So, youse’ve been bereft of my blogging for three-and-a-bit months. In that time, I’ve successfully moved house (but not finished unpacking); gotten drunk (several times); worked - on interesting projects (I’m sure I’ll be banging on about the joys of Xen here at some stage), and not-so interesting ones (firewall rulesets. VPNs. LDAP. bloody LDAP. gah); and, er, other stuff.
Sarah’s been over for the past two weeks, and I’ve been doing my best to teach her to cook - with vegan goulash, stuffed peppers, tortilla-based things, and rrychips. I’m not a particularly good teacher, but at least I’ve learnt more about the intricacies of soy mince, lentils, and the art of roasting vegetables than I ever thought I would have.
The vegangoulash was destined for last Wednesday’s beer & chilli party at paddy and ruthy’s house (don’t worry - I brought along turbogoulash with Proper Bloddy Meat, too). We both got very, very, very, drunk, and am quite sure, made a terrible nuisance of ourselves. ah well. Oh, and magic-bouncing-medicine-and-too-much-wine two-day hangovers are bad.
Wednesday, of course was “the twelfth” - or “orangefest” as we’re now supposed to call it. Being the archetypal cultural-middle-class-garden-centre-atheistic-prod, I’ve never actually seen a big orange parade before, so was perhaps more curious about the various goings-on than Sarah was. In the end, I was rather disappointed - the Lisburn Road (even in my frighteningly middle class bit of it) was lined four deep in W.K.D.-swilling (“irn bru” and vodka! ugh! when we were at university, we thought that that was just a weird urban legend about how depraved west coast scots were) spectators, many of whom had dressed in such a way as to live up to every “east belfast concerned millie’s group” stereotype you might ever have come across.
Okay, so that’s just snobbery talking, but I was sort-of expecting more of, well, y’know, a cultural event. Lambeg drums and music and baton-twirling and bowler hats and all-that. Instead, we got two hours of incessant flute bands, all seemingly playing the same bloddy tune, a few bedraggled orangemen, lots of taxis and white vans with their number plates either blacked out, or replaced with “LOL 1690”. Worse yet, there were only *two* lambeg drums in the whole parade - and they were being played by people standing in an open-sided lorry. Oh, and the only bowler hats to be seen were worn by the three or four guys at the head of the parade, walking behind the kids dressed up as a prince & princess.
So; yes, the Orange Order may have made a good attempt to get rid of their “5-nil” shouting and other distastefulness - but they still need to get rid of the dilapidated vans that form half of the procession; kill off the banners that refer to terrorists / gangsters / serial killers; have a bit more variety in the music - the one or two accordian bands made a nice break from the flute-playing monotony, for instance; get people to tidy their uniforms before the big day; oh, and, bloody hell, will youse please sstop waving the comedy “temperance” banners - which seemed to invariably be carried in front of a car containg thirty crates of alcopops.
