Ding ding! All aboard for Book Town!

Imagine a town with 23 book shops. Who wouldn’t want to go there? Well, people who hate reading, for a start. Ok, discounting them, how many bibliophiles would think they had died and gone to Heaven? Answer: ALL of THEM.

We are that sort of people-- the kind who love books and enjoy pottering around bookshops and browsing endless shelves and lazy days lying about reading. We’ve lived in England for over 9 years and, would you believe it, we had never been before. What are you on about, Spidergrrl, I hear you ask. Hay-on-Wye. The Book Town. A town made of bookshops. A town filled with enough paper that it could have once been a forest. That is where we have been for the past week. HEAVEN.

Hay-on-Wye is in Wales and as the name suggests the town of Hay sits on the River Wye. It is pretty tricky to get there being the car-free eco-people that we are, but we managed it. We had to train to Kings Cross station, tube to Paddington station, train to Worcester Foregate, change trains and then train to Hereford and then bus for 1 hour into Hay. All in all, it was about 7 hours, which sounds like a lot, but the pleasure of taking the train is you don’t have to drive or navigate so you can just sit and read or chill out listening to tunes on your I-pod. We weren’t tired, cranky or crooked (I have lots of back issues--more on that later)  the way we used to be after driving so it makes for a pleasant journey.  On the way home we went a different way--bus to Hereford, train to Newport Gwent, change trains and then train to Paddington station, tube to Kings Cross and then train home. It took about the same amount of time, but the reason we went a different way was it made the train tickets cheaper. Go figure.

Anyway, we arrived in Hay (which always makes me want to say, “Hay the official snack food of the reindeer games”--if you’ve seen the animated Christmas film Robbie the Reindeer you’ll know what I am talking about) and were greeted with the sight of our lovely front door.

It was a lovely duck egg blue (my Granny Blair’s favourite colour--which is fitting as she was a children’s author and fellow bibliophile) and the cottage did not disappoint. It was a nice sized “two up, two down” and was perfectly comfortable for our needs.

 

A very blurry photo (it looks like Spiderman sneezed as he took it) of the lovely and comfortable living room--with a sofa for me to lie on and a chair for Spiderman--just the way we like to read. Or rather, the way I like to be selfish and take up all the space and Spiderman accommodates me. 

Here is the conservatory round the back of the kitchen. On two of the days it was warm enough to eat our lunch out here, but the rest of the days it was *freezing.*

Here is the sign warning you as you come down the stairs. There’s a reason for this.

Here is me (all 5”3 of me) and can you see how I am taller than the sign? I was very proud of this--as if this were some sort of accomplishment of me growing taller rather than being part of the design of the house--but as Spiderman pointed out it was the house and not me. Which is a shame as it made me feel like a giant. But if  I could hit my head coming downstairs, then imagine poor Spiderman who is head and shoulders taller then me. Yikes! You had to be really careful in the middle of the night as the bedroom was upstairs but the toilet was down! But hey--it added to the fun!

Here is the beautiful bed with about a dozen decorative pillows. Sadly, it was a VERY soft mattress which does not sit very well with my bad back. I have a mild case of scoliosis, plus a twice broken coccyx which needs very firm support. To (badly) paraphrase Shakespeare, “All the pillows of Arabia will not strengthen this little bed.”   I managed it for the first few nights but soon, waking up all crooked persuaded me that I needed a firmer place to sleep. Luckily, there was a single bed in the spare room with a much firmer mattress. I was sad to not sleep with Spiderman, but my back demanded it. Luckily, I was not alone. If you noticed the teddy in the photo, I had my trusty, old, well-loved friend Laurence with me. I am so thankful to be married to a man who is not bothered that after 20 years of marriage I still sleep with a teddy bear.

After a bit of a rest and an unpacking session we walked back to England to the Co-op to “make groceries” (as they say in Louisiana) which is not as impressive as it sounds as England was only a 10 minute walk--Hay being right over the Welsh border. I had meticulously planned our menus to be cheap and easy, bringing with us many things like bags of lentils and rice so we’d only have to buy the fresh stuff.

Look at the lovely display of fruit and veg. We each had 3 pieces of fruit a day to snack on and then some onions and two kinds of potatoes for meals. Lemons for cooking and for making water taste better and the lone garlic.

Just so you don’t think we were *completely* healthy on the trip--we had brought along some of our favourite vegan, fair trade dark chocolate bars. These come in amazing flavours like (from L to R) lemon and cardamom, Sicilian hazelnut, coffee espresso, lavender, raspberry and coconut. Every night we would get 2 squares of each flavour--they smell as good as they taste--and savour them as we watched mindless telly. A treat for us as we don’t have a television at home--and  a CSI marathon until well past midnight reminded us why.

Well, that’s just day one of the Book Town tour. Stay tuned!

The Only Good Dalek

Spiderman has a book in his library called The Only Good Dalek. In my heart I know the rest of that phrase is supposed to be The Only Good Dalek (is a dead Dalek) but it immediately conjured up an image of a really nice Dalek who had trouble fitting in with his peers. It made us both laugh and we decided that the Derek was perfect for a Dalek and so the tale of Derek the Friendly Dalek was born.



The Only Good Dalek

Once, a long time ago on the planet Skaro, there lived a little Dalek named Derek. Derek was a friendly little Dalek, but being friendly was not high on the list of what it means to be a good Dalek and so he was often alone. He had learned that the feelings he had or the thoughts and dreams he possessed were wrong, so he mostly kept his mouth shut and tried to blend in. It was hard because he was lonely, but to even admit being lonely was a serious crime to the Daleks because it smelled of having feelings and Daleks weren’t supposed to have feelings. It was bred out of them by Davros to make them the ultimate killing machine. On top of that, Derek also suffered from feeling ugly. He hated the dull grey Dalekanium metal they were forced to wear. He longed for a splash of colour! Once he found some red paint in his shed and painted his body armour a lovely shade of cherry, but that only drew scorn from all the other Daleks. After that, they wouldn’t let him join in any of the Dalek games (which basically consisted of exterminating things.)

Derek at school

 School was the absolute worst. Every day the Dalek teacher would place an object on his desk and ask the little Daleks what they should do with it. This was their cue to shout “Exterminate!” and blast it with their laser. Once, it was a puppy and whilst the others were busy exterminating it, Derek was thinking, “If only I could take it home and give it a cuddle! I’d call him Spot!” Another time it was Dalek Khan who was ancient and half mad. The others thought he was useless because he could no longer fight in battle and ought to be exterminated, but Derek thought, “I think we should listen to our elders, they are so wise and have such stories to tell!”

 Soon it was exam time. Each Dalek would have to approach the table and an object would be placed before him. He was to identify it and exterminate it. The thought of this made Derek feel rather ill and he told his Mummy that he had a tummy ache and needed to stay home from school, but she was a good Dalek and didn’t believe in tummy aches (she only believed in exterminating) so she sent him anyway.

When it was his turn, he slowly wheeled himself up to the table. The teacher put a vase filled with roses on the table and waited for the correct answer. “Say it! Just exterminate it!” he thought to himself, but that was not what he really wanted to do.      

“Well…go on boy!” the teacher whined in his metallic voice.

“I’d like to….”

“Just say it boy!”

“I’d like to bash the rose petals….”

“And then?”  He could hear that H the teacher was growing impatient. Derek looked through his eyestalk at the lovely red roses. They were just the same colour as his body armour. He extended his plunger and took a deep breath and smelled their sweet perfume.

“We’ve not got all day!”

“I’d like to bash the rose petals and then….soak them in water and make rose water perfume for my Mummy!” he cried.

There was a collective GASP in the room and then suddenly, every Dalek turned on him and shouted, “EXTERMINATE!” and shot him with their lasers. Within seconds, Derek had been reduced to a pile of dust and all the other Daleks were awarded top marks in their exam and went on to invade other galaxies and lived happily ever after.    

      

                                                                 The end

 We also thought you could sing a wee song about him to the tune of “Rudolph the red nosed reindeer.” But we haven’t made it up yet. Maybe next time.

Bring it on down to Veganville!

This is a clip from Saturday Night Live where Justin Timberlake plays an all singing, all dancing block of tofu who extols the virtues of a meat free diet. This makes me scream with laughter (which is a bit of a problem as I am watching it at the public library and they frown on screaming laughter here.) I found it incredibly
FUNNY
FACTUAL
and REALISTIC.
Ok, not the dancing block of tofu (but who knows what tofu gets up to when the fridge door is closed) but the meat eater who calls you a hippy moron or thinks that if you just taste meat again you'd want to eat it.

 Paul McCartney once said, "if slaughterhouses had glass walls everyone would be a vegetarian." For me, kindness and compassion taste better than suffering, simple as that. We eat a delicious, varied diet full of flavour and nothing had to be afraid, feel pain or die to fill our plates.

Enjoy the clip--especially the happy ending. As he says, "it's never too late to change."
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xy35qv_justin-timberlake-bring-it-on-down-2-veganville-veganshake-snl-3-9-13_music

Full Frontal Nerdity

The British Library rocks my socks. They host so many interesting events. We have seen illustrators Anthony Browne, Peter Sis and Emily Gravett  as well has author Neil Gaiman. We’ve been to Sci-Fi panel discussions on what really is possible--this event is where I was introduced to my biggest girly crush Helen Arney. She is the most amazing geek songstress and player of the ukulele. The day after the panel discussion, I went out and bought my first ukulele.  Once for my birthday we went to the British Library for a dramatic reading of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol that featured a Victorian conjurer. Their events are always varied and never boring and always cost less than a tenner. Plus the British Library is just a hop, skip and a jump from King’s Cross Station. What could be easier?

 

Last night was no exception. We went to the last part of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd tour which stars Helen Arney the ukulele player of my dreams (and physicist by day), Steve Mould science presenter and comedian and BBC1 presenter of Britain’s Brightest and lastly, Matt Parker the only stand up mathematician in the UK.

It was a night full of comedy and maths and science thrills. They told us about how the British library uses robots to retrieve their books, how the books are kept in a place with reduced oxygen to prevent fires starting (this was demonstrated by attempting burn a copy of the Daily Mail in a Perspex box that had been filled with dry ice. The CO2 makes the lighter go out and keeps the paper from burning.) We heard about the collection of weird patents the library keeps--condom advent calendar, anyone?  Plus interviews with real scientist working with the Heritage Smells project who are using centrifugal devices to smell out decay in books and other items.

At the interval we could do some sniff tests to see if we could name certain household items by the smell (I got coffee, orange and lemon but could not get cucumber or mango) or scan items in a high tech machine that would tell you what you product was *really* made of (2 people who thought they had leather wallets were disappointed as well as a man with a tie that turned out to be rayon not silk.)  You could hear various animals from the BL’s sound archive and guess what they were-- there was a walrus who sounded like a beat box and a haddock who purred and a bird who could imitate a fax modem form the 1980s. There were handmade alcoholic cocktails made by a  company called Alchemy Dreams. We tried the one called Musty Books which contained elderberry, vanilla, bergamot and pine needles mixed with a double measure of 19%abv handmade liqueur and was meant to recreate the sweet old paper smell of a well- loved book. And it did--it tasted like an old book smells. 

The show was so much fun, but the highlight for me was speaking to Helen Arney afterwards and thanking her for the recent songbook she’s put out with the ukulele chords to all of her cool science based songs from Voice of an Angle (which I urge you to download from here . http://helenarney.com/) She very kindly personalised it to me and my 2 ukes Ruth and Tallulah at Thomas‘ request. But when I mentioned Ruth and Tallulah she remembered me! That thrilled me to no end and I was on cloud 9 all the way home.

Thanks again to British Library for bringing culture and fun and books (and bespoke alcohol) into our lives once more! 

The coffee goblin, the monkeys that push the train and people

Last night we took the train to Letchworth to the Broadway Cinema. Every time we go to the train station we have to pass the Tesco Express that happens to have a Costa Coffee inside.

Outside the shop is this enormous replica of a take-away Costa Coffee Cup. It is life size--well my life size as I am fairly short--and every time I see it I am overwhelmed with an urge to crawl inside the big cup and wear the plastic lid as a hat. I want to crouch down in the cup like some sort of demented coffee goblin and when people pass by, I’d like to rise up (with the lid balanced on my head) and saying “would you like some coffee?” in my best Keefus voice. If you went to high school with me, you will know what I mean by a Keefus voice. Anyway, the whole purpose would be to freak people out (in particular drunk people) and have a laugh.   There is an episode of Blackadder II where he gets drunk and sings the song about little goblin and every time I see the giant Costa Coffee Cup o’ Fun I want to sing (again--in the Keefus voice)

See the coffee goblin

Isn’t the goblin sweet

With his little nosey-wose

And his tiny feet

And then laugh maniacally like a crazy person. Mwa ha ha ha ha.

Spiderman can easily entertain me by using his Keefus voice to make up slogans for Costa Coffee (like it doesn’t costa much to buy good coffee) causing me to laugh really loud and people to turn and stare and he then pretends he doesn’t know why this mad woman next to him is making such a ruckus. Such is the history of our courtship and marriage.

When you get on a train here they make this peculiar sound like Ooooooo Oooooooo Ooooooo when they start to move which Spiderman explained to me is the sound of monkeys pushing the train. 

 

You’ve heard of horsepower? Well, trains are run by monkey power. FACT. You cannot see the monkeys, they must keep out of sight or they get fired. But you can definitely hear them. If the train is delayed then the monkeys are on a banana break. If the train is going incredibly slowly a monkey has fallen off and has to run to catch up. This make for huge amounts of speculation about what sorts of monkeys they are and how many you need to push a train. On the way home no monkeys could be heard pushing the train and so Spiderman said it was evil genetically engineered butterflies  with a poison dart attached to them pushing the train (this was based on a crazy dream I had had the night before) so I was a bit freaked out.

Anyway, the reason we had to pass by Costa Coffee and indulge my fantasy of being a coffee goblin and catch a train pushed by monkeys was that we were going to the cinema but not to see a film. What? What else do you see at the cinema? Well, hold on and I’ll tell you. We went to see a PLAY. A play at the cinema, are you clinically insane? Yes, but hear me out. The National Theatre was beaming to cinemas worldwide a live filming of a play that was being acted on stage. It was like going to London to see a play, but only going to Letchworth and having more comfortable seats and a quicker journey home.

 

The play we saw was Alan Bennett’s People about a beautiful old home crumbling around the eccentric owner. Her sister wants to turn the home over to the National Trust, but that would mean it would be open to the public and as it is said in the play--PRE--people ruin everything. It is a wonderful witty play about decay and redemption (whether you want it or not) which includes the most  creative staging of a porn film being filmed there as it is a “period piece” and they need a cheap location. There is also a magnificent scene where over the course of a song the crumbling, decaying house is cleaned, repaired and restored to its former glory and hoards of tourists wearing headsets listening to the AV commentary wander through. It was cleverly done and spectacularly poignant. The cast was outstanding, everyone playing their part to perfection.

 

What an amazing idea to broadcast live a London play--so many more people have the chance to experience good theatre this way. There were lots of rather old people there who looked too frail for a trip all the way into London, but were up for a night in Letchworth.

It was a blast. On the way back as evil butterflies pushed us homeward and we passed the giant coffee cup I hummed to myself (in my best Keefus voice) and thought about how lucky we are to live here. Truly all of my dreams have come true.