My Week Off

[coalescent]

• oxfordslacker has already written about the experience of Panic at the newly renovated Clementine's (previously Latino's). In brief, it's almost not a complete dive anymore, and that's something of a shame. His report does have one unsurprising but damning omission: The fact that when they played 'I believe in a thing called love', everyone danced. Mike, Alex, Dave: You should be ashamed of yourselves.

• Wednesday evening I rewatched the extended edition of The Fellowship Of The Ring and decided that Tolkien, master linguist though he may have been, must have been having an off day when he decided on 'Mount Doom' as the name for his fortress of evil.

• My train tickets did in fact arrive in time to allow me to escape to Birmingham on friday. I met with immortalradical, wg and danmilburn and immediately dragged them off to Andromeda, where I spent money I shouldn't have. We then visited the space Selfridges (warning: flash), which is striking enough to be attractive from the outside and badly designed enough to be utterly hideous on the inside. If it looked exactly like the set of The Jetsons, it would look cool; instead, it looks just enough like the set of The Jetsons to ensure that it was dated from five minutes after the doors opened.
  
  After dinner (and insanely geeky Angel discussion), we met with starofheaven and proceeded through the beautified-by-heavy-mist city centre to the symphony hall and the Emmylou Harris gig that was the main reason for the meet. It took about five minutes to make me a fan, though it remained true throughout the performance that the older tracks (greeted by audience applause) were my least favourite. Then we traded immortalradical for pikelet and wound down the evening with toast and conversation back at Dan and Aileen's place.

• Saturday, and I had to get from Birmingham to London by lunchtime to meet for greengolux's big day out. This proved to be less straightforward than I might have hoped, since New Street station was entirely broken due to electrical failure. I eventually caught a train out of Moor Street, changed lines at Banbury because my ticket insisted I had to go via Reading and into Paddington and I was headed for Marylebone, then left my jacket on the original train and had to hop over to Marylebone once I got to London anyway to collect it. Still, I got there in the end and despite the fairly dismal weather a pleasant afternoon and evening was had in the company of (deep breath) greengolux, twic, snowking, despotliz, truecatachresis, squigglyruth, sparkymark, e_pepys, elleblue and Mike. Spot the person who needs to get a livejournal account, and I really hope I haven't missed anyone off that list. We visited the local market, the Tate Modern (We like tha sun!), Geneva's room (it really is tiny), and went for a meal.

• The less enjoyable parts of the week include the fact that my Two Towers DVD still hasn't shown up, the fact that I can't watch the fifth episode of Carnivale because the sounds and pictures are significantly out of sync (cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth), and the fact that despite the fact that I phoned to give them my debit card details three weeks ago the water company decided to take the money out of my account this week, leaving me UKP30 overdrawn for the rest of the month instead of UKP60 in the black. I'm annoyed at myself for not checking that the bill had cleared, although I don't think it was a massively unreasonable assumption on my part that it would have done. Ah, well.

• In between and around all of the above I walked the streets of the Well-Built City, memory palace made concrete, alongside the renowned Physiognomist Cley (The Physiognomy, by Jeffrey Ford); journeyed through Islamic heaven (or hell) and out to a space station beyond Mars ('A Walk In The Garden' and 'Barnacle Bill The Spacer' by Lucius Shepard); whimsically explored the length and breadth of Nepal in search of yetis and Shangri-La (Escape From Kathmandu by Kim Stanley Robinson); and jumped from now to the end of time and all points in between ('Dear Abbey' by Terry Bisson). And now I've moved on to ajr's monday recommendation of More Than Human. Who says I can't afford to travel?
  
  Quote of the week comes from the opening of 'Barnacle Bill The Spacer':
  

  Most people, I suppose, want their truth served with a side of sentiment; the perilous uncertainty of the world dismays them, and they wish to avoid being brought hard against it. Yet by this act of avoidance they neglect the profound sadness that can arise from a contemplation of the human spirit in extremis and blind themselves to beauty. That beauty, I mean, which is the iron of our existence. The beauty that enters through a wound, that whispers a black word in our ears at funerals, a word that causes us to shrug off our griever's weakness and say, No more, never again. The beauty that inspires anger, not regret, and provokes struggle, not the idle aesthetic of a beholder. That, to my mind, lies at the core of the only stories worth telling. And that is the fundamental purposes of the storyteller's art, to illumine such beauty, to declare its central importance and make it shine forth from the inevitable wreckage of our hopes and the sorry matter of our decline. This, then, is the most beautiful story I know.

  
  Damn, I love the way that man writes.