Why This Is Hell

As far as I can tell, I have now got all the Shakespeare titles in Arden 2 -- having recently found a Love's Labour's Lost and now a Pericles and assuming there is no separate edition of The Sonnets. If I want The Two Noble Kinsmen I need to turn to Arden 3 (or possibly 4).

I am tempted to turn to Revels Editions, and indeed found a cache on Thursday, but they were mostly £6 each. Since I am unlikely to ever actually read them, this seemed a little excessive. I did pick up a The Alchemist, which I studied at ... A Level and didn't have a copy of. I need a better list, to check which I have already and some pricing research, although the two pound rule may be invoked.

I think I am up to seven copies of The Thirty Nine Steps, each of them a distinct edition. Six to go. The hunt continues.

I note also I have have been saying, "This used to be a bookshop" a lot this week.

There had been a plan for a two-pronged expotite on Maidstone, but that's been postponed for logistics reasons, so I thought, good, I can stay at home and watch season two of Survivors and write. So far today has been noticeable for the failure to do so.

Now I find I need a) a copy of Camera Lucida and b) to order stuff from Amazon which results in a need to go to the library and find wifi. It further occurs to me that I could buy the things that I need from town whilst I'm there. And this occurred just before I bought disinfectant in the corner shop - disinfectant I had anticipated buying in Morrisons after Plan C's visit to Staples, a visit shelved after a realisation I don't need to stuff from Staples right now. So library and wifi and shop and home - or library and Bux's wifi and shop and home - or library and wifi and shop and Rymans and Nerd and reading Memoirs of a Survivor and home.

Plans are multiplying.

None of them seem to involve watching season two of Survivors...

Last night I bought a rover ticket to go and see David O'Doherty. I think I bought the wrong one. I bought a Megarider when I should have bought a Unirider. My four trips to Britain's European campus will break even, and I don't have to scrabble for change. Just not lose the ticket.

Sneakily it last for seven calendar days, not a week, so I can't use it next Saturday morning.

To make a profit I shall have to go to ASDA. Maybe more than once. And maybe go to the campus of the hill twice on the days I'm seeing something in the evening. Maybe go on Tuesday morning, come back for therapy, return early evening. Have I time to go up to ASDA and back between 10.30 and 2.00 on Monday? In theory, yes, but is it worth it? I could go to KFC for lunch...

Yesterday I wanted to go out - although I should have stayed in to a) mark, b) tidy, c) research the conference paper. But sometimes getting out is what's needed.

And curious it was that Planet Thanet was the answer.

First on the Explorer to Margate, which is closing down brick by brick. Like Ramsgate it has a KFC and so, as I can't usually have one, I indulge. Ten minutes after arriving I'm served, and as always it's not as good as I imagine. I pop next door to a charity shop, do the Turner ("The Sound of Music" - rather dull in the end), and raid the charity shops and Julian Graves.

On to Broadstairs, and I discover that Time and Space has closed down - ah, no, in fact it has moved down the hill. That's lucky! (I have photographic evidence.) Past Ballard's the Florists and to the Broadstairs Bookshop, which smells of dust and cat pee. Or is that me? Some cheap hits. Albion is still open - but closed for lunch. Eventually they reopen. Again the smell of cat pee. Maybe it is me. This is a piled bookshop, so it's not so much browsing as archaeology. I skip out on too close a look.

Thence Ramsgate - charity shops and a second hand shop. A little pricey, but no smell of cat pee. Locate tapioca starch - but the recipient has some already and disbelieves it's the same as tapioca flour. We'll see. I have no time for Cafe Nerd and pop into Waitrose. No tapioca flour there; poor choice of safe flours in fact. Buy batteries once I've worked out which stickers apply to which.

The final stop is Westgate Shopping centre and I check my timings - 17.07 or 18.20. No time for coffee - I browse a couple of shops, and decide a sub for the bus is appropriate. I make the second (or third) discovery of the day, in Subway:

a BLT need not include lettuce nor tomato.

Or, rather, includes bacon but you have to specify lettuce and tomato when you are asked about salad.

That's not a BLT; that's a B.

The 17.07 is only going to Margate, it appears; the 18.20 is Mon-Fri only. This is not a shopping centre that welcomes the carless. I catch the loop back to Margate, and I've time to buy some butter and a packet of crisps from Somerfield. The shop is closing. Another slice of Margate going.

A long journey home - and the cats can hang, I'll go to the pub now, feed them later.

Damn - no ice cream as well as no coffee.

In my last job a student gave me a Jay and Silent Bob poster as a thank you - in fact a Bluntman and Chronic one. For many years it has been on my office wall, although it now needs remounting, and I'd misfiled the student's name. That's a disjunct there - I will have taught five hundred, maybe a thousand or more students since them, and they can't all be remembered. But still.

And thus on Thursday I returned for a flying visit - I avoided the college itself, but I met up with G, who I taught and who (as far as I can tell) replaced the person who replaced the person who replaced me. It's weird, because he's crossed the professional divide, and whilst we were perhaps more social with selected students there than I am now, the relationship is bound to be different. And it's more evidence for the shift from young turk to old fart.

At first the town centre looked much the same - I didn't get that thrill of recognition I get with returning to Nottingham and Hull, or the sense of disjunction from Birmingham or Leicester - and it remains a market town that's lost its market and not found a role. That is until you get into the former Octagon Centre, which has been renamed and expanded, with an Identikit mall splice on its western end where the bus station used to be. It spills out over a lost pub, and a couple of car parks, and has the usual run of shops that would be expected. No trees, no water, no art, no life, few places to sit, and an ambivalent attitude to be public or private space. but there was a Cafe Nerd, which is where I met G, before we adjourned to a pub that I'd not visited when there. (I didn't get to my usual haunts bar one - meant to get back to the Bell but didn't, have boycotted the Antelope since Jon was sacked/resigned, and the Falcon and O'Neils were about the company, not the pub. I did have a quick time kill in the Hobgoblin.)

G caught me up with the college, and basically it sounds like management has destroyed everything that we'd set up and made work through incompetence, reorganisation and I suspect bloodymindedness. I am so glad I got out when I did, because now I know I would have been dead by now. Dead and unemployed. G shot off to get ready for his gog; I checked into the guest house and scratched tea together from Tescos.

I walked back to the Nag's Head, and realised it had been the Pride when I lived here, and that this was the venue where the Sex Pistols played an earlier gig. (And if everyone saw that who claimed to have done, it must have been much bigger then.) G's band was on third, but I had missed the first act, and the second group were fine if a little noisy. Xenon Codex featured G in white suit and loud shirt, a guitarist, a five string bass, a drummer, and a two octave keyboard wired through twenty pedals. They played two songs and an encore, over forty five minutes. Ah, he's learnt the seventies prog rocks rules well.

Afterwards I sat outside for a while before I went to refind G. He introduced me to B, who apparently was scared of meeting me and didn't believe I was there. God rot my memory. It was B, of course, of the Jay and Silent Bob poster. She told me how much she looked up to Mark and myself, and of course that was very flattering and touching. But still. It's such a mismatch. I can't remember them all. But it did come back.

And the next day, a day as grey as Thursday was Sunday, I caught the bus out to a secret location, and, arriving earlier than planned or necessary, I sat at the pond and communed with the ducks. lamentables arrived at about the time I thought I was going to, and we wander across to the shop. There followed two hours of scouring, and taking out and putting back, and frowning at British reprints editions, and dark looks at the Irish guy who was whistling the first verse of some hymn or other, before we got to the closing for lunch point. We paid for our purchases - well I dealt with the paper money and lamentables with the shrapnell, one of us having taken the precaution of a cash point raid - and made for the Red Lion.

In the past we might have gone back to the shop for a further hour, but we had run out of energy, and I had run out of cash. We chatted, instead; it's been a while, and it was nice to soak up the sun which had burned through. Then back to the station.

My ticket failed to work in any turnstile, and I managed to catch the slow train down to home. Memo to self - it is possible to be overtaken on that route.

And now I have another legacy of the trip - two foot of books to catalogue.

Much of today has been spent tidying up - I've cleared two boxes of "filed" papers-and-stuff down to less than one, and cleared a large swathe off my desk, vacuumed, corralled the 1970s books into something approaching alphabetical order by author, moved some CDs and DVDs, slotted some journals back and -

It's still a mess, but I have most of my desk back. I wandered down to Morrisons today to a) buy some butter, b) get rid of some glass and c) explore the bedroom-kitchen shop. I left with no camera, so I wasn't able to take a picture of the Darwin car badge - which I suspect is something to be found at http://www.darwinuk.com/?gclid=CP6vz76XmZgCFUse3godDBEZmg - and I only remembered butter on my way out.

And now I've been looking for secondary materials on The Man who Fell to Earth, which is decidedly thin (I know of two books on Roeg) and And Chaos Died (oooh look, I have the manuscript of On Joanna Russ, maybe there's something in that). I need access to a 1978 issue of Literature/Film Quarterly - and the campus on the hill starts at 2003. Grrr. The one piece I do have is Fredric Jameson reviewing Gregg Press editions of filmed-books. Ah, but that issue has a piece on special effects which which will useful for Thursday's lecture.

Let it be recorded: Today has been a good day.

I've been feeling a bit trapped, and the endless coypu-editing, camp or otherwise, is getting to me (do experts not know the titles of the books they are discussing? can no one follow Routledge NuStyle?). A jolly, an expotition was in order.

There are various exhibitions in London I am failing to see. My therapist recommended an exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion, and there's a bookshop in Bexhill-on-Sea which requires more exploration. Various days turned out to be free, and Saturday was a wash out, and the shop would be shut on a Sunday, and I was working on Monday. So Wednesday was the day I finally was free - and note this is the day the dvd shop shuts. I renewed the railcard, caught the train and was in a bookshop was 11.30. I found a pile of seventies books which in some cases stretched the two pound rule, and a Leigh Brackett crime novel, and the shop keeper said he'd call it two quid a book plus a quid for the cheap one. Eight books for £15. Result.

Then a trudge around the various charity shops - with nothing leaping off the shelves that I could justify buying - I think the quality of the books is improving, but that means fewer battered paperback sf books. No waistcoats (vests), no jackets, no interesting bric-a-brac - although I paused on a purse disguised as a glitterball (or a glitterball disguised as a purse) with the notion of it being a birthday present. I found something that will do, but not, yet, what I wanted. I proofraed the dvd shop and went to find some Fried Chicken for lunch, which I ate near the Pavilion, kicking the gulls out the way (gulls like chicken. Who knew?)

I sort of resented having to pay for the exhibition - but I will say more about mid-period Ben Nicholson later, as it was rather interesting to see landscape and geometric abstraction mesh so closely together. There were some nice photos in the overflow of the Brighton Photo Biennial (it's over now, and it wasn't in Brighton). A wander around the building, a coffee, a reader of the Grauniad and then to Sainsbury's* via a rather worrying cakeshop.

I popped into Sainsbury's, to picked up some pitta bread (had it been a bit later then I would have bought sustenance for the journey home), but as it was I bought a blue cherry yoghurt and two six packs of pittas for the price of one at 70p. Naturally, they come up at 75p each. I query it. Someone is despatched to the shelf - and the sign was in the wrong place (it does not cover organic ones, which these were, and neither of the two signs were that close to any pittas. But - get this - i could have them for 70p. That's better than Tescos would behave.

I lost the card from the bookshop on the way to the pub - but found it on my way back.


* I remember it as a Waitrose. I remember green signage. Has it become Ramsgate in my head?

Note that Zavvi have boxsets of Friends and West Wing complete for just under £50 - and a Pixar box set which is less good value but presumably not bad.

Walking down T Road and a woman in her forties said to me, "I had no idea any of this existed" and laughed manically.

Tested camera on wall - picture of the site of Albatross House.

Dropped cards into work - took an hour.

Went to farmers' market and spent £45 on cheese (this is the real shit) with and £8 on chorizo with Patrick. 

Bought bacon bap from van - delayed by (homeless?) woman who was failing to pay, then failing to find her purse (she'd got it out already).

Charity shopping. Nada.

Boots for prescription. Tesco for remains of food shop. Need crackers, though. And something else. I forget. I couple more cards.

Listening in to discussion on Pratchett book: Mr Discworld Monthly remains unconvinced. C'est le vie. http://www.discworldstamps.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10560&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0&sid=6edbaefd7475f22bf5239f1dc6ef9a8f