Custard, Banana, Mustard, Yellow

It seems there is a problem in and around Staffordshire University. The evidence is right there, in the car parks of its Leek Road campus.

We have an epidemic of yellow cars. Today, there were at least five yellow cars parked up, and in a 20 minute walk to and from the supermarket last night, I saw eight. one of them, was a mini.
now, you might not have noticed. As a student, and a childish one at that, myself and some of my friends have started playing the 'yellow car/ mini' game, last seen in about 2005, and gleefully hitting one another when one of these vehicles appears. the minis have been dropped mostly because there are so damn many of them.

so, the reasons for this rash of yellow? are more cars available in the colour? is it just the student population, trying very hard to be different?
Or is it more sinister, is society becoming more cynical to the point where drivers enjoy driving around their little custard-coloured Fiat and watching 14-year-olds punch each other?

either that or it's an ultimately doomed attempt to brighten up the rougher parts of a city with serious problems.

Adventures in studentland: Oxford

This weekend, I was away from home, visiting my dear friend Chloe who is at Oxford, doing Russian (we're all very proud of her). Chloe's the first person to put up with me invading their new world, and she was very gracious about it.
Oxford is a lovely place, though really quite odd - everyone there is a student or a tourist. On a Saturday in Cheltenham there are schoolkids in every direction and I think I saw four in Oxford. It's a strange one, but being with a student - mine's at New College and very proud of it - you get to see stuff the tourists don't, like the cloisters (featured in Harry Potter) at night.
As I expected, my favourite thing about the visit was getting to meet Chloe's new friends, and try to assess how they reacted to our dearest Lysha, who visited before Christmas.
I got to meet most of the gang, particularly her boyfriend - she did well - and they're a really great bunch. I wouldn't blame her if she suddenly ditched the school friends. I went in with the warning that they'd all been given the impression that I was... eccentric (apparently it was something to do with drownings) but I was welcomed, and had a damn good time. We went to see a show (the Oxford University Gilbert and Sullivan society's production of Ruddigore) which was fun, do a movie night and eat ice-cream (while bewildering one of her neighbours).
It was a wrench to come home really, but I have an invite to come back in the spring or summer and I am so taking her up on it.

The next adventure in studentland will probably be with Lysha and/or Martin after Easter.

Plot? who cares about a plot?

because in many ways it doesn't matter so long as it's gorgeous. Same goes for comprehensibility.

I'm talking about films obviously, in TV and books, it's rather more difficult to get away with - though not always.

So yeah, I went with a few friends a short while ago to see Avatar, reportedly the most expensive film ever made. You can see where the money was spent, it is one of the most visually stunning films I've seen, and worth the ticket price. We saw it in 2D, because so many of my friends are students now, and appropriately hard-up, and I can't see any room for the 3D version to increase it's visual impact. It is beautiful.

However, and I'm pretty sure you saw this one coming, it's not a terribly original story. Boy meets girl, who starts off hating him, grows to like him, then hates him again because he's betrayed her family, but is eventually won over by a grand gesture. Only difference being that he's a man in an alien suit. Oh, and the main villain can hold his breath for minutes at a time, so he doesn't suffocate in the planet's toxic atmosphere.

I liked it, overall. The shortcomings (preposterous villains, hideous choice of typeface for the subtitles etc.) are effectively glossed over by the way it looks, and, lets be quite fair, we don't always want to be challenged or forced to think by a film, do we.

We planned to look at some trees

A few Sundays ago, my friend Hanna and I set off for a local(ish) arboretum, the one at Westonbirt, just over an hour away. The plan was to look at the pretty foliage and take nice pictures of it. For the occasion, dad lent me his Nikon DSLR, telling me not to lose or break it (because people do that on purpose).
We began the journey, heading southwest. It started raining, hard, which gave Hanna the opportunity to discover just how quickly her windscreen wipers could go. When the rain stopped, we were coming into Tetbury, a typical Cotswold town, all local stone and antique shops. We drove through, me taking photos out of the car window, and as we got to the edge of town, the rain began again. Wipers go back on, but... nothing. No movement from them at all. Try again, still nothing. We pulled over and phoned Hanna's mum, whose car it was we'd taken. We let her know what had happened, then phoned the RAC. I ended up talking to them, told them what they needed to know and finally got the message that the man with the van would be there in about an hour and 15 minutes.
So, since we had a while, we set off into Tetbury in search of some coffee and somewhere to sit down. The first place we tried wasn't letting anyone in despite having spare tables, so we found another, where the spare tales were there to be used, not just looked at.
We had our coffee, and a toasted teacake and headed back to the car where we took some photos of the dashboard (we might as well). Our saviour arrived, looked at the wipers, got out an electronic thing, put it back, then he fixed the wiper. By hitting it. With a hammer.
I'm told that's called 'percussive maintenance'. It definitely worked. Unfortunately, the advice was to head back home, so no trees for us. The mechanic followed us back to Cheltenham just in case the wiper motor needed hitting again and so we could fill out a couple of forms.
So, our trip to see the trees was called off, but, instead, we sat in Hanna's living room, had another coffee, and Hanna gave me my belated birthday gift, a photo album put together of all the things that have gone on in the last couple of years - the picnics, birthdays, the snow days.
It wasn't what we planned, but it was a lovely day, and there are worse places to be stranded than Tetbury.

Halloween!

I love Halloween. Aside from the fact that it tends to be one of those great Autumn days where it's windy and fresh and the foliage has all gone a glorious colour, it gives me a brilliant excuse for dressing up. I really enjoy dressing up.

It's probably part of that 'you can take the student out of the theatre but you can't take the theatre out of the student' thing. I'm like the metaphorical stick of rock with 'luvvie' written all the way through it - pretending to be someone else for a while is damn good fun.
This year, Halloween will be without all those friends who are off at university, but, since there is still a party (one of the remaining friends has the house to herself that weekend) I still get to dress up.

Looking at the 'pictures of me' thing on facebook, it seems I'll don a costume at the slightest provocation, and I do like to think I make the effort with it. Previous halloweens have seen me as bat, witch, werewolf, devil and so on and so on, while other opportunities have produced one of the original Charlie's Angels (raided my mum's old clothes bag), Prince Charming, schoolgirls, princesses...

This year, I was considering going as roadkill - using the furry bits from last years wolf costume, makeup bruises and cuts and a tyretrack across my chest, but I think I'll save that one (because it is a great idea). Instead I'm thinking bad fairy - all fishnet, thorns and wilted petals, like a flower fairy gone wrong. I'll have to make it of course, but I'm pretty sure I can do that.
It should be good fun. I will post pictures as we go along I think.

p.s. a friend has just started a blog for his uni course, go say hi: http://martin-baxter.blogspot.com/

It's been a while

I am a lazy person and I can't even blame school. so, in pictures, this is what has happened in the last month...

I went to a party, and drank several bacardi breezers

and wore quite a short dress.


I went to the Forest of dean in a mini

and did a maze in the rain

We threw a surprise birthday party for Jess (one of my most favourite people in the whole world)

Then went and drank excitingly flavoured vodka shots (I had a bakewell tart flavour one, it was gorgeous!)

I've got the house to myself for two weeks.
I went to Martins and we played mousetrap


The following night the girls came round for movies and a Chinese takeaway. We watched Moulin Rouge (and sang along), Bridget Jones's Diary, which just made the single girls (most of us) a little bit mopey, so we then put Some Like it Hot on before realising at five that it was getting light already, and it was probably time for bed.






















Oh, and Hanna stood on a slug in her bare feet.




so yeah. A fun few weeks certainly, during which I also got a job and ate far, far too much junk food. I will post something again soon (if I don't just tell me I ought to)