Self & Prescribed

Three days ago I switched from taking Effexor to Pristiq, or venlafaxine to desvenlafaxine. The latter is a sort of 'remastered' release of the former, in order to keep the pharmaceutical patent alive, but although the molecular difference is cosmetic, the actual affect is quite marked. All anti-depressants have dulled my mind, bruised my memory capacity and generally made me vague and scatterbrained, but Effexor takes that dumbening to new depths. Unfortunately, Pristiq is not available in the EU/UK, so for the past year I have been endumbened.

It's amazing how little it takes to shake an awareness up and down. Mere milligrams is what I, we, the medicated sorehearts, take. Measures so small as to mean absolutely nothing in that small terracotta pill in the palm of your hand, which you're sure is comprised mostly of chalk and hope. Molecules, a mere additional arm, nothing, and these three days you've felt such an upheaval in your nethermind. Tearstorms and rotten softness where once you thought you were strong. You tell your friends and you tell your family; it isn't me. It's just chemistry. It'll be done in a week or so.

You tell yourself it isn't you.

We, you, I rarely speak of the faith required of medication. The invisible substance you take will alter you, and alter your ability to perceive this alteration. It will gift you with an emotional vertigo unwarranted by your surroundings. It will make you worse, so much worse, and the only thing you can do is trust, believe, hope, that it will get better. It must get better.

Please let it get better.

Last week I attended a PostSecret event at the Arts Centre. I've been following PostSecret for years, and so was not unprepared for the heartstring tugging that those hours contained. Strangers stood before a crowd of hundreds and confessed to personal crimes that stole their voices, a powerful and what should have been liberating and uplifting act, but when I left and stood at the station waiting for my train, I felt tired, deeply worn, helpless. There is so much hurt walking around these ordinary streets behind these ordinary faces. Tasting the scope of this suffering is to stop where you stand, close your eyes, and lie down right there.

There was one secret shared - the only man to stand and bare himself - in which the words spoken were a carefully crafted fish hook on a very long line, and I didn't realise I was caught and leaving a tangled trail behind me as I walked all over town.

He said that anti-depressants saved him,  have made him so much better, but it was before he started taking them that he has never felt so alive.

It's been years of medication and health obstacles, and nothing has changed except my perspective. I want to write, now. I'm not scared any more. Actually I've been bashing my head at writing for some months now, and a growing part of me suspects that this medication truly is interfering. Or is that the excuse I've come up with to hide behind? I don't know. I can't tell.

Still, strive for this. Stretch and strain. My application for part-time has been approved, and now every Wednesday is mine. The driving motivation for this was pain management, as the last three Fridays I've had a major meltdown from the stress of trying to hold myself together through the working week, as the pain signal gets steadily louder and more ragged. Fatigue has continued to dog my heels, so I must assume it is not merely the rigor of travel that was flattening me previously. Hopefully breaking the week in two will offer enough respite that I shall be able to keep on top of things, whatever those things may be.

Sadly that old paradigm remains in place, and on what should be a day of rest I will feel guilt for using my time for myself.

But maybe that's the medication talking. Maybe it's all just chemistry.

What I want, what I miss, what I long for more than anything else is Loch Broom.   I want that cold North Sea water, a finger of the Minch sneaking into the west coast of Scotland to lie lazy between the hills. A beach of rocks worn delightfully smooth, older than dinosaurs and covered in lost kelp and discarded crab shells. The languid wail of herring gulls punctuated by the piping of oyster catchers. I miss the constant salt in the air, air that has been tossed over the isles and mountains and seas. I miss the hills, barren of trees but so full of hunched life, heather and gorse grumpy and gorgeous. I miss the way the sun  would play through the mountain passes and the clouds would curl over the peaks as though suddenly shy. I miss the certainty that, no matter how much turbulence I carried in my heart, I could look out a window and see-

Collecting Homes & Between Them

It's been only four days since leaving Glasgow, and yet it already feels like that moist cold flat happened to someone else in some other lifetime. Four days and three cities and three different sets of wonderful warm people. There was no snow in Glasgow, nor in Manchester, but the land all around is six inches deep in white and the powder growing as our double decker bus hurtled south. There's looking like a tourist, and there's gawping at snow hitting the window, stuck to trees and falling from the sky.

(The majestic turn of wind turbines made mysterious and magical in the blur of snow, against a snow-blank sky and anchored to snow-buried hills.)

Returning to places you do not know intimately yet have established a memory landscape upon is a curious deception. While I know the homes my friends have opened to me well, their city streets are hazy recollections. I have no idea of the layout of Manchester and Nottingham but managed to find tea shops I'd enjoyed in both and enjoy them a second time.

The sharing of such discoveries is a new thing for me, still. Perhaps always. J approves of one tea shop and disapproves of another. We both discover a retro game store and the oldest pub in England. He meets friends I have known so long yet have never met, and seeing that my friends also enjoy my friends is a cockle-warming delight.

This tour through England is something of a long goodbye, which is odd because it is Scotland that was our home. Somewhere between Glasgow and Manchester we crossed the border and it was a moment unnoticed and unmarked. I was probably dozing. Possibly snoring.

(J is intent on the 'hams' of England, having hit Birmingham/Burning Ham and Nottingham/Not A Ham and just now noted Grant Ham and Bing Ham on bus billings as they swing past the window.)

So many people- Wait, let me correct that. So many Scots asked me "Why Scotland?" There isn't really a neat answer to that question. It might have been due to Braveheart, or it might have been due to generic fat fantasy worlds harkening back to the shared delusion of what the Highlands are. Perhaps it was simply because it was far away, full of mist and crags and dark grass and all the things that weren't to be found in my backyard.

Now, knowing I won't set foot in that rich soggy land for some years to come, I can say definitively and certainly, it is because Scotland is my home on the other side of the world.

The Irrelevance of History

We're sitting in The Kenilworth in Edinburgh, a traditional pub with a ridiculous variety of whiskeys available. On the skirting around the bar island the fact that the building is dated form 1789 is written in a neat calligraphy in gold paint on dark varnished wood.

The first encampment establishing Australia as a penal colony of the British Empire happened on 26 January 1788. Thousands of years of Aboriginal culture carpeted over just like that. That is the Australia of today. 225 years old.

It is a surreal thing to have a pint and a pie in a place that is older than the nation you grew up in, especially when you have memories of the bi-centennial celebrations of 1988, of a school assembly in primary school, being tasked to make vaguely nationalistic posters and not entirely understanding why this particular date was so important, why you were given a special medal commemorating the anniversary, because at 7 years old you do not yet have a sense of time, of age, as at 7 years old you have not stood on the Great Wall of China, walked the streets of Edo, stood in the Cave of Hands, hid from a squall beneath Stonehenge, or come to understand how much you can learn in 10 years and how stupid you were 10 years ago.

Moments like these happen have happened over and over the past year. London was overwhelming. It seemed every building, every street corner, ever mail box had a little plaque commemorating this or noting that. The history of the place was inescapable, and so deep as to drown us all. How can anyone go about their everyday lives when there are tombs in the footpath? How are you supposed to pop down the store for a pint of milk when the building is advertising the fact that it was rebuilt after a zeppelin raid during the war? How can you do anything when you are surrounded by history which demands your attention and respect?

 I guess you just carry on, as everyone else here appears to be doing.

(Aside: Glasgow has shifted my sliding scale on what I consider eye candy, and whoa, there are so many pretty things walking around Edinburgh I'm getting whiplash. J is giving me a lot of shit for flirting with the bartender.)

Peace of Mind is a Privilege

Walking home alone from the middle of Glasgow city along the Gallowgate and through the Barras to our dingy flat in Calton is not a tour of the scenic parts of Glasgow. Do a search for 'Calton' and in quite a number of hits the word 'deprivation' will also appear, along with frequent mention of the fact that the life expectancy of a male in Calton is 54 years, which puts it on par with Iraq and Gaza, areas which experience military combat. The Tongs used to call it home, to the point where Calton was once known as Tongland. It is still wearing that reputation of violence, even though the gang has moved on and the violence has mellowed. I have heard it said that Calton has the highest crime rate in Western Europe, but haven't been able to turn up anything to substantiate that.

Suffice it to say, this place isn't pretty. It's tenement blocks and abandoned schools. Three of the latter within a three block radius of our flat, to be honest. There are vacant lots overgrown with grass and nettles and full of trash. The streets are well littered, plastic bags and polystyrene take away containers, drink bottles, buckfast bottles, straws and bottle caps, couches, fridges, miscellaneous pieces of large broken plastic, window frames and chocolate wrappers, you know, rubbish. That which is unwanted and yet does not go away. There's grass growing in all the roof guttering, personalitiless graffiti, and numerous potholes in the streets. I've written previously about that which goes on in our tenement alone. Add to that list now finding a complete and used heroin kit (very budget, I might add) in the hallway, used syringe and dirty spoon and all. Add to that the kids smoking pot who kicked a massive crack in our front door when an upstairs neighbour told them to get out.

Tonight, while walking back from the pub, a sole man of subcontinental lineage attached himself to me. He was well presented and did not ping on my threat radar. Comments back and forth concerning how warm it was (look, 11º in January is warm for Scotland, okay?) were similarly non-threatening, but because I am not only an introvert but a woman walking alone at night who is hyper aware of the risks faced by all women walking alone at night, I attempted to part ways quickly.

This completely failed because, as it turns out, he lives exactly one block down the street.

Normally this would unsettle me, as, well, I don't know him. I don't like random strangers who want to make conversation knowing where I live. I don't think anyone does. However, his cousins were unloading the car as we walked up, and there is an odd feeling of community in our little corner of Calton, and I really did not feel threatened.

What he did do, however, was warn me against walking in these streets, being a sole woman.

This lead to talking about the nice places in Glasgow, the west side where all the rich people are, which led me to:

1. bristle and fume that a man dares attempt to offer advice on how to keep myself safe because holy shit I know already anyway this post is not about that; and
2. reflect that safety, or the idea of safety, is a privilege of the wealthy.

Having lived in Calton for around half a year now, I can state that no, it isn't the nicest of neighbourhoods, and yes, its reputation is greatly exaggerated. While the detritus of junkies is unpleasant to behold, the kick in the door is the worst we've had. In all my solo darkness jaunts I have not once had trouble, I've never even had anyone call out to me. Calton is full of the elderly, who walk slowly to the corner store to buy cigarettes and the paper, and grandparents who own large dogs in small flats and walk them regularly, and young families the kids of which leave their bikes on the grass out the front of their tenements. As a freelancer I'm nocturnal. I walk all hours of the dark, from 4 in the afternoon to 3 in the morning. The Neds are present and visible, and have never once bothered me.

And, if we could afford it, I'd be out of here in a second. 

(Before this goes on, I want to state that living in a lower socioeconomic area does not guarantee crime/danger, nor does living in a higher one guarantee safety. From my experience, living in a well to do area simply means that the ability to hide any problems from attention is present and used.)

I don't want to be hyper alert when walking. I don't like constantly scanning my surroundings and gauging whether to cross a road or keep on this side. That I am uncomfortable sitting in the front room, with our window at street level, is a stressful thing, as this should be my safe place. I hate knowing that my uneventful time here is attributed not only to vigilance but luck as well. 

But we couldn't afford the west side. 

When we get home, back in Melbourne, Australia, we'll face the same decision: at exactly what point to compromise between affordable rent and safe surroundings. 

Safety is something that can be bought. You buy or rent in a safe neighbourhood, in a quiet street. You can pay for taxis to take you home instead of walking. Hell, you could even own your own car.

It must be said that I do tend to walk alone at night not only because it's cheap, but because I refuse to avoid the streets due to fear, a fear that may be unfounded. The distances are small enough here that, should I wish it, I can take a taxi home and it won't kill our bank account. There are buses running most of the night. Walking is a deliberate choice on my part.

But it is worth bearing in mind that on those occasions you feel someone may be putting themselves in unnecessary risk merely by getting from A to B, or by living in C, that they may not have any better option open to them. 

In such instances, telling them that it's not safe is remarkably unhelpful, because believe me, they know it, and they know it a hell of a lot better than you. Don't berate them for what they already know they cannot do anything about. Remember that it is not for you to dictate another person's threat tolerance, nor is the insistance on some alternate means of movement that would require extra finances ever wanted. 

If it is in your means and desire to make a difference, walk or drive that person home, if they wish it. If they need to have a momentary break and rant or whinge about the streets that scare them, support them in that moment. They will get back to being unafraid in a bit.

Most of us don't live in a nice safe world. We can see it, or something closer to it only a few kilometres away, but we can't live there. We compromise. We struggle for better. Sometimes we get better, and sometimes we don't. 

We all decide what we are willing to live with, within the restrictions we live with. Remember that although what each of us decides may be different, it is not for any of us to force our priorities of finances or safety on others.

First Snow in Glasgow

I have not the vocabulary to talk about ice. 

Snow seems a gift. We seek a 'higher' power, we look up for hope, to the sky, the heavens, which hold that which gives us life, be it deity or the sun. That above gives snow as a gift. It comes quiet and soft, and for a little while brings with it the greater gift of newness. Of cleanliness. For a little while, all the traces of your passing are hidden. You can pretend that you, too, are fresh and original. For the soul that has not lived with snow, snow is the closest we will ever come to magic.

Ice is not magic. Ice is not kind. It hides nothing. The frost grows imperceptibly slow. You cannot watch it advance. Frost defines the liminal, highlighting the borders of all things and in doing so reminding you of the presence of the garbage littering the streets that you had long ago stopped seeing. Gum long bonded with the pavement is made a doily, the eternal pothole puddle a post-modern resin work examining the strata of urban filth. The streets themselves now capture and exhibit all evidence of your wake; the roads hold tyre marks, the footpaths keep your footprints. Still the air is full of water, and what you breathe is razors. All those puddles that never cleared congeal into sharp clots, then films and sheafs crystal papers. You step on each puddle cautiously. Most are solid now, and give you nothing, not even friction. Some yet remain with a belly of water, or air, and those you stomp on with glee. Something about that crackle and crunch of ice underfoot. Something so satisfying in that crisp sound, that crisp give. 

I cannot talk about ice. I cannot talk about myself.

The Best of Gingers

Glasgow has imported the continental tradition of the Christmas Market. It started in St Enoch Square tonight. Small, but surprising in the quality and diversity of stalls on offer. Our particular discovery of hither unknown treasure is some amazingly incredible delicious non-alcoholic ginger wine, served piping hot and perfect. Two bottles of Papa's Mineral Company also make a variety of cordials, and I'll definitely be going back to pick up a bottle of the Winterberry Cordial, which sounds incredible. Glaswegians can pick up one bottle for £6 or two for £10. Very much recommended.

We also stumbled across "real fake snow!" which "feels cold! TOUCH ME!" which we did touch. And it felt wrong. So wrong. Rubbery and yet slimy without being viscous or sticky. Cold because it had sat on a shelf outside for hours. The sales rep offered to demonstrate the snow - how does one demonstrate snow? it just sits there being snowy, which it was already doing quite well - and pour a little from a vial into J's hand, slightly different consistency. He then added water, at which point the 'snow' IF IT REALLY IS SNOW got its hulk on and promptly tripled in volume, overflowing through J's fingers. The chemical reaction was enough to produce marked heat. "Non-toxic," they assured us. "Perfectly safe. It's some sort of polymer."

Look, to me it looked like exactly the sort of mysterious innocuous substance that turns up in an episode of Doctor Who and is ultimately some sinister mind-control body-morphing world-enslavement goop enabler. That's all I'm saying.

 To cap off a cold and wet stroll through the markets we returned to a small booth selling liquor-enhanced hot chocolates, and did I ever buy a massive thick goopy hot chocolate laced with Baileys, by golly.

 It threw me back to Prague where I spent the beginning of the year walking around without any particular goal other than to turn down as many curious little alleys as possible. There, the selling of hot alcoholic beverages in take-away cups was standard, and I loved it. It's no doubt a mark of my legal imprinting in Australia but walking around with a delicious hot drink that was deliciously spiked with delicious felt deliciously naughty. It also gave a lovely glow to the bitter cold, and kept my hands warm.

Ullapool, now Tessa Base Camp

If I walk to the end of the verandah, this is what I can see. In the foreground, beyond the frame of this glimpse, a flock of ducks scabbling lazily as they settle on the grass in the dying light.

The shore is stone. The loch is sea. Dried weeds amid the pebbles. On the steps to the footpath a shattering of mussel and scallop shells, derelict barnacles and crushed mother-of-pearl.

A raised voice echoing around a corner. Such fury and vehemence. Don't you dare. Get back here.

To my left, an empty carpark. Two horses in coats, clopping in tandem across that space between buildings. Whingeing whinny and snort.

For a moment, I believe the supermarket not to stock bananas. For a moment.

There is no wind down by the water. The air is cold, too cold busy itself. The silence surrounding me as I stand in the daffodils is dense with space.

Ed, En, BRAAAAH of Rooftops

Just one of the many closes that form the ribs from the spine of the Royal Mile.

In New York it was water tanks. In the UK, it's chimneys. Seriously. WTF.


And Edinburgh is just such a bloody pretty town, yet so full of winds and trees and twists it is near impossible to photograph.


How is it possible to be both orderly and ramshackle at the same time?


The monument to Sir Walter Scott, for contributions to Scottish literature, a revival of Scottish culture and raising interest and passion in Scotch identity.
A monument to a writer.
A writer.

Employment QET

It's very hard to pull out of the "I'm travelinq! I have no responsibilities! I am beholden to no one and nothinq!" mindset. As far as mindsets qo, it's a bloody awesome one, sinqularly unfettered, brazen and indulqent.

But, the monies. The UK £ eats and punches and qenerally stomps all over the AUD$, and I did come all this way to try my hand at a different life. Durinq my second week in London I made a lazy perusal of ads for live-in jobs, found one in the remote north-west of Scotland, and after takinq several days to write a sinqle paqe CV (seriously, aqencies of the Victorian Public Service, SHORT RESUMES ARE AWESOME), emailed that off. And continued flouncinq around museums and the like, with qreat intentions to look and apply for further jobs. Qreat intentions.

Anyway, I haven't applied for anythinq else. I haven't even looked.

Which is fine, because I qot that job.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

First: QLEE!
Second: Excitement!
Third: Shock.
Fourth: ...wait, this means I'm qoinq to have to start qettinq up in the morninqs?
Fifth: QLEE!