Is this the place?

You know when the words of a song suddenly make an awful lot of sense to you?

Är det här platsen
jag kan finna ro?
Lägga ner mig ett huvud
och våga känna tro?
Är det här tiden jag väntat på?
Säg att jag har fel
så ska jag gå.

Älskling låt dig inte luras
av mitt självsäkra sätt.
Jag är bara en rädd man
som försöker göra rätt.

Ät det här platsen
där man får en ny chans?
Det har varit en lång väg
för att komma fram.
Är det här året
då allting vänder?
Steg för steg,
en dag i sänder.
“Det finns inga mirakel!”
var det nån som sa till mig.
Men du och jag kan göra ett
här idag,
du och jag.

Är det här platsen
där tårar kommer
från alla förlorade år
som gick?
Är det här platsen
där själen läker?
Säg att det är så!
Säg att det är så!

Älskling låt dig inte luras
av mitt självsäkra sätt.
Jag är bara en ensam man
som försöker göra rätt.

Är det här platsen?
Kom, säg att det är så!

God, moving on and not looking back are such hard things to do!

“So I don’t look back. Still I’m dying with every step I take. But I don’t look back. I’m just a little, little bit better.”

En otålig man.

I do wish Per Gessle would hurry up and release “En händig man”.

“Mazarin” is still one of my favourite albums of all time evah.

That’s all, really. I promise I’ll start blogging again soon. There’s just been a lot going on recently. Existentially, I mean.

I’m BACK!

This one’s for Noel.

Home

I’ve really been missing London this week. Missing places in London. Missing some people who are very close to me in London. I saw the above image on Post Secret and it hit a nerve. I’m someone who pretty much hasn’t stopped moving around in 10 or 12 years and am beginning to wonder what “home” even means, let alone if I will ever find it.

Personally, I think it’s a person. Or people. A feeling. Some days I really feel at home here in Sydney. Other days I feel a long, long way away from what matters. (Without necessarily understanding exactly what it is that matters or why).

More than ever, I understand the mantra that life is “a journey”. Do I believe that? I don’t know. A lot of me would like to just stop. Stay still and take stock. Own things and surround myself with them.

Thankyou to Alex for pointing me in the direction of Post Secret. I think I will dedicate this post to Alex, in fact – a man I’ve always admired from a distance. It’s just the distance is a lot bigger than it ever used to be now.

457 my bitch up!

This morning I heard that my 457 long stay business visa has been approved by Australian immigration. Woo hoo! This means that I can work fulltime in Australia for up to 4 years and come and go from the country as I please. Woo hoo!

This also, of course, means that I can completely abandon the stupid “college” I have been attending to keep myself legal on the student visa. Well, when I say “attending” I mean going in 3 times a week to give them my autograph on pieces of paper to testify that I have been in classes. Classes I don’t actually have to attend because I was exempted from all of them on account of me being really clever, beautiful and fabulous.. you know the drill. Confused? I was.

So anyway, finally I have some, you know, actual NEWS to report to you all. Yay. Otherwise I would have just been boring you silly about how I’m working hard to perfect my breaststroke and building up stamina in the pool (and cruising boys underwater).

Seriously, you would not believe how long the shopping list in my head is now that I can actually start to think about spending money. The Big Question is: which phone should I buy? Comments welcome.

Dom jävlarna ska skjutas!

Shame about Anna-Nicole Smith and all, but anyway…

I just got a new Swedish album yesterday, Säkert! by.. um.. Säkert! (I heart the exclamation marks!)

It’s stunningly good and only 32 minutes long, which I like. Albums these days are far too long I always think. Maybe part of the reason this album is getting a lot of airtime chez moi is that it’s short and punchy. There’s not a dud track on it. Way better than those dismal, pretentious hip-hop albums that fill the physical limits of a CD with 70 minutes of filler and over-produced shite. Anyway, Säkert! is apparently my most played album ever already.. although I have no idea what algorithm this software is using to calculate that. I must have listened to Kent’s Du & jag döden (You and me, death) at least 1000 times since it was released. Anyway, I believe Säkert! is/are doing the business pretty majorly in Sweden right now and I can see why. It reminds me a lot of the German group “Wir sind Helden” (We are Heroes). Excellent, edgy lyrics and just bloody good pop/folk/rock songs. Very hard to classify. In particular, I urge anyone who cares to check out the single “Vi kommer att dö samtidigt” (We’re going to die at the same time). Great stuff.

Oh! And the new Raymond & Maria album Hur mycket jag än tar finns alltid lite kvar (However much I take, there’s always a little bit left) is also very good. You can’t argue with überfierce song titles like “Storstadskvinnor faller ner och dör” (Big City Ladies Fall Down and Die!!!!!!!!!!!!) Video is here.

You have no idea how frustrated I am right now. SVT have decided not to post videos of the Melodifestivalen 2007 heats on their website which leaves anyone who doesn’t live in Sweden or have access to SVT via satellite well and truly out in the cold. I’m reading about the contest every day on various websites, but it certainly doesn’t help to get text messages from schlager-obsessed mates in London gloating about how good the songs are and WISH YOU WERE HERE WATCHING IT WITH US!!!!!!!

It already looks as though it’s going to be a very close race this year. Which is a good thing. Last year it was obvious from the go-get that Carola would win. Personally, I would have liked to see Linda Bengtzing win, but I am a bit of a sucker for a good, traditional schlager number. Martin Stenmarck was a disappointing and unpopular winner the previous year (he made up for it this year with an excellent Swedish-language album which I’ve mentioned before). Lena Ph rocked in 2004, however. I’m still listening to Det gör ont 3 years later.

Is it just me or is Melodifestivalen like 3000 times better fun than the Eurovision? I really wish the UK would do something similar. But no. We’re far too kewl for that, apparently. The BBC are probably planning to send Kerry Katona to Helsinki or something. Seriously, it would NOT surprise me.

Oh well. Suppose I’ll just have to wait for the official Melodifestivalen DVD. Nnnyrrrrggghhhh!

Looking good. Like a supermodel should.

Just got back from my daily trip to the pools. Bit of a shocker today. I met these two lovely English backpackers at the shallow end of the medium lane: Barry and Charlie from Liverpool, both currently doing a round-the-world trip and on their way home to the UK in a few weeks. Had a nice chat with Charlie (the hot one) after I had collided with him on the way back from the deep end. Bless him, but his breaststroke was dreadful. He was working incredibly hard and going nowhere. After I’d collided with him (rammed my head up his arse, I SWEAR not on purpose, yeah?) we stopped at the shallow end and had a giggle about it. (God, I love the Scouse accent).

Anyway, after chatting with him for a few minutes, shaking hands and doing the whole “Reprazent, yo! Northerners and Scots are BROTHERS!” routine (which I normally find unbearably parochial on account of my big city pretensions and love affair with English RP) I told him I’d have to keep the momentum going and carry on with my laps, kicked off energetically, then the worst cramp I have ever experienced bit violently into my left calf and I spluttered to a halt about 10 metres into my lap yelling “fuckfuckfuckfuck”.

Looking good, Paul. Way to go.

Charlie and Barry were pissing themselves laughing as I hobbled back to the shallow end, clumsily trying to curl up my toes to calm the knotted, burning fist of cramped muscle.

Blah. Pass the tiger balm.

It’s important to be able to laugh at yourself in this country. And yeah, maybe I shouldn’t be trying to pick up straight English boys at the pool. Tsk.

Tänk på avståndet

Well, this is fun. I’m filling up my days at the moment by just kind of aimlessly walking around Sydney trying to pretend that I have an aim and that I’m not actually thinking what it is I’m thinking. Don’t you just LOVE it when you have resolved to distance yourself physically and emotionally from someone you really just want to be close to all the time? And now I’m realising just how much time I did, in fact, spend with him.

Ugh.

I swear, I have this freaky spray-on smile on my face all the time at the moment and I feel like a Stepford Wife or a fucking Borg who’s strayed from The Collective Hive.

Friend: “Hi Paul! How are you going?”

Paul: “Ha ha ha! I’m fine! What beautiful weather! How are the kids? We shall have fog by teatime! Goodbye!”

Anyway, I have a project this weekend. The forms I need to fill in to get a working visa arrived from the contract agency this morning. The letter that came with them exclaims the following:

DON’T PANIC !!!
We know these forms look Frightening !!!
We know how hard it is to motivate yourself to complete them !
Help is on hand, if required !
JUST THINK OF THE END RESULT !!!

I’d say it’s probably going to take me all weekend to fill them out. They make Ulysses look like The Beano.

Anyway, happy happy joy joy.

Absolute Schlager Hitmania

OMG! It doesn’t get much camper than this. Markoolio and Linda Bengtzing have just recorded a comedy schlager track called “Värsta schlagern” (roughly “The baddest schlager ever” – cunning play on words, you see, because “värst” means both “worst” and “bad” as in Michael Jackson “bad”) which is basically a very funny schlager song about.. um.. how to write a classic schlager song.

The lyrics are here. I particularly like the bit about stealing bits from ABBA…

For those without the Sveedish-fu, I’ll translate the chorus to give you the general idea:

And it’s love, it’s the wind blowing (Swedish pop tunes commonly talk about the sea and the elements, go figure)
It’s eyes and they’re sparkling
And lots of other tired old clichés
Which say everything and nothing
And it’s stars and they’re shining
It’s the world and it’s disappearing
And the title should be punchy like a slap in the face (original says punch in the stomach, but I didn’t think that scanned very well and slapping is gayer, so there..)
Yes, it’s the baddest schlager ever!

Just before they go into the ubiquitous keychange, they actually sing “And here comes the keychange finallyyyy-yyyy-yyy-yyyyyy!” It is basically the fiercest piece of music I have ever heard EVER. It’s got bells, handclaps, Benny Andersson piano motifs.. It’s got it ALL, frankly.

I love Markoolio’s funny Finnish accent too.

Cock & Feel-Up

I know I promised I wouldn’t blog about anymore boring Linux stuff, but I just discovered this excellent new application called YaKuake.

It’s like any other Unix terminal emulator except that you can have it running all the time in the background and when you need to do some command line work (as l33t geeks like me tend to want to do quite a lot) you just hit a hot key and the terminal comes sliding out from the top of the screen. Steve Jobs eat your heart out. This is the shit, bitch!

Anyway, I realise that’s probably really boring for most of you…

In other news, I went for a nice swim today at the Cook & Phillip pool in central Sydney. Up until now I’ve been going to the Victoria Park open air pool in, um, Victoria Park which is about a half hour walk from my house. The Cook & Phillip pool is a bit more of a trek, but well worth it. It is now my New Favourite Thing To Do Ever(tm). Mainly, and this is extremely shallow of me, because it’s full of extremely hot men. There’s even a sign in the men’s changing room discouraging “inappropriate and/or lewd behaviour”. You’ve got to love it.

Apparently, it’s known as “Cock and Feel-Up” by the local moxen here in Sydney on account of the goings-on in the locker rooms. Hurrah!

This probably qualifies as my most vacuous post to date, but hey, that’s the kind of mood I’m in today. I had a really nice swim there this afternoon; almost did a whole kilometre, which is a bloody good effort for me and I signed up for a stroke correction class to boot so that I can fix my front crawl and swim in the fast lane with the big boys. Hurrah!