What the British might call "Bits and Bobs."

Manchester has had 2 intermittent weeks of summer this year. The geese and ducks who live in the canal behind my house have hatched their babies for the year. The baby ducklings and gooselings (I know, I know), are adorable. They have yellow fuzzy butts and they are so cute.

There was one week, back in April, when the weather was so gorgeous, I took to drinking a cold glass of wine in my garden.

Then it was cold and rainy again for awhile. After that, a few weeks ago, we had yet another week of amazing sunny warmth, and I held a barbecue. It made me think about the things I really do miss about Sydney. How you could trust summer to hold, once it got going, and you could plan barbecues two weekends in a row.

How you could pop down to the Chinese Noodle Restaurant, under the escalator, and get amazing food for almost no money.

How you could have a bike there, and not have to own a waterproof suit.

How you could forget your umbrella.

And, of course, it's June now, which in Sydney means Lemonade season is about to get started. I miss lemonades so much, I got all teary telling someone about them the other day.

Of course, it's not just the food and weather I miss about Sydney. The ease of a well-oiled relationship and long friendship with Craig is something I miss all the time here. I spend a lot more time alone than I used to, and while I like it most of the time, I miss having someone around who can come along to the movies and art shows. Of course, friends and flatmates, oh dear, dear, friends and flatmates come to the rescue. All the time. But they're not nearly as reliable as someone that plans their entire social life with you.

These things feel easier when Mark is here, or when I'm in Norwich.

I went to Norwich a few weeks ago, and the city was in festival! The Norfolk and Norwich Festival, to be exact. The city was all dressed up!

I think the lion looks a lot less menacing with his pretty knitted mane.

Part of the Norwich festival was a show by Paper Cinema. There are really no good words to describe what they do, because they are so awesome. They use several cameras to produce animation and puppetry and project it live onto a cinema screen, while an orchestra play a beautifully arranged score. We saw the Odyssey, and you can watch the trailer for it here:

If they come to your town, go. Drop everything. Don't worry about the ticket price. You will never forget how moved you were by a paper puppet of a cyclops screaming in anguish as Odysseus and his men sneak away from him.

My opinion of Norwich has only grown in the time since my previous trip there. I learned that Norwich has the largest collection of mediaeval churches north of the Alps. A full 32 of the original 56  churches survive, probably explaining why Norwich has such a strong old-world feel. One of the churches has a beautiful old clock that, for some reason, says "Forget-Me-Not" on it. I love the pink colour of the clockface.

Every week a group gets together to play bluegrass music at Mark's local pub. We happened to be there enjoying a pint, and were treated to this amazing show.


It started with one guy getting out his banjo and starting to play, and he was eventually joined by about 5 other guys of widely-varying ages, with guitars and mandolins. I told my friend David Stephens about it (the best banjo player and puppeteer in the South East, at least!) (rhyming!), and he said, "Yeah, that sounds about right. One banjo to 5 of everything else!"

It seems this group gets together every week or so, and it was great to hear such great music.

I remembered to take a picture of The Window Coffee, and it was even cuter this time!

I also learned about an interesting part of Norwich's history: the Strangers. The Strangers were 20-40 Dutch and Flemish Protestant families who fled to England to escape Catholic persecution. Over time, the Strangers and their descendants made up about 1/3 of Norwich's population. They brought with them the weaving skills that eventually made Norwich a major center of pre-industrial wealth in England. It seems the Strangers were welcomed into Norwich's business community quite easily, as they had so much to offer. They also brought their pet canaries and today, the "Norwich canary" is the city's mascot and the emblem of the Norwich City Football Club.

Neat, huh?
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Last week was the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebration. Apparently the actual date of her accession to the throne and her coronation are somewhat different to the date of the celebration, but they decided to celebrate it last week to coincide with the Queen's birthday, giving the Queen's subjects 2 days of bank holiday. The Norther Quarter held street parties, basically making the Jubilee into an excuse to drink in the sunlit streets.

Fine by me! I had just booked over a month's work at the BBC, so I was ready to celebrate.

Lots of shops opened up stalls for the street party, and this awesome older couple got out their lindyhop shoes! They tore it up.

Dear Mark bought me an amazing new lunchbox for my upcoming days at the Beeb.

It's a fantastic lunchbox, and for some reason, I feel like it pleasantly encourages me to not only take a lunch break during work, but also to make it a healthy one. I also take along a thermos with veggie broth, so I can heat up the broccoli and dumplings in a quick soup.

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In other food news, most of you know that I was a vegan for 7 years. After reading The Omnivore's Dilemma and moving to Australia, I decided on a less-strict diet and went back to being a cheese-loving vegetarian. Because, let's be honest, I was a cheese-loving vegan, and I spent all my time either wishing I could eat cheese, or shoving it in my mouth anyway and feeling guilty over it.

That is no way to live life. These days I'm more concerned with locally-produced and whole food than I am with just cutting random things out of my diet. Though I don't think I'll ever eat meat. I've been vegetarian for far too long, and it's not something I miss.

Last Thursday, I did something that my vegan self could only ever have dreamed of: I went to a cheese feast! Basically, everyone takes 400g of a locally-produced cheese, you cut them into blocks and share them around. It was organised by FoodLink Manchester, and it was brilliant. We talked about the look, smell, feel, taste and texture of each of the cheeses, and got to try about 14 cheeses altogether!

My favourites of the evening were a sheep's cheese by Leagram's and a blue cheese by Burt's. The blue was produced in the Greater Manchester area-- super local!

I'm really excited now to try loads of different crazy cheeses. I'm even keeping a notebook with my thoughts on each one. It makes for a strange sort of poetry:

"Crazy looking rind, green, blue, white, purple.

Beautiful look.

Light smell of mouldy blue cheese. Not strong smell.

Part soft and runny, part semi-soft and crumbly.

Semi-soft blue

Incredible flavour, so good. 

Not too sharp.

Runny bit stronger than hardish bit."

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Speaking of poetry, Bad Language held an event recently called "CRINGE," where writers were invited to read out their teenage diaries and poetry. I volunteered to do it, of course, because I'm an oversharer. Obviously. I'd long ago thrown out all my high school journals, but I did keep a sketchbook from back then, and my amazing sister sent me scans of my poems.

Oh, they are so bad.

But I'm glad I did the event. It was an incredibly fun night, largely because everyone was embarrassing themselves, and everyone had come for that express purpose. Despite the fact that we were all wincing through the whole night at our own young selves' serious political and romantic misunderstandings, we were doing it together, and one really good thing came out of it for me.

While looking for some of my old high school scribblings, my sister found this drawing I made, when I was 17, of Nicolas Cage.

I leave you with that image, dear readers, to ponder as you go about your days. I hope it gives you no nightmares.

City of Surprise

Birmingham is only an hour and 40 minutes from Manchester by super-expensive train. The super-expensive bit is probably why I've never visited before. Also, I've never visited because I've heard it's a boring city, an ugly city.

I'm starting to think British people say this about every city. Britain doesn't have a city that everybody goes, "Oh, it's lovely there. It's cool and friendly and lovely." They don't have a San Francisco. According to them, they just have a whole load of Detroits.

I have heard from one or two people that Birmingham is nice. My friend Stuart lives there and he really likes it. I've heard English people say it's a very American city. Which I was hoping meant there would be tacos.

I visited Birmingham on a fluke a couple weeks ago. My friend Red (yup, that's her actual real name), works at a temp agency and they were offering two days paid work, travel and expenses covered, in Birmingham. I volunteered because I had the time and I need the money.

The bits of Birmingham that we saw during the visit were mostly on the university (as we were conducting surveys with university students). And the university is gorgeous. It has a really lovely campus, with loads of cool statues and public artworks. It was a fantastic place to wander around.

This is one of the campus buildings. I'm not even sure what people do in this building, I just loved all the domes.

And this super coolstatue commemorates Michael Faraday, by Edward Paolizzi. Faraday discovered the Magnetic Field & Electromagnetic Induction. 

And this building is the Selfridges in the middle of town! Selfridges is a department store that often does experimental design things in their front windows, but I've never seen something as large-scale as this. The whole thing is all bulbous and covered in these giant metal buttons. It's such a cool-looking building. Must be awful to work in, though, given there are no windows...

The Cathedral in the town is lovely, too, as are most British cathedrals. Red and I really liked the decorative hinges on the doors.  

One of the things I liked best about the city was that because it was very hilly, you often got surprising views. Just a bit uphill from the cathedral, when you looked across the little shopping plaza, it looked to me like the Cathedral was sinking between these 2 department stores, about to be completely engulfed. And wouldn't that be a lovely visual metaphor for the whole capitalism versus religion thing? Of course, I couldn't get too carried away with that thought. Red said, "I think it looks like the cathedral is pushing up between the buildings and splitting them apart."

I don't know whose glass is half-empty there, or whose is half-full.

Red and I had an awesome time, drinking at the Student Union and a little pub she'd found last time she was there. We got over 600 surveys filled out as well, which was a very good job, I reckon. We stayed in a weird hotel and both found ourselves thinking Birmingham Uni wouldn't be a bad place to waste another few years on education.

And then, we took the train back home to Manchester, to wait for that next offer of a few days' work.

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Things are going pretty well for me here lately. I have started to work freelance with another radio company, which is very helpful, given I need money and would like to stop feeling like radio is just so flipping hard all the time.

Last weekend, I went down to London to celebrate Mark's birthday with his twin brother, Paul, and all their friends in London. It was a fantastic weekend. I met more of Mark's friends, and caught up with some I've known for months now. I don't think I've had that lovely a night out in *ages.* Here's the cookie letter cake I made for Mark's birthday.

I know. It looks ridiculous. I'll do better some other time!

Norwich Eats.

When I decided to move to Manchester, I remember a woman I worked with at Alfalfa House saying, "Wow. That is a notoriously horrible place." I remember hoping it was an unreliable stereotype.

It was. I got here and I fell in love with this town.

Norwich is another place that carries the burden of bad stereotypes. It is supposedly parochial, boring, lacking culture and filled with small-minded people.

Mark's just moved to Norwich to begin his two-year traineeship, and I visited him over Easter weekend. Norwich, so far as I've seen, is absolutely lovely. Small for a city, sure.

I'm not sure it deserves those stereotypes. For one thing, it's beautiful. 

It feels like nearly everywhere you turn, there's another stunning building.

There's a huge river through it, and more than one cathedral. 

Though he's only been in Norwich about a week, Mark's already found this amazing café.

My friend Katie's maiden name is Appleyard! I was already inclined to like it.

Run by two friendly young men, Appleyard is a lunchtime haven. 

Josh and Daniel have a great thing going here: a pretty, slightly unfinished old building with lots of light and great food. They made me a vegetarian reuben per special request (basically sauerkraut, cheese, pickles and mustard on rye). The coffee's lovely, and they have local beer on tap. And it's entirely affordable. They only charged me about £3.20 for my sandwich. 

They're also looking to get some locally (stilled? distilled? brewed?) whiskey in soon! Seriously, this is an exciting place. Young people, starting their own place, with great food, drink, and atmosphere... Basically, I'm looking forward to visiting again. You should go.

Mark also took me to this adorable café called The Window, a tiny shop run by Hayley, a friendly, chatty young woman. There's not even space for a counter in this shop, so you have to chat with other customers and with Hayley. It feels like having a coffee in a friend's squashed kitchen. Really very nice. I forgot to take pictures, though.

We really enjoyed walking around Norwich, and catching sight of little jokes.

The Castle was exhibiting Diana and Acteon, by Titian, so we had to go. I didn't do all those art history classes for nothing! The Castle's a great spot to see the rest of the city, as it's so high up. It was a windy day, but I wanted a picture of Norwich Cathedral's amazing spire (see background). 

What wouldn't I do for a fire alarm like this? I think the gold and black lettering on it might be hand-painted.

At The Iron House, a brunch place Hayley recommended, we waited for what felt like ages for our food. I was really hungry, and to pass the time, we took pictures. I like this one of Mark, he looks all mean and confrontational. He's never like that, though, so it's a funny picture.

I got a bit bored and arty.

And then I wasn't allowed to keep taking pictures and had to sit for my own portraits.

As it turned out, Mark's food was amazing. Eggs Benedict:

And mine was fairly awful. A ugly beige-coloured lentil soup with more starchy thickener in it than lentils and more salt than good flavour. The toughest, driest, blandest bread I've touched in a long time. Maybe it's one of those places that just doesn't understand vegetables. I was feeling let down as we left this place, and also still very hungry.

But then we found another great place. The Mustard Cafe did me a lovely cheese & mustard croissant for takeaway. As I munched my warmed pastry and Mark tried to navigate us around the old French part of the city, I couldn't help thinking about how much I love mustard.

No wonder Norwich and I get along so well. It's the home of Colman's English Mustard, a national treasure. It should be more famous than Marmite, but because it's less well-known, it's more beloved. Did you know Colman's is one of the oldest existing food brands?

Did you want to?

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Lest you think all we did was eat out during my weekend in Norwich, I'll note here that Mark and I also watched movies, slept in a lot and cooked for ourselves, too. 

I really liked what I saw of Norwich this past weekend, it has some really good things going for it. It's got the only dedicated puppetry centre in the country, a great creative writing programme (Ian McEwan graduated from there!) and an excellent arts school. So it can't be all that culturally deprived. It's even got a supposedly really good market that's been going since Saxon times. Sadly, that was mostly closed for Easter holidays, so I'll report on it properly next time I visit!

It was nice to see that, even in a short weekend, Norwich managed to disprove a lot of its ugly reputation. It has great food and lots of theatres and kind, friendly people. As I got ready to leave yesterday, it was easier to say goodbye knowing that Mark will have a great two years there...

Meanwhile...

Since her last adventure onstage, our heroine has been very busy indeed....

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The big news first:
Most of my March was spent at the BBC doing a work experience. It was awesome! I am now officially a radio production freelancer for the good old beeb! For the first time, after about 5 years of producing radio, I will be paid for it! Feeling a lot less useless these days, honestly.

The other news:
Just last week, I found myself with an urge to write again. It has been months, my friends, since I've written a story. I think I've been feeling so down about jobs that I've had trouble focussing on "frivolous" things. Like this blog. It felt good to write again. Warning to my sister: this might make you cry a little bit. Sorry.

So, I decided to try the story out onstage at Bad Language, everyone's favourite Manchester literary night out:


That was a really fun night. Bad Language always is. If you're in Manchester on the last Wednesday of any month, get down to the Castle. You'll get to hear some brilliant writing from some of Manchester's brightest literary stars. And I'm not bragging, because I definitely don't include myself in that list.

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Meanwhile, I went down to London again to visit Mark. It was a gorgeous weekend, filled with sunshine and street food off Brick Lane, handmade noodles and Moroccan food, bagels and fresh coconut. It was everything I need of a summer, except a barbecue and even more friends around and being a little bit boozy. That *will* happen later this summer. I'm looking at you Joe and Gem. I'm looking at you.

Also in London, we visited with Sian, one of Mark's dear friends from Cambridge. Sian is sweet and funny and has a lovely laugh. Where some shake entirely when they laugh, or at least shake their shoulders, and others fall over, the only physical indication that Sian's laughing is her throat. Apart from that, she could just be smiling.

Mark and Sian with her little baby Samuel. Samuel does a great Bill Cosby impression.

We had a great time hanging out with Sian, Samuel and her friend Bianca. Smart, funny women, and a chubby baby who giggles if you whisper "Scrumblepants" at him. Well, fair enough, I'd probably giggle if you whispered "Scrumblepants" at me, too.

Samuel's at that serious put-everything-in-his-mouth stage, it's like he's on a personal mission to make sure everything has been in his mouth. You can see here, he's so pleased with eating his own hand, he's offered the other to Mark. Generous boy.

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We had an amazing event in our night sky a few weeks ago. The moon, Venus and Jupiter were all visible in the same eyeline. It was so exciting! My phone camera couldn't really capture it very well, but the big thing in the lower right is the moon, the dull spot near it is Venus, and the bright spot near the top is Jupiter. Outstanding!

I've been wandering around new bits of Manchester on my own a lot lately, which means I often come across things that I don't know about. Like this amazing building near Ardwick Green.

I took a picture and asked my Twitter and Facebook friends about it. They usually know loads about Manchester architecture, and here's what they came back with: It's called Drill Hall.

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I've also had the pleasure of taking three Belfastests around my town. Emily and Tom visited for a weekend, and I took them round the Ancoats Peeps (previously discussed on this blog here) and some of my favourite restaurants and bars. They were floored at the number of great pubs in this town. As I often am, myself.

Then Andrew came to visit as well! Here we are in the Marble Beer House, on Thomas St. We couldn't figure out where to look on my cameraphone. Because we are, like, digital, but not very good at it.

I met Andrew at Emily and Tom's Thanksgiving party, also previously discussed on this blog. I took him around the superb Gothic Revivalist John Rylands Library, mostly.

I love that building. Most stained glass is in churches and depicts apostles and disciples and stories I've never really understood. But in the Rylands Library, there is stained glass of Chaucer and Shakespeare. It's the persuasive art of religion brought to the secular cause of literature and philosophy. It's beautiful.

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I've been growing very interested in Möbius strips and Klein bottles lately. I know this is an extremely nerdy thing, and I would better spend my time learning the Dvorak keyboard if I wanted to be such an irascible dweeb anyway.
But I found this lovely video about Möbius strips, that made me very happy indeed:


And I found this company that makes the closest thing to a Klein bottle as possible in three dimensions.


"Need a zero-volume bottle?


Searching for a one-sided surface?


Want the ultimate in non-orientability?


Get an ACME KLEIN BOTTLE!"


So cool! Now, if any of you are not the sort of people who kind of want a Klein bottle, then I have seriously misjudged my audience.

Apologies.

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Hopefully, now that the work front is looking more promising, I'll feel able to update this blog a bit more regularly. I'm visiting Norwich this weekend– Mark's just moved there for his traineeship. I've been for a day before, and I've heard it's an arty, foody town, so I'm definitely looking forward to it. Watch this space!

Honesty, told live, without notes.

A few months ago, a new night got started in Manchester. It's called Tales of Whatever, and it's based on The Moth. It's true stories, told live, without notes. Personal stories. I'm a Moth addict. I usually listen as soon as a new Moth podcast magics into my phone. There's something overwhelming about hearing strangers' private stories told to the world.

I thought this was *ideal* for me, as everything I write is a vaguely true story anyway, so back in December, I went along and told a little tale.

Here it is, if you're interested.

Tales of Whatever is a beautiful event, a lovely evening. The organiser makes sure there are booked storytellers, and also leaves one short slot for a spur-of-the-moment open mic storyteller. Like any open-mic, it's hit and miss. But then you consider that these are real people, telling their own actual personal stories to a room of strangers. And there's that overwhelming feeling again. It's a little staggering to think about the honesty that could happen on that stage.

When I tried to go last week, the back room of the Castle Hotel was so packed, I found myself straining to hear from the corridor! Turns out, they've had some great press coverage lately, in the Manchester Evening News and the Metro newspaper. If those crowds keep up, though, Tales of Whatever's going to have to get a new space.

It's definitely worth going to. Just get there early to snag a spot in the room, and if you're feeling adventurous... if you're feeling honest... take along a tale of your own to share.

The City Is A Valley

I've never felt very much for London. It's always been a place that I like visiting. I like all the cultural stuff that goes on, I like all the opportunities to have fun and the bustle of it. I like some things. The Tube. Sitting on the pavement eating bagels and arepas on Brick Lane. But I guess I've always seen it as a place that I wouldn't want to live in. Like there are too many little nooks of it, and it would be too easy, in the busy days of normal living-there life, to never venture further than your tiny little neighbourhood. Like even though you're in the most vibrant exciting city on earth, you wouldn't do any of it, because everything too far on the Tube and expensive. Because maybe you'd get lazy...

Just visiting is wonderful, of course, because you don't worry so much about money, and you have heaps of time to waste on the Tube criss-crossing the city. But living there always seems daunting. Like New York.

But lately, I've been visiting London a lot. I did a work experience with a fantastic independent production company there called Whistledown in November, and this past weekend, I visited to attend a free radio training day at the BBC.

When I visit London, I stay with my beautiful, lovely, generous friend Deepali. I feel really lucky to know someone like her, she's always offering a glass of wine after a long day. And I have to be really honest and admit that visiting London is a lot less stressful because of her. She is just so kind.

Mark is also in London now, working as a paralegal at a property company, so this past weekend, we got to spend loads of time together in the city. On Saturday, we visited the supercool London Transport Museum, where you can sit in old horse trams and old steam Tube trains. It was a brilliant museum, so fascinating. The thing is, the London Underground was such a breakthrough, in so many ways. The map alone is a brilliant story.

It's in a gorgeous old building, with beautiful modern glass windows

They had the old trains done up to be historically accurate, so they had old archival ads in them. Here's one for PUNCH magazine:

And an old map, before they took on Harry Beck's schematic map, and before the Underground was as big as it is now.

Mark loved sitting in the old horse trams and underground trains, even though they featured awkward old animatronics and mannequins wearing strange period clothing.

And I loved it, too, because I am a total dork about civil engineering, design, cities and anything that makes them better. I've always been a city girl, almost every story I've ever written is about cities. And as Mark and I were wandering around on Saturday, we stumbled on this.

It's an art exhibit by Robert Montgomery at KK Outlet. The sentiment and the warmth of the presentation are perfectly matched. And the fact that it's about the loveliness of cities, and that I found it just walking through a city that I wasn't entirely sold on... made me feel so excited and thrilled, and truly warm there in the fire of everyone. I'm a total sucker for citylove.

It was freezing cold, and it snowed all night. Deepali lives in a part of town called Borough; Dickens mentions it in Little Dorritt and his father was in the debtor's prison there. And the strange thing is that when it snowed and we looked out Deepali's window... it really looked Dickensian. Snow-covered rooftops and pavements... dark and dreary and cold and grim. I liked the snow. I liked being in a place that can still sometimes feel like the place it once was. A literary place. It was wonderful.

On Sunday, Mark and I went to Brick Lane for bagels. It was very cold, and also treacherous to walk through the streets, because of the snow and ice, and we ended up huddling in a warm pub. Great weekend.

My radio training day was fantastic, too! I met loads of new people and spent time with some that I'd already known a bit. I learned a lot as well. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and bright. Here's the view outside BBC's White City building.

I don't know that I've completely changed how I feel about London, even after all this loveliness. I don't know that I'd want to live there, at least not for long, or that I like it as much as I like Manchester. But a few more lovely weekends like that just might do the trick..

The MSF Podcast: LIVE!

This is the inside of the quietest room in Europe, Salford University's anechoic chamber. I got to visit it during the 2011 Manchester Science Festival.

As y'all might know, I've been volunteering for the Manchester Science Festival for quite awhile now. It keeps me busy, I enjoy doing science-related things, and I've met some lovely people through it. Overall, it's been a lovely experience.

I've been producing podcasts covering last year's festival highlights. It's exciting because I'm trying to get a job in radio production, and this kind of work will hopefully help!

The first episode is about a Microbiology and Art exhibition, a sort of weird art show. Give it a listen:
It's right here. Please leave comments, tell me what you think of it– I need feedback!

Also, I wrote some blog posts for them last year, and I don't think I mentioned them on this blog!

The Environment Is A Cup

An Elephant Packed Into A Cell?

Out of This World

Majestic Fragility

Beautiful Bacteria, Visual Viruses, Fascinating Fungi