2005-06-06

London this weekend was pretty much the usual. I went to the Tate Britain to sniff some oil varnish fumes and sigh romantically over the Millais collection. I�ve got a real soft spot for the Pre-Raphaelites: my art school profs (fondly known as the De Kooning Gestapo) would have been appalled. In the evening I made a pilgrimage to the pub at which I saw Robyn Hitchcock play two years ago, where I did some fond reminiscing and admired the rhinoceros head on the wall. Back at the hostel, lounging in the common room, I met an affable chap from Arizona in the middle of a six-week European tour who mispronounced �Tottenham� and �Camden� and complained about the weather. I let him use my mobile phone to call his family back in the States, in return for which he balanced a very small plastic wizard on my knee. Fair trade. Around the table, two Spaniards, a South African, an American and a Dutch girl engaged in a conversation that was so aggressively, surreally banal that it defied all comprehension.

�I hate asparagus. It�s just, like, gross.�

�I don�t like onions. I never eat onions.�

�I like onions in salads, but not in hot foods.�

�I hate broccoli.�

�I love broccoli! Broccoli is the shit.�

�I hate spinach. When my mom cooks it, it�s like, the smell fills the whole house.�

�Yeah. For me it�s bananas. I can�t even eat one piece of banana. But I can eat banana bread. I eat a lot of banana bread.�

�Have you ever tried zucchini bread?�

�Yeah�how about beer bread?�

�Beer bread?�

�It�s really good.�

This went on for half an hour. It became sort of mesmerising after a while. They cannot possibly ALL be this stupid, I thought. To keep my brain from lapsing into complete atrophy, I devised a theory that they were actually an international anarcho-socialist terrorist organisation speaking in code to plot their next guerrilla attack, with �broccoli� representing the G8 and �bananas� standing for the IMF. Either that or they were way stoned.

Sunday I went to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park and saw an exhibition by a prominent German experimental artist featuring elaborately-devised badger traps made of disused car parts and styrofoam sculptures of clocks with the numbers all in the wrong places. At one point I actually felt the tangible impress of Culture upon my mind. It gave me a headache, so I went outside and looked at some tiny baby ducks instead. Oh, they were cute! So small and fuzzy! And then I came home.

So, today is my one-year anniversary of moving to England. Wow. To commemorate the fact, I am leaving England. Well, for a couple of days. I�m going to Stockholm on Thursday, because I randomly picked the cheapest flight available on Ryanair.com: I had a choice between Stockholm and Salzburg, and the hostel I found in Salzburg enthusiastically boasted on their website that they play The Sound of Music EVERY NIGHT in the common room. So Stockholm it decidedly was, although I would be interested from a scientific standpoint to see the staff at the Salzburg hostel, who must be complete raging psychopaths after such an extreme level of exposure to �Edelweiss�.

This will be my first solo expedition to a country where I don�t speak the language, so I�m a bit intimidated; but I think the international �drinky-drinky� gesture will serve me just fine in the bars, which I optimistically imagine to be full of strapping Nordic ski instructors eagerly awaiting the chance to share their herring-pickling skills with a relatively swarthy and diminutive foreigner.