Went to our usual holiday cottage in Ambleside with most of the Usual Suspects. (self,
rotwang, undyingking and T, and DocPotempkin; P, who usually comes along, had flu, and H now has two small children to cope with rather than one and thus couldn't make it.) There was walking, there was pottering around Ambleside to bookshops, galleries and cafés (I was brutally mugged by a small bronze figure of a cat who demanded to come home with me), there was cooking (in my case) and there was a not-entirely-expected five inches of snow overnight between Saturday and Sunday. That made for very pretty walking from the cottage, but the only way we could get the cars off the hill on Monday was with the help of a kind neighbour with a shovel. (Memo to self: next time we pack a shovel, even if we have to buy one first.)rotwang's D&D campaign finally got going with a session on Thursday of last week (the next session's this afternoon). He did attempt to use the words "insufficiently prepared" about it... (he's been writing the damn thing for about the last six months if not longer)Last Saturday we had
chrestomancy, angry_marmot, waistcoatmark, sielis, and DocPotempkin round for dinner. There was quite a lot of food; people just haven't got the hang of pacing themselves yet, so the cheese at the end hardly got touched (not that that was a problem, we fed much of the remainder to the poker group last night)Tuesday saw me braving the far-off scary land known as North-Of-The-River to attend a reading by Michael Marshall (Smith) and to get some more of the book mountain signed. I stopped at Lakeside to get some food on the way -- it really does seem to live down to its reputation -- and then had to brave the wilds of a new-build area to try to find the library where the event was being held. These towns where everything has been built at about the same time (Chafford Hundred) are a nightmare for navigation, because you don't have the same visual cues as in most towns which suggest whether you're going into the centre of town or away from it. It's also not helpful when Multimap's directions seem to consist entirely of telling you which exit to take off roundabouts, and they all turn out to be mini-roundabouts with no other signage... oh well, got there in the end, I wasn't late, and the event was fun.
Poker on Friday, as noted, and DocPotempkin and I wandered into town yesterday to go to the Dan Flavin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. Some of the effects with colour and light were quite interesting, but I'm afraid I'm enough of a philistine to have real difficulty appreciating the symbolism of, say, this piece. (Go on,
sielis, tell me what I'm missing?) 