Dead as a doornail

I've been working steadily yesterday (Wednesday) and today, on tool refactoring, metamodel engineering, reviewing intermediate versions of an MSc and a PhD thesis; as always making less progress than I hoped, but progress nonetheless. It does feel as though time is creeping up on me, half of my stay is over and I have little concrete to show for it.

One thing that is not working out as well as I had hoped is the initiation of actual research cooperation with the Enterprise Systems group. They are all very busy with their own topics; willing enough to help me out with concrete problems I was experiencing with their tooling, but the gap in interest, for instance regarding pragmatism versus theory, is wider than I had hoped for. I have had more response from the PLASMA group after the double-feature research presentation I gave there last week and the week before than from the group I am actually visiting. Mid-December, Richard Paige, head of the group, is returning from his sabbatical; though I'll have to vacate his office, I think (read: hope) there may be more opportunity for interaction.

One thing that is still working out very nicely, on the other, more positive hand, is my sampling of the Yorkish cultural life. After the highbrow performance of Tuesday, where I exposed myself to Shakespearian drama in theTheatre Royal, tonight I had bought a ticket for A Christmas Carol - The Musical, in yet another venue: The Joshua Rowntree Theatre. This is the fourth theatre/concert hall I have visited, and there are several more to go: per capita this is far beyond what Enschede or Hengelo can show.

Compare: the stage of Joshua Rowntree (Dickens), versus...

Joshua Rowntree Theatre turned out to be a nice, cozy, rather small affair a bit further away to the north of the city. It is too small to have anything like a bar: outside the actual theatre hall there is barely room for toilets. I looked up the location just in time to realise I would have to hurry home and get a quick bite if I wanted to be there in time. Fortunately, after my discovery of The Edge 50 meters from my front door, a quick bite is easy. Arriving there I was reminded, not for the first time, of an anecdote that Elise (I think) once told me: when being shown around the University of Twente campus, a group of Germans asked: "And where do the married students live?" The association lies in the question I asked myself: "And where do bicyclists park their vehicles?" I am sure you see the analogy...

...the stage of the Theatre Royal (Shakespeare)

The performance fit the place well: it was amateur level. A very mixed group of players, many of them between 10 and 15 years of age. Scrooge had a nose and chin that far outdid Clouseau's melting beak in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. It took me about 10 minutes to adjust my expectancy to the right level, after that it was bearable and at times enjoyable. The tale itself is maybe too well known and milked-out, and this was a scene-by-scene and word-for-word rendition of it, with a storyteller making sure we understood what was going on by reading passages from the original story. The only thing they added was an appearance of the ghost of Scrooge's sister, who I do not believe appears in the original, as a sort of moral commentator - as though the tale is not yet sickeningly moral enough without that. As for the musical part, which was one of the reasons for me to go there in the first place: high-school level, with two exceptions from the youngest players (Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Christmas Past).

I had decided that after the performance, if time allowed I could speed to Morrisons to do my final round of shopping before leaving for Canada on Saturday. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when the Ghost of Christmas Future cut it extremely short and showed Scrooge his grave straight away. On the way back I took a different route, via a bicycle path of the kind that I have now learned to recognise as an abandoned railroad track, which brought me so precisely to where I wanted to be that I now wonder if Foss Island, which is essentially a large parking lot surrounded by several megastores, may have been a train station. To wonder is to look it up and Bingo! there was such a station, or more accurately a freight depot, abandoned as recently as 25 years ago. (Once you start reading up on such stuff you never stop, so I now know that trains on this line also served the Rowntree Chocolate Factory, home of the Kit Kat.)

Speaking of trains, I now go look up my connection to Heathrow on Saturday morning. Hope I can leave here at a Christian time.