Living in a box

I’ve begun Project Relocation in earnest by putting my flat up ‘for sale’ on Igglo.

Igglo made quite a splash a while back with its new system. Buyers can show interest in properties that aren’t for sale and sellers can see if anyone might want to buy without formally putting their property on the market. I note that my building already has ‘ears’ listening to it, so let’s see if my little no-strings ad generates any concrete interest. If only the sun would come back, I could take some inviting pictures to post!

I’ve also been putting ‘ears’ on my favourite buildings and districts. Igglo agents have contacted me about a couple of properties today, but all except one were way above the maximum price I gave. Sigh. But I have made a preliminary appointment – although an offer will likely be made before I get the chance – to view one that looks great.

Looks great? No, it doesn’t look ‘great’, it looks like I could actually move there and that has become the definition of ‘great’.

I began searching with: I want to move as close to the centre of Helsinki as possible, but I don’t really need a whole 78.5 m2, so I could easily lose a room. My price range pulled up nothing but Eastern Helsinki. The horror, the horror!

If there’s one criterion that beats all the rest, it’s fast, frequent public transport. And that includes at night – or rather, especially at night, because taxis are so damn expensive. The metro stops before midnight and night buses literally go round the houses, so this in effect means the local trains. I was shocked to find that the only line still offering a decent service after midnight is the one I’m on!

My other criteria hit the dust with astounding rapidity. I now find myself saying ‘great!’ when I hear: Pitäjänmäki 43m2, ground level, no balcony, possible façade renovation coming, but no plumbing renovations for ten years. I even find myself contemplating ‘39m2 with a good floor plan’.

The time for dreaming of turrets went out with troubadours, but it seems I'm way behind the trends as usual. Hack off your hair and move to the ground floor, Rapunsel! (And maybe you can sell it to a cushion company to pay the commission.)

Don’t dilly dally on the way

The other night, a friend was contemplating whether or not to get another drink. He decided he would, but with the comment, ‘I always start to get a little worried when my bank balance dips below two thousand euros.'

This statement was a cause of great hilarity to a couple of us around the table. I am – if not by choice – the kind of person who starts to get a little worried when their credit card debts start to approach two thousand euros.

I’ve been thinking a lot about finances this past week – mainly because of holiday planning, but also on a more long-term basis. Things have been rather tight financially since I quit my proper career-type job to work for myself. I don’t regret leaving the hell of corporate life, but I haven’t enjoyed swapping it for the hell of counting every cent – and finding there are never enough.

I’ve finally come to the sad conclusion that it’s my flat that’s the money pit. It was excellently located and the perfect price for my old job and salary; but after various renovations and outsourcing, the condominium charge is now so exorbitant that, if it goes up much more, I’ll soon be able to rent another place with it!

There’s nothing for it: may the housing market be whatever it is, I’m losing way more by staying put. I’ve decided to get out as soon as I can. I’m trying to get back to Helsinki to cut down on travel costs and time. Much as I hate cramped living, this will no doubt mean putting one more notch on the failure tally and moving into a smaller place.

A decade ago, I came to Finland with three suitcases and a handbag. Since then, I’ve moved through a series of one- and two-room flats to this (for the Greater Metropolitan Area) spacious three-room place. And somehow I’ve managed to fill it, and my cellar storage room, with junk!

Going through the ordeal of moving is not a pleasant prospect, but I’m already feeling better after having made the concrete decision to get out. Downsizing means I’m going to have to get rid of some furniture and junk, and I’m feeling good about that, too. There’s something very satisfying about throwing out large quantities of rubbish, but you really need an incentive to set about it. I could probably lose half a room simply by going through old papers!

So it’s time to quit dilly-dallying and press ahead with Project Relocation!

The directors are dead, long live the director!

It’s the cast party that puts a full stop to a show. Any events after that feel like reunions. You usually have a week or so to mourn a show’s end before the funeral. This time, we cut into (and that’s into for all you Players reading) the celebratory cheese about three hours after I got off stage; stage management were still locking up the theatre!

But no sooner is one show buried than the next one rises from its ashes. At eight a.m. on May 20th – the time I hear the last party animals returned to their dens – I became the director.

Since my proposal was accepted in March, I’ve been toying with staging ideas, thinking about original music, polishing the script, but all on a backburner. Auditions for The Mourning Primrose are in ten days. Suddenly this thing is real.

This hit me properly last night when we had a script readthrough with the writing society. Thanks to everyone who came along: I eagerly await your feedback!

Holding a – even non-performance – reading of your own script is always rather nerve-racking. Not just for the author, but also for the people reading. I can’t put it into words, but there’s something about the author sitting there: things always start off a little awkward. But the readers helped neutralise this with the customary silly accents and camp interpretations.

Taking the piss out of our scripts is a tradition. The more a script is quoted, and in particular misquoted, the more successful it’s been. To my mind anyway. At least one of each day’s pre-show line runs in the Bald Prima Donna dressing room was always a ‘cock run’: changing words and intonation to make the script as dirty as possible. So I’m going to take yesterday’s piss-taking as a complement. If people managed to relax enough in my presence to arse around, it can’t have been that bad. Can it? I think. I hope.

These are my notes from scene 10. I start a scene with the stage direction ‘Anacoana is looking at his telescope’, give it to some Finn-Brit Players to read and wonder how I never thought it would come out dirty? Especially when I also have such words and phrases as, ‘tools’, ‘monkey’ and ‘touch without permission’ in close proximity.

But this OMG is nothing compared to the ones for scene 15, in which two men have a glass of rum together and talk about serving under a new captain...

This is looking like the start of new blog serial: follow the trials of a new author/director from birth of script to cast party. And it begins thus:

O .. M .. G .. what have I DONE?

The clock strikes fifteen, the clock does not strike

One year ago today I made my first – not so earth shatteringly interesting – post! This would be an appropriate occasion for an insightful look into blogging and life. Loss of The Bald Prima Donna has, however, left me temporarily without inspiration.

Time warps during productions. The wait after casting seems interminable. During the first rehearsals, opening night seems years away. Suddenly it’s next week and you’re nowhere near anywhere you’d like to be with your character, lines, blocking, marionette moves or whatever other special business the director has thought up to torment you with.

And then it’s over. You’re standing in the wings waiting to go on and you realise that this is the last time you’ll ever do this. The last time you’ll find everything extraordinary, amazing and such a strange coincidence, the last time you’ll grove to the Krishna Wallop. And it’s during this last performance that everything finally clicks. All those little nuances that you – and your fellow actors – have been seeking for the last four months choose this moment to appear, the last one.

But a production is more than just your time on stage. It’s the rehearsals, the après rehearsal drinks, the camaraderie, the ups and the downs and the getting through them. I won’t just be missing being Mrs Martin. I’ll be missing the rehearsals themselves; and those interminable hours of make-up and line runs and camera antics while waiting for part one of our double bill, The Maids, to finish. It’s goodbye not au revoir to the standard triple barbara in the dressing room.

There is always some degree of relief when a production ends. Especially as the final weeks tend to eat up a gargantuan amount of time. But after all the neglected washing up and laundry and e-mails have been dealt with, there are – as Kani said – some plays you’d rather not leave behind.

The Bald Prima Donna has been running at the Theatre de la Huchette in Paris with the same scenery, director and (intermittently) three of the original cast since February 16th 1957. Although we only had five nights of performances, fifty years might be a little excessive, even with this wonderful crowd :)

Bald Prima Donnas

Were they not content to be yodelling, antidepressant-taking, hissing hide-and-seek divas? No, no, no: the cats have to go bald as well…

And So It Begins

Two cats are much better than one. They do cute things together, like sleeping in piles, batting eat other’s tails … and beating each other to a pulp.

His Lordship has discovered a new pastime: kitten bashing. He stalks her and takes flying ambush leaps from atop the dresser. She punches him repeatedly in the face.

They sleep in each other’s beds. They steal each others’ food. One gets extra calories, the other gets medicated. Andromeda remains skinny, His Lordship gets fat and stays sick.

Yes, we’ve entered stage three. Andromeda is out and about in daylight and the war of dominance begins.

Italy: My Knight in Shining Bicycle Clips

Four years old and an avid shell collector. I leave our umbrella camp on the scorching sands of Senigallia, setting out on a lone quest to discover what the sea has abandoned on the wet strip left by the receding tide. I wander this way and that along the shoreline, eyes fixed on the pink and white and yellow shells embedded in the damp sand. I look up. A forest floor stretches out before me, umbrellas like toadstools, crawling with thousands of tanned ants.

A pang of realisation. I head inland and, although I hope as hard as a child can hope, am not surprised to reach the road without passing our toadstool. I pick a random direction and start to walk lengthways along the beach, crying. Outside the toilet block, two women approach me and ask my name. They’re Italian, dark-haired and wearing black bikinis and stylish sunglasses. But it’s no problem, because I speak good Italian. I tell them my name and that I’m lost; and also about my hotel, where my friend the bartender gives me glasses of Menta with swizzle sticks.

My friend the bartender comes to my rescue, my knight in shining bicycle clips. I ride back to the hotel on the handlebars of his metal steed. Then I sit on a high stool at the bar, drinking Menta and waiting for my parents. I can’t remember whether they're angry or not.

Back in London, lying in my single wooden bed in the sky blue room that will soon become my baby brother’s, I wonder where I’d be now if I’d never been found.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

I’m currently reading Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. This isn’t going to be a book review – I haven’t even got that far into it yet – but it’s got me thinking. Or rather, remembering.

The protagonist awakes in hospital to find that his implicit memory and semantic memory are intact, but he has complete amnesia when it comes to his episodic memory. He can therefore remember how to drive a car, but not whether he owns a car to drive. He can quote long passages of literature and tell people when Napoleon was born, but doesn’t remember his own date of birth.

But I’m going off on a tangent. The exact details of his amnesia aren’t that relevant. What is relevant is that he returns to his childhood home in a quest to ‘jog his memory’. Thus far into the book, this has not happened. Isolated memories do suddenly pop into his head, but often only in the form of a sentence that leads him nowhere: ‘The procession is set to begin, Captain Potato says when.’

The book is set in Italy and the protagonist lives in Milan. I’m half Italian with a Milanese family as far back as can be remembered. All connection to that heritage was suddenly severed with the death of my father over twenty years ago. Before that we had an active life in the Anglo-Italian community in London and would travel to Italy every summer. Sometimes to Milan, but more usually to a beach resort. (There is a great exodus from Milan to the countryside in the summer, just as there is from Helsinki.)

I began to wonder what I remembered of those nine years of Italy and being Italian. Not much. Certain incidents have obviously stuck in my head because of their unpleasant nature, but why the others? They are sometimes no more than a feeling, an odd sentence that takes me nowhere.

Over the next few weeks, I shall be gathering these little flames of Italy together in a serious of posts to see where they might lead.

Fake Tits and Shakespeare

What have people been typing into Google to find my blog recently?

The usual disturbing mix of blood and love, fake tits and Shakespeare:
- love and a dead rat
- bloody love (blogs)
- blood in a winter's tale
- pictures of costumes for shakespears' A Winter Tales [withering sic]
- perfect fake tits

Some underwear now creeping in too:
- green knickers showing
- baseball players in tightie whities

Plus a couple of wtfs:
- poem about washing-up brush
- adopt your own virtual egg!

The Fat Cat Shat on the Mat

Actually he vommed a hairball, but that didn’t rhyme.

His Lordship is getting a bit porky. I fear it’s through eating too much kitten food. Now that Andromeda has moved out of the toilet alcove, it’s hard to ensure that her food goes to her.

Thanks to a ridiculous design flaw, Her Ladyship has now taken up residence in my wardrobe. The wardrobe juts out about ten centimetres from the wall, but the floor of the wardrobe stops at the wall. This leaves a perfectly kitten-sized gap even when the doors are shut.

My shoes have already been evicted from the wardrobe floor to save them from accidents. Yesterday morning, the little bitch climbed up one of my skirts and balanced, hissing at me, on top of the hangers. Her Ladyship should know to respect another lady’s attire.

And there’s no way I’m going to start putting her kitten food in there for safety! No, the next eviction will not be my clothes but her. Tomorrow I’ll pop into K-Rauta and pick up a length of two by four to plug the gap. Hopefully some nice chappy at the shop will saw it to the right size.

Let’s see where she’ll go next…

Entering the Milky Way

(Aka a kitten update for all those interested.)

The young fool left the safety of under the bathtub to play in His Lordship’s toilet. While she was scrabbling around in there – it’s in a curtained alcove – I sneaked past and closed off the tub room. She was very pleased about this, as you can see. It’s comforting to know how much your kitten loves you.

Her Ladyship then took up residence in the litter box alcove. Still pretty gross, but a slight improvement on the post-apocalyptic dilapidation of her previous realm. At least we can see her!

Every time I pulled the curtain back, she’d hiss at me. I guess the feral cat insticts don't die easily, even if she's been off the streets for a couple of months. But she did let me stroke her and seemed to enjoy it, purring and rubbing her head on my hand and the litter box (great). Once or twice she even ventured into the hallway to claw the rug – rolled up and awaiting trashing – that His Lordship clawed to pieces and puked on when he first came. What is it about this rug that attracts the animosity of cats?

I left the bathroom door open during the night and she made it as far as the bedroom. I have a fuzzy memory of waking up with her on the bed sniffing my face, but that may have been a dream. I do distinctly remember waking up to go to the loo and her scampering out of the bedroom ahead of me.

This morning, I pulled back the alcove curtain and she was gone! Then I heard a hiss and saw her next to the toilet. She may still be living in the bathroom, but if she’s sleeping in plain sight, even for a while, I’d call that a pretty amazing improvement on her first day.

Thanks a bunch, R Stanton Avery!

What inventions would the world be better off without? Nuclear bombs? Communism? Instant noodles?

All quite valid suggestions for discussion, but the scientist I want to give a right earful to is Mr R Stanton Avery. In 1935, he invented the first sticky label.

Perhaps we shouldn’t blame the inventor, but those who misapply the fruits of his labour. It is, however, a lot easier to have a go at one well-known man than the thousands, maybe millions, of faceless drones who think that plastering sticky labels all over products is somehow a good idea.

And it’s not just a single price label. No, we have to have bar code labels, best buy labels, suggested usage labels, warning labels, checked in the factory by Jenny 037 labels…

I wouldn’t mind so much if the labels came off quickly and easily – a technology that we now have. The labels rip and you have to peel them off in twenty-seven pieces. They leave a sticky residue that’s impossible to remove. It’s all right saying just use soapy water. There are certain products that can’t be immersed in water or can’t be scrubbed using abrasive pads without ruining their surfaces.

I bought three new metallic food bowls for my cats yesterday. There was a huge – and pointless – sticker on the inside of each bowl. Two out of the three labels left a residue that didn’t come off even after scrubbing with a washing up brush and soaking for hours in soapy water.

FOOD BOWLS.

Today’s rant has been brought to you by Blood, Love & Rhetoric. Thank you and have a safe journey home.

Light Years Away

Anna MR’s verdict on His Lordship’s recent disquiet was, ‘He wants his nads back and then he wants a girlfriend’. Not much I can do about the nads, but he now has a girlfriend.

Well he would have, if Her Ladyship would come out from under the bathtub.

The two have displayed very different characters. The first time I saw His Lordship, he was still in his carry box in the back of the car that brought him from Estonia. He stuck a paw out between the bars, mewing and trying to escape. As soon as I opened the box at home, he was out exploring the entire house and posing for an extended photo shoot on the sofa.

I let His Lordship sniff Her Ladyship Andromeda while she was still in the carry box. He gave me an accusing stare and fluffed up into a huge ball of hackles. So I closed the bathroom door and opened the box so Her Ladyship could come out in peace while I got some food and water.

I then spent a good five minutes wondering how a kitten could vanish from a locked room. In the towel cupboard? No. Hiding behind the washing machine? No. Under the … no, that’s impossible! It was so dark, the only way to see if she had managed to wriggle under the bathtub was to take a flash photo. And there she was.

Under the bath is one of those areas like behind the cooker - a fearful place between dimensions where one should never go and especially never photograph! If she can survive a night under there she can survive anything.

His Lordship spent the night guarding the bathroom door. He was no doubt doubly narked that he couldn’t pursue his normal nocturnal activities of hunting goblins under the bathtub. Every so often he would go fluffy, so I assume Andromeda was up to stuff in there. At least she ate something and used the litter box.

Anna MR also believes that, despite the vet’s recommendations, life will not be any easier with two of the beasts. So far it has been quite easy. I haven’t actually seen my second cat since opening the carry box door! Maybe thing’s will hot up when Her Ladyship deigns to come out.

Women always take forever in the bathroom, don’t they?

Venimus, vidimus, feles iacuerant

The ghost of the Vappu champagne brunch sits on my shoulder: a big, scraggy bird (with bad breathe) that’s pecking at my head. This post will therefore be mercifully brief.

People have expressed an interest in the specific chemical composition of the cat’s antidepressants. Duly pictured. I note with some measure of relief that they’re human medication, not specially developed for cats. I fear that would truly be a harbinger of the fall of Western society.

Venimus, vidimus, feles iacuerant.