Short version: varied, geeky Easter weekend. Very glad this is another 4-day week!
Thursday: went to the Beer & Blake's 7 meet at the Knights Templar. It was a bit quieter than usual due to people being at Eastercon but enjoyable evening of geeky chatter nonetheless. Coincidentally, ULU's decided to go there for a social event tonight in lieu of fencing. Think I'll pass on that though.
Friday: Plans to see the Chinese gods exhibition at the British Museum with Liz were foiled by the museum being closed. Doh. After a bit of discussion, we wandered down to Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Hunterian Museum. Only, after deciding to sit in the park "briefly", we realised we'd spent rather longer than expected chatting and watching silly dogs bounding about. Oh well, next attempt to see that bloody exhibition this Saturday...
Saturday: Drove down to Bristol to Clare and Simon's to go see The Men They Couldn't Hang at the Thekla. As it turned out, both they and Stuart decided to come along too. Gig itself was pretty good, not quite as frenetic as the 100 Club ones, they played a few of their less commonly played songs as well a few of Paul Simmonds' and Swill's solo material. EDIT: Oh yeah, the rather fetching redhead who invaded the stage to play the tambourine for one song didn't hurt either...
The Thekla itself is a pretty interesting venue, being on a boat, but no Murphy's and, more seriously, a 10pm curfew. You there's a problem when the band's clock watching ("only 17 minutes left") as they try to cram everything in. Still, at least it meant we had time to go out for dinner afterwards.
Still, having pretty much dismissed their November tour dates as "too far", I think I may need to re-consider. Still, at least there's the Spitz Club in London at the end of July.
Sunday: After breakfast, including hot cross buns baked by Clare, stopped by the Commonwealth and Empire Musuem on my way out of Bristol. Pretty impressive and struck me as fairly even-handed in its portrayal of Britain's imperial past, good and bad. It certainly didn't do anything to sway my view that the British Empire was probably the least objectionable of the big European empires.
Would have liked more on the decolonialisation conflicts and on the economics of Empire thoug: It certainly didn't hurt that I'd read Niall Ferguson's Empire a short while back. Still, overall, a fun 2-3 hours. Interestingly, the ticket price permits unlimited re-entry for a year thereafter so I'll have to keep watch on any upcoming special exhibitions (there's one on the slave trade coming up).
Got home and found I'd left my wash bag at Clare and Simon's. Doh. Will probably pick it up from them at airsoft skirmish at Dragon Valley on 22 April.
Monday: Met
mrmrsmith and
colonel_maxim to see the Falklands War photo exhibition at the National Army Museum. To be honest, the Falklands exhibition itself was a bit disappointing. Not that much to it. Fortunately, the rest of the museum is always good for a laugh and I suppose there's the Imperial War Museum's upcoming Falklands exhibition too. I was a bit saddened to find the olive green Opel saloon car from the military observation team in Germany was gone. I wanted to get a good look at it as, for a while, I'd had an idea about one of those as a "military" vehicle for Beltring etc which still maintained the comforts I'd expect!
On the phone front, thanks all for the test messages. Despite a few late/flakey texts from O2, looks like whatever the problem was has passed. Weird though: on Friday Liz had demonstrated unsuccessfully sending texts from her O2 phone and, immediately afterwards, successfully from her Vodafone Blackberry. Ah well, at least all seems well again...
