Quaint ramblings and occasional reflections of a journeying Aussie musician...

14 December 2006

Chart

....screw this prosaic elegaic crap, none of us have any time for it in our busy lives anyway, so I'm just gonna give youse a chart of how I'm doing, plus or minus rating....


'So, Mike....'

'ARE YOU OK?'

+

'SLEEPING?'

-

...not much lately, but that seems to be more okay as I get older

'EATING?'

-

...two-minute dinners just aren't doing it for me anymore so I'm branching out into real cooking, but it's tricky for one - recipe suggestions anyone?

'WORKING?'

+++

...constant rotation between teaching, shift work and gigging - have you ever stepped back while reading an intense novel to marvel at the river of words before you? I had this experience with 'A Hundred Years of Solitude'.....anyway, I was scribbling away in my diary the other day and did the same thing....

HANGING/PARTYING?

-

...reasonably....the odd coffee or drink with friends is countered with days of hermitude (is that a word?)....

'LOVE LIFE?'

---

...non-existent, may have to do something about this....

Xmas Cheer....

Camden High Street, about 5pm, last Saturday....

I am walking towards the markets, I can't remember why, in the permanent dusk of an English December afternoon, with about 57 million other people, a sea of black, goth teenagers everywhere....I feel like every molecule of this place is repelling me, every brick, every post, every grim face, every puddle in the mis-shapen bitumen mess outside my ex-council flat....

....for a moment there I was considering some sort of sniper action against all those goths, down there at the lock, maybe from up top of that little castle thing above Starbucks, with a slug gun or maybe a paintball rifle shooting white paintballs, have that constant depressing river of blackshirts all running for cover, falling backwards over the bridge and into the canal....

....and the really crazy thing is, despite the obvious overwhelming sense of conformism, I don't actually have anything particular against goths....

I GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE! I NEED A HOLIDAY!

....but that's all right....most people I know here get to a certain time limit with this place before they have to run off and hang somewhere else for a bit, which is thankfully pretty easy. Mine's about two months, so I'm well past that now, but my escape route is all planned, another Aussie orphan Christmas in Paris...loads of mates, cheese and baguettes, red wine, general merriment skipping down all those gorgeous boulevards - it's not baking Aussie summer Chrissie with family (something I'll be missing quite a lot), but it's about the next best thing I can imagine....

03 December 2006

...the plot thickens!...

...so when I did my three gigs at Park Lane Sheraton, currently a stop on the Polonium Tour of Central London, I just remembered when recounting the whole thing to someone the other day that I was subbing for a Russian guy who runs the gig, who doesn't live here! I got a 3pm call for the 9pm gig from my man NK because the Russian lawyer guy who actually runs the gig got stuck in Moscow thanks to a grounded flight! Bloody hell, I'm closer than I thought....and this bodgy Russian MP3 site that I joined won't accept my credit card payments anymore....what's going on over there, seriously......

Been feeling it a bit lately, the old 'saudage' as the Brazilians say, the longing, for the homeland....whenever I flick through anyone's Myspace page from Australia, the photos always look so colourful...round ere, with all those pallid stone grey buildings in town set under a sunless sky, it seems like all the colour got rained out of this place and washed into the Thames years ago.

From my fellow Australians, I also miss the humour, and the directness, in speech....I've been in conversation with Brits and Continentals on numerous occasions, and I don't know if they even realise it, but they'll launch into an opinion about something and all the passion and articulation will be there but they'll get to the end of it and they won't have actually SAID anything. I've sometimes listened for 20 minutes, half an hour, and they keep cycling around the same things and I have to hold back from saying, "Yeah, but you haven't actually SAID ANYTHING!"

Aussies don't have time in their lives for any Old World rhetoric...it's probably another Irish inheritance...whenever I talk to anyone back home, you can feel it there, the immediacy of communication, and the funny thing is that they may not even realise what they're doing either. I was talking to my mum not long ago on the phone and she said something and I can't even remember what it was, but most importantly, it was straight up, and it was so refreshing to hear....and all of a sudden I got a flash of the sun on those endless fields, and Jugiong Road, and then, a sigh....

.....coming up to Christmas as well, this one rapidly encroaching will be my third in a row away from family.....we've got an Aussie orphans meet up happening in Paris again which'll be fun....

....it's looking like I might be able to stay here as well....I met a guy today who's helped out others in my situation in the past, and he gave my application the nod....I won't breathe easy until that stamp is in the passport, but it's looking promising....as the grimness of the winter sets in.....