A balanced weekend
Feb. 11th, 2018 05:58 pmThis weekend I managed to find exactly the right balance between social events with friends and hibernating at home, and between doing various bits of housework and finding time to read, rest and relax. It was great!
After work on Friday I joined Matthias,![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ienthuse, her husband, and two of our other friends for the reopening of Thirsty, a wine/beer/spirits seller whose shop also doubles as a small bar. They closed for a month to renovate and expand the bar area, and Friday was their first night open. It was extremely busy and crowded, but we were able to get a table. It was a bit loud to be able to talk properly (I can never hear in bars or restaurants, and generally don't even attempt to have proper conversations), but it was nice to see everyone. One of our friends has just got a new postdoc which would see him leaving the UK — he's Italian, and he and his (British) wife have been trying to leave since the EU referendum result, making them the sixth and seventh people I know who have chosen to leave the country specifically because of Brexit — so my happiness at his new job was tempered with sadness at Brexit chasing so many of my friends out of the country. I suppose it will be nice to visit them in Vienna, at least.
Our night out at Thirsty also marked the beginning of what would be a weekend of foodtrucks:![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
GuerrillaKitch were out Thirsty, and we followed that up with pizzas from Neapolitan Street Food at a tiny Cambridge brewery on Saturday. It was rainy and freezing, but Calverleys (the brewery) was still packed, though quieter than Thirsty and thus possible to actually have a conversation. I was there with the same friends as on Friday night. We moved on to another nearby pub to watch the rugby (which I don't care about, but Matthias and our friends do), after which we had curry for dinner and then headed home in the rain.
Today I've stuck much closer to home, cooking meals for the first few days of next week, pickling vegetables, and reading. I read two short stories in the latest issue of Lightspeed, 'Four-Point Affective Calibration' by Bogi Takács, and 'The Quiet Like a Homecoming' by Cassandra Khaw. Although they're very different stories, they both had this undercurrent of anger running through them — a righteous fury at injustice and dispossession and cruelties done to their narrators — which turned them into something of a linked pair.
I also read Robin McKinley's Chalice, which I would describe as a very, very McKinley book, with a lot of her tropes (a bookish, competent heroine overwhelmed with the enormity of the task at hand who focuses on her vocation — in this case, beekeeping — as a way to ground herself and give shape to her interactions with other people; a practical, earthy magic system; a monstrous main male character) and weaknesses (everything ambles along at a leisurely, dreamlike pace, and then rushes towards a hasty, inconclusive conclusion), and, like all her work, is essentially a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, but it was diverting enough for a grey Sunday afternoon.
After work on Friday I joined Matthias,
ienthuse, her husband, and two of our other friends for the reopening of Thirsty, a wine/beer/spirits seller whose shop also doubles as a small bar. They closed for a month to renovate and expand the bar area, and Friday was their first night open. It was extremely busy and crowded, but we were able to get a table. It was a bit loud to be able to talk properly (I can never hear in bars or restaurants, and generally don't even attempt to have proper conversations), but it was nice to see everyone. One of our friends has just got a new postdoc which would see him leaving the UK — he's Italian, and he and his (British) wife have been trying to leave since the EU referendum result, making them the sixth and seventh people I know who have chosen to leave the country specifically because of Brexit — so my happiness at his new job was tempered with sadness at Brexit chasing so many of my friends out of the country. I suppose it will be nice to visit them in Vienna, at least.Our night out at Thirsty also marked the beginning of what would be a weekend of foodtrucks:
Today I've stuck much closer to home, cooking meals for the first few days of next week, pickling vegetables, and reading. I read two short stories in the latest issue of Lightspeed, 'Four-Point Affective Calibration' by Bogi Takács, and 'The Quiet Like a Homecoming' by Cassandra Khaw. Although they're very different stories, they both had this undercurrent of anger running through them — a righteous fury at injustice and dispossession and cruelties done to their narrators — which turned them into something of a linked pair.
I also read Robin McKinley's Chalice, which I would describe as a very, very McKinley book, with a lot of her tropes (a bookish, competent heroine overwhelmed with the enormity of the task at hand who focuses on her vocation — in this case, beekeeping — as a way to ground herself and give shape to her interactions with other people; a practical, earthy magic system; a monstrous main male character) and weaknesses (everything ambles along at a leisurely, dreamlike pace, and then rushes towards a hasty, inconclusive conclusion), and, like all her work, is essentially a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, but it was diverting enough for a grey Sunday afternoon.