Cambridge, Oxford, Vienna Teng
Aug. 12th, 2010 01:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI suppose I should begin by saying that I passed all the rest of the bits of the LPC, and got a distinction in every paper. I'm pleased; that's a note to leave on.
As for what else I did this week, I should say, well, cried, mostly. First there was Oxford, and it was beautifully sunny when I arrived, and Shim and I did nothing very much. We went walking across the fields to Botley, with the railway line on one side and all of rural England on the other, and picked wild blackberries off the brambles on the way. Somewhat prosaically, we were going to PC World to spend a voucher, and now I have a nice shiny digital camera to go away with, the first one I've ever owned - for years I had my parents' old three megapixel one, which died, and then I had Shim's old point-and-shoot one, which has died a slow death. I hope I will not spam you all with my terribly artistic representations of butterflies and waterfalls and whatnot. Mine is not a visual imagination. We shall see.
On the way back home, Shim stopped me suddenly and said, "I want to show you something."
I followed him down into an alleyway, off by the station towards Osney, and suddenly, between the railway, the Botley Road and the circular road out towards the ring road, there was a tiny, silent twelfth-century Norman church. I never knew it was there, in five years. The tower and some of the windows are original, and I find that very peaceful, the thought of something sitting there obscured, unobserved and undisturbed, for a thousand years. I traced my fingers across the inscriptions on the gravestones and wished I could take pictures, but what difference does it make, really. A thousand years. It'll be there when I go back.
Then there was Cambridge; as Shim and I are moving there for two years from next summer and I hadn't been there since 1993, I thought it might be an idea to take a look around. So we went on an unbearably muggy day on the X5, Shim slept on my shoulder while I read about the American federal court system, and arrived there in time for lunch. I found it at once just the same and very different; lots of honey-sandstone architecture and people in full boating costume, but at the same time the Cam surprised me by not being navigable, and also I think it's true what they say about Oxford having more of a solid existence independent of the university. But I liked it so much, especially when I thought about the real possibility that existed of living in London for two years, with a long commute on top of a ten-hour day, and then felt like sprawling on the summer-scented grass and just absorbing the feeling of overwhelming contentment.
We meant to check out possible places to live, but time was short, and much more happily spent withhappydork, wandering by the river and through the colleges. She taught me to say some very rude things in Serbian; we both said awful things to Shim; we sat on the grass in the warmth. See above re: overwhelming contentment. I think I could be happy there. We shall see. Like I said to so many people over the week, I lived in Oxford, now Ithaca, soon Cambridge; it seems like I will never live in a real city again (defined as "over one million people; has industry"). I'm okay with that, I find.
I had another two days in Oxford.brightlywoven said, over dinner and late-night ice-cream, that if we were going to say goodbye at the station, then I needed to book a train. "It's okay," I said blithely, "I'm meeting people at five, I've got to get the four o'clock train."
"Yes," she said, "but there's another train twenty minutes after. And another twenty minutes after that."
In the event, Shim and I left on Monday afternoon and got a bus to the station, and all the way we talked about nothing, and had a brief argument about OS X and Linux, and when we walked over the canal he threatened to throw me into it, and all was ordinary and well. And we got to the station with eight minutes to spare before the four o'clock train, and we were doing so well, and then we were standing there in the station like any other two people waiting for the Paddington train and I started crying in that horrible, wounded way where you're never going to stop except with gravity and the passage of time.
I got the four o'clock train. I cried all the way to Reading and sniffled into Slough, and pulled myself together when the train pulled into Paddington; and after that I cheered up to seegavagai, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
apotropaios met us for dinner and I was positively cheerful over dinner, more ice-cream and an utterly delightful interlude spent climbing the lions in Trafalgar Square.
Okay, yes, about that. I'm apparently more afraid of heights than I recall, so we got to a point where I could get on the back of a lion and no further, because of the, oh, six feet between me and the ground, and Laura had not much better luck. After we had made utter idiots of ourselves, to the delight of all the children and American tourists in the vicinity, we persuadedapotropaios to lay down his dignity for the occasion and hoist us onto the lion. There are happy pictures of us triumphant. We went home and got drunk and watched First Contact. It was an antidote to misery. Data gets greener with age, and Picard is surprisingly buff, and Worf never does crack an expression. There are constants in my life, apparently; strange and wonderful.
We also went, on a whim, to see the corpse of Jeremy Bentham. I was there at UCL five years ago to be interviewed, but he had been taken away for cleaning and I was bitterly disappointed, so we went there to satisfy one of my minor heart's desires, and took pictures of his handsome waxy dead face, and the passers-by smiled at us indulgently and took pictures of us when we asked. One nice chap thought we were starting in September before we put him right. It's a little perturbing to be mistaken for seventeen when I am supposed to be on the verge of grown-up things, but. But, we went to a cafe I like, and got soaked in the rain, and had lemon cake and chocolate shortbread, and so what if people think I'm seventeen. I suppose they always will; I'm about to be the youngest person on my course. I'm not even grown-up in my head.
And so, we come to yesterday night, when we went to see Vienna Teng play her last London gig before she goes away to grad school and stops singing for a while, and oh, oh, Laura and I had been comparing notes, just before she came on, on previous gigs we'd been to, and making gentle fun of the sort of people who talk about the "energy" a gig has, but yes. That was it. Vienna Teng is teeny-tiny - about my size, in fact - and on her studio records her voice is beautiful, ethereal, but when you're in the front row of an enormous space, replete with chandeliers and crenellations, it strikes you that she has an enormous voice. She was playing with Alex Wong, her occasional percussionist and producer, and also a random British cellist they appear to have met in a pub somewhere, and taken together they were.... oh, they were spectacular. How to even describe it? They filled the space with sound, they filled my head, they played songs I love and songs I like and songs I don't care about and songs I don't know, and they used chairs and piano tops as instruments, they did sudden Lady-Gaga-inspired variations of stalwart numbers, it was a kind of shocking, subtle nuclear alchemy.
Then Vienna Teng sang who are you, taking coffee no sugar? who are you, echoing street signs? six feet from my head, and how can you not cry, really. I cried into "City Hall", which came next, and a little bit into "Harbor"; she sang, the light in me will guide you home, and I stopped crying after that. A couple of years ago - forgive me, love, for telling this story - when I had gone away for a while, to Liverpool, probably, and Shim was playing "City Hall" on repeat for a while, and it's a lovely song, optimistic but scored to be mournful beneath. And his housemate, a kind man, came and knocked on the door. To ask if he was all right, he said. Because I had gone, and he was playing the same, sad, sad, song over and over to himself in the night. I remembered it, because I am a horrible romantic, and have no business writing things like this in the middle of the night when I'm drunk.
They finished the show with a haunting, a capella version of "Soon, Love, Soon". Laura and I both wanted to try and get an autograph, and it was a small enough gig for this to be feasible; we queued up and got to the table where she was talking to fans, taking pictures, and signing, and I just gibbered a bit, and finally managed to tell her how much I'd enjoyed the evening while Laura took pictures and was eminently less of a tongue-falling-out wreck than me. She even had the sang-froid to produce one of the gig posters and ask her to sign, which she did. I wished her luck with grad school, and she wished me luck with grad school, and she gave me and Laura a hug before we ran out into the night.
I am still a wreck, really. I said goodbye to Laura this morning - how can all of this be the same day, I can't even - and cried all the way to Stafford, and came home and slept and went out for dinner with my family and cried some more. It's not even proper crying, any more; now it's certainly drunken, for one thing, but it's because things aren't sinking in quite and I can't help it.
Now, I really must sleep.
As for what else I did this week, I should say, well, cried, mostly. First there was Oxford, and it was beautifully sunny when I arrived, and Shim and I did nothing very much. We went walking across the fields to Botley, with the railway line on one side and all of rural England on the other, and picked wild blackberries off the brambles on the way. Somewhat prosaically, we were going to PC World to spend a voucher, and now I have a nice shiny digital camera to go away with, the first one I've ever owned - for years I had my parents' old three megapixel one, which died, and then I had Shim's old point-and-shoot one, which has died a slow death. I hope I will not spam you all with my terribly artistic representations of butterflies and waterfalls and whatnot. Mine is not a visual imagination. We shall see.
On the way back home, Shim stopped me suddenly and said, "I want to show you something."
I followed him down into an alleyway, off by the station towards Osney, and suddenly, between the railway, the Botley Road and the circular road out towards the ring road, there was a tiny, silent twelfth-century Norman church. I never knew it was there, in five years. The tower and some of the windows are original, and I find that very peaceful, the thought of something sitting there obscured, unobserved and undisturbed, for a thousand years. I traced my fingers across the inscriptions on the gravestones and wished I could take pictures, but what difference does it make, really. A thousand years. It'll be there when I go back.
Then there was Cambridge; as Shim and I are moving there for two years from next summer and I hadn't been there since 1993, I thought it might be an idea to take a look around. So we went on an unbearably muggy day on the X5, Shim slept on my shoulder while I read about the American federal court system, and arrived there in time for lunch. I found it at once just the same and very different; lots of honey-sandstone architecture and people in full boating costume, but at the same time the Cam surprised me by not being navigable, and also I think it's true what they say about Oxford having more of a solid existence independent of the university. But I liked it so much, especially when I thought about the real possibility that existed of living in London for two years, with a long commute on top of a ten-hour day, and then felt like sprawling on the summer-scented grass and just absorbing the feeling of overwhelming contentment.
We meant to check out possible places to live, but time was short, and much more happily spent with
happydork, wandering by the river and through the colleges. She taught me to say some very rude things in Serbian; we both said awful things to Shim; we sat on the grass in the warmth. See above re: overwhelming contentment. I think I could be happy there. We shall see. Like I said to so many people over the week, I lived in Oxford, now Ithaca, soon Cambridge; it seems like I will never live in a real city again (defined as "over one million people; has industry"). I'm okay with that, I find.I had another two days in Oxford.
brightlywoven said, over dinner and late-night ice-cream, that if we were going to say goodbye at the station, then I needed to book a train. "It's okay," I said blithely, "I'm meeting people at five, I've got to get the four o'clock train.""Yes," she said, "but there's another train twenty minutes after. And another twenty minutes after that."
In the event, Shim and I left on Monday afternoon and got a bus to the station, and all the way we talked about nothing, and had a brief argument about OS X and Linux, and when we walked over the canal he threatened to throw me into it, and all was ordinary and well. And we got to the station with eight minutes to spare before the four o'clock train, and we were doing so well, and then we were standing there in the station like any other two people waiting for the Paddington train and I started crying in that horrible, wounded way where you're never going to stop except with gravity and the passage of time.
I got the four o'clock train. I cried all the way to Reading and sniffled into Slough, and pulled myself together when the train pulled into Paddington; and after that I cheered up to see
gavagai, and apotropaios met us for dinner and I was positively cheerful over dinner, more ice-cream and an utterly delightful interlude spent climbing the lions in Trafalgar Square.Okay, yes, about that. I'm apparently more afraid of heights than I recall, so we got to a point where I could get on the back of a lion and no further, because of the, oh, six feet between me and the ground, and Laura had not much better luck. After we had made utter idiots of ourselves, to the delight of all the children and American tourists in the vicinity, we persuaded
apotropaios to lay down his dignity for the occasion and hoist us onto the lion. There are happy pictures of us triumphant. We went home and got drunk and watched First Contact. It was an antidote to misery. Data gets greener with age, and Picard is surprisingly buff, and Worf never does crack an expression. There are constants in my life, apparently; strange and wonderful.We also went, on a whim, to see the corpse of Jeremy Bentham. I was there at UCL five years ago to be interviewed, but he had been taken away for cleaning and I was bitterly disappointed, so we went there to satisfy one of my minor heart's desires, and took pictures of his handsome waxy dead face, and the passers-by smiled at us indulgently and took pictures of us when we asked. One nice chap thought we were starting in September before we put him right. It's a little perturbing to be mistaken for seventeen when I am supposed to be on the verge of grown-up things, but. But, we went to a cafe I like, and got soaked in the rain, and had lemon cake and chocolate shortbread, and so what if people think I'm seventeen. I suppose they always will; I'm about to be the youngest person on my course. I'm not even grown-up in my head.
And so, we come to yesterday night, when we went to see Vienna Teng play her last London gig before she goes away to grad school and stops singing for a while, and oh, oh, Laura and I had been comparing notes, just before she came on, on previous gigs we'd been to, and making gentle fun of the sort of people who talk about the "energy" a gig has, but yes. That was it. Vienna Teng is teeny-tiny - about my size, in fact - and on her studio records her voice is beautiful, ethereal, but when you're in the front row of an enormous space, replete with chandeliers and crenellations, it strikes you that she has an enormous voice. She was playing with Alex Wong, her occasional percussionist and producer, and also a random British cellist they appear to have met in a pub somewhere, and taken together they were.... oh, they were spectacular. How to even describe it? They filled the space with sound, they filled my head, they played songs I love and songs I like and songs I don't care about and songs I don't know, and they used chairs and piano tops as instruments, they did sudden Lady-Gaga-inspired variations of stalwart numbers, it was a kind of shocking, subtle nuclear alchemy.
Then Vienna Teng sang who are you, taking coffee no sugar? who are you, echoing street signs? six feet from my head, and how can you not cry, really. I cried into "City Hall", which came next, and a little bit into "Harbor"; she sang, the light in me will guide you home, and I stopped crying after that. A couple of years ago - forgive me, love, for telling this story - when I had gone away for a while, to Liverpool, probably, and Shim was playing "City Hall" on repeat for a while, and it's a lovely song, optimistic but scored to be mournful beneath. And his housemate, a kind man, came and knocked on the door. To ask if he was all right, he said. Because I had gone, and he was playing the same, sad, sad, song over and over to himself in the night. I remembered it, because I am a horrible romantic, and have no business writing things like this in the middle of the night when I'm drunk.
They finished the show with a haunting, a capella version of "Soon, Love, Soon". Laura and I both wanted to try and get an autograph, and it was a small enough gig for this to be feasible; we queued up and got to the table where she was talking to fans, taking pictures, and signing, and I just gibbered a bit, and finally managed to tell her how much I'd enjoyed the evening while Laura took pictures and was eminently less of a tongue-falling-out wreck than me. She even had the sang-froid to produce one of the gig posters and ask her to sign, which she did. I wished her luck with grad school, and she wished me luck with grad school, and she gave me and Laura a hug before we ran out into the night.
I am still a wreck, really. I said goodbye to Laura this morning - how can all of this be the same day, I can't even - and cried all the way to Stafford, and came home and slept and went out for dinner with my family and cried some more. It's not even proper crying, any more; now it's certainly drunken, for one thing, but it's because things aren't sinking in quite and I can't help it.
Now, I really must sleep.
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no subject
on 2010-08-12 03:45 am (UTC)BUT WERE YOUR TEARS MADE OF BLOOD.
You had a good seeing-off, petal. *squish*
no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:51 pm (UTC)As last days go, it was perfect. :)
no subject
on 2010-08-12 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-12 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-13 09:55 pm (UTC)*hugs* I hope it's a marvellous year, with good tears as well as hurting ones xxx
no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:51 pm (UTC)*delurks*
on 2010-08-12 01:53 am (UTC)And, also, I have somehow not heard of Vienna Teng but after your descriptions of her music I'm totally going to check her out. I always love discovering "new" artists to fan over and she sounds like someone I could fall in love with.
Re: *delurks*
on 2010-08-16 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-12 11:03 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-12 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-12 12:04 pm (UTC)And I am so, so sorry about the crying and the ripping half of your heart out to leave it behind while you go to America. I think I will be sad enough to be in Leeds while Anwar is in Milton Keynes; to be in America is, of course, a whole 'nother ball game. *hugs*
American address sometime, plz? I will clearly be wanting to send you post. *g*
no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:15 pm (UTC)(American address in ye olde inbox.)
no subject
on 2010-08-12 12:07 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-12 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-12 05:38 pm (UTC)And congratulations on the distinctions!!
Mostly I just want to hug you, though, because leaving is so freaking difficult, even when you've got exciting adventures ahead. Goodbyes are agonizing, especially planned, drawn-out ones like this where you can hear the clock ticking all the time. So, yes. I hug you! Virtually and ineffectually, but wholeheartedly. And I wish you so much good luck with everything that's on your horizon.
no subject
on 2010-08-13 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-13 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-13 12:35 am (UTC)I have always wanted to see Jeremy Bentham, and really should make a point of seeking him out. I also want to see Samuel Pepys' kidney stone, which is tucked away in a collection at St Thomas'.
no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-13 04:13 am (UTC)I'm seeing Vienna in Chicago in a few weeks. She is beautiful. I'm so glad that I get to see her before she goes off to grad school. "Shocking, subtle nuclear alchemy" - yes, this. That's what I love about live music.
no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-13 10:28 pm (UTC)Welcome to the States, I guess, and more specifically to New York (my own uni's in NYC, but I've heard that Ithaca's lovely). Congratulations on your results, and best of luck with grad school. I hope you enjoy my country as much as I did yours.
(Also, be sure to milk your accent for all it's worth-- if you're wide-eyed enough about it, you can talk your way out of murder. Or into free drinks. Mmm, free drinks.)
no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-14 05:29 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-08-16 09:35 pm (UTC)