Barbican
Because we don’t have enough money to travel for the Easter break, we have decided to make the most of London and try and see things we didn’t even know existed here. I had already got some good stuff planned out, but on Thursday night, at work, a guy we like to call chrismat was shouting through the office “who wants to see Shostakovich at the Barbican?!"
Of course I swiftly bellowed back ME ME before someone else could jump on him and I found myself with two free tickets for a concert given by the London Symphony Orchestra, directed by Gergiev!
The Barbican is the biggest art centre in Europe, built in the 70s, and it shows. Check it out for yourself…
The concert was amazing, the seats ideal. The white of the hair of the pianist contrasted perfectly with the black of his piano. The drummer looked regal behind his altar of drums. The sea of violinists created elegant waves with their batons. And the chaos of the warm-up became sublime harmony under the order dictated by the conductor, or rather the way he shook his hands as if to dry them off.
The only false note for me that night was the female soprano, or rather actress, who seemed to give birth to the sound in a rather vulgar fashion, knees bent under her enormous gown.
An excellent night to start the break with….
Flower Pot
I’ll never really understand why men can’t manage to relieve themselves without spraying everything around the bowl, the walls, the ceiling… When my patience runs out and I drag Krusty by the nose to stick on the rim like a messy kitten, he says I would not complain if we were cavemen, and on the contrary, I would be happy for him to fertilise the earth ( ?!!!). Perhaps I should put a little pot of flowers around the toilet so that he can at least fertilise something… ?
Swimming with Sharks
After the film, we went to a pub not far away. We started to have our doubts about the place as soon as we realised it was full to the brim at 5pm. But what was especially strange was that all of these people were only men (who all turned around as soon as they saw a woman walking in, of course). We started asking people what the ? was going on, and it came to light that we were smack in the middle of an online gaming community get-together (imagine how happy Krusty was) who had come from all over England to chat about the game they all had in common.
I was so surprised that these things just happen, under everyone’s nose, without any notice. But I was especially taken aback to see how…normal these people were ! I would never had guessed that most of these people were behind their computer screens every night. I also thought a fight was bound to happen, out of revenge for a destroyed ship or something, but no, only friendly smiles were exchanged between players and a camaraderie that is rare among strangers (I know they were not strictly strangers but after all it was the first time they were meeting in the flesh, and online spaceship battles can hardly be qualified as normal relationships…). Anyway, bravo to the computer geeks, they have used the internet to create opportunities to mix and get on without actually meeting, and not only escape into cyber-reality as I also thought they were.
One of those who I asked one of my thinly disguised sociological questions to even admitted having met better friends online than in the real world. Hmm…or has he simply never met anyone in the real world ? I am still firmly opposed to my own Klown playing the game, but I am not against shy people meeting friends online…Help, has this blog made me a computer geek sympathiser ?!
The Squid and the Whale
Yesterday we watched The Squid and The Whale one of the cinemas in Covent Garden. Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney were great in it, the 80s style filming is really convincing, so much so that I felt nostalgic from the first second. It’s a story of adultery, and divorce, and the way that sometimes life is simply a chain of problems and emotions that considered separately are very easy to resolve, but piled up (as they often are in reality) are hard to accept because they bring up so much history and hate, so little forgiveness.
It’s also, from the point of view of the children, a look into what happens the first time a child is disappointed in its parents, feels betrayed, in fact becomes an adult. I think that the first time a child realizes that its mother and father are not perfect is when it is suddenly propelled into a maturity that it is not necessarily ready for. I am so happy my innocence was preserved for so long.
Now that I am an adult (or closer to being one anyway), I feel like the good things in life are so hard to reach, and mistakes so easily made, that nothing makes much sense, really. This every day struggle to do the right thing, what is it actually for? Of course, when the struggle ends successfully, then the reward is so much greater than the effort, but it is so easy to feel like Sisyphus sometimes…
Tomorrow starts a new week…
Eve
I have a problem.
Krusty is cheating on me. In the beginning I was not too worried, he said it was just a temporary fling, that it was only to pass the time while he looked for a job. But it has been six months now, and I don’t know what to do.
Every evening he kisses me on the cheek and says he is off to see her, for an hour, maybe two, he doesn’t know yet. Sometimes I go to bed alone and he only comes to join me after midnight, when I am already fast asleep. Other times, he comes to bed with itchy legs, because the blood circulation was cut off in the position he was in, and I know it is her fault.
I have thought of confronting her, this Eve that he speaks of all the time, but it is without hope, I would have to destroy too much for that. So I let it happen, for now.
Can anyone tell me how to encourage a man to stop seeing his ‘lover’, to stop playing this online game called Eve that must be tearing more than one man away from his partner, even if only for a few hours at a time, flying through cyberspace?
Help! Should I just unplug the computer?!
Here I come!
I did it, I moved in with Krusty.
The move went well, all finished in half an hour, but then again I am a removal expert now, it’s part of being a gitane. Krusty was finding it difficult to accept the number of boxes I brought with me, I don’t think he had realised that with a gitane come tens of pairs of shoes and thousands of bags…He’ll get used to it, I’m sure.
At work, everything has been shuffled around too: in only two weeks, two of my bosses have left, including one that is going to Vogue. Imagine the waves of jealousy rolling through the office as soon as she comes through the door now…! I would love to take her place here on the magazine, but I don’t think the other bosses will share my opinion that after only eight months, I should be a boss too.
Never mind, it’s the rule of the ladder, I suppose. We’ll see. Until then, I will now rush home to my new address: Boss house, Boss street. So, who’s the boss now?! I don’t need a promotion…
April Fools
Someone must be listening to my prayers/ramblings up there, because in the space of only a week, I got a raise, S asked me to move in with him, Paul the bread man invented whole meal bread with chocolate chips and – the best thing of all in my opinion – I can now get Diet Coke with Cherry! I know, it’s chemically embarrassing and a real shame to admit it, but I love it so much!
For those who didn’t know, I have been working for 8 months now for Lexus Magazine, a quarterly distributed to drivers of Lexus cars, translated into seven languages and read in 34 countries. I know, I know: what? La gitane is writing for a car magazine? What ?! But actually, only six pages out of 52 concern the cars, and the other articles go from salt to ethical fashion. Despite the variety of topics, I have quickly become ‘queen Lexus’ to my colleagues, who all gather round to read the info on my desk about automatic transmission or the number of seconds it takes the roof of the SC 430 to fold into the boot… No, I am NOT proud to know about all of this. It is actually quite depressing to know that I can now hold quite a serious conversation about how a car works. I really wasn’t looking for this kind of thing when I decided to get into publishing, but while I wait for something better, I am learning a lot, I suppose.
My recent pay raise left me quite unsatisfied, surprisingly. Not only does my title remain the same, but it gives the job another tick in the positive box, and makes it even more difficult to leave. The team is great, the magazine is beautiful, the benefits are amazing, and not only was I paid more than average for the industry (don’t worry, even above average, it is still tiny) but now I am getting paid even more…how will I escape after that?!
Enough about work, anyway. You probably want to know more about my second piece of news: I am moving in with S, better known to some as ‘the neighbour’, or even Krusty. After a sad and touching end with M, I started to see a certain young man that I like to name Krusty after the famous clown, because of his receding hairline. Should he have green hair, he would certainly be similar…well, actually he is neither fat nor corrupt, and he has neither his own monkey nor his own TV show for kids, but he makes me laugh, a lot, and that’s resemblance enough in my mind. So, I am moving in with a very funny shrimp-man with a receding hairline in Tower Bridge, just over the road from the flat that I first moved in to with Stan and Daisy, who still live there. Krusty and I have been brushing our teeth together religiously for the last year or so (sometimes over the phone when we are not in the same place). Sometimes we wake up together in the middle of the night and have a chat as if we had never gone to sleep. We run together on the weekends, and sometimes he slows down and I realize that I am running as fast as he is walking. Welike to do DIY in our pyjamas the best…
Before moving in with him, on April Fool’s day (how appropriate), I have lived with my parents, in Bond Street, in an art gallery with Trauma Tara, as I liked to call the landlady (who reclaimed her tv while I was watching a film one day, out of the blue) and with a fashion designer who brought a different model home every night, sometimes leaving them alone in the dark, smoking on the sofa, to scare me no doubt… I then moved to Krusty’s brother’s place, in Wapping, but the flat was quickly sold and I had to move again, to Chalk Farm, where I was living with a Joey-like actor and a TV producer (for Teacher’s TV – glam !). Instead of moving from country to country, then, I will not go from tube station to tube station…I suppose I had to pretend to settle somehow.
So, with my new title of gipsy in the city, I send you my love, and promise to write more regularly, and hopefully more briefly. Hoping you are all well, and that you will write soon, too… x
