So much to talk about! I shall start with Peggle ‘n’ Pizza, a rather grand tournament held on Easter Sunday to find the one true Peggle master. For posterity’s sake, let the record state that the winners of the group stages were Oliver and Saoirse, with Dominic and Amber coming second. Tense semi-finals then saw Oliver and Amber triumph, and in the grand final Oliver emerged victorious with a score of 19,045 to 11,850. (See, this is way more exciting than football!) Oliver thus went home with the ceremonial Easter bunny ears. Hurrah! But will he be able to defend them in the future from eager young upstarts? We shall see…
(And it was a lovely experience too, frequently interspersed with moments of surreal confusion for me at the sight of unlikely Peggle couples. I shall try and get around to putting more photos up on Facebook shortly, but in the meantime a small selection follows. Oh, and mega-thanks to Joshua for applying his sporting expertise and devising a system for scoring!)
The pitch
A match of mixed emotions…
Hard at work
Friendships come and go, but Peggle victory lasts forever
Triumph!
The next day Lucy and I embarked on another ‘pick a random Tube station’ adventure, which was a brave thing to do in the face of planned engineering works and wholly unplanned person-under-a-train disruption. Nonetheless, we made it to Langdon Park on the DLR before realising that, in the nicest possible way, there isn’t really a hell of a lot there. (Sorry.) But that’s fine, y’know, because we ended up back on the other side of London and at Westfield – a place that delights and offends in almost equal measure. (You think ‘delights’ is a bit strong for a shopping centre? Then you haven’t seen the milkshakes…) In the evening we finally made it to the fabulous Lexi to see Religulous. I enjoyed the film, sure, but then I was fairly likely to? This doesn’t stop me recognising that the arguments are deployed in a pretty shallow way, although I sympathise with the problem of challenging absurdity intelligently. But I would like to see a film that I could take religious people to that could actually make an impact – the cinematic equivalent of Ebon Musings with added sparkle. (Give it a browse – if nothing else then for the Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists, an essay which so starkly demonstrates the difference between belief and faith it’s, erm, a revelation 
)
In the meantime, however, I’m more than happy to play Scrabble and watch Twiglet Twilight with one of my favourite theists. Now – how much right do I have to pass judgement based solely on the film? It’s cheesy, without a doubt, and I’ve heard it discussed in feminist terms for so long that I can’t not be slightly irritated by Bella’s unconditional devotion. Having said all that, one has to respect an injection of the dark and deadly into teenage romance, since ‘getting killed’ is a far more pressing and interesting dilemma than ‘getting dumped’. So I don’t know. Ho hum. Sanna’s family also invited me along to Pub Rock, a wonderful merger of ‘play’ and ‘pub gig where you get to sing along to the joy that is the final counnntdowwwwn!’ which I enjoyed muchly. By the end the lines between fantasy and reality were so blurry that we all fled to avoid an ambiguous Q&A in which it would be terribly unclear whether we would be questioning actors or band members, or – for that matter – whether ‘we’ were an audience or just drinkers down the pub. (In fact, some part of me is slightly worried that I still haven’t closed all of the mental brackets.)
You lucky people, you
If we weren’t in the show starting right away
We’d be in the audience too
Abbi, Tash, Joshua, Sanna, Saoirse, Robert, me
And so finally coming right up to date (almost): the dinner party tradition returned on Sunday as the above group of miscreants and ruffians assembled at Rob(ert)’s with enough food to throw an impromptu wedding. (We didn’t, though. Just to be clear.) Robert then added his own drinks menu to the event, with delicious mojito and sangria, and was the perfect host. As Saoirse and I talked about on the way home, each one of these parties has a slightly different feel and by the end – with Tash and Abbi having departed early – it all felt very cosy and friendly. No uproarious drinking, although enough to make a game of ‘I have never…’ worthwhile. *feels all warm and fuzzy*
Not an entirely successful group photo, but close enough!
Also: there have now been enough of these events that I have bucketloads of photos… more than enough to make something interesting with. Hmm – should maybe wait until the summer, though!
Hold me closer tiny dancer (hold me closer, just hold me closer)
Count the headlights on the highway
Lay me down in sheets of linen (Lay me down)
You had a busy day today (hold me close, hold me close)
(Thanks, Nic! Bought the album today…)
Particularly in light of the numerous ‘Leeds?!’ reactions I had to my holiday plans, let me start off by saying how impressed I was by the city. Admittedly, yeah, we stayed confined to the centre, but that was still enough to really rate what they’ve done with the streets. I’ve said for ages that cities can be made so much nicer by aggressively stripping out the cars, but it only takes two minutes strolling down wide, clean, beautifully pedestrianised streets of Leeds to know how true this really is. True, it is a little shopping focused, but not entirely, and it nevertheless very clearly illustrates the pressing need for change elsewhere. There’s no chance of such progress in London under Boris, of course, but once he’s been dispensed with we should start looking very seriously at which parts of central London can be rid entirely of private vehicles whilst maintaining decent public transport networks.
Not the greatest photo ever, but note the big wide streets?
Anyway! On Thursday night Lucy and I were delighted to meet up with a certain Andrew Kings and eat out to Pizza Express, who very thoughtfully gave us plenty of time to chat before bringing us any food. (Some kind of conspiracy?) We did end up with free dough balls, though, which is almost as good as free cheese. And it was so lovely to see Andy again after about 0.69 x 10^2 years! (HH – you are so on the list for next time.) Feast your eyes:
Me and Andy!
Friday was our turbo-tourist day, during which we ended up at the most fascinating exhibition on social order, ‘Rank’, at the Leeds Art Gallery. Aside from being genuinely interesting, it also felt pleasingly like a very pleasant form of exam revision; in any case, I’m sure I’ll be able to drop it in to my next DoS meeting. In the evening we culminated this rather cultural day with a performance of The Tempest at The Grand. I haven’t read the play, and Shakespeare can sometimes be rather difficult to follow in these cases, but as it turned out it was both easily accessible and very entertaining. The RSC were giving it all a rather clever African and colonialist theme, which I thought worked very well, raising questions about your sympathies without being too heavy-handed about it all.
(Not both for Lucy, no)
(There is a story about the above photo, by the way. Although we laugh about accent stuff most of the time, when buying these ice-creams I have to admit that I couldn’t quite follow every single word the guy said. That’s how we ended up with ice-creams with everything on: when in doubt, just say ‘yes’ and hope it turns out well.)
And then on Saturday we headed back home, after seeing The Young Victoria in the morning, a film which I will spare much comment aside from the fact that I was perhaps the only person in the world disappointed that we never reached the repeal of the Corn Laws. And thus concludes our Easter holiday in Yorkshire… aside from one, very important thing. Books! Obviously, us geeks try and fill gaps with reading, so I finished off Book Club’s 100 Years of Solitude before moving on to Valis and Animal Farm. The last one, I feel, has probably lost most of its power given that I felt I knew exactly what was about to happen at most points… the effects of history, I suppose. But it was Valis with which I really struggled – for most of the week – and I’m certain that this was not quite the best Philip K. Dick novel for me. (William Blake gave me enough trouble: I just don’t do mystic.) So, suggestions please: what’s his best work?
Up next: return of the dinner party…
I just wanted to take a moment to talk about Building Partnerships, which was one of the key themes at the dominicself.co.uk AGM this year. What, you didn’t make it? Well, luckily, the key slide is reproduced below. Essentially, in these difficult economic times, it’s important that liquidity can be maintained. Specifically, tea liquidity. But that requires mugs – no no, not readers – of the tea-containing kind. And this is where you come in.
Building Partnerships with nicparkes.com
You can read more about the competition from Nic himself, but the important thing is to keep on clicking through
In order to serve you better, the next couple of posts will emerge in an exciting multi-part serial format, with all the narrative runarounds and painful padding of a children’s television drama. And it would please me greatly if you could all try not to do anything notable during this period, so that I don’t fall further behind. All agreed? Good. So if you’re sitting comfortably, then I’ll begin…
For the first half of my Easter holiday with Lucy – the countrysidey bit – we were based in the Crakehall Watermill. This was an awesome B&B and exuded friendliness to the extent that our hosts were printing and annotating bus timetables with suggested visits, offering to give us lifts to the nearby village and bringing fresh milk in a little flask every evening. Reccomended! Plus, check out the surroundings…
Crakehall Watermill: the view from our window
Parish walks: the “I can read maps” look
Free! Cheese!
On Tuesday we visited the village of Hawes (pronounced the way you wish it would be) to fulfil my primary life aim: to visit a cheese factory! And the most exciting part of a cheese factory, as you might imagine, is the free cheese. A very wide selection of free cheese samples, in fact. I think the countryside is onto a winner here, personally. As did the friendly old man sitting on a bench outside this dairy paradise, who started talking to us through the age-old method of opening with a joke (it wasn’t the best, but then it was better than most of mine) before moving on to extolling the benefits of the North. (Which was a bit of a running theme that day, actually, as a woman on the bus had already told her friend about the pressures of living at a ‘frenetic pace’ in, erm, Oxford.) The conversation swiftly moved on to why there “has to be a creator” because “a Big Bang would only be messy” and reached a bit of a low when he introduced us to a companion as “this man and his girlfriend or wife”. Beating a retreat, this man and his girlfriend or wife walked back through Hawes where the BNP had taken to handing out leaflets at the market. I really am annoyed at myself for refusing one with a smiling ‘no, thank you’ – damn British instinct – and would like to amend the record to a ‘fuck off, thank you’ if possible. But it did really highlight the peculiarities of a place that can be so warm and friendly to some and so viciously exclusionary to others.
Relaxing!
We set aside the time on Wednesday to attempt a real and proper walk through the Dales. Armed with water, a few sweets, a map and a healthy sense of optimism, we made our way through the beautiful countryside to seek out the village of Redmire. There were ups and downs, of course. At one might we may have darted across a railway, jumped past a troublesome gate and had to scramble over a wall in order to regain some semblance of a footpath. And the mighty Redmire was perhaps a little too village-like, offering no possibility of lunch after all, but help was at hand in the form of a well-timed train, and we ended up somewhere slightly more populated tucking into the best burgers and milkshakes ever. Success!
The Yorkshire Dales during our walk
Stay tuned for Leeds…
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