Living in London

[insert usual apologies for neglecting blog here]

I have now been in London some 8 months which I suppose is long enough to feel somewhat settled. As I spent a fair amount of my early twenties agonising over whether I should really be spending quite so large a portion of my life in the rarefied atmosphere of Cambridge, and yearning for the-grass-is-greener 'Real World', it is reassuring to find that life in London is, after all, rather jolly good (although the literal grass is definitely not as manicured as Cambridge's).

How my time is spent, in order of decreasing average number of hours spent/week:

A) WORK

A taxi driver told me once that this phrase "covered all manner of sins", but I will try to cover my sheepishness at now being a "management consultant". The glaring difference in 'cool factor' between being a marine biologist and a management consultant is by no means lost on me, but I remain convinced that it was the right choice. My new profession would have me now come up with "three killer reasons" why this is so, and despite my best attempts to be contrary it is in fact three that spring to mind:

As advertised on the tin

1. This job is a fantastic way to broaden your horizons. I now know far, far more about Industries X, Y and Z than I ever thought I would, and my understanding of how this society works, and how people work, is the better for it.

2. My work now actually requires me to talk to people, probably more than my introversion would have me do naturally, which is great -- because people here (both colleagues and clients) are interesting folk by and large, hugely supportive, friendly, and come with a rather refreshing lack of academic pseudo-autism.

As not advertised on the tin (or at least advertised in smaller font)

3. For all that we get criticised for going in and telling people what they already know, in at least some of the work I've done I have felt a massive sense of service. To help people see how they can make things close to their hearts really happen, to do it with a sense that they always come first, to see my work making a difference to individuals -- this is more satisfying that I ever thought it would be.

B) SLEEP

I have been incredibly lucky such that 8 hours is not a problem to obtain; I also for the first time in my life have a real-sized bed rather than a college single; I have slept on said real-sized bed far more than the 'jetset' consultant lifestyle might have allowed (the furthest away I have worked is Birmingham!) -- all good things.

C) COMMUTING

I live in West Hampstead and am quite a fan of the Jubilee line no matter how we like to moan about it (although last week's peak hour delay due to a "loose screw" was probably cutting it fine). It takes me half an hour to the office, so I don't much mind it really. Also love the 139 bus, particularly as on the way home from late nights in Soho it deposits me about 30 metres from the door!

D) FOOD

The awesomeness of living in a big city means that there is a neverending supply of fantastic restaurants to discover, many of them neighbourhood gems rather than glitzy Michelin starred pretentiousness. Quickly becoming favourites: Tamada (Georgian, giant xiao long bao!), Saracino (best Italian meats ever), Atari-ya (great sushi, and even has a cheap and cheerful takeaway joint near Selfridges), Koya (uber bouncy tasty udon near office), Miyama (who needs Nobu for miso black cod), Toresano (taste of Spain), Japan Centre (how does the itsu next door survive), Phoenix Palace (old standby for comforting quality dim sum), the Gallery (great Sunday roasts, always good for a drink) etc. Also had the fortune of visiting lots of great cocktail places all with some kind of clever name or other which I can't really remember now -- Experimental Cocktail Club was very tasty, and had a great birthday night at B@1 recently where the staff are fantastic and they do a mean espresso martini.

Rather hungry now, perhaps I'll be back in another year to write about London Pt II? :)

In a land far, far away

It has been six weeks since the viva, and I have been sadly lacking in communication. Partly this is because from Down Under the old world of manic thesis writing and worrying about fish seems exceedingly far away, and so too the usual procrastination devices of blog writing and the like. However, here I am to make amends!

Thailand

D and I spent almost a week on Ko Tao in the Gulf of Thailand for a spot of diving and some R&R. We had no idea the red shirts were massing in Bangkok as we chilled out on the beach with endless mango shakes (so good surely because they must be 20% maple syrup?!) and accompanied by numerous scruffy but lovable beach dogs, after long days of diving. It was lovely for me to be underwater again in Gulf visibility of 20-30m; although much of the reef seemed sadly degraded and not particularly hard coral spectacular, the fish life was really pretty wonderful and I had some amazing dives at Chumphon Pinnacle and White Rock absolutely mesmerised by the shoals of fusiliers and yellowtail barracuda and "ikan bilis" being hunted by trevally. There is nothing like being surrounded by a school of gleaming flashing silver fish as the sunlight filters through their backlit streamlined forms. Other highlights included a sea krait out for a good old hunt, a scorpionfish I spotted on a ledge at 28m, going on D's last open water certification dives and a very, very cute little octopus on a snorkel off Nang Yuan Island which is actually 3 islands connected by a beach (and was famously once rented out in its entirety by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers).

The apres dive action was very lively, as the island is absolutely filled with backpackery types and has bars everywhere along Sairee Beach and in the village. It was pretty good fun if you wanted to partake of it -- I am not used to being able to go diving and then having access to a Long Island Iced Tea in a tiny shack along a road heaving with partiers and scooters. Beach BBQs and Thai pancakes were very yummy eating, and the daily THB300 massages were absolute bliss! Overall a pretty good place to unwind.

Sydney

In total I think I spent about three weeks in Sydney getting to know it properly. It is, overwhelmingly, a beautiful city. Everywhere you go the harbour gleams boisterously at you and the cockatoos and lorikeets caw above your head and the bridge and opera house peek round every corner looking more photogenic by the second. A surf beach is never far away filled with tanned beautiful people baking themselves or frolicking in the sea, with a promenade lined with breakfast places serving corn fritters and scrambled eggs till noon. And all this under that famed Australian sun in a huge sky -- the light down here gorgeously gilds everything (I liked very much the Aussie light in the landscape paintings of Elioth Gruner in the NSW Art Gallery).

But being in the city for a few weeks with a local boy I think gave me a better glimpse than that of the stereotypical. Whilst we spent plenty of time on the beach and in Circular Quay staring at that famous view and in the prettykins wine bars of Surry Hills, we also had time to wander about in some of the inner city suburbs which are perhaps the most interesting parts of the city. I loved Newtown with its edgy university atmosphere and buzzing mix of vintage clothes stores for the daytime and an endless stretch of cheap Thai eats at night. We also got to visit the pretty villages of Balmain and Glebe with their cafes and bookstores, Italian Leichhardt and Five Dock where a truly excellent flat white to drink over the morning paper whilst one surreptitiously watches the Italian men talking with their hands costs only $2.50, and just five minutes away from Five Dock we stayed in Chinese Ashfield, which although bereft of good flat whites had probably the best xiao long bao in Sydney.

I loved the international nature of the city -- whilst this is of course common to any big city, I felt particularly at home with the influence of Asia and SE Asia in particular on food (hooray for laksa and sushi rolls everywhere!), and what I hope is a real tolerance that arises from being a young city subject to wave after wave of immigration. I must admit that there are things I missed from the cities of Europe that I know -- a subway system, real life in the centre of town rather than endless suburbs, grand boulevards lined with beautiful old buildings, a high street rather than shopping malls -- but then, what other city can claim beaches like Sydney's, or national parks of gum forest right in the middle of the city, or of course that endless sparkling harbour? Or, when you come to it, the kind of people who name an old fossil find the "Demon Duck of Doom" (Bullockornis planei) and then put this on a sign in the Australian Museum?

Northern New South Wales

Halfway through our stay in Sydney we took a road trip up the northern coast which turned out to be a real highlight. It is far too big a country, with us clocking up 2500km in just over a week, but there is plenty to see on the way. We first spent a couple of nights in the Hunter Valley. That we were greeted on arrival with wine, cheese, olives and port and then left to ourselves in our lovely B&B is probably a good indication of what tourism in the Hunter is like. We took a little tour of the wineries (unfortunately we did not find much spectacular -- it is perhaps more of a white wine place, although we enjoyed several of the 07 Shiraz) with plenty of kangaroo spotting in the fields along the way so I got my marsupial fix. It was pleasant enough, although I think we felt a bit like a carbon copy tourist couple!


Heading further north, we stopped in briefly in Sawtell, just south of Coffs. It is a bit of a family holiday zone, so there were yet more endless beautiful beaches and cafes to wander about, and can I be blamed for getting D to take me to see the Big Banana? Finally we headed up to Byron Bay, stopping for coffee at a very pleasant historic river town called Ullmara which with its placid river and sunny beer garden and cafe was a rather nice surprise. At Byron we had a day at the Blues and Roots Festival -- I was pretty excited as it was my first time at a music festival and best of all I got to see Buddy Guy play! He is a true blues showman, in one long set he had the audience entirely enthralled as he told us stories, sang beautifully and also played some fairly mean guitar. Other big names that day included Joe Bonamassa (fantastic guitarist, but not much of a singer...), the John Butler Trio (really enjoyable, though I don't yet understand roots music really) and Jeff Beck (bit of an aging rock god). And all this with only small downpour at the end of the night so minimal mud! After camping the night we spent the next morning eating an enormous breakfast in Byron and frolicking at the beach along with hundreds of other souls trying to avoid being taken by the enormous rip (NSW beaches are really not the wallowing type).

And then we turned back down south, driving to Dorrigo via some lovely if slightly frighteningly windy mountain roads. Dorrigo was interesting, a tiny little mountain plateau town which is an odd mixture of proper redneck country town (two pubs and an exceedingly old school RSL where they shut at 8:30pm) and a couple of rather swish cafes and B&Bs. We spent very little time in town though, as we spent our days walking in the spectacular national parks all around, and our evenings gazing out over the endless rolling views whilst the resident ponies chomped away in the field in front of the house. The walking was wonderful, particularly interesting because the area is filled with completely different microclimates and forest types -- we did one walk in subtropical rainforest, another in dry alpine gum forest, and yet another in an absolutely unexpected and wonderful Jurassic Park landscape of enormous basalt escarpments, moss-covered Antarctic beeches and cycads sprouting their fern-like fronds in any available space. Pretty wonderful and it was a good way to end the trip (discounting the mammoth drive back to Sydney).

Lizard Island Part IV
I write this from an unexpected but lovely stint on Lizard -- I did tell myself I would find some way to come back on the last day of my last field season and here I am! I am helping an old acquaintance with her PhD -- absolutely brilliant to be here without having to worry about my own project. All I do is go diving, laying transect tapes, collecting corals or the like, and when I am done I chill out on the beach with a beer and a book. Today it is a bit blustery so we have had a dry day -- I spent the afternoon getting crabs out of their home corals to weigh and measure them, and collecting their eggs to measure fertility (they go back to their corals after this and are fine). They are very cute little critters! Not a bad way to spent two weeks I think, though I am also looking forward to getting back to Cambridge and the rest of the year. I think it has taken most of the last six weeks to really relax out of the PhD and finally gain some perspective, for which I am very grateful.

Viva-ed

Sat for 140 mins in a small room talking about my PhD. Had cup of tea and avoided biscuits in middle (neither of my examiners were eating any).

Finished!

:)

The Red Door

I thought it was high time to push the Christmas Ham (lovely as it is) further down the page. Actually, I have been thinking this for a while now, but the small issue of trying to finish my thesis got in the way a little. I am pleased to say that I handed it in on Thursday, through the red door that is the wonderfully acronymed BoGS (Board of Graduate Studies), with as much fanfare as Cambridge musters on such occasions (i.e. little or none). I have a rather dull bit of paper to say that I've submitted it; there is after all the viva still to come.

Having walked away from the door with D. asking that pertinent question that no doubt occurs to every other person in the same situation ("what are you going to do with your life now?"), I celebrated later in the day with as much fanfare as I could personally muster later in the evening at Restaurant 22 on Chesterton Road, something I've long wanted to get round to. It lived up to all the hype. Beautifully intimate front living room surroundings and really wonderfully tasty food. D. had some amazing salmon cutlets for a starter that I must admit to tasting a bit of, the pheasant and beef mains we shared were excellent with a great barley risotto side, and my British cheese board for dessert was also very yummy, although unfortunately by this time I was so stuffed with the three courses plus the various bits and pieces you get on the side (an amuse bouche of fennel and carrot foam, homebaked breads, sorbet after the starter, etc.) that it took quite some determination to eat every last morsel (gluttony prevailed). All washed down exceedingly pleasantly with a bottle of Clare Valley Shiraz. Feasting and drinking with impeccable unobtrusive service certainly made me feel that I'd done something worth celebrating, although English weather put something of a literal dampener on it both before and after! The next evening I managed to get a large bunch of people in a pub (well, to be precise, the outside bit of the Eagle where we froze a little but laughed and chatted and drank a lot, so all fine), so all in all I feel I have rather outdone BoGS for celebration style.

I'm now back in Malaysia where I dally for a day or two eating yummy hawker food and trying to get over jetlag before we head up to Hong Kong to see family and eventually celebrate Chinese New Year. Fun ahead, although I also seem to have accumulated an exceedingly long post-submission to-do list. Ah well, at least it won't involve wrestling with Word!

The Christmas Ham

2.2 kg of porky goodness, boiled for two hours in cider and water, then stripped of skin, scored and glazed with a thickened mix of cider, honey and mustard.

Yum!

Adding to the wall

I have just pinned up the first page of my soon-to-be-published journal paper on our group noticeboard of publications in the corridor outside the office. This group paper wall has grown massively in the last 6 months as our group has burgeoned in size, and I am more than pleased to be able to add to it! (We are not quite up to the level of the meerkat group across the corridor whose noticeboard threatens to fall off the wall for weight of paper, but there must always be something to aspire to...)

Huzzah, science is kind at times (after 7 months of ego-bruising-rejection).

Meanwhile, post-show is also kind in the sense that it gives me time to actually do some science. Thesis writing progresses when the going is good; when the going isn't so good thesis writing stands still whilst I rewrite entire sections of chapters that I thought I'd already written at some point 3 months ago (it happens; generally the rewrite much improves things, but net progress is unfortunately 0%). Nevertheless, work of some description is happening, although slightly dented at the moment by a nasty sniffly coughy cold (it is proper winter now... possible snow, big black woollen coat and all). January will be a bit of a panic month as I try to get everything done before my legal right to study in this country expires, but meanwhile I'm just trying to get on with it before a welcome Christmas break in London, Bristol and Bath. This is the first time in 3 years I'll have a cold Christmas. Ice skating, Christmas lights and turkey! (When you can't spend Christmas day wallowing in the sea with a beer, you must make do.)

In the Senate House

In between our two performances at the Senate House. Last few days have been a blur of Very Late Night Production Meetings in the ADC bar, endless muso-related woes, quite a lot of gaffer tape, scheduling too many people trying to do too many things in not enough hours, and the occasional realisation that I am also meant to be a dancer. Yesterday, my little company put on an absolutely unique dance/music/art performance in the University Senate House to a sold out house -- we somehow appear to have pulled it off. Who knew. This morning my body feels somewhat broken, but I am looking forward (I think ;)) to doing it again tonight! Am thankful for the brief lull this morning; it is a beautiful early winter day and I read a book over coffee, then wandered the backs watching geese and swans and bare trees against the clear blue sky; a gentle ease back into the real world.

It will be a little while before our usual array of photographs and videos come out but I will point at them on this blog when they do.

True to the tagline

DANCE
Watching: In the midst of a slightly overenthusiastic series of Saturday trips to Sadler's Wells to make the most of their brilliant autumn season. Highlights so far include an absolutely magical new solo by Russell Maliphant with an animated light projection by Michael Hulls that spilled light organically across the floor, leading and following the dancer as he swirled, Nijinsky-like, in a beanie and sweats. Understatement gets me every time. Also saw Morphoses' new season -- despite enjoying Christopher Wheeldon's latest, in a way slightly disappointed as it did not seem to have the utter compelling genius of Fool's Paradise or Commedia. Oddly, highlight of the evening was neither of the Wheeldon ballets, but instead Lightfoot and Leon's Softly As I Leave You, wonderfully danced by Drew Jacoby and Rubinald Pronk. In true NDT style, gorgeous and technical yet with an immense emotional depth and complexity. There is no other company that does this with quite the same finesse. A few more midnight train journeys back to Cambridge to come yet -- am particularly looking forward to Rambert this year. Their "Comedy of Change" is meant to be about Darwinism and bird behaviour, scientifically advised by one of the zoology/psychology professors here in Cambridge who lectured me way back when. My science and dance worlds have absolutely collided recently and although it is a bit of a shock to the system (being used to living a somewhat double life), I am absolutely thrilled by it all.

Making: The company is now in full swing rehearsing for our December's Senate House performance, having casually swung and leapt our way across the ADC stage sometime last week with what a reviewer called "aplomb" (ha!). We've just started rehearsals for a couple of our professionally choreographed pieces and I am really enjoying the process and keen to see what will emerge over the next few weeks. It is really nice to see the art emerging from all that planning! I started rehearsals for my own short piece a little ahead of everyone else, so I've actually just finished it and am not unpleased, in a radical departure from epic aggressive jazzed up fish hierarchies it appears to be a pretty brief amalgation of all those Maliphant and Wheeldon influences, and not complex at all, but I hope it will suit the Senate House and that the audience will enjoy it. Sometimes you don't have to try to say too much (I tell myself). Production work is something of an ever-stressful nightmare, but between the three of us core admin slaves and our ever growing production team, we take it in turns to mildly panic, and that means that the whole thing drives forward continually.
http://www.cambridgecontemporarydance.co.uk/lightmatter/ for more!

BOOKS
No time to read. Am slowly working my way through Dubliners. Really enjoying most of it, it is such a pleasure after grappling with and being defeated by Ulysses.

COFFEE BREAKS
No time for this either. In my first coffee break in weeks yesterday I sat in my favourite cafe Benet's with a mug of goodness, but I was reading about the integration of cooperative breeding work and cooperation theory, so although pleasant it was not exactly chill out time.

FISH
Chugging along. I am slightly worried that the dance company is trouncing my ability to actually finish writing this thesis, but I am making inch-by-inch (word-by-word) progress, and thesis.doc actually exists now which is more than could be said the last time I blogged. The aim is still January, argh, should I put this in the public domain in case I don't make it? I think I should, as the embarrassment of overunning much longer than that will perhaps be motivation to just write the damn thing. I am just about to submit about 20,000 words to a college to see if they want to give me some money in order to enable me to pursue more fish watching in coming years, so it is nice to see that I actually have 20,000 words, although of what dubious quality, I wonder?! Words are very much my work life at the moment, and I miss the actual fish very much, but to this end I have put a large picture of a chevroned barracuda on my computer desktop, which is cheering in a rather melancholic sort of way.

Harold et al

Meet Harold the Venusian slug, Kylie the slightly radioactive cat, E7_2+ the bicolor angelfish, and Jerome the Neptunian bigfoot:


Because of course I have nothing better to do with my borrowed overunning 4th year PhD time than to make FIMO animals. So much evening fun. I must admit to dropping Harold shortly after he came out of the oven to the loss of his left eye, but I've superglued him back together and he is as good as new:



Other unusual pursuits of last week involved an evening's sloe picking on the path between Coton and Hardwick (really beautiful and the sunset was something to be seen), followed by another evening of painstakingly pricking each sloe berry with a needle and dropping them into a gin bottle with sugar. Come this Christmas I should have some sloe gin to celebrate the festive season/drown my thesis sorrows.

Rehearsal madness shortly oncoming, so I am trying to make the most of this pre-term lull. Yesterday we cycled out to Anglesey Abbey and wandered amongst the glorious parkland full of Austen-esque statuary and rose gardens and sweeping vistas of chestnut tree avenues and beautiful autumnal colours. Then we came back to Cambridge and went straight to chavland (the Grafton) where I had a Crunchie milkshake (well deserved after the cycle back from the Abbey straight into the wind), watched a kiddie film, and then had dinner at Shanghai Ren Jia along with a whole restaurant full of people celebrating Mid Autumn Festival, winding up finally at The Free Press for a pint. The spice of life.

Cupcakes, culture & clotted cream

Whoops, it's been an age since I last wrote. Perhaps an indication of the boring woes of being a PhD student in that interminable "finishing" stage. Nonetheless the past couple of months have certainly not been unenjoyable. On the whole it was a better summer than I think we have had for a few years, the sun shining beatifically upon this normally grey little isle for weeks on end (although it also rained with a vengeance in July, just to balance things out a bit -- had two exceedingly sodden bike rides back from the wilds of southern Cambridge). So despite being rather full speed ahead with work most of August, it was pleasant interspersing this with the occasional hour or so sitting on the Trinity backs reading and watching the punts go by.

I had a couple of crazily fantastic weekends in August. First off I flew to New York for less than 48 hours to help my second sister to choose a wedding dress! Great fun although it did mean that I spent most of Saturday and Monday afternoons feeling a bit like a grumpy bump on a log despite copious caffeination to get me through wedding dress fitting and work respectively. It was so much fun being served cupcakes whilst critiqueing white satin confections of another sort. She must have tried on 50 dresses, but I think it was worth it. As they say you only do it once. Managed to fit in some New York favourites too, lunching at Chelsea Market, having dinner in the East Village, and having a big bowl of savoury ramen for Sunday brunch at Ippudo on St Mark's. Whilst at lunch we were having a slightly confused conversation about the wine of the night before, when our water waiter interrupted to give us a gentle masterclass on the grape under discussion. Only in New York. Still haven't found a city to beat it.

The next weekend, after some truly insane days at work and on email with the dance company trying to leave things in order before a big stint away, I headed up to Edinburgh for the last weekend of the Festival. Certainly lived up to expectations, but perhaps that's because we crammed 10 shows into two days. There is such an amazing buzz about the place. Highlights were the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre (one Scotsman, a cardboard stand, two socks, lots of costumes and a falsetto voice is all you need for an hour of side splitting hilarity), Baba Brinkman's Rap Guide to Evolution, and Jason Byrne. He reminds me a bit of an Irish Catholic Jack Black, a ball of manic hilarious energy with a show variously about being brought up in Ireland, raising kids himself, misadventures with various skeletal joints, and cutting up men in cardboard boxes... Absolutely fantastic.


From Edinburgh I flew straight to Cornwall to spend three weeks in its darkest western depths choreographing Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado for performance at the Minack Theatre on the cliffs of Porthcurno. This is the society's 48th year doing this stint at the Minack, so it is a very venerable tradition and one that I'd heard lots about from my theatrical friends so I thought it was time to give it a go! The theatre is a truly remarkable thing, built right into the cliffs near Land's End, with the sea as a backdrop for the stage. In fact the entire experience is also pretty remarkable as the entire cast, production team, and orchestra all sleep on airbeds on the floor in a village hall in lovely Paul (just up the road from better known fishing village Mousehole, near Penzance) for the three weeks: two weeks of rehearsal from scratch and one week of performance. (Although I cheated and moved out to a cottage in Mousehole for the last week, so I only really had the share the floor and the single shower with 50 other people for a couple of weeks...) Despite being pretty hard work for the first week or so when we were rehearsing flat out in the hall, the church, the carpark etc. (and choreographing in between), it was a great experience to spend time with such a lovely bunch of people and also get my teeth into some good old cheesy G&S choreography, although my allergy to cheese was helped by the fact that I got to make pretty geisha dances as well as pirate ships (what else for "Yeo ho, heave ho," etc?).

Cornwall itself was absolutely beautiful, at least in the second half of the trip when the weather cleared (I arrived to find Paul quite literally in a cloud). By show week I was freed from the rehearsal room to enjoy myself and think managed to get in a good varied holiday in between endlessly watching the show. One lovely thing was the chance to experience a little of the local culture as we sang in the Paul church service one Sunday we were there (as a token of our gratitude for being allowed to noisily invade their village for three weeks!), and also experienced a grand old singalong in the pub with the members of the Mousehole Male Voice Choir. I did a little Cornish sightseeing, visiting the almost tropical gardens of St Michael's Mount at Marazion, pottering about Penzance and Mousehole, walking from Sennen Cove to Land's End where I sent the obligatory postcard. And of course there were all the endless beautiful beaches and the sea, the glorious sea. Between a matinee and an evening we all trooped down to the beach (also built into the cliff, so there is actually a cliff path straight from dressing rooms to beach -- where else?!) and leaped into the freezing sea and got well buffeted by the waves and then froze for a bit trying to soak up the last rays of sun. Ah, very English. I even managed to fit in a couple of dives at Lamorna Cove in probably the best UK diving conditions ever (15 degrees and 8 m vis!). It was pleasant to be underwater again, and the kelp beds were quite pretty, and I found a lovely little cuttlefish, plus lots of bass and wrasse and shrimp and limpets and anemones, but to be honest I did it mainly so that I could say that I had actually dived in the UK and I'm not sure if I can be persuaded to do it again ;) And of course, I consumed a glut of pasties and clotted cream. That's Cornwall done I think! A really lovely part of the country.

Back in Cambridge and wading back into the dual jobs of PhD and dance company. Thankfully I arrived with the weekend to get myself up to date with the latter, but it's back on the former tomorrow morning at work, and then it will be the usual juggling act I love to complain about but that I know makes me happy really. I've also moved back out to Burrell's Field (being a 4th year PhD student - gasp - means all my privileges have been roughly removed, perhaps as a sort of incentive to actually finish); I have yet to see if all my belongings will fit into my dinky little bedsit after several years of gradual expansion into a couple of enormous Trinity 'mansionettes'!

Last night I dreamt

that I was diving somewhere in SE Asia, under a jetty in some godforsaken isolated outpost frequented only by hardcore divers.

Underwater, amongst the wooden pylons, there were schools of fusiliers and frogfish hidden amongst the fronds of soft coral. In quick succession, I saw:
- a movement out of the corner of my eye; it is a whole school of fusiliers streaking upwards to the surface. Followed by the most enormous barracuda ever, some kind of 1.5 m monster, sleek and predatory and full of big shiny teeth and silver and gorgeous. I'm not sure if barracuda in real life do herd fish to the surface, but this one did so very impressively.
- another monster of a giant moray lurking under the jetty, which upon noticing me actually came out of his hole and hovered, snake-charmer like, upright in the open, tail curled upon the ground. Now, I'm pretty sure morays don't actually ever do this, but in dreams all things pander to you..
- heading out to the blue beyond the dropoff, there was some kind of crazy baitball of who knows what, and sharks of all kinds circling in and out of them, primordial and savage and so ridiculously, gracefully beautiful. It was very Blue Planet.

I think from this dream one can tell two things:
1. Perhaps I am ultimately a fan of the Big and Impressive when diving rather than macro. Galapagos, here I come.
2. I really, really miss the sea.

Marylebone High Street

A perfect middle aged Sunday. Upon waking it is miraculously sunny and beautiful and a wonderful change from an endlessly drizzly Saturday. Wander up Marylebone High Street to Le Fromagerie for my usual Sunday morning breakfast of coffee and two happy organic half boiled eggs with soldiers for an exorbitant amount of money. Miraculously am there before it opens at 10am, this has never happened to me on a Sunday morning before. So a quick stroll through the farmer's market whilst waiting, admiring the quiches and huge bunches of lavender. After walking D up to Baker St tube past the mystifyingly huge hordes of tourists waiting to see the waxworks I very directionlessly wander back down the high street, past more happy Sunday brunchers.

Daunt Books beckons with its lure of travel to exotic far flung destinations (you know, like the ones I hail from), but I stick to the fiction section and end up with a rather handsome slim volume of T.S. Eliot poetry. I always bemoan my lack of poetry reading so I am at last attempting to make some amends. I am only a few poems in so far but thoroughly enjoying them...

Farther down the street I nip back into the farmer's market for two oysters, freshly shucked, one with tabasco and lemon, one plain and tasting perfectly of the sea. Gorgeous. I share words of delight with the man next to me at the table, busy eating his half dozen. Yet farther down I veer off the the west and end up in Selfridges. It is something of a magnet, particularly its chocolate section by the food hall. I fail to resist both chocolate and a couple of cheap tops on sale, and eventually munch on a salt beef sandwich from the Brass Rail for lunch.

Head up to Angel for Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray. Really enjoy it; there is much to be said for his brand of hugely accessible dance theatre that draws enormous lay audiences. Dorian Gray appeals much more to me than his usual formula (family friendly comedy-shtick modern reworkings of big fairytale ballets) because it is Bourne for adults -- sexy, dark, dealing with all the usual themes of the novel very cleverly updated to the modern world obsessed with celebrity and fashion and that fragile outer surface. Some electrifying moments, particularly in the pas de deux between Dorian and Basil (turned into a fashion photographer). I particularly enjoyed the references to MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet -- the Sibyl in Bourne's version (typically for Bourne turned into Romeo rather than Juliet), dying of a drug overdose, struggles masochistically way across the stage and up and over the central bed in direct echo of Juliet's final death in MacMillan's ballet. Dance theatre like this I can certainly applaud and enjoy (I often struggle with the more avant-garde dance theatre which seems to abound in dance colleges). If you're going to make a piece of theatre about physical beauty, using a caste of limber sexy physically articulate dancers is certainly not a bad way to go about it. A very stimulating afternoon -- but I did miss slightly the moments of heart in mouth beauty that (I continue to believe) is the reason why we all go to the theatre. For that I am guessing Morphoses (Chris Wheeldon's company) will provide amply come their autumn season at Sadler's.

Millinery

First evening to myself in what feels like forever. I'd forgotten the simple pleasures of not doing anything much, on my own time. Left work about 7pm, although with the 16 hour summer days it felt like much earlier. For the first time in maybe months I revisited my old favourite activity, sitting about in Borders reading dance magazines and the Economist over a hot drink. Then a rather pleasant evening making meatballs for a steamboat tomorrow (hurray for dinner parties Malaysian style) and cooking enough sausage casserole to feed a small African village (or just me for the rest of the week).

A bit too much intense verbiage at work recently. Writing, writing, writing -- on Sunday afternoon I was sitting there falling asleep over my laptop, thinking "must.. keep.. typing". Over 24 hours later I still haven't the foggiest whether any of those words, one in front of the other, actually make any sense. But still, I'm making progress (I hope). I suddenly feel very much back in the thick of it, after the strangeness of June which despite one's best efforts always gets lost to May week mayhem and other such diverting pleasures. But it will be nice, in a bit, to have a break from writing -- I foresee having to do a bit of statistics for the next chunk of work. Who knew that one day I would look forward to statistics! I'm trying to go full steam ahead for the next couple of months as I'll be away for much of September, choreographing G+S in Cornwall. Something to work towards!

Notables over the past 1.5 months... spent my birthday weekend in Seville, drunk on Andalusian sunshine and oranges and tapas and breathtaking flamenco and endless cheap cerveza and good coffee everywhere and chanced-upon salsa parties in the street and gorgeous Mudejar palaces. It made us feel rather self-congratulatory. Trinity May Ball, my fourth, felt a little like it was suffering from the credit crunch and various organisational hiccups, but had an absolutely fantastic time nonetheless. Highlights perhaps the silent disco (very hilarious being in one when you don't have your headphones on, watching people bop about to nothing), an enormous helter skelter, duck confit, and that old standby the 4am ceilidh. Night whizzed by and it was 6am survivors before we knew it. Theatre experiences -- my usual raft of dance shows, the standout probably Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant in Push. The piece that stood out for me was Russell's solo. A master class in choreographic minimalism. They could take you anywhere, those two. Also, a very very pleasant sunny afternoon at Glyndebourne with family and friends. Falstaff, black tie, picnicking, Pimms and bubbly, arguing over whether white blobs in next field were sheep or cows! I sat next to a very nice gentleman whom I discovered had read Classics in Cambridge back in his day, and whose grandfather sang Henry Ford in the very first English performance of Falstaff in 1896. All one could want Glyndebourne to be: surreal, English, very wonderful. Also trying to make the best of this wonderful summer, the first real one we've had for three years. Cycling down to Grantchester for evening drinks and dinner (peanut butter parfait perfection) at the Rupert Brooke; punting on a silent river at 10pm under the Bridge of Sighs experiencing a city view uniquely unchanged for centuries; listening to the punt guides tell tall stories to tourists from the banks of the Cam; long moments watching the waxing moon from Trinity bridge in the long magical summer dusk. Good for whatever soul I may have.

Busy also producing my own little bits of 'art' -- Cambridge Contemporary Dance restaged much of our Dante performance in late June. Slightly stressful working in a non-theatre venue but pulled it off in the end, we're not sure where all these Dante dance aficionados turned up from but they certainly came. Also now getting very excited about our next big project, a big evening of new work in December which will be performed in a venue no less august and unique and scary and wonderful as the university Senate House, that 280 year old neo classical edifice of imposing beauty which I walk past every day, now with an added frisson of excitement. Can we do site specific contemporary dance in it to celebrate the University's 800th Anniversary, we asked the Vice-Chancellor's office. They said yes! Who knew.

No wonder I don't seem to have achieved an awful lot of work over the past few weeks. Must embrace the verbiage (third year PhD student hat), the producing and planning (dance company co director hat), the creativity (various choreographing commitments hat), the dinners and teas and punting trips (the being-a-friend hat), the girliness and more planning (bridesmaid hat!) and the general happiness (the being-me hat).

:)

Enter cheese, pursued by statistics.

Can you tell it is late and I am tired from this blog title? Quite possibly.

Out of bed at eleven. Sunny. As is traditional for my late Sunday mornings, to market -- although I reneged on my usual ostrich burger and instead had a perfect cappucino from the guy with the little cart in market. Don't know how he did it, it was magic. Thus fortified, got picnic supplies from M+S and then lolled about very, very happily on Jesus Green eating said supplies. Sadly, attempted en route visit to the Cambridge Cheese Shop in All Saints Passage failed because it was closed! Not as dire as otherwise could have been as my cheese cravings are being assauged by the magical introduction of cheese courses to BA dinners, hence last Friday being faced (after smoked salmon, guinea fowl, and chocolate brownie ice cream) with an entire huge wheel of Camembert. Bliss! Anyway, cheese diversions aside, it was a very nice -- if cheese-less -- picnic lunch. We watched mallards and dogs and small boys pushing their big brothers around in strollers, and enjoyed the sun, and thought longingly about the sea.

After this I came home and slogged away for hours at some statistics (successfully, so I am pleased, as slogging away at the same dataset all Friday with nothing to show for it was really very depressing), and then cooked a huge vat of herbal chicken soup (you know, filled with mysterious bits of root and seeds that come out of a plastic packet from Chinatown), and then slogged for another few hours at dance company administration.

Rather odd to start the day extremely chilled and then have it degenerate into very tiring computer work, as my natural inclination is to do it the other way around, but all in all I suppose must congratulate myself at somehow having been productive and completely blissed out on nothing at all in the same 24 hours.

Fish! Dance! Who could ask for anything more?

My apologies for the yonks it has been.

I spent the first half of April in Indonesia, mainly diving off a gorgeous boat in Raja Ampat and then living it up (well actually still diving) in Bali. There were pretty fish, ranging from the small and cute (pygmy seahorses), to the large and majestic (manta rays) and with a very close encounter with a large and bemused great barracuda at the USAT Liberty; and also non-fish excitement in the form of a whole congregation of stingless beautiful moon jellies that we snorkelled with and an unbothered little turtle hanging out in the current. This is all it takes to keep me happy as a pig in muck. Oh, and iced coffee. And far too much good Indonesian food. And indescribable natural beauty, karst islands descending into a preternaturally dead calm sea. And the grand old fun of standing up on a surfboard (on a very very very baby wave). And wonderful company. (And an onboard masseuse.) And general cut-off-from-the-world peace.

Back in Cambridge life continues; I've been drafting more papers. My supervisor seems to think I am somehow going to be able to turn these things into a thesis. (I only hope he is right, as my thesis word count remains at zero.) Work is alright, really -- I'm getting used to the whole writing malarkey. It is painful at times but I am perhaps getting the hang of it, now I just need to keep on doggedly doing it for the next 6 to 8 months or so and try not to go insane meanwhile.

The dance company continues as usual. Last weekend we premiered three new pieces derived from Dante's Commedia. They were really interesting for the company to do as for the first time we had external choreographers. One of the pieces was set in Purgatory and I can now claim to once have danced "Sloth" (for which I lay on the floor not doing an awful lot) and to very, very almost really have been a tree on stage (there is a perennial in-joke in contemporary dance about how it is, or isn't, mainly about 'being a tree') -- I didn't get to be a tree, but I did get to be grass in the Garden of Eden. By comparison the other piece I danced in, a Paradiso piece, was conventional, although danced entirely in silence with only the dancers' breath for synchronisation -- a real test of how well the company's dancers now dance with each other. I think it's showing, all those 9am Sunday rehearsals together week after week. The final piece, which I wasn't in, was choreographed by Vanessa Fenton of the Royal Ballet. Somehow the company seems to be moving up in the world, which is fantastic.

We move on next to a development period for a performance we will put on in November for the University's 800th Anniversary. It's nice in the meantime to be able to not rehearse quite so much and take class instead. I'm making myself go back to ballet -- that technique is irreplaceable. By now I know that all I really have in ballet is ballon and not much else, but I'm resigned to that now and can just get on with working with what I have! I'm also really looking forward to getting into a good contemporary class again -- I think I will restart my Saturdays in London to this purpose.

The weather has been kind recently, to the point of actually allowing for walks along the river and lazing on the grass in weekend afternoons. (More woe to the undergraduates who have a month of exam fever ahead of them before they can join us.) When the sun goes down I continue the long process of educating myself the philistine scientist by going to poetry readings and the opera (and in a similarly experimental vein somehow signing myself up to choreograph Gilbert and Sullivan in an open air theatre set on the cliffs of Cornwall). The precious work/dance/life balance is magically holding steady!

Phew

The paper edits continue. It's been a long week but I am in high spirits because we've finally gotten to the point where we've sent it off for some external feedback, and this weekend I leave for a boat upon which we will mooch around Irian Jaya and occasionally hop off to go diving (no clove oil or nets or stopwatches involved!) and also I am getting to said boat via Hong Kong and Bali where I am fairly keen to have a go at standing up on a surfboard. Woohoo.

Meanwhile this afternoon after a bit of frustrated searching I was inordinately and geekily pleased to find that
HPDinterval(mcmcsamp(fm1,n=10000))
does what I want it to do. Enough said about my working life I think. No wonder I'm always blogging about dance.

Rather enjoyed contemporary dance

Looking at this, I feel I should probably start talking about science a bit more...

Yet more da---

Had a very lovely weekend enjoying the continued run of atypical sunshine. Alas, in England whenever it is nice one lives in a sort of constant fear that this will be it for the year and that this is all the summer we will get!

As is usual for me in London I did rather a lot of dance related things. Friday evening went to see the London Contemporary Dance School postgraduate choreography presentation evening at The Place (it was free and I was at a loose end). I was perhaps more surprised than I should have been to find it really incredibly dense and of the epileptic-fit-and-bandages style of choreography. Many of the pieces were more performance art than dance. In one which I actually quite enjoyed five performers stood in a line and laughed hysterically at the audience for several minutes, then made lots of strange faces for the next ten minutes, then laughed a bit more. I am not entirely sure why we train dancers for years only in order to completely throw all technique out the window. Much as I feel that art is not solely for entertainment, that it does have some role to move our cultural understanding forward, to challenge the audience into rethinking humanity, society, life, it still has to do so in an accessible way. What is the point if it is so dense and arcane that 95% of the public will feel it is so unfathomable that they cannot even try to get to whatever message the choreographer has in mind? And even then, I don't believe we always need a message. Graham Swift said it so wonderfully in Ever After when he argued that much as we like nowadays to snobbishly rave about art that makes some kind of incisive social commentary, and much as it is unfashionable to simply love it for its beauty, beauty is often what great art is about to many people. It is why we come back to it again and again from our harried daytime lives. Transcendence is the word I always think of... at its best, it is transcendent. Why is so much modern art so preoccupied with running full pelt in the other direction?

Anyway, rant done: the next evening I went to the Royal Opera House for a somewhat needed more conventional dose of dance. The mixed bill of Isadora and Dances at at Gathering was a good chance to see rather a lot of principal dancers all at once (and at six pounds for a standing ticket a steal). Isadora, a recreated staging of an old MacMillan work, was disappointing. Tamara Rojo did her heroic best to save it with some lovely dancing and acting, but why on earth did the RB decide to bring this back into the repertoire when in comparison to the MacMillan masterpieces that are for many the highlight of the company's work it pales in comparison? It is just a sort of collage of some nice bits of dancing and some entertaining but fluffy bits of film. It never gets beyond entertaining, it never even gets close to transcendence. Whereas Dances at a Gathering certainly does. A Jerome Robbins gem, it is lyrical and beautiful and subtle and it doesn't need to make any sort of statement beyond that (and is probably the better for it). Yuhui Choe, dancing Alina's role, was striking not only for her resemblance (in the head, the carriage of the arms) to Alina but for some incredibly controlled and articulate dancing. Very definitely a rising star -- the more I see of her (and she is on stage a lot these days) the more I like her. I also rather enjoyed Sergei Polunin's incredible jumps, that boy simply defies gravity.

When not watching dance I made it to a couple of classes at Danceworks. It was nice to be in a contemporary class again after simply too long away, I'd almost forgotten how calming and enjoyable I find the beautiful shapes and awareness of all the possible movement in the back that is Cunningham technique.

In a bid to improve my cultural awareness beyond my narrow world of contemporary dance I went to the Picasso exhibition on at the National Gallery (and got some street theatre in Trafalgar Square on the way). It was really very enjoyable -- I never used to like Picasso at all but recent encounters with him in the Fitzwilliam and elsewhere gave me an inkling that may have changed. His work is incredibly immediate. You can't just sort of stand back from it and appreciate it objectively -- it is vibrant and loud and often humorous and amazingly sensual and left me very aware that there was a human artist behind every painting. I found myself smiling at the humour of some paintings, enthralled by the lyricism of others. After coming out of the exhibition, being in the National Gallery, I simply had to head across to the 1700-1900 galleries to gaze reverentially upon Whistlejacket, that life size phenomenal racehorse painting by George Stubbs. Along the way I waved at the Constables and Turners and Gainsboroughs that I also love. It is such a wonderful place!

And in between I enjoyed the culinary delights of the big city. Takeaway sushi (I have a rather limited choice of this given the general fish ban but still enjoyed it) eaten in Embankment gardens where I bemusedly watched a large group of American teenagers accosting a bobby for photographs (he was very tolerant). Noodles, teh tarik and cendol at C&R post-ballet (hurray for Chinatowns and Asian food and late nights). Eggs laid by very happy organic hens and a huge frothy cappucino at Le Fromagerie, the perfect lazy Sunday breakfast place. And a trek to Canary Wharf hugely well rewarded as my friend cooked an exceedingly tasty lamb roast for Sunday lunch!

Oh yes and somewhere between dance, art and food I managed to get my hair cut. I have a bob! It hasn't been this short for over a decade; I'm rather pleased to have a new look.

Collops (of life)

Recent notables:

1. College Commemoration Feast last Friday. Having missed it for the past two years due to being in Australia (one can't have it all, it seems), it was so lovely to be able to go again, possibly for the last time! I had a very genial and stress-free time of it as for the first time I was sitting with the 'commoners' rather than the glitz and glamour of high table. We were served collops of beef ("larger than a slice but smaller than a dollop", the fellow I was with drolly explained) and 1977 port amongst other delicacies. It all went down very well indeed and the choir sang a glorious Amazing Grace arrangement by Eriks Esenvalds in addition to their usual. After three hours of feasting the students proceeded to the College Bar for the Dean's Party (where we were provided with "entertainment appropriate to our status" -- the fellows and guests proceeded to the senior common room for the same; I rather think theirs probably involved a bit more cheese and port), where I ended up chatting very amiably about climate change, modern art, and Pink Floyd. Ah, university life.

2. Going to a performance by the small but very slick and innnovative company Ballet Black at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. To my slightly starstruck surprise we were sitting next to the choreographer of one of the pieces, Martin Lawrance. (I recognised him from doing a workshop with the company he's worked with for decades, the Richard Alston Dance Company). I managed to squeak a hello and a "enjoyed your work" and was momentarily extremely confused as he seemed to think he knew me -- turned out he thought I was somebody else! Still, a confused conversation with a rising choreographic star in the UK contemporary dance scene is still something :)

3. The weather. I pick and choose my extent of Britishness, but this weather really does need to be mentioned. It is gorgeous! Sunny and blue for days and the narcissi are basking in it all on the backs. I should take myself to Jesus Lock to see if the daffodils have come out yet.

4. Sylvie Guillem, Russell Maliphant and Robert LePage's Eonnagata at Sadler's Wells was something rather undefinable and full of the most gorgeous images. It was not really dance but rather stagecraft. But what stagecraft! Sylvie silhouetted in shadow play inside the drapes of a silken gown; Russell in a mesmerising and gracious fan dance; some absolutely stupendous lighting design by Michael Hulls bringing to life everything from a martial arts arena to a symbolic joining of man and woman; and best of all, a long sequence towards the end involving a mirrored table and the most mind-bogglingly beautiful confusion between one performer, another, and each other's reflections. It is a work in progress, and not as consistent as it should have been, but I don't really mind, because the moments that worked were quite simply breathtaking.

5. A couple of friends from my second field season on Lizard visiting for the weekend. We had a very relaxed and Cambridgey time of it, lunching in the Copper Kettle and getting coffee at Indigo's, wandering down to Grantchester along the backs and the river for tea and scones at the Orchard, going for curry and a cheesy 'bop' in the Clare Cellars, nosing around market on a blindingly bright sunny Sunday, visiting King's Chapel and yet again staring up in awe at that sublime fan vault, reading the newspaper over yet more coffee in Bene'ts, making pancakes and caramel sauce in a nod to our Lizard Island day-off traditions, and heading to the theatre... oh, but it's a good town, it is.

6. Zoology Seminar Day on Friday afternoon filled with really interesting talks from group leaders from all over zoology. It really is a crazily diverse department, there were talks on climate change and red deer, cuckoo chicks, Drosophila gut movements, Y RNA, Ichthyostega, Francis Crick (by Peter Lawrence), the energetic cost of rods (the photoreceptor kind), etc. Fascinating. It was really good because group leaders being who they are, they were almost all excellent speakers and knew exactly how to pitch a talk to a scientific but unspecialised audience. The Y RNA talk was possibly the first ever molecular talk I have ever understood and enjoyed in my life.

7. And still working on that paper...

Aggression and Light

So, yesterday morning I had a meeting with my supervisor, and we worked out a sort of way for me to phrase this short "summary" paper I am writing: about 1000 words taking in most of my PhD, I kid you not. I spent all afternoon writing this. Late afternoon, having just finished a first complete draft, I had another impromptu meeting where we talked through a completely different better way for me to phrase this. I have spent all of today writing this.

Now my brain is pretty much mush from in two days producing 2000 carefully considered words talking mainly about how and why some fish beat up other fish.

In the evenings yesterday and today I was/will be at the Queens' Contemporary Dance performance Sprung! performing a slow, sustained, elegant, beautiful, transcendant, choral-music, mostly-balancing-on-one-leg piece of dance called Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light).

I often feel like my life is full of the strangest disconnects, but at least it keeps things interesting!