Tag: photography

A perfect market

I lost my hairbrush to the roving blackhole in my bedroom. This was an emergency. I immediately left the house for Boots, a store I mentioned a few months ago. I wanted to earn some loyalty points.

With my hair forming a halo around my face, I picked out a nice black comb for about £3. Near the check-out, I spotted some Christmas wrapping paper. I pulled out a gold foil roll with a red berry pattern. For about two minutes, I stood there contemplating my choices.

“Hello, Joan.” Suddenly, Owen was also standing in front of the wrapping paper display.

“I lost my hairbrush,” I said by way of explanation. “So I haven’t brushed my hair today.”

“This hair also hasn’t been brushed.” Owen gestured to his short hair, which, I’d guess, would never need to be brushed. “What are you doing now?”

“I’m trying to look for wrapping paper that isn’t so Christmassy. I think this is the closest I can get.” I showed him the gold-and-red-berry combination, and a silver roll with white swirly patterns.

He glanced at the rolls. “Still looks pretty Christmassy to me,” he said, dashing my hopes. “You won’t find anything but Christmas paper here at this time of year.”

I was crushed. “I do have a few Christams presents that need to be wrapped but that won’t use up the whole roll. I wanted to save it for presents later on.”

“Ah, I see. Very cheap of you.” Before I could decide whether or not this was an insult, Owen added, “Or very sustainable.”

I knew only one response to this. “I love it when economics and sustainability coincide!”

Coming of age

I can no longer be called a bad cook. On Tuesday, I hosted a dinner party all by myself (with dishwashing support from Dino).

On the menu:

  1. Herbed roast chicken — Mum gave me instructions over the phone at 6:30 AM Australian time.
  2. Spicy tomato salsa with fried eggs — One of my favourite dishes from mum. It was the first time I’ve made it and it was perfect!
  3. Stir-fried corn and beef — We usually use pork but beef works well too.
  4. Moroccan lamb and chickpea — From a book Damjan gave me just before I left for Cambridge.
  5. Maple syrup dumplings — Kate gave me the recipe for golden syrup dumplings about five years ago. Di bought maple syrup this term so I commandeered it for this recipe. It worked fine.

I made rice and my guests brought salad and Christmas crackers. I think I fed seven people for about £20. Bargain!

Middle Earth

I live in an old English town. There are many little stores. I walked into one and found myself surrounded by shelves stuffed with trinkets and knicknacks. I waited a minute before the shopowner came out from the back room. He looked like a hobbit, with a craggy face framed by bushy white eyebrows. His colourful tie was tucked into his front pocket. He even spoke like a hobbit. I walked out with a pair of computer speakers, which he dug out from a mysterious second storeroom.

Photo diary

Sometimes, my camera stays zipped up in my bags for weeks. This week, I pulled it out and got back into recording my life.

It’s Christmas time in Cambridge. This building is the Guildhall in the centre of town.

One of our last coursework requirements was to participate in a roleplay about the construction of an incinerator. I played Joan Wensley, the local beekeeper.

After 2.5 days of intense roleplay, we went to Browns, a bar across the road from the Engineering department.

You know it’s Christmas in England because everyone is drinking mulled wine.

In fact, here is our house’s version of mulled wine. My housemate, Di, cooked up a feast for us to celebrate Christmas.

She also made gingerbread cookies and chocolate chip cookies. I think I’m getting pudgey.

Last Saturday, I took the train to London.



At Christmas time, there is a temporary market at Covent Garden. Most of the things for sale are a bit trashy but Jon, Damjan, Di, Phil and I really liked the old fashioned telephones.

Christmas time in London involves lots of fairground stalls and thrill rides at Leicester Square.

There’s also a merry-go-round at Covent Garden. I think it’s festive. Damjan thought the tinny merry-go-round music was obnoxious.

People lock up their bikes all over town. However, this is the first time I’ve seen a giant unicycle parked at a pole.

Damo and I saw the Royal Ballet perform Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House. Unfortunately, I kept nodding off in the Prologue. Coffee soon fixed that. And Act III definitely overstayed its welcome.


There are lots of Christmas lights all over London. It’s pretty but I can’t help wondering about the electricity bill.

Milk Mondays

We get our milk delivered to our doorstep early on Monday mornings. Last week was our first week of deliveries. We had been hoping that the four pints would show up in ye olde glass pint bottles, and that we could put the glass out the next week for reuse by the milkperson.

We were slightly disappointed, though, when the milk arrived in the normal plastic bottles, quite similar to the milk we would by from Sainsbury’s. Nevertheless, it is quite convenient to have milk delivered and it is a good way to get rid of change.

Here is £4.22 for the 10 pints (5.7 L) that we want delivered tomorrow.

We leave this on the doorstep and hope that the milkperson gets to it before a Cambridge miscreant does.

It’s for a good cause

We were looking for a place to eat dinner and walked into a nice looking Spanish tapas restaurant.

“What’s with the Britney Spears outfits?” Jon exclaimed. All the waitresses were wearing white shirts, short skirts and pigtails.

“It’s for the BBC Save the Children fundraiser tonight,” our waitress explained. “We’re dressed for a ‘school’ theme.”

“I guess Britney was going for the schoolgirl theme too,” I said.

While we were looking at the menu, our waitress came around with a book of raffle tickets.

“Can I interest you in the raffle? The proceeds go to the fundraiser and the prizes are all from local businesses. It’s £2 per strip and will be drawn at 9 PM.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I never win anything in raffles,” Jon commented.

“Well, I don’t expect to win. I think of it as a donation, you know, a sunk cost,” I replied. Britney gave me a strip of six orange tickets, numbers 171 to 176.

Dinner was nice. A celebrity chef cooked a giant seafood paella in a pan of about one metre diameter. We donated £5 each to eat half-servings of it.

Just as we were paying the bill, they announced the raffle draw. We stuck around as the emcee call out number after number. We didn’t really listen, although every now and then, I would be distracted from our conversation enough to comment, “Oh, I need a haircut!” when a hairdressing package was raffled off, or “I don’t need that,” when the carwash was awarded.

And suddenly, I heard, “Joan? Is Joan here?”

I stood up slowly. “Yes,” I called uncertainly. Britney, who was standing next to the emcee, pointed up to where our table was. I wondered what I had won.

I walked down the steps and emcee handed me a large bottle of golden liquid. “Congratulations! You’ve won a bottle of whisky from CamTax.”

“That’s amazing!” Jon marvelled when I showed him my prize.

“I don’t really know what to do with it,” I admitted. I am definitely the person least likely to want a bottle of hard spirits.

Suffice to say, I was very popular with my housemates when I got home that night.

Guy Fawkes

Guy Fawkes Day in Cambridge is a big party. There were fireworks, a fun fair, toffee apples and cotton candy. I went on a ride. It was unexpectedly exhilarating.

We watched the fireworks from the college boathouses. There were signs warning people to only watch the fireworks from the Midsummer Commons (a big field) or from inside the boathouses. We joined the hundreds of people ignoring the safety warnings. I did get rained on with debris. The danger added to the thrill.

Owen, a coursemate, said, “England is the only country I know that celebrates the failure of a revolution. It’s like, every year, the Government sponsors these fireworks and a huge bonfire to burn the effigy of Guy Fawkes so that our leaders can remind people, ‘This is what will happen to you if you try to revolt!’ “

The Secret Life of Alcoholics*

“What are we going to get for Alex’s birthday?” Di asked. Alex is one of our housemates.

“I was thinking of getting him two boxes of Stella Artois. Do you remember how we were at Sainsbury’s that first week and how wistfully he looked at those boxes? We couldn’t carry them home last time.”

“That’s a great idea!” Di agreed. “Let’s go tomorrow afternoon.”

The next day, we left the house at 4 PM and rode 15 minutes down the road to the big supermarket. We found the beer easily. The special price for two boxes of 20 bottles was still available.

We took the boxes through the checkout and opened our backpacks to put them in.

“Uh oh.” I tried to rearrange the box to fit into my 30 L backpack but it was just too wide.

“It’ll fit in my backpack, I think,” said Di. She unzipped hers for the other box. Our hearts sank as it quickly became obvious it wouldn’t fit. “Maybe it’ll fit in my bike basket…”

We wheeled the boxes outside to the bike parking lot. Di picked up the box and carefully placed it into her basket. “I hope it doesn’t break the basket,” she murmured.

It didn’t fit.

“What are we going to do?”

We looked at each other and had the same idea at the same time. “We’ll have to take the bottles out and carry them,” Di said.

“I think we should put them in our backpacks, not in the basket,” I cautioned. “I reckon there’d be some law against riding a pushbike with 20 bottles of beer in the basket…”

We spent the next five minutes reloading the bottles into our backpacks. Then, with 10 kg of beer and glass on our backs, we gingerly hopped onto our bikes, turned on our lights (it was getting dark) and rode onto the street.

I laughed all the way, even as I struggled up the one hill in Cambridge. My bag tinkled with every pedalling motion. Rider after rider overtook the two of us. We did make it home without an accident.


*Don’t worry, mum, I’m joking.

Before walking

We were walking through the glasshouses at the Cambridge Botanic Garden when I spotted a sign that made me laugh. It said, “No perambulators beyond this point.”

“Look at that! Isn’t that funny? It says ‘perambulator’!” I laughed.

“What’s a perambulator?” asked Jon, puzzled. Jon is from Calgary in Canada.

“A pram.”

“What’s a pram?”

That stumped me. “Erm. It’s a chair with wheels. You push babies on it.”

“Oh, a stroller!” Jon clarified.

This exchange, too, was funny to me so I recounted it to Di when I got home.

“In Australia, we say ‘pram’,” I explained to Di. “If you said ‘stroller’, we’d understand but I think ‘pram’ comes more naturally.”

“What do the English call it?” Di asked.

“It said ‘perambulator’!”

Di started laughing. She laughed a lot. Yeah, I thought it was funny too, but not as funny as Di seemed to find it.

“That makes so much sense!” she said. “It’s like ‘before walking’.”

I was confused for a second, then I got it. “No, no! Not pre-ambulator! Per-ambulator!”

A tropical flower in the glasshouse.

The reason we went to the Botanic Gardens was that it was Apple Day.

I ate my very first toffee apple. My next task is to try a caramel apple.

Taking a punt

Perhaps it was the last warm, sunny day for the year. Something in the air told us that we needed to make the most of this Sunday in Cambridge. Dianne and I decided to take Jana punting before she flew out to Iceland.

We arrived at the Scudamore’s ticket box. “How much does it cost to hire a punt?” we asked.

“£16 an hour,” said the lady. She looked weary. Damn these tourists, she was probably thinking. Seeing how poor we looked, she asked, “Are you students? Which college? Okay, that’s £14 an hour. You’ll need a £70 deposit or we can take your credit card.”

We looked at each other. Di shrugged and took out her credit card. While the lady was swiping it, I picked up the punting guide on the counter and flipped through it. It was full of commentary on the sights we would see as we punted down the Cam.

“Hey!” A guy leapt towards the ticket office. “I’ve only got five people on my punt and I’m about to push off.”

“Only five?” said the ticket lady. “There were 15 just now!”

“Yeah, well, I’ve only got five.”

“How much for a guided punt?” I inserted quickly.

“Are you students? £10 each.”

“Give us a discount and we’re on the boat,” I replied.

He considered it briefly. “£9, then.”

Not much of a cut, but hey, that’s AUD2.50. “Okay! Deal.”

Punts are flat-bottomed boats. Punting is a popular activity at both Oxford and Cambridge.

Jana took this photo. I put on my Asian tourist pose.

There was a lot of river traffic on Sunday.

The amateur punters kept causing traffic chaos, like this river jam. Our guide was a seasoned professional — David from Pembroke College. Mostly, we sailed blithely passed the traffic tangles. We asked David how difficult punting was. He said, “I would put it on par with ice-skating.”

This is the Bridge of Sighs (check out the weblink!). It is one of three in the world, the other two being at Oxford and the original one in Venice. David told us the the Venetian one was called the Bridge of Sighs because it linked the prison to the court house. Prisoners would sigh as they crossed the bridge towards their fate.

On the other hand, students at St John’s Cambridge would sigh as they crossed because the bridge linked their college rooms to the examination halls.

Unlike at Venice and Cambridge, the Bridge of Sighs at Oxford crosses a road rather than a river. David told us that as the students at Oxford crossed over the noisy traffice, they would sigh and wish they went to Cambridge instead.

Why study when you can fish?

Postscript
Oh, and remember the punting guide I mentioned? I tucked it into my bag. When I got home, I gave it to Jana, saying, “Here, Jana, you can have this as a souvenir of your Cambridge punting experience.”

“Thanks, Joan,” she said. “Hey, did you pay for this? I didn’t see you do it.”

“Pay? No. Was I meant to?”

“I think so.” Jana flipped the booklet over and there, at the back, it said ‘£2.50’.

Whoops!