No entry for an age and then you get an enormous fucking meme? And no cut? Don't you just hate me!
I was tagged by vizzygoth to carry out this four things meme. (This is the point where I intended to politely insert an LJ cut, but it ate part of my entry and did strange things to my layout, so you're going to have to endure reams of text. Part of me thinks it's only photos that need cuts, anyway; as text doesn't fuck-up your friends' page and take an age to load over dial-up.)
4 jobs I've had
· Research for an animal welfare charity investigating whether turkeys are in chronic pain from the arthritis that results from intensive breeding.
· One summer I worked in the kitchen of a pub restaurant in Leith, Edinburgh. Once the shift had started, there was no way out of the overheated kitchen staffed by an array of odd characters with almost incomprehensible accents, except to scurry through the cellars that had ceilings six inches shorter than me, where all food was stored and we’d eat our meal. May, who washed-up, was fifty-nine years old and desperately hanging on for her retirement. She lived with her ‘mother’ who’d not long turned seventy and she had false teeth that would fall out when she got angry enough to throw plates at the cook, who would tease her just to see this. She was most proud of her ‘boyfriend’, a married lollypop-man who would take her out for a drive every Sunday afternoon and paid for her cigarettes. I felt like I was trapped in a short story by Graham Greene that’s set underground and inhabited by gnarly people who never see the light of day (‘Under the Garden’ in ‘A sense of Reality’). I left to sell sandwiches from the back of my bike.
· Working in a gastroenterology research department in a hospital in Soweto, back when De Klerk and his National Party were still clinging on to their last vestiges of power. It was the largest hospital in the southern hemisphere and despite well trained staff, operated with much in common with a war-zone.
· Croupier on the roulette table at Club Montepulciano (playing for sweeties).
4 movies I can watch over and over - this is difficult, as I haven’t lived with a video or DVD player for almost twenty years, so I don’t watch things over. These entries are largely influenced by that time.
· Diva - with all that prettiness and opera, it made stable student film fodder if you shared a flat with style conscious gay boys, even if they weren’t then ‘out’.
· Some Like it Hot - this filled a fair few Sunday afternoons when I was an undergraduate.
· Drowning by Numbers - I like lots of Peter Greenaway’s films and this one is sufficiently sexy, strange and attractive to merit more viewing. Also, I once heard a rumour that scattered through the film are all the numbers from one to one-hundred, so if you were bored with the film you could turn into one of those tiresome geeks who spots hidden numbers in that ‘Where’s Wally/ Waldo’ kind of way, (one friend realised the man who escorted her to the cinema wasn’t quite for her when he came out commenting on the numbers he had missed).
· Festen - Something more recent that I’ve only seen once; but I think it would withstand watching again. The subtly of the pained family interactions it captured made me laugh and wince.
4 places I've lived
· London - born here and now back in my manor, I’m a real London girl; though my curly hair and dreamy air have made many imagine I’m from the country.
· A campsite in the New Forest - a semi magical long hot summer after my father left and my mother was too shell-shocked to notice what we were up to. Our pocket-money came from returning Corona bottles to the local post-office that we’d ‘recovered’ from the campsite shop, and the woods we roamed were large enough to imagine you were lost even though you’d soon rediscover your whereabouts before fear was anything more than a distant thrill to be flirted with.
· Edinburgh - where I attended a university awash with Sloaney pretensions when such things were at their zenith. My English accent threw me straight into the deep end of a social circle I knew little of and my ungainly stokes kept me afloat sufficient that I had much fun; though sometimes slightly awkward and on the edge of things unlike those with the elegant ease of being born to it.
· In my imagination - so I’ve not lived in any far away places that perhaps I should have; but this is about as exotic as things get.
4 TV shows. Ur, this is hard too. I don’t have a telly and haven’t for ages, so I’ve substituted some radio programs, but that’ll mean shit to those of you outside of BBC Radio 4 land.
· The Archers - yes, it’s middle-class, middle-aged, predictable twaddle; but I like it that I have one soap I can indulge in and so pretend to participate in ‘popular culture’ even though it’s at its most unpopular end.
· At Home with the Snails - a slightly bonkers and surreal radio series from a few years ago, in which a young man becomes the psychological ‘project’ of his father, while his obsession with snails takes over his life despite the best attempts of his sexually uninhibited Scandinavian girlfriend.
· Bouquet of Barbed Wire - a 1970’s TV series very much of the era of Abigail’s Party. I chose this as I’d love to see it again, having watched it originally as a young child hanging upside-down and peering through the gaps in our open-plan stair case in our equally 70’s house, all the time hoping our mother wouldn’t waken from her sherry soaked slumber to shout at us for being out of bed.
· The Apprentice - yes it’s unwatchable shit and all the contestants appear inane; but as a friend of mine is on this current series, I guess I’ll have to watch it ‘til she’s out. I’m done watching that now.
· Bewitched - actually, I can’t recall witch one I preferred, ‘I dream of Jeanie’ or ‘Bewitched’. I’m not sure why but there was something about these that charmed me from an early age.
4 places I've visited
· Matmata, Tunisa - a town on the edge of the Sahara desert where, in order to cope with the extremes of the climate, people live in caves dug out at the bottom of circular pits that are about forty feet deep. Apparently it was used in the set for a Star Wars film (while finding a link to this, I found I’d visited another Star Wars site in Tunisia).
· Turkana, Northern Kenya - Hot, hot, hot; with a lake full of Nile crocodiles and a tiny tribal group reliant on UN food to ensure they can survive as the custodians of one of the worlds many dying languages. Another place I was lead to believe was used as a Star Wars set, though in trying to find a link to this it seems Turkana was a planet in the series and there’s no obvious record of the film crew visiting there. It seemed unlikely at the time, as it’s sooo remote; but I know nothing when it comes to Star Wars.
· Siringeri, India - this place in the high hills of the Western Ghats enchanted me, with a river filled with sacred fish, friendly pilgrims beside the river who offered me their fresh cooked food and air so pure it expunged any weariness I may have collected in my travels.
· Underneath Istanbul .
4 of my favourite dishes- food: I love it; so this is hard for other reasons. I’m sure this would be quite different next week.
· Giant Bangladeshi prawns in coconut curry with strange green vegetables and sticky rice. Nothing like the food found in your average British Bangladeshi restaurant.
· Proper, old-fashioned English stew such as venison, jugged hare, or pigs-hock cooked in cider, served with celeriac mash, purple-sprouting broccoli and roast brightly coloured root vegetables with sage.
· Squid in ink sauce with grilled polenta, and a bottle of Lacrima di Morro d'Alba.
· I should have a pudding of some sort: god this is so hard. summer pudding? Dark chocolate sorbet? Bread and butter pudding made with stale Caribbean black bun soaked in rum? Some delicious passion fruit parfait?
4 places I would rather be:-
· A Moroccan souk - I love street markets and energy and intrigue that exists down the slim alleyways of Arabic markets holds special appeal. Also, it’s a country I’ve wanted to visit for many years.
· On a train in India, talking to some strangers, eating a train tali and looking out on to tall palms and and the busyness of live that collects close to the railways. The stations have a special vibrancy to them.
· Walking on tops of those overstuffed clouds that you see out the window of aeroplanes
· Camping on the cliffs of Dorset on a gloriously sunny day, surrounded by friends with a hearty stash of whatever may be preferred to keep us entertained and wood enough to keep a fire burning well in to the night.
4 sites I visit daily:- other than LJ, my work homepage and sites I use to access journal articles, I don’t have many regular pretty places that I visit, though am always happy to be sent to themby you lot. I have hundreds of neatly sorted bookmarks, but they’re mainly for dull functional places like these:-
· Streetmap or Multimap. We all need to know where we’re going sometimes.
· The BBC - mainly for the weather (see, told you I was dull, but I’m English and we need to know); however, I sometimes check other bits of their site for news or random things.
· I used to go to Tom Dispatch sometimes, but it became rather predictable and depressing to read too frequently, and geared more for an American audience.
· I’ll sometimes check-out culture-flash if I’m looking for something to do around town (or any of the sites in my folder full of ‘venues and events’ bookmarks).
· And because those are all so dull, I’m giving you four ‘lucky-dip’ bookmarks from a folder I have called ‘candy’; though I’m not sure they’re the kind of candy you’d come back for more of, and it's rather random as to why they where ever bookmarked. This one plays with fonts and can turn photos into text pictures, but you need a decent picture to start with (unlike the one tried). It seems ants and sounds are here. This appears to be ‘political art’; often a combination that produces the worst of both. Here, you can hear an ‘Antony and the Johnsons’ song , that I imagine porphyre linked to. This looks like something some stoned surf-boys made to entertain thier kid siblings; but what do I know?
4 people I tag:- I don’t do chain letters, so it ends here, unless there’s anyone out there who’d LIKE to continue this.
While we’re doing memes: you can select a few positive and negative traits that I have, if you’re not already fed-up of seeing how warm and nice everyone is; and last week, I received an email from those mindmap people. It seems to defy any logic that I can tease out from what I know of your interconnectedness, and I’m generally quite good at logic.
Also, I have a leftover YSI link to a Babybird tune that may as well be used up by anyone who wants it; but act quick Meantime, this Reference Manager version 11 software link should be live for the week; but I imagine those4 of you who need it already have it. Comment if you want the serial number.