One big weekend
(Sheep outside the Upfront Gallery: Cumbria, England)
You may well have noticed an absence of news over the past couple of days; I have been back home in Carlisle and simply haven’t had time to write anything. The first night I was home, I met with more of my friends than I have ever managed at one time since we were at school, I think. Everybody was back in Carlisle to attend Radio One’s Big Weekend at Carlisle’s obscure out of town airfield. It has been big news as far as Glasgow, but even more so in Carlisle where the excitement appears to have been reaching breaking point. Apparently it made nationwide news and was of course broadcast on Radio One and on BBC television. I didn’t bother to apply for tickets as the acts weren’t of particular interest to me, though there were some impressively high profile headliners topped off by the painfully current pop enigma, Lady Gaga.
As you can see, my weekend ended up being much more serene than the frantic euphoria of a music festival atmosphere. Yesterday my mother and sister took me for a spin around to visit some old family friends (with some surprisingly ‘politically incorrect’ comments were made and lampooned) and to see an impressive amount of Cumbrian countryside. I have the impression the latter was unplanned but when the map was referenced halfway through the journey, the precise pages covering the area we needed were inexplicably missing. There was considerable water damage to it anyway, so possibly tose pages would have been illegible anyway. My sister blamed a four mile an hour crash she sustained in the icy winter months, having to empty the useful contents of the smashed car into the deep snow. Somewhere in the wreckage, those flapping dampened pages must have been torn away. The resulting navigational issues left us cruising the countryside for much longer than we anticipated. As a passenger, I didn’t mind at all.
News of the past days includes spending a portion of the weekend on a drawing for a zine. It features on their web page gallery, though didn’t make the cover. What else… Oh, losing over half my tank of fish to an infection that they must have had when I bought them. This was a massive disappointment and caused me to buy medicine costing more than all the pets themselves. This irony has not escaped me. I left them in Min’s capable hands, so today I return to see if the medicine has taken any effect, or if I have another couple of floaters on my hands. Here’s hoping they’re hanging on.
– Today Rosie is travelling back to Glasgow, checking on her remaining sick fish and starting a frightening fitness class in Glasgow, Scotland –
Methera!