Happily, Ryder’s clearance to release material again came through soon afterwards, although he remains unable to collect any remuneration.
remuneration (n) 1: something that remunerates [syn: wage, pay, earnings, salary] 2: the act of paying for goods or services or to recompense for losses – source: Guardian Unlimited June 20 2003
Thanks to the bland hegemony of Stereophonics, Dido and Travis, British pop is in the doldrums. Or is it?
doldrums (n) 1: a state of inactivity (in business or art etc) [syn: stagnation, stagnancy] 2: a belt of calms and light winds between the northern and southern trade winds of the Atlantic and Pacific [syn: the doldrums] – source: The Guardian Online June 13, 2003
Therefore, we ask that you release Carl Ayala on his own recognizance.
recognizance (n) : (law) a security entered into before a court with a condition to perform some act required by law; on failure to perform that act a sum is forfeited [syn: recognisance] – source: Traffic R1 DVD, 48:06
I don’t want her to know we’re in cahoots.
cahoot (n) : partnership; league; as, to go in cahoot (or in cahoots) with a person; usually used in the plural, and in modern usage often used to imply that the joint effort is unethical, shady, questionable, or illegal; as, a shill in cahoots with a pickpocket, to serve as a distraction – source: Some Like It Hot R2 DVD, 37:07
For some reason we then took the tube to Piccadilly which was full of people and therefore very uncomfortable. The scale of London is such that you mostly stop paying attention to all the other homo sapiens; indeed you must do that in order to stay sane. (Sanity in London seems to become a recurring theme for me.) The best thing about Piccadilly was this one arcade where a guy was playing a double game of Dancing Stage Euromix 2 at expert level. Moments before he started dancing I thought about having a go myself but after his stunning act there was no way I would get up on that podium and embarrass myself. It is awesome to see someone do that game properly.
Later that night Tom challenged me for one more game of chess, cos who knows when we’ll next see
. We played on Tuesday and I won but it was real ugly, just a few pieces left on the board. This time I beat him fair and square, thus cementing my fame as the brainiac. And I told him to place the board so that the white player has a white square in his/her right-hand corner.
As is customary, I left my packing till the 11th hour. From then on it would be just waiting, waiting and waiting.
The fun stuff with our landlord’s middleman continued up till the very last minute. He asked if we’d like to get the deposit paid back as a cheque, and I – foolishly – said yes. This was the cheque he got to us on Saturday morning. What follows is a crash course in cheques for Finns: they’re bloody slow. The long version: as Monday was a bank holiday, the banks weren’t open until Tuesday. So into the nearest branch we went, only to be told that cheques take four days to clear. Four days! Now I realize I’ve been pampered by Internet banking and credit cards and all that bourgeois stuff, but by the fourth day we were already heading out of the UK.
Everyone who’s been to London knows that the public transportation system is both reasonably swift and chronically overcrowded. I mean I was using Sure but sure as hell didn’t feel it. Besides the mere thought of ugly, perspiring tourists is enough to drive any city-dweller insane.
So off to Camden we went. Here’s Camden in a nutshell: lotsa clothes, might’ve been good if I would’ve been in the mood for shopping, or indeed if we’d had any money. Which reminds me that even though they say that Finland is the third most expensive country in the EU in my opinion Britain felt more expensive. But they do have one free thing and that’s the museums. And if there’s one museum everyone in London wants, nay, needs to see, it’s the Natural history museum because they have dinosaurs.
Alas, the dino exhibition was closed that day. Luckily for me (and therefore for the managers as well) the sign said it would open on Wednesday, so instead we just went to the Science Museum, as it was nearby. Nice rockets they had and early cinema/photography stuff. Erm. Now.
By Tuesday all our travel arrangements were clear and the only thing missing were the tickets that would get us to the airport. I spent the evening and better part of the night as well yakking with Tom, our host, about this and that. Our little discussion cleared up some things that I had been in the dark about earlier and I sure wish I would’ve had more time to stay.
One more thing needs to be told. Our hosts were constantly bugging us about what we were going to do in London. I was quite reluctant to go pretty much anywhere, as I think is quite evident from the tone of my writing as well. My theory is that there’s absolutely no sense in trying to cover London or even the ”most important” sights in a couple of days or even in a couple of weeks. So I just rather settled for picking out a place or two to visit and spend all our available time on those targets. If we’d had more time, say a year or so, I could’ve well done the tourist hell tour and seen all the impressive buildings and such. As it were I was much more interested in the people.
Kun laitteen jättää rauhaan tarpeeksi pitkäksi aikaa, alkaa se pyörittää näytössään demoja ja mainosvideoita. Yhdessä näistä loistavista animaatioista tylsistyneen näköinen mies ja nainen istuvat kahvilassa, kun toinen mies saapuu paikalla. Tulokas ryhtyy pelaamaan automaatilla jotain, ja varsin pian naisen mielenkiinto herää. Itse asiassa tämä kaveri pelaa niin loistavasti, että elli vaihtaa väsähtäneen ukkonsa uudempaan ja kaikki on pelkkää hymyä.
Sen jälkeen on lyhyt tauko, ja kun kone jatkaa tätä animaatiota, ovat asiat edenneet jo huomattavasti. Jälkimmäisessä demossa pariskunta istuu toisen asunnolla juomassa kahvia, ja eipä aikaakaan kun ilma on jo täynnänsä lenteleviä sydämenkuvia.
Mitä tästä opimme? Pelaaminen kannattaa aina.
Cardiffin kämppää jäivät puolestaan koristamaan ainakin kolme pokkarikirjaa, pirusti lankaa, puolikas paketti korppuja, viititsen kiloa aikakauslehtiä, huomattava määrä henkareita, kirjekuoria, paristoja, yhden ja kahden pencen kolikoita, herätyskello ja lamppu. Siis kaikkea sellaista, jota ei viitsi raahata halki Euroopan, mutta jota toisaalta ei ilkeä heittää poiskaan. Toivottavasti pojat keksivät jotain käyttöä noille matkaylijäämille.