Music

We had a lovely evening yesterday - we had our annual concert at a local school's fete. It's usually a great fun event - we play bouncy music (like medleys, such as the Bond themes, music from Grease, or music from Porgy and Bess), in a very relaxed atmosphere, and afterwards, we go back to our director of music's house for an American Supper (where everyone brings an item of food, and we all share it...)

The reason that I enjoy this so much is not just because the music making or the social aspect, but because every year, we get to see the impact that music has on children. Most of them wander through with their parents, getting cakes or going out to the raffle, but one or two every year dance to the music (particularly when we play the Can-Can!), or sit down and simply listen. I love being able to communicate how I feel about music to someone else, particularly someone who can then take that joy and potentially learn an instrument of their own. Just brilliant.

Good News / Bad News

Well - it has been a busy week or so - again...!

On Saturday, I took part in a Tae-Kwon Do tournament. I had been given the impression that it was going to be a 'local' event - i.e. for the three clubs in our area, so I was in for a bit of a shock when I spotted teams from Paignton and London! This was a team event, so three of us competing per team. (There were only four teams in our category!) We came away with a silver in the patterns - these are synchronised patterns, so each member of the team has to perform at the same time and with the same pacing. We didn't get anything in the sparring, but then we were a bit unlucky - I went up first (and lost, though I was later told that both my fights were close things), and the lady from our team who went up second withdrew halfway through the match (she hadn't wanted to spar in the first place and panicked!). So (as it was a knockout tournament, and each round was best 2 out of 3), we were down to the third/fourth play off. I went up first again, lost again, and then the final member of our team went up. She was winning the bout, and then jumped and landed wrongly on her knee, ending up not being able to put any weight on it, and having to go to hospital! (Fortunately, x-rays have shown that it was just badly twisted, and no major damage was done; given that our instructor is out for the best part of a year after possibly snapping a tendon, we do know what problems can come up!!) But I still enjoyed it, so much so that I'm going to put myself up for a single competition (i.e. not relying on anyone else...!) in Cornwall on the 7th June. Overall, our club did really well, winning 56 medals overall.

We also had a fun evening yesterday - Paul Merton is touring with an improv comedy show, and by some fluke we managed to get tickets (it sold out very quickly); I hadn't realised who else was going to be appearing in it; Richard Vranch (who is actually a talented comedian in his own right - he was wasted hiding behind the piano) - and Mike McShane (who has lost a lot of weight since appearing in Whose Line is it Anyway - he is half the man he used to be, but no less funny!). Great fun :-D

We've also had a few less fun things - our poor Skoda is now pretty much broken to the point where it is going to cost more to fix it than it will to buy a new car, so we are off out to get another one with my company bonus this year (huzzah for the change of company financial year which means that I get it 6 months earlier than normal!!). Hopefully this one will last more than a few months.... We are also definitely now on the move again (when we've found somewhere to go...), as our landlady has failed on the mortgage again, and the bank has informed us that they are taking her to court to gain possession of the property (though we still have until August to get out, and she may still pay the overdue balance (though as this is the third time in 6 months, I'm not holding my breath!)).

But I'm confident that we will get both of the above sorted out, and in the meantime, we have so many cinema things coming up! We've already been to see Iron Man (very silly, but great fun as well), are going to Indiana Jones this weekend, and then have films such as Batman, Prince Caspian and Hellboy 2 to look forward to - it's going to be a fab summer!

Copyright Breaches

As a blogger and a reader of blogs, I found this link running from Random Acts of Reality .
Essentially, the Hate Mail (both weekly and Sunday) has decided that lifting copyright material, or misrepresenting bloggers in articles is acceptable behaviour.

I am really lost for words on this. Even though Private Secret Diary has now received payment for his work, and When A Woman's Fed Up has had the article taken down whilst waiting for the results of the PCC enquiry - this situation should never had arisen! I am disgusted that this paper has the temerity to call itself "professional".

Ffantastic Ffiesta!

Well! The event that we have spent over a year and a half working towards is ffinally ffinished...

And what a weekend it was - around about 100 people congregating on the De Vere Hotel in Swindon to celebrate the works of Jasper Fforde with a Ffiesta of fun and games.

This had been a stressful convention to plan - not least because of contractual issues which left us (as organisers) nearly £2,000 in debt. Most of that was on my credit card.

I was also worried, as there had been a fairly nasty review of the last Ffestival on Ansible (someone who believed that it should have been a convention with signing queues and panels and the like), and I was having nightmares about everyone wanting their money back... So, you can imagine that my frame of mind wasn't fantastic going into the Friday night!

However, I really need not have worried.

It was a FFANTASTIC weekend! From the start of the Saturday morning, when Katie's "Getting to Know You" game worked its magic and got everyone talking, right through to Monday afternoon, everyone seemed to have a brilliant time. The bus tour of Swindon was a big success, as was the table top croquet tournament (and, as usual, in the quintessentially English game, the final was between the Americans and the Germans...) The Maskerade was such fun - the level of ingenuity of people getting dressed up was brilliant (as well as specific human characters, we also had a Dodo (Pickwick) with her chick, a Will-Speak Machine, as well as the representation of footnotes...) We even did an audience participation Richard III, which, despite possibly being a little overlong (editorial blushes...), turned out really well - much better than having to sit quietly and see the play done by ac-tors... (Hey - anywhere you can "Boo" Richard and yell "He's behind you" at Clarence and the murderers.... Probably somewhere closer to what would have happened in Shakespeare's day with the groundlings at the Globe anyway!)

What totally overwhelmed me, though, was the incredible generosity of everyone who attended. At the start of the auction, Phil stood up and explained that we were having financial problems, and that the convention was running at a loss. And then the bidding started. Jasper as auctioneer, and a variety of items, some donated by Jasper (many different editions of his books, in a number of different languages), some donated by the Ffiesta (mainly croquet sets of one form or another...), some donated by other people (Terry Pratchett donated, through his PA, three signed copies of his books; those magnificent folk at ArmadaCon donated two free tickets to their convention, something John and I took advantage of!) I was keeping a running tally as the auction progressed, and kept on thinking I had to have got my maths wrong - the total just kept on rising and rising. By the end, when we had auctioned off everything which wasn't nailed down (including an early draft of the first chapter Jasper's not-yet-published book "Shades of Grey", which he had read out to us earlier in the evening), we had raised £2,700! This more than covered our debts, and, with additional monies raised through the selling of merchandise and various silly games (throw the marshmallow into the dodo's mouth, guess the weight of the entroposcope, whack a dodo...), we have enough to put some aside for the next Ffiesta, and also to donate to charity - final totals not sorted out yet, but it should be over £1,000!

And on the Monday, a group of about 12 of us went out to the Uffington White Horse to show some of our American guests some very British pastimes - driving through twisty, high hedged country roads, some of them mildly flooded, discovering that the one signpost to where you are going to is half way up the road you were meant to have taken, about thirty seconds after you have just overshot it, and, of course, having a picnic in the rain, saying "Isn't this fun...?" Fortunately, the sun came out fairly shortly after we finished eating, and we ended up flying kites and having a brilliant time - a very relaxing end to the weekend.

And now I collapse...!

Incandescence

This is the first of the pieces that I have written on my commute to and from work - I have started giving myself a word / idea in the morning, and try to get anything in 10 minutes. If the idea seems to be going somewhere, then I carry on the story in the evening (and to the next day if necessary), if not, then I give myself a new word in the evening. What I'm putting here is still pretty raw, not polished.

Freewheeling, the bird soars through the sky. The sunlight flashes off of brightly coloured plumage; irridescent blue, pink and green. A trickle of bird song flows down to the observers, fluttering through the air. There is no chirrup or tweet from this bird; the song rises and falls in cadences to delight the ear.

It is a spectacular sight, only ever seen once every few years when the bird looks for a mate, and she is crouching under a bush at the edge of a clearing. She is small, dull, with brown and green feathers. She has no song, no bright colours, and is therefore of no interest to the observers, who have patiently researched and waited to find this particular clearing, in the middle of nowhere, at this time.

They knew they had to work quickly. Once the pheonix mates, the male bursts into flames, providing the heat for the incubation of the next generation. The ultimate sacrifice for the continuation of the species. It is also an extreme self defence mechanism. Should the bird be attacked, it releases a combination of hormones and digestive acids which spontaneously combust. If it is killed, it takes about five minutes for the bird to be completely aflame, meaning that any predator will also burn.

The observers watch the mating dance intently, focusing their instruments, making sure that they do nothing to alarm the bird. When the positioning is exactly right, they shoot.

The falling comet of colour, now stained a dull red, falls near their feet, and they work quickly before the chemical reaction is complete. Each whole phoenix feather is worth nearly $100.

Where has the year gone?

Once more, nearly three weeks since I last posted, and the usual excuses apply (though I think they are very poor ones when I consider the blogs that I read, usually medical people who work silly shifts, study, and still seem to manage to post every couple of days... But then, they have more interesting lives than I do, as well!)

I'm hoping that my posts will pick up after the beginning of May - the Fforde Ffiesta will be over, and I will have some spare time again. Will try not to spend all my time playing Scrabble on Facebook and actually post properly...

We might be on the move again - the shower and bath are both on the blink, and the landlady didn't pay the electrician's bill from the last time it broke (October -> February - 4 months without a shower...), so I am not hopeful that she will pay out for it to be fixed again. We have the same electrician coming in this week (I've promised to pay up front and claim back from the landlady by deducting from the ), but if it can't be fixed straight away, we are just going to hand in our notice...

On a more positive note, I'm going in for a Tae Kwon Do competition in the middle of May - getting to test my sparring skills properly against someone. I'm not expecting to get very far, but I'm really looking forward to it!

I'm also hoping that I'll be able to get more creative writing in after the beginning of May - I'm trying to write every day on the train to and from work, and I've got a couple of pieces that I'm willing to show to the world :-)

Busy!

I hadn't realised that it had been *quite* that long since I last posted... I have been rushed off my feet, both at home and at work, and the closest I have come to blogging has been composing posts in my head on the walk to and from work (most of them have been rants against cyclists and people who fail to indicate, but as I have made my feelings on that clear in an earlier post, I won't repeat myself...
So - we are now in April. Easter has passed by, and BST has started... And what have I been up to? Aside from being completely manic at work (April 1st is the start of our new financial year (although due to creative accountancy and the need for our sales team to edge a bit closer to their targets, year end is physically the 7th...)), John and I have also been highly active in our leisure time.
As well as more organising for the Fforde Ffiesta (link one more time ;-) ), we have also been to London, spending Easter at Heathrow airport for the UK Sci-Fi convention, Orbital (also known as Eastercon). This was a completely amazing experience - highlights for me included meeting Neil Gaiman again, and managing to exchange more words with him (well, a few) than "Wow, you are brilliant," being Gopher-liaison for Mitch Benn, and thereby getting to sit in the front row for his most amazing set (crying with laughted for at least three quarters of the time), plus having Christopher Priest sit with us for breakfast (for me, the ultimate convention experience - to be able to sit and chat with someone whose work you admire, but to talk about nothing at all (the fact that it was snowing at Heathrow...)). Plus, getting to wander round, sit in some very silly, and some not so silly panels, and to do my best to completely exhaust myself by Gophering for a good chunk of the weekend (I got enough 'groats' (1 groat for 1 hour worked) to buy a £5 t-shirt, a jacket potato, at least one or two drinks, and still have some left over to buy a lovely cloak broach, so I did quite a bit!) - it is something that I really enjoy about going to major conventions, and really miss when I don't get the chance to do it. We discovered after Orbital that the New Zealand Sci-Fi convention is also held over Easter - plans are already afoot to see whether, once we are established over there, we can work out a live satellite link up. One of the best comments about the convention, which summed up why I love going to these so much, came from Neil Gaiman. "You are my tribe." The idea that I can go along to a venue, where over a thousand people are, end up separating from my husband and friend (voluntarily, not by accident), and still know that I am amongst friends, fully comfortable with everyone around me, is something that transcends the shared love of sci-fi/fantasy. It might be the common bond that brings us together, but it is not that which makes it work - again, as Neil Gaiman said - "If, overnight, everything to do with sci-fi; DVDs, films, videos, books, comics, the lot, completely vanished, never to reappear, there would still be conventions. We would have to hold them about knitting, but they would still happen."
Last weekend, we were back in London for the Terracotta Army exhibition at the British Museum. This was breathtaking, even though it was only a very small portion of the full army, and I feel incredibly privileged to have been able to see it before it heads back to China again next week. The detail on the warriors was outstanding; a kneeling archer had moulded nails in the bottom of his shoes. They had even mocked up a painted soldier to show what they would have looked like when they were new - really quite terrifying, in fact - a very lifelike army, row upon row, of men and horses, taller than those who created them, silent, guarding the body of the man who felt that he was Emperor of the Universe.
And then back to earth with a bump with a very busy week of work this week, and my final hockey match of the season on Saturday - we are heading for relegation in a big way, and it is going to be a good thing - I'm looking forward to matches where we aren't going to lose 9-0! But first, I have to brave the end of season piss up...