Saturday
The morning was a frenzy of shopping, spending the new money on clothes and stuff. A home PC is on order! I hope it arrives soon.
After a rest, after 4pm I left, heading for the nodermeet in Westminster at pages bar. I emerged from the tube about 10 to 5 and walked south.
Princess LouLou had sent her apologies (get well soon Lou!), and Frankie was overcomitted as usual. So who would be there?
A few minutes later, just after I had passed the houses of parliament, an SMS from Booyaa arrived: ‘Are you coming to the nodermeet?’ Ah, the assembled masses are missing me already! ‘I’ll be there in 5 mins…’ I replied. I got there soon enough, and stopped at the door. A woman in black was demanding 3 pounds, and I could see a large sign ‘Nosferatu’ on the wall! Goth night! Vampires. And me wearing a touristy T-shirt.
Oh well. Well, 3 pounds was less than a round of drinks, so I paid, entered and got Guinness. No-one looks like a noder, and the door people hadn’t heard of them. Darn it, us Capetonians are supposed to be the unpunctual ones! I sent SMSs to booya: ‘They’re all vampires!’
‘How do I tell the noders from the other weirdoes?’
The theme seemed to be alterna-geek. Black clothes, silver chains, Buffy and comic book print T-shirts seems to be the order of the day. There was even a model of the starship enterprise hanging from the ceiling, and they showed nerd movies ‘The New Guy’ and ‘Jay and Silent bob strike back’. Odd how nerds are the only ones still doing goth. When my crowd, the UCT Role-playing geeks, went all goth in ’88, the ‘cool goths’ wouldn’t give us the time of day.
Eventually I started asking people ‘did a website send you here?’ I got two forms of answer: ‘No’ and ‘wot?’. Disheartening.
Booya arrived before 6pm. So we sat down, drank and talked about stuff. London pride is good beer. No one else showed, but honestly I had a good time. Frankie sent a message ‘hello to all the happy noders’.
I went home after 9pm, to find that the upstairs neighbour’s housewarming was still in progress, so I had some more drinks there and stayed until after midnight. These people have a story … A couple of weeks ago they, new to the block, had locked themselves out of their 2nd story flat when the wind blew the flat door closed.
I pointed out that if they put one of the garbage bins against the wall, it couldn’t be too hard to get in the open window. Ten minutes later I did it for them as she is short and round and he is ‘scared of heights’. They seem to be legal students, and are not ‘together’ are just friends and he’s gay. That explains the reluctance to do manly stuff like climbing walls.
On sunday afternoon I saw the great exhibition of Ansel Adams's photos and sttayed in the gallery as thunder and rain came down. But that's another story.