A trip to Cambridge...

[venta]

On friday night I trundled down to Cambridge to spend the weekend with davefish. Despite my car's best attempts to dump the contents of the radiator into the engine, I got there in one piece.

And so, many good things happened: we went to a well-hidden (through th industrial estate, into a shop, through the shop, out the back, up some stairs, round some corners and ask for Albert) second hand camera shop. Which had shelves and shelves of cameras and peripherals in various states of antiquity. I now know what that staple of 1940s who-dunnits, the Brownie box-camera, looks like. And for the princely sum of £45 I became the proud owner of a 70-162mm lens. Zoomy!

And we went to an academic booksale, and my arms were excessively stretched by carrying around massives piles of books. I wouldn't have thought that there'd be many things I'd need in the academic line, but I managed to buy a hefty chunk of the O'Reilly catalogue - books which might be useful for work, and at £2 a go it seemed rude to leave them there. I also had an interesting-looking book on the philosophies of open source thrust upon me by zotz, whom we found skulking about in there.

We took ourselves to Mountfitchet Castle, a recreation of a Normal[*] stockaded castle and village. It's a pleasant place to wander round, and in the interests of authenticity is full of friendly animals scruffing round your feet. There were many humourous chickens, and davefish managed to pull a little deer.

Mountfichet does suffer from the besetting crime of most recreations - it's very clean and nice, which is a (probably necessary) shame. And the castle is tiny - more of a castelette really - an apposite reminder that when William T Conqueror said "you can have this land if you can put a castle on it within the year" no one was going to get a massive stone edifice up in that time.

And then there was nice Chinese food, and sitting on the castle mound chatting with others, and the stars that started to come out, and the Castle Tavern (Pintwatch: nice range of beers, but £2.55 for Honey Dew??) and there was the frisbee that spells messages ("DUCK!") in LEDs when you spin it. And together they made a very fine evening.

Sunday was limited to slobbing about watching films. And despite my accusations that davefish owns some utter crud on DVD, they were both top. Birthday Girl is intriguing, and neatly avoids a lot of cliches in to which it could have fallen. It ends up as a delightful, unexpected story with some really dry humour.

Being John Malkovich is... strange. Though sufficiently compelling that it's easy to forget the sheer ludicrousness of the plotline. There are a number of really good performances from different peoeple - much kudos to John Malkovich for agreeing to be in it, and negative much to me for failing to recognise John Cusack.

Incipient Creeping Badness at the weekend involved me being very ill on Saturday night (davefish is slower on the uptake than me, and wasn't ill til Sunday morning), me sitting in a pile of deer crap at Mountfitchet, and a pair of lorries trying very hard to kill me on the way home (bonus points to the person behind me for being aware, and thus not running into me when I slammed the anchors on). And something has bitten me. davefish insists it wasn't him. From the size of the bite, I think it might have been a crocodile.

But in balance, a very enjoyable weekend.

[*] Just spotted this one. It should, of course, be a NormaN castle. I think I'll leave the typo there, though, as I quite like it.

Comments

[davefish.livejournal.com]

It was glorious to see you again, thanks for visiting.