After a somewhat delayed flight from Tokyo I was met at Heathrow by Damian and a short haired and ill Matti, who took me out for some proper English food at the local Harvester.
The next day we met Simon & Adelle near Luton for a Sunday Roast. They brought my car for me to borrow for a couple of weeks.
I then headed down to Kent to stay with my parents for a couple of days. We went to Bromley so I could have a look around at an English town. I finally got around to getting an MPEG coder box for my dad and his camcorder projects. One day I’ll get myself a video camera, but I’ve got to be a bit more confident about the state of my finances.
Time for the trip to Whitby. I’d arranged to meet Chip for lunch on the way, for which we met at the high class Little Chef on the M4. All-day breakfast was the obvious choice, I’d been missing service station food while in Japan.
The UK traffic situation meant that I was running rather later than I’d expected – it took me two hours to do the 1 hour journey to the service station, then another couple of hours to get past Hemel Hempstead.
So, despite leaving before midday it was eightish by the time I was passing Barnsley.
Tragedy! Nasty squealing noise, smell of burning rubber, dashboard lit up like a christmas tree. Eeep! Over to the hard shoulder and its time for a walk down the side of the motorway to the emergency phone. A strangely plasticy affair that seemed in danger of not being answered, good job this wasn’t really an emergency. The AA were called out to help.
“We don’t work on cars on the motorway any more”, so I’m hooked up and towed to the next services where he takes a look. It seems the air conditioning pump has ceased. He tried to route a belt around in such a way that it takes in all the other pulleys but doesn’t have any the right length. A call goes out to find out if theres anyone out there with a different size belt.
The call is answered by a patrol at the next service area, so we’re back on the road for another 20 miles up the motorway. Theres something of a convention going on when we get there, theres already a couple of other patrols there and just as we’re trying out some of the other belts another relay turns up offering me a lift to Whitby since his car is unaccompanied. But its not necessary as they’ve taken a belt for a 406 turbo diesel and managed to route it around everything apart from the tensioner and the aircon, which requires an inspired hack to get the necessary tension.
All of which left me arriving some time after 11 – suboptimal considering my still jetlagged sleep pattern. So much for catching up with everyone wednesday night.
The cottage we were staying in (arranged by Simon and Adelle, thank you!) was quite large – there were seven of us staying there. Simon & Adelle, Maria & Andy, Kelly & Duncan, and me. Everyone seemed pretty cool, but I didn’t get much of a chance to speak to any of them except Simon & Adelle.
Thursday afternoon saw me meeting up with Cat, Kate, Tim & Ed for a game of Ghettopoly – an interestingly themed monopoly variant. Cat was showing off the staples she had removed from her now-nearly-fixed broken wrist.
Thankfully there was no repeat of the pea incident when I met with Greg & Sam for lunch the next day – there was talk of Munchkin and the fabulous imagery of “Newtons Cradle of Filth”. We did get in a quick game of Fluxx (v3) too, which is rather entertaining. All too confusing with the add-one-to-everything rule card. Not forgetting the 2p flips either – much silliness as we fed piles of 2p coins into the flipping machines. Gonna have to go to the seaside more!
Saturday we met up for a history walk organised by SimonT and friends – it was interesting to hear about some of the history of the town and the abbey. Even if we didn’t look collectively scary enough to ward off the brave woman from the church who didn’t want us blocking her paths.
I didn’t spend a lot of time paying attention the bands – I rarely do. It got to saturday night before I even thought about it. Sheep on Drugs were disappointing, I remember seeing them something like 10 years ago when they were still fresh, this time around they seemed unnecessary. Icon of Coil were probably worse, I didn’t even realise they were on stage until it went quiet between songs. Rose McDowell the next day was decidedly not to my taste – I could only stand one song despite my good intentions of seeing all the bands that night, once the second song sounded the same as the first it was time to head out to socialise a little more.
Of course, I couldn’t miss Manuskript. Starting with Rock Me Amadeus seemed a little odd, but once things got going they rocked. Their new guitarist (Chris?) seemed to be enjoying himself and looking the part as well as fitting in musically. The sound was fairly poor though, so his guitar just sounded like a screech during his solos.
There were so many people there I’m not going to attempt to namecheck everyone, some special mentions though…I didn’t spend enough time talking to Paul and hard even said hello to Leslie – I hope you guys can make it over to Japan, it’d be good to catch up properly. It was good to see Louise and Cal, I will try harder to keep in touch this time!
The four days of festival passed too quickly, but intriguingly I was feeling more and more perky as the jetlag wore off while everyone else was decaying into party overdose.
Before leaving on Monday Simon and Adelle took me for a fabulous lunch at the Quarterdeck. Great food, recommended!
I headed to Oxford to get to the pub meet on Tuesday evening – I had hoped to catch up with some people during the day but that didn’t really work out. I did meet up with Sophie for lunch the next day.
Onward, to meet Chip again in Ruislip, we went to proper restaurant this time, though the Nepalese place has changed around its entrance, making it more like a normal place. I’m not sure if I like it, but it did give us a good view for the Ruislip Riot. Not sure what was going on but there seemed to be a whole bunch of school aged kids hanging around taunting each other outside McDonalds over the road.
And finally, thank you to Simon for the lift to the airport yesterday (or was it the day before?), and for all your hospitality and help over the past two weeks.
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