fourth floor feminism | sociable speculation

When I was seventeen I saw Les Miserables and was introduced to one of my favourite theories on life – the concept that there are only a limited number of narratives in life, and everyone in the past, present and future can only live by one of these finite number of arcs. A little time ago I was so appalled with a book I had been reading that as a calming exercise I mapped out the frustratingly small selection of romantic arcs literature allows female protagonists to follow and tried to create a believable subversion of each. Now I find myself writing about my daily life along a similarly limited and well-known track. As a returning traveller writing about the familiar as the unfamiliar, I am beginning to realise I need to subvert this well worn path just to remain interested in writing anything at all. At the moment the restraints on my writing are rigid and profoundly limiting. All my descriptve devices and observational habits were formed when I was in a completely different cou

There are two layers to my return to Perth and, like my feelings about leaving London, both are so powerful that my life seems to be lived in stark black and white, yet strangely muffled, as if they are cancelling each other out. The culture of Perth leaves me cool and bored at the moment, the mentality of blending in at all costs has already rendered the strangers on the street faceless grey extras, nowhere near the endlessly fascinating tapestry that Londoners were for me. The weather may be beautiful, but the physical man-made environment is unadventurous and too familiar to intrigue me and the natural wonders of the outback and bush are only mine when I have money and a car. So the pubs and the clubs issued their siren call of alcohol and dancing, sexy bodies and frantic posing and on Saturday night I went out to Subiaco, the upper end of the nightspots in Perth. There was a long line for the club, a strict dress code of ‘fabulous or forget it’, tall AFL footballers swaggering st

It was fifteen minutes to landing in Perth, eleven minutes, nine minutes and still we were flying over bush, only the fact that you could see more than one road in a glance at the landscape indicating that there was a city coming up. At eight minutes to touchdown Perth arrived in my view, and it was as big as a postage stamp. I was alarmed at how VERY small it was. Certainly I had known it would be small, but the reality emphasised how large Perth had seemed to be when I left, and how my sense of size had adjusted to a London measure. I was painfully astounded by the fact that the city became farmland on three visible horizons. I winced as I realised I could see both Midland (the end of the Perth Metro Area) and Rottnest Island (kilometres off the coast) in the width of the plane window while I was flying low enough to see cars on the street. A hot, flushed feeling of reluctant isolation swept through me again, as it had regularly throughout the flight. I had been perfectly fine

On Thursday Jacinta and I had lunch in her backyard in Wimbledon to enjoy my last sunny and warm day on England’s shores. We sat in the sun, trying to say everything we needed to, not saying enough. As we sat back, I glanced at the sky and remarked that it was the closest to Perth-blue that I had ever seen it. I couldn't have been more wrong if I had tried. On Saturday I had a window seat on the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Perth and as we left the Malaysian landmass we flew out of cloud cover and out over the Indian Ocean. We flew into a sapphire, blue sea and blue sky shimmering around us, my eyes, used to more subdued colours, draining all the blood from the rest of me in an effort to drink it all in. We followed the Western Australian coast, so vast and sprawling and monochrome in its subdued khaki that although you knew that you were travelling at a good speed, the ground seemed not to move. I watched hundreds of kilometres of beach inch past below me and I was shaking from