Caitlin through the Looking Glass
I’m going to Tanzania! I’m going in about two weeks with the coffee people who sent me to Uganda in April. It’ll be a bit different this time as they want more of a travel piece so we’ll be hanging out in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro and combining coffee and tourism. Should be awesome!
I was browsing through my stats and you can certainly tell that summer has arrived in this part of the world. I have bolded the seasonal search terms.
7.89% pimms ascot
7.89% hampstead caitlin australia
5.26% supercalifragilisticexpialidocious poppins
5.26% former editor british elle
5.26% jodhi may florence pictures
2.63% a soldier’s tale, play
2.63% photos of strawberries and cream at wimbledon
2.63% caitlin of london
2.63% fiona mcintosh grazia
2.63% history sur le pont davignon
2.63% gillray gothic
2.63% online live world cup coverage
2.63% glasgow walkabout, australia, croatia, world cup
2.63% sur le pont song
2.63% guyana australia youth challenge
2.63% recipe watermelon margerita
2.63% australians living istanbul
2.63% aussie caitlin blog
2.63% here supercalifragilisticexpialidocious for free
2.63% christian brothers college st kilda 2006
2.63% after 5pm at wimbledon
2.63% morrison wilde grave
2.63% myspace bulgaria rollerblading
2.63% diego rivera’s signature
2.63% chavtastic rose tyler
2.63% isle of wight
2.63% how do i caitlin become noticed in 30 days
2.63% strawberries and cream wimbledon
2.63% razorlight photos
2.63% wimbledon strawberries
2.63% jamiroquai live 8 performance
It seems that more people care about the strawberries and cream at Wimbledon and the Pimms at Ascot than the tennis or the racing!
Our World Cup dreams went up in smoke after Italy managed to score a penalty shot in injury time. So close and yet so far!
I feel quite passionless about it really. I would of course be happy if we’d won, though a little sad for Italy (I do have a soft spot for Italy). But I never expected to get as far as we did and I think we made a good showing. I’m just happy we were there.
It sounds like I’m trying to be philosophical but I’m not – I just didn’t have the emotional investment in it to get upset. I guess I’m not a real fan.
We won! We won! Okay, we didn’t win – we drew! But that’s as good as a win coz now we get to go through to the semi-final. And in my heart we won 3-2 even if Cahill’s final goal was disallowed because the ref had already blown the whistle for full time.
I’m glad we sent the Croatians home. They were playing really dirty and that’s not just me or other Aussies saying that – check this report from the BBC. For starters, I thought it was called ‘football’ (even though I call it soccer) on the basis that it was a game played with your feet. So why did the Croatians repeatedly jump up and knock the ball with their hands in the goal box? Sure, we got the corner kick as a result but corner kick versus goal, let me see, it’s a hard choice innit? Secondly, that arsehole that held onto Viduka’s shirt for most of the game – and tackled him while he was shooting – should have been sent off long before, not just when he got narky with the ref.
I do have to admit though that the Croatians played really well, especially at the end. I was really uncomfortable at the end because the Croatians seemed to have almost continual possession. Thank goodness, they couldn’t convert and thank goodness, that third disallowed goal was a third not a second. Those extra goals against Japan last week really matter now.
We watched this at the pub – Brazil v Japan was on in the other room but most people were watching the Australia v Croatia game. This being South London, everyone was fully on side with the Australians, even the Brits. In contrast to Paris, where I saw lots of Brazil shirts ahead of Sunday’s match.
Some commentary in the UK has focused on how three members of the Croatian team were born in Australia and seven members of the Australian team are Croatian. If this were true, so what? – we’re a multicultural country. But the fact is it’s not true – I looked this up and in turns out that all of the Socceroos were born in Australia. Eight are of either full or part Croatian descent but the dates of birth list respectively, Sydney, Melbourne, Sydney, Mt Gambier… Anyway, there certainly didn’t seem to be any mixed loyalties on the night.
So next we apparently meet Italy next (my second favourite team). I wonder if this will cause any confusion on Norton St or if it will just be unbridled passion for Italia as per usual.
I’ve been busy, busy, busy but you can read this post on Natalie’s blog to find out what I was up to last weekend. (Clue: The hint is in the title).
I’ll write soon – I promise!
What a fabulous book! I can see why this is considered one of the great books of the twentieth century. I wonder if it’s on all the lists – it certainly should be.
When writing instructors tell their students to “show, not tell”, they should simply point them in the direction of The Color Purple by Alice Walker. It’s incredibly evocative of character, setting and emotion yet it is not heavy-handed. Books about injustice often fall into the trap of telling you what to think and feel but Walker never falls into that trap.
It was heartbreaking to read about life as a poor black woman in the early twentieth century and devastating to read about the annihilation of the Olinka – African tribal people displaced by roadbuilding and rubber plantations. Walker doesn’t flinch from the truth yet she also shows us great love, compassion, loyalty and happiness.
I found this book very easy to read. I really enjoyed both Celie and Nettie’s voice. Often I find that when authors try to write in dialect or show an uneducated grammar and vocabulary it doesn’t work very well and distracts me from the story. Even something like Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting worked much better for me as a film than a book and that’s probably an example of where it’s done better than the norm. But Walker does this effortlessly so that you barely notice but it helps to evoke character.
I love at the end that Walker thanks the characters in her novel “for coming”.
32 down, 68 to go…
PS I am most of the way through A Suitable Boy!
The Australian Government is set to bring in new legislation mandating that all asylum seekers, including women and children, will be shipped to offshore detention centres to have their applications processed. These people have already suffered so much and I believe it is wrong for us to add to their suffering by locking them up for years on end while we decide what to do about them. The trauma, particularly on young children and teenagers, is enormous and this doesn’t change because we’ve locked them on a Pacific island rather than Woomera in South Australia.
The reform is part of a package formulated partly (and this is by admission of Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone) to appease the Indonesians who recently got very upset when Australia approved the asylum requests of a group of people from West Papua (also known as the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya). I don’t understand this. Firstly, thirty years of history with East Timor has pretty comprehensively proven that trying to appease the Indonesians is a fool’s game. Secondly, we’ve now left ourselves open for any government in the world to throw a diplomatic tantrum and try to get us to change our rules. Gutless.
If you disagree with what’s happening, please sign this online petition at GetUp.org.au. GetUp have been doing this for a while and are a reputable organisation – this is not a spam trap.
Crows in Tokyo have developed an insatiable appetite for broadband internet cable to line their nests, according to this story in The Times. They have discovered that the fibre-optic cable is far easier to use than telephone wires or power cables. Previous efforts to get the crow population in Tokyo under control have failed as new crows simply fly in from the countryside to fill the void. This one’s for the birds, I guess.
I started my kayaking course at a canoe club in East London last night. They use a sheltered baisin off to the side of the Thames, which is a good spot for practising in fairly benign conditions. A few of us with some prior experience are going to form an advanced beginners group and do our BCU 1-star qualification a week early so we can start working on our BCU 2-star. (This being the British Canoe Union’s official awards scheme). So that’s encouraging.
I re-read the FAQ on the requisite kayaking experience for my trip and it’s not that bad. I don’t need to be an expert or know how to roll or anything and apparently the sea kayaks (which are much longer and possibly wider than normal kayaks) are a lot more stable. It can’t be my first time sea kayaking and I need to be able to do an assisted re-entry, which I’ve done. We’re close by the bigger boats most of the time and we only go out for two or three hours at a time. So I was feeling a bit daunted by the task but it doesn’t seem so impossible now.
For the past two hours I have been keeping one eye on BBC Online’s live World Cup coverage and the other eye on my work. It’s Australia’s first soccer World Cup for 32 years and this match against Japan, our first of the tournament, was doubly important because we also have Brazil and Croatia in our pool. Japan was leading for most of the game and it looked like it was all going down the tube. Then we equalised in the last ten minutes of the game. Then we scored a second goal with two minutes to go. Then a third one in injury time, resulting in a convincing 3-1 victory.
We’re not bad at soccer (and yes I’m going to call it soccer not football to ease the confusion of international readers) but we rarely qualify because Oceania doesn’t have direct entry but a mere half a place that we have to play against a South American team to secure (often Uruguay). This will change as of the next World Cup as in future we will play against Asia for our half a place, which makes more sense given our geographic location and also should be slightly easier.
It’s nice to be in the World Cup at all and especially nice to win our first match and retain a chance of going through to the next round. I don’t like our chances against Brazil but every team has its off days so I guess there’s some hope. Croatia will be an important match of course and they’re meant to be quite good.
I wonder if anyone is watching back in Australia? It was quite popular last time but that was partly because it was in the right time zone (since Japan and Korea were joint host nations). The matches now are on in the middle of the night but the fact that we’ve actually got a team in there and we’re not complete rubbish might help boost its popularity. Soccer is not a big passion for the Aussies but we’re (and I don’t mean me but the nation generally) so mad about sport that we’re kinda into it no matter what game we’re playing. Mind you, I asked my Dad if he was planning to watch any of the World Cup and he sounded quite disbelieving and informed me that there was rugby on. Australia versus England, apparently.
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