+ Oxford has a lot of books, and only a hundred libraries (impoverished, darlings). So, until somebody conveniently dies and leaves them a Georgian mansion/Camelot/historical burial ground, they are keeping some of the lesser-needed books somewhere off site.
Other facts:
In the past week, I have:
+ Assembled a 45-page collection of documents, passports, dutifully hideous photographs and nail parings with which I aim to pummel on the door of the UK Visa Office yelling 'SANCTUARY',
+ Given said UK Visa Office my biometric details, so that if any dastardly character is walking around with my eyes and fingerprints they can tell the blighter what for,
+ Written nine out of ten requested articles on things like 'Manscaping', 'Cougars' and 'Ways To Feel Better About Your Body In Bed' (the last article has the topic 'How To Tell Your Partner He's Crap In The Sack', and I took a break because I was inclined to reply with things like 'semaphore', 'sign language' or 'on Stephen Colbert'),
+ Opened a UK bank account, which involved three trips into the city and a prolonged interlude in a foyer making faces at a very small Chinese toddler called Charles,
+ Chipped the front of a tooth trying ineffectually to dismantle a kite,
+ Helped an old lady with an alarming goitre across the road,
+ Procured a new Mac laptop, and spent approximately twenty minutes looking at it cooing 'SHINY' repeatedly,
and
+ Been attacked by two blowholes in two days.
In the wake of all this heady achievement - and because, frankly, I feel a little as if I want to crawl back under the covers and give in - I am going to go make a cake.
It's done.
It only took five months, ten housing agents, innumerable Emails To Express Interest, equally innumerable flats rejected because they lacked heating/fridge/floor, two blessedly helpful British Angels Of Mercy who trooped out to inspect possible abodes and will shortly be put up for knighthoods, a series of increasingly harassing intercontinental phone calls, several expressions of horror at the exchange rate, four scribbled diagrams and the sacrifice of a goat at a crossroads -
- but I've done it. I have a flat in the dead centre of Oxford. I will not, bar an act of God or Barclays Bank, be homeless and box-dwelling come September.
Hurrah!
The place itself is teeny-tiny. Let's not even talk of swinging cats; I'd be lucky to take a gerbil for a turn about the room without giving it a few decent cracks on the skull. However, it also has a gigantic two-storey window and a deeply amusing loft for a bedroom. Any visitors will have to be hung out of said window in a basket if they wish to sleep over, but that's their problem.
Its kitchen is brilliantly well-applianced and (far more importantly) blue, and it's in an old Edwardian schoolhouse, so presumably I will be haunted by the charming ghosts of young boys killed during the routine application of Edwardian caning, which will be nice.
There is, however, a small problem.
Actually having, for the very first time, an entire apartment to legitimately call my (rented) own, appears to have awakened a long-latent and utterly unexpected fervour for interior decorating. My bedroom and study in my Australian home have suffered 21 years of half-hearted adornment, resulting most memorably in years of doll-collecting staring down at me as I sleep (I still don't understand why people think this is creepy). Any possible ideas about creative decoration in Norwich were squashed back into the subconscious by the insane college regulations (No Posters Or Wall Hangings And Don't Lay Out Your Washing In Indiscreet Ways) and the disapproving eye of the Hungarian cleaning lady. I looked at my dad's design magazines with the lofty eye of the Philosophy Student Scorning The Superficial (most philosophy students have this eye, if they manage not to get it punched by third year).
Now, however, I have white walls and carte blanche, and some animal in me has reared its ugly head and said OH GOODY. I am looking through Design*Sponge like a particularly focussed madwoman. I am making plans about arrangements for pictures in my head. I am talking to bemused family members about Chinese lanterns and thrifting wardrobes. I have gone insane.
To be honest, I should have expected this. I only ever enjoyed The Sims and my dollhouses for the elaborate plotting of arranging dwellings; the actual dolls and Sim-people held precious little charm compared to making elaborate digi-mansions and begging for wallpaper samples from decorators for the dollhouses. (Might I add that I was 10, and probably quite scary.) At the time I thought it was just harmless megalomania run amok. Now, it appears, it was something far more sinister.
Lord. I'd better get stuck into writing this novel, before I start hanging about hungrily at linen sales and having conversations about the charms of mismatched glassware. Superficial nothing - if I become That Person I'll have to start breaking out the penitential hair shirts and begging for alms.
The process of uprooting my Fine Upstanding Self from these antipodean foundations is now steaming forth with vim and vigour. Visa applications, snide remarks regarding the NHS, international driver's license jiggery-pokery and startling varieties of sturdy winter boot are being tossed about the household like so many circus skittles. I have become some sort of bureaucratic Critical Mass Event, and all my dreams seem to involve signing paperwork.
Item number something-important: finding accommodation. Various machinations with my degree mean that I am effectively a triple threat of Non-Oxford-Establishment (an international [1], part-time [2] graduate student in the Continuing Education faculty [3], which as far as I know also offers courses in Gardening and How One Discusses Pesky Electronics With One's Grandchildren). Living in halls- the full, elitist Hogwarts experience, complete with Latin dinner services and hobbing the nobs over sherry- is forcibly out. I am Hagrid, in a hut, with Flobberworms.
(I am neither here nor there about this. I do have a nasty feeling that other graduate students, on discovering that I live in Off-Campus Accommodation, will assume that I have been expelled from quarters for devious proclivities involving sea creatures.)
Finding this Hagrid-Hut has been a new and interesting adventure. I'm not really very picky. I just want somewhere halfway close to Oxford, with cooking facilities (beyond 'boiling all my food in a kettle'), a bathroom, some kind of heating system which won't require me to pad about in winter with hot water bottles on my feet, and a variety of sleeping apparatus. A roof and floor would be all right. Maybe some windows. Possibly a door.
I would, admittedly, prefer that the sleeping apparatus was not either suspended from the ceiling, accessed via ladder, or flipped down from a wall, all three of which have been offered as options. The latter would make me feel like a piece of ironing.
Neither- and I didn't really expect that I'd ever need to make these specifications- do I really want to live in somebody's unheated, stone-floored converted barn/outhouse/chaff house, which has incredible amounts of space, but is also in the middle of a large field somewhere near Over Worton (where? precisely) and possesses no windows. And living in sloping, thatched attics poses a problem, since at 5'9", and being roughly the 'grace' equivalent of a drunken goose, I would end my life in an increasingly less entertaining series of concussions.
(On the Over Worton note: does anybody in England put their placenames through a once-per-century giggle-proof test? In the Oxfordshire area alone, we have Marsh Gibbon, Little Tingewick, Hinton-in-the-Hedges, Gagingwell, Burnt Norton [which is slightly below Norton, and presumably is where they put all their flammable rubbish], and the immortal Upper and Lower Slaughter. The English must have stiff upper lips through having to say their addresses to foreigners all their lives. MARSH GIBBON.)
I'm learning the tricks, though. To be suspicious of the word 'bedsit', which sometimes means a flat but often appears to mean that one shares (with ten other people) a bathroom, a kitchen, and possibly a bed and one's nicer clothes. To be suspicious of an 'electric token meter' (Want More Heat? Please Insert $2!). To beware persons who write back to your enquiry informing you that they, alas, are currently based in Italy/France/French Polynesia with their sick uncle/mother/Pekingese, but to please wire a token amount of money to them via Western Union to prove it is 'worthwhile' their coming back to England.
Wonder if there's a suburb called Flobberworm?
I'll miss many things about Sydney- the Chinatown markets on Friday nights, the colossal thunderstorms, the free Wednesday concerts at St James's, the oddly high likelihood that one's taxi driver is a Bangladeshi heart surgeon with a controversial slant on Hegel.
One thing I'll miss with a vague feeling of ambivalence, though, is the Sydney Inner West Hipster: a slightly rosier, healthier creature than the Melbournite versions (who appear to exist on a diet of Ann Demeulemeester, androgynous vampirism and Portugeuse cinema), if equivalently fond of miniature jeans. Many of the university-age hipsters seem to suffer from a hideous longing for Looking Bohemianly European, and have picked up a warped image presumably derived from French movie posters, The Sartorialist and an enormous overdose of Toulouse-Lautrec prints.
Put it this way: if they were aiming to Look English instead, they'd be getting their inspiration from P.G. Wodehouse, and everybody would be wearing monogrammed blazers, ascots and highballs.
Bondi's hipsters are all blonde and wear straw hats and too many rings, and the Eastern Suburbs long-necked freaks of nature somehow slid past hipsterdom into Prowling Indignant Fashionistas In Jodphurs; but the Inner West ones are true treasures. They use old cameras, and wear homemade earrings and red lipstick and canny bob haircuts, and sit in Glebe bedsits under monochrome photographs of the Seine, drinking horrible red wine and arguing incoherently about Camus and Art's Future. All the boys are drastically undernourished and have Moleskines in which they pretend to write poetry. Everybody has at least one op-shop cardigan.
I will miss them LOTS.
I was reminded of this last week, when two of them stood in my lift - boy in op-shop suit and Clark Kent glasses, girl in natty ballet flats and chic blunt haircut with beret - and had an exceedingly pretentious conversation about Modernism to impress one another. They were a couple (you could tell by the matching leather satchels), and by the time they'd confused Yeats with Keats while nodding sagely I nearly had a stroke from attempting not to laugh.
I was also reminded of this today, when a charming kid of about 14, with long lanky hair and obvious aspirations to looking European in calico cut-offs (despite hideous cold weather), boarded my bus and displayed his leg tattoos. Which involved the Louis Vuitton Murakami cartoon logo- and not even in a vaguely ironic way.
Often I find this breed of people completely obscure. This was one of those times. How will I ever discover their secrets overseas? Does Oxford even HAVE hipsters?
I'm going to Oxford.
Yes. That Oxford. The Big Thing With The Dreaming Spires (Shut Up, Matthew Arnold). The place with the Prohibited Mounds and the rowing matches and the ancestral thingamabobs and the Tolkein and the ivy-covered eggheads. The one I poked fun at when last in England for its ridiculous sense of entitlement (to which I will hopefully be immune, since I am forcibly part-time and therefore persona non grata to college accommodation offices. I will consequently have to seek out a nice little hovel in which to hang my hat and burn my food). The place in which Jude the Obscure felt obscure whilst falling in love with his incredibly irritating cousin. That Oxford.
And I still have blue hair and swear like a sailor when startled.
... This is going to be fun.
So, I'm a graduate now. Jesus loves me more than I will know, whoa whoa whoa, etcetera.
Yes, I wore the peculiar hat, attempted at one point to throw it in the air but watched it collide with another person's at a height of perhaps three feet and bounce rapidly to earth, compared my white fur tippet (fake) with my friends' white fur tippets (real and sadly shedding), and curtseyed in five-inch heels without falling off. The University of Sydney wants no more to do with me, and I have the paper to prove it.
(I did at one point cherish the concept of flying kites in the Quad on my graduation day; but the entire experience, as it turns out, was less Dead Poet's Society than mild bureaucratic shambles interspersed with charming moments. Which is pretty much university as a whole, really.)
What was much less Dead Poet's Society was the graduation speech, delivered to us as we sat be-tasselled and prepared to be vigorously, finally expelled from the Great Hall into the Great Big World. A stateswoman in the field of Australia literature- whose theories I know and have a closet full of bugbears about, but whom I am sure is a perfectly nice woman- got up and told us in no discernible order, for about half an hour, that she liked Matthew Arnold, that recessions and hard times need Arts majors (no explanation as to why; they presumably Just Do), that she once taught a prisoner at Long Bay, that anybody who dared tell us Arts majors had no Purpose because they did not lead to a Career were Utterly Wrong, and that she had fallen into the Thames at Oxford once. This last anecdote occurred three times.
As the final contraction before the birth of my post-undergrad days, it was, shall we say, a bit underwhelming. (Did I mention that when she fell into the Thames it was very cold and she was holding a bicycle?)
See, here's the thing (well, one of them). Arts degree-takers have been wrestling with the preconception that their choice does not lead to a Secure Vocational Future, and is therefore an Indulgent But Abstractly Useful Decision (I paraphrase having heard this argument at least, oh, 15,000 times) since the Industrial Revolution. Everybody knows that 'a proper education' these days does not lie in being able to discuss Socrates on one's father's chaise lounge, but in knowing what derivatives trading/commercial litigation/actuarial practise is, and having a savings account to prove it. As far as old hat goes, this is a minstrel's cap with moth-holes in it.
We all know the defences, too. There's the line about art being useful and enlightening in itself (which I agree with, though not with abstract, condescending pronouncements that it is essential to societal/individual/world welfare by people who've only ever seen the real world on the nightly news). There's those, like a helpful uncle of mine, who like to prove that it actually has what he calls 'real-life' impact; he once sent me an overly optimistic article about financial companies looking for Philosophy majors, probably written by the latter. There are ducks and weaves and defensive arguments over lattes and feelings of uselessness in the dead of night after chance meetings with International Relations majors and yes all right fine now if I give you a lolly will you go away.
Not that this debate isn't essential and an integral part of the arts and whatnot. Rather than a trotting out of a horse so flogged it must be nearly glue, though, I would have preferred something more about the world itself, and being newfangled people in it. Something along the lines of J.K. Rowling's excellent graduation speech to Harvard about The Fringe Benefits Of Failure, or Joseph Brodsky's to a similar sort of place about boredom. I am young, daft and entitled, and don't know anything about anything at all (this is what a Philosophy major gets you); instead of giving me Apollo's laurel wreath and kicking me off the ivory tower, why couldn't somebody have given us a hint of actual wisdom, even a horrifyingly depressing one?
The Dame did try, bless her. Apparently the aim of the bicycle story was to tell us to embrace accident, though for the life of me I don't understand why being covered in mud in an English November would incite me to embrace anything, much less accident. (In any case, it seemed to be her own silly fault for not noticing that the Thames had flooded and England has different seasons to Australia; less Embrace Accidents than Don't Be A Cloistered Nitwit, which is a fair enough lesson in itself.)
We're in a recession, there's wars, everything on the supermarket shelves is nasty, kids these days listen to terrible music, a horrible amount of people listen to Rush Limbaugh, and out there for our little hopeful be-hatted selves there's failure, ennui, obstacles, injustice, colossal senses of unimportance and impotence, tragedy, desperation, want and loneliness. The reason I know this, beyond reading the Economist and having eyes and ears and a human existence, is through an Arts education, because the world's pretty much always been like this, and philosophers and artists like to try and muddle their way into knowing about it.
I do wish somebody had stood up and told us what they know about all that, though. There's inspiration to help us out in our new lives, and then, well, there's Matthew Arnold.
I began, a short while ago, to write about the ridiculousness of the freelance writing market, into which (for various reasons) I am currently dangling my pretty pink tootsies; but I got exactly halfway through a post before deciding that I sounded so ridiculously entitled I may as well buy some Laura Ashley and a Pekingese named Miss Poky Poo, spray on Gucci's Eau de Smug, and be done with it. Ah yes, ha ha, the job market is HILARIOUS, I say, from my nicely air-conditioned and desperation-devoid ivory tower.
However, I was nosing about the freelance boards for job opportunities once again this morning, and this notice, appended to a request for a PR writer for a chain of pet stores, broke my silence, once and for all:
"Please note, this business is owned by two Beagles, so if you don't like dogs, or taking direction from them (they're pretty opinionated) this is probably not the best spot for you. (Although we are an equal opportunity employer, if you are a dog, unless you can type, it probably won't work out.)"
No, really. Go and read it again.
Cute, you say, and it is, in a way. But let us not forget that it is also stark raving bonkers. Taking orders from ventriloquism-aided beagles is what happens when you quit the job market and take up a satisfying career in acid-taking. The fact, ladies and gentlemen, that this is barely the tip of the iceberg (incidentally, I think we're going to need to find a better figure of speech once the icebergs disappear - the tip of the coastal city which remains above water, perhaps?) as far as - forgive me - barking madness goes should indicate the frank weirdness of my current existence. (So what else is new.)
I had, for instance, never known before I began my present trawling that there was such a thing as Fantasy Baseball Blogging, an ignorance which strikes me now as remiss. Anais Nin with baseball gloves? Slash pairings between burly rival pitchers? "I've never seen a bat THAT big before"? Somebody give me some idea over here. Throw me a bone, beagle-overlords.
It is also slightly confronting, particularly at 9am on a rainy morning, to be asked 'Do YOU have a humourous story about abortion? Your own? Somebody else's?', followed by a request to put it in 500-1000 words and cede the copyright in preparation for book publication. I suppose it's better than telling it around the pub.
The niche writing jobs out there are, in general, fairly astonishing. I've been forced to admit, to both myself and to the questions posed by job ads, that I am not an expert in power tools, gay men in sport, the history of marching bands, laws surrounding church pension groups, rashes caused by diabetes, or making jewellery which accurately resembles fish; I have not ghostwritten the autobiographies of one or more incarcerated rappers, talked to ghosts, or written a weekly column on oral sex.
(The latter was a suggested requirement for editing a self-help book on the subject- and fair enough too, because if they'd just said 'requires experience', the resulting resumes may have been highly questionable.)
And no, just for the record, I am not going to write Erotic E-Books With Unexpected Twists, purely because I'd take 'unexpected' very, very literally (Taxidermy! Entropy! Lyres! Christopher Walken, whom, like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody ever expects!). I'm not going to write 1,000 questions and answers for an 'Amusing Board Game About Art History', either, as I'd doubtless get bored and make all of them bad jokes:
"Q: Vincent Van Gogh walks into a bar, and the barman offers him a drink. How does he reply? A: 'No thanks, I've gone one 'ere.'"
There's also quite a narrow window of legitimate, well-paying (as far as freelance positions go) opportunities. On the one side of this glowing city is the dark and dense Exploitation Mire, where well-meaning freelancers attempt to avoid the bubbling mud-cysts of Work for Big $$$$$ Only Eight Days A Week!, and the poisonous traps of $0.03 Per Word, Increasing As Your Profile Rises! Let us not dare speak of Write For Us, Lttle Subscribtion Fee Required! It's dank and miserable and horribly misspelled.
On the other, however, are the serene banks of the Soul-Sucking River, where everything is legitimate, well-paid and immaculately grammatically correct, and requires merely a small compromise of one's ethics. The breeze wafts with the hot air of Product Writers Needed for PR Opportunity @ Toy Company (which, one discovers after a little internet search, needs a new PR image because the toys were found to contain lead). Published authors wave from the terrace and request a diligent serf to research, ghostwrite and edit their new book, which is an admirable interpretation of 'outsourcing'.
The best of these are the well-known and hideously well-paid Academic Paper Writing jobs. Some struggling little darling's mother whips out a credit card and on demand, like clockwork, is provided with what is ostensibly a Model Answer for the essay question provided, at the appropriate length, with bibliography and associated bells and whistles (and at an appropriate level, no less- one can order a C+ paper as easily as an A one.) Model Answers, in case you raise a moral objection, are only meant to guide our hapless university blockhead to discover his own essay-writing mojo. The merest suggestion that the Model Answer be handed in as their own work sends the Academic Paper Writing companies into mouth-frothing paroxysms and libel accusations.
The people who produce these tailored essays-on-demand, with occasional notice of less than one day, are generally graduates with astonishing last-minute research skills, and they're well-paid. For a 2,000-word undergraduate essay one earns several hundred dollars, depending on how much time is given; writing somebody else's PhD will probably earn you enough to pay off your student loans. Unless, of course, you cherish the apparently anachronistic notion that university is there to actually get an education. Personally I, being afflicted by a nastily strong ethical sense, think the essay-purchasers can go do complicated things to their instestines, which is why I will not be a millionaire any time soon.
I will, however, lead an intriguing existence, as I'm currently:
a) on the shortlist for a position writing for a Cosmo-esque women's website, whose application articles ('Write about 'Mr Right' and 'What To Wear On A First Date', 500 words each') I made as sarcastic as possible because I was devoid of any hope of actually getting the job. To say I wasn't expecting the response to my unbearably snarky submissions to be interest is a very slight understatement. If I get the job my head might explode.
b) employed as an occasional article writer by a woman who rejoices, no kidding, in the last name Rambo II.
If that doesn't mean things are going to get interesting, I don't know what does.
Suffice it to say that the interview with Oxford was not entirely what I expected, and leave it at that. If I'm not what they want, I shall not grieve, rend my artfully diaphanous clothing, and throw myself in front of the nearest omnibus (automobile or published- I wonder if anybody's thought to combine the two? Gigantic wheeled volumes with sets of chairs along the footnotes?) I shall simply Glide Onward, with my usual grace, tact and infinite poise.
... which means I'll get two steps and fall down a flight of stairs. Onto a visiting dignitary.
Now, back to aggressively editing my portfolio [and by 'aggression', I mean 'pieces cannot reasonably expect to make it out alive, recognisable or untainted by my attempts to convert miscellaneous bits into poetry'], reading Anna Akhmatova on the beach purely to confuse myself, and discovering that I am accidentally excellent, because those scraggy dotted flowers I bought once, in a fit of rare sentimentality, for That Person Who Seems To Like Having Me Around For No Apparent Reason are actually The Lily Of the Incas. Can you think of anything which sounds even remotely more luxurious? Yes, let's combine horitcultural royalty with associations of ancient civilisations and molten gold. Jesus.
I would like to note, also, that I found these rare, Chilean and Linnaeus-named things in a bucket at a supermarket. Australia is strange.
