hello sinister! I returned home from a field trip to find you all waiting for me in my inbox, and I was glad, because I'd spent a whole week sliding around on rocks, and losing my feet in rock pools. It was nice to be warm and dry and reading all your posts. I especially liked kirsten's posts, as always, and I loved the thought of the graffiti that gina mentioned. I think I might adopt "ah good, the sea" as my own phrase. It sounds so happy and relaxed, like you expect the sea to be there anyway, but it's still a warm, quiet, lovely surprise when you see it there in front of you. I love the sea too, although my devotion has been severely tested this past week. Everyone I know can recall me talking at great length about the sea; conspicuously, I haven't felt the urge to talk about it this week, after spending eight days on various beaches in the north of scotland, getting up close and personal with the North Sea and the surrounding geology. brrr. The best part was going to Dunnet Head, the most northerly point of the British mainland, one evening, just as the sun was starting to set, and standing on the edge of a cliff (behind a stone wall, of course...I may be stupid, but I'm not brave...). I don't think I've ever stood somewhere like that before, where you can look straight ahead, out to sea, and there's just nothing. All around, just a uniform grey sky, punctuated to the west by a low smear of pink, to the east by the vague form of the islands, smudged and vague behind the fog and the wind and the grey. I could have stayed there for the whole week; instead I gave myself a cracking cut/bruise at Portskerra (on a big nasty piece of gneiss - "that's why they call it hard-rock geology" apparently. hohum), smashed bits of shale open in the vain hope of finding some fossil fish (it turned out to be not such a vain hope after all!) at Achanarras, and erm, trampled through a lot of bracken at Helmsdale. All in all, it was a good week, although I would recommend any visitors to Helmsdale not to buy their sandwiches in the Spar there. It is inevitable that whatever you ask for in your roll,you will be given what is essentially a mayonnaise roll with small inclusions of whatever you actually asked for. And it's not very nice. Things have been all exciting around this way recently. University has started again, and I have to say, there has been an increase in the number of B&S t-shirts around campus. I have seen two this week already, that's a 100% increase since last year, which, mathematically speaking, is pretty damn good. So if either of those two Aberdeen university B&S t-shirt wearing folk are on sinister, show your faces now. Speaking of Aberdeen: I have noticed there are a few sinisterites currently in Aberdeen, I have spoken to one already, and I know of at least one more. Myself and Sunset are having preparatory talks on the subject of a Grampian Region get-together (picnic??? It's never picnic weather here!!), either in Dundee or Aberdeen, so if anyone is interested, I'll volunteer to be 'picnic' mummy (eek!). If nobody else is interested, I suppose the two of us will just have to meet up in the pub and get drunk instead. A pub-nic, I suppose. Without the -nic. ************B&S content*************** My brother has just started university in dundee, and a friend of mine was kind enough to drive me there to do my big-sisterly thing, and make sure he did all the things he was meant to, like eat, and drink water and find his timetable. On the way, we listened to B&S in the car, and my friend was quite happy with this, until LLPJ came on, at which point he said "this is that one I hate!!!", and switched the stereo off. Even though I think it's a cracking song, his reasoning for hating it was actually quite well-justified. He lived in a lot of british holiday resorts as a child, you know the sort, Ladbrokes and Pontins and suchlike, because of his dad's job, and consequently he saw an AWFUL lot of ..well, AWFUL cabaret acts. He said he likes the song, apart from the part where Monica Queen is singing, because it reminds him of a particular brand of dodgy cabaret he saw a lot of. You know the sort of thing: a short, middle-aged man, with a receding hairline, wearing a polyester suit with dandruff on the shoulders, crooning away with his face all twisted and full of "passion", pointing at the ladies in the audience while he sings. Then there's the middle-aged woman, with green sequinned cocktail dress, shoulder pads, blue eyeshadow, fuschia lipstick, lots of blue eyeliner, sequinned stilettos, starting to wail into the microphone about "the greatest love of all" or something along those lines. Then the little old man at the back gets his turn, on the organ, (this is usually the best part - and he would probably be wearing an old dinner suit and a polka dot bow tie, have no teeth, and sit grinning maniacally behind his organ) and all the old dears at the front get up and slow-dance at the front of the stage, before the stage has to be quickly cleared for the presentation of the prize for the children's fancy dress competition. This image has made me giggle every time I hear monica queen hitting the higher notes, thinking about that green sequinned dress and probably some american tan tights to boot. And on that note.... Hasta luego sinister lyns xx ps: If anyone is interested in the above-mentioned get-together, email me offlist and we can assess interest levels. --------------------------------------------- This message was sent using DISS Web Mail. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/local/mailman/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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