There's something about Perth -- and that is, it ain't Britain

I'm back in it, and it feels dead right to be back in the Southern Hemisphere again. What got to me (initially quite starkly, but perhaps less so, and nonetheless, irksomely right to the final hallowed minutes when the plane passed out of British territory) was the British taste for complete neutrality in fashion, eating and personal style. I yearned for something flagrantly Southern Italian for more times than I could have imagined. Is there anything wrong with expecting a little bit of pizzazz?

When I snapped back into my normal mental state of casual non-conformity, I found the gap between my hope and expectations and the actual state and condition of British processes of cultural thought was even greater than it had seemed to me to have been earlier.

The stark neutrality in taste (the failure to even try to have any particular quality of one's own that isn't general and applicable to any situation) reduced me to my own level of pragmatic utilitarianism. I would take from the situation what I needed, make no effort to get drunk as it would only end in failure, and efficiently process myself out of the country via customs. This was to be the climax of the trip.

I had one item of clothing that remained, for my last morning's stay, and it was woollen, billowing at the bust and sleeves, and cinched around the knees. It has the glorious status of not having encountered my sweat through wear at even one point on the trip. I wore it down to breakfast, with my eyes still puffy and enlarged from the glass of champagne I had made my acquaintance with, the night before.

I came down to encounter one last engagement with a typical English breakfast -- something I now knew on familiar terms as I'd had 16 in one row, during my consecutive days' stay in Oxford.

I was dragging -- sweeping slightly -- however unapparently to me, and I didn't know it. Some pale whisp of a Nosferatu character, a male in only general form, felt fit to tell me. Somehow my sleeve was encountering and sweeping plates. Oh my god, one didn't want to be reminded of an English sensibility, just when one had almost succeeded in eliminating it from one's mind. Just one last act of bland servitude towards my body, I as its slave, feeding it hash and bacon and the ordinary things the English love to eat. Here I was still, in my state of abjection, feeding my body something that it needed rather than desired, and here was an entity, without humour, reminding me precisely of that which I was intending to forget.

A critique from a male slave to blandness, criticising my form.

I tend to react to all forms of interpellation (look it up; it is a term by Louis Althusser) by taking on something of the form in which I've been interpellated -- only in an ironic and exaggerated sense.

In this case, I would be the ingenue and foreigner who knew not how to control the manner of my movements, nor how to be compliant and discreet.

"Oh goodness!" I replied, matching a lack of humour for an irony that wasn't going to announce itself as such. I stared down at amazement at my drooping black sleeves, and gathered one of them up in deliberate fashion. "I don't think that there can be any solution at all to these sleeves I am wearing!"

His Blandness was not cracking a smile.

I later regretted my lack of commitment in follow-through.

"I should have said... I should have said... " I thought, as I sat down to another meal of repetition, "Oh dear! You DO look pale. Are you feeling quite fine?"

If the quintessential British fear is to create a scene, then those who venture forth to challenge foreigners they do not know could find a true encounter with their inner selves by virtue of gratuitous dramatisation.