Ok, look away now

This is so so silly, but now, having watched the last episode of Buffy, and knowing there are no more, it feels a tiny bit like a light has gone out. Sad. In a different way to Six Feet Under being over, or even The Flying Doctors when I was a lot younger. Because there was magic in Buffy, literally and in the very fabric of the show. Not to mention the seriously amusing dialogue.



And I cannot believe how appropriate this song would have been for Buffy. Or was it even used in it sometime?

If I could tell the world just one thing
It would be that we're all OK
And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful
And useless in times like these
I won't be made useless
I won't be idle with despair
I will gather myself around my faith
For light does the darkness most fear

Seriously, if you ever enjoyed Buffy, close your eyes and let the montage happen. Tearfulness.



Maybe I'll grow up now.

Tricky

So for Halloween we are not answering the door, closing the curtains and ignoring rings on the doorbell from hooligans asking us for money. I really wish we had little kids coming around with their parents and we could give them sweets, but alas, not in this part of north London. I should have realised what Halloween in London would be like when I lived in Ealing and a kid at a bus stop, a few days before Halloween, asked me for a pound. I asked her why and she said, ‘For Halloween’. She didn’t blink when I said it wasn’t even Halloween yet. Eventually the lack of movement of my hand to my purse alerted her to the fact that she should probably ask someone else.

While closeted in our dark house, we will very appropriately be watching the final two episodes (ever! sob!) of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'. Actually, she hasn’t been slaying too many vampires lately. She should probably be known as ‘Buffy the Slayer who investigates creepy demonic situations with her friends and sometimes slays vampires too’.. Maybe there will be some vampires in the final big battle for the world, because the poet gets bored when there’s no fighting. I get a bit antsy when there’s no Anya.

Also, I will be psyching myself up for NaBloPoMo – The Return.

I have never really seen the point of Nanowrimo unless you already want to write a novel. Maybe I do, maybe one day. For now I'm sticking to short stories. But hey, it keeps all the wannabe novelists off the streets, and creative endeavour can only be a good thing compared to crime, substance abuse and other popular pursuits. But would someone somewhere please share the draft novel they have produced during Nanowrimo? I have never seen one, which only reinforces my suspicion that they are all really crap. (Except for my friend Shari's, of course, because she is a writer).

Gratuitous Anya post

Yes, I am actually a 14 year old girl living in 2003. And proud of it.

The Buffy Project - part 2

The poet is still addicted (less so than me, he gets bored with the non-fighty episodes) and I am starting to get sad because we have only one more disc to watch of the entire series. Three, maybe four episodes and it's all over. Is it just me, or when you really enjoy a television series, does it become like an alternative universe to you - the characters you love or hate do actually exist out there somewhere?

Sigh. Soon, no more Anya to adore from the wrong side of the DVD player. No more Buffy's clothes to study and sometimes covet. No more camp Andrew - how amused am I that he's become a regular character? No more occasionally irritating Willow and increasingly chubby Xander. No more Giles.... but wait! Do I detect the stirrings of a BBC television film (please let it be a series) in the wings? Or will I be reduced to starting the whole process over again with the Angel series, in hopes that Buffy characters will make regular visits, or that Cordelia will remind me of Anya?

And my lovely lovely favourite character dies, apparently. This is the problem with watching series years after they ended. The internet knows these things and tells you when you're not ready to know.

However, despite my fantastic ability to suspend disbelief, and in an attempt to distract myself from the upcoming series finale, I'd like to highlight two Buffy anomalies for the record:

1. All vampires turn to dust when staked, even those who only died very recently. It's a great visual effect, but surely only those who died so long ago that their original bodies would actually be dust should dust? Of course, that would mean that the very term 'dusting' would have to be reconsidered.

2. Vampires with souls, i.e. Angel and Spike (much prefer Spike, btw) feel remorse for their killings and cannot kill humans due to the emotional pain. However, humans, who supposedly had souls all along and are demon-free - kill all the time and some of them don't seem to feel much remorse. So does the reintroduction of a soul into a soulless creature make them better than human? Or was it just not thought through very well.

You get what you give

This song has always had the strangest and most lovely effect on me - both saddening and uplifting. Now it also makes me homesick. I think I might have heard it for the first time in Australia (although it was released the year I came to London) and there's something about being twenty-seven in a bright climate in a young country that is so bittersweet now.

I still think it's slightly too slow-paced, but I can overlook that. The singer is kind of geekily endearing. Like a cute younger brother.

Frightening a little mouse under her chair

The poet is going to London to visit the Queen for National Poetry Day tomorrow.

He has threatened* to misbehave but is of course the epitome of a professional always.

We're just back from a fantastic weekend at Orta in northern Italy. Lakes, islands, poetry and new friends, a wonderful way to spend my 37th birthday weekend.


*Hmm, I wonder if a blog post with 'threat' and 'Queen' in close proximity is flagged up by the security services?

Right Brain/Left Brain Freakiness

So I'm obviously a right-brainer, but it freaks me out that the poet and I saw her going in opposite directions at the same time! And that you can change her direction by concentrating.

Click here for the weird whirling woman

We're off to Lake Orta in Italy for the Poetry on the Lake festival and for the poet to collect a prize. Four star hotel on a lake, poetry and Italian weather for my birthday sounds pretty good. If only I didn't have a sneaking suspicion that London's weather is going to be even better over the weekend - but then has the BBC's forecasting ever been accurate?

Weeping guitars

I love this version of George Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps'. (And the way the video makes you think Nyjon plays the guitar...)



And I promise this is my last Nyjon post. But one last little thing, if any of you are interested in hearing the song the poet wrote for me with Nyjon, go to the cdbaby link a few entries earlier and click on 'First Love, Last Love'.

Useful site for UK ebayers

fatfingers.co.uk finds items on ebay (UK) that might get missed and not snapped up because the seller has mispelled the item description. Not that I'm encouraging ebay addiction or anything.

More Nyjon

Must. Stop. Looking. On. Youtube. For. Videos. That. Make. Me. Homesick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV_gY156LOQ&mode=related&search=

Must. Go. To. Bed. Now.

Music man

I keep forgetting to post about the debut album of a friend, Nyjon. He's a medical doctor (also trained as a naturopath) who runs a clinic on Harley Street (the prestigious medical location in England) using herbal medicine and diet to help people with cancer, and he's set up a charity (Chart) to raise money for people who can't afford this complementary medicine. And he sings, and writes songs, sometimes with the poet. I'm a bit too excited about the fact that the song 'First Love, Last Love' is one that the poet wrote for me with Nyjon, before the married days.

To use words not my own, [the album's] inventive blend of pop, funk and R&B carries a powerful and enduring message, spanning themes from responsibility and honesty in love to ecology and social reality. If only Al Gore would listen, I'm sure he'd snap up 'Lover Earth' (cowritten with the poet) as an environmental campaign song. Nyjon and the poet have just done another environmental song - Blue - which you can hear here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/DrNyjonEccles

You can listen to tracks, download them or purchase the CD from: http://cdbaby.com/cd/nyjon

His cover of George Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' is pretty special too. It's not on the album but is a fundraiser for Chart. To get the single, simply make a donation via their website.

The Buffy Project - part 1

When we got back from Australia at the end of May, and life in London seemed dismal and drab, as it often does, but PARTICULARLY WHEN THERE WAS NO SUMMER IN SIGHT, I decided it was time to finish something that was set in motion some years ago.

I was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. When I first moved to London in 1998 I stayed in on Friday nights to watch Buffy on Sky One. I watched Angel too, because it was on afterwards, but it never grabbed me so much. When I moved in with the poet in mid 2000, much of my concern at living in a house without a television was that I wouldn't be getting my regular fix of Buffy. I wasn't sure I could do it, and my mother was convinced I had a secret television hidden in a cupboard somewhere, but I grew to appreciate and enjoy not having a television. Buffy got left behind, and it was ok.

My brother had a couple of seasons on DVD which I watched back to back one December I was in Brisbane, when it was too hot to move and the rest of the city languished inside with their air conditioning. It was the last time I saw my father, and he watched many of the episodes with me. Somehow it became a bit of a bonding experience for us, not that you could have predicted my dad enjoying a show about a teenage vampire slayer.

But otherwise my life was Buffy-free. Perhaps it was the lack of sun turning my thoughts towards those who dwell in darkness, or maybe it was just silliness, but I decided to watch the entire series of Buffy this year - seasons 1-7 - to see what I had missed out on. It helped that the poet and I had just bought a portable DVD player so we could watch films (my pc was pretty old and slow and mangled most DVD viewing experiences).

And so began the great Buffy Project of 2007.

To be continued...

Silly as a bum-full of Smarties

I've just come back from the cinema, watching Kenny. What a guy. The film made me homesick for Australia, for the kind of guy I've met nowhere else in the world - completely down to earth and patient and decent, a bit rough and maybe not the smartest, but you'd trust him with your life. Not that people like that are peculiar to Australia, of course they're not, but there's a particular Australian breed of them. Fair dinkum types.

The kind of man who peppers his speech with 'he's serious as a heart attack, mate' and 'busy as a one-armed bricklayer in Baghdad'. Who has an unironic 'Advance Australia Fair ' singalong in the car with his little boy. Who looks out of his window in Nashville Tennessee on his first ever trip out of Australia, sees snow and says, 'Look at that, that's lovely. Good on 'em.'

Maybe I wouldn't want to marry him, but I sure as hell would want him for a brother-in-law or friend. Come to think of it, my Aussie brother-in-law is not far off. A good bloke.

'Useless as tits on a bull' got a big laugh from rest of the (British of course) audience, whereas the phrase just sounds normal to me. I guess I haven't lost all trace of Australian-ness, thank goodness. Even if I apparently sound like a Pom.

Who would have thought that finally getting broadband (now that I have a pc that can handle it) would be so satisfying?

Who would have thought the poet would ever be able to access his email quickly and efficiently, in a way that didn't bring despair to the entire household?

Thank you Tiscali.

Ire

How sad would it be for me to start carrying around my digital camera, just so that I would be able to gather photographic evidence of the blatant disregard for law that seems endemic in the UK today? Laws that are meant to protect the public.

e.g. two perfect opportunities from today

1. A van driving the wrong way down a one way street and nearly running me over. If I hadn't chanced to look in that direction just in case of idiots (a cyclist nearly mowed me down on the same street doing the same thing), it would not have been a pretty sight.

2. A man driving along while using his mobile phone. No hands free kit even.

I fantastised as I walked about getting clear photos showing the crime and the registration plate and sending them to the police, but who am I kidding?

It seems that too many people just want to do what they want to do, regardless of whether it might harm someone else. They obviously didn't have the same parenting I did. Which probably means they didn't get drummed into them that 'fooling leads to fighting' either. It does, it really really does!

Pasta - it's not just for people

(just back from Italy - more to come)

What tube tickets should look like

Thanks to serif publishing

London is a city of people that just want to get home on time

http://nostrich.net/archives/delays-on-the-underground/

I couldn't have said it better myself *. There's no panic on the Underground, no commuter terror as the threat level climbs to critical and then back to severe. I don't know whether it's the much-claimed Blitz spirit, or whether it's a big city mentality, but I seem to have lived here long enough to just get on with things, like everyone else. I do like seeing extra police on the streets and in the stations though.

* Oh, who am I kidding, the pedant in me would have said 'who' not 'that'.