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Oh, And My Sisters Are Black

Strange dream last night. I only remember fragments of it, but here’s what I do:

At some point during it, I left work at lunchtime to visit my dad and my sisters (who lived, conveniently, within walking distance of work). I bought a bag of sherbert along the way, but I was disappointed with how clumpy it was. I met my sisters – Sarah and Becky – on the way to my dad’s house, and Becky told me that she’s just got a job working at a chain bakery (a Greggs-like place) conveniently situated at the end of my dad’s road. Sarah teased Becky about the low level of skill required to do her job, and they argued. Oh, and both Sarah and Becky were black – I’m not sure how that’s relevant, it wasn’t important in the dream, I don’t think, and in fact it’s only now, thinking back over the dream, that I’ve noticed that that’s a little unusual.

In any case; when we got to my dad’s (and I’d almost finished my bag of sherbert) he tried to persuade me that I needed to start running up and down a hill in order to get into training for some kind of event, but I pointed out that I needed to get back to work, so I left.

When I got back to work, the caterers were carrying some kind of large soup pan and a ladle along the corridor to the kitchen on our floor.

The creepy bit of this is that when I got to work this morning and popped my head into the kitchen opposite our office, there is a large soup pan in there. It’s a fair bit smaller than the one in my dream, but it’s in the same style. Weird.

Interpretations welcome, as usual, but don’t expect to make sense of me.

Reactions To The Unholy Alliance

See these squares? See these circles? See the different colours? You are falling under a trance. When you wake up, you will have no clue what this blog post is about. Here’s a blog post I’ve been meaning to write for several months now: it’s about some of the varied and different ways that people reacted to the news that Ruth and I were together, and that Claire and JTA were also a couple (and, of course, Ruth and JTA are still the fabulous pair they always were, and Claire and I are still ticking along nicely with the wonderful relationship that we have). There probably aren’t many people who’ll read this to whom that news will be a shock (after all, Ruth made a friends-only post some time ago, and Claire dropped a one-liner into a recent blog post), so I’ll gloss over it and get on to what I actually wanted to write about.

I don’t want to write about how brilliantly it’s going so far – although it is – because you’ve probably heard that enough. I don’t want to spout liberal nonsense about personal freedoms and choices and what’s right for us, because I don’t feel the need to prove that what we’re all “up to” feels right. Hell, I don’t even want to try to argue that polyamory is as valid as a lifestyle choice as the infinitely more popular serial monogamy (but if you want to buy me a pint, we can debate that particular idea until the sun goes down).

All I’d like to do right now is share with you some of the fascinating reactions that I’ve heard (or overheard) since breaking the news of our new relationship structure to friends and family. Because, in the end, that’ll make more amusing reading material, and if I’m to be remembered for anything, I’d like it to be that I made people laugh.

Oh; there’s a few references to sex (but almost none to particular sexual activities), so please insert the usual disclaimer here and cover the eyes of the child that’s sat on your lap while you’re reading this. Ta. Seriously, it’s all pretty tame; enough to make a 14-year-old blush but nothing that’ll put you off your dinner or stop you from making eye contact with any of us, but I just felt like I ought to warn you before you started e-mailing me your complaints.

So, skim read it, or skip it, or drill down to the funny bits. But if I put this all down here, now, it’ll save me revisiting it all in quite such ludicrous detail in future, and I can spare the abnib front page the excesses of my ramblings.

Common Reactions

Here are some of the things that loads of people said:

“Congratulations!”

Okay, so perhaps it shouldn’t be right up here at the top of the list of the most common reactions we’ve gotten when one of us has “come out” about our somewhat unorthodox relationship structure. That top spot should perhaps belong to “Umm… what?”“You’re joking, right?” But it has been a popular response – more popular than I expected – and it’s been great to have this kind of support from so many people. To the handful of friends and family members who were so open-minded that their first reaction was “So you’ve gotten into a new relationship and you’re happy? Well; congratulations are in order!”, I salute you: you’ve shown an unprecedented level of acceptance and understanding.

That’s not to say that anybody who said anything else is somehow less thoughtful: just, in many cases, more shocked or surprised. And, in the end, almost everybody who knows has said “Well that’s great, then!” or something similar after they’d been given a while to think about it. It’s not easy to know the correct social etiquette procedure to follow when given news like this, so we were braced for a lot of confused faces, and we saw far fewer than we anticipated. Good for you.

Or, to put it another way: congratulations yourself!

“I couldn’t do it!”

This is a really, really common response. There are two things that I can really say to it:

You might be surprised. Relationships aren’t just something you’re good at or bad at; there are skills that can be learned – and that goes for all kinds of relationships, even creepy weird ones like mine. It’s possible to learn to be able to organise yourself (and your time!) in multiple relationships, and it’s possible to learn the communication skills and trust it takes to talk about things like jealousy and shit like that.
But that doesn’t matter anyway. You couldn’t do it? Okay.

We know that this kind of silliness isn’t for everybody. And don’t worry, polyamory isn’t contagious like smallpox or homosexuality: we’re not going to try to infect you and make you in to evil sex-crazed swingers like us. Even though that’s not what we are. Probably.

“Don’t you get jealous, though?”

Yes. Almost everybody in the world gets jealous at some point or other; it’s perfectly natural and – like any other negative emotion – it can be worked through.

Jealousy is one of the first things that comes to many people’s minds as being a potential problem with this kind of relationship. And perhaps it is. But it’s important not to forget that jealousy isn’t limited to non-monogamy. I’ve felt jealous during perfectly healthy, happy, committed, monogamous relationships before: because I’ve not gotten to spent as long with my lover as I’d like (and, perhaps, when somebody else – their friend, perhaps – has), or not been emotionally as close to them as somebody else, or when they’ve talked about their past sexual conquests or the size, stamina, or general studliness of their last lover. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

Something I’ve learnt of late, though, is how important it is to talk about feelings of jealousy, so that your partner(s) know exactly what it is that bothers you and so that, between you, you can come to compromises and agreements that make these feelings bearable, or make them go away entirely. And even if it doesn’t all work out (and let’s face it: statistically speaking, our age and the novelty of our new relationships alone counts against it), I’ll have learnt a couple of important lessons about communication in relationships.

Did you know that many biologists consider parrots to be one of the most jealous species on the planet? I don’t remember where I learnt that, but it sounds like it could be true. Hmm; they’re monogamous breeders. Perhaps I’m undermining my point with my knowledge of stupid fun facts. Damn.

“What happens if one of the four relationships breaks up? How will that affect the rest of them?”

For all the planning and all the talking we’ve done, we can’t answer questions like this one. They’re just too tough, with too many unknown factors. I’d like to think that if one of our partnerships split, the other three might be able to continue, but the ripple effects of that kind of break-up might be too much, and other splits may occur as a result.

It’s a risk we’re willing to take. Just like the risk of a heart-breaking separation doesn’t stop you from throwing yourself headlong into a relationship with somebody you adore, we’re risking our relationships and our friendships by establishing these new, less-common relationships. I think it’s worth it. You’re welcome to disagree, but you can’t feel what I feel.

On the other hand, we have all fitted ourselves with stylish tamper-proof detonator collars like the one shown below, wired so that if one of us does leave the presence of the other three for more than a week, their collar will self destruct. It’s the single best way to keep us together.

Less Common Reactions

This section contains a selection of the less-common responses to our news.

“So you’re all getting lots of sex, then?”

Not as much as you’d expect, I’d bet. I’d estimate that the average frequency at which any given one of us gets a bit of nookie has barely increased at all (or maybe that’s just what they want me to think). The increase in the amount of sex I was getting when, for example, I went from being single to being in a relationship: that was a hell of a leap, for sure. The increase when I went from being in one committed relationship to being in two? Far less significant.

Sex is great, but – in my mind at least – it’s not among the biggest things I look at in a relationship.

Breasts are the biggest things I look at in a relationship.

Ahem.

Those last two lines were a joke, by the way, in case it wasn’t obvious.

“So have you have a threesome yet?”

A few people have asked this, and it’s honestly surprised me how often it’s come up. Moreover, I was really surprised when one person in particular was quite shocked at the answer: no, we haven’t.

I’ve have a couple of threesomes over the years, but none of them have ever involved Ruth or JTA.

I’m not sure why people think of this first. Perhaps it’s because threesomes are some great romantic mystery in so many people’s minds: to be fair, there aren’t many men who’d turn down the opportunity for a bedroom experience with two Hot Bi Babes. Perhaps it’s because it seems like an obvious “next step.” I don’t know.

In any case: the answer’s no. Perhaps it’ll happen someday, but it’s not the most important thing to sort out. Far more important questions that you don’t think of until you end up in a relationship like this are far more mundane things like:

Who gets the front seat in the car?
Who pays for dinner?
Which side of the bed do I sleep on? Your other lover sleeps on that side, but I prefer to sleep on this side.
This invitation says “Plus partner.” Who do I take?
What are we doing for Christmas?
If I cook, who washes up? (turns out the answer is often “nobody”)
Who have I just woken up next to? I’m not sober yet and it’s still dark and I can’t remember who I got into bed with. I could prod them and listen to them grunt in their sleep, see if I can identify them that way… or perhaps I could turn the reading light on for just a second…

The big questions are so often the ones you don’t anticipate.

“Have you ever thought about… umm… crossing the square?”

Another reasonably popular but not really common question: is there any potential of a relationship between JTA and I? Or between Claire and Ruth?

Between JTA and I? No. JTA’s very definitely straight, and even with gender cast aside, I’m not sure we’d be “compatible” in the way that I wildly speculate he’d want (note: wild speculation).

Ruth and Claire? Well, it’s not my place to say what they think or feel. Whether or not that interests them is up to them, of course, but it’s my impression that neither of them have any intention of drawing any kind of “relationship line” through our “square,” at least not a line comparable to the lines that form it’s edges.

I’ll set the webcam up, though, just in case. Don’t click here if you want to see it.

“But how can you love two people at once?”

That’s a far bigger, more philosophical point than I’d like to go in to detail on here. A better question is: why is it that you think you can’t love more than one person at once?

My belief is that love is, fundamentally, chemicals in the brain: and I find it hard to believe that the chemicals in my brain have the concept of “counting to two” (in fact, I’ve discovered on long evenings in the pub, if I put enough chemicals in to my brain, I can’t even count to two): they’re a lot simpler than that. “Oh no,” says the brain-chemistry, “I can’t possibly make more of this chemical in the presence of that person, because I already make that chemical when I’m in the presence of that other person!” Please.

Love’s a remarkable thing, y’see, because there’s no “starvation economy” of it: when a mother has a second child, she doesn’t love the first one any less because of it. I don’t believe for a minute that we’re born with a certain quantity of “love juice” (ahem) in us and we use it up by loving people (damn, I really should have thought of a better term than “love juice,” which is just icky-sounding). Unlike time, money, and energy, love is virtually limitless, and you don’t run out of it just because there are more people who you care about.

Love Juice? Who the fuck comes up with these product names anyway? In case you were wondering, it's a lubricant oil for... painball guns. What?

“So how do you find the time, money, and energy for two relationships?”

Now that’s a better question. With great difficulty.

It genuinely is quite a challenge to find enough hours in a day, sometimes, and it takes a reasonable amount of planning to ensure that you even get enough time to yourself. In particular, I’ve found it very difficult to spend as much time with my other friends as I would like, and that’s something I’m working on improving.

Google Calendar is my friend. With it’s text-message alerts (*beep* *beep* *beep* “Oh shit, I’m supposed to be in bed with somebody!”), it’s a lifesaver.

“What does this mean for QParty? What does this mean for Ruth & JTA’s plans to marry?”

That’s two questions, but two that often get lumped together, despite the fact that they’re two very different questions. Let’s look at them one at a time:

Firstly, QParty. The (in some ways) unfortunate timing of my new partnership – getting a new girlfriend just weeks before a party to celebrate my relationship with my established girlfriend – and a similar situation for Claire… may have, we understand, confused the message of QParty for some people. And for that, I apologise.

The meaning of QParty doesn’t change, of course. It was always a celebration of Claire and I’s love for and commitment to one another, and that love and that commitment hasn’t changed one bit for the addition of an extra lover each. QParty itself was, of course, a special day for the pair of us, and those of you present may have observed that Ruth and JTA kept a respectable distance away (not least to reduce the risk of confusing some of our relatives); a favour we’ll be returning at their wedding in… what?… just under three years time.

I can’t speak for Ruth and JTA and their plans, but it’s my understanding that there’s no change in them. They still plan to marry, and marriage still seems to mean the same thing to them as it already did. And while marriage isn’t for Claire and I, I think I speak for us both when I say that we respect their choice to tie the knot in that way and we agree that it’s the right thing for them, and we’re really happy that they’re doing it.

I suppose that one obvious up-shot is that Claire could be the stripper for JTA’s stag party. Or is that just a little bit too weird?

“But, I mean: why are you having a party with Claire and not with Ruth?”

Because I’ve been with Claire for five and a bit years, and (at the time of QParty) I’d been with Ruth for less than a month. Is that a good enough reason? Part of QParty was celebrating that, after five years, Claire and I are still together. Many relationships don’t make it that far, and, in many ways, it’s a pleasant surprise that Claire and I did, especially considering how we started our relationships.

Perhaps, if everything goes smoothly, we’ll have another party in 2012 to celebrate both Ruth and I and Claire and JTA’s relationships. You’ll just have to wait and see.

And if we do, you can almost guarantee it’ll be fancy dress. Sorry, Jimmy. In any case, start thinking of suggested foursome-themed costume ideas suitable for two men and two women now (no, we’re not going as ABBA).

No, no, no, and no.

Pretty Unique Reactions

Finally, here’s a list of things that people have said that’s just a little bit more “off the wall.”

[silence; nods of approval]

One particular couple – who discovered our “quad” by accident because we forgot that we hadn’t told them and they “noticed” – took the approach of being so cool with it that they didn’t even feel the need to pass comment on it. “Oh, so they’re together now. Should I be shocked?” That’s pretty damn unique.

An alternative theory is that the people in question were shocked into silence. Or perhaps had taken a vow of silence as part of some religious cult. But I like my theory.

“It expect it’ll be a fucking disaster.”

We’re sorry to hear that a handful of our friends – thankfully very few – don’t think that it can possibly work out.

It may well not work out. There are loads of things that can go wrong in any new relationship (and, in fact, there are plenty that can go wrong in old relationships, too). We don’t think for a moment that it’ll be an easy thing to make work, but we’re glad that we’re able to work towards making it the success we hope it will be. We’ve laid a lot of important groundwork to help us support one another and to make it work, and we think we’ve got as good a chance as any relationship does.

Worst case, we’ve always got the exploding collars.

“Wow. So four of my friends are now each in a threesome? That’s ace!”

And that’s thinking like a mathematician. It’s not accurate, of course: I mentioned above that “threesomes” haven’t happened, and in poly-parlance, a “vee” (two people joined by one in the middle, in a ‘V’ shape) is a more accurate way of looking at any individual one of us, rather than a “threesome” or “triad” (which implies a relationship between the two people at the tips of the ‘V’). But honestly, mate, you call us whatever the fuck you want, because you had one of the single coolest-sounding responses to the news of anybody, and a ludicrous grin to go with it.

Fourplay

“So, what about children?”

Honestly, I’m surprised more people didn’t ask this question; especially among those who hope themselves to be grandparents in the making. But I was very impressed when somebody did ask, especially as the answer is so simple and unfinalised.

We’re not sure. Children may be on the agenda some way down the line, but we’ve still got a lot of discussion to do on that subject (and, to be fair, there are more immediate things on the agenda right now, like – who gets the front seat in the car? who pays for dinner? – and so on).

Me? I think the four of us would make great parents, and no, I don’t think the fact that theoretical far-future potential children would, in general, give a fig that for some reason they’ve got between two and four times as many parents as their peers. Hmm… I’ve just thought about that: surely I meant to say *exactly* two or four times: it’s not like we can comprise three times as many people as any other set of people: apologies if I’m wrong to any single-and-a-third parent families out there.

Really, though, that’s a fucking huge question to ask pretty much anybody who’s been in a relationship for three months or so. You might as well ask if we have a mortgage together yet or if we’ve reached that level of intimacy in which it’s okay to fart in bed: one step at a time, now, folks!

“What do you call each other? What do I call you?”

Well, I’m Dan, and that’s Claire, and over there is Ruth, and… oh, but that wasn’t what you were asking, was it? What you mean is, if Claire is my “partner,” then who is Ruth?

It must be so much easier to be Ruth or JTA, in this regard. Ruth, for example, can call me her boyfriend and JTA her fiance. I don’t have that luxury, so I tend to call them both my partners, or, better yet, refer to them by name (particularly when talking to somebody who’s only just discovered that “partner” doesn’t have to imply that there is exactly one of them).

What do you call us? Call us anything you like, for all I care! But I know what you’re asking: you’re saying, “I was telling my friend about this couple I know, then I realised that ‘couple’ might not be the right word, then it all got complicated…” Yeah, sorry about that: we didn’t mean to make things complicated for you. I quite like the word “quad.” It may make us sound a bit like small motor vehicle, but it’s an easy-to-remember, short, and understandable word: people tend to just work out what you mean when you say it, and so you don’t get yourself into any excessive complexity.

But honestly; if it makes your life easier to pretend to other people that you don’t know that we’re four couples at all, that’s fine by me too. Conversely, if you want to tell everybody you meet, that’s probably okay as well (albeit just a little bit creepy). There are more important things in life than the words you use. Like who gets the front seat in the car, who washes up, who takes soup up to the ill person in bed, what the correct protocol is for talking to people’s parents…

Coming out: I am not a vegetable!

Well, as you’ve managed to read this far, thanks! It means it might have been worth it to type all of this. Of course this isn’t an exhaustive list of everything anybody has ever asked us, it’s just a selection. I hope it’s been interesting, but I hope even more that you’ve been able to chuckle at it.

Love and hugs to all those who deserve it. Now get back to surfing the web like you’re supposed to.

Return From The Real Ale Ramble (and upcoming Abnib Events)

Real Ale Ramble 2007

Well, the Real Ale Ramble was fabulous as always. Particularly wet and muddy, especially on the first day, this year, but good visibility, so we got to see a lot of the beautiful mid-Wales countryside. Thanks to getting lost on the first day and walking a lot longer than we’d planned, I ended up walking in the region of 30 miles plus altogether, and Claire walked even further, doing a medium-length walk on the second day, too. JTA and are managed to beat Norman around Route C on the second day, which is a first (Norman is a 78-year-old who walks with a cane yet somehow manages to get around any walk we participate in faster than us… until now).

Oh, and after my trousers got soaking wet on the first day they began to chafe quite badly, which – in the cold – I didn’t realise until I took my trousers off and noticed that both my legs were bleeding. Sorry for the shitty-resolution photo and for the fact that I cleaned up this particular wound as much as possible "in the field" before thinking to take a picture for the record.

But altogether, it was a fantastic weekend away. As far as the beer’s concerned, I can particularly recommend Special-O, from Otley Brewing Company, which is the most delicious beer of it’s strength I’ve ever tasted, Berserker from Hebredian, a remarkably fruity Scottish brew, and Aur Cymru from local Heart Of Wales Brewery as clear favourites of mine.

Oh, and here’s the obligatory "JTA falling asleep in pub after long walk" photo:

Troma Night & Buffy Night

So now we’re back in Aber, which is nice, and I thought I’d share those pictures with you. We even had our very own "Troma Night On Location" out in Llanwrtyd Wells, and watched Goldeneye. Nobody’s blogged about whether Troma Night happened back here in Aber, too, yet, so I haven’t a clue. All I know is that next Troma Night will be similarly hosted by somebody other than Claire and I, as we’ll be in York (with, yes again, Ruth and JTA).

On, and there’ll be a Buffy Night this week: Thursday at 7pm at The Cottage.

Apology, Troma Night Update, Etc.

Damnit, I wrote a blog post and didn’t save it as I was going along (mistake one) and then closed the browser without posting it (mistake two). It’s kind-of demotivating, and I can’t be arsed to write it all again in full. So here’s the much, much shortened version of what I’ve been up to and what’s happening this weekend:

Last week: Me. Grumpy. Apologies. Head of cold. Not so arsey now. Woohoo.

Weekend: Claire away with Sundeep.

Friday: Quizzlecrawl. Tom + Amy = Brilliant. Richard III vs. MacBeth. Very close. Richard III lost. Grr.

Saturday: Troma Night. LolliLove. Star Trek V (RiffTrax). Hairspray. Virgins: Selina, Elizabeth. Fantastic.

Sunday: Lounging. Chilling out. Ruth. JTA. Paul. Roast boar. Roast everything. Digesting. Nom nom nom. Geek Night. Rory. Elizabeth again. BGA. Top Gear (too many cars).

This week and coming weekend: No Buffy Night =o(. Troma Night @ Rory’s ‘cos Claire, JTA, Ruth & I at Real Ale Ramble.

Consider yourselves updated.

Off To Gregynog

Claire and I are off to Gregynog with the Computer Science department this afternoon. We’ll be back tomorrow in time for Troma Night, which this week will actually feature a Troma film, which will be… well, unusual, these days.

I’ll be giving mock interviews to groups of Computer Science undergraduates. Claire will be the leader for one of those groups. Basically the same thing we did last year and the year before, and that she went to as an undergraduate the year before that. Are we getting old and predictable?

See lots of you Saturday anyway, I hope.

Quickly, Before They Turn The Glass Into Lesbians!

So, what have I been up to this weekend, you ask. Well…

“Cover The Mirrors” Launch Party

On Friday I took the train up to Preston. The train I was on broke down at Machynlleth when they linked it up to the carriages that had come down the Pwllheli line, and the repairs set me back by almost an hour, but it turns out that the rest of the rail network was running behind schedule that day, too, and so I didn’t miss any important connections. I arrived in time for a quick “birthday tea” with my family (for my dad’s birthday) before rushing off to the Waterstones for the launch party for my friend Faye‘s first published novel, Cover The Mirrors.

I drank as much wine as the store were willing to give me and bought myself a signed copy of the book. I even managed to get the photo, above, under the proviso that it’s only allowed to appear on the internet thanks to the fact that I’m holding a carrier bag in front of Faye’s face (she’s more than a little camera-shy). I haven’t started reading Cover The Mirrors yet, because I’m virtually at the end of The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, and I’d like to finish that first, but little doubt you’ll hear about it here in due course.

Dad’s Birthday

After the book launch, my sisters and I took my dad out for a few drinks to celebrate his 51st birthday. It turns out that, in my absence, Preston’s nightclub scene has really taken off. We started out in an 80s-themed bar which is part of a chain called Reflex. It’s so 80s it’s unreal: all 80s hits playing, David Hasselhoff and Mr. T decorating every wall, glitter balls and spots and mirrors everywhere… deely-boppers available at the bar… and so on. Really quite a fantastic theme venue. Then, under my sister Sarah’s recommendation, we tootled up the street and into a cafe/club called Manyana, where my dad got hit on by somebody young enough to be his daughter.

I snatched this picture. I’ve no idea who she is – we didn’t get her name – but she seemed genuinely surprised to hear my dad’s age. So I had the DJ announce it, just to make sure there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that there was an old person on the dancefloor.

This influx of Preston nightclubs is making them all remarkably competitive with their drinks prices, too. I bought a few rounds for the four of us and none of them ever came to over a tenner, and one – thanks to the “buy one get one free” policy at Manyana – came to under £6, which is quite remarkable for a city nightclub on a Friday night for four people!

Back To Aberystwyth

On Saturday I had brunch with my sister Becky, my mum, and her boyfriend and then got back onto the trains to head back to Aberystwyth. Owing to line maintenance, the stretch of track between Crewe and Preston is unusable every weekend within sight, and so I was re-directed via Manchester Piccadilly. Yet again, my train ran late, and I found myself sprinting across Piccadilly station, trying to find a train that was heading Shrewsbury-way…

…meanwhile, my friend Katie, having slept through her stop, woke up in Manchester Piccadilly and, not quite awake, clambered off her train in an attempt to find a connection. I’d apparently featured in her dream, and so she was quite surprised (and not quite sure if she was seeing things) when I sprinted past her. She sent a text (which I chose to ignore: my pocket beeped but I was too busy looking for a train to take the time to get my phone out) and then phoned me before she was able to confirm that yes, it really was me.

As we were headed the same way, she joined me on my train for one stop, which was a nice surprise for what was a long and overcomplicated train journey. A few folks have suggested that this might not be a coincidence, and that she might be stalking me, but I’m yet to be convinced.

In any case, I don’t have a picture to go with this part of the story. Sorry.

Jimmy, Beth, and Troma Night

YATN. If you were there, you know how it went. Big thanks to Jimmy and Beth for coming along.

Lloyd Kaufman’s Visit

In case you’ve not been anywhere that I can pounce on you and go “squee!” recently, here’s what you missed out on. You’ll remember that last week I mentioned that Poultrygeist – Troma‘s new movie – was coming to Aberystwyth. Well, it did. And it rocked…

…and better yet, Ruth, Claire, JTA, Paul and I got to hang out with Lloyd Kaufman, president of Troma Studios and producer of The Toxic Avenger, for a couple of pints and to share a bowl of nachos. The guy’s fabulously chatty and friendly, and if it weren’t for the awestruck feeling of “wow, we’re just sat here chatting with Lloyd Kaufman in Lord Beechings” we’d have probably been more interesting company.

Dan, Claire, !!!LLOYD KAUFMAN!!!, JTA, and Ruth

When he said goodbye, kissing the cheeks of each of the girls, I genuinely thought that they were in danger of exploding with excitement. Thankfully they didn’t, because I’d already bought them tickets to see Poultrygeist later on.

Which was, as I’ve said before, fantastic. It’s even better seen with a nice, energised audience, and better still when the director and several other people who worked on the film are hanging around afterwards to answer questions, chat, autograph things and so on. There are apparently 15 prints of Poultrygeist and the capacity to make more on demand, so if you want to see it and can’t wait for the DVD release, go speak to your local cinema now and ask if they’ll show Poultrygeist, even if only for a week (as Lloyd himself said, it’s better than showing Transformers on all 24 screens of some soulless megaplex). And hell, with Troma’s current financial situation, they could probably do with a helping hand with getting into as many projection booths as possible!

The title of this post – Quickly, Before They Turn The Glass Into Lesbians! – is a reference to one of my favourite lines in the film.

Paul might have bitten off more than he can chew, though, as he hinted on his blog. After some discussion with Lloyd, Paul is likely to be responsible for:

Re-establishing the UK division of the Troma fan club.
Acting as president of the above, for the forseeable future.
Investigating UK distribution of Troma films.
Oh, and making an official DVD subtitle track for Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead, which describes the Troma Night drinking rules and reminds you when you should be drinking. He’s got a few ideas about things that should be in such a subtitle track, too, and if you’re familiar with the rules you’ll probably be able to guess what he’s thinking about.

I’ll leave it to him to go into detail, if he wishes.

Matt In Hospital

Between places, we also joined a growing crowd at the foot of Matt‘s bed in Bronglais Hospital. His operation was a success, but he’s reacted unusually to the general anaesthetic and they’re likely to keep him in for observation for another few days. If you haven’t had a chance to visit him already, he’d probably appreciate the company (although Sarah seems to have barely left his side): visiting hours are 3pm-5pm, 6pm-8pm: just ask if you need to know what ward he’s in and how to get there. If you’re feeling particularly cruel, mock him by talking about how well your bodily excretions are working, or swap his drip with his catheter bag while he’s not looking.

But seriously: I’m sure we all wish him well.

Curry!

Finally – as if we weren’t full enough from a large Sunday lunch – after leaving the cinema, Gareth, Penny, Amy, ~~Ruth, JTA~~, Rory, Paul, Claire and I slipped down for a late-night curry at the Spice of Bengal. Which was delicious, although there was a little much food for those of us who were already quite full.

Nonetheless, a fantastic end to a fantastic weekend! I’m sure everybody else will have a different story to tell (Paul spent longer with Lloyd and went to more films; Claire and Jimmy got horribly drunk together on Friday night after she, Ruth and JTA failed to see a Meatloaf concert; Matt’ll have his own morphine-fuelled tale to spin, and so on), because it’s been a rich, full couple of days for many of us abnibbers.

QParty – Part 2 – The Party

After extended delays, here’s the remainder of my “looking back at QParty“ post.

The party kicked off at 6pm, and guests trickled in over about about half hour to either side, which gave Claire and I ample time to try to greet everybody as they came through the doors. At least, it did until about 6:30pm, when a sudden rush of the remaining guests swept us off our feet and made us spend much of the remaining time running around everybody who’d appeared since to make sure we at least got to talk to everybody. Paul – with help from Matt P and Rory – manned the door, taking people’s coats and offering glasses of champagne… well, sparkling white wine. In the cases where he liked the look of the people coming in, he remembered to tell them about the bar tab, too.

We began to collect people’s contributions for the QFrames – the large clip frames we planned to fill with mementoes from the event. These were many (so many, in fact, that when Jenny was filling them for us while on our QMoon, later, she ran out of clip frames and some contributions have had to be overlapped or – where people brought multiple items – some have had to be left out entirely). We were overwhelmed by the thought and sincerity reflected in many of the items that are now in QFrames (some of which we’ve already mounted in The Cottage: others we still need to find room for!). Just off the top of my head, I’d like to draw attention to a few things (can’t possibly list everything here!):

A selection of fantastic photos from Claire and my life so far. Some reflect our family lives (Claire’s dad brought a huge number of pictures of her as a child), some our lives with our friends (not-gay Gareth brought a great picture that he took at an early Murder Mystery Night; Sundeep supplied a brilliant snap from a trip we took up Snowdon; Gareth and Penny gave us a picture that really sums up Claire and I’s life in Aber – the two of us looking out to sea by a bonfire – and so on), and some are reminders of the people we care about (I was particularly impressed at the courage of my college friend Andy, who, in reference to a long-standing joke, supplied a photo of himself edited such that he looked like Andy Pandy).
A collage of photographs of me at different stages of my life, from my mum, overlaid with transparencies of the details of key events in it, from my birth certificate to my graduation.
The specification for a Turing-complete programming language called Q (it’s a little like Brainfuck), and a program written in it that outputs a congratulatory message, from Andy, my mum’s partner.
A page from “a physics textbook,” describing many different kinds of scientific terms and units using the letter Q, with an “addition”: the Q-unit, used to measure weirdness of the Dan and Claire variety. Thanks to Jimmy for that one.
A map to the star “Q”, registered at the International Star Registry by Ele, Lee, Helen and Pete.
Several wonderful letters, including an excellent dialogue between Ruth and JTA, and a tear-jerking description of our friendship over the last few years from Matt R.
A fucking scary mask from Liz.
Not one but two pieces of knitting on the theme of the letter Q – now these were difficult to squeeze into clip-frames! – from Jen and Beth.
A piece of my last laptop, somehow recovered and kept by Paul, who was present at it’s destruction.

And so on, and so on, and so on. There’s far more than we ever imagined we’d get: so much that the half-dozen A1-size clip-frames we brought were actually insufficient to contain them all! From the sweet to the nostalgic to the crazy, all of these unusual gifts (and the dozens not mentioned here) have really made us feel loved by you all: thank you all so much.

Thanks are also due to everybody who – despite our request to the contrary – brought more conventional gifts as well. In particular, we were surprised (in a good way) by the sheer number of bottles of champagne we were given. A side-effect of this – and of all the cake left uneaten from the party – was that when we returned from our “honeymoon” – QMoon – a week later, the only things we had in the house to eat and drink were cake and champagne. Oh, the horror!

Once everybody who was going to appear had appeared and gotten themselves a drink or two, we decided that it was probably time to get on with giving the speeches that are so obviously mandatory at this kind of event. We’d planned the order of events only the night before. Then changed the plan. Then changed it again. In any case, we’d decided that I’d introduce, in turn, Claire, my mum, and Claire’s dad, and then say a few words myself.

Claire would talk about how she and I first met – delicately censored, of course: the finer details of the actual story are not only more long-winded than is appropriate for a speech of the length that Claire wanted to give, but also aren’t so repeatable in polite conversation (if you feel like you missed out on some juicy details, see us after class). Claire spoke well about the early days and months of our relationship, addressing her audience well and taking the piss out of me just about enough (it turns out to be quite easy).

My mum was next. We’d decided between us that what she would like to talk about was family. Her speech was simply fantastic, and earned her a great deal of respect from many of my friends, based on the number of people who later came up to me and told me how “brilliant your mum is!” Despite a meandering into a discussion on the breeding of alpacas, her musings made their point: that families – defined not by blood or lineage but by groups of individuals bonded together by love – are one of the most fundamental building blocks of society as we know it, and that everyone in the room was, by Claire and I’s action and through Claire and I’s love for one another, joined and related as a huge extended family.

When everybody was done wiping their eyes and laughing about alpacas, Claire’s dad took the mic. He talked a little about Claire’s upbringing and her unusual ways, embarrassing her just slightly in the way that a modern father of the bride is expected to, before reading a poem that he’d written for the occasion. It talked about his respect for his daughter, and his love of her, and her upbringing, and then took a change in pace at the point in her life where her dad first met me: And what’s this I find? / A man in bed with a girl of mine! / Who is this, me’s a thinker’, / Who is this bounder? What a stinker! It gets better, of course, and finishes with lines asking me to take care of “his Claire” for the rest of her life. Which, longevity-permitting, is my plan.

Finally, I stepped in to talk about Claire and I’s unusual and conversation-inspiring name change: why we did it, what it means, and how we came to choose the letter Q above all the other letters in the alphabet and, in fact, all the other combinations of letters that we could have possibly considered (I still think it would have been cool to change my name to Plugh Xyzzy – pronounced pl-urh zuzzie – and if you understand why it’s such a cool name then you’re as sad and geeky as me, and when you say it in your hollow voice, nothing happens anyway). My speech came across okay, I think, not helped by the fact that I’d put off writing it until the day of QParty – something which, in itself, wouldn’t have caused me any problems, if it weren’t for the fact that I had to spend the afternoon cleaning up and otherwise preparing the venue.

That’s when we opened the buffet.

My sister, Becky, had offered to take charge of catering and other tasks, and, with the help of one or two volunteers, had assembled a fantastic spread of foodstuffs, all carefully labelled to indicate whether or not it was “meaty” or “veggie” (curiously, these signs were later seen being worn as badges by party guests). It took a reasonable amount of time for everybody to be serviced at the buffet queue, not least because several of our friends – who are more excited by buffet food than others – had managed to get back into the queue for a second helping before other guests had even got their first portion yet! Nonetheless, there was still a little food left at the end, and not just salad and other things that everybody hates, so I think Becky and her team got the quantity of food about right.

Next up came the ceremonial cutting of the cake, or not-so-ceremonially. Hmm… I suppose it’s the symbolically ceremonially cutting of the cake. Kind-of. In any case, we brought out the cakes, my mum lit the Q-shaped sparklers thereon, and we cut them so that everybody could have a piece or two. easy).

Finally, having done all of the complicated and stressful (but still fun!) bits of the party, Claire and I could get on with enjoying the celebration ourselves. We tried to make time to talk to and sit with everybody who came, but it was difficult to spend as long as we’d have liked talking to some of the people we see less often than we’d like, because there were so many of them. Nonetheless, the atmosphere was fantastic and the experience unforgettable. At one point, Claire and I were sat at a table with a group of people who, three years ago, wouldn’t have looked out of place all sat around a table in a pub in Aberystwyth, but have since moved elsewhere… and just for a moment, I forgot that we weren’t at some early Troma Night or sat in the Ship & Castle playing Chez Geek. Quite remarkable.

As the night wore on and the music became more recognisable a good number of us migrated to the dance floor, spending much of the evening leaping around and sweating excessively in the warmth of our suits and dresses. Another party arrived (after 10pm, the management opened the doors of the venue and turned it into a regular nightclub; although it didn’t attract much traffic anyway, being a student bar outside of termtime) in fancy dress, and somebody must have been tipping them off about the nature of our event, because several people in strange costumes came over to congratulate me and to offer to buy me drinks.

The evening wore on, and many of the guests excused themselves, but for a small group of particularly hardcore party people who stayed on with us until the very end. All in all, it was a fantastic night. Thanks again to everybody who helped to make it a success, to everybody who came, and to everybody who sent well-wishes even if they couldn’t come. There’s loads of photos up now in QParty Gallery – here are some of my favourites (with captions):

	“I will… eat your face! Ha! Didn’t see that coming, did you?”
	Aww.
	Peter noticed that David’s trousers were leaking.
	“Fingers! Nom nom nom.”
	“Permission to be smug, Dan?” “Permission granted.”
	Peace, brother!
	“Boss wants ta see ya, Andy.” “Look; I can get the money next week! I just need a little more time, please!”
	“Y’know… I shhink th’alcohol’s workeeng.”
	“So, what? I put my right leg in, then my right leg out?”
	Liz tells Jen exactly how big Jimmy’s penis is.
	Off camera (left), Beth is dancing on the other pool table.
	“No way, no how!”
	Do you remember this? This is what Pete used to look like when he had hair!

There are loads more, of course, and so many of them are so good. Take a look in at QParty Gallery (or at the lower-quality ones on Facebook) and see for yourself.

Poultrygeist (Unofficial) UK Premiere – Sunday!

Guess which mind-blowingly fabulous, as-yet-unreleased film I got to watch last night? Only Troma‘s newest film, Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead! Oh yeah, baby.

I’ve promised I wouldn’t spoil the plot or any of the cooler surprises for anybody, but I did want to share a few fun facts with you:

The movie scores on pretty-much every rule of Ruleset T of the Troma Night drinking rules. The September 11th references, the dismemberment, the stereotypes, the ADR, the child abuse, the gore effects made from household ingredients, the non-vanilla sex scenes… even the Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D. car flip… they’re all in there! Plus, I’m pretty sure that of all the in-house Troma films, this one has the most nipples visible at once, at one point, of any of them.
Lloyd Kaufman himself has a significant role in the movie. Not just one of his typical "bit parts," but a proper speaking… hell; a singing role. And he’s actually pretty good.
Then there’s the rest of the cast: Caleb Emerson (Dex Diaper from Citizen Toxie), Joe Fleishaker (Toxie’s sidekick Lardass), Ron Jeremy (Captain Orgazmo‘s arch-nemesis), Motorhead’s Lemmy and other Troma favourites are all back together, joined by friends like Matt Stone and Trey Parker (of South Park fame, among other things).
Oh, and it rocks.

Better yet, there’s a chance for you too see it at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre – plus a chance to meet the director! – as part of the Abertoir film festival this week. There’s a once-only showing of Poultrygeist at 8pm on Sunday 4th November (that’s this coming Sunday!).

If you come to Troma Night on Saturday you’ll hear me go on about how great it is then, too. Go get yourself a ticket, already.

New PWL Music Video

In case you hadn’t seen it already, I just wanted to bring your attention to the stunning new music video – Tree Of Knowledge – from Pagan Wanderer Lu. Christians like you are why God invented lions.

Normal service will be resumed just as soon as I can get five minutes in which to get stuff done.

QParty – Part 1 – Before The Party

Well, it’s been three weeks since QParty (and the heap of blog posts it generated) and about thirty weeks since Claire and I changed our names to Q, and I suppose it’s time to write my piece about QParty itself – I was stalling on doing so until I’d uploaded a majority of the photos from the event to QParty Gallery, which I’ve now done (if you’ve got photos we haven’t, of course, we’d love copies!).

I suppose the story of QParty started many months ago, when we decided – after having it suggested to us many, many times – that we wanted to have such a party. We’d talked about doing it before, when we first talked about changing our names someday but long before we talked about what we would choose, and we’d always come to the conclusion that while marriage wasn’t for us, we were both big fans of weddings (and, in particular, wedding receptions), so a party was probably on the cards from day one.

We wanted a party for a few reasons. The first and most important is, of course, that we love parties and we wanted to be at the centre of one. Another important one is that we genuinely wanted to celebrate our relationship, because we think it’s a pretty damn good relationship and it’s worth celebrating. Yet another reason was that we wanted to show the (few) people who were holding out on a wedding that really, this is it: this… what we have… is our relationship, and we’re perfectly happy with it, and we don’t feel the need to wear little gold bands or big expensive dresses to justify it.

It was exciting. It was also tiring. Did you know that all of the invitations we sent out were hand-calligraphed by Claire, the “invitation codes” and envelopes hand-written by me (no thanks to a complete failure to find windowed C5-size envelopes in Aberystwyth). It’s surprisingly hard work, even when you do try to make a romantic evening or three in of it with a bottle or two of wine.

We’d chosen a venue in Preston, of course, before we ordered the invitations. We chose to hold the party in Preston because it’s central location makes it immediately more accessible to a lot of people: the folks in Aber didn’t thank us, of course, but those who travelled from Norfolk and Lincolnshire (Claire’s family), Kent (parts of my family), Scotland (Kit and Fiona) and the North-West (loads of people) were probably very glad of the reduced journey time. Plus, it had the immediate advantage of being in the town with both of my parents’ houses, which gave the potential for loads and loads of floor-space on which people could crash, which turned out to be a huge advantage when a dozen or so of our less well-off friends (and some folks who just wanted to spend that little bit longer with us) descended upon them.

Thanks are due to SmartData, my employer, for the loan of their franking machine, which made posting all of the invitations a lot easier than lick-and-sticking. Briefly, when writing the database that powers the QParty website and our invitation-printing system, I considered implementing a WalkSort algorithm to help the post office deliver the letters by giving a box of envelopes to them already in the order they need to be to be rapidly sorted… but thought better of it. Damn, I’m a geek.

We travelled to Preston on the early afternoon of Friday 7th September, the day before QParty, carrying Matt P, Sarah and Paul (who needed a lift from Aberystwyth, so we offered them seats in Claire’s car in exchange for promises of help with party preparation). We didn’t anticipate seeing many other people on Friday, but we were wrong. Matt R, in his trademark way, “appeared” on our doorstep. Ruth and JTA rushed up to join us right after work, and we’d missed them so much that it would have been hard to justify quite how clingy we were about them were it not for the fact that we were surrounded by friends who know quite how close Claire and I’s relationship with JTA and Ruth is. Kit and Fiona (who, I’ve just noticed, use the same theme on their LiveJournal blogs) drove down overnight, and we did’t see them until the morning, but Matt R was kind enough to stay up to greet them and show them to their bedroom…

…but not before those of us who’d arrived earlier met up with my family, chatted about plans for the following day, and took a trip to the supermarket to get all kinds of party grub. Huge thanks to my mum who took charge of the catering. Later, many of us went to the pub for a couple of quiet drinks and a catch-up, and it was great to see folks that we don’t see so often and chat in the way that, a few years ago, we might have been caught doing in the Ship & Castle.

And so we came to QParty day itself.

The plan was pretty simple. We’d get up late in the morning and assign some jobs. A few folks from our team of early-arriving volunteers would be assigned to each task at hand: decoration (inflating balloons, tying streamers…), food preparation (making sandwiches, hedgehogs, chilling champagne…), etc. It could all have been so simple…

…but, of course, when we arrived at the venue early in the afternoon, we discovered that it was in a hell of a state of disrepair. All of the furniture was stacked in the corner, covered in dust. The bar was covered with glass. The floor was filthy. There was a pile of rubble in the dance floor. Evidently, the rennovations we’d been promised were not so complete as we had been led to expect.

Within 30 seconds of my blog post going up about the situation, Jon – star that he is – and Hayley were on their way to Preston to help with the tidy-up effort. Hayley, in particular, did a stirling job of clearing up the mess that was the stairwell (I’m sure I’ll never know where she found the vacuum cleaner that the bar staff claimed didn’t exist, and I’m still unsure where she moved that wooden pallet and the shipping crate on top of it). When we started to make progress, our friends and family switched to the job of food preparation, and all was beginning to take shape. By half past five – half an hour before the party was due to start, the tidy-up team were starting to relax and get changed into their various party wear.

Claire, it must be said, looked absolutey fantastic, and I’m left wondering why she doesn’t wear a dress more often. But that’s not to say that everybody else didn’t look great, of course: JTA wore what is perhaps the single most beautiful waistcoat I’ve ever seen. Matt R was only a violin case away from looking like a Sicilian gangster, so sharp and dark was his suit and hat. Ruth’s marvellously sexy dress should have featured in more photos than she ever allows people to take. And so on, and so on…

I remember Matt R’s first comment when he saw Claire in her dress: “Are you wearing a corset under that?” he asked. She shook head. “No, I said: she’s actually that shape.” I’m a lucky, lucky man.

I’ll be writing more about QParty and about the event itself in a second post.

LiveJournal For Google Reader v1.3 Update

Earlier this year, I released my LiveJournal Atom Feed Digest Authentication Proxy (also known as LiveJournal For Google Reader Users). This tool allows Google Reader users to subscribe to “friends only” posts in LiveJournal weblogs, which normally isn’t possible because Google Reader doesn’t support the necessary authentication methods.

Thanks to the hundreds of users that use the service, and in particular to Mike, Aaron, Thom, and Nat, who filed particularly valuable bug reports, this post announces the new version of the tool – version 1.3. If there were a tagline for it, it’d be “at long last, it’s stable!” The source code for this version is also available for download.

Here’s the “for dummies” guide to getting it working:

Using Google Reader To Get “Friends Only” LiveJournal Posts

There are lots of good reasons to use a newsreader (like, for example, Google Reader) to subscribe to your friends’ LiveJournals. The big and obvious one for me is that it’s possible to subscribe to your other friends’ non-LiveJournal weblogs, too, and to other comics and news sources and all kinds of things all from one place, so you don’t get stuck in a cycle of “check the LiveJournal friends page, now check this blog, now check that one,” and so on. But if you’ve used Google Reader already, you won’t need to be told about how great it is.

The problem is that if you just use Google Reader to subscribe to LiveJournal weblogs, it doesn’t pick up your “friends only” posts. That’s kind-of irritating, and could be a showstopper, unless somebody wrote a tool to get around the problem. Hey look, somebody did!

You’ll need a Google Reader account. If you already have a Google Mail or similar account, you can use that, or you can make up a new one to make it hard for the all-seeing Google to link together all of your online activities into their massive databases. If somehow you don’t have one already, create a Google account here.
Next, you’ll need a LiveJournal account. Unless you’re one of these fancy folks who uses OpenID to authenticate and read your friends’ “friends only” posts, you probably already have one of these. If not, create one here and then get everybody you know to add it to their friends list!
Finally, you’ll need to log in to LiveJournal For Google Reader Users. This bit’s really easy, because you just log in using your LiveJournal username and password. If you don’t like the idea of your LiveJournal credentials being stored on some site somewhere that isn’t LiveJournal, you’ll want to download the codebase and run it on your own server.

Then you’re ready to go! Just click the “add to Google Reader” links (or use the “atom feed” links to get links you can use in other reader tools, if Google Reader isn’t your thing).

And Here’s The FAQ

What’s new in this version?

It works properly, for one. Previous versions have had bugs when picking up feeds of users whose usernames contained dashes or underscores, or when your username had uppercase letters in it. These irritating little bugs took a while to be found, and are the result of strange behaviour on the part of LiveJournal’s server. They’ve now all been fixed, and all feeds should work perfectly.

What about… OpenID…? Communities…? DeadJournal…?

If you’re looking for extra features; here’s the round-up:

Support for OpenID probably won’t ever happen, and certainly won’t happen soon, because it’s horribly complicated compared to the simplicity of the rest of the program. I love OpenID, I really do, but LiveJournal For Google Reader Users will probably never support it (unless you feel like writing that bit of it). Sorry!
Communities probably will end up supported in the next version, so you can pick up friends-only posts in them, too. Stop asking.
Related journalling systems like DeadJournal can probably be really easily supported by this or a similar system. I’ll implement it as soon as somebody asks me to.
Another feature that’s in the pipeline is an indication of friends-only posts. Right now, in Google Reader, there’s no little “padlock” icon to let you know that what you’re looking at is a friends-only post: they all look the same. This’ll probably be fixed in a later version.

Got other suggestions? Leave a comment to let me know!

I’m already using Google Reader to subscribe to LiveJournal. What should I do?

You should unsubscribe (sorry!) from every single LiveJournal you’re subscribed to, then re-subscribe to the addresses given to you by LiveJournal For Google Reader. It’s a painstakingly long process, and I wish I could think of a way to make it easier, but I can’t. If you want to do it a few blogs at a time, that’s fine – and I suggest you start with the blogs which most-frequently make friends-only posts.

Why do I have to give you my LiveJournal username and password?

To get access to friends-only posts in your friends’ feeds, LiveJournal must be supplied with your username and password. LiveJournal For Google Reader stores these for you and provides you with a complex URL that doesn’t contain your username and password (so people can’t work out your password just by looking at the list of feeds you subscribe to).

To help you feel more secure, the entire application is open source (you can read the code and see that it’s not doing anything malicious) and you can even run a copy on your own server, if you don’t trust me at all.

Alternatively, if security is a concern for you, open a second LiveJournal account and have your friends add that one to their friends’ lists, and use this new account with LiveJournal For Google Reader. This way, your own personal LiveJournal account remains completely protected. Can’t say fairer than that, I guess.

If you change your LiveJournal password or close your LiveJournal account, LiveJournal For Google Reader will stop working until you supply your new credentials.

Why do you get all mysterious towards the end of FAQs?

You’ll have to wait and see.

QParty First Thoughts

Claire and I are back from QMoon now (in Italy, as you’ll have guessed if you read the four virtual postcards I posted to my blog), and it was a fantastic trip right up until we went to come home and everything went wrong. You’d be amazed how much trouble you can cause for yourself by when language barriers get in your way. For example, something I’ve learned is that when you’re trying to explain to an airport official who speaks only Italian why it is that the zip on your bag is broken, you should not use the words, "I’m sorry, my bag is exploding," because it turns out that doesn’t translate very well. I’ve also learnt that the correct way to get through passport control without trouble is not to be deliberately enigmatic: for instance, when an immigration officer says "That’s an unusual name you’ve got, isn’t it, sir?" you should not respond, "Why yes, yes it is."

There’s a story for another day in there somewhere, but suffice to say that despite the fact that we were not allowed to get onto the flight we were supposed to be on – to Liverpool – we were eventually allowed onto a ‘plane headed to Stansted, London, which isn’t quite the same thing but is still in the UK so that’s a step.

We’re back in Preston, now, and we’ll be back in Aberystwyth tomorrow (Monday) afternoon.

In any case, what I wanted to do was to share with you links to the great number of fantastic posts that people have made online about QParty. I’ll say more about QParty itself later, but for now – here’s what other people have been saying:

Kit raises n to the power of Q.
Andy K is next to write a post in the Q.
Andy R makes puns and muses (friends only).
Ruth rebels against abnib, and points people at Andy R’s post.
Matt makes better (well, cheesier) puns.
Hayley says nice things, and links to one of her photos of the event.
Adam says happy soppy things.
JTA says nice things about how it all came together in the end.
Ruth announces QMoon for us (remind me to give you a big hug).
Paul points out that everybody’s already said everything that’s to be said about QParty.
Jimmy eventually writes a few curious words.

The official QParty photo gallery will launch this week, too, and I’ll be sharing with you some of the many pictures our friends took of the event in nice hi-res, printable glory, as well as sharing with you the results of the QFrame idea (remember those big clip frames at QParty? no; of course you don’t, you were completely pissed). Until then…

QMoon Virtual Postcard #4

Pompeii was simply stunning; so much more than I’d expected. For a 2000 year old town it’s in excellent condition: in some places, it’s even possible to make out painting on the walls of the villas and pretty much whole buildings, as well as mosaics, statues, fountains and the like are perfectly preserved. It’s simply mind-blowing to walk in the grooves made by carts thousands of years ago as if it were last week.

It’s bigger than I expected, too – much bigger. While of course I knew that it was a whole town that was buried in volcanic ash and mud in 79AD, I’d never really stopped to think about quite how big a town can be. There are paved roads with pavements and crossing points and street name signs cris-crossing between homes, workshops, temples, markets, stables, wells, plaza, stadia, theatres, monuments, and they’re still uncovering more after years of work. It’s still very much a working archeological dig, and on a couple of occassions I watched teams of researchers – behind their barriers of tape of wooden gates – retrieving and cleaning tools and fragments of pottery, storing each in it’s own numbered bag for later analysis. There’s a warehouse on one side of the town where hundreds of retrieved artefacts are shelved, and thousands more are stored off-site.

Here and there, plaster casts of the bodies retrieved have been made and returned to the buildings where they were found: huddled up or bent double, often clutching at their eyes or faces, often with a look of terror. At the time of the disaster, the people of the town really had little warning of their impending doom. It’s a stark contrast to the burial mounds and castles that have dominated British archeology.

Later, back in Napoli, we went out to eat at one of the pizzarias that’s participating in September’s annual Pizza Fest: a city-wide competition of pizza-making skill. We ordered – in our best Italian, as our waiter spoke no English at all – a couple of interesting starters and a bottle of white wine while they prepared our pizzas – a Quattro Formaggio for Claire and a Diavolo for me.

I’ve no problem with admitting that my pizza is the single best pizza I have ever had. I took the time to find an English-speaking waiter at the end of the meal to tell him so. Evidently the restaurant is proud of it’s history in winning awards, as they’ve covered the walls with prizes and related newspaper cuttings. I’m not sure I’ll ever look at Hollywood Pizza in Aberystwyth the same light again.

We stayed for cake, and then for a few glasses of Limoncello, which I was in the process of trying to persuade Claire we should have when the waiter, impressed by our efforts to speak his native tongue (rather than just pointing-and-shouting like the Americans on the next table along), brought us a small chilled bottle of it on the house. Which was nice.

And then, painfully full and already quite drunk, we stumbled back to our hotel to find that the owner – having heard that it was our “honeymoon” – had given us a bottle of champagne, which he’d left in an ice bucket in our room.

Now we’re on the train back to Venice (about half-way through our 6-and-a-half hour train ride), where we’ll spend our final night in Italy before we fly back to the UK on Sunday morning. I can’t promise another blog post before we get back to Aberystwyth (and then, I’ll probably be writing a much-delayed post about QParty), so I’ll say now: this has been a fantastic and exciting trip. I’ve loved exploring three quite distinct parts of Italy, diving into the culture and language (badly) and, above all, spending an extended period of time of “just Claire and I,” something our lifestyles mean that we don’t get to do a lot of these days. Thanks again, dad, for this surprise trip.

Right, next time we come out of a tunnel (how long and how frequent are these Italian railway tunnels?) I’m going to post this! 3… 2… 1…

QMoon Virtual Postcard #3

The motorists have a game here in Napoli. The aim is, over the course of your journey, to (justifiably) sound your horn at other motorists more times than other motorists sound theirs at you. The taxi driver who brought us from the station to our hotel yesterday is particularly good at this game: I counted him beeping his horn 11 times on the ten-minute journey, but he in turn was honked at only about 8 times. I’m guessing that’s a pretty good score.

Apart from some confusion over the bill at our hotel in Rome (they seemed to want us to pay twice, for some reason), for which they later sent their best English-speaker to apologise and to offer to have themselves fed to the lions, and an hour’s delay on the train coming down here, our journey to Italy’s South was uneventful. In fact, exhausted from our morning battle with tourists as we’d gone to The Pantheon (brilliant bit of Roman architecture, well-preserved and only slightly spoiled by it’s re-consecration as a Christian temple) and an exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci’s intentions (including a full size working ballista and a detailed scale model of their controversial interpretation of his plans for a tank), I slept through most of the train ride, only being woken late on, by Claire, when Mount Vesuvius appeared in the distance.

It’s big. Hell, it’s huge, and it dominates the view across the bay from our first-floor hotel room. The bay itself is a reminder of it’s might, having apparently been formed as the crater of a massive lava bomb from some prehistoric erupption. We sat in it’s shadow last night as we ate pizza and ice cream and drank beer at the foot of Castel Nuovo (oh yeah, it turns out that Italy’s third-largest city has loads of castles: presumably every time it changed hands over the last 1500 years the new occupants erected a new one), within earshot of a Radio Italia-sponsored free music concert. Altogether a nice evening until we got lost in the docklands and chased by a 40-strong pack of feral cats. In any case, we found a nice bar where were able to sample Limoncella, a local speciality liquor made that tastes just slighty like lemon cough syrup, if such a thing can be imagined to exist.

This morning, we’re going to visit Pompeii, which I’ve always wanted to, so that’ll be good.

As an afterthought, thought I’d share with you that relying on English being a widely-spoken second language may work in the North of Italy, but here in the South we’ve had to fall back on the Italian we’ve learnt so far on our trip – and that old favourite, the pointing-and-shouting method of universal communication – to get things done. An ability to mime, and no shame about doing it in public, will get you far wherever you travel, even Glasgow.

QMoon Virtual Postcard #2

We arrived in Rome last night to find a city teeming with life. There’s a buzz everywhere, and a crowd whereever you look. Roma Termini, the central station, stretches for miles and is bustling with commuters and tourists, fighting their way through ticket office queues or met.ro (the underground train system) gates.

Not quite sure how to make things like the ticket gates work, we stood back for a few minutes to watch the locals, first. When in Rome, we quite literally had to “do as the Romans do!”

Our hotel, right on the met.ro line, is fabulous. Big rooms, WiFi, and staff that were kind enough to lend me an electrical adapter after the one my dad had given to us turned out not to fit Italian sockets. So now my phone’s charged, which is nice, because it doubles as my palmtop (for blogging, e-mail etc.), camera (for taking photos of everything in a “hey look, I’m a tourist,” way), alarm clock, and so on. I’m half-tempted to “forget” to return it when we go to Napoli tomorrow. There’s a great pizza place just around the corner from the hotel where we went for a couple of slices of *excellent* Rome-style (thin, crispy) pizza and a beer before we went out to see the sights last night.

We ended up sat outside a gay bar a stone’s throw away from the Collesseum (yes, THE Collesseum – the speed with which we got here, coupled with the fact that, a few days ago, we didn’t know we were going to Italy at all, means that we’re still going “look… THE $monumentname” every time we see one), sharing a litre of wine and bits of desserts.

Today we woke up late, owing perhaps to a little bit of a late night last night… uhm… making the most of our honeymoon. Ahem. In any case, we took the train over to Vatican City, and, after buying Claire a cloth to cover her shoulders with (heaven forbid that God see a woman’s shoulders!) from a nearby trader, went into the Vatican museums.

I’ve now recieved my lifetime dosage of looking-at-painted-ceilings. Yes, the Sistine Chapel really IS quite beautiful, and so are the other hundred painted ceilings in Vatican City, but there’s only so much staring upwards you can do before you start feeling woozy, and it’s not helped by being caught in a crowd of people. The Vatican was really quite stunning, though, and I’d always wanted to see it, even though Claire and I *did* have to make two major compromises to go there: firstly, we had to pay the Catholic church €26 for the privilege of looking at various artefacts that they stole while promoting various crusades, which I’m not sure I approve of them making money out of (I suppose it’s no worse than most of the exhibits in the badly-named British Museum in London, but at least they don’t charge admission). Secondly, we had to stop playing our Rome-oriented variation on the Yellow Car Game, which we call Spot The Nun, because it was getting too painful as we got close to the centre of the Catholic world.

Also, I was disappointed to find that Vatican City doesn’t have a bar. Although it did make up for it with the uniforms that the Swiss Guard wear: with their floppy blue berets and silly sailor outfits they are, without a doubt, the campest army ever.

It’s been a stinking hot day today, and because the Vatican museum was so big we were exhausted before we could get to the Pantheon, which was this afternoon’s plan. Instead, we’re now waiting for the temperature outdoors to go down before going monument-spotting again. It’s really true that in Rome you can just “trip over” bits of ancient history without even trying, in a “whoops; a column!” way. Here, at what was once the capital city of Europe, “old” is a word that isn’t done justice by any building made since the year 1000. There are times when you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in Paris or London, and moments later, you can feel like you’ve been catapulted back in time. It’s quite amazing.

Tomorrow we’re off to Napoli! I’ll post more from there!