Anotherblog

Jet lag gone

Jet Lag Gone
It took a week, but the jet lag is finally gone. I’ve been tremendously lazy in that time, just pottering about the house tidying up with Anna, and watching DVDs. Currently getting thoroughly stuck into The Beidebecke Affair again. Just as marvellous as I remember. Anna’s already watched all of the Prime Suspect DVDs, and I’ve made a bit of a start on the Marx Brothers collection. And we’ve watched several of the Ripping Yarns.

Anyway, it’s getting high-on time to do some more Film Forensics. I meant to make a start last weekend, but I did a little work on the Spit albums instead, and send off a CD to Ev today.

Back again

Back again
We’re still feeling a bit jet-lagged. I was up at 4:00am this morning, quite unable to sleep any more although I had managed to stay up until 10:00pm and had no naps during the day. The last few days have passed in a bit of a daze. Bother.

Anyway, yes, we stayed at the B&B until the 16th, then took off with Mum & Dad for a small village near Peterborough, where they are living in a charming thatched cottage, which Mum dislikes because it’s too small. Still charming, though. We spent a few days there and abouts, and it was very nice indeed. We went to Cambridge for a day trip and went around a bus tour and had a punt on the Cam, and the weather continued to be extremely nice to us. Then on the 20th we headed over to London and did more bus tours and stayed at a fancy hotel using Anna’s bartercard, and saw many touristy things (Tower of London, National Gallery), and bought many more DVDs, and saw the West End production of “The Producers”, which for my taste wasn’t nearly as good as “Jerry Springer: The Opera”. Finally, met up with friend Lnr for lunch on Saturday, and flew out on Saturday evening, at which point the miasma of tiredness descended.

Perhaps I will write more of this later when the tiredness goes away.

Back in the UK

Back in the UK
And what a nice trip it was to Ireland, to be sure. Actually, “To be sure” is a phrase rarely used, from what I could tell. I was already fairly familiar with the modern Irish vernacular from my time at Baltimore Tech, surrounded by Irishfolk, but being in Ireland reminded me of a couple of choice phrases:

Phrasing in the negative:
- Do you not?
- Is it not that …
- Would you not be interested in …

Using “Yourself”:
“Will you be sitting yourself down”?
“Yourself and your friend…”

“Mad”, used as one of “Cool”, “Wicked”, “Daring” and “Stupid” depending on context.

Anyway. We spent our last full day in Ireland in Dublin, browsing through the Book of Kells and other illustrated manuscripts, visiting the Custom House and reading excruciating detail of the potato famine and poverty in Ireland, and being consumers. I grabbed the 3 DVD set of “The Shawshank Redemption”, and a box of Marx Brothers films that had “Duck Soup” and three others (”Horse Feathers” was one - the point, however, being that they were the four major Marx Brothers films I didn’t have.

Yesterday was filled with travel. We were flying Ryanair to Ireland, and the tickets were so ridiculously cheap that even with booking fees and airport duties, the bus trip from Stanstead airport to Reading cost more than the plane flight.

We’re getting thoroughly stuffed with food. I will definitely be back on “no sweets” when I get back to Sydney.

The plan today: lounge about at Jen’s place, and watch as much Father Ted as we can stand.

The Crying Game

The Crying Game
You remember the bit at the beginning of “The Crying Game” where the Forrest Whittacer character was kidnapped just outside a fairground? He gets seduced down to the river’s edge and then forced into a boat. Anyway, we went to that location last night to get an Indian takeaway, and earlier in the day, wandered along the shoreline there. Also yesterday, we went to the castle in which the concluding scenes of “Braveheart” were filmed, starring Aodhagan’s forehead.

Dublin
Off to Dublin today to explore the Book of Kells and other such wonders. The weather is still lovely, and still windy. When will this run of luck end?

England

England
We were in England from Wednesday to Sunday, and very nice it was there too. Did I mention I’m a minor weather god? Whenever I go on holidays, the weather is nice. Well, the weather has been nice. Anna and I stayed at a B&B nearby Jen & Marco’s place, and we have spent very much time with Sophia and Sara and Jen, while Marco went off to work. Sophia and Sara are lovely. About three months old now, just at the point of smiling and making everyone simultaneously say “Awwww…”. Sara doesn’t cry often, but when she does it’s a fully fledged tantrum: Sophia crying more often but never as violently.

We did some touristy things: drove to Bath on Thursday, toured the Roman baths and admired the city, bought chocolates and excellent fudge and other sweets and devoured them on the way home. Went over to Marco’s parents’ place on Friday, and into London with them and into the British museum so that Anna could try to steal back the Parthenon Marbles, and stick her finger up the nose of a marble goat’s head.

Saturday, Marco acquired tickets for the West End production of “Jerry Springer: The Opera” on the same night it was controversially showing on the BBC. It was fantastic. The theatre was quite small, and we were only a few metres from the stage. Very excellent opera, and the two comedy tricks it used again and again didn’t get old, for some reason: the first, the juxtaposition of operatic singing with extremely rude subject matter (”What the fuck! What the fuck! What the fucking fucking fuck!” the theme of an operatic solo), and the second, having people endlessly singing half a word or sentence while everyone else looks at their watches. But yeah, very profane, and very, very funny, though the second half didn’t quite hold up to the promise of the first (the first half being a representative Jerry Springer Show, and the second half being set in hell with biblical figures reprising the conflicts of the first half - nice idea, but not quite as elegant as the idea promised). I bought a copy of the album, and played it for Claire and Eodhagan, and they loved it too. Definitely not something the folks would like, though.

And on Sunday, we set off early for the airport, and arrived at the departure gate only just in time, thanks to buses replacing one of the trains, and very long lines for the security checks.

Anna does something uncharacteristically silly
Part of the holdup at the airport was because when we went through the security check, Anna got pulled aside, and they searched through her handbag, very carefully, checking everything in turn. Just as we were beginning to think they were being rather overly paranoid, right at the end the guard pulled out a penknife from the bottom of the bag. I burst out laughing. We had decided not to take everything to Ireland, so we repacked our bags and left most of them with Jen and Marco. Anyway, Anna had taken a penknife in the main bag, but when we transferred stuff into the smaller bags, had also transferred the knife without thinking.

To add insult to amusement, it was actually *my* penknife that Anna had borrowed. So now she owes me a penknife.

Ireland

Ireland
We’re in Ireland at the moment, staying with Claire and Aodhagan in a country house just outside a small village (Julianstown) a hundred kilometres or so away from Dublin. It’s grand. The weather has been mostly very nice, despite the dire warnings of extreme winds - we’ve had the wind storms at night, when it merely serves to make bedtime all the more snuggly. By day we’ve been seeing the odd five-thousand-year-old monument, or five hundred year old castle, or two hundred year old pub. That sort of thing.

Driving along many, many country lanes with hedgerows on either side making it seem like we’re driving through a rather green version of pacman. A distant dustcloud that resolves itself as an insanely large number of crows flapping around over a newly ploughed field. The wind on the top of a hill, so strong our ears and cheeks become numb and by the time we’re back in the car we’re talking like Joan Cusack. A black cloud whipping overhead, depositing a thin layer of sleet over the car, and then ten minutes later, the sun out and the cloud never existed.

Nice. Or as any here, Kath & Kim addicts, would say: Noooice.