fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

I have been catching the bus into work for two weeks and getting in at times that fluctuate even more than the normal Tube times. Today I was asked especially to be on time and so I conquered my fear and I got on the Tube for a long journey. When we were out in the open I was fine, reading the Metro, even finally being able to read the articles on July 7th without wanting to cry and throw up simultaneously. Once we hit the tunnels though I started getting tense. Not even as bad physically as I was my other two three-stop Tube trips, just mentally tense. First I tried to work out if I had everything in order if I were to die that day - all my things were already packed so they could be sent home to Mum and Dad, all my London friends had been thanked. Then I started watching people in the carriages, wondering what they would be like in an ‘incident’, wondering if I would have to provide eyewitness accounts for them, or would they have to provide ones for me. And then, in a shamef...

After you leave the first time, you are always leaving somewhere, someone, something. At the moment I truly don’t know what is more painful for me, seeing London slipping, day by day, friend by friend, out of my fingers or the anticipation of beloved faces as I return home to family and friends. Last night I was watching the trailer to Ice Age 2 and I was suddenly cold with the excitement of seeing Louise again. We had gone to see Ice Age together at the Astor and the thought that very soon I will be once again holding that beautiful girl with her race-horse legs and expansive ways made my breath stop. Today, at my going away party, the only time I was close to crying was seeing off Fi and Kris. These two women I hold in very high esteem, and I met because we are all members of the Broken Drummers, a group of Terry Pratchett fans. Tim is the real Terry Pratchett fan in our family, and each time I spent an evening laughing with the Broken Drummers, I knew I was there because Tim lov...

Weather forecast HOT! (it has been hot about ten days this summer). Event My first wedding to attend since I was five, and on top of that, it was an English wedding. London Being bombed by terrorists. Solution Spend the weekend in Devon and Cornwall on a weekend mini-break. Preparations I persuaded fellow guest and good friend Kate to travel with me down to the Saturday wedding in Devon and then around Cornwall for the rest of the weekend for our last adventure before I leave for Perth. I then decided what I really had to see in Cornwall and planned a breakneck itinerary for the Sunday after the wedding. [Please note that due to the mixture of lifts and one-way train journeys the itinerary contained, our best priced expected trip home was going to be seven hours, with three hours of that spent waiting for connecting trains.] Friday Caught the bus to Paddington since I will only travel on the tube again if that is the only way you can get my coffin to Heathrow! C...

Well, this post title was supposed to be used for my huge farewell love letter to London. It was going to contain all my sadness and reluctance to leave, all the things I love about London, all the things that I hated about London. At 8.52 this morning I got off what must have been the last tube running into the city, three minutes after four explosions threw limbs across Underground lines and London streets. I spent the day reading the newswires in a deserted and siren-haunted city that is still dazed and paralyzed by terrorist attacks. The black horror of this coming after the euphoria in the streets of London winning the Olympics is almost too much to encompass. I am just thankful someone did not have to pick my cold, dead hands off the ground in London today.

Kim When it comes to fast, hard and complicated friendships, it doesn’t get much bigger than Kim and I. We became very close very fast, we went through the brilliant side of London partying hard, we went through the hard side of London together and then apart, and we have arrived at the complicated return to Australia that means a very different life for both of us. I met Kim, like I met Jacinta, in completely abnormal surroundings. We were two of a grand total of six women at an Aussie Rules function in North London somewhere with almost a hundred guys, in a venue like a sauna and with me drinking two pints of beer for the first time in my life. I watched this pretty and perky blonde start up a friendship with me in jealous disbelief that she was not wilting in the cripplingly uncomfortable conditions, but our great partnership was cemented when I met her Perth boyfriend a week later and ended up, to be perfectly honest, in an entertaining situation with his two friends. Kim, Ja...