Short Stories: Dancing In Front of Strangers

'I don't dance.' A common phrase of mine, say, five odd years ago. Fast forward five years on and my friend Lucia shows me her wedding DVD, which at one point features me gleefully doing the robot on the dance floor.

I've posted about the zumba classes in this blog before, which should already say something about the class' blogworthyness. Tonight, after most of the years of my life spent telling people I don't dance, I volunteered to be a demonstrator for one of the dances. This involved a lot of solo-samba-ing, air-boxing and, more mortifyingly, wiggling my hips at the rest of the class.

Me, dancing around and shaking my tush in front of about twenty other people.

Haaaahahahahaha.

I feel like I have a great big '1' drawn on the invisible scoreboard of my life, somewhere.

A Really Cool Book 'Shop' and an Awkward Near-Encounter

Today, I met up with my friend Min-Hwee in the west end. We had lunch in Chinatown at Jen Café and then had tea at Camellia's Tea House on Carnaby Street. When we were walking around on Carnaby Street we came across a book exchange: the Carnaby Book Exchange.

Totally free, you can come in, choose a book and sit down for a good read, or you can bring in an old book of yours to leave and take another away.

You're also encouraged to leave a note for another reader to find. So Min-Hwee and I went in on a mini-quest to find a book with a note.

Min-Hwee found one on her first try- a really old book (can't remember what it was) with the message 'Take care of yourself'' pencilled in on the inside of the front cover. It took me a while to find a book with a message, but when I did it was a good one.

This was the book I picked up:

I actually have this book too: it's an amazing bit of non-fiction.

I was surprised someone had left this, because it really is a very powerful book- Min-Hwee was too (she also has the book at home). When I turned the front cover, I found out why.

Both Min-Hwee and I are Chinese (well, I'm half-Chinese, to be exact), so we found it pretty funny.

Now to the awkward near-encounter... at the time, ironically, my friend and I were talking about who we still kept in contact with from our old school, and who we'd bumped into recently. We were in a shop when she suddenly pointed and said,

"Look, that girl was from our school! Wasn't she in your year?"

I looked around, and noticed the girl- two of them together in fact- were indeed from my year, if not from my class.

"Should we go say hello to them?" Min-Hwee asked.

"No!!" I suddenly felt a bit panicked: I'd never really been on speaking terms with these two at school so I felt like it would be a bit fake to go over and be all friendly and 'hiiii I haven't seen you in aaaaages' etc. etc. And to my further horror, I realised that I'd also forgotten their names.

I'll tell you now: I'm really, really appalling with names. As soon as I meet someone I warn them of this. Lots of people claim they're bad with names, but really, they're not too bad and just putting a polite disclaimer in, just in case. No, my brain forcibly ejects names from my mind like a pilot from a failing aircraft, often within a matter of seconds of being told someone's name, and then I have to be told several times over and over again afterwards. I try really, really hard, I honestly do, and it's certainly nothing personal- but I've always been like this. I used to dread being made to give out everyone's workbooks at school after the teacher had marked them because I couldn't remember which named book belonged to which classmate (particularly when our classes were 'disbanded' and we started mixing with other people from our year).

I explained this in hushed tones to my friend after she asked me if I was sure, and we hung back a bit to allow my former school peers to get a head start once they left the shop. After a few minutes passed, we (cautiously) emerged.

"Did you see which way they went?" I asked nervously.

"Yes, I think they went in that direction." And Min-Hwee unwittingly pointed straight at my two former schoolmates, who were only a few yards away.

"Agh, they're right there!" We both spun around and started to walk in the other direction, to find it was a dead end. We faced another two directions: more dead ends! By now I was giggling almost hysterically at this ridiculous situation, and pretty sure they could now hear the nervous ruckus I was making.

Eventually my two former school peers headed off.

"Did you think they saw me?" I asked.

"Well... one of them actually looked straight at you at one point- I'm pretty sure they did."

This calmed me down a bit. Surely if they saw me, recognised me and actually wanted to come over and say hi, they would, right? But they didn't- just like me. Maybe because they were in the same predicament and didn't remember my name and knew we weren't really close at school. Or, more embarrassingly, they sensed my unease and felt put off by my perhaps-obvious awkwardness.

I actually remember one of their names now- but I won't write it down, just in case they ever read this blog. Yes, I'm that freaking awkward.

~Fin~

QUEST! The Mystery of the Lost SD Card

Has anyone seen any of these guys before?

My friend Gurpreet visited from Birmingham last weekend and found an SD on the tube with 421 of someone else's holiday images on it, and now he's trying to find the owner to return the card to them- aside from sharing and passing on this photo on Facebook (hoping the whole seven degrees of separation thing works somewhere down the road), here's m contribution to his quest.

A little background on Gurp- crazy things happen to me weekly. Positively insane things happen to Gurp almost every day. One of my personal favourite stories of his is the time he accidentally ingested antifreeze, managed to stagger to a wedding without dying, and accidentally found out at the wedding that whisky is a legitimate cure for antifreeze poisoning (no joke- but don't try it at home, kids). Just before he visited we were joking that with the two of us in the same place in the same time, something mind-blowing was bound to happen. In fact within the first five minutes of us and a few other friends meeting up a cash management van drove straight into a set of traffic lights right next to us.

Anyway, let's continue with the real story. It was after lunch, and five of us, mostly of battle reenactment stock, were strolling down Carnaby Street.

"Tash, did I tell you about the SD card?" Asked Gurp.

He, Drefan (otherwise known as Adam, and another friend I met through battle reenactment society- another story) and Drefan's girlfriend Julia were on the tube from Tooting Broadway to Leicester Square, on the northern line, when they found the SD card. We were all pretty excited, trying to guess what was stored on the little memory card- we decided that the most likely ones were definitely either holiday snaps, or a secret government mission that we'd have to take up on the demise of the previous owner/ secret agent and then the card would self-destruct as soon as we'd received further instructions.

Gods, we really hoped it was the latter.

When Gurp returned home he popped the card into his camera (reasoning that it was less likely to corrupt and destroy his camera than his computer if there was any bad software on the card), and found over four hundred photos. Gurp being Gurp, and never one to back down on a quest, began his detective work (which has already proven successful in the past when it comes to random lost items).

After looking through the photos for clues, landmarks and signs, he managed to deduce the following things:

-The photos were of a group of people backpacking in Venezuela

-The group of people seemed to range from 18-25 years old

- At least one of them belongs to C.U.L.N.C, the Cambridge University Ladies' Netball Club

- The SD card was (as mentioned) dropped on that Northern Line train

So. If anyone reading this happens to know anything, please tell these people to get in touch so we can return their awesome-looking memories. If you're the owner(s) of these pictures, so sorry we looked through them and I hope you don't mind me posting these two photos- I hope we can get the pics back to you!

Review: Opera at the Cinema

When I got back from the special screening of Tosca (see my last entry), I wrote an article straight away. Unfortunately I didn't really know what to do with it. So here it is.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

When I say opera, what do you think of? Women in massive dresses and equally massive wigs? Long, melodramatic soliloquies of a character who is apparently dying but still has enough breath left to sing for a good five minutes? Do you imagine the audience to be made up of snooty upper-class people in sequins and top hats, sporting tiny jewel-encrusted binoculars on golden handles?

Perhaps this is a bit of an exaggerated, almost cartoonish take on how people view opera, but I’m pretty sure plenty of people reading this are nodding in agreement, even if they know deep down it’s a little bit silly. I also know that it’s exactly these types of social and cultural stigmata, as well as the price of opera tickets in general, that have been behind the decline of opera’s popularity over the recent years. It’s seen as inaccessible, attended only by those who can afford it, and who understand it. In short, from the outside it can seem a little bit elitist.

This is, apparently, where the silver screen comes in to save the day.

This evening I was lucky enough to be invited to a special screening of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca at Vue Westfield, recorded live from the Royal Opera House. I’ll admit now that I have, in fact, studied opera in the past as part of my music degree, so I’m not exactly uninitiated, and I know what to look out for in terms of the structure of story and music. My knowledge of opera, on the flip side, also allows me to see how some might feel intimidated by the whole concept.

This is why I really appreciated the conductor’s brief but avid summary of the main characters and the story’s setting before the main show began. It broke the ice really well, and I felt that it made a huge difference in how ready the audience was to absorb the music and storyline. For example, the conductor (Antonio Pappano) highlighted a scene in Act III where Puccini tries to incorporate real church bells ringing at different locations offstage for a more authentic morning-in-Rome feel: when the scene itself occurred later on, I felt like we (the audience) all knew about the special secret behind the scene, which made it all the more enjoyable.

The show itself was, of course, perfect: the powerful Angela Gheorghiu leading as the fiery, jealous woman-in-love Tosca; smouldering Jonas Kaufmann as Tosca’s dashing lover, painter and rebel Cavaradossi; brilliant Bryn Terfel flourishing as the astoundingly malevolent, love-to-hate-him Chief of Police, Scarpia. Their voices were phenomenal, but the unique beauty of watching them on screen lay with the strategic camerawork. You’d have to pay good money to sit close enough to see every expression on every character’s face in the theatre, but in the cinema we were treated to a view from every character’s perspective. It’s in this way that the audience is also gently directed towards connecting with the characters.

Watching the whole thing with Vue’s Breatht4King technology (boasting four times the megapixels of 2K and HD), with high frame rates for fluid movement on screen and a wallop-packing sound system, I felt myself at times almost forgetting that I was in the cinema. I was hoping for a way in which opera would become more accessible to the masses, and I got that and more: not only does cinema-opera mean that opera doesn’t have to be limited to whoever can afford it, or whoever lives in a big city with an opera house, but it also provides a light and non-patronising way of educating the audience about the show, too.  Even better, it gives you a view of the action you don’t even get at the theatre unless you happen to be in the very prime seats.

Vue is about to launch a series of live-broadcast and recorded screenings of productions going on at the Royal Opera House, including operas and ballets (the latter being another cultural thing I believe people should appreciate more), and I do hope that this easier way of accessing them encourages more people to give them a go. Hopefully one day the image of top hats and jewel-encrusted binoculars will become more of a thing of amusing history rather than a modern-day caricature.

A Pseudo-Cinderella Evening

What's more awkward than sharpening your blunt-from-lack-of-practice flirting skills on a cheeky barrista in a coffee shop? Flirting with the barrista and suddenly realising your mother is watching you disapprovingly.

After work yesterday, my mum asked me if I'd be interested in going to a special screening of the opera Tosca at Vue Westfield. I was there in a flash- I love opera, I love cinema, and I've always wanted to go to one of the interesting functions my mum often gets to go to as part of her job (she works for a media production and promotion company). I also saw it as an opportunity to practise my networking skills- I'm a keen writer, but I'm quite a clumsy conversationlist at times because my brain often works faster than my mouth is able to formulate the right words. So, feeling relieved that I always dress well for work anyway and was already wearing a nice dress and boots, I made my way there.

I met mum at the Starbucks near the station there, and went up to grab a hot chocolate, and ended up chatting/ flirting lightheartedly with the barrista guy before remember that my mum was sat right behind me, and was quite opening staring at us. I was all the more mortified when it came to paying and my well-meaning mum suddenly called me and thrust a handful of money in my direction (which I very politely declined, laughing 'thanks, don't worry about it' but dying a bit inside at the same time). At least the barrista guy seemed to appreciate the fact that I stacked everything up neatly before we moved on- having worked in catering before I always make a point of trying to make serving staff's lives as easy as possible.

The rest of the evening was quite surreal- there I was in the posh part of the cinema, smartly dressed and sipping glasses of champagne, eating tiny canapes and schmoozing with other guests (making a joke of the fact that I was only a 'plus one' and that my mum was really the one in the media industry, but no-one seemed to mind), and then going on to see an opera, albeit on screen. At one point I rather inelegantly sent a chunk of feta cheese flying whilst gesturing wildly, which was quite embarrassing (I cleaned it up myself- again, less work for the waiting staff), but far worse embarrassing things have happened to me, so it didn't bother me too much, so it didn't bother anyone else either (I hope).

I think I made a good (read: at very least memorable..!) impression, on the whole, even if I never meet any of these people again. One guy likened me to Katniss from the Hunger Games when me doing archery somehow came into the conversation,which was slightly amusing in an ironic way, seeing as I'd met someone a few days ago who reminded me of Peeta Mellark from the movie version (see my previous entry). Anyway, it was great fun getting to know different people and with just the right amount of glamour without me feeling ridiculous and out of place, and I could get used to that sort of life- although I know it was a one-off. I felt like Cinderella, going around talking to Important People at an Exclusive Event, going home by midnight. In any case, I've definitely come a long way in terms of being able to go around a room and talk to strangers by myself, and I hope I can only get better.

I also hope I get better at keeping small cubes of cheese on little blinis as opposed to on the floor, too.

~Fin~

Afterword: I wrote a short article about Vue cinema's campaign to bring opera to the silver screen and make it more accessible to the masses, I'll post a link or something when I figure out where to publish it.

My First Metal Concert/ People-Sniffing

I have been listening to Nightwish since I was about fifteen years old- so ten years, then. Not only have I never seen them live before, but I've never seen any band live, so I was pretty damn excited for my first one to be Nightwish.

I queued up outside the Birmingham O2 Academy with my friend Lucia in my black skinny jeans, burgundy biker-style jacket and great big boots just in case anyone would be treading on anyone else's feet (I figured I'd go for the 'crush or be crushed' approach), brimming with anticipation and yes, a little bit of fear too- another friend had warned me about things like walls of death and circle pits (both forms of extreme moshing- look them up on YouTube for an idea of the carnage that can occur), and I was warned to avoid the front and stay towards the back.

So, of course, you can guess where I ended up being chivvied.

I needn't have worried though- although there was the odd bit of pushing and shoving up at front, the crowd was quite diverse in age and nature and, for the most part, surprisingly courteous to each other. At one point a quad of loudmouthed yobs tried to start a wall of death by bodyslamming around, but to my amusement were met with very icy and very British glares all round from long-haired young metalheads to more mature-looking revellers alike. It was a real mix of real people- mostly of student stock, of course, but plenty of people in the next tier of age like myself, and quite a few more seasoned concert goers, too. I even saw an old boy in a wheelchair up in the circle.

However, I happened to have two freaking weird people behind me for a large portion of the concert. The guy, who I shall refer to as Curlybonce for his mop of corkscrew hair, was as dull as a marshmallow spoon, and the girl- possibly his girlfriend- who I shall refer to as Rainbowhead for her admittedly awesome rainbow-striped hair, was, well... anyway, Curleybonce's eyes looked like this: =_= and Rainbowhead's eyes looked like this: O_O, so they were both at very least thoroughly marinated. Throughout the supporting band Pain's performance I was vaguely aware of someone pressing up right against my back and almost in the crook of my neck, but hey, I was more or less in a mosh pit (although people were only really lightly moshing at the best of times), so it didn't really bother me much (and certainly not as much as later on when a big guy was flush against me and there was something not-quite-right digging into my back... again, I chalked that up to a hazard of being in the stalls).

I think it was when the supporting band Pain went offstage that I felt a small hand on my shoulder. I turned around to find Rainbowhead's nose about two inches from mine, her wide eyes staring into my soul. She said to me in hushed tones,

"Excuse me, but you smell absolutely incredible."

Er.

"I do?" My super-friendly defence mechanism kick-started itself and I grinned like a maniac. "Haha, aww, thank you!"

"Yes, you smell amazing." She edged closer and I tried and failed to take a step back, having nowhere to go in the sardine can that was the front of the stalls. "Tell me, what do you use?"

"It's this new oil perfume from Lush- do you know Lush?" I said, feeling more like I was in my element now (being a Lush fan for many years and having worked for them at one point). "It's called Sikkim Girls." I smiled and turned around, thinking I'd done my job and been helpful. I felt the small hand on my shoulder again and turned around, Rainbowhead's face still occupying the same amount of my personal space as it had before.

"Is it Vanillary?"

"Er... no it's... it's Sikkim Girls. It's more of a-"

"Hey guys you really need to check this out, come over and smell her she smells amazing!" Rainbowhead had whipped around to address Curlybonce and a few others apparently from their group, and she whipped back round at me. "Come back here so everyone can smell you!"

Feeling quite like I was quite back out of my element again, I faltered. "I'm really quite happy right here where I am, thank you..."

"Aww, but I want everyone to check your perfume out, come on!"

"Um, no?"

Lucia (keeping in mind this is the same friend who I mentioned a while back got married in June), who had been previously jostled relentlessly by Rainbowhead's erratic 'dancing' and was watching in disbelief, rounded on Rainbowhead and told her to cut it out.

"Oh," Said Rainbowhead in a mock-conspiratory tone to me, "I'd better leave you alone, I don't think your friend- or girlfriend, whichever- likes me."

"Just friend", I laughed, just as Lucia snapped "Her friend, actually."

Rainbowhead shrugged and smiled dreamily. "Friend, girlfriend, who knows?"

"I know, and I'm telling you." Lucia retorted (as I tried not to laugh even harder at my friend's loyal outrage on my behalf and at this girl's obliviousness). Lucia gritted her teeth as Rainbowhead imitated her voice and turned her back to her.

As for Curlybonce, he kept shoving into me and elbowing me in the head for most of the supporting act until I yelled 'Oi' and Lucia poked him and told him to back off (met only with this face: =_= and without a word). Then, later on when marshals were getting us to pass cups of water down to the rest of the crowd, he wouldn't take it.

'=_=', He gazed at me.

"Please pass this on," I politely requested, feeling that it should have been plainly obvious to him that this was the general idea of passing water back but trying to remain gracious.

His gormless gaze took on a slightly annoyed look, and he didn't budge an inch.

And very suddenly, I lost my patience.

"At-least-pass-the-damned-thing-on," I snarled at him, shoving the cup closer to his face. His face took on a slightly more affronted look, and he slowly and wordlessly took the cup of water from me and passed it behind him.

Thankfully the two of them moved on shortly after. The concert itself was amazing though, with a lot of my favourites played- and I got to see the keyboardist/ main composer Tuomas in the flesh, whom I used to have a bit of a thing for when I first got into Nightwish (I mentally high-fived my past teenage self when he settled on the same side of the stage as where I was facing). Also, for the few annoying sods that there were, the presence of a few nice one made all the difference- we got talking a bit to a guy called Kevin from Devon, who seemed like a genuinely nice dude and we thought looked a bit like Peeta Mellark from the Hunger Games (Kevin, if you ever stumble across this blog, you're mad for going back to work in Devon literally the day after and I hope you got home alright), and there was another girl just in front of us who was quite friendly too.

All in all, I felt it was quite genteel for a metal concert- certainly it was good fun. I'm glad no circle pits or anything happened, despite a handful of idiots' best efforts. Now if only I could get a hold of some infamously illusive tickets to see Muse (which usually sell out in minutes and are subsequently found on eBay for a shocking amount)... it certainly won't be my last band concert, that's for sure.

~Fin~

RANT: Answering the Phone

I think it's high time this blog had a rant tag- here we go!

Today, something happened when I picked up the ringing phone. Something that has been happening to me more and more frequently recently, and not just with one caller.

Ring ring.

Me: 'Hello?'

Caller: 'Hello?'

Whooooawhoawhoawhoa. Time out. Stop. Hold up. Wait a minute. Let's look into the whole etiquette of phoning someone, shall we?

When you call someone, unless you've arranged a set time with someone, have a personalised ring tone (and maybe a picture that pops up if on a mobile phone) for them or they're having a transient psychic moment, the other person isn't going to know who's calling. So, when the other person picks up and they (usually) ask 'Hello?', the logical and just plain decent thing to do is reply with 'Hi, it's *blank*'.

See? Simple, quick, to the point. Maybe if you're good friends you can add a funny noise or signature sentence, or another few words of your choice- anything that lets the other person know who's calling. What you don't do when someone picks up and goes 'Hello?' is to go 'Hello?' right back.

What the hell do you mean, 'Hello?'? You're the one that called me!

See, what you've done here is to answer a question with a question- which is not only maddeningly obstructive and confusing, but could also be considered impolite. When I picked up and said 'Hello?' I wasn't just greeting you, I was also very politely asking 'Who are you?' When you ask 'Hello?' right after me, to me you're just asking 'Well, who are you?'

Don't give me that, even if I'm not the one who you expected to pick up, you know who you're after and could at very least introduce yourself.

Now, this applies even to normal people. However, I also have the added fun little bonus of being a bit 'voice blind', or whatever you want to call it. In a nutshell, I find it hard to recognise people's voices, even people who I've known for years- and over the phone I find it pretty much impossible (a real head-scratcher, because I also have absolute pitch, which means I can identify any musical note without being told what it is, or sing back a note you tell me to sing without hearing it first). Anyway, the long and short of it is, I doubly don't know who you are when you call me. In fact this became a running joke at my last job, which partially involved having good links and relationships with suppliers and staff based elsewhere over the phone; my colleagues and the others I worked with learnt that they had to go 'Hi, it's *blank*' when I picked up, or at least teasingly 'Hey Tash, guess who it is?' (I did get slightly better at recognising everyone after almost two years there- slightly, but not completely).

Like I said at the beginning, the phenomenon of picking up the phone and being met with a 'Hello?' right back has been occurring more and more recently. I can't imagine why, especially when you tend to know when you're calling a home phone number as opposed to a mobile phone number, and especially when you're family or a friend. So today, a bit fed up of this nonsense (and already in a prickly mood from being patronised by a cashier at the supermarket over a type of apple), I just 'hello-ed' right back again to see how far it would go.

As the non-conversation progressed I did begin to recognise the family member of whom the increasingly confused voice belonged to, but I stuck to it to prove my theory that they knew exactly who had picked up the phone and/ or who they wanted to speak to. Let's take it from the top (and I sh*t you not, this is exactly how the call went).

Me: 'Hello?'

Caller: 'Hello?'

Me: 'Hello?'

Caller '... Hello?'

Me: 'Hello?'

Caller: 'Er... hello?'

Me: 'Hello?'

Caller: 'Hellohellohello? Is this Tash?'

Me: 'Hello!'

Caller: 'Can I speak to your mum, please?'

What did I tell you?

~Fin~