A homage to loading screens.
In which spring is arriving
The weather does not know what it wants to do at the moment. As spring comes in, we sat by the harbour, eating ice cream, and felt uncomfortably cold and hot at the same time. The sun shone brightly down, as a sharp wind nipped up from the water. We shivered, but were too hot to wear our coats.
In which things go wrong in hard-to-diagnose ways
We go away for the weekend. We come back. And the house is cold. Turn on the hot water tap: freezing. The boiler has given up the ghost.
I turn on the PC this morning: and that refuses to come on, too. Which, to be honest, is a recurrence of a problem I was already aware of. Sometimes, on start up, it gets partway and loses contact with the disk drive. Or, sometimes, if you ask it to do too much disk-thrashing just after booting, the same thing happens. On the other hand, if it starts up all its services and is fine for 15 minutes, it will probably stay fine until it’s switched off.
All that points to something like a loose contact somewhere, if you ask me. As I say, it’s been happening for months now; but today I was in the mood to sort it. The computer now has a new hard disk cable. It booted up first time, and it’s still running. Let’s see if it still works in the morning.
The boiler might be suffering from something similar. The gas engineer came out, poked around at it, and fixed it. The chap wasn’t sure what the problem was, or how he fixed it, but fix it he did. Maybe. It’s working now, but we still have to see if that, too, will come on again come tomorrow.
In which we celebrate a milestone
It’s nearly six months, now, since we moved house, and we seem to have made it through the winter. By next week the days will be longer than the nights; and this morning, when we left the house, the sky was blue and the sun shone down on us. Astronomically we might be at the start of spring; outside, it feels as if spring is already verging on summer.
In which I get on the telly
No blogpost yesterday, because – well, I was rather busy. Regular readers might remember this post from last week, in which I speculated vaguely about auditioning for a TV quiz show - I didn’t say which one, but it was fairly easy to guess. Those auditions, as it happened, were yesterday.
They were open auditions, so I just turned up. And, really, it was all rather painless. They weren’t busy; I sat down, answered some general knowledge questions, and had a bit of a chat about potential subjects. All very friendly. The interesting bit, though, was after I came out. “Would you mind hanging around for a while,” someone said, “the local news would like to interview people.”
Happy to oblige, I waited around, before going outside, getting miked up, and answering a few questions about what I’d just been doing. And then: “could we have some setup shots of people queuing outside the audition room?” So, the news team commandeered a corridor with a likely-looking door at the end, sat us down, and told us to try to look nervous. I found it hard not to laugh, as the cameraman zoomed in on our anxious faces from somewhere around floor-level. We acted out arriving at the audition, for the cameras, and I suddenly realised how hard acting is: how hard it is to make scripted actions feel natural.
The whole thing seemed far more complicated than the audition itself had been. And even if I don’t end up on any quiz shows, I’ve had my 2 minutes of stardom on the local news now.
In which our ears are flapping
Chap walking down Stokes Croft, chatting away on the phone:
“Are you imagining me inside a giant shoe?”
In which we discuss local things, and eat pancakes
A few different things on my mind today, none of which are worthy really of a full post.
Firstly, in serious local political news, the city council’s minority Labour administration has collapsed, to be replaced with a minority Lib Dem administration. Whether the change in cabinet will lead to any changes to or abandonment of the destructive and wasteful guided busway scheme, much blogged about here in the past few months, we will have to wait and see. For that matter, there may well be changes to the rather rushed scheme to pedestrianise half of Prince St Bridge, which some people think was part of the guided busway plans; but which I think was more likely to be some sort of council sop to transport charity SusTrans, whose main office overlooks the bridge.
Talking of things round the Harbourside, regular readers might remember me talking about *Folk Tales*, the monthly music-and-storytelling event at the Scout Hut on Phoenix Wharf. February’s Folk Tales was last night; however, me and K didn’t remember this until about half-seven last night, at which point we didn’t really feel like going out. Oh well: roll on the next one. I remembered, when noticing that people have been searching the internet for information about it (and finding me).
Aside from that: we had plenty of pancakes on Tuesday night, as is only right and proper; and enjoyed them so much, we had more yesterday. Which is probably slightly going against the point of Shrove Tuesday, but never mind. More pancakes has to be a good thing.
In which we describe Portishead
Another lazy weekend this weekend. Wanting to get out of the house, though, we took a trip to Portishead.
It’s a strange town. A strangely-shaped town. Like Clevedon, it’s a seaside town that doesn’t look towards the sea. The harbour is lined tightly with recently-built classically-themed terraces, designed to look like Totterdown or Clifton, but packed in much more densely. Further south is a muddy bay, a headland looking across to Newport; and the remains of an old fortress, little more than lines of concrete in the clifftop grass. There is also, signs said, some Iron Age defensive works; but they are well-hidden by trees and my rusty eye couldn’t make them out.
Clevedon had a pier and an interesting bookshop; Portishead didn’t seem to have any similar attractions. We tried to find the lighthouse marked on our map, before going home, blown back by the wind off the sea.
In which nothing special happens
It’s another ordinary Saturday. We lie in for a bit, then we get up and put the kettle on. We don’t have any plans; we’ll probably watch some of Saturday Kitchen on the telly. K’s brought some work home for the weekend, the car needs a headlamp bulb changing, and of course I can always do a bit of work drafting up some blog posts and tweaking the Secret New Site Design. But, generally, we don’t have any plans big enough to be called plans. It’s just another ordinary Saturday.
Lots of people, of course, will be going out and doing stuff today. They’ll be going out in pairs and trying to have a romantic time together, after giving each other giant cards in Arterial Blood Red. Restaurants will be packed, and shops everywhere will be running out of flowers and chocolates. Because it says, on their calendars, that that’s what you have to do today.
To my mind, though: that makes the day less romantic, not more. You shouldn’t do something special for your special someone, just because of the date. You should do something special for them if you want to show your love, yes, but if you want to show your love you shouldn’t have to wait for today. Christmas is slightly different, it’s a time for getting in touch with people; but Valentine’s Day is something of a pointless exercise.
So, today shouldn’t be different to any other. As a form of affirmative action, we’ve said to each other that we will specifically avoid doing anything special today; we’ll do everything we can to make it as ordinary a Saturday as possible. There are 364 other days in 2009, after all.* I’ll find some way to surprise K, to make her smile and blush, to remind her how much I love her. It won’t be today, though. It’ll be any day she deserves it; any day of the year.
* although, if you want to be pedantic, there are only 320 left after today.
In which we have no bread
As people have been asking, here’s the cake that K’s very kindly made me for my birthday. I haven’t actually tasted it yet – as I write this it’s sitting in the fridge – but as all of K’s cooking is wonderful and delicious, I’m sure it will be fantastic.
My favourite pudding is tiramisu, so K came up with a tiramisu-flavoured cake, with a chocolate sponge sandwiched together with the marscapone-cream-egg mixture that she makes her tiramisu from, all liberally laced with Tia Maria. I am entirely responsible, though, for the suggestion of adding Cadburys Animal biscuits, thus turning it into a tiramizoo.
In which we go out in the snow
Another day with no morning bus services, and the roads gridlocked. I walked K to work, taking the camera with me, and watched a lorry get stuck on the hilly part of Bedminster Road. Trying to get towards Ashton, it stopped in a queue of traffic, then realised it couldn’t get started again without risking sliding back down the hill. It sat there, impotent, with its hazard lights flashing, as everyone else tried to drive round either side of it.
And then, I nearly broke a leg trying to take photos of the local station. Slipping at the top of the stairs, I grabbed the handrail frantically as my feet disappeared from underneath me. Best to stick to taking photos from the bridge, I thought.
At least the train that came was – to a train geek – quite an interesting one. 2D04, from Taunton to Bristol, one of the services on the Taunton-Bristol-Cardiff route that runs with retro 1970s carriages restored to their original condition, although the engines are rather newer.
And finally: I’m sure it says in the Bible that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. Before we went to bed last night, we looked out of the window to see it snowing again, the street covered in a fresh pristine carpet. We couldn’t resist getting dressed again, and going out for another walk with the camera.
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