vanessarama

And now for something completely different; Things I Like!

1. Opening night of The Tempest fan comments. YAY YAY YAY I AM GOING TO SEE THIS TWICE.

2. 17 Sundays. If you are a lady of curves living in Australia (or even overseas, they ship worldwide) check them out. Their clothes are extremely cool and extremely comfy, and not expensive for what they are. They've also got a range called 17 Sundays Basics, which is cheaper. You can also buy them at The Iconic, which sometimes has a bigger range. It's odd but they have completely revised the way I dress and the way I feel about my body, and how self-conscious I am. Today I am wearing their Snake Eyes wet-look leggings and the Mercy Belt, which is a big three-buckled waist belt, and I feel like a million dollars in them. I can also highly recommend their dresses and I just got this jacket in which I feel like another million dollars.

(This recent shopping frenzy is, unfortunately, mainly due to me thinking every couple of days "I've had such a crappy day, I deserve a present!")

3. Discarded Images - a tumblr full of awesome little images from mediaeval manuscripts. Did you know people were just as obsessed with pictures of cats in mediaeval times as they are now? I particularly love the many cats licking their bottoms which appear in margins of Gospels and the like. Not to mention the plethora of mediaeval fart jokes and surprisingly explicit nudity.

I went to Horsham. Or, as I have renamed it, Locust City.

Yep, that locust plague we city folk keep seeing bits and pieces about on the news is not only real, it's disgusting. They are EVERYWHERE out west - buzzing about or sitting around or squished on roads. Several hit me in the short walk from the bus to my hotel. On the bright side, hotel was brand new and therefore the pillows and mattress hadn't had time to get uncomfortable yet; dinner was good if expensive; and the workshop went well.

And then I came home and Rohan made bacon and eggs for supper. Which is how every chapter in my life should finish.

Now I go to catch up on Merlin fic and knitting patterns which may have been posted in my absence.

Something else I noticed while I was in the UK: RECESSION. It's everywhere.

We didn't notice it so much in London (probably because we stayed in a relatively nice area and also because we were mainly going to tourist spots) but in the provincial towns it was very, very noticeable. Every single town had multiple vacant shops and every local news bulletin was reporting either the closure of some local factory or massive job cuts by local council. In some places we went past industrial estates or business parks, some of which looked pretty new, which were completely deserted.

OK, here we have experienced a bit of a financial crisis, but it is NOTHING like what's going on there. The scale of it is massive. At least I still walk past shops with 'Help Wanted' signs in the window here.

We have now been home for almost 36 hours and the ground has stopped swaying. The trip home was about as good as we could expect - I think I'm actually getting better at this 21 hour plane trip thing. The first shower afterwards is always wonderful! Jet lag has not really hit yet although we are waking up way too early. We picked up Oliver yesterday and he has been punishing us by yowling every time there are no humans directly within his line of sight. He's very purry and cuddly and affectionate though :)

While I wait for my 1500+ photos to download to the computer, I will list some of the things about the UK that struck us as very different to home and which either bemused or delighted us. List made by me with help from vissy and Rohan:

1. Blackberries (and other weeds) aren't sprayed! In fact we saw people out picking blackberries on a Sunday morning! Here in Australia blackberries are a noxious weed and are regularly sprayed with weedkiller by local councils; you wouldn't dare pick them unless you were very familiar with your council's spraying dates.

2. Sheep have tails. I have mentioned before how weird this seems to us; sheep's tails are docked here to avoid painful death by flystrike. I did observe some British sheep with only partial tails, or no tail at all, so they evidently don't keep them universally, but here they're pretty much universally not there. To my eyes British sheep seem to have an extra leg :)

3. Pubs are actually good to talk in! Most pubs here (in the city, anyway) seem to fancy themselves as pseudo-nightclubs and consequently are full of doof-doof music turned up loud. British pubs are far more pleasant and people even take their kids there.

4. We stayed in eight different places and every single one of them had a different shower arrangement. There were dials, knobs, levers and buttons, but never had a simple pair of hot and cold taps.

5. There seems to be an aversion to using £2 coins. If you got £4 change, it would almost always be all in £1 coins. This is heavy. Also the money is all paper, not plastic like here, so the notes can be really tatty!

6. There are dogs everywhere. Even in castles and historic monuments! Even in pubs! People bring dogs into pubs!

7. People take strollers and prams everywhere. Including up spiral staircases and over very rough ground. I fear for the number of kids we saw who may get brain damage from the banging of their strollers over massive cobblestones!

8. England is amazingly set up for walking, with 'Public Footpath' signposts everywhere, even going across private property. I can't imagine how most property owners here would react to people walking across their private land. Also, most country towns are so far away from each other (and most properties out of town are far enough out of town) that you wouldn't walk it.

9. Roads. Oh, the roads. See, with the exception of Sydney and Hobart, Australian towns and cities were (mostly) planned during the era of motorised transport. Roads here tend to be wide and to go in relatively direct lines from A to B. Cities and towns tend to be grids. This is not the case in the UK where roads have occurred more organically. Roads are wee and winding and may loop and double back, and they are all connected by a massive network of roundabouts. Sometimes double roundabouts. There are also about a hundred times more cars on the road then here. Peak hour in a country town like Warwick is as bad as peak hour in the Melbourne CBD.

10. SO MANY PEOPLE. How do you fit so many people into such a tiny country?

11. SO MUCH VARIETY IN PRODUCTS. Even in the Boots near our hotel in London - which is a pretty small Boots - there were at least 15 different varieties of bottled water and a dozen different flavours of chips.

12. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. People are always banging on about how athletic and outdoorsy Australians are. I tell you, British people, and elderly British people, put us to shame. To SHAME! They're always outside. They walk everywhere. THey're tough as boots. Everywhere we went there were elderly people out for a stroll over insanely rocky and treacherous terrain. People with walking sticks! People with wheely-walkers! Clambering over rocks and up steep hills with nary a murmur! I salute them.

I am not dead! I am in Wales!

For most of the past week we've been in Llangollen, in north Wales, where we had no internets. We did, however, see ruined abbeys and castles; we rode on two separate steam trains; we ate at two of the best Indian restaurants it's ever been my pleasure to experience; and we have seen many sheep. Many, many sheep.

Now we are in Abergavenny, the Town Of Cats (we saw 5 in our first evening here) where we have internets (although the B&B seems to have blocked Facebook) and today we have visited three Merlin locations (two of which were also Doctor Who locations) and one Doctor Who location (they were: Raglan Castle; Puzzlewood; Clearwell Caves; and Skenfrith Castle, respectively). I have over 1200 photos to sort and work out, and then I'll post some of the best ones.

Oh yeah; MERLIN. Was awesome.

I'm not going to catch up on LJ, so be sure to tell me if I've missed anything important, ok? <3

1. Holiday update: Eurostar is now booked. All we have left is the car hire. We leave five weeks from Friday. Eeee!

2. EEEE MERLIN TRAILER! I don't know if we will go to the screening at BFI - we'll be in Bury St Edmunds, and it's on a Sunday which means transport will be tricky, and I've vowed never to pin my hopes on a celebrity appearance ever again. But I'm thinking about it.

3. We finally watched all of s2 and 3 of Ashes to Ashes. Quite, quite extraordinary. I was totally hooked, especially trying to work out what was going on in that final series.

4. Last night Rohan watched an episode of Mission: Impossible which featured Leonard Nimoy doing the worst Australian accent in the world. It went something like this:

NIMOY: Oi knoow a borss corck beck in ‘ong Kong…
ME: Boss cock. WHUT.
ROHAN: Do you think he’s actually going to say “Strewth”?
NIMOY: Beaut!
ROHAN: I wonder if he’ll use any actual Australian slang.
ME: Nah. All our real slang is too rude.

5. Maybe it's the post-funeral strangeness talking, but I got back to work yesterday and I honestly do not give a shit about a lot of the work-stuff I used to. It's as if I've suddenly realised that this is not my life, there is more to life, and it's important to bloody well live it and enjoy it and not worry about some member getting their knickers in a twist over trivial matters. It just doesn't matter that much any more.

6. Also post-funeral and post-clean-up: I am determined to clean up my damn house and throw out a lot of the crap I've been hanging on to. One clean-up project per weekend. Yayes?

So, Rohan and I have been in Hobart for the past few days. I had some work, and then we visited Port Arthur historic site as well. ( I took some snaps and learned some stuff. )

1. LONG WEEKEND YAY!!!

2. Rohan took the day off yesterday and true_statement came around and we crawled all over a big map of the UK until we had a travel plan nutted out. WOOT.

3. I went to the doctor to get my prescriptions renewed. It was a new doctor, and he is English. I asked him about getting the flu shot since we're going overseas, he asked me where, and it turns out he grew up on the Welsh border and had lots of suggestions about places to visit. He drew me a little map of Wales on his prescription pad! We spent 5 minutes talking about my health and 15 minutes talking about Wales, and he said I can call him if I have any questions. I think he was so happy to have something to talk about other than work for a bit. DOCTOR FTW!

4. Did I mention it's a long weekend? I have lots of knitting and yarn cataloguing to do.

5. Oh yeah. MERLIN. Silly silly show with pretty pretty people, you make me happy.