All Greek

Clearly I don't have the diligence to keep any sense of fluidity in this blog, so again, here's a handful, a mezze platter, a scroggin of bits and pieces from the last few weeks...

LONDON

Deb and I got tickets to the Magnetic Fields gig at Cadogan hall. In my euphoria I even wrote down the set list. Young potato sat happily in her church pew for 2 hours as Stephin Merritt's honey voice sang Too Drunk to Dream, Grand Canyon, Smoke and Mirrors, Papa Was a Rodeo... Bliss, I tells ya.

I confess to partaking in some Shakespearean nerdery. Deb got us tickets to King Lear at the Globe; we were groundlings for the night. Highlights were the stringy bits of Gloucester's eyeballs, and, as always, 'Now gods, stand up for bastards!' Afterwards we drank red wine sooo nonchalantly at the theatre bar, eavesdropping on the actors' conversations.

That's not all. I went all out and took a day trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, to see the birthplace of the bard himself. I imagined myself travelling serenely across the English countryside and being welcomed by an authentic posse of minstrels at the other end. As it turned out, Stratford that weekend was the launching point for an enormous dance music festival, and the train was soon filled with backpacks and tents and doof doof music and people using the toilet in pairs. At the Stratford-upon-Avon train station there were hoards of police officers in reflective vests, conducting everyone through a winding metal barrier. They had a sniffer dog. And once past this obstacle, there were people selling dance party wares at the roadside - glo sticks, fluffy pink cowgirl hats, various fluorescent items.

Eventually I made it into the township and spent a pleasant afternoon tip-toeing over the warped and wonky floorboards of rebuilt seventeenth century houses with tenuous connections to Shakespeare. I saw his grave (if it really IS his grave) at the church, and took a few photos BUT was then completely distracted by a first edition King James bible on display in a glass case. Wow!

Another weekend was spent in Cornwall, at a tiny music festival by the sea. We trouped down on Friday evening and arrived in complete darkness, putting up our tents by the light of the car headlights while the wind wreaked havoc with our rain ponchos. Hysteria. When we woke in the morning the rain had stopped and we found we were perched on a cliff top with spectacular views of wheat fields and the sea. We drove to the local township, St. Agnes, which was ludicrously quaint, with tiny winding streets and bright flags hung over the road. Back at the festival site that afternoon, we drank and drank and the sun moved in a heavy arc over the ocean, burning us all up. I had rolled up my jeans; the next day I was wearing red socks.

Getting home on Sunday was surreal. We stopped to rest our poor hungover bones on the beach at St. Ives, which is an incredibly pretty town with a creepy undercurrent. (I've just looked up filming locations for The Witches and it turns out Cornwall was one of them.) Most terrifying are the enormous (football-sized) gulls on the beach. They're menacing. A girl in our group had some hot chips in a polystyrene container which she opened with a snap; suddenly twenty of these beasts were shrieking and tearing at each other in the air above our heads. As if that wasn't too much for us to bear in our delicate state, a dad in swimming trunks appeared, swinging at the gulls with an oar until they scattered. Then he turned to us, brandishing the oar, and growled, 'Ye've gotta have a weapon.'

The rest of London was a haze of cafes and restaurants and shows (Soho Theatre good, Royal Court bad); books read on the tube; overwhelming clothing stores where I made token purchases: tights, nail polish. During my last week I took another acting course - the Physical Theatre summer school at East 15. I was happy to find myself in another group of disparate and enthusiastic people, with another fabulous teacher, and another bunch of exercises and ideas to go off and think about...

At some point in the middle of all this Londoning, Deb and I got on a plane and went to GREECE. Her lovely family adopted me for a week and we cruised through the islands. Greece brimmed with tourists; I found it very beautiful but feel like I only really got to see the parts of it appropriate to a cruise ship audience. At each disembarkation we wandered picturesque streets, admired crumbled walls and shining marzipan houses, and took photos of hundreds of other tourists taking photos. Our best day was at Rhodes, where we hired a car and drove to a remote and peaceful part of the island. The beach was called Archangelos, and the water was so salty that we just buoyed along, saying, 'This is so nice, this is just so nice.'

Onboard, cruise ship entertainment was everything I could possibly have wished for. Night 1 was Latin Fever Night. It was all feathers and sequins and glassy smiles. Inevitably, there was audience participation, and I had the honour to be pulled up onstage by a waifish Ukranian dancer in blue leather pants. He found he couldn't spin me (my jandals stuck to the floor) and solved this problem by marching me tango-style to the edge of the stage, instructing 'jump', and flinging me into the air, much to the delight of the audience of mid-Western American retirees. We did this walk-fling manoeuvre a few times, until, evidently finding me flingable, my partner ended our pas de deux by sort of passing me around his body like a basketball. Oh how a cruise ship audience loves to see a woman flung. I was recognised in the corridor later, for my efforts.


Now I'm reunited with Melbourne friends in EDINBURGH. I arrived yesterday with Adrian, caught up with Amy, met Buck Angel at a small private screening of a documentary about the rights of sex workers in Europe, then had the terrible misfortune to sit through half of the Jim Rose Circus (which apparently used to be edgy, but which was really so puerile and dull that our crew left for the beer garden halfway - not something I've ever done before). So, eventful thus far.

Again, I find myself wandering the streets of Edinburgh saying, 'this is so nice', and squealing and pointing a lot. I love the stacks of turrets and steeples. I might just want to go back to my Scottish roots here. For now, off to a show.