A London Some'ting

...or the great pork tour of 2016.

The Dotytron and I celebrated 15 years of jungle love this year.  15 years is not nothing. It's kind of a big deal.  We've been through a thing or two, and we wanted to celebrate in some grand, fiscally irresponsible fashion.  Originally the plan was New Orleans, for a extra-long weekend bacchanalia of jazz and beignets and crawfish and brass bands.  Then the Dotytron stumbled upon the 10 year anniversary of Rupture, a promotion company in London that's been pushing the breakbeat heavy sound that we love, that I really pushed when me and C64 were in the promoting game, that has been my heart and home.  For their 10 year anniversary they put together what can only be described as a "punishing" line up (very technical term).  So we did what any other jungle-crazed ex-ravers would do, we looked at each other and calculated the costs, and the time difference, and the fact that with the Dotytron's work schedule we'd only be able to spare like, 3 days in jolly old England, and the ridiculous exchange rate, and we said, "F**K IT, IT'S ABOUT TO GO DOWN."  And we did it.

The logistics of leaving all three at home were not triflin'.  They were something else. We drew up a master schedule, we booked our caregiver to come in on the weekends, we set up contingencies and play dates and made food so it was all ready to go.  We sent emails, we left health cards, and even still, I was a ball of stress and nerves leading up to it.  A neighbour asked me before we left if I was excited and I was just like, "I'm too freaked out that something is going to go horribly wrong. I don't think I'm going to be excited until I get back to Toronto and find out that nothing happened."  (This turned out to be a bald-faced lie, since outside of a quick hello Facetime video shortly after arrival, I didn't worry/think about them once).  The wonderful grandmas (one of whom is effectively deaf and the other one who has major joint issues) conducted themselves admirably and we owe them the world.

We left on a Thursday night red eye.  Arriving at 9am the next day.  Now, I don't know if you lot know this about the Dotytron, but he is a terrible traveler.  His comfort zone consists of a razor thin slice of equilibrium - he can't sleep on planes, he gets sick, he's tall and awkward and uncomfortable.  It wasn't looking good for him, because even despite duping our family doctor into giving him a prescription for sleeping pills, they didn't do squat.  I on the other hand, am an exemplary travel.  Being used to functioning at a high level on little sleep is a point in my favor.

On arrival.

Our crash pad.

We dropped our bags, showered, and then hit Borough Market for a roast pork, applesauce, and crackling sandwich, and a sausage, arugula (sorry, rocket), and stilton sandwich.  The Dotytron also had one of the best cups of coffee of his young life at Monmouth coffee. It's coffee where people wait in line for about 25 minutes for a cup.

Then we did something we've never done before...we split up.  Usually, we're glued to each other, but he wanted to meet up with some Toronto crew to go record shopping, and I would've rather eat a bag of barf than follow around a bunch of DJs on a crate-digging expedition, so I went to the Tate Modern.

I **think** that's St. Paul's Cathedral, but we are always the worst tourists in the world, so I can't be sure.  Pretty picture though, right?

I hoofed it to Ottolenghi Spitalfields and picked up a bunch of goodies to tide us over the next day when we knew we'd be crunked.

After a long, luxurious, deep nap made all the sweeter by the subconscious awareness that there was no way I'd be woken by a little body climbing into bed and kicking me in the head, we posse'd up and headed to the venue, which was conveniently located about 100m from our apartment.  Good planning, us, good planning.  I have to be honest, I slept so deeply that I almost didn't want to go to the party.  It was also hectic because the promoter's had promised the Toronto contingent (about 8 people made the trip to London for the party, including our two buddies who were DJing) paid guestlist tickets available at the door.  Anticipation for the show was so intense (people were selling counterfeits??!  For a rave?!) that the promoters told us to line up by 10pm, or else they'd hit capacity.  It was kind of annoying (like seriously, you're not going to prioritize the people who you promised tickets and who crossed an ocean to be here?), and it was kind of fraught, but we got in around 10pm.

Skanna - aka the love of my life

Ummm...what is there to say about this party, except that it was LIFE AFFIRMING.  I felt like I was home, in a very real way.  Among my tribe of people (aka weirdo junglists).  The party was oversold like crazy...three sweaty, grimey rooms PACKED with a throbbing mass of people...one of those parties where you can't even dance because it's just a constant rotating shift of people squeezing by.  Was I uncomfortably skin-to-skin with some white dreads at some point?  Yes. Was I thoroughly grossed out by the tacky feeling of their sweat-slicked bodies against mine?  YES.  Was I worried that one wrong step and I would be trampled?  YES.  Did I get hit on?  Yes (still got it, Lagerfeld).  Eventually, in the main room, during what was billed as the "Alliance of Science" set (Equinox, BKey, and some other shacker) I was dancing up on top of some benches lining the main room.  This sound...this breakbeat heavy choppage...this tsunami of thunderous, sequenced, programmed amens, this chest-rattling bass...nothing does it for me like that.  I never get to hear it.  I never get to be surrounded by people who love this sound like I do and will brock out.  I never get to be around my people.

The thing is...people still CARE about jungle in the UK.  There's still a scene...and not just that, but a bit of a revival going on.  People were calling out "Insiiiide" and shouting "boh" for rewinds and I was like YES YES YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES!  Dotytron of course came back all fired up to rebuild the scene here but we all know that Toronto is a provincial backwater...a tertiary, staid, conservative town and if it wasn't the case that almost everyone I love in the world was here, I wouldn't stay.  I was like, you're almost better off saving the money you'd spend bringing Equinox here to play to 100 people (MAX), and going to London once a year for a weekend of Rupture.

It was beyond magical.  I danced from about 10pm-5am (jah bless the time change and our arrival working in our favour...it felt like we left the party at midnight).  I was sore and grungy and covered with a thin mist of rave rain and it was like a benediction.  We fell into our usual party rhythms...the Dotytron flitting around, socializing, me eking out a little square of space by the bass bins, throwing elbows to maintain it, reconvening at various points but otherwise, blissfully on our own trajectory, but near enough so that our orbits overlapped.  I want to go back.  I would go back in a heartbeat.

The next day our big outing was the Harry Potter Studios tour, in Leavesden.

We hit Borough Market again the next day for breakfast which was a duck confit butty.

So, you take a hour-long bus ride to the studio lot.  They usher you into a theatre, and they show a video of Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Daniel Radcliffe reminiscing about their time on the studios filming the movies.  At the end of the movie, the three of them turn away from the audience and open the door to the great hall at Hogwarts, and say something to the effect of: "Follow us now," and then the screen of the theatre rises up and the doors to the Great Hall at Hogwarts is there and everyone turned to each other and went, "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" and people were like, bursting into tears and screaming, and it was truly, truly, the best.  So funny and dorky and amazing.

It was a big day for us.  For our splashiest meal, I made us a reservation at Fergus Henderson's incredibly influential restaurant, St. John.  When he opened the restaurant, he was one of the only people doing nose-to-tail eating and elevating so-called "humble" cuts of meat and returning to classic British cooking.  The food was a revelation.

Oat crusted mackerel with bacon and brown butter, potted crab toasts, and the iconic bone marrow dish.

The Dotytron had liver and chard and I had lamb's heart with rutabaga mash.  It was heavenly.  The heart had a texture like pork cheeks, but slightly more tender, sapid and blood rare in the middle.

The next morning we had breakfast at Modern Pantry, Clerkenwell.  I had a pecan frangipane croissant, and a shakshuka type thing.  The Dotytron had a benny with a yuzu hollandaise.  

We spent our last full day record shopping, regular shopping, and milling around.  Pretty lowkey and chill.  I had plans to check out a classic Sunday roast dinner, but because the seat of the Empire turns out to be a provincial backwater (is anyone surprised?  Not I!), we found that a lot of restaurants right in the core (Picadilly and the like) closed after a lunch service.  Da hell?  So we wandered around, peckish, Finally, we arrived at a Spanish restaurant with a crowd of people outside, waiting for one of the coveted seats.  There was no order to the crowd, so there was the general sense of unease in the air, subtle jockeying for position, mental headcounts of the people in the mass outside cross-referenced with the number of seats inside.  The Dotytron and I were the last pair to snag a set of bar stools and felt like we'd won the lottery for it.

Croquetas

Tuna Tartare, which our Run Lola Run server insisted was her favorite dish.  It was okay.

Spanish tortilla

Fried baby artichokes with hollandaise

Octopus a la plancha

Fried zucchini blossom served drizzled with honey

Beef cheek stuffed piquillo pepper, fried

Spanish flan and an olive oil cake with some weird trail mix served on the side

Two lovebirds, in love

Two lovebirds, homeward bound

It was such a good, fun, trip.  Although, 2 months later, it seems like a distant memory.  I'm hungry to go back.  

The thing is: 15-odd years ago, I made a choice to spend my life with this Tally McGoo from my high school.  I didn't know what I was choosing at the time.  I mean, how could I?  I was a half-formed lump of clay.  I'm still not even a fully-formed lump of clay.  Yet, every day, for the past 15-odd years, I've gotten up and continued to choose this life we've made together.  I choose this guy, with his big, pure, open heart and his ability to make me gasp with laughter. I choose his sentimentality and sensitivity and empathy.  I choose his silliness and his ability to be a goof around our children and his endless patience as a parent.  I choose our ups and downs, I choose our squabbles, I choose our brocking out in a car together, I choose our shorthand and our finishing each other's sentences.  2001 me, goomba that I was, turned out to be pretty smart, guys.  I don't know what life is going to throw our way.  I don't know what our struggles are going to be.  I don't know how low the capriciousness of fate will bring us.  The only thing I know is that there is an alchemy between we two.  As a team, we are magic.

Fin.

Frivolous (But At the Same Time Vitally Important) Question

Okay, here goes:

Denim harem jogging pants with high tops, yay or nay?

I think I'm gonna go for it.  We'll see how this shakes down.

I recently splurged on my first grown-up lady powder blush and it has CHANGED. MY. LIFE.  My go-to Benefit Benetint is good, but it kind of dries out my skin, somehow, and sometimes the flush was a little subtle.  I went with Nars blush in Torrid, which is a darker, deeper pink with a little less glittery bits than their all-star product, Orgasm, which is the blush that's supposed to look good on everyone.  It did look good on me, but this deeper tone works better with my darker skin.

I also scored the score of life!

This coat retails for $420 at J. Crew and I nabbed it (in excellent used condition) for $100!  It's such a lady coat.  I love it.  I was on the fence for a bit because I wasn't sure the sandstone colour would suit my skin tone and I was kind of heartset on a grey, but this looks and feels so luxe.  I'm obsessed.  You know I loves me a deal.  Combine a grown-up lady coat with my addiction to the thrill of second hand clothing finds, and this is a big, big score.  It looks so good with my skinnies and runners!  Obsessed.

Dr. Rei gave me a gold, Nars eyeshadow pencil thing and all in all, I've been really feeling myself lately.

I'm very loved up on my network of people at the moment.  Friday was my day off and I had brunch with my new friend, N, who is a brilliant, beautiful, woman of colour doing interesting research and has amazing style to boot.  Then, I had a massage and my RMT went to a book launch and Chester Brown was there and we both had a moment of being all "ewwww, he's so gross!!!" and she made a crack about how, if she ever saw Seth, she'd knock that porkpie hat right off his head and I felt SO GLAD that I know someone who knows/appreciates/can make that joke.  I so want to meet Chester Brown so I can ask him if he knows he's gross.  That's very important to me.  It's really hard to tell from his work.  He's very honest about the the gross things he does and the gross ways he does them, but there's a certain flatness in the delivery and a lack of self-reflection that also makes it seem like he doesn't know he's gross?  Like, if you were gross the way Chester Brown is gross, shouldn't you be contextualizing/feeling guilt/wanting to ameliorate your grossness?

To wit, I recently read his comic, Paying For It which is about a period when he became a client john, during this tumultuous time in his life when he was still technically the significant other of Sook-Yin Lee, and was living with her, but she was pursuing a relationship with this drummer (!) and eventually moved that drummer into their apartment (!) and effectively ceased to be Chester Brown's partner.  But he still lived there for a while.  Anyway, as with The Playboy, I appreciated Brown's honesty, but that doesn't make his dealings with the prostitutes and his editorializing any less gross (he's very superficial when describing the prostitutes).  I get we're all superficial, and he's entitled to that (maybe?), but at the end of the comic there's a big position paper on how he feels prostitution should be legalized, but nothing about his own sexism and grossness and situating that in any critical, self-reflexive, trying-to-be-a-better-person way.  It was just icky.

Related, we started watching this show, The Girlfriend Experience, which is tangentially related to the Steven Soderbergh movie of the same name.  It's shot in Toronto (but isn't set in Toronto) and it features Riley Keough as this law school student who takes a demanding internship and becomes an escort.  It's shot in a very dark, dim, moody, Soderbergh-y way and has that same, voyeuristic, detached tone.  It's not hugely compelling but the episodes are only half an hour and at this point, we're mildly interested.

Last night, as we readied for bed, the Dotytron was reading Paying for It and I was reading my own thing and I suddenly had the thought that guys secretly might want the escort type experience...like they really just want to see themselves pandered to, and have this blank slate woman to reflect themselves back, so I decided to try.  This is not going anywhere sexxxay, don't worry.  I mean, so much of the time I feel like we barely even listen to each other (I mean, we do, but not about mundane shiz).  So I thought it might be a good way to focus and really pay attention to my partner if I adopted the persona of someone who is basically being paid to listen to you.

The character in the Girlfriend Experience always has this blandly interested expression on her face and speaks in a coolly detached, neutral voice (again, very Soderbergh-y) so I affected that and turned over to face the Dotytron, and the exchange went like this,

Me: *Adopts a cool, demur, low tone* "You're reading the Chester Brown?"
Dotytron, reading, "Yeah,"
Me: "What do you think about it?"
Dotytron: "I don't know!"
Me, soldiering on, still with the low voice, "You can tell me anything, you know"
Dotytron: "AGH! WHAT?!!? WILL YOU SHUT UP!?!?"

LMAO.  At that point, I told him what I had been trying to accomplish and we both laughed at what a colossal fail it was.

Not very scientific though.

A narrow house me and Merrick came across on a walk

Black sesame steamed milk!!!

Two babes, now with babes, a little older, a little wiser, a little babe-ier

 I'd be remiss talking about how loved I am on my peeps if I didn't mention as always, the inimitable Dr. Rei.  We went to see Rihanna on Wednesday and had the best time of life.  A long walk, Banh Mi Boys, followed by black sesame steamed milk, then Travis Scott and Riri giving the best show ever - so many medleys and so many hits!  I love her.  She's such an open and real performer.  I love how imperfect she is and how she owns that.  It was such a fun night of dancing and women being amazing.  Love!

We went to visit my sister this weekend and it was filled with the usual: Cracker Barrel, Delmonico's, playing in their backyard, picking up all the goodies, cousin shenanigans:

Little Little Cuz put on these fake glasses and went around claiming he was an "old man." The old man's name?  Timothy, of course.

I bought Twin A a pair of tights because he's obsessed with mine.  Anytime I wear tights, he comes up to me and touches my leg, "These your tights, mama?" and our caregiver told us that he likes to pull his socks up as high as possible.  I got him these and he loved them so much.

These are the perfect high-tops for a short legged person like myself.  Wahhhh - they were too big!!!  They come in men's sizes so I put my considerable research skills to use and tracked down a pair in my size.  Can't wait til these are on my feet! The style is the Vans Sk8-Hi Slim.  Pretty ubiquitous, but the colour is hard to find.  It's a cream colour which is easier to wear than the more readily available bright white.  They're sold out everywhere!

 Good hair. Solar flare. 

Nature is the bomb.

Sister selfies. This is AFTER Twin A barfed on me at Brian's USA Diner. Sorry Brian, we owe you one.

This is a picture of how Twin A sleeps.  He's hardcore into the sleeping with his eyes open in the creepiest way imaginable, tip.

Cousins gonna cuz.

Back at home on Sunday night...Twin B being a maniac.  I was trying to capture him knocking himself on the head like Donkey Kong while making those grunting noises, but then it turned into him doing that disgusting stuff with the food because he's a nutjob.

Snapchat fun.

Last Monday was one of those epic comic working mom days.  Our caregiver was going to be late, so I had planned to stay home an hour to drop off the Big Yam at school, and then meet her back at our place for a twin hand off. Running late, I was upstairs trying to throw on some clothes and brush my teeth when I heard Twin A shout, "HE BARFED!!! LINDSAY BARFED ON THE CARPET!!!" and while, like most witnesses, he was a little unreliable when it came to the details, he got the gist right.  But I had to get the Big Yam to school, so I bundled everyone up, and shoved them all in Eddie VAN Halen, and then listened helplessly as Twin B barfed AGAIN.  Then, because we were late, I had to hustle all three out with me and carry the barfy Twin B in my arms to the office for a late slip, before delivering the Big Yam to his classroom.  At that point, I called it a day and took the rest of the day off so our caregiver wouldn't have to bring the twins with her to pick up the Big Yam from school.

Of course, as I'm learning about Twin B, he needed to barf the sickness out of his system, pass out for a solid, deep 2 hour nap, and then he woke up from said nap and behaved like usual.  It's a very intense, odd, methodology his immune system has, but it's pretty consistent.

Then, that night, bedtime, we hear a thump from our bedroom and then Twin A starts wailing...but that's par for the course, until he ran out and we saw that he had blood streaming down his face and had a small 1.5" cut on his forehead.  So I had to take him to the ER, which was a s**tshow (it is true what they say about ER's being the busiest between 6pm and midnight).  We were triaged and then I think the nurse didn't believe me when I said there were no signs of a concussion or loss of consciousness, because she sent us to the waiting room of the damned.  By the time we got to the WROTD, we had already been in the hospital for 2 hours.  Some people in the WROTD had been there for 3 hours at that point and still hadn't been called.  Finally, because I am nothing if not a good advocate for my own health care, I was like, "the last time we were here we were taken to another area where they do stitches and fractures?  Can I go there?" Which got us fast-tracked to that waiting room, but I had the misfortune of dealing with a doctor bro who told me he was in the middle of switching over with another doctor, who would be there in "5 minutes" and since the freezing agent takes 20 minutes to set in, and new doctor is the one doing the stitches, that I should just wait.  Well, cut to 45 minutes later, and I finally said to bro doc, "Uhh, if the freezing agent takes 20 minutes to set in, can we at least start the process?"  

Then, when new doc finally showed up, she was pushing for the glue for Twin A and I had to say, "Nuh-uh, last time he picked that out the next day," and push for stitches, which Twin A slept through, because my kids are champions at the doctors.  Twin A slept through the stitches, but even better, slept through them injecting a needle full of freezing agent into his forehead.  It was pretty gross.

The upside is, the stitches lasted all of 2 days before he picked those out, too.

Oy.

Fin.