2 weekends ago Magnus and I attended some friends' wedding in Sheffield, England. We took the opportunity to visit some other friends in N. England and had a bit of a whirlwind trip because of it. We stupidly flew to Manchester instead of Newcastle, which would have been wiser, because we then jumped into a rental car and drove the 3 hours to visit Tony Smith of the StarShipSofa.
This was our first face-to-face meeting, in the flesh, as it were and it was quite exciting! Tony records the new weekly Sofanauts show on Friday afternoons and so I appear on episode No. 5 as a live studio guest! What a gas! You can listen to all or a bit of it here: Sofanauts No. 5 In case you don't know, the Sofanauts is a new panel-type podcast in which Tony invites 2 or 3 guests and there is much talk and discussion on current events or issues in the Science Fiction community. It's fun, but perhaps only if you're interested in that sort of thing.
Tony and Mrs. StarShipSofa are gracious hosts and the kids are great! Their house is beautiful, full of bright colors and quirky art and character. Tony's daughter vacated her room for the night so Magnus and I had a bed to sleep on - thank you E! Tony receives complimentary copies of several new books each week and they are starting to pile up. He practically begged us to take a few off his hands. So we did. Titles by Hal Duncan, Cory Doctorow, Anne and Todd McCaffrey, Patricia Biggs and Alison Goodman. We had a lovely evening just gabbing about various and sundry over dinner and into the evening. Unfortunately, we had to leave relatively early the next morning to drive to Sheffield for the wedding, which started at 1pm.
The wedding and the reception were beautiful and we knew a couple of other people at the wedding. The couple being married were Jane and Anthony and Jane and I sang in the CtK Choir together in Frankfurt and Jane took singing lessons from me for about a year. I suppose I met Anthony at the same time as Jane, because he came to Frankfurt to visit our choir director, Stephen Hartley, and sang with the choir when he was there. It was lovely to see Stephen and Joyce, whom I haven't seen since he left Frankfurt. We never managed to travel to York to visit them while we were living in London. For shame! I fizzled pretty early and we skipped the Ceilidh in the evening, which I would have loved, but I think fast energetic dancing is out for the time being... (more on that later).
On Sunday we drove up to Lancaster to visit our friends Andy and Lizzy and their 8 month old Phoebe. We had a great time just catching up. We visited the Butterfly House in Williamson Park near the Ashton Memorial and I took some photos with my new Nokia, but they're not so great. Let see:
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