Animal Farm

This weekend was filled with me writing an essay and going to see The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Go and see it, it is great! Aaaaaaar! I also watched Casablanca for the first time ever, that is also great. But the other thing I did this weekend was go to Sam and Matt's house warming party. I had been invited by Sam approximately three weeks ago. Bare that in mind. Three weeks notice. On Saturday, about five o'clock she rang me to ask if I was still coming. I said yes, I was looking forward to it, in fact. Then she said 'I don't remember if I told you or not...' 'Yeeeeees?' I enquired uneasily. 'But it's fancy dress!' She replied.

what kinda fucking party is this?

No. No she hadn't told me it was fancy dress and had left it until the last minute when all the shops would be closed to tell me it was a fancy dress party. It was fancy dress with an animal theme. Given that their house is a menagerie (dog and snake) I guess that's where the idea came from. I told her I had very little time to prepare, you know, three weeks previously would have been ample time to sort something out, but two hours? GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK!! I mentioned that my costume may only stretch as far as a Wolves in the Throne Room t-shirt, but suddenly realised that I could dust off the old bear skin rug and go in that!

Come on, Yogi, we have a party to attend...

So I did. The thing was, I only knew a couple of people at the party and the door was answered on me by a complete stranger who looked askance at me draped with a dead bear. I was, thankfully, at the right address and saw all the old faces, mainly Jimmy and Claire, whom I have not seen either of since I worked for Humber Archaeology back in about 2006. Jimmy is still eating curry and Claire is still a farmer's wife. I also met some new people, who's names I knew but had never come across before and watched Matt dance like he was on fire to Rammstein.

I was cordially invited back to their place on Tuesday night for dinner, so took the offer. Free food is always enough to draw me to any event! I texted Sam on Tuesday evening to inquire that we were still on for the evening and she replied in the affirmative. I was slightly worried due to the forgetting the whole 'fancy dress party' thing, so I thought I'd better jut check. I set off around seven and as I was hitting the Hull road I got two missed calls from Sam. Pulling over (safety first), I called her back wondering why she could have been so desperate to call me as I was on my way.

She asked if I could do her a massive favour and my first thought was that she'd forgotten to buy food for the dinner and could I pick up a chicken on my way. But no, it was a different problem. Matt had earlier taken the dog out for a walk, the first time daddy had been allowed out with Chester alone, but in his fuss to get Chester's harness on had dropped his car key and locked himself and the dog out of the car. In the rain. I was asked by Sam if I could pick up his spare key from Matt's folk's house, which, fortunately, was on the way to Beverley. I arrived with said key, to find Sam still in her work clothes and mild panic about the dog being locked out of the car. Not Matt, mind. The dog. Another night, another adventure with the Sam and Matt show.

Anyway dinner was lovely, and I got to play with Matt's snake for the rest of the night. Fnar fnar.

On Martson Moor Baht'at

The esteemed Mr McKibbin and He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named rolled into town this weekend, demanding that they stay at my house. What could I do to refuse? HWCBN gave me such a thrashing that I lost consciousness three times and the sight in my right eye due to the crushing of my orbit as the blows rained down on me from his billy club. When I finally came round the two were ensconced on my sofa braying at my predilection like crows. It will take weeks to remove the blood from the carpet. The reason they were in town was because Pragya was having the final of three marriages, all to the same bloke, go figure. Three marriages and I had not been invited to a single one. Not only that, but I was expected to put up these two, who had been invited. Talk about rubbing my face in it. What am I?  A fucking hotel? I took umbrage at this turn up of events and went to Nathan's housewarming party instead. But before I did, the three of us went out for a drive at HWCBN's insistence. He broke my ulna as a warning. First stop was to Marston Moor to have a good look at where King Cromwell had smashed the Frenchies in 1389 or something, then it was off to Spofforth Castle to have a good look at some ruins where King Cromwell had smashed the Frenchies in 1389 or something. Here are two photos taken by the amazing talents of McKibbin:

Marston Moor

Me

As I said, that evening I took myself off to Nathan's housewarming party where he had dug a ten foot deep fire pit and stuffed an entire reindeer down there to cook. Later all Hell broke loose involving blue cheese. The less said about that incident, the better. In other news, I have mostly been hopping back and forth between sites and have spent a bit of time at Hes East helping Becky finish off the Roman well she's been hacking out. I present a series of photos for your delight and to give you some idea of the conditions we have to work in:

Bless Bless

So this is the last post I shall write whilst here in Iceland. I leave tomorrow for Terra Britannia at 7.00am. My last day on site was last Thursday and we went for the now traditional Grillhusid lunch. It also coincided with a colouring in completion when we found a load of photo-copied pictures of Disney characters. It was decided that mine was best with five votes to two over Lilja's 'effort'.

The winner by far

On Friday Atli and Hrönn had their house warming party. Apparently I'd called his and Hrönn's new apartment cold and sterile. Well it was certainly warm on Friday, helped a little by a bottle of vokda... Then Jo and I took ourselves off to the Westmen Isles (Vestmannaeyjar) for the rest of the weekend. I don't know if you know, but these are a set of small islands just of the south of Iceland. Home to about five thousand people about a third of the main town on the biggest island of Heimaey was buried under a volcano in 1973. We went specifically to see this, we called it Tephra Tourism. We climbed the mound of tephra that was left over after the eruptions of 1973, nowadays called Eldfell. Fire Mountain. How fucking obvious is that? What dullard came up with that name? It's a mountain, it's got fire coming out of it. What shall we call it? Why not just call it 'Massive Fucking Destruction Mountain' and have done with it. That aside it was kind of weird being on a hot mountain that was only six months older than me.

The population of Heimaey are all like 'WTF! OMGZ!!! DUDE!!!'

It wasn't just Volcanoes that fucked Heimaey up, Algerian Pirates turned up one day in the seventeenth century and captured most of the population, shooting the rest like fish in a barrel in some caves that hey thought they'd escaped to. You would wonder why people even bothered going back to the island after all these catastrophes, but Icelandic folk are hard headed if nothing else and the population still clings onto this rock, eating Puffins, sea bird eggs and roots and berries by the look of things. Even the fresh water supply was fucked up by the Volcano. In a nice touch all these horrors were lovingly carved on the new Church door.

I assumed this church door was pre-1973 and they had left a blank panel on the middle right section in case 'anything else of interest happened in Heimaey'

Another massive highlight of the trip was seeing some Puffins. Having eaten one before Christ's Mass, it was churlish of me not to see them in their natural habitat. We stared at the stupid little fat fucks in the driving rain then decided to visit the folk museum. We had been lied to by the Lonely Planet again. It had told us in hushed tones about a cabinet of artifacts from the island's only Nazi party representative. We searched high and low but could locate no Nazis what so ever. The boat trip home was one of the choppiest ever. The ship was practically capsizing with every tsunami sized wave. It was certainly not helping Jo's tummy due to the Monkfish dish disaster from the night before...

The Vestmannaeyjar Ferry arrives safe and sound in Reykjavik...

Home of Once Brave

On Thursday or Friday, I forget, we were having a discussion on site about super powers. Now, I have always been of the opinion that the only super powers that you need are: Invisibility, X-Ray vision and the ability to walk through walls. Ace McCloud said the ability to steal other people's abilities, which I thought was pretty good. Duncan said the ability to fly, which a bullshit ability. "But I'd be able to fly anywhere in the world' He said. 'But with invisibility you'd be able to walk onto any plane and fly anywhere in the world.' I said. 'I'd be able to fly home from work.' He floundered. 'I wouldn't even turn up to work.' I countered 'I'd be too busy looking at women in the shower. And I wouldn't need money, I'd just take whatever I wanted, cos no-one would be able to see me.' The stupidest of all the abilities was Roz's ability to talk to animals. 'I'd be able to solve crimes by asking the birds who did it!' she defended her stupidity. Imagine the scene:

a courtroom where a murder trial is taking place:

The prosecution 'I call forward my first witness; a Blackbird.' I can't imagine how quickly this case will be thrown out of court.

'I'd be able to talk to my pet tiger!' She attempted one last plea.

'What about? How it was in his cage? How he'd like to be back in India with his family?'

I am drowning in a sea of dunces.

I stayed in on Friday night and played computer games all night, then got up on Saturday and did exactly the same thing. Until the evening where we all headed down to Angelos and Sindre's gaff for a house warming party. I got pretty drunk and then we all headed into town at about 4 am, so I managed to beat my own record of staying out. I finally got home about 6 am, well oiled....

Sunday began as a lazy day until Jo dragged me out of the house for a walk round the Grotta Peninsular. We stopped off at a supermarket where Jo took photos of stupidly named food products. Ho ho ho, stupid foreigners... At the lighthouse of Grotta the wind picked up and threatened to blow us out to sea. Fortunately all it did was give us slight hypothermia. A hot-dog and a cup of coffee later we decided enough was enough of battling the elements in an attempt to have fun and headed home.