Spare ribs and crispy duck...

Proper blog block at the moment. Hence, partly, all those quotes, which are not posted to bore you but because I found them interesting. As I've said before, this is my place and if you must insist on dropping by you'll live by my lack of rules.

Went for late lunch yesterday with daughter Danielle, who was celebrating being 20 (late, because she was actually hungover at the alotted time, bless). 20?! Really hard to fathom where all those years went. We had John Prescott's favourite diner - Mr Chu's China Palace in Hull - to ourselves and filled up on copious amounts of rather good fodder. When we'd done we made some sham attempt to walk some of the food off by trotting around the shops across the way but it quickly became clear, as we coated touch screen monitors in PC World with the remnants of spare ribs and crispy duck that lurked on our finger ends, that it wasn't going to do any good. A nice afternoon, anyway, in the company of someone who I am incredibly proud of.

Now? Working on new things. Seeing as the old things...well...I better not get into that.

Where do they go?..

My daughter, so she tells me, spends much of her time in this rusty Jenga-meets-obelisk of a building, which houses lots of Leeds Met and its design-orientated students. I have just discovered that this Cor-Ten steel-clad construction cost £45m. I quite like it. Apparently the rust, contrary to my expectations and shoddy understanding of corrosion and oxidisation, makes the steel more durable because it provides a naturally built-up protective layer. I have no idea, really, what Danielle does in here, although a lot of it involves designing staircases. She does try and tell me. But I'd rather there be some level of vagueness on my part because I'd hate to know more than my next generation, who will, I believe, save the planet and mankind from destroying itself. With, in Danielle's case, the deft use of staircases. For me, it's impossible to equate the Danielle who makes regular appearances within this rusty structure with the little girl that used to sit on my shoulders, although the two of them still look very similar. This makes me feel both proud and, ridiculously, a little bit sad for myself, because I realise that, like the Cor-Ten steel, I've started to look very weathered on the outside and, unlike the Cor-Ten, on the inside too. I'm afraid my protective layer has failed rather dramatically.