Today I am staying at the Benefield Wheatsheaf. This is a pub in Cambridgeshire or thereabouts, noted for good food and hot waitresses – a different one for each course. I like the one with dark hair who talks in very complete sentences. I am fascinated by the way it is impossible to get her to stumble on her words, or begin a sentence halfway through like normal people do (even if I accidentally flick carrot from my cutlery). For her it is a complete sentence or nothing. Sometimes she realises in mid-sentence that the current sentence is no longer entirely relevant and that she needs to switch to a different sentence. This does not trouble her – she calmly completes the obsolete sentence, pauses and then gets on with the more appropriate one. I admire this. I don’t know her name.
Cambridgeshire is a simple place, that doesn’t seem to have any hills or weather.
Tonight I dined on pigeon, which is so small you have to have 2, followed by venison, cooked medium apparently, and 1 beer and 1 glass of wine no.22.
I am now 27 years old. This is 3 cubed, or for a graphic representation of my age, you can picture the little boxes in a Rubik’s cube. It makes me feel a bit old.
I had a birthday recently, which lasted for about a week, and revealed what I have been missing by not having any birthdays for about 12 years. First we went to London for a school disco, which was in a school and didn’t have air conditioning. Everyone enjoyed this greatly but I for one can’t remember much after we got onto the minibus to London, and judging by the photos I just spent the night grinning at anyone I recognised and trying to unbutton my shirt. One girl made the mistake of trying to steal my hat, an orange golf visor, very appropriate to the theme. I have had issues in the past with hat theft so my policy is zero tolerance, and this takes the form of throwing myself angrily upon the thief and pummelling them until I manage to retrieve the hat, which is not a pretty sight when I am drunk and the thief is female.
There was a bit of innocently intentioned homoeroticism with Carlos, which no one is allowed to talk about because his family back in brazil might come and kill me for scarring him. So I’ll just mention that.
We had badges with my fictitious school St Pauls and little ‘Most likely to…’ badges made for us by Gem, not to mention a cake. Vijay dressed up as a headmaster and gave me a ukulele.
This week I saw Harry Potter and the Something of Somethings at the cinema with Linda, my flatmate. Not having read many of the books, I had no idea what was going on, except it featured a lot of odd-looking adults dressing up as children. There was no apparent story linking the scenes together. I do think though that Emma Watson is hot.
I should also make a note here that this week I drove past a dead seal by the side of the road in Wiltshire. I guess this is something to do with Stonehenge.
I would guess that JK Rowling looks back on her decision to call the headmaster Dumbledore with embarrassment, given that it is such a daft name. When she wrote the first book she presumably thought she could get away with silly names and it was only when the books became popular and intelligent people started reading them that she realised she had made a massive mistake giving such a central character such a daft name. It really grates when Harry or some other loser is saying some otherwise quite sharp sentence but then has to put ‘Dumbledore’ in it, as if he is talking down to a 5 year old child.
Last week we went to London as part of the grand plan to do more spontaneous stuff. This involved driving to Wandsworth where there was a little pub doing a music session performed by the ‘2nd hottest guy in the world’ apparently. He said I looked a bit like Jason Mraz. Is this a good thing? It can’t be easy when your entire life is a spelling mistake.
The other thing I did for my birthday was buy cakes for people in the office. This was well received and I didn’t know but when one does this one receives numerous best wishes emails, and lots of people come up and shake one’s hand. I tried to accommodate numerous interests by offering muffins, flapjack, animal shaped biscuits and other stuff. Not many people are into animal shaped biscuits, I discovered. I also bought in some weight watchers cakes. I bet not many IFS people do that.
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