Christmas & New Year!

31/12/10

Dear Bloggee’s,

I haven’t been in touch for a while because we’ve been staying in the reasonably isolated Lake Bushland Caravan Park and they appear not to have heard of t’internet. I’ve been letting mama get on with her fervent blogging (she’s typing so much I’m surprised she’s not churned out a 50,000 word book by now) and relaxing myself. After all, we are on holiday.

Christmas in Ballarat was, of course, splendid. Holly roasted the veg to perfection and I drank for 12 hours straight. Slowly of course – I surprisingly had not even the slightest hangover the next day!

I got a frisbee, a veggie burger cook book, eyeliners and a purse from Hol and greatly enjoyed it when mum started to dance with a bottle of red wine when Never Do a Tango With an Eskimo came on the stereo. I managed to record it for ever more on her video camera but I have a feeling that’s one film mum’s going to want to keep in the vault. What a terrible shame!

It certainly was a wonderful thing to have so many facilities around – clothes could be washed, there was free wireless, and my bed, despite being on the floor, was the cosiest there ever was. Although I did keep accidentally rolling onto the touch lamp Holly had kindly positioned near the head of the bed. It was very confusing being woken up by a bright light at 4am.

Unusually, very few games were played over Christmas – we had a snap tournament where Holly and Pete easily triumphed over us slow-witted Pommies, but nothing else was brought out. There’s something very wrong and very strange about that.

This has to be the first Christmas during which I haven’t watched A Muppet’s Christmas Carol for an extremely long time. Instead we broke out Hornblower and are now completely hooked. Who knew Ioan Gruffud could be so gorgeous!?

On Boxing Day morning we all packed up our belongings and headed off in Corella the Corolla, leaving Holly and Pete to pack 3 tents, 6 beds and an awful lot of kitchenware into their car, Dolly. When we picked Corella up from Hertz garage at the airport 3 weeks ago she had only done 13,000kms, I reckon we must have nearly doubled these numbers since. So, we left Ballarat and drove east past the Melbourne skyline for 5 hours to a tiny place called Nicholson, where the caravan park lies. We’re near the coast in a 6 bed cabin. I am on the top of one of two bunk beds, the lower two beds are occupied by my parents, who felt the narrow ladder, more suitable for a seven year old, might be too much of an ask. The ladder is a nightmare. I didn’t realise I’d grown so big! There is nothing to hold onto when you’re climbing it and I can’t fit more than one of my size 8 feet onto a rung. Each rung is so narrow and sharp I put off getting out of bed in the morning because it’s so blimmin’ painful. But I must be grateful. Camping from tomorrow night will be dreamy – I’ll be able to dive into bed from a great height.

We’ve been in this cabin for about 5 nights and have done a variety of different day trips, clocking up the number on the odometer as we’ve gone. Last Monday we drove, all five of us in Corella, into Alpine Shire, aka The Alps. The road up there, The Great Alpine Road, was a bit of a thrill ride. At it’s highest it grazed the edge of so many vertical drops, often positioned on c-shaped corners, I was gripping my seat. As if that would have saved me!

The view at the top was tremendous. The mountains were covered in silvery trees that had been stripped of their branches and any foliage during fires but poked up like long bony fingers, all bending in the same direction. The trees were so dense that from a distance the mountains looked covered in silvery snow. In fact this is one of Australia’s primary skiing destinations. I would never go along that road in icy conditions, I can’t believe anyone would even think of it.

Yesterday, Holly, Pete and I went to visit some caves, but we all decided that once you’ve seen one set of caves, they lose their charm. Holly thought you would have to bring a child along with you to make it worth it. The kids on our tour were told that fairy’s lived in the caves. They were all having a spectacularly magical time.

Now I come to the subject of my hair. Once again it has proven to be important news. My roots were getting ridiculous. I looked a bit like a less nuts Katie Waissel so I had to do something about it. The upkeep of platinum blonde locks is hideously expensive so I thought I would go for something a little different this time, perhaps go for a more ‘employable’ image! I told mum and dad this morning that my appointment would simply involved the bleaching of my roots, as it usually does, but in fact I had entirely different plans in mind. And so, here I sit with dark, cherry coloured hair that just reaches my chin, waiting for them to get back from whichever swamp they went to visit for a spot of birdwatching today. I’m bracing myself for a couple of startled looking faces.

The dyeing of blonde to brunette involves re-injecting the warmth into hair that’s been bleached to within an inch of its life. And so before my lovely hairdresser could turn it dark I had bright pink colour put all over it. I had to sit there staring in the mirror hoping earnestly that this wouldn’t be the final outcome. I took a couple of photos. It’s not something that happens very often.

I’m glad I had it done today. I often use my hair colour/style/length as a memory aid since I have a habit of forgetting most things I do (hence the blogging), and now I’ll be able to differentiate between things I did in 2010 and what I went on to do in 2011.

Plans for this evening involve a BBQ, since it’s achingly hot today – the wind feels as though it has come from a supersized hairdryer – and perhaps another game of Trivial Pursuit – Bet You Know It (where you bet on whether you think your opponent will know the answer to their next question and win chips if you bet correctly! It’s amazing) whilst watching the fireworks go off in Sydney on the telly. I’m looking forward to it.

Happy New Year to you all. I miss you very much indeed!

Port Fairy

Hallelujah! The locusts have gone.

We spent our last days in Hall’s Gap sheltering from the torrents of rain and hail plummeting from the heavens whilst feeling a little smug that the locusts appeared to hate it. Every time the Sun came out they would line up like soldiers facing the same direction for maximum coverage. Then as the raindrops began to fall they fell one by one as if on the battlefield.  HA. Serves them right.

We evacuated the cabin and set off, ocean bound, towards Port Fairy, formerly known as Belfast but renamed after a particularly important ship.  It is, as the Lonely Planet describes, ‘a loveable town’ with streets lined with thick evergreens that look like Christmas trees that have soaked up their fair share of steroids. The town is on the far westerly end of the Great Ocean Road so the two days we spent here we took plenty of little drives along the coast and walked the perimeter of Griffiths’ Island, a gorgeous, rocky place with very many birds that the parents could feast their eyes upon.

There’s a nice reminder of what I now look like!

The cabin was much like the other two, a little smaller and the walls were paper thin. Some alarm went off at 5.30 on the second night and this infuriating person over the hedge behind us revved his Harley for about half an hour before setting off, so let’s just say cabin-based harmony was indeed, disrupted. Then again, it wasn’t all that harmonious – the camp manager had to break in through my window to unlock our front door. All mum could think of was how ashamed she was of my messy room. The camp guy had ‘seen worse’!

The next day we packed up and pottered off towards Ballarat. Well that’s what I imagined would happen at 10am as the chilly air and boiling hot sun came through the car window as we left Port Fairy. 9 hours later we rolled up to Holly’s front door.

We had scaled the entirety of the Great Ocean Road, 80% of which curves around the shoreline in the same shape as a desert snake moves across the sand. We stopped at every single viewpoint on offer. Every 5 minutes there would be a sign pointing to the right where we could see another angle of another rock. NOT that it wasn’t breathetaking – but I really wanted to get to Holly and Pete’s for a beer and a spot of sisterliness.

Eg. of the beautiful rocks… (The Twelve Apostles)

The last time I saw the Twelve Apostles I was with my lovely friend Caroline who had fallen off a chair at Neighbours Night the night before. Poor, lovely Caroline. She had ripped tendons in her ankle and, I think, her knee and had to navigate the Ocean Road on crutches. I was surprised, this time, that I didn’t remember more of the sights I was seeing. I think I must have been spending most of my time worrying about Caroline falling into said ocean.

So now I’m at Holly and Pete’s!!! We drank a lot of wine last night and watched Bran Nue Dae, a musical set in Broome where they used to live – it was hilarious – I highly recommend it.

Festive cheer is finally kicking in. It’s cold. I am shivering as I’m typing this so things are homely. Also, there is an English newsreader on Sky News, Holly is making delicious smelling coffee (for everyone but me), and the ceiling is drippings with lights.

I hope everyone else isn’t too cold. I sent out 7 of the 17 post cards yesterday so you might be hearing from me soon. In the meantime… MERRY CHRISTMAS!

 

Locust Pocus

They’re still here. We just got back from a day trip and had to fight our way to the door. The green lawns surrounding our ‘brick unit’ now look like parched desert landscape with a couple of apparently inedible weeds dotted around. Bushes have been stripped of their leaves and every car we see looks like a miniature locust genocide has taken place across the bonnet.

We walked to the local restaurant a couple of times this week, the first time we decided to face the sea of hopping brown bugs lining the ground, wincing each time they didn’t get out of the way in time and shrouding our faces so they wouldn’t fly full speed into our eyes. I ended up with one in my shoe. Please note, they’re about 2 inches long, it was horrific. And the next time we ventured out my wonderful, brave dad drove us there, drove home and walked back through the swarms so he could enjoy a cold stubby.

The extractor fan above the cooker began to grown legs just after we arrived in Hall’s Gap. The locusts were falling down into it and blindly attempting to find their footing, instead it just looked like they were trying to claw their way through to us. So we carefully cut out a disc from a Diet Coke box and stuck it over the many legs hanging from the ceiling with plasters.

The only happy news I have to report is that I am yet to have one hop across me at night, unlike mum, poor gal.

We’ve had an apprehensive few days here so far because we’re moreorless prisoners in our own cabin, but it hasn’t stopped us from setting off every morning looking for places to go walking. I tell you, my parents like nothing better than setting off down a dusty trail with their binoculars, and if they aren’t on foot they’ll perform emergency stops to get a good look at whatever kind of bird.

A couple of days ago we drove up and up and up around very many corners until we reached a bizarrely-named place called Wonderland Carpark. It was simply the base for a few walks and we decided to do a 20 minute one up a gorge called the ‘Grand Canyon’. We zipped up the path in no time and got to another sign telling us we could walk up to the Grampians most breathtaking viewpoint, the ‘Pinnacle’. The first part had seemed so easy that we thought why not! Nearly 1hr30 later and having climbed up and down a rock face as steep my nose we couldn’t believe what we’d done. The ruddy Pinnacle was one heck of a mission! My legs were burning by the time we got back. It’s pretty clear I haven’t done any exercise since I was at uni. I also managed to acquire a sunburn facial and about 5 more mossie bites just to add insult to injury!

Since the outside world has been something of a danger zone, we rented a couple of movies to watch in the cabin over the past few nights. I got the Aviator; standard, quality fayre – Mum got Notes on a Scandal and Mr Bean’s Holiday – two of the most contrasting films you could possibly imagine.

The television remains hilarious. I’m watching some emergency, hospital-based prog which keeps reminding us, virtually every other sentence, that the patient could have died, and may well still! It’s so insensitive!

A kangaroo just jumped past our locust-covered window… I am bemused.

Dinner’s ready! Mmm…. jacket potato.

A Plague of Locusts

It sounds like one of my pointlessly melodramatic titles, but in fact I am currently sitting in the middle of one of the very same. But before all of that I shall start at the very beginning, which as we all know, is a very good place to start.

Going into Melbourne on your own is not half as fun as going with practically anybody else. I decided to get the 75min train in from Ballarat (pronounced Balla-RAT I have learned) and didn’t spare a thought about what I would do at all, not for more than 20 seconds. So when I got into Southern Cross station and hopped on another train to get to Melbourne Central I must have walked around the block about 3 times before I managed to find anything remotely resembling a shopping precinct.

There’s something about shopping on your own at home that’s quite therapeutic, but alone in a massive city the novelty can wear thin pretty quickly. In Melbourne, without a companion to keep the conversation on an even keel I felt myself experiencing something I would like to call ‘shopping mood swings’.

Normally I am a swift and ruthless shopper, in and out, no fuss, at least when I’m on my own. However, much to their credit, Aussie shop assistants are unfailingly polite; “How ya doin’?” forming their minimum form of inquisition in every shop you come to.

Being an extremely polite person myself I feel it’s only necessary to give a proper reply and a chirrupy smile. Then I take one look around, frown, and run from the place, returning to my former sombre ‘woman-on-a-mission’ poise. It is only when you keep going for 5 hours that you notice your patience wearing thin and feel strong pangs for the evasive shop keeps of the Motherland.

I came home with presents for Hol and only one thing for me, not including the Coopers Pale Ale and the pumpkin and veg ciabatta in my stomach. Mmm.

That night Pete came around to our cabin for some grub. Sadly we were without the wonderful board game, Cranium, which had turned out to be a bit like too much fun the night before; Dad had, at one point, had to puppeteer Mum into guessing the action ‘aerobics’ and had ended up partially dislocating both of her shoulders. I look forward to playing that game a lot more frequently at Christmas, perhaps after Mum has limbered up a little.

We waved goodbye to Pete and Ballarat and the next morning, having piled the contents of the fridge and a small crate of Pure Blonde beers into the Toyota Corolla (which by the way I have just named Corella because of them parrots outside) we headed up the Western Highway to Hall’s Gap in the Grampians, a small collection of hillocks/mountains but definitely nothing like European ones with their jagged peaks and avalanches. These are ever so green.

What we didn’t count on was what happened on the way up the Highway.

I was plugged in to my iPod, trying and failing to like the new McFly album, as you do, and we started to drive into what appeared to be a ton of enormous dandelion seeds floating through the air. I was only a little bemused when one of them flew into the windscreen and splattered greenish mess across Mum’s eyeline; random bug – I thought, but alas, a million suicidal superbugs followed suit and before long dad was going at 20mph and the windscreen wipers were on full blast trying to clean them out of the way. At this point we still had an hour’s driving to go so regarded the swarms as something of a spectacle.

Enlarge it for full effect :-/

It was only when we arrived at the Parkgate Big4 Resort and were still surrounded by the ever-increasing swarms that we began to understand that they were here to stay. Dave from reception, who showed us to our cabin in his golf buggy (see the frightening pic) said he’d never seen anything like it, and delighted in driving through them all, settled on the grass, gnashing away, so that we could take home a record of an example of the Extreme Australian Critter.

Our cabin is about 4x the size of the last one and I have a queen sized bed to myself which I can lie on one side of. Four of these Australian Plague Locusts (as they have been named by these ever imaginative Aussies) have found their way in through the front door and some are trying hard to get in via the fan above the stove but I remain hopeful that I’ll survive the night. I’ve got my wine. And I bought a book called ‘I Kill’ about a gruesome serial killer in Monte Carlo that I started today and am already a good 100 pages into. Compared to it’s contents these locusts are a piece of cake!

Mum’s just declared some kangaroo’s have appeared on what was the grass near our cabin. She’s welcoming them in a Kath n Kim style accent. Bonza!

“Droopy eyes? Powernap now!”

I saw this written on a road sign near the end of our hour long drive between Melbourne Airport and Goldfields Holiday Park in Ballarat last Wednesday night. If it hadn’t made me internally laugh so much I probably would have done what it said. I think the Brit’s ‘Tiredness can kill, Take a break’ is a little more sobering and sensible than tempting travellers to close their eyes at 110kph

Nevertheless, it had been a long journey, and never had I been so pleased to see the inside of our hire car – how dad managed to drive for over an hour having spent a day in Cathay Pacific’s hideous bucket seats, I’ll never know. Although it does remind me of when, aged 17, I got home from Thailand, immediately went out into Exeter to see all of my friends, and then drove some of them back to Tiverton because I was still on a generous holiday high. I don’t think they realised I hadn’t slept in 36 hours until we were on the M5. Adrenaline is a powerful fuel.

Time-travelling makes my memory hazy! I appear to be in Australia, it’s 10.30am and I’m sitting at the round table in our cabin watching ridiculously over-the-top television, sipping a coke, whilst mum and dad tuck into their muesli. Dad is on his laptop too, I think he’s working.

I’m still verrry sleepy, it’s Holly’s 29^th birthday today but we went out to celebrate last night as she’s off on a field trip this afternoon until Christmas Eve Eve.

As the fella in Liquorland told us a couple of days ago, ‘this weather is highly unusual, temperatures normally average around thirty!’ – It’s been 17 degrees at best, and blimmin’ chilly. We’ve had blankets on our beds and I felt pretty bemused when I noticed I had a slightly tinged nose after a couple of hours bird watching/strolling around Lake Wendouree. Is there still an enormous hole in the ozone layer above Aus? I guess so.

Thanks to jet lag we’ve been taking it easy, napping as the sign suggested, lunching with Holly and Pete who live down the road in an amazing house and swanning around the town getting our bearings.

I knew nothing about Ballarat, surely most people would forgive me? However, lately I have learned that about 160 years ago they discovered that there was an enormous gold reef somewhere underneath the ground here. Miners set up camp and there was some sort of population explosion! 1800 men a week were coming into Melbourne on ships to try their hand at a little gold panning. Then, selfishly, the Aussie government decided to charge the miners a license fee to even try searching for gold and the whole thing became impossible. The miners rebelled and tried to protect themselves in a stockade, the government attacked and a number of people were killed. They re-enact this particular event up on Sovereign Hill every week… they call it a ‘light show’ – I reckon there’s a lot of fire involved.

So now we can all feel a little more intelligent when ‘gold’ comes up as a topic on QI.

There’s also a man-made lake here specifically created as home to the 1956 Olympic rowing events. It’s a pretty nice lake, but what with the 10 year long Victorian drought it’s been completely dry until recently.

Ballarat has around the same sized population as Exeter (90,000) but it’s a lot more spread out with wide avenues and very many characterful houses decorated with intricate wrought iron and painted pastel colours.

Holly’s house was probably an old miner’s home. It’s what I like to describe as glowy grey/purple and has wooden floors stretching through it. It has white venetian blinds at every window and she, ever so sweetly, cleaned the place to within an inch of it’s life prior to our arrival. Family photos adorn every shelf although she admitted they had only been up for a few days. I love it

Our cabin isn’t quite as salubrious. It’s very nice, nicer than nice, and getting into my bed (one of four bunk bed beds) is like snuggling up in a toasted sandwich. We have a two more nights here and then we’re off to the Grampians – mountains apparently. I want to indulge in a spot of abseiling.

I hope that England is thawing and that you’re no longer falling on your backsides repeatedly.  Lots of love, Phil.

Gulliver’s travels

I would have personalised the title, but Gulliver is about as cool as names get.

I have been informed, subtly, by the sign below the screen that I have 15 minutes of free internet time. Thankfully, wordpress is a wonderful blogging site and saves what you write every 60 seconds, so at least I dont have to wearily moan about technology when everything disappears.

I am very weary. Everything is extremely heavy on my skeleton at this particular moment in time.

It became apparent as we shuffled out of the Jury’s in some time on Tuesday morning, that I was developping a sore throat and a stuffy nose. Aeroplanes are pretty nasty when this is all going on. Cabins are so dry, and knowing you have to spend 10 hrs trying to sleep sitting up with a cold is just one of those groan-worthy moments.

Luckily, they had about a million films for me to watch, so I indulged in a bit of swooning whilst watching The Life and Death of Charlie St Cloud and felt very happy to be single during Going the Distance with Drew Barrymore/Justin Long. Neither of which were very taxing and just about all I could manage. Then I settled in for a couple of episodes of Glee. Naturally.

Cathay Pacific have these weird seats which are a bit like bucket seats, instead of leaning backwards into another person’s space, they sort of slide downwards within their own confines. It sounds like a good idea, but to be honest, I prefer the old fashion space-invasion. They curve your spine awkwardly so you just want to cave in. There must have been about ten screaming children throughout the flight as well which did not help. The screams came to a crescendo as we geared up for landing, so much so that you could easily have likened the aeroplane to that of a goat-kid slaughter house. It was terrifying. I had to put my ear plugs in again. Mum did too, we were miserly… bleddy kids.

Then again, I aparently did the same thing on my first flight abroad so I feel a tad guilty for being so abrasive.

So, “just” another 9hr 25 til Melbourne, that’s nearly the same distance again! HOW is that possible? We’re already teetering on the brink of actually being IN Australia! It really is just that big.

I’m going to watch Avatar on the next leg. Apparently I am some kind of freak of human nature for not having seen it already.

Thank you all for giving me your addresses. I have seventeen post cards to write during the course of my trip. No pressure! Seventeen mini-essays are on their way. Having said that, anyone else want one, just give me the address here.

Better go! Time is ticking, only have 2 mins left. Lots of love, Phil xxx

Panicking!

I’m not panicking at all. Mum is racing around the house, frantically emptying bins, turning every switch off, scouring the house for whatever she’s missing. I’ve really had a very leisurely morning. My bag weighs 18kg – not all that bad. The bag is seriously enormous and heavy already before you even put a thing in it. It’s nice to know I can buy 5kg of Australiana. Who wants a cuddly koala?

Ok, I’m being told to get off the computer and put my defrosting pasty in my bag before we migrate into the taxi. Farewell England. I will miss you a lot… but not half as much as I’ll love this.

 

Gleee

…so I’m listening to Glee. I can’t help myself. I even decided to walk home from Topsham at midnight last night because I wanted to have a little extra ‘me time’ with the iPod. The bus swooshed past me when I was in the middle of that icy field part between Ebford and Topsham but I danced the rest of the way back.

Whilst I’m here, thank you Guy for having me around for our second Thanksgiving meal last night. It was delectable and I had a lovely night – even if I did babble on again! I’m getting used to living with the shame.

So it’s 1.30pm, mum has packed. She’s hoovering and sorting the house out whilst I’m staring at a pile of clean clothes and the packing list underneath it all. My bag has been freshly excavated from the garage and is still far too cold to touch! Well that’s the first excuse. The other being that I know it’ll only take about an hour to pack. I think dad packs in about 10 minutes, but he doesn’t have to worry about appropriate holiday apparel, make-up, shoes or the weight of his bag, does he?

As many of you may have seen, I had my brace taken off! I didn’t realise before how conscious I was of it. I used to hide my teeth as much as possible but now I’m manically grinning at every available opportunity. Perhaps a little too often. I noticed I scared an elderly gentleman on my way through Topsham yesterday. I’ll hopefully be having them whitened when I get home, might as well! Then I can blind everyone as well.

We leave tomorrow, on the National Express, and stay in the Jury’s Inn near Heathrow for a night, spend the whole night crossing all our fingers for no snow on the runway and then fly at about 11am with Cathay Pacific. I’ve never flown with them before but I really hope the seats are comfy, else it’ll be a long, long 23hrs.

I have nothing else to say, apart from a little pleading I reckon. Please do keep reading this! There’s nothing better than seeing 50 people have logged on… that’s my current record. I understand I will have to keep up with the anecdotes and make sure my spelling is accurate to keep all of my more pedantic friends happy… I suppose I just want to have a link with home when I’m sooo far away at Christmas time.

Auf Wiedersehen meine Freunde!

4 o’clock Sunset

Something other-worldly is about to happen. It seems like only yesterday that I was blogging on this very site from my sister’s house in Alice Springs, Central Australia. She had been living there for over a year, but was on the verge of moving south. Since then, she has made Ballarat her home. Another wonderful Aussie town with a name including far too many of the same letter (much like my own name in fact!), around an hour north-west of Melbourne. A probable metropolis!

Gone are the days she would hunger for a street packed with bustling little shops, in this new town we can hop on a train and within the same afternoon, end up in a place where shops sell de-icer! However it is highly unlikely said product will be on the shelves at this time of year.

I am yet to decide how I feel about a boiling hot Christmas. I dare not complain or keep it a secret that I’ll be happy to leave behind icy roads and cold fingertips, but Christmas-time spent in swimwear and flip-flops is something I’ve not encountered before.

Some years I’ve felt happy to bypass the more familiar effects of Christmas. I worked in a pub for the majority of my 19th Christmas Day, content with one showing of A Muppets Christmas Carol and eating lots of bubble and squeak the next day in a vain attempt at crushing as much festivity down my throat as I could before it was all gone. This year, however, I feel like I want to wear gloves, spend a couple of wet afternoons coating the house in sparkle and get a little bit fatter in front of Home Alone.

Not possible. I bought a bikini from ASOS last week and am too afraid to look at it having tried it on. I may have lost a stone during The Op, but it has almost certainly gone back on. I would go and check to see if I’m right but I just ate a pasty and a pile of peas so I doubt I’d report back happily.

As well as all of this climactic Christmas confusion, none of us are exchanging any presents this year. I don’t mind at all, apart from I cannot envisage waking up on the day to a lone tree. There’s something quite sad about it. I might wrap up some of the vegetables we’ll be eating for lunch and unwrap those. I’m sure individually wrapped sprouts will eke out the unwrapping session I need.

So, as it is, there’s  precisely a week until we go. Before which I will finally be having my brace removed. For never was there a tale of more woe than that of Phil and her…face.

Apart from the sinking of my lips back into my face, that day will be the best of days. I can remember getting my first fixed brace off when I was about 15 or 16 and having to miss the first lesson at school. I arrived back mid-Music lesson and climbed all the way to the top of Tregear (big old leafy building) with an enormous smile on my face that did not stop when most of the class stopped watching whatever video was on to turn around and look at my sparkly piano keys.

This time, not only will my teeth have straightened out, my whole face will have reset into its’ new position. I can still feel nails underneath my skin holding it all together, and my chin feels like a huge bruise whenever I touch it as all of the nerves are still healing, but for the most part, everything will be over. I can only imagine the relief.

It has been the biggest of deals. Every ounce of energy I’ve had these past few months has been spent adjusting. I look different, do I like it? Well, I’m not sure. I imagine I probably will eventually! Everything in side of my head is in a different place. The roof of my mouth is higher, my nose has changed, even my cheekbones have undergone what I can only describe as a renovation.

Above all of my insecurities is a cheery voice exclaiming that it really does not matter how I look. It doesn’t affect anyone else so why should it worry me? Mum and Dad have spent so many evenings staring at my face rather than the television that I imagine they’ve adjusted. It will be interesting to see what Holly and Pete think of my face. I’m not sure I’d like it if she did the same to hers!

Anyway! Enough of this, I am going to get cleaner. Mustn’t forget the excruciatingly painful St Ives face scrub. You’d be surprised at how often you absent-mindedly scratch your chin. Ow.

 

Start to life

Good evening everyone.

This is the life. I say that, it’s not my ‘the life’, but it’s the kind of life the dissatisfied working population of Britain (and possibly the world) would make obvious that they crave. It’s the ‘I can most of the time, wake up when I want, do what I mostly want and have every opportunity to spend watching DVD marathons and playing on the Wii’ life.

It’s not my kind of life. On Monday I decided that I wanted to go abroad this week, simply because I could. I would go somewhere by myself and spend a lot of time in museums and galleries and cafes and bars and I would be the life and soul of my very own European party. However, as easy and wonderful as that would have been, company would have been preferable. It’s just unfortunate everyone who might just give themselves up to travelling with me is either on the other side of the world, busy or has insufficient funds for the foreseeable future. Hope has been offered in the form of one Emerald Henderson, bringer of joy and happiness exclusively to me at 1am last night as she hinted at the possibility of a spontaneous, cheap holiday that she would be able to join me on!

There is a great big, glowing, luminous bulb at the end of this summer tunnel.

That excitement that used to fill summer, so thick you could taste it, and it tasted of dewy, warm grass, has evaporated this year as if it had been sucked up by a man with an Earth-sized hoover. This summer feels simply like time. Time without a name. I cannot fill it with anything that will mark it out as being something special, even something useful or necessary (such were chapters of my degree) as I have to wait. I have to wait for the people at the hospital, the incomprehensibly smart people who know how to take my face apart and piece it back together so that it is better, to tell me which month to keep free for healing. This means that honestly, I cannot plan anything, and for one of the worlds great organisers (not because I’m not spontaneous but because I value anticipation) this is agony.

Instead, I’ve filled my days with shopping. Shopping is all there is. How depressing. I could have taken up manically cycling like I did in Australia last year, or perhaps decided to manufacture my own clothes, but alas, in all the impossibility of it all I turned to my debit card. I am now the owner of 22 new DVD’s bought in anticipation of jaw-healing-time-boredom (at roughly £4 each from Tesco), a Wii console, 4 cheap controllers from Japan, a TV, a PC, 4 games, copious sale items, 2 clocks, some straighteners and a sofa. Some heels too, but they were for jury duty and therefore bought by order of the queen’s court.

I would never, ever, ever normally purchase this much, ever, but I have saved and, as I say, have nothing to distract me from the psycho currently inhabiting  the ‘want’ section of my brain. I keep repeating, ‘long term investment’ and ‘career starts soon!’ to myself in the hope that somehow it’ll all seem justified. It’s not, but it’s all too late.

This is my chance to abstain you know. I have just typed out what I’ve done and I should really just surrender to this Age of Austerity that’s been described as approaching in the press.

That’s it. Just that handbag and I’m done. And drinks in Leeds. Since I’m graduating next week. Then that’s it.

Perhaps I should say ‘No unnecessary purchases’. There.

Onto brighter things!!

I don’t really feel that guilty… I’ll just wait til I find myself a couple of hundred quid short on rent and curse the day I decided Lego Harry Potter on Wii was a good idea.

I’m going to bed. I didn’t sleep til 5am last night thanks to a variety of owls flirtatiously hooting at each other and because a moth flew into my ear early on and I couldn’t rid my mind of the image of thousands of them descending on my senses. UGH.

Lots of love, sorry for the release of guilt. :S