Chip's Place

An amalgam of several partial posts that never quite made it to the ready-to-post stage - so here they all are, rolled into one.

Got my ski boots, finally, in all their silver, orange and translucent glory - picture below. I need to try them out soon. Very soon. Iasonas is already wanting to take his back - he's not happy. Funny, that - not like him at all...



We narrowly missed winning the Swan quiz last week. After more than a little help from a very drunk man, we appeared to be joint first on the scoring, and if Tom had bothered to check my answers, or I'd been a little more confident with my answers for the music round, we'd have been in first place. Sadly, though, we still wouldn't have won, as another team had been mismarked by 3 points (!), and they'd have won regardless. Still, we'd have got the 2nd place prize of a £25 drinks voucher.

Thursday was notable for an amusing quote - "You're really evil walking down the street. You should smile more." - and for me not repeating last year's self-immolation event. The Ujala was as good as ever.

Saw an amazing sunbow in Harrogate on Friday. It was a clear blue sky with a strong but low sun - full arch of a "rainbow" but without any rain. I've seen a few small arcs of ones before, but this was something else again. Fortunately, for once, I was sat in traffic jam, so I had plenty of comfortable spectating!

I've just watched the new Doctor in his first episode, and I was quite impressed. I did enjoy his "Who am I?" speech in particular. There were a few annoying bits - over-use of Welsh people (never a good thing), the continual aim of Russell T Davies to get the phrase "Doctor who?" into his scripts, and the veiled references/adverts for Torchwood. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing more of Mr Tennant, and Sarah Jane appears to be reappearing in a future episode, so that'll be good. Having it be a little less politically-motivated during the next series, and feeling less like a constant jabbing at Tony Blair (e.g. "launched within 45 seconds" last year, "don't you think (s)he looks tired?" tonight), would be a good thing - it's not meant to be a satire.

I managed to work Goldbach's Conjecture into a joke about peas. I was quite pleased with that one.

Went round York today in the snow, taking a few pictures. Here are my favourites :





And lastly but not leastly, apologies to Tom for marring his unbirthday dinner somewhat. At least you had 5 other friends there to give you cards.
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I've lived in York now for a little over 3 years, and one of the things I've perennially thought I probably ought to do at some point is to go on a ghost walk. However, while it's a popular pastime for foreigners (in which group I'm including anyone who doesn't live in York), it's always felt faintly demeaning to go and do something that's there primarily to keep the toruists happy and out of our way.

However, tonight, because I'd had a very early tea (mmmm, rare venison steak), I had a choice between going to watch other people eat at a restaurant, or go on a ghost walk. Hobson's choice. In the end, it was quite good fun. The guy was very funny, so I let him off for throwing water at me, and he took us to some less well-trodden parts of York - the big house behind the Minster and next to St William's College looks amazing with its Christmas lights on at the moment.

Sadly (for him), one of the foreign foreigners who was picked on by the guy appeared to be called Urine.

I also finally managed to partake of the new opening hours this evening - we didn't buy any drinks after 11, despite the barman's rather plaintive attempt to tempt us into going and buying something at the bar, but we were sat chatting in the pub till 12, about topics including funeral attire, dehydrating genes, TV theme tunes (including the A-Team, Quantum Leap and Indiana Jones) and which famous people shared our birthdays (mine include Alexander the Great, Andre Agassi and Michelle Pfeiffer).
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