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. 

LonDon.

Hyde Park

For the first four days of our holiday we were in London. We paid more money than is morally acceptable for meals, and learnt how to use the tube, and never once went to Buckingham Palace. We had breakfast with friends, visited The Globe, walked through Hyde Park, saw The Hobbit while jet-lagged (do not recommend) and resisted the urge to touch actual Ancient Egyptian artefacts in the British Museum.

I don't want to discuss how much this dessert cost me.

British Museum, home to all the stuff the British have stolen.

London is kind of incredible. Probably I need to visit more massive cities to properly compare it. But if you’ve not been there, it’s larger than you can possibly conceive, while still being manageable. You can get to everything easily enough, and almost everywhere has something worth seeing.

At the end of our holiday we came back and spent another four days in Londonia. We stayed in a different area and were blown away by how different everything was. Every restaurant had Shisha pipes, Eastern European men gathered in large groups on the street (doing what, I’ll never know) and the tube station had a garden in it.

Bayswater

That’s the thing about London. While Australians might throw the word ‘multicultural’ around like tomato sauce at a Barbie, we don’t really have any idea what it truly means. In London, you can experience a whole wealth of cultures, accents, foods and influences. And there tends to be pockets of London where people who identify with certain cultures live and play. We went to Brick Lane, where every restaurant is Bangladeshi, and men stand outside and accost you, convincing you to come in, eat, drink, enjoy their discount, don’t listen to that guy, he’s lying to you. The influence of Middle Eastern Islamic culture means that there are late night dessert shops everywhere. Don’t want to drink alcohol? they seem to say, neither do we. Come eat ice-cream! To which I say, um… yes?!

I spent most of our second stint in London feeling sick and awful. I had a cold, but it was also cold and wet outside most of the time, so being outside was a horrible time. But also, nothing was going to stop me from squeezing out the last few drops of our holiday. We did less tourist things in those last few days and more hanging out with people we know who live over there. Just eating and drinking with them, seeing things that they like about London, doing things with them that they would probably be doing anyway.

And it was in those moments that I began to see why they live there.

On the tube back to our hotel after the Brick Lane night, I hung off the pole in the middle of the car(riage) and glowed with quiet energy as I babbled at Boyfriend all of the reasons we should do it, or could make it work.

I’m not saying we’re gonna, but I’m not saying we won’t. It no longer seems impossible.

 

Things you see on the tube dot tumblr dot com

Woah. You guys. I’ve just spent a month in the UK. We’ve been back for less than a week and already it feels like a dream, or something that happened to someone else, or something that happened four years ago.

Basically when I think back to all the things Boyfriend and I did in those thirty days, I feel like we were drunk or something. And now I am living through the holiday hangover. I’m happy to be home (my own bed! My own shower! A fridge! My laptop! Joyous), but I can’t believe how incredibly lucky we are to be able to travel, to see stuff, to do stuff, on the other side of the world and I’m sad it’s over.

But I’m back to talking to you, dear reader, every week if we can both manage it, and that’s awesome. Also you should know I’m probably going to be blogging about our holiday for the next few weeks.

The Fall of the Eleventh

If you’re not a Doctor Who fan, I’m sorry for your life, and also sorry that this post might not be overly relevant to your interests. (This post is not 100% spoiler free, but it’s also not super spoilery, so if you’re not up to date with Doctor Who, make your choice…. Now).

Matt Smith is leaving Doctor Who. Just announced. Hot of the presses. I guess what you need to know before I go any further is that Eleven is *my* Doctor. If you weren’t around when I first discovered Doctor Who, feel free to go back and read this post, which is a literal transcription of my first Who experience. Please enjoy my first reaction to River Song which was "Who's this wench?" - charming, Lizzy, charming. The first episode I watched was The Eleventh Hour, and I was hooked right from the very start. I watched all of Season 5, and then went back and watched everything from the start of Eccleston, working my way back through again until I caught up with everyone else, who were still reeling from A Good Man Goes to War - in which we all learn the big secret about River Song. The first episode I had to wait for was Let’s Kill Hitler in which, unfortunately, no one kills Hitler.

Let me say now that Matt Smith is making the right choice. He is a very good actor, and he should go off and do all sorts of excellent things with his career. Let me also say that I am sure I will love the Twelfth Doctor. It’s just that, with my watching history, this will be the first regeneration I will watch not knowing what’s coming next. When I went back to watch Nine, I knew he only had one season, and I knew that Ten was coming next. I knew everyone loved Tennant, that he was everyone’s favourite, and that he said “Well” a lot. (Actually, I lied earlier; the first episode of Who I ever saw was The Waters of Mars. It was just on one time. I had no idea what was going on, everything was super dramatic and at the end a tentacle-faced dude appeared and sang the song of his people.) When I watched the Tennant seasons through in sequence, I thought he was great, but I was still waiting for Smith. One season of his was enough, he was my Doctor. And now I am staring down the end. We get two more episodes and then… he’s gone.

And I think this is what is freaking me out the most. It’s not that he’s going, because they all have to leave us in the end, it’s not that we’re getting someone else, because that will be brilliant I’m sure, it’s that we have just two episodes left to enjoy him in. The 50^th Anniversary special isn’t really going to be about Eleven. It’ll be about Ten, and Rose, and wtf is happening with John Hurt and celebrating the show’s history. It shouldn’t be all about the current Doctor, of course, but that means we get just one proper Matt episode. And it’ll be his last. And it’ll be on Christmas Day. For crying out loud BBC, I was just starting to get over my hatred of that holiday, are you trying to crush my soul?

One amazing thing about all of this is that Boyfriend and I are actually going to be in the UK on Christmas Day. So instead of watching the regeneration on the ABC on a hot Boxing Day’s night, we’ll be watching it on the Beeb, in England (probably) and on actual Christmas Day. There might even be snow, if we’re lucky, and a fireplace, and I don’t know fucking mead or something. The point is it will be super British, and just a really different experience to what I’m used to. We will meet a new Doctor in the home of Doctor Who. One of my bestest friends, Amy, will be there, and afterwards we can sit around eating pudding and dissecting what we just saw and what kind of Doctor Twelve will be and weeping for the loss of Eleven. It’ll be great.

Right so I want to tell you guys what my plan for the blog is going forward. But I’m still kind of working it out. So far I have confirmed a designer, the wonderful Finbah Neill, to redesign the page. Go and look at his stuff, he’s very good. Like, wow, I just went and looked over some of those posts again and damn boy. I’m thinking I will keep the dodgy, DIY vibe some of you seem to love but I want to revamp it a bit. Fin is good at lots of things and I’m confident he and I can work something out. The other thing I know for sure is that I won’t be starting any new projects til I’ve finished this semester. So that would be late June/early July. At the moment I think what will happen is I will make overanalysing media a bigger part of what I do from now on but it won’t be all I do. I also would like to take suggestions for things to watch, probably via facebook, so if you aren’t a fan there yet, dooooo it.