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

I was in Embra on Thursday and Friday. I got booked into The Salisbury Hotel and had dinner at Heller's Kitchen, both being a stone's throw from the National Library archive.

The hotel was good. The receptionist was unused to hearing guests with Scottish accents, though. The hotel mostly gets Americans. I replied to her comment thus: "Accent? Fit accent's at en? I divnae hiv ony accent iv-aa. I spik proper recieved proonoonciation Inglish. Ers auld fowkies hear me spikkin an mistak me for Alvar Liddell, ken hen..."

Dinner was ver' good.

Embra was like an oven. I bought a second hand pre-WWII Gollancz hardback of Gaudy Night for £5, and ate a Magnum watching the happy shiny people ouside the Embra Art School graduations.

The job I had on went OK.

The train back to Aiberdeen was horrible. It was three carriages of train packed with five carriages worth of passengers. I got a seat and stayed glued to it. There was a screaming child in the carriage. A 3 or 4-year-old girl. She had two similarly-aged companions and some older female guardians. English was not the first language. The girls screamed and screamed and screamed - it was, I suspect, her sole mode of communication. It was a shrill piercing scream but it delighted me every time it manifested...

Basically, we had three bairnies and three adults, most of whom might not have been fluent in English. They were looking for a table together. One older guy had a table to himself, and the mother asked him if he would give it up for her. The guy said 'no'. Another guy - same generation, 70+ - came and sat opposite him, and I could hear them complaining to each other anent the temerity of the woman. So, she had to take the only seats available - two ajacent 'two pairs', one in fromt of the other. Then the kids started playing up, then the bairnie started screaming. The old boy started puling the most incredible sour faces, and complaining to the people sitting around him about the horrible noise and the lack of a quiet carriage and how he hoped 'these people' weren't going all the way to Aiberdeen (they were). His horrible sour faces, pained grimaces. rolling eyes, gritted teeth &c made my day, because... If he had had the decency to give up the table and four seats to the family at Edimburgh when the woman had asked, she would have had a better chance of getting the children to behave, which is exactly what happened when we got to Monterose and the train had cleared out sufficiently to allow the woman to relocate her party to a four. The bairnie mostly behaved after that.

I would always give up my place in a four to a family (aye, as long as some other seat was available).

The guy struck me as a right Farrage.

One 15 year-old-female and, I'd guess, her gran, were coming back to AIberdeen from London. I heard her say when we were entering Aiberdeen that "London is much nocer than Aberdeen." 'Nicer' is not the word I would use. 'Nicer' is not a word that should be applied to London. She had been to see the new Twilight movie premiere and had managed to get on to the red carpet.

BM for cawffee and a scopne thir morning. I bought some Rainbow live CDs from the 1976 German tour. I bought wine for tonight and juice for breakfast. The washing is on. I have done some £££ work and will start the next job in a minute. It was a hot bright morning but the aifternoon has turned out dull. Miah is out as much as it is possible for a cat to be out. Indian take-away for tea, then, what? a Lewis?

Peet is out at a binge tonight. I see that his leg has broken out again.

What has happened to the World Cup? Is it finished? Who won? Brazil, I suppose... Well, maybe you Andy Hemnam guy will win next time.

Gaudy Night is a splendid campus novel. I'm pleased to have it in a 30s hardback edition.

I'm not fisning for responses or anything, but I'm keeping an eye on that Atheist Thread in TA, and it strikes me that the only person speaking any great sense is PJ, but most of it seems, as Shakespeare observ'd, to fall on barren soil.


Douglas

Goan ya wee sook!

ps Wordlover's posts have been impeccable.

pps We have bees - very confused ones, probably mislead. We have called in the bee-keeping fraternity. No jokes about 'the buzz', please.

NB o/h will probably be along in three days or so to correct my West of Scotland grammar. Find it hard to believe that Edinburgh was like an oven!

"Find it hard to believe that Edinburgh was like an oven!"

What? Dark, greasy and claustrophobic?

PJ's OH

PS The vernacular sentence is correct.