The Piano-ator -- "I'll be Bach!"

(I wanted to call home this morning, but got up too late - don't think you'd appreciate a phone ringing at 10:30pm, just when you're settling in for bed. I'll try again tonight (Sunday morning).)

I have a piano! It is teh awesome.

Dee got it from an online place for my birthday. It's a Korg SP-250 (stage piano), digital, full size and with that fancy-pant hammer-action that makes it feel like a "real" (analogue?) piano. So. Very. Cool. It arrived yesterday, and it was all I could do not to fob off work and come home for it!

Last weekend we visited London's "Tin Pan Alley", the music-strip in the West End. We found the piano there, but for about an extra £100 -- no thanks! So for £50 cheaper we got the piano and a stool from DV247. Not bad at all, especially since we had to wait less than a week for it to arrive!

Funny: the evening after visiting Tin Pan Alley we went to a Jazz night at the 100 Club on Oxford Street ... and the pianist had the same piano! Very cool -- before Saturday I'd only seen it in pictures, then over the course of a day I got to play with one (in the store) and listen to someone hammering out frenetic melodies and slammin' chords, as we danced and jived (unlicensed, of course) in any free floor-space.

The weekend before that, you may know, we spent in the Cotswolds -- picturesque English countryside, tawny rough-hewn stone for walls, houses, people (okay, the people weren't made of stone, but wouldn't that be cool!). We stayed in Bourton On The Water; Dee tricked me because I thought we were going to drink bourbon on the water! Still, getting away for a relaxing weekend was probably better. Probably.

The town itself is billed as "the Venice of England", but the locals didn't take too kindly to me tying a bunch of ducks together in the shape of a gondala and paddling along the little waterway that twisted through the township. The ducks didn't mind, and gave me lots of little friendship-bites to show how much they respected and admired me.

The countdown is well and truly on now -- we both can't wait to get home and see everyone, and eat decent fish and chips, and feel sunlight, and drink cold beer.

An evening at the theatre

Indulged our thespian hearts with a trip to Shakespeare's New Globe Theatre last night.

First: dinner at Harry's Bar in the city. Named after a famous cocktail (coquetier! eggcup!) bar in Venezia, Italia (Venice, Italy ;-)), Harry's of London shares, well, nothing with it's Italian namesake: it's a wine bar and restaurant, and the wine is Chilean, Australian and French rather than Italian. Nevertheless, the food was good: I had gnocchi (maybe Italiano!) with prawns; Dee tried the risotto (ooh, maybe it's more Italian than I gave it credit for). We ate with a friend of Dee's, her partner and two of her friends, and although we were both tired and didn't really like the idea of meeting new people just then, the night turned out okay.

Apparently Harry's in Venezia is really expensive; in London the bill was cut down to a more manageable size by a mid-week special: half price on the total bill if you have 2 courses. It was cheaper to have a main and dessert than to just have a main! Now that's a savings plan I could get into. Guess there is some good in the credit-crunch -- with all the bankers out of work, swanky places like Harry's has to let rabble like me in!

After dinner we wandered down towards the Thames and across one of the many bridges, the city beginning to sparkle as dusk mellowed to dark. Behind us, Wren's St. Paul's loomed ominously, whilst ahead the whitewashed walls and thatched roof of The Globe warmly invited us; it could've been the late 1600's, with both Globe and the great church rebuilt after the Great Fire of London. Or so I imagined.

We handed over our little cardboard tokens and shuffled up the wooden stairs to the top gallery, whereby we were afforded a near-birds-eye view down upon the stage the the players. We sat upon hard wooden benches, eschewing the hired cushions that those of less-hardy temperament (and posterior fortitude) felt necessary. Shortly the strains of a light tune played on lutes and horns signalled for quiet; a hush fell upon the crowd.

The play's the thing, you see, and the thing in this case was a jolly little tale, "The Merry Wives Of Windsor". A comedy, although I could not say whether t'were the skill of the Bard or that of the players that made it so; t'was a genuine laugh-out-loud, raucous comedy. Ooh, look thee upon these words! T'is like the particular, peculiar method of Shakespeare's own art hath soaked my brain; stewing in olde English forms of yore, it cannot help but express itself as I pen this journal!

So: perched upon hard benches (of birch or cedar) we watched a tale of clever wives, jealous husbands, bellicose doctors and rotund knights and laughed. Sooth: I could not decide whether Shakespeare so influenced English humour, or whether the comedic endeavours of Fawlty Towers and it's ilk were the influence for the players of this tale; in either case, you've not seen impotent fury until you've seen a skinny English gent in a badly-fitted wig first tempting a knight to make advances upon his wife, then cursing that she, in appearances at least, entertains such carnal ideas with said knight.

"CUCKOLD!!"

(Comments in thy best rendition of olde English please.)

A hydrocarbon- and hydroxl-fuelled weekend

Ah, back at work on a Monday morning. I'm enjoying my new job, actually - we even do things that could be considered ethical: enabling a micropayment economy in some of the poorer parts of the world, therefore boosting the economy and giving humans access to funds which they've never had before (e.g. in parts of Africa it's only something like 5% of people who have a bank account ... and we complain when they shut down our country branches!!).

Certainly better than letting rich people move their money around the world in order to let them stay rich ;-) and avoid the taxes that the rest of us poor working chumps have to pay. But enough subversive prosthelyitising! The point of this blog entry is to tell y'all what we did with our weekend - and it was all about friends, fermented grains and fossil fuels (and future fuel-cells, ahah!).

On Friday night we went to Chris's work drinks at a dingy little bar called the King's Arms in Holborn. Now, if that's where the King's soldier's spend their time, I'm surprised that Scotland didn't conquer England years ago - okay, a little unkind, it's a fun place to hang out but it's certainly shabby. Made all the more shabby-looking by Chris's entire office standing outside with pints of beer!

Strange phenomenon - when the sun comes out everybody is at a pub somewhere. And there are enough sprinkled throughout the city and surroundings, but they're always so full that people are spilling out the door, around the building, across the road in the local park. Strange, strange, strange.

So we had a couple of drinks and met a few new people Friday night. (Chris later went out clubbing with our mate Stolly, but Dee and I headed home for an early-ish night.) Saturday we caught up with another Aussie named Mark for lunch at the Union Tavern nearby. Bangers and mash for me, yum! After lunch we took Mark back home, and found Chris, Tina, Colleen and her friend Murray all having a wee party!

So many people in the back-patio area that we picked up the couch and took it out with us. Highlights: big chats about everything; more people turning up randomly; Chris bringing out a fern from his room, "because Planty was missing out"; yummy take-away Indian food (and lots of it).

On Sunday we got up early and headed to the British Motor Show (by way of Giraffe for pancakes and smoothies). So many cars! Trucks! Vans!



I walked around with Mark, a rev-head from way back. The coolest things in the first half of the building were the concept cars - with brightly glowing ninja-headlights, doors that swept up and back like wings and dashboards that looked like they belonged on the Starship Enterprise.

There were also a bunch of "green" cars - from low-emission petrol to hybrid (petrol and electric), diesel to biodiesel to other biofuel, fully electric with batteries or hydrogen fuel-cells. There were cars with recycled plastic bodies and solar panels, cars you plugged in to the wall at night, even a solar-powered bio-diesel Lotus Elise sports-car (in fetching brown-and-green forest colours).

I like seeing the electric cars, but most of them looked either a) ridiculous (square boxes on wheels, or bubbles that made the smart cars look sleek) or b) like something out of a Japanese cartoon (much better, but will they actually mass-manufacture them?).

Then it was onto the other side of the building for the petrol- and diesel-guzzling supercars -- Ferraris and Zondas and Lamboghinis and manufacturers I've never even heard of (but Mark's eyes glazed over and he drooled like Homer Simpson when he saw them). Lot's of things for going really fast - there were even a couple of motorcycles, so I was happy.

(Chris apparently sat in a Mini Cooper-D (for diesel), pretending that he really might buy one to the person minding the stand. Then when we finally caught up with him in the afternoon, he was genuinely considering it as a car to get sometime in the future! So I guess they did their job.)

Home to a barbeque (it's great, that patio!) and then we watched The Castle (classic) to try to introduce Colleen (Scottish) and Tina (English) to Australian culture. Not sure they got it :-).

Check it out now - the funk-soul brother

Well, nobody made any suggestions (probably a little bit late to ask I guess) but we still managed to have a nice four-day weekend. Stayed mostly at home on Thursday and Friday, played computer games (I got Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War for £10 from Amazon, and it runs flawlessly in Ubuntu/Linux). I had loooooooooong sleeps, whilst Dee actually went to the gym a couple of times (thus making me feel even lazier ... and lovin' it!). Saturday morning we all went to the gym (Dee, Chris and I) and then it was Fatboy Slim in Hyde Park in the afternoon-to-evening!

Actually, there were a few artists on a couple of different stages -- mostly electronic music, DJs, some rappers -- as it was part of the "O2 Wireless Festival". What wireless has to do with music, I don't know; perhaps it's because you can download music over the wifi network, or maybe a salute to the early days of radio? Whatever the case, Chris and I lined up outside the open-air venue -- a 2-metre wall surrounded an area the size of maybe 5 football fields (Hyde Park is huge).

Once we got inside, it was chaos. Well-meaning chaos, music-enjoying chaos, too-much-to-drink-before-lunchtime chaos. Plastic bottles littered the grass in about the same density as the human attendees; lines to the many bar-slash-tents stretched out across the lawn. Around the walls were stalls selling food and trinkets (glow-bracelets, necklaces, flashing lights, the usual dance-club paraphenalia), whilst strategically placed (and bad-smelling) mega-loos serviced the other end of the process. I imagine that most of London was once like a mega-loo -- plastic porta-potties in lines of tens and twenties, the humble pissoir-racks giving the men the previously-untried (and generally unwanted) experience of peeing whilst looking straight at another person (as the urinals were about chest-high and back-to-back). Eww.

Fatboy Slim came on at about 8:30pm (after Robyn, whose pop-style and catchy beats were stuck in my head for days afterwards). I hadn't seen pictures of him before, but he looks more like an English teacher than a popular musician. He spun his mixes, the crowds went wild, and we all bounced to old favourites (We've Come A Long Way, Baby) and new. (Chris made it his job -- no, his solemn calling -- to get as close to the front of the stage as possible. My tolerance for pushing through people was not so high, but I did follow him some of the way.)

When the show was over, a mass-exodus ensued. Expected, inevitable. I tagged along with Joyce and Luke (Chris's friends) whilst they raced to the exit, then came back to find Chris once they were off in Luke's car. The plan was to get a quiet drink somewhere -- the reality was the two of us walking south instead of north, then jumping on the train and getting back to King's Cross station at midnight. Which was just in time for the local pubs to close, so no quiet drink for us!

Sunday Dee and I went to Camden Market (it's fun, that market). We walked there from our place, looked around for a bit, but soon realised that the walking was more fun than the looking, especially when you don't have anything you really need to buy (got Dayna's pressie a while back; otherwise Camden would be a good place to find it!). So we caught up with Chris and Tina for lunch, then wandered back along one of the many canals to home. All the walking meant we didn't feel too bad about having a little pizza for dinner, whilst watching "I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry" on the ol' Xbox.

Good weekend, really! What has everyone else been up to?

McLaren Vale Sea and Vines

Just a quick update from us.. this long weekend was the McLaren Vale Sea and Vines festival.. basically the wineries offer seafood and desserts, live music, that kind of thing. Since it's about 15 minutes from our house we figured we had no excuse not to go check it out.
Cheryl drew the short straw and was the designated driver.. although considering all the extras she got as part of their designated driver program, i'm not sure the straw was so short after all. Each winery had something different - she got a free muffin, a brownie, a cookie, not to mention all the tea, coffee or water she could drink.. And after I paid $5 for a glass (which then cost $5 to fill at each winery) she managed to score a free one of those too.
Anyway, it was a nice way to spend a lazy public holiday. So what did the rest of you get up to?

This one is for Lisa...

Apparently this was played on the ABC between shows back in the 80s.

Roger Glover and Friends - Love is all

Gee that brings back memories :)

Ahaaa

** Happy New Year! **

Let me be the first to wish everyone a fantastic 2008.... woohoo.. and as my friend Toby said, I'm from there, so my new year has started already.. yay!

..now to clean my house....

Merry Christmas!

I know I'm a bit early, but I'm off to Budapest tomorrow and i'll stay at Simon's tonight cos the bus to the airport leaves from near his place. :)

found this great site - click on the picture to see something very funny.. hope you enjoy it as much as me and dee.. heheh..



p.s. make sure the sound is on!

Dayna visiting us

A quick post (aren't they always?) because, regrettably, I'm at work, but I had to tell y'all about the action-packed weekend we've just shared with Dayna. Tons of fun, but I'm a little bit tired now on Monday morning.

Dayna arrived on Friday and Dee met her at Bethnal Green station -- I was still at work! (Hmmm, it gets in the way, work.) We went out for some drinks and a lot of good Indian food on Brick Lane on Friday night -- by the end of the evening I seriously thought I would never need to eat again. (I later also realised that white wine, although deceptively tasty and easy to quaff in the rare London-evening sun, was merciless if you don't have enough water before going to bed. Still, I recovered soundly by Saturday morning.

Dayna headed off quite early on Saturday morning to meet her round-the-world friends Mez and Carly, while Dee and I took it a little easier and headed out for shopping along the market-esque Bethnal Green Road. Talk about cheap! We had fun searching for housey stuff (pegs, coat hangers, an iron) in the plethora of discount shops and stalls. Our new iron was £5! Bargain!

We met Dayna (and co.) in the city that night and went to see the stage show Wicked -- the true story of the Wicked Witches of Oz. Very funny, very entertaining, great music, fun fun fun! I think Mez and Carly were almost falling asleep tho' -- they'd been up and traveling for some ridiculous amount of time.

Sunday we took it easy. Well, Dee and I took it easy -- Dayna got up early to go meet her friends and do touristy stuff (sensing a pattern here?). Heh heh, probably shouldn't have stayed up so late when we got home from Wicked, sorry Dayna -- guess we were just being wicked. Anyway, we got up eventually (tee hee!) and toddled off to met Dee's friend Emily, stopping at a couple of the Sunday markets along the way -- the Flower Market and Spitalfields. (We'd intended to hit Cambden Market too, but didn't quite make it as you'll read soon.)

When we finally caught up with Emily we were tired (from walking) and hot -- it was sunny! We had to wear sunscreen! I might get a tan! Luckily Emily invited us into a cool underground cinema to see a movie with her -- but not, as it turned out, exactly what we were expecting!

Em's brother was the director, for one thing, which is cool in itself. The film was a documentary about the Zawoses, a family of musicians living in Tanzania, and how they struggled (are struggling) to keep their music alive now that the head of the family has died. Tanzania suffers from the same problems that much of Africa does -- the shortages of food and water, difficulties in education and health, and the epidemic of HIV -- and training the new generations in the music making skills of the Wagogo tribe whilst staying alive is a difficult proposition.

At the end of the film there was a question and answer session with the director and one of the Zawose band members, followed by a live performance! Now we don't generally listen to African music (or even world music really) but the beats and drums and handmade instruments and dancing was so cool! Complex rhythms and timings, harmonies and just such a wide vocal range. Very cool -- I bought the CD to put on my MP3 player and listen to whilst at the gym!

Afterwards we caught up with Dayna, Mez and Carly again for dinner and drinks at "The Dove". Good solid pub grub, and plenty of different beers. Dayna bought a jug of strawberry früli beer, I had one called "Lucifer" (very strong) and then we tried a chocolate beer which was surprisingly chocolatey. (I know, I know, what was I expecting? But it was weird that "beer" and "chocolate" could go so well together.)

So a busy weekend indeed. Needless to say we're having a night in tonight, maybe watching a DVD (we bought The Last King Of Scotland after renting and watching half of it back in Edinburgh). Now don't tell Dee, but I'm trying to figure out how we can cram even more into next weekend ;-).

Could be my wicked side again, I s'pose. >;-P

We'll have to organise to go see Dayna one weekend.