Sunday 13 December 2009

Paid a visit to my parents a couple of weekends ago; the weather was dire for most of the visit but the rain held off long enough for us to go for a pleasant walk on the Saturday morning around Urishay Castle (pictures here). The site contains a ruined house from about the 17th century and the ruins of a 12th century chapel, now maintained by the appealingly-named Friends of Friendless Churches, of which my mother is a member. Mum tramped up to the chapel to have a peep at it; Dad and I, being more cautious if there isn’t a big sign up saying “YES, YOU MAY WALK HERE”, elected to stay behind and look at a field of sheep.

Made the annoying discovery a couple of weeks ago that the Oriental supermarket at the University appears to have closed down, thereby removing one of the few sources of Shin Ramyun in Reading. Resorted to ordering a box online from the Wing Yip Store. When it arrived, was slightly stunned at the size of the outer box given that I had only ordered 20 packs – obviously pleasing that they were securely packaged, but slightly embarrassing given that the package was left, in not strictly legit fashion, at a house across the road. When I called to collect it, the box appeared to be blocking a large part of the poor resident’s small living room. I thanked him breezily and shuffled off quickly.

My whole family developed a taste for ramyun while living in Korea in the mid-1970s and seem each to be devoting a certain amount of our time to tracking down stockists; see this entry from my brother Dave’s blog from last year. My mother claims to have recently located a stockist in Hereford, which seems unlikely but just goes to show.

Met Claire for a drink and a bite to eat at the Ivory Lounge on Friday, compromising after an initial disagreement over venue. We managed to get a table although then spent a certain portion of the evening being elbowed in the head by standing drinkers, and halfway through our evening were joined by about 25 members of CfBT’s IT department at the table next to us. As a complete contrast, we joined the crusty real ale types at the CAMRA-favoured Hobgoblin to finish off the evening.

This weekend, I decided that there was a sound religious basis for putting up Christmas decorations, today being the third Sunday in Advent, and yesterday having been the Catholic Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Got the decorations out of the attic and spent a certain amount of time bickering with Ruth about which of our respective decorations should be chosen to adorn the house – obviously, just slapping the whole lot about randomly would have been simply tasteless and unrestrained. In deference to the limited floor space I chose to put up just one of the three artificial mini-trees I seem to have acquired over the years. As usual, I adorned the tree with the little red cherry lights I bought in Debenhams some years ago now, as well as various baubles. My baubles are of the gold multi-pack variety; Ruth has a smaller and more eclectic collection of baubles that are no doubt classier although less obviously Christmassy.

An hour or so after we had finished decorating the tree and switched on its little lights (see pic), Harley bit through part of one of the wires thereby rendering the lights potentially dangerous and no longer usable. Intend to stop addressing him as Git at some stage next week.