altariel | Wet weekend

This weekend we went to Glasgow to see Robert Plant at Barrowland on Saturday night. It was fucking brilliant. Even the support act was fantastic. I am still slightly dehydrated, unlike the rest of my immediate surroundings.

We stayed at the City Inn, where I'd stayed for WorldCon. In addition to its charms, the City Inn supplies free porn. It's a bit like in that episode of Friends: "Cookies and porn! You're the best mom ever!" The City Inn also supplies mini chocolate digestives. Our taxi driver on the way to the hotel told us that Hallowe'en is a particularly popular celebration in Glasgow. I don't know if this is true or not, but I do know I've never seen a queue stretching out well onto the street outside a joke shop before.

Glasgow was wet, but not as wet as our house is right now. An hour and a half before I was due to leave to meet Mr A. at the station, the pipe leading to the hot tap in the bathroom sink began to flood onto the bathroom floor. A short but intense farce followed, which will only reach its final act this afternoon when the plumber puts in his appearance. (Water supply was stopped over the weekend, but there's still been yet another flood through the bathroom floor into the kitchen.)

Our train on the way up was an hour late, thanks to a broken-down Virgin train in front of us. The driver of our (GNER) train made sure we were reminded it was a Virgin train, every time he gave us updates. The train back on Sunday was incredibly full; I think some people must have ended up standing the whole time between Edinburgh and London. We only got seats by pushing over old ladies (not true).

I polished off the end of Kafka's The Trial, Selected Poems of Carol Ann Duffy, The Finishing School by Muriel Spark, and the end of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (due back at the library on Friday, oops). Also a first novel by Spencer Jordan, Journeys in a Dead Season, which intercuts between two narratives, one of a shell-shocked captain doing a walking tour around bits of Leicestershire in 1922, and a prisoner on remand in the present day, waiting his trial for a series of attacks on young girls. The historical sections were much, much better, and I wish he'd just written that book.