Then home fast for a bite of toasted cheese then a rapid scoot into the Oxford Literary Festival, for Ben Goldacre. The festival has these huge gold thrones shaped like piles of books for the authors to sit on. When we arrived, PD James was on one, tiny lady behind huge piles of books, dwarved by her giant golden throne. Someone gave us free whiskey while a man recited poetry (presumably about the whiskey). Over on a soap-box someone else was making a spirited defence of some economic position while a small audience heckled, bravely. It was buzzing. We took down some titles and listened to the talk. I puzzled about how I could harness the placebo effect to cure myself;
timscience got a huge laugh by shouting "Prince Charles!" at an appropriate moment. The hour flew by, he's a lively talker, and later we got his Doctor's signature. There's a look about book fans. A look that could easily be summed up as "too clever to need good hair". Then we ran to the Ashmolean for
swisstone's stag do. Which consisted of pots, books and beer, on a wibbly wander through Oxford. The Norrington room at Blackwells was a highlight; instantly eveyone disappeared into the bookshelves chasing their chosen subjects.Next step was food for cats and humans before going to joella's 40th, where I suddenly found myself in an on the line reunion party, trying to remember faces I'd last seen at the turn of the millennium, catching up on how other people's threads have gone over the past ten years. Although by the end of it I'm not altogether sure that my first assessment (that I knew pretty much no-one there) wasn't the most accurate assessment.
Oh wait -- it's easter week! That means that it's once again time for inner life of the cake topper chicks. Click on through and add your notes. Does that make sense? Not sure. It's a flickr thing. Check out the cake topper chicks from easters past.
