adverse 3

Quoth the Razor: Never Mo.

Ye Olde Advent Verses, II

 To pee, or not to pee, that is the question:

Whether 'tis Nobler in the seat to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of bubbles,
And by the remote end them: too dry, to sip
No more; and by a sip, to say we pause
The movie, and the thousand battling orcs
The ring is heir to? 'Tis a plot construction
Devoutly to be wished. To pause, to pee,
To drip, perchance to stream; Aye, there's the tub,
For in that pause for breath, what scenes may come,
While we have shuffled off to liquid toil—
We must press pause. There's the prospect
That makes Calamity of so long a film:
The unflushable Country, from whose bedpan
No TV-watcher returns...
Thus Crabbies does make Cowards of us all.

Advent 2012. Begins.

Hello All.

A very exciting time has come. ADVENT! Advent.

This year your treats come in the form of re-worked literary classics, made-to-fit people we know and love. Your job? Figure out who they're for, each one (and where the original comes from? Maybe?). Like, say, this December first example:

To borrow and to borrow and to borrow,
Cheap in this pretty place from pay to day
To the last sale table in record time;
And all our magazines have lighted fools
The way to dusty debt.

  Pout, pout, chief handler!

This line’s but a gawking shadow of poor players
That strut and fret an hour up in the dressing-room
and hang stuff up no more.

       It is a sale

sold by an idiot, full of silk and fur yet
dignifying nothing.

...

x

e & c

All the mud in Wales

I know,

I know.

It's been a while.

But you guys are busy. You got things to do. I don't want to impose myself on that unless it's pretty important, right? Right.

So. We moved to London (Kew), and went biking in Majorca with mom and dad, and Charlie got and started a new job (Shazam!) and I got and started a new job (BSU!) and then

we ran three trail marathons in three days.

That was last weekend. In Wales. The Pembrokeshire Coast Challenge, all around, up and down and then up again and then, oh, down, then up, then actually up a bit more, then down again and then fording a stream or two.

It was, not surprisingly, a trail event. Three trail marathons strung together over three days, taking us along the coastline from Dale to Dina's Head. Here, that's this:

What was surprising was what trail running actually entails. We'd done most of our training in Richmond park, running along the trails between the trees and deer and tourists on rental bikes and locals in family-wide matching fleece; that was trail running, we thought. But, no, no. Of course, it wasn't. The metaphor we used to amuse and comfort ourselves while slogging though shin-deep mud, up endless rock-climb cliffs, down splintering shale drops and across bouldered streambeds was that this was like mountain biking, and all the running we'd done before was road biking. A totally different sport, really. And, sadly, we only had our road bikes with us. That is to say, our regular running shoes (in my case, my 3mm soled barefoot shoes. Basically ballet slippers). 

So. There was a lot of walking and scrambling required, to keep from slipping and tumbling down massive cliffs in to the cold, waiting ocean. Every morning after breakfast but before all the runners piled into vans to be carted to the day's starting point, the race organizers made of point of emphasizing, one more time, how easy it was to die out there. Death this, death that. We were all made to carry packs with whistles, compasses, water-proof maps, warm clothes in zip locked bags, chocolate,  etc etc, but really, they're not much good once you've tumbled down and in. Although I suppose the clothes in the ziplock would stay dry, should anyone find them bobbing along and fancy a change.

So. We ran when we could. All the field bits, the short bits across coastal towns or campsites, and when we were running, properly running, we were fast! We were faster than lots of the others! But, mostly, we did a lot of scrambling and slogging through bits where the other runners would bound happily past.

One of the rare, runnable stretches. Lotsa rain.

But that was okay! Because it was a small race (96 enrolled, total) and everyone recognized everyone and everyone was nice and friendly and stopped to chat for a bit before bouncing past on their mountain-bike legs-and-shoes. 

And it was beautiful! A beautiful place. There were seals (baby ones, even!) on the beaches below us and shaggy-haired calves on the path in front of us and breath-taking flocks of swooping lapwings above us. 

It was super. And super hard. Super duper hard. A whole new kind of tiredness, pain, hunger, all that. One of the best things about being into this kind of stuff, though, is that you actually like that. I know marathon pain already. Collecting and comparing the kinds of tired, sore, hungry are one of the reasons I do these things. Our times were: 7hr-ish the first day, 8hrs20min-ish the second, and 8hrs30min-ish the third. We were never very last, on any of those days. But, of the 96 entrants, only 56 actually finished the whole thing. Of these remaining 56, Charlie and I came in:

Last.

Exactly. 

Tied to the second, Last.

Which I love. For lots of reasons. If nothing else, an excuse to do it again, someday.

Sue runs away from us on the third day, blissful in trail boots.

The Festival? The Fes-Ti-Val.

Well. That's it. One more year's spring-summer drawing to a close, and, with it, one more year's worth of festivals. This year, despite* the Glastonbury-sized hole in the season, I ended up doing tonnes** of festivals, weekend after weekend, so that it kind of just felt like the whole time was just One Giant Festival. One giant mud puddle, one giant fresh-cooked donut, one giant line-check. So, in case you were wondering, here, in chronological order, are the festivals I played this year and four things about each:

•Dartmouth Music Festival (w/ Stringbeans):
     -Beautiful setting: boats!
     -City festival, so, pubs and churchs and things for venues.
     -No proper stay-overnight facilities, so camped in someone's backyard.
     -Ice cream: 2.5/5

•Mayhem in the Meadow (w/ Nuala):
     -Not really Mayhem at all.
     -Real small, friendly.
     -Near ocean, so: Swimming!
     -Food, pasta with watery sauce, decidedly middling.

•Fire in the Mountain (w/ WFTB):
     -New favourite, maybe!
     -River to swim in!
     -Chased/loved by large group of horses!
     -Loads of good free food!

•Keynsham Music Festival (w/ WFTB):
     -Very, um, small town (lots of electric guitar solos)
     -I was introduced as "performance art"
     -A free festival, which is nice for Keynshamites.
     -Big plowman's spread for artists served by quite-cute elderly church types.

•Priddy Music Festival (w/ The Availables):
     -One of the muddiest. Sue goes barefoot to save shoes, pulls up worms with toes.
     -Bunch of tents in a field type thing. Also a pub.
     -Kind of non-descript and hard to remember.
     -No free food for artists. Hm.

•Lushfest (w/ The Nightjar Orchestra):
     -Free soap! So much free soap! So much!
     -Free ferris wheel!
     -Festival for Lush employees from around the world. Which is pretty neat.
     -Don't remember what I ate, but it was good and free.

•Larmer Tree (w/ The Availables):
     -More mud, rain.
     -Bigger festival in a bigger field. Maybe even several fields.
     -Everyone seems happy. Even at 10am in the rain.
     -Lotsa stuff in the dressing room. Some ryevita crisps that were very cardboardy, and good cookies.

•Village Pump Festival (formerly the Trowbridge pump festival) (w/ Reg Meuross):
     -Right underneath the white-horse, which is cool.
     -Main stage, which is neat, but sound issues. Lotsa frantic running around technicians.
     -Breakfast with Seth Lakeman n crew.
     -Free food AND hotel. Right by Laura and Allan's.

•Bath Folk Festival (w/ The Availables):
     -City festival (venues around town)
     -Really good sound. Thanks James.
     -Actual folk folk festival. Like, loads of concertinas and things.
     -No food, but I'm stuffed, so don't care.

•Greenman (w/ Nuala):
     -They burn a giant green man. So, like burning man, but in Wales. So, raining.
     -Lots of great other music. TuNeYaRdS! Feist!
     -Also incredibly muddy. My riding-boots/wellies are the best thing I ever got for free on freecycle.
    -Lots of great food from the Chai Wallah people. Some kind of banana and granola soup that was       actually really good.

•Shambala (w/ Nuala):
     -They pay for me and Charlie to rent a BMW to drive down. Which is pretty nice.
     -75% of patrons are dressed up. Crazy costumes and inhibitions galore.
     -Lots of workshops. Wood-carving. Stone-cutting. Lathing. Sewing. All these sorts of thing.
     -Some of the best (maybe The Best?) performance poets I've ever seen.
     -Food is middling, but free. No donuts, but there is nettle beer.

Now, time for some work that doesn't require rubber boots, food tokens, water-proofed (with a garbage bag) viola case. Not that I don't love my work. I love my work.


*Or maybe due to?
**tons