In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

One of the things that happened when I moved into my lovely proper new house here in Leeds is that I finally took possession of all the accumulated gubbins which I had left behind with my parents when I first moved out at the age of 18. Mainly, this meant the books of my childhood and my teens - with which I am now at leisure to get nostalgically re-acquainted.

The Oz books were, in no uncertain terms, the central axis of my childhood. In fact, ( see this picture of me reading to my little friends on my sixth birthday? )
Well, that's an Oz book I'm reading to them - The Land of Oz, I think, judging from the colour of the spine. I had all fourteen of the original L. Frank Baum series, in lovely bright paperback covers as published by Del Rey, and read them religiously and repeatedly from the ages of approximately four to seven years old. (I had a random hardback copy of Lucky Bucky in Oz, too, but even as a child, I sneered at it and looked down upon it for not being a 'proper' Oz book). Dorothy, the Wizard, Ozma and all their little friends were fiercely real to me, and I was quite, quite convinced that the magical Land of Oz existed, if only one knew how to get there.

( This all got a bit longer than is really polite to leave uncut )

I've been watching You Rang M'Lord while I ate my tea: it's being repeated at the moment on UKTV Drama. A bit of Googling has informed me that it first aired in December 1988, when I was all of twelve, and I remember enjoying it very much at the time. I'm now having the pleasure of rediscovering it, and finding out that my taste as a twelve-year-old was not as poor as I'd assumed. It may not be high art, but it does some interesting things with the inevitable main theme of class tensions, and some quite surprising things with its characters and the relationships between them.

In particular, now that I'm older and more 'media aware', I'm really quite impressed that it featured an explicitly lesbian cross-dresser as a regular character: Cissy, one of the two daughters of the house. OK, so the impact is watered down by the fact that the series as a whole is set in what is effectively a fantasy otherworld, and that the primary function of her lesbianism really seems to be to help portray the family as decadent toffs. But still, some credit is surely due for challenging boundaries there.

I certainly remember myself being fascinated and amazed by the character at the time. Just one of many things which now cause me to look back and wonder why it took me so damned long to fully recognise my own sexuality. Ah, well - better late than never.

In other news, I feel utterly crummy tonight, and though I'm supposed to be going to the pub with the oxgoths, I suspect the evening will in fact end in an early retirement with a hot water bottle. I'll see how I feel in half an hour, but that bed is definitely calling...

Well, my sister, Charlotte and her partner, Nicolas, should be in the air on their way home to England now. We had a really enjoyable weekend together: for them, mainly exploratory; for me, nostalgic.

On the Saturday, we took a coach tour up along the east coast of NI to the Giant's Causeway, Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge and other attractions. The weather really came up trumps, presenting us with possibly the hottest, brightest day I've experienced since I moved to NI, and meaning that we were more worried about slapping sun-cream on every five minutes than whether our umbrellas were going to blow away (a more normal problem round here). The sun brought out the best in the scenery: Nicolas enjoyed taking fabulous pictures of it with his posh digital camera; I enjoyed taking snap-happy ones with my £7.97 Tesco's number.

The only down-side to the day was the moment our coach juddered to a halt in the middle of the road... having apparently run out of diesel! We could have gotten pretty cheesed off with the driver at this point for being dim enough to let that happen, but he was such a good-humoured chap, who'd been cracking jokes with us all along the way, that we just took it in our stride. He did save the day, anyway, by managing to coax it back to life no less than three times - just enough finally to roll, engineless, into a petrol station in Portrush. He arranged for some people on the coach who were doing an optional extra tour of a whisky distillery (not including us) to be picked up by another driver in the area and taken onwards, while a bunch of those of us who remained pushed the coach the final four feet needed to get it within reach of the diesel pump, and pretty soon we were on our way again to enjoy our time at the Giant's Causeway.

In the end, we got home a couple of hours later than intended, but we didn't feel we'd missed out on anything we'd expected to see, so the diesel episode just became all part of the fun. I have a photo of the driver grinning sheepishly as he filled up the tank, and can now say I've helped to push a broken-down coach! Oh, and I also managed to pick up excellent birthday presents for both damien_mocata and finthecat for their birthdays next weekend, which I'm pretty sure they'll love.

Today was much more lazy, after the long day yesterday. We got up around 11ish, gathered ourselves together, and headed down for lunch in the Crown Liquor Saloon. The skies were grey, and by the time we'd finished our lunch it was raining. But we decided to do the tourist bus anyway, especially when we saw that the company who do it had got their covered buses on the route in response to the weather. It wasn't much of a photo opportunity due to the rain-streaked windows, but interesting nonetheless. Finally, we had a nose around the University, and the Botanic Gardens given that the rain had eased off again, and then it was time to drop them at the Europa bus station for their bus to the airport.

That's the last time I'll act as host in NI, and funnily enough it was for the exact same two people that I hosted in Oxford for the last time before I left there last year. The next person who arrives to see me here will be my Dad, with a big van ready to take me home. Home? Yes - it still is, is the honest truth.