shadows of echoes of memories of songs

I got soaked at lunchtime, halfway down High Street on a bike when the skies opened; my trousers got so wet that they looked (ironically) like waterproofs, slick as plastic. I stopped off in the magic charity shop (Sobell House on Little Clarendon Street: not much stock, smells of wee a bit, but has some ace bargain clothes) on the way back to work to buy some cheap dry clothes so I wouldn't spend the afternoon soggy and shivering, and actually spent long enough trying on other cheap dry clothes that my trousers were more or less dry by the time I got back to the office, though it had started raining again as I was wheeling my bike into its stand. Remembered to buy forks, forgot to buy the cat-shaped earrings. You win some, you lose some.

I'm fed up of getting wet every time I leave work, though: yesterday I ran round the corner to the newsagent around 10am to buy breakfast, and got drenched on the way back. Barely five minutes outside, I mean, what are the chances? Mind you, I also bumped into one of my former English tutors, and what are the chances of that, too? I didn't actually bump into her, of course, which was just as well as she was quite bump-heavy. Baby due today, apparently.

Anyway, so I'm on my way home after work & Oxfam, cycling in the not-rain for the first time today, thinking "well it may be tupping freezing but at least I'm not actually wet, and the sky's clear-ish, quite pretty actually, hello sky, hello clouds" and I'm about 200 yards from home when some knobheaded knob-end from Knob End (or perhaps Dean Court) throws a water-bomb at me from his car window. KNOBHEAD. Okay, that's not quite what I shouted, but close enough for a family journal. And frankly it would have taken too long to say "I've just come home from 11 hours at work, I'm cold and tired and now my trousers are soggy for the second time today, please turn your knobmobile round and drive right back here so I can stab you in the face with a fork." I mean, put like that, it's not much of an incentive, is it.

On the plus side, I now have an enormous bowl of pasta with tuna, courgette (home-grown from a friend's allotment), capers and olives, and I'm not (usually) a knobheaded knob-end. Could be worse, I guess.

Now that addedentry has finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I can a) talk to him about it, and b) post about it. Unfortunately, I don't have much to say except that I enjoyed it and I thought it was a satisfactory conclusion to the series, so you're getting no speculation, spoilers or slash from me.

We did go to the midnight book-launch at Borders, ( like the sadcases that we are )

Re-reading the entire series prior to the release of the last book, I worked out what it was that annoyed me so much about the recurring Dursley-infested opening sections...



... they read like children's misery lit (or "Painful lives" as Waterstones apparently calls that section), the dark side of glurge. If the thousands of copies of Dave Pelzer's sordid books that are rattling around in Oxfam's sorting boxes start rubbing shoulders with all the thousands of slightly soiled Potters which have probably already hit the second-hand market, the above hybrid is what might result. The worst of it is, the fanfic writers probably got there before me... and they're probably loving it.

Glastonbury Festival
June 21-24, 2007

If I don't write this up soon I'll never get round to it, and the back(b)log will pile up like the Pilton traffic, so...

Glastonbury was MUDDY. That's the executive summary for those of you who've been on another planet for the last few weeks (or somehow managed to tune out the blah blah blah of festival-going friends). Sadly, the mud and rain and general meteorological misery really did eclipse pretty much everything else for at least some of the time; it's hard to feel the love or find the fun when you're worrying about whether you're ever going to be able to extract your feet from the swamp into which they're slowly sinking.

Despite the mud, we managed to see a lot of bands. In rough order of viewing, with the shortest reviews possible, ( here they are! )

Apart from seeing (at least a bit of) 35 bands, we managed to do some of the wandering around and seeing cool stuff that makes Glastonbury something other than a music festival. We saw a sand sculpture of a dragon, and sat on tree-stumps drinking hot chai, and admired Banksy's 'LooHenge' which seemed to be sinking into the mud with a big visual shout (unlike the 'real' stone circle, which just sat quietly underneath all the wellies and the weirdness). We got a portrait of us 'painted' (muddy felt-tip on notepaper) by the famous Jackson Pillock.

We watched "American Psycho" in the cinema tent, and heard absolutely everything else in the cinema field as we tried to sleep each night. ("This is England" sounded like a waking nightmare, all hate and misery. "Borat" just sounded like a load of amateurish rubbish.)

Owen wore fairy-wings. I wore my wellies of joy non-stop, and wore bright colours under cagouls. We ate tons of tasty hippy food (and a lot of doughnuts). We hardly had any alcohol for the entire four days, at least compared to some of the excess around us (half a pint of perry for me on the Thursday, hot chocolate with rum in it for Owen on the Saturday, a cup of hot cider each on the Friday, and THAT'S ALL, I kid you not). I ran across 10 metres of ankle-deep mud in 20 seconds to buy the Guardian (and get my free reusable fabric shoulder-bag from them).

On the last night Owen was ill, and we walked all the way to the medical tent and back, and had hot sugary tea in the café at the end of the world in the small hours of the morning, and got quite giggly at what looked like a bottle of MUD, though was probably just a bottle covered with mud. Later in the day I fell in the mud while trying to jump out of the way of a fast-moving tractor. A man laughed at me, but a nice girl gave me handfuls of wet-wipes.

At least 50 people asked me where I got my umbrella hat, offered me money for it, complimented it, or laughed appreciatively. (Seriously, umbrella hats are the best thing ever: your head stays dry, your hands stay free, and you make everybody smile.) A cheerful Scot asked me to do a twirl to show off the hat. He'd forgotten to bring his tent.

And that's about it, really; it doesn't add up to any bigger meaning, any shape or substance, it's just patterns in the mud. 180,000 different Glastonbury Festivals, as similar as snowflakes. It's as much about hats and chips and dancing in the rain as it is about being swept away by music or dazzled by fire. Fun in parts, difficult in parts, pointless and beautiful.

My photos are on Flickr.

Maybe it'll be sunny next year.

PUB. Tomorrow (Saturday). The Jam Factory, from 8pm. Nice beer! smallbeds will be there! What more incentive do you need, goddamnit?

And I promise I won't wuss out of this one on grounds of tiredness or general crapness. :-}

If you're planning on catching up with us later & want me to txt you if we move elsewhere, let me know.

( Read more... )

Only a week till Glasto! Who else is going, then?

The older I get, the more stupid I feel. At school, I felt as though I knew a lot about my subjects (though not very much about Real Life); at university, I felt as though I knew even more about my subject and quite a lot about Real Life, including some bits of Real Life that I'd've been quite happy not to know about.

Now I don't even know what my subject is any more, and I don't really know anything about Real Life (except the sort that happens while you're waiting for it to happen, but increasingly that feels very detached from any kind of representative reality... but that's a whole nother area of tedious navel-gazing, and one of which I will steer clear for now).

I've forgotten most of the things I knew at university, I've forgotten most of the things I knew at school (and what's left is a bit 1066 and all that), and I feel as though I haven't learned anything properly since leaving university. Yes, I've learned all sorts of things; but I don't feel as though I've learned anything as fully.

Yawn, you say. Terribly boring. Everybody feels like this. Go and read something else, then.

My reliance on the web is partly to blame. There was a time when I had to actually know things in my head because the library shut at 7pm, and we didn't have all the books in the world at home (despite best efforts), and books were where you looked things up. Now it's like an open-text exam with all the books in the world on your desk, and all you have to do to find the answers is leaf through the books, and it doesn't help, even if you're allowed to take annotated copies of all the books in the world, even if they're the teachers' editions with the answers at the back. Which they are, I suppose.

I still have anxiety dreams that are a bit like that, actually. I used to be good at exams, but I have dreams where I don't have a pen and the questions are in a language I don't know and the time seems to be ticking away faster than I can keep track of (and it is, though, it is, isn't it) and everything's all confused and hot. I don't think I'd know where to start now with a real exam. Apart from remembering a pen.

Focus, for god's sake, focus. You've still got all your own teeth. Mostly.

I want to learn everything in the world. I wake up terrified that I'll never be able to learn anything properly again.

There was a time when I'd've thought about something and planned how to write about it and then written it down in proper sentences and edited it and written it out again neatly. This isn't that time any more. It isn't any time. I don't have time. I don't have time.

I am increasingly fed up with having to sleep. Such a waste.

There's more (always), but it's even less coherent (usually).

Yes, hello, I have been hiding under a rock for a while. In lieu of tedious diaryism, here are some things I have done for the first time in the last couple of weeks:

Installed Ubuntu. What feels like several hundred times, though I've actually only done two installs, and the rest has been booting live CDs/DVDs, and CD images in virtual machines, testing boot times. ... I have now been in the new job for two and a half weeks, and I've got so little done, and my colleagues are all cool and interesting and frighteningly clever, and I sometimes feel like they must have hired me out of pity.

Walked to the top of Boar's Hill to see the dreaming spires. Okay, we only walked from Wootton, but still. And you can't see the spires unless you're nine feet tall and have a telephoto lens the length of a telegraph pole. I am five foot one and a bit and have a point-and-click Canon Ixus, and got a photo of my feet, though that was deliberate. There is a thing you can stand on, which you're not meant to stand on. I will post photos. ("The photos are in the next post" is the LJ equivalent of "The cheque's in the post".) We saw llamas mating on the way back down the hill. I won't post photos of that, don't worry.

Tried to fix my grandad's hair... in Second Life. He's inspired by the whole idea, and currently determined to build a virtual Switzerland, and to recreate the voyage of the Titanic. We had trouble getting the "dignified" look he wanted for his hair. He turned 80 last year.

Bought a computer on eBay. It doesn't have a hard drive. I may have to buy another one. Or a hard drive. Or both. I'm hedging my bets.

Executive summary in pictures: [Ubuntu | Standing on maps | Scary llama ]

Ah, lovely. A quiet night in together, curled up reading on the sofa...

His reading:
A-E: chain 24-6 mm.; Pro Patria/GR; 42 x 33.5 cm.
F-H: chain 30; no mark; 42 x 33 cm.

Her reading:
$select = "SELECT first_name, last_name, tel, email FROM customers";
$result = mysqli_query($link, $select);

Overheard in the office:

"What does your software do?"
"It's a management information system."
"Ah, I SEE."

[a few minutes later]

"Basically what we produce is a technology-based learning solution."
[Everybody nods sagely.]