Sinister: How to make things happen and a London Picnic

[Dimitra Daisy]

This is for anyone who may care what I think, especially those who are about 
to change their lives. Especially Vel and Sir David. Though, judging from 
his last post, he knows enough of this already. By the way, his post 
reminded me a lot of a Divine Comedy song that says:
I can still remember
When I was just a kid
I was free to do what I wanted to
But I never, ever did
So now with years of discretion reached
May we not forget
"Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite"
For there's life in the Old World yet!


This is a story about making things happen. It is about being brave and 
having faith, I think. Also it is about how the world is bigger than you 
think. About how you have more possibilities, options, ways to do things, 
than you can see upon a casual look. It is also about the Internet, about 
how it makes the world bigger, how it opens doors that a few years ago would 
stay forever closed. Finally, it is a story about making great friends.
Not that I haven’t told you it before… I have, but not from this point of 
view.


And so: how to make things happen:
1. Wish!!
2. And dream. It’s important that you can imagine what you want, even if you 
can’t yet imagine how you can get it.
3. Don’t take no for answer. Believe there always is a way to get what you 
want, it’s just that you have to find it.
4. Get stubborn! It would be good, for a change. Want to prove to those who 
say you can’t have what you want that they are wrong.
5. Believe it will be fun, it will be great, that nothing will go wrong, 
that it’s worth the trouble, etc. Sometimes you’ll have to be patient, but 
think that whatever will happen in the end will be, if not the best, good.
6. The best plans are those made as you go along. Don’t get disappointed, 
watch out for the signs and follow them.

By this point you’re probably laughing at me or shaking your head thinking 
this is too romantic, too unrealistic or just too nice to be true…

I went through a lot of my stuff today, half-tidying half-looking for a 
photograph. And I came along all that, last spring, used to hang on my wall 
just above my bed; what was the first thing I saw when I woke up and what I 
stared at when I lied there dreaming, or crying, or talking on the phone, or 
maybe even making love. A picture of me aged one on a beach; a used bus 
ticket with random shapes and lines drawn on it (by a boy, in strange 
coloured ink), reading ‘zozefina’ and ‘tonight we fly’; a similar one with 
his name on it; a photo he had taken of the port in Prindizi, Italy; a photo 
a friend of mine had taken in Lisbon; a postcard showing a field of tulips, 
on the other side of which I had scrawled some Belle and Sebastian lyrics; a 
page torn out from a magazine, with the picture of an extremely expensive 
bicycle and some text I had found amazing; a postcard from a painting 
exhibition, showing random people doing random different things in random 
different cities round the world at the same time; and, finally, a map of 
Amsterdam that had been displayed in four different rooms of mine till then.
It is surprising -though not completely unintentional- how much this 
selection of things said about my life then. And one of the things it 
shouted out was that I wanted to travel –it was shouting it out even before 
I had the chance to realise it.

This story is strange –magical- and one that changed my life.

(I am always saying how Sinister changed my life, how it made my world 
better –how it helped make it the place it should be. There are some nights 
I want to post love letters to the list. And it deserves it; as Ally Cook 
once said, maybe for something or someone else, but I’m not sure, ‘I think 
you’re wonderful, and so does everyone else.’
But here is the story of how this happened. Or rather of how it began to 
happen.)

The aforementioned realisation came as I was on the phone to a friend, I 
think, when he suggested we joined some volunteer work camp thing for a few 
weeks, since we probably couldn’t afford to travel another way. And I found 
the idea extremely nice. I got excited and we spend some afternoons sitting 
in patches of grass in various part of the town planning it.
And then, within the next four days or something, two things happened: one, 
my dad without knowing about this offered me money to go on a trip in the 
summer, as a present; two, my friend started changing his mind about how 
he’d like to spent his holiday.
And there was I, suddenly being able to afford to travel around Europe, what 
we all had been dreaming of… with a friend who found it would be too much of 
an effort, why don’t we just go to an island instead? It almost made me 
shout I hate islands. And a boyfriend saying –saying- he’d come with me if 
he could afford it, and at the same time wanting to split up.
And practically not much more. And it all felt more and more strange.

By the way I had just got a computer, and I had made my first e-friend 
(through Napster). His name was Michael and he lived outside New York. He 
probably still does. He stopped writing sometime in July, but as far as I 
can remember he was sweet and I somehow miss him. I used to write him 
everyone once in a while and describe the state my life was in, mostly cause 
I was bored of narrating things to myself.
I will quote these emails, not because I can’t be bothered to find another 
way to tell the story – well okay partly because I can be bothered to write 
it again; but mostly because I like how it shows exactly how I looked at 
these things before and while they were happening. Something I have 
forgotten now, really.

22nd of June: In my life, things keep getting better and then worse again 
and so on... it's kind of tiring but then again it's so strange it becomes 
interesting... It's a strange season... I was supposed to have exams, like 
from the 6th to 29th June but I don't because the university is closed... 
why is a long boring story... So I was prepared for studying and I find 
myself with nothing to do... At a time when everything, I mean most of my 
relationships and plans, seem to be trying to work out well but fail to do 
so...
However, having a strange faith in god, or in the universe, or in the way 
things are, I believe that all this is leading somewhere and that somewhere 
is better than today...

Naturally, feeling this way and as everything around me felt stranger and 
stranger, I ended up asking him if I could visit him. He said yes, but I 
never did. The ticket was far too expensive, I probably wouldn’t get a visa, 
and my mum said it was too far away. If he was in Europe, it would be okay, 
my –by then- ex boyfriend said, but New York is just too far away. And I got 
a bit scared, to be honest. I had only talked to him a few times, what did I 
know about him?

But then something happened. Rachel came along, and she was in Europe. In 
Scotland!! The land of Belle and Sebastian!! And she wasn’t scary at all. 
She seemed to be very much like me to be scary. And she was the first person 
ever to give me advice that made me feel better instead of worse.


6th of July: Remember when things round here tried to get better but instead 
got worse?
Well they're stuck at worse now... A long sad story...
But somewhere far away from here things do want to get better!
One day about a week ago I was in the Sinister chat room (people in love
with Belle and Sebastian, yes) and I mentioned how bad I felt about breaking
up, and a girl called Rachel started a private chat with me, she asked me if
I was alright and seemed really upset...
This ended up in her inviting me to Dundee, Scotland, and arranging that
we'll afterwards go together to the Benicassim festival in Spain!
I'm breaking up and still living with my boyfriend who prefers to avoid
dealing with the situation, my other flatmates kind of ignores me though he
used to be a friend of mine and his girlfriend hates me obviously, I'm
fighting and crying most of those days (and also a few days ago I fought
with my dad who was drunk and said all kinds of nonsense and my mum who was
so tired of that she couldn't talk without starting to shout- but those two
are better now).
And besides all that, I'm excited and smiling!
I'm leaving in less than ten days!


For some reason this is the part I always get stuck when I try to tell this 
story, I don’t know what to say next. Should I talk about why and how we 
decided to do this? About whether we were worried or not? Was it out of 
desperation or was it something else? Or should I just say we did all that 
and had great fun and so we decided to do more like that?

We just decided to do it. I don’t know exactly how, it just happened, I 
don’t know about Rachel but me, I was watching what was going on and 
participating in it –living- without thinking about it. Not without thinking 
at all, just without questioning everything and judging it using common 
sense and all that we usually do. I just did whatever felt right. And there 
was always something that felt right, even though sometimes it took a while 
to reveal itself.
On a train between Barcelona and Benicassim, tired, hungry, excited and 
sleepy at the same time, Rachel and me told each other a lot of times, in 
lots of different words: never get disappointed. We had arrived in Barcelona 
feeling totally lost and not knowing whether we should continue or just 
spend the night there… when we heard the girls standing in front of us 
talking about Benicassim and decided it was a sign, and got tickets for the 
last train there. Which by the way was the first train there on that day to 
have sits free. There were people who had spent the day waiting at the 
station. We just arrived in time to catch it. And then I turned around to 
find Rachel wasn’t there and thought ‘great, the perfect time to get lost’ 
but it turned out she was talking to Vanessa. And this bumping into a 
Sinisterine in what at the time felt like the middle of nowhere gave us 
faith… I think I don’t know in what…

People sometimes I ask me why do I write ‘keep the faith’, ‘what faith?’ 
they ask me; and I ask them back if they like Hefner. And if they say the 
absolutely adore them, then I tell them I have faith god is on my side.

Were we worried? Well of course we were. Rachel more than me, I just 
couldn’t afford to be worried. My life was becoming stranger and stranger, 
in a bad way, every day; I just had to go somewhere else. From the night we 
decided to do it, in late June, to the day I flew back to Greece in 
mid-August, I can’t remember myself thinking it won’t be good, not even 
once.
So yes, in a way it was desperation too, in a way in was naivety too –today, 
I wouldn’t agree to go visit I have only talked to on the internet once. But 
when you and a girl in Dundee had been having similar things happening to 
you, thinking similar thoughts and dreaming similar dreams, can you call 
yourself naïve for deciding to go on holiday with her the first night you 
meet her?
Not that we knew that we had been having similar dreams and similar thoughts 
then. We only suspected it.

But when it comes to travelling, wise decisions just seem to make 
themselves. Plans form themselves and great things just happen.

The simple and modest plan that me and Rachel would meet in London for my 
birthday and spend a few days there was born on the 3rd of January; by the 
end of the month it included a London picnic, two Belle and Sebastian gigs, 
and a train ride to Scotland, and it had grown to be 15 days long.

It happened like that:
Stacey sent us an email saying the Athenian Picnic would probably be 
postponed. I almost sulked cause it was scheduled for my birthday, but then 
I decided I was too happy to sulk. Rachel decided she should do something 
about it and suggested (at a bus stop, while the bus was late) that we met 
in London for five days around that weekend. I said I probably couldn’t 
afford it, but (when the bus came) went back to her house and found a very 
cheap ticket from Athens to London (like 25 pounds with the taxes). We 
watched Martha meet Lawrence Daniel and Frank and where inspired to have a 
picnic on my birthday. I went back to Greece and told my mum, and all she 
did was say okay. Mark posted asking for people who turned 21 this year, I 
replied. He wrote back with weird explanations, from which I gathered he 
needed someone’s 21st or 30th birthday in order to book a club for 
tigermilking. I started bouncing around and wishing it would happen when I 
was in London. Mark got lazy about it, and I forgot. Belle and Sebastian 
announced three gigs in the UK, ten days after I was arriving there and 
while I didn’t have a return ticket. I spent a few sleepless nights trying 
to plan it and find a way to fund it. I concluded that saving hard, begging 
my mummy and the rest of my nice relatives, and taking advantage of the fact 
that it was my birthday would do. Or that it had to do anyway. I bought a 
return ticket for the 5th of April, and train ticket to Edinburgh. Rachel 
bought me one of the two gig tickets as a birthday present, I bought myself 
the other one. Then Mark jumped back in telling me he could have 
Tigermilking on the 23rd, “would you be 21 near that date”? So I went to the 
post office and posted a photocopy of my passport to him, in an envelope 
loaded with stamps. The next day he told me it wasn’t on. I sulked, while 
having a feeling I shouldn’t be sulking. He went to Scotland. He came back. 
He told me it was on. I stopped sulking. Rachel asked me if I ever intended 
to finish that post. I didn’t feel like it, but I had to. So here I am.

Rachel tells me to tell you I’ll be 21. She also tells I should ask you lots 
of questions.
Would you like to come to Tigermilking?
It will be a bit like the birthday party I’ve never had. But then it will 
probably make up for not ever having a birthday party and most my birthdays 
up to now being quite crap, sniff. We could have had a picnic before hand, 
follow the tradition, but I like to do things differently. So I think we’ll 
have a picnic on the 24th. It’s a Sunday, twelve days from now and 
accidentally the day I‘ll 21. I think we’ll have it at Primrose hill. 
Because it’s classic for Sinister (Nicholas), it is a hill (Greg), it has 
nice view (lots of people), it is near to my house and I’m lazy (Paul 
Field), I’m getting curious about it and we can always end up in Paul’s 
house if the weather isn’t nice, (me). Hee, not really.
So would you like to come?
Would you like to email and tell me tell me where people usually meet and 
what they do in London picnics and where they go when it starts to rain?
And finally, would you like to bring me a present?

Love and long posts that confuse me, and travelling, and birthdays,
Dimitra
xx





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