A hectic weekend, but largely a good one I think.

Spent most of Saturday in London, trawling Camden to see if anything nice had turned up there since I last visited (not really) and then visiting yvesilena, who was out when I arrived due to a misunderstanding but showed up just as I was on the point of going home, so that was all right. Definitely a worthwhile day, though; it was good to do something completely different, very good to chat to Yves for a few hours, and also rather nice and restful just to sit on trains letting my thoughts turn over at their own pace.

(I always forget how valuable that sort of enforced thinking time is to me; I think it's a legacy of the silent meetings at my Quaker secondary school. I've occasionally tried to get the same effect by just sitting and doing nothing at home, but it doesn't seem to work nearly as well when I know I could just get up and do something else at any time. Quaker meetings and train journeys have the common factor that although you chose to be there in the first place, once you've made the decision you can't sensibly get up and walk away half way through.)

Got back at 10ish, in time to spend a few hours at ceb's Halloween party. Having been in London all day, I hadn't had time to come up with a costume, so I cheated shamelessly by re-using the dagger-wound half of my Julius Caesar costume from the_alchemist's party in September. Still, that went down well, so it looks as if I got away with it :-)

Yesterday was the usual Doctor Who stuff at the Gallery, but before that I dropped in on Mum's new house off Milton Road to have a look round and help her put up a curtain rail. It really is very scary how similar the house is to the one she moved out of in Wokingham; when Mum went upstairs to get the curtains to hang on the rail, she paused at the foot of the stairs because she was expecting me to follow her and have a look round the upstairs. The reason I hadn't already moved to do so was because I'd completely forgotten I hadn't been in the house before!

Putting the curtain rail up involved standing on Mum's TV stand to get at one end. Now Mum, unlike me, is keen on actually polishing furniture. This meant that (a) I had to be a little careful of my balance while standing on the thing, and (b) for the rest of the day I was sliding around in my shoes because there was furniture polish all over my socks! Very weird feeling indeed.