Floating down to Camelot

Agh. Once again, I fail dismally in my "I'll try to be better about posting and reading" resolution. I never even finished writing up our Cotswold Way holiday, and here we are, returned from another trip. I'm still writing it up, though. When in the Lake District, we were trying to remember details of our previous holiday there in 2017, and my then write-up caused us much amusement and cries of, "oh yes, I remember that!" Would I remember a single thing in life if I didn't write it, I wonder? (And how much has been forgotten over the last few years, when I've been so bad at doing so.)

Oh well... Last October, we had a weekend in Grasmere for a family gathering, which reminded me that the Lake District has been my Best Place Ever since I was 8, and obsessed with Swallows and Amazons. So we duly booked a week in Grasmere, staying just a few hundred yards from where we'd stayed in October.

( Lake District: an enormous post with pictures )

The week before last, we walked Hadrian's Wall. This being a National Trail, it meant following the sign of the acorn. Within a few hours, we started calling this "the unicorn," accidentally at first, but soon deliberately. "Hadrian's Wall Path" became "Hadrian's warpath," so here is an account, with pictures, of our adventures following the warpath of the unicorn.

( The warpath of the unicorn: a truly enormous account )

I decided that it would be nice to have a few days in Bath to celebrate my birthday. Unfortunately, what I failed to realise was that Bath has a famous Christmas market, and half the population of the south-west of England would be there. Apparently there was barely a hotel room to be had in the entire place, so travelling there for the weekend is a thing. Had I known, I would have arranged the trip for the previous weekend. Oh well. We still had a nice time. Here are some pictures that - unusually for me - are NOT of comical medieval animals.

( A few days in Bath )

We were asked to dance at a firework display last night, down on the seafront in Sandown. I don't think I've been to a Bonfire Night firework display since I was... ooh, 9 or 10 years old, when, armed with bags of Bonfire Toffee (which meant black treacle toffee in my house, although to others it's cinder toffee) we headed out to a Field of Mystery. I say Field of Mystery because, chasing down my vague memories the other day, the only conclusion I could come to was that the display had taken place on a recreation ground not far from my parents' current house, where no such rec exists. I asked my parents, who also had a think, and concluded that it had been on a farmer's field not far from their current house, but they had no idea which field, or how on earth any of the audience got in or out.

( More on fireworks, including a whole series of absolutely rubbish photographs )

( And a few pictures from a death-defying walk )

I got a new phone this week, prompted by the fact that my old phone's battery was struggling to survive half a day. I would like to say that I approached my purchasing decision with intelligence and sophistication, carefully reading up on all the specifications and making Lists, before dazzling the phone shop staff with my clear and incisive articulation of my conclusions. Well, I still could say that, but it would be a lie. What I actually did was go into the shop and say, "I want a phone that will cost me about the same as I'm paying now, works the same as my current phone and fits into this nifty little pocket in my handbag." The chap brought me two options. One didn't fit into the little pocket. One did, and as an added bonus, was a nice shiny pale gold. "I'll have it," I said.

And so I have a new phone. You are probably interested in all the technological specifications, so here are its key features.

1. It is very fond of skating, or maybe downhill skiing. I could put my old phone on the couch beside me, and it would usually stay where it was put. My new one slowly, inexorably skates towards me, gradually gaining speed until it hits me on my toe. (I always sit with my legs curled beneath me, which is why my toe is beside me on the couch.) I can press down the couch cushion and ensure that it absolutely, inarguably flat, and what happens? Yes, another ski run, terminating on my toe, even as the remote controls that were next to it are still sitting there unmoving. "Right!" I can say to it, as I slightly press down the far side of the couch cushion, so that if the phone decides to go skating, it will skate away from me, to nestle safely in the slight indentation between the un-sat-on cushions. And what happens? Yes, once again, it skates towards me, defying gravity, and hits me on the toe.

2. Actually, writing up point 1 makes me wonder if it has some sort of magnetic attraction towards me. I did wonder why the phone shop man spent quite so long setting up my phone. I thought he was just registering things and transferring data, but maybe he was also establishing some sort of new-fangled homing magic, so the phone would always find its owner. Or its owner's toe, at least. I can see that this would be quite useful.

3. My old phone had rounded edges, so when I put it down on a hard surface, I could easily pick it up. My new phone is thinner and less grippable, and when it's on the glass surface of the coffee table, it strongly resists any attempt to pick it up. I often end up having to slide it off the edge, and trying to catch it before it decides to do an Eddie the Eagle impression and land on my toe. Sometimes random buttons get pressed as I do this. As is the habit of random buttons pressed by accident (or cats), this will probably result in an awesome feature opening up, one which I will never again discover by design, as long as my phone and I both shall live.

4. It's shiny!

I started my coastal path walk at 16.10 last Saturday, having managed to leave work a little early. I finished on Monday at 15.06 and 30 seconds. Yes, the 30 seconds is important, since I'd spent the last two miles walking as fast as I could, desperately clock-watching as I aimed the 15.08 bus.

( A rather long walk, with pictures )

We spent Easter adventuring in Westeros - or, rather, Essos. This write-up will be of no interest at all to anyone who wasn't there - and of minimal interest to those who were, since, well, they were there. However, it's good to have a record for future reference.

( How to annoy people in Essos )

You'd think I'd have learnt by now.

Since I'm an infrequent visitor to London, and not someone who needs to traverse it daily, I always opt to walk across it rather than descend into the abyssmal depths of the underground. I check on walkit.com to glance at a recommended route, and then... entirely fail to follow it. The trouble is, I get bored with main roads, and especially bored with returning from anywhere by the same route by which I came. Plus, main roads are big, roary things, quite overwhelming to poor provincials like me. Towering buses conceal any interesting buildings that might be lurking on the far side of the road, and there are far too many side streets, where the pedestrian crossings sternly display a red man, even as all the traffic appears to be halted and all the locals are flooding across the road. I end up hovering nervously, torn between the belief that if I step out, the roaring traffic of That London is suddenly going to descend on me from a hitherto unseen direction, and the fear that if I stand there despite the total emptiness of the road, all the locals are laughing at me for being a law-abiding provincial who Doesn't Understand How We Do Things Here.

( Adventures in that London )

I had great fun last week doing the Great Sporcle Puzzle Hunt, which occupied me for the best part of a day. It's 15 quizzes, most of them of the general knowledge type, but also including anagrams, ciphers and so on. After you've solved each quiz, you have to study your answers and derive a further answer from them. When you've got all 15 answers, you enter them in the Meta Quiz which gives you a further puzzle to solve. From this, you derive one last answer, which you enter in the Final Answer puzzle, and yay, you're done!

Since you need to get well nigh 100% in quizzes that cover a wide range of categories, you are actively encouraged to use Google, reverse image searches, anagram finders and any other tool you can to solve them. This is NOT considered cheating. There's a time limit on the quizzes, but you can pause it while you go off and do your research on a different tab, and retry as often you like. There's a hint giver if you're having trouble finding the single word answer that's hidden in your quiz answers. I resorted to this several times. In some quizzes, the final answer leapt out at me straightaway, but others had me stumped for a considerable time.

If you choose to do it, good luck!

The time has finally come. My old boots are finally getting thrown out. The bin men will take them away shortly. I clung to them desperately for so long after they started to fall apart. When it became clear that they couldn't go near water without leaking with a sieve, I bought a new pair, after trying on pretty much every pair of boots on the island. I didn't like my new ones. In fact, I HATED my new ones. I did a few short walks with them, grumping all the way, then put them in a cupboard and returned to my old ones. By then, they were leaking even if they as much as glimpsed a drop of dew from 100 yards, but I still clung to them. In my mind, the New Boots were hideous monstrosities that weighed a tonne and had enormous solid heels ten inches thick. I tried repairing the old ones, but they were a lost cause. I scoured the internet for second-hand pairs of the same type, but found none. In the end, I pretty much stopped walking entirely.

Then, after months of impasse, I tried my new boots, and realised that they weren't the hideous, heavy monstrosities I thought they were. I tried ten miles in them, and had no problem. I tried 16, and had sore shins, but it was a walk entirely on hard surfaces, so perhaps that was only to be expected. Grudgingly I had to admit that perhaps I'd misjudged them.

I'd done very little walking this year, but yesterday I did 21 miles in my new boots. No problem at all. No sore shins, and no blisters.* I hate to admit it, but my old boots would have given me blisters on my first walk after a long hiatus. So the time has come: the old boots are going out to the bin men, and will be no more.

It seems a bit harsh, really, after all the good and loyal service they've given me. I feel I ought to be taking them out to my favourite part of the Coastal Path and giving them an honorable burial. Not only would it honour them, it would also baffle future archaeologists.

* Well, actually, I DO have a blister, but can't blame the boots. Not only do I wear boots until they fall apart, I do the same with socks. I ended yesterday's walk with a blister on the sole of my foot. The fact that there turned out to be hole in my sock in exactly that place is, I suspect, significant. Pellinor is now tutting and shaking his head and saying "I told you so," since he doesn't approve of my holey socks, and thinks I should chuck the entire lot out and get a drawer-full of new ones.

( The old boots: Rest in Peace )

Our Morris dancing gardener has Plans for this bush in our front garden. Topiary type Plans. Realisation of said Plans is in its early stages at present. Any ideas what the end result might be?

We've spent the weekend in unexpectedly bright sunshine in Arundel, on the sort of "dancing weekend" that our mixed team favours: i.e. one in which we occasionally fit in a dance or two in between the meals. I've go no time to say much about it, since I've been writing like mad these last few weeks, trying to finish an epic fanfic before going away on Friday. This hasn't been helped by being away for the last 3 weekends. But have some pictures, anyway, and a few bullet points of Stuff Seen.

( Pictures of Arundel )

This week we learnt:

A. A brand new uplighter shade made out of thin parchment-coloured material leads to a much brighter room than an old, broken (thanks to Wii Sports and drunken folk dancing) ochre-coloured shade, made out a fairly thick fabric and lined with the Dust of Ages.

B. When you remove a rotary drier that's been sitting in the middle of your rather small lawn for years, stuck permanently in the "up" position and now distinctly unpleasant, suddenly your garden looks MUCH bigger, MUCH nicer, and with a reasonable sized space to sit in.

In other words:

A. Reducing the barriers between light bulb and room leads to more light visible in room!

B. Removing large item from small space leads to a larger expanse of useful space!

The questions now are:

A. Why did this fail to occur to either of us years ago, when I first started complaining about the poor light in the room?

B. Why did this fail to occur to either of us years ago, when I first started complaining about the lack of useful space to eat al fresco summer dinners in?

A couple of years ago, my Mum made the shocking discovery that I didn't have a kitchen timer, but relied on looking at the clock and remembering the time. So outraged was she that she got me a kitchen timer for Christmas. (It was the Best Christmas EVER!) It was a cheery green plastic egg with spots on, and you set it by rotating its two halves. Unfortunately, as I soon discovered, if you rotated it with greasy hands - a common enough situation in the kitchen - it rubbed the numbers off. After a few months, I was left with a green plastic egg with spots on, still cheery, but with no markings other than the spots. It still worked, but it was like a lucky dip. "Well, I've set the timer," you could say, "but what I've set the timer to, I have no idea."

So I bought a new timer, since my few weeks with a functional cheery plastic green egg with spots on had showed me that Mother Knows Best, and kitchen timers were indeed a Good Thing. This time I got a non-cheery dark maroon one, with a shiny dial that you twisted around. It worked excellently, at first. However, it soon became apparent that although it worked excellent nine times out of ten, the other time it decided to keep secrets. "Hmm," you would think. "It seems like a very long time since I put that cake in the oven." You'd go through the investigate, and once you'd put the fire out and waved goodbye to the fire-fighters, you would confront the innocently-smiling timer that was sitting there with its dial at zero. "Why didn't you tell me?" you'd shout. "Why didn't you jingle loudly to announce the achievement of your mission?" "Well..." it would admit, "I decided that it was a bit boastful to shout about it, so I thought I'd be modest this time, and not breathe a word."

So I bought a new timer. This time I went for a digital one, although I soon discovered that it had some annoying features. It turns out that I do not like having to go click click click click click (or click, hold... and agh! Overshoot!) instead of just whizzing a dial around. Additionally, instead of giving a nice quick brrrring!! it went "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" and went on until you did something about it. So if you were cooking something that could take a bit of slack in its timing, and were busy doing Very Important Things when the timer went off (like posting cat pictures on Facebook, or something) you couldn't continue what you were doing for a minute then wander through to deal with the cooking. No, unless you wanted to be driven to distraction by the frenzied beeping, you had to drop all your Very Important Things and rush through to the kitchen and sort things out. However, that was an irritant, not a fault. The fault was that after a few months of working just fine, the timer decided that it knew best. You'd set it for ten minutes, and it would dutifully count down until it got almost to zero... whereupon it would sometimes suddenly decide that of course you didn't really want to cook your bhajis for ten minutes, you'd meant 15 all along, so it would helpfully jump back up to 5 minutes and start counting down again.

So I bought a new timer. I went back to mechanical this time, and bought a shiny silver egg. I took it home. It didn't work. Not one bit. I wound it up, set it... nothing. It just sat there. Dead. Dead. Dead.

So I rummaged through the recycling and found my receipt, and took it back to the shop. I chose a replacement and took it to the counter, and asked if I could check it first. The lady wound it up to 20 minutes... BRRRRING! it instantly went. She tried again. BRRRRINNGG!!!!! So I went and got yet another one. Same problem. Another one. Same problem.

I now have a new kitchen timer. I wonder how many days before I will need to have another shopping trip...

EDIT: Just set the new timer for 40 minuets (or even minutes, timers not being that good at old-fashioned dancing.) Ten minutes later... BRRRRIIIINNNGGG!!!!! What is it with me and kitchen timers?

We spent last week adventuring in the far reaches of space (or the not-so-far reaches of space, since Space is Big.) This was the continuation of the campaign we started two years ago, which culminated in a super-powerful Ancienty chap telling us that All The Things were at risk unless we joined him in his fight against The Destroyer. We decided that said super-powerful Ancienty chap was a capricious, arrogant twit. We suspect strongly that other characters in other campaigns have tangled with said Destroyer, who is also a capricious, arrogant twit, but our current characters don't know this. "Can we have a year to think about your job offer?" we asked, and, faced with the news that All The Things were potentially under threat... we decided to ignore it, and continued to visit wacky tourist attractions, search for elephant tusks, buy quirky robots and go to concerts.

Duct tape was the prevailing weapon in our arsenal, most notably when we spent about two hours trying to work out how to detain 4 prisoners in the toilet of our passenger shuttle. Few guns were fired, and these often ineptly. One of the few fights we engaged in involved using pasties as a weapon. (It made a strange sort of sense at the time, honest. We were on a mining planet, you see?) The most passionate debates - apart from the duct tape/toilet thing - revolved around PR and marketing strategies, HR and recruitment issues, childcare, contract law and the financial management of ailing steel farming companies. Can we conclude from this that we are getting old?

We found the elephant tusks, and all finished happily for every past owner who had become fond of them during their chequered career! We rescued an 8 year old telepathic girl from a life of brain probes and hideous tesssts! We saved a planet from being crashed into by a comet! We launched the career of a rubbish film star! We discovered a boy band! We captured a pirate! (This was the long-term nemesis of Pellinor's character. I thought that he would feel a little sense of sadness at finally being rid of his nemesis, but he is made of less sentimental stuff, and captured him without a qualm.) We even got a medal ceremony! I have always argued that all games should end with a medal ceremony, ever since I took 2 days destroying the Death Star, only for the game to cut instantly to credits without letting me bask in my hard-won victory.

As well as fighting fictional pirates, most of us ventured into Plymouth - most of us in appropriate costume - for a pirate-themed metal gig, which was fun, but very very hot. Two days later, the dreaded lurgi began to sweep through the party, clearly the fault of those pesky pirates. It reached me on the journey home. I thought I was past the worse today, and ventured into work, but was sent home after a few hours, on the grounds that I was "as white as a sheet," and was sitting inside shivering in two coats, while everyone else was in short sleeves and saying how hot it was. Illness is giving me interesting dreams, though. Last night, I dreamt a long and very vivid adventure prompted by the government making possession of 20-sided dice a capital offence...

We've spent the weekend in Wiltshire, in what felt like a proper holiday, even though we were only away for one night. Pictures follow, rather more of them, it seems, of quirky captions than actual scenery and Stuff. Oh well...

( Painted churches, strange topiary, talkative trees, and the like )

As you could probably guess from all the comical animals I posted yesterday, we returned yesterday from a week exploring the Bay of Naples. Here follows far too many photos, and much rambling.

( Roman bits and pieces, entertaining fumaroles, and a goat: rather an epic post, with loads of pictures )