2 posts tagged “friends”

i do believe that this march is the craziest month i have experienced in a long time. it's a mixture of the very bad, the very good and the very stressful. i can't believe how many appalling and generally stressful things have happened just in a couple of short weeks - and not just to me, but to a lot of people i know too.

• our car - our lovely alfa - was stolen (and to add insult to injury, when djeli went to pick up the vw golf hire car he found he'd been "upgraded" to a vauxhall astra. how that is an upgrade completely eludes me)
  
• a very precious friend found out she is likely to have cancer
• i am flat broke. i don't recall ever having been this strapped for cash in my life before (except that time i got stuck in belgium but at least that was just broke, not actual debt)
• a friend of mine got back from skiing to find a client of hers had died suddenly. then the mother of a friend who was staying with her died. then the friend of another friend died.
• djeli found out that, far from being in the fabulous position for contract renewal he thought he was, his project hasn't been allocated budget and so he'll probably be out of a job come the end of the month
• we just found out that our landlord is no longer working in the job he had in australia, in spite of our being told last time we saw him that the deadline for his project had been extended. given that his wife has hated every minute of being in australia, the chances of his taking another job there are pretty much nil; chances of them coming back here and asking for their house back are pretty much 100%
• if the previous point comes to fruition, this will happen mid-june. just after my parents arrive for a 2 month stay which is kind of dependent on our having somewhere to house them. with djeli's telford job come to an end, the semi-planned move to birmingham is also cancelled so we could all be living under newspapers in hyde park.
  
• mid-june is also when our visas are due for renewal, something which is currently a bit up in the air due to our tax having got way out of hand, so we need to deal with the tax and make that all sweet before we can even think of putting in the visa renewal application, and of course, we can't even contemplate trying to find a new place to live without valid visas, and djeli is pretty much unemployable without same due to the time-scales of the sort of projects he works on.
• i, of course, was working on a Grand Plan, with djeli's fabulous support, which would have seen me taking most of the year off work to sort out our finances and pull together a load of backlogged adminny stuff to really try to get my composition career off the ground at long last. this is looking increasingly cloud-cuckoo-land, even if djeli hadn't finally worked out everything from the joint account and discovered that i owe him £3,000 (i've been trying to get this figure out of him for 2 years now), and if he's out of a job, i'll be the only one who can still be employed in the space up till the end of the visas.

so... um... i've seen better months! but there's been flipsides too:

• yes, the car was stolen, but it was stolen just after we'd come back from skiing and it's never been so empty - all djeli's luggage and coat were inside, his ipod was inside because it had been to france with us - even the lovely fluffy picnic rug was inside! so the only annoying things that were lost were the fm transmitter (which IS a nuisance because they don't make them with signals that strong any more) and the shovel (from the Big Snow the other month). so yes, it's bad, but it really could have been a lot worse.
• i've achieved soooo much this month - finally managed to sort through all the junk that's been cluttering up the place for ages and am now getting through the big backlog of projects on my to-do list and generally getting things done (thanks, david allen!) - this includes sorting out my australian tax and heading into the final phases of the satie arrangement for america, which have been on my to-do list for 3 years and 2 years, respectively.
• penury has given me a new-found interest in budgeting and it feels good to be getting back on track and being able to plan for my money a bit
• the accounts ARE getting done! this feels like a huge step forward, and if we get through all the horror-things on the other list ok, then i'll be able to take them over and hopefully keep them running smoothly so we don't get into such a pickle again. at any rate, it feels good that there's forward momentum happening at last. and while the £3,000 is a bit of a horror, i'm glad to know what the number is - there were moments when i thought it might be much, much worse - 2 years' worth of christmases without knowing how much money you have can do a lot of damage...

so that's march as of now. bring on april, i say!

a very close friend in sydney got married on saturday. i couldn't go because it basically ended up being a choice between getting to her wedding and djeli being able to spend christmas with his boys, and seeing as his eldest is turning 16, it's going to be the last christmas he'll be able to spend with them while they're still (officially) children, so it was really no choice at all. that, and i'd like to make my very aged great-aunt happy (and my other rels) by turning up for christmas for the first time in 4 years. the other hard decision was that if we'd gone to the wedding i'd have been able to be there for my da's 75th birthday. so i feel i'm missing out and letting people down this year. i just hope christmas can make up for that.

and today i'm home with a sort of fluey thing which has collided with the tension headache i've had for the past 2 weeks now, which my masseuse started doing something about on sunday (45 minutes of her pressing hard on a knot, saying "does that hurt?", me going "aargh!" and her saying "ok, tell me when it stops hurting". fun) and which will obviously continue through at least one more session, so there's been a lot of pain and general feeling-sorry-for-myself.

on the plus side, there's been the joy of on-demand tv. i totally forgot to watch the first episode of merlin on whatever night it was on (saturday?) so i got to catch up with that (bbc iplayer. looking pretty good, i think - good escapist stuff anyway and has giles from buffy in it and gwen from torchwood in the first episode too so that has to be a recommendation), then treated myself to two episodes of the river cottage road trip and ... erm ... 7 episodes of the second series of jamie at home (all on 4od), all of which i missed when they were on the telly proper. which i probably shouldn't have done because it set me off pining, not for the fjords, but for the time when i could cook whatever i fancied and actually entertain my friends properly - in ways involving exciting combinations of flavours, varying textures, puddings and no brown rice.

i've begun to realise, in short, how very far away my old life is - between the wedding and the sorry state of (my) food today (although, i made an exciting discovery in the form of sumac at a food festival we accidentally tripped over on saturday), it feels like a fantasy that i used to be able to just cook quiches and casseroles and sausages and bacon and white rice and meringues and make my own marshmallows without thinking twice about it or feeling guilty. and i feel quite distanced from most of my sydney friends, mostly because a lot of them don't really do email and can never be bothered to read any of my blogs or check my photos or anything while i, on the flip side, loathe and detest telephones only slightly more than i loathe and detest facebook, which seems to be the only social networking site most of them frequent (why?? why??? surely you have better things to do!). and true, i do have this blog linked in to my facebook account, but i'm pretty sure nobody's actually reading it from there. i would love to be proved wrong...

i should say that while this distancing does make me sad (especially where food is concerned - jamie oliver cooking rhubarb and custard souffles in front of me was kind of the last straw there) there are good things about it too. i've managed to cast off the shackles of the assorted expectations i was labouring under and reach a not-even-but-improved balance between dayjob and real work - lately i've even managed a few days where i've been able to fit in a little composition before going to work which has felt just brilliant; i'm a lot more adventurous with food now, especially vegetables - i've learnt to cook with and eat fresh chillis, capsicum, radishes (home-grown!), spinach, and salmon. we've set up our own vege garden too, which has been pretty successful (too successful in places - next year we will apply the lessons learnt in the areas of staggered planting times and thinning out) and resulted in our own spinach, radishes, zucchini, peas and peas, with cucumbers, spring onions, carrots and tomatoes still to be sampled. oh and djeli's brussels sprouts which we are hoping liberal spraying with malt vinegar will save from the horrible bugs they have on them without resorting to chemicals.

i find it interesting that since i have been on this diet (which, while it does get me down on a regular basis, i have to say has created pretty spectacular results - i've lost 14 kilos since february, been sick much less often, have significantly more energy than when i started and have started writing again after about a 3-year patch of composer's block) we have bought 9, yes 9, new cookbooks, most of which i can't eat very much out of at all. which is frustrating but also in a wierd masochistic way makes me feel some semblance of culinary normality. i haven't baked anything in 8 months, which is something unheard of for me, yet still i collect every issue of the waitrose food magazine that comes out (one day those giant toblerone cookies will be made), check every month's new recipe cards and the recipe books just keep piling up. the latest acquisition (from saturday) is the london cook book, which is a delightful mish-mash of recipes - from a classic english fry-up to chinese dishes, iranian food, a recipe for making fresh ricotta - all sorts of things. marvellously random. and now that i've discovered that it doesn't seem to exist on the web, i'm even more glad we lashed out on the day rather than thinking about it and then finding that it couldn't be found.

we had a beautiful day on saturday - it was very nearly perfect. stunning autumn weather and the design festival was on so once we'd gone to euston and djeli had bought his train tickets for the week (the car is poorly and languishing in the auto hospital so he's reduced to trains to get to telford and then taxis to and from work because there's no public transport where he's living) we donned our explorers' caps and set off for the wilds of peckham rye to go to a tiny but quirky student design exhibition, then headed back to blackfriars and across the river to the oxo wharf to potter about the design shops - some very very cool stuff there - well worth exploring. djeli found a wooden sculpture thing listed in the festival guide as being at the southbank centre, so we strolled up along the river, past the second-hand book stalls (we were very strong and didn't even peek) and in hunting for the sculpture, we came across this food fair, which felt rather cruel with chocolate ice cream and venison sausages and assorted other culinary delights i wasn't allowed, but there was also the man selling sumac who had a little dish for people to taste (which was great, because i'd heard of sumac but was a little nervous about what it would taste like - the answer is "very good"), someone giving away slivers of sheep's cheese, a snacks company promoting their new wheat-free breakfast cereal (very yum. the little bit of honey was a tad naughty, but it was very tasty and otherwise pretty much right on diet) and then there was a sort of lecture-with-samples on orchards and the joys of britain's many hundreds of apple varieties. i don't think i've eaten so much fresh apple in years! and after that we bought the cook book and decided we really ought to head home.

oh dear. i seem to have rambled completely off course with this post. i guess that's what happens when i try to write these things at - eep! - midnight. grovelling apologies to anyone who's actually read this far. i will try to do better...