Friday: Straight from work to the station to head up to Keighley with
lnr. The B&B where we were staying had thoughtfully provided biscuits so we could continue with our experiments. Lovely just to spend the night with lnr. Saturday (daytime): The photo shoot, about which I may say more later. For the time being let's just say that some bits of it were fun, and the end result -- 300-odd fantastic photos of
lnr -- was definitely worthwhile. ... And I'll never be able to look at banana-flavoured Angel Delight in quite the same way again.Saturday (evening): Down to London for Stay Beautiful. Thank you to
julietk for the brilliant idea of DRINKING ON THE TRAIN -- for some reason I just wouldn't have thought of doing that, but a bottle of wine between us made the journey pass much faster, and meant that we could just giggle at the very loud Oxford United fans rather than being irritated by them. We learnt an excellent new song from them, too:One man went to burn,
Went to burn down Swindon,
One man and his petrol can
Went to burn down Swindon.
Two men went to burn ... etc.
It was an impromptu performance of folk music in the making, the raw untutored voice of the people singing their story.
...
We met up with
hoiho, daneel_olivaw, julietk, Pete, marnameow, sbp, beingjdc, J-P and Kate (phew, did I miss anybody? Apologies if so, I'm dreadful at LJ namechecks) at the station, where lnr and I went to buy MORE WINE, which was drunk (as were we) on the way to the club. Nice to be there with so many people that I knew -- made it feel not like a Scary London Club (that was the first time I've been clubbing in London!) at all, but more like an unusually full Oxford indie night. :-) And the music was cool -- good indie plus a generous handful of Sad Old Goth tracks which we definitely appreciated. We stayed till the bitter end, and then went back to
marnameow's shiny kitten-filled flat where plum wine was drunk, jelly babies were eaten, Pregnant Barbie was admired (in a bit of a "taste it, it's disgusting!" kind of way) and the Cure was (were?) danced to. Had been expecting to crash at julietk and Pete's Shiny New House with its boxesboxesboxes, but ended up being too lazy to move from marnameow's floor, where I eventually fell asleep.Sunday: Morning was spent in hangover recovery, drinking glasses of water with added kitten-hair goodness. :-) Watched the kittens fight each other and chase sunbeams, and I attempted to emulate them by wiggling my bottom and pouncing on a little blue shiny thing-on-a-string. Unfortunately I didn't quite achieve the vision of feline grace and power that I was aiming for, instead ending up in an inelegant belly-flop on the futon. Helped to shift the hangover, though.
Went to Ruby in the Dust for breakfast, where we met up with
ewx, sion_a and crazyscot; and then we all went on to Camden for SHOPPING. Straight to Fairy Gothmother first so that lnr could buy the shiny corset she'd been wanting for a while... and lovely lovely sion_a bought me a fab birthday present, which I will probably be wearing at my birthday party. Then on to look for SHOES, and
lnr found some that went perfectly with the corset. And I finally gave in to shoe-lust and bought HUGE SHINY BOUNCY shoes, which again will probably be premiered at my birthday party.I also tried on (but somehow resisted buying) some shoes with over a foot of platform, which were utterly awesome, and made me tall enough to tower over
daneel_olivaw. It was heartbreaking not being able to buy them, but even just wearing them was pretty excellent. And yes, I could walk in them, for sufficiently cautious values of "walk". :-) Stopped in the Devonshire Arms for a couple of suitably goth pints of Guinness (complete with pentagrams drawn in the head);
marnameow also impressed us all with her kitten-drawing skills. Soon julietk, Pete, marnameow and beingjdc headed home, leaving the rest of us to do a bit more shopping and a bit more drinking before heading back to Cambridge. lnr, ewx and hoiho came back to ours for coffee and pizza, but didn't stay late; I think we were all getting a bit shattered and frayed by that point. In other news, sleep is good. Possibly getting more than 8 hours of it in the weekend might have been sensible.
Now to deal with all the emotional aftermath of the weekend. <sigh>
