This week I found myself in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, looking for a bin for my banana peel.
“What on earth is a ‘paternoster’?”, asked my friend.
“What?”
I was distracted and muttering about the seeming disappearance of London’s ubiquitous bins at the exact moment I needed one and the importance of avoiding a Mario Kart-esque banana peel chuck.
“A Paternoster, Anna. We’re on Paternoster Square”.
For a brief moment I contemplated playing a spot of my favourite parlour game Balderdash, where players must invent three additional definitions of obscure words and let others guess which of the definitions is indeed true.
But because we were cutting it fine for a lecture (on Ave Maria Lane, amusingly), I decided against telling him that Paternoster was the name of a hipster organic coffee shop, a scholar, or a property developer, and settled instead on the ‘Our Father’ in Latin.
Two hundred beats per minute
Sticking on the theme of parental Latin phrases, I made a trip back to the alma mater this weekend.
Like many recent graduates, my memories of Cambridge still feature one too many stressful moments for me to feel like they were the golden days.
I once rang up my older brother in tears over a fiendish Dutch homework late at night. Ever the source of fraternal wisdom, he reassured me with, “They do speak English in the Netherlands, you know”. Looking back, this perhaps added to the general sense of existential crises most humanities students inevitably face.
A few weeks after that incident, I rang up my brother up again. This time from the back of a taxi on the way to A&E. In more grammatical gap-fill induced stress, my heart had quite literally skipped a beat and was suddenly going very, very fast. Two hundred and ten beats per minute fast, to be precise. Glad to say that over the course of the evening I was all sorted out and sent home. Even if the long word I’d learned - superventricular tachycardia - still didn’t seem to be long enough for the German gap-fill exercise.
Returning to the town without the dark storm cloud of an exam term hanging over me, and strolling through the cobbled streets in the sunshine, was therefore rather therapeutic. Almost restorative. I could divide my attention equally between my friend and the hash browns in front of me, as opposed to letting it be splintered into essay drafts, committee meetings and muddy lacrosse practices. I could sit in a circle on a patch of a grass (the true sign it is warm enough in Britain), picnicking with friends for as long as I wished.
I could even just about let myself remain unbothered by the rail replacement bus, and the fact I knew the person sitting behind me, all the way back to London.
Kangaroos in the Outlook
Hash browns doubling as a Proustian madeleine for my time Cambridge, I found myself remembering an episode from a few years ago and relaying it to a friend who had thankfully been spared the angst of my second year self. I think one would need to watch my school years in a coming of age movie to fully understand the context and complexities of the situation, but the result was that in the early hours of one morning, I found myself drafting a piece of autobiographical stand-up, “The Kangaroo of Always Hopping Forward”.
I’m afraid to say that the kangaroo has never left the folder of my laptop where such creatures lurk amidst Faustian essay drafts and incomplete gap-fill exercises. Perhaps one day I’ll feel ready to let the kangaroo roam free. Until then, I’ll leave you with the blurb.
In her debut comedy The Kangaroo of Always Hopping Forward, Anna explores the nooks and crannies of her eventful adolescence; summers spent guarding French cathedrals, the utter chaos of Filipino family reunions, and the bizarre quirks of a certain German teacher - Anna is absolutely not like you and she’s still not quite sure why. All set against the backdrop of mental health issues and close shaves with cancer, Anna’s heart-warming and touching comedy will leave you aching from laughter and with only one thought:
Much like the kangaroo itself, the show must always go on.