Long weekend

Long weekends are great, there should be more of them. Sri Lankans get a whopping 25 public holidays this year (compared to UK 8) - including one each month for the day of the full moon.

Saturday
Anyway, my long weekend was fine. On Saturday I made it to pretty Oxford for an old highschool friend's wedding. Nice day, happy to see him married. Went for a stroll in a country park, and the town.

Sunday
Met some Irish friends for lunch. Then returned home and played lots of Mario Kart Wii.

Monday
Today was a typical English Spring day. Cold, wet and windy. Got to Chinatown for lunch, got drenched, returned home to cook some Thai food with my friends, then played lots of Mario Kart Wii. I didn't take any pictures of the rain.





P.S. Sorry none of these pictures are getting onto my Flickr account. I've been quite lazy, and since my camera broke last year, I got out of the habit of uploading. Will start again soon, I hope.

On the pleasures of music

Today I got quite a bit of pleasure from listening to music - from both the softer and harder ends of the musical spectrum. I find music has the ability to give at times a very special, almost euphoric kind of pleasure. And it's ability to do so completely perplexes me. I'd like to know why music is so imporant to us and can evoke emotion in all of us, and how it came to be so.

I guess you could call me an evolutionist, I believe that which ever traits we have, we have them because of natural selection from evolutionary pressures on our ancestors. We fear, for instance, because those who didn't posses such a thing as fear didn't last long enough to leave children. We enjoy certain foods because of some personal pyschology perhaps, but more broadly I believe it's because of natural selection - and while I might not know the exact mechanism, it's probably the case that if we tend to die young if we don't get nutrient A, then those people who tended to like, and thus seek out essential nutrient A, tended not to die before they left children.

Any aspect of ourselves should have a reason for being so. The pleasures of music seem to be common to us all. But why? I don't get it. What advantage did early humans have in an ability to find pleasure out of very particular sounds. There could be social reasons, but as far as I'm concerned, I've not yet heard a convincing explanation as to why we find pleasure in music. I once read a theory to do with the fact that we inherited an inclination to be sensitive to rhythm from fish, but I wasn't entirely convinced.

Hard Music
Hyperviolet - by Pig Destroyer
Accessible Losses - by Darkest Hour
As the earth spins round - by Sikth, but sample misses the best bits :(

Today I roamed the streets a little melancholy - with a certain someone in mind. To lighten my mood I decided to play a little Pig Destroyer, on a metal mix that my friend Mr Michael Rayner recently compiled for me. This, along with some other tracks, somehow focused my mind, and made the task of walking down the street that much more pleasurable.

I'm new to 'metal'. I used to enjoy some songs bordering metal, but I never quite crossed the death growl threshold. My friend is an avid metal fan, so I asked him to compile a sampling of metal music to help me see why metal is so great. Indeed, its combination of death growls (which become rather quaint, I think), virtuosic guitar and drums, grunging assonance and leading, blasting rhythm is quite hyptnotic. 'As the earth goes round' has a particularly beautiful ending, lulling you away to a contemplative state, underscored by a tyranny of bass beats.

I just have to be careful not to put the volume too loud on my iPod because I came home tonight with a ring in my ear, similar to when you come home from a club. It lasted about an hour.

Soft Music
An die musik (an Ode to Music) - by Franz Schubert
Clarinet Quintet in A, K581, Larghetto - by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Prelude No.4 Opus 28 - by Frédéric Chopin

Softer music also gives me great pleasure. I'm not the best piano player in the world, but when I got home tonight I completely unwound myself by playing some tunes on the piano - Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert - some of my favourite composers. I'm sure plenty of people have written on the pleasures of Mozart, and have attempted to explain its origins in pyschology or perhaps mathematics or both. I don't know why it gives pleasure, just that it does. It can take me away to a beautiful, melancholy place, it can bring elation, and such joy and sadness. The two sometimes get confused.

Garfield minus Garfield

When you take Garfield out of Garfield, you get a tragicomic tale of a very lonely man...

Refamiliarising myself with London

Friends
Went over the weekend to drinks & dinner with some university friends plus many others. We fit 30 people (not all present in photo) into the smallest apartment I've ever seen at 10 square metres. It was hot, loud and sweaty, but kind of fun.


Work
Today was my first day back at work. It wasn't so bad. The weather is nothing short of perfect - warm blue-sky days. I wasn't expected at the office until 9:30 so I took a leisurely stroll to the office, through leafy streets and several churchyards, remembering how pretty parts of London are.



Thoughts
Still plenty on my mind. Took a seat this evening by the Thames, near my friend's house. Sat for a while. Read and watched the people going by. Occasionally I'd glance up, nice view...

London

Summer has certainly arrived in London. Today was a beautiful day at 27C. Met a friend for ice-cream, then joined some other friends and sat in the park...


Tomorrow is my first day back at work...

Leaving Canada, Arriving in London

Leaving Canada
Pleasant few days in Vancouver after my short stay in Whistler. I basically spent the whole time with friends, cooking, visiting nude beaches, riding bicycles, eating lots. For some reason my appetite has been HUGE recently. I don't know why.




Arriving in London
Minutes into arriving in London I realised how much better Vancouver is than London. I missed the clean crisp Vancouver air, its spacious streets, ample trees, endless water and towering mountains. What a special place. London's rather squalid, flat, urban, it's too big and too busy. It's bedlam. At least, those were my first thoughts this morning.

After a nap, I had a bit of a change of heart. My friend got home so we headed to central London - Charing Cross, Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden. I know London very well, returning feels like coming home. And Summer nights are rather special in London, as was today's. There's such a festive atmosphere in town, all the pubs overflow with drinkers onto cobble streets, all chatting away in the balmy evening air. We had dinner, then went for a drink. I guess being back is not so bad after all... It's just very familiar.

Whistler

My time in Whistler is nearly up. Yesterday proved to be a good day. Started with a huge breakfast, then left to myself. Went for a stroll through Whistler village. Made it to some golf course. Saw two bears. It's a strange thing, to see a bear. I found myself thinking: if the bear starts running, which direction will I run? It did start to run, but not in my direction, so it was all fine.


After my encounter with the bears, I met Mike to do a small hike. According to Mike's calculations there should have been no snow left in the forest, but in fact we did the entire hike over 1-4 ft of snow. Which wasn't entirely unpleasant, in fact it was quite fun.




What a beautiful part of the world.

Shredding the Gnar Gnar

One of the reasons I decided to pass through Canada on my way to the UK was because two of my friends live and work in Whistler - a premier ski-resort a about an hour and half away from Vancouver. Yesterday morning we made the drive up to Whistler, past exceptional scenery - mountains rising from the sea.


It's Spring now, and by a lucky fluke there's enough snow left on the mountains to ski or snowboard on.

This was my first morning in Whistler, and along with my two friends Mike and Tina, we were ready to shred the gnar gnar. This is snowboarding lingo for riding fresh snow. I have never snowboarded before, and it showed. I didn't so much shred the gnar gnar as slide down it on my backside. That was for the first hour anyway. I sort of got the hang of it after that. It was nice up the mountain. It snowed. Snowboarding was very fun, but very tiring. And by the time I got back down to the village my appetite was huge. A fun day.

Vancouver

Although I'm not currently in Vancouver, I feel out of a sense of thoroughness that I ought to document my time there.

Once you know one international student, you know a dozen. I happened to know two in Vancouver, from my trip in Korea. I met many of their friends, but on one day we made a small group of 5 to go explore the outskirts of Vancouver, which are exceptional, in this instance taking a bus and 'sea-bus' to a place called 'Lynn Canyon'. Crossed a bridge, walked through some pine forest, saw a river, pleasant.



Dinner, on my insistence was 'sam gyeob sal' - a Korean dish made from Bacon which I've already mentioned in this blog twice. Later went for beeer.


Vancouver reminds me in a small way of Brisbane. It's a medium-sized city and it's full of Asians. The city-centre is a little rougher, but the outskirts are incredibly beautiful - the ocean and tall green mountains covered in snow. It's pretty in Spring too, lots of trees in blossom.