The Realisation of the Promised Vestiments

(or, catch-up number 1)



Next stop, West-End costume designers

Don't worry, the bananas didn't get it.

Catharsis III: Finishing My Beans

One of my most hilarious character flaws is a perpetual need to stock up on food. Normally, I am unaware of this phenomenon. But the minute I decide to move houses and start checking out my cupboard contents, there it is! Enough food to keep a family of five alive for a month.

This time, the amount of bean types hit me particularly hard. In my cupboard, I found no less than 8 kinds of beans distributed in 11 cans and two bags: soy beans, mung beans, chikpeas, green lentils, kidney beans, canneloni beans, berlotti beans and, of course, baked beans. Through ingenious smuggling techniques, I have now made my friends help me consume most of these. I do, however, have 5 left, and only two days to eat them. Don't warn Toby and Maria! Hehe

Catharsis II: Library Returns

Post-Dissertation Catharsis

Finishing a big piece of work requires serious celebrations. This is the moist side to the ongoing process of riddance. Please don't feel sorry for my liver - I am flying back to the Kingdom of Imposed Teetotalism, Norway, in only two days.

Thursday
2 Stellas
2 Leffe
- memory gap -
At least 2 beers of unknown type
1 Malibu Pineapple

Friday
Water x 10

Saturday (Oh My God)
An unknown number of glasses of wine,
spread out in time and interspersed by
gypsy dance

Sunday
I thought white day,
but as Sunniva aptly reminds me, we had:
2-4 Erdinger and Stella
at least 2 glasses of rosé

Monday
Another white day.
Max. 2 glasses of red wine

Tuesday
1.5 can of exciting beer on the roof, then 1 cup of rosé
- time gap -
1 glass of white wine
2 glasses of red wine
2 Erdinger
1 Malibu Pineapple
1.5 Tequila

Idun in the Sky with Extremely Many Diamonds

I am done. I am done. I can't believe it.



(Photo: Hans-Marius Foeleide, Sandane. Nicked from NRK Sogn og Fjordane)


Toby, who patiently helped me print my four coupies of about 57 pages each before doing his, is also done, or better still: he is running for his life just now to UCL, which closes at 5pm, with his bound dissertation in hand, just as I ran to SOAS to try and make it before our closing time, 4pm. The last text message read:
"At Russel Square now, 20 minutes to go!".

The drama, which was not that real since the deadline is tomorrow, was still memorable: We printed, found mistakes, printed again, found mistakes, and then printed without looking, and eventually ran to the binding shop in Angel where the colour pages were printed and the darn thing was finally bound.



This was at 3.30, and I tried to calculate if it would be possible to get it in today. Then I ran to the bus, ran from the bus, bolted up the stairs at SOAS past sweaty professors who have forgotten what writing a dissertation is all about - and made it by about 30 seconds. I have to add at this point that I had no less than 20 books from the SOAS Library in my backpack, so this was not only running, but running with a certain edge to it. I could feel people staring at my sweaty chest, messy hair and pathetically flushed face, thinking "My God". This did, however, not affect me to any mentionable extent, as I had arrived on the second floor and caught a distant glimpse of the door to the promised land.

Just as I stepped in, the lady went "Oh, it's four" and shut the door (behind me, luckily). And so it was done. I know it's only Thursday, but more importantly, it is NOT Friday, and in this fact lies a personal victory of unimagiable significance. Now I will go and swim in a barrel of beer.

The Pact

Kids' screams down from the market pierce my hard-pressed head like sharp needles. I'm drinking tea as if tea was magic potion with the ability to magically reduce my scandalous word count. The deadline is Friday, but I have pledged to hand in my dissertation by Wednesday. Below, the co-signer of the pact, Louise, one month ago, about to discover how little time she had left for writing. Like me, Louise is notorious for her time consumption. But we can do it! See you Wednesday, Louise!

Recent Events III: Python eats pregnant ewe

So far, this picture has been the only good thing about the ongoing newspaper war in London, which entails that about 20 people will attempt to force LondonLite into your bag and another 20 will throw the London Paper at you (in a single afternoon).

The memorable caption goes:

"A python sits on a road after swallowing a pregnant ewe (ei søye) in the Malaysian village of Kampung Jabor, about 124 miles east of the capital Kuala Lumpur. The six-metre reptile [after this I will NEVER walk barefeet in the woods or visit Malaysian villages, I repeat, NEVER], weighing in at 198.5lb, was too full to move, making it easy for firemen to capture it.

Epilog
Biletet har sett meg så til dei grader ut av spel at eg heldt på å døy av skrekk i dag tidleg då eg skulle dusje og mistok kjønnshåra mine for ein enorm edderkopp. Pistre!

Recent Events II: More about the Canal

By some beautiful coinsidence, I discovered a notice one day for a canal festival in Islington, went there on the day, and, two days later, hitched a canal ride through the Islington tunnel with a woman who turned out to be the organiser of the event.

This wonderful enthusiast used to work in an office next to the canal at King's Cross, and told us (as we travelled through the Islinton tunnel underneath Chapel Market and all the rest of it) she had rented a boat for seven years on which she lived half the week. From her residential docks, she set out every morning to her workplace, tying up her boat by the canalside. After seven years she had saved enough money (from not renting a flat and commuting) to buy the boat. Having retired, she can now puff along Britain's waterways all year long, at the pace of a trout, having coffee, watching the geese and chatting with other life-indulging narrowboat owners - while the rest of us lead fast lives right nextdoor.

Canal people are nice people. As you can see from the photos, they know how to relax and enjoy a nice, sunny day.

Recent Events I: Fire!

Don't we just love nightly events that, despite waking us up, will add spice to our breakfast conversations! This fancy fire engine decided to pay Chapel Market a visit one night at 3 am. For a while we wondered if we were in fact on fire, as the van seemed to park dangerously close to the bakery downstairs. But we were not, a rubbish bag was. Any action, though, is good action in times like these.

Living With Men

It's funny, isn't it, how women just seem to take on all the boring tasks that prevent kitchens, worldwide, from turning into stinking garbage pits?


This seemingly harmonic photo from the kitchen this morning, of Toby and my father contemplating breakfast, actually conceals a darker, more inconvenient truth: active avoidance of dishwashing.



Both of the depicted individuals claim that on several occasions in the past year, they were actually quite close to doing the dishes. Unfortunately, both have yet to produce any substantial supporting evidence of this, which begs the inevitable question: Is this what living with men is always going to be like?