In Brief

This weekend saw Fliss visiting Manchester as part of the regular North/South cultural exchange project. To that end we attended The Vortex at the Royal Exchange in celebration of TJ's birthday. I quite enjoyed the play although the second half seemed a lot shorter than the first. I was a little disappointed that it very quickly centred on the mother/son relationship to the exclusion of all the other inter-relationships explored in the first half. We finished the evening with a swift jar or two in Sinclairs before Mufi squeezed 5 of us into TJ's little car to give us a lift home.

Fliss and I visited Rivington for a walk on Saturday morning. We tackled the castle first but found it was closed. After a few abortive attempts to find the path to the bottom of the oriental gardens we ended up going round the back of Rivington Pike. A lot of the buildings seem to have been caged off due to "unsafeness". However I suspect this just makes them more tempting to climb around.

The evening saw film watching. We watched Clerks 2 which was very funny although I'm not sure if it's better than the original. There was also the rather fine Sci-Fi flick Children of Men which was very enjoyable.

We spent a lot of today playing Time Splitters 2 in co-op mode. Despite having had it in my collection for ages this was the first time we played it. It's very enjoyable with each level having it's own theme and I'm pretty sure lots of references to various films and other games. We did get stuck on the Neo-Tokyo mission and had to resort to searching the 'net for some advice. Hopefully we will finish it next time Fliss visits.

It's always sad seeing Fliss off at the end of a weekend but luckily I'll be seeing her again in 5 days. It's times like this I wish there was a decent rail ticket discount scheme.