West Midlands

Today we drove out to Worcester (a bit south-east of Birmingham) to interview Paul, a 3rd-year music student who wrote a score for my video project. As part of the grade for the film archiving course, we have to put together a 20-30 minute piece incorporating archive film. My project is about the effect music has on silent films. Two different composers are writing a score to the same 5-minute film. As a part of the project, I am interviewing both of them about their approach to writing the score.

Anyway, Paul lives out in Worcester; about a 3.5 hour drive from Norwich. K and I made a bit of a road-trip out of it. She hasn't really been out of Norwich much since we got here, so she was happy to come along. But I also enlisted her as the interviewer as she's much better at that kind of thing than I am. It was almost like our days at CMN "back in '99/'00" (we did a few infommercials together).

The drive out there was nice, once we got out of the snow in East Anglia. Still haven't fixed my windshield sprayers, so we had to stop a couple of times to pour water on the windshield while the wipers were on. The spray from the salted roads plays havoc on visibility!

Over on the east side of England, spring has already sprung. The sun was shining, the trees blooming, and the daffodils unfurled. We couldn't believe it. Worcester is a nice little city, though it suffers from the same problem as most cities in England: sparse street-signage and house-numbering. Makes it very easy to get lost when you're looking for a specific address. I still think it's because when they took down the signs during WWII to fool the Germans, they never put them back up afterwards. After circling around for about 20 minutes, I parked at a supermarket and went inside to ask for directions. No one seemed to know where it was I was trying to go, so I was forced to use one of the ever-more-scummy pay-phones (which since the advent of the cell-phone have fallen more and more into disuse and disrepair). Paul came out to meet us and directed us to where to park.

The score he had written is fantastic! Really happy with it. He will undoubtedly go far if he gets exposed to the right people. The interview went well, though he was very nervous about being on camera. His girlfriend said he had been fretting about it all week. We did our best to make him feel comfortable. Afterwards, we took him and his girlfriend, Leela for a pint at a local pub. Had a nice chat.

It was about 15:30 when we started our return to Norwich. To make a little more of the trip, we decided to drive through "Shakespeare's" Stratford-on-Avon. Just as touristy as we thought it would be. We did not stop there. Instead we meandered up to Coventry (an armpit of a city) and nearly got lost in a dizzying network of over/underpasses and roundabouts. By this time we had gotten a feverish craving for an traditional English Sunday Roast so our goal was to find a suitable pub restaurant. Just outside of Coventry, we passed several enticing ones but we decided they were on the wrong side of the road and thusly not worth the trouble of a u-turn. Then lo-and-behold, around a corner and just ahead of us was a large gleaming white, red, and gold building called Toby Carvery. This was undoubtedly the reason why we ended up in Coventry. Ravenous, we pulled into their parking lot immediately.

What a feast! Choice of gammon steak (roast ham), roast turkey, or beef and then all the traditional "fixins" (Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, roast or mashed potatoes, savoy cabbage, "Swede", cooked carrots, gravy, cauliflower au gratin, etc. etc. etc.) you could fit on your plate for £7.99. You are allowed to go back for seconds on the side-dishes, but we were both about to explode after devouring our first round. If we didn't have to continue our long drive back to Norwich, we'd have taken a nap.

Made it back to Norwich by 19:45. Encountered a miniscule blizzard just south of the city, but strangely, there was no snow in Norwich.

Still full from dinner!

-RP-