The Coffee Spoon Addendum

I'm not entirely sure who reads this thing of ours, but in case there are any of you from outside my home town, I have to quickly explain the Adelaide Factor. Basically, in Adelaide, you cannot leave your house without bumping into at least five people you already know. They will not be in places you'd expect them to be. In fact, they will frequently be in places you could never imagine them being, or you'll meet them while you're in a place you'd never normally go. Even when you're in another state, you'll probably meet up with at least two randomly placed Adelaideans.

With that out of the way, I can tell those of you that don't know that I have just recently started a holiday in the United Kingdom. This marks the first time I have been overseas in my life, so I was quite nervous about the whole process, especially flying (not my favourite activity to begin with). Fortunately I had just the one stop before hitting London, in Kuala Lumpur. Even so, when I arrived I was tired, disoriented, and still quite anxious. On top of which, I discovered my flight had been delayed, and I still wasn't entirely sure I was in the right place. There was a middle-aged man waiting at the gate when I got there, and presently we were joined by a young couple. After a considerable silence, the young man spoke up to check we were all in the right place, and then a conversation started.

The older man was a Brit who'd been living in Australia for 25 years and was now returning home to start life anew. The young couple were starting off with a contiki tour before they would begin working in the UK. (Coincidentally, the young guy was in web design, the same thing my brother now does in London.) After a while, and with the plane still some way off departing, the couple went to take a walk and I started to read to pass the rest of the time. Eventually, we all went off to our separate seats on the plane. At no point had any of us exchanged names.

When, finally, the plane landed and we were all let off, I trudged into the airport amongst strangers with very little thought in my exhausted head. Until I ran into the couple again. Now we could discuss the difficulties of customs and waiting for our friends and family to pick us up. And, not wanting to miss my chance, I got their names: Lindsey and Charissa. I wished them good luck and excused myself to the toilets. And who should I immediately see but my other friend from KL. I was able to wish him luck - he was, after all, starting a whole new life - and once again get a name: Adrian. All of a sudden, as far from home as I'd ever been, I could comfort myself with a little Adelaide moment.

Yes, I know what you might say: we were all going from Adelaide to London on the same flight, so meeting them again is not exactly a Believe-It-Or-Not shocker. There was a closed pool of people to run into. But I might not have seen them again, and I had been thinking about how I should have goten their names. And it was a little funny to go from one to the other straight away. Besides, whether it was a true Adelaide Factor moment or not, when you're on your own and uncertain about where you should be, it's nice to see a familiar face, even if it's only a few hours old.

There are many studies floating around which attempt to trace the origin of creativity. Social, neurological, and psychological scholars abound, all attempting to explain how ideas, from nothing, suddenly appear. But lately I've been asking myself a parallel question: where does creativity go?

I began this year with a flourish of creativity, the results of which being a handful of discarded recordings and the beginnings of this blog. Around the middle of this year-for my own reasons-I turned on my creativity. I was bored of it. And there were plenty of other things I could use to occupy myself.

Only, now I want it back. It's not the creativity that disappeared, of course, but the incalculable ideas which were jettisoned from my subconscious into the hard rubbish of forgetting. I have so many ideas now, and all I need to do is make the time to realise them. And maybe I will.

But what did I miss?

And how could I ever know?

So I was sitting on a dank office chair, across from a blatantly disinterested travel agent, when I first heard the anthemic scrawl of Katy Perry's I Kissed A Girl. You've all heard this by now, right? Where apparently the most powerful sensation of Perry's first same-sex rendez-vous was the "taste of [her] cherry chapstick"?

My first thought was, well, haven't we heard this before? It must be more than ten years—hell, more like fifteen—since evening current affairs were first demonising Jill Sobule for a more nuanced version of the same sentiment. (Sobule also caught the public's ire for seemingly championing anorexia by sweetly singing 'I want to be a supermodel', so perhaps she wasn't the best spokesperson for uninhibited liaisons.) But my second thought was, well, this is mainstream radio. Is it not a great moment for our generation that popular music is breaking down the heteronormative barrier, where love songs must conscribe to the discourse of boy-meets-girl? Or worse, the terrifying misogyny of vacuous commercial gangsta/hip-hop?

So, the question I put to my girlfriend was this. Kate Perry: great feminist statement, or pure exploitation?

And the answer, within seconds, was final. Exploitation. Cruel exploitation. "It felt so wrong," squeals Perry, "but it felt so right." It felt so wrong? I mean, 'I sped through a yellow light at the intersection and I liked it', perhaps. But should the physical expression of feelings be wrong? Why is it that, once we get the idea of same-sex relationships past the censor, we still have to titillate ourselves with their inherent 'naughtiness'?

And besides, isn't interesting that we don't get titillating pop music from the other side of the gender fence? Why don't we get fresh-faced teenage boys melodising their debut same-sex affairs? Alternatively, why are male songwriters publicly known to be in same-sex relationships—Michael Stipe, for just one example—happy to leave all of their emotion gender-neutral? Is it because Stipe isn't a fictitious mass-marketed creation cynically playing to a demographic marked for teenage boys with threesome fantasies?

Also, her diction is terrible. And she is clearly being auto-tuned out of existence. And the song, of course, is rubbish of the lowest order. Plenty is wrong with this, now I think of it. Hey, where did those censors go?

It was the wrong side of the road,
But you didn't stop me from turning, I watched
You froze,
Briefly questioning the moment, then
You didn't stop me.