Rare paragraph about Australian politics: I'm not surprised, because the entire time I was in Australia you couldn't turn on the TV or radio without hearing Latham being done down. But yes, time to develop some mosquito repellant that works on me (Canadian mosquitoes liking me more than I like them being the only reason I don't want to move to Canada).

On a metal note (a very low one): Yes yes yes yes yes! Arch Enemy are playing in England again! Although I haven't listened to them much since I discovered, like, other death metal bands, last time I saw them they were totally mint, so I'm so there! Life is sweet! But no no no no no! They're only playing in Nodnol, and not at a time when I was planning to be there anyway, which means I have to spend yet more time on &$#*ing trains!

Don't get me wrong, I love railways, for both environmental and sad fetishy reasons. I have a minor ambition to travel on every stretch of railtrack in the land, and my most recent journey meant the conquest of many a new bit, taking me through several weirdly named towns, like Wem. But twelve hours on them in two days? Four hours from the end of my journey, my bottom was in agony and in the last hour I felt too sick to do anything to distract myself. Hate life!

And now for some observations from my travels.

1. I have discovered, over the years, that wearing platform boots is not a wholly pleasurable experience. I could do without the sexual harassment from ten year olds they inspire, it doesn't make driving easy, and while they allow me to compensate for the three or four inches of height I'm missing thanks to my twisted spine, I risk making my legs look ridiculously long.

Nonetheless, I keep wearing them because in my opinion they look cool, make being a force to be reckoned with easier (although I enjoy being bossy and short, I can't always be bothered to expend the effort), are as comfortable as trainers, and allow me to stride through puddles and stand in seas without getting my socks wet. (Yes, I have a thing about standing in seas too. Is that really so strange?)

At least, that's what I thought. North Sea: easy. Pacific ocean: no trublem. Irish sea? The first wave caressed the first half an inch of my five-inch platforms. "Come on, you can do better than that!" I declared. And indeed it could: the second nearly came up to my knees! Cue: Zed spends the next fifteen minutes taking off her boots, changing socks, threatening to sue Aberystwyth tourist board if she gets trench foot, and putting the boots back on again.

Fortunately, this was *after* the wedding.

2. My family was all cosmopolitan this weekend! Noj stayed in England, I went to Wales, and my parents went on a jaunt up to Scotland (in honour of their recently acquired sports car, as they did that int seventies when they had a Lotus).

3. I hate train travel. Did I already say that? Well, it needs reinforcing. I nearly missed the wedding because my first one arrived twenty minutes late. I had to run for the first connection, which is no easy feat in five inch platforms with skirt ribbons trailing after you.

4. Actually, I love train travel. Did I already say that? Well, it needs reinforcing. Who said you never meet anyone on public transport in Britain? (Well, probably me.) And who said the Finns were a reserved race? (Well, Ibid did, for one.) Between Lancaster and Wigan North Western, a Finnish government employee sat next to me and after a while started chatting! Sadly, he got off before I could indulge my Fenophilia.

Also, on my way back, in Wolverhampton station a random bloke told me how great the new bridge they'd built in it was.

5. Kids rarely fail to scare me. Between Crewe and Shrewsbury (or Shrew and Crewesbury, as I prefer to call them), there were a group of pre-pubescent boys behind me, who were going on about which of their friends were anorexic. It's shocking enough that it's common enough in this particular demographic to merit discussion, but one of their friends apparently claimed to be three stone five. I really hope he was lying: as every vague fan of the Manic Street Preachers knows, the teenage / adult body pretty much can't weigh less than four stone seven pounds - so that it's happening to people young enough to weigh over a stone less than that, argh!

6. The Welsh dictionary my Mum lent me (we have a lot of Welsh schools - or whatever the plural of ysgol is - as customers) was completely useless. The first word I thought I should try and teach myself was hello, but it wasn't in and I got all confused. Was hello in fact short for something? It's a funny word, there aren't many two-syllable English words that end in an o, are there? But hi wasn't in, and I didn't suppose I was likely to find greetings, heil or salutations either.

It also didn't have a pronunciation guide, so I still have no idea how to pronounce one of the three Welsh words I know (toiledau - the other one being bryn).

7. Alex (who I met on the train between Shrewsbury and Aberystwyth - fancy that!) would like me to append to my entry about my recent trip to Nodnol that he didn't form a bad opinion of Hill - I mean Bryn; I simply hadn't had the chance to find out his opinion one way ort other. Now I have had the opportunity to discover it, I can report that it was positive.

8. I am apparently credited on Screaming Banshee Aircrew's album! (Which I ordered from Music Non Stop last week, but haven't yet received.) Hurrah, for to be credited on an album has long been an ambition of mine! I have no idea why I'm credited, as all I did was turn up to a few gigs, buy their merchandise and voice my approval, but yay! (Actually, it seems I'm triple-credited on the Swarf album too, by the virtue of being on Liz's friends list, writing for Kaleidoscope and forcing other people to listen to them, but not by name.)

I also found out me and Bryn are still being listed as contributors to Kaleidoscope magazine, even though we haven't written anything for it since July last year. Cool.

8. One thing I forgot to say about London: me and Bryn found the most enormous pair of New Rocks ever! The platforms were about fifteen inches high, contained three rows of springs, and had room for more besides. Even I agree that that's going a bit far!

9. Why do British towns never look like they do on maps? Judging by the map, finding the hostel in Aberystwyth and then getting to the church should have been a doddle, but we ended up spending about half an hour traipsing through leafy nowhere. Fortunately, we still got there on time.

10. Someone's mobile phone went off during the service. But at least the weather, while a touch chilly, was byutiful. The service was slightly shambolic, but more enjoyable than the last one I went to. That was all, "Your marriage is really about getting closer to Jesus", whereas this was, "Your union is also with Jesus - but not like that!"

11. Weddings are an irritating business, because they never fail to make me spend loads of time thinking, arrr, when I get married, I'm going to do this, this and this, but how will I balance what I want, what me and my partner's families want, and my atheism? Oh hang on, I'm not planning on getting married, and certainly not having a wedding wedding. Muppet! And then, a few minutes later, this thought process happens again . . . and again . . . and again . . .

12. I wasn't the only person in uberboots! A girl was doing the corporate goth look in a pinstripe suit and New Rocks. Sadly, we (me, Alex and classmate Joe) felt compelled to flee from the cheesy music before I had a chance to suggest a photo. We did get one of Teresa wearing more black than me, though. (Once she'd got changed for the evening, naturally!)

13. You know the song that goes "I just wanna make lurrrrve to you"? They played that. Eeeeep. I'm perfectly ok with the idea that many of my friends and relatives have sex or may have done so at some point (although obviously I'd be somewhat disturbed if I found out my friends having it off with my relatives, and indeed if my relatives were doing it with relatives they weren't married to), but declarations of wanting to do so are another matter altogether. And what must their relatives have thought?

14. I'd forgotten how painful cheesy music could be. Me and Alex requested some Duran Duran and the DJ said he'd play it, but after about an hour, we were still being tortured with the likes of "Mambo Number 5" and "Dancing Queen". Joe persuaded us to dance for a bit in spite of the pain, but I couldn't actually stay in the room when Shania Twain came on.

15. For the record, Teresa and Tim both looked great; they did appreciate my wedding present on the grounds that it was blank cheque (sadly for them, I'd filled in the amount, I just didn't make it out to anyone, as I didn't know whether they were planning on getting a joint bank account); the best man was Tim's sister; and, in spite of my tendency to get together with people in Times of Cheese (Chris at the Evil Club Of Pantsness, Bryn at a Bucks Fizz performance), the man of my dreams was seemingly not in evidence. But I had a good time anyway.

16. Aberystwyth is, like, student paradise. The hostel I stayed in was on the seafront, and when I got back, through the window, I could see a bunch of people having a bonfire on the beach, and a few other lone souls strolled past without a care in the world. Though places like Cambridge, Canterbury and York aren't particularly dangerous, I did my best to avoid walking alone through them after dark, and if you are going to walk alone through them, you do so shoulders hunched and hurriedly. Aberystwyth students also appear to be uniformly studenty.

I don't regret my decision not to go there though (it was my second choice of university). While UKC didn't prove to be a perfect match for my temperament, my reasoning at the time was that I'd spent nineteen years living in the middle of nowhere, so I didn't want to move to somewhere more remote. Back then, I didn't know such things as rock scenes existed, but seeing how important they've become to me and how good for me they've been, going to places with them was certainly the right move.

Still, what a great place. Apart from it being All Picturesque And Comfortable And Resonant With Good Vibrations, I've become deeply enamoured with end-of-line edge-of-world places of late, and it had loads of run-down multi-coloured houses, for which I have a hard-to-explain love.

So, ta for Teresa and Tim for inviting me: twas fun!

The only bad bit (apart from the trains) was getting back to Cumbria. Oh, but it's depressing! It's like the sky's too low and I can't get any air into my lungs that's not stagnant, even speeding along in the Z3 on the journey home. I love showing people around the place and I love going to new bits of it. But without maximal effort to satisfy my neophilia, it crushes me. I can't settle into a routine here or I turn into someone I despise. My mind gets eaten by the trivial and my vitality gets sucked out of me. It's not that I wake up and think, "Beepsocks, I have to spend another day in Cumbria", but standing there outside the station, with grease in the air and the kids walking past muttering "Moonboots", and reading back over all the journal entries I've written since it started being somewhere I had to come back to for the holidays, my soul feels diseased. Even its few moves towards being somewhere that suits me - the fledgling goth scene, the arthouse film matinees - seem so pathetic.

I have a chart on my wall telling me how many days it is before I can leave. Sadly, it currently reads 336. My Mum says I don't have to stay here a whole year if I really hate it, but I don't really hate it, it just feels bad for me. Anyway, where would I go and what would I do? Plan B requires significantly more money than I currently have, and I can't do Plan A until next September anyway.

Ok, enough whinging. Screw you, Cumbria, I'll be brilliant in spite of your evil! Anyway, I'm escaping often enough . . . just by sodding train!


Tuesday 12 October 2004

Oh dear, that last entry got a bit melodramatic, didn't it? Yesterday was abjectly horrible, though. I spent the whole day practically screaming in frustration over having to be at work, unable to do anything fun or satisfying, and then couldn't bring myself to do a darn thing all evening, until I hit on the idea to reread my stories that emerged in a creative burst I had April last year. Good news: my writing's improved a huge amount since then. Bad news: dear Mykos! I thought some of it might be salvageable for future use, but some of it was too horrifying for me to do any more than skimread.

Today's been better, though. But GAH! Why the smink is seetickets.com forcing me to pay a three pound booking fee for my Arch Enemy ticket, and four pounds seventy postage? The gig may be heavy, but the ticket won't be! It was less than half that (and that was extortionate) to get one to Dream Evil and Labyrinth. Why the difference?

Last night I dreamt! Somebody loved me! No, not really - I don't have nice dreams. Instead, someone had given me a black latex skin suit, which I wore regularly, despite my Michael Jackson inspired doubts. Interesting . . .