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Stainless steel cake
Mar. 13th, 2005 10:45 amMost of yesterday was spent pottering about in town, but in the evening I had the privilege of celebrating Harry Harrison's 80th birthday with him and a bunch of about 30 other people.
Harry's daughter organised the celebration, which was a dinner at a big Chinese restaurant in Brighton Marina. I don't like the Marina much (filled with ersatz and pretentious architecture, though I do like looking at other people's yachts) so I haven't been down there for ages, apart from visits to the cinema. A host of new eateries seem to have sprouted up, including another big Chinese place on a boat.
Our restaurant, the Emperor of China, was pretty good - we had a set menu of the usual kinds of things one finds in a Chinese restaurant. I ended up sitting next to Rog Peyton, who used to run the Andromeda bookshop in Birmingham, and Chris Priest.
So the conversation was very much genre based and mostly about the difficulties of the industry. Running an independent genre bookshop, dealing only in books and no associated merchandise, is generally considered to be an impossible task these days in the UK.
Behind me was a table of about 20 Chinese students, all female, all in anime T-shirts, celebrating someone else's birthday. They all looked about 12. Having spent some time in Hong Kong, I've always found the Chinese to be about as inscrutable as the Italians, and boy, can they be loud. I'd still slightly deaf from all the shrieking. But it was nice to have a 20 year old's birthday party at one table, and an 80 year old's at the other.
At the end of dinner, a vast green cake with an iced Stainless Steel Rat on it emerged. Harry's daughter presented him with a replica flying jacket, to replace his original one which her late mum apparently threw out on the grounds of it being too old and horrible to have in the house any more. I expect a slight gender split here among this LJ's readers - the women tended to sympathise with the late Mrs H, the men with Harry.
But it really was an honour. I grew up reading Harry's work and when I was a kid in Gloucester I never dreamed I'd ever meet him, let alone be at his birthday party. Writers in those days, especially if they were American, seemed so remote and Olympian.
Harry's daughter organised the celebration, which was a dinner at a big Chinese restaurant in Brighton Marina. I don't like the Marina much (filled with ersatz and pretentious architecture, though I do like looking at other people's yachts) so I haven't been down there for ages, apart from visits to the cinema. A host of new eateries seem to have sprouted up, including another big Chinese place on a boat.
Our restaurant, the Emperor of China, was pretty good - we had a set menu of the usual kinds of things one finds in a Chinese restaurant. I ended up sitting next to Rog Peyton, who used to run the Andromeda bookshop in Birmingham, and Chris Priest.
So the conversation was very much genre based and mostly about the difficulties of the industry. Running an independent genre bookshop, dealing only in books and no associated merchandise, is generally considered to be an impossible task these days in the UK.
Behind me was a table of about 20 Chinese students, all female, all in anime T-shirts, celebrating someone else's birthday. They all looked about 12. Having spent some time in Hong Kong, I've always found the Chinese to be about as inscrutable as the Italians, and boy, can they be loud. I'd still slightly deaf from all the shrieking. But it was nice to have a 20 year old's birthday party at one table, and an 80 year old's at the other.
At the end of dinner, a vast green cake with an iced Stainless Steel Rat on it emerged. Harry's daughter presented him with a replica flying jacket, to replace his original one which her late mum apparently threw out on the grounds of it being too old and horrible to have in the house any more. I expect a slight gender split here among this LJ's readers - the women tended to sympathise with the late Mrs H, the men with Harry.
But it really was an honour. I grew up reading Harry's work and when I was a kid in Gloucester I never dreamed I'd ever meet him, let alone be at his birthday party. Writers in those days, especially if they were American, seemed so remote and Olympian.
