I'm cold

Oct. 28th, 2012 11:24 am
millionreasons: (Default)
Yesterday was de-facto Hallowe'en. It felt it: the start of the time of year when missing a bus becomes a minor trauma as it means ten minutes shivering in the bus-stop. The time of year when pub toilets seem to run out of hot water, paper towels and electricity for the hand-driers. When you wonder at the wonder of radiators and want to embrace the person who invented them.

We went into town to the Paul Denney exhibition at Somerset House. They were setting up the ice-rink, a modern-day sign that winter is coming, like restaurants advertising their Xmas meals or adding a scarf to the wallet-keys-travelcard outside essentials.

I had expected the exhibition to be in a nice warm room, but it was down in the Deadhouse, i.e. the crypt, i.e. rather cool. Some of the paintings were hung solo in tiny chambers, which were once the coal holes. Inside the main exhibition room were the tombstones of former courtiers:





The venue was suitably atmospheric for the paintings:





We warmed up on a splendid hot chocolate (milky English hot choc crossed with thick Spanish chocos) at Salt Espresso and some free tea samples in Twinings shop-cum-museum. As well as a nice cup of Darjeeling, the man on the till chucked in a couple of free tea bags when I bought some rose Earl Grey. They might be owned by Big Food, but I like them (and am pretty easily bribed). We walked all the way up the freezing cold, windy Strand as the buses were diverted, only to miss one at St Paul's. London buses used to have radiators which were nice and cosy and sometimes the bus drivers forgot to turn them off in a hot spell in Spring but they worked. Then air-conditioners arrived, which was great because it gets very hot on buses in summer. But people open windows because people are idiots and even when they don't, half, no - three quarters of the time the air-con aren't on. However, last winter, travelling up to Uni by bus every week, many of the 210s and 183s did have their air-conditioning on, creating freezing conditions and making me sit downstairs with the old people and crying children. I queried this with TfL and they said the drivers have no control over the a/c; it is thermostat-controlled. So basically, none of them work. When they should now be blowing out warm air, they're not on. It drives me fucking bonkers.

Anyway, we got a 73 down to Essex Road to Rachel and Mark's Cut And Paste Your Entrails Hallowe'en DJ night at the Mucky Pup. Mark kept his specs, earphones and hat on over his monster mask. I went as an overweight, wallflower goth, which basically meant dressing in black (including an original gothic lace vest) and putting on some slap.


Brought up on the right side of Doncaster

I wasn't very good at being a goth in the 80s/90s, what with my fair hair, round face, dislike of Fields of the Neph and giving up the black clothes in the summer. Other people were dressed as where's Wally and Pussy Riot (on the way home I saw an Anne Boleyn, but no Jimmy Saviles, not yet). A skull-spider hung from the ceiling and I wondered if if was the Hallowe'en equivalent of mistletoe, but didn't stand under it to find out. Rachel (who last year dressed as a hen party because it was the scariest thing she could think of) played the arachnophile Lullaby by The Cure, but perhaps she should've played this:

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