May Bank Holiday Weekend/Jo's Birthday

(This post is getting later and later; it was initially supposed to be up last Tuesday, but to keep it from becoming May Bank Holiday/Jo's Birthday/Christmas, I'm going to post it now. It may be edited at some future date, but I wouldn't hold your breath.)

Where the last post was about the future, this one will be about the past (getting to be really the past!). The past two weekends in fact. Spent two weekends ago in Cambridgeshire with the Lady and family; one afternoon in Cambridge itself, one day walking around St. Ives (Cambs), and one day in St. Neots. Spent last weekend doing Jo's 'Cocktails, Canapes, and Karaoke' birthday party and relaxing.

Cambridge:

Headed down to St. Neots on Saturday afternoon two weekends ago, and spent the evening visiting with Jo's parents and eating the choco-mocha-caramel cake Jo made in honour of her mother's birthday. It was tasty.

Sunday afternoon in Cambridge was quite nice; sunny and clear, though the wind made it a bit cool, but very good for looking at the outside of colleges. (The insides were either closed for exams, full of fat tourists, or exorbitantly expensive.) Did not go punting on the Cam as, a). it is overpriced, and b). I'm not Victorian. Slight SNAFU on the book-shopping front as it was a Sunday afternoon during a bank holiday, so no popping into dark, cramped back-alley antiquarian bookshops in search of obscure first editions for me. Did manage to find an open Oxfam bookshop and bought Dudley Barker's biography of Chesterton, which isn't a brilliant work but has some great pictures. Met up with Kate and boyfriend Dave just outside Kings College, both of whom (Kate and Dave, not Kings) we haven't seen since we moved out of Kate and Jenny's house last September. Dave flies helicopters for the military (the kind with lots of guns and missiles and are quite aesthetically and conceptually pleasing) and had his training just outside Phoenix, Arizona, so we spent some time talking about the desert and Arizona and fun times there. He's also just returned from a tour in Afghanistan, which is also predominantly desert, but which I'm not that familiar with. (Afghanistan, as far as I can determine, is part of Asia, which makes getting involved in a land war there one of the classic blunders. History shows that this is a fairly accurate assumption.)

(Funny side story: It's February 1953 and Francis Crick and James  Watson, two molecular biologists researching at Cambridge, have just discovered the internal structure of DNA, the double helix, how DNA holds its genetic material. So what do they do? Proclaim this monumental scientific breakthrough to the scientific community? Immediately publish their findings before anyone else can steal it and pass it off as their own? No. They go to the pub. 

Reputedly Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and announced, 'We have found the secret of Life!' (Oh, and the physical structure of DNA, too.)

Only in England.)

Monday we wandered around Houghton and St. Ives (Cambridgeshire, as opposed to St. Ives, Cornwall, which is about 350 miles away*), which despite weather forecasts to the contrary, was quite a nice little jaunt. Got to see some quaint English cottages with the thick straw roofs and tiny windows, which are more like the kind I imagine C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien sitting in front of, smoking pipes. These cottages are a lot different than the kind you find in the North, mainly because they are not made of big blocks of blackened stone. (Which isn't to say Northern buildings lack a specific charm; I really can't imagine Brontë country without big stone houses, and the old Yorkshire pubs wouldn't be the same if they didn't weigh about 200 million tons.) The day started out fairly grey and windy, but cleared up as we walked through trails that were alternatingly forest, canal, cemetery, village streets, alleyways and fields. I even got a little pink on my melanin-deficient arms! Got into a fowl mood (groans) by spotting some duck-chickens (?), proper ducks, geese, coots, a peahen, and even some baby swans in the canal. and had some ice cream in St. Ives. Mmm...ice cream... Went out for dinner at Wyboston Lakes, a convention centre and hotel in St. Neots that Jo's brother Rob used to help manage, to celebrate Jo's mum's birthday. Wish there could be more days like this.

Tuesday consisted of diagnosing the engine noise Jo's car was making as "time for a new engine" (which has been done apparently), having a chat with the cat (which is not fat, in a hat or on a mat), packing up Jo's mum's car, and driving back to Leeds in quite possibly the worst weather ever.
[I take that back, the freak absolutely-zero-visibility downpour during the Cornerstone 2K roadtrip was the worst weather ever.]

 Either I have one leg shorter than the other or I was standing in a hole.

Canal boat and cottage.

Houghton Mill.

The Three Horseshoes Inn

Jo's Birthday
Jo's birthday saw the flat fill up with probably the most people we've had in it so far, and that number was...nine? [checks photos, and confirms number] The theme was Canapes, Cocktails and Karaoke, and it did pretty much what it said on the box: Jo spent most of Friday cooking and cleaning in domestic-goddess fashion, and somehow put together enough delicious nibbles to feed [checks again] nine people with some extra to snack on later. I got out of the cooking and cleaning by going to work at both jobs on Friday, but got to show off my acquired bar-tending skills by mixing drinks for the party. Served up some classics, found a few new drinks online, and even tried to make up a new drink, which turned out to not be very good. "Know thyself" a wise man once said, and I can now justifiably declare that I am not a mixologist.

This was fairly quickly followed by a trip into town for a little karaoke, which is Japanese for "musical crime", at OK Karaoke. OK Karaoke is a very scary club located in a very nice old building not far from where I work. It was filled with all manner of stag and hen (bachelor and bachelorette) parties, none of which exhibited much by way of either class or sobriety; but Jo had booked a private booth for us, so we bid sweet adieu to the sozzled celebrants and found our box. Proceeded to march our way through a crazy variety of songs, though I think we missed 'A Whole New World', one of our classic Japan karaokethon tracks.

Emerged sweaty and victorious a couple hours later, and went to Fab Cafe, a sticky-floored pop-cultured student dive. Hung out for a while, feeling old, and got home for more canapes around 2am. (2am used to be a "respectable" getting-home time; now it just feels like too much work. I'm not as young as I was once, though I'm guessing that's par for the course; as Sam Phillips once said, "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be". Currently making plans to hit the big 3-0 by being in America. Yikes.)

In completely different news, World Cup fever has taken hold; meaning annoying England flags have cropped up on every available surface like a pox on both their houses (except in Scotland, where USA, Slovenia and Algeria** flags have cropped up like predestined Calvinists). Cars, houses, buses, businesses, t-shirts, socks, even underwear. The most annoying thing about this jingoistic phenomenon is the way 'England' is generally printed across the flag itself. This strikes me as fairly redundant: if you're going to sell flags in a specific country, one would assume that residents of said country would be able to identify their own flag without too many hints; "Thank you for confirming that this is, in fact, my national flag and not an extra-wide Red Cross banner." If anything, you'd think that England fans would want to have 'England' written in Slovenian or Algerian to let their opponents know who was winning. Is the English version for my benefit? I already know what the English flag looks like. I can identify the American flag too; it's the one with stars, stripes and "WE'RE #1!" across the middle. (How many flags can you identify?)

*352 miles by car, according to Google Maps. Also according to Google Maps, if you walk from St. Ives to St. Ives, it's 1091 miles, and you need to go via France - twice - and Ireland, with the disclaimer that: "This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths." Indeed.

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** Group C of the World Cup consists of England, USA, Slovenia and Algeria. The Scottish, being contrary by nature, have decided to support everyone BUT England, in the hopes that they'll be able to laugh at their southern neighbors' defeat sooner rather than later. In an inexplicable twist of fate, I've somehow managed to secure the USA ticket in the office World Cup pool. I guess that decides who I cheer for on Saturday!


UPDATE 1: In case you've been hiding underneath a rock, England and the US tied 1-1 in the first round of their Group in the World Cup. This has worked out quite well for me, as no one has any desire to kill me because my team beat theirs, and I can now cheer for America without worrying about being killed (except by Slovenians and Algerians).