You had plenty money 1922

Kiss Me Kate @ Old Vic , 18/01. it was awesome, if not a little fucked up in relationships. interesting to see where the songs went, and everyone trying to steal the show from everyone else, which was actually completely in character. Only real problem was the actress playing Bianca was... not quite there with the rest. I dunno, just didn't fit. rather good stage design and costuming too - all black and white clever things with banners for the play.

Bro's wedding: family, food, *other* family, small children behaving themselves, the sheer speed Chelsea Old Town Hall puts through weddings, pretty dresses, and unbelievably hungover the next morning. Seriously. the waitresses were making sympathetic noises.

If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep @ Royal Court 09/03 - play about debt. where society is going, companies trying to monetarise it whilst the entire audience sat there and winced because it's all too true. I'd call it a question raising play - it didn't try to provide the answers (it specifically stated it wasn't trying to, idiot critics who weren't listening) but it did show us all the questions we should be asking. Possibly yelling.

Stage door: I was first out, but as the crowds amassed, i turned and asked 'okay, who *isn't* here for Damien Moloney?' Lots of shuffling of feet and coughing. Anyway. Crowd all terribly patient and polite, Damien utterly lovely and answering questions and posing for pics for everyone. and yes he'd like to do a musical.

In other news: weather, can it be spring sometime soon? not suddenly taking a dip and snowing again?

Sooo, yesterday we decamped to Houseboat Hampton. With half a tonne of food. (seriously. *two* beef wellingtons, chocolate mousse, alcohol, cheese, bread, salad, tomatoes, and the ingredients for a very *large* eton mess. Eton Mess is my mum's new fave dessert for parties because it can be done in five minutes and requires no prep.)

got up motorway with relatively trouble... until we got to Hampton and spent god knows how long to go about four miles.

Got there, met David's fiancée Jo, (marriage is taking place... sometime that is not January, February or May) Tabs' boyfriend Alberto, who is rather lovely. and Brazilian. And had brought his own chillis for chilli oil that I started raiding (medium heat, nicely tasty). Some accused me of showing off. Dad pointed out that no, she just snacks on chillis. We ate, we gossipped, we drank endless snowballs. I finally has the Adele albums and David gifted several of us with sloe gin. mwhahaha.

And on Boxing Day we decamped to Blewbury in Oxfordshire for a meander and fresh air, and a drink. Entered Red Lion to be greeted by a packed pub singing twist and shout (there was ongoing karaoke including Angels and American Pie), people in bull costumes and several in white with red sashes and gore marks on their faces. Apparently they'd decided to re-enact the Pamplona running of the bulls. in a small mostly listed village in Oxfordshire. yes, dear reader, WTF was definitely on our minds...

Right, got to book time off work next week due to funeral finally being scheduled. Great Aunt Bina (my grandma's elder sister - utterly, utterly cool) got pneumonia a couple of weeks ago. She'd been getting that little bit frailer and frailer as the years went by (in her 90s, still getting around by herself but in sheltered housing) and when she got it, everyone went '...okay, chances of survival not very much.' Died sunday and we'd been waiting to hear funeral dates since Susan, who was one of her nieces she was closest to was away. So wake and funeral in Newcastle.

In other news: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is flaily hands and the credits being there so you can finish gawping and going 'wah'. Masterpiece of restraint and acting (not what Oscars call acting, but proper, quiet, tense, drop a pin and everyone jumps). Also brain-breaking period detail. Lots of us (70s/early 80s babies) going 'oh god. I remember that pattern. The bag in the foyer?' '....Our school hall curtains.' 'The grafitti.' 'BEDCOVER.' 'Our nan's was blue.' 'Wimpy's.' 'Breathe, sweetie, deep breaths.' '...So many shades of brown.' Seriously, the set dressing and costuming is an extra character on its own.

There are also tiny, tiny details and wordless scenes - two scenes not in the book, one which just fits perfectly and adds a technically not necessary but HUGE detail for one character, and then the Christmas party flashback, where not a sodding word is spoken but every single relationship is explained. And so many others just... rounded out to an extent that we were going 'SWEET FSM FLAILY HANDS OMG OMG THIS IS JUST ...WAH.' It's not the tv series. People are colder and harder and there's no nostalgic/respectful haze but it's tense and condensed and complex and gripping. Plus Kathy Burke as Connie. (cue everyone going 'happy sigh')

:frowns: How is it there is only ttss_kink set up so far? (thursgood also exists, but that's not been updated since '07. This film has been out five days already, people, and it has Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy in it. There are SPIES. it is a 99% male cast. Fandom, you fail.

Other fandom stuff: Taz and Jen mentioned they were discussing Torchwood/Narnia last night in the pub after everyone else went home, I went 'that Susan joins Torchwood one?'. and now I suddenly have thoughts of 'Pevensies run a branch of Torchwood.'

Pevensies: able to keep Harkness on a short leash and totally unfazed by his antics. 'Yes, shagging water-dwellers can give you a nasty skin rash sometimes, there's a cream.' 'Well, yes, of course we put them down, Jack, stop being so squeamish.'

Seriously, Susan's recruitment is obvious, Edmund gets seconded from MI5 or 6 or whoever he's working for, Peter drifts into it whilst on leave from the army (Army brass: 'Torchwood want him? Please take him, he scares the shit out of us'), and Susan yanks Lucy out of whichever hospital she's working in because they need a new doctor who won't bat an eye at weird physiology and poisons and can do battle doctoring in their sleep. suspect they end up at Cardiff *anyway*. Jack is on the one hand terribly interested in these pretty young people who give off all the vibes of older than they are, and have a completely different set of values from everyone else in this day and age. On the other hand, just slightly ...scary. And often treat him like a child. Susan the cool diplomat bombshell who's a better sharpshooter with a pistol than the best sniper is with a rifle, Peter the general, little Lucy the healer who really does remind him a bit too much of his ex, and Edmund the spymaster. He'd swear they fell out of the Rift if it wasn't for the fact that they check out completely. All scans show them as this time period, no chronal energy like you get with the Doctor's companions.

A silly, silly weekend. With muchos fun.
( wedding )
( Northhampton ho! )

yesterday : mild jawache steadily getting worse all day until kicked upstairs to bed.

Merlin had the ever-lovely Will Mellor, swordfighting, pouting, bantering, hissy fits, the boys brooding because they were separated, and the girls knowing more about how to put armour on than Merlin. Slashy as hell, and I really like the concept of Arthur being an upper-class arsehole, it's *fun*.

Today, family went blackberrying. Cue scratches all up hands, my ankles and feet and Dad looking like he's plunged his arms into a vat of thorns on the spin and lacerate setting.

Came home from blackberrying to get mild headache - the type that makes you go 'ow' if you tilt it forward, which made putting up the laundry/taking it down fun.

I think you should have music.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OHBQEAZX
Boccherini's La Musica Notturna, from the Master and Commander soundtrack.

sitting around. spent yesterday travelling up to Nottingham listening to Test match special, dumped everything in room... and came back down to find Chris and Dad watching the Test Match on the tv.

Spent today grazing continuously and imbibing a large amount of Pimms.

Various relatives taking odd photos, so we have strange photos of people's feet, slumped on the sofa, glasses of drink.

My life is HARD.

Sadly, I have to get up at ick o' clock to get th e 7:07 to St Pancras to get to work in the morning....

been told by relatives that I have not actually changed one iota since I was small. Sam told me that she has a picture of me in a white dress, long blonde hair, as a small child, looking exactly the same. and my personality is exactly the same.

Fuck. Was doing the washing up, had a sneeze-cough (which is kind of a one-shot hack to get phlegm up), and mum started laying into me because it's louder and sounds worse and the coughing fits are louder and she accused me of exaggerating it for attention and it being horrible manners (yes, my mother is all about the manners and public appearances on her own level and has often over the years accused me of doing stuff for attention - she's pretty much an introvert and I'm the family extrovert, and that's even compared to my brother and dad), I protested with the fact that it's half cough, hence why it sounds horrible, you think I do this for attention and fun, and she kept going, saying my coughs are louder and nastier and she's quite familiar with them thankyou, my coughs do not sound like what they've been in the past few weeks, me yelling that you think this is fun, I've torn things with this cough, it's painful and I sometimes end up wheezing, you think I'm doing this for *attention*, and I ended up screaming at her to the point that dad came in to see what was wrong and I was crying at that stage, tried to get out of the room because she just wasn't listening and was still insisting it was bad manners and he tried to mediate a bit and it came pouring out - she's heard it my whole life, it was never this loud and I said it was because I spend most of my time in London and it being drier (parents' house is ten-fifteen minutes walk uphill from the Thames, fair bit of farming land and floodplain nearby plus river being border to oxfordshire and twee little country villages, whole area's very densely tree'd, Reading town centre where I went to school and worked for the past few years pre-London is tiny and is on two rivers and a couple of canals) and she retaliated with the fact that it wasn't like this last year.

I pointed out that I didn't live with them last year, they never heard it, as far as people at work are concerned, Heather's coughs and sneezes are like echoing gunshots, Heather's coughing fits are loud and sometimes leave her wheezing and I didn't know that they were so much louder, and there'd never been hacking, even when I was ill - I'd just always known that they were loud because they'd always had that rep all the way through school. (life in the UK started at school age, hence why I tend to have that separation) And that I'd had this for the winter last year to the point where they told me to go to the doctor's, and why I went to the doctor's this time. I asked why she thinks I made jokes about having to get a place by the river, and she thought it was just jokes. I pointed out that at times I was utterly miserable because of my lungs, no matter how much I loved London itself. And that no, I don't mention it the whole time, I make jokes about it like she does with migraines (I'd earlier yelled at her 'how about if I accused you of the migraines being for attention?') because it normally doesn't come up, it's just something I'm used to. She asked about the doctor, I told her she hadn't been able to find anything, and all the tests had come back clear, the next test is for allergies. Only suggestion was the humidifier because I'd told her about it getting worse the drier it got. Which I've always known about re:dryness, because I never had the cough when I lived at the seaside and that it's worse and more prolonged in London. Realised that the coughing fits that tore a muscle were when I'd been working for a couple of months in Bracknell in what was essentially a hermetically sealed office.

So yeah. Not fun. Still in a bit of a state like I normally am after a crying and screaming match. \o/.

:glomps and snogs cidercupcakes, then spins her round for good measure:

Happy birthday, sweetie.

In other news - anyone up for slightly belated drinkies/dinner tomorrow or wednesday?

Yesterday, visit to Hansons. We're exposing the bro's girlfriend to our relatives gradually in order of craziness, so she got Nick first (Nick is nice and qualifies as very normal) then the Snowdens (fairly normal, though we're vaguely worried about David who's a Queen's Scout and is now working for the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme) and this sunday she got the neurotic nutters who work in tv - and mostly reality tv and game shows at that, so really the nutty end. Classic bit had to be when in the middle of a discussion about X-factor, Britney, and several other bits, we also get an explanation of chaos theory with interjections about 'but those examples are really well-documented so you'd just have to throw enough data at it to get the pattern'. With a couple of side-trips into causal patterns with me pointing out that everything has a pattern, correlation is in most places unlinked and coincidental. And then seeing bro's gf going 'you people are *weird*'. Entire table 'Well, it would be mean to inflict the great-aunt on you this early.'

:whines: I wanna spend money at play.com and I can't for at least another two days....

Family gathering for one of the uncles' 50ths. Plus the in-a-few-days 15th of a cousin.

Fairly pleasant, lots of relatives by marriage I'd never met, other family, talking, food, etc. (including three types of jelly and a bunch of marshmallows from hallowe'en.) Also fireworks.

Anyhoo, the 15 year old has got to that stage of trying out different stuff and having arguments with her mother. This includes wanting to dye her hair black, which the mother is dead set against. (she's planning to go emo. I told her that she would be mocked for this, and tried to encourage her to incorporate some Sparkly!Goth into it.) We all reckon she's going to do it anyway sooner or later and mummy will just have to accept it. The conversation also incorporated piercings that she is SO NOT being allowed until she's older, and *definitely* not tattoos. And then the words 'like Heather' were included. Along with disapproving looks. I enquired whether I was being held up as a bad example that she should not aspire to, and was informed that I definitely was and that Leonora should *not* be attempting to emulate me in any way when it came to body modification.

I find this somewhat amusing, having always pretty much been the quiet, mild child - no acting out, no staying out late, etc... just happened to acquire the rep as the weird member of the family due to the tats and piercings and the predilection for sci-fi geekery.

I'm so proud. And Leonora gleefully informed me of an interesting way of gauging whether or not to get something done - ring up, tell them you've had it done, then check how bad their reaction is before deciding whether to go ahead with it.

Had utter drought when I got home re: writing, then it flowed. *Just* ahead of the day-count, but it's getting done and the next bit is vaguely planned out.

Having been mainlining the BBC Pride and Prejudice for the past three nights, (flatmate : I love Bride and Prejudice! me : original's better. I mean, we love the B+P mr. Collins, but the Darcy/Lizzie marriage proposal is *so* much better in this one. (proceeds to quote bits, but not perfectly) flatmate : I agree, but may I ask, how many times have you watched this? me : shhhh. wet shirt moment coming up.) I've decided that I need to watch the film tonight. Mmm, Matthew McFadyen. Keira. Rosamund Pike. The short bloke from Bedrooms and Hallways and Enigma and POTC. Donald Sutherland being *awesome*.

The problem? I'm now craving a spectacularly porny P+P wip I had saved to my favourites on my old comp - I stupidly forgot to copy over said faves at the time - everything *but* the favourites - and of course the parentals wiped the memory (mother dearest being a systems person, she wiped it thoroughly). don't remember the title, don't remember the author, it's not on crack_van, and you have no idea how much P+P porn there is on the net and in del.icio.us. :sigh: I want my badfic. Maybe I should just go hunt down The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen in Waterstones for a giggle to see if it'll assuage my cravings. (no really, it's a book in the comedy section that got released for christmas a couple of years back)

Also : Do parents *ever* stop anxiously asking after your social life? I mean, they quiz me about whoever my brother's current girlfriend is (my response being 'I live in London! I barely see you lot! Why would I know?'), and actually bleated 'you know, there's a family gathering coming up, please feel free to bring along a boyfriend or girlfriend' at me on the phone last night. Sometimes I swear they think I'm dating megolas. I know they were probably sort of convinced a few years ago. The problem with having not ever been in the closet : your parents think *anyone* you bring to dinner/have stay over is a significant other.