A quick update
I’m off to Oxford in a bit, but I wanted to write a quick post on what I’ve been up to lately.
Yesterday was Thanksgiving, as you are doubtless aware, and I am staying here with a bunch of Americans. This being the case, we all made food and celebrated. It came off surprisingly well. I made my mom’s famous Pumpkin Upside-Down Cake, and people raved about it. This is despite my forgetting to add the evaporated milk that, even now, rests inside the pocket of my coat.
Before that on Thursday, I did some shopping. I returned a shirt which I found too small to H&M, but they didn’t have the exact shirt in the next larger size. So I proceeded to look around through all their clothes and settled on two long sleeve T-shirts, a blue T-shirt and two button-down shirts (very nice). And not too terribly expensive, though I have to keep remembering to multiply every price by two. (That probably won’t end anytime soon, either.)
On Wednesday I was busy. I nipped over to the Type Museum in Stockwell in the morning and got a private tour. Very kind of the man to do that; they have an open day once a month, which I wasn’t able to make. It was incredible to see how the typesetting process worked back in the days before computers. Type founding, which they still do at the museum for somem clients, is particularly incredible work, with upwards of 6 unique stages to go from a drawing to an actual “matrix” piece, which is then used to mold the hot metal into a piece of type for printing. Thank god for Adobe, huh? :-)
After that I stopped back by Foundation House and went out to lunch with Brian Ridgers, my Shakespeare teacher last year. We chatted about a little bit of everything over some great southern Indian food. Then I dropped by the Saatchi gallery and looked at the pieces they had there. I was particularly impressed by David Thorpe (sample), but the great white shark in formaldehyde was awesome as well.
In the evening I went to see Steven Lee, a comic. He was very funny, better than Robert Newman was. A few jokes I didn’t get, but a very interesting habit of dissecting jokes that didn’t quite work and making them hilarious when seen inside-out. I’ve got another comedy show lined up for tonight, after Oxford.
Which reminds me, I have to get going. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I’ll talk to/see you all again all too soon. :-)