several birthdays
(Okay; so I've now got my flist read to skip=500. That's progress, I'm afraid...)
So. My life:
On Friday, my cousin Benj, his eldest brother Jonathan, his girlfriend Charlotte and my grandmother all came over for supper in celebration of Benj's impending doom eighteenth birthday, and much fun and hilarity and chocolate cake were had by all. The only specific incident that I wish to recount is the following: Benj ended up having a look at what I've got so far for Horror Story, which he said he rather liked (which is a Good Sign, because he is the type of person who a.) likes to think of himself as a bit of a Culture Snob although he acknowledges that he isn't really and b.) tends to be almost aggressively honest in sharing his opinion, which means that he probably does think it's good). The reason that I share this with you is because it illustrates that we really are cousins: he read the lines 'It’s like a skeleton that’s not quite finished yet, when the crows and ravens have been disturbed: you’ve got the bones, and scraps of skin and flesh and hair, but nothing else. It stinks like nothing else on earth, and the eyes are gone…' and told me that they were probably a little too heavy on the imagery side.
I laughed and grinned and bade him scroll down to the next page, on which the first lines, spoken by the same character, were 'I’m sorry. I’m being morbid'. We obviously think too similarly to one another not to be related.
This isn't entirely true, actually, because there are other people who manage the same kind of synchroninity who aren't related to me by blood desperately directly. One of them is Leanne, who I saw at locowerewolf's party (who isn't Old yet, but will be before she comes back from where she's going away to, so we got in a pre-emptive strike whilst she was still on the right continent) who managed to say exactly what I was saying at the same time as I was saying it several times during the course of the evening without any kind of script or prior agreement being necessary. We also had a conversation almost entirely in German (me) and Spanish (her) which was good fun and somewhat surprisingly lucid given that I don't officially speak a word of Spanish and she's never learnt German, although I felt slightly guilty at having caused the look of complete dislocation on Eleanor's face as she'd never learnt either. (It was very strange, actually, because I realised that a year or two ago I was her: not in the sense of being female and blonde, etc, obviously, but in the sense that I'd been the one hovering mostly silently on the edges of conversations that I'd wanted to join and not quite knowing how. Noticing this, and being the person having the conversation, was an interesting exercise in self-awareness.)
It was actually a really rather lovely evening: I was dropped early because my parents were on their way somewhere and hung around and chatted to locowerewolf and her mum and was appallingly bad at choosing cocktails for a while before everyone else turned up. I ended up being the only guy there (which meant that I was forced by a sense of an imperative for full disclosure to relate the story of meine_kleine's dad bestowing on me the status of Honourary Girl by association) which was, in an odd sort of way, vaguely flattering (because my ego takes every chance it can get, greedy little thing it is) and I can't remember where this sentence was going to go so I'll talk directly to the audience for a moment. Also present were katters279, who is cool; nosesaretasy, who I didn't get to speak to very much but who was wearing a really awesome top with spider webs on; Karen, who I hadn't seen for ages apart from the last time I saw her, and some really very call people whose names I didn't quite catch ,as so often happens. I should also probably mention that as part of her birthday present I bought locowerewolf a TARDIS, and also say that she really is a rather wonderful person and that I am honoured to have known her for as long as I have, and hope to continue this association in the future. You really are rather cool, you know.
On Sunday I worked in the morning and then packed (and was forced to grab an extra jumper on the way out, as apparently 'it's colder up north') and drove up to Durham with my father, or at least we drove approximately half way each, which is something like a hundred and fifty miles a head. We found ourselves somewhere to stay and did so (which involved amusing encounters with the receptionist who was also, according to a sign (which was later confirmed) 'working in the pub') and then headed back into town on Monday morning. Due to the vagaries of Durham's geography and transport systems, our own ineptitude and the fact that we rather like meandering around unfamiliar cities with no fixed plan, we ended up doing several circuits several times, both to get into the city and to go around it. We looked in on several colleges, all of which were nice, and one of them stood out as being rather awesome. Trvelyan stood out in several ways, not least of all because it has a cool name. It had been recommended by one of my teachers, who had asked me where I was going when I collared him to sign my exeat, and was the home of Mr Ford for several years. From the outside it didn't look like anything special, although apparently in the spring it is besieged by thousands of daffodils, but the inside was rather special. Trevs was built in the sixties: the designers obviously decided that right-angles were boring and not quite psychedelic enough, and so all of the buildings were hexagonal. That and the narrow corridors leant a pleasantly Lovecraftian feel to the architecture, and the lovely sense of surreality was only heightened by the fact that the student who we spotted and who offered to show us around not only studied English but, we discovered, came from a small town in Hertfordshire we wouldn't have heard of called St Albans. If my life stays true to form I'll bump into her at some point in town.
Speaking of bumping in to people, I ended up encountering Mike, Callum and Kate on a bridge, which was not entirely unexpected as I knew they would be in Durham anyway. Dad and I wandered around getting lost, leaving umbrellas in places and drinking tea before going to the talk in the English faculty that we were actually in Durham to go to, which turned out to be an anti-climax. Although what was said was quite interested, it was delivered by someone who was hesitated an awful lot and filled the pauses with ums and ers and was fairly obviously ever so slightly drunk as well as late. Despite this, I really rather like Durham; the course looks good and the city is lovely, all nooks and crannies and old buildings cosying up to one another, and even the furthest out colleges are only fifteen minutes away from the town centre by foot. It also had a surprisingly large congregation of old red telephone boxes, all huddled together in one place: I couldn't decide whether they were having some sort of secret, huddling meeting or if they were trying to mate.
(On the other side, the roundabouts are really weird.)
We left Durham at around quarter to four, and the heavens decided to open. Not only did we get to see some really fantastic lightening, but I also drove in weather that rivalled the wetness of Oxford (thus proving that it is impossible for me to go to a University without it raining and that it wasn't actually Sarah's fault at all). This happened whilst I was doing a very happy sixty on a busy dual carriage way; at one point it got so bad that I had to slow down to thirty and go into third because, apart from anything else, it was getting really quite difficult to see. (And then it started hailing.) It was actually rather fun and far less difficult that I thought it would be, and Dad surprised me a little by letting me drive it; whether or not they were sensible conditions for a learner to be driving in, it was certainly a good experience.
Despite the rain we actually made quite good time, and even with food we got back to St Albans at about quarter to ten, at which point rather than going home I went to the tail-end of charr's birthday barbecue instead. I arrived, according to one eye-witness, with great stealth, leading to speculation about secret ninja skills, and snarked at the television and drank Guinness (which was really very tasty, actually) and chatted to some of the really rather fantastic people assembled there, who included charr, safebox and charcoal_cloud in addition to Richard (who seemed, as predicted, to have forgotten all about my accidentally mortally offending him at the beginning of he year) and Sarah-whose-party-I-went-to and charr's sister-Rosie-with-the-awesome-Scottish-accent Zoe-who-should-read-Iain-Banks and various sundry others who I didn't know or can't think of an appropriate soubriquet for. Many exciting things happened, including fireworks and my saying to much unintentional innuendo and amusement given the preceding conversation that "I did Byron this year" and a plural noun for poets being discussed, and then it was decided that we were decamping en masse to The Glasshouse, which is not only a cactacae ghetto in New Crobuzon but also, I discovered, a rather nice pub near the station. Getting there entailed a battle of the sexes in which short cuts were taken and pedals came into close proximity to metal to an incongruous soundtrack of Bob Marley rather than the more traditional one of Blur's Song 2.
Apart from having pub lunches and other such things, this was my first experience of going into a pub proper, and certainly the first time I had done so with friends rather than adult people. It set a rather daunting example, because the first thing that was said was "A pint of your finest ale, please, barman," which is the kind of thing that one assumes that people only actually say in books and films and not in real life until you actually hear it with your own ears. Unfortunately I was unable to actually illegally have something to drink because my gratuitous taxi (Dad) was due to turn up at Richard's house two minutes after we got there, but I shall have to do so next time. He turned up, and I made my good byes and went home, ruing the fact that I had school the next day, because the company that I was forced to leave was most excellent indeed.
Nothing desperately interesting has happened today, except for the fact that my stalker has now made it official and created a livejournal account to do this properly under the inspired and wholly original name of anthon1stalker. I love the fact that my life is strange enough that he isn't actually a sock.
So. My life:
On Friday, my cousin Benj, his eldest brother Jonathan, his girlfriend Charlotte and my grandmother all came over for supper in celebration of Benj's impending doom eighteenth birthday, and much fun and hilarity and chocolate cake were had by all. The only specific incident that I wish to recount is the following: Benj ended up having a look at what I've got so far for Horror Story, which he said he rather liked (which is a Good Sign, because he is the type of person who a.) likes to think of himself as a bit of a Culture Snob although he acknowledges that he isn't really and b.) tends to be almost aggressively honest in sharing his opinion, which means that he probably does think it's good). The reason that I share this with you is because it illustrates that we really are cousins: he read the lines 'It’s like a skeleton that’s not quite finished yet, when the crows and ravens have been disturbed: you’ve got the bones, and scraps of skin and flesh and hair, but nothing else. It stinks like nothing else on earth, and the eyes are gone…' and told me that they were probably a little too heavy on the imagery side.
I laughed and grinned and bade him scroll down to the next page, on which the first lines, spoken by the same character, were 'I’m sorry. I’m being morbid'. We obviously think too similarly to one another not to be related.
This isn't entirely true, actually, because there are other people who manage the same kind of synchroninity who aren't related to me by blood desperately directly. One of them is Leanne, who I saw at locowerewolf's party (who isn't Old yet, but will be before she comes back from where she's going away to, so we got in a pre-emptive strike whilst she was still on the right continent) who managed to say exactly what I was saying at the same time as I was saying it several times during the course of the evening without any kind of script or prior agreement being necessary. We also had a conversation almost entirely in German (me) and Spanish (her) which was good fun and somewhat surprisingly lucid given that I don't officially speak a word of Spanish and she's never learnt German, although I felt slightly guilty at having caused the look of complete dislocation on Eleanor's face as she'd never learnt either. (It was very strange, actually, because I realised that a year or two ago I was her: not in the sense of being female and blonde, etc, obviously, but in the sense that I'd been the one hovering mostly silently on the edges of conversations that I'd wanted to join and not quite knowing how. Noticing this, and being the person having the conversation, was an interesting exercise in self-awareness.)
It was actually a really rather lovely evening: I was dropped early because my parents were on their way somewhere and hung around and chatted to locowerewolf and her mum and was appallingly bad at choosing cocktails for a while before everyone else turned up. I ended up being the only guy there (which meant that I was forced by a sense of an imperative for full disclosure to relate the story of meine_kleine's dad bestowing on me the status of Honourary Girl by association) which was, in an odd sort of way, vaguely flattering (because my ego takes every chance it can get, greedy little thing it is) and I can't remember where this sentence was going to go so I'll talk directly to the audience for a moment. Also present were katters279, who is cool; nosesaretasy, who I didn't get to speak to very much but who was wearing a really awesome top with spider webs on; Karen, who I hadn't seen for ages apart from the last time I saw her, and some really very call people whose names I didn't quite catch ,as so often happens. I should also probably mention that as part of her birthday present I bought locowerewolf a TARDIS, and also say that she really is a rather wonderful person and that I am honoured to have known her for as long as I have, and hope to continue this association in the future. You really are rather cool, you know.
On Sunday I worked in the morning and then packed (and was forced to grab an extra jumper on the way out, as apparently 'it's colder up north') and drove up to Durham with my father, or at least we drove approximately half way each, which is something like a hundred and fifty miles a head. We found ourselves somewhere to stay and did so (which involved amusing encounters with the receptionist who was also, according to a sign (which was later confirmed) 'working in the pub') and then headed back into town on Monday morning. Due to the vagaries of Durham's geography and transport systems, our own ineptitude and the fact that we rather like meandering around unfamiliar cities with no fixed plan, we ended up doing several circuits several times, both to get into the city and to go around it. We looked in on several colleges, all of which were nice, and one of them stood out as being rather awesome. Trvelyan stood out in several ways, not least of all because it has a cool name. It had been recommended by one of my teachers, who had asked me where I was going when I collared him to sign my exeat, and was the home of Mr Ford for several years. From the outside it didn't look like anything special, although apparently in the spring it is besieged by thousands of daffodils, but the inside was rather special. Trevs was built in the sixties: the designers obviously decided that right-angles were boring and not quite psychedelic enough, and so all of the buildings were hexagonal. That and the narrow corridors leant a pleasantly Lovecraftian feel to the architecture, and the lovely sense of surreality was only heightened by the fact that the student who we spotted and who offered to show us around not only studied English but, we discovered, came from a small town in Hertfordshire we wouldn't have heard of called St Albans. If my life stays true to form I'll bump into her at some point in town.
Speaking of bumping in to people, I ended up encountering Mike, Callum and Kate on a bridge, which was not entirely unexpected as I knew they would be in Durham anyway. Dad and I wandered around getting lost, leaving umbrellas in places and drinking tea before going to the talk in the English faculty that we were actually in Durham to go to, which turned out to be an anti-climax. Although what was said was quite interested, it was delivered by someone who was hesitated an awful lot and filled the pauses with ums and ers and was fairly obviously ever so slightly drunk as well as late. Despite this, I really rather like Durham; the course looks good and the city is lovely, all nooks and crannies and old buildings cosying up to one another, and even the furthest out colleges are only fifteen minutes away from the town centre by foot. It also had a surprisingly large congregation of old red telephone boxes, all huddled together in one place: I couldn't decide whether they were having some sort of secret, huddling meeting or if they were trying to mate.
(On the other side, the roundabouts are really weird.)
We left Durham at around quarter to four, and the heavens decided to open. Not only did we get to see some really fantastic lightening, but I also drove in weather that rivalled the wetness of Oxford (thus proving that it is impossible for me to go to a University without it raining and that it wasn't actually Sarah's fault at all). This happened whilst I was doing a very happy sixty on a busy dual carriage way; at one point it got so bad that I had to slow down to thirty and go into third because, apart from anything else, it was getting really quite difficult to see. (And then it started hailing.) It was actually rather fun and far less difficult that I thought it would be, and Dad surprised me a little by letting me drive it; whether or not they were sensible conditions for a learner to be driving in, it was certainly a good experience.
Despite the rain we actually made quite good time, and even with food we got back to St Albans at about quarter to ten, at which point rather than going home I went to the tail-end of charr's birthday barbecue instead. I arrived, according to one eye-witness, with great stealth, leading to speculation about secret ninja skills, and snarked at the television and drank Guinness (which was really very tasty, actually) and chatted to some of the really rather fantastic people assembled there, who included charr, safebox and charcoal_cloud in addition to Richard (who seemed, as predicted, to have forgotten all about my accidentally mortally offending him at the beginning of he year) and Sarah-whose-party-I-went-to and charr's sister-Rosie-with-the-awesome-Scottish-accent Zoe-who-should-read-Iain-Banks and various sundry others who I didn't know or can't think of an appropriate soubriquet for. Many exciting things happened, including fireworks and my saying to much unintentional innuendo and amusement given the preceding conversation that "I did Byron this year" and a plural noun for poets being discussed, and then it was decided that we were decamping en masse to The Glasshouse, which is not only a cactacae ghetto in New Crobuzon but also, I discovered, a rather nice pub near the station. Getting there entailed a battle of the sexes in which short cuts were taken and pedals came into close proximity to metal to an incongruous soundtrack of Bob Marley rather than the more traditional one of Blur's Song 2.
Apart from having pub lunches and other such things, this was my first experience of going into a pub proper, and certainly the first time I had done so with friends rather than adult people. It set a rather daunting example, because the first thing that was said was "A pint of your finest ale, please, barman," which is the kind of thing that one assumes that people only actually say in books and films and not in real life until you actually hear it with your own ears. Unfortunately I was unable to actually illegally have something to drink because my gratuitous taxi (Dad) was due to turn up at Richard's house two minutes after we got there, but I shall have to do so next time. He turned up, and I made my good byes and went home, ruing the fact that I had school the next day, because the company that I was forced to leave was most excellent indeed.
Nothing desperately interesting has happened today, except for the fact that my stalker has now made it official and created a livejournal account to do this properly under the inspired and wholly original name of anthon1stalker. I love the fact that my life is strange enough that he isn't actually a sock.