Incoherent and lengthy gushing (it's been a bloody good fortnight)
Ok, first off, just before I went away last week I got offered a job out of the blue for September next year, teaching on a graphic novel diploma course for the University of East Anglia. I was planning to turn them down because I didn’t think I’d really be qualified and I’ve had enough experience with under-qualified teachers, so I didn’t want to become one but I’m now seriously reconsidering. I don’t have to give them any definite answer until Easter though.
The course I went on was based in a big converted farmhouse called the Hurst out in the Shropshire wilds. The studio was a nicely converted barn with slate tiles on the ground floor, a big Japanese-style wooden bench/table area and books stacked on virtually every available surface surrounded by forest and dilapidated stables and storage sheds that reminded me of the storehouses I used to play in when I was little. The views of the hillside were absolutely stunning, it’s a real pity there wasn’t time to go rambling around the estate. The train station was called “Craven Arms” which made it sound like a pub (and to be fair there were a few drunks scattered around it). The nearest village was called Clum, and all the others on the way had typical frumpy English names that sort of added to the charm of it.
I probably would have been nervous about meeting new people and the fact that I was the last person to get in and be introduced, but to be honest I was preoccupied with wondering how to get a taxi in the middle of nowhere in case the Hurst minivan couldn’t pick me up (I left it till the actual day to sort that out), so I was just relieved to get there without a single hitch. And now I’m aware that I’m waffling. So.
There were the two tutors, Bryan Talbot and Steve Marchant, and there turned out to be seven other students who were a real mix of age and background:
Emily and Lily were the only ones younger than me, both about 17 I think, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of manga, animie and cosplay and far more writing/illustrative talent than any 17 year old should have a right to!
Emily’s writing a story about dragon spirits possessing humans in the modern world and two such cases, a boy and a girl, have to go on a quest to stop a bad dragon spirit with a very linear progression of collecting magic stones in a sword but I quite like the idea of it all going on in a contemporary setting and it looked like the lead characters would have an interesting chemistry. She runs a “Kingdom Hearts” RPG online so I ended up talking to her about Deus Ex Machina, got a few tips and came up with some interesting parallels.
Lily’s doing a comedic Apocalypse story in the spirit of “Dogma” or “Good Omens” (she is the only person to ever see my Good Omens tattoo and both recognise it AND think it was cool!) about a devil girl called Niney (as in the number nine) and an angel who falls to Hell but decides she doesn’t like it there and flies off before Niney can cut her wings off. I laughed my ass off at the first scene she showed me (I have full permission to use one of her tricks - a peeved silence followed by the swear word “Fuckity!” in my comic as long as I credit her copyright).
Thierry was the oldest of the students, mid 40s maybe. He grew up in France so he was bilingual, although I’m not sure if his family was actually French. He wants to write a story about a struggling haute-cuisine restaurant and the staff’s entanglements that sounded really interesting. It was all very high-brow and I could definitely see a paper like the Guardian serialising it but he wants someone else to draw it for him. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him as much as some of the others though.
Courttia’s already a published prose writer based in London and apparently an Arvon course veteran despite only being in his early thirties but he’s looking to do a trilogy of graphic novels that sound like a cross between “Blade” and “Interview with the Vampire” about two ‘daywalkers’ born from a pair of illegally enslaved African girls, the sole survivors of a ship-board vampire massacre that ploughs into the Bristol coast. The first book, the one he was working on during the course, was set entirely in the 1800s and to be honest my initial reaction was that it would of been more interesting to mix their current-day activities in London with the flashbacks to Bristol. But as he pointed out, it would probably get confusing if the story was spread out over three books rather than one, so fair enough. African vampires in 19th century Bristol is enough to peak my interest anyway.
Katie was only a couple of years older than me but ended up as student matriarch. She’d done an animation course too, although hers was a lot shorter but a hell of a lot more thorough considering it was with some real Ardmaan animators she was taught by and not just a couple of Hull pissheads (Me? Bitter? Surely not!). I got the wrong end of the stick at first and thought she was doing something about her cartoon rabbit character because she said she hated anything with gore or violence (Courttia based a description of one his characters looking like a vegan in a butcher’s shop entirely on her) but it turns out she wants to write and illustrate an all-out autobiography about dealing with the after-effects of abuse. I just marvelled at how brave it was to lay out something so personal in front of a group of strangers in such an honest way. (I mean, some of my stories are based on personal experiences but that’s because I’ve got fictional characters and metaphors to hide behind!) She wasn’t feeling too well at one point though, and apparently painkillers make her hallucinate so it was a shame that I didn’t see her as much as some of the others. I really regret not going over with a mug of green tea for her or something. I love the little emails she’s been sending us all since she got back because they’re so funny and sincere.
Nic works for Ceefax news in Norwich and it turns out he literally lives about 25 minutes down the road from me, so I plan to meet up with him in the new year. I think the fact that he’ll roll with laughter at almost anything, including his own jokes, squicked everyone out a wee bit but he was very easy to talk to, had impeccable taste in music and is a really good writer. He’s writing about a series of murders within the London Chinese community based around ancient torture methods used in some myth about rival suitors for a Princess. I mentioned the China exhibit I’d seen in London back in July and he seemed gutted that he’d missed it so I’m going to drop off the big-ass catalogue book I got there for him to use as visual reference for the antiques or mythological flashbacks he wants to include. It’s good to know there’s now two people in Norwich, both him and Marc, who I can natter about comics with in person without leaving the city and without getting bogged down in the typical art school spiel about 50’s censorship or Superman!
Rob, who ended up being my cooking partner, had been doing stuff for the comics small press for a while now I think. I chatted with him while we were cooking/washing up and I saw a vampire story he illustrated for a 2000AD-style anthology a while ago. Now he wants to write something himself that’s not so fantastical about an escaped serial killer out on the Moors. He gets taken in by a religious old man whose son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren he murdered, but he doesn’t realise that, even though the old man knows who he is. It looks like a really tense psychological story that would probably make a brilliant film if he could get the right people interested (yes I know, comics are a medium in their own right, not a platform to others, but at least film adaptation = more money to make more comics!).
There was also Peter and Kerry, The Hurst ‘caretakers’, an Australian couple who I think were both poets there to run things and help out with whichever pair was doing the cooking or washing up. They had an adorable little two year old as well, Pearl, who really didn’t fit the typical ‘all children are little drunks’ approach I normally use with kids. She really was more like a tiny adult, she could even draw! If I ever have kids, the best I could hope for is that they turn out like her.
And then of course there was Steve and Bryan. I felt bad for never having heard of Steve before, he’s an old-school punk with two books on how to draw cartoons out and he’s been working for the London Cartoon Centre for years! He was mainly in charge of convincing the writers that they could draw and we did some really fun ice-breaker workshops with him on the first day. He also gave me some really good criticism on the pacing for one of the stories I’d already thumbnailed out. He gave us copies of some auto-biographical stories he’d done and I absolutely loved them, real funny bittersweet stuff about the ups and downs of his love-life. I stayed up a couple of nights drinking with him into the small hours (who am I kidding, I stayed up every night! But there were only two where it ended up with just me and him… I think he said he had a thyroid problem or something so he never goes to bed before about 4am… anyway) I talked to him about his experiences teaching all over the country and told him about the job offer to teach at the UEA in case he fancied the job. He wouldn’t be able to commute between London and Norwich often enough but what he said made me totally revaluate the idea of doing it myself.
Bryan was equally lovely (although not so good at holding his alcohol!). He looked at two of my scripts but didn’t really have any suggestions other than a few minor tweaks to the dialogue, nothing about the pacing or the layout, even though he seemed to have a lot to say about other people’s (he pretty much did Emily, Couttia and Thierry’s thumbnails for them). So hopefully that means that what I’m doing is good. He actually asked me why I’d come on the course because he didn’t feel like there was much he could show me, even though I felt like I learned a huge amount from the talks he did on “One Bad Rat” and “Heart of Empire”, the use of subliminal imagery, tricks of layout using spirals or the golden ratio, use of eyelevel and horizon/vanishing point to get a reader to identify with a character, etc. All really useful stuff I’d had NO idea about previously that will no doubt affect everything I draw from now on. It was funny to watch Bryan get chattier and more honest as he worked his way through the red wine every night but then he’d be fine each morning. And he had this huge back catalogue of anecdotes about conventions and jobs he’d done to keep meal times interesting. I particularly liked the one about Warren Ellis he told me after I mentioned him commenting on this here blog-thingy! ^_^*
I think Bryan got a bit offended when me and Courttia fell asleep on the couch during his last night talk on “Alice in Sunderland” but it couldn’t be helped. I was really interested but it was about 9pm, we’d been working all day, the room was warm and dark and Bryan’s accent was very soothing! He still gave me his address though and I promised him I’d send him my massive Dictionary of Angels book that would have some good occult reference for his new project “Cherubs”.
The guest lecturer was Posy Simmonds and it was interesting to see her preparatory work and look through all the sketchbooks she keeps, gradually evolving character designs or quick observational sketches of random people that she then browses through later when she needs a design for a minor character. Arvon had bought copies of “Gemma Bovery” in (along with “One Bad Rat”, of which I got one for Bryan to sign - *woot!*) so I bought two copies of GB which she signed, one for me with a sketch of the narrator Raymond because he’s my favourite and one for Pix, who I explained had been the one to introduce me to the book, so she got a sketch of the heroine Gemma. Should make a really good belated Christmas pressie for her!
Because everyone seemed so different and because we all had our own ‘bunk’ that no one else went in while everything else was totally communal (including the chores), I started thinking of us as a sort of Firefly crew after the first day (although I didn’t share that little delusion with anyone else). Courttia had seen “Serenity” and wasn’t hugely impressed but that’s understandable since he hadn’t seen the series. No one else had even heard of it. I only brought it up on three occasions though. Once when I was talking to Courttia about the slave ship in his script that the vampires had attacked and left full of gore with reference to “Bushwacked” about what you don’t see sometimes being scarier, once when Bryan talked about how anti-Vietnam the original Star Trek was which I agreed with before going on to ramble about how “Serenity” could be read as being about the ‘pre-emptive’ War on Terror and generally about the U.S./U.K. meddling with things they shouldn’t and then one last time when I was talking with Lily on the train home about “Fantasia” and ended up re-enacting the Wash with toy dinosaurs moment with plastic tea cups, which made Lily want to check it out. So maybe two or three converts made without coming across as too obsessive! *grin*
I got back from Shropshire late Saturday night, resisted hiding in my room and hung out with Marc and Amy and some of their mates who’d come round for a bit then slept right through till about 4pm the next day. Didn’t even get out of bed ‘till Marc yelled that “Hogfather” was on Sky One just before 8. Which we were able to watch because we got satellite telly while I was away! Yes! It was a night of Terry Prattchett, “Buffalo Soldiers” and “A Clockwork Orange”, joy of joys!
I hate cooking when it’s just for me but I miss cooking/eating with the Arvon crew already (I blame the KesMuse - she’d of been a chef if she wasn’t an illiterate mutant savage), so it was kind of opportune that Marc mentioned he was cooking Tai for a bunch of Amy’s friends and offered me some as well. I offered to cook my famous Apple Crumble as dessert, which didn’t really fit with the Tai theme but did let me feel like I was contributing and gave Amy an excuse to buy some ice-cream in, which was good!
Last night was Marc and Amy’s last night in the house before X-Mas and there was a bit of a funny incident. I was up at about 2am, I was watching “5th Element” in bed. Marc just wandered in wearing nothing but his boxers, mumbled something incoherent and flopped onto the end of the bed. I didn’t really appreciate the random intrusion but just assumed he was drunk and the pair had another fight or something. But then he made his way up the mattress and started trying to crawl into the bed with me and we ended up having this sort-of mini tug-of-war with the covers because I was only wearing a pair of pants and had the duvet tucked over my chest. Then the StacyMuse kicked in and I ended up shoving him away with my foot and yelling “Marc! What the fuck?” and he just grunted incoherently, got up, walked into my cardboard cut-out of Elvira, stood facing the wall for a minute, grunted again, then wandered off. While I was wrapping myself up in a cow print fleece Amy called me from their room asking where he was and I had to just double check he wasn’t sprawled on the floor of my room anywhere. Turns out he’d made it downstairs and was sleepwalking! Damn eerie considering I thought his eyes were open (but if people can fall asleep with their eyes open I’m assuming they can quite feasibly sleepwalk too). Once Amy explained it (and reassured me that I hadn’t woken him up and done some weird brain damage to him or anything, because I thought waking them up in that state was supposed to be dangerous) I couldn’t stop chuckling. Still can’t. It was funny listening to her herding him back to bed and even funnier when I saw Marc in the morning! And I realised that if I can laugh about that then I must be over the whole break-in with the random people wandering into my room back in Hull, which is really cheering thought... The being over it, I mean! Heh.
To top it off it was the Sweet factory X-Mas dinner today: boss-lady bought each of us Oompa Loompas a mahusive bottle of Baileys and was handing out X-Mas cards stuffed with £50 cash in! Woot!
I’m homeward bound tomorrow and even though I planned on coming back on the 28th, I think I might postpone until January because if I do New Years with Marc and Amy there’s a good chance I will get hideously drunk, spend hours playing that weird Mario Party game on the GameCube and do absolutely no work. The fact that it’s fancy dress makes it VERY tempting though. Marc said he’s gonna go out dressed as Brian Blessed’s Hawkman character from Flash Gordon, which should be hilarious considering he’s skinny as a rake and I want to see just how close he comes to freezing to death!
The course I went on was based in a big converted farmhouse called the Hurst out in the Shropshire wilds. The studio was a nicely converted barn with slate tiles on the ground floor, a big Japanese-style wooden bench/table area and books stacked on virtually every available surface surrounded by forest and dilapidated stables and storage sheds that reminded me of the storehouses I used to play in when I was little. The views of the hillside were absolutely stunning, it’s a real pity there wasn’t time to go rambling around the estate. The train station was called “Craven Arms” which made it sound like a pub (and to be fair there were a few drunks scattered around it). The nearest village was called Clum, and all the others on the way had typical frumpy English names that sort of added to the charm of it.
I probably would have been nervous about meeting new people and the fact that I was the last person to get in and be introduced, but to be honest I was preoccupied with wondering how to get a taxi in the middle of nowhere in case the Hurst minivan couldn’t pick me up (I left it till the actual day to sort that out), so I was just relieved to get there without a single hitch. And now I’m aware that I’m waffling. So.
There were the two tutors, Bryan Talbot and Steve Marchant, and there turned out to be seven other students who were a real mix of age and background:
Emily and Lily were the only ones younger than me, both about 17 I think, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of manga, animie and cosplay and far more writing/illustrative talent than any 17 year old should have a right to!
Emily’s writing a story about dragon spirits possessing humans in the modern world and two such cases, a boy and a girl, have to go on a quest to stop a bad dragon spirit with a very linear progression of collecting magic stones in a sword but I quite like the idea of it all going on in a contemporary setting and it looked like the lead characters would have an interesting chemistry. She runs a “Kingdom Hearts” RPG online so I ended up talking to her about Deus Ex Machina, got a few tips and came up with some interesting parallels.
Lily’s doing a comedic Apocalypse story in the spirit of “Dogma” or “Good Omens” (she is the only person to ever see my Good Omens tattoo and both recognise it AND think it was cool!) about a devil girl called Niney (as in the number nine) and an angel who falls to Hell but decides she doesn’t like it there and flies off before Niney can cut her wings off. I laughed my ass off at the first scene she showed me (I have full permission to use one of her tricks - a peeved silence followed by the swear word “Fuckity!” in my comic as long as I credit her copyright).
Thierry was the oldest of the students, mid 40s maybe. He grew up in France so he was bilingual, although I’m not sure if his family was actually French. He wants to write a story about a struggling haute-cuisine restaurant and the staff’s entanglements that sounded really interesting. It was all very high-brow and I could definitely see a paper like the Guardian serialising it but he wants someone else to draw it for him. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him as much as some of the others though.
Courttia’s already a published prose writer based in London and apparently an Arvon course veteran despite only being in his early thirties but he’s looking to do a trilogy of graphic novels that sound like a cross between “Blade” and “Interview with the Vampire” about two ‘daywalkers’ born from a pair of illegally enslaved African girls, the sole survivors of a ship-board vampire massacre that ploughs into the Bristol coast. The first book, the one he was working on during the course, was set entirely in the 1800s and to be honest my initial reaction was that it would of been more interesting to mix their current-day activities in London with the flashbacks to Bristol. But as he pointed out, it would probably get confusing if the story was spread out over three books rather than one, so fair enough. African vampires in 19th century Bristol is enough to peak my interest anyway.
Katie was only a couple of years older than me but ended up as student matriarch. She’d done an animation course too, although hers was a lot shorter but a hell of a lot more thorough considering it was with some real Ardmaan animators she was taught by and not just a couple of Hull pissheads (Me? Bitter? Surely not!). I got the wrong end of the stick at first and thought she was doing something about her cartoon rabbit character because she said she hated anything with gore or violence (Courttia based a description of one his characters looking like a vegan in a butcher’s shop entirely on her) but it turns out she wants to write and illustrate an all-out autobiography about dealing with the after-effects of abuse. I just marvelled at how brave it was to lay out something so personal in front of a group of strangers in such an honest way. (I mean, some of my stories are based on personal experiences but that’s because I’ve got fictional characters and metaphors to hide behind!) She wasn’t feeling too well at one point though, and apparently painkillers make her hallucinate so it was a shame that I didn’t see her as much as some of the others. I really regret not going over with a mug of green tea for her or something. I love the little emails she’s been sending us all since she got back because they’re so funny and sincere.
Nic works for Ceefax news in Norwich and it turns out he literally lives about 25 minutes down the road from me, so I plan to meet up with him in the new year. I think the fact that he’ll roll with laughter at almost anything, including his own jokes, squicked everyone out a wee bit but he was very easy to talk to, had impeccable taste in music and is a really good writer. He’s writing about a series of murders within the London Chinese community based around ancient torture methods used in some myth about rival suitors for a Princess. I mentioned the China exhibit I’d seen in London back in July and he seemed gutted that he’d missed it so I’m going to drop off the big-ass catalogue book I got there for him to use as visual reference for the antiques or mythological flashbacks he wants to include. It’s good to know there’s now two people in Norwich, both him and Marc, who I can natter about comics with in person without leaving the city and without getting bogged down in the typical art school spiel about 50’s censorship or Superman!
Rob, who ended up being my cooking partner, had been doing stuff for the comics small press for a while now I think. I chatted with him while we were cooking/washing up and I saw a vampire story he illustrated for a 2000AD-style anthology a while ago. Now he wants to write something himself that’s not so fantastical about an escaped serial killer out on the Moors. He gets taken in by a religious old man whose son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren he murdered, but he doesn’t realise that, even though the old man knows who he is. It looks like a really tense psychological story that would probably make a brilliant film if he could get the right people interested (yes I know, comics are a medium in their own right, not a platform to others, but at least film adaptation = more money to make more comics!).
There was also Peter and Kerry, The Hurst ‘caretakers’, an Australian couple who I think were both poets there to run things and help out with whichever pair was doing the cooking or washing up. They had an adorable little two year old as well, Pearl, who really didn’t fit the typical ‘all children are little drunks’ approach I normally use with kids. She really was more like a tiny adult, she could even draw! If I ever have kids, the best I could hope for is that they turn out like her.
And then of course there was Steve and Bryan. I felt bad for never having heard of Steve before, he’s an old-school punk with two books on how to draw cartoons out and he’s been working for the London Cartoon Centre for years! He was mainly in charge of convincing the writers that they could draw and we did some really fun ice-breaker workshops with him on the first day. He also gave me some really good criticism on the pacing for one of the stories I’d already thumbnailed out. He gave us copies of some auto-biographical stories he’d done and I absolutely loved them, real funny bittersweet stuff about the ups and downs of his love-life. I stayed up a couple of nights drinking with him into the small hours (who am I kidding, I stayed up every night! But there were only two where it ended up with just me and him… I think he said he had a thyroid problem or something so he never goes to bed before about 4am… anyway) I talked to him about his experiences teaching all over the country and told him about the job offer to teach at the UEA in case he fancied the job. He wouldn’t be able to commute between London and Norwich often enough but what he said made me totally revaluate the idea of doing it myself.
Bryan was equally lovely (although not so good at holding his alcohol!). He looked at two of my scripts but didn’t really have any suggestions other than a few minor tweaks to the dialogue, nothing about the pacing or the layout, even though he seemed to have a lot to say about other people’s (he pretty much did Emily, Couttia and Thierry’s thumbnails for them). So hopefully that means that what I’m doing is good. He actually asked me why I’d come on the course because he didn’t feel like there was much he could show me, even though I felt like I learned a huge amount from the talks he did on “One Bad Rat” and “Heart of Empire”, the use of subliminal imagery, tricks of layout using spirals or the golden ratio, use of eyelevel and horizon/vanishing point to get a reader to identify with a character, etc. All really useful stuff I’d had NO idea about previously that will no doubt affect everything I draw from now on. It was funny to watch Bryan get chattier and more honest as he worked his way through the red wine every night but then he’d be fine each morning. And he had this huge back catalogue of anecdotes about conventions and jobs he’d done to keep meal times interesting. I particularly liked the one about Warren Ellis he told me after I mentioned him commenting on this here blog-thingy! ^_^*
I think Bryan got a bit offended when me and Courttia fell asleep on the couch during his last night talk on “Alice in Sunderland” but it couldn’t be helped. I was really interested but it was about 9pm, we’d been working all day, the room was warm and dark and Bryan’s accent was very soothing! He still gave me his address though and I promised him I’d send him my massive Dictionary of Angels book that would have some good occult reference for his new project “Cherubs”.
The guest lecturer was Posy Simmonds and it was interesting to see her preparatory work and look through all the sketchbooks she keeps, gradually evolving character designs or quick observational sketches of random people that she then browses through later when she needs a design for a minor character. Arvon had bought copies of “Gemma Bovery” in (along with “One Bad Rat”, of which I got one for Bryan to sign - *woot!*) so I bought two copies of GB which she signed, one for me with a sketch of the narrator Raymond because he’s my favourite and one for Pix, who I explained had been the one to introduce me to the book, so she got a sketch of the heroine Gemma. Should make a really good belated Christmas pressie for her!
Because everyone seemed so different and because we all had our own ‘bunk’ that no one else went in while everything else was totally communal (including the chores), I started thinking of us as a sort of Firefly crew after the first day (although I didn’t share that little delusion with anyone else). Courttia had seen “Serenity” and wasn’t hugely impressed but that’s understandable since he hadn’t seen the series. No one else had even heard of it. I only brought it up on three occasions though. Once when I was talking to Courttia about the slave ship in his script that the vampires had attacked and left full of gore with reference to “Bushwacked” about what you don’t see sometimes being scarier, once when Bryan talked about how anti-Vietnam the original Star Trek was which I agreed with before going on to ramble about how “Serenity” could be read as being about the ‘pre-emptive’ War on Terror and generally about the U.S./U.K. meddling with things they shouldn’t and then one last time when I was talking with Lily on the train home about “Fantasia” and ended up re-enacting the Wash with toy dinosaurs moment with plastic tea cups, which made Lily want to check it out. So maybe two or three converts made without coming across as too obsessive! *grin*
I got back from Shropshire late Saturday night, resisted hiding in my room and hung out with Marc and Amy and some of their mates who’d come round for a bit then slept right through till about 4pm the next day. Didn’t even get out of bed ‘till Marc yelled that “Hogfather” was on Sky One just before 8. Which we were able to watch because we got satellite telly while I was away! Yes! It was a night of Terry Prattchett, “Buffalo Soldiers” and “A Clockwork Orange”, joy of joys!
I hate cooking when it’s just for me but I miss cooking/eating with the Arvon crew already (I blame the KesMuse - she’d of been a chef if she wasn’t an illiterate mutant savage), so it was kind of opportune that Marc mentioned he was cooking Tai for a bunch of Amy’s friends and offered me some as well. I offered to cook my famous Apple Crumble as dessert, which didn’t really fit with the Tai theme but did let me feel like I was contributing and gave Amy an excuse to buy some ice-cream in, which was good!
Last night was Marc and Amy’s last night in the house before X-Mas and there was a bit of a funny incident. I was up at about 2am, I was watching “5th Element” in bed. Marc just wandered in wearing nothing but his boxers, mumbled something incoherent and flopped onto the end of the bed. I didn’t really appreciate the random intrusion but just assumed he was drunk and the pair had another fight or something. But then he made his way up the mattress and started trying to crawl into the bed with me and we ended up having this sort-of mini tug-of-war with the covers because I was only wearing a pair of pants and had the duvet tucked over my chest. Then the StacyMuse kicked in and I ended up shoving him away with my foot and yelling “Marc! What the fuck?” and he just grunted incoherently, got up, walked into my cardboard cut-out of Elvira, stood facing the wall for a minute, grunted again, then wandered off. While I was wrapping myself up in a cow print fleece Amy called me from their room asking where he was and I had to just double check he wasn’t sprawled on the floor of my room anywhere. Turns out he’d made it downstairs and was sleepwalking! Damn eerie considering I thought his eyes were open (but if people can fall asleep with their eyes open I’m assuming they can quite feasibly sleepwalk too). Once Amy explained it (and reassured me that I hadn’t woken him up and done some weird brain damage to him or anything, because I thought waking them up in that state was supposed to be dangerous) I couldn’t stop chuckling. Still can’t. It was funny listening to her herding him back to bed and even funnier when I saw Marc in the morning! And I realised that if I can laugh about that then I must be over the whole break-in with the random people wandering into my room back in Hull, which is really cheering thought... The being over it, I mean! Heh.
To top it off it was the Sweet factory X-Mas dinner today: boss-lady bought each of us Oompa Loompas a mahusive bottle of Baileys and was handing out X-Mas cards stuffed with £50 cash in! Woot!
I’m homeward bound tomorrow and even though I planned on coming back on the 28th, I think I might postpone until January because if I do New Years with Marc and Amy there’s a good chance I will get hideously drunk, spend hours playing that weird Mario Party game on the GameCube and do absolutely no work. The fact that it’s fancy dress makes it VERY tempting though. Marc said he’s gonna go out dressed as Brian Blessed’s Hawkman character from Flash Gordon, which should be hilarious considering he’s skinny as a rake and I want to see just how close he comes to freezing to death!