So the last bits of 2014 were great. Which is a bit of an administrative hassle, if you’re the type of person who feels compelled to write a painfully exhaustive review of the year, only to go on and do fun things in that selfsame year afterwards. But still, Pequod’s with Todd and Carolyn was a joy. As was JJ’s games night, where I got to play Cards Against Humanity for the first time, although I do maintain the potentially controversial opinion that it’s not risqué enough.
We also played Catchphrase, during which I had to describe the word ‘penny’, and after saying something like “like a pound, but the smaller British currency unit” (although probably not as clearly as this) a panicked team-mate shouted “kilopound!”. Which was (a) amazing, and (b) a bit sad, because we’re nowhere near as metric as Americans think we are.
New Year preparations. Killer punch not pictured.
Anyway, it’s 2015! And 2015 kicked off at Saujanya’s generously-hosted party, chiefly memorable for its provocatively hot punch (have you ever had your nostrils assaulted by steaming alcohol before?) and a large quantity of champagne as midnight hit Central Time. Later, I courted good luck for the year (at least so Robert alleges) by ordering Hoppin’ John – a Southern New Year tradition – at Michele’s brunch.
“Day trip, anyone?”
Yesterday, to avoid cabin fever during the off-again-on-again holiday break, Randi and I took a day trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin. The chunks of ice on the lake were beautiful, the Wisconsin cheese curds delicious and the mile-long streetcar system – while probably unnecessary from a strictly utilitarian point of view – was very cute all the same. But I don’t want to talk about any of that; I want to talk about the Metra train which we used to get there. Kenosha is the terminus station on the Pacific North line and the cost of a ticket for the two hour ride is a mere $7 (or about £4.50 in real money).
That’s the turn-up-and-go cost of a return ticket – no fiddling about with advance booking and seat reservations. Oh, and you’re allowed to return the next day if you so prefer. The penalty for buying your ticket on the train itself instead of the station? An extra $3. And at no point did we have to endure any automated announcements about taking all our personal belongings with us, either. This is all such absurdly good value from a British perspective, it makes me feel a little ashamed. Railways are in our cultural DNA: how come we get so beaten by a country which couldn’t care less about them?
Kenosha
One other thing I wanted to write about was This American Life, and in particular their programme (part one; two) from 2013 on Harper High School in Chicago’s south side, which I listened to over the break on Katie’s recommendation. Because as much as I enjoy going on my train-based Midwestern escapades, it’s sobering to reflect that I’m effectively cut off from whole swathes of my own city which are just too scary and intimidating to visit. The social problems are, of course, hardly unique to America – but the easy availability of guns adds a shocking level of cheap, fatal violence. In the year prior to this podcast, 29 current or former students had been shot, and the testimony of teenagers who walk home down the middle of the street – considering this marginally safer than the sidewalk – is hard to forget. A highly recommended listen.
“I’d say this was a life-changing year,” I was advised for this blog today. Well, yes, quite a lot happened in 2014. It was a twisty journey which took me from London to Chicago, but I’ve never been more glad for having seized an opportunity with both hands.
January
For a second year running, I celebrated New Year in the Mile End flat, at a party which – looking back at the photos – was dominated by glow sticks, rooftop views and crouching on the floor of the bus home with Anna. A week later, many of us were doing robot dances together at a Recklings gig, where we also got to see Jen (yay!) again. With the family and cousin Nancy I saw Mandela, with the flat I stayed in to watch In Bruges and went out for Jeeves and Wooster, and with Matt and Caroline I drank a lot of wine at Gordon’s. Also, after a six year wait, I finally got to meet the elusive and mysterious Diamond Geezer.
Cat, Josh, mud and London
February
As you’ll see, there was a good run for watching terrible films at Drayton Park towers. In February we endured Drag Me To Hell, before embarking on a sequel to our famous Flat Day by hugging trees together in Hampstead Heath. Josh also scored us tickets to The Commitments, and later saw fit to turn 25 and celebrate it. Michele was also in town by then, so we visited Salisbury (where 4.6% of the population are ‘some other kind of white’) and the New Forest, through which we choose the muddier but much worthier paths. Oh, and we all hit up the London Transport museum. Naturally. Red Velvet at the Tricycle was spectacular, the Scan Van fulfilled a long-desired wish to save my parents’ photos from decaying in shoe boxes, and I ended up carrying Vlad’s engagement ring across London in my pocket. Meanwhile, at work, up popped the prospect of a job in Chicago…
March
March was not my greatest ever month. But when Michele and I broke up, lots of people took great care of me: stopping me from doing ridiculous things using the power of flowcharts, and trying to cheer me up instead with LOL (it’s a romantic comedy set in Chicago!) and Disaster Zone: Volcano in New York (it… has no redeeming qualities). I did see good movies this month, too, like The Lego Movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Headhunters and, yes, Hackers. I also visited Katie during her first year at (beautiful) Durham. But I remember getting restless for a change of scene, which I guess made it perfect timing for my interviews.
April
Writing this has reminded me how drawn-out the transfer process felt, even though looking back it really wasn’t. But yes, in April I got my official offer, which made it pretty safe to start saying “oh, I’m moving to America” to people. People like Maryam, who met up for dinner, and Andy, who came to London for the day and agreed to go see Marx’s grave with me. Also this month, there was a great turn out to Cat’s final Recklings gig, while Biff and Christa lured us to pub to play a strange Monopoly cards game, and Abbi spoke movingly at the launch of Love Letters to the Home Office. This blog also celebrated its tenth birthday, and at the same time, I got the sad news that someone pretty key to my life ten years ago – Mr. Wrigley – had died. He is missed.
Sri Lanka
May
Before I left, there were lots of people I needed to see. Some of them were rather far away, so in May I went on my first trip outside Europe or North America (about time!) to see Sophie in Oman and Josh in Sri Lanka. Both were pretty wonderful visits, as was a quick day trip to Paris. Back in London, this was the last month in Drayton Park for all three of us, and the end of two amazing years living with Cat and Josh. There’s no better way to spend your early 20s than with your two best friends, and as a parting gift, Josh and I finally had the visit from Jehovah’s Witnesses we’d been waiting for. I also got to say goodbye to Chiara and Matthew in East London, to cousin Julie, to Melissa in the Corrib and to Caroline and Charles. And last but certainly not least, a weekend in Manchester with Robert and Tash.
June
Finally! My last drinks in The Island with family, Pizza Express with Lucy and one last News Revue, all rounded off with a Deportation Party in Islington. And then it was a very odd work week: two days in London, one day flying, and two days in Chicago. Chicago! Nolan met me outside the Blue Line station, explained which bars were too bro-y and which did great burgers, and took me to where I’d be living with him and Brett for the first two months. The summer is a great time to explore any city, and there were also a bunch of birthday celebrations: Saujanya’s – where I did the newbie initiation thing of drinking Malort – Todd’s, and my own, at Motel Bar. But one of the strangest, yet nicest, experiences of being new and open to people was striking up a conversation with two country music guys outside a bar, which led to an impromptu late night performance around a bonfire in their back garden.
Finally, the coveted track jacket
July
4th July is – of course – Independence (from us) Day, which I celebrated by eating a large number of hot dogs on Kristina’s balcony while people set off fireworks in the streets below. Also up there on the patriotism scale in July was downing Budweisers at Girl Talk’s bizarre Made in America concert. I saw Edge of Tomorrow, which was great, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes which was less great. Other highlights included the Shedd Aquarium, discovering Twin Peaks (and creating its spiritually similar Furtive Liaison), the very first Common Room – beginning an unbroken tradition of 2014! – and, wonderfully, getting to see Billy Joel at Wrigley Field. Much less fun were the stressful hours spent hunting down places to live on Craigslist. But in the end I found somewhere great, and with the help of Nolan’s U-Haul, moved to my new home at the end of the month.
August
So I settled in with my new flatmate, Billy, and gloried in walking to work in 15 minutes. I also got to hang with cousin Sophia and Al, go sailing with Lauri, watch The Blind Side in Montgomery Ward Park with Suzanne, and enjoy an excessively long White Sox game against Todd’s beloved Blue Jays (who lost). (In general, both my knowledge and appreciation of baseball were hugely improved in 2014.) I was also invited to a really fun pub crawl organised by the League of Chicago Theatres, through which I also scored tickets to a musical adaptation of Coraline. The second half of my August was spent in Kuala Lumpur with Zee, Ellen and the Groupon Malaysia team. This was another really awesome trip, and it’s such a pleasure to be able to travel and work with great people along the way.
September
Back in Chicago, the start of the new school year came with a couple of mentoring programmes to volunteer with. This was also the zenith for going on dates with some really cool and wonderful people: including to Second City, the Improvised Shakespeare Company, the Botanic Garden and simple – but lovely – beers by the beach. I also found my way to a rooftop pool party with a bunch of Billy’s high school friends, saw Guardians of the Galaxy and was delighted that others at work were interested in a day of rollercoasters at the Six Flags theme park.
The photobooth at Jamie and Paul’s
October
One of the absolute highlights of the year was Jamie and Paul’s wedding in San Francisco. A totally wonderful day, amidst a global family gathering, was made even better by the follow-up Chicago visit of my parents and Tash. Together we did a bevy of touristy things, conjured up suspiciously glorious weather for October and jumped around on the roof a lot. This month Randi and I also struck theatre gold with Alice and Bethany, while I also tried rock climbing, Chinatown and karaoke. Emily Boyd dropped in for pizza and drinks, Brother Matthew answered our questions on the doorsteps of his church, and on Halloween I failed to don an adequate costume but was still allowed to eat sushi and critique Star Wars.
Secular Christmas begins early in Michigan
November
If I’m still here in 2016, I imagine I’ll view the Presidential elections with a mixture of excitement and dread. Until then, the 2014 Midterms will have to do for my experience of American democracy, and although the night itself was pretty grim, it did at least put paid to the constant TV ads. Thankfully, pretty much everything else in November was utterly glorious. I’m talking about Ellen’s chilli cooking competition, more theatre trips (Strandline and Watch on the Rhine) and my favourite film of the year, Interstellar. Most exciting of all, Cat and Matt came to stay with me, and we packed in a lot of fun, food and Family Feud. Afterwards, Cat stayed on for a fabulous Friendsgiving hosted by Kevin and Grace, and then Randi and I set off on our Michigan roadtrip adventure.
December
Carrying home a Christmas tree is an important tradition to maintain, and helped bathe December with a festive glow. I met AJ, Catherine and Jason, laughed at their unfamiliarity with opening Christmas crackers correctly and played a suitably competitive session of Munchkin. Agata hosted a gingerbread baking workshop, Kristina threw a party with the first, long-awaited mulled wine of the season, and Nisreen and Mike presided over a game of Apples to Apples. Matt and Ben was brilliant while The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies marked a final visit to Middle Earth, not to mention the Christkindlmarket, the Groupon Holiday Party and my first dizzying experience of the futuristic Oculus Rift! And Christmas itself, while low-key in the apartment by myself, was also a surprisingly magical combination of Muppets, chocolate, Skype and reading under a blanket like a happy old man.
Thanks to everyone who made this year great, and happy 2015!
Confession: this year, I failed in my reading target of reading ‘at least one more book than last year’, which would have required a minimum of 31. I could make several attempts to excuse myself, not least an abandoned effort to read the King James Bible which consumed many hours, and the distractions of moving. Nonetheless, here is my year in books:
It started out well, with The End of the Chinese Dream. I’d been looking for a good book on China for a while and picked this intimate study of the hopes, dreams and fears of Chongqing residents over a general sprawling history. It’s particularly memorable for its account of using a traditional Chinese ‘wishing tree’ to subvert government restrictions on surveys. There’s a much broader narrative to Adam Tooze’s The Deluge, a history of the global political reshaping which followed the First World War, which I wanted to read something about in this centenary year. (Fun fact: once upon a time, I went to Tooze’s ‘Economics for Historians’ lectures.) Suffice to say, I really enjoyed this, and recommend it to anyone interested in how and why the twentieth century turned out as it did.
More surprisingly, another piece of non-fiction this year which really stuck with me was Addiction By Design – Natasha Dow Schüll’s study of machine gambling in Vegas. I think I read this after an extract in The Guardian happened to catch my eye, and I found it completely enthralling. Not being a gambler myself, I had always assumed that the pleasure of a place like Vegas would come from the thrill of taking risks. In fact, the majority of casino revenue is now made up of gaming formats which are geared to precisely the opposite: routinised, almost trance-like experiences at slot machines. A work supported by years of research, the author deserves credit for making it so accessible to a general audience.
I’ve focused on non-fiction so far, which is where a lot of my hits of 2014 turns out to be, but there was a lot of good fiction stuff too. The Line of Beauty drew me into its world and served up some of the most well-written sex scenes I’ve ever read (your mileage may vary, but I remember being pretty struck by them). Heart of Darkness is a justified classic, obviously, and well conveys the dark and the terrible of European colonisation. The Caves of Steel was the first Asimov book I’ve ever read and, apart from being clever, imbued me with a strong, false nostalgia for the science fiction of the 1950s, and the kind of futures they imagined. The Ocean at the End of the Lane was vintage Gaiman: I’m not convinced it had much that was new, but I’m always a sucker for the twisted fairytale world he creates. And much of the pleasure of The Silkworm was the comfortable feeling of being allowed back into a JK Rowling book series, with characters you already know and love, ready for another adventure.
On the other hand, The Autograph Man was (as everybody warned me) Zadie Smith’s least best, and meanders around the lives of some fairly unlikeable but also unremarkable characters. I wasn’t particularly taken in by The Big Sleep: it was fine, and scratched an itch for a hard-boiled American detective, but I’m not in a rush for more of Philip Marlowe. Under The Net has somewhat slipped out of my brain, although I think I understood something from it at the time. The Book Thief was simplistic but moving. Love in the Time of Cholera is all about the writing, and that always stays with me less than plot, meaning that now when I look back I draw a blank although I remember enjoying it at the time. One thing which did stay with me was Lolita, so I’m glad that I tried again with this book after abandoning it halfway through a few years back. The first half is still much better, but it’s worth reading alone for Humbert’s skilful self-justification, all the creepier for its certain seductive power.
Oh yes, and late this year I also read War and Peace. I’m pleased that I did. Big epics usually take some time to get into, especially with so many characters, and this was no exception. But since the first thing most people say about War and Peace is how long it is, I have to say that it didn’t feel so long, especially once I could devote proper stretches of time to it. So, why bother? Well firstly, I knew next to nothing about Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars, so Tolstoy proved very instructive. The characters are pretty memorable, especially Natasha – after whom my sister was named! – and there are a couple of moments (especially during the war sequences toward the end) which hit you hard. He also throws in a couple of great quips.
Many congratulations to Simon for appearing in the essay collection Going Underground. And many thanks to Christa, whose gift of Division Street America was not always easy to read, and often melancholy, but an important insight into the city of Chicago. Love Letters to the Home Office and The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile I have written about elsewhere.
And finally, for anyone who’s still reading: sometimes, for whatever reason, something you read enters the ‘random useless fact’ part of your brain and stays there. So allow me to share two entirely unrelated things which I found interesting in my reading this year. Firstly, courtesy of Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction is the Tuyuca language of a small South American people. It’s one with mandatory evidentiality, which means that the grammar of the language requires you to specify how a statement is known – whether visually, nonvisually, secondhand or through being apparent or assumed. (Comparably, for example, English often forces you to specify whether a noun or singular or plural: you can’t ‘pick flowers’ where the number of flowers may be 1.) But just think how much more precise the news would be if we spoke Tuyuca, eh?
Second fact, this time from Rousseau: the Polish-Lithuanian parliament of the 16th-18th centuries had a procedure known as the liberum veto. If any member invoked it (by shouting “Nie pozwalam!”, Wikipedia claims), then it didn’t just crush the legislation being debated, it also brought the session to an immediate end and voided everything which had already been passed in that session already. For anyone who despairs at the banality of Republican obstructionism in the US Congress, take some comfort in the fact that at least they don’t have the liberum veto. (Rousseau wasn’t very impressed, either. He called for the death penalty for anyone who tried to use it.)
Yes, I’ve been playing too much Worms
Happy Boxing Day! Usually at this time of year I’m overwhelmed by (a) the coma of Christmas, and (b) the self-imposed chore of writing a year in review, but I couldn’t help notice that I was due my one thousandth post on this blog. And boy, it only took ten years to get here. So look, there’s a little Worm incarnation of me celebrating. (It’s only fair to concede that I spent several hours of Christmas Day losing to Katie at Worms very, very badly.)
Despite this humiliation, it was actually a lovely day, if quieter than the traditional family Christmas to which I was briefly thrust into over Skype. On Christmas Eve I stole one of Cat’s family traditions by settling down to The Muppet Christmas Carol, and then the next morning I unwrapped beautiful care packages from Tash and Katie which had been waiting patiently under the tree:
So much proper chocolate!
I even got to be part of the Hurley family Christmas by playing Pointless together:
Highlights: philosophers and MPs. Lowlights: sport
And, of course, Doctor Who! So yes, I wouldn’t do this every year, but I still captured plenty of the Christmas magic.
Other things of note: enjoying the very last episodes of The Colbert Report, including Obama’s performance on the show, Julie’s birthday party, Grisel’s “I’m moving to San Francisco” farewell gathering (boo) and tagging on to see the final instalment of The Hobbit afterwards at the Navy Pier IMAX.
I seem to be more forgiving of this trilogy than most people. It’s clearly absurd, and no rational world would ever have permitted anyone to stretch out a short children’s adventure tale to the same length as Lord of the Rings. But I find the world spectacular and enjoyable enough to forgive all that. (Maybe it’s the accents?) Less acceptable is all of the LOTR foreshadowing, which rather wrecks the surprise element of that story’s opening, since all of the characters now know what’s coming anyway. So maybe it’s just that going to see The Hobbit reminds me of all those happy Christmases seeing the original films with my family, and for that, I’d probably pay to watch The Shire Parish Council Meetings (Extended Edition)*.
*Best not put that to the test, though, Peter Jackson.
Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
