next year, things are gonna change

[Next Year, Baby - Jamie Cullum]

Yes, the title of this blogpost is a blatant attempt at acknowledging the fact that 2010 is almost over.

I cannot believe that I was Ireland precisely a year ago, drinking vast quantities of Guinness, enjoying outrageous flirtations with various obliging Irishmen and drinking in the misty-rainy green goodness of the Emerald Isle.

My reason for writing today was not to churn our the usual sentimental tosh, you’ll be glad to know. Today was one of those days that seem culled out of a sketch show, or a comedy tv series with a predilection for slapstick and must be recorded for posterity. It was an exceptionally sleepy morning, and after wrestling myself out of bed, I proceeded to down a large quantity of very strong coffee and set off to meet Shokhi. The morning passed uneventfully until both my colleague and I elected to walk over to the food court at Tidel Park in an attempt at alleviating intense boredom. A caffeine-withdrawal headache seemed imminent, so I headed straight to the French Loaf counter and asked for a cappuccino. The surly looking server proceeded to attach an appropriately festive, bright red sleeve to my tall paper cup of steaming hot coffee, and I took it, never dreaming of the trouble this insignificant looking bit of cardboard would cause.

Halfway through my coffee, I was momentarily distracted from eavesdropping on Shokhi’s conversation on the phone by the circumstance of most of the contents of my cup finding their way onto the table, my lap, and my hand. After staring blankly at the mess for a few seconds, we managed to clean some of it off (though it still dripped slowly off the table onto the floor) and I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible (lots of judgemental IT people were staring open-mouthed at what was surely the most entertaining thing to happen all morning). I commandeered Shokhi’s dupatta to cover most of the tell-tale brown stains on the front of my, as luck would have it, pristine white top. I also proceeded to nearly trip on the escalator, teetering precariously on the edge of the top step while my arm uselessly went back and forth on the moving handrail.

After sheepishly making our way back to the office, we giggled our way through the rest of the morning, sending pointless emails to colleagues who were sadly not in the office and abusing the world in general. We seem to do that a lot. The afternoon was enlivened by some more pointless and verbose emailing, lots of IM-ing, googling of horse-faced women, and ordering of books at our 60% employee discount. The late afternoon threw me into a state of crisis, as the inadvertent pushing of a button made strange-looking P-shaped marks appear on all my Microsoft Word documents. A panicky email sent to my boss received a somewhat weary reply, explaining to me that the “P-shaped marks and dots and things” that induced such panic were nothing more than line and paragraph breaks. I asked a very kind man in the office to fix this for me, and he rather dryly demonstrated how to press a button that was staring me right in the face so that the ungainly marks and dots would disappear.

Such an emotional roller-coaster of a day having taken its natural toll, Shokhi and I promptly left the office soon after – though not before I had tripped twice, forgotten to scan my finger by way of signing out, and tripped once more when overtaken by a fit of giggles. We decided we needed to reward ourselves, and with this admirable object in mind, stopped at La Boulangerie and consumed some truly decadent cake before parting amicably.

Happy days are here again.

:)

book-ends and weekends

I forgot to explain the reason behind my anti-Chennai outburst earlier, so here goes. On Friday, my colleagues (yes, I have colleagues now!) and I made a split-second decision to go watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I. Since I had been denied the opportunity to watch this film for at least a week after its release, I was rather excited at the prospect. Unfortunately, the only movie theatre in the city that still had tickets available was PVR, at the horrid Ampa Mall. Still, how bad could it be?

Intensely annoying, as it turned out. The majority of the crowd at the theatre seemed far more interested in making themselves heard than in listening to what the people on screen had to say. Apart from the distraction afforded by the subtitles (whoever heard of English subtitles on the big screen for an English-language movie?!), we were treated to wolf-whistles every time Hermione appeared on screen, loud comments every time Bill Nighy as Rufus Scrimgeour said anything, and general mayhem whenever someone’s cellphone, replete with annoyingly loud ringtone, went off. Despite this, the movie was brilliant. I have thoroughly disliked every single Harry Potter film (except the Prisoner of Azkaban), so this came as a pleasant surprise. Of course, the comparisons with the Lord of the Rings in my head were inevitable, but despite the obvious debt owed to Peter Jackson’s vision, I laughed, cried and was terrified at the appropriate moments.

It was a good start to a great weekend.

Saturday found me vacillating between spending a lazy night at home and going to Zara in the evening to meet the effervescent Jayashree. After changing my mind about five times (as usual) I impulsively decided to brave it out, and got myself into evening clothes without further ado. We sweet-talked our way into getting a table, and spent over three hours talking, drinking and generally swapping stories about all of our various acquaintances who seem to be living far more exciting lives than ourselves. Happily sloshed, I headed home for some Maggi and ended the night with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Sunday was lazy, as Sundays should be. I woke up nearer the afternoon than the morning, read my book all day until I finished it, and fell sleep just as Harry started hearing a strange voice coming from the walls in his second year at Hogwarts.

Monday rushed by in a fever of excitement – El Clasico was due to kick-off at some ridiculous hour of the night/early morning. Sadly, Ozil and Real Madrid were utterly thrashed by a truly sublime Barcelona, and I couldn’t help wishing that my frog-eyed football boy had chosen to play for them.

Who says a simple life is uneventful?

bookworming.

BBC Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and make those you have read bold.
2) Star (*) the ones you LOVE.
3) Italicize those you plan on reading.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen *
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien *
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte *
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling *
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee *
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman *
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien *
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot *
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen *
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery *
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy *
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (again, I tried twice!)
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (this deserves a mention because I’ve tried 3 times, unsuccessfully)
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson *
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (on principle, NEVER)
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray *
80 Possession – AS Byatt *
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (ugh, never want to read it again)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Total Count: 41/100.

I still maintain my disbelief in the veracity of such lists. But ha, 41!

what use am i as a heap on the floor?

My fingers are still tingling from the merciless cold water I was doing my weekly washing up with. It’s strange how easily one gets used to things one never had to think about before. I still dislike doing the dishes right after I’ve eaten (it just seems wrong!) but when the heap of dishes starts glaring reproachfully at me from a corner of the kitchen, I tie my hair back and prepare to get dirty.

And then, there’s the weekly laundry jaunt. Luckily, my nearest laundromat is right downstairs so I don’t have to lug great big bags of dirty underwear and wet towels down the street. Often, doing laundry is a result of two things: an excess of small change jangling about in my purse, or a serious lack of clean clothing. I try my best to carefully juxtapose the abovementioned circumstances, because when they delightfully do come together it’s like the Universe is on my side and all’s well with the world. Believe me, a lack of clean clothes and the appropriate coins is not fun and results in me running manically from door to door startling Chinese people with my frantic demands for fifty pence coins.

Luckily, I haven’t had to do any of the dirtier household jobs like clean the bathroom or vacuum my room: we have cleaning people coming in every week to do those things. Usually, I wake up about ten minutes before the cleaning lady turns up, and hence her knock is followed by a mad dash around the room picking up towels, papers and books and chucking them on the bed, a quick peek in the bathroom to make sure I haven’t left any shampoo bottles upturned on the floor and then an embarrassed retreat to the kitchen with my book/laptop while she cleans. I always feel very judged.

Grocery shopping is by far the most fun activity I’ve had to engage in since coming here. The first few weeks, I was just so dazzled by everything I could buy: chocolate icing in a jar? semi-skimmed milk? double cream? fifty different kinds of digestive biscuit? long-grain or short-grain or medium-grain rice? freeze-dried mushroom essence? Not that I’d ever know what to do with a lot of those things, but just the possibility of having them in my shopping basket was so exciting. And of course, those enormous fridges with all manner of cakes, icecream, desserts and frozen food calling out to me, telling me they’re exactly what I want. The temptation is almost overwhelming. Truthfully, one of the most exciting parts of my life here is my weekly trip to Tesco.

I want the weather to get better so I can read in the park again. Enough snow!

oops. i’ve forgotten what i had to say.

I’ve had so many interesting conversations in the past couple of days that I really thought I’d have something to say. Except, I’ve sort of lost the will to dissect things here (for now).

I suppose I might as well make a list of all the books I want to read and cross them off one by one. Lists do give one a sense of accomplishment, which is something I’m sadly lacking in, in any case!

Ta!