Cold Christmas (#2) in Scotland

Well we're back in London today, after a 7 hour (!!) train ride last night - we were delayed for over two hours, 30 minutes out of London, so by the time we'd caught our bus back home it was almost midnight.

Luckily we'd prepared: in Glasgow we bought dinner for on the train, and upgraded our "cattle class" seats to first-class for the princely sum of £15 a pop. So we sat in relative comfort in the (actually too-warm) cabin, snug and safe from the ice and snow outside, and eventually we rolled into Euston Station.





It's been a fun couple of days. We arrived in Irvine (on the Scottish coast, with views of the Isle of Arran) late Thursday night, and Andy and his dad "Rab" (Robert) met us at the station. A short but treacherous walk along icy streets - Dee took a tumble just metres from the door - and we were in the Melrose apartment.

Robert and Dorothy, Andy's parents, looked after us like we were family - delicious food, silly conversations (the "craic") and plenty of the ol' Christmas cheer. We had scallops, Christmas roast, "square sausage" & IRN BRU and even found time for a traditional British curry at an old Scottish pub somewhere in town. We got presents! "A selection for the wains," said Rabbie, handing us each a Cadbury's selection box. "The wains always get a selection box." (I have no idea if that's how you spell it!)





We had a couple of walks while we were there - down to the frozen beach front, past a pub that is older than white settlers in Australia, and into a shopping plaza nearby - but mostly stayed inside (too cold!). We watched a lot of football! (Soccer to us antipodeans.) They really are the nicest people, and of course we invited them to come visit us in Australia...

This weekend is Christmas #3 - now the pressies for Dayna and Bruce have arrived!

There are a couple more photos on Flickr, and I finally got 'round to uploading some of Dee's birthday celebrations, too! Finally, here's a funny IRN BRU ad (it's a Scottish softdrink).

The beach in winter

We've just been for a walk along the beach in Cromer. It's a seaside town in Norfolk (East English coast). As you can see in the picture, we had to wrap up warmly before we went out - it's less than 10 degrees out. :-)

I'm staying with Bruce's family for the week. There's Bruce's folks - John & Gwen, his Grandad & Bruce and I. We're staying in a listed building (built in 1800s) which was super cold when we arrived but has warmed up after leaving the heating on all night. It's a strange house with three stories - kitchen & a family room on ground floor; two bathrooms, a lounge & a bedroom on first floor; and three bedrooms on second floor. I'll keep fit running up and down the stairs. :-)

We're just about to go and have lunch. *big hugz* thinking of everyone.

Happy Chrimbo, fam!

Merry Christmas from Scotland, dear family! We arrived in Irvine late last night, and after a long lie in, followed by a walk along the snowy beach, we're back in a warm house playing carpet quoits and watching Christmas telly!

Hope everyone is having a good day, we miss you and can't wait to see you soon.

Happy festive season from London

I think I've got the hang of my new gadget enough to send an update. :-) I've got a new phone - pay as you go with internet and unlimited texts if you topup each month. It's one of the things I'm doing to save money.
I've just finished my 14th day working at IOP headquarters. well, 13th and a half. today was super-quiet - most people have been on holiday this week. Unfortunately I only have enough leave to cover the compulsory days between Christmas and New Year, so I had to work Christmas Eve.
I guess this is part of why it doesn't feel like the festive season for me. We have a tree up at home but none of us will be there for Christmas, so there are only a couple of sad little presents underneath. We were going to have a family celebration last Sunday but Royal Mail was slow so we didn't do pressies, just had a Sunday roast. Tasty, but not Christmassy!
I'm currently eating lunch at the train station, waiting to head to Wolverhampton for Christmas with Bruce & his fam. It's my first English Christmas so I'm hoping it snows! I made mini puds & yummy slice last night - without copha cos I couldn't find the english equivalent. So the slice didn't cut very well but it should still be tasty. ;-)
I hope everyone has a great day tomorrow. Thinking of everyone!
Lots of love n hugz,
-d-

Happy birthday Lisa (sorry it's a bit late)

Hope you had a lovely relaxing day!

Happy birthday to you...
Happy birthday toooo yoooooooooouuuuuuuu...
Happy biiiiiiiirthdaaaaaay deeear Liissaaaaaaaaaa...
Happy biirthdaay toooo yooooooooooooooooouuu!

Happy birthday Carolynn

Hope you've had a splendid day!!

Sweet 16. Oooh. ;-)

Happy birthday tooo youuuuuuu

Haaaaappy biirthdaay tooo yoooouuu

Haaaaapppy biiiirthdaaaay deaaar Caaarolynnnnnn

Haappy biirthdaaay too youuuuuuuuu

*big hugz* from an almost snowy London (we've had a few flakes, but nothing much so far)

Formal

There is more on facebook and I'm getting all my friends to put their pics up too.
It was a great night, we won belle and beau of the ball, "belle and male belle" is what they called it.

day two

lovely day to walk to work. clear blue sky and a crisp cold morning. no clouds - a nice change from Manchester. wonder how long it'll last. :)

london morning

beautiful clear day

Better than a photo with Santa

New Header

Okay, it's taken me many hours over the last few weeks, but I've finally finished the new Bandwagon Header. I wanted to update it with the new members of our extended family, so I figured why not just update everyone as well.

I hope you all like it.

Just for you Mum I've got a tee on RedBubble (with zero markup, the cheapest I can make it). I've changed the design a bit to make it more tee friendly. You can see it here http://www.redbubble.com/people/damienmason/t-shirts/4124819-1-family

I'll also separate out all the different people so you can grab yourself or reorder or remix them.. My plan is to do it now but it'll depend on how Ossie goes, I've just put him to bed for a nap :)

So what do you think of the new header?

Edit: Okay, here are the files.

If you want to remix the header, grab these ones. They're all transparent PNGs with a background the exact size as the header bg and everything placed as it is in the header.. so you should be able to stack the pngs in layers in a photoshop file and then work with each person independently.
Adam
Carolynn
Chez
Dad
Me and Oscar
Daria
Dayna
Dee
Glenn
Jared
Lisa
Mum
Nana
Trinity

I've also put together massive (1000x1500) transparent pngs for each person, in case you just wanted yourself (for avatars etc) which are here

Adam
Carolynn
Chez
Dad
Me and Oscar
Daria
Dayna
Dee
Glenn
Jared
Lisa
Mum
Nana
Trinity

And finally I thought if you wanted to do a calendar rather than using the long horizontal version you might like the more compact tee version, so I've made a big (2880x2100) white background jpg of that for you. It doesn't have the text the tee has.

Calendar pic

Hopefully that's enough to keep you all going for a while :)

Exams again

Yes, I'm at that exciting stage of the year again...Exam time. Our exams go for a week but over two weeks (yes it's strange to put the weekend in the middle of them). I'm not looking forward to exams but im definatly looking forward to the formal. Its on the 2nd of December, I already have my dress (I made it) and all my friends and I can't stop talking about it.

Popcorn for dinner

I finally got around to uploading some photos today; you can find them on Flickr (with a couple retroactively added to our last post). I've also got a new phone (an Android phone, whee, it's "wik" (wicked, good) for all you non-geeks, nyah-nyah) and so have a few ... creative ... digital-filtered photos from around London.

One filter makes photos look like a polaroid,
and gives me a manly, straggly beard

So we had the beer festival in Norwich (Norfolk) the other weekend: a massive, Hogwart's-like hallway under a vaunted, cathedral ceiling filled with barrels and barrels of delicious beers. Traditional ales, lagers, stouts, ciders; there was something for everyone (well, everyone who likes beer I guess), and all paid for with little paper tokens we bought when we arrived.

You'll be a pinball-wizard, Harry

With too many different types to possibly try all of, I tended to base my decisions on the name of the brewery and/or the beer itself. So after a Red Dragon ale I had a Jack The Ripper, a Hobgoblin, a Pirate, a Neverwinter Nights (confession: I'm making them up). We stayed in a local hotel, had breakfast downstairs and headed back to London with Chris and Tina.

We also saw an amateur production of Jack The Ripper (The Musical) -- yes, the same one I was in so many years ago (ours was better :-D). It was in a tiny little theatre built under London Bridge (literally under -- in a gloomy tomb, very appropriate for the show and probably more spooky than the acting).

Another filter: "toy camera".

Yesterday we visited "Befnal Green", our old 'hood in the East End. Took the bus into Liverpool Street, walked through Spitalfields (Jack The Ripper again!) and up Brick Lane; street markets and food stalls and crowds of too-cool hipsters scared us into the straightest bar with the campest name: The Birdcage. We sat with a bunch of old rummies and watched Arsenal play Wolverton ... then finished our drinks (I had a Fosters!! Tee hee!) and ran away to watch some fireworks.

The number of people were intense! After 30 minutes of the fireworks we thought we could beat the crowds, and so ran away to the nearest bus-stop. Unfortunately, no bus came and eventually we were walking along with the herd looking for another way home. Turned out to be another bus stop, then a late night taxi back here -- our planned early night after a few nice fireworks turned into a gruelling trek across the urban jungle towards the safety of our temporary nest!



The punchline: we got home, ordered some dinner from a local curry house (yes, lazy, but nothing in the 'fridge because we've been so darn busy) and then settled in with a tasty glass of Australian red. Waited for food, waited some more, waited, waited, waited. Eventually we got through to the curry-house who informed us that a power-cut had shutdown their kitchen, so it was no dinner for us. We searched through the cupboards, and ended up with popcorn for dinner...

How rock and roll is that!!? :-D

A busy October indeed

It's been a busy couple of weeks for us this month, with: a visit to Manchester; a trip to the country; Sunday roast for my birthday; a Brazilian barbeque; leaving drinks for MI5; an office move; a halloween party; a sci-fi film all-nighter. To top it off we're headed up to Norwich for a beer festival next weekend! Perhaps November can be a quiet one?

I think I already mentioned Manchester (in an email?) -- we took the bus on Friday night, arrived quite late and were very happy to see Dayna & Bruce (thanks for picking us up! I'm not sure we could've handled another 20-30 minutes on a bus, even a Magic Bus.) It was really good to see Dayna, and we spent the weekend talking, playing Wii, drinking Dayna's impressive collection of donated alcoholic beverages (as Vicky has left for kiwi-land). We even did some tourism/shopping around Manchester central, with the mandatory "duck into shops and pubs to escape the rain" manouever. Then it was back on the bus on Sunday to get here! All in all a fun weekend away.

Another weekend was spent away in Dorking, south of London. Only an hour or so on the train, but out of the city and surrounded by greenery: fields and glens and forests and hills. We stayed with Martin and Helen (of "Jack The Ripper: The Musical" fame -- Martin is originally from Castlemaine) and had a lovely dinner in a pub/restaurant in the middle of nowhere (Helen drove) with delicious food and an awesome, relaxing atmosphere. Seriously! Good! Food! The kind of place you have dessert, even though you can't really fit it in. The next day we hit a farmer's market, before returning to the big smoke on the train.

Hmm, all these relaxing weekends, we should be completely chilled out, right?

The weekend of my birthday Dee cooked a lovely roast lamb for us & 9 guests. We stuffed ourselves silly, I got presents (yay!) and played Xbox. Tim Churchward, who I went to Uni with (and who is known as "the nicest man in the world") even visited with his wife -- they are travelling, and stayed with Martin and Helen for a few days. Great to see them!

Chris and Tina (housemates) were away for my actual birthday, so when they returned they took us out to dinner at the O2 Arena to a Brazilian barbeque house. Dear Goddess, so much fresh and tender barbeque meat: you grab a plate, load up on the bare-minimum amount of salad required to keep away the scurvy, then wait with hungry eyes as the waiters bring freshly cooked skewers of lamb, beef, chicken, fish and other poor, delicious animals straight to your table, slicing off as much or as little as you request before putting the skewers back onto the barbeque to continue cooking. I ate. And ate. And ate. For days I couldn't eat red meat! I even tried chicken hearts! (Chewy, tastes more like beef than chicken, and more than a little freaky.)

Afterwards we took a ferry back along the Thames to London Bridge, then had a traditional ale in a real pewter tankard at The Cooperage. We spoke to the manager about some of the paraphenalia hanging on the walls -- apparently in ye olden dayes of cobblestones and muck it was easier to drag barrels of wine and beer on gigantic wooden "cask sleds" dotted with flint than to risk breaking the wooden spokes of cartwheels.

On the work-front this week we moved into a new office, a proper "City" office. I'm even wearing a suit again (although not a tie)! Right in the heart of the square-mile, our office is newly appointed, clean, bright and airy and has a coffee machine. Yes, small things like that are all that is required to make me happy. The week earlier we said goodbye to a young man who may or may not have joined the secret-service -- we'd become good friends, and I'm hoping he stays in touch, even if he can't talk about what he's working on :-).

Right now we're sitting in our local "indy" cinema, Shortwave, having a glass of wine and trying to decide whether we want to see the Mexican film they're showing this weekend. It's free, as they're meant to be showing Coco Before Chanel, but I spent last night in a sci-fi film festival so I'm not sure how long I can stay awake, even with a nap from about 8am until 1:30 (I got home at 7am, and only slept a little bit in the cinema).

T'was fun though: I met Martin at Victoria station on Saturday night, then we headed to Troy's place for a Halloween party. We were amongst the first to arrive. We didn't dress up, as we were off to the film festival later, but I put in some scary looking contact lenses and we both donned wigs that Troy had from the last dress up party. Soon enough more people arrived: Frankenstein, Death, witches, zombies and even Jack Pumpkinhead and his lovely Lady (what was her name?). Troy cooked nibbles, and Martin and I filled up before heading to meet Allen (from RBS) at the film-festival at midnight.

It might sound daft, going to a party before an all-night film fest, but I think it was a stroke of genius: at about 5:30am Martin and I headed back to Victoria Station and he jumped on the express to Gatwick, where he was catching a flight to Australia at 9am!! With that kind of schedule he was bound to fall asleep on the 'plane, wake up in Dubai, then fall asleep again when he got to Melbourne at about 11pm -- time zone adjustment sorted! Or, at least, that's how the thinking went. We'll wait 'til he gets back to report on how successful the plan was...

I'll upload some photos and link to them here in the coming week: Manchester, and full photostream.

Happy birthday Glenn

Hey bro,

I know you had a fab day with cake and fizzy drink (but no fairy-bread.. awwww). Hope the rest of the year is as good as today has been.

Haaaaappy birrrthdaaaay to yooooooou...
Haaaaappy birrrthdaaaay toooo yoooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuu...
Haappy biiiiiiiirthdaaaaaaay deeeeear Glennnnnjiiiiiii...
Haappy biirthdaaay toooo yooooooooooooooooouuu!

keep smiling!
*hugz*