The tour guide

A beautiful day for a walk around  Oxford. The International English Club had a guided walking tour today. David told us lots of interesting stories as we wandered.

Evening was a great laugh at a friend's birthday. It was fancy dress, on the theme of 'drawn and animated' and I won the non-existent prize for the most Indie costume. In amongst mostly superheroes and Disney cartoon characters, the Hedgehog in the Fog was an unusual choice, but I highly recommend watching it if you have a spare 10 minutes and a love for truly beautiful animation. It's a Soviet short animation about a wee hedgehog by Yuri Nurshtein. The film won lots of awards when it came out, and is now considered a world animation classic. You can watch it (with English subtitles for the few words in it) here. I remember a long conversation with a British animator I know on the bus about how amazing it is. Outside the world of animation I doubt he meets many folk in the UK, who have seen it, but he was very glad to. Three people at the party had seen it before, and only one of them I had previously told about it, which is pretty good going! My mother brought me up to always make my own costumes, none of this cheating by buying a full costume, so I had spent last night sewing things onto a woolly hat, including a hedgehog face, a white horse picture, thin and thick fog, a wee bag for his jam and a bat which I even drew myself (drawing is not one of my talents, thought I was quite proud of the bat!), plus  the late addition of some leaves. Great chat, interesting people and good food all added up to a lovely evening.