Second leg

Drive in intermittent rain to Glasgow. I put off getting onto the M6 until just short of Carlisle, and then it's follow the road as it gets renamed/renumbered until the M73 forks off, then M8, then off at junction 19 and follow the signs to the SECC.

Worldcon site

Have to wait a bit for the room to clear before checking in; then get registered. Finding that WiFi is £3/30min, with the clock ticking even if you're logged off, I refrain. The lack of drop kerbs makes finding dinner challenging; so we give up and eat in the unremarkable carvery at the hotel, where no-one comes to take any drinks orders; and we are ignored until we are done and get up and start to go. I don't recommend that part of the restaurant on those grounds. Maybe the up-marked one would have been better; but at least we got a reduced rate for the con.

Then to the bar, and beer at a striking £2-95/pint…

Strictly for the birds…

A sunny day, with enough cloud and breeze for comfort, so drive down to the Falconry Centre at Giggleswick. We arrive just in time for the first show, and stay to the last.

Bataleur Eagle

The weather is wonderful for the birds, even if one of the falcons gets a bit distracted by the local wildlife, so we get really good displays of both high soaring flight and the final lunge for food (to the extent that one bird brushes my head on the way down).

Take the pretty way home, through Hawes then up the B-road past Outhgill to cross over on the single track road I walked a couple of days ago. And soon after we get back, the cloud comes down low and heavy drizzle sets in.

More mooching

No appetite yet at breakfast (which was huge yesterday).

Shorter walk, Ravenstonedale, then along the minor road towards Adamthwaite. Vaguely peckish at 12:30, so stop at bridge and eat rest of picnic stuff. Leave the road by the bridleway to Murthwaite, then down the steep descent by Sally Beck to to A683, and so back.

Since my holiday in France a couple of months ago, I've not worn socks; but now the toenail is long enough not to itch when just sitting in socks and shoes (tested yesterday), I'm hiking in boots and the whole two layers of sock gig. A couple of miles short of the hotel, I'm getting tired hot feet, so change into the sandals I packed. And my feet are just so much more comfy!

After being cool and cloudy all day, it brightens up by evening. After a lighter supper, I go for a stroll — and spot this:-

L-plates

Moochin' around

Sunday starts dull, so it's promising walking weather. Yomp up to Kirkby Stephen to find a petrol station for later, and beer for now, going via Ravenstonedale to stretch out what would otherwise be a 10 mile there-and-back.

Grab a pint, watching a bit of the Grand Prix, then eat leftover picnic stuff lunch in the churchyard - a pretty red-stone church, with an interesting portico where the churchyard abuts the market place. Then I buy a map, and find a pretty way back, along the river, through Nateby, then down the B-road to Castle Pendragon, and over the top back to the A683.

No appetite. Still not hungry after yesterday's huge meal.

Off to Worldcon

Staring the journey with a stop-over at the Fat Lamb near Kirkby Stephen; so the route planners tell us take the A1, turn left at Scotch Corner. Only as we have just gone past the A52 at Grantham, the traffic locks solid — and there's nothing coming the other way.

After a while a helicopter flies over; a while later a motorbike runs up between the lines of cars. There is a little movement forwards so I'm about opposite a gap in the central reservation, but there is a car between me and it.

Then a paramedic car squeezes down the middle and the car next to me edges forwards to let it pass, allowing me then to three-point and out through the gap. So A52, A46, A614, a prettier, if slower, route.

Later, coming past Leeds, there's a long stretch of 50mph limit alleged roadworks, for a couple of miles after the bit being worked on. Revenue generation I guess; but that is enough. I leave at Wetherby, and on to Harrogate, then past Settle, taking the A683 to the inn, which despite the best efforts of the postcode to mislead, turns out to be on that road, at the corner of the turn to Ravenstonedale.

As we have driven into cloud, rain and gloom, even at just 18:00, we're ready for food, which is plain simple fare, well done, and in enormous quantities. And so, as pepys put it, to bed.

Roadkill

Spotted the second dead badger by the roadside in as many days. One is not on the usual cycling route, but the other is. It's going to be a smelly summer — unless, of course, it keeps on being wet and I drive.

Sleep is good

Went to bed about 11pm and slept through to gone 9am; woke to wet weather. Just about caught up from recent late nights; but no chance to do anything in the garden.

Wimped out

No, I'm not doing the Dun Run; I'm posting this at the time the thing is starting to gather momentum.

I decided to sleep this p.m., and catch up on gardening, after having nuked the last two weekends and many evenings with the film festival.

Not that the weather forecast was that inspiring this a.m., with drizzle on the ride home from town this lunchtime.

Play — Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

The emperor has no clothes.

Milestones

8000 miles on the dial as I parked down the Backs for dinner. Went to the Sala Thong for a Thai — and found that they were running a party of 50 in the river, and another couple of dozen upstairs. So I sat in virtually solitary splendour while I ate.

Another year

Now on the third year of blogging.

And, noticing moor-chicks scurrying for cover as I cycled past them this morning, I realise that I managed to completely miss duckling season this year.

Cycling home last night, after a front had brought some unexpected rain — it was supposed to have petered out by the time it got here — I found that the front was moving only slowly forwards, enough that I kept catching up with the rain as I went, unless I kept on pausing.

Film — Howl's Moving Castle

The last film of the Festival for me, given the cancellation of Paradise Now — so maybe film fatigue had set in; but I didn't see this new Ghibli/Miyazaki film as anything more than “Just OK.”, especially by comparison with other, earlier works. Or it may be because I deliberately hadn't read the Diana Wynne Jones book on which the film is based, expressly to avoid the usual negative comparisons of such adaptations.

I suspect the latter is the main cause. Having no idea of the original, I felt there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to no good narrative cause, but likely intended to realise in pictures neat bits from the book; which it did at the cost of exposition — even little things, like making it clear, when first introducing the name out of nowhere that Suliman was the vizier's name, and not the king's (which seemed the obvious interpretation from what little context we had).

A shame really — lush animation, even with gratuitous flying machines, around an emotionally empty plotline. Yes, that heretofore unthinkable thing, a Ghibli movie without a teary-eyed moment.

Film — Raining cats and frogs

A boy, his adoptive parents, a neighbour's daughter, farm animals and the inhabitants of a local zoo are set adrift by a quasi-Biblical Deluge. Veering from poetic to pedagogical (though the jury is still out on panspermia), while the inevitable problems arise with the food chain, stirred up by an unlikely snake in the grass character.

Again, very French.

Film — Innocence

Deep in wooded country, there is a school (curriculum = biology and dance, from what we see), a hybrid of Gormenghast and a girls-only version of Ohtori Junior school (Shoujo kakumei Utena: Adolescence mokushiroku); with five houses, of seven girls. New arrivals are delivered in a coffin; and each of the others then hands down their rainbow-coded hair ribbons, red for the youngest. Strange rituals punctuate each year — the choosing of a blue-ribbon girl to leave; the nightly departure of the violet ribbon girls from their dormitories; and there are rumours of strange punishments, especially for attempted escape.

Slowly some of the hidden secrets are revealed, but not all, before we follow the underground route of graduation.

Lushly photographed, atmospheric, and very, very French — heavier on symbolism than pragmatics, and with more young girls clad only in white cotton knickers (and school uniform panty shots) than a fan-service anime. Overall — possibly there's less to it than meets the eye.

Film — Paradise Now

This one got cancelled for being “inappropriate and insensitive”

PARADISE NOW is the story of what may be the last 48 hours in the lives of two Palestinian men — friends since childhood — who have been recruited as suicide bombers. When they are intercepted at the Israeli border and separated from their handlers, a young woman who discovers their plan causes them to reconsider their actions. But with pressure mounting, time running out, and passions running high...there's no way to know which way they will go. Giving a voice to the Palestinian condemnation of violence, Abu-Assad's compelling and beautifully performed drama is a tense and intelligent tale that will grip you to the final frames. As a testament to the film's inherent humanity and its balanced portrayal of such volatile subject matter, PARADISE NOW has received official backing from the Israeli government.

…my emphasis.

Personally, I can't think of a more appropriate time for it to be seen that it is not just us in the privileged nations alone who cannot condone such acts.