Friday saw the ascension into the firmament of Keiti Gachevska, who handed in her PhD thesis. If there's anything you need to know about organised crime in Eastern Europe, she's your go-to gal. Needless to say, a modicum of alcoholised liquid was taken in celebration.
Saturday was also a long-awaited day - the arrival of the Cheese Boat at Norbury junction. Our motley crew (Emma, Neal, Dan and - eventually - James) converged on Gnosall (love those anglo-saxon names), walked for a couple of miles to stimulate our appetite, then set of (with a minor detour to a pub) for the junction, another couple of miles down the canal. We saw herons, a yellowhammer, lots of flowers, ducklings, and great views of the Wrekin. I'll post some photos when I get back into the office.
The Junction hosted a rally of canalists, who are clearly divided between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as us landlubbers. Some went for beautifully painted narrowboats, satellite dishes, those horrible painted cans and twee names. Others opted for functionality - black paint, scuffed and marked, logs and battered bikes slung over the top.
The Cheese Boat saw us coming. Apart from stiffing me for the pickle I paid for, we were pretty impressed by the interesting variations on cheddar, and very impressed by Perl Las and Perl Wen, two organic Welsh soft cheeses. Needless to say, we bought a massive amount, and washed it down with beautiful buttery bitter (Junction Best) from the pub.
Already suffering from tendonitis, I added sunburn to the injury list - not the last wound I'd suffer that fateful day either. Thanks to my interestingly-pale (or pasty, as my 'friends' put it), I'm a bit paranoid about sunburn, as I blister in the presence of candlelight. However, yesterday looked overcast and I forgot my hat and factor 50. Thus by the time I returned to Wolves ready for Irina's party and Blast Off, I looked like a tomato with eczema - as a disconcertingly large number of former friends pointed out.
We made a cameo at the Bulgarian-and-assorted-computational-linguistics do, then determinedly headed out to the Civic for Blast Off, Wolverhampton's best - and only - indie night. I'd prefer more Gorky's, Tindersticks, Stereolab, Field Mice and Neu! personally, but it's pretty good. One of my media students kindly mixed me a decent cocktail and James, Neal, Emma and I added to our walk-related injuries by dancing like loons until 2.30. Somewhere along the way, I added to my injuries. Finding something determinedly attached to the sole of my Doc Marten (of course), I tried to yank it off, only to discover that it was a large and jagged chunk of glass - cue much blood. Thanks to the Civic's security and First Aid people - kind, friendly and efficient, despite the absence of a pair of scissors. I was soon 'bopping', as I believe the young folk call it, to Hot Chip as though major haemorrhaging was nothing worse than a stubbed toe.
The only downside to the day was Stoke's battling defeat at home to West Ham, only slightly balanced by Emma's beloved Munster getting hammered by unfancied Leinster.
4 comments:
I am confused; is this cheese boat actually, like, a boat, on, like, some like water? Never have I before heard of such a wonder. Sad to hear of your blood and skin displacements. Your musings made me muse on how things change: in my younger days, doc martens were the exclusive apparell of skinheads. I wore them through the 1980s when they were cool, but I'm still slightly suspicious of them. I have a vintage pair of doc shoes with buckles, and had a similar lacerative experience with them. Just a word to the wise: you need to fix the sole of your docs (hot knives - I kid not) or they'll split and that'll be the end of 'em.
Please note new profile picture, which hopefully illustrates my late 'Book Aid' comment.
Picture much appreciated. The DMs (almost my only chosen footwear since 1992) have been consigned to the bin - now I have to face the misery of wearing another pair in. My cherry-reds took 2 years! I like to think they've been reclaimed from the fascists.
The cheese boat literally is a canal boat patrolling the waterways selling diary products.
That cheese boat sounds like something out of Arthurian romance, but I'll go with it. I concur with your reclamation of dms. In the 80s there was a fashion for breaking in cherry red dms and then polishing them black - over a few months they get to look really classily distressed. I never tried polishing black ones brown though... Also, on the breaking-in front. Start buying lots of pairs of cheap shoes (high heels are the best) and no sooner break in one pair than buy and wear several others. The reason for this is that eventually your punished feet harden to a kind of wooden toughness and you can break in ANY shoe painlessly. I learned this from several fashion-victim girlfriends who have feet so fearless they could qualify as hooves. We men have a lot to learn my son...
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