I’ve always wanted to go to Brighton, so it was a polite surprise when my highly organised and forward planning female partner informed me we were going there, in the car on the way to London mere hours beforehand.
Girls are great aren’t they? I have a tremendous affection for mine, however, as I’ve mentioned before, with my experience of ‘proper relationships’ only coming after the age of 30, my brain is full to bursting of habits, theories, cod philosophy and happy bobbins, that until now has remained far outside the direct burning gaze of female scrutiny. Under this new light of experience I have learned a lot of things quite quickly, like not to just say ‘yes’ if you haven’t fully heard the question asked.
I was expecting a foursome. As in my lass meets her mate, and I meet her bloke, they catch up and we find stuff in common to talk about, which would have been comparing the merits of Call of Cthulu and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons having found a large framed map of a fantasy kingdom in the lounge. Alas he wasn’t there, having devoted his whole weekend to said pastime (, and before condeming us both as geeks, you’ve got to respect a guy who’s negociated himself an entire weekend of pure escapism with his mates).
We also shot some footage of ‘Danny Pensive’ my character creaton/alter ego which Bron is working on. It’s one area of our relationship I can’t fault, she loves pointing cameras and recording everything the moves, and I’m an attention seeking egotist. It just works.
Brighton was in the middle of it’s Fringe festival, the venue where we saw two plays venue was a bit small, but the plays were good, Rachel (Bron’s mate we were visiting who wrote one of them) clearly has a good ear for dialogue, and giggles a lot.
Sunday consisted of wandering around London looking at landmarks and filming, then going to see the comedy store players. It’s the second time I’ve unintentionally seen Phil Jupitus, and despite not being a bad improviser he did suffer from some proper stagemongering, a trait which I myself suffer from.
K800, Aye.
I have a new phone. It’s terrible. I’ve only had my last one a year. Despite my loathing for disposable technology as fashion accessory, my last phone was a ‘motorola sliver’. To be honest I didn’t care what kind of phone I had, I just wanted one with a camera on it. And the camera on it was rubbish, My new phone is a sony ericcson with a proper 3mpx camera on it and loads of other gubbins that I’ll probably never use. The golf game is highly addictive though.
God I feel old, I can remember in my Student gaff at Uni having to go round the corner to the phone box in the rain with a stash of 20 pences to see who was doing what on friday night. We did have a land line, but between the four of us only two were paying for it, one was never there and the other guy whose name escapes me as he was such a recluse openly stated he didn’t like the idea of paying for anything he ‘couldn’t see’.
This led to a metaphysical discussion about how to quantify the electrical implulses that came down the phone line into the phone and I explained that yes, although the telephone handset itself was paid for, it was the conduit for the energy and was the nearest thing to a solid object there was. He tried it a couple of times, but it’s hard to justify phone use to a recluse with no friends.
Anyway it’s a nice phone, but I feel I’ve already damaged the enviroment beyond repair simply owning the thing. Still, if the radiation melts the ice caps tomorrow and we all drown, I’ll be able to compose some nice photographs of the world collapsing.
Danny Pensive visits Brighton