What happened to the weekend?

Another weekend of Greenbelt work, made slightly more pleasurable by shiny new toy, which is a dream to work on. I turn the hi-fi up (REM, The Bees, The Delays, Jeff Buckly, William Orbit) and disappear into my own little world churning out pages and pages of FAQs for the Venue Managers, answering emails, confirming site layouts, checking people’s availability, making phone calls, updating guides and forms, taking phone calls, creating a new database, updating spreadsheets…ticking off action after action on a To Do list that is frighteningly large. No time to play until the list is significantly reduced.

By Sunday evening however I’ve had enough and escape to Rusholme for a Curry with friends.

The upheaval continues in Rusholme as they continue to change the layout of the carriageway, parking bays and footways and install new street furniture (shiny metal and embossed with the Rusholme symbol). As we walk back to the car, we observe that the new tarmac on the pavements has funky blue and white shiny pieces in. It seems to make sense on the curry mile, beneath all the flashing neon and bright colours.

One of our party also observes that the white pieces will help camouflage the hideous chewing gum splodges that seem to blight every footway sooner or later. Of course this changes my perception of the pavement, with the white pieces now taking on the appearance of thousands of pieces of chewing gum. Suddenly I’m not so fond.

Back home and a further few hours of Greenbelt work and emailing (amazing how many people are also on-line and replying there and then), this time on the laptop in front of Seven Years in Tibet (with Mr Pitt looking mighty fine so I’ll forgive the meandering accent). Again it’s amazing how a single sentence can change your view of something. This time I can’t stop thinking of Jill Sobule’s line in Heroes.