Bath-mas

I have had a long and tumultuous relationship with Christmas. Actually that’s completely inaccurate. What I mean to say is that I haven’t really liked Christmas since I was about 14. I’ve blogged about it before, in fact, so I won’t go into great detail, but basically it’s always been a disappointment, or stressful, or a combination of both.

As I’ve matured I’ve come to realise that vehemently hating things is kind of draining, and also not particularly amusing to friends and people around you who kind of just want to enjoy their day and don’t want to listen to you being so *different* by not liking *Christmas*. I’m not about to buy tinsel themed outfits or anything, but my objection to the holiday has certainly mellowed.

And this Christmas just gone was the best of my adult life.

After LonDon, Boyfriend and I caught a train to Bath. Due to flooding, this was an adventure in itself. Our train was cancelled, but we (along with hundreds of others) were allowed on the next one. This meant we had to stand in Paddington Station waiting for an announcement and then run (literally run) with all our luggage and amongst a mob of people to the platform. This also meant we were on an incredibly crowded train filled with young Londoners heading home for Christmas. I haven’t been in such a 20-something heavy crowd since university. If you’d done a survey you would have found perhaps 2 or 3 outliers represented in a baby and an old couple, terrified at their mistake, and everybody else would have been within 2 or 3 years of the mean age of 25. That’s right, statistics, people, statistics.

Bath.

Bath is nice. Incredibly nice. The entire city is heritage listed, which means everything looks like it did hundreds of years ago, except that instead of having sewing shops and teahouses it has Marks and Spencer and Starbucks. Actually that’s an exaggeration, Bath still has heaps of teahouses. Probably they are the same teahouses Jane Austen sat in and thought, “I’ll make him seem really aloof and cold but actually he’s just shy and dreamy! Genius!”

When we arrived at our hotel, there was a jazz band made up of teenagers playing really good jazz. We listened to the jazz and ate afternoon tea and thought about how is was 42 degrees back home. Then we walked back down to the train station to meet Amy, who is our friend, who has been living in the UK for more than a year and who would be spending Christmas with us. Back at the hotel the jazz band had gone, but the afternoon tea remained. It was a good compromise. Plus we discovered the cocktail list.

What followed was three days of eating and drinking and being stupid. On Christmas Day we went for a walk through the almost empty streets, looked at houses for rent and decided we definitely should move to Bath, the three of us, and have adventures. We came back to a five-course lunch, where we befriended our waitress, got tipsy and wore paper hats. 

Hats.

Ok, no I actually got a bit drunk, so while Amy and Boyfriend went to the bar to continue drinking, I (probably not so) quietly excused myself and retired to our room where I proceeded to have an hour long bath (in Bath, yes) and sobered up slightly.

After dinner that I can’t believe we had any room for, we watched the Doctor Who Christmas special, wherein I managed not to weep like a baby until Amy Pond’s surprise cameo, at which point I think I looked like my face had had a shower. As soon as it was over, we switched channels to ITV, and Amy and I watched the Downton Christmas special as well. As strange as it is to say, watching TV that night was one of the highlights. I discovered Doctor Who with these people (Boyfriend and Amy, I mean, as well as others) and we got to enjoy it as it aired in England, together. Similarly, Amy and I have been watching Downton together for some years now, and it felt so nice to lie on a bed and watch a silly English drama in England with her.

We spent Boxing Day drinking. I mean, we went for a walk and stuff, and things were open this time so that was nice, but mostly we continued to make our way through the cocktail list. The head bartender had some kind of degree in cocktails. The dude was amazing; he mixed us drinks not even on the list, had a vegetarian Bloody Mary recipe and gave us all gifts at the end of our stay. Basically he made our Christmas even more amazing (and drunk) than it was already. On the 27^th we did the obligatory Roman Baths tour, had lunch and said goodbye. Which was sad, in a way, but also ok, because we’d had this time together, and it filled us all up, I think, with the maximum amount of happy points.

Boyfriend bought me this owl bag for Christmas

Things I managed to not mention chronologically but definitely warrant a mention:

 - Boardgames in hotel lounges are the business.

 - We came third in the trivia despite being at a significant disadvantage when they started asking England-specific Christmas questions.

 - There was a “ski bar” outside the hotel that did warm cider and jars of cocktails.

I'm not kidding.

 - We went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve even though Boyfriend and Amy weren’t actually that keen and it was basically just me bullying them into coming so that I could sing all the songs and pretend I was still in a choir and that was really nice of them.

 - Some swans tried to kill us.

Right after I took this I started running.

 - The meals were absolutely incredible and I discovered what celeriac is and it makes good soup.

 - I was too drunk to work out how to use the bath plug and had to get someone from reception to show me.

 - All traditional Christmas decorations make 300x more sense in cold climates and did not fill me with nearly as much rage as usual so that was nice.

 - Hey Australia, let’s get some decorations that don’t have fake snow on them, how about that?

 - Christmas can be really awesome.

 For those interested we stayed at Bath Abbey Hotel and booked the Christmas Package. Seriously, A+, 5 stars, would recommend. 

Country/Girl: Anniversary

Country/Girl - loving life at the Chinchilla Melon Festival

Well, well, well what do we have here? ANOTHER anniversary to blog about? Well what do you know?

One year ago (tomorrow… details, details), I moved to Dalby, Queensland, Australia. In the scheme of things, it wasn’t so large a move. My friend Amy, for example, moved to the UK last October. I mean, way to show me up, there, friend, sheesh. But still, it certainly was a pretty giant change of lifestyle. I left a city of more than 2 million people, full of my friends, family, job and familiar *everything* to come to a town I knew almost nothing about, and which has less people in it than the suburb of New Farm, where I used to live.

Before I left people either wanted to tell me I was crazy and that I shouldn’t do it, or that everything would be magical in the country because “gosh darn the people are so friendly”. So how do I feel, after a year of actually living here? You’re damn right I’m gonna write a list!

·      Well gosh darn, yes, the people are pretty friendly. But not because of an antiquated, simple attitude, or because of some idealised city-person imagining where all the farmers lean on posts and tell you to have a nice day, missy. People are friendly here because they identify as belonging to Dalby. They are filled with pride, a sense of belonging and camaraderie that you simply won’t find in a city. They want to better their town, they want people to like it, they want you to feel welcome so that you become a part of it too. 

Also. It pays to be nice when there’s not that many people around. You don’t want to piss off too many people in a place where everyone knows everyone.

·      And yeah, that’s not a myth. A lot of people know a lot of people here. People define themselves by their connections with others. Everywhere, I mean, all people do that. But the boundary of where those people are is smaller, and the likelihood of an overlap is significantly increased when you live in a small town.

·      Perspective changes. Dalby is not actually that small. When I lived in Brisbane I could not conceive of somewhere tinier than Dalby. The first time I went to Newcastle, the 7^th largest city in Australia, I thought it was amusingly small. And now, well, I recently drove through somewhere called Macalister. That’s what happened, I drove through it, in about 45 seconds. Whoosh.

·      Similarly, Dalby is not even a little bit remote, like I used to think it was. In reality, three hours from Brisbane and one from Toowoomba is not remote at all. And we live in town, too. Drive 10, 15 minutes out of town and you start to see real country. There’s a 24-hour Maccas here, this is a metropolis. 

·      I thought I knew how to drive. But now I *know*, you know? Driving in the city poses its own kinds of challenges, but you have to be ruthless here. If I hadn’t learned to be ruthless, I’d still be waiting to cross the highway at the intersection. Right of way has a different meaning when you’re dealing with roadtrains. 

·      Some of the things I thought would be hard, like getting a job, were easy. 

·      Most of the things that have been actually hard have been things I never even thought about. Like what do you eat on a Sunday when all the shops are closed and you haven’t got anything in the house? And how do you deal with cravings for Japanese or Thai food when the nearest restaurant is more than an hour away? Actually most of the hardest things have been food related.

·      Worse than food cravings, have been people cravings. I’m not so sure that this has anything to do with living in Dalby, and a lot to do with not living in Brisbane, but I do get kind of lonely here. I miss a lot of specific people, but mostly I miss being amongst people who’ve known me a long time. I miss being comfortable with friends. The strangest thing about this is that a lot of my friends have left Brisbane in the last year, anyway, and I really feel like moving back would not solve this problem. When we see one another, it’s brilliant, but we have all moved on, in some ways, and most importantly, we must continue to move forward.

·      Shaking up my life has been the best thing I’ve ever done. I was stagnating in Brisbane, on a career path I wasn’t happy with, doing the same thing all the time without any goals. I have experienced more new things in the last year than I have in my entire adult life. I’ve learnt so much about myself, and what I’m really like, when given the space and time to sort that out. Moving to Dalby was a change that turned me upside-down and shook me. I’ve been going through the stuff that fell out of my metaphorical pockets and working out what I want to keep ever since. 

·      I’ve learnt so much about Boyfriend, my partner in crime this year too. I’ve seen how strong he is under pressure, how clever and brave he is. I think we’ve seen each other at our best and worst this year, and it’s set our future together in stone, and onto a really exciting path. 

·      Moving somewhere, anywhere, I think, gives you a real sense of empowerment. But moving somewhere so different and scary, somewhere with a different culture, in many regards, and a different way of life, has made Boyfriend and I both feel like we could do anything, we could move anywhere, and be ok. 

Aubergine Paint Proof

Black walls, a black ceiling and a chipping black floor. The layers of black paint could tell countless forgotten stories, but here is mine. 

Happy.

They called it the “Cement Box”, which is a fairly accurate description. The walls were made of those awful, crumbly besser bricks and the floor was hard and cold. Objectively, you couldn’t think of a worse place to perform in. Dancers and actors are meant to perform on sprung floorboards, not cement, and there was some rumour about someone getting haemorrhoids from sitting on the concrete too long. Though I don’t even know if that’s medically plausible.

The lighting rig was a nonsensical mess of wires, and we always ran out of light bulbs. One day I took an old light into a technical theatre supplier and asked the guy behind the counter what kind of bulb I would need. A look of fear flickered across his face as he told me that the light was about 50 years old and full of asbestos. We kept using them, of course, but we stopped opening them after that.

The audience sat in blue and red chairs, which always seemed to go missing between shows. You’d have to crawl through the storage spaces and into the orchestra pit in the upstairs theatre to find them, and I was always determined to get enough of each so we could alternate. Aesthetics, you know? Important stuff.

We staged old classics and student-written work, some of it was god-awful, some amazing. But the most impressive part of all was that we did it all ourselves. Every play was acted, directed, costumed, designed, marketed and managed by amateurs, students... kids really. The company was called “Underground”, which was meant to be a joke, I think, because the theatre was semi-subterranean.

Backstage was my favourite place. You could go hunting in the depths and find all sorts of magic: working lamps, foam walls, dodgy doors and an office chair papier-mâchéd to look like a villain’s high-backed seat. You’d find actors sitting on broken audience chairs or on moth-eaten couches, an Assistant Stage Manager doling out props and the director smoking with some of the actors, trying to be relaxed. And then, watching over them, my favourite part of all: the graffiti. The name of every show that had ever been performed in that cement box was immortalised on every square inch of space on the walls and ceiling. Everything was covered, crammed with the names of people I don’t even know, shows that happened 5, 10, 15 years ago. I spent enough time there to know that the oldest date was on the door. 1984. Before I was born.

The best graffiti by far though, was in the tech box. I spent countless hours sitting in there, so I would know. Every show, the stage managers and techies would leave their marks too. Though undated, they undoubtedly went back as far as some of the ones out the back did. But there were no names here, just an endless continuation of the same joke. “No actors in the tech box” one read, “no fuck ups in the tech box”, said another. “No farting in the tech box”, “No sleeping in the tech box”, “No scrub turkeys in the tech box” … “No holds barred in the tech box”. I wish I could remember more, because they were one of the first things to go.

The place was full of secrets, of doors you only discovered after a year of walking past them, of little-used rooms and unknown passages. It was full of fire hazards and broken things, full of dirt and possum shit. One night the resident possum made its theatrical debut, scaring the pants off actors and audience alike.

I became the keeper of the keys at the start of 2009. From the second I had stepped foot in there 3 years’ previously, I had wanted to know all those secrets. It was like knowing where the entrance to Narnia was, or how to get into the Lost Boys’ hideout. The guy with the keys in 2007 used to park his car out the back under the graffiti to save on university parking fees, and I had heard about people sleeping in the office, or having sex in the office, which was frankly disgusting. I knew where the good napping places were (NOT the office) and I often studied or ate my lunch in the foyer with friends.

Always start a relationship in a dirty, cement pit, would be my advice.

All my friends acted or teched in that place, I met my partner there, I had some of the best times of my life there. It was a safe space, a fun place, a filthy, grimy, ugly space. I wrote a third year paper about theatre spaces and how they impact on the theatre that is made in them. I researched theatre troupes in far off, exotic places like Melbourne. They all had whimsical, abandoned, amazing spaces, and it was only in writing about them that I realised I had one of my own all along.

And that’s when it got taken away.

Yes of course, the evil “man” came and ruined our bohemian dreams. That’s how this story always had to go. The union contacted us, and told us they were giving the Cement Box back to the uni, and then came a series of meetings with people in suits. I wanted protests, placards, fire, shouting, but what really happened is that we cut a fairly boring deal and got out of the way. They promised not to paint over the graffiti, and for the most part they kept their word, but they covered some of it with the same awful purple paint they covered the rest of the black with. Aubergine, a lecturer told me later, is the new colour for theatres. They renamed it after Geoffrey Rush and a couple of my friends stole the old Cement Box sign and hung it in their house.  Not to be outdone, I broke in one night with a tin of paint and in large blue letters proclaimed “No more Underground Productions in the tech box”. I thought I was very clever, but it was gone a month later.

In my essay that semester, I wrote thousands of academic words about art and space, about the impact of both on each other. I waffled on about creative safe-spaces, about the value of found spaces and designed spaces alike. I desperately tried to fit our little space into the essay, and I slipped it in there towards the end. But it’s only now that I realise that the Cement Box didn’t just influence the art we made, it was a crucial element of the people we became. The filthy, badly built Cement Box made us the loud, crude, funny, dirty, clever, self-made people that we were, that we are still. It lives on in the friendships around me today, in the life I share with my partner, in the terrible jokes we still tell. They painted over 30 years of stories, but this is mine, and it is aubergine paint proof. 

Thanks to Emily Rowe and Amy Randall for photos.

A Million

“Do you have enough space back there? I have like a million leg room”.

You know how sometimes you just develop your own language, and your friends know the language, so it just becomes so normal that you forget it’s not real language? I went on a road trip with some new work friends on the weekend (which is why this blog is late). I said the above sentence and the three people in the car laughed like it was a joke.

“A million leg room haha.”

“A million undetermined units of legroom, hahahaha.”

It wasn’t a joke. That’s just how I speak sometimes.

I’m a bit of a show off, and an orator. I love to tell a story, love to have people listen to me, to laugh at my jokes (to read my blog). But sometimes, new people laugh at things I wasn’t intending to be funny. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just a strange realisation to have in the passenger seat at 100Km per hour on a country road.

It’s one of the things I miss most about my Brisbane friends. Having and developing a language of our own is one of the best ways I’ve ever felt close with people. I love words, I feel in many ways they are almost holy, but I also love to mess with them. Years of living and working and studying with friends have produced a special lingo over which we all subconsciously bond. Meanwhile, Boyfriend and I shorten everything. We’re not seeing a movie, we’re “going to the moves”, we don’t eat dinner we have “the dins”. These aren’t even particularly sickening, coupley things, we’re just quite lazy (or “laze”).

And it’s not as if my new friends don’t do it too. The phrase “legit strat” was used over the weekend, and we all laughed and discussed how it would be silly to say “legitimate strategy” (especially when I think we were discussing sand castles). But of course the speaker was just using a turn of phrase, not trying to make a joke. I wonder if he felt like it was a bit weird we all laughed and dissected his words. Maybe he says “legit strat” every day. We just don’t all speak the same language yet.

I’m reading Paper Towns by John Green at the moment (shh I haven’t finished yet, no spoilers). One of the major themes is about how we see others. Do we see them through a window, something of their creation that allows us to see certain aspects of their personality? Or do we see them through a mirror, as variations of ourselves? The main character hasn’t quite decided yet, but I think it’s a combination of both. Language is one of the most subtle ways we can portray ourselves, yet is the most present, we use language almost every moment of every day. It is also one of the more obvious tools we use to create our conceptions of others. Do they speak like me? Do they use words I understand? Are they gentle, abrupt, silly, loud, intelligent, crass or rude?

So maybe it’s not about windows vs. mirrors, maybe it’s about megaphones vs. sounding boards.