yonmei

02:05 pm: London, 28th-1st December
I've booked a tiny hotel room in Belgrave Road Cartwright Gardens (the "Euro Hotel") for 3 nights. (TripAdvisor reviews say it's "spotlessly clean", it's close to two tube stations Euston Station! yay, which is all that really matters. The free breakfast is fine if limited, but so long as there's muesli, fruit, and tea I'm good. Full English breakfast cooked to order comes with room.)

I briefly hoped I was going to be able to book an ultra-cheap room via the lastminute.com sale (they were boinging "1000 hotel rooms for £10!" all over their website) but I think they were all for dates in October (lastminute.com's 10th anniversary) and in any case, whenever I tried to book, their server crashed. Which is pretty much lastminute.com in a nutshell. But this will be fine.

I thought I had booked a not-quite-so-ultra-cheap-but-still-pretty-good-for-London room in Belgravia, but just as I was composing the post to tell you all about it, I got an e-mail from their parent company telling me the booking had been rejected - their really-ultra-cheap rooms had both gone. So I booked somewhere else. Hopefully I'll get to keep this room.

Tags: imaginary friend meetup, travel, travelling

11:30 am: Hooray
I have just arranged to go to London for Friday 28th November to Monday 1st December, inclusive (Bargain Berth on Caledonian Sleeper, travel down Thursday night to arrive in London 7am Friday morning, and home again on another sleeper train on Monday night to arrive in Edinburgh Tuesday morning.)

I have not yet figured out where I am staying on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, but *handwave* these things can be booked on lastminute.com, if nowhere else.

PS: Breakfast Borough Market Saturday morning. At least I hope so.

Tags: imaginary friend meetup, travel

11:28 pm: Saturday 20th September: a poll
Poll #2319 Saturday 20th September - the options
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What should I do on Saturday 20th September?

 

Tags: food politics, imaginary friend meetup, iraq, polls

10:39 am: This is Scotland
I am sitting outdoors in a gloriously green garden, in warm sunlight. My feet are bare and if I'd thought to pack them I would be wearing shorts.

(My back feels lots better: I kept telling people "sore but normal" yesterday, when it was still worrying me, but it really is today.)

I should be writing a complex and and sarcastic story involving House and a flock of other characters, not all of them ducklings or Wilson, but somehow I can't focus on that.

Hey ho for mayhem, angst, torture, suicide, and despair! I think I can focus on that.

Tags: fannishness, green in the city, imaginary friend meetup, write write write

01:16 pm: Insane Picnic
The sun is shining, on 1st July I'll be promoted (no more money, lots more work, honour, and significant amounts of What Fresh Hell Is This, WFHIT, I need an icon that says that...) and I want to have a picnic.

I invite you all! (This may have to be an imaginary picnic. Or a virtual one.) We will meet on Whinney Hill on Sunday 6th July, at noon, and stay there till we run out of (a) food (b) drink (c) the glorious view. (I have decided not to worry about the sun not shining or it raining.)

I have a clever container which is luggable in which I can bring ice-cubes and cold drinks. (I do not do fizzy sweet stuff with chemicals, so if you like Fanta or Coke or champagne, you need to bring your own supplies.)

Besides large quantities of orange juice, and lots of ice-cubes, and a litre of water, I shall bring:

A couple of bottles of wine. Red and white.
A large supply of home-baked rolls.
Butter and cheese and whole-grain mustard and chutneys.
Apples.

Also, if I figure out a way of transporting both, a flask of espresso and a carton of ice-cream so that we can have iced coffee, because there is Nothing Nicer.

What will you bring to my picnic? (While I don't myself eat meat or fish, I'm not actively opposed to other people doing it in front of me. I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals: I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.)

PS: I have reasons to be depressed, but we'll talk about those later. Right now: picnic!

Tags: coffee, eating some delicious food, green in the city, imaginary friend meetup, weather

06:57 pm: Coffee and Mackintosh
I wrote a very elegant post about Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his art, and then I made the mistake of pressing Return and this appears to have the effect of deleting the post completely, never to return. Here's what I remember of what I wrote.

I wrote about meeting surliminal, hfnuala, and chillies in Harvey Nichols coffee shop. The view is splendid, the little biscuits they serve with the coffee are very nice, the coffee is fine, the muffins are poor, the scones (by report) are very nice indeed.

chillies has grown a very successful beard since I last saw him. Suits him.

Then we went off to the Charles Rennie Mackintosh exhibition at the Dean Gallery, and walked around and generally feasted our eyes. CRM is best-known as an architect, and all architects draw, but CRM seems to have done water colours all his life but done most of his painting when on an extended holiday in the South of France in the last five years of his life. His wife, Margaret Macdonald, outlived him by five years but had stopped painting by 1921: her career was destroyed where it was not subsumed into his. (In a letter to her in the 1920s, CRM acknowledges that "half or threequarters" of all his projects were hers....) Someone should write a book like Joanna Russ's How To Prevent Women Writing - a companion volume, How To Prevent Women Painting.

I found most interesting a painting by CRM of a French hillside town, but he had changed the red tile roofs to grey and the sky was grey and overcast. It looked more Glaswegian than you could believe a French hillside town could look. He must have been homesick....

I liked best a painting of a fort, on a rock, with the rock and the fort most detailed and exact - but over the shoulder of the fort you could see in the distance a harbour (he painted it elsewhere) with the water rippling and shadowed by cloud. Another painting of the harbour, the warehouses across from his hotel, showed the warehouses clear with almost architectural exactness, and their reflections in the water rippling and elongated, and the waves at the foot of the painting almost abstract glints from the paper.

Update: chillies wrote about the exhibition here. hfnuala wrote about the day here.

Tags: charles rennie mackintosh, coffee, imaginary friend meetup

12:00 pm: Midnight in the mad bakery
I got in past midnight last night and remembered I'd planned to ice the orange cookies and to make cheese/mustard scones for a lunchtime fundraiser at Dementia Plaza today. Just cheese scones would have been fine: I could have whipped up a batch of scones and had them baked by one am. Icing the orange cookies too... I wasn't asleep till after two. Bah. Still, it meant I had time to clear all the booze out of my system, so that I woke feeling sleepy but at least not fuzzy-headed this morning.

The orange icing was good, though. The juice of an orange plus a capful of orange vodka, mixed with a lot of icing sugar. The cookies? Turned out more cakie than cookie - one of these days I will learn how to get the proportions of sugar, flour, butter, egg right, but till then I keep producing these big fluffy things. With peel that had been soaked in hot raspberry vodka for nearly 24 hours, and the zest of two oranges.

To dinner last night at green_amber's, with sneerpout and Pam WINOLJY. By some chance sneerpout and I had never happened to be in the same non-virtual room before, so it was interesting to meet her at last. It had been years (we had trouble working out how many years) since Pam and I had met - certainly we'd lost track of each other since well before 1997, when Pam went to York.

Dinner was fabulous: much wine (served in pink fluffy glasses), a delicious soup with fresh coriander, pasta with a rich mushroom sauce, and white chocolate key lime pie that was orgasmic. Pam and I both had a second helping. green_amber showed off her matching slippers as seen on Sex in the City. sneerpout noted that she was now drinking from green_amber's slippers. Pam WINOLJY admitted to a pink fluffy dressing gown. I wondered out loud about drinking wine from a dressing-gown.

A lovely evening on the whole, marred by two things: I'd walked over (and walked back, this time via Victoria Street where Pam WINOLJY was staying) and was breaking in a new pair of boots. Unfortunately this was overkill on my feet - the one hour walk to green_amber's would have been fine, but the same back again was too much, and this morning I have blisters, which is a sod. Also, the other thing, about which all I can say is: If you really feel that way about the past six years, all I can do is apologise. I'm sorry.

Tags: bake sales, baking, eating some delicious food, imaginary friend meetup

07:34 pm: Fred continues to multiply...
mhw interviewed me:

1) Do you still write much slash? and did you ever think, when you showed me the K/S stuff and I was decidedly perplexed and not-at-all-sure, that I might end up years later writing slash?

( Yes. I never think. )

2) Do you think you'll ever move away from Edinburgh? if you had to leave, where would you move to?

( I did. But I came back. )

3) How do you think you've changed since we last met?

( ten years after )

4) How did you select your LJ name, and what, if anything, does it signify?

( yonmei is... )

5) At the wave of a magic wand, I find myself solvent and mobile again, and shall be able to come up to Edinburgh for a few days. There must be oodles of stuff there we haven't seen or done together: what would you suggest for a splendid day's itinerary?

( morning, noon, and night )

If you want Fred to continue propagating, ask me to ask you questions.

Tags: breakfast is a good meal, fanfic, fred, i write fanfic, imaginary friend meetup, yonmei