Two evenings
Jun. 7th, 2003 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaLast night Penny rounded up a small herd of Oxgoths, and took us to see the Trinity Summer Lawns play - an outdoor student production on (strangely) Trinity college lawn. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, complete with Pimms in the interval.
Of course, the weather wasn't really playing - most of yesterday was baking, but sitting still in the shade last night was actually remarkably cold. And someone had arranged with the god of comedy timing to make sure that every time the script called for someone to look skywards and say "What's that ?", there was a helicopter going overhead.
So they had a few problems. But... it did seem to me to be a very amateur-ish production, even allowing for it being a student play. I think it suffered from being slightly overambitious in production, and having a director who didn't really know what they were doing. It did, though, have pretty good costumes, including rather wonderful jackets worn by Maugrim and Aslan, and a leather tail-coat worn by Mr Beaver.
Once over, we repaired to the Turf to warm up again. And, even for a pub whose serving is famously slow, they were being a bit inept. I got served after the bar-guy's friend noticed me and pointed me out... he then managed to mishear "three pints of Guinness" as "three pints of Stella". And he was incompetent with a hand pump; I seriously considered suggesting he just held the glass by the pump - I reckoned I could operate the pump better pushing (from the other side of the bar) than he could pulling.
Pintwatch is pleased to announce that the Turf still keeps nice beer, ranging between 2.15 and 2.40. It would not, however, recommend Arundel's Hard Willie, which is a very odd pint indeed.
Penny gets this week's cat-herding prize for getting 10 of us to do anything in concert.
Particularly in view of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
grahamb's recent forays into stencil-art-documentation, I thought it was about time I went on another round-up of graffiti in East Oxford. And, in fairness, I wanted to play with my new Zoooomy lens. It's over six months since my last graffiti patrol, and quite a lot of new stuff has sprung up. Many things previously photographed are still hanging on to their wall space, and there are some suspiciously new-looking patches of paint where old friends have been erased.
My favourite graffiti site[*] proved most disappointing - the stencils and freeform spay-can stuff is gone. Instead the wall tells me that David loves Evie, and apparently Andrew Grice is gay. The only noteworthy thing is that on one wall in large, cerise letters it says "the ripper". On the opposite wall, it says in similar letters "the jacker". Any ideas ?
Although there were a few free-form pictures, most of the stuff I saw was stencils, ranging from a near-lifesize one of a child to a tiny "bread not bombs" slogan. Usually people don't really bother about me taking photos, but this evening everyone seemed to think it peculiar. I've not had quite that many odd looks in a while (and that includes the folk dancing :) One woman stopped screaming at her kid long enough to demand why I was taking photos. One bloke stopped to tell me how "strange" the stencils were. One bloke drove up, wound his window down, then changed his mind and drove away again. Don't know quite what's going on there.
Oh, and I had tea at the new Red Star Noodle Bar (née Soundbite Café). It's very fine. Japanese-orientated (rather than Chinese as I'd expected), and inexpensive - to quotecondign describing the Oxford Thai, it's "ethnic food done cheap and dirty".
[*]The white walls on either side of the ginnel[**] by the betting shop on Howard Street.
[**] Note forthegreenman and other foreigners: a ginnel is a small alley.
Of course, the weather wasn't really playing - most of yesterday was baking, but sitting still in the shade last night was actually remarkably cold. And someone had arranged with the god of comedy timing to make sure that every time the script called for someone to look skywards and say "What's that ?", there was a helicopter going overhead.
So they had a few problems. But... it did seem to me to be a very amateur-ish production, even allowing for it being a student play. I think it suffered from being slightly overambitious in production, and having a director who didn't really know what they were doing. It did, though, have pretty good costumes, including rather wonderful jackets worn by Maugrim and Aslan, and a leather tail-coat worn by Mr Beaver.
Once over, we repaired to the Turf to warm up again. And, even for a pub whose serving is famously slow, they were being a bit inept. I got served after the bar-guy's friend noticed me and pointed me out... he then managed to mishear "three pints of Guinness" as "three pints of Stella". And he was incompetent with a hand pump; I seriously considered suggesting he just held the glass by the pump - I reckoned I could operate the pump better pushing (from the other side of the bar) than he could pulling.
Pintwatch is pleased to announce that the Turf still keeps nice beer, ranging between 2.15 and 2.40. It would not, however, recommend Arundel's Hard Willie, which is a very odd pint indeed.
Penny gets this week's cat-herding prize for getting 10 of us to do anything in concert.
Particularly in view of
grahamb's recent forays into stencil-art-documentation, I thought it was about time I went on another round-up of graffiti in East Oxford. And, in fairness, I wanted to play with my new Zoooomy lens. It's over six months since my last graffiti patrol, and quite a lot of new stuff has sprung up. Many things previously photographed are still hanging on to their wall space, and there are some suspiciously new-looking patches of paint where old friends have been erased.My favourite graffiti site[*] proved most disappointing - the stencils and freeform spay-can stuff is gone. Instead the wall tells me that David loves Evie, and apparently Andrew Grice is gay. The only noteworthy thing is that on one wall in large, cerise letters it says "the ripper". On the opposite wall, it says in similar letters "the jacker". Any ideas ?
Although there were a few free-form pictures, most of the stuff I saw was stencils, ranging from a near-lifesize one of a child to a tiny "bread not bombs" slogan. Usually people don't really bother about me taking photos, but this evening everyone seemed to think it peculiar. I've not had quite that many odd looks in a while (and that includes the folk dancing :) One woman stopped screaming at her kid long enough to demand why I was taking photos. One bloke stopped to tell me how "strange" the stencils were. One bloke drove up, wound his window down, then changed his mind and drove away again. Don't know quite what's going on there.
Oh, and I had tea at the new Red Star Noodle Bar (née Soundbite Café). It's very fine. Japanese-orientated (rather than Chinese as I'd expected), and inexpensive - to quote
condign describing the Oxford Thai, it's "ethnic food done cheap and dirty".[*]The white walls on either side of the ginnel[**] by the betting shop on Howard Street.
[**] Note for
thegreenman and other foreigners: a ginnel is a small alley.
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Date: 2003-06-10 08:09 am (UTC)Good, but not as good as the sentence which used to live at the end of Bullingdon Road - "as a child I could walk on the ceiling". That go demolished when the Hobgoblin built its beer garden :(
Did you wander down the 'alley by a dry canal thing that goes from Florence Park down towards Donnington bridge'?
Er... the where ? Florence Park is the park behind the Shadow Gallery ? It's one of those placenames that always eludes me. I don't think I'm aware of a dry canal thing, at all...