Illuminating York

Clifford Tower showing scenes of Danish invasions

These are busy times: not only are there Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day to celebrate, the first involving lots of dressing-up and merrymaking, the second lots of fireworks and merrymaking, but in addition, the city of York is organising festivals like there is no tomorrow.

Currently there is Illuminating York, not by accident scheduled after winter time has set in as it mainly involves projecting scenes onto buildings. They apparently do this for the fifth time in a row now, the theme chosen for this year is "Illuminating the Past, Enlightening the Future". I have seen more of the former than of the latter.

But it was already after nine when I got a glimpse of all this, let's start a bit earlier in the day. During our trip to Castle Howard I had been complaining to Adolfo that I thought very little was being organised within Computer Science on a social level, and in reaction he very kindly forwarded a mail from one Sam Simpson scheduling a dinner somewhen next week with EngD students. (I might tell you more about the EngD programme some other time, suffice it to say that it stands for a Doctorate of Engineering, rather than of Philosophy as is much more common in our field.) Though I am obviously not in the target group I decided to take this bull by the horns and invite myself, explaining my situation in a mail to Sam; after which she dropped by, forcing me into a double-take as obviously I was expecting a different gender (as should you, my reader, if I succeeded recounting this little anecdote correctly). She told me that Richard Paige, my absent host, is usually the one organising such things...

In any case, Sam also informed me about a regular Frinday afternoon drink in a pub called the Deramore Arms, in the old village of Heslington West, which is nowadays pretty much squashed between the old and new campuses of the university. Though I did have another Body Pump class planned, it sounded like a good idea to get acquainted with this particular local custom and join them afterwards. The pub is on Main Street, a name I had noticed because it is a tiny, incongruously overlookable side street off my daily route to and from the office. A name like Main Street, like New Town, is a definite sign that you are in a neighbourhood with a history stretching back many centuries.

Leandro, Victor, Sam (somewhat out of focus)

I enjoyed a pint in good company, consisting of members of three different research groups, one of whom, +Leandro Soares Indrusiak from Real-Time Systems, I had actually spoken with on the phone half a year ago in a failed European project application. Apart from the aforementioned Sam, who works at Human Computer Interaction, there was also Victor Bandur from High-Integrity Systems Engineering (which is just a fancy name for Formal Methods) led by Jim Woodcock (houtsnip). He (Victor) actually offered to go biking sometime. Since I think he had speeds in mind that surpass what I van achieve on my little Halfords bike, I declined for the time being, though if the weather turns out the way it is currently being forecast then I do plan to take a trip to Selby on Sunday.

The pub also offers food, but not knowing the rituals I did not order any, which was just as well as the others were also on their last drinks. This did mean that the pint, directly following a draining hour of lifting weights, affected me more than I liked, and bearing the experience of last week in mind I took care to get something into my stomach as soon as possible afterwards.

All of the above caused it to be almost 21:00 before I finally made for the festival with which I started this post. The thing lasts until Saturday, but rain is forecast for that night and, moreover, I plan to be playing games until around nine so there will not be more time then.

Erik Bloodaxe himself

Unfortunately it all looked more grandiose on the announcements than it was in practice. Maybe unsurprisingly so: after all, though the buildings are quite picturesque in themselves, they are also very stationary, so in the end you are just watching a short film. At least that is how it affected me. I do remember seeing a comparable lighting show in the main square of Bologna celebrating some occasion of no doubt even greater anciennity, designed by Peter Greenaway, and that was more captivating than the two shows I watched this night. They were both about Viking times: one in the Museum Gardens featuring Erik Bloodaxe, the supposedly Norwegian king of York in the early 9th century BC, and the other using Clifford Tower to recount the Danish invasions occurring in the decades before the Battle of Hastings.

Before closing time at 22:00 I had seen enough, which meant I still had a good part of the evening in front of me. I did not feel like spending this alone in my studio, so I resolved to find another pub to have another pint, with a book to keep me occupied (I have not suddenly grown so lonesome that I actually wanted to talk to strangers) but at least surrounded by people. I found just what I wanted at the Derwent College Bar, the place I had unsuccessfully tried to get food at two weeks ago. This killed the remains of the day very effectively.