How to negotiate with a sweet tooth

I'm moving home this weekend. For the third time in a year. It's been a transient and somewhat unsettled 12 months, in more than the physical sense.

However, this time it's somewhat different - I'm moving in with my boyfriend, and I'm moving south of the river. South! (breathe, Kelly). We had long and fraught conversations about where to live, my North vs. his South, which degenerated into my Anywhere but Balham To Prove Your Unswerving Devotion to Me and his I Love You But I Love Balham More.

We reached an impasse.

Eventually, he offered to bake me a different cake every week that I lived down south with him. I thought about it for all of two seconds and accepted.

As he's going to be away for nearly 5 weeks for the world cup, the procession of cakes has started in advance of our moving in together. So far, I and my workmates have been the lucky, lucky recipients of some rather amazing concoctions, as follows:

- Dark chocolate and ginger fridge slice (part of the reconciliation push)
- Chocolate cupcakes (for V day, again not strictly part of the Cake Zone agreement)
- Lemon Drizzle cake (currently holding number 2 place)
- Banana Chocolate cake
- Courgette cake
- Chocolate cornflake cups
- Coffee and Walnut cake (comfortably holding the number 1 place; not remotely compromised by being dropped on the concrete outside my flat)

I think in order to give this truly astounding effort the recognition it deserves, I am going to start documenting the cakes on this site, with ratings based on look, taste and texture, with extra points being awarded for embellishments (decorations, additions, off-piste flourishes).

Let the caval-cake commence!

Bye bye bruv

I hugged my little bro for the last time (for a while) this morning. *sniff*. He is heading off to catch a plane bound for Sweden at 6pm tonight. It has been so, so nice to have him around. I figure it is the most amount of time we have spent together since we were little kids, amazingly. As teenagers, we crossed paths occassionally, exchanging nothing but a friendly punch on the arm in the hallway. It is so humbling to see him grown up into the sweet, loveable, growly-voiced bloke he is now. We are both trying to live good lives and be the decent people our parents brought us up to be.

He has been nothing but the easiest house-guest ever, washing up every night and tidying up after himself, offering his food-chopping services at every dinner. He raved about the meals we cooked him, and seemed perfectly happy to spend nights at home watching Peep Show on DVD, with the odd Aerobie outing.

Another bonus is witnessing the relationship between my boyfriend and my brother grow in front of my eyes. They hadn't spent much time together at all, so this visit has been a chance for my brother to scope out my long-term boyfriend and give him the family stamp of approval, and for my boyfriend to gain an honorary younger brother to whom he can pass on Mac-guru/martial arts-wisdom.

Now all I need is for my youngest brother and parents to get their butts over here. Or for my boyfriend to agree to move back to Melbourne with me. Or for someone to invent instantaneous travel, Star Trek style. Which would be my preferred option.

Best Weekend Ever

Hola! You know, usually I hate people who fit the description "bright and bubbly", but today I am feeling like I totally get those people. My style is usually 80% eeyore, 5% tigger, 15% Christopher Robin, but today those completely made-up statistics go flying out the window.

I just had the most lovely weekend. Friday afternoon - my meeting finishes earlier than scheduled (4.15pm!) which means I get to leave early. I walk from Embankment Place to Victoria station, taking in the beautiful St. James park on the way, and stop at the bridge to gaze at possibly the most picturesque view in London. I keep walking and all of a sudden I notice the presence of several extremely well-turned-out policemen, complete with old-fashioned Bobby helmets. It dawns on me that I just walked by Buckingham Palace (I have never seen it before). I turn around and go and have a proper look, amongst all the Dutch/American/French/German tourists. The guards are like dolls, they are so still and perfect.

So, after buying a few souvenirs for my mum, I meet my boyfriend and we go get some quick noodles at Wagamama before seeing the show we are seeing, stopping at Marks afterwards for dessert. My boyfriend and I are tight-arses of the highest order.

Billy Elliot, the stage musical, is fantastic – blisteringly energetic, heartfelt, moving, and gaspingly funny in parts. The stage works like a clockwork marvel, with a staircase leading to Billy's bedroom spiralling up out of the floor and back, and streetscapes transforming into a cosy front room and then into a community hall, seamlessly. I am floored, as I always am when I see a big west-end show in London. I hope that magic never wears thin for me.

Saturday, we sleep in until nearly midday. For a chronic insomniac, I have been sleeping well lately. We head down to Islington, and spend a lovely afternoon tinkering around a shop called After Noah, which specialises in retro nostalgia. We buy a load of sweets which my boyfriend hasn't seen since he was a nipper (refreshers, toffo's, sherbert fountains and shrimps) and I proceed to eat them all on the bus trip back.

I make cod and veggies for dinner, with stewed apples for dessert, and we settle down to watch one of my favourite films of last year - Little Miss Sunshine.

Sunday morning, I am dreaming that I can't get to work because my car is stuck in a tight corner and keeps conking out. My alarm goes off and I wake up in a panic, thinking I am late for work. I can't figure out why my boyfriend is so relaxed when I tell him it is 8am already, until he reminds me that we still have one day of the weekend to go. Bliss! Back to sleep.

I make rice pancakes for breakfast (we are going wheat-free for a month). Most of the afternoon is spent working on an identity for a friend. This is the first job my boyfriend and I have worked on together, and it goes fine. He tinkers with my designs, I tinker with his, it is all very co-operative. I walk to the shops and struggle back in the wind and snow with the groceries, but it's OK because there are crumpets with jam at the end of it.

My boyfriend makes polenta pizza (my suggestion), with a bit of help from me, and it turns out to be really yummy. I have not had much luck with polenta in the past - I remember some Jamie Oliver biscuits I made years ago which had the texture and crunch of sand. I think the trick is to get polenta meal (or flour), which is much finer and cooks much quicker.

We watch Clerks II (welcome back, Kevin Smith) and fall into bed...

I want more weekends like that.

Zany Crazy Love Children from Outer Space are Eating my Brai-i-i-in

Oh my goodness, I am enjoying watching The Mighty Boosh DVD perhaps a wee bit too much. This surreal comedy has got me hankering for a little more craziness in my life, and a little less drone-like trudgery - a little more surreality and a little less commuting-with-the-grey-people.

Watching The Boosh is like taking drugs, without taking drugs. Parts of it are so funny I find myself laughing out loud at the mere recollection, at inappropriate moments - like last night, when I sprayed the bathroom mirror with a mouthful of toothpaste at the memory of a particularly hilarious scene.

Everyone needs a bit of silliness in their life. And this program is brimming with the stuff - good-natured, unself-conscious, flamboyant barrel-loads of it; set in a fantasy world where cowboy hats and lycra are de riguer, Death is a cockney geezer, the Moon is an alabaster retard, and there is always an excuse to break into song or scare small children.

Also, completely incidentally, Noel Fielding (who plays Vince Noir) reminds me a tiny bit of my gorgeous boyfriend. And we all know that can only be good.

Samuel L. Jackson, eat your heart out

Sometimes, in an attempt to alert my boyfriend to his overuse of swear words, I start using the same level of bad language back to him (to shock him out of his complacency, right?). This backfires on me about 50% of the time, as this conversation about the freshness of the bass he cooked on Saturday demonstrates (Mum and Dad, look away now):

BF (after much ranting about how good the fish is):
This motherf**ker was swimming around last week!
Me: He certainly is a fresh motherf**ker.
BF: He was the shinest motherf**ker at the Sainsbury's counter!
Me: The motherf**ker is good, alright.
BF: Have you ever eaten such a fresh motherf**ker?
Me: He is one tasty motherf**ker.

At this point I become aware that we seem to have strayed into Pulp Fiction territory.

Culture Clash - the torture of the brit/aussie relationship

I miss home. I don't miss the steering wheel being too hot to touch in Summer, or the need to wear sunglasses during every waking hour (even indoors sometimes!), or the hayfever attacks that left me weeping all through the Spring. I don't miss the bushfires, or the ugly "new" suburbs, or waiting 45 minutes for a bus. What I mean is, I miss my home - my family.

It has been hard, harder than I have let myself realise, to stay in this country when my family and most of my friends are on the opposite side of the globe. If I was blessed with the gift of foresight I may have reconsidered getting involved with a British man... but who thinks about these things? All I knew was, he was damn cute and I had come to London to experience a different way of life. Part of me suspected that I would end up with a British bloke - after all, the aussie blokes never seemed to work out, and everyone predicted it would happen when I left for London. I remember rolling my eyes and assuring them all it would never happen.

There is no getting away from the fact that this situation has created pressures in our relationship - pressures which most couples never have to deal with. The question of "your country or mine?" is still waiting to be answered, dumped in the too-hard basket for now. The sad truth is that one of us is going to have to leave their life behind and build a new one in a different country, without the comforting background noise of family and life-long friends. I am still resisting this, hoping that we will return to Oz sometime soonish to try it out.

I am going home for a short visit in November though, by which time it will have been 2 whole years since I have seen/hugged my parents and youngest brother, and a year since I saw/hugged my middle brother. I can't wait. Seriously, I am twitching just thinking about it.

I just don't know how I am going to cram 2 years worth of catching up into 2 jet-lagged weeks in Melbourne.

When the Sceptic met the Chinese Needle Man

My first boyfriend, eons ago in High School, was a member of the Australian Sceptic's Society. I didn't give a second thought to this at the time (he was also into D&D gaming and fractals, so on the nerd-o-meter, the ASS membership didn't register) - but fast forward 10 years or so to the current moment, and my latest boyfriend couldn't be more different. He is very (ahem) open-minded when it comes to all things New Age, or even Ancient Chinese. I can't really complain about this because 1. I have seen with my own eyes that acupuncture alleviates his back pain almost immediately and 2. a fortune teller told him he would end up with an a girl from a country with a dollar denomination (probably Australia), whose name began with K, J or L (close enough).

So, that's how this dyed-in-the-wool sceptic found herself lying on a table in North London with tiny needles sticking out of various body parts (including my head). I couldn't help giggling at the irony of my paying to be stuck with needles, while just outside the clinic, on the streets of Kentish Town, the illicit drug trade was just starting to creep out from the shadows as the light faded.

I also got rail-roaded into buying some seriously strange looking "herbal remedies" (note heavily ironic use of quotation marks), plus some further appointments for more acupuncture sessions. I am hoping it may help with my on-off insomnia and anxiety issues. I hope I have the right balance of being open to a new, possibly helpful remedy, whilst maintaining a critical distance due to my natural, inherited scepticism (thanks, Dad!).

Just for the record, I didn't sleep particularly well last night, disappointingly. More reports to follow...

London Swelters In Summer Heat Wave

Wow. It's getting hot over here. Amazingly, the weather for our camping holiday in Wales was actually pretty good, with balmy-to-warm days and light-showery nights (except for that one night we camped through the longest, loudest thunder-and-lightening storm In The World). We even went swimming in our bathers on a couple of occassions. No matter that we needed resuscitation and silver blankets to resume breathing afterwards.

Wales itself was gorgeous - huge, practically empty beaches; massive sand dunes to run down; loads of beautiful walks where you found yourself tripping over ruined castles and ancient monuments (check out this 5,500 year old burial cairn); enough surfing and body-boarding to keep my knees and elbows nicely bruised; all with fresh air filling your lungs with every inhale. It's amazing (or maybe not so) that after living in London for so long, clean air actually seems to have a taste - and that taste is good. Almost as good as the raspberries and strawberries we spent picking one sunny afternoon on the farm where we were camping. But not quite as good as the home-made raspberry jam you could buy from the farm shop. Which, by the way, is best consumed on the day of purchase, spread liberally on a fresh, cloud-soft scone, with a generous dollop of clotted cream on top. Heavenly.

We also had a lovely piece of local bass from the fishmongers (so thats what non-supermarket-bought fish tastes like) which we ended up baking in the oven, after smoking out the entire apartment block with our "disposable BBQ" on the balcony. (Note to Self: naked flames and rental properties don't mix. Also: does it mean you are getting old when your best memories of a holiday are all food-related? Never mind).

Anyway, I also got to meet the Boyfriend's extended family - his paternal auntie, her welsh husband and two of their grown-up kids, at a lovely (if somewhat red-wine hazed) BBQ - the proper full-size, outdoor, established kind. She is a very talented print artist and makes a lip-smacking aubergine pickle.

All in all, it was a very good holiday. Ultra-relaxing, with enough surfing and coastal walking activity to prevent one's muscles from atrophying. I just wish I was still bobbing on the waves in Llangennith, with nothing to look forward to except a slightly smoky piece of delicious, freshly caught fish for dinner, with freshly picked raspberries for afters.

London in the Springtime

Well, somebody was obviously listening to my original post, because every day this week we have woken up to a *brilliant* blue sky with sunshine bursting through the windows! I had almost forgotten that most agreeable sensation of the sun warming your back - so much more glorious and benevolent than the pathetic effort that the radiators manage.

I even went down to the newsagents last weekend in my thongs!! (The British insist on calling them "flip-flops" but I refuse to budge). The whole way, I was marvelling at how great everything looks in bright sunshine, and how nature and the flowers seemed so...grateful. Cherry blossoms up and down the street have all burst into flower almost overnight.

If only my relationship was so easy to keep happy - a little water (praise), a little sunshine (love & affection), and everything comes up roses. Instead, we are struggling to keep this fragile little plant alive in the current (emotional) climate...