May 19, 2005
I have a wedding dress
I have a wedding dress and it’s beautiful.
I don’t yet have a honeymoon destination but I will.
I am loving London, and Bronwyn and even this rainy day. Everything else is daunting, so we go shopping.
May 16, 2005
My Big Fat Lancashire Wedding
As a Canadian with a Lancashire wedding just around the corner, I found My big fat Yorkshire wedding very amusing. Bronwyn and I are going to visit the London Library. And over in Canada the anti-choice protesters pull out the big guns at the drop of a hat.
I’m off to London for a week tomorrow, looking forward to some serious wardrobe upgrades after a year in Munchkin Land and bookish things with Bronwyn. I am also going to buy my wedding dress!
May 14, 2005
Lamb Tagine
In Part One of Kerry and Stuart learn to cook, we are making Moroccan Lamb Tagine for “tea” tonight. We do have problems with our cooking dynamic, as Kerry accuses Stu of taking over and dominating cooking, he tells her she’d only get bored of it anyway and then she does. But I am serious about this and today I cubed lamb bits with the utmost attention.
Today I read “The Guardian” in print, and it was fantastic though I can’t wait to get The Observer and The Times tomorrow. Yesterday we joined the Lancashire Library, and I got a ton of books (though sadly they had not one Margaret Drabble) including Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, which apparently inspired a song by The Cure, and was one of my favourites as a child, along with Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce and A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson, as I went through my obsession with time travel. It’s still a really good story.
Have to go take on the lamb now. This weeks been one of great fretting and dislocation but I think things are coming down to earth.
May 11, 2005
Culture is everywhere!
Now reading the brilliant Juniper Tree Burning by Goldberry Long, who will be my professor in September. It’s a great story, told just so you’re dying to turn the next page, and the writing is excellent. I also received a copy of the 2005 Acta Victoriana in the post today, and am really enjoying most of it. Now stressing out about weddings and immigrations. Real life has too many technicalities. My trip to Sainsburys today was a celebration of colour and taste. A woman asked me if I wanted anything else at the deli, and I said “No thank you” and I was thrilled with my ability to give a polite response. It’s been awhile.
Due to over-zealousness, there is a £50 credit on my Mastercard and I intend to spend part of it on Waterstones 3 for 2s! Oh England, I do love you.
Donkey worker’s rights at Blackpool Beach. On preserving the memory of Gwendolyn McEwen. The ever-brilliant India Knight on smut packaged as good fun.
May 11, 2005
Surprising Things
– the taste of zucchini
– that moving from a one-roomed apartment into a house is terrifying, resulting in one carting all one’s possessions from room-to-room and following boyfriend whenever he leaves the room
– the size of sweet potatoes
– that it costs nearly $2000 to immigrate to Canada
– that accessible culture is overwhelming and makes you want to crawl into a hole
– how exciting it is to be able to talk to people in shops, and so you do it loud and muchly
May 10, 2005
Madness
We flew from Osaka to Manchester via Singapore and Zurich. There is no sense to that. It’s good to be back but alack! It seems we have a wedding to plan. Madness will ensue.
May 7, 2005
Almost gone
This last week has been Golden Week, a clump of national holidays all at once, and it’s been absolutely golden for us as well. We’ve been drunk nearly every night, seen wonderful people every day, we’ve eaten wonderful food and relaxed and enjoyed this amazing place. We’re getting fed up with saying good bye though. Tonight was my work’s sayonara party. There are four of us leaving at once, two of us are getting married and another two are having babies this summer. We’re a close group and it was pretty sad. Today we went to Kokoen Gardens at Himeji Castle, which was beautiful and peaceful. We’ve been eating up Japanness and there was it. We also had a tea ceremony, which was really cool. Last night we went out with our friend and his wife, and I had my hair cut in the day. The day before we had Stuart’s work’s sayonara, which was brilliant and got seriously out of control. We met up with all kinds of students on Wednesday, and it was great. Tuesday was Kobe, Monday friends and fishing. I really am finding it hard not to go shopping again. You can find stuff in this country you wouldn’t even knew existed, but the fact is you need it. In Japan, it’s all about goods and wears.
I’m going to miss my beautiful apartment, and prikura. I’m going to miss Miffy goods, and 100 yen stores, and kimonos, and karaoke. I am going to miss our beautiful friends and our bicycles, Morty and Gladys even more. And the kindness of the people, and the funniness of random things, and the strangeness of every day life. The every day adventures. This wonderful lifestyle that allowed us to do Habitat for Humanity in Thailand, and to subsist on a rather sumptuous diet. I’ll miss my loft bedroom, and train travel like it’s a vitamin pill. I will miss the mountains more than most things. I’ve never left a home I might not return to. It’s going to be a long heartbreak.
But, I will be reading The Guardian in person in just one week’s time. We’ve decided that weekend papers will not be part of our (tiny) weekly entertainment budget, and rather are vital and necessary. Oh the Guardian! This week, delivered this brilliant manifesto on the subconscious opting out from the musical zeitgeist. On how writers are doing it for themselves. Gunter Gass on today’s Germany, which drove us to find out exactly what “a mess of pottage” actually is. Great new Virginia Woolf stuff. And a profile on Nick Laird.
The house is halfway clean, suitcases packed, pocky and magazines ready for the plane. I don’t want to go but I have to, and this just means I will miss here forever.
May 6, 2005
Suberashii
Our house is tragically bare, but this is good news because when we pack out suitcases in the next day or two, I won’t have to cry from frustratoin. This week has not been the most productive, but I couldn’t imagine it being more enjoyable. We’ve been out drinking every night this week, seen tons of people, enjoyed beautiful weather and I have curbed my out of control shopping habits. I bought the Cloudberry Jam CD and I really love it. We leave Japan on Monday, which will be painful. The country has been so good to us, and afforded opportunities we’d never have had otherwise. The education this life has been will stay with me for a long long time.
Nihon wa suberashii kuni desu.
