Twenteen.

Ah, yes. My day of birth is drawing to a close, and it really is true that birthdays are considerably less exciting the older you grow. I remember my 10th birthday, driving Emma to distraction through my constant repetition of 'THE BIG ONE OOO' and the promise of a new bike. 

Now entering my twenties, I'm perfectly happy with a bottle of Cava and a glutinous spate of over-eating. It has also frightened me, as it has now actually occurred to me that this time next year, I will need to be ready to assume my role as a valuable contributor to society - a notion that scares me to my wits' end. Indeed, I realised I took one small step towards the role of true 'adult' by organising, cooking and hosting my own dinner party. The fact it was a great success, with no dramas involving burnt lamb or undercooked brownies, was more of a shock to my mother than to myself. And why I chose to host my own dinner party, and all the stress that goes with it, instead of booking a restaurant and letting them take the reigns, is beyond me. I guess its because it is my way of showing my deep affection for my friends, and my brain has chosen to express this by listening to the overriding urge to over-feed them all. As far as I know, no one has died, yet. 

And even though my dinner party was a great success, the rest of my life, and my future for that matter, still hang precariously in the balance of my indecision. In another twenty years, I might just be hosting another dinner party, of a very different nature..more to do with impressing colleagues than celebrating life with carefree abandon with my dear friends..dear God!

Sverige etcetera

It has actually been a shockingly long time in the world of blogging since my last gem of a post, which perhaps suggests it is possible to blog and not feel the need to post every hour of the day my whereabouts. My whereabouts indeed, have taken me over to unexplored territory for a member of the Buckle clan, despite my grandmother telling me on every available occasion "I almost went on a cruise up there around Norway and all that...but not in the end, couldn't stand the idea of all that fish."

Ah yes, all that fish - a stereotype held by many, it would seem. Upon my imminent departure and arrival, I received many a comment along the lines of "not turned into a salmon yet, then?" or "had enough caviar on toast" or one particular spark of witty genius from father Martin: "I think we should have herring for tea.. I'll bet you're missing them.." 

And it is true, Swedes, I know for sure, do certainly ingest a lot more of our fishy friends than their English neighbours, and are generally more accepting and less squeamish about eating various crustacean delicacies or fish of the pickled, vinegared, and raw variety. Indeed, my dear friend's family gave me a soft and gentle introduction to Swedish cuisine that went beyond the usual Swedish meatballs  and gravy: a sumptuous feast consisting of a slab of Norweigan smoked salmon, ready for home-slicing, and a strange concoction of fish roe, prawns, tuna, mayonnaise, dill, crème fraiche and salmon into one bowl of creamy paste. I have sadly forgotten the name, but the experience of eating it will never leave me.. And of course don't forget our easily recognised vinegared herring in that striking purple marinade. It is hard to adjust to the idea that Swedish food incorporates the sweet factor into many ordinarily savoury foods. The idea of eating cheese (complete with ingenious cheese slicing tool) and ham for breakfast for me is beyond what I can conceivably see as revolting, yet I was delighted to be acquainted with the cereal staple "Start", which is not unlike eating flapjack. 

Yet my fishy dinner was tame in comparison to another Swedish delicacy; something Emmy's parents thought they would "spare you the pain of". It is, essentially...apparently...fermented, rotting fish in a can. The odour is apparently so strong and pungent that it requires opening at the bottom of the garden. This is to prevent the stench from permeating the house for the next month. 

So far I am making my perceptions of Sweden sound as if all I absorbed was their preference for fish, yet much of what I experienced goes beyond my maritime culinary experiences. Emmy's house in Gustavsberg (I do apologise for the probable incorrect spelling) is situated a half hour from the busy centre of Stockholm, and is surrounded by the Baltic sea, bountiful lakes, beaches, and plentiful forest. 

Emmy spoke of how the pace of life is almost unbearably slow - people see nothing wrong with taking half the day having coffee, there is no need to rush anywhere or do anything immediately. Any sense of urgency is replaced with an understated relaxed approach to life. With such long days in the summer months, I can understand such an approach - so much daylight, the days must seem to stretch on forever and ever. It was only after three or four days that I finally began to adjust to the Swedish pace of life - everything seems so easy, even taking a bus to town. The Swedish sense of style, especially within Stockholm, seemed equally effortless and relaxed - the "I don't care" look so artfully pulled together. Converse and leather jackets are the uniform of the capital's inhabitants, complete with thick-rimmed glasses and an air of unreserved nonchalance. Stockholm, the 'capital' of understated 'cool' seemed comparatively empty and quiet, contrasting starkly to London's manic, heaving mass of humanity, and the general need to be 'doing' something all the time, to always be impressing someone. Of course, no one in Sweden can ever be better than anyone else - that is the ultimate faux pas - so says the ultra-socialist government.

One of my fondest memories will be of sitting on the veranda over the local beach, enjoying some Swedish pastries and taking in the early afternoon sun sat low (as ever in Scandinavia) over the calm and still waters of the Baltic sea. The fact that forest runs immediately into sea has a magical quality to it. Sitting by the flat calm of the Baltic sea finally instilled something of a calm in me. 

I suppose after a good two weeks to ponder my Scandinavian adventures, my taster trip to Sweden can be summed up in a few words: sweet herrings, warm hospitality, and calm - pure underrated, welcome calm.

Desire and Power.

I have spent a large portion of my time considering the above title over the past few days. Rather than being something provocative and thought-provoking, Exeter University's English department has made it one of the driest subject areas available for study. If I had properly consulted the booklist, and found that the Edmund Spenser's Fairie Queene is a Jacobean-style exercise in brain torture, then I might have reconsidered. However, as much as I rail and complain, it does not stop the fact I have four exams to get through before the 19th of May. Come the 19th of May I will probably kiss my clean kitchen floor at home with true, heartfelt relief - I'll have survived! The tortellini diet will be no more!!!

Moving on to less literary and more topical subjects of desire and power, unless you have been living in technophobic isolation, one can't have missed the making of political history this week. Britain has been entirely consumed in the shifting sands of political allegiances: Cameron, Clegg. Brown, Clegg. Never have I watched BBC news more. I must add that their coverage of the whole affair has been excellent in every respect; they've pulled out all the stops, including a studio especially constructed outside the Palace of Westminster, for round-the-clock political commentary! Except they did seem to go a little overboard whilst charting Cameron's visit to the Queen: "Cameron is now just leaving Buckingham Palace, Cameron is now in the car, Cameron is now making his way down the Mall...". It all got a bit overwhelming, like I was watching a very restrained version of Big Brother, but with cars and politicians instead of hair extensions and hot tubs.

So overwhelming that it provoked some pretty heated debates across the kitchen table at home. My brother claimed we were in danger of being overrun by fascists - a completely laughable notion if you just look at the BNP's performance in the election. Countering that, my mother mentioned on more than one occasion the idea of driving up to London and waging protest outside Number 10 until the then-primeminster Gordon Brown did the democratic and noble thing, and resigned his post. I suppose she was just driven mad by the thought of five more years of Gordon's bumbling media performances and international embarrassment. In fact, I believe the tweeting of Jemima Khan sums up best the reasoning behind mum's protestations:

"Didn't vote for the party which invaded a foreign country for no reason, lied about it, made us an international pariah, then bankrupted us."

I, personally, have never been so delighted to see the slimy, supercilious, manipulative little snake that is Lord Peter Mandelson leaving Downing Street. He just seems to miss the point of a General Election entirely, flatly refusing to admit that Labour would not be able to democratically form some kind of government for the next five years. In his usual, slippery way, he was conducting secret meetings with the Lib Dems in the small hours, desperately attempting to maintain his hold on his position of Secretary of State; I expected nothing less from an unelected MP. A very brazen, but hardly surprising move for a man who is widely known as Lord Voldermort, and is credited with having some kind of a political hit list. He is perhaps the penultimate example of a man driven by the desire for power - who ever said English degrees weren't useful?

To lay aside all selfish human pursuits for the end of this post, I found a wonderful poem by W. H Auden , whilst in the depths of my revision. I felt I should post it, even though many will recognise it as 'that poem' from the funeral scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral:

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

It seemed to transcend all the political mayhem.

Election Vomcano.

Oh glad tidings to all of my three readers. It has been a while, but unfortunately I have been tied up with things outside the realm of cyber-space (what a 90's term - my spell checker doesn't even recognise it).
I wish I could say I was tied up with something terribly exciting, like being stranded on the far side of the world because of the inconsiderate behaviour of Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano no one had heard of until last Thursday. But alas, I have no exciting tale to tell. I am one those people exempt from the chaos and madness taking place at every known station/airport/ferry port in Northern Europe. I am one who happens to be stranded on this fair and sunny isle for another reason: revision.

I can recall from the depths of my fuzzy and increasingly poor memory, a time when April and May were times of plentiful fun and frolics. To my seven year old self, April was the month of excessive amounts of chocolate. It also signified a change in school uniform; from dour, itchy forest-green pinafores, to light and airy summer dresses. Now it is overshadowed by the prospect of exams. I am hardly one to complain; I am an English student. The stereotype goes that we never do any work, our degrees are basically three years of working our way through a library at a leisurely pace.. and we all know it is just impossible to revise for English exams.

How I wish. I have spent the past week and a half slowly transforming myself into a wandering zombie, a living quote bank. I have developed chronic neck pain from hunching over the table for three hours plus a day, attempting to force information into the vacuous space that is my brain. What has made it even more galling is the weather: blinding sunlight, Facebook statuses full of 'BEAACH' talk, chavs walking around with no t-shirts on. Yes, summer is arriving in the eyes of the British public. And all I can sample of it is to take whiffs of fresh air a couple of times a day. Or even occasionally standing on the back-garden patio absorbing natural daylight and fresh air. Soon, I know, I will become allergic to sunlight. And all because I want to prove this year has not been a total write-off, and I can in fact perform under pressure.

Which leads me to another topical issue, away from my selfish ramblings. The country is supposedly 'alive' with 'election fever' as the tabloids are calling it. But we all know that the British idea of 'election fever' is sticking a placard in your bedroom window. Indeed, the most I've seen on a personal level is the rise of people joining various Facebook groups to alert their peers to their sudden political consciousness.

Yet the election has proved a welcome distraction from the toils of Henry IV Part I, I have to say. The leaders debate last week was so cringe-worthy and painful I had to turn it off after ten minutes: I was almost hypnotised by Gordon Brown's jowel movements, let alone that bizarre habit he has of sticking his tongue behind his teeth. And David missed his opportunity, as has been duly noted by now. But what was even more infuriating was the fact that people seem to like Nick Clegg all of a sudden - because he exuded an easy charisma, because he didn't take too well to Gordon attempting to cosy up to him with lines such as "I agree with Nick on this one..". Is this how shallow politics have become? So much is based on good PR and the appearance of a leader in the first ever UK TV debate? Of course, the debate was important in bringing life back into politics, after a pretty horrendous few years under tired old Labour, let's be honest. I think the MP's scandal alone was enough for people to decide "I needn't waste my time in voting for a bunch of frauds who are all the same".


What is clear is that Britain needs a change in government as badly as I need my fresh air and sunlight - indeed, perhaps even as badly as the airlines need an ash-free atmosphere..