October was busy! I went to Emily's Fish Party on the 30th anniversary of the Great Storm of 1987, made the most of my free time in Amsterdam on a work visit, submitted my novel for consideration for the first time to some agents, beat the Time Run escape room, rode on the Mail Rail, walked in the Brecon Beacons (just about) and, finally, had a fantastic time at PyCon UK 2017 (more on that next post).
Fish Party
Emily arranged several activities for this, including a cut-out fish wafting race and a game of Pin the Blame on Michael Fish (the "tail" was his tie, labelled newspaper cartoon-style as "public opinion" -- it wasn't his fault the weather forecast was wrong.)
We also had a (Michael) Fish-themed music playlist on Spotify (there actually is at least one song directly about Michael Fish) and played a round of Marco Polo Michael Fish in the garden.
Amsterdam
Work sent me out to Amsterdam for a few days for some meetings with the other half of our recently-merged company. It was the first time I'd flown from the tiny Exeter Airport, which conveniently has one or two fights to and from Amsterdam each day. I do like the smaller airports.
The Amsterdam office is near Oosterpark which was a lovely find to spend a bit of spare time in. It also happened to be near Kitty's workplace, so I met up with her one lunchtime, and we went to Bagel and Beans.
We also had a near-complete meet-up of the IRC channel I frequent (sorry infi), which meant a table for six at a pizzeria for atob, bz2, fuzzie, Kitty + 1, and myself. It was really great to see everyone again.
Novel
Those 50,000 words I spewed out in 2008 for Nanowrimo worked themselves closer to escaping into the world this month. Actually, I'm not sure very many of the original words have survived at this point, but at any rate, I sent various-length samples of the now 80,000 word fantasy novel to the first batch of hopefully sensibly chosen agents.
As of writing (3 Dec 2017) I've had three replies, all rejections. I'm trying not to get disheartened about it. The last two in particular were "not for us" style, which is a little more than I'd expect if my submissions were just crap.
That said, if anybody reading this wants to give me feedback, I'd love to hear more opinions, even if it's just on the first 1-3 chapters (which seems to be the most any agent asks for unsolicited). I'll take any critique thrown my way :)
Time Run had come recommended as a great experience as well as having a competent set of puzzles, and it didn't disappoint. The escape room was hosted entertainingly by people in loose character, the sets were properly outstanding, and the puzzles avoided having the feeling of being a sequence of combination codes. There was even a novel mechanism for the countdown timer; the only escape room I've done that hasn't just been a clock on the wall. And we beat the clock with a comfortable amount of time to spare.
It turned out they aren't closing as soon they had thought when we booked the room (quite a few escape rooms are essentially pop-ups in vacant warehouses) and they have a second experience, some kind of points-based take on an escape room, so we've booked in for that in December!
Mail Rail
The same day the group also visited the Postal Museum, which has just opened a stretch of the Post Office's old Mail Rail for visitors. They did a good job at converting/creating a narrow-gauge railway designed for parcels into something people could use, and it was interesting to see the tunnels. The tour was stretched out as much as possible with videos projected onto the walls of a couple of the stations we stopped at, and had some terrible acting in a pre-recorded voice-over during the ride, but we felt it was pretty good value for money all things considered.
The museum itself didn't keep my attention for very long (though the working pneumatic tubes that we could send written messages across the museum was definitely a highlight) but let's face it: the Mail Rail was the real attraction there.
Brecon Beacons
The year before I joined the Scouts, while I was still in the Cubs, the group did their summer hike/camp in the Brecon Beacons, and I've always felt like I missed out on it (though we had some great ones while I was there myself). As such, it's always been floating around my subconscious as something to do.
Last year at PyCon someone in the Slack channel mentioned they were doing the Beacons while they were in Wales. The Brecon Beacons turned out to be closer than I expected to Cardiff (train to Merthyr, then bus, heritage train into the National Park itself), so I resolved to do likewise this year. I booked a YHA at the east edge of the Beacons for a couple of nights prior to PyCon, with the plan to get the heritage railway out most of the way on Day 1, walk to Pen Y Fan (the highest peak) and back on Day 2, and then return via the heritage railway on Day 3.
These plans were not to be! But I still had a nice time there.
On Sunday evening before I travelled out the next day I noticed that the extra day of service that Brecon Mountain Railway was putting on had been cancelled at some point, so my walk to the YHA that day ended up being 17 km rather than 9km. Did I mention I was carrying a laptop in my rucksack because I wanted to do the Sprints and code dojo at PyCon? It was a heavy rucksack -- or at least more than I was used to.
Turns out Brecon Mountain Railway got the wrong dates for school half term, so moved their additional day a week later with only a few days notice. Thanks!
The views on the way from the station to the YHA were, however, rather special.
The YHA itself was very nice too. I got there shortly before reception opened and got talking to a Duke of Edinburgh supervisor, who had just arrived with a cohort of teenagers who'd just finished their hike. They certainly narrowly missed the full day of heavy rain we got the next day! (They were also extremely well behaved and respectful of the shared facilities; it was a shame they weren't there the next day too.)
Indeed, the next day was pouring down with rain; I couldn't see the top of the nearest hill. It was a 25km round trip to Pen Y Fan, and I just did not want to walk it in such grim weather. And it was my holiday, so I didn't! Instead I went out for a short walk up the hill to the cloud line, then returned to and curled up in the YHA, which had a nice shared living room, to catch up on some reading.
The next morning was gorgeous as I walked back to Torpantau station, persuading me that I should give the Beacons another go sometime, perhaps organised somewhat better to give me more chance of a sunny day!
Luckily, the train showed up this time:
I got back to Merthyr Tydfil and, having discovered earlier that I'd forgotten to pack any t-shirts for PyCon (how did I manage this, I had a checklist and everything), stopped into the supermarket by the station before catching the mainline train back to Cardiff.
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