Rising from the depths...
No, I haven't posted all week. This has been thanks to the fact that I have had a cold of at least twice the usual severity and have spent pretty much the entire time crawling sullenly between bed and the notorious Recliner Of Doom (so called because it attempts to cripple and/or eat anyone who sits in it apart from me) and praying to Grandfather Nurgle to take the germs away. About the only useful thing I've gotten done has been some writing, though that's always a major plus point, and thankfully it's been a no-work week.
I should, however, at least post about last weekend before I forget. So, here we go...
So, last weekend was the Jorvik Viking Festival. This is a pretty big annual event, with people charging around in costume, living history events, competitions, children's activities, lots of opportunities to spend money on Viking-themed crafts and other random related tat, and on the final Saturday night a massive battle re-enactment that culminates in a Viking ship-burning funeral. I went to the latter last time I had the chance, a couple of years ago, and it was absolutely amazing and incredibly moving; this year, though, there was something else to do that was even more interesting, as some bright spark had had the idea of booking a pagan-metal gig to coincide with the festival.
So on Saturday I turned up in York around lunchtime, following the traditional bus ride over the moors from Whitby, and was met by Keri hellbound_heart and Jim ironlord, the former of whom lives in York and had kindly agreed to act as hostess, and the latter of whom was up from Nottingham seeking recompense for what happened last time he'd come to the festival. We went and wandered around town for a while, ate food - in my case, kangaroo burger and ketchup, followed by a round of Dutch pancakes with maple syrup, whipped cream, and so much icing sugar that it blew all over me in the breeze and made me look like some kind of possessed cocaine dealer. Fortunately it brushed off easily, and we headed off to poke around the festival - mostly so that Jim could enter the annual beard competition, which he failed to win but seemed to have a lot of fun with - before going in search of a pub as by that point we were all freezing. Especially me, since I was bloody-mindedly wearing a sleeveless denim vest that I didn't want to cover up with my fleece as I liked the way it looked. >.>
En route to the pub, we heard a holler of "Wacken!" behind us. Now, that isn't a battlecry I'm used to hearing anywhere but the festival itself, so it was with some surprise that we looked around - as I remembered that, of course, I was wearing one of my Wacken-issue drawstring rucksacks, and this was what had drawn the attention of what turned out to be four Swedish metalheads who were visiting York for the day. Some enthusiastic nattering followed, before we sent them off to the bar they were looking for and carried on to the pub...
...which turned out to be closed for a private party, so we shrugged and decided to follow the Swedes after all, to Bar Pivni. Where we didn't find them, so apparently our directions hadn't been that good, but I got a round of beers in (I would like to thank Jim for being a gent and switching to ordering a half when it turned out that his beverage of choice was eight quid a pint - thanks mate!) and we tromped upstairs to look for seats. Here we found a particularly lairy stag party adorned with various bits of Viking costumery, who were apparently trying to make sure the stag never made it to the altar by killing him with eighteen-percent-strength beer and everything else they could throw down his neck. We also found that we'd discovered a jukebox which featured Napalm Death - although it was pointed out that this was clearly no way to get value for money, given that Napalm Death famously released the shortest song in history (wait, what do you mean there's a video for it?) and this led in turn to me contemplating the possibilities inherent in a jukebox with Abruptum on it... hehehe.
However, eventually the raucous shenanigans at the next table got too much and we went off again to find Jim's Nottingham mates who were apparently also here somewhere. We discovered them in a tea room (memories of Cambridge Rocksoc's infamous Tea Shop Crawls) and hauled them off to the Three Legged Mare pub instead, where we had a round and a natter (and I was delighted to discover that they'd painted the women's toilets entirely in purple, which was awesome) before heading back to Keri's place for dinner, which apparently had been in the oven all day. Sounded intriguing, at any rate...
Now, while I appreciate that everyone's got to be somewhere, even if they're famous, and it's sometimes going to be pure coincidence when you wind up hanging out with someone who other people would queue up all day just to meet, I have to admit to still having a slight moment of nervous tension on meeting Keri's partner prelati... aka Gavin Baddeley, legendary occult/alternative/dark/metal/goth/allthatstuff journalist and author. Good news is, he turns out to be a very nice bloke - although he did give me his cold, which is the one I'm still trying to shake off, so :p to him for that. Food followed in short order and was incredibly nice: slow-roasted lamb with carrots and various trimmings, which I bolted at a speed which I think slightly worried Keri. >.> Sorry! It was a compliment to your cooking, I promise...
With time getting tight, we left Gav at home and headed back out to the gig. When we arrived, Maelstrom were already onstage - which caused me a brief but startling mental continuity error, as their singer is a skinny, red-blond thing with startling blue eyes, dressed in a white shirt and black tie, who bore a sufficent resemblance at a distance to the former oml404 that it genuinely made me jump. I was also a bit surprised by the dress sense that seemed to be permeating the band - lot of short hair, more shirts and ties, that kind of thing - but as I nosed my way to the front of the crowd, it rapidly became clear that they were actually really good in a sort of pagan-metal-fusion way that covered about as many genres of extreme metal as could plausibly be fitted into a tight space and was great fun to dance to. Brilliant band, check them out.
After a very quick attempt to venture to the back of the venue at the end of their set, I scrambled back out of what by this point was a pretty intense crush - not helped by various people taking up a hell of a lot of space in Viking costumes - and resumed my station at the front just in time for Ravenage, who had really been the primary draw of the whole evening for me as I already knew I liked them a hell of a lot. And in terms of performance and general quality of show, they really didn't disappoint me - the only downer was that they were reduced to a very short set by the absence of their keyboardist, who had apparently been kidnapped as a touring musician by those villainous Scottish pirates Alestorm and had been replaced by... the guy who taught him the keyboards in the first place! Which was pretty cool - how many music teachers would step into their young protege's spot in a pagan metal band in a pinch? Many thanks and hails to him for ensuring that even if they had to run short, we still got Ravenage! Also hails to the bloke somewhere in the front row who was blowing an actual Viking warhorn over the proceedings, which added a fantastic extra dimension to what was already an atmospheric performance (Ravenage perform in full Viking get-up, and singer Glyn in particular looks every inch the part, being a massive red-bearded bear of a man who looks kind of like Gimli from the Lord of the Rings movies scaled back up to Man-height). Special props too for featuring my favourite line of the night, from the opening of Northbound Part 1:
"What brings you to the North?"
"Because I am tired of the South!"
which is the kind of sentiment that will always elicit a cheer from me. ^_^ And then they finished with a raucous rendition of More Beer and went clattering offstage, and we all stood around to wait for the headliners Týr.
Who appeared to be having some technical problems. There was a great deal of laughter when their backdrop fell off the wall and none of them noticed for quite a while (despite a lot of pointing and "TURN ROUND!" from the crowd), and it seemed to take ages to get everything set up and checked the way they wanted. However, I wasn't complaining, as some kind soul on the sound deck had thrown on Black Sabbath's Mob Rules album to bridge the gap, and I will never complain about being left to stand around and sing along to Turn Up The Night and Sign Of The Southern Cross. ♥
Týr are a Faroese band, and while they're legends in the pagan-metal scene, this was their first ever headlining show in the UK. And man oh man, was it a good one. I'm not generally that big a fan of their stuff on record (don't always get along so much with the vocals) but live they were absolutely blazing, belting out their heathen anthems and tales of battles the rest of the world doesn't remember with magnificent conviction and thunderous power. A fair amount of thousand-years-out-of-date political teasing (especially an "any Scotsmen in the audience?" gambit which interacted hilariously with the fact that several of Maelstrom's diehard fans were still in the front row with a fucking enormous St Andrew's flag) introduced various tracks, all of it tremendously goodhearted and with nobody that I saw taking any actual offence whatsoever, and they stormed through with banners flying high. Perfect gig, arguably - the show finished with everyone happy, throats raw from singing, eyes shining, the room charged to the limit with energy. Loved it, and I'm really glad that such a genuinely deserving band received such a fantastic response at such a special show.
Normally I try to get out relatively quickly after a gig, but in this case I was slowed by needing to stick with Jim, Keri, and Gav (who had shown up some time after us) and it seemed like everyone had something they needed to do or someone they needed to talk to. The upside of this was that I got to say hi and shake hands with both Maelstrom's frontman and Ravenage's Glyn, the latter of whom on hearing that I was from Whitby asked if I could get them a gig there(!). Even when we were done in the venue, that still wasn't the last of the shenanigans, as apparently Jim was buying an old games console off one of his mates and needed to go and fetch it. Keri, Gav and I stood around outside in a state of some bemusement and waited for him, until Gav decided he was bored and buggered off to the pub. Jim reappeared, cardboard box in arms, and we agreed that since it was late we were probably better off going home than not.
We did, however, end up getting distracted by Jim's desire to find a particularly noteworthy street address: number one-and-a-half Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma Gate (yes, really, it does exist!) and as we wandered back we had a bit of a hair-raising time of it avoiding all the raucous drunks who seemed to have come out in absolute droves. It was proper main street meltdown territory, complete with one girl sitting on the pavement outside a club, clearly dangerously drunk, with her friends trying to get her to put her vicious-looking high heels back on "cos they won't let you in with no shoes". Personally I'd have been more worried about getting her into A&E in that state than into another bar, but that's normal people for you apparently. Once again, I fucking love being a metalhead and the general lack of brawling, drunken carnage (at least of the actually life or limb threatening variety) and obnoxious behaviour in the scene...
I wasn't sure if there was a plan when we got home, but it turned out to be "sit around, drink Relentless/wine/whisky according to preference, eat food, listen to last.fm, and BS like crazy", which I was more than down with and which sustained us until gone three in the morning. I wrote down a huge list of bands to check out off last.fm (repeatedly annoying Jim, who kept pointing out that I'd have known who they all were if I listened to his oggcast - there you go, Jim, have some publicity to make up for it) and managed to hold up, at least to my own satisfaction, my corner of a lengthy and rambling conversation that finished up with Gav casually discussing the times he'd met assorted Black Metal scene legends and causing me to go several shades of green with envy. Bed eventually beckoned, though (or living-room-sofa, in my case, and very comfy it was), especially since I knew I was going to be poked awake early next morning...
...because Jim had another mission in mind, this being to go on the Sunday-morning guided tour of Fulford battlefield. The "forgotten battle of 1066", overshadowed by its brothers Stamford Bridge and of course Hastings, Fulford was where the Norse under Harald Hardrada and Tostig Godwinson took on and broke the English under the young Earl Morcar and his brother Edwin. We got a two-hour tour, conducted by Charles Jones, the archaeologist whose team discovered the site and did most of the research that's been carried out there; it was amazing to be able to walk the line of the English shieldwall and look out at a landscape which had barely changed (modulo a couple of metres up or down here and there) since the day of the battle. I was pleased to discover that all my years of Warhammer and 40K have apparently paid off, as my understanding of real battle tactics turns out to be a lot better than I'd realised - as Jones was explaining what had happened and who had fought where, I was nodding along and even occasionally extrapolating ahead and then finding out I was right, which was very cool.
Sadly, that was the very last iteration of the tour, because barring a miracle (which we aren't going to get, I fear) a bloody housing development is about to be dumped right on top of where the shieldwall ran, and nobody's going to have the joy of seeing the battlefield intact ever again. :( Fucking heartbreaking, but apparently there's nothing for it; the developers and planners seem to have proper stitched this one up. May the ghosts of Northumbria's valiant fallen rise up and plague them all...
Having done that, and nearly frozen in the process, Jim and I headed back to mine, where I'd agreed to let him stay so that next day he could go and hunt razorshell clams on Filey Brigg. This was going to require a disgustingly early start - high tide being 9.30 and Filey being an hour's drive away - but for some godsforsaken reason we still stayed up stupidly late. Getting up next morning was not going to be fun.
Lo and behold, it truly wasn't. The drive down to Filey in the Intergalactic Battlecruiser, belting out XIV Dark Centuries and Ravenage, made up for a lot, but on reaching the Brigg and getting out of the car we realised just how fucking cold it was. The thermometer read 2 degrees Celsius - adding in the windchill on Filey's sweepingly broad and completely undefended beach, I reckon it must have been effectively below freezing out there. We prowled along the tidemark, Jim scowling at the sand in search of the telltale holes that apparently indicate the presence of his desired prey, me attempting to help but mostly admiring the view of the Brigg in the sunshine and trying not to freeze.
But... no razorshells. Not a bivalve to be seen, though plenty of empty shells turned up. Eventually we admitted defeat and went back to the car. By a fortuitous chance, though, our route home would take us right past my parents' house, so I rang ahead and it was agreed that we could come in for a cup of tea and a warm. Which was nice. Cheers mum and dad!
Some time later, we returned to my house where, since Jim had missed out on adding one new food item to his life list, I agreed to make him a different new thing to try instead: my by-this-point-notorious semlor recipe. I still suspect that these low-fi culinary necroabominations would give any actual Swedish person fits. But then, given that I basically only started making these as a tribute to the one and only Per Yngve Ohlin (♥), they bloody well ought to be as evil as fuck - and so they generally are.
But they do taste nice (as Jim confirms, to the point that he's challenged me to a Black Metal bake-off - seriously, I don't even - which of course I am delighted to accept). So that was a success, at least, although by this stage of the day I was rapidly realising that I had, indeed, caught a cold. Jim went home later that evening, I fell over in a state of rapid decline, and that's basically been all she wrote between then and now as I have felt like death ALL WEEK.
...I did have a great time before it all ended in sneezing, though. ^_^ Many thanks to Keri and Gav for their hospitality, Jim for the driving and general company, and let's do some more of that sometime! \m/
Laters,
Rath
I should, however, at least post about last weekend before I forget. So, here we go...
So, last weekend was the Jorvik Viking Festival. This is a pretty big annual event, with people charging around in costume, living history events, competitions, children's activities, lots of opportunities to spend money on Viking-themed crafts and other random related tat, and on the final Saturday night a massive battle re-enactment that culminates in a Viking ship-burning funeral. I went to the latter last time I had the chance, a couple of years ago, and it was absolutely amazing and incredibly moving; this year, though, there was something else to do that was even more interesting, as some bright spark had had the idea of booking a pagan-metal gig to coincide with the festival.
So on Saturday I turned up in York around lunchtime, following the traditional bus ride over the moors from Whitby, and was met by Keri hellbound_heart and Jim ironlord, the former of whom lives in York and had kindly agreed to act as hostess, and the latter of whom was up from Nottingham seeking recompense for what happened last time he'd come to the festival. We went and wandered around town for a while, ate food - in my case, kangaroo burger and ketchup, followed by a round of Dutch pancakes with maple syrup, whipped cream, and so much icing sugar that it blew all over me in the breeze and made me look like some kind of possessed cocaine dealer. Fortunately it brushed off easily, and we headed off to poke around the festival - mostly so that Jim could enter the annual beard competition, which he failed to win but seemed to have a lot of fun with - before going in search of a pub as by that point we were all freezing. Especially me, since I was bloody-mindedly wearing a sleeveless denim vest that I didn't want to cover up with my fleece as I liked the way it looked. >.>
En route to the pub, we heard a holler of "Wacken!" behind us. Now, that isn't a battlecry I'm used to hearing anywhere but the festival itself, so it was with some surprise that we looked around - as I remembered that, of course, I was wearing one of my Wacken-issue drawstring rucksacks, and this was what had drawn the attention of what turned out to be four Swedish metalheads who were visiting York for the day. Some enthusiastic nattering followed, before we sent them off to the bar they were looking for and carried on to the pub...
...which turned out to be closed for a private party, so we shrugged and decided to follow the Swedes after all, to Bar Pivni. Where we didn't find them, so apparently our directions hadn't been that good, but I got a round of beers in (I would like to thank Jim for being a gent and switching to ordering a half when it turned out that his beverage of choice was eight quid a pint - thanks mate!) and we tromped upstairs to look for seats. Here we found a particularly lairy stag party adorned with various bits of Viking costumery, who were apparently trying to make sure the stag never made it to the altar by killing him with eighteen-percent-strength beer and everything else they could throw down his neck. We also found that we'd discovered a jukebox which featured Napalm Death - although it was pointed out that this was clearly no way to get value for money, given that Napalm Death famously released the shortest song in history (wait, what do you mean there's a video for it?) and this led in turn to me contemplating the possibilities inherent in a jukebox with Abruptum on it... hehehe.
However, eventually the raucous shenanigans at the next table got too much and we went off again to find Jim's Nottingham mates who were apparently also here somewhere. We discovered them in a tea room (memories of Cambridge Rocksoc's infamous Tea Shop Crawls) and hauled them off to the Three Legged Mare pub instead, where we had a round and a natter (and I was delighted to discover that they'd painted the women's toilets entirely in purple, which was awesome) before heading back to Keri's place for dinner, which apparently had been in the oven all day. Sounded intriguing, at any rate...
Now, while I appreciate that everyone's got to be somewhere, even if they're famous, and it's sometimes going to be pure coincidence when you wind up hanging out with someone who other people would queue up all day just to meet, I have to admit to still having a slight moment of nervous tension on meeting Keri's partner prelati... aka Gavin Baddeley, legendary occult/alternative/dark/metal/goth/allthatstuff journalist and author. Good news is, he turns out to be a very nice bloke - although he did give me his cold, which is the one I'm still trying to shake off, so :p to him for that. Food followed in short order and was incredibly nice: slow-roasted lamb with carrots and various trimmings, which I bolted at a speed which I think slightly worried Keri. >.> Sorry! It was a compliment to your cooking, I promise...
With time getting tight, we left Gav at home and headed back out to the gig. When we arrived, Maelstrom were already onstage - which caused me a brief but startling mental continuity error, as their singer is a skinny, red-blond thing with startling blue eyes, dressed in a white shirt and black tie, who bore a sufficent resemblance at a distance to the former oml404 that it genuinely made me jump. I was also a bit surprised by the dress sense that seemed to be permeating the band - lot of short hair, more shirts and ties, that kind of thing - but as I nosed my way to the front of the crowd, it rapidly became clear that they were actually really good in a sort of pagan-metal-fusion way that covered about as many genres of extreme metal as could plausibly be fitted into a tight space and was great fun to dance to. Brilliant band, check them out.
After a very quick attempt to venture to the back of the venue at the end of their set, I scrambled back out of what by this point was a pretty intense crush - not helped by various people taking up a hell of a lot of space in Viking costumes - and resumed my station at the front just in time for Ravenage, who had really been the primary draw of the whole evening for me as I already knew I liked them a hell of a lot. And in terms of performance and general quality of show, they really didn't disappoint me - the only downer was that they were reduced to a very short set by the absence of their keyboardist, who had apparently been kidnapped as a touring musician by those villainous Scottish pirates Alestorm and had been replaced by... the guy who taught him the keyboards in the first place! Which was pretty cool - how many music teachers would step into their young protege's spot in a pagan metal band in a pinch? Many thanks and hails to him for ensuring that even if they had to run short, we still got Ravenage! Also hails to the bloke somewhere in the front row who was blowing an actual Viking warhorn over the proceedings, which added a fantastic extra dimension to what was already an atmospheric performance (Ravenage perform in full Viking get-up, and singer Glyn in particular looks every inch the part, being a massive red-bearded bear of a man who looks kind of like Gimli from the Lord of the Rings movies scaled back up to Man-height). Special props too for featuring my favourite line of the night, from the opening of Northbound Part 1:
"What brings you to the North?"
"Because I am tired of the South!"
which is the kind of sentiment that will always elicit a cheer from me. ^_^ And then they finished with a raucous rendition of More Beer and went clattering offstage, and we all stood around to wait for the headliners Týr.
Who appeared to be having some technical problems. There was a great deal of laughter when their backdrop fell off the wall and none of them noticed for quite a while (despite a lot of pointing and "TURN ROUND!" from the crowd), and it seemed to take ages to get everything set up and checked the way they wanted. However, I wasn't complaining, as some kind soul on the sound deck had thrown on Black Sabbath's Mob Rules album to bridge the gap, and I will never complain about being left to stand around and sing along to Turn Up The Night and Sign Of The Southern Cross. ♥
Týr are a Faroese band, and while they're legends in the pagan-metal scene, this was their first ever headlining show in the UK. And man oh man, was it a good one. I'm not generally that big a fan of their stuff on record (don't always get along so much with the vocals) but live they were absolutely blazing, belting out their heathen anthems and tales of battles the rest of the world doesn't remember with magnificent conviction and thunderous power. A fair amount of thousand-years-out-of-date political teasing (especially an "any Scotsmen in the audience?" gambit which interacted hilariously with the fact that several of Maelstrom's diehard fans were still in the front row with a fucking enormous St Andrew's flag) introduced various tracks, all of it tremendously goodhearted and with nobody that I saw taking any actual offence whatsoever, and they stormed through with banners flying high. Perfect gig, arguably - the show finished with everyone happy, throats raw from singing, eyes shining, the room charged to the limit with energy. Loved it, and I'm really glad that such a genuinely deserving band received such a fantastic response at such a special show.
Normally I try to get out relatively quickly after a gig, but in this case I was slowed by needing to stick with Jim, Keri, and Gav (who had shown up some time after us) and it seemed like everyone had something they needed to do or someone they needed to talk to. The upside of this was that I got to say hi and shake hands with both Maelstrom's frontman and Ravenage's Glyn, the latter of whom on hearing that I was from Whitby asked if I could get them a gig there(!). Even when we were done in the venue, that still wasn't the last of the shenanigans, as apparently Jim was buying an old games console off one of his mates and needed to go and fetch it. Keri, Gav and I stood around outside in a state of some bemusement and waited for him, until Gav decided he was bored and buggered off to the pub. Jim reappeared, cardboard box in arms, and we agreed that since it was late we were probably better off going home than not.
We did, however, end up getting distracted by Jim's desire to find a particularly noteworthy street address: number one-and-a-half Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma Gate (yes, really, it does exist!) and as we wandered back we had a bit of a hair-raising time of it avoiding all the raucous drunks who seemed to have come out in absolute droves. It was proper main street meltdown territory, complete with one girl sitting on the pavement outside a club, clearly dangerously drunk, with her friends trying to get her to put her vicious-looking high heels back on "cos they won't let you in with no shoes". Personally I'd have been more worried about getting her into A&E in that state than into another bar, but that's normal people for you apparently. Once again, I fucking love being a metalhead and the general lack of brawling, drunken carnage (at least of the actually life or limb threatening variety) and obnoxious behaviour in the scene...
I wasn't sure if there was a plan when we got home, but it turned out to be "sit around, drink Relentless/wine/whisky according to preference, eat food, listen to last.fm, and BS like crazy", which I was more than down with and which sustained us until gone three in the morning. I wrote down a huge list of bands to check out off last.fm (repeatedly annoying Jim, who kept pointing out that I'd have known who they all were if I listened to his oggcast - there you go, Jim, have some publicity to make up for it) and managed to hold up, at least to my own satisfaction, my corner of a lengthy and rambling conversation that finished up with Gav casually discussing the times he'd met assorted Black Metal scene legends and causing me to go several shades of green with envy. Bed eventually beckoned, though (or living-room-sofa, in my case, and very comfy it was), especially since I knew I was going to be poked awake early next morning...
...because Jim had another mission in mind, this being to go on the Sunday-morning guided tour of Fulford battlefield. The "forgotten battle of 1066", overshadowed by its brothers Stamford Bridge and of course Hastings, Fulford was where the Norse under Harald Hardrada and Tostig Godwinson took on and broke the English under the young Earl Morcar and his brother Edwin. We got a two-hour tour, conducted by Charles Jones, the archaeologist whose team discovered the site and did most of the research that's been carried out there; it was amazing to be able to walk the line of the English shieldwall and look out at a landscape which had barely changed (modulo a couple of metres up or down here and there) since the day of the battle. I was pleased to discover that all my years of Warhammer and 40K have apparently paid off, as my understanding of real battle tactics turns out to be a lot better than I'd realised - as Jones was explaining what had happened and who had fought where, I was nodding along and even occasionally extrapolating ahead and then finding out I was right, which was very cool.
Sadly, that was the very last iteration of the tour, because barring a miracle (which we aren't going to get, I fear) a bloody housing development is about to be dumped right on top of where the shieldwall ran, and nobody's going to have the joy of seeing the battlefield intact ever again. :( Fucking heartbreaking, but apparently there's nothing for it; the developers and planners seem to have proper stitched this one up. May the ghosts of Northumbria's valiant fallen rise up and plague them all...
Having done that, and nearly frozen in the process, Jim and I headed back to mine, where I'd agreed to let him stay so that next day he could go and hunt razorshell clams on Filey Brigg. This was going to require a disgustingly early start - high tide being 9.30 and Filey being an hour's drive away - but for some godsforsaken reason we still stayed up stupidly late. Getting up next morning was not going to be fun.
Lo and behold, it truly wasn't. The drive down to Filey in the Intergalactic Battlecruiser, belting out XIV Dark Centuries and Ravenage, made up for a lot, but on reaching the Brigg and getting out of the car we realised just how fucking cold it was. The thermometer read 2 degrees Celsius - adding in the windchill on Filey's sweepingly broad and completely undefended beach, I reckon it must have been effectively below freezing out there. We prowled along the tidemark, Jim scowling at the sand in search of the telltale holes that apparently indicate the presence of his desired prey, me attempting to help but mostly admiring the view of the Brigg in the sunshine and trying not to freeze.
But... no razorshells. Not a bivalve to be seen, though plenty of empty shells turned up. Eventually we admitted defeat and went back to the car. By a fortuitous chance, though, our route home would take us right past my parents' house, so I rang ahead and it was agreed that we could come in for a cup of tea and a warm. Which was nice. Cheers mum and dad!
Some time later, we returned to my house where, since Jim had missed out on adding one new food item to his life list, I agreed to make him a different new thing to try instead: my by-this-point-notorious semlor recipe. I still suspect that these low-fi culinary necroabominations would give any actual Swedish person fits. But then, given that I basically only started making these as a tribute to the one and only Per Yngve Ohlin (♥), they bloody well ought to be as evil as fuck - and so they generally are.
But they do taste nice (as Jim confirms, to the point that he's challenged me to a Black Metal bake-off - seriously, I don't even - which of course I am delighted to accept). So that was a success, at least, although by this stage of the day I was rapidly realising that I had, indeed, caught a cold. Jim went home later that evening, I fell over in a state of rapid decline, and that's basically been all she wrote between then and now as I have felt like death ALL WEEK.
...I did have a great time before it all ended in sneezing, though. ^_^ Many thanks to Keri and Gav for their hospitality, Jim for the driving and general company, and let's do some more of that sometime! \m/
Laters,
Rath