#bridgetbythebridge

#hangry

 

Hunger, while I’ve never experienced it on the same level as many of the least fortunate citizens of our planet, would have to be one of my least favourite sensations. It’s up there with the sphincter clenching terror when first spying a bloody great spider on the cornice, or the fist clenching annoyance of a salesperson who refuses to step out of the boundaries of ‘store policy’ to sort you out with a refund for the neon pink hotpants you didn’t try on or worst still, the gut wrenching nausea when your eyes first open after a night out that ended you-don’t-know-where, with you-don’t-know-who after you-can’t-remember-how-many large Pinot G’s.

I love food, I love to eat, and I take pleasure in preparing meals for myself and for others. I hate missing meals and get ragey when I’ve missed a meal.

So when Bear proposed that I go on a 7 day cleansing diet (which is Bear-ese for acute digestive trauma) I shuddered with fear and loathing.* How could I ever love a man who would ask, nay, recommend, I deprive myself of my two favourite things on earth; food, specifically of the rennet-fermented lactic variety and water, specifically of the grape infused alcoholic variety.

If you want the details of what I ate, look no further than the seven photos below. Everything I ate for a week is there. The only thing you don’t see is black coffee and water and the last night’s dinner. That meal, in a nearby restaurant gastronomique, coincided with the arrival of Louis XIV, and that meal coincided with an even acuter case of digestive trauma as my insides pulsated in horror at the fat, the lactose, the butter, the wheat and the wine they’d forgotten over 7 long days of famine. 

But I did it. Others watched me woof down a plate of mango while they inhaled kebabs. The Critique and I went to see a play; she sipped Sauvignon, I gulped a bottle of lukewarm water. There was never a moment when I wasn’t thinking about what I’d eaten, or more specifically what I was going to eat next. I was hungry for a week; except when I ate the fruit and my stomach swelled in glee…until it broke down the fibre, and then, well I wasn’t hungry, but I did need to open the windows.

 

If you are planning to do it anytime soon, here is what I learned.

Pay attention to presentation. Don’t snack straight from the fridge; dice it, arrange it on a plate and sit at a table to eat it. Anything makes a difference when there is no cheddar on your plate. Place a picture of Colin Firth in front of you while you eat; it might trick your brain into thinking the grapefruit is goat’s cheese. #probablynot I also found that colour was important; rabbit food feels more like rabbit food when it is vehemently verdant. I made sure that everything was so multicoloured, all it lacked was jazz hands. If I couldn’t get drunk enough to imagine I was Kylie, my plate would.

Salt, Pepper, Balsamic and Fresh Herbs are the new fat, except that have no fat, and you can’t fry things in them. Fat makes food taste better, that is why the good people of Scotland have been frying everything they can get their hands on for these past two decades. #deepfriedkebabanyone So if you can’t have fat, and you can’t have chips (I know, cruel world we live in) then you may as well tip a bag of fresh basil into your salad, coat your steak in black pepper and drizzle the rest with vinegar. If it tastes good, you eat it with joy and fill your brain as much as your belly.

Get ready for a revolution; water is life. #iknowright I carry bottles with me at all times anyway, I’ve got a bobble at work, a bobble for the gym and a bobble beside my bed. I reckon I filled each of them four times a day. My shrinking stomach couldn’t fill with food, so I fooled it with water…and then spent half a day peeing. Which was still better than, actually, no, I won’t…TMI. But when you look at what I ate, you can do the maths. But that was pretty full on too.

 

So what did I get out of it? 

• 5 nights sleep; the best sleep I’ve had in months, moreover, I was genuinely tired (not wiped, knackered, wasted or wrecked) when I fell asleep
• Radiant skin; Bear hasn’t shutup about my clear eyes and smooth face all week, like he is the one that ate 5 grapefruits in 5 days!
• 4 kilos lighter, which motivated me, but was not the goal

 

I also proved to myself that I could.

 

 

Saturday - "Melon tastes like cardboard in England"

 

Sunday - "what happens inside when you combine an egg and grapefruit?"

 

Monday - "Mango tastes like Granny Smith in England" 

 

Tuesday - "Dry Toast; manna from heaven"

 

Wednesday - "shit, I'm so eager, I bit before I clicked"

 

Thursday - "I'm eating a sandwich for dinner. I passed out on the way home. All I had was juice for breakfast"

 

Friday - "F**k this S**T..WINE!!!"

 

*Just in case you suspect he tells me what to eat or how to look or any of that, don’t. I’d been moaning about feeling crap for weeks and he was being his always helpful self

#joyful

 

Every single day.

It feels like every single day we wake up expecting to wipe the sleep from our eyes, scrub off the cobwebs and wander out into the abyss, earn our daily bread and crawl back to bed to recover the spirits then rise up and do it all over again. That is what we expect, but these past few weeks it seems our Gods have other plans.

Perhaps unhappy with how much time we are spending staring into our phones catching Pikachus, the Gods, they became angry. Enraged with our disregard for our own race, they reminded us of the power of our own arrogance. They flung upon us horror, they showered us in sadness, stalled our progress with protest, they divided us in segregation and they burned us in conflagration. There was even a f*cking coup (ostensibly it’s 1962) and worst of all, the Gods punished us with the all too sudden return of BOJO.

I am not going to waste energy trying to explain how this all made me feel. I’m exhausted, I’ve spent too many nights awake late into the night picking through the dramatic exclamations of BBC News. I’m tired. I’m weathered. I’m confused.

I’m also joyful.

When I find myself in times of trouble, I don’t look for Mother Mary*; I think that her and her ilk are half of the bloody problem these days. When I find myself in times of trouble, I try to think about all the things that bring me joy. Not just happiness, not contentment, but pure unadulterated joy. The only way I can rationalise the hate and the anger is to fire back in retaliation with a rainbow unicorn fart powered jet of joy. So here we go.

This Little Piggy Went into my Mouth

 

My nieces went to see Disney on Ice in Sydney last week. Motherbear texted a photo of two very small people, coated in neon snowflakes and pink crystals and silver balloons. Two little people who have no idea of what happened this past week, or the extent of their elders’ arrogance and ignorance. They saw Elsa and Anna skating, and they were joyful.

Marks & Spencer’s Dinky Pork Pies; not just a pork pie, but a very, very small Pork Pie, so small that it is in fact Dinky. It is filled with meat and unlike its full sized brethren can be consumed in a single mouthful. I’ve got Bear addicted them. I’ve got the Concierge examining the contents of my shopping in anticipation of a porky present. We all eat Dinky Pork Pies and we are joyful.

 

I saw Ghostbusters. If you haven’t seen the new Ghostbusters, you must, it is more fun than a bubble dance rainbow party. It is fun because it turns all your boring action tropes on their head. It is fun because every ten minutes or so, Kirsten Wiig gets covered in slime. It is fun because some of the old favourites show up in surprising cameos. It is mostly fun, and you cannot underestimate just how much joy this will bring you; it is mostly fun to see Chris Hemsworth dance. Chris shakes his money-maker, thrusts his hips and grins. I laughed out loud on my own in a crowded cinema and I was joyful.

When one Chris just isn't enough

 

 

My peeps are all getting happy. New Girl lives in San Francisco with her Butcher husband. The Body will imminently spring forth a tiny Baby Body. The Kaiser of Kool is married because in the Greatest of Britains he legally can. Sunshine, starved of his namesake for two long years, is returning to the south. My peeps are realising their dreams and they are joyful.

I went to the ballet. Odette leapt and twirled and her spindly quivering fingers expressed more with each flicker than the filibustering of all those whooping wigs on the news. The music filled my empty spaces, the sound of wooden shoes hammering against the stage matched my racing heart (yes that sounds trite, but you know what I mean) as they pliéd, as they pirouetted and as they pas de deux’d. It was the Australian Ballet choreographed by Graeme Murphy and aside from the odious odour of Murdoch (they have to get their money from someone) it was perfect. I wept and I was joyful.

 

Cygnine perfection on a Platter.

 

 

It may seem like escapism, you may posit that I’m ignoring what is happening around us. I am not; I read the news with more diligence and attention than many of my entourage, an entourage more concerned with HiddleSwiftWestadashian. I watch, I read both sides, I do my best to make head or tail of our Topsy Turvy world. I have no answers and I am sad. But I will no longer use these pages to glorify the dickheads. The more airtime we give them, the more power the dickheads claim over the public consciousness. So I watch Michelle Obama and James Corden and Waleed Aly and I am joyful. 

And finally, after months in the dark, in the rain, in the clouds and storms, finally the sun has come out…de de de doo. And I say, it’s alright. **

 

 

 

 

*In case you are 12, that is a reference to The Beatles

** In case you are still 12, that is also a reference to The Beatles

#shitstorm

 

According to the world’s most erudite source of reference, the Urban Dictionary, a shitstorm is “a course of action that would appear to lead to a good outcome, but when undertaken, leads to a situation that is utterly out of control beyond human comprehension.”

…Beyond human comprehension…as in, if actual faecal matter started raining from the celestial heavens above, it would likely make more sense than what is happening in real life.

  

For the past two weeks I have spent my downtime collecting and clarifying my thoughts about #Brexit, the EU referendum result, the impending sense of gloom and doom, the idiots, the believers, the readers and of course Rupert the Revolting. I’ve been reflecting on what it means to me, a British Citizen living Great Britain but still very much a foreigner, an immigrant, an imposter. I’ve wondered why globalisation and the freedom of movement and democratisation of knowledge has led to us being obsessed with labels and the search for our own little tribe to belong to at the exclusion of all others. Why do we care so much what our neighbour does when so many of us are barely looking after ourselves and our own?

 

  

My father and his family left Great Britain in the 60’s in search of a better life. The Great Britain that raised him was plunged in poverty, suffocating under smoggy air and very, very small. He and his siblings went in search of something greater…and found themselves in Australia. (Ok so maybe they weren’t that well researched). But still, they left a Great Britain that predated the European Union by a whole 7 years and the stories he told us of his idyllic isle sounded dark and Dickensian.

We came back to Britain in 1986 to learn about the land he loved and left. He hadn’t set foot on the Motherland in almost twenty years and delighted to rediscover ye olde British traditions and share them with his Aussie wife and eldest child. We explored culinary delights from Gretna to Land’s End and all the bits in between. We gobbled on the greasiest Fish & Chips in Christendom (he didn’t finish it), we were blessed with food poisoning from the tinned carrots we were fed in the tradition of all the best English pubs of the day and we revelled in the requisite trip to M&S for a real Pork Pie. I’ll admit, that bit was good, but the tiny pie cost him a week’s wages when converted to GBP. Not wanting to go bankrupt for decent bacon, we spent the majority of the holiday eating in the ever reliable and economical Little Chefs and Wimpy Bars. #greatbritishbuggeroff

The roads were better; he never shut up about that. But Australia is 32 times larger than the UK so laying bitumen is a marginally more arduous task. Equally the intense heat causes road surfaces to buckle and crack. Then, in Selfridges, he purchased the first pair of trousers he’d owned in 20 years that didn’t need to be taken up four inches to fit him. He said it was because England had more choice; we said it because he was a shortarse and Australia catered for the national average not Oompa Loompas.

In short (all puns intended), the Great Britain of the fifties and sixties, post-rations and pre-EU-avocadoes was pretty dire and the POMs didn’t even win the cricket back then. #yesitwasthatbad

So with all due respect, and based only upon my very specific personal example, I’d like to know what exactly Farage, Johnson and their ilk are predicting for our Britannic future. We’ve taken the country back, but back to what exactly, 1949?

 

#Brexit is happening; there is nothing we can do now. The only positive, if it can even be considered a positive, is that they are all quitting, running from the inferno faster than the cockroaches. Our Television screens are a little less polluted by rhetoric, lies and promises written on the sides of buses. I know I usually look to the sides of buses for political insight. But I suspect that when your most prevalent source of information is Rupert the Revolting’s Sun, the side of a Double Decker Bus is positively Stephen Fucking Hawking.

Good thing then that the rest of the world are trundling on so well to balance out the crazies.

…Or Not.

 

 

It’s taken a week to call the election result in the Great Southern Land. A week to figure out that the dude who was in, is still in, only now with added Far Right Foolery in the Upper House to add an extra dose of Bigot to the governing of the country. At least they can vote her out in 4 years. Which will be at least how long it takes for gay people to be allowed to marry in Australia. 

Australians too are obsessed with the pre-globalisation-and–Internet fifties. The Baby Boomers of Brisbane dream of the times when kids played in the front garden, breathing in the asbestos and the leaded-fuel vapours of their Dad’s FJ Holden. Mum went to work to be sexually harassed by her male supervisor while the Italians down the street were victimised for their suspiciously oily skin and the offensive smell of garlic that permeated Sydney’s western suburbs for a decade. Back when the DDT added a little extra spice to the potatoes, when your grandmother was popping pills to see off the tremors and you sent your sons to school to be slapped with a 3-foot bamboo rod while your daughters were date-raped in the back of a ute. Ah yes, those were the days…

Well then God Bless America. The Americans are keeping it real for us all. #facepalmemoji

 

I won’t go off on one (again) about guns. I won’t go off on one (again) about Trump. I won’t go off on one (again) about America in general. Only to say that they have done such an excellent job of setting the global tone since 1950; we’ve all been excellent students and can only hope that the aliens in Roswell are in fact real and will come to save us from ourselves.