At last we’ve moved to Brighton. Which is all very lovely, but the question is: do we keep the pelmet? The previous owners left it in the living room. It’s very theatrical (it even has a safety curtain). It’s growing on us. We don’t know if that’s good or bad. You tell us. (Oh, the picture may look a bit odd, because it’s stiched together from four photos).
I wandered to the bottom of the road this afternoon to see if things were getting back to normal. They weren’t. Police are everywhere and a large area is still closed off. And it’s very quiet. Normally in the day time our road is full of cars parking close to the tube station, and a few buses running up and down the street…but as everyone is being kept away none of that’s been happening.
We woke up this morning to the radio telling us that “Irish dissidents” have bombed the suburb we live in. The BBC have pictures.
Yesterday Cathy sent me this URL: http://www.seethru.co.uk/games/randomURL/. It’s a site that redirects you to a random .COM web site based on a word plucked from a dictionary at random. It’s my kind of a site… because for a while now I’ve been plucking random pictures from the internet based on dictionary words.
Me, Jono and Jane needed to be near Pembrey on Sunday (Jane will tell you why). The few places we tried were busy, and we ended up spending Saturday night at Hotel Miramar in Llanelli. I just want to say that this area of Wales needs much more competition in the hotel market.
1. The only accommodation they could offer was an apartment: “Adjacent to the Hotel Miramar we have three apartments decorated and furnished to a high standard with all facilities”. These may have been high standards circa 1972, they may have been acceptable as student accommodation, but in truth it was depressing. I can’t even say “it had character”. I think it was all the stains that did it for me. It’s sort of sad, but I would have much rather stayed at a motorway motel or similar. It would have been about the same price: £75 for the three of us.
2. On the plus side, the staff were helpful. The bathroom was on it’s way towards small pool before they fixed the leak, and we were in danger of freezing before the heating was fixed (yeah, it’s July, but it was cold). But they fixed them. That’s good. Or am I lowering my standards?
3. Breakfast wasn’t bad. But who’s idea was it to put cheap instant coffee in a coffee pot? It’s not clever, it’s not fancy, it doesn’t taste good. Note to self: always go for tea; it’s hard to get tea really wrong. One strange thing we saw during breakfast: someone, probably hotel staff, went into the apartments through the backdoor — leaving the door open — and out through the front door, leaving that unlocked. Nothing bad happened, but it’s just disconcerting to watch.
4. “The Hotel Miramar is adjacent to Llanelli Railway Station.” Yeah, this is the big mistake. Anything around a station is not going to be good. We drove around a bit, and we hope we missed the best parts of Llanelli, because if we didn’t it’s a depressing place. We didn’t feel like going out at all, other than to the off license which was literally next door.
A positive note: we had dinner at the Pemberton Arms in Burry Town and that was good pub food with a happy young bloke serving us. We tried to eat at the Poacher’s Rest in Ferryside, but they didn’t really want to feed us, and the manager greeted us with a knife in his hand.
In summary, avoid the area, or pay lots in a plush hotel.
We saw Jurassic Park III on Friday. Yeah, the dinosaurs look a bit better, but don’t bother. No story, or what story there is you’ve seen before. Bah.
By chance we were very bored on Saturday (more about that later) and caught the original Jurassic Park on TV and the contrast was striking: that film is just so much better than JP3.
This tickled me: yesterday I had to pop to the shops, and on the high street there were a few volunteers from some animal welfare group rattling collection tins, looking for donations. I walked past one who asked if I’d spare some time to help with animal welfare, and at that precise moment a dog let out an almighty yelp as a woman in a wheelchair ran over it’s paw. The guy with the tin didn’t even go and look at the dog. Pah.
Yesterday we went up a near-by hill in search of a breeze to fly our new kite. We didn’t find a strong enough wind, but we did find good views of the London Eye and the Millennium Dome.
We decided to head off and find the Newbury Kite Festival at
Thatcham, figuring these guys would probably have picked a location for a festival where there’s likely to be a good wind. Actually, the wind wasn’t that great for us beginners, but we did get our kite off the ground.
The first picture, above, shows some formation flying. We saw quite a bit of this… all set to music, of course.
The second picture is of one of the music structures placed around the festival. It’s a statue with strings, and the strings sound as the wind passed through them. Cool.
We also saw huge parafoil kite (tied down to a car), stacks, kite buggies, kites fighting, and … that’s all I can remember.
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Last night, at the Half Moon pub in Putney, a friend’s band took to the stage: headlining for the first time. They’re called Hostess.
What sort of music? “Hostess combine glorious trip hop beats with delicate melodies to refresh your soul.” You can listen at http://www.hostessmusic.com/music.html.
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The photo above is of an in-flight information screen on a flight from the UK. Notice anything wrong
with that picture? It’s difficult to make out but the aircraft in the middle of the screen is stuck on
route into the UK. Notice also the system crash log text at the top of the image. Not very reassuring, but
as we were already at 30,000ft or something, there wasn’t much point worrying about it.