10 entries tagged
diary
We were going to go see the Moscow State Circus, but then
several of us collectively decided it was far too cold to sit in
a tent so we went round to Jo’s to play Cheapass Games instead. Jeremy
and I haven’t played Parts
Unknown since we binged on it with Adrian and Alex at Aviemore (it is possible we have too many
Cheapass games, since we don’t play them often enough to
work through them all faster that that). Jeremy also read out
Martin Hand’s account of Caption 2001. It seems
Caption 2001 succeeded surprisingly well at fostering romance
amongst the attendees. We’ll have to ask him if it is OK
to add it to the site...
I took Thursday and Friday off so I could catch up on all
those chores I have been neglecting—repairing the
puncture that has kept me off my bike
for a month or so, starting Christmas shopping, captioning for
the Caption 2001
photos, buying train tickets for visiting my mother on
Mull,
and so on. Instead I wasted Thursday doing the SVG demo (a reaction to
frustration at work), and spent Friday lying in bed sick, and
wasn’t up to much on Saturday either. So today Jeremy and
I finally tackled the garden a bit, finished the repairs to
my bike, and then walked to the train station (there being no
useful busses on account of an anti-war march), bought the
tickets, and continued down
Botley
Road
to Toys ’R’
Us where we tried to find toys to suit our respective nephews
(no nieces yet). Since my brother Mike’s
son Darren is not quite a year old yet (born 03-02-01),
he’s something of a challenge to find suitable toys for.
Then on to
Habitat to check out this season’s fairy lights and
try out sofas we could not house even if we could afford them.
On the way home we dropped in at the local Odeon to watch
The Others, an excellent ghost story in which
Nichole Kidman does very good mad starey eyes.
We spent Saturday evening and night in an orgy of
present-wrapping for our respective extended families. It
was also my sister Rachel’s birthday today.
Sunday was Jeremy’s sister Ellés Xmas party, so we
got to offload the first one-third of the christmas booty
(Jeremy’s sisters and nephew Tiimu),
leaving me with the sack that goes south to my father’s
family and the sack that goes north with us to visit my mother
on Mull.
Today I was visited by my mother and my sister Kate. Since
Kate uses a wheelchair I have learned a lot about the kerbs
along the length of Cowley Road. Ironically a lot of the
obstructions are caused by work on repairing and improving
access for wheelchairs: too bad they could not have taken more
notice of my family’s itinery and get them done a week
earlier...:-) Our back garden sadly looks a little
desolate in winter (pretty much bare earth with some sad-looking
twigs poking out), but to Kate’s Australia-adapted eye
even that looks novel.
I’m now back from a week-long visit to my mother’s in
Tobermory on the
Isle of Mull. (Mull is an island off
the west coast of Scotland with a total population of perhaps
3000.) Altogether we had my mum Jenny, her husband Dave, and
their dogs Tubbs, Sacha, and Jerome; myself and Jeremy (from
Oxford); my siblings Mike (Dundee), Kate
(Brisbane in Australia),
and Rachel (Guilford);
Mike’s baby son Darren; and sometimes Mum’s stray
boy Iain and his dog Buster. My reader will doubtless
appreciate that even in a relatively large house this
constitutes quite a crowd... Still we survived with no
casualties, and even got off the island and on the way home
before the Great Storms began and the ferries were cancelled.
Darren is 10 months old and cute as a button. He spent a lot of
his time on Mull crawling at speed up and down corridors and up
and down the various adults who were trying to deflect him from
anything heavy or small enough to try to eat or big enough to
try to eat him. Actually of my Mum’s dogs,
Jerome (the biggest) is no threat; it is Sacha’s misguided
attempts to mother him that might have been a problem if we had
not kept an eye on him.
Today Jeremy and I took the coach in
to London to
visit the Tate
Modern. We thought we had already missed the 2001 exhibit
Surrealism: Desire
Unbound, but no! we were in luck. Some four hours later we
tottered out, tired and £8·50 poorer but greatly edified. They
had one room which was basically gossip about the Surrealist
movement members, illustrated with the books of poetry or
collage or photographs that resulted. Considering how chaste
the period in question (1930s, 1940s) is usually represented in
modern fiction, it’s interesting how many permutations they
came up with: many in the Surrealism movement believed in what
was then called free love and nowadays sometimes called polyamory. The
sections on erotic
art and erotic
objects was good fun. Those crazy Czechs with their lewd
photomontages and unspellable names! Jeremy was
annoyed that work by female Surrealists got little
mention except in the
room about Surrealism’s depiction of women.
This despite the women’s work being often being more
interesting to the modern eye—the men’s talk of
muses and idealized lovers looking more dated today (it was more
radical in, say, 1930). Bought a floppy clock (the Tate is
taking the opportunity to sell more interesting merchandise) and
then tried to figure out from where one was supposed to view the Juan
Muñoz installation. First we looked down at it from the
highest gallery level, but eventually we worked out you are
supposed to look at it from below! By this time the gallery was
closing so we
staggered home feeling very culturally stimulated.
One of the signs of adulthood, I once said, is the first
party you throw where one of the guests brings a baby. This
happened to Ian and Ruth when they volunteered to be this
year s (or last year’s) New Year’s Eve party
venue: Dan and Lucy brought with them tiny Nathaniel (a bare
few months old). Given Lucy’s profession (genetics
research) involves
inseminating frogs through a process that is fatal to the male
frogs, we were relieved to see that Dan is still hale and hearty
(or perhaps she replaced him with another
genetically identical copy). Jenni (visiting from the US) have
me a fantastic Xmas pressent: a framed drawing by Matt Feazell.
Today Jeremy and I spent mainly recuperating (Jeremy has a
lousy cold right now) but after a while we felt we had to go
stomping out in the cold bright winter sunshine through one of
the bits of green that the Oxford map is liberally daubed
with. I took the opportunity to phone my Dad while ducking
under ivy-laden branches to say Happy New Year. Phoning my
parents while Jeremy is throwing sticks at frozen rivers is
becoming something of a tradition...
This weekend I was mainly visiting my dad and his
extended family in sunny Ramsgate. My sister
Rachel had organized for my brother Mike and his
son (my nephew)
Darren to visit as well (I hadn’t seen them since Christmas),
the occasion being Dad’s birthday. (As a result, there
is no tarot installment this week.) Apart from Dad, Josie and
little James, we met big James, his four daughters Katie,
Kim-Rose, Sephie, and Lilly, their mothers Jan and Alison,
Josie’s mother Kay, one of her granddaughters Teresa and a
great-granddaughter Penny, Josie’s brother Jack, his wife
Irene and her mother Gwen, my sister Rachhel’s boyfriend
Andy, plus a tortise called Tiger and
rabbits called Grass and Hopper. As it happened, Andy had
photos he’s just collected from his
father’s birthday, with similar quantities of relatives
and cute nephews and suchlike, including a cousin Tyrone from
America. What a lot of relatives! At least it seems that way
to me, with my geographically dispersed extended family (my parents,
brother and sisters and I live in six cities in two continents)...
Compared to the long straight organized roads through endless
flat prairie of Alberta, even British motorways look like a maze
of twisty little fog-bound lanes... let alone the back-streets
of London or Oxford. I’m surprised tourists
from North America don’t get claustrophobia.
Alas! What photos I took are on Jamie Lokier’s
digital camera in far-off Bristol. Well, I say far-off,
but in Canadian terms it’s trivial, of course.
I managed to throw my back out getting the suitcases lined
up ready for driving to the flight home—one moment
I was putting down Jeremy’s black bag, the next
I was all curled up in agony. Luckily I was able to
unkink enough to hobble in to the car using a chair as an ersatz
zimmer frame. The airport at Calgary loaned me a wheelchair so
I had no trouble getting through check-in and customs. At
Gatwick the wheelchairs have small back wheels, which means the
occupant cannot wheel themselves, and instead must put up with
being pushed around by an attendant. This infuriates my sister
Kate no end. (She cannot use her own chair at the airport
because wheelchairs have to be checked in as luggage.)
I have also discovered that those electric golf-cart things
are not as fun to be driven around in than you might hope.
Still, I am
recovering my mobility now.
Yesterday (the 23rd) we made a point of waiting for the post to
arrive before going in to work, but to no avail. When we
returned home we found yet another of those cards telling us a
parcel was waiting for us at the depot in Sandy Lane West.
Since I was taking a day’s holiday on Christmas Eve,
I set off to pick up the parcel.
Cycling to the depot would be straightforward enough if it had
occurred to anyone to add a few directional signs along the
route. You start by cycling up Cowley Road past Temple Cowley.
This is a steeper climb than I remembered, and I soon got
very hot. The intersection at Temple Cowley is a little
intimidating—in order to get to the off-road cycle lane
you have to move in to the middle lane (since the left lane is
left-turn-only). The off-road path takes you to the Ring Road
roundabout, and crossing the road on foot takes you to the
cycle+dog path that parallels the Ring Road. This is an ideal
shared cycle path: broad, flat, and only sparsely populated with
pedestrians. The first left would be Tesco’s megamart.
Skipping that you come to a confusing dip-under-the-road
junction with something labelled Barns Road. You need to go up
on to this main road and thereby cross the Ring Road. Another
off-road cycle path now appears, but ignore it; it is leading
you away from a mini-roundabout which you want to use to turn
right on to Sandy Lane West. The home stretch! The trick here
is to not look out for the Royal Mail Consignia
sign, because all you will find at the Reception window there is
a hand-written sign telling you to go back two places to the
Nuffield Industrial Estate. Once you go down there the
Enquiries office is reasonably well signposted. Annoyingly
there is nowhere to park a bicycle. (This is Oxford, after
all!)
Even more annoyingly, there was also a piece of paper in the
window saying they were closing the office an hour an a half
early today. So the journey was all for nothing.
Could they have prevented this? Yes, by telling me the modified
office hours on the card they stuck through my letter box. This
card is completely generic, probably printed in the millions at
some central printers. Too bad they don’t produce a local
version for each Post Town so they can have the address printed
on them (we have received these cards with no address on at all
in the past). Too bad they don’t have a special Xmas
Season version of the card giving their reduced opening times.
Given that December must account for a disproportionately large
fraction of displaced domestic parcels (as opposed to parcels
for business addresses), this would seem a logical measure to me.
On the other hand, is it worth fucking over people like me for
the sake of a measly hour and a half extra holiday? Surely that
office needs at most two people present (one customer-facing,
one fetching parcels), so paying them enormous overtime would
not break the bank, right?
