Mr Joe

Well, cozza here.

Its been a long time coming but I couldnt face myself to get this blog up and running again.
But, here goes, I never really made the time to add to this, obviously Joe made lots of time to put his random photos on and funny stories etc. It feels very surreal still, even more to be adding to this etc.

Bloody hell I miss him, especially as trying to write up this nightmare PhD that was based in Sri lanka, and it constantly reminds me of Joe and our time together in our falling down house in Meewatura, and of course many times with Laura, and later Chula, and hearing about Joe & Ben and their posh house!

It was lovely (in an odd sense!) to meet so many of Joes friends, and to put faces to people that he spoke about. He was a real chap ~ my family and friends who hadnt met him before, all remembered the tall hansom chap in the velvet suit at my wedding over a year ago, prancing about doing the barn dance with Laura. I'm glad that I got to spend quite a few heady red wine nights with him in Aberdeen before Christmas, obviously his fault for my hangovers when I had to get up early for supervisor meetings the day after!

Thought this might be a nice way for people to post up messages and photos, keep lots of them in one place for everyone to look at. Especially maybe funny stories that people can share with others?

Anyway, time I should be getting back to work!!

Massive hugs

Love Corrine (cozza!)

wtf aberdeen has a beach?

well apparently it does. doesn't look much like a beach to me though, beaches are supposed to have coconut trees and warm water and cocktail bars. i think it is probably therefore not actually a beach but an attempt to draw the tourist trade from local rival montrose, which has spear-fishing and a coral reef.

however i learned two things:



and

mush

hey, in scotland there's sod all to do, this sort of situation drives even normally sane people to go out looking for mushrooms to eat. and not the interesting ones, either. just normal boring mushroom flavoured ones:

at least these are approaching the right shape


(you'd eat something this colour?)


(yes this is edible, apparently)


DISCLAIMER: if anyone reads this and eats a mushroom that looks like one of these because they trust me because i'm a professional biologist, and dies, then they're a complete arse-head. and a dead arse-head at that.

still the sunsets are nice.

kazakhstan, macaroni etc.

i break with the traditions of writing about interesting things, and consistent blog formatting, to bring you a view of scotland. many of you will never have heard of this place, this is not surprising because it's miles from everywhere, and there's nothing here except MACARONI PIE and DEEP FRIED HAGGIS and loads of central asians (amazing fact! aberdeen's only diplomatic representation is the embassy of Kazakhstan)

here is the view of where i live, taken from scolty hill, which is both a hill, and completely scolty, as far as we could see. click on the picture and you should get to some notes because otherwise it's a bit boring.

what jokes

i should perhaps mention at this point that although it may look like my life in sri lanka was just one crazy jape and zany scheme after another, there were also evenings like this:



this, it has to be said, was considerably more exciting than my life at the moment, but you know. the bar was higher then.

playing shakespeare's greatest Prince

as my more attentive reader will remember (my other reader should refresh her memory here http://joeandcozza.blogspot.com/2006/06/i-am-someone-from-africa.html), i was in a play when i was in sri lanka.

this fine piece of drama was called "The Merchant Of Venice Kandy" (ho ho ho), and i played the prince of morocco, the definitive performance of which has been generally recognised as that of stephen greif http://imdb.com/name/nm0340039/ from olivier's immortal made-for-TV shylock. you may remember greif from his other roles in Dempsey and Makepeace, or Dragon Quest VIII: Sora No Daichi To Norowareshi Himegimi.

well, i would like to think that had he seen me holding an entire audience of well over twenty people spellbound for literally minutes at a time, he would be prepared to hand over his crown.

here are some publicity photographs, as taken by Tess, which may be signed for a small fee. the photos may also be signed i suppose, although i imagine that would be cheaper. i'll check.



the entire cast; it should be obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of the Bard which actor is playing which character.



the intensity of emotion can be draining to sustain, but we suffer for our art.



the characterisation demands complete mastery of the full range of human emotions.

Update!

someone has just phoned to suggest that there may be a yet greater shakespearean Prince. well, this may be true in a strictly academic sense, but nobody does Pericles, Prince of Tyre these days.

meanwhile back in the UK

i went to a conference in oxford. it turned out to be free, mainly because i kept running away when ppl approached me for money. i stayed on cowley road, that is the best place ever, except the bess obviously.

on cowley road they had a actual shop selling ACTUAL JAK FRUIT, exotic sri lankan fruit fans:



pheer that! now they have jak fruit in UK there no need to go sri lanka at all! more convenience!

for those of you who aren't exotic sri lankan fruit fans, jak fruit when ripe is a bit like old bubblegum, except a bit more like food.

something about india

the thing about india is people say it's dirty. i ask you. what a blinkered, racist attitude.

here is where we had breakfast, in delhi:



and here is where we had lunch.



the ice in your drink is carefully sourced from the finest bicycles:



and then when you're feeling a bit warm you can go for a swim in the river:



this is the holy ganges. interesting fact this: the WHO has a recommended minimum amount of poo allowed in water for bathing, it's a few hundred somethings per something. the water in the ganges here at varanasi has a few hundred thousand of those somethings. people hold their noses and block their ears before getting in.

ho ho ho, you're thinking, that silly tourist didn't really go in the river.

oh yes we did: