Clare Bowditch (solo!)

A few weeks ago I did a solo trek into north London (well, only King's Cross) to the London Scala to see Australia's Clare Bowditch and Australia's Gotye perform live. Clare was very entertaining to watch - doing almost a stand-up comedy routine in between her breathtaking songs (although she seemed to struggle a bit with her new guitar, and some of the songs are just not quite the same with the full band). When she played an acoustic version of The Moon Looked On, she happened to look right at me (the dork looking on earnestly in the front row) and I was almost overcome with some sort of emotion... a positive one anyway. This is the album version of the song:



It also happened to be Clare's birthday, so the producer/sound girl/whatever she was put a surprise on the stage for Clare before the performance.




Here are some shots of the lady on stage. She managed to be both beautiful and graceful despite coming out in a crumpled sort of dress thing, a sticker on her arm, and tatty cowboy boots, which she proceeded to take off early on because they were uncomfortable.




It was interesting to see her in London, because she's basically unknown here, whereas in Australia she's been around the music traps for years and last year won the ARIA (like an Australian Grammy, sort of) for best female artist. Here she was supporting Gotye, who as far as I'm concerned has a lower profile than Clare in Australia. So very few of the audience seemed to know the songs and sometimes it seemed awfully quiet in the room; like we were seeing a classical quartet instead of a pop singer.

This is her finale piece de resistance - playing a teapot.



After all that, I didn't have the stamina to stay for Gotye. It was a weeknight!!

World in turmoil, or something

Fortunately for me, I'm in a position (so far) to be self-righteous and judgemental about all the financial doom and gloom being peddled by everything from the Times to the free Metro paper on the morning tube. Sure, lawyers are starting to be made redundant in London, but there's not the constant likelihood of my firm actually ceasing to exist overnight which would plague me if I worked in a bank or as a trader. The risk of me ever becoming one of those things is also ridiculously low. Sometimes I fail to understand how I even ended up as a lawyer, given the amount of space in my head that's devoted to trivia on 1990s American television rather than what constitutes a binding contract or how the court system is structured.

Anyway, for no particular good reason - just a hunch, and a favourable Australian dollar conversion at the time* - we closed our savings account with the English arm of Icelandic bank Landsbanki a few weeks ago. Today the news broke that all the Icelandic government has had to take over Landsbanki (see the Guardian article). There's not really any concrete word on when account holders will be able to access their money, although I think a certain amount of loss is guaranteed between the UK and Icelandic governments. Once you've gone through probably frustrating and lengthy compensation application processes. So as I said, we closed our account before all this happened, which is excellent and also lucky for us. I feel sorry for the Icelanders though. Although at least they live in a fantastic country. Perhaps that softens the blow a bit? Perhaps not.

I've tried to get by being deliberately oblivious to how markets work in terms of my personal finances but maybe I will have to start paying attention now.

*I'm now told we did it for a very good reason, which is that The Boyfriend knew this was about to happen. I'm glad someone did.

Stand by

I've been meaning to post again soon but we managed to spill coffee on the poor old iBook this weekend, which put the mousepad and keyboard temporarily out of action. They seem to be OK now that the sugary-y coffee grounds have solidified but who knows how long they'll hold up. I always prefer not to know how disgusting my keyboard has gotten below the primary surface and being forced to prise the keyboard off and take a look was not an enjoyable experience.

So anyway, more words soon, provided the computer holds up.