The last few days have been busy - I've rushed from pillar to post, and tried to combine that with spending as much time asleep as possible.

Thursday night was a lot of fun - KMFDM put on a good show. Took a few photos (the usual 120, of which about 20 are any good...) which will go up later and generally had a good time after I'd worked out which of the security chaps was "friendly" and which was "annoyingly jobsworth". I'm really enjoying live music again, and have Skinny Puppy to look forward to next week.

After getting back into Birmingham at 1am at least, thanks to these new-fangled power sockets on trains, I'd edited down my photos as well as keeping myself entertained with Zeromancer, VNV Nation and Ministry. I’m sure at least 3 of you will want to see the photos at some point – watch this space.

Friday was work, and rushing around in order to be able to get to York in time for ant_girl's Birthday Fun Weekend. The roads were pleasant enough, and we had at least, ooh, 5 minutes to spare getting to the restaurant. Group meals in York seem to have a different dynamic to the Birmingham ones - I didn't notice any angst, politics, fallings-out, food-fights etc. I remained on my toes just-in-case ;-) Chinese was good - bean curd in abundance - though I'm pretty sure there were more digital cameras than people present.

On Saturday a dark-cloud descended on Forbidden Corner (Middle-of-Nowhere, nr Middleham) to explore a quintessentially English theme park. It was a slight blast-from-the-past as we drove past a B&B I'd stayed out ages ago, then past Middleham Castle which I remember visiting then off to the corner. The place itself was ~odd~. Depending on your mood it's either a tacky exposition of self-expression on the part of the creator, or a celebration of eccentricity. As mister_ed has mentioned, it would have been much more the latter if it hadn't been full of children (bah!) but was still fun. There's something surreal about being underground, in a small room with a revolving floor and finding a bemused looking scout behind every door. Some nice group photos in evidence I suspect – which if you’re interested you’re likely to see elsewhere, and if you’re not – no loss there!

Saturday night was Darklands, where they had a little raffle and I won some promo CDs they didn't want any more. Having listened to one I can understand why...  I spent an amount of the evening staring agog at the DVD player output – first some Duran Duran videos and then a Nuclear Blast promo set. The second was a pleasant surprise as I didn’t realize Zeromancer were on that label (which has links with detonator.tv. The first left me speechless. Having avoided pop music while I grew up in the 1980s, and only just discovering some of it now, the videos for Girls on Film and The Chauffeur. Interesting. Yes. Interesting. Very arty. Yes.

Yesterday was another chance to see Harry Potter and the Overacting of Oldman, a lovely dreamfire inspired roast vegetable dinner and the most chocolate dessert in the world! We also watched The Cement Garden, which was an interesting film - yes - interesting. I'll never look at the Rugby Cement Factory from the train in quite the same way. I look forward to the book, which is somewhere in one of my bags.

Thanks to work I had another night in York, due to having to be in Huddersfield this morning, which is where I am thanks to my snazzy 3G 2.75G 2.5-ishG Vodafone card that finally arrived last week.

Current Mood: contemplative