Journal Entries
My weekend in London
Posted Jan 18, 2006
Yes - I am one of those mad ones who actually took a plane to come to the meet last weekend. I flew in on the Saturday morning, arriving well in time for lunch. But, having left the cold and fog of the Rhine valley, I was knocked over by the heat of London. I'd taken the wrong coat again. So I dumped my stuff at the hotel and freshened up a bit before meeting Lucky Star and Dai, Milla and family for lunch.
We had an animated chat while the kids jumped on the wooden sculptures ouside the restaurant at Gabriel's Wharf; afterwards they stayed South of the river and went to the Tate Gallery, where we met Croz, and I crossed the river to make my way to join the party at Kew Gardens.
This turned out too ambitious a project in the end. I spent a good deal of time looking for chemists and cups of tea to soothe my tum which obviously didn't take to the food on the other bank (I was born in North London). I didn't make much leeway Westwards and rang Mazin Mad Fiddler in the end (after repeated calls to plot my progress and check how far round the gardens they'd all got) to say that it wasn't worth my bothering to find his flat, let alone Kew Gardens, any more - by the time I got there, they'd be leaving for the pub anyway.
Never mind - we all met up later at the Olde London. And a good time was had by all. Despite large amounts of 
clouding my memory, I will try and list everyone I met and spoke to, in the order I met them... Please don't be offended if I met you and don't mention you .. I'm sure I'll get plenty of reminders after I post this.
Bald Bloke, Jimster, Mr and Mrs Dreadful, Teuchter and Mr Teuchter, LiL Old Me, ReddyFreddy, B'Elana and Mr B'Elana, (Beginning to get vague now...) Then we convened for the quiz in which Paully and Jimster compered alternate rounds. Our team, consisting of Mazin' Mad Fiddler (in his special sweat shirt), Venus, Reef Girl, Mr B'Elana (B'Elana herself - in her special tee shirt - kept disappearing) and me .... WON!!! We all got s and badges and were very pleased with ourselves!!
Afterwards people seemed to be leaving already, but I got to say hello to Roymondo, and was so sozzled I pronounced his name wrong (something I NEVER do when I'm reading it all to myself here on line -honestly) and introduced myself to 2legs, and had a chat with Seraphina and Ged.
Milla and I walked back to the hotel together and I certainly had a good night's sleep.
The Mad Fiddler has since sent me loads of photos of the lovely glass sculpture exhibition that they had seen at Kew - 
It was really good to have someone to sit with and talk to at breakfast -- I hope I didn't frighten or confuse your little boy, Milla.
The rest of the weekend I had fairly well organised - on Sunday after breakfast, I went to the service at St Paul's. Even if the service is no good (it was OK), the choir are lovely to listen to, and you get a chance to sit and look at the amazing interior in peace without being jostled by other tourists.
I met my friend outside the cathedral and we had lunch at Spitalfields. My recommendation: don't do likewise, at least, not in the only "indoor" restaurant there.
We went and looked at the winning photos in the National Portrait Gallery, about the top hundred of the over 5000 entries to the Schweppes competition. No idea why some of them did so well - we couldn't tell what made them stand out from normal holiday snaps, and a large number of them were boringly symmetrical in composition. Some had no composition to speak of at all.
Then we went to Camden to the Etcetera Theatre over the Oxford Arms and saw a brilliant production of a very funny play, The Rover, by Aphra Behn: http://classiclit.about.com/cs/profileswriters/p/aa_abehn1.htm
or http://web.utk.edu/~misty/Behnhandout.html
In fact the whole script seems to be available on line: http://drama.eserver.org/plays/17th_century/rover/i/#i1
I slept at my friend's that night and left for my parents' home in deepest East Anglia on the border of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire on Monday morning. The flight back was on Tuesday afternoon, and all went well, landing at 9.15 pm - earlier than scheduled. I was home just after 10, and had to go back to work this morning.
It's all over 
... till next time. 
Discuss this Journal entry [12]
Latest reply: Jan 18, 2006
Thanks for the Tee Shirt!!
Posted Dec 28, 2005
I won an h2g2 tee shirt. Can't find the thread any more, but it was for contributing to a talking point about how to improve hootoo. I didn't actually suggest anything because anything I would have wanted to say was said by others before me, and anything else I had already said often enough before in similar threads. I wonder if any alterations will be made that researchers really wanted.
Anyway - the tee shirt arrived yesterday. It will probably be too cold in January to turn up to the meet in it, but maybe I'll manage to display it somehow!
Discuss this Journal entry [11]
Latest reply: Dec 28, 2005
Joining the RAF
Posted Oct 12, 2005
My son (No 2) is 21 and still a bit unsure about his future. He did his community service instead of military service (compulsory for boys in Germany - at least for the first two boys in the family). To do this, he had to go through a rigorous procedure of conscientious objection.
Then he started to learn to fly. The school he is learning at is floundering somewhat and he hasn't been going so much lately. I don't know if that is because his enthusiasm has abated or because there is simply no teaching going on.
Either way, you can do a daytime job while learning to fly, so he's been applying like mad for all sorts of engineering courses and anything even vaguely connected with aeronautics.
On an impulse, he has even applied to the RAF for Air Traffic Control training. He has a British Passport. He was invited to an interview at the Ramstein air base today. It's terribly exciting. I just hope it doesn't matter that he is a registered objectionist with the German Military.
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Latest reply: Oct 12, 2005
The presentation
Posted Oct 10, 2005
My youngest son is really bright but hasn't done one iota of work for school for about four years. I have no idea how he manages. He will be 17 in a couple of weeks. By the German system he is just embarking on his 3rd last year.
Last week he had to prepare a presentation on any subject (current affairs) for sociology. They were to take a newspaper article and embellish on it.
He chose to talk on Northern Ireland and the troubles. He put a great deal of work (work? him?) into it and in the end knew far more than I did. He went back in history to the 12th century to try to get to the bottom of it. We printed off maps and diagrams for the overhead projector. I took him to the copy shop and paid for that - the rest he did entirely on his own.
In the end, he had more than enough material for the 30 minutes and got 13 points out of 15. That's not absolutely perfect, but not bad considering he's not bothered with anything for all this time.
He definitely seems interested in politics. Although, when I asked him on the morning of his talk, before he went to school, he did admit "I still don't know what they're actually fighting about!"
Thanks to Lucky 
for her contributions. Can't tell you exactly how much he used of it, as the final contents were secret. (typical boys)
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Latest reply: Oct 10, 2005
The Wedding
Posted Oct 9, 2005
Our conductor got married yesterday. I do hope she'll have a happy life. The chap she has married seems a bit odd to me, but they have decided to stick together. They met in a chatroom.
She looked really lovely, and she is an absolute darling person with rather unfortunate looks and figure, but yesterday she made a lovely bride and we were all so happy (good job I distributed a couple of dozen boxes of Kleenex around the choir seats for us.)
She celebrated a full Mass and had chosen lots of favourites for us to sing. Our previous organist came from Cologne and conducted us, played the organ and also a trumpet solo with a local organist.
We had practised two songs to include as a surprise for her. Her favourites - one was "More than Words" by Extreme. For months, I had been planning to sing this in Latin (the bridegroom is a Latin teacher) and had put several hours into fitting it to the tune, after my husband had spent several evenings translating it (not easy for him, as he had trouble understanding the English, and had no idea how the song went). Despite all our efforts, I was late for the rehearsal where we were going to start working on this (Damn work again) and so the project was scrapped.
Never mind, the whole affair was a great success and she was very touched by our choice of songs.
The second "surprise" song was a really cheesy song by an Austrian singer (rather sing in Latin any day - the Austrian dialect is very difficult!) which, on singing several times, really got to you in the end, and we were all dabbing our eyes when she turned round and smiled at us - she was obviously completely taken by surprise.
Permission to sing the songs was no problem as the priest was one of the clique anyway - two of his cousins are in our choir.
The best part was that our ex-organist had managed to persuade his brother to play along with us. He is something of a local star and has a very solid classical guitar background, but plays rock and pop now and is really worth watching. It was a privilege to sing with the two brothers who are both brilliant in their own rights - one as a church musician and the other as a pop musician and when it came to the breaks in the two "surprise" songs they produced just the most breathtaking sounds.
After the last song - which was the Austrian one - the congregation burst into thunderous applause.
We could have gone on for ages, but there were 5 babies waiting outside to be baptised. And the Wedding Party had a table booked.
It was the perfect way to spend that glorious sunny October day.
*reaches for the last two remaining Kleenex*
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Latest reply: Oct 9, 2005
You can call me TC
Researcher U154942
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