Barbican

There's a great exhibition at the Barbican, if you can find it.  I had to walk through windy lanes, London's main meat market and a building site to get to see Helen Chadwick's famous chocolate fountain and piss flowers. The chocolate oozes gorgeously and continuously down a phallic central pole, then randomly geysers up around it, sending up creamy strands of goo. The smell is overpowering... Cadbury Dairy Milk gone wild. The piss flowers sit like giant white toadstools on a green mat. They were created by Chadwick and her boyfriend pissing in the snow, then making casts of the melted shapes: her pee created the deep central pistil, while he more creatively doodled flower shapes around each one. Other highlights were the pictures of embryoes discarded like gems for their flaws, then styled as Victorian mourning jewellery, and the landscapes enhanced by vaginal secretions. Chadwick was outrageously original... her art was really in what she chose to call art, as she herself said. Shame she died in her early forties, of sudden heart failure.

Polenta Lament

It's really hard to buy polenta here. Londoners love everything pre-packaged and ready prepared... so you can buy it as a gooey, shrink- wrapped, stabliser-fortified pad, but if you want to lovingly prepare it yourself, as my tutor Chris Saliba taught me, you're in trouble. Hell, it only takes 3 minutes or so to cook it! The collapsing of time is becoming ridiculous and takes all the creativity out of life... what kind of cheese would I add, how much salt, how about some chilli... so you end up traversing London seeking real ingredients. Kaffir lime leaves? Dried, no problem, but fresh... Rice noodles? What are they? And this is meant to be a multicultural city!

Hair Chop

Beware if having your hair cut in the UK! Unlike in Australia, it's really common for hairdressers to have no training at all. If you can hold a pair of scissors, you can get a job as a hairdresser, especially at one of the cheap chains. The first time I had my hair cut here, the woman divided it into two bunches and sawed off the ends of each one. Then she tried to even them up. And tried. And tried. To no avail. Today I am trying a new salon, and I've now wised up to request a senior stylist, which means they might at least have cut someone else's hair before having a go at mine!

Spread the Word

English Marmite is absolutely horrible. It is chocolatey brown and runny, not mention revoltingly sweet. I have had to ask my mum to send some Australian Marmite over, not to mention some Peck's Anchovette Paste. Fascinatingly, Peck's was English, but they sold the licence to an Australian company and now it's only available there... and mysteriously in South Africa as well. If you're not familiar with Peck's, go straight to the supermarket and get some, then spread it thickly on white toast with plenty of cold butter. It's easy to eat the whole jar in one sitting.

Eccentric Middle Class

Recently I needed a solicitor... found one who lives in a mock Tudor house in a private lane. I was ushered into a dining room lined with glass cabinets full of Toby jug/Lladro lady knick knacks and furnished with gnarly antiques. One quarter of the room was taken up by a collection of bottles of various spirits and the whole place stank of grog. Every bit of available floor space was occupied by bottles of Evian. It was completely overwhelming. The solicitor herself seemed quite normal, except that she obviously had to screw her courage to the sticking place to look me in the eye. Shyness? Then as I followed her out, I could see that her tweedy skirt was frayed and split right open down the back, exposing a sturdy beige foundation garment of some type. These characters are common... if male they wear stained shirts and exist on ready meals from Marks and Spencer, but I think this example had a liquid diet!