Thursday
My first driving lesson in about a year and a half, went OK but stalled several times and didn’t enjoy it much. Navigated to Godmanchester and back and lauperr drove on a motorway for the first time!
Friday
Went up to Godmanchester again for lauperr‘s interview at the Woodgreen Animal shelter which she did brilliantly at!
At 6pm I travelled to London in Russ’s car to stay in the Columbia hotel overnight, drove past the Abbey Road studios and narrowly avoided crashing into a Ferrari. After seeing the Ferrari Russ tried to show off by accelerating quickly out of some traffic lights and nearly broke his car, there were some funny smells coming from the engine 🙂 We had some very interesting discussions about the future of the music industry and sachets of ketchup before running to the car in *pouring* rain only for the rain to stop as soon as we got in. When we got to the hotel all the engineers sat around drinking beer telling stories and I geeked a bit.
Saturday
Met in the foyer at 6:30am to get a taxi to the Albert Hall. Amusingly, because we’d asked for a taxi from the Columbia Hotel to the Royal Albert Hall the company assumed we must be important and sent a silver Jaguar with personalised plates and a chauffeur in a suit! We weren’t going to tell him otherwise and quite enjoyed the ride. Perhaps he thought we were something to do with Elton John who was on the next night. We’d been stood in the foyer for ages waiting for the taxi and Russ joked that the Jag outside must be for us and the guy at reception said “Yes, that is your car, it’s been waiting for some time” in a very posh voice.
We got the nice control room again this time with air conditioning, a fridge, water cooler, kettle, bathroom, sofa, mirror with lights etc. although the bathroom became out of bounds after one of the engineers was… ill in it and went home. We stayed well clear. The recording went reasonably well and we managed not to kill anyone with the new “safer” sling system for the flown microphones despite it being ludicrously worse than the old system 🙂 I did a lot of dangling off balconies with heavy objects and running up and down endless stair cases frantically with bits of rope, chains and cables.
After the usual amusing comments in the tape logs and pressing yellow buttons lots of times the recording was over and we got to rip it all up again, put it in boxes and ride them down slopes into a lorry. The journey home was uncomfortable because I was sat in the third seat of a two seat 7.5 tonne truck. When we got back to the studio we unloaded the lorry and by the time we finished it was 2:30am the following morning and we’d been working for 20 HOURS! In my half asleep state I started to wander home in the dark but was rescued by a beautiful fair maiden in a red carriage.
Monday
I took my driving theory test and passed despite being given zero for one of the hazard perception clips for “reacting inappropriately” or something. There was a frelling cyclist pulling out in front of the car!!
Tuesday
Today was the regional finals of the Young Engineer competitions at Rolls Royce in Derby. We were given a very long lecture about how gas turbines work from a wonderful eccentric guy who insisted on acting out the part of a packet of air very dramatically and singing a song about the cost of fuel relative to the amount of thrust generated! I didn’t win anything which was a bit disappointing, I could really have done with the cash 😛 Photos to follow.
We looked around some huge turbines before coming home with my Rolls Royce cap and balloon copter.
Phewf. Now we’re up to date.