h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

[MTG]

[fg]

I've just seen the time.



B

What we need to have is an end-of-retrograde party. It isn't until Thursday that Mercury goes direct, but jeez, did ever a bunch of people suffer so much through the meanderings of one itty bitty planet!!

OK, until Thursday, everybody has to move around the salon backwards.

*Matina brings out a pineapple upside-down cake*

Lil, is your birthday not soon, or just past? Seems I recall you as a virgo, and my day is just about three weeks away.

*falls over backwards from lack of sleep*

B

Shouldn't the upside-down cake be upside-down, I mean right side up, I mean.... you know what I mean! And ummm... do we have to butter the downside of our bread 'til then?

*Trips over Marv*

Marv, those are some sweat picks of the raftin.

Lil, I'm psyched to hear how it goes! I might need to get my own Hellcat.

I just moved. Speaking of house cleaning, I had 3 years of dust to get out from those hard to reach nooks. That was miserable. If you're living in a common apartment, never be the last one to leave.

I clean the kitchen every day. I clean the bathroom once a week, except when I can't be bothered. B tidies quite often. We dust intermittantly. I spring clean once a year, technically speaking, though I am frequently a couple of years behind.

Notting Hill was fun, though I was a tad cross that having wiggled myself into a front seat for the parade, it went on for about 45 minutes with big gaps and then stopped for an hour. Pretty cool though. I'm guessing that the main point is the street party bit, and that was fun. I particularly like the way that this fairly upscale and trendy, though admittedly self-conciously kooky, area has astonishingly loud music and drunken dancing inflicted upon it once a year. If all the rock concerts on Red Square were whittling away at the foundations of St Basil's I hate to think what ear bleedingly loud sound systems every five metres does to the buildings around there.

B, of course, was slightly horrified by the lack of any visible Organisation, but then he hasn't quite recovered from finding out that the entirity of the centre of London is not shut down at least twice a year for the purposes of bread and circuses.

It may be that your s-i-l, Teuchter, is receiving lots of support from the Breast Care team and has already had a chance to talk things over. I know the disease strikes fear into most people's hearts, it would mine, but the handling of the disease has changed out of all recognition since I started ing what seems like a century ago. Don't push her to talk, if she wants to, fine, I know you have made sure she has your support, because you are that sort of person, and it will mean a great deal to her knowing that her family are with her every step of the way.

H was in a pottering mood over the long weekend, well actually he was finding things to do instead of getting to the report he had to do. The utility room got tidied, as did his pile and box of network bits in the study. He even braved my dumping corner in the kitchen (you know that area by the door that is too small for food prep). He did get the report done eventually.

Lil, I showed him your description of your network problems, but he isn't familiar with the software.

[Ti]
[~o~]

! neht ydnah rorrim aedi yllis a smees

“Sdrawkcab nolas eht dnuora eveom ot sah ydobyrev yadsuht litnu ,ko”
Yrt a evig i ko.

[PTL]

I somehow wasn't surprised to see so many fellow Vigoan's in the Atelier. The first day of the Lid Dem conference happens to be the day after my birthday so I will be travelling down to Bournemouth on my Birthday a long trip that is.

I didn't get enough sleep.

Sol, did you tell him that London shuts down for protest marches, (like the anti war one and the countryside march), and for events like Gay Pride?

Picking a paragraph out of "Absolute Beginners" by Colin McInnes which is set in London in the late 50s, he talks about the lead up to the Notting Hill riots there in September - what - 1957?

"As soon as you passed into the area, you could sense that there was something on. The sun was well up now, and the street were normal, with the cats and traffic - until suddenly you realized that they *weren't*. Because there in Napoli, you could feel a *hole*: as if some kind of life was draining out of it, leaving a sort of vacuum in the streets and terraces. And what made it somehow worse was that, as you looked around, you could see the people hadn't yet noticed the alteration, even though it was so startling to you."

I won't quote more - he is not a compact writer and this section is a couple of dozen pages long - but it is powerful stuff.

What strikes me though, and I don't know enough about the experience of blacks in London in the last 50 years, is that the Notting Hill carnival takes place in the same area as those riots. At that time the area was pre-gentrification, it was not trendy or even particularly salubrious. For people of my 1980s generation, it would be the equivalent of the main London Carnival taking place in Brixton. Initially of course the reason for the carnival taking place in Notting Hill would have been a demographic one. I wonder now if it might also be a matter of historico-political celebration.

Of course it may just be that I didn't get enough sleep.

Ben

for Teuchter. When my Mum was having great lumps hacked out of her she went through a deeply tiresome (for us!) phase of pretending the whole thing was completely minor and trivial and even though she had had grafts taken from her tummy muscle to plug the hole in her chest wall and therefore couldn't stand up unaided and I was supposed to be looking after her, I kept finding her trying to move her armchair or lift weights or pogo to the shops and back or someting similarly utterly stupid and daft. Not necessarily a helpful anecdote but people will insist on taking these things in their own way and own time and all we can do is rush up and rescue them from the armchair before something splits.

After a terrifying experience being lifted off my feet by the press of the crowd at Notting Hill one year, I tend to avoid it. I'm a wimp like that. I was 'carried' along in the squeeze for several feet and the crowd opened up as they stepped off the pavement, by which time my feet very several inches off the ground and I fell flat. Just as I thought I was going to be trampled to death and be on the News at last, a HUGE man - well over six foot and nearly as broad with dreadlocks down to his waist, smoking a joint the size of a chairleg - leant down and picked me up. Bless his cotton socks. I think he must have been the incarnation of the Carnival or something, because having stood me on a low garden wall so I could see (and be seen by) my friends, he vanished. How does a man that size vanish, even in a crowd? And he was STRONG. He may have been a big man but I am not a skinny lady.

In something like the size of crowd that the carnival gets (or ony other big crowd like that I guess) people can move around without you noticing.
What a long weekend, good fun if very tiring. A wedding, a hangover (it was a good party!) and a looping drive round through the country on a bank holiday not seeing any traffic jams. Great.
Caer, you're right Wisley is a very, very good garden. Shame I was too hung over to enjoy it properly

[k]

*tries walking backwards without success* Backwards is not a natural direction for an - it's easier to turn around and walk the other way.

My dentist has stopped treating NHS patients and I can't find a new dentist to register me. I only want a check up and a clean so I suppose I'll have to forget it until it's an emergency - and then I'll go and queue down at the teaching hospital.

I have managed to make an appointment to have my hair done on Thursday though . Nothing drastic - just a trim round the dotted line.

On the subject of breast cancer, on the occasions when I've had health scares I've tended to hide away and tell no one on the grounds that the people who love me will take the news much worse than I will. Hospital staff tend to worry a bit when you turn up alone with no family support but I'd much rather have it that way than be fussed over. I'm a bit like a - I'd rather hide under the shed until the problem goes away.

*consults her To Do list*

Ironing
Wash pe kit
Do something about paid employment
Dentist
Hair appointment
Lunch

Did something extremely silly last night. I left my bike on he rack on the bus I rode to my class last night. I am not worried about it being stolen as the stop I got off at is the last on that bus' run. There is also a bus driver in my class who saw it, though he did not know it was mine. Now, I have to take time off of w*rk to go and retrieve it.

*Matina brings out a big beautiful shoo-fly pie*

*Lil jogs backward into the salon to the butler's hatch, procures a slice of pie and a glass of organic apple juice, and back-pedals to the sofa*

They're showing season 5 of the West Wing on Bravo so I sat down to watch that last night. I was sniffling by the end.