Honestly, Beautifully : honey blade

2002-02-11 - 12:24 p.m.

... and behold, hide now has no white lines around the outside! Yay!

Credit for this goes to Mr. Matt, a friend of *Agent Grrrr*. Never met him but heard lots about him. And apparently he's reading this too, so 'ello :)

I know I have been a little on the quiet side, entry-wise. This is because I spent the weekend in Sheffield. Oh yes!

Nii-chan sent me a text last week asking me if I wanted to go to a party that her boyfriend and housemates were holding to celebrate the end of their exams. Since I will always take an opportunity to see Nii-chan, and since I get on pretty well with her housemates, I accepted the invitation. I tried to get Neko to go too, but he said he couldn't afford it and besides, he figured he wouldn't know anyone there and would just sit around, being depressed.

He did, however, see me off at St. Pancras. Funny thing happened on the tube, actually. When the train got to South Kensington, the doors closed. Then we heard them open and try to close again. I looked at the door closest to us and saw a woman standing there, holding the doors open and looking down the platform. After a while the doors opened again and a guard got onto the train through the doors closest to us. I heard him talking to the woman I'd seen holding the doors open and then he went over to a pile of bags in one of the luggage drops and began lifting them off the train.

Security, basically. If you see unattended bags you should alert a member of tube staff, just in case the bags contain a bomb or something.

Anyway, he picked up the bags and began to take them off the train, when another woman who'd been sitting a few seats away from me suddenly ran past us, shouting. She grabbed the bags from the guard, threw them back into the luggage drop, then went back to her seat. The guard told her she was supposed to stay with her luggage, she told him to cool down and from there it escalated into a full-blown argument about security measures. Apparently, someone had asked who owned the bags in question and when no-one had responded, it was treated as suspicious. So we wound up with the very irritated guard yelling "there was a call to identify the bags and you didn't say anything! Were you asleep, or are you just stupid?!"

I'll have to write an entry about amusing things I've heard or seen on tube trains sometime, I really will.

Anyway. Nii-chan had said the party wasn't going to be as mad as the last one I went to, but I think that just meant that less people turned up and people got slightly less drunk. Only slightly, mind.

I spent quite a long time talking to a girl called Karla. She'd been attending university in Japan for a couple of years so we were chatting about our respective experiences out there. Turns out she went to the same university as Kohshi Inaba.

Anyone who knows me reasonably well will be able to picture my reaction to being told that.

Incidentally, Agent Grrrr, it seems she went to the same college that you did, but she left the year you started. Scary, no? :)

I told her about Yoyogi and it turns out that in the time she spent in Japan, she never once got to go to Yoyogi. I told her about the nine-year old girl I saw with her mum and younger sister, wearing a t-shirt that said "FUCK STAR" in big letters. She thought that was cute.

She and I also ended up talking about pet names (I'm trying to train my dad not to use them, she never had any), and when they started playing Rammstein she told me about how her dad, who comes from Hamburg, wouldn't consider Rammstein to be really German because of the way they pronounce "mich". Apparently, people who live in Hamburg or in anything north of Hamburg consider everything south of Hamburg to be "north Italy". Which covers the rest of Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

According to her father's standards, I was taught "real" German at school :)

There was also a lot of talk about comedy names for J-Pop bands. There were the obvious ones like "hide with Spread Beaver" (hence why I only talk about "hide") and "KinKi Kids", but she told us she'd seen a not-very-good J-Rock band a few years back that called itself "Dildo". She had to explain to her Japanese friends why this was funny, apparently.

And from this came "Dildo, supporting hide with Spread Beaver!". Which may be less funny when seen written down.

Around 1.30 or so, people began to disperse a bit. Karla had to meet someone the next morning so she needed to go home, and a couple of other people went out to the Corporation. For a little while, the rest of us went to Harlequin's bedroom and watched Eraserhead. I remember watching the first half-hour or so of that a few years ago and having it make me feel quite ill, so I didn't pay much attention to it. Eventually me, Nii-chan and another girl, Kate, went up to Nii-chan's room and stayed there.

I'm not going to tell you what we did, you'll just have to use your imagination =grin=

I wanted to head back early-ish on Sunday. Around 2.00 I phoned for a taxi, asking for it at 2.30. 2.30 came around and no taxi. It got to 2.45 and I said that if it got to 3.00 and there was still no taxi, I'd phone the taxi company up and yell. 3.00 came round and no taxi, so I phoned.

The guy I spoke to first asked if I'd definitely booked one of their taxis. Since it was the only place I'd phoned, I'd say yes. He then asked when I'd called. I told him, and then he asked for all the details of where I was going from. After a lot of shuffling around, he said he'd put my taxi down for 3.30. He then said he'd send a taxi out straight away.

While we were waiting, Nii-chan said that taxi drivers didn't seem to be all that sure of where the house was. As such, by the time the taxi did show up, it was almost 3.30 anyway.

I got back to London shortly after 7.00. Neko and I went to Tokyo Diner, then when we got back to the flat we got hungry so we ordered pizza.

Unfortunately, I think the chicken in my soup at Tokyo Diner was a bit dodgy, because I've got a stomach bug today. Not nice in the least. I have the evening off work, at least, but this also means I'm missing the first day of my new uni semester. Meep >_<

Maybe I should hold a hot water bottle to my stomach. It might do some good...

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