Fuddland

I got back from Durham last night on train journey which was the complete opposite of the last one in terms of quality of service — these new Virgin trains are very nice indeed.

It was a good week, full of merriment and not much sleep, and I’ll miss the three hot meals a day that were provided [although it’s probably better for my health and my weight that I don’t normally have that quantity]. Due to others’ technical difficulties I was unexpectedly the first person to give their talk, but it went okay and got it out of the way early in the week — I probably shouldn’t have gotten quite so drunk the day before, but perhaps the residual alcohol calmed my nerves a little. The rest of the time was spent trying not to fall asleep in lectures and revisiting the old haunts from the last time we were there, as well as a couple of new places.

Due to the atrocious weather and general laziness on my part, I didn’t take any pictures, although I did write a Durham haiku during one of the lectures on the Thursday:

Cathedral City,
Second time I'm visiting,
Still just as hilly.

That just about sums it up, although the cathedral really is very impressive and well worth a climb, and you can spot the parts where they filmed Harry Potter fairly easily too.

Plans to sort out the garden today have been scuppered by the weather, which appears to have followed me home, so instead it looks like it’s cups of tea, five DVDs and recovering from the excesses of the week, which is as good a way to spend a Saturday as any in my book.