memorable – Page 10

Your Experience May Differ

To: Daniel Hill <dlh9@….>
              
From: Dan Q <dan@….>
              
Subject: Aberystwyth University Is Awesome! Warning: Your Experience May Differ.
              
                Dear Daniel,
              
                There’s an age-old tradition amongst Aberystwyth graduates, and in particular amongst Computer Science graduates. But to truly understand it, you first need to understand a
                little bit about Aberystwyth University. Also, to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion (you’ll “get” that joke by your second year, if you don’t already).
              
                As you know, your username is “dlh9”. There’s a reason for that: The letters are your initials. “But I don’t have a middle name,” I hear you cry (or, at least, not one that the
                University know about), “Where’s the ‘L’ come from?” Well, it turns out that Information Services, who look after all of the computer networks, have a System [TM]. And their System
                [TM] is that staff get usernames like “abc”, undergrads get “abc1”, postgrads get “abc12”.
              
                (this has lead to some awesome usernames: for example, “bed” used to be the username of somebody from Residential Services, and “sad” was once the username of one of the counsellors
                at the Students’ Union)
              
                Anyway, I digress. I was talking about usernames. The digit in your username is the year you started your course. So, because you’re starting this year, yours is “9” (see, ‘cos it’s
                2009 – get it?). You’re not allowed to spend more than nine years getting your degree, so that’s a pretty good primary key (you probably know what one of those is, but if not, you
                will before the academic year is out). Postgraduates get two digits because they often hang around for years and years. I don’t know what would happen if somebody spent a century
                getting their PhD, but I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be pretty.
              
                And so there’s been a long-standing tradition amongst Aber grads, and particularly Comp. Sci. Aber grads, and especially particularly Comp. Sci. Aber
                grads-who-graduated-and-got-jobs-in-Aberystwyth and never got around to leaving… that when their username comes up for “renewal” – when a decade passes after they first started their
                course – they finger (you’ll learn what that means soon enough, too) the Aber computer systems and check if their username has been re-assigned. It’s a great way to make yourself feel
                old, as if the annual influx of younger-every-year Freshers didn’t do that perfectly well already.
              
                Over the years, I’ve seen many friends play this little game. Some of them won, but most of them lost – it turns out that the odds aren’t really on your side: there are 17,576
                conceivable username combinations each year – from aaa9 to zzz9 – and only 3,000 new students, so odds are less than 50% whether or not you ignore the statistical biases that mean
                that things like “qxz9” (Quentin X. Zachary?) are basically never going to turn up.
              
                So imagine my surprise when I, for the first time, get to play the game, today… and I not only win, but I get a double-win, because the person to whom my old username has been
                recycled is an undergraduate in my old department!
              
                Yes: I was the last owner of “dlh9”. I was “dlh9” from 1999, when I started, to 2004, when I graduated, an alumni of the Computer Science Department at what was then the University of
                Wales, Aberystwyth (it changed it’s name to Aberystwyth University shortly afterwards – this, combined with the fact that I have since changed my name by deed poll, means that I am
                the proud owner of a degree certificate that contains neither my name nor the name of an existing university!). At the time, my name was Daniel Huntley – I didn’t have a middle name,
                either – and I spent five years getting a four-year degree in Software Engineering before I started working for a software company here in this very town. I haven’t yet got around to
                leaving.
              
                It still feels strange to write an e-mail to your e-mail address – my old e-mail address. It feels like I’m writing an e-mail to myself. I wonder what I’d have made of it if I’d have
                received this e-mail when I first arrived at University. It’s not so hard to imagine: the person I am now would be unrecognisable to the person I was back then, just like I am a
                complete stranger to you, but writing to you nonetheless. But even if you discard this e-mail and never think of it again, you’ll have done me a wonderful service by allowing me the
                chance to participate in a fascinating thought experiment that has granted me a great and deep nostalgia for the time I spent at that University.
              
                (by the way; I apologise if your e-mail address is still getting the spam it used to get when it belonged to me)
              
                Like me, Aber’s changed over the last ten years. The University’s changed, and the Computer Science Department has changed too. But I’m sure that you’ll find the place as beautiful
                and as satisfying as it has always been: this remarkable town on the West coast of Wales, where the mountains meet the sea, full of strange and quirky characters, a million miles from
                anywhere, and truly unique. I find myself longing for you to have *my* experience of Aberystwyth; to do all the great things I did, to meet all the great people I did – but you won’t.
                You won’t have the same lovers; you won’t discover the same music; you won’t join the same clubs; you won’t have the same beautiful sunsets while you roast burgers on disposable
                barbeques and the rising tide laps at your ankles; you won’t have the same hangovers; you won’t scrape through the same exams; you won’t steal the same traffic cones; you won’t climb
                the same mountains. A different story told differently.
              
                You won’t have any of the things that made my time here in Aberystwyth so wonderful for the last ten years, but don’t dispair, because you’ll have something far better – you’ll have
                all of your own marvellous experiences. Mine are mine in nostalgia alone, but yours are yet to come. And I hope you have an ass-kickingly good time, because that’s what every Aber
                Comp. Sci undergrad deserves when they come to this magical corner of the world.
              
                When you get as far as your lectures, tell Richard Shipman I said “Hi”. That’ll put you in
                his good books, I’m sure. ;-)
              
                And if you see me around town, give me a wave and I’ll buy you a pint. If you got nothing else from reading this old man’s drivel, you just earned yourself a free pint. When I was a
                student, I’d have called that a win-win. Your experience may differ.
              
                Good luck, and best wishes;
              
                —
                
                Dan Q
              
                  Home

BiCon 2009

This weekend, I was at BiCon 2009 (my third BiCon – I guess that makes it a tradition), and it was awesome. Here’s a short summary of the highs and lows:

Travel

Worcester’s closer than I remembered, and – once Claire‘d gotten used to the Vauxhall Astra we’d rented – we made good time there and back. It’s a really simple journey, really – you just drive along the A44 until you get there, and then you stop (well, okay, there’s a brief stretch on the A470 near Rhayader, but that doesn’t really count, does it?). The biggest difficulty we had was on the University of Worcester campus itself, which is a maze of twisty little passageways, all alike.

Accommodation

The usual student halls affair, although with rooms far larger and kitchens far better-equipped than those in, say, Penbryn. Also, the organisers must have run out of regular rooms, because the flat Claire and I were in had en-suite rooms, which was an unexpected luxury.

An interesting quirk in the halls of residence at Worcester is that they’re very, very keen on motion-sensor-activated lighting with very short timers. The lights in the hallway outside my room would come on for barely seconds, and when I first checked in, I’d only just worked out which was my door and dug my key out of my pocket before I was plunged into darkness and had to leap around to get the attention of the sensor and get the lights back on. The one in the kitchen was even worse – while playing board games on the first night, we eventually grabbed an anglepoise lamp from one of the study bedrooms to use, as it was simply too frustrating to begin your turn right as the lights turn off, and have to wait for a few seconds until your movement is enough to turn them back on again.

On the other extreme, the light (and the – noisy – linked extractor fan) in my bathroom was so sensitive that it would turn on if I so little as walked outside the door to my bathroom, while it was closed, and often wouldn’t turn off for several hours.

Registration

Registration was the usual fun and games, with less time than usual setting up our badges in accordance with the “sticker code” (sort of a handkerchief code, but with a key and an atmosphere of being a little more playful). As usual the sticker code started small (and, unusually, with a distinct and separate “official” code) and expanded over the course of the weekend, such that by the end of the conference it looked like this:

I didn’t spend very long on my badge and stickers this year: just enough to get a core message across… plus a not-on-the-key “Q scrabble tile”, as a reference both to being a board gamer and to Claire and I’s unusual surname. There’s probably at least half a dozen others I could have legitimately added to my pass.

To save you squinting at the pictures (or clicking on them to see bigger ones: that’s allowed, too), I’ll decode my badge for you: polyamorous, likes hugs, possibly available (as in: I’m theoretically open to new relationships, but seriously – where would I find the time?), and the aforementioned “Q scrabble tile” and another “Q” that I found in the sticker stash.

Claire volunteered for a shift of reception desk duties, which is cool, because they’re always in need of more folks there.

Other People’s Workshops

I didn’t go to as many workshops as I have in previous years: many of the things I was interested in clashed with one another, and other slots were simply full of topics that didn’t catch my attention. Also, I’ve found that going to a workshop in “every other” timeslot is a perfectly good way to get by, and spending the alternating periods hanging out, meeting people, and playing board games is a great way to keep energy levels up in the otherwise quite draining busy-ness of BiCon.

Right at the start of the conference, I narrowly missed going to Genital Show & Tell, which I later heard was awesome – I’d gotten carried away talking to people and got there after they’d locked the door, putting a sign up on it that read “This workshop is closed. Sorry.” and underneath which somebody had added “Yes, it is possible to have too many genitals in one place!”
I enjoyed Fun & Games, at which Ele joined me and we shouted lots of rude words, although never in as articulate a fashion as Nomad.
Went to the Smutty Bisexual Storytelling workshop for the first time this year, and it was amazing: huge thanks to the amazing Jacqui (is that spelled right?) for that fabulous (hot!) session.
Loved the talk and the discussion at the Quaker Marriage workshop (much thanks to the facilitator, whose low-key online presence suggests might prefer to remain unidentified), and the fabulous religion/marriage/sexuality conversation I had afterward with another participant in that workshop.
Hung out at two of the three scheduled Naked Lunches, at which I enjoyed bonding with several other (naked) geeks over a shared love of Interactive Fiction. Who’d have thought?

My Workshops

This year was the first year that I ran a workshop (last year’s impromptu purity test party doesn’t count), and, because I like a challenge, I ran two:

Alongside “fire_kitten“, I got bullied into (well, okay, I sorta promised) running a workshop entitled Different Approaches To Polyamory. As the only official poly-workshop on the programme (that’s why I offered!), it was somewhat over-subscribed, and we actually ended up with almost a quarter of the conference attendees present, and for part of the workshop we had to split them between two rooms. A lot of people grabbed me later during the conference and thanked me for the workshop, which was pleasing, especially as I did very, very little: mostly I gave the participants some conversation topics and split them up into groups, and chaired a bit of a chat about it all at the beginning and at the end. But if it worked, it worked, and it sounds like it worked.
When I’d first heard that there was a minor shortage of workshops, I felt compelled to provide one, but I couldn’t think of anything that I knew enough about to stand up and talk about, that people might actually be interested in hearing about. And then I thought of something. I did my other workshop on Listening Skills for Supporting Others, and it also went really well. It was a little under-subscribed, probably because it was timetabled against the time that many people will have been preparing their BiCon Ball costumes (hell, if I’d have been doing so at that time, it’d have made things a lot faster and easier for me!). However, it got some fantastic feedback, even from folks who seemed skeptical at the beginning that any good could be done by listening and supporting feelings, rather than by providing practical help.

BiCon Ball

The theme of the BiCon Ball was Crime and Punishment, and so there were – predictably – plenty of burglars with swag-bags, police officers, superheroes and villains, and the like. The standard of body-painting was even better than normal (a number of people opted to wear virtually nothing, instead being painted as, for example, Wonderwoman, who didn’t wear much to begin with).

Just to be that little bit different – and to take a metaphor to it’s illogical extreme in our characteristic manner – Claire and I decided to actually dress as a crime itself. She dressed as a salt shaker and I dressed as a Duracell D-Cell, and together we were… a salt and battery. Get it? Everybody else we spoke to that evening did, too, eventually, although many of them needed some prompting.

And There’s More…

Other highlights and notable moments include:

The “settling in” period seemed a little worse than usual this year than last year. Somehow it took me a little while longer than normal to “get into the BiCon groove” and to start appreciating BiCon for the heap of awesome that it really is. It’s always challenging jumping into that environment, and that’s to be expected, but something made it a little slower this year. Perhaps the lack of a beer in my hand!
Thoroughly enjoyed the last-minute late-night picnic party we helped kick-off after the BiCon Ball. Some of the coolest people at BiCon found their way to the quad not far from the students union, carrying their leftover food supplies, and we broke bread and exchanged hugs and chatted and it was fabulous. After all that and one thing and another, I finally got to bed at almost 4am, knackered but happy.
Discovered some cool new board games that might be finding their way to a Geek Night near you (assuming you live in Aberystwyth) soon, including Frank’s Zoo, Snatch, and Type Trumps (Top Trumps, but with typefaces; yes really).
Feeling like I’d helped make BiCon a success by volunteering to do a variety of bits and pieces (like the workshops, above) and generally being useful. It feels great to contribute back to the event and the community.
Katie managing to accidentally break a pool cue between her breasts. I didn’t even know that such a thing was possible (apparently, it’s left quite a bruise, and I’m not surprised).
Catching up (albeit only in passing) with Henri and Pascale, with whom we shared accommodation at our very first BiCon.
Spending an hour and a bit chatting to somebody who seemed to coincidentally know their way intimately around pretty much every interest I’ve thrown myself at over the last twelve months. But better. The killer was when it turned out that she spoke Esperanto better than me (if it’s any consolation, she made up for knowing everything by being gorgeous).
Watching another somebody dancing. Honestly, I could have watched him all night.
Everyone seemed to like the campus, which is cool (presumably they didn’t have rooms with extractor fans that whirred until three in the morning, which is quite irritating if you happen to have gone to bed before then, which happens sometimes).
Didn’t see as much of my flatmates as usual, which is a pity, because it included some fabulous people.
Having common sense. Knowing what to say yes to, and what to say no to, and why both are okay.
Not too bad a “coming down” post-BiCon period, this time.

Right; that’ll have to do for a BiCon 2009 Roundup, because Ruth‘s cooking me dinner so I need to go eat.

Repost #13158

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

This repost was published in hindsight, on 12 March 2019.

Ruth wrote:

Since I last posted, I’ve been fairly busy, one way and another. First, Dan and I travelled up to Preston where I was forced to allow that it isn’t a complete pit after all because it does have a couple of nice bits (viz, a pretty park by the river and a nice museum/library with a ball on a really long bit of string in the lobby).

We also visited Blackpool, which was a new experience for me. Incidentally, the entertainment value of eating giant eclairs and then riding on a waltzer is limited. I kicked Dan’s arse at crazy golf, on a really nice course with astro-turf and little streams.

Later, we travelled up to Scotland with some crazed, drunken bus company employees (they were an ok bunch apart from their habit of getting up at 5am) to canoe the Caledonian canal. I managed the 18 mile first day, got out of our boat and found that my RSI had flared up and I couldn’t move my arms at all. Dan sympathetically fell about with laughter, but on the third day (Fort Augustus to Drumnadrochit) the winds on Loch Ness were so bad that he and the other canoeists were forced off the water so we both finished up walking the Great Glen Way to Inverness.

On the way back down, the planets were aligned correctly (or something) so we were able to do the surprise thing that Dan had been planning for ages as my graduation treat. We got up at 5.30 and drove out to a deserted farm shop on the outskirts of Preston, where we sat in a car park for 10 minutes or so before a battered landrover emblazoned with “Pendle Balloon Company” arrived towing a large basket on a trailer. I was surprised.

Ballooning was amazing. First, we got to help put the balloon up (which was really cool). The inside is full of wires and cables which are used to control it in various ways. We went up to 5500 feet before coming back down so we could get a better view of the countryside. It was cold at that height but there was barely a breath of wind for reasons which I am sure you can all figure out by yourselves (I felt colder when we eventually touched down and could feel the breeze again). The views were stunning, the gentleness of the flight was quite something, and I had a great time. When it was over, we drank champagne with the pilot and other passengers (which is apparently a ballooning tradition, although I don’t know whether the plastic beakers are traditional or not).

It was a good trip. Knackering, and full of unexpected events, but highly enjoyable. Now I’m settling in for a summer of alternating basking in the sunshine with working like buggery on voluntary projects. All I need is a part time job so I can carry on eating and paying the rent, and I’m set.

Scotland Etc.

A quick summary of a holiday (and a series of associated trips on the side) that Ruth and I took a fortnight ago (yeah; I’ve been busy). Ruth has already written a little about the trip. I’d hoped to blog “on the move”, but a combination of low signal and low energy after a day of paddling made this pretty much impossible, so here’s the “grand catch-up”:

Wednesday 27th May

Ruth and I travelled to Shropshire to visit Ruth’s grandma in hospital, but it turned out that she’d been discharged about an hour before we arrived, so we briefly visited her at home.

Then we drove on, up to Preston.

In the evening, we played Chocolate Teapot with my family. I haven’t written about Chocolate Teapot on here yet, but the short summary is that it’s a “light” board game I’ve put together in the style of Apples to Apples meets Chrononauts… meets Dragons’ Den. So far, folks seem to like it, although I’m still ironing out a few kinks in the rules.

Thursday 28th May

This morning, we were supposed to do something special I’d had planned to commemorate the occasion of Ruth finishing her final exam, but we weren’t able to on account of the weather. I’d kept secret from Ruth what it is we were eventually to do, and the tension of not knowing (she’s not good at surprises) was very obviously boggling her poor little mind by now.

Instead, we went to Blackpool, rode a few rides (and felt ill thanks to eating a huge chocolate éclair each and then riding on the waltzer on the Central Pier), and played adventure golf, which Ruth won by a significant margin. And then ate fish & chips, because that’s what one does in Blackpool.

Got tied up with some stuff in East Lancashire early in the evening and missed our chance to get to see Pagan Wanderer Lu on his weekend mini-tour. Damn.

Ate far too much Chinese food at an all-you-can-eat buffet and gave myself nasty indigestion.

Friday 29th May

Did things in Preston, like buying lots of really really cheap clothes to wear for the remainder of the trip while paddling around in Scotland.

Saturday 30th May

Travelled up to Gretna Green with my dad and Ruth. Left the car at the services there and transferred to a coach full of Go North East employees. Travelled up to Fort William, in the centre of the Nevis mountain range and close to the Great Glen Way and the Caledonian Canal.

Despite it by now being late in the afternoon, my dad suggested we walk up Ben Nevis, so Ruth and I – joined by two others: John (fellow canoeist) and Dave (the bus driver, although – that said – about half of the folks on the trip were bus drivers) – followed my dad up the mountain. Dave, who’d apparently never climbed a mountain before, made it about 200 feet up before he had to give up. Ruth and I got to about 3200ft before we realised that we hadn’t actually eaten since breakfast and had to turn around and get some food, and only my dad and John made it the extra thousand feet or so to the summit, keeping a spectacular pace going as they did.

There’s photos from Ben Nevis here.

Sunday 31st May

This was our first day in canoes. Ruth and I took one, John and my dad took a second, and the third was taken by a pair of the bus drivers, Yvonne and Claire. We were to paddle our way up to Inverness, towards the North Sea, over four days. The remainder of the group were to walk the Great Glen Way – about 13 miles longer, and – of course – hillier, but at least they’d be powered by their legs and not their arms!

The first day was the hardest. It was the longest, which made an impact, but it was also the hottest. I’d not planned for this kind of heat (I’d thought – hey, Scotland, that’ll be a few degrees colder than Aberystwyth, but it turned out that Northern Scotland was in the middle of some kind of unseasonal heatwave): my case held lots of long sleeves and not enough pairs of shorts! Out on the lochs and canals, there’s no shade, and on our first day’s paddling, there wasn’t any breeze either. Combine that with 17 miles of rowing, and you’ve got a recipe for exhaustion.

Ruth overdid it somewhat, and triggered a relapse of her RSI, and she wasn’t able to carry on rowing for the rest of the trip: instead, she joined the walkers group, and a walker called Martin took her place in my canoe.

Among the many canoeing photos I took, there’s a very cute one of Ruth with one of the walkers helping her to drink a glass of lemonade because her arms were too broken to lift the glass for herself.

Monday 1st June

The second day’s canoeing was a lot shorter, and a lot easier. Martin and I – after a little bit of weaving around the canal and failing to paddle in a straight line – found a great synchronisation and made a great rowing team. We easily led the other two canoes for most of the remainder of the journey.

On this, the second day, we even beat the walkers along the first half of the route, meeting them part way for lunch on a pebble beach alongside Loch Oich.

One of the hardest bits of canoeing the Caledonian Canal is that British Waterways no longer allow canoes to use the lock gates (there’s a concern that if your boat tipped over you could be sucked into a sluice gate and held underwater for quite a lot longer than most people can hold their breath for). So we had to pull ashore, lift the boat out, and carry it up or down each hill. Walking rather than rowing gave our arms a rest, at least, but it’s not easy to lift your boat, your day bag, and your oars and then carry them up a hill.

Tuesday 2nd June

On Tuesday, we were supposed to cover the first half of Loch Ness. At Fort Augustus, we got into the River Ness (it was easier to get the boats than the canal would have been, from the back garden of the building we’d kept them at), and appreciated for awhile the current helping us along a little. We passed the smallest lighthouse in the world and headed out onto the Loch.

The wind had picked up, and it was choppy on the Loch. Paddling over waves and against the wind was more challenging than what we were used to, and the six of us adopted a tight formation in order to keep an eye on one another in case we got into any trouble. We hugged the shore to avoid the worst of the wind, and took an early break at the bottom of the garden of a waterfront house, where we ate our morning energy snacks.

The wind felt okay in the bay we’d sat in, but as soon as we got back out onto the Loch, we could feel the wind: it was getting stronger. Paddling was very hard, and Martin and I redoubled our pace several times. It felt like we were making great time – a hard wind in your face and an ache in your arms will give you the illusion of speed – but when we pulled over and took a break, we looked at the map and realised that we had travelled about half a mile in the last hour. At this rate, we’d barely reach the next Youth Hostel in time for breakfast… the following day.

We pressed on, and stopped again and I looked up the shipping forecast on my phone. The wind was due to get worse still, with gusts of up to 25 miles per hour. We were already at a point at which we spent almost as much time going backwards that forwards, and turning sideways to the current resulted in the boats rocking alarmingly and very quickly filling with water, so we ran them aground, dragged them ashore into a building site, and called for backup to come and pick them up.

The building site turned out to belong to a chap who I’ll hereafter refer to as The Friendliest Man In Scotland, who was quite unsympathetic to the idea of us sitting around and waiting for rescue from the backup vehicle, and shouted and swore and threatened legal action quite a lot. While we waited for the rescue vehicle, I used my phone to find XSS vulnerabilities in his website. You know, like this one.

After we’d got rid of the canoes, we raced to try to catch up with the walkers, who were a couple of hours ahead, finally reaching them a little while after they’d reached the cabins in which we’d be spending our next night. It was disappointing to not be able to canoe the rest of the distance, but it really wouldn’t have been possible to go any further this day, and the weather forecase didn’t look any better for the day after (it turned out to be wrong, but we didn’t know that when we had the canoes returned to their owner).

Wednesday 3rd June

And so we canoeists joined the walkers for the very last day of the Scottish trip. The walk was long and arduous, and Ruth and I probably ought to have set off earlier, because we were right at the back of the group when we entered Inverness, and we actually had to cheat and catch a bus for the final mile in order to not keep them waiting at Inverness Castle for any longer than we already had.

In summary, canoeing across Scotland was… exhausting. Even (and perhaps especially) for the bits that we weren’t actually in canoes. But it was also a great opportunity to see that beautiful country from a new angle – from water level, looking up at the Munroes and along at the Lochs. It could be beautifully still and calm out in the middle of the bigger lochs, and it was great to just stop and sip some water and take in quite how magestic the mountains of Scotland actually are.

At Inverness, we took victory photos (here they are), had a quick McDonalds meal, and got back on the coach to Gretna, then drove back down to Preston.

Thursday 4th June

On Thursday morning, we finally managed to do the thing we’d tried to do the previous week… weather conditions were at last favourable for: a trip in a hot air balloon (thanks, Pendle Balloon Company)!

Ruth was suitably surprised.

The whole experience was a lot of fun, and everybody present got roped in to helping lay out the balloon, inflate it with cold air, check and disentangle the control lines (and all the same stuff again but in reverse at the opposite end).

It’s amazing quite how gentle a balloon take-off is. While the pilot fired the (hot!) burners in a full burn ready for takeoff, I glanced out of the side of the basket and down at the ground… and realised it was slowly moving along underneath us – we were airborne, and I hadn’t even noticed!

We sailed around at 3,500-5,500 feet for awhile, looking down over mid-Lancashire. We got a great view of Houghton Tower, where I’ve been to their annual open air classical concert a number of times (including some I didn’t manage to blog about). Ruth geeked out about different kinds of road junctions and their comparative space/throughput efficiency trade-offs. We came in low over fields of cows and horses and confused the livestock as they trotted towards the barns for their morning feed.

And after an hour of sailing around, we bumped down into a field (which happened to double as a microlite runway, which was convenient) and all helped to pack the balloon away. And it was awesome.

There’s photos from this, too: here they are.

Afterwards

Finally (after a celebratory friend breakfast at a restaurant near where the balloon launched from), we hit the road and got ourselves back to Aberystwyth. It’d been a busy, exhausting, but fun week.

Claire And The Dwarfers

I think Claire would appreciate me sharing the following photograph with you all. Click for a bigger version:

From left to right – Kryten 2X4B-523P (Robert Llewellyn), Arnold Judas Rimmer (Chris Barrie), Claire Q (playing herself), and The Cat (Danny John-Jules).

In the background you can just make out the tail fins of what I’m told is “Carbug.”

You can keep up with what Claire’s up to in London with the Red Dwarf cast and crew via her Twitter feed. Go take a look.

Sleepless? Priceless!

Time for this iteration of a software project: 4 months
Time left after the client changed their mind about the “must have” requirements: 2 months
Amount of sleep within the last 40+ hours: 4 hours
Number of JOIN clauses in an eleventh-hour SQL statement that suddenly fixes everything: 12 (LEFTies, RIGHTies, INNERs… and also a UNION)
Time internal deadline missed by: 55 minutes… which isn’t actually that bad, considering everything that went wrong in the 55 minutes before them
Money earned: nil
Feeling after delivery complete: priceless*.

* also: knackered – guess I’d better get some sleep!

Year One – A Happy Post That Everybody Will Misunderstand To Be An Unhappy One

Ruth and I celebrated the first anniversary of our being a couple, this weekend. She came down to Aber and we took the steam train up to Devil’s Bridge, wandered around the waterfalls, and spent a good few hours sitting in a pub (pretty much the pub in Devil’s Bridge, tiny place that it is) playing darts.

I’ve never really been one for celebrating anniversaries. A birthday is an ocassion to go out for a pint, and new year is when you… well, that’s when you go out for a pint, too. But it was really quite good to spend some time with Ruth (something I’ve not had a lot of while she’s been living in Oxford, this summer) doing the coupley things we don’t often get to do.

Fuck knows where we’re going to be in another year’s time. If her plans play out the way she’d like, she’ll be leaving Aberystwyth again this time next year, and I’m still going to be here. Neither of us are particularly confident about the prospect of pulling off a long-distance relationship that will work in the same kinds of ways that the relationship we have now does, and I’ve suffered a smidgen of anticipatory grief about the possibility us coming to an end.

On the other hand, we’re both keen to see what we can do to make sure it doesn’t have to end unless it absolutely has to, and that’s reassuring. And I am, as always, optimistic. We’ve got today. We’ve always got today.

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.

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.

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!

QMoon Virtual Postcard #1

Thank you all so much, everybody who came to QParty, and to everybody who’s blogged about it (I’m paying a small fortune for internet access, so I haven’t had time to read everything you’ve all written, but I’ve been quite moved by everything I’ve seen so far: abnib must be full of Q-jokes!), and in particular to Ruth, for blogging about where we’d gone after I texted her.

I’ll write more about QParty at a later juncture. For now, let me fill you in on QMoon, our mystery “honeymoon” (thanks dad!).

It didn’t take us long in my dad’s car on Monday morning to realise that we were headed to Liverpool John Lennon Airport, and then – herded into a “Q” – to discover that we were flying out to Treviso Airport, just outside of Venice, Italy. My dad gave us three numbered packages, and a fourth, containing a letter, InterRail passes, hotel booking details, some spending money, and instructions on when to open the packages. We opened this one as the RyanAir 737-800 pulled away from the ground.

As might be expected from a holiday organised by my dad, great and detailed plans were provided for the various forms of transport that we would take. A plane (well, let’s face it, a flying bus – this is, after all, RyanAir), a bus into Venice, a water-bus to our hotel, and so on. Buses, as you can see, a major part of this segment of the plan.

Passport control initially gave us some trouble, a guard pointing out that our surnames were “unusual,” but nothing really problematic.

As I texted to Ruth and she dutifully blogged, Venice looks EXACTLY LIKE IT DOES IN EVERY MOVIE EVER. There really ARE no roads. This became most apparent to me when I saw a bin lorry (okay, a boat with a trash compacter on the back) pull up at a dock, and a man jumped out with a trolley. He ran down the alleyways, filling his barrow with bin bags collected from the doorsteps of the cramped pathways, eventually meeting up with the boat at the next jetty and depositing his load. Then he’d swap with the driver of the boat who’d do the next “run.”

Everything – really everything – depends on the canals. For a moment, it’s easy to believe that they had a perfectly conventional road network that they flooded one day, just for fun. Police boats and ambulances rush around old-style gondolas, water-taxis pick up and drop off, and lumbering old water-buses – somewhat reminiscient of London tube trains when they’re full of wall-to-wall people – crawling from stop to stop. This provided us with some confusion early on: you need to pay attention not only to what point along the canal you’ll be getting off, but also what side of the canal your stop is on! It’s easy, we discovered, to get off at a stop near to your destination only to realise you’re on the wrong side of the water! Thankfully, traghetti (small two-oar gondolas) provide a crossing opportunity for half a Euro, cutting between the other traffic and rocking alarmingly as they meander across the water.

Our hotel was pleasant enough, although the room was of a typical small Venetian size and the view was in the opposite direction to the Canale Grande, and there was initially some confusion over the bill. However, it was wonderfully central and – being right on the canals – gave us quick access to the city.

We went out for a meal on first night of mushroom soup (delicious) and lasagne for me, tagliateli for Claire, along with a bottle of a delicious local(-ish) wine, then explored the city. Wandering just off the main canals and the main touristy areas we found ourselves lost in a labyrinthine maze of winding alleyways (some barely wide enough for one man to walk down) and dead ends. The buildings loom tall above you, all usable land long since having been occupied, and hundreds of years of expansion (upwards and outwards!) has resulted in a landscape like something from an Escher painting or some Ghibli movie, chimneys and walkways and crumbling buildings being re-built upon and all.

We took an early night, exhausted by a busy day, and today (Tuesday) set out to try to find the statue of Casanova before the 12.38 train to our next destination. We failed miserably at this and at our secondary goal of finding his birthplace, and instead enjoyed a light brunch in a little outdoor cafe and explored some of the local shops. Oh, and found some sweet exactly like Pocky, so that was good.

And now we’re on the high-speed train to Rome, where we’re spending the next couple of nights. We didn’t really get long enough in Venice, but we’ll be returning there after our day in Napoli, and perhaps we’ll have enough time to see the Basilica di San Marco and some of the other architectural attractions of this most amazing city. For now, I think I’ll try to translate as much as I can from the in-train magazine while Claire sleeps off this morning’s walking!

Oh, and for those of you who can see Ruth’s most recent friends-only post: I agree whole-heartedly.

Will post again when I can.

The Purple Rose

I received a surprising gift at work this morning. Click the picture for a full-size snap.

A gift box from InterRose, delivered by Royal Mail Special Delivery. The building manager who brought it up from the reception desk to my office kept insisting that it wasn’t from him (apparently the receptionist had been quite excited by it until she discovered it wasn’t for her, either).

I opened it up, watched by my co-workers. The box contained a single rose, it’s petals dyed purple, wrapped in a red ribbon, and a tiny envelope with my name hand-written on it. Looking in the envelope, I found a small card with the following message:

Lusting after and loving you from afar.

Your secret admirer.

x x

The current favourite guess amongst my co-workers is that the rose was sent by my mum. But I think they’re just jealous.

Thank you, secret admirer, whoever or wherever you might be. Although I’m pretty sure I know…