My Aunty's favourite city is, and always has been, Edinburgh. She travelled there in 1976, two years before I was born, and I have been raised with this constant understanding that of all the places she went, it was this city that most stole her heart.
And a little piece of family love, and feeling close to someone like my Aunty Libby, was exactly what I needed when I arrived in Edinburgh. And in a crazy frantic way, exactly what I found.
I left Manchester for Edinburgh on this day, and it was not an easy day. Oddly I think my (hideously severe) hangover helped... (I woke up with my shoes still laced up, if that gives you some idea!). But some days being a lil numbed down to a level where simple tasks take your full attention can help. Some days there is no room for thought or reflection. Some days you've just got to get up, breathe, and put one foot in front of the other until the sun sets.
I was moving to Edinburgh very spontaneously, after my living situation in Manchester capitulated somewhat. In fact, I nearly went Home home, but I just kinda couldn't do it - not without my summer of music festivals, and not without seeing Edinburgh. No, more than that. Not without knowing Edinburgh.
Through my wonderful 'dam family I came to meet a beautiful young sloe-eyed girl named Storm, and her student dorm room was to be my soft place to land. Storm is possibly the only person I have ever met who talks more than me, so us living together in a dorm about the size of a broom cupboard could easily have spelled disaster...
Well, it didn't. From the moment I got there, this beautiful and incredibly generous soul just kept repeating to me - "we just fit". And fit we did, in the tinest of dormrooms, in the most unlikely of situations, for the most perfect time.
This particular Tuesday, I bid a crisp, sunny Manchester a teary goodbye on the station platform at Piccadilly Station... I heaved my hangover and my endless kilos of crap North, through breathtaking rolling hills... and I found just enough space, and so much love, in a tiny dormroom in Warrender Park Road.
OK OK so in the spirit of the season, here's a lil Christmas nostalgia...
Last Christmas (after I gave you my heart) was layers of whipped cream and champagne and that feeling where hungover and sleep-deprived and not a lil tipsy converge. I was, of course, in Amsterdam... safe in the soft warm walls of that hostel called Home, The Flying Pig.
It was my second Flying Pig Christmas in as many years, only this time I had popped back for the occasion from my current 'home' in Manchester, and the year before I had been living in The 'Dam. Many original 'dam family members remained, and our lil posse had swelled impressively with new faces too... and so we came together, to celebrate this good day.
I started the day out of the hostel, waking heavy and hungover at my Dutch Angel Ines' house to find Santa had come!! My parents had arranged for In to buy me gifts!?! Heaven... then into the debauchery of the Pig, where I found my friends on cleaning shift were already well into their Christmas bonus champers. Well, what was I to do but join the fray!?
There were whipped cream fights, constant sparking of Amsterdam's finest, bottles popped ceremoniously over the Room 17 balcony into the Vondelpark below... there were great friends, constant laughter and there wasn't much effective cleaning done, unsurprisingly enough ;-)
Since the staff are supposed to cook all the guests their dinner, this utter lack of sobriety (before lunchtime, little own dinner!) was something of an issue... to this day I have no idea how we turned packet mix mashed potato, soggy brussel sprouts and some kind of Dutch supermarket meat product into a meal for 50, especially given that the majority of the kitchen help were seeing sideways at the time, but we did.
My dear friend Action (nickname, not noun) did lose a chunk of his finger sharpening a knife, but on the scale of how it might have gone?? Methinks we done pretty 'dam good.
I miss those crazy cats this Chrissy. Well, I miss some of them - two of my 'dam family closest are upstairs asleep in my parent's spare room and I have just finished wrapping their gifts with my mumma. Ahh... long live a world so small and safe. Long live the 'dam family.
I am too. And I don't mean I am strange in that girlie "I can't go to New York until I can afford Jimmy Choo's" kinda way, I mean to me shoes are... earthy.
OK OK don't tune out, I am serious. If you think about it, shoes are the thing that connect us - quite literally and physically - to the earth. And yes, I do sometimes find strappy lil girly things that somehow do it, but more often than not if the temperature is somewhere a little above freezing, you will find me in a pair of Birkenstocks.
And not to be a brand-whore, but specifically Birkenstocks; copies do not patch it.
So on this random Augustian Friday, I replaced my Birkenstocks. I took the sweaty, cracked, unheigenic dark brown Birkenstocks that had been given to me on my Amsterdam Birthday (Feb 2nd, 2006) by my old work friends from the Flying Pig - "so that I would remember them every step of my adventure", or so the card read - and bought a shining new pair... exactly the same.
And I had to have a lil moment for the old ones... a lil do-it-yourself ceremony. I stood outside the Portuguese shopping mall in Lisbon, people milling about either side of me doing their business, and me standing there like a maniac saying goodbye to my shoes...
A quiet moment of reflection, for all the days and nights spent treking unfamiliar streets in totally foreign places... for all the dancefloors where all around me are pretty lil things in pretty lil shoes, and me in my clunky ol' faithfuls... for the fact that they don't slip in the wet, don't blister in the heat... A quiet moment of reflection for those beautiful souls who gave me those shoes, and who had, in fact, come with me every step of those years.
It was about the only thing I achieved that whole week actually, given that I had been laid out with a post-Sziget (music festival) flu the whole time I was in fair Lisboa. I slept, I wandered, I eased my way into Portugal slowly and quietly, and I said goodbye to a pair of shoes.
(I'm too lazy to get my journal to remember the exact date, and I remember the day so that can be enough)
This is just a few weeks (days?) after I left home, all those moons ago. I met a gorgeous American girl named Sonal, who was a guest at the agritourismo where I was working, and she and I had somewhat bonded.
You find us in a tiny villiage called Pescosolido, which lies on a hill just above the larger and less pretty Sora, in the South of the Abruzzo National Park, Italy. I started my trip by working here in exchange for free room and board; few weeks of Italy and quiet and language, after the hectic party of a Summer I'd just survived in Melbourne.
This day I was keen for a walk, typically enough. Sonal asked if she could join. Sonal, as it turns out, is known affectionately as 'Sonal the Sloth' by her friends; a small snail could easily overtake her when she's running at full throttle.
Once the predictable frustration wore off (I'm used to a good 7kms a day at real-life human full throttle!), it was a lovely wander down from the farm into Sora. Here I drank too many irresistable, sensational coffees in Sonal's favourite cafe, and then I imagine we probably checked emails or did something similarly unexciting.
The weather in Italy in the mountains is always unpredictable, and as we came to start our hour-long walk (shuffle!) home, the heavens opened. To distract ourselves Sonal started quizzing me over and over and over and OVER on the full conjugations of the Italian verbs essere (to be) and avere (to have)...
Blissfully, we were saved by a passing local who recognised us; Jessica had been teaching Sonal Italian at the agritourismo... She and her sweet friends gave us a lift the last lil way home, and that's her on the left in the pic (Sonal on my right).
In all my days of attempted Italian language since I have never forgotten this afternoon and this lovely woman's smiling voice as she relentlessly drilled these essential verbs into my linguistically limited skull.
Out of the hazy mess of memories, feeling somewhat overwhelmed but realising that this lil project needs to start somewhere, i hereby for this post select.....
Saturday 16thFebruary, 2008
This is the night I was lucky enough to crowd myself into the Manchester Apollo, shoulder to shoulder with countless hyped-up and sweating strangers, for the Mark Ronson gig. Mark had just taken home his Brit Awards that week (or was it his Grammys? Ahh I could google it to check, but you get the picture), and the atmosphere was consequently heightened to buzzing point.
His 'Version' album had been a big one for me for at least the six months prior, and this night itself marked the closing bookend to my time in the fair, funky city of Manchester, England. My living situation there had capitulated somewhat, and I had decided to leg it north to Edinburgh after that very gig.
It was no ordinary show - brass, strings, guests I could name but only the hip-hop savvy would recognise (and I would have to google that too, to be sure I was right myself!)... Mark himself is a producer, rather than an actual musician; he joked himself throughout the set that he only played guitar well enough so he had something to do on stage when he toured. But I for one could almost feel the man's talent, almost see it rising off his pinstriped suit...
Now you wouldn't be the first to call me a groupie, and if you read this blog this wont be the last time you find me gushing about the power of live music, but this gig was sincerely One of Those Nights.
Two stand-out moments...
1. He opens with his 'version' of Maximo Park's "Apply Some Pressure", only does it solely instrumental. The aforementioned heaving and hyped crowd all (my good self included) begin screaming the words... Most especially the line "What happens when you lose everything? You start again... you start all over again"... For a girl who kinda did just lose a piece of her "everything" that week, and who was about to "start all over again" in bonny Scotland, it's fair to say this struck a chord.
2. When Valerie kicked in. Now we have all heard Amy and Mark's brilliant cover of The Zuton's track, and I for one don't think it's even nearly been killed yet, despite reckless overplaying. When this track started, I was the only one of our gig-going group who wanted to move forward, closer into the madness, into the sweat... And as I started to walk forward and away, gaps started appearing in front of me, as if by magic. Moving forward was easy, smooth, fun... And as I walked forward, while the tracked kicked in, I could feel tingles rushing all over my skin while I danced myself crazy; it was as though the light of the full moon was shining unobstructed onto my skin. I was moving forward, away from something, and the path was lit by the Universe.
Sorry if I lost you a bit there... this got a tad metaphoric ;-)
I suppose the fact that I am already home makes it somewhat more original?? Yes, yes let's say that, especially since the alternative is that I have just been too slack these last two and a half years to bother with one.
Anyway, here we find me in my parent's kitchen, steaming espresso in hand and bandage on my right wrist - but we will get to both my broken wrist and my caffeine addiction/obsession with time...
This is the intro posting, to forewarn anyone interested in reading my lil ditties what this blog will be about. This is my own nostalgic reflection section, posted public because it's more cleansing that way. This is my therapy, my escape, my attempt to record something of what the magic of the last two and a half years wandering, living and working in Europe has brought.
My idea is that I will randomly chose a date, and then write about it. I can't promise I will stick to that, but that is the idea.
