A little trip to Lille

I went to Lille with work a few weeks ago and I took photos.

Lille is a strange little city. It's grey and concrete and a little bit grotty, but nonetheless has a certain charm to it that makes me rather quite like it.  I didn't get to see much of it because I was there at a work conference.  We stayed int he world's shittest hotel - it smelt of smoke, it was noisy, the temperature control was just bizzare and the sliding door to the bathroom broke so I had to really struggle with pushing it open and closed.  The shower was a tray with a curtain and at the end of each shower the floor was sodden with pools of water.  When I arrived I found this delightful towel on the bed:

It doesn't make up for the shitty hotel.  We went out to a cafe for the breakfast each morning - croissants and coffee - which was alright.  The second morning I got some street harassment - it was 7.30 am and a bloke in his 20s/30s starts walking beside me and asking me questions.  Fuck off.  I thought he was going to follow us into the cafe at one point, but thankfully he didn't.

The conference had some good stuff:

Mmmm delicious French pastries.

Artisan lemonade.  They also had pink and yellow stuff.  It was tasty.

Being so close to Belgium there was good beer:

And food baked in beer:

This was the sweetest stewed beef I had ever tasted.

We also briefly visited the Christmas market before we left:

It sold tat.  Made up gifts that only exist to fill the consumerist clamouring in our capitalist souls.  I didn't buy anything.

There was this ferris wheel.  If you look closely you can see that the cars are painte dliek Christmas puddings:

I read Raising Steam while I was there.  This page reminded me that the romantic relationships I want in fiction are those where the couple has been together several years and are comfortable with each other and still deeply in love, but also have lives outside of the relationship:

In summary, if you can visit Lille, do it.  Also read Raising Steam.

I has been on a trip

I just spent 6 days in Kent visiting family and as I took a lot of photos I thought my trip would make good blog fodder.  And I've been reading a lot of lifestyle blogs recently, and I'm apparently quite impressionable..

Here goes.

My first thing to talk about are these wonderful earrings I got on Tuesday just before I left:

They are from Fabrication Unlimited, an Etsy shop based in the States, but postage to the UK is dead cheap and delivery was only a couple of weeks.  I considered asking for the lightning bolts in gold but decided I quite liked the silver effect.  As for the blue ones, well everyone needs a little bit of hope in their life.

Then I left, and left the earrings at home. As you do.

I spent Wednesday with my Dad and we went to Buttercups Goat Sanctuary in Boughton Monchelsea.  If you like goats, and in you are in Kent, you need to go.  There are oodles of goats. Big goats, little goats, lame goats, healthy goats, horned goats, sleepy goats, white goats, black goats, brown goats. Friendly goats and lazy goats.  I like goats, a lot.  I don't want to steal pictures from the website, but I urge you to go and look at it.  And check out the how to donate pages as well.

Then we went to the Three Chimneys pub in Biddenden.  We went by possibly the most circuitous route, as it appears my Dad isn't quite clear on the route to Biddenden, and when he was clear, I kept missing important turnings.  Sadly, once there, I could have no beer as I was driving.  So I had sausage and mash instead and it was good.  I had a lot of sausages this week.  Meatyrific.

On the Thursday me and my Mum went to Scotney Castle, a National Trust property that just so happens to have have hops farmed on it.  It also has some lovely gardens, and I found these sunflowers:

Hops are important in the ale brewing process and we went on a tour of the hop farm and learned about the growing and gathering process.  This is how hops grow:

Tasty hops.

It turns out that the farm has always kept a record of how many bales of hops were harvested each year.  It can vary a hella lot from year to year, dependent on the weather, as shown by these boards in the processing plant:

Some years (about a century ago) they only harvested about 61 bales. Other years they harvested closer to 500.  Can you imagine only producing a paltry 60 odd bales and having to make a living off that, for the rest of the year?

The tour included a walk round the farm to see where seasonal hop pickers lived, up until about the 1930s (I think).  They lived here:

These sheds used to have corrugated iron front walls, and would house between 10 and 15 people, of all ages, in double bunk beds erected against the side and back walls.  There wouldn't be room for much else.  That should give you an idea of the small size of them.  Some of the sheds were used by the same families, year in and year out, and still have the wallpaper put up by the families.  They cooked in a communal shed, opposite the living quarters:

This is a field we walked through towards the end of the tour:

Included because I think it's a nice photo and I'm usually crap at landscape photos.

They had beer samples at the end. I wasn't driving, so I did try them. The bitter was decent enough but the pale ale was much better. 

On the Friday morning, me, my sister, brother in law and niece went out for a fry up, at my suggestion, because I've been reading this blog and craving a Full English.  We went to The Rustic Cafe, attached to a garden centre, which I was dubious about, but it turned out to be bloody lovely.  The only things missing were black pudding and hash browns, but as I couldn't finish what I'd ordered maybe that was for the best.  The decor was nice. Our tablecloth was a map of the world:

On Saturday I went into Maidstone to meet friends and go to the comic shop.  I grew up in Maidstone and it was bloody weird being back, seeing all the changes.  I haven't walked round the town for about 5 or 10 years, and it's changed quite a bit.  It was really disorienting actually.  At the bottom of Gabriels Hill is a big retail space that used to be a newsagents.  It was where I went to buy UK reprints of Marvel comics and every time I went there and looked at the comics rack I was terrified I would be found out.  That someone would shout at me that these things weren't for girls.  Now that retail space is this:

How times change huh?  Maidstone is not quite the pit of horror that I remember, it has been cleaned up, but it still feels like a dump to me.  I guess it's impossible to get rid of emotional negative connotations.

I also visited Maidstone's actual comic shop, that I didn't go into at all until after I moved away (about 15 years ago).  The shop is called the Grinning Demon and it used to be on the High Street.  The High Street shop was a dark box and the few times I went in I was met with surly, grumpy, miserable staff.  The only good thing about it was that I got a copy of the first Peter David Supergirl trade in there.

Now the shop has moved to the Royal Arcade and it's magnificent!  The shop itself is light and airy.  They have tables outside and upstairs for gamers (card games, not video games).  They offer free tea and coffee to the gamers.  You walk in the shop and the owner (Graham, I think) asks if you need any help.  Have some pictures of the inside of it:

 (Local artists' work on the walls!)

They have a sofa (pictured above) which I took advantage of as I was very hungover and couldn't cope with other shops.  I just sat there for half an hour and the owner was cool with this.  I had just bought this lot of comics too, I didn't just wander in off the street and claim refuge:

Other things to note from my trip are:
This massive horse chestnut tree I found in Mote Park:

These beers that I drank (not all on the same night):

I got up on Sunday morning to discover the wire in one of my bras had worked it's way through the bra material, which was incredibly disappointing.  It's one of my better ones as it gives me shelf boobs.  I had this crazy idea that if I took both wires out it would be a useable soft cup bra.  Not so.  I think I need to learn more about bra machinery.

Finally, salutations to the very helpful gentleman who carried my suitcase down some steps on the London Underground.  I suspect he decided to help because I was limping, as my knee had decided to play up for that stretch of the journey.  Whoever you were Sir, I thank you!

Read comics in public day!

It was yesterday, so as I did last year, I toddled off to my local pub's annual beer festival and got a picture of me reading a comic there.  At the prompting of alexanderlyons and theyallfalldown on twitter I chose an old Robin issue with Spoiler in it - we decided to all read a Stephanie Brown book seeing as she's not gonna be Batgirl anymore.  I am VERY pleased to hear that she is still gonna be in the new DCU as Spoiler though!

Anyway, I proceeded to taste a lot of beers and ended up rather drunk and playing ridiculous drinking games that were altogether (un)successful, depending on your point of view.  I then came back and had a drunken twitter discussion with Ragnell about Perez's Wonder Woman.  I just started reading that run, and I'm quite frankly rather pissed off about the Amazon's origin story, wherein they are raped, tortured and bound by Heracles and his army.  Bah.  Then they are charged to wear the bracelets forevermore as a reminder of their incarceration.  Bah, I say.  Apparently this run was approved by Gloria Steinem?   Bah.   I nearly stopped reading it after the first two issues, but I'm glad I carried on, because the rest of it is rather good.

Thankfully (as we'll be heading back to the beer festival later today) I'm not too hungover today. I think continuing to read old Robin comics definitely helped.  Say, if DC were to put 'good for hangovers' on their books I'm sure they'd sell more..

There are tons of photos of folk reading comics in public on the Flickr stream and of women reading comics on the dedicated tumblr.