Inn Transit

Sorry about the reduced posting rate on this blog recently. I have been frantically trying to get work done, and to a very great extent failing, but in a manner which is taking up most of my time and creativity. Argh.

The Greenbelt talk is largely "written" now, but will need extensive practice to turn it from notes into something that's actually deliverable, and the other things I've been trying to do are in various half-formed stages. I have, however, found the time to give lots of constructive help and advice to other people about their creative projects. www.infinitarian.com, for all your displacement-activity needs.

Things I actually have done recently have included a very nice weekend in London, attending B.'s much-delayed birthday pub crawl. A spurious narrative justification based on Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels meant that everyone was invited to come as a character from 19th-century literature, so that the denizens of Southwark, Borough and environs were treated to the sight of -- among others -- Bill Sykes, Lorna Doone, Jane Eyre, Doctors Jekyll and Van Helsing, a slightly out-of-period Leopold Bloom and a rather impressive Bride of Dracula, all wandering around getting increasingly plastered and arguing about where to eat.

B. had arranged some particularly fiendish clues to direct us between venues, which for easily-guessed reasons became subjectively more difficult as the evening progressed. I drank lots of very pleasant beers in lots of very pleasant pubs with lots of very pleasant people, and saw more Londonian backstreets than I have in a long while. I also had time for a brief trip to the Tate Modern in the morning.

Next weekend we'll be attending the equally exciting, and even longer awaited, reunion of the Oxford University Douglas Adams Society, where we plan to revive some fine old DougSoc traditions including role playing pubcrawls, partying where Oscar Wilde used to live and playing Mao, and which therefore promises to be fun on a stick. Watch this space for a full report.