Day: 6 November 2006

The Pedestrian Knock-over Round

Journal

I was doing so well too. I’d managed to pack up seven bookcases without reading any of the books — well, okay just the one — when I discovered a box beside my desk marked “Journals”. “Ha ha!” I thought, “this should be fun.”

One thing that I like about my journal writing when I was younger was how precise I was with my approximations. I would never write things like “Got up around 8am” it had to be “Got up around 8:03 am”.

I opened my journal from 1992-1993 randomly at page 77 and read.

Sunday 13th December 1992 (ADVENT 3)

[7:16 pm] I didn’t get up until 1pm today. I missed church and lunch at DRH. I thought that I might write a quick letter to Liz Steele in Kenya – I still haven’t finished it!

I like the use of an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence. What a crazy thing not finishing a letter is. Ooh! what a crazy and rebelleous student I was.

You see, I was reading The Lord of the Rings until about 3 am this morning and when I awoke in the morning at 8 am…

It must really have been 8 am on the dot for me to have written that. My alarm must have gone off or something.

… I could hardly see or function so I consciously decided to stay in bed and go to the 6 pm Evensong in St A’s, St As.

See, that’s what I like: attention to detail. Even my abbreviation of St Andrew’s, St Andrews (the name of the Episcopal Church I attended) had the apostrophe in the right place.

Even at 1 pm I didn’t really want to get up. I was so tired. It’s probably also because I’ve got two essays to do for Friday and I’m trying to avoid them.

I said Morning Prayer at my desk and then wrote to Eddie [my brother] and Liz in Kenya.

Ian T. Rankine came to visit me with a box of Frosties and two pints of milk which we then devoured.

We didn’t just eat them, you’ll notice. No! We devoured them. Inspired by the tiger on the packet no doubt.

It was just a short visit, however, and at 4:54 pm …

At 4:54 pm EXACTLY!

… we headed down to Regs with some new ideas for the Gladiators [TV] programme including Shark-infested Pools, the Trench Warfare Round™, and the Pedestrian Knock-over Round™ where the Gladiators drive cars and the contestants try to avoid getting knocked over!

It’s nice to see that people’s taxes were being put to good use to educate my friend Ian and I.

And so here I am after Evensong at my desk eating a 150g bar of Galaxy and feeling quite upset …

I did wonder why I put on so much weight at university: being upset is so fattening!

Blogging break over. I’d better get on with packing, I suppose.

When Monopoly hotels mate

Art exhibition that looks like a church on its side.

Yesterday afternoon, before seeing Motörhead, I caught up with my friend Simon Varwell in Glasgow. Cos that’s what you do exactly seven days before moving house: you travel 100 miles to meet up with friends when you should be packing!

Walking from a trendy café in the Merchant City towards … somewhere (I don’t know Glasgow very well) we passed a number of equally trendy clothes and shoes shops including one called Cruise. Not to be confused with Cruse, the national bereavement counselling service. Unless they are indeed linked, and Cruise only sells black outfits.

Hey, my dad may have died, but damn it! don’t I look the business!

Not far from there we stood outside the Gallery of Modern Art and admired the statue of the Duke of Wellington, with a traffic cone on his head. (You can see a photograph of it at Wikipedia, I was delighted to discover this evening!)

We didn’t stand outside for very long. The gallery is free, so we went in. My two favourite pieces were a pair of giant dogs (fashioned from resin and fibreglass) which appeared to be guarding a wooden church building that looked like it had fallen over. That’s what the photograph above is of. I stood back and looked at it for a moment.

“That looks like what would happen if two Monopoly hotels mated and gave birth to a church!”

It was one of those interactive art exhibits. There was a bright neon sign above the door that read “Welcome” (an idea perhaps for our local congregations?). Inside, in the spire (how inspiring!), there was a video being played on a television monitor. It showed a naked man sitting with his back to the camera, in what looked like a church building, singing hymns, unaccompanied. Maybe the idea was that we accompany him hymn him.

We were invited to sit in there and watch the video. I graciously declined. I’ve had to deal with enough naked, hymn singing men sitting in faux church spires to last me a lifetime. But it was kind to offer.