Please evacuate Godalming...

...because I plan to destroy it, just as soon as I take over the universe and have all the planet's bulldozers at my command.

Mum decided this morning that we should go to Winkworth Arboretum, which from our point of view is on the far side of Guildford.  I drove, and she navigated, while the younger siblings sat in the back seat, and for once in their lives made relatively few annoying noises.  It was all going so very nicely - until we came to a really stupid junction on the Hog's Back, where the 'straight on' bit looks like a right turn, and the bit that looks like it goes straight on is in fact an exit, from which you get fed onto a random dual carriageway of doom, which cuts through the middle of Guildford, and then disappears on the other side - without any exits!

Well, by now we were heading north-east of Guildford, when we'd planned to turn right in the town centre and head out southwards, and we ended up doing a huge loop around the country lanes outside the city (at one point, we went through Chilworth, and I was very unhappy to find myself there, because in my universe Chilworth counts as very far away from home), until we found ourselves re-joining our planned route at Godalming.

Plain sailing from there on?  Yeah, right.  Godalming seemed to be just a huge mass of badly-signposted roundabouts, mostly surrounded by traffic jams.  And one of them was partly shut because it was half-way through being re-turfed - by 7 or 8 workmen, who were just standing around eyeballing the stack of turf as if they expected it to lay itself.  Needless to say, it did nothing of the sort.  The whole town was the last thing I needed after our ridiculously huge detour.  Hence my decision to bulldoze it someday.

Well... the arboretum was very nice, once we got there - I have photos, which I might get around to showing you sometime - but I've decided that next time anyone proposes a day-trip, I'm going to glue myself into my chair to make sure I don't have to go.  Because I've had enough of a road trip today to last me for years.

Speaking of photos, I have graduation ones: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=303702&id=729711216&l=6994d1b393.  Me in a funny hat and a superhero cape B]

So, rant over.

Hopefully I'll write something a bit more positive next time... 8p


- The Colclough

Do I have ze Papers?

Semi-random philosophical question: what are the most important pieces of paper in your life?  Books don't count, because if you included books, the list could get really enormous really fast.  So, just loose bits of paper.  Hmnnn...

I present, for your consideration, a list of candidates:

• A letter?  Could be, if you're in the habit of sending and/or receiving letters on paper.  Not for me though, as mine are nearly all in electronic form.  Haven't had a letter on paper in... uh... no idea actually.
• A cheque?  Depends on your financial situation 8p
• Something you wrote or drew?  I have thousands of these, and if push came to shove, one of them might win out - but a lot of them are pretty negligible.
• Your birth certificate?  Obviously important, but not that exciting.  After all, practically everyone has one.
• Your marriage certificate?  Much more exciting... if you have one.  Which I don't.
• Your death certificate?  Not really - you don't get one of these until  your life is over, so it can't count as an important piece of paper *in* your life.
• Your driving license?  Could be a winner for petrolheads, but from my point of view it's more a practical tool, rather than a thing of emotional significance.  Well, I say that after having had it for more than three years, with the trauma of failing my first test long since lost in the sands of time.  You might regard your license as your most important piece of paper for the first few months after you get it.
• A certificate of academic achievement?  Quite possibly, especially if it says something about first class honours.

I haven't actually picked one myself.  I just felt like having a philosophical ramble.

But then again, having been given a piece of paper at Guildford Cathedral yesterday which says something about Bachelor of Science with First Class Honours, I might just go for that one as my current choice for the time being 8]

I could take this as my cue to go tangential on the architecture of the Cathedral, but I'll leave religious masonry for another day.

It's a bit weird to find myself looking back on my graduation as a past event, after well over three years regarding it as something in the future.  Guildford may have one of the country's most minimalist and austere cathedrals, but it's a cathedral nonetheless, and being there with most of the other people on my course, all in matching superhero capes and funny hats (yes, we threw the hats afterwards) is one of those once-in-a-lifetime things that sticks with you.  I think it will be, anyway.  It's interesting to question which aspects will be remembered - the determination of my cape to become asymetrical... the commentary on last month's haircut (which most of my coursemates hadn't seen yet)... the endless, hand-numbing applause... the long, oddly smug-yet-awkward walk down the aisle after shaking hands with the principal... the mildly inappropriate but not overly depressing weather... the funny puddings back at the college afterwards... or something else altogether?  Only time will tell, I suppose.

Some of the other guys have already got jobs - Steve said his mostly involves watching lots of Irish film trailers, which somehow seems inherently funny - and others (myself included) are still looking.  Or in my case, looking a bit, and writing monster movies on the side - as you do.

We didn't get professional photos taken.  We've got a Nikon D80 DSLR, and we adopted the tried-and-trusted digital photography method of keep-on-pointing-and-shooting-until-something-works.  Well, more or less.  It wasn't quite point-and-shoot per se, but you get the idea.  But it was a heck of a lot cheaper doing it ourselves.

*long pause*

Uh... that didn't really feel like a properly-written ending, but I'm not sure what else to say, so I'm going to leave it there for now.  Photos maybe coming sort of soonish.


- The Colclough

Things and Stuff

No, I haven't made a conscious decision to blog only on Thursdays from now on.  It's purely coincidental.  I'm afraid the following is a rather disparate collection of mini-rants on totally unrelated subjects 8p

I've decided never to waste money on Recorded Delivery postage again.  Royal Mail have had 9 working days to get the Megastropulodon DVDs to the cast, and one of them still hasn't turned up.  Well, it hadn't last time I heard from the would-be recipient, which was on Tuesday evening.  Considering that I paid £1.70 for first-class recorded delivery, I'm getting very cheesed off with RM.

I gave up the hair experiment on Monday.  I got fed up with it being permenantly dirty, knotty and getting in my face, so I made use of some scissors.  Other people have said they like the result, but I don't like it at all.  I'm not showing you a photo.  I've been considering wearing a hat for the next six months so I don't have to see the mess every time I walk past a mirror.  I hate mirrors sometimes.  I suspect there's a happy (ish) medium somewhere between what I had on Sunday and what I've got now, so I shall be avoiding scissors for quite a while now.

On a slightly more positive note, I've finally got round to booking my funny hat and my superhero cape for my graduation ceremony at the end of August.

Which leads me straight back to the negative side of things... now that I've finished college, I don't know what I want to do with my existence for the next few decades.  It really feels like I've dropped off the end of something, and I'm sort of freefalling.  I can't even knuckle down and work on a new animation, as my various script concepts are stubbornly remaining just that - concepts, and not much more.  Anybody else got any ideas about what a super-powered granny might get up to?

The uncertainty is very depressing.

Um... what else to rant about...

Well, they say great artists steal, maybe that applies to bloggers too?  I shall go and raid someone else's blog for inspiration... *goes and raids*

Hannah (whose fault it is that I started writing this blog in the first place... at least in part) has been complaining about finding it hard to express important things verbally, about the tendency to bottle things up, about unasked and unanswered questions (http://hannahlikessheepbaa.blogspot.com/2010/09/id-wear-my-heart-on-my-sleeve-but-its.html, http://hannahlikessheepbaa.blogspot.com/2010/09/me-and-my-heart-we-have-issues.html), and I'd have to say, some of it reads like a transcript of my own brain, because I don't talk about stuff either.  I've been trying to think of something encouraging to say in reply, but nothing has come to mind yet, except to say you're not alone.  There are aspects of me that nobody else knows about.  Apart from God, of course - I guess that's omniscience for you.  I suppose the first step towards being honest with other people is that we have to be honest with God first; after all there's no point trying to hide the truth from someone who already knows the truth anyway.  Once we've got to grips with talking to God, then maybe it might start getting easier to talk to other humans.  Or maybe I'm just barking up the wrong tree again.  I don't know.

Anyway, I've probably ranted enough for the time being, so I'm going to hit the 'publish' button and get on with something else.

- The Colclough