Thursday was the day. Finally it had come. I had to do a presentation today instead of sitting there, looking interested and occasionally making a comment or asking a question that at least sounded intelligent. Thirty minutes of presentation, three questions and it was over. The climax of the working week. I felt dirty, yet relieved.
The afternoon was spent doing some sight-seeing and buying a couple of bottles of
Arzuaga that I had had the chance to sample the previous night.
The evening was a team dinner at a rather excellent
Basque restaurant which was a wonderful experience as well as excellent food.
Friday was a day holiday for me, spent in Madrid. Since I’d been lucky enough to get plenty of sight-seeing time in throughout the week, all that was left on my itinerary were the
Prado Museum and the
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art. The former was an immense museum and there was no way to do the whole thing in a day, never mind two hours. So I focussed on the 10 odd rooms of the works of Goya. The TB Museum was a more eclectic mix and very much enjoyable. Some of the work I particularly enjoyed was by
Conrad Felixmueller and
Emil Nolde.
After that, an uneventful flight home and back to Penny.
We interrupt the retelling of last week’s travels with a personal rant on the topic of those multi-coloured charity wristbands. Generally the wearers tell us that they like to advertise the causes they’re interested in, whether it’s poverty, bullying, cancer or whatever. Personally, I see them as a kind of charity bling, proclaiming to the world “I am considerably more charitable than yo!” with the implication that the wearers are somehow better people.
I think it’s bad enough that problems such as cancer and famine are dependant on charitable donations and I believe that charitable donations, if made, should be made discretely.
Saying that though, I can see it from the charity’s point of view; they don’t care whether people donate out of feelings of charity, guilt or hubris as long as they hand over cash. But I still find the wristbands terribly gauche.
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wristbands
You’ll probably have spotted the trend that very, very little happens on Sundays so I’ll skip straight to Saturday.
Saturday morning was an early one, despite the late arrival the previous night, because Penny and I were off to see
Neil Gaiman’s signing at
Forbidden Planet in London. We were queuing from 9:30, the doors opened at 10:00 and we were finished by 11:00. It was really hard deciding what to take to get signed as we’d been told we were allowed three books and it was unclear whether or not we had to buy a book when we get there.
I was really gutted when we got there and discovered that not only did we not have to buy a book, but we were actually allowed six! I’d brought a spare and bought one book on site (couldn’t resist). So the books I managed to get signed were ‘Anansi Boys’ (his newest), ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ (an excellent book of short stories), ‘Good Omens’, ‘Coraline’ and the MirrorMask screenplay. If I’d have known how it was going to work I’d have brought ‘Signal to Noise’, ‘Midnight Days’, ‘Sandman’ or ‘American Gods’ (which I couldn’t find on Saturday morning). Penny brought her much-loved copy of ‘The Wolves in the Walls’, which is illustrated by Dave McKean.
Neil himself was very friendly and affable and much amused by the fact that Lenny Henry had
accused him of smoking giant reefers with Dave McKean when writing MirrorMask. He also revealed that a new anthology of short stories is due soon, assuming he’s got enough material. I presume it will be published sometime after his next work, a children’s book.
All that done, we did some exploring (Hamley’s and Liberty’s) before ending up in
Vinopolis in the afternoon. Situated under London Bridge, around the corner from the London Dungeon, the Vinopolis is a wine museum and wine tasting experience. It was definitely worth visiting, though it would have been prohibitively expensive had it not been for the two for one deal we had. As it was, we decided to go for some whiskey tasting too. Some of the wines we tried were average at best, but we also discovered some absolute gems like a 2003
Israeli Riesling/Chenin blanc, a
Californian Muscat and the
Crofts Triple Crown port. Among the whiskey tastings we particularly liked the smoky flavour of the
Talisker.
After that, it was Pizza Express for dinner, a train home and a much-deserved 10 hour coma.
Quite a day!
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vinopolis,
wine,
neil gaiman
Kev’s 30th Birthday
Eastbourne (For Terry Pratchett signings, albeit without any of TP himself)
Madrid
There were some pictures of the talk given by Dave McKean after the MirrorMask showing at the London Film Festival (
read about it here) but they came out way too dark. I’ll try and Photoshop them, but I’m not holding my breath.
With a bit of luck we’re back to our normal blogging schedule, which means more regular updates than a whole batch of them once every week. There’ll still be a huge batch of updates to come from last week, not to mention a series of photos that I’ve still not uploaded to
Flickr. Doing all of that is probably going to take me a couple of days.
Unlike last week, this time I’ll be blogging events in set order, but I’ll begin probably be working backwards.
Photos are a different matter, I’ve got old photos going back to the
Pratchett signing.
This week’s schedule? Who knows for sure? Certainly not me. But I know that I’m in the UK at least for the next couple of days.
On a techy note, I’ll be trailing
Google Analytics over the next few weeks, since
Sitemeter gives pre-analysed web-traffic data in an undownloadable format.
Thursday
Phew! The last day of running workshops! (Pork and fish were the lunch options again) And so another evening’s entertainment had been organised. This time it was *gasp* in the centre of
Braunschweig! We were going to leave the hotel! After some Dutch courage to brave the great outdoors, we headed off to an Argentinian steakhouse. Mmmm… Lovely! Best steak ever! Though I might have been biased by the fact that it was neither pork nor fish.
After food some colleagues and I decided to go off and do some sightseeing before joining the others in a bar. It turns out that Braunschweig, of which I’d not seen anything but the industrial side, was actually a very pleasant, pretty mid-sized town with an architecturally interesting old-town.
So eventually we ended up in a bar called
DAX, after the German stock exchange. It turned out not to be as random a name as was thought, as the prices of all drinks were displayed on a giant board and changed electronically every two minutes, depending on demand. It did cause quite some drink mixing with some people, as they would rush up to the bar whenever something was particularly cheap, regardless of what it was. Personally, I made sure managers were buying and stuck to the excellent local beer,
Duckstein.
Friday
A sort of day-off! Hurrah! After some work in the morning, I had nothing else to do. Around about this time I also learnt that I had had the most gruelling workshop schedule of everyone, as I had been presenting in every single slot. The next nearest person had only presented in every second slot. So, with that in mind, I decided I was entirely justified in going off to Braunschweig to do some sight-seeing, shopping and general dosing about before it was time to catch my flight home.
I finally came home Friday night, laden with food, new clothes and books. It was a long a troubled journey home, but I was certainly glad to be back and glad to see Penny again.
Saturday
Ah, blessed weekend! Saturday was a busy day, consisting of picking up a new company mobile, a new computer part-paid by the company and, when Penny finished work, we went and had a lovely meal at
The Swan, which is on the Basingstoke Canal. Next we had the Aldershot Fireworks Extravaganza, or whatever it was called, which was actually excellent. And finally, Di’s housewarming where I most anti-socially drank Di’s wine and spent most of the evening talking to someone with fairly balanced views on paganism.
Sunday
Virtually nothing happened today. Thank the gods…
Monday
Monday morning began ridiculously early, so I could catch a morning flight to Hannover. My weekends are more precious than ever now that I’m home less, so there was no way I was going to agree to flying out on Sunday night. Thankfully the company paid for cabs for everyone, which was a relief as it meant I wouldn’t have to try and negotiate public transport at stupid-o’clock.
Upon arrival, work began in earnest with a couple of workshops to run. The destination at the end of the day? The hotel bar of course!
Tuesday
Take away the travel, Tuesday was identical to Monday. Workshop, after workshop, hour after hour. By now though a pattern is emerging in the meals. Every single lunchtime and every single evening meal there is some variant of having a choice of either pork, fish and/or vegetables. There had been some cost-saving going on and we had a restricted menu, differing each mealtime only the cut of pork and the type of fish. Every single meal except breakfast. Blegh. Only one thing for it… Off to the hotel bar!
Wednesday
Ah, more workshops. More pork. More fish. But at least the evening was different this time and some entertainment was arranged. In the hotel of course, which I still hadn’t left by this point. It was starting to feel like Hotel California. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
The bowling, for such was the entertainment, ended up being an adequate diversion, but not the main one of the night. That coveted title went to a somewhat inebriated manager who began his somewhat drunken escapades by getting much drunker by doing a couple of tequila slammers. Not in the usual fashion though. His particular technique was to snort the salt and pour the lemon in his eye before downing his (generous) shots. It still wasn’t over though. Not content with pawing and, in some cases literally, chasing some of the women from the project team around the bar he decided it was time do his part of international relations. He put his left hand on his top lip (so as to impersonate a moustache) and began goose-stepping up and down the bar, bellowing “Eins, zwei, drei, bier!”. In a German bar. In Germany. In front of a room full of Germans.
Oops!
Wow, what a week it’s been! No blog for the last week and a half due to an enforced absence in Hannover. But let’s tackle it one day at a time…
Saturday the 30th of October
It all began on Saturday with Kev’s birthday party. Penny and I arrived what we thought was late, but we ended up getting to Kev’s a good few hours before anybody else gave an ETA. It was a good party and good to see everyone again. It was the first time I’d seen Russ and Andrea since the infamous Night of the Jentalist! Lynsey’s cooking was excellent and the wine bountiful.
Sunday
Sunday began with us all watching Blade Trinity – AKA bloody bubblegum for the eyes. (Note to self: Use less weird metaphors). In the late afternoon Penny and I rushed off to go and See Dave McKean’s ‘Mirrormask’. We were much pleased to find out that not only was Dave there to introduce the film, but he was doing a Q&A afterwards, he’d brought the cast and Lenny Henry (friend of McKean & Gaiman) decided to show up too.
The film itself was a fairly simple family story at the heart of it, but the visuals and the storytelling together (especially the visuals) made it an awesome experience. Sadly, Penny – exhausted from the previous night’s excesses and lulled by the warm theatre – dozed off from time to time, thereby missing chunks of a film she’d been clambering to see for some time.
After the film was the Q&A session which was more entertaining than informative. The cast were pleasantly ‘normal’ rather than showbiz and Dave himself seemed rather unsure of all the attention. The best line came from Lenny Henry, when asked about the creative process of Gaiman & McKean: “Have you seen the film? They were obviously on drugs! I turned up and they were smoking giant reefers, like rolled up Persian rugs!”
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mirrormask
