Thursday 5 June 2008

"Moments follow one another without belonging"

I've been trying to write something about the past week for... well, a week. Alright, I admit it. I've been wanting to use this title ever since it became stuck in my head the other day. There are worse reasons for writing blog posts though, I'm sure.

One disadvantage of not using Livejournal anymore is that I can't write über elitist filtered friends only group posts so that only people not directly involved can read what I have to say. Having said that, I only ever did it once on my Livejournal. And I doubt I'd go to all the effort of making a friends group now. But that's not the point. I'm not sure what the point is, but that's certainly not it.

Fuck. That sounds like things are bad doesn't it? No. The complete opposite. Things are very good. The past ten days or so have been absolutely fantastic. Sunday the 25th I went to Cardiff to see Emma. Came back Monday evening in the rain. Wednesday was the Maxïmo Park gig. I arrived at the venue at 1pm to meet Dana who had come over from Germany. When faced with six hours of queueing (I hate that word. Especially when the spell checker isn't working, because I lose track of what vowels should be where), what better thing to do than to crack open the vodka and coke? It was fantastic fun. Meeting new people, seeing old people, being given free fire from XFM, finding my new favourite person in the entire world, seeing some great bands, realising how fantastic Maxïmo Park are, nearly missing my last tube home, realising I should find out when my last tubes home are.

Thursday daytime was spent mostly sleeping (and collecting the Monopoly board that I ordered for the next night's fun), and then meeting James and Olli who were dumping stuff off at my house before a number of tube challenges. That evening there were plans for a Random 15 challenge. This particular challenge involved fifteen stations being secretly picked from the proverbial hat (computers have made hats all but irrelevant. It's quite unfortunate), the first one being announced in advance (because we all need to know where to meet up), the remainder being revealed when the clocks start and then we set off to visit them all in any order. The route had to be planned against the clock, which is different to most other of the challenges.

We were battling against some quite big problems on the network that night (not to mention hunger!) so we ended up abandoning half way through and going to McDonalds (although not before taking photos of us by the TARDIS that was there) then meeting everyone at the pub just before throwing out time. Very few groups finished, and we were all hoping that we were using up all our bad luck before the main challenge the next day.

The main challenge was the annual zone 1 challenge that myself, James and Matt did for the first time last year. This year Olli came along with us and Matt went with another guy. After meeting outside Oxford Circus at midday, King's Cross was drawn as this year's starting station so we made our way there furiously planning a route (well, James was. He'd planned it all without me noticing!) for a 1pm start.

Compared to last year we didn't have many problems at all. Certainly nothing like a ten minute wait at Liverpool Street anyway. Towards the end we had some minor problems (a lack of Hammersmith & City trains at Aldgate East) but we managed to fix them with our brilliant logic skills. A lack of ideal trains at the last minute meant we were one minute slower than last year, but I think I probably enjoyed this year more. Last year was good because it was the unknown, but we paced ourselves far better this year so we weren't so utterly exhausted after the first run.

We didn't stay for very long at the pub afterwards (just enough time to enjoy the nicest bottle of cider I've had for a long time) then we went to meet Charleh at Leicester Square, meet up with Laura then head back to mine for the inaugural Blood Red Shoes forum Monopoly tournament ® (for once, not a cover story for anything). After severely cocking up the journey back to Uxbridge (entirely my fault, which I'm very sorry about) we went to buy food and alcohol. Arriving at my house both were consumed for a few hours and we discussed Life, The Universe and Everything (well, Charleh and I did) then I took her back to the station because she had work the next day and when I returned (twenty minutes early) the battle commenced. As expected, I was first to become bankrupt. I think Olli won in the end, but I can't be sure. It was fun anyway, and that's what matters.

Olli had to leave earlier on Saturday so I took him to the station, then James, Laura and I had another Brie and Bacon sandwich from the café in Uxbridge station and Laura got another chocolate cookie sundae thing after we'd bought one the previous night and left it in my fridge. I bid them farewell and returned to tidy up.

Yesterday I was having some windows replaced which meant that I had to be up at 7:30am. Normally that would be fine but annoyingly Tuesday night marked the finale of the Primary season leading up to the US election. The result has been inevitable (yet close) for a few months now, but I'd have liked to have stayed up to watch the final speeches. Especially as Hillary Clinton was still apparently introduced as "The next president of the United States". Despite Obama having passed the all important mark of 50% of deligates.

Still, I woke up to let the window people in and went back to sleep for another hour. I met Charleh at about midday and we spent the afternoon mostly watching Coupling (which she, scandalously, had never seen before) then we went off to North Greenwich to meet James, Katy, Phil and his friend where we saw Avril Lavigne.

Despite being much more of a "pop" concert than last time I saw her (last time I saw her it was her, two guitarists, a bass player and a drummer wheras this time she had eight dancers, choreographed dance moves and huge screens), it was still brilliant fun. There were a number of "what the hell?" moments, particularly when everyone went off stage whilst the video played a montage of her promo videos whilst Avril's cover of a Joan Jett track played over the PA, but it was still great fun.


Apologies for how long this is. I'll give a lolipop to any who has read it all.

Oh, and I do wish there was some deliberate irony in me starting an entry saying "I don't like writing long blog posts describing what I've done with people who read said blog" and then following it up with a thousand words of doing exactly that. But it's not. That's just what came out of my fingers. And I really hate editing myself.

1 comment:

Matt said...

well there's at least one reader here who wasn't party to most of it. I tried to watch/listen to the Clinton speech that night, but I was distracted by the incredibly enthusiastic bloke behind her, who seemed to think every sentence she uttered was worthy of a jumping, screaming applause.