Well, today started oddly and has just got frankly bizzare.

First off, the head of admissions came and spoke to me just after I got in. Turns out she and her husband got a hamper of booze from someone over the weekend which included a bottle of port. Apparently neither of them drink it and she seemed to recall that I did and asked if I wanted it or not. Win.

Secondly, there's been a report of a suspicious package in the main post office which has been taken seriously enough that the army bomb disposal guys are there and have closed off Silver Street. More recent reports seem to suggest that it's just a bag but still... However I can't get there to take a look as I'm on the phones in the office until 1. (Yes, I know, heading towards a bomb disposal team isn't the greatest idea in the world ever, but the market place is still open and I want my lunch damn it!)

( (Someone else's) pictures )

Edit to add:
From the Northern Echo;

A FAKE bomb sparked a police investigation and caused part of a city centre to be evacuated today.
The alert was sounded just before 10am when a suspicious bag was spotted at the rear of Cotswold shop, in Silver Street, Durham.
The bag had a bottle inside and a fuse.
Bomb disposal experts found the device to be a hoax.

So, there's a new brass band compilation album coming out in March to mark 25 years since the end of the strike. The heavy hitters are there, Grimethorpe (the band who did Brassed Off), Desford and Carlton Main (Frickley) etc but also there, providing track 5 is Bearpark and Esh...

Now, from the snippet of the recording I've heard we weren't sounding back (was before I joined alas) but we're no where near the leagues of these guys. It's sort of like the band that gigs down the local pub a couple of times a month being put on the same CD as say Oasis. It's awesome, don't get me wrong, but massively surreal.

'The Music Lives on Now The Mines Have Gone' is an album featuring the UK's most historic Colliery Brass Bands from across the length and breadth of the UK. The album will be released on 1 March 2010 on Universal, some 25 years after the end of one of the country's bitterest and most divisive industrial disputes. The mines did close but the music stayed on thanks to the Colliery bands - today a potent symbol of a great heritage, the beating heart of many former mining communities.
Thats the description from the website for the album (http://www.themusicliveson.co.uk/index.php) and it's even got a mention in the telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/7047452/Colliery-bands-sign-new-album-deal-to-mark-end-of-miners-strike.html). Oh, and the picture on the page that lists the bands, thats us too.

I pre-orded it from Amazon as soon as I got home from work :)

- found out I passed my BSL exam just before Christmas.

- attended Teresa's funeral. 'Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye' was a good one although once again I didn't envy Peter leading the Farewell Shanty at the grave side. All in all though, a good do.

- booked a platelet test appointment given that I now live close enough to a centre to be worth it (and in truth, have done for years, but only remembered as such recently).

- found out that my dice do actually want to kill me, to the extent of bolt rounds exploding inside subdermal armour (crit 15 explosive to the chest is not your friend). I wonder what I've done to upset them. Fortunately they forgot about fate points so I'm not rolling up a new character just yet.

- had my annual staff review and been informed I'm 'reliable and dependable'. My line manager has also agreed (in principal) to me doing the First Aid at Work course offered by OH.

- put in a leave request for the band tour of Switzerland at the end of May. Leaves the day of GEF and back halfway through Maelstrom but oh well.

- seen this years test piece and not actually disliked it. In fact, I quite like it. The world may end.

I was watching House of Cards last night (not that I feel the need to justify this, but as there was nothing on TV I may have watched it all..) and two things came to mind;
1) I keep forgtetting how great that series is and that I need to start making other people watch it
2) I should have used it for that TV series meme that went round a while back

This then made me realise that I'd never actually gone through and given answers to the ones that weren't guessed and as such, have included them below.

( Answers )

I'm aware that this doesn't get seen by many on the folk scene, but for those of you that do lurk and who don't already know, Teresa died on Saturday morning. I don't have any details on funeral arrangements etc yet but the Mudcat thread (here) is probably the best place to keep up to date.

( What details I do have etc )

Rest in peace now old friend.

Passengers were rescued by a steam locomotive after modern rail services were brought to a halt by the snowy conditions in south-east England.

Trains between Ashford and Dover were suspended on Monday when cold weather disabled the electric rail. Some commuters at London Victoria faced lengthy delays until Tornado - Britain's first mainline steam engine in 50 years - offered them a lift. They were taken home "in style", said the Darlington-built engine's owners. Train services in Kent were hit hard by the freezing conditions at the start of the week. The weather-related disruption included three days of cancellations for Eurostar services through the Channel Tunnel.

Tornado, a £3m Peppercorn class A1 Pacific, was in the South East for one day, offering "Christmas meal" trips from London to Dover. Its "Cathedrals Express" service, the last mainline journey in its first year of operations, was about to depart when staff heard about the stranded passengers. About 100 people were offered free seats, according to Mark Allatt, chairman of The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust - the charity which built Tornado.


'All credit'

He said: "It was a nice way to finish for Christmas, though I think some of the rescued passengers didn't realise they'd even been travelling on a steam train until they got off."

Mr Allatt, who was on the service at the time, said he only saw a handful of other trains between London and Dover throughout Monday. He added: "If any of the train operators want to modernise their services by using steam trains, I would be happy to give them a quote."

A spokesman for Southeastern Trains congratulated Mr Allatt on his "moment of glory". He said: "I'm sure those passengers were saved from a lengthy wait, all credit to him."

- Durham cathedral at night, when lit with pale blue lights and covered in a light sprinkling of snow is a truely magnificent sight.

- Playing a concert in a church in Durham does occasionally lead to looking up and seeing a blue banner with a certain gold and red cross on hanging from the wall :)

- I decided to chip in and get a copy of RATM as, lets face it, it's not a band single. Then I heard Simon Cowel say it was a personal attack on him, so I got another copy as I hadn't thought of that angle.

- ( LT Fic Bandwagoning )

Well, I seem to be coming down with another cold and feel like I have the brain power of a particularly stupid fish atm, so I'll keep this short and sweet.

-New Years: flights all sorted, just need to sort logisitics of getting to/from Newcastle airport. Shouldn't be too tricky though as the combination of railway and metro is an easy one.

-Job: going well.

-Band: silly season is well and truely upon us and we're out most days until CHristmas now. We also have confirmed dates for the trip to Switzerland next year and it's confirmed that I'll be missing GEF. Oh well.

-Babies: everyone seems to be having them atm. Congratualtions to all those who deserve/need/want/etc

-Song lyric meme: oh go on then. Although knowing what my playlist is like I wish you all the very best of luck. The first lines from thirty songs from my MP3 player on random. Guess the song title and the artist.

( Updated with those guessed. )

So, on Friday we're not going to be in the office, we're going to be on a 'training day'. We're, apparently, going to learn all about customer relationship management and there will be 'roleplaying scenarios' involved. I get the feeling though, that when they're talking about using tact and diplomacy, they won't mean the ones hanging from my LT weapons belt. Mores the pity.

It occured to me earlier that I may have been slightly negligent about what I;ve been posting here, mostly memes, fic or minor whines about things. As such I figured I'd put a quick post up about a short holiday I went on recently with my family.

( Where by 'post' I mean, share a few pictures )

In short, Carcassonne is awesome. Go there.

Well, I looks like IMDB has run out of decent ones so I'm cheating and using Wikiquote.

( And finally... )

In other news, I had a bit of a twinge in my shoulder before lunch. It's been bugging more than usual for the past few days but figured I should play safe and do a couple of stretches to loosen it up again. Only this time, instead of the desired effect, I got muscle pain down one side of my back (which abaited as soon as I stopped) and muscle pain over my shoulder and down my arm. Leaving me now with the original sore joint and additional sore limb.

Additional: Half the office is off sick today, the head of department has confirmed swine flu, everyone else who is off has the same symptoms. Joy.

11 have been correctly guessed and I've edited in the answers in the previous post. For the other four I've put additional clues below.

( 1, 10, 11, 13 )

This past weekend was made almost entirely of busy and consisted mostly of the following;
-being sat on by my parent's cats
-the round trip of Durham -> Lancashire -> Bangor -> Caernarvon -> Leicestershire -> Durham
-picking which direction to walk down Bangor highstreet purely on the basis of following the Void Lancer who was waling past incase there happened to be any demons
-Jeremy Hardy
-putting grated radish in misterdaniel's drink
-Jelly Number 3
-punching Hayden (he asked for it (no.. really) )

This past weekend did not include;
-sleep

And now the Meme, stolen from Alan

The rules are
Go to IMDB take a memorable quote from a TV series, and repeat 15 times


( The quotes. )

Soon as HR get the paperwork sorted, I'll be an offical employee of the University of Durham.

Beer o'clock at t-minus 64 minutes and counting.

Just finished interviewing for the job I've been doing for over six months.

I believe that makes it tea o'clock.

I have to admit that this has been a weird year for it. I missed any kind of organised silence due to being on a plane/in an airport both today and Sunday, and also missed the parade on Sunday that the band marches in. First year that I've been banding and not played at one memorial or another and I have to admit to feeling vaguely guilty about it.

Anyway, I'm back from the land of Foreign, accompanied by a stinking cold as as such, any idea of writing something meaningful have been drowned in Lemsip. So instead I'm going to post two sets of lyrics. The first is a well known folk song by Eric Bogle (also known for 'And the Band played Waltzing Matilda' among others) and the second is a reply set to the same tune.

( No Man's Land )

( Willie McBride's Reply )

There are many others I could post; Vimy or Old Broken Soldier by Tanglefoot, Langemarck by George Papavgeris etc etc, but then this'd just turn into a wall of text so I'll leave it at those two as there's something about the balance between them that I think works.

Played for a wedding at the Prince Bishop's Castle.
Had a few beers at the Prince Bishop's Castle.
Geeked at the hereldry in the Prince Bishop's Castle.
Raised a glass to Hatfield and the rest, while singing Evening Song, in the chapel of the Prince Bishop's Castle.

Today I have;

-booked to crew the Utopia event in November.
-registered on the Dragon's forums in the hope of organising transport so I crew their event at the end of October.
-replied to a PM from a friend that I'd forgotten about for almost a month, and had a throughly pleasant conversation with them as they happened to be online at the time. This rarely happens due to the 8 hour time difference.
-actually checked up the lyrics of a song I could mostly remember so should hopefully have that one down in the next few days.
-introduced my head of department at work to Kate Rusby, after she admitted to quite liking gentle folk music
-put out feelers for lyrics/chords/dots for a song I heard on last.fm and want to learn. Google and Digi-trad failed me on this one so might be tricky, but someone will probably have them somewhere. Within an hour of putting it on Mudcat I have the lyrics and an offer of a copy of the whole album :)
-finally recieved my new bank card, 16 days after my old one ran out.
-got out and oiled my valve trombone, the first step to getting it back into a playable condition.


Still to go;

-last band rehersal before the Proms concert on Saturday. Not that I'm biased or anything, but we've got a large number of truely awesome pieces lined up that we don't usually play so it should be a great night.
-food. Should probably not forget that.
-pub. The pub we decamp to after band does not do real ales, the best it does is Stones on tap and Newcy Brown in the fridge. However, since we go regularly they're going to see if getting a guest on tap for us is ecomonical for us. We knew bringing one of the highups of the local CAMERA group into the concussion section would be wort it for something :)

The University has handbooks for international students to help with their orientation etc. Having 5 minutes spare this afternoon I decided to have a flick through and found these gems in the 'UK Culture' section.

-( Greetings )

-( Queuing #1 )

-( Queuing #2 )

-( Hand gestures )

-( And finally )

From Cheshire Zoo (or so the BBC tells me)

From electrokin
( Rocks, Castle, Gender, Music, T-shirt )



From plucky_lass
( Brass, American Football, LRP Relationships, Fiction, Tea )

Standard disclaimer about probably having forgotten something applies.

High
-Got half of the important conversations in that I wanted. Stuff just kept getting in the way of the others but that just means they can wait for the G.
-There was an issue with my booking. It got sorted without fuss both at the Gate and God.
-New foam shields (and many thanks to Dave for finding a temporary home for them until the G).
-Arriving at the Guilds to be told by Karnak that Hengish was possessed by a vampire and mage bolting people, right as Hengist burst out of the Healers and mage-bolts started flying. The timing was beautiful.
-Word games at breakfast. I do hope we didn't corrupt that poor child too much.
-Catching up with people I haven't seen in ages.
-Watching the diplomatic clusterfu.. err.. issues, at the end of the final fight and wondering just how obvious the shoulder tabs of my tabard were to the Tarantula's standing around.
-The 'you taste like pig' conversation in the Guilds.
-Going out on a suicide rescue mission to grab some guys who'd been left behind on a linear and getting to kill an Akari Lord with out my shiv stick. Honest. That's exactly what happened. Just ask anyone else from the rescue squad. They'll all back me up, even though they were busy killing their own Akari Lords at the same time. All of us. We were big damn heros us. *sage nod*
-Getting hit with crush on the head seven times (while immobilised in my defense) and still being standing at the end is both big and clever.

Low
-Not realising the unit plan for the final battle had changed and thus not taking the field with them.
-Seemed slow to start. Partially (I guess), due to missing a large part of IC time on Friday and the lack of numbers.
-Never did make it to talk to the Wolves.
-Not getting chance to actually spend more than about 30 seconds at/around the Ceilidh.

Other
-Didn't kill Fudge for his impromptu filk on Saturday night. Although Conan nearly did as we were leaving site.
-Forgot there was a ritual of peace a couple of times.
-Choma still not free.

Just a quick question for those who've played this before/know a load of Irish tunes. Whats the 3rd tune in Gaelforce? (embedded below), Rocky Road to Dublin and Minstrel Boy are well enough known, but theres a couple of us who have no idea on the third and are curious.




Edit: I think we have a winner with Toss the Feathers;

Can't really add much to what has already been said in various places in cyberspace other than to restate that I'll miss him. Last time I saw him was the Bards event where we drank and sang together into the early hours. They were good times.