The point of travelling to Scotland was to be in attendance for at least one of the sessions of Joe’s final year exhibition, or should I say the Abertay Digital Graduate Show. Not that this piece of artwork is ‘digital’, but it seems that the BA Games Design and Production projects can be in whatever medium one likes. At least you can’t get an AI to do this kind of stuff. Good luck to them all.
Down the years I have acknowledged our Clare’s planning fetish. I share it, to some extent, but I tend to stick to one medium (a diary) whereas C.’s various lists, diagrams, files and so on spread and multiply. This board has just appeared in her half of the attic/office. This is planning as board game, as one of those models football managers or Napoleon would use to organise their troop movements. And it didn’t even appear until May — though I am guessing we will be seeing more of this even after 2025 has played out.
The wife, who apparently has been waiting to see this version of Swan Lake (you know, the one with the male swans) for 20 years, asked me out on a date for this one, and it was like, why not. It thereby becomes the fourth ballet that I have witnessed. The first was decades ago, the other two have been depicted on here: these guys in Moscow should count, and this cameraman was definitely about to film one.
And my review: yes, it was pretty good, it definitely had a sense of humour (which for the other ballets I mention, was not in evidence). I was keeping up with it all until about 40 minutes in, when the swans arrived. After that I kind of lost the plot a bit. But there were plenty of people on the stage who could dance very well and looked very good whilst they did so. There you go, that’s my review of Drew’s Ballet Experience #4.
Never even got close to leaving the house today. The living room was mostly out of bounds, thanks to deliveries of stuff in cardboard boxes that has just kept on coming over the last few days, and some of it isn’t even ours. If Kevin from Morpeth is wondering where his box of chocolate bars is, we’ve got it, it’s one of those in the picture.
Time to do some work. I didn’t travel out here only to access this room, but it was certainly a contributing factor. Did you know that when the Royal Navy handed over control of Ascension Island in 1922, the place was in possession of 4½ pounds of Bovril? Now you do.
A place I can still find reason to frequent now and again. There were a few students seen to be doing the same (none of mine, though…).
It’s not easy to categorise a post as both “Interior” and “Landscape” but I’m claiming it for this one. Farewell to Gibraltar, it’s been a decent few days and if things work out I will be returning at some point.
The University of Gibraltar is why I am here, indirectly anyway. It is one of Europe’s newest, founded in 2016 and built into a converted old barracks. It’s also one of Europe’s smallest: what you see here is a considerable proportion of the whole. Something about it reminds me of the atrium where Heywood Floyd and the Russian scientists have a conversation in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s the red-and-white theme that does it. And no, there didn’t seem to be any students around. They’re all ‘on placement’, apparently.
I am still making my fortnightly Monday visits to the John Rylands Library for my Palaeography (literally, ‘old writing’) course. With two classes after today’s to go, we have reached “Early Modern English Scripts”. I do not know whether this will ever have any impact on my life, but it’s been interesting enough. Manuscript pages should be touched as little as possible, so rather than holding them down by hand, one should use weights, two types of which are seen here. These will be the kind of thing, never seen in other contexts, that some tiny specialist company based in an old mill in Bradford-on-Avon has been manufacturing and selling for a few hundred years.
Not many students are seen on campus at just after 9am on a Friday, then again, nor am I, all that often. She seems engrossed enough in something, anyway. I hope I managed to keep my class entertained too.
Being 42 