Today a friend's birthday took me to Royal Leamington Spa. Classic British name that - a descriptive Anglo-saxon middle bit with Victorian sobriquets stuck on at either end like nipple pasties. Royal and Spa refer to the city's popularity with Queen Vic as a place to go and get scrubbed in pools of salty water back in the nineteenth century, before they'd invented mini-breaks.
You're unlikely to visit Leamington spa unless you're a student, which is how I came across it first. There's a Russel-Group (think Ivy league but without the ivy) university about an hour's bus-ride away in the outskirts of the town Coventry. Coventry, though actually perfectly adequate, has such a bad reputation in the UK that "sent to Coventry" is a recognised euphemism for someone being unwelcome, disgraced, or otherwise in the shit. Hence, in order to bamboozle potential students (and particularly the lucrative international market) the university is called Warwick, after the charming medieval town which is absolutely nowhere near it. Students at Warwick take up residence either in Coventry or in Leamington Spa - and Leamington spa has a better reputation for cheap beer and other students so it gets the lion's share.
My associations with Leamington are therefore of hangovers, and marathon-binging on classic sci-fi my friend John projected onto his bedroom wall. The town itself is filled with charming Victorian and Georgian townhouses, three stories tall with high ceilings, tall windows and white fascias, but honestly if that's what you're looking for you should go to Bath Spa.
As a geek travel destination it's not going to top anyone's list, but you might be brought here for geeky work. There's a videogame industry in Leamington, with the region optimistically referred to as "Silicon Spa."Developers include the venerable Codemasters, Rare, Playground Games (devs on the motorsport series Forza Horizon), Freestyle Games (now working on the Call of Duty Franchise, presumably contributing assets, mobile tie-ins or platform conversions as they're not one of the holy trinity of Treyarch / Sledgehammer / Infinity Ward), and sundry others. I wasn't able to find anything public facing that I could check out during the trip, except to discover that the Leamington Underground Cinema festival has a prize for videogames, which is the sort of tip I'd ordinarily check out - except that the festival is held in October so there's going to be a long wait.
(Also I discovered that the LUC will screen the HP Lovecraft Historical Society's Call of Cthulhu silent movie adaptation on 6th December, complete with live musical accompaniment, which is the kind of thing only a diseased mind passes up on - stay tuned for December to find out how diseased my mind is.)
Travelling to Leamington took me down motorways in some perfectly lovely British countryside. The Midlands might be famous for industrial hellscapes (Dickens got particularly frothy about Birmingham back in the day) but the countryside of Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire is peaceful and pleasant - a garden, Shire-ish type of place. This was spoiled a little by almost being driven into a ditch by an unmarked police car roaring up the opposite lane, blue lights spinning and erring too close to the markings in the middle of the road.
The day's diversion was painting a mug. It's not a geek activity, I acknowledge this, but the British nerd has a make do and mend attitude. I painted a d20, d4, d8, pencil and packet of crisps onto my mug, so that when I'm DMing a game of DnD my mug will be camouflaged against the surface of the table, and when I'm not DMing a game of DnD I can look at my mug, sigh wistfully, and think of better times. The birthday group produced a selection ranging from the knowingly incompetent - "It's a bit like a Mondrian, actually" - through to the charmingly twee, because what on earth do you put on a mug? I suppose you could paint a totally brutal metal diorama, something with a fifty foot robotic axe maiden straight murdering some dragon hordes, but if you can do that to a mug you should probably open a tattoo parlour.
When I was finished with the DM-diorama on the mug surface, I painted Cthulhu into the bottom of the mug so that he will always be waiting for me, never more than a few gulps away.
I had to move the car and while I was out I popped into a couple of charity shops. I grew up the son of two insatiable readers and bargain hunters, and had a taste for comic book albums that far outstripped my purchasing power, so I am perhaps a little fonder of these temples of tat than your average male. If you have little time and are presented with a choice of several different charity shops (and if you find one there will be more) always plump for the Oxfam: Books and More. Oxfam's regional distribution hubs send the best books (and albums, DVDs, comics) to these stores and they tend to have a good sci-fi selection. Bargain hunting for niche books in the UK is a whole, obsessive and squinty, holiday to itself, and I didn't really have the time or pocket space to indulge in a good browse - though a masterworks collection of Jerry Cornelius stories was pretty tempting.
The two, terrifyingly young students running the counter in the Oxfam were discussing Leamington's least salubrious son, occultist, drug-addict and general cad Aleister Crowley. I knew the magus was born in the town and I had considered going to see the terrace he was born in, but the students confirmed what I had feared - there wasn't even a blue plaque to mark his birthplace. For those who don't understand the significance of a blue plaque, in Britain events and persons of vanishing insignificance are commemorated with a blue metal plaques screwed to the side of the nearest appropriate building; consequently anything that is not recorded by a blue plaque cannot definitively be said to have occurred. At one stage I think there was talk of making them part of legal proceedings, and it is still true that any historical event not recorded by a blue plaque has effectively "gone down the memory hole."
Leamington is obviously missing a trick. A blue plaque to the effect of "Aleister Crowley, Beast of the Apocalypse, Born 1875" would have been an absolute charm. The visitor information centre could sell little imitation "Beast of the Apocalypse" fridge magnets with a selection of different names so that each tourist could have their own personalised commemoration.
The rest of the day was talking and laughing and singing dirty songs with friends, all of which is by far the best stuff a person can do with their friends while clothed (and doesn't really preclude any of the disrobed alternatives if we're honest) but does not make for good reportage. I learnt what a "blumpkin" is (I wish I hadn't, don't Google it), ate a really good scone (jam spread onto the scone, then clotted cream on top of the jam because I am not an animal) and grinned ridiculously. A good day, then, if not the geekiest.
