2012

I'm taking advantage of a rare Gab nap to write TWO blogs of surpassing dullness. This one is all going to be a bulleted list and will walk anyone with far too much time on their hands through the events of 2012 for me - just in time for the year to be over and a new one to start.

• I rang in 2012 in rubbish style. On New Year's Eve, I went wine tasting in Maclaren Vale on a 40 degree day with Beth, Gab and Sarah. We had a whale of a time, but a combination of the terrible heat and the fact that the girls were heading off on a cross-desert golfing trip the next morning led to them calling off the celebrations at 11.30pm and going to bed! I was home before 12am. What a terrible start to the year.
• On a much happier note, 2012 was the year that I moved in with the lovely Merilyn and Christina. Leaving all the work of finding a place to the girls, I swanned in an took up residence in our lovely Lilypad (as we liked to call it) within walking distance of the bay run, an organic farmers market and the best ice cream in the world (Bar Italia in Leichhardt). Living with these ladies was absolutely one of the highlights of my year and I miss our little home more than most things in Sydney.
• I had two weddings in one day - both former housemates and both exciting and joyful occasions.
• I turned 25 and had THREE birthday cakes.
• I lost two colleagues to pregnancy - this meant that I got an office with 25th-floor views of Sydney but also meant that I was sad and lonely for many months.
• I booked a certain plane trip, after much indecision.
• My church opened the doors of its shiny new building, six years after the old building was lost in a fire. There were bagpipes playing amazing grace. There was an army marching down City Rd with umbrellas. There was rejoicing. Lots of rejoicing. There were brightly coloured child fences and the fear that we would actually lose a child out the massive, easily-opened doors onto the street (as far as I know, this never actually happened).
• We hosted not one but TWO dance parties at our house. It was so much fun. The second one had a smoke machine and coloured lights. We are basically the coolest household that ever was. (I acknowledge that we stole the smoke machine idea from Bec, but since she lives there now she can be part of the household coolness)
• I quit my job of two years with Macmillan - a job that I loved, but it was time to move on. Also it had got really lonely.
• About a month after announcing my resignation, I found out that I had a job in Cambridge and would not be living on the breadline.
• I moved to Cambridge.
• I met approximately 1000 people. I still struggle to figure out who is who and who does what, but I promise I'll get there!
• I went to London, Brussels, York and Edinburgh.

I feel like so many things have happened this year that I've barely scratched the surface. I made many friends in Sydney, or deepened existing friendships with people I love dearly and miss terribly now that I'm here. I met a ton of wonderful, lovely new people in Cambridge who I suspect will be in my life for a long time to come. More than anything, I've loved talking, laughing, dancing and praying with all of you. It's been hectic, and stressful, and emotional and overwhelming at times but I think I'll look back on 2012 more than anything as a year of joy, full of laughter and fun - a year when I've been wonderfully blessed by God.

So nothing remains but to say, Happy New Year!

Christmas is Christmas the world over

Yes, Christmas is over. Yes, I missed the boat. But I did so much Christmas this year and I've been so busy doing Christmas that I didn't write anything about it so I'm going to write about it NOW. If this is not acceptable, please do feel free to save this up for Christmas 2013.

There is something about being away for Christmas that leaves you with two choices. You can either be a Scrooge, reject the whole notion of a proper Christmas and pretend the whole thing isn't happening. Or you can do what I did and embrace the season with a strange enthusiasm that scares those nearest to you. This included reading A Christmas Carol, hence my reference to Scrooge. I wonder how many of my generation saw The Muppet's Christmas Carol a thousand times as children (and it was fantastic every time) and as a result, they now picture the characters of A Christmas Carol as muppets (and Michael Caine) - because reading the book, I realised that in my head it was all muppets.

I am feeling awfully lazy so I'm just going to list a few things I did for Christmas this year.

Two Christmas parties with work: How did our team manage this? Somehow, we have managed to winkle our way into another team's Christmas festivities as well as our own. Total win, because the one that I don't really think we belong at was in Newnham College, which puts on a fantastic Christmas spread in a very picturesque dining hall. The other is just a run of the mill pub drinks do but it involved a Secret Santa. I got to try mulled cider and there was much Christmas cheer.

Choir - Christmas concert. Actually two Christmas concerts. We sang carols at a street fair AND we had a proper end of year concert in a church with an audience and I knew lots of the words to the songs as well which was a win. This also involved mince pies.

Church - I managed to go to a candle-lit carol service, another non-candle-lit service that had a proper little orchestra, and a Christmas morning service. All of these involved mulled fruit juice (Christians) and mince pies.

Christmas dinners - the first one with my housemates, who cooked up a delicious feast. The second one, Gab and I cooked ourselves and it was not in the least a disaster. I can now put 'Christmas roast dinner' on my resume. (This is in reference to the fact that one ought to be able to list one's professionally useless but hard-won accomplishments on one's resume. For instance, I always know how much water to put in a kettle; I can list the monarchs of England in order from Richard III downwards; and, now, I can cook a decent although not astonishing Christmas roast.) The second Christmas dinner was referred to as the ex-pat dinner. Originally it was going to be just Gab and me rattling around Cambridge on Christmas Day, not entirely sure what to do with ourselves; but in the end, I found us two other Adelaide girls with nowhere to go and we threw in a Dutch girl for good measure. I suppose you could make a comment about misery liking company but I've never been totally sure what that phrase means. And, actually, we weren't miserable at all. That evening, to deal with the Christmas Day fullness, Gab and I went for a long night walk around the completely empty streets of Cambridge. On Christmas night, Cambridge is a ghost town. No students, no tourists, no one at all! The river was marginally overflowing its banks (although subsequent experiences in York show that it was not properly flooded), the Christmas lights were lit and we only got a bit drizzled on. It was a lovely evening.

Throughout, we also drank mulled wine and cider and sang Christmas carols and altogether had the most Christmas I've ever had in one holiday season.

And above all, while I know that the original festival is about pagan midwinter, I do love being reminded that Jesus came into the world as a human child, and that he came because I needed a Saviour. And that's always a joyful thing to remember.

I hope every one of you had a wonderful Christmas full of joy and laughter. I'm sorry that I didn't get to talk to you and I hope we'll have lots of time to compare Christmas tales soon. And - several hours late for some of you, and still quite early for me - Happy New Year!

Falling in love

I have gone through an emotional journey over the past three weeks. One that has taken me from active dislike, to indifference, to a grudging concession of liking, to actual genuine affection.

One of my earliest memories of riding a bike is riding, as a six-year-old, from our house on the edge of Jamestown to the rectory. Jamestown is entirely flat. I learned to ride on our completely flat driveway. Always a cautious and unathletic child, I never moved at more than an enthusiastic walking pace. This is why I didn't know how to use the brakes on the bike. There is one gentle slope in Jamestown, as you approach the rectory. It is a gravelled slope. I think we all know where this is going - not knowing how to brake using the, well, brakes, I braked with my feet, fell off the bike and sustained fairly painful gravel wounds on my stomach.

I never rekindled my love of riding. I didn't have a complex about it. Susan and I rode our bikes up and down the driveway and around the place like normal kids but, from memory, I was never comfortable with hills after that incident. Besides, I've always felt that walking pace is fast enough. I could probably count on one hand the amount of times I cycled between the ages of 10 and 25 (including cycling around Lake Burley Griffin . . . it was not a fun day).

So, buying a bike didn't fill me with a sense of unparalleled delight. I bought a cheap, rusty, ugly bike because I don't have a whole lot of money, and because this kind of bike is less likely to be stolen. I spoke to someone whose bike has both a first and a last name, like a person, but mine is called Bessie because I saw her as less a friend, than a pet. And less a pet than a pack mule. Really, she's all about getting me from A to B.

The day after buying the bike, I cycled to church and home again. This was undeniably the best choice, as I had met up with people after church and didn't leave the city until 10pm, at which time only the most amazing luck in the world would have allowed me to get a bus. But it was cold. And raining. And I was taking the main roads because I didn't know the bike paths. And the bike muscles were complaining because (as mentioned) they had rarely been troubled in the past 15 years. And for some reason, I had the chorus of 'Walking in a winter wonderland' firmly stuck in my head, despite the fact that I was cycling, it was autumn, and there is nothing wonderland-ish about the main roads through the southern part of Cambridge at 10.15 on a raining Sunday night. If my mind had been read, it would (apart from the music on loop) have just been the words "IhatethisIhatethisIhatethisIhatethis" until I got home and locked up the stupid bike in the stupid rain and kind of hoped the stupid thing would be stolen.

The first week, I still hated it. The bike paths are all through the back streets or green areas, so I was constantly taking a 'short cut' recommended by google maps, and getting lost, because I have no sense of direction. It was taking me 40 minutes to do what google told me should be a 20 minute ride. I was still taking the main roads to work so I didn't get lost, which meant I had to get off my bike 10 minutes before work and walk to avoid the terrifying bridge intersection.

Week 2: I actually figured out the route to work, and how this made much more sense than the main roads route. OK, I still didn't love the bike, and found it difficult to go faster than a brisk walk. But I could see the point of it. I wasn't going out of the city just to go back in, as was happening with the bus. That's a plus. And my commute was down to around 25-30 minutes. I rode to choir, which was a definite improvement on walking for 50 minutes in the dark.

Week 3: I figured out how gears work. Yes, snigger into your sleeves. Or, show your astonishment that a woman of my years had no idea what the bike gears were actually doing until literally 6 days ago. And mind you, I learned to drive in a manual so I should have been ahead of the curve on that one. But seriously, I was mystified about them. Figuring out that you can change those suckers up and down depending on the gradient of the land was a revelation. The commute went down to google's promised 20 minutes. My muscles congratulated me on this development.

Here are some of my favourite parts of my commute to work:

The first 5-10 minutes is a cut through a green area sort of behind my house. The bike path runs alongside a shallow stream bordered by hedges and occasional small trees. There are ducks and another miscellaneous water bird that I don't recognise. There are autumn leaves on the path.

Where the bike path turns into back streets, there is a cul de sac with a big stand of deciduous trees (no, I don't know what kind) that have shed golden leaves all over the road until it is a carpet of yellow, but there are still enough leaves on the trees that the light is muted and golden. It smells like fallen leaves. I always pause here for a moment before I go onto the streets. It's like a little piece of magic.

The street just before the station is also lined with autumn trees but these ones are bronze-leaved. If it's a foggy evening when I come home, the street lights are surrounded by mist and the bronze leaves shine in the slight damp.

There is a gentle slope from the station down to a roundabout where I don't even have to pedal on the way home, which is nice after a day at work.

Things I don't like so much:

The roundabout. I just can't judge the gaps. I end up waiting for years before I'll finally venture out.

Riding beside the stream in the dark (i.e. any time after 4.45 - boo, England, boo). It's lovely in the mornings but in the evening it's on my left so I have to ride on the stream side. I live in fear that I'll fall into that stream someday. At least it's more likely to be on the way home than on the way to work.

Riding down the shared bus and bike lane from the station to work - it's the only logical way to get there, and I only have to share it with the buses for about 200 metres, but I have a dread of being cleaned up by an inattentive bus driver.

Riding through the station car park to get to the guided busway because taxi drivers are the worst.

So, that is the story of how a resentful relationship turned into a proper friendship. Bessie is nothing short of an invaluable accomplice in my current adventures. I'd attach a photo of her but honestly I'm not really sure how, and I need to get ready to go out. She won't mind. She's not very photogenic, poor girl. I'm thinking of changing her name to Elizabeth and giving her a last name. I think she deserves it.

Cambridge: More English than England

I think in Australia, we have this idea about England and the English. Of course, some of those assumptions relate to basic loutishness, reality TV/tabloid style ideas. But there are others, and here are some of them:

Old buildings
People on bicycles
Rain
Cold
Politeness
Educatedness
Knowledge of things like Chekhov and where David Livingstone is from
Playing board games
Drinking tea
Roast lunches on Sunday

Well, Cambridge is like that. I had a conversation with someone I met in church a couple of weeks ago. He had moved to Cambridge around the same time that I had, only he had moved from somewhere in the north (Sheffield? For the sake of narrative flow, let's say Sheffield.) In the midst of, How do you like Cambridge? etc he said, "You do realise that England isn't actually like this?"

It's true - England is not like Cambridge. Cambridge (and I imagine Oxford as well) is its own little thing. The people here, by and large, are very educated - a lot of them have gone to Cambridge University and stayed on, or they work at Addenbrooke's (the biggest hospital in the UK, I believe) or they are attracted to one of the white collar jobs you can get here. And so things that wouldn't exist anywhere else are just normal here. For example:

• Going to a bonfire night party with home fireworks, where there is also a choir that sings a few songs and then gets the rest of the party to join in
• Sunday roast lunch
• Knitting club with young people in it
• Having a conversation with someone about how much we both love Steinway pianos
• Having a conversation with someone about civilian morale in WWII
• Mentioning David Livingstone to someone who knows where in Scotland David Livingstone is from (this shows me up, because I didn't know he was Scottish and the reason I had brought him up was that I'm related to him. Fail)
• Eating bacon sandwiches in a fellow's rooms in Pembroke College (that was just cool)
• Bike theft being the biggest crime issue
• Walking past someone in academic robes and a bowtie outside Starbucks

Needless to say, I like Cambridge. In fact, everyone in Cambridge is like me - only more so. Will the novelty wear off? Perhaps. But for now, it makes it much easier to make friends and fit in. It's nice to join a choir and a knitting club, and have no one bat an eyelid.

Working 9 to 5

This week I began work at Cambridge University Press as a production editor. I should mention right now that this post won't be very interesting, so feel free to go and eat biscuits or watch paint dry or take a bath. I won't be offended.

The thing is, people keep asking me what my job is. Until sometime during Tuesday, I didn't know but now I've figured it out! So this is what my job is:

The books I work on are academic and professional books - more specifically, science, technical and medical academic and professional books. Luckily I don't have to read them, because they all have names like 'Sleep Disorders' and 'Divided Brains' and 'Conservation' (those are the simple ones - I can't remember the long ones but there are some doozies) and they're full to bursting with graphs and figures and mathematical illustrations and references and they're written by people with unpronounceable names. Because the humanities and social sciences team sometimes get overloaded, I also have one title called The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism and to my great chagrin, this one seems to be more trouble than all the others. I want Humanities to treat me well, as it is my heartland. However, I don't intend to read a word of that book either so maybe it's only fair that it's giving me grief.

This is what happens.

The editorial team upstairs work with authors who have written wonderful, brainy books. They get the books in ship-shape order and ready to be published. Then, they send us the manuscript and illustrations and graphs and things and tell us to get cracking and get the book published.

On a Monday, my manager divides up the new books between the crowd of (seven) production editors. As the new person who can't write a two paragraph email without asking questions, I will be given the easy books that are short and have minimal illustrations.

Then, I go through my manuscript and make sure I have absolutely everything I need. (NB the manuscript will be a word document, not an actual manuscript because that's just how we roll in the digital age.) I find myself a friendly freelance copy editor and book them in for the job. I also send the manuscript to a typesetter, who makes the file all nice and also tells us how many pages the finished book will be.

When the typesetter sends the book back, I send it to my friendly copy-editor to go through with a fine tooth comb. Then, the book is sent BACK to the typesetter to turn into proper files that you could use to make a book. It is then proof-read by a proof-reader and the author, who I have booked in advance (and apparently this can go along the lines of: "Author, your files will be coming to you on (Insert Date)." "I shall be in Abu Dhabi until (Insert Ridiculous Date)." ". . . Um could you cast your eye over the book though? On account of when it's published it will earn you some money." (Back and forth which results in me delaying the schedule and author not being as late as they would like to be so either everyone loses or everyone wins.)) Then the book comes back all ready to be fixed by the typesetter again, and everyone in the office takes a good long look at it, then more changes are made and then (God willing) it's ready to go to press.

In the meantime, the cover could be absolutely anywhere, but it's my job to make sure it's not absolutely anywhere, it's in my covers tray and everybody in the world has seen it and added their 2 cents worth and it's been fixed.

And then it's sent to the printer.

Essentially my job is to manage the schedule, manage the budget, let everyone know what's going on, liaise with the author and the editors and the typesetters and the cover designers and the proofreader and sometimes contributors and the editorial team upstairs. And if I do it right, the book comes in on time, on budget and everyone likes it, even if they thought that they hated it when they first saw it.

The good thing is, the people are absolutely lovely. This includes the authors who, despite being not always able to get things done on time because they are simply busy and marvellous professors and doctors who have lives and jobs and babies, are very kind to me as well. The colleagues are wonderful. I ask them 100 questions per minute of the day, and they come over and sit behind me and point to the obvious thing I should do, or have done wrong, and pretend that I am of average intelligence. They also say nice things about Australia and tell me where I should go on my holidays and don't mind when I have a simply foul and disgusting cold and I bring my germs into the office because it is my first week of work and rather than stay home and rest I have to come into the office and cough disgusting germs and blow my nose and most likely get the 8 months pregnant lady horrifically ill and induce early labour or something. And they invited my to go coppicing with them! How delightfully English (in the 'this is what we think England should be like' sense, rather than the 'this is what England is actually like' sense). We get 7 hours a year to do charity work on work time and get paid for it and my team is going coppicing as a team building exercise.

FYI: Coppicing is a pruning technique where a tree or shrub is cut to ground level, resulting in regeneration of new stems from the base. It sounds like hilariously hard work that you presumably do in boots and a waterproof in the middle of November.

There is also, somewhere among the many buildings and 800-900 people onsite at Cambridge University Press, a knitting club. Interesting.

If you have stuck with me until now, felicitations. You are wonderful. Your sacrifice of love is rewarded with my e-gratitude, and here are three kisses just for you:

xxx

In Pursuit of Trivia

Well, here I am! I arrived in England last Wednesday (the third) and in Cambridge on Saturday. During that time, I walked around a lot of London, then walked around a lot of Cambridge. I have finished a blissful two and a half weeks of unemployment and, as of Monday, will be a Production Editor at Cambridge University Press. While this thought fills me with terror (I have no idea whether I'm actually capable of this job), I'm also relieved that I'll finally have a way to fill up my day. Being a tourist filled a lot of the blanks, but there is only so much touristing you can do on your own.

I don't have any photos to post - apart from a few shots taken on my phone, I haven't been doing much photography so far. Mostly because when I first arrived and took a self shot with Big Ben, I look like I'd aged about 15 years in the 2 days since I'd left Australia. I'll get around to it - these buildings have been here for a while.

Instead of a day by day account of my movements, I thought I'd impart some exciting trivia that I have learnt during my short time in Cambridge.

• English post boxes are often set into walls, and these types of post boxes are a red metal plate sort of thing with a mail slot in them. And you can tell how old they are! They have the initials of the monarch on them - and while this tends to be ER II, once someone pointed the initials out to me, I've also seen ER VII (Edward VII), G V (George V) and even V I. Excitement abounded. Perhaps I'm alone on the exact amount of exciting this is.
• The 2 pound coin has writing around the edge (the actual outside edge) that says 'Standing on the shoulders of giants'. What does this mean? I imagine it's a quote. (I then googled it to actually find out - it is supposed to be a general paraphrase of something Isaac Newton said but as it's not something he actually said in so many words, it is cheating and I don't admire it so much). Equally unintelligible is the writing on the 1 pound coin, but its lack of intelligibility is more to do with being in Latin than being a poorly attributed quote.
• Primark really is as exciting as everyone told me it will be.
• 'Petty Cury' (a street name in Cambridge) means 'little cooks' in old English, because in the old marketplace you would get cooked food in that street. Peas Hill, just nearby, comes from the old English word for fish. Actually a few places in Cambridge refer to themselves as hills. I am yet to see a hill.
• Cambridge is an 'arid' climate. Compared to the rest of England, mind you. In the botanic gardens, they have a 'dry' garden - I felt like doing a proper Australian thing and saying 'You call THIS dry' but that would lead only to stereotyping.
• My accent can be mistaken for American.
• The House of Lancaster only adopted the red rose after the war was over. It wasn't called the War of the Roses at the time on account of only one side had a rose at that point.
• There are circa 38 000 bikes in Cambridge. I will hopefully be the circa 38 001st on account of it is definitely the easiest way to get around. I just have to counteract my general fear.
• The world is an awfully small place. On Wednesday night, I met a lovely girl from Adelaide with whom I have around a dozen friends in common. It was very nice to hear a matching accent.
• The flat white is categorically the best coffee to order at Costa. Bless their hearts, the flat white is the newest thing on the English coffee scene.
• While many wealthy and influential women have been involved in founding colleges in Cambridge - as far back as Queens College, which was founded in the 1400s by the Queen at the time - the first woman to receive a degree from Cambridge was in 1948. And it was the Queen Mother. And she didn't even go there - it was an honorary degree.
• Every college chapel (query on the 'every' - but I like the idea that it's true) has an organ, and an organ player to go with it, from among the students. I would love so much to learn to play the organ. However if 10 minutes on google can be trusted, we mere mortals who are not Cambridge students don't really have the means to learn the organ. But seriously, if anyone knows a way I can learn the organ, let me in on the secret because I will seriously do it. The problem is not so much the means, as the organ. There just aren't that many lying around.

I wish that I had more of interest to share, but as I've already stretched the definition of 'interesting' rather far with the above trivia, it's probably best to leave it there.

Not much else to add, except that Cambridge is a very beautiful place. God is taking good care of me. I miss the people back home, so please stay in touch.

Much love to all!