Autumn, urban fox, Necrobus

For the first time in what seems like a very long time, we didn't have anywhere to go this weekend - no specific plans, no required travel, just a chance to do... well, stuff. Like washing, and buying a dressing gown after putting it off for ages because it seems like too much of a luxury, and watching some TV, and applying for some more jobs because I'm still trying to sink that one that's both permanent and will let me do a little more of the fun stuff.

Sunflowers in Holland Park

Autumn is starting. At first it was just leaves on the ground - I didn't see them fall, just found them lying there on the pavement underneath the tall green trees. But now I can see them changing on the branches, watch them spiral slowly down and drift down in a slow zig-zag. The temperature is dropping, although today was very warm and sunny. The light comes later, and leaves earlier.

Why is this area cordoned off? I don't know!
But there are autumn leaves on the ground.

But I'm enjoying this change, and I'm looking forward to autumn keeping on coming. Autumn has always been my favourite season. And I've had two summers, and although I'm not complaining about it (not in this blog, anyway) I'm looking forward to seasons again. And they will be quite distinct seasons here, I believe.

SAW A FOX, a London fox! He was not interested in speaking to me at all, even when I mentioned Fabian's name (just in case they happened to have been acquainted by relations of hearsay). He was more interested in attending to the contents of a rubbish bin, and glared at me when I approached and stepped underneath the trees when he realised I was staring. On discovering I wouldn't go away - I was determined for a conversation - he simply walked past me and down the street. I was scolded by M for being so rude, which I think is fair enough. No wonder the fox didn't want to talk to me.

Necrobus by day, courtesy Jozef Fekete

Last night, after spending the day mostly mucking about and watching Burning Love (a most entertaining parody of dating shows, which I do recommend to you highly), we decided to actually do something and headed over to Trafalgar Square. London is something worth seeing at night.

We decided to see some of it from the perspective of the darker history sidey of London - there's quite a lot of that, what with all the executions and prisons and murders and all the years to fit them into - by jumping on the Necrobus for a Ghost Bus tour. I know. These ghost tours can be horrible mistakes. They can be incredibly tacky or incredibly (awkwardly) serious. This one was not.

We were taken around inner London and shown the sights on the Necrobus, which used to carry people out to funerals and had further history that was divulged in an incredibly amusing and entertaining theatrical performance. And we got to see some of the sights at night, with deathly highlights pointed out. Do it. We both recommend it.

Later, we ate cake. Mmm.

View out the window this evening

Blogs posts to come

• The Gathering II, briefly finishing up my trip to Strathpeffer
• Germany - Cologne, Bonn, Achen
• Luxembourg - beautiful
• A cottage on the Welsh border - bats, owls, a bitey horse

The Gathering

I have a particular fondness for Scotland, as those of you who know me will be well aware. It's a beautiful country, both soft and hard, rolling and jagged. It's a Romantic country, with hidden edges that aren't as romantic when you're there. And, for me, it's a part of family history and identity, and a personal link to and with people I love. In 2013 I visited Ullapool and the surrounding area, including Little Loch Broom where my great grandfather was born. Now I have visited Strathpeffer, more MacKenzie country and seat of Castle Leod, and it was quite nice to do so with my grandmother.


Every 5 years the MacKenzie Society of Scotland & the UK have an international Gathering - though they wouldn't kick an international out in another year, it's just a good excuse to try and round people up from across the globe. The Scots were a good bunch for immigration, both from an entrepreneurial spirit and, all too often, need. This year it means MacKenzies from the Netherlands, from Germany, from Australia; Canadian MacKenzie, French MacKenzies (who speak very little English), and 13 MacKenzies from New Zealand (or Aotearoa, if you're trying to beat the Australians in the MacKenzie Clan March around the field). I may have missed out a country or two though I hope not - forgive me if I did.

So on Friday 7 August I caught a train to Inverness from London. I left around midday and got in at 8.30. It was a long journey but there was some fantastic scenery, and it was all new - last time I came South to Inverness, not North. It was beautiful, as I expected. I would like to visit Aviemore and Pitlochry some time. I was also kept entertained (at times) by a small child who played peed-a-boo and then met some other children who had been constructing some animals from cardboard, and who gave him the gift of a blue fish.

This way to the village of Strathpeffer.

The Highland Games had been going all week, based in the castle grounds just shy of the small village of Strathpeffer, and there were a range of events organised. My grandmother and her friend were over in the UK, and attended many of these, from whiskey tasting to trips out and about. There were forts and castles and hills to see, and plenty of lunches and dinners. On Friday night there was a caileidh I was very sorry to miss - apparently Grandma impressed many with her dancing skills. She has always loved dancing.

I was met off the train by some of Grandma's friends, who stayed in her house recently while she was in Tasmania. They were wonderful. I bumbled off the train with my green backpack and wandered down - they were waiting at the end with a sign and a hug from each of them. They drove me to their house and a delicious pasta dinner they'd prepared for my late arrival, gave me whiskey and ginger ale, told me stories, offered me a bed. An old friend of my grandparents' who I had met before on occasions when he's visited NZ - think a stereotype Scot, no-nonsense, real Highland brogue all but impenetrable, passion for the languages of land - popped round. Then I went to a warm bed and slept, and in the morning was filled with sausages and bacon and toast and eggs and (oh yes!) black pudding. I am still so often taken by surprise by how hospitable and kind people can be. It's a marvelous thing. (So is a good black pudding.)

The tree planted for Grandpa in the MacKenzie castle grounds.

Grandma and her friend picked me up in their hired car (after joining breakfast for a wee kipper or two) and we drove the half hour or so to Strathpeffer, managing not to get too lost. We drove through Dingwall (lolz! What a name) and turned down a small straight road with trees planted either side - and there, then, was the entrance to the castle, being guarded by a handful of men in kilts on their way to the games. We were allowed through the gates - we were staying in the Castle.

In the grounds there is a field full of trees, some very old and large, and some new. One was planted for my grandfather - Poet, Lieutenant to the Caberfeidh, and Commissioner - in 2004. It seems odd that it's been so long. The tree is small but growing well.

Then the Games - with a fantastic pipe band playing at intervals throughout the day, walking around the feild surrounded by spectators MacKenzie and otherwise, and by stalls selling tartan and soaps and trinkets and various kinds of fast food. There were individual pipers playing in the corners all afternoon, dancers on the stage kicking their legs, competing for the best. A pit was set up for throwing things, the track prepared for runners and cyclists. I believe there was caber tossing, although I managed to miss it - I was walking up the hills, covering my shoes with mud and admiring the shapes and colours of the land. There were wild flowers in fantastic shades - those purples and yellows - grass in the paddocks heading up the hill, then ferns, suddenly, abruptly, on the other side of a stone fence.

Oh I do love a good piping band!

Colours I missed

Looks across farmland

There was a banquet. It was formal. I helped with the flower arrangements by running down to the stream and bringing back brown-tinged water, I ate food (it was good, and some of it involved salmon) and talked, I encouraged further creation of hats from the large red napkins we were given (it was a formal event after all). We retired back to the castle - and I must thank the Caberfeidh and his family again for letting me stay there - where I slept on an incredibly comfortable mattress on the floor and drank whiskey with Grandma and compainion while uselessly attempting to help with the crossword. I was never that good at crosswords. Or Scrabble. Too much pressure.

Did we down all the whisky? Did we ever finish the crossword? Find out in the next installment!

A gorgeous wee spider I found beneath a tree hundreds of years old.

Roman remains, and eagles

I'm not that interested in their beaten gold necklaces, their large glittering rubies set in silver. I much prefer fragmented scraps of ancient leather sandals, a thin awl made of bone, the piled up remains of a midden. I get sick of the array of golden objects in museums. These items only give us just a small clipped part of their large, sprawling, messy story that we are, still, a part of, if only because we have the responsibility of telling it.

Old Roman mosaics because they are a mix of all these things. They tell us legends, they tell us about the people who lived in those places, and they tell us a little bit too about the history of an area based on how well they have survived, or not. Imagine all those feet that walked across those tiny carefully arranged stones, in their leather shoes, and why they walked where they did.

A farmhouse, on the way to the Lullingstone villa - perhaps, centuries away, someone will visit the foundations of this site,
shift through fragments of dinner plates and bathroom tiles and admire the peak of a leather cap.

The Lullingstone Roman villa in Eynsford, Kent, is fantastic. We went there on a gorgeous day and, after a false start, found our way along the road to a side track through some farmland. The upper fields were filled with golden wheat, the border trees were green. I could not help but think it idyllic.

The villa at Lullingstone, protected in the centre of the Centre. 

And it seemed, when we reached the villa visitor centre and had a look around inside, that it must have been that way for a long time - idyllic, pastoral, a place to want to live. With the river nearby, good soil in the ground, and a reasonably warm climate, it's long been a place humans have been. When the Romans moved into England it was one of the areas they settled, for a time.

The Lullingstone villa was built in the 1st century, and went through various expansions, modifications and occupations over hundreds of years until  it was destroyed by a fire sometime in the 5th. Today the foundations and parts of the lower wall remain, along with fragments of art and daily life. The story of the building suggests changes in architectural fashion, fortune and occupants, and culture. My favourite example is the pagan shrine where inhabitants could worship local water deities and spirits, which was later plastered over, the old niche in the wall filled in, suggesting a shift towards the worship of household deities in this cult room. Later still the space was altered to house a Christian chapel above, decorated with the Chi-Ro symbol and art that today graces the British Museum's walls. It's possible that, even with the chapel in place, pagan ritual continued in the cult room below.

I think the villa is best known for its mosiac, though. The site was rediscovered because of the mosaic when a farmer, digging a post into the ground, struck it.

The mosaic, from the British Heritage website.

The mosaic shows a scene from one of my favourite stories as a child - Pegasus. It shows Bellerophon riding on this magnificent creature, slaying the chimera, with the faces of the seasons and geometric patterns surrounding it. There are also some things that may be slugs with lion tails, I'm not sure, I just know I wouldn't have liked to meet them in the cult room or the chapel.

The detail is beautiful. It's amazing this could have survived so well, underneath the ground, underneath time, and kept its colour. The mosaic could be a demonstration of pagan worship, or an allegory for Christian values. It could be both. And as for why I loved the Pegasus story so much, I don't know. I never liked horses that much, unless they had wings or horns.

It was also interesting to be able to see some of the other odds and ends that were excavated from the earth around the villa, including skeletons and burial ware from the family tomb, carved marble faces of strangers, goose remains from a doubtless delicious feast near the kitchen, a tiny baby's bones that would have died too young to be recognised as a person or to deserve a resting place in sacred ground. Ten days, they say. That's how long you needed to live before you were human. It seems unfair, and tragic, but I think it's also practical, and a way of managing grief in a time where infant deaths were far more commonplace.

A view across to some of the displays, above the villa remains.

They also had on display a recipe for milk-fed snails (in modern script). I don't recall it exactly, but I know it involves soaking a vast quantity of snails in a bucket of milk until they are so swollen they just fall out of their shells. I think the next step is to eat them.

Later we went for a walk down into Eynsford itself, a small and idyllic village surrounded by trees and fields of livestock and golden wheat. I had never see a field of wheat before, somehow. It seems odd that I hadn't, when fields of wheat are such a staple of literature and Western diets.

We visited the ruins of an old Norman castle, near the edge of the river. There were flowers at the edge of the water, and bees everywhere.

And we discovered Eagle Heights because of a road sign, and visited that as well, managing to catch the end of one flight display and the entirety of another. It was well worth it. They are spectacular creatures, birds, and it's easy to forget it when you see them most days - little sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds. I like those birds, but birds of prey are something else. Some are huge and, as they fly above the crowd their wings brush your head and you are delighted but also glad to not be small. Some are so fast you are afraid as they wizz past your head they will crash through you like a bullet.

I had just read H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, and it was exciting to see some of these birds after just reading about training a goshawk.

The occupants of the Roman villa, whether Roman or Briton, must have sometimes kept birds of prey like these - probably not bald eagles, or fishing eagles, but peregrines perhaps - to hunt. 

I O U

I owe you blog posts. It's just that weve been busy not only doing travel things, but general life things, like working and commuting and making dinner and trying to find a place to live more permanently. Then catching flights.

Currently we are in Luxembourg - on a boat cruise on the Moselle river as I write this, though I'll have to post it later in the hotel when I have teh internetz. Luxembourg is in one side of the river, Germany the other. Its a sunny day. We are in wine country.

We have been to Kent, and seen Roman villa remains and birds of prey and a castle.

We went to a Greek play in Islington.

I went to the MacKenzie Highland Games in Stathpeffer with my grandmother - every five years they have an international gathering, and this year there were 13 from NZ. It was fantastic to be in Scotland again, and to go to a new part of it with some of my history. And, of course, to see the tree planted for my grandfather on the castle grounds.

I have been fighting tube strikes by working from home where possible. I have been reading lots of books.

We went to Cologne in Germany last Saturday, exploring that city and taking day trips to Bonn and Aachen. We took the train to Luxembourg on Friday morning. And now it is time to continue looking around - mostly, at the moment, at rows of vines going up Luxembourgish hills and across German flats.

Legend tells of a lost operating theatre

I want you to picture Raymond Russell in the mid 50s. He's of a medium-height, English, with a pair of rounded glasses and an impressive Doctorate in History. He's sitting in the Archives, probably at Kew - rows and rows of old information, books to ceilings, at a small table with papers spread out. He makes notes in a long scrawl that runs nearly off the edges of his spiral bound notebook. At least, that's how I like to picture him.

Legend tells of a lost operating theater - but quietly, only to those who take the time to listen. Dr Raymond Russell listens because he is researching the history of St Thomas' Hospital. When St Thomas relocated to Lambeth in 1862, all the entrances to whatever herb garrets and operating theaters for women it may have contained were blocked up. Time passed. The people who knew about it kicked the bucket - though papers, those very same papers Russell was poring over, kept its secrets.

Russell decided to investigate in St Thomas' Church, which still stood and had been part of the original hospital. He looked first to the ground, for a secret basement operating theater, and found nothing. He looked next to the high space above his head in the rafters of the church. One story tells that he climbed up into a space in the attic, stepping out into an old empty wooden space, dusty and dank, where some corners still held dusty dried herbs. Another says that he broke through the church wall into the theater itself, disturbing a century's worth of dust to rediscover what instantaneously became the UK's oldest known operating theater. Either way, all was completely dark - the skylight replaced long ago by slates and all other windows blacked over with smog and dirt.

Imagine Raymond Russell's torch going dramatically out as he came into the room, pulling out the matchbook he got from St George's pub, and lighting the space with long vague shadows that trembled under the thin weight of his breath on the flame.

Today the operating theater and the herb garret have been made into a marvelous, small and quirky museum. You can follow a set of tight winding stairs upwards to pay at the desk before one more (less winding) short journey to the entrance of the garret. You will discover an assortment of herbs and fragments of animal - and some recipes - reflecting medieval health care. There are displays showing some of the tools used in early surgery, which will fascinate you and make you very glad for advances in medicine and science. There are a few slivers of liver and a chunk of preserved human brain.

There are dried opium poppy heads, which the stories said were found in the rafters soon after Russell rediscovered the space, but where actually found by someone called in to do pest control in the 50s. As you might imagine, after a century of being left to their own devices, there was a thriving community of furry and scaly creatures up there. He discovered there were layers of floor boards - the doctors of old were no carpenters and, when old boards started to rot, they simply built over them - and discovered the poppy heads down underneath them. The museum knows this, because the man himself showed up a couple of years ago and identified the dried poppy heads (which he had varnished! Never varnish an archaeological find! Not even in the 50s). He was apparently quite delighted to see them there, and to see the space had been so well used.

And there is, of course, the operating theater itself. It dates from 1822, when part of the herb garret was converted to provide a space for women in need of surgery (or help producing babies, which looking at some of the implements they once used to "assist" this process was very akin to the surgery of the day). In the 1800s, your chances of surviving surgery (possibly childbirth) were 50% on a good day.

So now you need to imagine yourself in a small wooden room, lying on your back on a slab of wood. There is a skylight above you to let in natural light, and candles posted around the room to add a little more. Around you, rising up like a small amphitheater, are rows of benches. These are all occupied by curious and eager men wearing the garb of student doctors, toting whatever scrolls and notepads they took to such sterling opportunities to observe a master at work.

You are most likely tied down, especially if you have damaged a limb (they will either need to amputate this, or dis- then relocate it) or have some kind of internal trouble (they will need to open you up) or, well, anything really. You're tied down. But they've given you opium to help ease the pain you're currently experiencing, because it's about to get a helluva worse. On the table beside you are a variety of saws in different sizes, some scissors, a selection of knives with different edges, and a whole collection of instruments for grabbing and pulling and twisting. They are all incredibly sharp and all very silver and shiny. 

They don't stay shiny for long.

Meet me at the cemetery gates

I don't know why more people don't see old graveyards as valued destinations for a weekend's venture out into the world. Old graveyards are a place of life and history, much more than death - especially over here, where grave sites can stretch so far back in time and crowd over each other, and where many graveyards are also wildlife reserves.

Highgate Cemetery, East Cemetary

But you try to tell someone at work about your visit to the old graveyard over the weekend (Abney Park one week, and Highgate the next): "Yeah, a good weekend thanks, we went to this old cemetery."

"... Did someone die?"

Abney ladybird

Yes. Many people died. That's the point of cemeteries. "No, we were just looking around." And then I have to try and explain in a maximum of two concise casual sentences while they politely try not to flinch, without sounding like a creepy graveyard loiterer (I'm not creepy) over-defending my predilection for graveyard loitering. They're beautiful I say, and there's so much history. What I mean is this:

All old graveyards I have experienced have been beautiful. They have nice grounds, with trees and flowers and all manner of flora, which in turn house little creatures like birds and insects and, over here, grey squirrels. There is a balance between careful maintenance and letting nature run its course. I love ivy. I love the way it climbs and leaves its mark. Old graveyards are peaceful places and, especially in a big city, they provide a nice place to walk and dream, either in solitude or with a companion.

Highgate

The stones and tombs themselves are works of art, testimony to human skill and design, and testimony also to human emotion. These stones represent memories and histories and beliefs. People bothered. They tell the nearly universal human story of our desire to be remembered as individuals, and to remember. They can tell histories of families, and histories of places - what kind of people lived here? Who was the population? How did they choose to represent themselves once they were gone? And of course, there are the famous people, whose tombs often attract people. These small monuments become symbols of what that person did and represented to the world in their lifetime.

And they are also liminal spaces (thanks Anth 101). This is part of the reason some people tend to avoid them - they're a space to help ritualise and protect us against the mysterious, dangerous transition from life into death. But I rather like liminal spaces. I don't feel tied down to being a thing in a liminal space outdoors. I feel like I can just drift and dream in between, let my thoughts shift about in the breeze, enjoy being outside and myself. There's no one else to worry about in such a liminal space, no expectations (real or imagined, from others or myself) and no clear end to time. Time goes on in a cemetery.

Or I could just play them this song by The Smiths, which has some other good points in it:

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people all those lives, where are they now?
With the loves and hates and passions just like mine
They were born and then they lived and then they died. 

Many people, though, just can't get past the corpses-skeletons-dead people thing. "They just creep me out. I even shiver going past a graveyard on the bus!"

Abney

Cripes. As many zombie movies as you watch, and ghost stories you read, and vampire thriller romances you make up in your head, the dead are not going to come back to life. Probably.

Still, there are also a lot of people who do stroll through cemeteries without necessarily having a person they knew to visit. Some of them are visiting history and figures - like Karl Marx, like George Elliot, like wonderful Douglas Adams, all in Highgate Cemetery that we visited on a beautiful sunny Saturday. Others are just enjoying art and architecture.

Abney chapel

In Abney Cemetery, Stoke Newington, which I believe we also visited on a sunny Saturday, there is a beautiful old chapel somewhere in there centre. It's now old and collapsing and out of use, but it was built originally as a non-denominational for anyone to hold a service for their departed. Today there is a big wide fence around it (covered with the anti-climb paint that covers so much in London) to stop people getting in and potentially being hit on the head by crumbling bricks. There is corrugated iron over some of the entrances, and most of the glass has come out of the windows. Bits of lead curl and twist uselessly from the old windows, and a vine is climbing all over it. But is is beautiful in its disrepair, as it would have been when it was first built.



Apparently these two cemeteries are part of the Magnificent Seven. There may be more dreaded sunny days to occupy.

Douglas Adam's grave, Highgate.
People have left pens to his memory.

Highgate

A birdhouse in Highgate

Abney chapel

Highgate

Fungus in Highgate

This white lion reminds me of Henson's Storyteller... Abney Park.

Marking important living trees, Abney

Abney

A hipster's night in St Pancras with rabbit sausages and Shel

On Monday 13 we went to a fantastic concert in the gorgeous old church in St Pancras (St Pancras Old Church). Shel, a female alternative-folk-rock-pop band from Colarado, filled the small space with the most incredible sounds. But first, I ate rabbits.*

We accidentally had dinner at what I like to call a Hipster Cafrestaubar. I say accidentally, because I was actually trying to get to a different eating establishment but #GoogleLedMeAstray. (Is that hashtag a thing yet?) It did, however, lead us astray in a most delightful way.

In the churchyard. Not at Grain. We did not eat here.

We wandered around and through the crazed complex that is St Pancras Kings Cross station, picking our way around the back and across a bridge, paused at another of London's many water features spewing chlorine from the ground, then circled a large building before ending right back at the front of it before Grain Store.

Here is how Grain describes itself on the Google advertising panel on the right side of the page:

Spacious, industrial-chic restaurant with expanded kitchen and a creative, vegetable-based menu.

So yeah, hipster food. That's clear enough from the description, but what's not clear is that the food it serves is truly delicious - truly delicious - and is served sustainably. Although I admit sustainability isn't the primary thing I look for when I'm out eating, it is something I value and want to pay more attention to. And when you can get such fantastic food from a company that puts an effort it, it's definitely worthwhile. Now I'm going to tell you what I ate because it was an important meal for me.

We had bread and dukka for starters - perfect organic olive oil, the kind that's smooth when it goes down and doesn't burn the throat - with some grilled aubergine (one of my favourites). Michael had the flaked sea bass, tasty enough that I remembered the description and breed (yes, I am one of those who will sample all plates if given the chance). I had homemade rabbit sausage on a bed of delicious and varied peas and pulses, and they were two of the best sausages I've ever eaten. Rabbits, I have decided, are delicious. Then we had chocolate and beetroot brownie - a small, tantalising portion, only imperfect in that they should really have given us more.

Me wandering my winding way in St Pancras Old
Church grounds

We wandered our winding way around the station and up, to St Pancras Old Church. It had been a slightly overcast day, and it was twilight just after 7. The church itself is small, another example of a beautiful English brick church, and its grounds were wonderful. I suppose they weren't anything particularly special, although they were reasonably sized, but it felt beautiful to be walking in there, underneath large leafy trees whispering in the breeze. It is also the home to the Hardy Tree, a large ash with old rescued tomb stones cluttered around its base.

In the 1860s the graveyard went under excavation as a railway terminus was built (something which happens often in the UK; the thousands of years' worth of carefully laid out dead have to make way for the transport and housing needs of the thousands of multiplying living). Thomas Hardy, an architect before he became better known as a writer, was working on the churchyard excavations and was determined to save some of the headstones. They were put around the ash, and there they stayed as the tree grew. Today the roots and the stones are entwined. They obviously mean something to the ash.

The Hardy Tree

On a literary note, it's probably also worth noting that Mary Wollstonecraft was buried in the Old Church yard, and her daughter Mary met and planned her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley. Then Mary (the living one) wrote Frankenstein.

There was a figure sitting near the Hardy Tree, on a bench seat, in a dark waistcoat and a black hat, smoking a pipe with hair falling over her face. That figure can sing and play music like a charm.

Shel are a band of four sisters from Colarado. Their name is an acronym of all their names, and their music is bright and folky and quirky and sometimes a little dark. It's really my kind of thing. They use a range of different instruments, fiddle, mandolin, guitar, keyboard, beat-box, and all four of their voices at perfect times. I'm not very good at describing music styles, so I recommend you look them up to find out more about genre and definitions.

Their performance was fantastic. The venue was small but completely filled (with hipsters - hipsters with things like waistcoats and hats and pipes) and it set the perfect tone. Shel had a great stage presence, building on each other and performing together fantastically. One of the best things about a live band is seeing how they work together, how they make the music come alive not just with their instruments but with each other. Shel do it well. There was also some great interaction with the audience - they clearly have a few fans and friends over here.

Highlights:

• Their song Rooftop, which I hadn't heard before, and which was even more filled with sound and energy than their recorded version. In addition to the other instruments there was some impressive beat-boxing going on.
• Fantastic cover of The Battle of Evermore. Led Zeppelin were a huge part of their childhood, and I think they do the original justice.
• The dragon song and the owl song for their encore.
• Lost at Sea, which they sneakily filmed a video for in Ireland...

Thanks to my brother, who let me know they were coming to play in London. It was a really great night night. And I managed to talk to two of the band, who were both really friendly and kind enough to write messages for him which I will post all the way to the other side of the world when I remember.

Some of you, reading my description and looking at the pictures and hearing about the audience may begin to have suspicions about me. Is it possible that I could be a hipster? Why do I mock hipsters so? Do I protest too much?

~ Fin ~

*Then weeks later I wrote about it, and finally posted it.