Just back from an expidition to Bluewater, mecca of the shopping classes. What a fabulous setting for a desolate future-gone-bad style film it’ll be once it falls into disrepair – the concrete sticks supporting the Thurrock crossing lit with red beacons in the background as you curl around descending into the pit, for a moment I was in Gibsons future (again), All Tomorrows Parties were mine.
Walking from the car park (I’d left it in Pink-E) entering John Lewis was reminiscent of the entry to Disneyland, you transition from the real world of cars and traffic jams and motorways and rain into the manufactured shopping experience, something happens when you cross that threshold, its all gone and you’re just a walking wallet with flashing lights and bright posters trying to extract the money from you.
Maybe I shouldn’t have snapped quite so at the ‘assistants’ there, I know they were just trying to do their job but I felt they were just trying to make me move on, I’m not the kind of person who can afford to shop there. Wait – what is so much better about this 100 pound shirt than the 40 pound one over there? Sure its got a nicer display rack but I’m reasonably sure the build quality isn’t significantly different. Besides, I spend to much time having guiness poured over my head to want to spend too much on the kind of shirt that’ll stain.
I did, at last, find an 80s compilation with ‘Safety Dance’ by Men without Hats – I’ve got a couple of bizarre industrial covers and a low bitrate version of the original but I’ve been looking for it for a while now. Thats one quest over, next the 69 Eyes DVD, but Bluewater isn’t the kind of place that’d sell well. And another Lego Spybotics – the blue one this time, I got the purple one before – they’re selling them off at 25quid each, end of line, if anyone lives near a Lego shop and find a green or a red one, let me know…
This week in Cambridge has been a bit more interesting – things are starting to pick up a little now I’ve gotten writing some specs. I’m hoping to pick up some keys for my new house on Monday, but I’ll say more about that later – I don’t want to jinx it by talking about it too much.
The Calling on Tuesday was interesting, with Ozzy doing a storming set of Germanic/EBM/Medieval/EarlyMusic crossover. Must get to more of his sets, they’re damned good. Even if they do have too many bagpipes.
Then Thursday I met up with lark_ascending and crazyscot for fabulous food (Thank you!) before hitting the Carlton Arms….where the evening started with an argument about ISO2022 character set encoding, covered a small collection of stations (mainly on the Cambridge-London line), and eventually ended up with a gaggle of geeks outside who didn’t really want to go home. These are my people, even if I didn’t actually talk to that many of them (and caught the lj-usernames of even less, introduce yourselves, if you’re reading) I did at least feel like I could fit in. Geeks, the lot of ’em.
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