| Delusions of journalism |
[Feb. 25th, 2008|12:54 pm] |
So yesterday – braving rain, faulty tickets and some sniggering twit who kicked a mouse onto the line – we took the train up to London. And o! what a rapturous trip.
When I was little, I was for all practical purposes addicted to these brightly-coloured little bundles of E-numbers known as Nerds. When Tesco stopped stocking them – because, as we all know, Tesco is the be-all and end-all of the confectionary retail universe – I sadly assumed that they were no longer being made. The point of this sudden and jarring jaunt down memory lane is that, in a little shop called CyberCandy (ya rly), I have officially rediscovered Nerds. Apparently their even more tongue-curling cousins, sour Dweebs, have ceased to exist in the interim, but I did buy a small box of this additive-laden nostalgia at a very slightly extortionate price. And then promptly lost it in the British Museum, because I’m clever like that, but not before tasting once again the concentrated sugar rush that is the grape and/or strawberry flavoured Nerd. Ah, memories.
CyberCandy is an awesome shop, by the way. It’s gaudy and crowded and I think it might be the closest thing I’ll ever find to an actual real-life Willy Wonka chocolate shop. And it has so many intriguing imports adorning its shelves – Mountain Dew (which I mostly just know from that Occultism-in-D&D parody); the fabled Australian white chocolate and peppermint Freddos; tantalisingly untranslated packets of something squashy and Japanese; even jelly sweets that purported to glow of their own power and came with a pair of long tweezers in every bag (for what I can only assume are safety reasons).
I had a chance for a neat segue into the topic of the British Museum earlier, and passed it up entirely. So: the British Museum. I was there with my mum to go and see an exhibition about some dead Chinese bloke who had an army of pots or something.
…My God. It was incredible.
Can you imagine crafting a life-sized dude out of clay, in painstaking detail, and arranging him in a tomb huge and intricate enough to represent all of China? Possibly? Maybe? Now imagine doing it seven thousand times. And again for the horses. And again for the chariots and carriages. And again for the dancing bronze waterbirds. And again for the suits of mail, each stone disc individually interlinked as if it was a serviceable piece of armour. Now imagine that every figure is unique: that no two share the same combination of features or colours. And that you have to make them all weapons, too.
Can you tell that I was slightly overwhelmed by the sheer… there are so many words I could use here to describe it, from ‘amazing’ through ‘wondrous’ and inventing a few that begin with Z for good measure. As Percy Shelley never wrote: “my name is Ozymandius, king of kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and be terribly bloody impressed.”
If I was a columnist for a magazine or something, I would now be tying all this mess of anecdotes together in a pithy final paragraph that comments on life or modern politics or the state of TV these days. Alas, I am but a humble teenaged pretender, and so you are getting fobbed off with this slightly meta excuse for a closing remark.
And how was your weekend? :D |
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