Another catch-up!

Well, it has been a long while since I posted (again!)
I can't believe that it has been 2 weeks since our fab Newcastle trip, where we headed up-North to visit one of John's ex-housemates and his wife. As well as a chance to catch up on the many years since we last saw each other (hey - we've all got married since then!), and fondly Jenny's cat, we also took the opportunity to expose my thin Southern blood to the chill Newcastle wind and head out into town. To get out of the knife-like wind, we walked over the tilting bridge (though sadly, didn't get a chance to see it tilt as the website with the times on it was wrong by a couple of hours...) into Gateshead, and went to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.

It wasn't the first time I'd been in an art gallery, but it's definitely the first time I'd been in a modern art gallery. I can't say that I was overly impressed... I was a little bit amused by the display of the Fluxus art, where the description given ran along the lines of "These artists (especially George Maciunas, who founded the movement) felt that art shouldn't be contstrained by galleries or museums, and some campaigned for such buildings to be closed", yet the display was being hosted in a gallery...

I know that modern art is supposed to "speak to the soul", but I really think that if something needs to have an essay next to it explaining what it is about, then surely it isn't doing its job as art.

Getting out of Newcastle was fun... We won't mention the refusal to use the sat-nav, nor the getting on the wrong motorway...

The last couple of weeks have seen some interesting weather hit the British Isles; Bristol seemed like it was getting away with it (it *never* snows in Bristol...), then got smacked with a couple of inches at the end of last week. However, other people have posted on the snow (particularly UHDD who has some amazing shots of the Lake District), and as I think that it covers the worst of all possible weathers (being both cold *and* wet), all I shall do is grumble about the cancellation of a hockey match and two hockey practices (apparantly we had the wrong sort of snow for our "all weather" astroturf...)

I'm looking forward to the weekend - I've got my first TKD competition for a while over in Cardiff. Whilst I don't expect to do any better than I did last year (in fact, given that I've gone up a couple of belts, I do expect to fact tougher competition...), I'm looking forward to the challenge!

Still doing my sewing as well, though I'm learning the follies of overconfidence; after finishing John's waistcoat, I've had to unpick a *lot* from my latest top due to first of all sewing up the sleeveholes, then, through trying to be too clever (fitting in a lining where there wasn't one on the pattern), made the armholes too small... Ah well - all good experience!