Moving in

The honeymoon is over, literally, and now begins the process of acquiring bookshelves and an extra wardrobe and all that sort of thing. I had actually been keeping a lot of CK's things in storage for a while, so the volume of stuff in the flat has not greatly increased; however, it does need to be rearranged so that it can be got at conveniently. There is not a lot of space on the living room floor at the moment, as a result.

Our honeymoon led to me driving a little over 900 miles in a week. It turns out that you can pull this off in a country 600 miles long, if you are forced by your relatives living inconveniently far away from each other to essentially do a lap of the nation.
It was not bad really. A couple of days loafing at home and walking the dog (with afternoons out to Cambridge and St Alban's). Two and a half days in London, doing all the usual tourist photos. Meeting up with old uni and school friends in pubs in Hitchin and London.

The only real mishap was when we tried to leave Yorkshire -- the car didn't like this. The plan was to head over the Snake Pass and spend the day in Liverpool, having stayed overnight with my aunt and uncle in Sheffield. However, as we approached the Derbyshire border, something went terribly wrong and we suddenly had the kind of engine note that does not bode well, especially in the Peak District, which has enough long climbs at the best of times.
So instead we were forced to spend the afternoon in Sheffield, which was not too bad really, while a garage in Crosspool replaced a section of the exhaust system. The most expensive section going, I would note, containing the catalytic converter.
At any rate, we were able to cross the pass in daylight, so we still got the nice scenery to look at, even if we didn't get the chance to catch up with Stephen.

CK had some trouble with the potato-heavy diet, prompting her at one point to exclaim "Don't you guys ever eat rice?" but otherwise it was all fine. As well as seeing relatives and friends, I also got the chance to visit places I'd never bothered to before (e.g. Stonehenge, Salisbury... er, Birmingham). Which was nice.
And now I'm back in Hong Kong, so I don't have to do any more driving for a long time.

Never been so happy to be in debt

Phew. The loan we applied for to cover the costs of the wedding has come in.
It's not ideal to go into debt for this but, while it is technically possible to cover everything with the money we have, it doesn't leave anything for, well, rent and food - and I don't get paid till we come back from Jakarta.
So, you know, it's better than just maxing out a credit card.

Passive-aggressive Facebook


I got this FB message a few minutes ago:
"I can't approve your tagging, unless we are Facebook friends."

Just think about what's going on there.

Tom's last capoiera in HK from inMotion on Vimeo.

Auto-didacticism

As you may or may not know/care, I am now an Irish citizen.
I was recently talking to my flatmate (Cork-born and bred), about how I'd been reading up on Irish politics, since I felt I should know at least a little bit about it.

Predictably, he said he wasn't sure why I would, since most Irish people don't care too much about it either.
But the thing is, when someone says 'Labour' or 'Conservative', even a Briton who diligently avoids British politics will have some idea of what they are and has acculturated associations to go with those names. For a hypothetical American they might mean nothing, or they could be reasonably simplified as 'kinda Republican/Democrat'.

For me Fianna Fail/Fine Gael were just names, so I looked them up. Unfortunately, it turns out you can't just label them 'kinda Conservative/Labour', because Ireland doesn't work that way. One of them is even a direct descendant of the Blueshirts.
So I am going to have to keep working on this if I want to, as one might say in Newspeak, bellyfeel Irepol.

If anyone has any books to recommend, do tell.

The thing about capoeira is it isn't very macho

A conversation after training on Tuesday night:

"You know, sometimes I think those Muay Thai guys don't take us very seriously."
"Yeah, well wait till we're all 45 and they've smashed their knees off."
"And we're still doing cartwheels."
"Yeah. Then we'll see who's laughing."

Muito axé

I had an absolute shocker of a capoeira session last night. I just started feeling massively overheated after about an hour, and just had to stop so that I could breathe properly again. I hope I'm not coming down with something. I had a bit of a rest and managed a couple of restrained turns in the roda at the end.
Mascote, the kid of the group, was the opposite of me. A fidget at the best of times, he was ludicrously over-energetic last night. In the roda he was tearing up the place, but not thinking it through. At one point all I had to do was sidestep behind him and wait till he stood up out of rolê to smack him in the back of the head. (I didn't actually kick him, of course. It's bad form, and anyway he's about 12.) Kind of a weird evening.

The cool news is we all now have our uniforms - the abadás(trousers) and cordas (rope belts), at least. T-shirts to come. Definitely makes one feel a bit more like a proper capoeirista. Despite my last post here, the bananeiras have not been going so well, but my aú and meia-lua de compasso are improving considerably. I think a lot of it is getting enough practice that you can afford to think about what you are doing next rather than how to execute it.