Category: old blogging

OK, I admit it. I’ve surpassed myself for booking into a bizarre hotel. The Stoneleigh Park Lodge Hotel is situated in the middle of the Stoneleigh National Agricultural Centre showground, a most unusual setting. For those that have never been to a major agricultural showground, it’s a wide open space with a grid of roads and seemingly randomly placed buildings which are left unused for much of the time. One of those buildings, in this case, happens to be a hotel. I reckon there are no more than ten guests here. The restaurant is in another of the randomly placed buildings, about two hundred yards distant across a "green". I can’t decide if I want to be the only guest in the restaurant but be able to have a glass or three of vin rouge with my meal, or if I want to drive into Warwick and see if there is any more life to be had, but be limited to just the one beverage. Hmm.
I think Warwick will most likely win.
On the plus side, the hotel is quiet, comfy and has a phone point. All pluses. And it’s reasonably priced, though not the cheapest. £50 for a double room, including breakfast. But then PFE is paying, so it doesn’t matter, does it?
Oh yeh. I’m PFE. Arses.
Incidentally, isn’t there a blogger in Warwick. Where does that Dead Kenny bloke hang out?

Oxford services on the M40. Not likely to be highly recommended by me any time soon.

Some of you will have noticed that Dave Kennamatic seems to have gone missing. Alarmingly, he’s not even answering email.
"What can I do about this?", I thought to myself. Why – a poll, of course!

Vote-o!
The poll will remain open until Dave posts something.

Funny that the EU referendum vote in Latvia, and most of the other referenda votes too, have seen much less coverage in the media than the "No" vote in the euro referendum in Sweden the other day. Clearly a pro-European news story doesn’t sit so comfortably with the agendas of the newspaper editors.

Bren, Greg and I were going to go to Reading today to poke about the shops, as I need to find one or two items, and I’d travel on from there to Birmingham where I’m attending a trade show tomorrow. But Bren is under the weather, so they’re not up to it. Which is good in one respect, as I’ve done nothing about packing yet, although I have managed to organise myself sufficiently to go and pick up the hire car.

The Plants For Europe website now has a few more pages added. This should hopefully begin to make a little clearer what exactly it is that I am doing – or, at least, it will do when I finish the site. The "What are Plant Variety Rights" and "I have a new plant…" pages will make things even clearer, when I get around to making them.

I’ve been having problems with my laptop. The mouse pointer moves, all by itself, to either the top right or bottom left of the screen. I’ve just disabled the pointer stick, and that seems to have cured the problem – I’ll have to rely on the touchpad instead, which suits me fine as I prefer using it anyway. But it is a little annoying. And I don’t think I want to return the whole machine under warranty to get it repaired, as I don’t really want to be without it for something so minor.

I’ve no idea what use it might be to anyone, but grayblog now has an RSS feed. It can be found at http://www.grayblog.co.uk/rss/index.rdf. All posts from now on will have a title, but that title will not appear on the standard grayblog pages, simply because I don’t want to have to think of a witty title for each post. Titles will be more functional than entertaining.
Well, I say that there is an RSS feed, but I can’t get it to work at the moment. Check back later.
UPDATE: it’s working now.

Ah yes! Monday’s day out. I’d almost forgotten…
After doing a few chores involving the bank, Boots and the district council, I caught a train to London Bridge where I met up with Gem. We don’t see each other anything like often enough. She’s been feeling a bit low lately after a messy break-up, and I get the impression that things have been a bit stressful for her at work, with layoffs and people jumping ship. She seems to be approaching one of those crossroads in life, so I hope it was good for her to take a day out, relax, talk things over with an impartial observer, and generally have a good day.
Anyway, we mooched from London Bridge along the South Bank, pausing for a baguette-based lunch along the way. Not the best baguette I’ve ever eaten, filled with particularly dry grated cheese, but very nice to sit by the river and people watch whilst we caught up on each other’s news.
Then we sauntered along further until we got to the London Eye, where there was an icecream vendor. I really fancied a 99 with two flakes, but he only had chocolate icecream. It was good, but not really what I had in mind.
After this, we went in for the feature attraction of the day, which was a tour of the Saatchi Gallery. Modern art is not really Gem’s bag, and this visit was my idea. She has promised that next time we shall spend an afternoon looking at Impressionist paintings to make up. I say "make up" because even I was not entirely satisfied by the gallery experience. There doesn’t seem to be a logic to the way that the gallery is laid out and the pieces displayed. There is currently a Damien Hirst retrospective, but it was hard to actually gain any sort of overall view of the development of his work and style. Instead, his pieces were scattered through the rooms of the gallery, juxtaposed with works by other artists. The overall feeling of the gallery is that each artist is simply trying to out-shock or out-clever the next, and the endless references to death, sex and shit do become a little tiresome after a while.
Favourite works? Ron Mueck’s Mask, which is truly terrifying in it’s proportions. Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (known as The Shark In The Tank to you and me), which gives a terrifying impact when viewed from a distance, but seems weaker and more frail when viewed close to. Richard Wilson’s 20:50, which is innovative and produces an awful vertiginous sense in the viewer who also becomes part of the artwork by entering it. In fact, seeing 20:50 alone is worth paying the entrance fee for.
After the Saatchi, we retired to a waterside bar to enjoy some beers in the late summer sunshine, before heading up through Covent Garden to Oxford Street, where we braved the hordes, looked in a few clothes shops and ended up in Waterstone’s at Simpsons to use their loos and buy some paperbacks. Then we headed back to Soho, had some cocktails, met Gem’s friend Lisa, and finished the day with the three of us enjoying a Chinese meal before I had to dash and catch the last train home.
A good day all round, I’d say.

Galileo, RIP (rest in pieces).