinner was at a Turkish restaurant.

Being the sustainability team, Juhi and Mariane made office decorations out of old magazines.

Isn’t it intricate? I took my cue from this and wrapped some of my presents in magazine paper.

I went to work on Christmas Eve and then caught a 6:30 PM bus to Cambridge. Rebecca and Ian had invited me over for Christmas lunch. I didn’t realise that in England, everything shuts down for Christmas. There are no tube services, no buses, no coaches, no trains. If you don’t have a car, you’re stuck within a walking or cycling radius of wherever you end up on Christmas day.

Which is why I travelled to Cambridge on Christmas Eve and went home on Boxing Day. Luckily, Bec found a place for me to stay overnight.

I had a really comfortable and happy time. It was good to be with friends for Christmas.

We had rosé wine and quality Christmas crackers.

The jokes were not as cheesy as usual and the toys were keepable. From the crackers, I kept a four colour pen and a shower puff.

For our soup starter, Bec blended cauliflower and leek, then garnished with chestnuts. YUM!

And look at this! Roast chicken and vegetables. At London home, I was amazed by the carrots and brussel sprounds. Here, the sweet potato, potato and parsnips were a revelation.

We had Christmas fruit pudding with custard, plus jelly and ice-cream. But before I could tackle dessert, I requested we go for a walk. My tummy couldn’t handle not having a break between mains and dessert.

This photo was taken at 3:15 PM…

…And this was 40 minutes later! The sun went down very quickly.

Merry Christmas!

Shepherd’s delight

It could have been a lonely Christmas but my friends rallied around me. Our house had a Christmas dinner on Sunday night. On Monday, I had a relaxed yet productive day at work. Then I took the bus to Cambridge, where Rebecca and Ian welcomed me with open arms, food, wine and presents.

These photos are of the Cambridge sky above Jesus Green at about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, Christmas day. It was spectacular.

I learned the adage as:

Red in the morning, shepherd’s warning.
Red at night, shepherd’s delight.

Wikipedia dissects this piece of weather folklore.



A walk in the park

The mysterious sign from the previous post in this series is now spelled out in English: bird hide! Maybe it should be a ‘human hide’ because from inside the wooden shelter, people can do covert bird watching.

This is the view from within that bird hide. This large suburban park is dominated by a large man-made lake.

It’s hard to take photos of a lake without being a bit high up. If you’re at the same level, your photo is filled with sky or foreground and a thin, boring strip of brownish lake. I tried to take a more interesting photo by focusing on the lake edge. Although perhaps more interesting, this photo doesn’t show anything of the lake’s size.

It was a beautifully sunny day, though, with white fluffy clouds. Ah, it’s a nice memory while I sit here in my room, rugged up for London’s winter. I didn’t leave the house all day today. I’m like a hibernating bear.

I spotted the rusty pump wheel(?), which was some distance off the path. I wonder what it’s for? I’ve posted a few photos of the wheel. Although I tried, I don’t think I produced a photo that made full use of the interesting subject.

I know much of this is overexposed. I was trying to make it look like a hot dry day. I haven’t had the chance to look at this on a CRT. On my LCD laptop screen, is lightly sepia in tone. I suspect this is too pink on CRT screens.

This version has the same tone as the last one and is probably more ‘correctly’ exposed and therefore more detailed. Sigh. I don’t know. I don’t know if this is an interesting photo.

This photo is even less interesting. The colouring is more correct here. I think some people will like the sky. There’s no creativity in taking a photo of a pretty blue sky.

Anyone got any ideas about how to take a photo of this pump wheel?

This bird is a purple moorhen, very common at this park.

Awful lot of birds crossing the road.

Some of these birds migrate between Victoria and Japan every year.

I think this is a messmate stringybark because of its messy stringy bark. I’m not sure, though. I learned about messmates on a first year ecology fieldtrip to Sherbrooke Forest. It’s a beautiful cool temperate rainforest of Eucalyptus regnans. Only now, reading the Wikipedia article, do I realise (remember?) that E. regnans is the same as Mountain Ash.

Last time I said I don’t like animals. Some people probably think this is strange for an environmentalist. Instead of animals, I love forests, more specifically, trees. I think I trace my environmentalist roots back to bushwalking with my family in the Grampians. I wish I could go back soon.

This sign reminds me of one I took a photo of at Dove Lake in Tasmania. Let me see if I can find it…

…Here it is!
This photo from Tasmania was taken on 23 January 2005. It was one of the first photos I took with my Olympus E-300 camera. By the end of this month, I will have had my camera for three years.

In those three years, I’ve figured out how to take photos of myself.

The end!

Who’s Joan?

I dreamed I lived in a show like 24. Undercover, I worked my way into the baddies headquarters and shot two of them. The head baddie came over and I played the dumb girl, all confused. He believed me, that it was an accident.

Also, somehow, we were a couple.

We were on our way to somewhere in the suburbs and we kept running into my high school friends. I ducked my head so that they wouldn’t see me but it didn’t work. One after another, people came up to me.

‘Hi Joan!’ they said. ‘Joan, is that you?’

I pretended to be oblivious. Then the baddie noticed what was happening.

‘Hey, are they talking to you?’ he eventually asked.

‘What?’ I said, wide-eyed and innocent. ‘What are they saying?’

He looked at me as if for the first time. ‘You do look a lot like her,’ he murmured.

‘Who’s Joan?’ I asked. I could hear my heartbeat in the silence.

‘She’s a very high up goodie.’ He peered at me carefully, heartache at the edge of his eyes. Then he shook his head and willed it away. ‘No. Of course not. You couldn’t be.’

I knew it was only a matter of time before my cover was blown.

Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody

It was midnight. I was trying to sleep but the screaming wouldn’t stop. Outside, someone had been screaming for a while. I got out of bed again and peered anxiously out the window.

‘Is someone getting raped?’ I thought. ‘What do I do? Can anyone else hear it? Should I go outside? Can I stop it?’

The screaming stopped. I went back to bed. Then it started again.

‘Maybe it’s a dog,’ I thought. As far as I could tell, the screams hadn’t formed any words.

Two dogs started barking.

Again, I got up to look out the window. I thought about the story of a girl being mugged and killed in a New York alley. Many people looked out of their windows onto the alleyway. No one tried to help the girl because everyone could see that plenty of people were watching. Everyone assumed someone else had called the police or was making their way downstairs to intervene. And so, the girl fell victim to the phenomenon of distributed responsibility.

‘Stop it!’ someone yelled. It was a woman’s voice and it came from halfway up the block of flats across the road. ‘Leave it alone!’

A man’s voice joined in. His voice came from lower down the apartment block. ‘Stop beating the dog! Stop, or I’ll call the RSPCA! I’ll call the cops!’

‘Fuck off! Mind your own fucking business!’ That man’s voice came from the bottom of the flats, probably on the lawn. The screaming started again.

So it was a dog.

The dog wasn’t barking or whining. It was crying in long vowels. It was a human sound. If I had been in its position, I think I would have shut up in an attempt to appease the tormentor.

I was relieved that there were two people braver than me. I could go back to bed and wait for the shouting to stop. I wondered what I would have done if I was the one with the phone in my hand. Should I have the RSPCA’s number programmed into my mobile? Would the RSPCA pick up at midnight? Would I call 999? Not for a dog, surely?

A blaring siren pulled me back to the window. A police car flashing its lights drove past our front door and turned left into the housing estate.

Two police officers got out. They spoke to someone outside at the bottom of the building, then walked to the front lawn. They were on the lawn for a while. Were they talking to the dog beater? Or looking at the body of a dog?

Who knew how long this whole thing would go for? I climbed into bed. I needed to get up in less than seven hours.

Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody

This is a story about four people: Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it.
Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did.
Somebody got angry because it was Everybody’s job.
Everybody knew that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that Somebody wouldn’t do it.
And Everybody blamed Somebody because Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

Red bus

My bus home was going thankfully quick at the tail end of peak hour. Then luck ran out — we hit a traffic plug five minutes from home. Another red double decker bus (with the same route number as my bus, in fact) had stopped diagonally across the road and was choking traffic.

I went back to my newspaper but was then disturbed by passengers leaning over me to look out my window. I looked up at them, then followed their eyes out the window too. There, lying in the middle of the road was a cyclist and a bike. His fluorescent yellow jacket was splattered with blood.

As we inched past the unmoving man and the cops, I saw that there were still people on the immobile double decker. They, too, were gaping out their windows onto the road.

Going up

When I arrived at work this morning, there was something wrong about the three lifts that take people up and down our seven-storey building.

‘You’ll have to wait a while if you want the lift,’ the concierge said. ‘We’ve called the maintenance staff. They should be on their way to fix it.’

Above the center lift, the arrow was flashing and the number 19 popped up.

‘What’s floor 19?’ the man next to me exclaimed.

‘Well, they were doing a lot of building last night,’ said the concierge.