Stegosaurus, Bears, a Pinetum, Hell is Up a Hill and Cooking with the Hippo

It's been a while since I updated.

• Walking with Dinosaurs - Uncle chrestomancy and Auntie TheHattedOne treated Ryan and Bea (plus bateleur and I) to the Walking with Dinosaurs show at Wembley. After some enthusiastic planning, this become an all-day event starting with a rather fine Italian lunch in Richmond, then training up to north-west London before the show itself. The actual performance was awesome - moving continents, growing and dying plants, cracking eggs, plus, of course, life-sized dinosaurs with (I think) accurate history (they finished with a full-sized T-Rex). The music was great and the duo were more impressed than frightened. Sadly, I think it's over now, but recommend if it ever comes back.
• Devon. Or maybe Somerset. - Following up the dinosaurs on the bank holiday weekend, chrestomancy organised a weekend break at a cottage on the Devon-Somerset border. This involved al_fruitbat, _alanna, TheHattedOne, myself and, of course, chrestomancy. It also involved Arkham (we won the third second game), Porlock Hill (1 in 4 and steeper which chrestomancy's car Buzz dealt with better than its gibbering passengers), Dunstan Castle (beautiful, well-preserved with ghosts and bats, well possibly just bats), The Bear Shop at Taunton (impressive stuffed toys including meercats, dragons, lemmings and a lovely swan), cream tea (well-earned retrospectively) and The Walk of Doom. chrestomancy had said from the start that the plan was to eat well (we did - the local pub food was great and al_fruitbat cooked a gorgeous mushroom stroganoff - or, more accurately, the closest approximation that the shopping provided), drink well (the number of empty bottles for two days was impressive) and then walk it off. Great plan, right? Well, on the Saturday afternoon, everything went well. We walked to the county gate and then on to the site of an old Roman Fort and it was about an hour and a half; no problem. However, come Sunday afternoon, we decided we should do the walk down to the sea which the book said "allow two hours" for. I joked about it being fifteen minutes down and an hour and three-quarters up. Sadly, I wasn't far wrong. Down wasn't too bad, once al_fruitbat and chrestomancy got to grips with the awful directions ("OK, so when it says right, it means right after you've turned and started heading back" - yes, it really did). We saw a Pinetum (we all wondered what that was, it was a bit of an anti-climax when we found out) and a Victorian Ice House (dark, but impressively still present) on the way down. The shore line was pebbly, but chrestomancy happily skimmed stones. The way back was complete and utter murder. Up, up, wheeze, stop, wheeze, recover, up, up, etc. The stops became more and more frequent and the hill became steeper and steeper (or it seemed like it). Eventually chrestomancy, in somewhat better shape than some of us, went ahead to get the car. Yet again, Buzz handled the hill better than its passengers. Although in our defence, we'd pretty much hit the top by the time it arrived. The post-walk collapse involved crisps, showers and alcohol.
• Cooking with the Hippo - Having spent a couple of years cooking with Bea, I finally got around to my first session of cooking with Ryan. The agenda was chocolate button biscuits and he coped rather well. He was less keen on the resulting biscuits, but then he's never been a big fan of biscuits with "bits" in them. Bea, however, voted them excellent.
• Eagle Eye - On floralaetifica's recommendation, we added this film to our list. I really enjoyed it, I loved the pace and I loved the leads. OK, the story is not dissimilar to several other films, but it's well worth watching if you're after an action flick.
• Shade's Children - Being a fan of the Sabriel trilogy, I bought this and read it eagerly. I found it hard to put down once the story got going and, in general, enjoyed the story. The but? I felt it never really explained how the situation had come into being, or why it wouldn't happen again. Overall, cautiously recommended.

The Kindness of Strangers

Heroes episode 27 (episode 4 of season 2).

( Spoilers )