I get up early and nip for a much-needed shower before the other two appear. A day of sweltering, tiny theatres has taken its toll, plus my mum is coming up from the Borders to take us for breakfast this morning, so scrubbing up is absolutely essential. Mum arrives with my step-dad in tow, in their especially lovely new Jaguar XF (which has a dial instead of a gearstick – how cool is that?) and pick my brother and I up at around 10am. We drive the short distance to a nearby cafe, where we sit and wait for it to open properly before having a pretty decent fry-up and a nice chat about wedding plans and whatnot (this being the first time we've met up since the engagement) before they head back into the wilderness.
My brother and I head home and spend the rest of the morning playing NHL 2003 until it becomes clear that, for our own sanity, we should probably leave the house. There are two shows we want to see today, the first of which starts at 2.40 at a place called The Caves on the Cowgate. We head down early to make sure we can get tickets (clearly aiming for better-known shows today to avoid being in a room with 10 old fogies again) for Nerds of a Feather, a geek-themed show featuring sets from two comedians called Graham Goring and Chris Stokes. The first talks, Stokes, about being a geek, and particularly about his love for TV shows like Doctor Who and Columbo, as well as the “I think you'll find...” geek phenomenon. He comes across as very likeable and has a lot of good jokes, making subtle use of a projector to do some nice visual gags. Graham Goring looks worryingly like me and uses the projector much more in his set, with visuals, animations and sound effects annotating almost all his jokes. It's very enjoyable from a nerdy perspective and I especially like his jokes about Super Mario Brothers and Sonic 3, something I don't think I've seen done in a comedy club before. Today is their last show of the run and they make a nice point at the end of coming on stage together to thank the venue staff and so on, as well as each other. I can't imagine how much doing something like this every day for a month must take it out of you and feel like a bit of an epic slog.
Our next show, as with yesterday, is shortly after this one and on the other side of town. We wander over there and buy our tickets to see Andy Zaltzman, whose work I know well having spent much of the last two years listening to his Bugle podcast (making it odd that I haven't got round to seeing him in London before, though he did once walk past me at Highbury & Islington tube station). He has an odd, clownish look but does a great line in political satire mixed with surreal flights of fantasy, as well as what he knowingly refers to as “incredibly contrived similes” throughout. The show runs for just over the usual hour, featuring the story of how he delivered his newborn son on the bathroom floor (with obligatory cricket metaphors used to describe his catching technique) and a discussion on the pros and cons of the coalition government. It's incredibly clever and the jokes come thick and fast, even with the drier material. My brother seems to enjoy it a lot too, which I'm pleased about. This is our last show of the Fringe (and indeed Zaltzman's) and it's definitely ending on a high.
We walk back up the hill into town, unsure as to how we fancy spending the rest of the evening. IN the end we decide that it's been an expensive weekend, so we grab the makings of home-made pizza from Sainsbury's and head back to his flat for some grub. We also, for some reason, end up watching The X-Factor (that's two Sundays in a row – what's happening to me?!) and the apparently extraneous (X-traneous?) X-tra Factor hosted by Konnie Huq. By 11.30 this rather heavy weekend has totally caught up with me, and I head for an early bed (which is probably a great relief for my has-to-go-to-his-sensible-job-tomorrow little brother, who's done a great job of entertaining me these last three nights). Back to London tomorrow, then.
Monday 30 August 2010
Saturday 28th August
I am gently woken by the sun streaming in through the window of the spare room in my brother's rather nice top-floor flat next to the Meadows. After his girlfriend heads off to work and we've tucked into some absolutely-necessary sausage sandwiches, we get his old PS2 out of the cupboard to play NHL 2003 – a game we had a bit of an obsession with when it came out 8 years ago. At the time we set up two custom teams of players we knew nothing about, but liked the names of, and amused ourselves by playing endless series of games between them while making up funny back stories for each of the players. The crazy shit you do as a teenager, eh?
This morning we decide that a nostlagia series is in order, but when we plug in the dodgy old second controller (untouched for several years) it refuses to work and instead just vibrates constantly, uselessly. Unperturbed, we decide to to walk up the road to the local Cash Converters to see if they have an old second-hand PS2 controller in amongst their cabinets of pawned electrical goods. They don't, at this one, but my brother knows of a bigger Cash Converters further down the road. At this point it becomes clear that we are on something of an exciting quest – searching out an ancient artifact that may or may not even exist any more; very much a black plastic Holy Grail. The second Cash Converters is indeed much bigger, and we are delighted when we spot an official PS2 controller sitting inside a glass case, bearing an inviting £2.99 sticker.
Triumphantly I carry the controller back to my brother's flat and we play a few games of NHL, laughing as we reacquaint ourselves with the stupidly-named ice hockey players we had built an entire mythology around almost a decade ago. The game itself also stands up surprisingly well for something so relatively out-of-date in the video game world.
By lunchtime though, we need to head out to our first show of the day, which is Smith and Smith at the GRV. One of the Smiths, James, I went to uni with – and having followed his blog have been keen to check out his stand-up act for a while. Weirdly, given that we both live in London, this is the first time I've gotten round to seeing him perform, so I'm looking forward to the lunchtime gig a lot. My brother and I turn up around 1 and have a quick pint in the GRV bar before heading into the smallish room for the two half-hour sets. It's a small audience (we are two of six people) but neither Smith seems put off their stride by the fact, meaning that both come across very accomplished and confident in their 30 minute routines. James, as I had probably expected, has an academic, thoughtful approach to his stand-up, based around stories and internal monlogues – and the immediate (if possibly a little obvious) comparison I could make would be Stewart Lee. I'm not sure if this is because I've just read Lee's book, but James clearly shares the same focus on the importance of language in comedy and every line of his routine sounds crafted and considered. Daniel Smith (whom I previously hadn't heard of) is also very funny, using his set to talk about death and build his jokes around a fascination with recurring murders involving people sharing his name – meaning he gets to make a lot of “dan-” based puns (my personal favourite being “danslaughter”).
Our next show starts very shortly after, so after saying a quick hi and well done to James we dash across the city towards Le Monde, the venue for 'Fancy a Threesome', a £5 show I'd decided to take a gamble on based on the presence of Jim Campbell of the Football Ramble as one of the three comedians featured. We arrive a little early and have a disgracefully overpriced bottle of beer in the gaudy bar before being shown in to an odd-shaped theatre with two rows of seasts. This time we are in an audience of 12 – and all but my brother and I are well over 50. Two people, sat behind us are German and clearly don't speak a word of English. I'm immediately baffled as to why any of these people are here; the comedians are all obviously in their 20s; and on top of their age they turn out to be the most unresponsive audience I've ever been a part of. It becomes truly excruciating during the first act, who tries hard but gets absolutely nothing from anyone. The second, a Canadian named Pat Burtscher, is very funny though – mainly because he basically takes the piss out of the audience and seems to try extra hard to offend the weird, grumpy old people who've come to his show. By the time Jim Campbell comes on, however, he seems fairly sure that the show is a disaster and does his material almost certain that he's not going to get any response. The room is also incredibly hot – and for more than one reason I'm entirely relieved to get out of it.
We wander back up through town and head back to the Udderbelly bars around the Uni buildings. We hover by a table block and people-watch for a while. We spot Reginald D. Hunter, John Bishop (whom I've developed an intense dislike of already, mainly because his face is absolutely everywhere) and Jimmy Carr hanging around, having pictures taken and chatting to fans on their way from place to place. My brother's girlfriend finishes work and comes to meet us, so we walk over to the Pleasance Courtyard ahead of our next show at 8.30. This place, with it's twists and turns and bar tents and hundreds of venues, is what comes to mind when I think of comedy at the Fringe – and I'm already excited about seeing our third show of the evening, Gary Delaney's Purist. This is partly because his one-liner jokes always make me laugh, but also because I'm confident that the audience will be greater than 12 people, under the age of 50 and willing to actually laugh at comedy.
In the end, I don't go disappointed. Gary Delaney's is a great show, with a great audience, in a brilliantly intimate room. He breaks up his relentless joke onslaught with chattier bits that make the show really nicely paced – at one point dropping poker chips into buckets based on whether the biggest laughs come for dirty jokes rather than clean ones. Perhaps predictably, the rude jokes get bigger laughs and he closes the show with some really shocking, but really funny, material. I'm also pleased to pick up one of his 'No Whimsy' badges on the way out.
Hungry again, the three of us walk back to the Udderbelly in search of greasy burgers (and end up stuck behind a moany Australian woman who feels the need to complain that the hot chocolate she just bought from a van isn't the greatest thing she's ever tasted. From a van, love. People.
This morning we decide that a nostlagia series is in order, but when we plug in the dodgy old second controller (untouched for several years) it refuses to work and instead just vibrates constantly, uselessly. Unperturbed, we decide to to walk up the road to the local Cash Converters to see if they have an old second-hand PS2 controller in amongst their cabinets of pawned electrical goods. They don't, at this one, but my brother knows of a bigger Cash Converters further down the road. At this point it becomes clear that we are on something of an exciting quest – searching out an ancient artifact that may or may not even exist any more; very much a black plastic Holy Grail. The second Cash Converters is indeed much bigger, and we are delighted when we spot an official PS2 controller sitting inside a glass case, bearing an inviting £2.99 sticker.
Triumphantly I carry the controller back to my brother's flat and we play a few games of NHL, laughing as we reacquaint ourselves with the stupidly-named ice hockey players we had built an entire mythology around almost a decade ago. The game itself also stands up surprisingly well for something so relatively out-of-date in the video game world.
By lunchtime though, we need to head out to our first show of the day, which is Smith and Smith at the GRV. One of the Smiths, James, I went to uni with – and having followed his blog have been keen to check out his stand-up act for a while. Weirdly, given that we both live in London, this is the first time I've gotten round to seeing him perform, so I'm looking forward to the lunchtime gig a lot. My brother and I turn up around 1 and have a quick pint in the GRV bar before heading into the smallish room for the two half-hour sets. It's a small audience (we are two of six people) but neither Smith seems put off their stride by the fact, meaning that both come across very accomplished and confident in their 30 minute routines. James, as I had probably expected, has an academic, thoughtful approach to his stand-up, based around stories and internal monlogues – and the immediate (if possibly a little obvious) comparison I could make would be Stewart Lee. I'm not sure if this is because I've just read Lee's book, but James clearly shares the same focus on the importance of language in comedy and every line of his routine sounds crafted and considered. Daniel Smith (whom I previously hadn't heard of) is also very funny, using his set to talk about death and build his jokes around a fascination with recurring murders involving people sharing his name – meaning he gets to make a lot of “dan-” based puns (my personal favourite being “danslaughter”).
Our next show starts very shortly after, so after saying a quick hi and well done to James we dash across the city towards Le Monde, the venue for 'Fancy a Threesome', a £5 show I'd decided to take a gamble on based on the presence of Jim Campbell of the Football Ramble as one of the three comedians featured. We arrive a little early and have a disgracefully overpriced bottle of beer in the gaudy bar before being shown in to an odd-shaped theatre with two rows of seasts. This time we are in an audience of 12 – and all but my brother and I are well over 50. Two people, sat behind us are German and clearly don't speak a word of English. I'm immediately baffled as to why any of these people are here; the comedians are all obviously in their 20s; and on top of their age they turn out to be the most unresponsive audience I've ever been a part of. It becomes truly excruciating during the first act, who tries hard but gets absolutely nothing from anyone. The second, a Canadian named Pat Burtscher, is very funny though – mainly because he basically takes the piss out of the audience and seems to try extra hard to offend the weird, grumpy old people who've come to his show. By the time Jim Campbell comes on, however, he seems fairly sure that the show is a disaster and does his material almost certain that he's not going to get any response. The room is also incredibly hot – and for more than one reason I'm entirely relieved to get out of it.
We wander back up through town and head back to the Udderbelly bars around the Uni buildings. We hover by a table block and people-watch for a while. We spot Reginald D. Hunter, John Bishop (whom I've developed an intense dislike of already, mainly because his face is absolutely everywhere) and Jimmy Carr hanging around, having pictures taken and chatting to fans on their way from place to place. My brother's girlfriend finishes work and comes to meet us, so we walk over to the Pleasance Courtyard ahead of our next show at 8.30. This place, with it's twists and turns and bar tents and hundreds of venues, is what comes to mind when I think of comedy at the Fringe – and I'm already excited about seeing our third show of the evening, Gary Delaney's Purist. This is partly because his one-liner jokes always make me laugh, but also because I'm confident that the audience will be greater than 12 people, under the age of 50 and willing to actually laugh at comedy.
In the end, I don't go disappointed. Gary Delaney's is a great show, with a great audience, in a brilliantly intimate room. He breaks up his relentless joke onslaught with chattier bits that make the show really nicely paced – at one point dropping poker chips into buckets based on whether the biggest laughs come for dirty jokes rather than clean ones. Perhaps predictably, the rude jokes get bigger laughs and he closes the show with some really shocking, but really funny, material. I'm also pleased to pick up one of his 'No Whimsy' badges on the way out.
Hungry again, the three of us walk back to the Udderbelly in search of greasy burgers (and end up stuck behind a moany Australian woman who feels the need to complain that the hot chocolate she just bought from a van isn't the greatest thing she's ever tasted. From a van, love. People.
Friday 27th August
Today I'm off to Edinburgh as the result of an impulsive and probably financially unwise decision to travel north to catch the last weekend of the Fringe (and, peripherally, to visit my younger brother who lives and works in the city and kindly agreed to put me up for a few nights, as well as hopefully coming to see a few shows with me). The train is at 11am, so after saying goodbye to K as she heads off to work I get the tube to Kings Cross and hang around a bit before scuttling through the predictably busy station towards my thankfully booked seat. I say mine – I actually sneakily take the window seat next to mine in order to be next to the plug socket should my phone or laptop need any extra juice. The young woman whose seat it is inevitably turns up a minute later, at which point I politely ask if I can stay in the seat for the aforementioned mobile electricity reasons. She says that she really likes the window seat, but that I can have it if I want. Feeling bad, I then offer the seat back to her – but impenetrable British politeness stops her or I from budging and eventually she sits down and proceeds to play Solitaire on her iPod for the entire journey, rather than gazing out of the window as she probably would have been had I not been so inadvertently selfish.
I pass the four-and-a-half hour journey by catching up with a week of blog posts, listening to music and eating the packed lunch K had, rather wonderfully, made for me to take on the train. My headphones keep me cocooned from my fellow travellers in the packed carriage – though a loud group of theatre types sitting at the table in front of me insist on talking loudly about how incredible everything they like is, dominated by the alpha-intellectual male who has no shame about raising his voice to have his opinions be heard. It reminds me of the scene in Annie Hall when Alvy and Annie are waiting in the queue for the cinema while a loud man “pontificates” about the work Marshall McLuhan. I do this too, sometimes, I suppose – but at least I have the courtesy to keep my voice to myself and the person I am boring.
The journey passes without further incident and we pull into Waverly station at around 3.30. Edinburgh is my favourite city to arrive in by train, as you can walk up the ramp towards Princes Street Gardens and find yourself right in the centre of the city, with the castle above, Scott Monunent to the right and the Old Town to the left. I can't think of another city I've ever been to that is so immediately striking and immediately typical of itself. I call my brother (he is meant to be here to meet me) but his phone seems to be turned off, so I take some initiative and walk up Cockburn Street to the Royal Mile, recalling the geography of this city I once lived in and knew much better, and towards the Fringe box office. There is a short queue, so I join and buy tickets for three shows for tomorrow – two that I had already planned to see and one that I picked more or less on an impulse decision. Excited to definitely be in Edinburgh and defintely seeing some of the comedy I felt I was missing out on only a couple of weeks ago, I call my brother back and discover that he's standing just down the road from me. This road being the Royal Mile during the festival, I have to traverse the clueless, gawking crowds of tourists giddily photographing living statues (how impressive will they be in photos?) and refusing the thousands of flyers earnestly handed out by theatre students dressed as Dorothy Wordsworth or whoever – but eventually we meet up and head for a quick pint at Wash, round the corner on the Mound.
We're soon joined by my brother's girlfriend and we wander towards the Edinburgh Uni buildings, seemingly the epicentre of the fringe, centred around the big Udderbelly tent, and have a drink in the Spiegeltent arena, soaking up a little of the Festival atmosphere. It's clear that these places would have been much more busy maybe a couple of weeks ago – but there are still plenty of people around and queues for shows everywhere you look. We walk up to the Udderbelly itself and stand amongst the crowds sipping Stella from plastic cups before hunger drives us to a nice-looking bar/restaurant place called Biblos, where we eat giant burgers and I start to get a bit knackered. We stop off at one more pub on the way home to my brother's flat (one he complains about a bit; we differ significantly in our taste for drinking venues; whereas tiny, crusty-looking old pubs appeal to me greatly, he prefers a more “sophisticated” bar-type setting, which I absolutely hate) before exhaustion finally propels us home.
I pass the four-and-a-half hour journey by catching up with a week of blog posts, listening to music and eating the packed lunch K had, rather wonderfully, made for me to take on the train. My headphones keep me cocooned from my fellow travellers in the packed carriage – though a loud group of theatre types sitting at the table in front of me insist on talking loudly about how incredible everything they like is, dominated by the alpha-intellectual male who has no shame about raising his voice to have his opinions be heard. It reminds me of the scene in Annie Hall when Alvy and Annie are waiting in the queue for the cinema while a loud man “pontificates” about the work Marshall McLuhan. I do this too, sometimes, I suppose – but at least I have the courtesy to keep my voice to myself and the person I am boring.
The journey passes without further incident and we pull into Waverly station at around 3.30. Edinburgh is my favourite city to arrive in by train, as you can walk up the ramp towards Princes Street Gardens and find yourself right in the centre of the city, with the castle above, Scott Monunent to the right and the Old Town to the left. I can't think of another city I've ever been to that is so immediately striking and immediately typical of itself. I call my brother (he is meant to be here to meet me) but his phone seems to be turned off, so I take some initiative and walk up Cockburn Street to the Royal Mile, recalling the geography of this city I once lived in and knew much better, and towards the Fringe box office. There is a short queue, so I join and buy tickets for three shows for tomorrow – two that I had already planned to see and one that I picked more or less on an impulse decision. Excited to definitely be in Edinburgh and defintely seeing some of the comedy I felt I was missing out on only a couple of weeks ago, I call my brother back and discover that he's standing just down the road from me. This road being the Royal Mile during the festival, I have to traverse the clueless, gawking crowds of tourists giddily photographing living statues (how impressive will they be in photos?) and refusing the thousands of flyers earnestly handed out by theatre students dressed as Dorothy Wordsworth or whoever – but eventually we meet up and head for a quick pint at Wash, round the corner on the Mound.
We're soon joined by my brother's girlfriend and we wander towards the Edinburgh Uni buildings, seemingly the epicentre of the fringe, centred around the big Udderbelly tent, and have a drink in the Spiegeltent arena, soaking up a little of the Festival atmosphere. It's clear that these places would have been much more busy maybe a couple of weeks ago – but there are still plenty of people around and queues for shows everywhere you look. We walk up to the Udderbelly itself and stand amongst the crowds sipping Stella from plastic cups before hunger drives us to a nice-looking bar/restaurant place called Biblos, where we eat giant burgers and I start to get a bit knackered. We stop off at one more pub on the way home to my brother's flat (one he complains about a bit; we differ significantly in our taste for drinking venues; whereas tiny, crusty-looking old pubs appeal to me greatly, he prefers a more “sophisticated” bar-type setting, which I absolutely hate) before exhaustion finally propels us home.
Saturday 28 August 2010
Thursday 26th August
Today at work is an avalanche of bollocks and I'm glad to be heading home – especially as I'm now on holiday again until Tuesday – but annoyingly last night's overtime homework has produced more for tonight. I need to get it out of the way quick too, as K has booked an impromptu visit to cinema to see Scott Pilgrim vs the World, a film we've both been looking forward to with interest.
Following up on last night's work involves logging into my work computer via remote desktop – something I've never done before, what with it being a bit tricky to do on a Mac and me never, ever actually wanting to do any work at home – but now I have the PC-based laptop around the place it is, apparently, quite simple to do. Following our IT guy's instructions, I log into my work computer, which is a somewhat surreal experience. Opening my work email and our special, 80s-style bespoke database is a weird thing to be doing at home – and it freaks me out slightly to think of my mouse cursor moving around the screen and windows opening and closing on my computer in a closed-up, dark office. After fiddling with more bastard Excel documents for a while, I get started on finishing up last night's work, which goes much quicker (I am rushing) and is done and dusted by the time K gets back.
I make us a quick dinner and we head out into the miserable rain, up the road to the Cineworld in Wood Green. We collect our tickets and head into the rather nice 'Delux' screen, which involves massive reclining chairs and tons of legroom.
I'm not sure what to expect of Scott Pilgrim. I know enough about the premise of it based on the trailers – and it's been hyped up by the sort of people who usually follow Edgar Wright projects (as I do). I've never seen the comic though, and I suppose I'm half-expecting another Kick Ass, albeit a 12A rated version. It's easy to go into these indie comic adaptations wary – as it's easy for them to end up as slick, panel-by-panel recreations that have very little of their own substance or any directorial input. Scott Pilgrim, on the other hand, seems every inch an Edgar Wright creation. It is slick, and does feature a lot of directorial tricks and gags – the best ones involving video game references (why has no one ever done a nerd film where bad guys explode into coins before?! It's a brilliant idea – and brilliantly realised here) and the fact that each new character has their own set of them is a nice touch too. Michael Cera is very much the usual Michael Cera character and some of the jokes are a bit clunky, but it's a very fun film to watch and a treat visually – if not the riotous, noisy, sweary funfair-ride that Kick Ass is.
Following up on last night's work involves logging into my work computer via remote desktop – something I've never done before, what with it being a bit tricky to do on a Mac and me never, ever actually wanting to do any work at home – but now I have the PC-based laptop around the place it is, apparently, quite simple to do. Following our IT guy's instructions, I log into my work computer, which is a somewhat surreal experience. Opening my work email and our special, 80s-style bespoke database is a weird thing to be doing at home – and it freaks me out slightly to think of my mouse cursor moving around the screen and windows opening and closing on my computer in a closed-up, dark office. After fiddling with more bastard Excel documents for a while, I get started on finishing up last night's work, which goes much quicker (I am rushing) and is done and dusted by the time K gets back.
I make us a quick dinner and we head out into the miserable rain, up the road to the Cineworld in Wood Green. We collect our tickets and head into the rather nice 'Delux' screen, which involves massive reclining chairs and tons of legroom.
I'm not sure what to expect of Scott Pilgrim. I know enough about the premise of it based on the trailers – and it's been hyped up by the sort of people who usually follow Edgar Wright projects (as I do). I've never seen the comic though, and I suppose I'm half-expecting another Kick Ass, albeit a 12A rated version. It's easy to go into these indie comic adaptations wary – as it's easy for them to end up as slick, panel-by-panel recreations that have very little of their own substance or any directorial input. Scott Pilgrim, on the other hand, seems every inch an Edgar Wright creation. It is slick, and does feature a lot of directorial tricks and gags – the best ones involving video game references (why has no one ever done a nerd film where bad guys explode into coins before?! It's a brilliant idea – and brilliantly realised here) and the fact that each new character has their own set of them is a nice touch too. Michael Cera is very much the usual Michael Cera character and some of the jokes are a bit clunky, but it's a very fun film to watch and a treat visually – if not the riotous, noisy, sweary funfair-ride that Kick Ass is.
Wednesday 25th August
It's the time of year when my company puts out it's biannual new titles catalogue, which involves producing a list of all the books that we'll be handling for the next six months, along with the fully-edited and proofed blurbs for each title. Producing this catalogue falls to our department – and in particular the proofreading element. Slightly annoyingly, it needs to be done on top of our normal workload, so the proofing has to be done as overtime. Hence tonight I'm taking home a wedge of paper containing the blurbs for around 200 books which need to be gone through thoroughly and using every inch of my eagle-eyed proofreading skill. Happily, being at home, I can also put Monsters, Inc. on in the background and take a break every time I get suicidally bored – not something I can really get away with in the office. Though I think if I were allowed to watch bright, colourful Disney films while I was working I'd be at least as productive as I am now, if not more. This might not be the case.
I want to get the work done by the time K gets home, but it's a bit of a slog and when she does, in fact, get through the door I'm still knee-deep in paper. Luckily for me this means she can crack on with making dinner – a rather delicious curry – and I finally get finished at around 8. Utterly bored of work, I'm in the mood for some light-hearted, facile television – but unfortunately K manages to find a documentary on Channel 4 I can tell from the start is going to be hard going.
Titled My New Brain, it tells the story of a 20-year-old boy (or man, as 20-year-olds are inappopriately referred to on the news; I wasn't a man when I was 20!) who, while out getting drunk with friends at university, fell off a 20-foot wall and suffered a severe brain injury. Having been in a coma for five weeks, the film joins him six months into recovery, when he is making admirable progress. His speech is noticeably affected as is his movement, and he seems perpetually confused – though he is capable of having conversations and seems mostly lucid. His family are heartbreakingly strong – particularly his mother – and do their best to cope with his mood swings and the things he can't do for himself any more. The strangest thing seems to be the fact that his personality has completely changed since the accident, and his family must come to terms with the fact that he is a different person now. It's hard to watch, mainly because his family remind me a lot of my own family, but also because his injury is the sort of thing that could absolutely happen to anyone. It could be tempting to point to the fact that he was drunk and stupidly trying to climb over a wall to get back into a club he'd been kicked out of – but people do stupider, drunker things every day and get away with it. The film ends with his 21st birthday, a point at which he seems to be coming to terms with what has happened to him (he has no memory of it) and the fact that he can't go back. I'm pretty choked up by the end.
I want to get the work done by the time K gets home, but it's a bit of a slog and when she does, in fact, get through the door I'm still knee-deep in paper. Luckily for me this means she can crack on with making dinner – a rather delicious curry – and I finally get finished at around 8. Utterly bored of work, I'm in the mood for some light-hearted, facile television – but unfortunately K manages to find a documentary on Channel 4 I can tell from the start is going to be hard going.
Titled My New Brain, it tells the story of a 20-year-old boy (or man, as 20-year-olds are inappopriately referred to on the news; I wasn't a man when I was 20!) who, while out getting drunk with friends at university, fell off a 20-foot wall and suffered a severe brain injury. Having been in a coma for five weeks, the film joins him six months into recovery, when he is making admirable progress. His speech is noticeably affected as is his movement, and he seems perpetually confused – though he is capable of having conversations and seems mostly lucid. His family are heartbreakingly strong – particularly his mother – and do their best to cope with his mood swings and the things he can't do for himself any more. The strangest thing seems to be the fact that his personality has completely changed since the accident, and his family must come to terms with the fact that he is a different person now. It's hard to watch, mainly because his family remind me a lot of my own family, but also because his injury is the sort of thing that could absolutely happen to anyone. It could be tempting to point to the fact that he was drunk and stupidly trying to climb over a wall to get back into a club he'd been kicked out of – but people do stupider, drunker things every day and get away with it. The film ends with his 21st birthday, a point at which he seems to be coming to terms with what has happened to him (he has no memory of it) and the fact that he can't go back. I'm pretty choked up by the end.
Tuesday 24th August
Having been on holiday last week, the healthy weekly-swim regime had to take a week off. It had all been going so well too (apart from the odd session postponed due to my general wussiness rearing its head as soon as it starts raining outside) – but the fact that Tuesday to Sunday last week was spent eating and drinking more or less constantly (see the relevant blog posts for irrefutable evidence of this) means that I currently feel about three weeks behind in terms of exercise. As a result, even the gentle walk from home up to the swimming pool seems like a bit of a slog, though the weather is nice enough to make the meander through Priory Park a pleasant diversion. I arrive at Park Road a bit early, as usual, and sit on a bench enjoying the latest Football Ramble podcast while waiting for K to turn up.
I start my usual slow/medium lane regime, counting down from my target of 30 lengths. It's immediately obvious that I'm slightly out of practice, as the first 10 lengths or so are a real struggle. However, by the time I get closer to 30 I'm properly in my stride (if you can be said to stride in a swimming pool) and manage to stick a few more on at the end. I'm also mildly entertained by one of the men in my lane trying to chat up a girl, managing to sneak a few words of conversation each time they're stopped for breath at the same end. Unfortunately for the hopeful chap, she soon seems to be ensuring that they're never at the same end together – setting off well before he gets to her end. Eventually he gives up and gets out. It's probably for the best – it's virtually impossible to get someone's phone number when you're in a swimming pool. I'd imagine.
K is a little tired from a hard day's work, but she manages her full me-shaming quota of lengths and we head out to get dry. Outside it's noticeably darker than it was at this time a few weeks ago, and we walk through the park when it's probably just a little darker than is safe. There's a fairly intimidating boy doing circles around the grass on his moped, but other than that we pass through unmolested. Back at home we eat the leftovers from last night's bolognese and watch the latest Mad Men – which might be the best one of this series so far.
I start my usual slow/medium lane regime, counting down from my target of 30 lengths. It's immediately obvious that I'm slightly out of practice, as the first 10 lengths or so are a real struggle. However, by the time I get closer to 30 I'm properly in my stride (if you can be said to stride in a swimming pool) and manage to stick a few more on at the end. I'm also mildly entertained by one of the men in my lane trying to chat up a girl, managing to sneak a few words of conversation each time they're stopped for breath at the same end. Unfortunately for the hopeful chap, she soon seems to be ensuring that they're never at the same end together – setting off well before he gets to her end. Eventually he gives up and gets out. It's probably for the best – it's virtually impossible to get someone's phone number when you're in a swimming pool. I'd imagine.
K is a little tired from a hard day's work, but she manages her full me-shaming quota of lengths and we head out to get dry. Outside it's noticeably darker than it was at this time a few weeks ago, and we walk through the park when it's probably just a little darker than is safe. There's a fairly intimidating boy doing circles around the grass on his moped, but other than that we pass through unmolested. Back at home we eat the leftovers from last night's bolognese and watch the latest Mad Men – which might be the best one of this series so far.
Monday 23rd August
As is always the case when getting back from even the shortest of holidays, there seem to be tons and tons of emails waiting for me. What is obvious, though, is how few of the emails I get at work are actually of any importance whatsoever. I spend the morning trawling through them, but find that most can be discarded and even the trickiest ones have already been dealt with by my wonderful colleagues in my absence. As a result, I'm quickly back on this week's work, which unfortunately falls into the tedious-but-necessary world of online admin and staring at spreadsheets. Carefully. For hours. It's at times like this I have to struggle to see this job as anything more glamorous than a menial data-entry position on the fringes of the publishing industry – but it keeps me in beer and sweets, I suppose.
After this less-than-exhilirating start to the week, I head home via Sainsbury's and stock up on the various things we'll need to get through the rest of this shortened week. Shortly after I get back, Alex pops round with her little sister Drew, who's staying down in London for the week. Drew, aged 8, is in dire need of entertainment, it seems, and the girls are here specifically to raid my DVD collection. Alex clearly knows that I'm bound to have at least a few proper kids' films in my juvenile selection (though unfortunately for them my prized Pixar collection is all on Blu-Ray and thus no good) – and she's right, as they managed to pick out Cool Runnings, The Goonies and Wallace and Gromit (two of which, it must be said, are actually K's). We sit and chat for a little while and I recount my cat-harassment story from the weekend for Drew's amusement. The girls head off shortly afterwards and I get on with sorting out dinner.
The rest of the evening is spent, as with many evenings when K is out of the house, fannying around on the computer and watching unnecessarily dull TV shows. I do manage to find, however, Richard Dawkins' recent documentary Faith Schools Menace on Virgin catch-up – a subject I've seen and read the always-entertaining professor take on before – but nevertheless and interesting film looking at the shocking state of selective religious schools and the completely unregulated way they teach RE to impressionable children. One scary moment sees Dawkins asking young girls in a Muslim school to pose questions about evolution to their science teacher (fairly simple ones like, “If we evolved from apes, how come there are still apes around now?”), to which the teacher had absolutely no idea of how to reply. These schools are the ones who claim not to be indoctrinating children, but to offer them a choice and present all beliefs as “theories” - except that they are clearly ignoring fact, paying lip service to the idea of a balanced curriculum and receiving state funding to do so. Needless to say, this subject is one I'm concerned about; especially as I may one day find myself, as an atheist, unable to send my child to the best (or even just the nearest) local school based on the fact that I'm not a demonstrably practising Christian. Shouldn't state schools be for everyone? Hmm.
After this less-than-exhilirating start to the week, I head home via Sainsbury's and stock up on the various things we'll need to get through the rest of this shortened week. Shortly after I get back, Alex pops round with her little sister Drew, who's staying down in London for the week. Drew, aged 8, is in dire need of entertainment, it seems, and the girls are here specifically to raid my DVD collection. Alex clearly knows that I'm bound to have at least a few proper kids' films in my juvenile selection (though unfortunately for them my prized Pixar collection is all on Blu-Ray and thus no good) – and she's right, as they managed to pick out Cool Runnings, The Goonies and Wallace and Gromit (two of which, it must be said, are actually K's). We sit and chat for a little while and I recount my cat-harassment story from the weekend for Drew's amusement. The girls head off shortly afterwards and I get on with sorting out dinner.
The rest of the evening is spent, as with many evenings when K is out of the house, fannying around on the computer and watching unnecessarily dull TV shows. I do manage to find, however, Richard Dawkins' recent documentary Faith Schools Menace on Virgin catch-up – a subject I've seen and read the always-entertaining professor take on before – but nevertheless and interesting film looking at the shocking state of selective religious schools and the completely unregulated way they teach RE to impressionable children. One scary moment sees Dawkins asking young girls in a Muslim school to pose questions about evolution to their science teacher (fairly simple ones like, “If we evolved from apes, how come there are still apes around now?”), to which the teacher had absolutely no idea of how to reply. These schools are the ones who claim not to be indoctrinating children, but to offer them a choice and present all beliefs as “theories” - except that they are clearly ignoring fact, paying lip service to the idea of a balanced curriculum and receiving state funding to do so. Needless to say, this subject is one I'm concerned about; especially as I may one day find myself, as an atheist, unable to send my child to the best (or even just the nearest) local school based on the fact that I'm not a demonstrably practising Christian. Shouldn't state schools be for everyone? Hmm.
Sunday 22nd August
There is an episode of The Vicar of Dibley, of which my mother is very fond, where Dawn French (who, incidentally, is great in the new BBC4 sitcom Roger & Val Have Just Got In), through a series of polite commitments, has to eat three roast dinners in one day. Generally preferring my comedy a little edgier than Dibley, I'm no massive fan of the series, but it is funny watching her stagger from one meal to the next, looking like she's ready to burst. I mention it because today, K and I are facing the prospect of two consecutive roast lunches either side of the M5.
We had originally intended to be back in Gillingham, stopping off on the way back to London, for Sunday lunch, but when it became clear that our Cornish hosts were kindly going to lay on a roast for us here, we sent the message to cancel. Unfortunately, the message was never received – so K's poor mum is slaving over the lunch even as we wake up. It now looks like we'll be eating here, driving to Dorset and eating again. Part of me is quite pleased – who doesn't love a nice roast (or two) after all? - but I do hope that the portions are more modest than they appear in the gentle C of E-based comedies of my youth.
This morning is a lazy affair, spent watching Tim Lovejoy make an arse of himself attempting to coherently “present” Something for the Weekend (in the words of Alan Partridge, he couldn't present a...cat) while Louise Redknapp looks on, utterly vacant. We achieve very little before lunch, save for eating breakfast – there is something pleasantly soporific about Matt and Ellie's living room that induces total inertia from around 9am to 1pm, w hen Matt arrives with the beautifully roast chicken, cabbage, potatoes and broad beans braised in milk. It's relentlessly delicious, and serves as an excellent farewell after exactly the relaxed couple of days in the country I had hoped for.
We make our way back to Gillingham at around 2.30 and I spend the majority of the journey destroying my phone battery by staring in wonderment at the newly-discovered GPS function on my phone. I travel in cars very rarely, so a chance to use Android's very impressive GPS system shouldn't go to waste – despite the fact that K (who's driving) knows exactly where she's going and doesn't especially need me piping up with redundant directions every five minutes. We arrive in good time, getting through the door just as K's harassed-looking mother is serving up “lunch” (though it's now getting on for 5.30pm). Thankfully it's a completely different setup to Matt and Ellie's roast, this time treating us to roast beef and veg – and I even partake of a little red wine while we go over, for the first time, some of the wedding details with K's parents. I had been briefly concerned about how much they were engaging with the idea, but now it seems that they are on the same page as us, having even gone as far as to visit the ceremony venue early this morning.
After stuffing ourselves with food for the second time today, it gets to the time when we need to head back to London. We walk down to the station to catch the 18.50 train to Waterloo, which is predictably busy on a Sunday evening, but I manage to squeeze my laptop onto the wee fold down table in front of me and catch up with some writing. We finally get home just before ten – meaning that I'm in time for Match of the Day 2 and able to catch up with the weekend's results (including a brilliant second consecutive 6-0 win for Chelsea) and yesterday's goals. By the time it's over, though, we're both utterly shattered, and it's time for bed and back to the working-week way of thinking.
We had originally intended to be back in Gillingham, stopping off on the way back to London, for Sunday lunch, but when it became clear that our Cornish hosts were kindly going to lay on a roast for us here, we sent the message to cancel. Unfortunately, the message was never received – so K's poor mum is slaving over the lunch even as we wake up. It now looks like we'll be eating here, driving to Dorset and eating again. Part of me is quite pleased – who doesn't love a nice roast (or two) after all? - but I do hope that the portions are more modest than they appear in the gentle C of E-based comedies of my youth.
This morning is a lazy affair, spent watching Tim Lovejoy make an arse of himself attempting to coherently “present” Something for the Weekend (in the words of Alan Partridge, he couldn't present a...cat) while Louise Redknapp looks on, utterly vacant. We achieve very little before lunch, save for eating breakfast – there is something pleasantly soporific about Matt and Ellie's living room that induces total inertia from around 9am to 1pm, w hen Matt arrives with the beautifully roast chicken, cabbage, potatoes and broad beans braised in milk. It's relentlessly delicious, and serves as an excellent farewell after exactly the relaxed couple of days in the country I had hoped for.
We make our way back to Gillingham at around 2.30 and I spend the majority of the journey destroying my phone battery by staring in wonderment at the newly-discovered GPS function on my phone. I travel in cars very rarely, so a chance to use Android's very impressive GPS system shouldn't go to waste – despite the fact that K (who's driving) knows exactly where she's going and doesn't especially need me piping up with redundant directions every five minutes. We arrive in good time, getting through the door just as K's harassed-looking mother is serving up “lunch” (though it's now getting on for 5.30pm). Thankfully it's a completely different setup to Matt and Ellie's roast, this time treating us to roast beef and veg – and I even partake of a little red wine while we go over, for the first time, some of the wedding details with K's parents. I had been briefly concerned about how much they were engaging with the idea, but now it seems that they are on the same page as us, having even gone as far as to visit the ceremony venue early this morning.
After stuffing ourselves with food for the second time today, it gets to the time when we need to head back to London. We walk down to the station to catch the 18.50 train to Waterloo, which is predictably busy on a Sunday evening, but I manage to squeeze my laptop onto the wee fold down table in front of me and catch up with some writing. We finally get home just before ten – meaning that I'm in time for Match of the Day 2 and able to catch up with the weekend's results (including a brilliant second consecutive 6-0 win for Chelsea) and yesterday's goals. By the time it's over, though, we're both utterly shattered, and it's time for bed and back to the working-week way of thinking.
Saturday 21st August
I wake up in the night with Matt and Ellie's cute-if-slightly-menacing cat Tealeaf nibbling at my elbow. She seems pretty persistent, so I reluctantly get up and chuck her out of the bedroom door. This doesn't prove to be much of an obstacle, however, as she easily paws the door back open and sets up camp somewhere near my face for a second time. This time I need rid of her, so I put her back outside and place my laptop-weighted backpack against the door. She bangs away at the outside forlornly for a few minutes, before giving up and finally letting me sleep. I'm not particularly fazed by this behaviour – back in Bath, our cat Daisy had a penchant for behaving as a furry alarm clock for me personally (probably because, as the only student of the house, I was the one at home feeding her during the day and she developed a characteristically feline dependancy on me) – so I let her get bored and wander off.
In the morning, however, K gets up for a shower and instantly Tealeaf is back inside and on my case, curling up in the crook of my arm or between my legs, meaning that any movement on my part would disturb her snoozing unforgivably. I stroke her head for a while and finally concede that I'm going to have to get out of bed if she's going to leave me alone. It's nice that cat's tend to like me, but sometimes I feel completely under their control in their presence.
Ellie, remarkably for a committed vegetarian, cements her top host status by rustling up a mean bacon sandwich and scrambled egg breakfast, and we sit for most of the morning chatting and watching crappy Saturday morning TV. I even manage, in a house full of people resolutely anti-football, to take advantage of a momentary distraction to flick the telly onto Football Focus. The upshot of this, though, is that it becomes clear that we should go for a walk.
The plan is to head through the woods and over the hills towards a nice little pub by the river in Calstock. This sounds like a great idea to me – the only thing nicer than a stroll in the countryside is a stroll in the countryside that ends with a pint, after all – and we head out at 1.
The weather is not great, but it's not tipping it down either. The early stages of our little ramble involve much slipping in the mud on my part (apparently Nike skate shoes aren't made for the countryside, who knew?) but thankfully we hit a nice tarmacked stretch before long. Less thankfully, this coincides with an enormous hill, which cruelly gets steeper and steeper as it goes on. When we reach the top though, struggling for breath, Matt reliably informs us that it's all downhill from here. The view is probably amazing, but the mist hides it all from us – so we are left to be content with the sight of a dead frog on the road, which K stops to photograph for reasons known only to herself.
The hill down to Calstock is steep, and ends in a picture-postcard Cornish village full of winding streets and pretty buildings. There also seems to be some sort of regatta going on on the river, so we take a seat on a bench outside the as-promised rather nice Tamar Inn. I order a home-made Tamar Inn burger and take my first refreshing sip of lager of many to follow.
Lunch is great, and we continue to chat and buy rounds of beers for most of the rest of the afternoon. At one point a large stag party arrive, then leave, on some pub crawl between probably remote taverns, and various locals wander around cheering on kids in boats. After a remarkable five pints though, we decide it's probably time to leave – especially as we have the enormous hill we walked down to contend with, this time half-cut.
The hill proves itself to be a bit of a bastard when you're swaying slightly, but luckily we get a break halfway up when we come to Matt and Ellie's allotment. We wander in to collect vegetables (broad beans, beetroot) for tomorrow's roast dinner, and I fulfil a lifetime ambition by getting in with the chickens (carefully crossing the electric fence) to liberate a solitary egg from their little coop. I hand the egg to K for safekeeping – joking that if she can keep it safe for the rest of the journey home then I will agree to let her carry my child one day. I'm disconcerted to see her moving to put it in her back pocket – fearing for its safety when we get back to the house – but she does a sterling job and the egg makes it home unscathed.
We're all a bit tired when we get back at around 7.30 (and oddly sober – the long walk having soaked up a lot of the alcohol we've taken on board) and it's all we can do to watch the first 90-minute edition of this year's X-Factor. Which is crap, obviously, but after some cider and red wine on top of this afternoon's beers, I'm approaching a sedate enough state to deal with any amount of banal television.
We stay up to watch an odd, Richard E. Grant-led adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles on ITV, (which proves oddly impossible to age, looking both dated and modern) before all clearly needing to get some kip. Looking back, X-Factor aside, this has probably been my ideal countryside Saturday – and I wouldn't change a thing about it.
In the morning, however, K gets up for a shower and instantly Tealeaf is back inside and on my case, curling up in the crook of my arm or between my legs, meaning that any movement on my part would disturb her snoozing unforgivably. I stroke her head for a while and finally concede that I'm going to have to get out of bed if she's going to leave me alone. It's nice that cat's tend to like me, but sometimes I feel completely under their control in their presence.
Ellie, remarkably for a committed vegetarian, cements her top host status by rustling up a mean bacon sandwich and scrambled egg breakfast, and we sit for most of the morning chatting and watching crappy Saturday morning TV. I even manage, in a house full of people resolutely anti-football, to take advantage of a momentary distraction to flick the telly onto Football Focus. The upshot of this, though, is that it becomes clear that we should go for a walk.
The plan is to head through the woods and over the hills towards a nice little pub by the river in Calstock. This sounds like a great idea to me – the only thing nicer than a stroll in the countryside is a stroll in the countryside that ends with a pint, after all – and we head out at 1.
The weather is not great, but it's not tipping it down either. The early stages of our little ramble involve much slipping in the mud on my part (apparently Nike skate shoes aren't made for the countryside, who knew?) but thankfully we hit a nice tarmacked stretch before long. Less thankfully, this coincides with an enormous hill, which cruelly gets steeper and steeper as it goes on. When we reach the top though, struggling for breath, Matt reliably informs us that it's all downhill from here. The view is probably amazing, but the mist hides it all from us – so we are left to be content with the sight of a dead frog on the road, which K stops to photograph for reasons known only to herself.
The hill down to Calstock is steep, and ends in a picture-postcard Cornish village full of winding streets and pretty buildings. There also seems to be some sort of regatta going on on the river, so we take a seat on a bench outside the as-promised rather nice Tamar Inn. I order a home-made Tamar Inn burger and take my first refreshing sip of lager of many to follow.
Lunch is great, and we continue to chat and buy rounds of beers for most of the rest of the afternoon. At one point a large stag party arrive, then leave, on some pub crawl between probably remote taverns, and various locals wander around cheering on kids in boats. After a remarkable five pints though, we decide it's probably time to leave – especially as we have the enormous hill we walked down to contend with, this time half-cut.
The hill proves itself to be a bit of a bastard when you're swaying slightly, but luckily we get a break halfway up when we come to Matt and Ellie's allotment. We wander in to collect vegetables (broad beans, beetroot) for tomorrow's roast dinner, and I fulfil a lifetime ambition by getting in with the chickens (carefully crossing the electric fence) to liberate a solitary egg from their little coop. I hand the egg to K for safekeeping – joking that if she can keep it safe for the rest of the journey home then I will agree to let her carry my child one day. I'm disconcerted to see her moving to put it in her back pocket – fearing for its safety when we get back to the house – but she does a sterling job and the egg makes it home unscathed.
We're all a bit tired when we get back at around 7.30 (and oddly sober – the long walk having soaked up a lot of the alcohol we've taken on board) and it's all we can do to watch the first 90-minute edition of this year's X-Factor. Which is crap, obviously, but after some cider and red wine on top of this afternoon's beers, I'm approaching a sedate enough state to deal with any amount of banal television.
We stay up to watch an odd, Richard E. Grant-led adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles on ITV, (which proves oddly impossible to age, looking both dated and modern) before all clearly needing to get some kip. Looking back, X-Factor aside, this has probably been my ideal countryside Saturday – and I wouldn't change a thing about it.
Friday 20th August
After a couple of busy, early mornings, it's nice to have a bit of a lie-in today. K gets up and potters around with breakfast and I stay in bed reading more of Stewart Lee's addictive How I Escaped My Certain Fate – which is less a standard memoir and more of an analysis of Lee's distinctive and studious approach to stand-up comedy, focussing in particular on his return from self-imposed comedy exile between around 2001 and 2005. It also includes three annotated transcripts of his three stand-up shows from the period, which I'd recommend to anyone interested in the craft of comedy; something Lee is clearly obsessed with. It's also interesting, having recently read Richard Herring's How Not to Grow Up, to see Herring written about from the other side of the erstwhile double act. Spending the morning immersing myself in the world of stand-up is, quite apart from anything else, certainly putting me in the mood for my trip to Edinburgh this time next week – and I'm mentally taking notes of a few names to look out for when I find myself at the Fringe box office.
I eventually put the book down and get up to start the day. K and I, feeling that we've probably seen enough to know what we want to do regarding the wedding venue, decide to take a deep breath and get the whole shebang booked. After a bit of procrastinating in front of the telly, I finally muster the wherewithal to pick up the phone and call both the venue and the registrar – at which point I find out just how ridiculously quick and easy it is to book a wedding ceremony. By an odd coincidence, the date that we have in mind is exactly one year today - 20th August 2011. I pass this on to the nice lady at Chettle House and that's it, we're in. I then call the North Dorset registrar and after handing over a couple of basic details we're in there too. With little fanfare, the one-year countdown has begun. I wander back downstairs to tell K, everything feeling slightly surreal, and celebrate by playing a bit of Super Mario Kart on the Wii with her little brother. I can't think of a better (or more fundamentally childish) way to move on from probably the most grown-up thing I've ever done.
It's odd to think that, back when I first played Mario Kart on the SNES in around 1994, or when I sold my SNES to buy Super Mario Kart 64 in 1998-or-so (back when N64 cartridges cost £50!) that I'd still be happily lobbing green and red shells at anthropomorphic mushrooms on the day I booked my own wedding ceremony. But here we are.
The next order of business this afternoon is the second leg of our holiday: driving down to Cornwall to visit Matt and Ellie. This will be the first time we've been to see them since their wedding – and I'm looking forward to a chilled-out, boozy weekend in the depths of the countryside. The weather is looking pretty crap, as it has for much of August, so we'll likely be spending the majority of our time indoors – which suits me just fine.
We borrow K's parents' car and head off at around 2pm, aiming to arrive in Cornwall when Ellie finishes work. The journey goes smoothly, despite the complete lack of visibility over the moors as we enter the county, and we stop at the large Morrison's in Tavistock to stock up on booze and some gifts for our hosts. By the time we get to their amazing riverside cottage just outside the village of Gunnislake, the clouds are making it seem like a slightly wintery night-time – so we huddle in their cosy living-room and get involved in a few stubby beers and a couple of bottles of wine.
With the busy day and relatively long drive having taken it out of us, we don't last very long into the evening, but it's nice chatting about wedding-day and honeymoon plans with a couple who have recently been through it all and have some invaluable advice to offer. As one of K's bridesmaids (along with her twin sister, who has also joined us in Cornwall), Ellie is pleasingly eager to take part in all stages of the planning, which I know makes K enormously happy. We retire to bed shortly after midnight, a little wedding-ed out but looking forward to all the crazy plans the next 365 days will bring.
I eventually put the book down and get up to start the day. K and I, feeling that we've probably seen enough to know what we want to do regarding the wedding venue, decide to take a deep breath and get the whole shebang booked. After a bit of procrastinating in front of the telly, I finally muster the wherewithal to pick up the phone and call both the venue and the registrar – at which point I find out just how ridiculously quick and easy it is to book a wedding ceremony. By an odd coincidence, the date that we have in mind is exactly one year today - 20th August 2011. I pass this on to the nice lady at Chettle House and that's it, we're in. I then call the North Dorset registrar and after handing over a couple of basic details we're in there too. With little fanfare, the one-year countdown has begun. I wander back downstairs to tell K, everything feeling slightly surreal, and celebrate by playing a bit of Super Mario Kart on the Wii with her little brother. I can't think of a better (or more fundamentally childish) way to move on from probably the most grown-up thing I've ever done.
It's odd to think that, back when I first played Mario Kart on the SNES in around 1994, or when I sold my SNES to buy Super Mario Kart 64 in 1998-or-so (back when N64 cartridges cost £50!) that I'd still be happily lobbing green and red shells at anthropomorphic mushrooms on the day I booked my own wedding ceremony. But here we are.
The next order of business this afternoon is the second leg of our holiday: driving down to Cornwall to visit Matt and Ellie. This will be the first time we've been to see them since their wedding – and I'm looking forward to a chilled-out, boozy weekend in the depths of the countryside. The weather is looking pretty crap, as it has for much of August, so we'll likely be spending the majority of our time indoors – which suits me just fine.
We borrow K's parents' car and head off at around 2pm, aiming to arrive in Cornwall when Ellie finishes work. The journey goes smoothly, despite the complete lack of visibility over the moors as we enter the county, and we stop at the large Morrison's in Tavistock to stock up on booze and some gifts for our hosts. By the time we get to their amazing riverside cottage just outside the village of Gunnislake, the clouds are making it seem like a slightly wintery night-time – so we huddle in their cosy living-room and get involved in a few stubby beers and a couple of bottles of wine.
With the busy day and relatively long drive having taken it out of us, we don't last very long into the evening, but it's nice chatting about wedding-day and honeymoon plans with a couple who have recently been through it all and have some invaluable advice to offer. As one of K's bridesmaids (along with her twin sister, who has also joined us in Cornwall), Ellie is pleasingly eager to take part in all stages of the planning, which I know makes K enormously happy. We retire to bed shortly after midnight, a little wedding-ed out but looking forward to all the crazy plans the next 365 days will bring.
Tuesday 24 August 2010
Thursday 19th August
After getting up at a slightly more civilised hour than yesterday and taking a brisk walk with the dog, ably wrangled by K's younger brother, we head up to the show field to help with the clear-up. Handed the rather fun rubbish-grabber-robot-claw thing, we are sent to make a round of the remaining tents across the show site, ensuring that any remaining rubbish is piled outside the tents in anticipation of the imminently-arriving bin lorry. It doesn't sound fun - but we have a laugh poking around in the oddly abandoned marquees, trying to get round the site before the dreaded rain returns and the truck arrives. We also spend a little time imagining how the bottom end of the field will look for our wedding reception, getting an idea of the size of the marquee we'll have and brainstorming all the little extras we want to have there on the day.
Today is to be pretty wedding-heavy, as we have booked in to view a couple of potential ceremony venues later in the day. When our clearing-up stint is done, we borrow K's dad's car and head to the nearby village of Shaftesbury (notable for the quaint and picturesque Gold Hill, where the Hovis adverts were filmed despite being amusingly non-Northern) to check out the town hall there. What we find is disappointing - despite the building being quite nice to look at, the inside is small and shabby; and frankly neither of us can imagine getting married and coming down some stairs, squeezing past the Stannah stair lift and walking out into a busy high street on a Saturday afternoon. Accordingly we write off Shaftesbury and the town hall idea, and head back to Gillingham for lunch.
Later, we pick up K's twin sister and head out into the countryside towards Chettle House, a country manor we found online and have an appointment to see this afternoon. We have directions printed from Google Maps, which, while very clever, aren't particularly useful when you're snaking around country lanes with no names – plus we're so far into the wilderness that while all of us have GPS-enabled phones, none of us can get a single bar of phone or data signal. After taking at least three wrong turns, we eventually decide to pull over and dig around in the boot for the road atlas – which turns out not to exist. Luckily, my phone briefly regains signal and I frantically use the GPS to work out where we are.
We finally pull into the tiny village of Chettle around half an hour late and work our way up the hill to the well-hidden Chettle House. The sun comes out just as we arrive, and it's instantly obvious what a great backdrop the house, built in 1710 by Thomas Archer, would make for wedding photos. We wander around the outside before meeting the owner and checking out the nicely-sized licensed rooms. With much to think about, I take a couple of photos and start to get a bit excited about the prospect of hiring it – just as I am sure K is.
Getting as lost as we did (and now realising that the house is far more accessible than we thought) set us back on seeing the second place – but after a forty minute drive to find it we're already fairly sure that this one will be a no. It's not only a long way, it's also down endless single-track lanes into the middle of nowhere; but we decide that we should go ahead and look around if only in the interest of comparison to the house we'd liked. The lady who meets us, along with her incredibly massive and lively lurcher puppy, is implausibly posh – she even says 'yah' with no hint of irony – but her house is, it has to be said, pretty beautiful, and the converted chapel section would definitely be a nice place to get married. Either way, we're not swayed in our decision and we head back to Gillingham still with Chettle House in our minds.
When K and I get a moment to ourselves, we talk seriously about getting this thing booked – we have almost exactly a year to the day we really want, and our research seems to suggest that a lot of places are getting booked up already. It's scary to think that we could have somewhere confirmed before we even go back to London – but it's exciting too.
Today is to be pretty wedding-heavy, as we have booked in to view a couple of potential ceremony venues later in the day. When our clearing-up stint is done, we borrow K's dad's car and head to the nearby village of Shaftesbury (notable for the quaint and picturesque Gold Hill, where the Hovis adverts were filmed despite being amusingly non-Northern) to check out the town hall there. What we find is disappointing - despite the building being quite nice to look at, the inside is small and shabby; and frankly neither of us can imagine getting married and coming down some stairs, squeezing past the Stannah stair lift and walking out into a busy high street on a Saturday afternoon. Accordingly we write off Shaftesbury and the town hall idea, and head back to Gillingham for lunch.
Later, we pick up K's twin sister and head out into the countryside towards Chettle House, a country manor we found online and have an appointment to see this afternoon. We have directions printed from Google Maps, which, while very clever, aren't particularly useful when you're snaking around country lanes with no names – plus we're so far into the wilderness that while all of us have GPS-enabled phones, none of us can get a single bar of phone or data signal. After taking at least three wrong turns, we eventually decide to pull over and dig around in the boot for the road atlas – which turns out not to exist. Luckily, my phone briefly regains signal and I frantically use the GPS to work out where we are.
We finally pull into the tiny village of Chettle around half an hour late and work our way up the hill to the well-hidden Chettle House. The sun comes out just as we arrive, and it's instantly obvious what a great backdrop the house, built in 1710 by Thomas Archer, would make for wedding photos. We wander around the outside before meeting the owner and checking out the nicely-sized licensed rooms. With much to think about, I take a couple of photos and start to get a bit excited about the prospect of hiring it – just as I am sure K is.
Getting as lost as we did (and now realising that the house is far more accessible than we thought) set us back on seeing the second place – but after a forty minute drive to find it we're already fairly sure that this one will be a no. It's not only a long way, it's also down endless single-track lanes into the middle of nowhere; but we decide that we should go ahead and look around if only in the interest of comparison to the house we'd liked. The lady who meets us, along with her incredibly massive and lively lurcher puppy, is implausibly posh – she even says 'yah' with no hint of irony – but her house is, it has to be said, pretty beautiful, and the converted chapel section would definitely be a nice place to get married. Either way, we're not swayed in our decision and we head back to Gillingham still with Chettle House in our minds.
When K and I get a moment to ourselves, we talk seriously about getting this thing booked – we have almost exactly a year to the day we really want, and our research seems to suggest that a lot of places are getting booked up already. It's scary to think that we could have somewhere confirmed before we even go back to London – but it's exciting too.
Monday 23 August 2010
Wednesday 18th August
The Gillingham and Shaftesbury Show inevitably means an early start – though by the time I roll out of bed at 7ish, her dad and a few other family members have been up at the show field for a couple of hours already. We have a quick micro-breakfast and drive the short distance up to the field – incidentally the venue we have pencilled in for our wedding reception next year. The huge show is already busy, and packed with stalls advertising everything from farming equipment to insurance, with the enormous food hall tent and farmer's markets dominating the northern outreaches of the field. We park up by the Main Ring, where horses are trotting around in preparation for the show-jumping competition later, which is in turn to be folllowed by a display by the Royal Signals motorcycle display team.
The first order of business, though, is to get a proper breakfast on board, so we wander up through the food hall and get a couple of sausage sandwiches, before walking a first circuit of the field. We bump into K's older brother, along with his wife and their two kids, somewhere around the bouncy castles. We spend a little while watching the eldest, three-year-old Olly, runing giddily through the ball-filled fun house and sliding down the massive inflatable slides, before K takes him on the bumper cars for the first time of many today. I stand holding the bags like I was somebody's mum (they're not my cup of tea, fairground rides), until it's time to wander on and catch up with the parents and various other siblings.
The weather is beautiful for the most part as something like 20,000 people pile through the gates – though by lunchtime the heavens have opened and we shelter, shivering under a marquee, only nipping outside to bet on and watch the always-entertaining ferret racing. At this point I am at the opposite side of the field from the car containing my raincoat, so we brave the weather for long enough to run back over to the Main Ring – by which time it has, inevitably, started to brighten up.
One more heavy downpour aside, the rest of the day passes very pleasantly indeed, and I treat myself to a couple of pints of authentic West Country cider later in the afternoon – before we head home, completely wiped out and ready for an early night. So much bigger than the Summer Fayre we went to back in June, the Show has been a success by all accounts; meaning we'll need our sleep tonight before heading back in the morning to help with the sizeable clean-up operation.
The first order of business, though, is to get a proper breakfast on board, so we wander up through the food hall and get a couple of sausage sandwiches, before walking a first circuit of the field. We bump into K's older brother, along with his wife and their two kids, somewhere around the bouncy castles. We spend a little while watching the eldest, three-year-old Olly, runing giddily through the ball-filled fun house and sliding down the massive inflatable slides, before K takes him on the bumper cars for the first time of many today. I stand holding the bags like I was somebody's mum (they're not my cup of tea, fairground rides), until it's time to wander on and catch up with the parents and various other siblings.
The weather is beautiful for the most part as something like 20,000 people pile through the gates – though by lunchtime the heavens have opened and we shelter, shivering under a marquee, only nipping outside to bet on and watch the always-entertaining ferret racing. At this point I am at the opposite side of the field from the car containing my raincoat, so we brave the weather for long enough to run back over to the Main Ring – by which time it has, inevitably, started to brighten up.
One more heavy downpour aside, the rest of the day passes very pleasantly indeed, and I treat myself to a couple of pints of authentic West Country cider later in the afternoon – before we head home, completely wiped out and ready for an early night. So much bigger than the Summer Fayre we went to back in June, the Show has been a success by all accounts; meaning we'll need our sleep tonight before heading back in the morning to help with the sizeable clean-up operation.
Tuesday 17th August
I finish my less-than-gruelling two-day week at work and head straight for Waterloo. K and I are off to Gillingham, her home town, for a few days – firstly to attend her dad's regular Gillingham and Shaftesbury agricultural show which takes place tomorrow, then to scout out some potential wedding venues we've researched and finally as a base from which to visit our friends Matt and Ellie in Cornwall from Friday to Sunday. I get the tube towards the station, battling my way through the evening rush hour – during which I discover that the song Satan by Orbital is the perfect soundtrack for negotiating a terrain packed with dawdling tourists and inconsiderate commuters. I arrive a little early, giving me some time for a cigarette and to potter around Smiths and whatnot, while listening to one of the Collings and Herrin Edinburgh podcasts.
I get on the already-busy train and manage to bag a seat at a table for myself and K, who will be getting on at Clapham Junction, seeing as it's closer to where she works. I get out the netbook – this being the first time I've ever taken it out of the house – and set about catching up with some blog writing. The novelty of using a computer on the train still fascinates me, as it seems to fascinate the little girl sitting opposite me as I'm typing. K joins the train and quickly finds me, diverting the little girl's attention from my computer to her knitting as the journey progresses.
We arrive in Gillingham shortly after 9.30, to find the house packed to the rafters with K's entire family, including her very sweet four-month old niece. I take a seat in the comfortable living room and am handed a can of Lager by K's older brother (the capital letter there is to denote the brand; Lager, it seems, is Co-Op's chosen name for it's 2.6% own brand beer – clever). We sit and chat for a while before the youngest kids are put to bed, then start watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on ITV. This is a film which, as a bit of a movie fan, I am ashamed to say I have never seen – and I enjoy the first hour or so very much, but as is often the case with watching movies on commercial telly the adverts mean it drags on for absolutely ages – and K and I eventually give up and head to bed before the end.
I get on the already-busy train and manage to bag a seat at a table for myself and K, who will be getting on at Clapham Junction, seeing as it's closer to where she works. I get out the netbook – this being the first time I've ever taken it out of the house – and set about catching up with some blog writing. The novelty of using a computer on the train still fascinates me, as it seems to fascinate the little girl sitting opposite me as I'm typing. K joins the train and quickly finds me, diverting the little girl's attention from my computer to her knitting as the journey progresses.
We arrive in Gillingham shortly after 9.30, to find the house packed to the rafters with K's entire family, including her very sweet four-month old niece. I take a seat in the comfortable living room and am handed a can of Lager by K's older brother (the capital letter there is to denote the brand; Lager, it seems, is Co-Op's chosen name for it's 2.6% own brand beer – clever). We sit and chat for a while before the youngest kids are put to bed, then start watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on ITV. This is a film which, as a bit of a movie fan, I am ashamed to say I have never seen – and I enjoy the first hour or so very much, but as is often the case with watching movies on commercial telly the adverts mean it drags on for absolutely ages – and K and I eventually give up and head to bed before the end.
Monday 16th August
Predictably, I wake up feeling like another full night's sleep is probably necessary after yesterday's mammoth trek. I get up and stomp through to the bathroom, my feet feeling like squishy, rotten chunks of meat that have been tenderised to an implausible degree. I'm fully aware that I've only walked a measly ten miles and then sat on my arse in front of the telly for the following six hours, but in my defence it was only supposed to be a three mile stroll (hence I was ill-prepared, having packed only unsuitable Nike trainers and a slight hangover) that turned into a 10-mile slog around the hard-paved streets of North London's fashionable Camden and Haringey boroughs.
Somehow I muster up the energy to get ready for work and head in to the office. The week has a pleasantly straightforward start for the most part – particularly welcome in that it's only a two-day week before K and I head off to Dorset on Wednesday. There is plenty to do, certainly, but barring any unpleasant bombshells from the Bosses, it all appears manageable so far.
After work I head home and get to work on dinner, tonight taking the form of my signature spicy sausage bolognese dish (all the deliciousness of normal bolognese but without the hassle of frying up mince, plus the added bonus of spare sausages to put in a sandwich for the morning!) before K gets home to tuck in with me. I also make sure to download the latest episode of Mad Men so we can watch it later. I find myself enjoying the novelty of watching just one episode a week at the moment, downloading them as they are broadcast in the US, meaning that the series unfolds as the programme-makers presumably intended – rather than the box-set-binge format in which we had enjoyed the first three seasons. Mad Men's leisurely pace lends itself to this format anyway, with the story unfolding like the carefully crafted chapters of an unassuming, character-driven novel. The quality never seems to dip either, and every scene seems to take place for a reason – even if that reason isn't always clear at first.
Somehow I muster up the energy to get ready for work and head in to the office. The week has a pleasantly straightforward start for the most part – particularly welcome in that it's only a two-day week before K and I head off to Dorset on Wednesday. There is plenty to do, certainly, but barring any unpleasant bombshells from the Bosses, it all appears manageable so far.
After work I head home and get to work on dinner, tonight taking the form of my signature spicy sausage bolognese dish (all the deliciousness of normal bolognese but without the hassle of frying up mince, plus the added bonus of spare sausages to put in a sandwich for the morning!) before K gets home to tuck in with me. I also make sure to download the latest episode of Mad Men so we can watch it later. I find myself enjoying the novelty of watching just one episode a week at the moment, downloading them as they are broadcast in the US, meaning that the series unfolds as the programme-makers presumably intended – rather than the box-set-binge format in which we had enjoyed the first three seasons. Mad Men's leisurely pace lends itself to this format anyway, with the story unfolding like the carefully crafted chapters of an unassuming, character-driven novel. The quality never seems to dip either, and every scene seems to take place for a reason – even if that reason isn't always clear at first.
Tuesday 17 August 2010
Sunday 15th August
Morning comes, as does the unspeakably dry mouth caused by the late night Mighty Meaty. I still don't regret it though, even as I run to the kitchen and down about a litre of apple and blackcurrant squash. Inevitably, it's almost impossible to get back to sleep, so I lie in bed and fiddle with my phone for a while before reading a bit of Stewart Lee's book How I Escaped My Certain Fate, which came in the post yesterday. After a while it becomes clear that the day must begin – especially as K and I have planned to do a Big Walk. We haven't done a Big Walk for a while, again because the last few weekends have been pre-planned for us and because, mostly, we've been a bit lazy when we have been here. The plan is to walk to Hampstead and get a roast from a pub for lunch, so we find a cunning-looking route online and head out around midday.
The route takes us up through Crouch End, past Archway, across Highgate Hill and down past the Whittington Hospital, before dumping us at the bottom of Parliament Hill. Neither of us have been this way before, so along the way the route looks worryingly residential, though when we arrive at the park we are both marvelling at how easy the walk is – especially considering how awkward it can be to get to Hampstead by public transport (and hence why we don't go there very often).
We walk up Parliament Hill and check out the views, being sure to pick out the just-completed Heron Tower to the left of the Gherkin and the in-construction Shard building, which is set to forever alter and dominate the skyline. K isn't as interested in this as I am, so we carry on walking in a general northerly direction – mostly in search of the lunch we both now feel in deep need of. Hampstead Heath is not a particularly easy place to exit at the top, we find, and in the end find ourselves turning left and right almost at random, before eventually I get frustrated and make a beeline straight up the hill, towards where I'm sure the road must be. We scramble through the woods and somehow find ourselves on the road into Hampstead, feeling like we've escaped an almost-certain midday, mid-summer Blair Witch Project scenario.
We stagger, exhausted and hungry, into Hampstead itself, in search of a pub that will sell us a roast dinner in this oddly quiet, wealthy enclave of North London. We find pubs that will – but not for under £15. Bugger that, say we from the lowlands. No pub roast in the world is worth more than a tenner. Instead we opt for plan B – grabbing some sandwiches from the little Tesco's and going back to the Heath for a little picnic. With less than ten pounds spent between us, we battle back through the woods armed with food, laughing at the ripped-off rich folk as we scurry past them like rats having raided the kitchen.
We sit and greedily stuff ourselves with our picnic before preparing to head back down the hill through areas of descending wealth and status: from Hampstead to Highgate Village, to Crouch End, to Turnpike Lane. However, before we have a chance to get moving, a vicious bastard wasp comes along and stings K on the back of the neck. It doesn't seem in a hurry to fly off either, so she has to flick the wretched thing away. I offer sympathy – but not before I've Twitpic-ed the already hugely-swollen sting.
We walk along the north edge of the Heath towards Highgate, and eventually make our way out of one of the few, unsignposted gates. Following the long, busy road past Highgate School we walk up to Highgate village and I load up on the requisite amount of Diet Coke I feel I'll need to complete the journey. By the time we've walked down the steep hill to Crouch End, we're both thoroughly exhausted and ready to get home. The last few steps to the front door feel like a huge effort and my feet are throbbing – and by the time I've kicked my shoes off and crashed on the sofa there's no way I'm moving for the rest of the day. I get out the computer and amuse myself by plotting the walk on a website that lets you do such things, and work out that we did 10 miles, far more than the 3 or 4 we'd originally intended. I know this is hardly an epic hike, but it's enough of a tramp around the hard streets of North London to register as effort expended – and we spend the rest of the day vegging out in front of the telly.
The route takes us up through Crouch End, past Archway, across Highgate Hill and down past the Whittington Hospital, before dumping us at the bottom of Parliament Hill. Neither of us have been this way before, so along the way the route looks worryingly residential, though when we arrive at the park we are both marvelling at how easy the walk is – especially considering how awkward it can be to get to Hampstead by public transport (and hence why we don't go there very often).
We walk up Parliament Hill and check out the views, being sure to pick out the just-completed Heron Tower to the left of the Gherkin and the in-construction Shard building, which is set to forever alter and dominate the skyline. K isn't as interested in this as I am, so we carry on walking in a general northerly direction – mostly in search of the lunch we both now feel in deep need of. Hampstead Heath is not a particularly easy place to exit at the top, we find, and in the end find ourselves turning left and right almost at random, before eventually I get frustrated and make a beeline straight up the hill, towards where I'm sure the road must be. We scramble through the woods and somehow find ourselves on the road into Hampstead, feeling like we've escaped an almost-certain midday, mid-summer Blair Witch Project scenario.
We stagger, exhausted and hungry, into Hampstead itself, in search of a pub that will sell us a roast dinner in this oddly quiet, wealthy enclave of North London. We find pubs that will – but not for under £15. Bugger that, say we from the lowlands. No pub roast in the world is worth more than a tenner. Instead we opt for plan B – grabbing some sandwiches from the little Tesco's and going back to the Heath for a little picnic. With less than ten pounds spent between us, we battle back through the woods armed with food, laughing at the ripped-off rich folk as we scurry past them like rats having raided the kitchen.
We sit and greedily stuff ourselves with our picnic before preparing to head back down the hill through areas of descending wealth and status: from Hampstead to Highgate Village, to Crouch End, to Turnpike Lane. However, before we have a chance to get moving, a vicious bastard wasp comes along and stings K on the back of the neck. It doesn't seem in a hurry to fly off either, so she has to flick the wretched thing away. I offer sympathy – but not before I've Twitpic-ed the already hugely-swollen sting.
We walk along the north edge of the Heath towards Highgate, and eventually make our way out of one of the few, unsignposted gates. Following the long, busy road past Highgate School we walk up to Highgate village and I load up on the requisite amount of Diet Coke I feel I'll need to complete the journey. By the time we've walked down the steep hill to Crouch End, we're both thoroughly exhausted and ready to get home. The last few steps to the front door feel like a huge effort and my feet are throbbing – and by the time I've kicked my shoes off and crashed on the sofa there's no way I'm moving for the rest of the day. I get out the computer and amuse myself by plotting the walk on a website that lets you do such things, and work out that we did 10 miles, far more than the 3 or 4 we'd originally intended. I know this is hardly an epic hike, but it's enough of a tramp around the hard streets of North London to register as effort expended – and we spend the rest of the day vegging out in front of the telly.
Saturday 14th August
It feels like it's been an incredibly hectic couple of weeks – but that's mainly because we haven't really had a proper weekend at home. Weekends away are fun and a bit of a change, but I do tend to miss weekend days spent pottering around London and heading to the pub whenever that gets boring. It is also, more importantly than anything, the opening day of the Premier League season. Inevitably, in one of our first major cliché moments as an engaged couple, this is also the Saturday we have set aside to spend properly researching wedding venues. We're going to Dorset on Wednesday for K's dad's Big Show, allowing us a handy day to spend going to visit potential spots to hold the ceremony. Today, therefore, we start by sitting side by side in the kitchen, each in front a computer, furiously Googling “wedding venues North Dorset” and the like, grabbing phone numbers and email addresses and working out how far from the reception venue each of them are. I only get into trouble once – when K takes a look at my laptop screen and sees that I have in fact got the BBC live text coverage of Tottenham v Man City, the 12.45 curtain-raiser, open as one of my Firefox tabs. Whoops.
We do make headway, though, and soon K has fired off our form request email to ten-or-so venues, two of which we really like the look of. Around lunchtime we head out to Wood Green to do a smallish food shop, seeing as we're only at home for a couple of days this week, and when we get back I steal a few minutes in front of Soccer Saturday. It's great to have it back – and as the day's 3pm kick-offs get underway, it all comes flooding home. Even in this memorable World Cup year, international football is instantly forgotten, especially as the day's first big shock result comes through. Starting their season away at Wigan, play-off winners Blackpool are possibly the least-fancied of side promoted to the Premier League in recent years, sitting in most pundit's lists of relegation candidates ahead of kick-off (not least mine, as evidenced by yesterday's Premier League preview post on twofootedtackle.com). Amazingly, though, some atrocious defending by Wigan sees them 3-0 to the visitors by half time, with the orange-clad men adding an amazing fourth in the second half. By 5pm, Blackpool are top of the Premier League, albeit with Chelsea yet to play.
With Chelsea specifically in mind, I finally leave the house at 5 and head to The World's End in Finsbury Park – very much the football-watching pub of 2009, when we lived around there – to meet Will. Typically Will is running around 45 minutes late, so I get a beer and a decent seat while I wait for him to arrive. The game starts with Chelsea in full control, West Brom looking every inch the slightly-overawed newly-promoted side. Barely six minutes in, Florent Malouda taps in John Obi Mikel's fluffed rebound to open the scoring for the champions (and does that feel nice to write!), before Drogba makes it two from a long-range free kick. Two more from Drogba, and a nice one from Frank Lampard later, and Chelsea start the 2010-11 season much as they ended the 2009-10 season – with a thumping victory. Just as the final score of 6-0 is confirmed by Malouda in stoppage time, K arrives with her sister Lucy in tow, along with the rest of the usual gang. Will and I join them for a drink.
Later on we head down to a new “pop-up venue” near Finsbury Park station, and this time it's my turn to be a few pints ahead of everyone else. After a couple in here and the live bands start, I'm completely trollied, and filled with dread after Will buys me another drink that I never asked for. I dutifully force it down, though it is to be my last memorable act of the evening. K, thankfully, is on hand to assist me to the tube – and even orders a Domino's pizza off the internet when we get home. Less thankfully, she pays for it with a tenner lifted straight from my wallet. As is often the case in these situations, the pizza tastes like heaven itself – neither of us caring a jot for the inevitable salty dehydration of the morning.
We do make headway, though, and soon K has fired off our form request email to ten-or-so venues, two of which we really like the look of. Around lunchtime we head out to Wood Green to do a smallish food shop, seeing as we're only at home for a couple of days this week, and when we get back I steal a few minutes in front of Soccer Saturday. It's great to have it back – and as the day's 3pm kick-offs get underway, it all comes flooding home. Even in this memorable World Cup year, international football is instantly forgotten, especially as the day's first big shock result comes through. Starting their season away at Wigan, play-off winners Blackpool are possibly the least-fancied of side promoted to the Premier League in recent years, sitting in most pundit's lists of relegation candidates ahead of kick-off (not least mine, as evidenced by yesterday's Premier League preview post on twofootedtackle.com). Amazingly, though, some atrocious defending by Wigan sees them 3-0 to the visitors by half time, with the orange-clad men adding an amazing fourth in the second half. By 5pm, Blackpool are top of the Premier League, albeit with Chelsea yet to play.
With Chelsea specifically in mind, I finally leave the house at 5 and head to The World's End in Finsbury Park – very much the football-watching pub of 2009, when we lived around there – to meet Will. Typically Will is running around 45 minutes late, so I get a beer and a decent seat while I wait for him to arrive. The game starts with Chelsea in full control, West Brom looking every inch the slightly-overawed newly-promoted side. Barely six minutes in, Florent Malouda taps in John Obi Mikel's fluffed rebound to open the scoring for the champions (and does that feel nice to write!), before Drogba makes it two from a long-range free kick. Two more from Drogba, and a nice one from Frank Lampard later, and Chelsea start the 2010-11 season much as they ended the 2009-10 season – with a thumping victory. Just as the final score of 6-0 is confirmed by Malouda in stoppage time, K arrives with her sister Lucy in tow, along with the rest of the usual gang. Will and I join them for a drink.
Later on we head down to a new “pop-up venue” near Finsbury Park station, and this time it's my turn to be a few pints ahead of everyone else. After a couple in here and the live bands start, I'm completely trollied, and filled with dread after Will buys me another drink that I never asked for. I dutifully force it down, though it is to be my last memorable act of the evening. K, thankfully, is on hand to assist me to the tube – and even orders a Domino's pizza off the internet when we get home. Less thankfully, she pays for it with a tenner lifted straight from my wallet. As is often the case in these situations, the pizza tastes like heaven itself – neither of us caring a jot for the inevitable salty dehydration of the morning.
Friday 13th August
Georgie is back in the office today after her trip to Edinburgh, and immediately her tales from the Festival are making me jealous. Once again I umm and ahh about booking a train for the Bank Holiday weekend, and again bring up the prices of the trains online. K encourages me via email (probably with her own Mat-free ulterior motives) and I text my brother Jim (who happens to live in Edinburgh) to see if he'll be free over the weekend in question. Annoyingly, he doesn't text back for the rest of the day and I'm left with the prospect of reconsidering the wisdom of such a trip tomorrow.
This evening, K goes to meet her friend Jess in a pub after work, with vague plans that I should come and meet them and some other friends in Crouch End later on. I have a quick dinner and a can of Kronenbourg left over from Wednesday while watching a couple of episodes of Louis C.K.'s brilliant new sitcom Louie, which I downloaded earlier in the week. It's not long before I'm feeling a little left out and lonely, so I call K and make sure it's OK for me to come up to the pub. I walk over to Crouch End and meet K and Jess in The Maynard, before eventually heading to The King's Head, where Ant, Rich, Nick, Ellie and her boyfriend Mike Boyfriend have been drinking for quite some time. We're a few behind the group and while I eagerly play catch-up I never quite feel comfortable, instead getting bloated and a bit sick, rather than drunk. I have a nice chat with Mike Boyfriend about my sort of pet subject – Soviet-era football – something I'm rarely able to do in this group of footballing ignoramuses.
Before it gets too late, K and I head towards home and she insists on getting something to eat. I'm not particularly hungry what with having had time to get dinner before drinking, but we soon find ourselves in KFC, with K opting for some new chicken wrap thing called an iTwist (because putting a small “i” in front of something guarantees that you are buying an oh-so-2010 product). It actually looks quite nice on the poster – but I'm a Fully Boxed man myself, not that I can face ordering one just at the moment. Carrying her meagre dinner past the frightening teenagers of Crouch End KFC, we finally make our way home.
This evening, K goes to meet her friend Jess in a pub after work, with vague plans that I should come and meet them and some other friends in Crouch End later on. I have a quick dinner and a can of Kronenbourg left over from Wednesday while watching a couple of episodes of Louis C.K.'s brilliant new sitcom Louie, which I downloaded earlier in the week. It's not long before I'm feeling a little left out and lonely, so I call K and make sure it's OK for me to come up to the pub. I walk over to Crouch End and meet K and Jess in The Maynard, before eventually heading to The King's Head, where Ant, Rich, Nick, Ellie and her boyfriend Mike Boyfriend have been drinking for quite some time. We're a few behind the group and while I eagerly play catch-up I never quite feel comfortable, instead getting bloated and a bit sick, rather than drunk. I have a nice chat with Mike Boyfriend about my sort of pet subject – Soviet-era football – something I'm rarely able to do in this group of footballing ignoramuses.
Before it gets too late, K and I head towards home and she insists on getting something to eat. I'm not particularly hungry what with having had time to get dinner before drinking, but we soon find ourselves in KFC, with K opting for some new chicken wrap thing called an iTwist (because putting a small “i” in front of something guarantees that you are buying an oh-so-2010 product). It actually looks quite nice on the poster – but I'm a Fully Boxed man myself, not that I can face ordering one just at the moment. Carrying her meagre dinner past the frightening teenagers of Crouch End KFC, we finally make our way home.
Thursday 12th August
It seems I am being punished. I knew it would happen – as soon as I wussed out of swimming on Tuesday because I couldn't face the prospect of walking the 15 minute stroll from my house to the Leisure Centre, I knew it would end up raining even worse on today, the day I had promised K I would finally accompany her to the pool. The heavens open around half an hour before the end of the working day and I resign myself to the fact that I'll have to take my umbrella up to Park Road as well as my swimming stuff. So be it – I certainly won't get away with bailing out for a second time in a week.
I have a little time when I get home before I head out, so I tinker around with my new laptop, slightly frustrated that while this is the machine that is supposed to enable me to do more writing, I don't actually have a proper word processing program on it. I'm not used to this – Microsoft Word seems like one of those things that should just be on a computer; it always has been before and it never occurred to me that it might actually cost money. I have a poke around online and find that to actually buy it will set me back some ludicrous number of pounds, but I can't really get by just using WordPad, the glorified version of Notepad that can do fonts, oh yes, but refuses to save files in anything other that .txt or .rtf format. What is this, the 90s? Unbelievable. However, after a little bit more poking around online, I come across OpenOffice – a brilliantly open-source version of the entire Office package that's totally free. Opening up the word processor brings up an interface that is practically identical to MS Word (and I briefly wonder if hardcore Christians refuse to use Word, what with it capitalising Word in the same way they do for the holy “Word” of God). Now I'm set up and have a proper 'thing' to write on – and I have no further excuse not to be banging out thousands of words of prose every single day.
With OpenOffice downloaded and my nerding about done for the evening, I head up to the pool to meet K. The place is busier than it was last Tuesday, when it had been almost perfectly quiet, but not so bad that I can't start doing my lengths in earnest. Like last time, I set myself a target of 30 lengths and keep count of them by counting down from 29 to 0. It's a psychological trick that seems to work – in that when I'm coming to the last few lengths, which should be the hardest, I find myself on a low number and thus more compelled to keep pushing towards the target. I hope this doesn't only make sense to me. What might is that, getting bored with merely counting, I imagine that I am in a race with a field of 30 people, and that I started at the back of the grid. Every length I complete equates to overtaking another person – meaning that by the end of the 30 length stretch I am the winner. Needless to say, I work my way steadily up the field, overtaking with ease before taking first place and even completing a few lengths with clear air ahead of me. I try to ignore the fact that K managed a Herculean 64 lengths – but she's in a different class of race altogether.
I have a little time when I get home before I head out, so I tinker around with my new laptop, slightly frustrated that while this is the machine that is supposed to enable me to do more writing, I don't actually have a proper word processing program on it. I'm not used to this – Microsoft Word seems like one of those things that should just be on a computer; it always has been before and it never occurred to me that it might actually cost money. I have a poke around online and find that to actually buy it will set me back some ludicrous number of pounds, but I can't really get by just using WordPad, the glorified version of Notepad that can do fonts, oh yes, but refuses to save files in anything other that .txt or .rtf format. What is this, the 90s? Unbelievable. However, after a little bit more poking around online, I come across OpenOffice – a brilliantly open-source version of the entire Office package that's totally free. Opening up the word processor brings up an interface that is practically identical to MS Word (and I briefly wonder if hardcore Christians refuse to use Word, what with it capitalising Word in the same way they do for the holy “Word” of God). Now I'm set up and have a proper 'thing' to write on – and I have no further excuse not to be banging out thousands of words of prose every single day.
With OpenOffice downloaded and my nerding about done for the evening, I head up to the pool to meet K. The place is busier than it was last Tuesday, when it had been almost perfectly quiet, but not so bad that I can't start doing my lengths in earnest. Like last time, I set myself a target of 30 lengths and keep count of them by counting down from 29 to 0. It's a psychological trick that seems to work – in that when I'm coming to the last few lengths, which should be the hardest, I find myself on a low number and thus more compelled to keep pushing towards the target. I hope this doesn't only make sense to me. What might is that, getting bored with merely counting, I imagine that I am in a race with a field of 30 people, and that I started at the back of the grid. Every length I complete equates to overtaking another person – meaning that by the end of the 30 length stretch I am the winner. Needless to say, I work my way steadily up the field, overtaking with ease before taking first place and even completing a few lengths with clear air ahead of me. I try to ignore the fact that K managed a Herculean 64 lengths – but she's in a different class of race altogether.
Sunday 15 August 2010
Wednesday 11th August
Tonight England are playing their first friendly game since the horror show of the World Cup campaign - a festival of absent effort and crushing expectation that raised little more than a miserable, resigned shrug from the folks back home and deserved little better - and, as expected, hopes are not particularly high. All of a sudden it's fashionable to dismiss any England player with more than ten caps as pampered (and that's always the word that gets used) and to feign disinterest in the match at all. It's, admittedly, not a particularly important one in the context of the season - and is oddly timed given the proximity of the start of the Premier League season - but it is against Hungary, architects of the amazing 6-3 win in 1953 (known as the 'match of the century') when the free-scoring Aranycsapat taught England and the world how to play football properly (a story well-told in Jonathan Wilson's brilliant Behind the Curtain, football history fans) - so there's interest from a historical perspective, right? Also the tabloids seem convinced that the World Cup players will get booed onto the pitch at Wembley, which, while a depressing prospect, will provide a little novelty.
I grab a few beers on the way home from work - given that I've struggled to rouse Will into coming to watch the match at the pub and find myself, in K's absence, home alone on a Wednesday night. The game comes on the telly (and the team, in fact, are not booed onto the pitch) and I get the laptop out to do some writing while a fairly dull friendly begins in the background. I open Skype and see that Alex is online - weird in that I know she doesn't have internet at home - and discover that she's sat in the pub across the road doing some househunting. Bored of the football and feeling more in need of company, I wander over there, get a pint and take a seat in one of the big leather chairs in the surprisingly nice round-the-corner bit of the large Wetherspoon's. We have a good time flicking through Gumtree and the like in search of not-horrible, not-massively-expensive flats (of which there are worryingly few) before moving out to the front for one more drink and to catch up with the football. After going behind to an own goal, England end up winning 2-1 thanks to two inspired Gerrard contributions. It's very early days in what must be considered a new era for England's international football - but at least they weren't completely terrible again.
In need of dinner we both head home and I finish my beers in front of American History X (a film I've always liked and haven't seen for years) and when K gets home around 11 I am surprised to find that I'm a little drunk. But in a nice way, I suppose.
I grab a few beers on the way home from work - given that I've struggled to rouse Will into coming to watch the match at the pub and find myself, in K's absence, home alone on a Wednesday night. The game comes on the telly (and the team, in fact, are not booed onto the pitch) and I get the laptop out to do some writing while a fairly dull friendly begins in the background. I open Skype and see that Alex is online - weird in that I know she doesn't have internet at home - and discover that she's sat in the pub across the road doing some househunting. Bored of the football and feeling more in need of company, I wander over there, get a pint and take a seat in one of the big leather chairs in the surprisingly nice round-the-corner bit of the large Wetherspoon's. We have a good time flicking through Gumtree and the like in search of not-horrible, not-massively-expensive flats (of which there are worryingly few) before moving out to the front for one more drink and to catch up with the football. After going behind to an own goal, England end up winning 2-1 thanks to two inspired Gerrard contributions. It's very early days in what must be considered a new era for England's international football - but at least they weren't completely terrible again.
In need of dinner we both head home and I finish my beers in front of American History X (a film I've always liked and haven't seen for years) and when K gets home around 11 I am surprised to find that I'm a little drunk. But in a nice way, I suppose.
Wednesday 11 August 2010
Tuesday 10th August
I spend a lot of today wishing I was somewhere else. Luckily, this time it's not because of the kids across the road singing their hearts out. Even if they were, I wouldn't have been able to hear today as we have the windows firmly shut against the slightly depressing early August rain. My colleague Georgie is off to the Edinburgh festival for a couple of days from tomorrow, and having spent much of my lunch hour catching up on blogs by the likes of Richard Herring, Andrew Collins and my fellow Royal Holloway survivor (and now comedian) James Smith, I can't help but wish I was there.
I know I wrote last week about how horrible the festival makes Edinburgh when you're used to the place being mostly free of visitors, but I can't help but envy her opportunity to soak up the atmosphere and see brilliant little shows and generally get pissed around people earnestly looking to have a good time. The pang of jealously gets so bad that I actually go on thetrainline.com to check out prices for the upcoming bank holiday weekend, when K will be at the Reading festival, in an attempt to sort out a quick trip up there. It's too expensive and I soon come to my senses - but I realise that I've had a few moments recently where I've wished I was wallowing in the distant aura of one of my old haunts. Today, it's the idea of spending a little time in one of my old favourite Edinburgh pubs (the Brass Monkey, the City Cafe) - but at the weekend it was my early teenage years spent getting the number 19 bus from Folkestone to Canterbury to spend the afternoon shooting my friends at Planet Lazer before buying some dubious metal album from Our Price. It could just as easily have been a session at The Bell in Bath or The Happy Man in Englefield Green - but I suppose when you spend your life moving around you have a lot of places to be homesick for.
This evening, being Tuesday, is supposed to be spent taking an invigorating swim at Park Road, but since the weather is so atrocious I manage to convince K that my evening would be better spent catching up with my blog and cooking her a delicious, peppery bolognese. I feel guilty for not going swimming, but promise that I'll make it up on Thursday night.
I get home from work and get dinner sorted, then sit in front of the telly with the new netbook and catch up on writing - while catching up on last week's Would I Lie To You? and the much-delayed crime special of You Have Been Watching. Stupidly, I fail to take into account the fact that K might want to watch these shows, so when she gets back and we've watched Shooting Stars, I end up sitting through You Have Been Watching for a second time. Luckily, Brooker and Iannucci make me chuckle again while I get to indulge in my minor crush on Josie Long. Until K notices, that is.
I know I wrote last week about how horrible the festival makes Edinburgh when you're used to the place being mostly free of visitors, but I can't help but envy her opportunity to soak up the atmosphere and see brilliant little shows and generally get pissed around people earnestly looking to have a good time. The pang of jealously gets so bad that I actually go on thetrainline.com to check out prices for the upcoming bank holiday weekend, when K will be at the Reading festival, in an attempt to sort out a quick trip up there. It's too expensive and I soon come to my senses - but I realise that I've had a few moments recently where I've wished I was wallowing in the distant aura of one of my old haunts. Today, it's the idea of spending a little time in one of my old favourite Edinburgh pubs (the Brass Monkey, the City Cafe) - but at the weekend it was my early teenage years spent getting the number 19 bus from Folkestone to Canterbury to spend the afternoon shooting my friends at Planet Lazer before buying some dubious metal album from Our Price. It could just as easily have been a session at The Bell in Bath or The Happy Man in Englefield Green - but I suppose when you spend your life moving around you have a lot of places to be homesick for.
This evening, being Tuesday, is supposed to be spent taking an invigorating swim at Park Road, but since the weather is so atrocious I manage to convince K that my evening would be better spent catching up with my blog and cooking her a delicious, peppery bolognese. I feel guilty for not going swimming, but promise that I'll make it up on Thursday night.
I get home from work and get dinner sorted, then sit in front of the telly with the new netbook and catch up on writing - while catching up on last week's Would I Lie To You? and the much-delayed crime special of You Have Been Watching. Stupidly, I fail to take into account the fact that K might want to watch these shows, so when she gets back and we've watched Shooting Stars, I end up sitting through You Have Been Watching for a second time. Luckily, Brooker and Iannucci make me chuckle again while I get to indulge in my minor crush on Josie Long. Until K notices, that is.
Tuesday 10 August 2010
Monday 9th August
It's so nice to wake up in a proper bed. K says I'm being soft and should bear in mind that I've only stayed in a tent for two consecutive nights, when lots of people sleep on the ground for much longer periods, even at little music festivals. Either way, I feel suitably refreshed and even head into work a little early to get on with the business of the week. Once again we're more or less on top of things at work at the moment - which makes a pleasant change from recent weeks - and the morning passes mostly uneventfully.
I say mostly, because for a good portion of the morning I am typing through gritted teeth and at one point even announce to my boss that I intend to resign. This is all because, as I've mentioned before, we work across the road from a well-regarded theatre school - which is packed full of terrible, grinning, deluded little idiots doing degrees in Musical Theatre. To be honest I'd rather work over the road from an Al-Qaeda training camp.
This morning they are practising the same grating 'showtune' over and over again - music which is apparently taught with the adage that "louder is better". It's a warm day and so all their windows are open, as are all of ours. We work in a very quiet office, so everything I do is soundtracked by their awful, earnest, screeching pointless racket. Amazingly, the boss even goes over there to ask them to close their windows as people are actually trying to work nearby. They counter by saying that the windows need to be kept open as two of the students have already fainted this morning. Fuck's sake.
Anyway, after work I head down the Passage to meet K for festival-delayed shopping. I am a bit early and get started alone, sticking closely to K's carefully-prepared shopping list - before having my efforts criticised and augmented later on. We grab the makings of a curry and head home to Rogan Josh up before episode 3 of the new Mad Men.
I say mostly, because for a good portion of the morning I am typing through gritted teeth and at one point even announce to my boss that I intend to resign. This is all because, as I've mentioned before, we work across the road from a well-regarded theatre school - which is packed full of terrible, grinning, deluded little idiots doing degrees in Musical Theatre. To be honest I'd rather work over the road from an Al-Qaeda training camp.
This morning they are practising the same grating 'showtune' over and over again - music which is apparently taught with the adage that "louder is better". It's a warm day and so all their windows are open, as are all of ours. We work in a very quiet office, so everything I do is soundtracked by their awful, earnest, screeching pointless racket. Amazingly, the boss even goes over there to ask them to close their windows as people are actually trying to work nearby. They counter by saying that the windows need to be kept open as two of the students have already fainted this morning. Fuck's sake.
Anyway, after work I head down the Passage to meet K for festival-delayed shopping. I am a bit early and get started alone, sticking closely to K's carefully-prepared shopping list - before having my efforts criticised and augmented later on. We grab the makings of a curry and head home to Rogan Josh up before episode 3 of the new Mad Men.
Sunday 8th August
I wake up after a very short period of relieved unconsciousness and something doesn't feel right. Something, in particular, down my right side - the limb I've been lying on and crushing into the hard ground. I roll onto my back and hold my arm up, only to see my wrist hanging completely limp in front of me. It doesn't hurt, but I can't move my fingers or hold my wrist up at all. I amuse myself for a few seconds by waggling my seemingly dead right hand around with my left, letting it drop back down like the useless claw it's become. I'm only mildly worried that it's dislocated - mainly because it doesn't hurt but also because I've never had an injury remotely like that before and so have no idea what it would actually feel like. I've also never had my arm go quite this numb before either, it must be said, so I'm pleased - in my half-awake state - when the feeling slowly begins to return and I can grip things once more. Later, Big Nick will suggest that I missed a fantastic masturbation opportunity - but I don't think K would have been particularly impressed had I given it a go.
We get up and hang around for a bit, wandering into the arena to get bacon sandwiches and diseccting the previous night - it turns out that while K and I had been the worst in going to bed at 8.30, no one else had lasted much longer. Maybe we're all a bit too old for this shit. Maybe we just cracked on the strong cider too early. Either way, as part of our group recuperation we head back across the zoo to take on the African Experience safari. Once again, K and I really shouldn't be able to get in for free - and while I feel bad about taking money from the zoo and possibly depriving the gorillas of celery and whatnot, by the end of the weekend I will have spent almost £20 on two cornish pasties in their restaurant. Oh and some baked beans.
We're early to the ex-military truck that will be taking us on the safari drive and are met by the friendly old Kentish driver who is rapidly losing his voice - to the extent that he sounds exactly like the green witch character from The Mighty Boosh. We head out into the huge open part of the park past cheetahs, zebras and giraffes, winding slowly up and down the hillside. The weather is beautiful and the animals make a surreal and very pretty juxtaposition against the wide, flattening landscape of southern Kent, and looking towards the sea I get a strange pang of homesickness for Folkestone and summery Kentish life.
We get back from the zoo after a bit of lunch and K and I begin to pack up our tent. There are more bands on today, but we both need to work tomorrow and there seems little point in hanging around much longer when we won't be around for the headliners. The tent is quickly folded away and we wander away from the site in search of the worryingly sporadic bus to Ashford. Arriving at the first country lane we see, it becomes quickly obvious that getting the bus is going to be a nightmare - so instead K haggles with a nearby cab driver and gets us a reasonably priced ride to the station. Here we part with a little more of the cash we saved by blagging our way into zoos and the like to get the new high speed train back to Kings Cross which takes a ridiculously quick 35 minutes in lovely air-conditioned comfort. Somehow we find ourselves at home in London less than 2 hours after we packed up our tent - and I run inside for a much, much needed shower.
We get up and hang around for a bit, wandering into the arena to get bacon sandwiches and diseccting the previous night - it turns out that while K and I had been the worst in going to bed at 8.30, no one else had lasted much longer. Maybe we're all a bit too old for this shit. Maybe we just cracked on the strong cider too early. Either way, as part of our group recuperation we head back across the zoo to take on the African Experience safari. Once again, K and I really shouldn't be able to get in for free - and while I feel bad about taking money from the zoo and possibly depriving the gorillas of celery and whatnot, by the end of the weekend I will have spent almost £20 on two cornish pasties in their restaurant. Oh and some baked beans.
We're early to the ex-military truck that will be taking us on the safari drive and are met by the friendly old Kentish driver who is rapidly losing his voice - to the extent that he sounds exactly like the green witch character from The Mighty Boosh. We head out into the huge open part of the park past cheetahs, zebras and giraffes, winding slowly up and down the hillside. The weather is beautiful and the animals make a surreal and very pretty juxtaposition against the wide, flattening landscape of southern Kent, and looking towards the sea I get a strange pang of homesickness for Folkestone and summery Kentish life.
We get back from the zoo after a bit of lunch and K and I begin to pack up our tent. There are more bands on today, but we both need to work tomorrow and there seems little point in hanging around much longer when we won't be around for the headliners. The tent is quickly folded away and we wander away from the site in search of the worryingly sporadic bus to Ashford. Arriving at the first country lane we see, it becomes quickly obvious that getting the bus is going to be a nightmare - so instead K haggles with a nearby cab driver and gets us a reasonably priced ride to the station. Here we part with a little more of the cash we saved by blagging our way into zoos and the like to get the new high speed train back to Kings Cross which takes a ridiculously quick 35 minutes in lovely air-conditioned comfort. Somehow we find ourselves at home in London less than 2 hours after we packed up our tent - and I run inside for a much, much needed shower.
Saturday 7th August
We wake up early - it's hard not to when the noise of the campsite flows into the tent unhindered, along with the sound of worryingly heavy rain hammering on the roof. We're fairly warm and comfortable though, so resolve to stay put until the weather improves, which it finally does at around 9am. The first order of business is a cigarette and a can of coke to clear away the cobwebs of last night's soporific boozing, then at 10am we walk over the adjacent field with a crowd of around 200 others towards Port Lympne Wild Animal Park. Our particular wristbands (picked up for free at any rate) don't actually allow us entry to the zoo, but we're planning to blend in with the large crowd and hope for the best. As it happens, we effectively manage to rush through the gate unhindered - and head into the huge park for free. Nice.
I've been to Port Lympne a few times, but not since I moved away from Kent in 2000. I always remembered it as a fun day out - one particular time when Andy and I took his young cousins for a day out sticking in my mind especially. The whole park slopes down winding tarmac paths, past gibbons, baboons and rhinos before levelling out around the gorillas and the big cats. We spend a little while at the impressive gorilla pavillion - the animals themselves (and the other guests at the park) no doubt bemused by the sight of hundreds of unwashed rocker kids stumbling half-asleep around their habitats.
After a while, K and I get a little hungry and leave the group to head to the restaurant - whose service station prices (£7.00 for a baked potato? very reasonable!) are not enough to stop me tucking in heartily. Later we pop back down the hill to see the gorillas being fed, and to watch one especially show-offy male skid down a 20ft slide to everyone's amusement.
Having spent around 4 hours in the park, we head back over to the festival site to get on the strong cider and watch the first few bands play. The sun is properly out now and the site looks instantly less grim than it did last night and this morning, despite the piles of beer cans, crisp packets and even the odd exploded carton of couscous littering the floor. Thanks to some infintely more subtle booze-sneaking, K and I manage to get a 3 litre bag of Weston's cider into the arena and get stuck in while watching Jairus - a Folkestone band I've known for a long time, due to the fact that my friend Tim's older brother was once their bass player.
We stagger around for the remainder of the afternoon, bumping into various friends and acquaintances and taking in a few bands - the most memorable of which are Cerebral Ballzy, a New York punk band who throw so much into their live show that I'm pretty sure most of them are sick during their 30-minute set in one of the tiny marquees.
By about 8pm K and are I totally sloshed, and after getting a cheeseburger each on board we head back to the tent for a little rest. Naturally, we both pass out immediately - and don't wake up until midnight, having missed all the headliners and indeed the closure of the arena and bar. Now feeling stone cold sober again, I head out to try and get hold of a beer or two to help me back off to sleep. The site is noisy and full of hammered teenagers milling around with little to do. I bump into a few people I know but it seems that everyone we're camping with has also drunk themselves out of contention and are fast asleep too. Giving up on the booze idea, I head back to the tent to try and sleep.
It's at moments like this that I remember why I don't come to things like this. I'm now sober, wide awake and trying to sleep on the hard ground, while attempting to shut out the nosie of people talking and singing along to the rubbish music pouring out of their tinny iPod speakers. I can't exactly tell them to keep it down, can I? Instead I lie still and even try sleeping with my fingers in my ears. It's hard to judge how long one has spent trying to get to sleep, but judging by the number of songs I hear in this tortuous period, it has to be close to three hours. Camping is horrible - especially when you're the only sober one around.
I've been to Port Lympne a few times, but not since I moved away from Kent in 2000. I always remembered it as a fun day out - one particular time when Andy and I took his young cousins for a day out sticking in my mind especially. The whole park slopes down winding tarmac paths, past gibbons, baboons and rhinos before levelling out around the gorillas and the big cats. We spend a little while at the impressive gorilla pavillion - the animals themselves (and the other guests at the park) no doubt bemused by the sight of hundreds of unwashed rocker kids stumbling half-asleep around their habitats.
After a while, K and I get a little hungry and leave the group to head to the restaurant - whose service station prices (£7.00 for a baked potato? very reasonable!) are not enough to stop me tucking in heartily. Later we pop back down the hill to see the gorillas being fed, and to watch one especially show-offy male skid down a 20ft slide to everyone's amusement.
Having spent around 4 hours in the park, we head back over to the festival site to get on the strong cider and watch the first few bands play. The sun is properly out now and the site looks instantly less grim than it did last night and this morning, despite the piles of beer cans, crisp packets and even the odd exploded carton of couscous littering the floor. Thanks to some infintely more subtle booze-sneaking, K and I manage to get a 3 litre bag of Weston's cider into the arena and get stuck in while watching Jairus - a Folkestone band I've known for a long time, due to the fact that my friend Tim's older brother was once their bass player.
We stagger around for the remainder of the afternoon, bumping into various friends and acquaintances and taking in a few bands - the most memorable of which are Cerebral Ballzy, a New York punk band who throw so much into their live show that I'm pretty sure most of them are sick during their 30-minute set in one of the tiny marquees.
By about 8pm K and are I totally sloshed, and after getting a cheeseburger each on board we head back to the tent for a little rest. Naturally, we both pass out immediately - and don't wake up until midnight, having missed all the headliners and indeed the closure of the arena and bar. Now feeling stone cold sober again, I head out to try and get hold of a beer or two to help me back off to sleep. The site is noisy and full of hammered teenagers milling around with little to do. I bump into a few people I know but it seems that everyone we're camping with has also drunk themselves out of contention and are fast asleep too. Giving up on the booze idea, I head back to the tent to try and sleep.
It's at moments like this that I remember why I don't come to things like this. I'm now sober, wide awake and trying to sleep on the hard ground, while attempting to shut out the nosie of people talking and singing along to the rubbish music pouring out of their tinny iPod speakers. I can't exactly tell them to keep it down, can I? Instead I lie still and even try sleeping with my fingers in my ears. It's hard to judge how long one has spent trying to get to sleep, but judging by the number of songs I hear in this tortuous period, it has to be close to three hours. Camping is horrible - especially when you're the only sober one around.
Monday 9 August 2010
Friday 6th August
Tonight, straight after work, we're off to the Hevy Festival at Port Lympne Wild Animal Park in Kent - a zoo/safari park I haven't been to since I lived in Folkestone and an undoubtedly unusual place for a rock festival - so Rich comes round to pick K and I up in his brilliant gold Chrysler. After gathering Mike and Big Nick we head out onto the M25 and slowly make our way through the Friday evening traffic and the unspeakably bleak architecture of the Dartford Crossing. Inevitably, given that we are about to get to a field and attempt to put up tents in the dark, it starts raining around halfway down the M20 - a weird, fine mist that doesn't bode particularly well.
We get to the park at around 9.30, just as the last light is fading, and find a smaller campsite and arena set up than any of us were expecting. Not that I quite know what to expect - the last time I went to a music festival for a full weekend was the Reading Festival in 2001, and while I know this is a much smaller, probably nicer prospect, I've spent the intervening nine years dreading the next time I would have to sleep in a tent surrounded by pissed teenagers. That said, K is a big fan of the whole festival thing, as are most of our friends, and since the line up for Hevy looks fun (plus we got on the guest list) I thought I should finally give it another try.
For a little while though I'm not sure I've made the right choice. We queue for ages to get through a fairly shambolic security procedure, then proceed to put up our quite large tent in near total darkness and irritating rain. The ground is also incredibly hard, and without a proper mallet to hand we succeed only in bending all our pegs and getting into a bit of a row. At this point, I cannot see a single possible upside to this.
However, by the time it's finally up and I have a beer in my hand all fury is forgotten. The rain eases off and we get on with the business of getting drunk on this first, band-less evening of the festival. We wander the short distance towards the incredibly compact 'arena' section, and are promptly turned away for carrying alcohol (but only after K somehow makes it through with a full 2-litre bottle of Strongbow, which she none-too-subtly then reveals to the incredulous security man).
Instead we finish our cans and go through to catch the very end of whatever was going on in here, standing around drinking the £3.50 cans of San Miguel one can exclusively purchase from the bar tent. No matter - it's only the first night after all - and eventually we head back to our little group of tents and sit around chatting until it's time to wipe out. This will be my first night sleeping in a tent for well over two years (and the last time was a deeply horrible sleeping bag-less frozen nightmare) and my intricate preparation involves being drunk enough that I pass out without noticing.
We get to the park at around 9.30, just as the last light is fading, and find a smaller campsite and arena set up than any of us were expecting. Not that I quite know what to expect - the last time I went to a music festival for a full weekend was the Reading Festival in 2001, and while I know this is a much smaller, probably nicer prospect, I've spent the intervening nine years dreading the next time I would have to sleep in a tent surrounded by pissed teenagers. That said, K is a big fan of the whole festival thing, as are most of our friends, and since the line up for Hevy looks fun (plus we got on the guest list) I thought I should finally give it another try.
For a little while though I'm not sure I've made the right choice. We queue for ages to get through a fairly shambolic security procedure, then proceed to put up our quite large tent in near total darkness and irritating rain. The ground is also incredibly hard, and without a proper mallet to hand we succeed only in bending all our pegs and getting into a bit of a row. At this point, I cannot see a single possible upside to this.
However, by the time it's finally up and I have a beer in my hand all fury is forgotten. The rain eases off and we get on with the business of getting drunk on this first, band-less evening of the festival. We wander the short distance towards the incredibly compact 'arena' section, and are promptly turned away for carrying alcohol (but only after K somehow makes it through with a full 2-litre bottle of Strongbow, which she none-too-subtly then reveals to the incredulous security man).
Instead we finish our cans and go through to catch the very end of whatever was going on in here, standing around drinking the £3.50 cans of San Miguel one can exclusively purchase from the bar tent. No matter - it's only the first night after all - and eventually we head back to our little group of tents and sit around chatting until it's time to wipe out. This will be my first night sleeping in a tent for well over two years (and the last time was a deeply horrible sleeping bag-less frozen nightmare) and my intricate preparation involves being drunk enough that I pass out without noticing.
Friday 6 August 2010
Thursday 5th August
Having forgotten to check 'My eBay' last night, it's the morning before I remember to check the status of the item I put up for sale last week. Feeling in need of scaring up some extra funds to put in the wedding savings account, plus feeling guilty for happily splurging on a new laptop at the weekend, I decided to list my old Korg Electribe sampler - starting at £50 but hoping for a bit more.
I bought it in 2004, during my first year at Royal Holloway (off eBay, in fact) for well over £200 - at a time when I was so bored during the day that I happily spent hours putting together clicky drumbeats and ominous synth chords. Over and over again. Now, though, I haven't touched the thing for at least two years and haven't even thought about making music for at least a year. I suppose I'm less bored and miserable than I was then - I wonder if that's a prerequisite for a lot of people to make music?
On checking my email this morning I'm pleased to see that the sampler has gone for over £100; not bad when I had been warned to expect the worst in these days of software solutions and the overall cheap cost of more advanced rival machines. Maybe the guy who bought it likes the retro appeal. Either way, I'm a bit annoyed to find that he lives up north somewhere, meaning that he won't be able to come and collect it and that I'll either have to queue up for an hour in Wood Green's horrendous post office (not bloody likely) or sweet-talk the folks in the warehouse at work into posting out for me (much more likely). I stick the box in a sturdy carrier bag with a picture of an elephant on the front - and promptly forget to take it into work at all. Bugger. In order to stall for time, I email Mr. Winning Bidder and ask to confirm his delivery address. Hopefully he won't give me negative feedback (The 17 stars I have accumulated over something like six years of sporadic buying and selling on eBay mean an awful lot to me, after all) if the thing arrives a day late.
After work K and I enjoy a nice dinner of the remaining frozen kievs, new potatoes and brocolli, before deciding to watch Training Day - one of the films Ant copied onto my hard drive on Tuesday. It's one of those films I've heard a lot of good things about, but have never found myself in a position where a box with 'Denzel Washington' and 'Ethan Hawke' on the front was going to appeal to me. I've got nothing against the pair of actors - I just don't tend to go for the kind of films they, but particularly Washington, are in. Training Day, however, is a lot of fun from the start and confounds a lot of expectations about this kind of film and the kind of storytelling you'd expect to find in it. I like the way that Washington's character's story is the most complete and possibly the most relevant to the narrative, yet we have to see his story through the confused, naive eyes of Hawke's. There's some good humour in there too and I'm a sucker for any film where rappers turn up in amusingly self-serious cameos. Snoop Dogg is OK, Dr. Dre is woeful.
One interesting thing about the film, however - which is the same impression that I took away from films like Crash, Heat and Collateral - is that LA looks like the ugliest, drabbest and most boring place in the world, to the extent that I'm amazed films are made there. It offers simply no backdrop (other than the people who live there and endless rows of cars, I suppose) and its 'skyline', while glimpsed briefly, is completely without landmarks. It could be any cluster of skyscrapers in the world and I defy anyone (who doesn't live there) to identify it as LA over, say, Detroit or Houston. Is this why they need to use the Hollywood sign to signify the place in films and TV shows? It seems odd to me - as does the fact that the place is still considered to be a glamorous destination. My little brother went there a couple of years ago, as the first stop on a round-the-world gap year trip, and suggested that it was pretty horrifying. The highlight, he said, was being offered raw meat on the bus by a little old lady. Delightful.
I bought it in 2004, during my first year at Royal Holloway (off eBay, in fact) for well over £200 - at a time when I was so bored during the day that I happily spent hours putting together clicky drumbeats and ominous synth chords. Over and over again. Now, though, I haven't touched the thing for at least two years and haven't even thought about making music for at least a year. I suppose I'm less bored and miserable than I was then - I wonder if that's a prerequisite for a lot of people to make music?
On checking my email this morning I'm pleased to see that the sampler has gone for over £100; not bad when I had been warned to expect the worst in these days of software solutions and the overall cheap cost of more advanced rival machines. Maybe the guy who bought it likes the retro appeal. Either way, I'm a bit annoyed to find that he lives up north somewhere, meaning that he won't be able to come and collect it and that I'll either have to queue up for an hour in Wood Green's horrendous post office (not bloody likely) or sweet-talk the folks in the warehouse at work into posting out for me (much more likely). I stick the box in a sturdy carrier bag with a picture of an elephant on the front - and promptly forget to take it into work at all. Bugger. In order to stall for time, I email Mr. Winning Bidder and ask to confirm his delivery address. Hopefully he won't give me negative feedback (The 17 stars I have accumulated over something like six years of sporadic buying and selling on eBay mean an awful lot to me, after all) if the thing arrives a day late.
After work K and I enjoy a nice dinner of the remaining frozen kievs, new potatoes and brocolli, before deciding to watch Training Day - one of the films Ant copied onto my hard drive on Tuesday. It's one of those films I've heard a lot of good things about, but have never found myself in a position where a box with 'Denzel Washington' and 'Ethan Hawke' on the front was going to appeal to me. I've got nothing against the pair of actors - I just don't tend to go for the kind of films they, but particularly Washington, are in. Training Day, however, is a lot of fun from the start and confounds a lot of expectations about this kind of film and the kind of storytelling you'd expect to find in it. I like the way that Washington's character's story is the most complete and possibly the most relevant to the narrative, yet we have to see his story through the confused, naive eyes of Hawke's. There's some good humour in there too and I'm a sucker for any film where rappers turn up in amusingly self-serious cameos. Snoop Dogg is OK, Dr. Dre is woeful.
One interesting thing about the film, however - which is the same impression that I took away from films like Crash, Heat and Collateral - is that LA looks like the ugliest, drabbest and most boring place in the world, to the extent that I'm amazed films are made there. It offers simply no backdrop (other than the people who live there and endless rows of cars, I suppose) and its 'skyline', while glimpsed briefly, is completely without landmarks. It could be any cluster of skyscrapers in the world and I defy anyone (who doesn't live there) to identify it as LA over, say, Detroit or Houston. Is this why they need to use the Hollywood sign to signify the place in films and TV shows? It seems odd to me - as does the fact that the place is still considered to be a glamorous destination. My little brother went there a couple of years ago, as the first stop on a round-the-world gap year trip, and suggested that it was pretty horrifying. The highlight, he said, was being offered raw meat on the bus by a little old lady. Delightful.
Thursday 5 August 2010
Wednesday 4th August
Things get off to a flying start in the office this morning. Feeling unusually refreshed and work-focussed I leap out of my particular trap and rattle off a decent proportion of my entire week's work before lunch. Of course, taking sandwiches on board can slow up proceedings - and indeed the afternoon is less productive. Especially when we all get a little distracted in the Department and chat nostalgically about times we've been to the Edinburgh Festival, which of course starts this week.
Having lived in Edinburgh for 9 months-or-so when I first went to uni and having been a regular visitor since I was a little kid, I assumed the anti-festival posturing of the locals for a while. Everything becomes more expensive, students try and convince you to come to their earnest but doubtless rubbish play and it takes half an hour to walk from the Grassmarket to the top of Cockburn Street when usually it would take about 2 minutes. There was a guy I liked who worked behind the bar in a pub on the Cowgate who would invariably and defiantly wear his "Fuck the Festival - I Live Here" t-shirt all month long.
But of course the Edinburgh Festival is brilliant - and it's great that it happens and gets bigger and bigger every year. It's great for comedy, for music and live performance of just about everything; and there is definitely a special magic in the air for the duration - it's just too easy to fall into the "grumpy local" mentality when you know the city so well at other times of the year. K and I are going up at the end of September to do the usual round of family visits, and I'm already excited about the amazing view of the castle that greets you as you walk up the ramp from Waverley Station.
Tonight we've planned to do a rare Orange Wednesday cinema trip - one I usually avoid because they're inevitably busy - to see Inception at the Cineworld in Wood Green. K gets back from work and has a quick dinner before we head out, aiming to get to the cinema around ten minutes before it's 8pm advertised time. This was bad judgment, as when we meet up with the other five or six people we'd been meaning to watch the film with we learn that the 8pm screening is long sold out. Desperately, we walk up to Wood Green's other cinema, only to find that the next showing isn't til 10pm - meaning that we would get out of the 150 minute film at around 1am. Unwilling to consider this or spend £6 to fall asleep somewhere warm, we stand idly chatting on the street for a while before all heading straight home again.
Back at home we stick Sherlock Holmes (the Guy Ritchie version) on the TV - which K had seen at the cinema but I wanted to check out having had my interest in Conan Doyle's stories rekindled by the ongoing BBC series. It's an enjoyable film, if at times clearly displaying attempts to crowbar in unneccessary Ritchie-style directorial tricks (the bare-knuckle boxing scene being a particularly fun-but-pointless example) - though Robert Downey Jr. is great and his accent surprisingly convincing. We scoff the sweets that K had bought to sneak into the cinema, and reflect on an evening that hasn't gone how we planned, but worked out quite nicely in the end.
Having lived in Edinburgh for 9 months-or-so when I first went to uni and having been a regular visitor since I was a little kid, I assumed the anti-festival posturing of the locals for a while. Everything becomes more expensive, students try and convince you to come to their earnest but doubtless rubbish play and it takes half an hour to walk from the Grassmarket to the top of Cockburn Street when usually it would take about 2 minutes. There was a guy I liked who worked behind the bar in a pub on the Cowgate who would invariably and defiantly wear his "Fuck the Festival - I Live Here" t-shirt all month long.
But of course the Edinburgh Festival is brilliant - and it's great that it happens and gets bigger and bigger every year. It's great for comedy, for music and live performance of just about everything; and there is definitely a special magic in the air for the duration - it's just too easy to fall into the "grumpy local" mentality when you know the city so well at other times of the year. K and I are going up at the end of September to do the usual round of family visits, and I'm already excited about the amazing view of the castle that greets you as you walk up the ramp from Waverley Station.
Tonight we've planned to do a rare Orange Wednesday cinema trip - one I usually avoid because they're inevitably busy - to see Inception at the Cineworld in Wood Green. K gets back from work and has a quick dinner before we head out, aiming to get to the cinema around ten minutes before it's 8pm advertised time. This was bad judgment, as when we meet up with the other five or six people we'd been meaning to watch the film with we learn that the 8pm screening is long sold out. Desperately, we walk up to Wood Green's other cinema, only to find that the next showing isn't til 10pm - meaning that we would get out of the 150 minute film at around 1am. Unwilling to consider this or spend £6 to fall asleep somewhere warm, we stand idly chatting on the street for a while before all heading straight home again.
Back at home we stick Sherlock Holmes (the Guy Ritchie version) on the TV - which K had seen at the cinema but I wanted to check out having had my interest in Conan Doyle's stories rekindled by the ongoing BBC series. It's an enjoyable film, if at times clearly displaying attempts to crowbar in unneccessary Ritchie-style directorial tricks (the bare-knuckle boxing scene being a particularly fun-but-pointless example) - though Robert Downey Jr. is great and his accent surprisingly convincing. We scoff the sweets that K had bought to sneak into the cinema, and reflect on an evening that hasn't gone how we planned, but worked out quite nicely in the end.
Wednesday 4 August 2010
Tuesday 3rd August
It's Tuesday, so for the fourth week in a row it's time to go for an evening swim. It's a humble achievement, but I'm glad I've managed to keep it up even this long - and now that Saturday's two-day hangover is but a grim memory, it feels more necessary than ever. My energy and enthusiasm for the project waxes and wanes during the day, but when I get home I manage to find some resolve and walk under a darkening sky towards the leisure centre to meet K.
I arrive a little early and sit around for a bit waiting for K, resisting (for now at least) the tempataion to engage in the perverse pleasure and shame of smoking a cigarette outside a gym. Either way, plenty of others are coming out of the doors with their wet hair dripping onto their almost-lit Marlboros in a manner that must make the super-toned gym staff cringe with horror. K turns up and we head in, facing none of the massive queues of last week but still having to wait for the staff to finish their conversations before giving me the wrong change from a tenner. It really must be hard working there if they have to let their professionalism slip at the counter with such regularity.
Happily, the pool is much quieter than it was last week, and the water is much cooler. These combined factors, as well as the fact that I'm in better practice than I was a couple of weeks ago, help me do far more lengths of the pool than I managed when we started swimming together four weeks ago. I have to stop occasionally but I smash my target and surprise myself by not passing out or being sick. It seems that, despite being ill from cider all weekend, I might still have a young man's body under there somewhere. It's all good motivation to carry on with this regime and step it up as time goes on. Operation Don't Look Like a Fat Bastard in Your Wedding Photos is still very much in the early stages, but it is at least still active.
We get home at around 9 and Ant pops round to swap some films and TV shows with us, then we all sit and watch Shooting Stars at 9.30. Now back for a second series following its resurrection, it's somehow still getting better and better, and is probably the only thing on TV at the moment that makes me laugh the entire way through. Vic and Bob are still unselfconsciously weird and funny, without ever resorting to the sarcasm and knowing humour that plagues so much other TV comedy - and I genuinely think I could watch them piss about for hours and never get bored.
I arrive a little early and sit around for a bit waiting for K, resisting (for now at least) the tempataion to engage in the perverse pleasure and shame of smoking a cigarette outside a gym. Either way, plenty of others are coming out of the doors with their wet hair dripping onto their almost-lit Marlboros in a manner that must make the super-toned gym staff cringe with horror. K turns up and we head in, facing none of the massive queues of last week but still having to wait for the staff to finish their conversations before giving me the wrong change from a tenner. It really must be hard working there if they have to let their professionalism slip at the counter with such regularity.
Happily, the pool is much quieter than it was last week, and the water is much cooler. These combined factors, as well as the fact that I'm in better practice than I was a couple of weeks ago, help me do far more lengths of the pool than I managed when we started swimming together four weeks ago. I have to stop occasionally but I smash my target and surprise myself by not passing out or being sick. It seems that, despite being ill from cider all weekend, I might still have a young man's body under there somewhere. It's all good motivation to carry on with this regime and step it up as time goes on. Operation Don't Look Like a Fat Bastard in Your Wedding Photos is still very much in the early stages, but it is at least still active.
We get home at around 9 and Ant pops round to swap some films and TV shows with us, then we all sit and watch Shooting Stars at 9.30. Now back for a second series following its resurrection, it's somehow still getting better and better, and is probably the only thing on TV at the moment that makes me laugh the entire way through. Vic and Bob are still unselfconsciously weird and funny, without ever resorting to the sarcasm and knowing humour that plagues so much other TV comedy - and I genuinely think I could watch them piss about for hours and never get bored.
Tuesday 3 August 2010
Monday 2nd August
I deserved yesterday's thumping headache and misery, but today's seems a little unnecessary. I know I had a couple of mid-afternoon drinks, but that shouldn't equate to such a severe punishment today - the only explanation could be that I am entering day two of the same beastly hangover. Fair enough. I seem like I have my extended time to serve for what has been a frankly ridiculous few days.
Having picked up a can of Diet Coke on the way to work, just to see me through the morning, I crack on with the day's business. Being the time of the month when we start to focus on the new titles for six months down the line, I have plenty to prepare and, primarily, an absolute ton of tedious data entry to wade through. It's simple enough and fills up the time in the day, but creaking through the second day of a cider hangover is no way to cope with staring at the glum, unforgiving interface of a small, blue, MS-DOS-based database.
It does end eventually, as is often the case, and I head home looking forward to a fairly quiet evening. I sit in the living room, marvelling at the novelty of being able to catch up with some writing in front of The Simpsons courtesy of my lovely new netbook, and get the lasagne K lovingly prepared last night in the oven in time for her return.
After dinner we stick on the second episode of Sherlock we missed last night, and while it's more enjoyable detective-capering set in modern-day London, it lacks a lot of the novelty of the first episode and the plausibilty goes for a Burton somewhere in the middle. Maybe it's just a lull in the middle of the three-part series in preparation for a stunning final episode.
Having picked up a can of Diet Coke on the way to work, just to see me through the morning, I crack on with the day's business. Being the time of the month when we start to focus on the new titles for six months down the line, I have plenty to prepare and, primarily, an absolute ton of tedious data entry to wade through. It's simple enough and fills up the time in the day, but creaking through the second day of a cider hangover is no way to cope with staring at the glum, unforgiving interface of a small, blue, MS-DOS-based database.
It does end eventually, as is often the case, and I head home looking forward to a fairly quiet evening. I sit in the living room, marvelling at the novelty of being able to catch up with some writing in front of The Simpsons courtesy of my lovely new netbook, and get the lasagne K lovingly prepared last night in the oven in time for her return.
After dinner we stick on the second episode of Sherlock we missed last night, and while it's more enjoyable detective-capering set in modern-day London, it lacks a lot of the novelty of the first episode and the plausibilty goes for a Burton somewhere in the middle. Maybe it's just a lull in the middle of the three-part series in preparation for a stunning final episode.
Sunday 1st August
I thought I'd start writing the date in the titles of these posts rather than just the day of the week, as it has become a bit of a nightmare looking back over old ones when it's just a long string of Mondays, Tuesdays and so on. The first day of a new month also seemed like a good time to do it.
Ah. Now that's a real hangover. The AM suffering of the last two days has, apparently, just been a warm up for this one. Or perhaps what I'm feeling now is the aggregated punishment for three nights of highly irresponsible behaviour. I can't summon the wisdom to blame myself quite yet, though - at the moment it all feels like Old Rosie's fault. Or possibly Mike's.
I wake up on the sofa at around 7.30, with the lights on and some dreadful soap on ITV2. I have no idea why I was watching ITV2. I look around and notice my brand new netbook lying face down on the floor. I can only hazard a guess that I rolled in, started fiddling drunkenly with my fun new toy, then passed out and dropped it on the floor. Cursory, bleary investigation seems to show no damage to the computer - which is good; I'm like a pissed-up, one-man Gadget Show at the moment - so I head to bed, setting an alarm for an hour later. I'm expecting K back from Sonisphere later so I'll need to be up to clean and do the shopping.
I'm a little surprised, then, when K calls me at 8.2o to announce that she's on our street and will be in presently. Luckily, given my fragile state, she's in no mood to force me to start cleaning the house just yet - as she apparently had a couple herself last night too. Phew.
After moping around for quite a while, we eventually force ourselves to do the shopping and some basic cleaning to the flat. Needless to say, I feel terrible. No amount of food or fluids can alleviate my stomach ache and throbbing headache. Is this one of those real hangovers that people say you get as you get older? Or is it just because I've been drinking like a tramp for three days? It's very hard to say.
What's even worse is that our plans this afternoon involve going to the pub. Not planning to drink (or even feeling able) we get on the tube at around 4 and head south to Stockwell, where K's friend Tristan is running a kind of variety cabaret afternoon at the pub he manages. After walking through some oddly-residential areas in the unfamiliar surroundings of South London, we end up at The Cavendish Arms to see a stand-up comedian performing on a small stage outside the front of the pub. Stood in what would have been the car park, facing out onto the street away from the door of the small bar and surrounded by people, a man with a moustache sings a song about a panda (which, incidentally, I had seen on YouTube only a couple of days ago).
Other acts include a banjo player, some dancing children and a couple more singer types with acoustic guitars. Mike and Ant show up and eventually we're all having a nice time, even daring to sip on a couple of Kronenbourg tops. It's not a good idea - but it's taking the edge off the boozeache. This is the last of the drinking for at least a week, I swear.
During the headline act, we are given a startling image of the worst case scenario future should a life of drinking this much continue. As a young woman sings a funny song about advertising, an old man sat on a picnic bench in front of us suddenly projectile vomits pure cider some five feet in front of him, soaking the table and splashing onto his arm. Suddenly no one is listening to the song, rather staring and giggling at this horrible, pathetic and undeniably weird display of hitting rock bottom. He does it again, without facial or physical reaction, and is eventually led away from the pub by one of his reluctant mates. The singer/comedian does well to handle the moment ("Did you not like that bit, mate?") and it all adds to the surreal mood of the day.
I think the puking man is the wake-up call I need - for this week at least. Shuddering as I walk away, I'm already looking forward to a wholesome working week.
Ah. Now that's a real hangover. The AM suffering of the last two days has, apparently, just been a warm up for this one. Or perhaps what I'm feeling now is the aggregated punishment for three nights of highly irresponsible behaviour. I can't summon the wisdom to blame myself quite yet, though - at the moment it all feels like Old Rosie's fault. Or possibly Mike's.
I wake up on the sofa at around 7.30, with the lights on and some dreadful soap on ITV2. I have no idea why I was watching ITV2. I look around and notice my brand new netbook lying face down on the floor. I can only hazard a guess that I rolled in, started fiddling drunkenly with my fun new toy, then passed out and dropped it on the floor. Cursory, bleary investigation seems to show no damage to the computer - which is good; I'm like a pissed-up, one-man Gadget Show at the moment - so I head to bed, setting an alarm for an hour later. I'm expecting K back from Sonisphere later so I'll need to be up to clean and do the shopping.
I'm a little surprised, then, when K calls me at 8.2o to announce that she's on our street and will be in presently. Luckily, given my fragile state, she's in no mood to force me to start cleaning the house just yet - as she apparently had a couple herself last night too. Phew.
After moping around for quite a while, we eventually force ourselves to do the shopping and some basic cleaning to the flat. Needless to say, I feel terrible. No amount of food or fluids can alleviate my stomach ache and throbbing headache. Is this one of those real hangovers that people say you get as you get older? Or is it just because I've been drinking like a tramp for three days? It's very hard to say.
What's even worse is that our plans this afternoon involve going to the pub. Not planning to drink (or even feeling able) we get on the tube at around 4 and head south to Stockwell, where K's friend Tristan is running a kind of variety cabaret afternoon at the pub he manages. After walking through some oddly-residential areas in the unfamiliar surroundings of South London, we end up at The Cavendish Arms to see a stand-up comedian performing on a small stage outside the front of the pub. Stood in what would have been the car park, facing out onto the street away from the door of the small bar and surrounded by people, a man with a moustache sings a song about a panda (which, incidentally, I had seen on YouTube only a couple of days ago).
Other acts include a banjo player, some dancing children and a couple more singer types with acoustic guitars. Mike and Ant show up and eventually we're all having a nice time, even daring to sip on a couple of Kronenbourg tops. It's not a good idea - but it's taking the edge off the boozeache. This is the last of the drinking for at least a week, I swear.
During the headline act, we are given a startling image of the worst case scenario future should a life of drinking this much continue. As a young woman sings a funny song about advertising, an old man sat on a picnic bench in front of us suddenly projectile vomits pure cider some five feet in front of him, soaking the table and splashing onto his arm. Suddenly no one is listening to the song, rather staring and giggling at this horrible, pathetic and undeniably weird display of hitting rock bottom. He does it again, without facial or physical reaction, and is eventually led away from the pub by one of his reluctant mates. The singer/comedian does well to handle the moment ("Did you not like that bit, mate?") and it all adds to the surreal mood of the day.
I think the puking man is the wake-up call I need - for this week at least. Shuddering as I walk away, I'm already looking forward to a wholesome working week.
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