…seen a real-life animal that looks more like a Quentin Blake drawing than this Palm Cockatoo chick, born at Adelaide Zoo last year?
(From Zooborns, of course.)
A small victory
This is me:
I swam TEN LENGTHS today. Actually, I swam four lengths followed by twelve half-lengths, because they closed the deep end of the pool so that some burly men could practise diving with all their clothes on and pretending to rescue each other. They may have been trainee lifeguards, or army cadets, or just burly men who like diving in their clothes. I didn’t ask.
Anyway, I could barely manage two lengths when I started a month ago, so although ten lengths of a 27.5-metre pool is barely a quarter of a kilometre, I am pleased with myself, although you’ll be glad to know that I didn’t actually do a fist pump.
Weirdly, in just four weeks of swimming I have become noticeably (to me and the beloved, possibly not to anyone else) more svelte around the middle, too, so although I never intended to change my eating habits as part of my new healthier 2011, I now have the added benefit that I don’t even feel bad about the two croissants I had for breakfast, or the giant bowl of pasta I plan to eat shortly.
Interestingly, if you Google for pictures of Ian Thorpe, one of the first results is this one:
Which wasn’t appropriate for my purposes, but I felt like I should share it with you anyway.
Baby cheetah in a bucket
Courtesy of Zooborns.
QI
I like QI. I like Stephen Fry, and I like Alan Davies – or at least, I like the version of Alan Davies that appears in QI – and I like the format. I like most of the guests, with honourable exceptions for Jeremy Clarkson and Rory McGrath. I especially like Rich Hall. And I like it when they get slightly unexpected people in for a one-off. After all, the only qualifications for being on QI are that you are (a) fairly well-known and (b) not stupid. Right?
Well, sort of. The problem is that using those criteria you might expect to end up with a roughly equal gender split, and QI has never had that. I have just, because I am a serious and dedicated blogger, had a look at the complete guest list for every episode ever of QI, and I have discovered, to my disappointment but not to my surprise, that there has only ever been one episode broadcast which featured more than one female guest, and that that episode was one in series D whose subject matter was “Domesticity”. Ahem.
I know all the arguments about why there are more male than female comics. I even agree with some of them, like the one about the level of competitive blokery prevalent on the club circuit, which is where most comics start from. But QI isn’t limited to comedians. It has featured DJs:
composers:
politicians:
and writers:
…as well as countless actors and presenters. You could describe these people as wits, but they’re not comedians. And there are plenty of bright, witty women around. Some of them are even comedians. I’m pleased to see Sandi Toksvig and Sue Perkins cropping up more frequently in recent series, and I would happily watch Jo Brand every week, but if Daniel Radcliffe can be invited on, where are Josie Long, Victoria Coren, Mariella Frostrup, Shappi Khorsandi, Miranda Hart, Sally Phillips, Lucy Porter, Sarah Millican, Julia Davis and Tamsin Greig? Where, for that matter (if you’re going to have John Sessions and Rory Bremner), are Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Victoria Wood, Alison Steadman, Caroline Quentin and Patricia Routledge?
I can only assume that they’re scared that an all-female panel, or even a mostly-female panel, will be cleverer and funnier than the men-only shows. I have a sneaking suspicion that they’re right.
Friday videos
These are my two favourite videos this week. The first is long but worth it; the second is just a song I like a lot.
(Working at a radio station has forced me to listen to music I didn’t choose, and it turns out some of it’s really good!)
WC2, commuting, and small flats
This winter, I changed jobs. Everything about the new job is an improvement on the old one, but one thing that’s so palpably better that it makes me want to weep with the relief is the location. Until late last year, I was commuting from glorious Herne Hill to the wilderness of White City, a journey of roughly ten miles, all of them unwelcoming and frenetic. In comparison, my 45-minute hop up to the West End on the reliably speedy number 3 bus seems like unimaginable luxury, although I suppose I might tire of it eventually, and since my destination is now only 4.5 miles away my average speed of 6mph could probably be improved upon, unless I’ve got the maths wrong, which no doubt I have.
Whatever, the point is that once I get to WC2 I am in WC2, which is a place of surprise and adventure. It’s an area of London I’ve known for as long as I can remember – what Londoner hasn’t? – but being there daily, and relying on it for my everyday chores and routines and treats, is something else entirely. I have learned which sandwich shops always use fresh bread and don’t charge obscene tourist prices (naturally, I’m not telling you which they are), and I’ve found a friendly and charming woman called Rita who will do my eyebrows, which are terrifying to behold in their natural state and need a firm hand, and I am on nodding terms with an elderly man who lives in the flats that overlook the open-air pool on Endell Street and spends his days in the café where I go for lunch after I’ve been swimming. Suddenly, in myriad small but miraculous ways, this corner of the city belongs to me.
And I love it. Tucked away between Leicester Square and Covent Garden are more shops, galleries and restaurants than I ever expect to have time to investigate. I could eat somewhere different every day. I have read the spines of a tiny percentage of the books for sale in the secondhand shops along Charing Cross Road and already found fifty books I want to buy, although so far I have limited myself to an Agatha Christie and the Observer’s Book Of Weather. I have discovered a gothic church I’d never seen before, two proper sweet shops, the Equity headquarters and a part of Neal’s Yard I never knew was there. And I haven’t even started yet.
But back to that commute. As I mentioned, 45 minutes for a journey of four and a half miles is not, in the scheme of things, an impressive rate of motion. But I’m coming from a commute that lasted 75 minutes and involved a walk, a tube, a change, another tube and a walk, or, if I wasn’t in a hurry, a shorter walk, a train, a change, a tube and a longer walk. Either way, the journey was crowded and unpleasant. So relatively speaking, my new journey is a breeze.
I think it’s impossible to overestimate the importance of relativity when it comes to health, wealth and happiness. I had a horrible commute for eighteen months, so this one makes me happy. If you’re ill, getting better makes you happy. If you’d given me £50 when I was a student you’d have made me happy. Now I’d just think “fine, that’ll go towards this month’s service charge”.
All of which gives me great hopes for the future, because the longer the beloved and I share a flat that’s barely big enough for one, and a bed that was never designed for two, the happier we’ll be when we get to live somewhere that’s properly big enough for a couple and has a BATH. I hope I never get everything I’ve always dreamed of, so I can always gleefully anticipate the day when I do.
You dreamed about the same creep I did!*
Me and my brother and sister have a game. It’s called “In… what… waaaay” in honour of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, although it doesn’t really deserve a name of its own, because it’s just “guess the movie I’m quoting”. But we’ve seen all of the same movies, so it’s more fun to play than it would be with random strangers.
Anyway, there are some films, Ferris among them, which almost aren’t worth using any more because we all know them so well, which means that if you can come up with a line from one of those films which the other two don’t immediately recognise, you are definitely the winner of that round.
In a separate development, I am really enjoying my new job. Really enjoying it. Put those two facts together and maybe it’s not that strange that last night I dreamed that my actual job was coming up with movie quotes for people to guess. As the alarm went off at seven o’clock this morning, I was gleefully reciting the line “that’s the bedroom…but nothing ever happened in there”* and waiting to see who’d guess it first. I can’t remember who was doing the guessing, but – as when we play it for real – it was all very jolly and uncompetitive.
I’m pleased that my brain chose to associate my new job with playing “In… what… waaaay”. I think it bodes well.
Some of my dreams are interesting and many are definitively not. The most interesting dream I’ve ever had, which I can still conjure up perfectly vividly even though I dreamed it in 1992, is a story for another day. The second-most interesting dream was a nightmare which still sends shivers down my spine, although it’s one of those nightmares which don’t sound scary at all when you describe them. I’ve never been able to interpret either of them in a way that made sense, so perhaps I will write about them here one day and see if someone else can do better.
In general, though, I’m not a very cryptic dreamer: most of what I dream about is a perfectly transparent reference to whatever I’ve mostly been thinking about that day. Here are three examples:
1. When I’d been at the Guardian about eighteen months, I was asked to take on a much more technical job than I’d ever done before. It was still project management, but it involved knowing about servers and back-end systems and other things I didn’t really understand. These were projects on which the website would literally stand or fall. In the days before I started, I dreamed that we were all riding in a giant bus, which was being driven jointly by our Chief Technical Officer and our Systems Administrator. At a crucial moment, they asked me to come forward and drive the bus. As I took over the steering wheel, I swerved it violently to one side and crashed the bus into the verge.
2. A couple of years later, I was helping to run a survey of people’s favourite films by collecting lots of data and sending it to a friend, who was mashing it up and turning it into something interesting. Midway through, I dreamed that the friend in question was a private detective (in the dream he was also Sherlock Holmes, and I was Watson) and he’d called me into his office to help with an assignment. “I need you to gather some information”, he said. “I need you to go out and find every example you can of the anthromorphisation of letterboxes in nineteenth-century English literature.”
(I guess my subconscious added a flourish of its own there.)
3. Shortly after the beloved and I became engaged, I dreamed that we were in a large room full of people we knew, eating a meal. Our table was at one end of the room and we were facing out towards everybody else. Our chairs were eight or nine feet tall, and we’d had to climb ladders to reach them. As the meal ended I looked down and realised that the ladders had been removed, and we had to stay in the chairs, with everybody looking at us.
No need for Freud’s help in interpreting any of those, I don’t think.
(On the other hand, the period in my life when I had the liveliest and most colourful dreams was while I was reading On The Interpretation Of Dreams before I went to sleep every night, which is an activity I strongly recommend if you can’t afford hallucinogens.)
*They’re both easy, but please go ahead and guess the source of each quote in the comments. It will make me very happy.
Eating out in Herne Hill: another lesson from history
That last post about swimming was Glad all over’s four hundredth. If I’d known, I would have written something more momentous. This blog’s about to be three years old, which means it gets an average of 2.5 posts a week, except that that’s misleading because there’s always at least one post a day during December, which means there are fewer the rest of the time. But there you go – three years and it’s still alive, and thoughtful and attractive people like you are still looking at it, which is the main thing. I always thought blogs should ideally be about something – should have some kind of focus or area of interest around which posts are written. Actually I still think that about every other blog. But Glad all over isn’t about anything. Sorry.
Anyway, that gives me the freedom to write about whatever I like, so today I’m going to write about eating places in Herne Hill. There is a Spanish restaurant and a Thai place and I haven’t tried either of those and I should and will, but at midday on a Saturday there is a paucity of places to eat in SE24, especially when you are a party of six of whom one is eleven years old. The pubs aren’t particularly child-friendly, except for The Florence, but there they have a rule that insists parties with children, even a single sober and very grown-up eleven-year-old, have to sit out back in the slightly scummy conservatory area, rather than in the nice warm bit where the bar is. Anyway I don’t like The Florence. It’s home to a rugby-shirted Clapham-ish crowd that I’m happier avoiding, and the music is too loud.
There’s Pullens, which is lovely but never not full at the weekend. There’s Café Provençal which has a charming East-Dulwichy sort of atmosphere but not particularly good food. And there’s Pizza Express, which I’m afraid is where we ended up, having ruled out all the other options. The Pizza Express in Herne Hill is new, having taken over the empty space previously occupied by Three Monkeys, the much-missed Indian restaurant which closed down within weeks of being taken over by Mela. I don’t need to describe it to you: it’s exactly like every other Pizza Express. They’ve even managed to rip out the feature staircase and gallery that was a highlight of Three Monkeys, to make it even more blandly unsurprising.
What did surprise me today, though, was that when I asked for a mozzarella and tomato salad, the waiter told me they’d “run out”. Now. Am I mad, or is it entirely inconceivable that a pizza restaurant would, shortly after midday on a Saturday, have “run out” of the constituent parts of mozzarella and tomato salad? This is not a swanky salad with special and hard-to-find ingredients: it’s made with mozzarella, tomatoes and basil – three things that form the basis of pretty much every single dish on the Pizza Express menu. Had I been feeling livelier I would have questioned the waiter’s confident assertion, but I wasn’t, so I didn’t. But still. Pizza Express, eh? Next time, remind me to disguise the eleven-year-old as an OAP and go straight to the Half Moon, where the pizzas are cheaper and nicer and you can watch the football.
Phew
So today I had my inaugural lunchtime swim, and I am pleased to report that while the open-air pool in Covent Garden doesn’t quite live up to Lake Huron, it’s a lot nicer than Brockwell Lido. Architecturally it’s pretty horrible, unlike the Lido, which is gorgeous, but the warm water changes everything and transforms it from a hostile environment into a welcoming one. I only managed four lengths – and, well, I had to have a rest in the middle – but it didn’t leave me cold and miserable like my Lido swim did, but rather happily invigorated, albeit with trembly knees that may not be working at all by the morning. There’s something about swimming in warm water on a cold day that is just perfect and not like anything else. I will be back.
Swimming
In an attempt to honour the third of my new year’s resolutions, which was to find a better form of exercise than Pilates, I have been thinking about going swimming. The last time I went swimming in this country was at Brockwell Lido this summer. The water was deep and icy-cold and I lasted less than a length before it started to feel like a struggle. I think I managed a total of three lengths in about twenty minutes, all the while panicking that I’d give up and drown in the deep end, even though I was never more than a few yards away from a lifeguard, and I was one of only three or four people at the pool.
But water does funny things to me. I can’t watch movie scenes filmed underwater without starting to feel nervous, and the anxiety I start to feel whenever I’m out of my depth is not nearly proportionate to the actual risk, although that must be a commoner reaction than I thought, or we wouldn’t use the term “out of one’s depth” to mean “in trouble”. I’m not a very strong swimmer, but I can float and bob around quite happily for forty-five minutes or so without needing to touch the ground, so it’s a psychological problem rather than a physiological one.
The problem is, most pools – especially serious, unheated outdoor pools like the Brockwell Lido – aren’t really designed to be bobbed and floated in. They’re designed for people who want to swim lengths. Frankly, I never want to swim lengths. I want to do star jumps and dolphin leaps and handstands. But if it’s a choice between swimming lengths and any other form of aerobic exercise, I will happily go for the lengths. I have no desire to lose weight (I feel compelled to say this in the light of my second New Year’s resolution, which was not to be bridezilla: I feel quite strongly that I don’t want to be one of those women who suddenly shoot down to a size eight in the weeks before their weddings, and as it happens this sits very happily with the fact that I have no plans to stop eating and drinking exactly what I want, whenever I want it), but I would like to be fitter and I would like to sleep better, and Pilates only offers small consolation in these departments. I need to do something that makes me tired.
So I think I’m going to sign up for a Swim London pass, which is cheaper than gym membership and covers forty pools across London. It doesn’t include the Lido, which is a shame since Brockwell Park is less than thirty seconds’ walk from home, but it does include Brixton and Crystal Palace, both a brisk walk or bus ride away, as well as the Oasis centre in Covent Garden which is two minutes from my office AND has a heated rooftop pool. I may not be able to bob and float there, but at least I’ll be able to swim a length without my lungs closing up in protest at the cold.
Because the thing is that as well as being afraid of the water, I love it. My two most vivid memories of pure physical pleasure in the last year are of swimming, once here:
And once here:
The first is a pool in Cyprus, the second Lake Huron. In Cyprus I swam twice a day, in a pool that was never deeper than I am tall. In Lake Huron I went out of my depth because the water was warm and soft and tasted of minerals and it wasn’t frightening. Actually there is an undertow in the lake, even though there are no tides, and the bottom has sharp rocks along it – a fact that scars on my right hand and knee will attest to. But you see, I wasn’t scared of injuring myself when I injured myself, so I didn’t mind. And when you’re out there bobbing and floating and spinning, with nobody to watch you except a few water birds and the occasional butterfly, there’s nothing in the world like it.
What do you suppose are the chances that swimming at the Oasis sports centre in Covent Garden will be more like Lake Huron and less like Brockwell Lido? Yeah, me too. But I’ll give it a go.
Glad All Over 