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19 August 2001 - trala -- 03:04 p.m. 18 August 2001 - Holiday update -- 09:48 p.m. Stuck for an interesting suicide method? Just read any scifi book ever. What is it with these people? </rant> "I can tell the difference between Katy and an airbed. The airbed moves a bit. It doesn't lie around all day." ::develops inferiority complex to annoy father:: Matthew's lumping around, everyone else is asleep. I finished Teranesia (and wrote a review for ricecakes). Definitely some A-level biology in there - I don't know whether to be annoyed that I didn't understand it, or pleased at the reminder that I've dropped biology. And the mad feminists (oh, tautology) were funny. Now I'm reading Luminous (short stories, also by the same author). I picked it for the fractals on the cover, lolol. I always thought it was 'illuminous'. From 'illuminated', I suppose. I think the first place I came across the word was when we went to see the Blackpool Lights (vague memories of trams, that's all I've got). But I think 'illuminous' is actually a nicer word. Maybe that's just me. (Postponing Luminous - can't cope with more biology yet). While hunting through my piles of books I noticed Snow Crash has a character called Hiro Protagonist, and you just know that's going to send me tailspinning into memories of my English Lit. essay. 1984, or Stardust? I can't pick. Mm... Stardust, I think. Neil Gaiman. Stop saying 'wiggly' in explanations. But several million points out of ten for explaining 'esoteric'. If you spend too much time writing things down, every time anything interesting happens you immediately start trying to work out the best way of writing it down. It's quite annoying. Who are these 50 people a week that visit citron? Lisa... um... no, I'm stuck. Ah well, mysterious strangers are always good. Anyway, we are now driving around aimlessly looking for somewhere good to wander. Well, we're in the New Forest... no, I'm sure there are no wandering places here at all. Dad's interesting fact: Venezuela means 'little Venice', so named by Columbus when he saw the houses on stilts. Our wander was very nice, if slightly rainy. I now have the mental image of my dad on a ropeswing to banish into the depths of somewhere unpleasant. Wander Part 2 in Buckler's Hard, a place of boats and weasels. Why is Beaulieu prounounced Bewley and not bow-lee-er? Why do I write the dot first when I do a question mark? Why do I pronounce the d in Wednesday? Ah well, I'm peckish. Is Sally short for Salispa? Is pony short for ponella? Things to name my children/Lisa's children/pets: Salipsa, Agamemnon, Eric, Iodine, Serendipity, Penelope, Antipodes, Abigail, Stephen, Bippety Bop, Chewbacca, Domininc, Dmitri, Vladimir, Arboritum, Flavia, Skrimshanks the 3rd, Flagon, Demerara. After several hours of pubhunting (this is truly the land of plastic pubs) we ended up in the Fox and Hounds. The chips were great, but my lamb had clearly been killed by drowning it in mint sauce. Bleh. But okay. It's raining lots. Insert typical Bob Camping Evening here. "Blondes make the best victims. The advantage is that they show up the bloodstains so beautifully." - Alfred Hitchcock. SUNDAY Mum's frying the breakfast, and later there will be a trip to the owl and otter sanctuary. Tomorrow we leave the stopover. I have been forced to wash up due to my irritating siblings, but they will pay (cue evil cackling). One disadvantage of a caravan is that whenever someone coughs, the whole thing shakes. We bike-rid to the sanctuary, which was nice. The Asian shortclaw otters, wonky owls (forget the name, but they were standing on one leg), deer, and other random stuff. Oh, and we watched them feed the lynx. They gave it a whole chicken, and it ate the feathers, the beak and all. Gross. My knees ache. I think I'll slash my bike tyres to prevent a repeat performance. NTS: read 'Neuromancer', branching-out.net/forager. I finished Stardust but it didn't really grab me. I don't think I'm really a Gaiman person. Now reading Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) and The Book of Ultimate Truth (Robert Rankin, and bloody irritating at that). MONDAY Packed up and leaving for Cornwall by about half 9. We've got about the same distance to go, but with more wiggly roads so it'll take longer. Near where we're staying there's a place called Wicca. How jolly. We are on Trevalgan Farm, which apparently has its own rock (trevalganite, I think). It's very lovely, mythic rocks, seaviews, jolly in-charge types into recycling and conservation etc. Matthew's bratting. I have learned to play gin rummy and I didn't lose, the shock. Note from Lisa: I hate Matthew he is annoying TUESDAY My hair is looking very windswept today. We're going to St. Ives in order to wander and eat Cornish pasties. My brain is rebelling against rereading, so I've given up on 1984 and gone onto Snow Crash. NTS read more Neal Stephenson books. We can't help but experience the joy that is local radio. Pirate FM. We went to one of the St Ives beaches and basked vaguely. Giant Cornish pasties and blueberry muffins for lunch. It kept raining really hard for about 10 seconds every hour or so. Some people had built a giant sandcastle and we watched the sea destroy it. Matthew put sand in Lisa's hair so he has to wash up for 3 days. "What do you think I am, some kind of incredibly stupid dickhead?" I don't know why, but I find that very amusing. Reskajeage is a great placename. Also Experimental Sta. WEDNESDAY Monolatrists know that there are many gods but worship only one. secular=not to do with religion (e.g. registry office wedding = nonreligious) ophidian=assoc. w/ serpents (Eve, Hawwa, Asherah). Eden=Hebrew for 'delight' Today we went to somewhere else on the theme of beach, and Mathew broke his body board in half. And I finished Snow Crash. Now I'm on Snake Oil, by John Diamond. THURSDAY Today we had a Day of Culture. We walked into St Ives alon the coastal path (which was lovely, the sea was the exact shade of turquoise, that if you painted the sea that colour people would think you were mad) and wandered. We wandered randomly and shopped (I'm still cashing in on the Matthew-sitting) - I got a floppy hat which I decided was hip and groovy but now think is snazzy. It's ...erm, khaki? With a blue rim. I'm going to write 'dressed to maim' on it. And two necklaces. Mal-Az, for balance and happiness, and a squiggly Celtic thing, from a shop called The Painted Bird with people with purple hair in it. Oh no, wait! Before shopping, we went to a pub. The Sloop Inn, or something, right on the harbour. And we had a super brilliant lunch. I had... tagliatelli with crab, salmon and white wine sauce. Lisa and Mum had mussels, Dad had chowder, and Matthew had Rogan Josh, and we all ate bits of each others as usual. Now I'm back in order. We went to the Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden (part of St Ives Tat Combined). It was amazing. You could touch all the sculptures, and the giant bronze one you could walk through. I got a postcard of one, bronze with stringt bits in. Lovely. Then we went to the Tate. There was a sculpture called Bed, which is a huge pile of bread with the shape of two people made by ripping some of the bread up. That was stupid. Apparently it challenges the use of wood and stone as a medium for sculpture, but what it actually does is sit around getting mouldy. There was another thing which was lots of people in different positions lying around randomly, by the same guy. They had that 'Fields' thing, 40000 - ish (I think) clay blobs looking vaguely like people filling up 3 rooms staring at you. Creepy. Matthew named one of the ones in the front row 'Eric'. Oh, and there was a huge white room with a small model of a baby slightly off centre. Creepy and odd. But there was a good view from the coffee shop, with a loopy waiter writing down our orders on his hand with his finger. Then we walked back, and now we're sitting around eating chicken sandwiches. FRIDAY We returned to Porthminster beach. Lisa got sunburned, Matthew bought a new bodyboard, I read. Oh, and later I scrounged a tenner from the parents and went book hunting. (I had 4 nooks left, one of which is War & Peace - my boredom level is measured by how long it is since I last read it. October half term, I think.) I got Stark, by Ben Elton. Also, I found the only bookshop in the whole world with a copy of Eric, so I eeped for a while and then bought it. I'm reading Mum's book, now - How to Be Good, by Nick Hornby. It's a good story, but very annoying since there are only 2 characters that I don't want to beat to death with a spade. At dinner Matt had one of his patented hysterical fits, because: he wasn't allowed 2 bits of chicken, Mum told him not to talk in gibberish, and he was asked to pass something. Tragic, clearly. Tomorrow we're going to the Eden Project, because we can't go to the beach 2 days in a row when Lisa's sunburnt. Random Fact: The name Wendy was made up by the person who wrote Peter Pan. SATURDAY A 9th century Arabian philosopher with a fearsome name: (there should be macrons, but I can't remember how to do them) Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn as-Sabbah ibn 'omran ibn Ismail al-Kindi (macrons on first 4 us, the second a in Sabbah, the a in 'omran, the second i in Ismail, the last i). We went to the Eden Project (which I think should be called Project Eden because it sounds more ominous). Mucilaginous is an excellent word appearing on one of the signs. It's mostly in two huge biomes - none of the pictures I'd seen before really showed you how enormous it was. The Humid-Tropics Biome (Malaysia, Africa, etc.) was ful of palm trees and spices, and the Warm Temperate Biome (Med. and California) with tobacco, lavender, tomatoes and things. There were millions of different plants - it was gorgeous, and the many signs everywhere gave you so much information. Also, Mark Spate from SMart (Vision On, to the parents) was wandering around. He looks much older and less zany in real life. The sibs don't like him, so when he walked past they shouted 'look, it's Cliff Richard' at him. I think we should have asked him for Morph's autograph (a thought which seemed to amuse the parents). Also, I acquired clothes on the way to eating. SUNDAY Last night I had three very odd dreams. 1) I'm at home, except the part of the top floor above the living room is missing and there's a skylight. A dragon tries to burn down our house. 2) The constestants of Big Brother 2 (UK) were being presented with sticks of celery. 3) Lara Croft is questing (I'm not in this one) - something about 3 small dogs with false teeth and a desert tribe who make money by selling CDs of songs fom The Sound of Music in weird languages. Cast includes: Obscene Bi Boy, Psychotic Weirdo Girl, Complete Idiot and Total Bastard. Very odd. Also, the other night mum dreamed she was getting her GCSE results and she'd failed British Gas GCSE. We went to Zennor, a mini village famous because a mermaid kidnapped the squire's son. It's very pretty. We went to an insane museum which had so much stuff that we were there for ages. There was a thing about place names. Lots of places around here start with Tre- and Porth- which mean farm and harbour. And then we ate fish and chips. MONDAY At about 1.30am I died of food poisoning, and spent the rest of the night trying to sleep out in the awning in a chair. It's lunchtime, and I'm not allowed to eat until dinner. I may die. Also, I have declared holy war on my brother. "It is very difficult to take in something really impressive. This is probably a good thing, because if the mind was truly capable of comprehending the magnificence of, say, a freat cathedral, or the strangeness of most fish, we would probably all go mad." - Stark, Ben Elton TUESDAY We pottered around a town, I forget where, but bookshops mainly. I got Dragonflight or something, Pern anyway, and The Onion (a book of their archives). But dad got Needle in the Groove and Apocalypso, weird that, it's the wrong way round somehow. I'm reading NitG in the car and it's odd. Also we went to Mousehole, which you say Mousel. There was a rockpool with mutant blue jellyfish. In the evening we went to the Minack Theatre and saw Arabian Nights, which was totally fantastic. Except I inhaled some Coke by accident and sneezed it all over a Merkin lady in front of me. Totally ruined her top, but she didn't notice, lolol. The whole point of the Minack, the reason it's always sold out months in advance, is that it's carved out of the cliff so the sea's behind it and the mist starts coming in towards the end. The performance started at 8 and we got there at about quarter past 6, so we had really good seats. The people who got there at about half an hour later were in the restricted view bit right at the top. Because it's outside they can't have big scenery so they made it out of people. Like, in Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves the cave was people was baubles and the tree was people, and in the Tale of the 3 Princes there was the Inn and the wall and the mountain and the Buddhist Temple. Also, some of the actors looked like other famous people. I got Simon Pegg, ...Tom...Green, or something? He eats a mouse in Road Trip, that guy. And Dawn French. Lisa loved one of the lighting people. We looked at the name of lighting and sound people and decided that the most likely name was Rebecca. SEXY!!! love Lisa Also, there was a very ingenious bit to explain how Aladdin got the lamp back from Mustappa. "Look out! There's a huge raven with red eyes, massive claws and a serrated beak about to swoop down on you!" ::grabs lamp:: "It's gone now." I had a slight hysterical fit at that. NTS: go to the theatre more often. WEDNESDAY Our last whole Cornwall day and we're inside a cloud. Apparently the rest of the country has a heatwave, just our luck. Ah well. It's so weird, this mist. You can't see very far in any direction, like, I don't know, like in a VR game, the whole world doesn't exist at once, only the bit you're in, but it's gone wrong, they stopped to soon and the sky's missing. Emergency backup world, with minimum graphics for low power supply. Arg, I'm going loopy. We had lunch in Hell Mouth Café (in the middle of nowhere) with some fruit-loop in-charge man. Total nutcase. Note from Lisa: Me and Matt had icecream that was lime, lemon, raspberry, blueberry and peach flavour! Needle in the Groove is weird and creepy, I don't understand the bit about the music - well, it's about music, of course I don't. But it's not really about that, it's about how the past affects the future. Weird. For dinner we went to a pub called The Engine, and I had wild boar and apple sausages, lolol. THURSDAY Today is a Day of Travelling, so little is happening. Except I have totally destroyed my Tetris record, 158 lines, yay! (Disadvantage: I'm playing 3d Tetris in my head now. Arg.) I think I would make a great mad old woman, no? So I will start now. I am a mad old woma who wears slippers and nonmatching clothes and half-glasses. La. Dragonflight is fun. Good to see dwaggies getting good press for a change, not like the greggil-eating monsters they usually are portrayed as. (Vendea says, ohh, I could just fancy a nice bit of greggil on toast. She's probably joking, but I wouldn't wait around to find out. Run away, little greggils!) (I love the word greggil, can you tell?) At the campsite (NF again) Matthew fell out of a tree, nijit. FRIDAY A split kind of day. The males went to Beaulieu motor museum, while we females went to Lyndhurst (I think) on bikes and pottered. Lisa bought Carpe Jugulum, a good choice (except Matthew keeps calling it carpet jiggelum in a bizarre attempt at humour). We went also to the New Forest Visitor Centre/Museumm and I got very angry at the thought of people hitting the NF ponies in their cars and not telling the verderers (on purpose, some people are just sick). And we ate at some pub, I had exploding Cajun chcken, yum. And also planned my house for being a mad old lady in. Which can live at auspice, because otherwise this entry will take all year to type up. SATURDAY Yaya, we're going home! Holiday facts: 4.5 alcohol units, Matthew likes courgettes and peppers, I like the Avalanches. 18 August 2001 - I'm back -- 05:10 p.m. |
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© Katy Robinson 2001 |