venta

So, about a fortnight ago I said "proper review of Whitby soon". That was patently a lie. However, for the sake of my my own future self's memory, I'm going to press on and write some drivel about it. You are welcome to read it if you wish :)

I squeaked out of work early, raced home, grabbed my ready-packed suitcase, hurled it and myself into the car, hurled the car up the motorway and made relatively good time. Right up until I tried to cross the moor road, and discovered that it was having a fog party. To be fair, it was really high-guality fog, and lotsof it had come to the party. What jolly nice fog, I thought to myself, as I peered anxiously into it, looking for the next catseye in front of me.

I know the moor road pretty well. Not, however, well enough to remember exactly which bit is coming next when I can't see anything. Catseye, catseye, catseye. I say, what's that catseye doing over there? I'd better steer a bit more to the right. Um, more right. Oh, hello chevrons! Gosh, well, I guess that was Saltersgate Bank then.

I enventually rolled into West Cliff car park almost bang on midnight, with gritty eyes and a woolly head from staring at all the lovely fog. My suitcase and I rolled down the hill, running (almost literally) into maviscruet, kate_r and some of their friends. Which is a pleasing way to start the weekend; I remember that Kate_R was probably one of the very first people I ever met at WGW. Anyway, I blathered incomprehensibly at them for a short while, before being dismissed with a stern "go the fuck to bed". I did.

By the time I pried myself out of bed the following morning, keris had heroically got up, and heroically raided the butcher's, the baker's and ~~the candlestickmaker's~~ the greengrocer's to provide the ingredients for a Proper Breakfast. So we (by which I mean mostly davefish cooked it in our nice kitchen, and then we all sat down at our nice dining table.

Y'see, last April I tried to book our usual flat: no, sorry, it was already gone. But! said the landlady, they were buying a new flat, it would be ready in time for November, would welike that? We would, I confirmed. She kept me informed of purchase progress, and by the time I was mailing her about our August usage of her flat (for folk week) it was all completed. Did she want a deposit, I asked? Sorry, she said, the new flat was already booked for WGW. Argh, what?

She'd forgotten that she promised it to us, and rented it to someone else. Argh. I scoured the internet. And then I realised I was going to have to mail Davefish and Keris and tell them that, at the beginning of September, we had nowhere to stay. Argh. Then my mother called, and mentioned in passing that her friends Christine and Roger had just bought a holiday home in Whitby. They weren't planning to rent it out, she said, just use it themselves or occasionally lend it to friends.

Really! I said. Have I mentioned what jolly nice people I'd always thought Christine and Roger were? Anyway, they arejolly nice people, and they let us use their house. Despite the fact we've never damaged a property we've rented before (though Keris thinks she broke a drinking glass once) I spent quite a lot of the weekend being terrified that we were going to burn their nice house down, or flood it, or blow it up, or inadvertently go out leaving the door open and a sign saying "help yourself"... We didn't. Obviously.

Keris and I wandered round the shops all Friday afternoon, and she made me buy some ridiculously sparkly shoes from, um, ShoeZone kids' section. I also bought a lovely garment that seems to be the offspring of a formal skirt and a comfy pair of trackie bottoms. Other than the having-a-£2-sale CD shop in the bizarre bazaar, I don't think I bought a single thing from a goth shop :)

After a couple of WGWs with appealing line-ups, this one was more than a little limp in my estimation. However, Friday was the more appealing night.

While contemplating fish and chips, Davefish and I had checked out Chasing Dragonson YouTube and discovered them to be more than a little British-heavy-metal. Onstage, they were pretty compelling - canonical guitar sound, with a female vocalist. She had a great voice, but the sound engineer had gone a bit overboard and turned it up to 11.

In fact, this was an ongoing gripe all weekend: the bands in the Spa were just Too Bloody Loud.

Bad Pollyannaare a sort of low-rent Evanescence, but they're good value and I always enjoy watching them. Though (as someone, I forget who) said: their singer should stop explaining what the song is about, and just sing the damn song. I bought the new album.

According to mrph, I am the sort of person who likes "those William Control-produced bandslike FVK". I'dlike to be offended by that, but as it happens I dolike Fearless Vampire Killers. OK, so they're patently a manufactured boyband, but they're good clean fun. And Ilike bands where four of the five of them sing. The fact they were celebrating Hallowe'en (a day early) by all dressing as Jim Carey was more than a little weird, but I can overlook that. Plus they get Comedy Cover points for a good effort with Holding Out For A Hero.

Like most people, I could pull exactly one Altered Imagessong out of my head ( Happy Birthday). Unlike most people, valkyriekaren knew several more and I think standing with her probably increased my enjoyment of them. They're the sort of relatively gentle pop that'd be nice if they were over there and you were sitting in a sunny park, with a pint, half-listening. I'm not sure they're headliner material. They do, however, get points for covering The Supremes' Baby Love- and, for a rather unexpected encore, Taylor Swift's Shake It Off.

I'm not really very sure what I did with most of my Saturday. I think I fitted some yoga in in the morning, and had a fry-up. And some time passed, and then I went to the unpleasantly-named Cranberry Swamp to meet snow_leopard, sleep_er, john_the_hat and Kirstie for afternoon tea. Despite the unpleasant name, the cafe (which is in what used to be the posh underwear shop) is extremely friendly, very accommodating of a table full of people who turn up and separately order a variety of different things at different times, and makes nice cake. Oh, and the cake is all gluten-free, if that's something you care about. (My cake was nice, which is all I care about.)

Since the Bring & Buy stall the others have been running for ever has finally wound up, it was nice to actually see them in a non-clothes-selling context, and lovely to actually just have a chunk of time to chat and catch up. Eventually we threw ourselves out, because the cafe had been closed for really quite a long time.

Saturday night's line-up was such that I seriously considered not bothering, but eventually presuaded myself to stop being wet and went out.

I caught the end of In Isolation, who are perfectly decent goth guitar-pop but for some reason I just can't get excited about them. Vince Ripper and the Rodent Showsounded, from the name, as if they were going to be rockabilly but were instead two blokes shouting at a sequencer. One of them commented from the stage that Vince Ripper and the Rodent Show are often referred to as a poor man's Alien Sex Fiend. I think he's probably right. And I don'tlike ASF that much in the first place. Reviews suggest they did a Comedy Cover of Walk The Line, which I'm disappointed I missed, but I was out in the foyer talking to people.

I dolike The Last Cry, although I wish they'd get a proper drummer and stop pissing about with backing tracks. (I say that about a lot of bands.) They're one of those bands that seems to have a following rather more fanatical than I can understand, but they're an enjoyable and professionally slick darkwave band. Disappointingly, the singer is no longer continually surprised by his own hands, although he does still have an impressive range of facial expressions.

By Spear of DestinyI'd pretty much given up. I listened to the first few songs - perfectly OK punky stuff, but again, hardly headliner material (in my book ;). I did note from the comfort of the foyer than they served up a Comedy Cover (Joy Division's Transmission). Which you could hear pretty well because everything was Too Bloody Loud.

Sunday is traditionally the day I meet my folks for lunch, so I skipped on the fry-up and headed out to Greens. Since the sad demise of our favourite Number 4, it lookslike Greens has slotted in nicely as the go-to Sunday lunch plan. I trusted my parents (just) enough to allow them into our nice house and let them sit on our nice sofas, and then they took themselves off home.

Apparently, since I've gone to meet MavisCruet for cake in Sherlock's at least twice in previous years after the football, that's now a tradition as well. Not being one to fly in the face of tradition, Davefish and I went down to Sherlock's, dragged tables around to make enough space (which we promised to put back afterwards, and which I realised several days later we hadn't done). MavisCruet and Kate_R arrived with the same friends in tow (their names, for my own future reference, are Gemma and Graham - I used to be great with names but seem to be losing my powers). Sherlock's were out of clotted cream, but cheerfully serving Giant Scones with whipped cream (sadly I got an especially explosive scone, and showered myself and Graham in crumbs and currants. He was very nice about it.)

Davefish and I hung out in the Little Angel for a while afterwards, talking to the various people who came, and went, and shuffled up to make space, and so on. Then we crammed ourselves into the 80s night - still in the rather makeshift venue of The Wellington which is nice, but tiny. Tiny, and full of people. Really full of people. People who are bouncing up and down. As you walked back towards the DJ booth, the air got hotter and thicker, until it could practically be sliced and sold to tourists.

I figured I might as well start as I meant to go on and threw myself onto the dance floor. Which is tiny. Dancing was a strangely laminar exercise in avoiding limbs, hair and - oh, hello Marconi - tails. And yet more and more people fitted onto the floor, and when one of the DJs needed to get across the floor on her crutches, the crowd still managed to partlike the red sea.

Davefish and I needed to be up relatively early to head home on Monday, so he sensible packed himself off to bed. I didn't. And then on the way home accidentally accepted MavisCruet's kind offer of a glass of I Can't Believe It's Not Port. ("But I need to go to bed!" "It'll only take you 20 minutes!" I've made that kind of mistake before; fortunately Kate_R went offlike a friendly alarm clock and made sure I went home to bed despitethe presence of amazing latex squid to play with.)

And I did get up, and we did do the hoovering, and Davefish got to work at a vaguely plausible time. And then I got stuck in a jam because the M1 was closed. And then I got back to Ealing, and tried to go to Morrisson's, and got involved in the world's most hilarious diversion due to a tiny-but-critical section of road being closed for roadworks. I squeaked back home just in time to have roast beef on the table when (or only slightly after) ChrisC got in from work.