We’ve just spent a proper weekend at North House for the first time in ages, tidying the garden up and just keeping on top of things. I really like the flat we’ve got down here, and it feels far more like home than the empty, slightly smelly, house we own up north.
But a couple of hours getting rid of the weeds? Oh, I miss it so very much. I can’t wait until this phase of our life is over and I get a garden back.
What shall we give away to promote butter? I know, five potatoes.
To be fair, it’s a nice idea to give you the ingredients for a recipe, just not what I was expecting. I think it wasn’t just me either, loads of dumped bags on the street. Wonder if anyone tried to eat one raw?
but it’ll be cool if it does. This is my desk panda.
Popping out for my lunch today, I saw a woman on her mobile phone, chatting to her friend while absent mindedly staring through the window of a shop. So far so normal, except the shop was a Starbucks, and she was staring directly at someone sitting in the window trying to have a quiet cup of coffee and watch the world go by. I reckon they were about two feet apart, if that.
It’s amazing how uncomfortable a stare can make you, even when you’re not in the same room as the starer. The coffee drinker was shuffling and trying very hard not to look at Phone Girl, in the end settling for a 45degree stare at the ceiling with an added air of indifference. It didn’t work.
If I was younger (and therefore crueller) I would suggest this as sport. You could score based on how many people you got to move (with points being deducted if the staree didn’t notice).
Isn’t it funny how there are unspoken rules about where you can and can’t go?
I commute on the train. Very rarely, I get to sit down. Most of the time I’m standing up, and sometimes I’m jammed in like a sardine. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why it changes on a daily basis, although I’m developing a hatred of those trains where they have the seats paired in a three and a two, rather than a two and a two. (And why aren’t there enough places to hold on when you’re standing in the door well, although that’s a different rant.)
This morning was a sardine day and we all shuffled up the carriage to let the last few people on. I found myself standing outside the nice, clean, empty, disabled loo. Why on earth weren’t people using the space? We were 10 minutes away from the terminus, so it was unlikely to be used, it’d help more people fit on, what’s the problem?
And yet no-one was interested. In the end two of us looked at each other, shrugged and went in. The other guy even put down the lid and settled down with a book, which was too far even for me. But I did get the most comfortable journey I’ve had in a while, with enough space to even do starjumps, much to the disgust of Minty who wouldn’t/didn’t come in. Ah well, if he prefers commuter BO that’s up to him.
One thing that’s really interesting about working in the city of London is you get to see all the places that get used in background shots while they do all their doom and gloom stuff about how it’s all going wrong. We’ll be watching the news about some new cock up, and instead of listening to the details, we’re pointing at the buildings in the background going “ooooh, that’s down the side of the Bank of England, that’s the route I take when I’m coming down from Finchley”. Lame, I know.
There’s often someone with a camera on London Bridge – in the mornings, you get film crews filming actors pretending to be businessmen, or shots of the floods of people crossing the river to get to the City, and in the evening you get tourists getting that shot of Tower Bridge in the dusk (and to be fair, it’s a cracking view and one that I’m glad I get to see every single day). But this week, there’s been much much more – a couple of crews getting the standard shot, but now joined with press photographers getting it too. This morning there was a group of about 20 bowler hatted actors, all in black suits, white shirts and red ties, storming along with us.
Of course, they got the pace completely wrong, and only walked very quickly, rather than frighteningly quickly, so they stood out a mile. And being London, not one person let on they were there, except for the odd tut because they were getting in the way.
I love this city.
I am very happy after finding the shop that Crumpler have set up in the UK (in London)
Funny how dreams tell you lots about what’s bothering you in real life, isn’t it? While we’ve been moving, we’d had our stuff in our old house, other people’s houses, storage, and our rented room. I’d been getting increasingly unsettled by this – I had no idea what I owned any more because I’d not seen some of it for 18 months, and I knew that a fair bit of it could vanish and I wouldn’t notice.
One of the nice things about living out of suitcases is I’ve learnt that an awful lot of what I own is just stuff, and could be abandoned quite easily. OK, it’s harder to make that decision when it’s there in front of you, but if the storage unit burnt down, well, so be it.
When we found out that the sale of our house had fallen through I started sleeping really badly, and having lots of lucid dreams about all our stuff. Do you reckon the one where I was sorting out our storage and found an anchor has any hidden meaning?
One of the best things about being in our new place is that all our stuff is finally in the same place. Even having it in the same county was a start. OK, so we’ve not got rid of NorthHouse yet, nor are we likely to for a while yet, but the relief is indescribable. And even better, now everything is together again we can start to get rid of stuff. Stuff that we’ve paid to store, and paid to haul round the country, stuff that is just a load of old shite.
I’ve not got a LJ blog, but I’m going to steal one of their features:
Mood: POSITIVE
Quite apart from signing up to do a 10k when you’re not a natural runner (which is a bad idea all of its own), a really really bad idea is to pass your race number to a friend. Who is a bloke. And rather good.
I’d said I’d do the London 10k in an hour, which looked achievable. I’d been training reasonably well, and while I’d found it a struggle, I was quite hopeful. And then my feet started hurting when I ran. I assume I’ve not been stretching properly, but reading some of the horror stories on line, I cut the running straight away, then started building back up, very very slowly, and very very carefully. The 10k was out of the window.
It seemed a complete waste to not use my face entry, so my friend offered to use the number instead. Rather than waste the entry fees, I handed over the pack that arrived, and waited to congratulate my friend on completing the race.
So I wasn’t expecting the rather terse email I got the day after the race. “Can you explain why a man ran with your number? He came 8th”. Ooops? OK, a fit and healthy 20something being the 8th over 30s Woman isn’t that surprising, but for some reason it just never occurred to us. I toyed with the idea of claiming to be a really bad transgender runner, but knew it was better to come out with the truth. And then grovel. Lots.
Thank god the organiser guy had a sense of humour, and just ticked me off. But somehow, I can’t see me entering again.
