Montage of Homepage Photos
Minor side-note: for about five years, I changed the main picture on the home page pretty regularly. So consider this a montage homage.
Coupley wintery Chicago photo
My first thanksgiving was lovely 🙂 As promised: lots of delicious turkey, sweet potatoes and cranberries, unexpectedly adjoined with a boisterous game of charades. This only reinforced the impression that Thanksgiving is basically a dry-run for Christmas day, which is fine as long as you don’t suffer any major family falling-out the first time around. Still, on discovering that Americans don’t have Christmas crackers, I propose a swap: we’ll all take days off work to eat, drink and be merry late-November time, as long as they wear little paper hats at Christmas to differentiate the meals. And because Christmas cracker hats are cool.
The other highlight of my trip so far was seeing A Clown Car Named Desire at Second City last night. The inspiration to go came from looking for a Chicago counterpoint to News Revue although the whole thing is bigger, more polished and less topical than that. Apparently Second City is particularly famous for its improv and last night there was a whole extra third act of improvisation tacked on to the end which was a lot of fun.
If I lived in Chicago, I expect I’d be back again before very long…
Taking advantage of some ‘on holiday \ crashing in office’ time to finally revamp this website. It’s definitely way overdue to admit that I’m never going to have the time or expertise to rebuild something from scratch again, and so my inner archive nerd is content with migrating everything from Nucleus CMS (so long, but thanks for everything!) to WordPress. And, for the time being, a very very standard, default, boring, minimalist theme. I’d rather keep blogging quickly than be weighed down by something complicated and outdated, and hopefully this will make me a more frequent blogger of bitesize chunks too.
So long, old home page
Aldwych
I have form when it comes to dragging my mum along to geeky Tube adventures, whether it be trekking out to the furthest station, nudging cub scouts out of the way at the London Transport Museum or envying up the offices at 55 Broadway. Last Saturday we added Aldwych station to the list, which closed in 1994 but is still open to occasional tours, filming and training. Down on the platforms you’ll find posters including, amongst other things, the rules by which reluctant officials agreed to allow Blitz-era sheltering. (Why do I have the feeling there’d be a 30p charge for it today?)
In case you were wondering why Aldwych closed, by the way, it’s because it was a stupid station – with platforms only reachable by lift – on a little branch line from Holborn from which it’d be quicker to walk. So that’s that.
One of the abandoned platforms
Also recently: we celebrated Anna’s birthday at Big Red, provided a large chunk of the audience up top of a pub for a new pilot comedy show heading (if all goes well) to Dave, and saw Gravity with Josh. I wasn’t blown away, I have to say, although it was a cool cinema experience and probably the only time I’ve felt 3D added much. You don’t really see this film for the story, or the characters, or the dialogue – you see it for the moment of terror as you imagine what it might be like to spin uncontrollably in space without being able to stop.
The rest of the last few weeks has been increasingly punctuated by Doctor Who to the extent that I can begin to imagine how normal people feel before an English World Cup final match. (I mean, clearly that’s fantasy – I meant how they would hypothetically feel.) Sunday lunch at Abbi and Paul’s: whooped at the return of Paul McGann. Stay in with Cat: enjoy Brian Cox’s surprisingly dense lecture on the science of time travel. Go home: get emotional at An Adventure in Space and Time. The climax tonight will be watching The Day of the Doctor at the cinema. (Also in 3D, actually.) I’m heading to Chicago for two weeks tomorrow to have my first Thanksgiving experience, and can’t think of a higher note to leave the country on. Forget about pilgrims or overly-trusting Native Americans: I give thanks to the Doctor.
The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
