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ravenThe train to London from Liverpool Lime Street is probably the busiest service in England. It's usually on time. So I was surprised when it jerked out of the station on the appointed minute, went approximately six metres and rolled to a stop. After a second there was an announcement, somewhat apologetic: "Ladies and gentleman... er... the brakes have failed."
This is a Pendolino tilting train, for reference. It goes at 125 miles per hour round corners. Um.
After a bit, they decided to reset the train, whatever that means. "It will take five to six minutes," said the man, "and all electrical devices on the train will cease to function. We repeat, all electrical devices will cease to-"
The lights went out. There was a pause, and a burst of laughter. There is, I think, a particular type of Scouse humour, and this is it. (On the way back, what sounded like the same guy made an announcement to say: "To the young lady trying to buy wine with a credit card - I've just given the machine a bang with a hammer! Come and get your wine!")
The train actually made up the delay, and I wandered into Euston a few minutes early. I was in London to do some philosophy teaching for a friend - basically, I was helping introduce a bunch of fifteen-year-olds to the subject for the first time, which has its good points and its bad points. The main bad point is, of course, that no one is actually interested in philosophy. It's not something you do at school or see at television, it's not something that ever gets talked about from day to day, and it's very, very hard to get vaguely bored teenagers to care about the nature of mind or whatever.
The good point is that I get to talk about philosophy to a captive audience. I don't think I'm a very good teacher - certainly the yawning could be blamed on the humidity, but maybe not in so much excess - but still. I do love my subject, which has to count for something.
Yesterday night I did something kind of crazy. Sort of, anyway. I guess I should have asked earlier if anyone in London wanted to meet up, but I completely forgot I'd have a free night. I was kicking myself, because it was a beautiful summer and in the last month I've been dying slowly of loneliness, and I was wandering in solitary fashion down the Charing Cross Road and yes. I don't know if I ever mentioned it, but I tried to get rush tickets for Rent in New York - I know, I saw it already, but I loved it so much I wanted to see it again - and failed. I didn't know if the same idea existed over here, but I wandered into a theatre to find out and sort of bemusedly ended up with a ticket for Avenue Q. (Not rush, apparently - tickets for students and OAPs. I'm definitely not complaining.)
Is it kinda weird to see a musical on your own? I guess so. But I ended up sitting next to a girl who was also seeing it on her own, and we got to chatting, and that was nice. I loved the show. I didn't think it was laugh-out-loud funny, unlike, er, the entire rest of the theatre, but I enjoyed it. (And even a crap musical - which this certainly wasn't - would've beaten an evening sat on my own.) For some reason, Sesame Street only with porn really, really works. I stopped finding the puppeteers distracting and started finding them impressive, and I actually found bits of the story really poignant. The internet is for porn, it's true. (Which is not to be read as an either an enrdorsement or critcism of LJ's current policy, just to be clear.)
One thing about Avenue Q, though - someone, probably Ben, told me that the West End and Broadway versions are different. Why would this be? The only thing I noticed was that the sign indicating a 15-minute intermission had been scrawled over - "-mission" crossed out and "-val" written in, which amused me, as I just had this picked up in a beta last week.
So I'm glad I did that. Today I was helping teach just war theory, which is interesting enough, and talking about PPE and philosophy in general, and the humidity in the room was killing. Afterwards, I didn't know what to do so I went to Forbidden Planet, which probably sums up my entire life.
Er, what else? I spent the beginning of the week with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hathy_col and tau_sigma, and had just a really lovely time. We watched Heroes, and ate so much pick 'n' mix it was getting silly, and then, because it was a lovely summer's day and we were in Britain, we went to Southport and had an authentic seaside experience. Seriously. We went down the pier! We played on ancient arcade machines that told all our fortunes - apparently I'm a romantic (huh!), Colleen's an expert on everything and Tali needs to make better friends(!) - and ate chips with ketchup and mayo, and ice-cream, and wandered through the crappy rides at New Pleasureland and Colleen extolled the joys of Southport. Apparently, allegedly, Paris was based on it.
To which I say: LIES. But it is on the tourism website, which of course has no reason to lie to attract people to thiscrappy town full of heroin addicts. So I stand corrected.
But, you know, it really was fun. We ended up eating fruit and cheese pizza (advertised as Vegetable Deluxe - but it had olives, cheese, pineapple, tomatoes and peppers on it, and these are ALL FRUITS OMG, and mushrooms are FUNGI) and looking up rubbish on YouTube and Wikipedia, and trying to find the best bits of the Star Trek movies, and watching Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in varying states of utter ridiculousness.
(I have this lovely memory of staggering aroundlikethesun2's flat in Chicago, killing myself laughing at William Shatner doing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I like the themes that reoccur in my life.)
And after that, just talking and talking and laughing at rubbish and talking some more. It was lovely. And London was okay, too. I just feel rubbish now, partly because my very busy week is over and partly because I just am rubbish lately. Everything is getting tasteless and plastic again, and the sun highlights everything's edges and doesn't help.
I walked past one of those lovely, antiquated second-hand bookshops on the Charing Cross Road, and went in and bought a battered copy of The Truth, and as I was paying I noticed a sign advertising a job. I thought to myself, I'd have a pretty decent chance of getting that job - I have five A-levels and three years of very relevant experience - and almost asked for an application form. Because wouldn't that be lovely? To just... work in a bookshop. I know I already do. But sometimes I wonder if I haven't already found my calling, and all the rest is silence. Do I need a career? Can't I just work in a bookshop and hide from the world forever?
Clearly it's the part of me that always wants to hide from the world forever that's talking. And I shouldn't spend so much time on my own, because that's how I get like this. But the rest is not silence. I need to start coping.
This is a Pendolino tilting train, for reference. It goes at 125 miles per hour round corners. Um.
After a bit, they decided to reset the train, whatever that means. "It will take five to six minutes," said the man, "and all electrical devices on the train will cease to function. We repeat, all electrical devices will cease to-"
The lights went out. There was a pause, and a burst of laughter. There is, I think, a particular type of Scouse humour, and this is it. (On the way back, what sounded like the same guy made an announcement to say: "To the young lady trying to buy wine with a credit card - I've just given the machine a bang with a hammer! Come and get your wine!")
The train actually made up the delay, and I wandered into Euston a few minutes early. I was in London to do some philosophy teaching for a friend - basically, I was helping introduce a bunch of fifteen-year-olds to the subject for the first time, which has its good points and its bad points. The main bad point is, of course, that no one is actually interested in philosophy. It's not something you do at school or see at television, it's not something that ever gets talked about from day to day, and it's very, very hard to get vaguely bored teenagers to care about the nature of mind or whatever.
The good point is that I get to talk about philosophy to a captive audience. I don't think I'm a very good teacher - certainly the yawning could be blamed on the humidity, but maybe not in so much excess - but still. I do love my subject, which has to count for something.
Yesterday night I did something kind of crazy. Sort of, anyway. I guess I should have asked earlier if anyone in London wanted to meet up, but I completely forgot I'd have a free night. I was kicking myself, because it was a beautiful summer and in the last month I've been dying slowly of loneliness, and I was wandering in solitary fashion down the Charing Cross Road and yes. I don't know if I ever mentioned it, but I tried to get rush tickets for Rent in New York - I know, I saw it already, but I loved it so much I wanted to see it again - and failed. I didn't know if the same idea existed over here, but I wandered into a theatre to find out and sort of bemusedly ended up with a ticket for Avenue Q. (Not rush, apparently - tickets for students and OAPs. I'm definitely not complaining.)
Is it kinda weird to see a musical on your own? I guess so. But I ended up sitting next to a girl who was also seeing it on her own, and we got to chatting, and that was nice. I loved the show. I didn't think it was laugh-out-loud funny, unlike, er, the entire rest of the theatre, but I enjoyed it. (And even a crap musical - which this certainly wasn't - would've beaten an evening sat on my own.) For some reason, Sesame Street only with porn really, really works. I stopped finding the puppeteers distracting and started finding them impressive, and I actually found bits of the story really poignant. The internet is for porn, it's true. (Which is not to be read as an either an enrdorsement or critcism of LJ's current policy, just to be clear.)
One thing about Avenue Q, though - someone, probably Ben, told me that the West End and Broadway versions are different. Why would this be? The only thing I noticed was that the sign indicating a 15-minute intermission had been scrawled over - "-mission" crossed out and "-val" written in, which amused me, as I just had this picked up in a beta last week.
So I'm glad I did that. Today I was helping teach just war theory, which is interesting enough, and talking about PPE and philosophy in general, and the humidity in the room was killing. Afterwards, I didn't know what to do so I went to Forbidden Planet, which probably sums up my entire life.
Er, what else? I spent the beginning of the week with
hathy_col and tau_sigma, and had just a really lovely time. We watched Heroes, and ate so much pick 'n' mix it was getting silly, and then, because it was a lovely summer's day and we were in Britain, we went to Southport and had an authentic seaside experience. Seriously. We went down the pier! We played on ancient arcade machines that told all our fortunes - apparently I'm a romantic (huh!), Colleen's an expert on everything and Tali needs to make better friends(!) - and ate chips with ketchup and mayo, and ice-cream, and wandered through the crappy rides at New Pleasureland and Colleen extolled the joys of Southport. Apparently, allegedly, Paris was based on it.To which I say: LIES. But it is on the tourism website, which of course has no reason to lie to attract people to this
But, you know, it really was fun. We ended up eating fruit and cheese pizza (advertised as Vegetable Deluxe - but it had olives, cheese, pineapple, tomatoes and peppers on it, and these are ALL FRUITS OMG, and mushrooms are FUNGI) and looking up rubbish on YouTube and Wikipedia, and trying to find the best bits of the Star Trek movies, and watching Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in varying states of utter ridiculousness.
(I have this lovely memory of staggering around
likethesun2's flat in Chicago, killing myself laughing at William Shatner doing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. I like the themes that reoccur in my life.)And after that, just talking and talking and laughing at rubbish and talking some more. It was lovely. And London was okay, too. I just feel rubbish now, partly because my very busy week is over and partly because I just am rubbish lately. Everything is getting tasteless and plastic again, and the sun highlights everything's edges and doesn't help.
I walked past one of those lovely, antiquated second-hand bookshops on the Charing Cross Road, and went in and bought a battered copy of The Truth, and as I was paying I noticed a sign advertising a job. I thought to myself, I'd have a pretty decent chance of getting that job - I have five A-levels and three years of very relevant experience - and almost asked for an application form. Because wouldn't that be lovely? To just... work in a bookshop. I know I already do. But sometimes I wonder if I haven't already found my calling, and all the rest is silence. Do I need a career? Can't I just work in a bookshop and hide from the world forever?
Clearly it's the part of me that always wants to hide from the world forever that's talking. And I shouldn't spend so much time on my own, because that's how I get like this. But the rest is not silence. I need to start coping.
