I really enjoyed my recent minibreak to Dublin; although it only lasted a couple of days I found it a nice diversion from my quotidian concerns.

Not long after my 6am posting, I picked up my heavy backpack and made my way over to Liverpool Street, where I met up with my friend Etsu. From there we took the Stansted Express train to the airport. I was really disappointed with the Stansted Express actually; I’ve used the Gatwick Express once, which uses these slinky red cone-nosed trains, and expected a similar quality of transport from the Stansted version, especially as it cost up to £17 each way. Instead we had to travel on a crappy train with broken seats and litter everywhere. The worst thing about the Stansted Express is that it’s the only way to get to the airport in a decent amount of time; the other trains going there take hours and don’t run during the early hours. I was glad to get a £5 discount on my return ticket through the airline.

The flight to Dublin was free of charge without taxes, and the return flight cost 2 pence, incurring about £10 of taxes. Unfortunately because my friend doesn’t have an EU passport we had to pay £8 each for airport check-in. Though the flights themselves are so cheap, Ryanair makes its money from the optional extras (airport check-in, priority boarding, credit card payment). Never having been on a proper budget airline, I was worried about having to find our own seats on the plane, envisioning mayhem and fisticuffs onboard, but it was fine. I would say that there’s no need to pay the extra £4 per flight per person to be first onboard, unless you’re in a big group who wants to sit together. In total we paid £20 each, the same amount as the train to Stansted Airport…

I’ve become quite nervous on planes in recent years, for which I blame Lost and Final Destination. I hate the take-off and landing, though I’m fine during the cruising period. The plane was quite small - only six seats in each row - so it was easier to feel when the plane was changing direction, and I was quite glad that the flight to Dublin only took an hour. Etsu slept for most of the flight, while I read a novel inspired by Errol Flynn’s time in Jamaica.

After we’d landed and I was waiting for Etsu to come through passport control, this big African guy in his late 40s who’d been on our flight approached me and asked me for my phone number. He was quite persistant, and in the end I told him that I had a boyfriend. (I hate doing that, as the fact that I’m not interested should be enough - I shouldn’t have to evoke the idea of some non-existent alpha-male to reject someone’s advances. And besides sometimes that line doesn’t work - he might try to convince you that he’d treat you better or be a better lover than you’re current guy, or that what your bf doesn’t know won’t hurt him, etc. etc.)

So after that we took the AirLink bus (€10 for a family ticket) to O’Connell Street, which is one of the main thoroughfares of central Dublin. Our hotel, the 3-star Ripley Court Hotel, was a short walk away. I’d chosen the hotel based on its budget cost (€65 per room per night) and its reviews on TripAdvisor, but I was still rather worried about how nice it would be. I needn’t have worried. Although from the outside the hotel looked quite unwelcoming, the interior was lovely. The hotel room was really nice too, plenty of space and a lovely ensuite bathroom. We enjoyed a massive Irish/continental breakfast each morning, featuring bacon, eggs, toast, cereals, hash browns, sausage, fruit, etc., which provided us with plenty of energy for the day ahead.

After we’d unpacked and had a brief rest, we decided to explore the area, aiming for the river. Walking back to O’Connell Street, we traversed shopping centres and main streets, and somehow ended up on a street which contained several sex shops (of course). We walked around some more then eventually ended up at a generic cafe where I had a thai curry and Etsu had some pasta. I was shocked when I went back to the counter for another orange juice and was asked for €3.25; though I’d been warned that Dublin was expensive, it was dearer than I’d expected.

Wednesday was our only full day in Dublin, so we both wanted to make the best of it. Etsu really wanted to see the Book of Kells, so we visited Trinity College and the Book of Kells exhibition that morning. The best option was to have a guided tour of the college (€10), which included the cost of visiting the Book of Kells. Our guide was a cute, geeky PhD student, who gave us some background on the college buildings (including several which were designed by architects who’d never visited the site), plus information on which of the halls of residence had housed famous former students such as Oscar Wilde. He also told us about the professor who was killed in a gunfight with students on campus. After the tour we went on to see the Book of Kells, for which we had to queue for a while despite already having paid for our admission. It was interesting to find out about that impressive work, and the mystery of its origins.

I ended up having to buy some trainers as the leisure shoes I’d brought with me were hurting my feet. We stopped off in a branch of Footlocker, and I picked up a pair of Nike Air Maxes. I didn’t actually mind buying them as I’d wanted some new trainers for a while anyway.

After lunch at an Irish pub we went on to my choice, the Irish Writers’ Museum. I enjoyed finding out more about writers like George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde, and to view artefacts like their typewriters and correspondence. I also learned about the Irish writers’ tradition of subverting authority, and challenging the status quo.

We returned to our hotel for a brief rest then ventured out to the lively Temple Bar area. We walked around, and enjoyed the live music from street performers and shopped in some of the souvenir shops. After a while we ended up in the Bad Ass Cafe…

We wanted to sample the famous Irish Guinness before we left Dublin, so after we’d checked out of our hotel room on Thursday we went to a nearby pub and ordered two half-pints. Though it was much more pleasant that the Guinness I’ve tasted previously, I couldn’t finish my half-pint, but luckily Etsu was happy to finish it off for me.

Our flight home was delayed for about an hour, due to technical issues, but 50 minutes after take-off we arrived safely in London.

Overall I really liked Dublin. Ideally I would have loved to have had a week to really explore the city, and perhaps to take a day trip out to the Wicklow Mountains, but two days was a nice taster. Though there were a few similarities with London, I felt like I was in an European city like Paris or Brussells rather than a British city like Birmingham or even Edinburgh. They use the Euro, their road signs use kilometres instead of miles per hour, and even their pedestrian crossings reminded me of those I’ve seen in mainland Europe.

When I visit foreign countries I can’t help noticing other black people (I saw a handful each day, and was surprised to see an afro hair shop near my hotel), and I think that Etsu was also looking out for other Far Eastern people, as she mentioned that she hadn’t seen as many Japanese people as she’d expected. I also noticed a lot of Eastern-European people living and working in the city. There was a moment when we were walking through a park when every group of people who walked past us spoke a different language, which reinforced how cosmopolitan this international city of culture had become.

By the way, did I find the inspiration for a certain blogger’s name?

I came home from Dublin a couple of hours ago, and I’m just chilling out and finding my bearings again. I probably won’t have a chance to write about my trip until the weekend, but in the meantime I wanted to share something I mostly prepared earlier.

Like a lot of people, I’ve grown up watching Madonna; watching her videos and dancing along to her albums. Her Immaculate Collection LP was one of the first albums I ever bought for myself, and I loved to hear the crackle of the vinyl under the needle in the seconds before I played La Isla Bonita and twirled around my bedtime in the imaginary arms of my own Latino lover.

Over the years I’ve admired her inventiveness, not only in her music, but in the multitude of personas that she has created for herself. Twenty years later and I’m still listening to Madonna’s music, which is a feat in itself. She may not be the best singer or dancer that you’ve ever seen, but undoubtedly she is one of the best entertainers of the last twenty years.

So here’s a collection of some of my favourite Madonna songs/videos. Sorry about the large quantity, but I found it really hard to choose!

Playlist

1. Express Yourself
2. Don’t Tell Me (love the bit when she approaches the camera with the muscly cowboys behind her)
3. Human Nature
4. Beautiful Stranger (I sang this for an exam at music college - it was such a fun song)
5. Into The Groove
6. Secret
7. Nothing Really Matters
8. Deeper and Deeper
9. Die Another Day
10. Like A Virgin
11. Get Together
12. Material Girl
13. Sorry
14. La Isla Bonita
15. Hung Up
16. Vogue
17. Like a Prayer
18. Jump
19. Cherish (think I had a brief obsession with this song…)
20. Who’s that Girl?
21. Frozen
22. Love Profusion
23. Hollywood
24. The Power of Goodbye
25. Erotica
26. Crazy for You
27. Open Your Heart
28. Bad Girl
29. Rain
30. True Blue (I remember singing this in the playground at school)
31. Papa Don’t Preach
32. I Want You
33. Live To Tell
34. Take A Bow (I love that she used the same brooding guy as her love interest in these last three videos, which make these songs seem linked into an ongoing love story.)
35. You’ll See
36. One More Chance

At the moment I’m in the office listening to a group of builders erecting scaffolding outside. They’re a jolly bunch, with their bare shirts and hairy chests, playing Capital FM and making jokes about their giant penises (partially for my benefit I think, as my open window allows me to hear them quite clearly).

My boss sent me outside a few minutes ago to check on their schedule - I think they thought I was going to tell them off about their noisiness or ribaldry. Of course that was the last thing on my mind.

I started working when I was sixteen, and I have always had a job since then. I’ve progressed from working for £2.45 an hour in Kwik Save, to becoming an office manager with a £25k salary.

Most of the time my work has supplemented my studies or creative endeavours. I’ve had a couple of jobs that I’ve enjoyed, or at least I’ve enjoyed their perks (working in the cinema, arts centre and library), but most of my jobs haven’t been fun or fulfilling. At the same time, working has taught me about responsibility, time management, working with others and has provided me with some financial freedom.

Right now I’m working in a counselling centre, and I should feel good about that. I used to feel good about the fact that my work was connected to helping people in need, but I currently feel really unconnected to the overall worth of my job, and its contribution to society. All I can see are the mundane tasks set before me, the endless letters, and phonecalls, and statistics and “I’m sorry to bother you but…” and the rest. It’s like I’m the hamster spinning on the wheel, and I can’t get off. I’m hungry, unfocussed and need a break but as there’s no one to relieve me I have to stay in the office for 7 hours straight.

It’s been a slow process, but I think the turning point was the trip to Jamaica in May 2007. I don’t know why that’s the turning point, but since I returned from that trip I’ve been less happy about working here and less productive (though I still get the necessary work done).

I guess there’s a kind of irony that a couple of years ago part of my job was to motivate disaffected workers, and now I’m the unmotivated employee. I need to quit. I’ve been planning to hand in my notice at the beginning of September, as I can take some annual leave in August and find another job. I wish I could do it sooner.

I haven’t been very active on here in the last couple of weeks. I just didn’t feel like blogging, and whatever I wrote felt forced. The lack of comments also bothered me, as I started to feel like I wasn’t connecting with anyone, or that the people who used to come here had lost interest.

At the same time, I’ve had a load of new visitors to the old post that was stumbled, and strangely I felt very uncomfortable with the extra attention. I was also sensitive to the criticism that the post provoked and the feeling that I had to defend myself to people who didn’t give a damn about me. I guess it made me feel vulnerable, and wary of revealing my feelings while all of that was still going on. I guess it wasn’t totally a bad situation, as I’ve picked up a couple of new readers. I’m such a contrary creature, lots of bloggers would kill to have thousands of visitors like that, but perhaps I’m not ready for the masses right now.

So what’s been happening for me? Here’s a quick catchup of the last week or so.

Fri 13 June: Not long after I’d left work at 6pm I saw a guy in his 50s walking down the road. He was shouting obscenities as he walked along, and as he passed me (without actually looking directly at me) he shouted out the N-word. It was the first time that I’ve ever been called that, and though it was a shock I didn’t take it personally as the guy was obviously mental.

Sat 14 June: The house next door to my parent’s home is up for sale, and after seeing the for sale sign I called up the estate agents and got an appointment to view. It was more for curiousity than anything else, as I wouldn’t really want to live next to my parents, wouldn’t want a 3 bedroom house to myself and wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage anyway. The guy who’d lived there died a few months ago of Emphysema, I think he was in his late 50s and seemed like a nice guy. The estate agents had given a price of about £230,000, and said that it needed modernisation, so I wasn’t expecting a palace, but the house was quite dilapidated and looked like nothing had changed in the last 30 years. Though structurally the house was a mirror image of ours, it looked smaller somehow. It would take a lot of work for someone to fix up that house, but it could have a lot of potential for a property developer or a family who didn’t need to move in straight away.

Wednesday 18 June: Had my last session with the counsellor. It was a strange session, and I felt quite ambivalent about the whole thing. One thing I said was that I felt that the eight sessions weren’t really enough, it was like using a plaster to cover a gunshot wound. It wasn’t a total waste of time, and we did discuss some issues that have been affecting me for a long time. One of the things I can keep in mind from the sessions is that sometimes I assume that I know what other people think of me, and sometimes I use those assumptions to push people away.

I also have trust issues, but I feel entitled to them since I always get hurt when I trust people. During one session when I discussed a guy who had betrayed my trust quite recently, she asked me why I was blaming myself when he was the one who’d lied and misled me, and I told her that I was upset with myself for not trusting my instincts, for giving someone the benefit of the doubt when I should have listened to my intuition.

Unless I pay for private therapy I don’t really have many other options. I’ve still got a spare pack of Prozac which I could possibly return to, but I’m not sure that it’s the best option for me. I prefer to feel the way I feel, even if I feel like crap.

Friday 20 June: I went out to get a very late work lunch at 4pm. In the chicken and chips shop this Eastern European man starts talking to me. I looked at him briefly and realised from his reddened face that he was probably drunk. When he whispered something about my breasts I felt sick and ignored him.

After work I took the tube to Oxford Circus and visited Chappells, a music shop, for a particular jazz and blues sax song book. Though the shop has moved from its previous home in New Bond Street to Waldour St, it still felt like visiting a old friend. I was reminded of the old me, the girl who was so taken with her musical dreams.

Later on, a few streets from home, a old geezer tried to sweet-talk me, but I ignored him. Then to top it all off, when I got home and checked my email I saw a bizarre message sent via my contact form: “u are so sexy u no dat. can u send me some of ur pictures naked to my email.” My only response to that lovely message was the delete button.

And in other news: The other day at work I was asked to fax our payroll request to the bank because my colleague had called in sick so that we would all get paid on time. When I saw the sheet I realised that my colleague, Kay, was getting paid nearly £500 more than me after tax, and she only works half a day more than me. Seeing that information has really changed my attitude towards her and my job in general. She often asks me for advice, especially with computing and technical stuff, but since there’s so much difference between our pay (and she’s not my boss) I’m going to concentrate on my work and leave her to get on with hers. It’s becoming more obvious how much this job is just a dead-end for me, though I still haven’t sorted out what to do next.

My boss asked me to help her with a short-term project for the next few weeks in addition to my normal hours. Though the work itself is very tedious and boring, I decided to go ahead with it for the money. The only good thing about it is that I’m working from home. I’ve been finding it really hard to give up my days-off, but I console myself that this arrangement is not forever.

Today wasn’t a bad day. I didn’t have a lunch break at work, but I’d brought sandwiches to keep me going. My right eye was and is still itchy from hay fever, and my nose is slightly icky, but I’m not feeling too awful overall.

Walking home from the train station, I found myself walking behind a woman who had an amazing figure. She was wearing blue jeans and a lovely purple top. I envied her a little bit, but also stored that image as additional motivation to aim for my ideal figure.

As I passed the vet’s office a young black guy with an Afro paused at the end of the road in a red car, which was pumping out that classic tune: “Papa was a Rolling Stone”.

An hour ago I was watching this new reality tv show: Mary Queen of Shops, which featured Amanda, a woman who was running a clothes boutique aimed at fuller-figured women, though she seemed to look down on her customers because of their size. Mary, the fashion expert, had to re-educate her not to criticise her customers’ bodies and to think of them as normal women who aren’t catered for by the mainstream fashion industry. It was both sad and funny to watch that clueless woman making such a mess of things, selling the equivalent of tents and sacks to her curvy clientele.

Though she seemed to make a huge improvement by the end of the show, I still got the impression that she wasn’t totally sincere and that she may have been putting on a front, that she probably still felt that larger women were “sad” and “misshapen”. The whole thing made me wonder why she wanted to develop a business for that market, she would have probably been happier selling fitness clothing for size-zeros.

And in other news, a 3G version of the iPhone was announced today, but I still don’t want to buy one at this stage. Allow me to buy it sim-free, or open up availability to more than one UK network and I’d think about it seriously. In the meantime I’ve just bought a new Sony Ericsson K800i from Tesco (I know, but it was a good deal). It’s a great little phone with a very nice camera. Even my dad likes it, plus it was the official phone from Casino Royale…

And why did I feel okay today? I think it’s connected to the exercise that I did last night, but I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

If you’re eating while you’re reading this sentence, you may wish to skip over the next paragraph.

I live a few roads away from a vet’s office, which I often have to pass on my way to the local high street. For a long time I would often notice the odd deposit of animal excrement near the entrance to the vet’s office, which made me wonder if either it was a natural consequence of the vet’s treatments, or if the animals were just literally scared shitless by the experience. A few weeks ago I remember seeing a nurse disposing of some poo, so it looks like a poo strategy is now in place.

Anyway, this morning I was approaching the vet’s office, and saw the vet’s nurse walking a cocker spaniel into the back entrance. The dog looked at me curiously, and the nurse had to pull on his leash to get him inside. Then a man walked past me carrying another cute doggy. This second dog met my eye as she* passed me, and I could see her unspoken wish to escape. I’d met a kindred spirit.

I wonder how she’s doing.

(*I don’t know really know if she was a female, but in my mind she was.)

I was just listening to the news randomly a few moments ago and heard the newsreader talking about a 15-year old girl murdered today in South London. I looked up at the screen and recognised the street, which is not very far from my workplace.

Her body was found at 3:45pm, and if I’d taken a particular route (which I often take at lunchtime) when I left work at 5:40pm I would have seen the aftermath, with the forensic teams and investigators. Instead I went straight home, oblivious to this tragedy on my doorstep.

The girl was wearing her school uniform at the time, and now I’m wondering if she went to the same school where I used to go, which is not far from there. She was stabbed at least 10 times, and the murder is not thought to be gang-related. A man in his 30s has been arrested. With just those facts you can imagine a possible scenario, but it’s just speculation.

Just a little while ago, while watching Clash of the Titans (1981), my father said to me that if he’d had his way I would have been named Andromeda. Or at least it would have been my middle name.

It’s an interesting name, but I’m not sure how much it would suit me. Or perhaps the name would have bestowed certain qualities on me, perhaps I would feel more like a princess. A princess who was due to be sacrificed due to her mother’s hubris, but a princess all the same.

On the train home this evening I sat down next to a woman (fairly attractive, probably in her 30s) who was carrying a large carry case like the one on the left, but it was red.

For the next few train stops I wondered what was in the box. At the end of every other sentence in the book I was reading my gaze would discreetly flick over to the box and make another guess at its contents. I could see a white label on the far side of the box, which might have revealed all, but I couldn’t read it from my position, and besides, I liked the guessing game.

A couple of stops before mine, she got up to go. I moved to let her pass, and saw something stamped on the case that ended my speculation.

So now it’s your turn to play. What was in the case? Was she a handywoman? Mobile hairdresser? Spy gadget saleswoman? Professional assassin? Or something more quotidian?