Nik's Saga

In contrast to my organisation when leaving Iceland - having everything packed over 24 hours before leaving - this morning was the usual last-minute packing rush.

Actually it wasn't too much of a rush as I did have three hours, the train not leaving Liverpool until after midday. What concerned me more was the weight of the bag and just how easy it was going to be to travel with it, so I've ended up leaving some stuff behind including, to my general dissatisfaction, the harp. It does need a little more work to get rid of the runs of the varnish (with a razor, I'm told) and I don't think I'd want to try to pack a tin of varnish in my luggage (knowing how the staff at Stanstead treat baggage). With a bit of luck though I'll be back home just before Rent-A-Don and can finish it and pick it up then.

Travelling to Scotland by train on New Year's Eve was always expected to be a bit crowded, and I was quite right. Even the local train from Liverpool to Warrington was pretty full. I was a bit surprised when I was told to change at Warrington. I used to change at Preston and Warrington is actually slightly south of Liverpool. Then the railbay bod at the gate pointed me in the direction of the wrong Warrington train, but as this one left three minutes after the one I was expecting I queried it and found the right one instead.

So I got into Warrington, changed platform and, for some reason known only to my unconscious, got onto the wrong train. I think I didn't realise how much time I had to change trains (I'm not used to trains running on time) and there was a nice big Virgin Wobblino waiting there for me. Fortunately it was going to Lancaster so I could change at Preston for the Edinburgh train. Maybe it was my subconscious trying to take me to the caravan.

The west coast main line service was full. So full that they eventually opened up the first class compartment for those who didn't have seats. The journey was quite routine after that, and we were actually arrived early at Edinburgh Waverley. Then finally it was a short but oh-so-familiar hop up the coast to Leuchars for St. Andrews.

For the last few years - few being about ten, I think - I've done New Year with the Harris Mob, the Nicols and the Beards. We do the whole Christmas thing again, with gifts, games and lots of food and alcohol and generally have a wonderfully relaxing time. The Nicols are coming up tomorrow, as it's a little difficult for them to take long weekends with a small child.

It's official, by the way. I know everything. Or so Matt (Debby & Bob's eldest) told his Dad this evening. Nice to know that someone else clearly recognises my genius.

It's my final complete day at home and it's a stressed one. I've done the latest tranche of Christmas shopping (yes, I know it's late, but I didn't know until yesterday how many people I had to buy presents for).

On the up side though, I did manage to get the BBC Radio versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the sale in Borders. I thought very seriously about getting a Palm Tungsten Z5 but decided against it as I'm still being paranoid about money. So instead I cheered myself up with an M&S cranberry juice instead. Instant gratification to take my mind off other things. :)

The mind is still working like mad though, currently in conflict with the brain which is trying to force me into a darkened room to go to sleep for a while. No time for headaches today. Too much to do! The washing is in, the computers have most of their software upgraded and innoculated against various nasties, the packing is completely unstarted and there are more presents to organise/finish/wrap. I feel that I've done nothing at all while I've been here, yet I've been busy the whole time.

The second coat of varnish on the harp has dried and I'm not entirely happy with it. I don't think I should have done it while I was feeling so grotty on Christmas Day, as it's ended up with a couple of runs. I may just be being picky, so I'm torn between saying 'sod it' and finishing it anyway, and taking the varnish and the uncompleted harp back to Iceland to finish there (having been given instructions on how to deal with the drips by Dad). Logically I suppose I'll be taking it back to Iceland. Still, I suppose it means one less thing to do today. I had no idea that the varnish was going to take so long to dry out. Clearly the idea of a kit you can make in one day doesn't include varnish drying time.

Actually, I'd assumed that Dad would look at it and tell me that there were drips. You see, it's been drying in the most effective place in the house - on top of the central heating boiler in the bathroom. This has meant that every time I visit the bathroom I end up looking at it. Maybe Dad hasn't because men don't sit down as much.

I was also planning to buy an epee today. No, not by visiting the shop, but rather by phoning the shop, buying the item and then having some friends who live in the same small town pop in and pick it up for me as I'll be seeing them tomorrow. Unfortunately All Star seem to have closed down entirely between Christmas and New Year, so there's that plan down the drain. I'll have to see if I can arrange something while I'm up in Scotland, as I'd really like to have a second epee to take back so we can start practicing at shire meetings.

Oh well, back to the final panic. And maybe a paracetemol.

Today is Wednesday so it must be Shewsbury. And so it was that this morning I found myself on another train - this time going from the underground bit of Lime Street station - heading for Chester and a connection onwards to Shrewsbury.

Lime Street station has changed quite a bit over the years since I was using it regularly to travel to and from university. It's a lot cleaner for starters, and the eateries are a bit more upmarket than the old Burger King. You can now get decent coffee with money you've got out of one of the money machines near the Marks and Spencer Simply Food outlet. Another new fitting are the signs warning you that unattended luggage will be removed by station staff, the emergency services or an opportunist thief. I kid you not.

The trains a cleaner and more comfy too, although Chester station could do with a bit of a facelift. Shrewsbury station is a beautiful red-brick mansion just underneath the castle walls, and it was here I met up with Gonz. Both of us were a bit peckish, so we started our afternoon with a sandwich at the Traitor's Gate Trattoria just along from the station. It's very atmospheric, built into the cellars of an old building tucked away off a side street, and does excellent coffee and great baguettes and ciabatta.

Our plan was to go and have a wander about the castle, but the universe had different plans. The universe wanted me to buy more DVDs so the castle and the regimental museum of the King's Staffordshire Light Infantry are closed until February 16th. Typical, especially as that happened to be my great-grandfather's regiment and I had no idea that the regimental museum was there in the first place. So instead we went shopping.

Shrewsbury has a Past Times, which was having a sale, in which Gonz got a hnefetafl set the same as mine for a third of the price it cost in the National Museum in Reykjavik. Ho hum. It also has an MVC, a WH Smiths, a Virgin and a games shop. Unfortunately the games shop was closed for lunch when we went past it the first time and then closed for the day by the time we got back. That was probably a good thing, as I'd already bought season 2 of M*A*S*H, season 1 of Bugs and seasons 1-4 of Red Dwarf (the episodes only, not the unnecessary and expensive extra bits). I managed to refrain from buying huge amounts of things like Futurama, The Tomorrow People and Ulysses 31 but I fear that it might only be a matter of time...

I've also taken on a new task: converting the Gonz to such televisual delights as Blake's Seven and literary classics by Douglas Adams, David Weber and Lois McMaster Bujold. How can one possibly claim to be a well-educated geek without them?

Well OK, there weren't actually any steam engines in action at the National Railway Museum in York, but there were certainly a lot of steam engines not in action.

It's been a long time since I've done the trans-pennine train. When I was an undergrad there were several of us living in Liverpool, Stalybridge, Leeds and York who would meet up for pizza and a movie in Manchester, Leeds or York several times during the summer and normall once during the Christmas break as well. I have fond memories of going to Manchester, having cheese and ham pancakes at the Dutch Pancake House then going to see Aliens the day it came out. And wow, was it fantastic or what? So it was one of those strangely nostalgic journeys.

Some things have changed, of course. For instance, I used to go though Manchester Victoria and now you go through Manchester Oxford Street and Manchester Picadilly instead, and there certainly wasn't a Manchester United Football Ground station. Much as I am loath to admit that Scum can possibly do anything right even I have to admit that having a mainline railway station just outside the ground has to be a good idea.

Having a mainline railway station at the National Railway Museum is also an excellent idea (although here I have to admit that I think it was the station that came first this time). I met up with Martin and we had an excellent few hours wandering around the museum looking at trains, things that came off trains, things that attached to trains and things that allowed trains to work properly. I was particularly impressed by section on signalling. This is probably my HCI side coming out, as the methods for displaying the state of the network, the trains upon it and the control indicators are applicable in computing as much as in railway engineering.

Of course we also spent some time worshiping at the shrine of the Deltic (I'm told it's traditional - I never quite understood that one myself) and longer in deep examination of the cut-away engine showing how it all works. A handfull of science degrees between us and we managed to work out the basic physics with reference to the engine and also how to operate the signalling model. Another particularly good exhibition was the collection of royal trains, which made us both shudder at the decor and wonder at the number of bells in each carriage for calling an attendant. At least half a dozen, I kid you not. All to remove the need for the royal rear to move from any seat it chose.

But if there was one thing I would have happily taken away (assuming I had a house big enough for it) it was a large oval table for boardmeetings. This had 6 indented seating nooks and sets of drawers between them. It would have made a fantastic gaming table, with plenty of space to store miniatures, dice and rulebooks. :)

Still, just think of how much it would cost in excess baggage.

I'm still battling the bug here, and am now at the deep voice stage of the infection. I was planning to do all sorts today but the bug got the better of me.

Never mind. I have at least got the final coat of varnish on the harp, although I was feeling sufficiently blah when I did it that I missed a bubble which has now set as a small crater on the surface. It's an identifying mark, that's my excuse. The toile isn't complete yet - it isn't even started, actually - but I have completed the final set of embroidered bookmarks and I've started applique-ing the goldwork onto the book cover, so the day hasn't been a complete loss.

I've even put the not sleeping due to coughing and sneezing to good use. I've now watched the second of the Martinez DVDs and rewatched the first one. The second also provoked the occasional sigh of wonderment and delight, and there are one or two (or seven or eight) techniques I really must work on. The entire section on cuts to start with. There's also a really sneaky one that I know won't be allowed, so I'll have to take up sidesword as well as normal rapier just to use it. It's fascinating to watch the DVDs as I can see the practical application of geometry in them, which is the whole point. It has been said that spanish fencing is just a good excuse to practise your dance steps. Well I intend to do it the other way around; I'm sure I can choreograph a dance suitable for practising your spanish footwork. :)

This evening though, I had my annual natter with one of my oldest friends, Kate. We've had an extremely communicative year this year, in that as well as our annual Christmas conversation we had a long phone call in April. It's great - we don't see each other from one end of the year to the other but then just pick up where we left off as if no time at all has passed. Kate is very sporty and loved Iceland when she visited it 15 years ago, so we are both agreed that she and her partner just have to come over in the summer for the walking and the winter for the skiing. Once I've got a house with a spare bed, that is.

For the rest of the night though, I plan an earlyish night in bed as I'm off to York tomorrow and to Shrewsbury the day after. I am going to be so shattered after that. Hopefully I'll also have spread some of the infectious happiness around the rail network too. :) :) :)

The British Bug has taken it's revenge on me for being out of the country so much. I have come down with the classic sneezes, runny nose, sore throat, aches and pains that are so common here in the UK in the winter.

So I've spent the day curled up half-asleep in front of the telly, having enjoyed the perennial viewing of Death on the Nile together with regular updates from News 24. The news about the earthquake and tsunami that hit south-east asia was quite important to me, and has left me thinking thank goodness it was now and not in a fortnight's time, as Mum and Dad are due to fly out to Penang in Malaysia just before I return to Iceland. At the last count Penang hadn't been hit hard - only 7 known fatalities - but the hotel they're due to stay in has been shown and the ground floor and the public rooms thereon have been quite badly flooded. There is a distinct chance that the holiday is going to be delayed. They're insured, of course, but I know that they were looking forward to getting away from the snows of winter.

Snows of winter? Pah. Call that snow? :) My sister Kayte did, and was positively bouncing up and down in it. Wicked person that I am, I didn't tell Mum that Kayte was hoping to get away from the pub in Nottingham and come up for a few hours yesterday, which she duly did, much to Mum's delight. She did have to leave a little earlier than planned because of the snow, and when she phoned to tell us that she'd got home safe she said that the motorway was quite horrendous. It almost makes me feel good about taking the train everywhere this holiday.

Varnish coat number one on the harp has now dried and looks quite good. I'm now off to apply the second coat in the hope that it'll dry out before I leave for Scotland on Friday.

There is one thing I really like about Christmas Day - Christmas Pudding. There is no better dessert (with the exception of my late Nana's rice pudding) than Christmas pudding with lashings of cream.

We have part of the extended family over for Christmas dinner and, as usual, the talk has turned to family history. For some reason I seem to have been designated as this generation's keeper of genealogical facts - probably because I have a degree and am therefore educated - in spite of the fact that the chances of me having children are no higher than those of Elvis riding the Loch Ness Monster onto centre court at Wimbledon to watch Tim Henman win the men's championships. It may aslo have something to do with the Big Plan to scan all the old photos into the computer and me being the family computer bod.

There doesn't seem to be anything particularly outstanding about my family. OK, there was a scandalous incident with my great-great grandfather, who came to Liverpool form Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire and was soon joined there by his sister. She left not long after to return to York, leaving a baby in great-great-grandad's keeping, so who knows whose that was. It wasn't my great-grandfather though, so I doubt I'm the long-lost heiress to some central european throne (although that would be fun - just think of the fun we could have in the inherited castles!).

My assorted ancestors appear to have been in Liverpool for only two generations. Before that they seem to have been in the Welsh borders and the Yorkshire moors, but the main family names - Whitehead, Lunn, Pearce and Morse - are Irish and Scandinavian in origin. Family legend has me related to Barry Morse (the actor who played Lt. Gerard in the original series of The Fugitive and (more importantly) the scientist in Space 1999, and to Robert Whitehead, the inventor of the self-propelled torpedo (which is fundamentally interesting).

Since the last long discussion of family history I've managed to track down my great-grandfather's WWI regiment, and been told that my grandfather taught demolitions to the US Rangers. I take this as a clear sign that the desire to blow things up (or knock things down) is genetically determined and will continue my experiments with gunpowder once I get back to Iceland.

Mmm... the pudding has now settled. I think it's time to top up with a mince pie. :)

It's almost Christmas, although I'm afraid I can't summon up any enthusiasm for it.

I did get into town this morning, and actually had quite a successful morning's shopping. The city centre was far less crowded that I had anticipated so it was a surprisingly relaxing experience. John Lewis didn't have the metal boning though, so I'll have to try the Aberdeen store when I'm up there. I remember seeing it in Aberdeen.

The city centre has changed quite a bit since I was last there (which was probably an Eastercon at the Adelphi about 4 years ago). It's now got a lot of sculpture in the main shopping street, which is quite interesting, although I don't understand why the giant horse is made of string. As well as some assorted presents for people I also picked up a new pair of black leather gloves that will take a large extended cuff for fencing - my current fencing gloves are both ugly and beginning to show signs of wear and tear. The duct tape gives it away somewhat.

Unfortunately I didn't really have time to go to the Walker. I got the bus home and, for once, didn't feel particularly uncomfortable or threatened by the mass of Scouse humanity accompanying me. What I did feel was the beginnings of a son et lumiere migraine, which pretty much killed the rest of the afternoon.

Oh yes, and then I watched Shrek. Very nice animation, very clever script, but the realisation that, given a coat of green makeup, I could be Princess Fiona the Ogress' stunt double did rather depress me.

I'll try to be enthusaistic tomorrow, at least when we've got visitors, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this year, like last, I might just sneak away to write a lecture. I hope that you folks out there have a better one.

But it's been a close call at times. I'm still trying to work out why I spend ludicrous amounts of money to come home to hear the parental units arguing. I even cleaned the bathroom today to get away from it all, and I'm hoping that I might get a word of thanks for it sometime.

On the up side I did engage in a little more retail therapy and have extended my DVD collection a bit thanks to the 'buy one, get one free' offers at HMV and WH Smith. I decided to shop now as I have a feeling that I'm not going to have much opportunity after Christmas. Anyway, I found a double pack of the George Pal War of the Worlds and When Worlds Collide.

These two movies played a big part in me becoming a Sci-Fi Looney. I have very vivid memories of watching them on my grandparents' black and white television even before I saw Star Trek and Doctor Who. They, together with The Time Machine are the first SF I remember seeing, so George Pal had a lot to answer for. :) They're there on the Early Memories list with Jason and the Argonauts (which is another essential Christmas movie, of course).

I also managed to get hold of the book I was looking for the other day; Gunpowder. Why it was lurking in the history section not the science section beats me. It's not as if you expect New Scientist to review history books, is it? Mind you, there were a number of books in the military history section that were quite tempting. On top of that I picked up a copy of Zombies!!!, a game for 2-6 players; the Christmas edition of New Scientist and (for reasons that are too long to go into and would probably make me very angry again) a copy of the educational version of Microsoft Office 2003 for the parental PCs.

Tomorrow I plan to go into Liverpool city centre early in the morning to get some fabric for the toile and some metal boning for a new corset. I haven't seen really strong boning in Iceland, but I believe that John Lewis in town should have it. If I go early enough I might get out of town before it gets really, really busy. Hmm... or I could go to the Walker Art Gallery and have a look at their Tudor collection. They have a well-known Henry VIII (not a Holbein but 'after Holbein') and an equally famous Elizabeth I (the Pelican portrait. The only problem with that idea is that I could get lost in the Walker and the William Brown Street Museum next door for most of the day. Now there's an idea with merit... except that I suspect that I'm going to be expected to clean the rest of the house tomorrow.

And the first coat of varnish on my harp is still sticky so I couldn't apply the second one today. Boo. Hopefully I can do it tomorrow and the harp will be ready for stringing come Boxing Day. Or maybe Monday.

Accomplishments of the day (well, the last two days really):

• Erected and decorated a 2m Christmas tree. Our tree has a number of strange things on it, such as the Calvinosaurus, the Hobbesosaurus Rex, the butch angels and the incredible farting cherub. Admittedly there are some quite tasteful things too, but they're not as much fun.


• Hung up all of the Christmas cards. I hate that one, it's repetative and generally boring, and there are always a couple of hundred cards to do. Depressing, that.


• Arranged most of my trip to Scotland. It's St. Andrews on New Year's Eve until the Monday, then up to Aberdeen, then down to Paddy & Jean's place before flying down to Stanstead and back to Iceland.


• Arranged trips to the National Railway Museum and to Shrewsbury castle to see various other folks.


• Put the first coat of varnish on my harp.


• Explained the Univseral Turing Machine to my Dad. Boy, that was a tough one. Think of it this way - the Turing machine is describing logic gates before they were known as such, so when you give the diagram to someone well-versed in electronics they immediately see it as electronics not as maths. That one took the best part of an hour over breakfast and eventually came down to explaining state diagrams as a glorified game of snakes and ladders.


• Refrained from killing Dad whilst explaining the Universal Turing Machine over breakfast.


• Refrained from killing anyone else either, although sorely tempted.


• Visited the craft shop again and bought more paper and a couple of interestingly-shaped hole punches.

The last on the list was inspired by this truly astonishing program I've discovered on a channel that doesn't even seem to have a name. Alan & Barry's Craft Hour is on one of the shopping channels and is trying to sell craft stuff. Now I admit that some of the craft stuff was very tempting, but even I have standards, and refuse to buy from a TV shopping channel. I might visit their website though... The interesting things though are Alan and Barry. They are both fifty-ish, well-padded and as camp as Butlins. It's quite fascinating in a slightly gruesome manner. They demonstrate the stuff quite well, and I suspect that they really do know their crafts. 11:00 to 12:00 somewhere on Freeview. Catch it and be astonished.

Tomorrow I aim to put the second (and hopefully final) layer of varnish on the harp and also not to kill anyone. The latter will be the tough one, I can tell.

The sixteen leaves are now finished. And I think I'll be taking a break from goldwork for a while - after all, it's not as if I don't have other things to do, is it?

The next step will be to cut out the leaves and applique them to the main body of the fabric together with the braid that forms the stems of the laurel branches, then finally do the outlining. I'm not sure whether I'll couch the outlines with a gold braid, a black braid, or possibly do them in split stitch in black. Decisions decisions.

The lap harp is now ready to receive the first of its two coats of varnish, having been cleaned off with white spirit to remove any grease first. It should be complete by Christmas. :)

Well, that assumes that everything goes according to plan. We're a bit behind, on that, as we'd hoped to get the tree up today (the Solstice being a good day for that, I feel...actually the solstice is a good day for other major things too, like finishing leaves). It is, at least, all ready to get up tomorrow. I was hoping to go to Aberkan tomorrow as well, but that'll depend on Mum's stress levels. Mmm... I'm sure that we can at least go to the new craft shop around the corner. I need some more festive paper for tea bag folding (an art I discovered last week), which strikes me as as good an excuse as any.

For now though, I'm going to curl up with my book on particle physics. And once I've finished that one I've got one on the atom bomb builders, plus a really interesting one on cryptography. Although I don't intend to do them all in one night.

Over the last couple of days I've been watching this business with the Birmingham theatre and the sikh community with interest. I cannot help but compare the situation with the one in St. Andrews recently, where there were protests outside the Byre theatre about a student production of a play that certain christian fundamentalists claimed was blasphemous. Would the Byre have cancelled the play had the protesters started throwing bricks around?

The Byre situation was big enough to make it onto the BBC News website, which is why I know of it. I see from the Telegraph that the production team of the Saint (the student newspaper that used to be the Chronicle, and with which even I have had run-ins before now) are not to be allowed into the Union building until they have attended a cultural awareness course. For which they must pay themselves, of course. All this for being a bit unfriendly towards some Welsh fundamentalists.

This seems crazy to me. Another victim of political correctness appears to have been the student rag-mag. Remember those? Full of rude jokes about anyone and everyone? If all the nurses in the world were laid end-to-end I wouldn't be at all surprised. There was an Englishman, a German and a Frenchman in a sinking ship.... Can you imagine the uproar that such would cause nowadays? Students are supposed to be radical, for goodness sake! They're supposed to say and do things that no-one else in society dares to do, and that includes producing theatre that some people may find uncomfortable.

Just because a minority - religious or cultural - objects to a play is no reason to ban it. If you don't like it, protest, but don't stop other people from going to see it. Better still, go to see it yourself rather than taking someone else's word for it. Protest from a position of knowledge. If a play advocates harm to a group, then of course that's a different matter and the play should never have got to the stage in the first place.

I object to Eastenders. It offends my sensibilities in that it presents Britons - of all varieties - to be stupid, thuggish, self-centred alcoholics. Of course, I don't watch Eastenders for these reasons, but I know all about it because I've heard other people talk about it. Do you think that if I go an throw a brick through a window at Television Centre then they'll take it off our screens?

Or will I just get arrested?

Three and a half leaves done (making a total of thirteen and a half), plus a lap harp sanded and with holes filled, ready for varnishing tomorrow. Not a bad day's work, if I say so myself.

OK, so I haven't done much else today except watch documentaries, Stargate SG-1, Scrapheap Challenge and Die Hard 2 (my favourite Christmas movie), but I think I got quite a lot of what I did do done. Watching TV reminded me of what I'm missing - Daniel is back in Stargate, although I've no idea how - I must have missed an entire series of Scrapheap, never mind Time Team, and I hadn't even seen three of the documentaries before. On the plus side though, Iceland doesn't have that annoying female presenter on T4 who gives the impression of being either drunk, high, or educationally subnormal.

Oh yes, and I indulged in the viewing of another of the basic prerequisites of Christmas television: the Christmas showjumping at Olympia. I like showjumping, I've done so ever since I was very small when my grandfather used to take me to the county shows to watch Harvey Smith, David Broome, Ted Edgar and Marian Mould. He was an excellent rider himself, as he'd been in the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery (the lunatics who do the musical ride with the field guns) and we would go all over the place to horse shows as a result. If riding lessons hadn't been so expensive (being in a city) I suspect I would have learned to ride much earlier than I did (at thirty).

This led me to thinking - what are the basic requirements of good Christmas television?

• The Olympia Horse Show, naturally.
  
• The Great Escape. Again.
  
• The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (on BBC1, not Channel 4 - they should so not have adverts in the middle).
  
• More than a ten-minute news programme on Christmas Day.
  
• A Ray Harryhausen film or two.
  
• The Vicar of Dibley.
  
• Two or three good murder mysteries (I look forward to the Christmas Midsommer Murder) including Death on the Nile.
  
• A couple of good swashbuckling movies (Sword of Sherwood Forest and The Prisoner of Zenda are always acceptable).
  
• A selection of good documentaries (seasonal or otherwise).
  
• No Eastenders, Coronation Street, Neighbors or other similar stuff to interfere with a good schedule.
  

I'd better check the Radio Times and see how this year is going to rate on my personal Christmas rating. I seem to recall that last year was pretty bad. Still, at least it's mostly in English. :)

I've just watched the first of Maestro Martinez' two DVDs on the Spanish school of fencing. Mmm... lots to think about. Lots to practise before Rent-A-Don. I really desperately want to get to the final lesson of the second DVD - rapier and dagger - but I must be calm and disciplined and work my way through, right? Maybe I can justify it by claiming I have to check that the DVD is OK...

And thank you those of you out there who would happilly volunteer to do that for me, but I couldn't possibly impose. Not even upon you, Antonio. :-) Now all I need to do is find someone with whom I can practise daily... or at least a couple of times a week. As it happens, I have a student in Akureyri who might just fit the bill, so I shall talk to her once I get back. Once I get a second epee or my new case of rapier arrive from Darkwood, that is.

All being well on Wednesday or Thursday I'll be off to Aberkan to get the fabric for a new fencing habit and (hopefully) a new Spanish court gown as well. The fencing habit has priority though, so I'm taking advantage of having Mum to help me make a toile (a sort of light fabric pattern which you fit to the person and then use it to create the pattern pieces on the real fabric) for both habit and gown. They'll be quite similar, although the habit will be larger as it has to fit over my armoured chemise.

Another thing that arrived in the post today was a Dover reprint of a 1587 lacework and embroidery pattern book. I'm going to give needlelace (punto in aria) a try to decorate the edge of the ruff I'll need to go with the gown. Hmm... it would be quite nice to have a ruff to go with my fencing habit too, although that would have to be rather more washable, given the perspiration issue.

For now though, I'm about to sit down to write another lecture on functional programming, or the guilt centres of my brain will start going into overdrive.

There are days when I almost wish for a flu epidemic. Partly because it would be interesting, in a dispassionate way, to see how the world coped, but more because then I could become just another statistic. Of course I don't really want a flu epidemic, as that would hurt too many people, but the statistic thing is true. Right now I'm living for the sake of other people again.

Statistics are interesting, in a strange way. Stalin once said something along the lines of six deaths are a tragedy, but six million deaths are merely a statistic. It's an interesting idea - tragedy can only be felt on a personal level; beyond a point it becomes too big to handle emotionally. Would being a statistic in this way lessen the effect on those around me?

I've been a statistic before. The National Bureau of Statistics (or whatever it was called) was collecting employment statistics and asked if I was willing to answer work-related questions every three months for a year. I was quite happy with that - it was anonymous, and of moderate use to society. Every three months I said that yes, I was looking for another job, and somewhere in a government computer my dissatisfaction with my programming job was registered.

Come to think of it, I don't think I saw any major changes in government policy as a result of my inclusion in the statistics, so either I'm an oddball or the government don't really care. Or both.

Thanks to the miracle of the video recorder - a technology that I'm told is now obsolete - I watched the final episode of the current series of Spooks last night.

Wow.

They killed Danny.

In the space of a single season they've changed the entire central character set. One was framed, the second sacrificed to a political agenda and now the third executed by terrorists. Certainly no holds barred there. Mind you, back in the first season they set a character up so that we thought she'd be a major character and then killed her off, so they'd certainly set a precedent for it. It also kept up their track record for excellent season finales.

I really enjoy Spooks - it's intelligent, well-written, and doesn't assume that the only threat to the UK comes from Al-Qa'eda. But then I've thought for a long time that many politicians are a threat to civilised society. :-)

It's been another computer day. The PC at the office of one of Mum's community centre places now has broadband again, together with functional CD and DVDs. That last part amazed me. They'd been got by Sasser some time ago and had called in PC World to fix it. After that the machine could be used for word processing, but little else. I opened it up to disconnect the disk drives in order to reinstall them. What did I find? That they weren't working because whoever had been in there last - the chap from PC World, I'm told, had replaced the ribbon cable upside down. Now, given that the connector has a little knob to prevent it being put in upside down, and it took a bit of a pull to get it out, he must have jammed it in with some force.

The mind boggles.

You only really appreciate things like broadband when you don't have it any more. Thank goodness in my case that's only a temporary measure.

Mum and Dad don't have broadband, just the traditional 56K modem that runs at about 48K. Which means that downloading software tools takes forever (I was forced to resort to playing Freecell for a while today) and even normal web pages take too long. As usual I've come home to do computer support and, like last time, the problem is mainly adware and other malware. I'd already set the machines up to refuse cookies but they still managed to aquire a selection of unpleasant unwanted bits of code and registry entries. Over the festive period I'm going to try out SpyGuard to try to keep the things out and to tighten up the security even more. Mum has been migrated to Mozilla and I'm working on Dad.

Last night's decoupage session worked out surprisingly well, even if Mum and Dad came back much earlier than planned and walked in to find me sitting at the dining table craft knife in hand and bits of paper all over the place. Still, I managed to hide their cards so they only saw Petal's before opening their appropriate envelopes.

In the breathing spaces between computer stuff I've almost finished the embroidered bookmarks - or the decorative bits of them anyway. I should be able to finish the last one later tonight then I can spend part of tomorrow doing the construction bit. I want to get that done by Friday morning so I can go to Mum's embroidery club meeting in a relaxed frame of mind, not worrying about having to get things finished. Assuming that happens I'll be back onto the goldwork leaves. I'm halfway through them - eight down, eight more to go.

I bought books today. Real science books, with real prices and not-quite-insane taxes.

I din't find the book I was looking for - I went in search of The History of Gunpowder as recommended by New Scientist - but I did come out with Philosophy and Physics, The Fundamental Particle Garden and 100 Things To Do Before You Die, which also has several suggestions for things to do once you're dead. I want part of me to be turned into diamonds, and another part to be sent into space to burn up on re-enty. This will be after the funeral with jazz band that my sister already knows I want. You have been warned. Wear bright clothes and expect to party.

I've also opened parcels that were waiting for me here in Liverpool. My lap harp has arrived so I'll be spending some time over the holiday sanding and polishing it. Dad's main present arrived from Amazon as well as some Ral Partha figures (female character figures and some renaissance duellists). Unfortunately my paints are in Aberdeen as they weren't deemed necessary in the initial car load. I might be able to pick them up at New Year.

Mum & Dad are going out tonight to a carol concert in the church of St. Nicholas and Our Lady (Liverpool's original parish church, now known as the seafarer's church, and the home of the little-known third liver bird) so I have time and space to make Chrismas cards. I've never tried this 3-D card-making thing, but if it all goes horribly wrong at least I still have time to embroider something!

A full day of travel normally means a lot of time to think. This tends to apply even if I'm driving, so a day where I'm entirely a passenger leaves me just too much thinking time on my hands.

Consider James Bond. Last night I watched The Living Daylights, the first of the Timothy Dalton Bond films. Dalton makes for a much harder Bond than Roger Moore - and let's face it, by Moore's later films he was becoming increasingly unbelievable as an action hero. Dalton is much more believable. I could see him having no qualms whatsoever about killing someone, perhaps even enjoying it. Was this a deliberate reaction to Moore? I suspect so. I wonder if he only did a couple of films because his Bond would have made an excellent villain in one of this own films? Dalton's Bond has much more in common with Scaramanga than he did with Moore's version.

Apart from pondering the relative strengths of the different portrayals of Bond, I've also had the chance to consider the state of the railway network. I flew into Stanstead then got the Stanstead Express to Tottenham Hale, the Tube down to Euston, and then a Virgin train up to Liverpool.

I was greatly impressed by the rollingstock overall. It's been a long time since I'd been on a train and my memories of dirty carriages with dismal upholstry had given me second thoughts on whether to travel by train in the first place. Admittedly the guard seemed to speak little English and didn't understand my question about whether I needed to change at Tottenham Hale or continue on to Liverpool Street, and the chap with the refreshments trolley was barely intelligible, but the train was clean and comfortable and the tannoy announcements clear. Even the Tube was pleasant, but that was probably due to it being 20:00 on a weeknight.

The Virgin train up the west coast mainline was a whole new way of travelling. Not only was it clean and comfortable, but it had a power socket for a mobile phone or laptop, and a headphones socket for the onboard entertainment system. On top of that it was one of these strange tilting trains, and I definitely felt it tilt several times.

Of course, I had lots of thinking time. The journey time from London Euston to Liverpool Lime Street is 2 hours and 39 minutes. That's exactly the same as it was over 20 years ago. But hang on, that's longer than it takes to fly from Iceland to the UK. No wonder people don't use the trains when there has been no decrease in journey times for 20 years, while the price has increased dramatically.

On top of which we were also three minutes late into Lime Street. What hope is there for the railway network?

So far everything is going according to plan. I've just hoovered the bedroom and I have done the packing. All I have to add is the embroidery I'm working on and I think I'm ready.

Vacuum cleaners are white goods, aren't they? Even though ours is black and blue. We have a very ergonomic vacuum cleaner. It's a small curvy rectangle on two wheels - all pretty enough - but its best feature is that the nozzle thing at the end of the pipe has an extrusion that fits into a slot in such a manner that you can carry it with one hand without having to worry about the pipe throttling someone (possibly yourself) or sweeping those expensive porcelain ornaments onto the floor when you turn around. I'm very impressed and will make sure that when I next buy an vaccuum cleaner it has a similar mechanism.

I'm quite conscious of design features like that - comes with being an HCI bod, I suspect. I have great respect for the people who design safe effective systems that no-one else then thinks about. Consider, for instance, propane bottles - the type you get for caravans or camping stoves. When you screw the gas regulator in you have to do it anticlockwise. If you're screwing a regulator into an oxygen bottle you screw it in clockwise.

I think it's that way around. I might have got the individual directions wrong but the point is that connectors for flammable and non-flammable gases have different handedness. A simple and elegant safety system that has always impressed me. I believe the same applies for oxygen and anaesthetics in hospitals - you can't plug the wrong one in as the connector handedness is wrong.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to something else that amazed me the other day. I was listening to a Radio 4 program on the fingers when the mentioned that there are practically no muscles in the fingers, it's all tendons. Naturally I had to look at my fingers to investigate. I was astounded - when I wiggle my fingers I don't get the bunching up I'd expect if if was muscles. I had never noticed this before. It led me to wondering if my fingers would be as effective if they had muscles, not tendons. Ergonomics by evolution.

I had always known that the fingers had tendons but I knew it as a learned fact, not an experimental result. The radio program made me think about the learned fact, experiment, and so discover something for myself. I always feel that it has been a good day if I have either learned something new or notice something that had previously escaped me.

Don't worry though - I'm not about to take a knife to my fingers to get a closer look at the tendons. I'm too fond of embroidery to risk damaging them.

As I am leaving Akureyri to return to the UK for Christmas on Monday morning, I'm spending the weekend doing the inevitable pre-Christmas organisation.

My aim to to be completely packed by the time I go to bed tonight so that I can spend tomorrow doing a final tidy of my desks and whoosh the vacuum cleaner around the bedroom so that I can have a relaxed evening sewing and still leave the room clean and tidy to come back to in the new year.

So far I have located all of the various gifts (and the surprisingly large pile of pre-Christmas presents like tree decorations and festive napkin rings) and piled them on my bed. Then I watched the Everton v. Liverpool derby match (in Icelandic) and didn't appreciate the 1-0 result. This tired me out so much I had to have a mid-afternoon nap to get over it and was then distracted by The Man With The Golden Gun on television for the third time in the last six weeks. I'm still on Scaramanga's side.

So tonight I shall finish packing my big bag (though not to capacity, I hasten to add) and maybe do a bit of sewing (I'm suffering from embroidery withdrawal as I haven't picked up a needle in three days). Then a quiet day tomorrow with a couple of movies and an early start on Monday.

I wonder what the chances are of everything going to plan?

Playing in the SCA is an excellent way of preparing yourself for the stratified social structure of academia. I have understood this for some time. What had never occurred to me was that it would also be good practise for the departmental Christmas dinner.

I'm just back from dinner at Friðrik V, the upmarket resterant in Akureyri and I am full to bursting after a meal of positively feast-like proportions - over 25 individual dishes. Fortunately the experience of SCA feast, and the habit of pacing myself and only taking small portions put me in a better position than some of my colleagues to manage such a meal.

So what did we have? Forgive me for not remembering all of the sauces and so on, but there were a lot.

We started with fish and five different breads (including the one baked for 24 hours in hot sand), herring in a curried yoghurt sauce, herring in a pepperoni and olive sauce, and herring in a fruit sauce. From there we went onto a three-layered fish pate (shrimp, blue ling and sole) served with a bilberry sauce, and cured trout and smoked salmon with butter-scrambled eggs served with a mustard sauce. I'm not a big fan of the smoked salmon you get in the UK but the stuff here is wonderful. It's thick cut and smoked in the traditional manner using dried heather and sheep dung. I wasn't so keen on the trout but the salmon was superb.

Next to the meat pate. There were two reindeer pates, one made in the resterant and the other bought in from Reykjavik, both of which were very tasty and served with a light yoghurt sauce. These were accompanied by a salad of greens with fresh blueberries and goose meat.

The starters out of the way we had a rhubarb and asti spumante sorbet to cleanse our palates before starting on the main meat course. This was composed of smoked pork with caramelised potatoes and mixed salad; boiled potatoes poached in milk; smoked lamb with peas; red cabbage cooked with cinnammon and nutmeg; roast pork, pork ribs and pork crackling served with a potatoes boiled in their skins and another variety of red cabbage, all accompanied by pork and coca-cola gravy (I kid you not, and it was very good), granny smiths apples in whipped cream and Cointreau, and traditional Christmas flat bread. How the apples fit in I don't know, but they did go very well with the flat bread.

Next a short break for cheese, three traditional Icelandic cheeses that have taste (unlike the stuff you get in the supermarkets)! One of them was the world's only brown cheese made entirely from cow's milk. I'd never had brown cheese before, and it certainly had a kick. Oh yes, and a strawberry to go with it.

We were on the home straight now, with only dessert left to face. The chef, who was incredibly friendly and helpful and came out to present and explain each remove to us, insisted that we had to have at least two desserts from the selection of belgian chocolate cake, chocolate mousse, fresh fruit salad in cognac, german rice pudding (with caramel or cherry sauce), tiramasu and something else Italian whose name eludes me other than it began with the letter P. I skipped the tiramasu and the other Italian pudding as by then even I had reached my limit.

This was all then rounded off with coffee and a chocolate. All of this, plus a G&T and a schnapps for just over £50. Not only was the food great, but the conversation was too. We'd had a seminar from a chap from Bradford earlier in the afternoon so the Christmas dinner was doubling as a guest dinner. And he and his wife are both gamers and SF fans so we got on like a house on fire, swapping suggestions for good games to be played with family and friends over the holidays. If the rest of the department didn't know I was crazy before, they certainly do now.

All that is left now is for me to climb into bed and digest. I think I should be hungry again sometime around Tuesday.

In the last month I have witnessed two strange atmospheric effects that I've never seen before. On top of which we had an aurora last night.

It wasn't a very good aurora mind, just hazy bands across the sky with a little bit of curtaining to the north (in just the right position that if you were viewing from the balcony it was hidden behind the main body of the house).

Far more impressive was the sun pillar I saw a couple of weeks ago. It was lunchtime and the sun was about as high as it gets - which is not very high and only just over the mountain-tops - when I saw this pale gold column of light rising up from the sun.

Today is was the turn of anticrepuscular rays up to the north in the mouth of the fjord. I was particularly pleased to be able to put a name to the phenomenon after having read a rather interesting article about all sorts of similar things in a copy of Scientific American dating from the 80s that I found in the office downstairs.

Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me either time so the links will take you to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site, which is well worth checking in its own right.

I'm off to dinner in an hour or so to the local posh resterant for the departmental Christmas dinner. I've been promised reindeer and other local delicacies in the buffet, so I'll report back on the food later.

I had something of a stitch-fest last night, embroidering my way through John Travolta in Swordfish and John Rhys-Davies in Helen of Troy. I got all of the embroidery bits of five gifts completed but then, when I came to look for ribbon to finish them, I discovered I had no red. I have every other colour under the sun - plus octarine and azure-rose.

Well, perhaps I was exaggerating about the octarine and azure-rose, but I do have a lot of ribbon in many different colours, and I was sure that bright red was one of them. So it was back to the craft shop - Ab Búðin, it's called - for three metres of red ribbon. I got the 'three metres' right this time, to the amusement of the assistant.

The plot thickens with the grammar thing though. I got a wonderful email from one of the students today; she'd been reading my blog and told me I'd got it almost right, then explained why. Which was very nice of her, so if you're reading this, Martha, then thank you! It turns out that three is masculine because metrar is masculine, not because borði is masculine. This is going to take some getting used to,

Consider the noun horse. In English it's a nice straightforward noun that comes in four basic flavours - horse, horses, horse's and horses'. Not so in Icelandic. In Icelandic it comes in sixteen flavours, because there are four cases for the singular and four for the plural, and each of those eight cases may or may not include the definite article. Sixteen ways of saying horse - hestur, a nice regular masculine noun that seems to be the standard reference for nice regular masculine nouns.

I went out this morning and bought myself a small hardbacked notebook in which to keep all of these language notes. I also got another dozen greetings cards plus wrapping paper, labels and the other normal Christmas acoutrements. In the process I discovered that during the lead-up to Christmas I don't have to go all the way into town to the post office as there's a temporary post office in the middle of the shopping centre, next to the giant Christmas tree made up of 2-litre bottles of Coca-Cola.

Very handy indeed.

It seems that yesterday, with my imperfect grasp of the Icelandic language I got it all wrong. Again.

English is a wonderful language - if a little short on the rhymes that make poetry easier - with lots of irregular verb forms, strange spellings and interesting loan words that must make it a real stinker for anyone who is learning it. One thing is doesn't have, though, are lots of cases except for pronouns (which are a hold-over from Old English).

Icelandic has them all over the place. Nouns change. Verbs change. Even names change. It turns out that what I thought yesterday was þrjár (thrjowr), the feminine form of three, was in fact þrjá (thrjow), the masculine accusative of three. I think.

I think this because I went in search of the word for ribbon, which is (again, I think) borði masculine because it ends with -i. I was surprised by this; I was expecting a feminine noun ending in -a but no, there it was, definitely ending in -i. So I surfed my way along to the Mímir Icelandic Grammar website and discovered this whole thing with cases and numbers.

Languages were never my strong point. Grammatical terminology isn't either. I put this down to being deprived at school in not learning Latin. I'm sure it would make much more sense if I had.

I seem to have gone through today on autopilot. Getting up this morning proved to be less of a challenge than usual, even though the sky was just beginning to turn from jet black to a mere midnight blue.

Midnight blue... now that must be a mediterranean term, because midnight here is most certainly black. It's also been clear a lot of the time but as we're getting close to Solar Minimum - the point in its roughly-eleven-year cycle when the sun produced the fewest sunspots and magnetic storms - we haven't had any aurorae worth speaking of. Nothing more interesting than the occasional pale green glow in the north.

It's only to be expected right now - according to www.spaceweather.com there are only about 3 sunspots visible at present and they're quite small. In spite of last month's storms we may be approaching Solar Minimum early, which is just my luck now that I've got a camera capable of photographing aurorae.

The sun may be inactive, but haven't been. I've got a reasonable amount done today without noticing it - that's the autopilot for you. I managed to get almost the entirety of next semester's HCI module onto my work web pages, gave out results to various students and even paid a visit to the craft shop on the way home.

I still feel slightly awkward going into shops. It's probably because I don't speak the language and my paranoia kicks in, but it might have something to do with this being a small town where everyone knows everyone else. And I don't. Still, I think they're beginning to recognise me in the craft shop as I buy all sorts of stuff and occasionally use it as a venue in which to practise my minimal Icelandic.

Icelandic is one of those languages that has masculine, feminine and neuter nouns with the result that verbs and everything else change depending upon the noun they refer to. This was something I really hated when I studied German at school because I could never remember which word I should use for 'the' - der, das, die, dem, den... it always confused me.

Consider the number three, where þrír (threer) is the masculine, þrjár (thryowr - ow as in ow!) is the feminine and þrjú (thryoo) is the neuter. Metre isn't so bad, the difference in pronunciation between metr and metra can be explained by my accent. Oh yes, and did I mention that r's are always rolled?

So when I asked for three metres of ribbon, I asked for þrír metra. Completely wrong in all respects in spite of containing the words for 'three' and 'metres'. This is strange, as fabric - which is, I think, efni - seems to be masculine. Fortunately the woman in the shop now recognises me and corrects me, and while she smiles in amusement she does manage not to fall over in a fit of hysterics.

I may have to try the Moose's trick of spending six months calling everything Mr Cheese or Mrs Cake.

I managed to get up at a 'reasonable' time this morning. Even with a 3am nodding-off-time I got into work before 10 AND tried to go shopping beforehand.

I'm a little confused by the shopping times here. I got to the shopping centre at about 09:30 and found that most of the shops were still closed. Yet offices often open at 08:00 and it's only a couple of weeks before Christmas. The only one open was Byko, the local DIY store.

After a nondescript working day I went to the post office to send a parcel to the UK and get more stamps. For those of you interested in price comparisons, the cost to send a greetings card to the UK is 65 IKr, about 54p. The Jól stamps are quite pretty too. I've got my first set of 32 cards ready to write and send off within the next couple of days, but I've no idea how long it'll take the post to reach the UK and elsewhere.

The Christmas shopping is going in fits and starts. I've been making various things so a lot of that is mostly complete, but I still have to get the big family things. I've also realised that the travel alone is going to cost about £300, which puts a bit of a dent in the budget.

If I hide in the corner will the world go away?
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I have just spent 125 minutes in heaven. I was completely oblivious to where I was, to what has been happening over the past few weeks and spent the time with a crazy grin plastered across my face. No I haven't been eating strange wild mushrooms, I was watching a DVD.

I haven't watched Star Wars for about 18 months now, because it's too good to just put on in the backround while I'm doing something else. I have to be able to devote my entire attention to it. When the super-special edition came out on DVD I had to buy it just because it existed, ignoring the fact that Lucas has messed about with it again. Today I finally had the time to appreciate it.

So what did I think? My first thought was that I really, really, really need a widescreen home cinema with a screen at least 2m tall, but that's normal any time I watch Star Wars on the small screen. Now what I really want is the IMAX version... :)

I'm not sure whether I like the new souped-up Mos Eisley with all the extra aliens. I know that it was introduced in the previous special edition, and I liked the idea then, but I'm not so sure any more. I know that Mos Eisley is the main spaceport and should be relatively large but I feel that the original version's portrayal added weight to the idea that Tatooine was the hind end of nowhere.

Now for the big beef. Han should shoot first. He's a rogue, a scoundrel, and it's a matter of life and death - his life and death - so he would certainly shoot first under those circumstances. I really hated the special edition version where Greedo shot first, so it's good to see things improved a little. It's still not right, but it's improved.

And I don't like the scene with Jabba either, for that matter. It's obvious that the scene was shot with a human, not a slug, and the bit where Han steps on Jabba's tail is particulaly unrealistic. What's Jabba doing there anyway? He's a big crime boss with a huge palace, so why is he bothering to come out to docking bay 94 to talk to Han?

Bad special effects bug me. I was horrified to see big brown squares around the TIE fighters in the escape from the Death Star sequence. There is absolutely no excuse for poor colour matching like that. At least the attack on the Death Star was free of such cock-ups.

I also noticed that Luke's lightsabre is clearly one of the tunable types whose colour you can select at will. It starts off blue in Ben's cave but by the time they get to the Falcon it has turned green. It's a good thing I can explain that one away or it would bug me too. Similarly C-3PO's restraining bolt must have come off when he fell down the sand dune after being hit by the Tusken Raider. Good explanation there too.

Cockups, errors and interesting editorial decisions apart, I still love this film. I don't care if it is incredibly late seventies - shaggy hair cuts for starters - it was the movie that made flesh all of the books I'd read, it made blasters and starships real. It had an innocence that appealed to an impressionable pre-teen SF geek. I know there are arguments to be made that Empire is better because it's darker, but I still prefer Star Wars itself.

May the Force be with you. Always,

Yes, it's been snowing again, although this time it's only a dusting.

I like this kind of snow, the snow that you remove from the car with a brush, not an ice scraper. It also seems to leave the car looking bright and clean, which is a good thing in my book.

Looking at the cars around town I have to accept that I do have a small car. It's big enough for me - I can, after all, get my longbow inside, which was and still is my main criterion for car size - but it's a lot smaller than all of the other vehicles around. Today, for instance, I saw this monstrosity whose tyres alone came up above my waist.

Now what's the point in this? OK, I can see that it would be useful for gripping the ice and snow in the depths of winter in the middle of nowhere, but in town it's a bit silly. Maybe the driver had come in from in interior to do some shopping.

What really astonished me the other day was that I saw my first Hummer (that's the civilian version of the Humvee). Yes, a genuine American er... monstrosity. It took up an entire lane of the main road, and that's 'took up' without any clearance on either side. I don't really see the point of something that big - but then I never understood the 4x4 that's used for the school run in the UK either. Or the turbo that's used to go shopping.

The US MRP for the Hummer H2 is in excess of $50,000. Over here it's probably more like $80,000 by the time you add taxes and everything else. You can buy a decent house here for that price. It's considerably more than my annual salary. On top of which, it's not exactly economical on the fuel front. Is there something wrong with me that I find that quite disgusting?

I suppose it all comes back eventually to the problem that any society I'd like to live in wouldn't work because it requires people to be honest and consciencious.

*Sigh*

I did the work from home thing today. This was good, as I also managed to get the big pile of fencing and other SCA stuff away from the middle of the floor.

When I came back from Crown in November I left my fencing kit in the car because, I thought, although it was cold it was a very dry cold and this was no threat to my kit. I extracted it before the car problems though, only to find that when we'd had a really bad rainshower at Stanstead, my kit - and, I assume everyone else's luggage - had been left outside on a trolley to get wet. My main luggage must have been in the middle of the pile but the fencing kit, being 'outsized luggage' had been sitting on top.

As a result I discovered that I had a rather nastily rusty schalger and even a rusty epee. On top of which the luggage had clearly been handled heavily by the handlers and the butt of my rubber band gun was broken. I blame the woman at the check-in who charged me extra and wouldn't remove the old labels in case she broke her nails. She probably sent a message to the handlers saying "treat the big red and blue bag roughly".

So anyway, I've had to remove everything from the bag, clean it all off, throw stuff in the washing machine, that sort of thing, which is why it's been sitting in the middle of the bedroom floor.

On a completely different topic, I'm taking a bit of a break from the goldwork to do some Midwinter gifts. The leaves have been taking about two and a half hours each, rather than the two I'd predicted, and I've now finished eight of the sixteen. The gifts I'm doing have only got small embroidered initials on them so I should get through them fairly rapidly. I'm having an interesting time working with Anchor Marlitt and its DMC equivalent, which are beautifully shiny but not the easiest thread to work with. It's single thread work on 18-count hardanger, so it's quite delicate.

An interesting side effect of this was that when I went into AnnEy, the needlework shop around the corner, and bought hardanger fabric the assistant asked me what I needed in the way of threads and opened a drawer to reveal a selection of Coates number 5 and number 8 threads in a marvellous range of colours. This is good - I like hardanger.

Mmm... I wonder if I've got time to do some hardanger cards for various folks? No, no, I have too much to do! I'll certainly bear it in mind for next year though.

Sleep, why hast thou forsaken me? Or at the very least, why do you stay out all night until 5am?

Yup, the insomia is getting worse. I've tried relaxation, meditation, background music, background TV, darkness, light... everything I can think of short of medication. And I don't want sleeping tablets again after last time.

So at 5am this morning I was sitting at my computer finishing the first draft of a rather lewd (if you understand Elizabethan symbolism) sonnet in the Spenserian style. It needs a lot of polishing yet but I'm quite pleased with the basic structure.

What am I doing writing sonnets, you may ask. Well, I got an interesting email from a publisher yesterday inviting me to submit some poetry for a new book. Now I've had various bits and pieces published in the US before now, but this would be my first UK publication. I hadn't actually written anything since before I came to Iceland, so I thought I ought to get back into the swing of things. Besides which it gave me something to do in my state of wakefulness.

I paid for the 5am. The alarm went off early and I rolled over, causing me to miss a meeting at work. Although on less than four hours sleep I don't know that I'd have been of any use to the meeting either. As it was, I managed to get in about 11:30.

Oh yes, and I've now solved the curried problem - it turns out that the term is derived from the name of Haskell Curry, a mathematician who did a lot of work on Boolean and other logical functions. No prizes for spotting that the language is named after him too.

It has also helped my understand why I can't do maths. My name just isn't silly enough. :)

December 1st, while not a public holiday in Iceland, is still a day for celebration. Iceland became independent of Denmark on December 1st 1918, although it was at that point the Kingdom of Iceland under the Danish monarchy.

As a result, at 17:00 this afternoon I went out into the ice and snow on the campus to join a couple of hundred other people to listen to a speech (in Icelandic) and to hear the Ringing Of The Bell. We have this big bell, you see, overlooking the car park, which is rung on high days and holidays. I'm told that it was installed as part of the millennial celebrations - there's a photo of it in my photo gallery. The last time is was rung was in October to celebrate the visit of the King and Queen of Sweden to the university, but it's usally rung for graduation, the national day June 17th) and other important occasions.

Naturally, an important event like independence day prompted me to have appropriately deep and meaningful thoughts. Thoughts like 'an alien mothership would look really impressive hovering above that bell' and 'you can connect a Mac to alien computers more easily that you can connect it to human computers' - although the latter is the result of a particularly bad few days back in 1995. Sorry about that, folks, but my mind wandered somewhat during the speech. I have to admit too that I ran away back to my office when they threatened us with a choir of small children.

Back in my office I was getting to grip with curried functions. No, that's nothing to do with cookery, but some strange terminology to do with functional programming. I'm taking a mental crowbar to my ideas on how to write programs ready to teach this course in the new year and occasionally I feel a bit bruised by the act. This is one of those times.

And thinking of curried things, there is a delicious smell of curried shrimps drifting up the stairs from the kitchen. I think it is time to go downstairs and make myself pasta and meatballs.