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My little sister sent me a rather alarming email today. Apparently one of her lecturers has been sending rather friendly emails, suggesting they catch up for coffee, etc. In one, he said something about her smile. The alarming thing – that she was asking me if I think he’s being dodgy. I mean, hello?! I don’t think even I was that dumb at that age.

Speaking of which, we just paid £140 on eBay for two tickets for La Traviata at the Royal Opera House. After only yesterday booking two tickets to Swan Lake worth £120. (Yes, after almost a year on, I’m ready to see it again – but still nervous about whether it will live up to the first one. Funnily enough, I chose two seats very close to the front – second row in fact – off to the side; I’m sure though we still won’t be as near the stage as Jane and I were in St Petersburg.)

So £140 is a lot of money, no? It’s actually quite reasonable, given that the face value of each ticket is £50 – yes, reasonable, because someone else was selling 2 x £50 tickets for £500, and last year I paid something like £90 for 2 tickets worth £11 each. Why the big deal? Some Russian bird is singing, and on looking her up I found out she’s no 3 on the Times 100 entertainers and artists list, and the little blurb about her actually mentioned La Traviata as an example of her talent/skill. So. But then, last year, I specifically bought those scalped tickets to hear this Italian soprano sing (I was intrigued by the description of her singing in an article I read in the Metro, and now I realise she must’ve been a big league opera diva), and on the night, she was replaced by someone else due to ‘illness’. And the Times blurb I believe said that this Russian bird likes her parties.

Both the ballet and the opera aren’t for a little while yet – both in the third week in January. Cultural indeed that week will be.

I never thought I’d know what it’d feel like to be a trophy girlfriend. The first party we went to on Wednesday night, the IT one, was as sad as SF expected it to be. And impressing IT geeks is hardly an accomplishment – I think you just have to be a girl to make them go starry-eyed when you walk into a room. But we then gatecrashed the T & C one (which SF would’ve been to anyway had the two parties not been on the same night – he chose to RSVP to the IT one because partners were invited to that one, ain’t he sweet?), and when the hottest guy on his floor (a leaner version of that guy on Lost) took him aside and told him he’d done well for himself, well, SF was mighty pleased, and has been trying since then to pay for my dress. I should say that although the T & C party was held in a much nicer venue – about a hundred times funkier and swankier – the dresscode was less formal than the IT party’s, in fact, I think everyone was just wearing whatever they’d been wearing that day at work, and I was the only girl, well, the only person there who didn’t work in the bank, so I think that helped a lot… that and the poor lighting.

So now that I’ve done my job, I guess I won’t be needed at any more work functions – which is just as well considering how shattered I was on Thursday. I think most of the work I did with patients on Thursday was less structured and more ‘functional’. And I didn’t even think that I’d made full use of the free booze on the night, but I guess that’s what happens when you haven’t been on the piss for a while.

There’s nothing like shopping in Ikea to make you feel irrevocably, no, irretrievably, one half of a couple. We went to get something to store the excess of clothes that I have – not that I have an excessive amount of clothes, it’s more that he does, so that he can’t quite accommodate mine. Anyway, the piles of clothes threatening to fall out everytime he opened his wardrobe doors was starting to do his head in, poor dear. Unfortunately, we couldn’t quite agree on what to get – the chest of drawers he wanted to get for his room wasn’t the kind of storage I wanted for my clothes (don’t fancy reaching far into the back, and pulling things out to get to things in the bottom) – so we came away empty-handed. Except for the inevitable bits and bobs we picked up as we trawled through Ikea, and the stacks of stuff PJ my friend bought.

I was very happy to hear today that Labor has finally wrested control of the government away from John Howard. Hooray! Funny but I feel less upset than I did last week when I found out I wasn’t enrolled to vote – I uncharacteristically actually had the foresight to take myself off the roll before leaving Oz, to then a week before the election realise I strongly did want to vote. Not that my one vote would’ve made a difference, but it was a right I – rather belatedly – decided I wanted to exercise, and it felt pretty sucky to have actually given it up. The worrying thing is I didn’t actually know what Kevin Rudd had promised until today – only that I can’t understand how the majority of Australians could have voted for Howard the last two elections, and that Kevin Rudd always sounded very intelligent every time I saw him on telly. But hearing today that he’s very much for being more proactive about climate change, well, I think that would’ve definitely secured my vote.

…..I’m so ashamed to know so little…

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I’ve only been at work a week and I’m already shagged. Everyday I’ve felt brain-dead when I get home from work. And I’ve spent almost the whole weekend just resting. Part of the reason I think is the commute to work – it takes almost an hour each way, which I know is average for most but it doesn’t make it easier to take.

At least with work being where it is I can almost pretend I’m a City girl on my walk from the tube to the hospital. Until the streets start getting dirtier, and the people are no longer homogenously dressed in dark suits. At least it doesn’t quite reach the same lows as the neighbourhood in Lewisham.

SF has been super-sweet, getting up with me every morning (about an hour earlier I’m sure than he usually does) so he can leave with me. And we can now catch the same tube (my stop is the one after his). I’m sure we make the other commuters sick sometimes – the trains is often so packed that it’s just too hard, even impossible sometimes, to read the Metro, or to get a book out of your bag, so we have to occupy ourselves in other ways ;).

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We saw an interesting play yesterday. It took place in a train station, with the audience members seated over the main concourse, equipped with headphones through which we tuned into the ‘intense personal drama’ unfolding. The effect was similar to watching a film – the inevitable thoughtless scanning of your eyes over the scene (they cleverly kept the main players out of sight for the first little while) probably producing much the same effect a director’s considered framing would – while your ears listened to a play (the actors wore mikes which fed into our headphones). Pretty clever stuff. And guess what? It was an Australian company – Back to Back.

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I read something the other day which made me react in a way I didn’t at all expect. Now I haven’t properly looked this up to verify the accuracy of it, but apparently oestrogen in women bonds with the oxytocin released after sex and causes it to last/circulate longer in our bodies, thereby sustaining that warm fuzzy bonded post-sex feeling. Whereas on the other hand, testosterone in men has the opposite effect, causing more rapid deterioration of the oxytocin, so that for men, that warm fuzzy bondedness isn’t as strong and doesn’t last as long. And do you know how I felt when I read that? Betrayed. Like everytime SF is holding me in his arms it’s all a lie, that I may think we’re there together but in fact I’m alone.

That scares me, the fact that I would react like that – I’m turning into one of those irrational females, always on the verge of exploding into hysterics. Rupturing into hysterics.

I want to know – did this piece of information cause the same sort of reaction in other girls? Anyone?

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