Something significant has happened. Yes, there’s been another month gap between posts, but in that month I have laid my hands on a shiny new smartphone which has the significant advantage over its predecessor of actually taking nice photos which aren’t blurry, indistinct, or tinged blue like a world permanently bathed in flashing police lights. So this means I barely have to write anything at all, to be honest. I can just stick on the sideshow and leave you to it.
(Except, yes, you’ve probably all seen these already on Facebook, in significantly higher quality than I use here. Originally, leaving my blog in this early 2000s design timewarp was simply laziness, but as the years go by I’m increasingly going to pretend it’s a conscious artistic design, in homage to the era of its creation. So squint, dammit, squint at the photos and just be grateful they’re not blue anymore.)
But let’s start by going back to the first weekend of August. It was hot: hot enough to pass that critical tipping point where cider becomes my default drink over beer. Oliver and Abi were back from their American adventures, so we had an afternoon of incomprehensibly-complex board games and Shakespearian quizzes. The next day there was a family BBQ, and some nice photos:
Matt Smith-era Self Family
And then just a few short hours later, we gathered on the sofa to learn that Malcolm Tucker Peter Capaldi is the next Doctor. Gasping ensued. Really? Like, really? Because this is going to be awesome. And especially awesome because over the next few months I have the weighty task of introducing Doctor Who to a newbie, which is a frightening responsibility to have, so it’s nice to have a new era to go into together. But which episodes to show? Which episodes to hide? How early do you get to Blink? (These are not rhetorical questions. Tell me. I’m scared I’ll mess it up and end up with somebody who thinks the Doctor is half-human.)
Gosh, that was a lot of rambling and we haven’t even got to the surprise Berlin trip yet. But first!
Josh and Anna
Flat Night
Me and Nour
Please observe the little trains snaking through the background
It has been a good month: chilling out in beer gardens with Josh and Anna, celebrating our flat’s anniversary, stealing Michele’s friend Nour and somehow persuading him to go see Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (our mutual reaction was haha that’s hilarious and haha Hollywood couldn’t pull that comedy off aren’t-we-smug) and journeying up to the top of the Shard on a last-minute invitation from a mother burdened with a spare ticket. Two notes about this, actually:
1. I could hear a somewhat-sarky Diamond Geezer in my head the whole trip, especially when we got to the gift shop. Which of course just means that he’s become a ‘valuable brand’ for ‘curated experiences’, and someone should stick his endorsement on trendy ‘alternative’ tours of the view from two-storey office blocks and slightly rising hills. But face it: the Shard is tall, and you can see a lot from a tall building, and that’s that.
2. My mum’s instant reaction on emerging into the upper viewing deck was to stare down for a few seconds before saying “you do realise we’re looking at South London this side?” and move away. Hah.
Photos a bit like my old phone used to take
BERLIN!
It’s only been a year, and now I was back on a work trip. Which itself was interesting and rewarding, but then a bunch of us stayed for the weekend too, and then it was really time to enjoy ourselves. Berghain isn’t a place I would ever naturally go in my life, and indeed I only lasted until a pitifully early 3am before crashing out, but it was so worth going for the out-of-this-world atmosphere, with shadowy dark corners and spooky steps like something from a video game ‘abandoned factory’ level but filled with cool Germans and techno.
We ate the best food in the nicest places. We drank crazy German beer where the price is determined by a live stock exchange of beer purchases but it doesn’t really matter because it’s Berlin, not London, so beer is always cheap. We properly chilled out. We did the touristy sight-seeing bits. And I confronted an American tourist on his lack of enthusiasm for Ampelmann. (“But why is it a thing?” “What do you mean? It’s Ampelmann! It’s the glorious marriage of Soviet-era graphic design and gift shops!” He looked unconvinced, but he was in an Ampelmann gift shop, so I think I was well within my rights.) The bottom line is: Berlin is now about #3 on my ‘list of potential cities to flee to if London is flooded or attacked particularly badly by zombies’.
Not the best food I ate, but certainly the longest
And bringing us right up to date with ‘stuff that happened just now’, I spent this Bank Holiday weekend with Cat and Matt in Norfolk in the lovely family home of the Hurleys. (Her mum could seriously run a B&B off the back of those breakfasts 
) Kings Lyn Lynn is not Berlin, but it was actually no less lovely, as we celebrated Cat’s birthday in advance with her homeland friends (sorry guys, we’ve stolen her forever), rambled through the countryside (“this field has a horse in it!”) and unearthed some incredible VHS tapes of Cat’s pantomime past.
(Traumatically, these village performances always culminated in a spirited rendition of the national anthem, which is more than enough to mark the very marked difference between growing up in Norfolk and growing up in Willesden Green.)
Norfolk: beautiful in its own way
This is getting on for a treatise, so I won’t carry on through the very many other lovely evenings this month with Matt and Caroline, with Simon and Ellie, or with my mum dining out in Angel. I will say a massive congrats to Katie for her scary A-Level results, and how excited I am getting for Canada…
Oh, what, Canada? That’s right guys: 2013 is shaping up to be a lot more travel-heavy than I had planned 
You’ve probably not heard of it, but there’s a small university town – about an hour’s train ride from London – which is, on balance, an agreeable sort of place. The buildings are moderately pretty, the river a diverting backdrop for a mid-afternoon stroll, the students uncouth but tolerable in fair weather. I speak, of course, of Oxford, where I spent last weekend recuperating with Sophie ‘I collect universities like stamps’ Rodger. We ate, we drank, we made ourselves sad watching videos of Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown with angry incomprehension, we made ourselves happier again with ice cream. (I don’t mean to suggest any real connection between this unfunny bigot and Oxford, other than I happened to be there shortly after learning of this existence.)
As it happens, the last time I’d stepped off that train onto that platform was seven years ago, which caused a mini-flood of memories. Although this was swiftly overtaken by plain envy that Oxford train station is much better than Cambridge’s, and doesn’t require you to trek halfway to London to get to it. Sigh.
Disclaimer: it’s really obnoxious to start a post with some mega-quotable philosophy. But:
We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
It’s worth pointing out that ‘passion’ here is not just Romeo-and-Juliet-style-tumbling, but anything that comes down to what we want. Even if what we ‘want’ is not a thing (mmm hotdog) but just to uphold some social or moral custom (mmm avoidance of unnecessary physical pain within an organised legal framework). The ‘reasoning things through’ bit just helps figure out the most effective way to get the hotdog, or how best to avoid your neighbours getting beaten up by the police, but it doesn’t set the goal. (What does set the goal? Well, y’know, evolution, society, hormones, culture, wise words from your parents… but that’s another story.) In other words, it’s not illogical or irrational to do something bad \ stupid \ reckless \ joyously silly and ridiculous, as long as that’s what you were going for.
Point is: if you accidentally fall in love with someone who lives in a different continent, the logical course is not to complain but to kick your reason into gear to try and make it work anyway 
So far, the main casualty seems to be reading and sleep. And I’m working on the reading. Yay. 
Anyway… the last few weeks have been a summery sleep-deprived blur of lounging outside, cider and sunburn. In the revolving door of awesome American visitors to the family, we’ve had Roger and Lily Ann and Daryl and Ermila. Over on Highbury Fields, Holly came to picnic and reminisce about QPCS, while at the school itself Katie graduated Sixth Form (we didn’t do that in my day, we just ‘left’) and finally freed that great institution from having to cater to the strange whims of Selfs.
Holly and Josh
In the ‘surreal Friday night’ corner, exhibit A is going for drinks with Henry and ending up sitting alone in a church at midnight and listening to a sermon before retiring to his for whisky. (I am neither a Catholic nor a whisky-lover as a result of said experience, but it was fun all the same.) Meanwhile, yesterday’s house-cooling braai at Abbi and Paul’s was excellent, and the perfect trigger for that all-important ‘I am calm, content and full of barbecued meat’ feeling which we all need in our lives. (Non-carnivores may substitute ‘meat’ for ‘vegetarian sausages’, of course.)
But of course, the social event of the season was clearly the Self Sisters Shebang: Tash and Katie’s joint 21st and 18th birthday party. Far too many lovely people to list, but special thanks to Alix and Adam for doing the photography which I am about to steal for this post. The theme was ‘black tie with a twist’, although it should be noted for future reference that the ‘twist’ of a long white beard comes with the rather debilitating drawback of stopping you from drinking anything, and so did not last the night…
Uncle Sam, a cat, and two masked somethings
Family Self
Happiness breeds terrible writing. Sorry about that: it’s kinda been the fatal flaw of this blog from the very start. But I’m still going to blog from the local maximum of the happiness curve (‘the top’), because it’s more fun for me this way, so fans of schadenfreude can console yourselves that for all we know next week will be all weeping and gnashing of teeth.
The last two weekends have been birthday weekends: firstly for Emily, whose annual house party is one of the few things which can tempt me south of the river, and then for Robert in Manchester. This one confirmed my belief that the best parties are the ones which can dispense with all of the standing and awkward moving between groups in favour of one communal gathering around sofas, powered by pizza and Call of Duty and drinking games and (pretty violent) arguments about probability. I was (I checked) the only Arts gradate in a room full of mostly Chemistry graduates and PhD students, which was great for making me feel stupid but also enlightening and much fun.
(Fun fact: if you make a joke around my usual circle of friends about MMR causing autism, you’ll usually get laughter and\or feigned agreement. Not so with scientists. They bristle like you’ve blasphemed, presumably terrified that you actually believe it.)
And then this week I’ve had the week off, seeing as it was my birthday and I needed a holiday to cope with becoming so old. I also needed time off to go to the John’s May Ball with Simon, Ellie and Patrick, of course.
Woah, fairytaleish…
But then there were more birthday things! Michele became possibly the first Chicago resident ever to visit the UK and make a beeline for Willesden Green, to be rewarded \ punished by Self-family antics and slapstick. Yesterday Katie took me to see Joss Whedon’s film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, which was glorious and funny and – like most Shakespeare plays – leaves you with a mix of “hah, nothing changes” and “hah, pretty sure you can’t yell at someone for not being a maiden anymore”.
And then Cat unveiled her surprise birthday party in Desperados, having roped my sisters into a web of deception, leaving me a little stunned with how incredibly nice people are to me. (I did warn you that reading happiness is dull.) So many, many thanks to Cat, and Tash and Katie, and everyone who turned up: Abbi and Paul, Biff and Christa, Matt (as in boss), Matt (as in Hull), Clark, Emily, Susannah, Robert (as in Dietz, Chicago’s Nicest Bloke). I couldn’t imagine a better crowd to either work with, be mentored by, or share genes with. (Hoping you can work out which is which there.)
OK, that’s it. Back to your regularly scheduled programming of rants at Question Time and cynical observations about the standard of typefaces in online commerce.
Americans do not call paracetamol paracetamol. In fact, I’m not sure what they do call paracetamol is paracetamol – it was probably replaced by high fructose corn syrup in the 1980s. This is mere cultural curiosity until you end up sprawled over a hotel bed with an exploding head, conversations running through your head like the rants of drunken angels. (Do other people hear voices in their head when they’re ill, or is that just me?) At that point, you will long for Old World paracetamol like you never imagined.
That was the low of Chicago Part 3. On the plus side, I finally made like a tourist and rode the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier
Flags capes
And talking of cross-cultural initiations: last week I had the pleasure of taking a gaggle of Americans (plus one German) to News Revue. Thankfully, a little bit of prep work on the UK’s political \ cultural scene (“most elderly male celebrities are now facing charges, most people don’t like Michael Gove”) paid dividends.
Also seen: Star Trek Into Darkness (fun aside from the one moment where he calls Earth on a communicator, which caused my inner nerd to wince) and The Match Box at the Tricycle, a one-woman play about the death of her child and, I think it’s safe to say, probably the emotionally heavier of the two despite not having ‘Into Darkness’ in its name.
Beth on Bergen: “It’s always fun to see you two having such a great time exploring a new place!” Apr 7, 15:05
