Ein tausend Elefanten brechen aus
May. 4th, 2013 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaSo, another Spring, another Whitby Goth Weekend...
Having galloped up the A1, I abandoned the car on the West side of Whitby and luggaged manually over to the house![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ceb had found us on the East side. davefish let me in the house, and I fell over just as he said "mind the fake step".
This became something of a theme of the weekend. The bottom step of the flight of stairs leading up from the front door was carpeted like the others, and looked like the others, but was about an inch high. I fell up and down it around 80% of the times I used the stairs for the remainder of the weekend.
The house was large and sprawly, with stairs in odd places, so although the rest of the household (keris, damerell, waylay and Ian WINOLJ, lovely people all of them) was at home it was spectactularly easy to all be in and miss each other. We eventually made it out to the Magpie for tea in two parties, where the following conversation ensued:
Venta: Davefish, do you want to share a giraffe?
Davefish: Yes!
Davefish: I have literally no idea what I just agreed to.
What an excellent attitude :) Fortunately, the waitress was a perfectly sensible lady who brought us a half-litre giraffe of white wine without question.
I was actually keen to see Friday's bands: Pussycat and the Dirty Johnsons were unfamiliar, but some online listening revealed them to be fairly straight dirty rock and roll. The sort of band that sounds like at least one member will be dressed as a zombie. (CEB told me - correctly - that none of them would be dressed as zombies, but I stand by my claim. That's what they sound like.)
Zombina and the Skeletones are long-standing favourites round these parts. They also sound like at least one member will be dressed as a zombie, and hurrah! They almost all were. I don't think I've seen them since they last played Whitby, when they were a bit... er... rubbish. But now they have a new drummer, and a new saxophone player, so they sound a bit like a zombie-infested Zutons, and it was all good clean fun.
Doctor and the Medics (yes, them) sounded initially promising, kicking off with a mop-wielding Cyberman on stage and a bunch of 80s covers. And they did some of their own stuff, and they were... fine. I headed back out to the bar to buy a pint (real beer! proper Hobgoblin! at WGW!) and got distracted talking to people instead.
Which meant I barely dashed back into the main room in time to hear Voltaire. He's patently not a goth act, he's basically a folk-singing comedian with vague zombie tendencies. I find him really funny, and think he's a great choice for a headliner.
So... real beer, lots of zombies, and three live drummers. Hurrah! (Voltaire is let off the live drummer requirement, on account of not having a drum machine either.)
I woke up quite early on Saturday, as I had a shift starting on the bring-and-buy stall at 9:30. I got up and realised I felt... dreadful. Well, serves me right for drinking all that Hobgoblin. I grabbed breakfast on the way to the stall and tried to look human.
The stall was extremely quiet compared to last November, so fortunately I could sit about looking pathetic and trying not to keel over. It wasn't tillsnow_leopard asked me to write my email address on something that I got suspicious. I was dizzy, and unbalanced: not really all that usual for a hangover for me. I'd chomped down breakfast fairly happily: again, not that usual, if I'm hungover it's all bad stomachs. More to the point, I also couldn't focus properly on the letters leaping about as I wrote, or wield the pen accurately. At this point, I decided that maybe the massive bang on the head I'd got when I interacted with one of the very low-slung beams in the bedroom in the middle of the night might be more the problem.
I briefly considered taking myself to A&E, but (a) couldn't be arsed and (b) since I wasn't bleeding, all they'd do even if I was concussed would be send me home and tell me to take it easy. Snow_Leopard maintained that my pupils seemed to be matching and acting reasonably, so we decided it probably wasn't fatal. However, the general feeling of malaise (plus being unable to move my forehead) did put a bit of a crimp on my day.
Eventually I was released from the stall, and went and ate rather avant-garde soup in the Art Cafe on Flowergate with Snow_Leopard andsleep_er.
Saturday evening's bands hadn't really inspired me in the slightest. I'd tried to do a bit of online listening beforehand, but they were the sort of people who are way too cool to put mp3s on their websites. Also, Clan of Xymox have a fantastically unpleasant website that appears to be visiting from the mid 90s.
Anyway, I was interested in William Control, the strange 6pm pre-bands band. However, not quite as interested as I was in getting my corned beef pie in Humble Pie, so missed them. Deviant UK are always good value, being as how Mr Deviant is a pantomimedame villain with comedy eyebrows. They seemed a little lacklustre compared to last time, but I like bands that do electro twiddliness with real guitars and real drums, and was happy to bounce along to Wreckhead.
I try to stick to my rule that any band gets three songs to win me over. I struggled to last three songs from The Danse Society, though. I think they may have had a real drummer, but can't really remember because I was distracted by the fantastically flat waily singer. I bailed pretty quickly.
Skeletal Family I remember being fairly dreadful last time they played, too. However, they've now got their original singer back and are a perfectly decent rock band. That's about all I can think of to say about them. They're fine. However, Clan of Xymox I can't even be bothered to come up with a description for. I wandered off to talk to people instead.
Sunday involved getting up more or less in time for lunch, and eating ice cream on the (rather windswept) beach, before packing Davefish and Keris off home.
Sadly Sunday - like Saturday - had quite a few gaps where I was sort of flapping about with not much to do. And, as grumbled about beforehand, it's impossible to find people if you have not been efficient enough to make plans. I did a couple of quick sweeps of pubs and totally failed to locate people I knew. Worse, on a couple of occasions I bounded merrily up to people to find them polite, but clearly not particularly keen on talking to me. Which was rather disappointing.
Still, at various times I did manage to run into clutches of friendly people, and even a couple of wholly unexpected and surprising souls likeoctalbunny. And the person who gave me a fake phone number as a means of joining their coffee shop crawl probably really did do it by mistake ;)
However, Sunday night is 80s night, so there was much dancing like an idiot. The acoustics in the Shambles are weird - the music is painfully loud on the dance floor, but almost inaudible off it. Fortunately,tiamatlady has either brilliant hearing or supreme song-spotting skills and kept me well-posted on what was getting played.
Our East-side apartment was lovely, excepting the trouble of getting to it. Having never stopped in the "old" bit of Whitby before, I hadn't really appreciated the extent to which a lot of people spend their entire weekend promenading around the cobbled streets in their most glamorous outfits. At any given time, the narrow thoroughfares were 50% full of people poncing around in crinolines and ludicrous steampunkery, 50% full of photographers, and 50% full of people who were just trying to walk down the damn road (and failing).
On Sunday, someone from whom I was buying a charity raffle ticket asked me if I'd known it was goth weekend when I arrived. Yes, I said, that was why I was here. Oh. He looked very puzzled, then asked if I was having a "dress-down day" (black jeans, black fleece, black trainers and a band t-shirt, since you ask). I concded that I wasn't a very dressy person, and had dressed up to go out the previous two nights, and had now reverted to type. Oh! He was all interest. What did I dress as?
Er... I didn't dress as anything. I dressed as me in a skirt. I dunno. Bah.
Anyway, apart from being borderline inaccessible our lovely apartment belonged to the jet workshop at the bottom of the Abbey steps. And they're big on geodes and other such geological forms of decor. These things...
... were all over the flat. Often exactly where you'd trip over them when hurrying across rooms. I lived in vague terror of hearing an expensive crunchy smashing sound all weekend.
They also liked elephants.
And scale models of HMS Victory (in the bathroom). And elephants, did I mention?
A lot of elephants.
Everywhere.
Having galloped up the A1, I abandoned the car on the West side of Whitby and luggaged manually over to the house
ceb had found us on the East side. davefish let me in the house, and I fell over just as he said "mind the fake step".This became something of a theme of the weekend. The bottom step of the flight of stairs leading up from the front door was carpeted like the others, and looked like the others, but was about an inch high. I fell up and down it around 80% of the times I used the stairs for the remainder of the weekend.
The house was large and sprawly, with stairs in odd places, so although the rest of the household (
keris, damerell, waylay and Ian WINOLJ, lovely people all of them) was at home it was spectactularly easy to all be in and miss each other. We eventually made it out to the Magpie for tea in two parties, where the following conversation ensued:Venta: Davefish, do you want to share a giraffe?
Davefish: Yes!
Davefish: I have literally no idea what I just agreed to.
What an excellent attitude :) Fortunately, the waitress was a perfectly sensible lady who brought us a half-litre giraffe of white wine without question.
I was actually keen to see Friday's bands: Pussycat and the Dirty Johnsons were unfamiliar, but some online listening revealed them to be fairly straight dirty rock and roll. The sort of band that sounds like at least one member will be dressed as a zombie. (CEB told me - correctly - that none of them would be dressed as zombies, but I stand by my claim. That's what they sound like.)
Zombina and the Skeletones are long-standing favourites round these parts. They also sound like at least one member will be dressed as a zombie, and hurrah! They almost all were. I don't think I've seen them since they last played Whitby, when they were a bit... er... rubbish. But now they have a new drummer, and a new saxophone player, so they sound a bit like a zombie-infested Zutons, and it was all good clean fun.
Doctor and the Medics (yes, them) sounded initially promising, kicking off with a mop-wielding Cyberman on stage and a bunch of 80s covers. And they did some of their own stuff, and they were... fine. I headed back out to the bar to buy a pint (real beer! proper Hobgoblin! at WGW!) and got distracted talking to people instead.
Which meant I barely dashed back into the main room in time to hear Voltaire. He's patently not a goth act, he's basically a folk-singing comedian with vague zombie tendencies. I find him really funny, and think he's a great choice for a headliner.
So... real beer, lots of zombies, and three live drummers. Hurrah! (Voltaire is let off the live drummer requirement, on account of not having a drum machine either.)
I woke up quite early on Saturday, as I had a shift starting on the bring-and-buy stall at 9:30. I got up and realised I felt... dreadful. Well, serves me right for drinking all that Hobgoblin. I grabbed breakfast on the way to the stall and tried to look human.
The stall was extremely quiet compared to last November, so fortunately I could sit about looking pathetic and trying not to keel over. It wasn't till
snow_leopard asked me to write my email address on something that I got suspicious. I was dizzy, and unbalanced: not really all that usual for a hangover for me. I'd chomped down breakfast fairly happily: again, not that usual, if I'm hungover it's all bad stomachs. More to the point, I also couldn't focus properly on the letters leaping about as I wrote, or wield the pen accurately. At this point, I decided that maybe the massive bang on the head I'd got when I interacted with one of the very low-slung beams in the bedroom in the middle of the night might be more the problem. I briefly considered taking myself to A&E, but (a) couldn't be arsed and (b) since I wasn't bleeding, all they'd do even if I was concussed would be send me home and tell me to take it easy. Snow_Leopard maintained that my pupils seemed to be matching and acting reasonably, so we decided it probably wasn't fatal. However, the general feeling of malaise (plus being unable to move my forehead) did put a bit of a crimp on my day.
Eventually I was released from the stall, and went and ate rather avant-garde soup in the Art Cafe on Flowergate with Snow_Leopard and
sleep_er. Saturday evening's bands hadn't really inspired me in the slightest. I'd tried to do a bit of online listening beforehand, but they were the sort of people who are way too cool to put mp3s on their websites. Also, Clan of Xymox have a fantastically unpleasant website that appears to be visiting from the mid 90s.
Anyway, I was interested in William Control, the strange 6pm pre-bands band. However, not quite as interested as I was in getting my corned beef pie in Humble Pie, so missed them. Deviant UK are always good value, being as how Mr Deviant is a pantomime
I try to stick to my rule that any band gets three songs to win me over. I struggled to last three songs from The Danse Society, though. I think they may have had a real drummer, but can't really remember because I was distracted by the fantastically flat waily singer. I bailed pretty quickly.
Skeletal Family I remember being fairly dreadful last time they played, too. However, they've now got their original singer back and are a perfectly decent rock band. That's about all I can think of to say about them. They're fine. However, Clan of Xymox I can't even be bothered to come up with a description for. I wandered off to talk to people instead.
Sunday involved getting up more or less in time for lunch, and eating ice cream on the (rather windswept) beach, before packing Davefish and Keris off home.
Sadly Sunday - like Saturday - had quite a few gaps where I was sort of flapping about with not much to do. And, as grumbled about beforehand, it's impossible to find people if you have not been efficient enough to make plans. I did a couple of quick sweeps of pubs and totally failed to locate people I knew. Worse, on a couple of occasions I bounded merrily up to people to find them polite, but clearly not particularly keen on talking to me. Which was rather disappointing.
Still, at various times I did manage to run into clutches of friendly people, and even a couple of wholly unexpected and surprising souls like
octalbunny. And the person who gave me a fake phone number as a means of joining their coffee shop crawl probably really did do it by mistake ;)However, Sunday night is 80s night, so there was much dancing like an idiot. The acoustics in the Shambles are weird - the music is painfully loud on the dance floor, but almost inaudible off it. Fortunately,
tiamatlady has either brilliant hearing or supreme song-spotting skills and kept me well-posted on what was getting played. Our East-side apartment was lovely, excepting the trouble of getting to it. Having never stopped in the "old" bit of Whitby before, I hadn't really appreciated the extent to which a lot of people spend their entire weekend promenading around the cobbled streets in their most glamorous outfits. At any given time, the narrow thoroughfares were 50% full of people poncing around in crinolines and ludicrous steampunkery, 50% full of photographers, and 50% full of people who were just trying to walk down the damn road (and failing).
On Sunday, someone from whom I was buying a charity raffle ticket asked me if I'd known it was goth weekend when I arrived. Yes, I said, that was why I was here. Oh. He looked very puzzled, then asked if I was having a "dress-down day" (black jeans, black fleece, black trainers and a band t-shirt, since you ask). I concded that I wasn't a very dressy person, and had dressed up to go out the previous two nights, and had now reverted to type. Oh! He was all interest. What did I dress as?
Er... I didn't dress as anything. I dressed as me in a skirt. I dunno. Bah.
Anyway, apart from being borderline inaccessible our lovely apartment belonged to the jet workshop at the bottom of the Abbey steps. And they're big on geodes and other such geological forms of decor. These things...
... were all over the flat. Often exactly where you'd trip over them when hurrying across rooms. I lived in vague terror of hearing an expensive crunchy smashing sound all weekend.
They also liked elephants.
And scale models of HMS Victory (in the bathroom). And elephants, did I mention?
A lot of elephants.
Everywhere.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-05-04 02:51 pm (UTC)[*] read as "steam train geekery" if you didn't get that bit :)
no subject
Date: 2013-05-04 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-05 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-05 07:58 am (UTC)Having grown up with a Steam Train Geek as a father I inherited some of the passion.