Various things added up to make me quite late for tea with AN and
We then headed to the Pembury which is conveniently just round the corner from AN's place! So that was a good excuse to introduce her to what a cool pub it is. There were lots and lots and lots of lovely people there, and if I namecheck I shall likely forget some, but I got to see:
In the afternoon I headed to Manchester to see
On Tuesday we had time for lunch in a ducky little hippie vegetarian place before I had to catch a train to Birmingham. Birmingham is mostly a pointless place, except that it contains
Wednesday morning I had a bit of time in Birmingham between
Then it was back to Cambridge in time to greet my parents who were back from an exciting trip to California. They got to see
Unfortunately, the pros were really embarrassingly awful, much worse than the amateurs. I have lost the note I took of who they were, which is probably a good thing since I have little to say about them that is at all complimentary. There was a duo of middle aged men who I think got into the spoken word scene before it was cool, but were still thinking they were breaking new ground simply by being middle-aged white (they made such a point of that that it was very little short of racist) guys doing performance poetry and mentioning naughty things like sex! and alcohol! And a Canadian poet who wasn't so cringingly awful as they were, but didn't really understand his audience well; he was over-serious, and a lot of his political material had no relevance to a British audience.
Never mind. The slam section of the evening (where amateurs do three minute slots and randomly picked audience members rate them to find the champion) was very good. Lots of variety, including some rather good poetry and some nice comic stuff. I did the door for the first part of the evening, and the scoring for this part. Although I'm moderately good at mental arithmetic, it's actually harder than it looks to add up five 2 digit numbers fast with an entire audience staring at you expectantly. I fluffed the first one completely, but Thuggish Poet covered me with some nice banter and I got the hang of it after that. I don't really have the training for modern spoken word poetry, but I think I could get into it.
And it was generally a lovely crowd; I particularly enjoyed being introduced to Thuggish Poet's friends, and consistently getting interesting and intelligent questions about science as a response to mentioning my job. Definitely better than: oh, that sounds really hard! I was always hopeless at science *giggle* or: you work on cancer, let me tell you this tragic story about how my hairdresser's sister's boyfriend died of cancer / tell you the latest crackpot theory of a new age cure for cancer...
Back to Cambridge again via some of the lovely Brighton charity shops (no, I didn't plan the logistics of this bit very well) for Shabbat with the parents. Attended synagogue with them in the morning, which is always pleasing and a good chance to catch up with some of my friends from that community. Then I met up with
Sunday I headed back with
I stayed over with
Annnnd this is the final part of a long series which has taken me about two months to get round to posting. I still haven't managed all the book reviews, but never mind. That was a cool holiday, and many thanks to all the lovely people who were willing to hang out with me and give me places to stay.