Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Manchester précised:- Is it wrong to say "Dear God" when lifting a box of bibles?
- Aldi vote UKIP.
- Le chat dans le chap.
- Manc water is.
Basically thems'll be notes for the blogpost that never got written up, and which really ought to have been. So...
Manchester briefly:
The bibles had to come out of the back of the van to make space for the washing machine. Yes, there was a slight degree of do-come-on-a-mini-holiday-and-end-up-shifting-white-goods to it. And it turns out God is comparatively lightweight. Still, there was a good view from Yorkshire or wherever the washing machine used to live. Didn't see any lonely goatherds though.
Aldi don't vote for UKIP, what with being a commercial entity not a citizen, but someone had sprayed on the side of one near the railway to Manchester, and so visible to not only the WCML but to any shopper who came by car, "Vote UKIP". On the side of a German discount chain shop. One which is probably only providing the good denizens of Stokeport with such bargains thanks to EUisation. Either someone has a very keen sense of irony or UKIPpers are a bit beschränkt.
Le chat dans le chap est M. Rufus Wainwright que a s'écrit un opéra, Prima Donna, sur la vie d'une chanteuse d'opéra, Régine St Laurent [Queeny Canadian-River-Designer], qu'espérer faire un comeback. I quite liked it. M. Après-P fell asleep. The set was good. That sounds like faint praise, doesn't it? But the boxes of mute and not-so-mute were effective even if events sometimes managed to include a few cases of "Oh, come on" while not amounting to much. The final line is something along the lines of "That didn't last very long", mais dans le français très simple, naturellement (which, equally naturellement, j'ai oublié), and did sum things up a bit too well.
Did I cry? Did my nipples show interest? Did each follicle become very pleased to see you? Did I find myself sitting to attention [I've just reread this. I meant my posture]? Did my ears try to meet on top of my head? Nope. There was no Zadoking (and yes, I did just put it on and so found out about my ears doing that).
So three weeks or whatever it is later what do I remember? The colour, the plunge of all of a foot-and-a-half and something about Paris not being Picardy (incidentally just finished reading Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong: good, though not helped by interspersing it with chunks of Band of Brothers. At which point I note the alarming proportion of my to-be-reads that are set during wars. Not sure what this means).
It was fun. But clearly I'm used to being able to supplement (or prime) the memory with the soundtrack, because I don't remember the tunes (although perhaps flicking between the surtitles and the sound to work out which words I don't know the French for perhaps was a little distracting, but then how was able to distract myself?).
And there's a lingering tendency to want to describe it as nowhere near as bad as I was worried it might have been. Which is faint praise on the maternal scale.
It's possibly just that I have had no one else to enthuse with and so it's dissipated. I went with one dragged friend, who dozed through parts of it, in a different city where it'll have played to only a very small part of that population. So basically it's just me. So basically square whatever my current opinion is and you'll probably come out with something about right.
And so much for briefly. Anyway, I was only writing about this because I'm off to more singing and faintly faltering glamour tonight, avec Priscilla (actually avec Dan), which I shall be greatly annoyed by if I find myself resorting to describing it as NNABAIWWIMHB.
And having read a couple of reviews of dear old Queeny, how did I miss I the seventies thing? Although I also did that with La Cage aux Folles (aussi avec Dan[don]). And why the seventies?
Anyway, the last thing on the précis list needs no more words, so I'll go off-liste. The Lowry isn't very big, and has quite unfortunate John Lewis Partnership windows (see Flickr in about 2011 given the current rate of degunking-and-uploading), but turns out that he's both more recent than I thought he was (there are cooling towers and a flyover in one Victorian cityscape) and better than I thought he was. The other Lowry has very cheap chocolate, as did I, for a short while. Yet to work out what makes export-strength Creme Eggs export-strength.
What else? Manchester's not very big (ok, it is when you keep having to change buses). And I've clearly got used to TfL making things work.
Oh, and apparently it turns out I'm quite good at German board games. Although this has now led to me playing a German game sold in England with a French name in a Cuban bar (not in Manchester. It was a friend's birthday and her present). And winning by such a margin the final score never got calculated. Clearly going for it's-her-birthday-and-I'll-make-her-cry-if-she-wants-to. Oops.
But there have been a lot of birthdays recently. There was the more than 50% family dinner at somewhere which had live music competing with the ambient soundtrack. there were the birthday drinks with antlers on (a bar full of Scotch so I stuck to G&Ts). There was my ignorefest (if one has to put the age in base-14 to make it sound interesting it's not) concluded with an unvaried Indian takeaway order with my brother and the SIL, a in-my-mind-recent prequel I hadn't seen watched instead of a by-now-old sequel, and TIY Barbie cupcakes. I was bemused by the pink and the glitter and the stars and the hearts (what, no rainbow dolphin-ponies?), and wondered what they were trying to tell me. Turns out they were trying to tell me that they were moving soon and had found the things in a cupboard and so trying to get rid of them. Happy birthday to you too. Except it was. See that comment about greater than fifty-percent. Did I even cover the beginning of the month birthday? Probably not, but it was yet another well-Pimm'sed picnic (with ice cream cake on tap).
And so it came to pass that the getting through things before they move became them moving and... that hurt. It's also going to be odd seeing half of the Working grandparents' house in the wrong place. Said he who diverted a wardrobe and table from there from auction, but childhood bedrooms neutralise more. Come to think of it I'm quite glad the other wardrobes didn't get kept because then I'd have had to haul or heft them up the stairs to the brosil's place.
Anyway, you probably don't really need to know about the SIL's face when that crash from the back of the van came (a pile had the foundation collapse and so Shanghai-buildinged, crystal glasses and all, though other boxes. I now understand why they came in an absurdly big hat-box. Because it gives them braking, not breaking, distance) or the joys of Angle to Angered Monarch in a bit over an hour (caused by someone setting up lights to have pulses of two lanes of traffic round roadworks on Petanqueville Road, instead of a single lane each way. The traffic in one direction thus blocks that coming the other way causing any jams to echo back down the road, and so, through the powers of a one way system, back to where it started, thus making a fun little thing called gridlock, which then petrifies all other roads that touch it, which then... Much fun was had by all, including the wedding limousine [ouch]. But it turns out that bendy-bus drivers have brains. It's just the regular ones who block all three lanes of Grazing Road because they're performing a vital public service of not being able to get anywhere and so making damn sure no one else can. Much like Matchbox cars London buses come in boxes; little yellow ones.
So that was all fun. And brief. And I have to go now.
Anyhoo,
