Hidden Norfolk - Cinema With Style

Whilst wandering witlessly around the city yesterday, gaping in slack-jawed wonder at the first sunshine we've seen since February, I happened past the Theatre Royal and popped in to book third row centre tickets for Angela Hewitt's upcoming Beethoven-fest together with object-of-my-more-moist-dreams Alina Ibragimova with the Britten Sinfonia (WOOT!) …

Anyhoo, just down the hill from the theatre nestles this rather beautiful building where I took refuge from all the scary blue stuff in the sky and enjoyed a second breakfast and the Guardian Book Review in their elegant coffee and cake house.

This photo also contains a surprising hidden gem: a teeny-tiny arthouse cinema - The Noverre - lurks inside the white building on the right.

You go in through the middle one of the three doors you can see (blow up the photo and you might make out "NOVERRE" over the door) and the cinema is straight ahead of you, housed in the red brick building you can just see on the right of the picture.
No popcorn (yay)!

As well as being a haunt for the caffeine-and-cake-deprived, the main building - known as The Assembly House - boasts a spiffy banqueting hall, a music room for chamber concerts (it's been going a while; Liszt and Paganini both played there), a pair of ballrooms and a rather fine restaurant.
Boffo all round.

Come and visit.

Meanwhile … A Whole Month Late …

We had a spring last year.

The sun shone and plants had sex.

Some people did, too … though not me of course.

And as per usual the Wisteria at St.Giles Church were out in mid April.

This year we have had a grinding, relentlessly dull, dreary and rainy late winter dragging us into the depths of depression and bitter resentment for month after miserable month.

"The rain it raineth every day" ("I stole that from Willie the Shake*")

* I stole that from Joni Mitchell …

But at long last: two whole days without a cloud!

Two! Count 'em! Two whole glorious fucking sunny days!

Suddenly it's stinkingly hot and the wisteria have woken up to realise it's almost smegging June and they should have been frantically shagging for weeks already.

Last night at Tony's gig we spent most of the evening outside on the patio, watching the crescent moon sink into a sapphire sky.

Folk in places like California (hi, guys) take this sort of thing for granted, but as this is the first time we on the east coast of Blighty have seen the sky since February it cast a magical spell that lasted well into the early hours. It was that good. Really. Had there been anybody there willing to mate with me things would indeed have gotten all unnecessary.

As it was I lay on my back with my binoculars, getting my first view of the year of such wonders as M13 and other delights that hide behind the horizon most of the year and only peep out in mid-summer.

Unfortunately, this far north at this time of the year it doesn't get dark enough for decent astronomy until after midnight, and then you've only got a couple of hours before the light starts creeping back into the sky.

Having missed an entire spring-worth of stargazing I'm making the most of what might turn out to be the only clear weekend until winter.

And of course wandering around the city taking photos for the first time in months.

Have a spiffy weekend, people.

Make the most of me being happy. It'll last as long as the sunshine.

True Heroes Live Forever, pt.2

I put my back out last Sunday and I've been hicking about with a walking stick all week, much to the hilarity of the office.
I've also been too grumpy to blog (as per …).

This evening, however, I'm too sad not to. Another great hero of mine that none of you will have heard of died today.

What a shitty week all told.

I'll be back when I'm less grumpy and my heroes stop dropping like flies.

True Heroes Live Forever

This year's Goodwood Revival will see a celebration of the Shelby Cobra and I'll probably cry like a baby as those sweet, elegant and sexy machines roar past me.

Carroll Shelby died yesterday.

What he did with his life, however, will ensure his immortality.

A Snot Monster Writes …

Bleah …
Yes, it's still raining, and to make my world even happier and just filled with buckets of fluffy kittens and chocolate boobies I've been down with Man Flu since Sunday and it sucks.
Pounding headache, throat so sore I can't speak, occasional vomiting, a fucking painful hacking phlegmy cough that wouldn't disgrace a lifelong eighty-a-day smoker, a raging, sweaty, no-sleep fever, snot and sneezes pouring out of my face like Linda Blair projectile vomiting and an all-over ache like I've just got a good kicking.

Of course, any woman would shrug this off as a mild sniffle, but hey! I am the weaker sex and I'm gonna milk it for all it's worth.

Shit, I feel so crappy I can't even face alcohol. I need hugs and sympathy but in real life that only happens to other people so I'll just fill myself full of drugs and crawl back under the duvet.

See you when I surface. Oh, and look out for flying snot.

Still Raining

Blah …

… blah …

… and thrice blah.

Bite Me

Midway through season four of my annual Buffyfest and it appears I am not alone.

This from today's Guardian.
Gotta love that first paragraph.

So …
Play amongst yourselves, I'm heading back to Sunnydale.

"Deprimere ille bubula linter!"
"Er … Debase the beef canoe? Why does that strike me as not right?"
… etc.

Spot The Difference

Spring, 2011

Spring, 2012

Potato Flower

Found abandoned on top of a metal bollard.

Just about the only sign of spring around here.

Astronomy In England

Some of you may have noticed (though most of you probably have not) that I've not posted any astrophotography shots since February (here's one).

Well, there's a reason for that and that reason is this:
I live in England.

Friday night is Observatory Night.
It has been cloudy, foggy or pissing down with rain every single Friday since February.
It's been raining here solidly for two weeks now.
It is the stinkiest pisser of an alleged spring on record.

Shakespeare, probably our greatest Englishman and one who - staging his plays in an open air theatre - would have had occasion to glance up at the English sky from time to time, wrote "For the rain it raineth every day."

Bill Bryson, who, for reasons best known to himself, has settled down just across the river from me, says that looking up at the sky here is "like living in Tupperware."

Except it's a lot wetter.

 This year the rain it raineth every bloody Friday night, and in particular it raineth on the heads of astronomers, forcing us to sit, night after night in the lecture theatre, drinking endless cups of bad coffee and talking rubbish.
Last night I glumly took these photographs before grumbling my way indoors, brewing up a stinking brown mess in the kitchen and then moaning about the weather to the soundtrack of the clickety clack of a bunch of miserable old codgers in the "telescope mirror grinding room" (which contains … er … a pool table) and wondering if there will ever be another clear Friday night.

The past week and a half has seen our Spring Star Party, where a whole bunch of us (though luckily not me) had a thoroughly dispiriting  time sitting, shivering in soaking, freezing tents in the middle of nowhere up in North Norfolk being lashed with gales and torrential rain.
Last night, as I helped them unpack their dripping wet gear from the van they seemed remarkably chipper about it all. Over here, it seems, astronomy is not so much about looking at the stars, it's more about hope … the hope that one day before we die we might get the chance to actually see something in the sky other than water.


Welcome to astronomy in England.