Dark Light

When Mr Amery of Cambridge announced that he would shortly be celebrating his score and sixth birthday with a party of special magificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton. When this was to be coupled with the birthdays of Matthew & Sally, as well as them – plus Sarah, it proved the cue. Not for a song, but for a party.

I was invited to this party, obviously. I mean, I could be writing what will probably be a long and over-referenced report of an event I wasn’t invited to and its surrounding events, but there are few things duller than a long description of a party you didn’t go to.

Ahem

It was a dark and stormy night.

Well. It was a bright and crystal clear afternoon, and the wind whiped around Reading, for it is Reading where our tale begins. (There are few places where you will encounter both Tolkien and Bulwer Lytton references within a few paragraphs of each other. Welcome to Aquarionics, home of the badly matched crossover. See? I’m six paragraphs into the report, and I haven’t left the house yet).

I left the house. I was late. This was something of a shock, considering I’d been very carefully planning to leave myself time. I failed to do so. Within five minutes of leaving, I discovered that my MP3 player (Which is a USB Pen Drive that happens to play MP3s, which means all you have to do to install it is to have an OS that does USB Mass Storage. Which is, in fact, Windows 95 R2 upwards. You don’t have to bugger around with DRM software, or things that try to replace your MP3 playing and encoding software, or stuff that doesn’t work on Linux. It’s Great) didn’t like the MP3s that were on it, so I couldn’t listen to the CD I’d just bought and encoded (Which had the newest Anti-Music-fan idea of installing new drivers for your CD player automatically when you put the CD in the drive. Luckily, I held down shift, which disables autorun.)

An hour later I was in London, discovering that the Underground was well and truely screwed today. So I went into central London and back out again in order to go from North-West of Central London to North-East. So, two hours later, I was in Cambridge.

It may not have escaped your notice, long term readers, but I like Cambridge quite a bit. I still want to move back there, and this weekend hasn’t helped in dealing with the fact it’s fairly unlikely to happen for a while.

So, Train station to Bus station. Discovered that the bus that would take me to Rivendell (The name of the new house) was a Citi 6. The Cambridge Citi buses are great, every twenty minutes between 8:00 and 5:30, and after that when they feel like it. I took a taxi.

“This is Cambridge Road” said my taxi driver, as he stopped. “Just let me out here, then” I said, foolishly.
He did.

He drove off.

This was not Cambridge Road.

This was Girton Road.

Girton Road would, at some point a few hundred feet away, turn into Cambridge Road, but from my viewpoint I couldn’t see this, so I asked at a shop. When we navigated though enough english that we both understood, I discovered that not only was I not on Cambridge Road, but when I got there, I was at the wrong end. So I went hiking.

Found Party. Good Party. Good Beer, Good people, New Games, Fridge Poetry, People I don’t see often enough, people I’d like to see again & other party stuff. Oh, and biscuits. Rivendell is absolutely gorgous, as is – when I left the next morning – Girton. Wanna move back…

Next morning was given tea and breakfast, and then hiked for an hour into Cambridge, where I had lunch and met Rosemary to lend books and chat, then buggered off home.

Where I discovered, something to my suprise, that there was a problem, and that the 100 gig hard-drive in the server had died.

Bother.

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