Bitching Dr Beeching

Here's a photo that sums up how well the railways were working this weekend

As was trailed in our last thrilling installment of The Renaissance Monkey, our hero was about to go and get trolleyed with work colleagues to celebrate the departure of a certain Red Demon thingy after which he was to jump on a train North to see his mother for her birthday. One of these exercises went well.

I was very restrained knowing I had to be up early the following morning and the thought of dealing with my mum with a raging hangover didn't bear contemplating. At a little after 10 I called it quits and went home to pack a few things and then to bed. Tinseltroos didn't rock in until much later but she was allowed the hangover as she wasn't coming with me. Duly on Saturday morning I set forth in the medium drizzle to London Euston where I arrived at 8.30. Normal procedure travelling to my mum's is get on a train at Euston, travel for an hour and forty five minutes, get off the train at Crewe. Done. A cursory examination of the internet before travelling revealed that due to the inevitable "planned engineering works" my journey would be somewhat circuitous. I boarded a train at Euston, an hour later we rolled into Northampton where we were all thrown off and driven, rather in the manner of prairie cattle, into 'buses to drive to Birmingham. Sisoftroos maintains, and I think she may be right, that the three most terrifying words in the English language are "replacement 'bus service". We trundled up the M6, stop starting in the traffic for an hour and a half until we arrived at Birmingham International.

Upon arrival there it took a little detective work to find where the suburban trains into the city of Birmingham ran from but eventually I fought my way onto a platform full of grumpy shoppers and then squeezed myself and my bag onto a tiny, packed commuter train which stopped at every tiny station in every suburb of Birmingham until we finally arrived at Birmingham New Street.

I stomped the length of the gargantuan New Street concourse looking for trains that stopped at Crewe. After several false leads and bum steers I tracked one down and boarded. From New Street we made reasonable time and I eventually arrived in Crewe, starving and parched at about 2 o'clock, five hours after I'd set out.

My mum had a fun time, I took her out to dinner and she took me to the arts fair in the town she lives in (highlights included me, trapped in a church full of singing primary school children surrounded by some horrible paintings by "local artists", with no way of escape) and then on Sunday morning at a very early hour I was out back on a train as my mother had church duties and so needed to be rid of me. The journey back was more straightforward - no changes were necessary. Unfortunately due to more engineering work and some jammed points we sat outside Milton Keynes for an hour and eventually pulled into Euston an hour and half late. A two and a half hour journey became a four hour journey.

Having dumped my bags Tinseltroos (who had just about recovered from her hang over if not her cold) and I went and had a late lunch in my favourite restaurant. From that point on the weekend took a marked turn for the better and today I'm back in work for more fun and games.

Nose Goblins

As I still seem to be on the final lap of my stint on Hellboy I've started e-mailing friends I haven't seen for weeks or months for a catch up. For a few weeks I may actually get a social life back so now would be the time to see people. This would also be the time that the inevitable post-frantic-work cold hits me. I always get them as I wind down either as a show winds down or just after I've finished. I felt fine yesterday morning, which I spent in a car to Pinewood and then my usual waiting for an hour and a half in the canteen for the meeting to be called. I am beginning to know all the staff in there now, that's how much time I've spent there. I have at least now got into the habit of taking a notebook with me so I can do some work on my own little projects. By the time I got back to the studio at around 3-ish I knew something wasn't right and by 5 my nose was a torrent of snot which did not let up for the rest of the day. I fled work at 6 on the dot, bought fish and chips on my way home and watched the Roma vs Manchester United match on the TV as I curled up on the sofa shivering under a blanket. Mercifully there doesn't seem to be any head ache associated with this cold and I feel much better this morning so hopefully it's only a minor annoyance.

I've also started work on a photo book. The service I use to print my pictures online has started offering 5 inch square prints for about 5p a print. What I'm doing is getting a print of every photo that's a candidate and arranging them and then holding the stack together with a bulldog clip so I can look through it as if it were a book. This makes it easy to swap, remove and add photos as I go. Booda Baby, very kindly, not only said some very complimentary things about my pictures but also pointed me at a photo competition run by Blurb.com and a few others. This is quite fortuitous as I was probably going to go with Blurb to print my book when it was done anyway so if I have a set of photos I'm happy with by the entry closing date I'll probably enter it. What the hell. The current selection also exists as a set on my flickr account for anyone who might be interested. All subject to change/lameassedness/procrastination of course.

Rotten Apple

Epler i vann (apples in water), originally uploaded by Åsta.

Blogging will be light for the foreseeable future as my laptop died this morning. I can only really access the internet at work now and my employers, spoilsports that they are, expect me to do their bidding during work hours even on weekend work days like today.

I have no idea what's up with it. There is no action when you press power so I'm thinking it's a mechanical rather than software problem and power related rather than a poorly hard-drive. We will see what the "genius" at the "Genius Bar" advises when I can get an appointment to see one, which will be Monday at the earliest. I'm really hoping that the repair is cheap, I don't want to be buying a new computer at this moment.

Ginger Cake

Ginger Cake, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

I've had another day off as I slept very little last night and am still very sniffly. Apparently it's like a ghost town at work as everybody is off sick. Tinseltroos has just emailed to say that she's feeling a bit grotty so I fear she may be about to succumb to the lurgy. Fortunately Schossadlerflug is stuffed with cold drugs and vitamin C tablets. Fight fire with fire say I.

Having slept for the morning I felt like I should do something so I've been cleaning the flat and I've made the ginger cake you see above. I'll take it into work tomorrow for the few people who make it in. Cakes are the only things I can make with any confidence when I have no sense of taste or smell because the quantities are so precise. Right I'm off to clean the kitchen.

Sat at Home

Hangover Face, originally uploaded by Mr Atrocity.

Today I'm taking the first sick day I've had in well over a year because I am broken. I had the foundations of a cold yesterday afternoon and it has blossomed over night into something nasty. Were I not so tired it probably would have been ignorable but as it is I am curled up in bed, sleeping when I can and trying eat and drink as much as possible.

It's pretty typical that the instant I stop working every hour there is I get ill. In fact were I thinking more clearly I should have foreseen it. Ho-hum. With luck a day's rest will fix me up so I can power through the last four days of work before I stop for the holidays.

The photo above is from a hang-over I had in the summer. Though the cause and symptoms are different it is a fair representation of what I look and feel like now.

Aichoo!

A Special Place

As I have only had two days off work in the last six weeks my social life has, inevitably, dwindled to practically nothing. My routine is terribly simple:

Q. Am I awake?

If the answer is "Yes" there is a followup:

Q. Are you at work?

If the answer is "No" then I go to work.

This has of course left me somewhat short of things to talk about. The over-riding set of emotions I'm carrying around like over-stuffed panniers concern how things are going at work (you can guess roughly how well by the number of days I've had not here. Hint: More days off equals happier work environment.) Unfortunately I can't really discuss ( a polite way of saying "rant") here about all that because of the general secrecy and other blither that surrounds what we do.

Instead I thought I'd briefly rattle on about one of the things I love about living in London so much. I've lived here for nearly ten years but it's only been in the last few months that I've actually moved right into the very heart of the city. before that I lived about 4-5 miles from the centre which is close but not quite right in the thick of the action. Now however I live in an area that it is possible to identify on the oldest existing map of the city dating from the mid 1500s and that is a rather comforting sensation. To know that the area I live in has been constantly occupied for half a millennium is strange and due the nature of Londoners and London being what they are the actual layout has changed precious little in that time. Looking at the map from 1593 that's atop this post I can see quite clearly the road off which I live and moreover can trace the route I'd take if I were to walk down to London Bridge (then the only way across the Thames) and I find it really no different than it is today. Thanks to the Great Fire of 1666 scarcely anything is left standing predates that aside from the road layout but the is still plenty of ancient material around. For example, my route into work takes me across the top of Lincoln's Inn Fields where the charter of the Bank of England was signed in 1694 in what is now Newcastle House. That building still exists today. The knowledge that wherever I walk I am steeped in centuries of tradition, where people have lived and worked, walking the same routes I do and seeing many of the same sites is a wonderful counterpoint to all the amazing modern developments. The foundations run deep here. As the city grows ever upward toward the sky we can look around and down into the earth and see back to the past. London is a city out of time and I feel so much at home here, temporally as well as spatially.

Making Some Noise (Silently)

More of the apologetic, sorry for not writing more, blah, blah ,blah, but once again work has conspired against me and any kind of free time this week. It's my birthday a week on Sunday and Tinseltroos and I are taking a long weekend then in the countryside. At the moment that's the main focus for maintaining my sanity as I'm working on two projects simultaneously as well as trying to write an advanced lighting course for the company. Yesterday was made worse by the two leads I'd had on getting a guitar falling through, so I'm back, once again, to square one in my search. It's very interesting that early '80s type super-strats seldom turn up on eBay in the UK. I know that the whole LA rock/glam metal scene was never as big here as it was on the other side of the pond but I'm pretty amazed at how massive the difference in availability of the sort of guitar I want as opposed the sort that I don't is. Once again more eBay searching will have to be done.

In better news I did finally get around to connecting up my Line 6 Pod guitar amp emulator thing to my laptop so I can record electric guitar fun straight into Garage Band. I did a quick pastiche of "Runnin' With The Devil" on Monday night as a proof of concept. It worked a treat so now, when I have time, I can actually record some music. The Pod is great. Not only does it mean I can play guitar without upsetting any of the neighbours, I can also download other people's presets for matching other players' tones. As you might imagine, Eddie Van Halen's tone is a popular one for people to try and match and there are some really good ones. If any of you have a Pod and want a Van Halen "brown sound" tone then I can very much recommend the "Edward Van Whalen" preset on Line 6's website.

Well that's about all I have for you now, let the rest of Thursday be productive and let the clients like what I've just sent them. Fingers crossed.

In cross-posting fun I did write a piece for Tinseltroos' blog about Tom Ford's new fragrance for men here because it made me so cross.