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.