"Sure. Fine. Whatever."

Liverpool is apparently nothing but a giant building site right now. As we all know, and have bewailed, Chavasse is the worst of the lot. No longer a nice grassy area with benches and trees and a view of the water, it's - well, a building site. With giant cranes and people in hard hats. It is not what I would call a vast improvement. In fact, this irritates me: Liverpool is European Capital of Culture because of what it is, what it was. Reacting to the announcement by bulldozing large parts of the city and replacing them with bland American-style shopping malls seems to me to be symptomatic of someone's having missed the point somewhere.

(That said, I am very amused by the Capital of Culture billboards popping up on the trains and stations. My favourite one is: "Twenty million people are coming. Move down the train, please." Also, the naked statues that hang off the architcture keep acquiring "Capital of Culture" boxers.)

Anyway, I was there today for purposes of shopping. Not as much fun as it sounds, because I was running errands for a multitude of people. Still, shopping by yourself is surprisingly fun; you can linger where you want to and if you want to spend a long time looking at hair dye, no one's within their rights to stop you. In the end, I managed to get what I went for, namely a gift for my cousin-sister Nupur, who apparently got to be sixteen without my noticing and wants something for her Homecoming dance.

At this point I asked, as you do, what Homecoming actually is. I think it's one of those words like "erstwhile" and "Plantagenet" that you sort of know the existence of, but not what relevance they have to anything. After five minutes of her explaining I was more confused than ever. Wiki helped a bit, and Nupur assured me that there is a boyfriend - my little sister has a boyfriend, oh god! - and a dress involved. The dress is black with silver bits or possibly the other way around, so today was spent partly looking for black-and-silver jewellery. And quite by accident, I found exactly what I wanted. I have no idea whether it's the sort of thing she'll like, as she really, really doesn't take after me - as in if we were actual sisters, I'm fairly sure The Taming of the Shrew would come up in conversation a lot - but I rather did. Anyway, it's an onyx set in silver as the pendant on a short silver chain, and I was pleased with it. We shall see.

(We shall also see the boyfriend. I hope I don't have to kill him. She said, quite calmly, "You had a boyfriend when you were my age."

I said, irrationally, "That was different."

"Why was that different?"

"Because that was me!")

In fact, it's been a vaguely productive day. I also managed to acquire reading material for the trip - SFX and Cosmopolitan, because I am just that predictable and besides this month's SFX has Supernatural on the cover and I've just downloaded the pilot of that, yay - as well as a lot of chocolate to feed to chocolate-deprived Americans, some very bad sushi and a banana Muller yoghurt. This last thing is important, as I'm not sure I will eat anything else through the academic year.

And, and, I confirmed my domestic flights. I can't quite believe that today is Thursday and on Monday I will be in Chicago OMG. OMG. OMG. Leigh and Meredith and CRABCAKES OMG. I am ridiculously excited. So, um, that's about it. I want to pop up later and post some scribbled fannish thoughts, and I wanted to review the XF episodes "Little Green Men", "Grotesque" (so, so good) and... uh.... Syzgy. Syzygy. Syzyzyzyzgy. Long word without any vowels. It was good, anyway. And LGM was the most depressing piece of television I have seen in years. Intentional, in the good way, but not exactly upbeat viewing.

In other news, I did have a post of wank and emo here last night, but I have deleted it in favour of trying to be cheerful.

Also, amchau: I'm home for the rest of tonight, please do call me whenever.