Month: November 2001

Well, I survived 3 rounds of redundancies, but the 4th was just too much to hope for, and so I was made redundant on Monday along with 26 others (of those 10 were voluntary). I’d been there for 2 years, so at least I’m entitled to the government statutory payment of 240GBP for each of those years. Wow! I’m rich.

So, I’m not being asked to work my notice, and so am getting to spend more time in Brighton. I spent Tuesday sleeping and generally mooching around the house. On Wednesday I went into London to meet up with some friends for lunch, visited the office and cleared up my work pc, and went to see my Financial Advisor (who still managed to con some money out of me – incredible). Yesterday I started doing some technical playing (big thanks to Paul for lending me his laptop for a while) – php and mysql. And today I’ve met up with another redundant person this morning to discuss some work we might do together, and then I had lunch with one of the survivors in a lovely pub in Brighton (The George in Trafalgar Street – only serves vegetarian food, and the quality of that food is great) before she dragged me around some of the antique shops in the North Laines.

All in all, it ended as a far better week than it began.

I’ve just been to StarWars.com and watched the trailer for the new film. It looks like a forbidden romance (jedi’s aren’t allowed to love apparently) and that the creation of Darth Vader is underway. Watch it…

We’ve bought each other Mountain bikes for Christmas. We bought them at The Bike Chain in Brighton, and have had them now for 10 days or so. Yesterday we went on our first “proper” ride on them (previously we’ve been on a couple of rides along the seafront, but nothing more exciting that). We cycled through Brighton to Stanmer Park, through Stanmer Park and stopped at a little shop/cafe for a refuel of water before heading off along the downs (being passed by lots and lots of cars). We then headed off downhill towards Rottingdean and stopped at the seafront for a little while before cycling along the cliffs until we got back to Brighton. In total just under 15 miles and we arrived home exhausted. It was good fun though, especially the cycling downhill to Rottingdean bit…

My folks have been visiting for the last few days, and so we’ve had a bit more opportunity to explore Brighton and Sussex. It’s been great, and the weather has been really kind to us – cold but sunny, and only one day of rain (and we’d planned to be indoors that day anyway – we went around the Pavilion which is a really interesting place). See the photos.

We also went to a new restaurant on Saturday evening – Lucy’s Restaurant on the sea front, between Alfresco and the new children’s playground. This is a fairly small place, and they’ve just decided to open up in the evenings Thursday to Sunday. The menu isn’t huge, but there is a good choice, and I heartily recommend the lamb cutlets – they were fantastic. It’s a nice relaxed place, and we’ll be going back again soon.

A friend spotted this news article in the Mirror about the Lewes Bonfire Night – “WAR ON TERROR: BINFIRE NIGHT Muslim outrage at Laden burning”. It seems the Muslim Council are objecting to the burning of the Bin Laden effigy on Monday night, not a big surprise I suppose but the Lewes Bonfire Societies are known for doing some slighty dodgy effigy burning.

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We went to Lewes on Monday night to experience the Bonfire Night festivities. There are 5 different Bonfire Societies who make effigys, costumes and loads and loads of flaming torches. There are 31 different street processions – we saw 5 or so of them, and they were fairly impressive. We watched the Waterloo bonfire start and then headed off back towards the car and found an excellent view across the 5 different firework displays. We didn’t really have a plan, but just wandered around. Next year, we’ll probably organise ourselves a bit better and learn from this year. See more photos.

I’ve known about the GPS Art web site for a while, but I didn’t realize that there was a Brighton Elephant or that it had made it as a BBC News story. Must have been a slow news day.