Glastonbury Festival #6

This summer, like every summer since 2005 (except from the year it wasn't on), I went to Glastonbury Festival. It's a yearly occurrence giving a good group of friends the chance to catch up, sleep rough, drink cider, and see bands. Here was this year's "crew":



If you enjoy music festivals, I can't recommend Glasto enough. Once you go, you will be comparing every other festival to it for the rest of your festival-ling days! So many good places to eat, a great atmosphere, a sea of tents (as modelled by myself below)



...and of course, the music. We weren't too thrilled about the lineup this year, but there was still a decent amount to see. My particular favourites were Eels, Queens of the Stone Age, and a long-term favourite of mine, who I'd been waiting at least a decade to see, Pulp!



Ah, Jarvis... your banter, your "moves", and your songs are still tremendous.

The mud and rain were quite horrible at times, especially as it took 6 drenched hours to get into the site, but we battled through. As always, it was worth it. We will have to think of something else for our "Glasto friends" group to do next year, as they're having another off. But I certainly won't rule out a return in 2013... or 14...

Check out the full set of pics here!

Let's Play Catch-up

I've been busy! I've been on holiday, and have loads to post about, but before that, I need to catch up with some smaller things that have happened.

Let's start at the end of May, when we went to see Belle & Sebastian at The Roundhouse. I bought the tickets as a Valentine's Day gift, so it was a long wait for the actual romantic night out! They're one of L's favourite bands, so they made a perfect gift; and this was my 3rd gig in the venue, which I really do like.



Next up, a trip to the zoo. Late! In the summer they open the doors in the evening to adults only, allowing you to spend the end of the day looking at animals, with a drink and a bite to eat. Talking of eating, I think the burger I had was the best part of the evening. The zoo started closing the animal houses and sectioning off the park way earlier than I would have expected, so I was rather disappointed to be ushered away from areas before I had even seen half of the zoo. Still, they had a cool penguin area, and who doesn't love marching penguins?



We then had a small workmate gathering one weekend to say "cheerio" to one of our team. David (middle of the below pic), headed back to Spain a few weeks ago now - a thoroughly nice guy who could never quite work out my Scottish accent. We headed to "Queen's Skate and Bowl", where you can, clearly, do both of those things. And also drink, eat, and partake in karaoke. Interesting venue! We didn't sing, but did try and regain our skating legs.



There was one final catch-up before the holiday, where I headed to the homeland to catch-up with my Dad. I hadn't seen him since November, which is very sad. But he has a new job, which is happy news! I'm quite proud of him really; laid off from his engineering job which he's had or changed for at least a couple of decades, he decided to go back to college and finish his career in an area really enjoys: nature! And what better way to illustrate this than post a picture of him crawling after a blackbird?



Whilst up there, we took a trip to his "office" - Kailzie Gardens in the Scottish Borders! It's most famous for having a live feed to a family of nesting ospreys out in the woods. Dad's the project head of "KLAWED", where he's aiming to attract both more wildlife and visitors to the area. He's really excited about it, and so am I! It's a very pretty place, even in the rain.



So, now I'm pretty much caught up... except for the two summer trips: Glastonbury Festival and the big ol' jaunt to the USA. More to follow, promise!

Lovely Construction

Our office is high up. Really high up. For London anyway. We moved in back in September after a massive amount of growth; both in reputation and in staff numbers. Almost immidiately, we realised we would need a new space; so we've taken the shell next door.

The view is equally amazing in both. To our wonderful sights across the Thames, towards St Pauls, the Eye and beyond, ie this:



we are adding this:



The office starts as an empty shell, so we have to kit it out. It started out just like this:



We did an amazing job in the first room; with glass meeting rooms; a tonne of flat-screen TVs showing the states of our systems; and modern, spacious desks. This one will be no exception; though it is to be catered towards the Engineers (like me!). This means more screens. Ridiculously large, flat screens from Samsung:



Seriously; these things are soooo sexy. 55 inch screen, 1 inch thick. We have a series of smaller screens too, though constructing their wall-mounts seems to be causing our Infrastructure guys some headaches:



We also have entire wall, floor-to-ceiling whiteboards. Essentially walls with special paint which you can draw on with whiteboard markers, and it washes right off. Pretty nifty! Oh, and we'll also have an arcade. Yes. An arcade. With at least 9 proper retro 80s machines, fresh from bidding wars on eBay. These ones were moved into the room whilst we carpeted the arcade room and painted it black.



It's nearly finished, but I'm off on holiday! So I will post the results up in a few weeks; hopefully everything will be fully constructed, and super-sexy. Then it's on to building the new New York City office...

The Thames Path

The Thames, whilst far from being the bluest, cleanest river I've ever seen, is still a delight to wander around. We're lucky enough to live in a building right on the Thames Path, so it's really easy for us to pick a direction to spend an afternoon heading in.


Ours is the blue one!

For those who haven't walked any of it before, the Thames Path runs from source to sea on both banks. Due to the amount of London which is situated right on the banks of the Thames, walking even a small part of the Path can take you through different sights and sounds of London life. Also, as some things do block the path at points, you do occasionally have to head inwards a bit.



One such section of the Path which can be quite busy, took us from the South Bank, via the Tate Modern (and the wobbly bridge!) to London Bridge.



Last weekend, L and I headed west from our home in Battersea, about 6 miles to Barnes. We then crossed over Hammersmith Bridge for a pub dinner, before heading home (by bus though, our legs were mighty tired!) in time for a nice sunset over the Thames.



If you find yourself with a nice afternoon and you want to explore some of London's riverside delights, then I fully recommend picking a chunk of the Thames, and let your legs take you places...

Full Flickr set for "Battersea to Barnes" here.

Starting, Again

Quick announcement: I'm actually going to blog!

I'm actually going to post things on here. They may be brief rambles which are too big for Twitter, they may be photo journals. But there will be *something*.

The latter will definitely be true, as I head off to the US for two weeks - I'm totally planning a photo blog. But, since I've announced it, there will definitely be things appearing here soon. Also, I should probably settle on a design nicer than "meh, just black"...

I'm Up To Date!

I just realised... this is the first time in probably 2 years I have been up-to-date with my photos online! My latest Flickr uploads were my latest photos, and I have nothing left in between. Maybe... this is the start of something good. Maybe... I'll actually keep it this way. Maybe... people will even actually look at them?! Who knows! But I'll give it a shot if you will?

Adventures

When I first moved to London I was introduced to bar in Battersea called Adventure. This was mostly due to the fact my friend, already in London when I moved down, used to live with the co-owner. As it was near our respective flats it became a popular meeting place, and still is amongst a much wider circle of friends.

Nearly 4 years later and the bar has now developed into a chain of four. Our usual place is very small, but there's a bigger one in Balham where I have spent an extremely intoxicated birthday. I have (sadly?) never been to East Dulwich; but to complete the four they now have one in popular Covent Garden. It seemed apt that we'd go to the new bar for the aforementioned mate's birthday.

The style of Adventure is, certainly at the weekends, loud and busy. It's a cocktail bar with an insanely large selection of cocktails, served by fun, chatty, and sometimes a little drunk, bartenders. There's also bottle and spirits if cocktails aren't your thing. We went armed with a tonne of vouchers courtesy of Living Social, meaning we got 65% off when buying 4 cocktails; perfect for drinky-fun party-times. The site offers different deals each day designed to generate business for bars, spas, restaurants and the like in the form of cheap and one-time-only deals.

We had fun, and many drinks, and I'm sure we'll be meeting there again soon. For more reasons than the fact I still have 5 vouchers left...

So, we went to Windsor

Being a teacher, my girlfriend had the last week off. Being in need of a short break, I also took a couple of days off. Being a nice day, we wanted to go some place new and take photos and such. Being a little short on cash we decided to go somewhere which was only a short journey from the nearest train station. So, we went to Windsor.

First off we visited one of those touristy places which has always been there but seemed to be ignored despite it being 45 minutes away on the train: Windsor Castle. It was very photogenic in the sun along with its well-kept greenery.

We then enjoyed a long walk down "The Long Walk" before crossing the bridge to Eton, where we had a nice pub dinner.

Suffice to say the sun was a welcome change to the grey and damp which has been prominent in the UK in 2011 so far. I for one can't wait for it to start actually giving us some heat as well as nice skies and good light.

Christmas & New Year: Stateside

I've been catching up with the photos I took over the festive period; a time which I spent between New York City and Wisconsin. I was at my company's New York office and apartments up til a week before Christmas, before jetting off to spend Christmas with my girlfriend and her family in WI. Then it was back to New York for New Years eve! Well, sort of - there was some crazy snow, fog, and flight problems to make it all seem a lot more hectic than it actually was.

I managed to get 3 distinct sets on my Flickr out of the best photos. The first of these includes the week up to Christmas Day and the few days after. Everything was beautifully white and I was in the middle of some delightful countryside and farmland.

The second covered Christmas Day - which was spent with a large portion of my girlfriend's family - which was really nice as I missed my own family terribly having never spent a Christmas away from them before. They all made me feel very welcome!

This also marked a change in my (thus far) fairly amateurish photography. L and her parents gave me my first DSLR camera! So I apologise for the first few sets of photos as I get used to the wealth of features suddenly at my keen fingertips...

Thirdly, I have a few snaps from New Years eve which we spent in Central Park. Mostly I took pics of fireworks, but the lighting and snow seemed to enjoy my camera so there's a few shots through snowy trees and such. However, I was just glad to spend a fun time of the year with L in her homeland!

Happy 2011 :)

Well, hello there.

I've never had a blog before, nor a website to myself. I enjoy Flickr and Twitter so have decided to make a "proper go" of it and start rambling and posting stuff and things on here as well. Let's see how it goes and, indeed, how long it lasts...