Damnit

[triskellian]

smiorgan has beaten me to an account of the marvellous things we did this weekend. However, he missed out the vodka bar in Milton Keynes for blondeccgirl's birthday (really much better than 'vodka bar in Milton Keynes' makes it sound), and

...the highlight of the whole weekend. Something happened which I thought was merely a myth, and impossible in the real world: a tourist came up to us and said 'can you direct me to the university?' I pointed out six or so buildings in the immediate vicinity, and further confused the poor guy by explaining that there are a bunch more up there, some over there, and even a few in that direction, before smiorgan took pity on him and pointed him in the direction of the highest concentration of colleges.

What I got in the second-hand bookshops, along with my usual haul of pretty editions of Shakespeare and poetry, was an original hardback edition of Masquerade, which I've wanted for years. You may be looking confused, but chances are if you were having a childhood at even approximately the same time I was, in this country at least, you've seen it. It's the book containing the clues to the location of the buried hare-shaped treasure, with pretty pictures, each hiding a hare. I spent part of yesterday afternoon solving the surface puzzles, reading websites about the various different layers, and marvelling at the general prettiness :-)

Of course, what I was supposed to be doing while I was congratulating myself on my purchase, was writing an essay, and I did a fair bit of that as well, along with background work which included reading a large chunk of Genesis and researching Caravaggio. My laptop's wallpaper is now alternating between his two versions of The Sacrifice of Isaac. That's the sort of background work I enjoy.

Comments

Re: Masquerade

[triskellian]

I didn't get further than finding the hares in the pictures when I saw it as a child, and yesterday's puzzle-solving pretty much stopped at anagrams and riddles - I'd never in a million years have worked out how to solve the main puzzle, so my main interest is the prettiness, too.

And while I'm writing, it occurs to me that the style is similar to the painting in your living room - was it a formative influence of Josie's as well?