burn your fridge
Lots of things recently have made me very, very happy indeed.
On Friday, for example, I received something in the post, which always makes me very happy, unless it's spam or junk mail or irritating little flyers from youth organisations that probably technically qualify as both anyway. This, however, was very obviously not junk or spam, for several reasons, namely that it was a rather large and interestingly shaped object in a very large envelope that had my name handwritten above the address. It also had Macmillan written on it.
Inside it was a copy of Un Lun Dun by China Miéville, inside of which was a little compliments slip saying 'Here's a souvenir', and also a little note in purple ink from China Miéville on the title page that said 'To Anthony, With huge thanks for your help! All my best, China Meíville'.
As I said, it made me very, very happy.
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Last night -- was it only last night? -- I went to see Lost Prophets at Wembley Arena. The first support act were called Aiden, seemed obsessed with fire and were fairly rubbish; their main saving grace was that their last song sounded like it was called 'Burn your fridge'. Taking Back Sunday were better, and I unexpectedly recognised some of their songs; Lostprophets were awesome.
Other interesting things to mention about it are the fact that I have discovered that my talent for providing snarktastic commentaries isn't just confined to films, the fact that the lightshows always seem to get progressively better, the fact that they used a clip from A New Hope in the LP lightshow and the fact that at the official merchandise stall they were selling t-shirts with 'MEGA LOLZ!' on the front in very big black letters.
After the show, Robbie slept over at my house to save him having to go home by himself, as everyone else was staying at Helen's because it is about three minute's walk from their school. For some reason, we both woke up very very early and stirred at roughly the same time; I leant over, saw that the clock said 6:30, and promptly went back to sleep again. Neither of us know why this occurred.
As I seem to be doing a lot at the moment, I got to school at an unholy hour, and moreover, as a consequence of technically having been awake for two hours was very alert. Gyan told me that my illness was obviously getting worse, which is only funny when you know that when I appeared in school at eight twenty-five on Monday morning he exclaimed that I must be ill because he hadn't seen me at such a time for approximately five years.
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Yes I am experimenting with my grammatical typography. I'm glad you noticed.
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When I went in to school last Monday morning I was so tired that my arms ached. On Tuesday I stayed up until two o'clock talking to the pirate cousin and his philosopher girlfriend, because they came over for supper. We had a fantastic evening, actually; I came home and made a very artistic fruit plate, much to my mother's suprise (I tend to shirk cooking duty when I can; when I do, I tend to get a terrible urge to be creative. In this case, it led to my bemoaning the fact that we didn't have a single serviceable apple that I could core and use a horizontal slice of as a centre-piece, scaring people with my talk of pineapples and improvising with the last tangerine and a final grape.) and then chatted to Amachai and Anat and Helen and played basketball and ate food and then played rummikub.
Helen, much to my surprise, had never played before, so we played as a team, whilst my father opted out because he has an irrational fear of any kind of organised enjoyment. Helen grasped the fundamentals of the game unsurprisingly quickly given that she'd just come back from a residential further maths course in Leeds, and much to my amusement we made a surprisingly effective team despite the fact that we didn't actually communicate our ideas in full but by a combination of non-sequiteurs and rearrangements of tiles on our deck. We didn't in fact win on points, but we did win two out of the three games that were played before we had to take her back home. On the way I provided a running commentary about the places that we passed at a very high speed because mum was driving faster than tour buses usually do, and I apparently impressed people with my improvised patter by knowing odd facts like who built the abbey -- Offa - and trivia about why the border between parishes was really quite important and why the Duke of Marlborough pub is thusly named and other such interesting things, and on their advice am considering investigating doing guided walking tours of St Albans as an occaisional summer job if such a position is available. We then dropped Helen off and returned home by a difernt route, and then, as I have said, I stayed up talking to my piratical and philosophical relations (or as-near-ases) until a silly hour in the morning because they live a long way away and it was an opportunity not to be missed.
People change; last time Amachai was here he was an angry and aggresive young man and I was twelve and was far happier reading a book than talking to my cousin who lived thousands of miles away. We've both changed, and for the better. When he last met me, I was defined by being the clever one; now I am myself. I can't remember him nearly as well as he remembers me from then, but I like him a lot more now than I did last time we met, which was meant to be a positive statement rather than a negative one.
Family is odd. On the one hand, your family are those irritating members of the public that you just can't seem to get away from; you cannot choose them and you are stuck with them, like as not. But then again, there is an instant connection that you can draw on to make stronger ones if they are there; you know these people somehow. My relatives are comfortable; we live in completely different worlds, and yet can slot into one anothers' lives without much fuss and without much inconveniece. Blood isn't thicker than water necessarily, but it acts like oil: the machinery of communication doesn't quite clog up with infrequent use in the same way that it can do in friendship.
I'm not entirely sure what I am trying to say here, and again it didn't go quite where I wanted it to go. But that is life.
On Friday, for example, I received something in the post, which always makes me very happy, unless it's spam or junk mail or irritating little flyers from youth organisations that probably technically qualify as both anyway. This, however, was very obviously not junk or spam, for several reasons, namely that it was a rather large and interestingly shaped object in a very large envelope that had my name handwritten above the address. It also had Macmillan written on it.
Inside it was a copy of Un Lun Dun by China Miéville, inside of which was a little compliments slip saying 'Here's a souvenir', and also a little note in purple ink from China Miéville on the title page that said 'To Anthony, With huge thanks for your help! All my best, China Meíville'.
As I said, it made me very, very happy.
---
Last night -- was it only last night? -- I went to see Lost Prophets at Wembley Arena. The first support act were called Aiden, seemed obsessed with fire and were fairly rubbish; their main saving grace was that their last song sounded like it was called 'Burn your fridge'. Taking Back Sunday were better, and I unexpectedly recognised some of their songs; Lostprophets were awesome.
Other interesting things to mention about it are the fact that I have discovered that my talent for providing snarktastic commentaries isn't just confined to films, the fact that the lightshows always seem to get progressively better, the fact that they used a clip from A New Hope in the LP lightshow and the fact that at the official merchandise stall they were selling t-shirts with 'MEGA LOLZ!' on the front in very big black letters.
After the show, Robbie slept over at my house to save him having to go home by himself, as everyone else was staying at Helen's because it is about three minute's walk from their school. For some reason, we both woke up very very early and stirred at roughly the same time; I leant over, saw that the clock said 6:30, and promptly went back to sleep again. Neither of us know why this occurred.
As I seem to be doing a lot at the moment, I got to school at an unholy hour, and moreover, as a consequence of technically having been awake for two hours was very alert. Gyan told me that my illness was obviously getting worse, which is only funny when you know that when I appeared in school at eight twenty-five on Monday morning he exclaimed that I must be ill because he hadn't seen me at such a time for approximately five years.
---
Yes I am experimenting with my grammatical typography. I'm glad you noticed.
---
When I went in to school last Monday morning I was so tired that my arms ached. On Tuesday I stayed up until two o'clock talking to the pirate cousin and his philosopher girlfriend, because they came over for supper. We had a fantastic evening, actually; I came home and made a very artistic fruit plate, much to my mother's suprise (I tend to shirk cooking duty when I can; when I do, I tend to get a terrible urge to be creative. In this case, it led to my bemoaning the fact that we didn't have a single serviceable apple that I could core and use a horizontal slice of as a centre-piece, scaring people with my talk of pineapples and improvising with the last tangerine and a final grape.) and then chatted to Amachai and Anat and Helen and played basketball and ate food and then played rummikub.
Helen, much to my surprise, had never played before, so we played as a team, whilst my father opted out because he has an irrational fear of any kind of organised enjoyment. Helen grasped the fundamentals of the game unsurprisingly quickly given that she'd just come back from a residential further maths course in Leeds, and much to my amusement we made a surprisingly effective team despite the fact that we didn't actually communicate our ideas in full but by a combination of non-sequiteurs and rearrangements of tiles on our deck. We didn't in fact win on points, but we did win two out of the three games that were played before we had to take her back home. On the way I provided a running commentary about the places that we passed at a very high speed because mum was driving faster than tour buses usually do, and I apparently impressed people with my improvised patter by knowing odd facts like who built the abbey -- Offa - and trivia about why the border between parishes was really quite important and why the Duke of Marlborough pub is thusly named and other such interesting things, and on their advice am considering investigating doing guided walking tours of St Albans as an occaisional summer job if such a position is available. We then dropped Helen off and returned home by a difernt route, and then, as I have said, I stayed up talking to my piratical and philosophical relations (or as-near-ases) until a silly hour in the morning because they live a long way away and it was an opportunity not to be missed.
People change; last time Amachai was here he was an angry and aggresive young man and I was twelve and was far happier reading a book than talking to my cousin who lived thousands of miles away. We've both changed, and for the better. When he last met me, I was defined by being the clever one; now I am myself. I can't remember him nearly as well as he remembers me from then, but I like him a lot more now than I did last time we met, which was meant to be a positive statement rather than a negative one.
Family is odd. On the one hand, your family are those irritating members of the public that you just can't seem to get away from; you cannot choose them and you are stuck with them, like as not. But then again, there is an instant connection that you can draw on to make stronger ones if they are there; you know these people somehow. My relatives are comfortable; we live in completely different worlds, and yet can slot into one anothers' lives without much fuss and without much inconveniece. Blood isn't thicker than water necessarily, but it acts like oil: the machinery of communication doesn't quite clog up with infrequent use in the same way that it can do in friendship.
I'm not entirely sure what I am trying to say here, and again it didn't go quite where I wanted it to go. But that is life.