Are you alluring in bedsocks and a hoodie?

I feel as though I've neglected my creative energies a little in recent days (not to mention neglected those poor people who await my next blog with eager anticipation... ahaha), but this is definitely not my fault. Due to the trampy and scavenging way we get internet in our house, we no longer have any, so I have had to haul myself up the hill to campus to write this. Well, technically I should be researching either George Balanchine or Malorie Blackman or both for upcoming presentations, but what the hell. I will do that too. And I was away all weekend with better things to do so I mean, really, what do people expect?

I've pretty much moved into the library actually. It's nice here. It has the basic essentials required by a student: heat, internet, food and opportunities for socialising. My house has none of these things, except for maybe a bit of food, with the added bonus of the next-door-neighbours starting their DIY projects at 8am every morning, the absolute bastards. It's not a happy way to wake up, you know, with what sounds and feels like (and is) someone drilling into the wall behind your head. A happy way to wake up is warm and snuggly, knowing you haven't got anything on to bother waking up for. I'm becoming a massive fan of sleeping in a hoody and bedsocks as well as pyjamas though, although it's not a particularly alluring look. But then, if perchance I was in bed with someone I wished to seem alluring in front of, there wouldn't be any need for such measures, and hopefully I'd have asked if they have a working heating system and then suggested we go back to theirs when they said yes.

ANYWAY. I was meant to go and see Chris Moyles's new TV show being filmed on Monday night, but the reprobates at Channel 4 overbook all the civilian tickets so we didn't get in. However, we should be able to get priority tickets for the next one as a refund thing so it's all good. Me and Doodle just fannied about in central instead, which was rather lovely. It's rare to get to just wander around without crashing through crowds of tourists or businessmen. Plus, it wasn't raining. We had pizza on the Southbank then walked over the Golden Jubilee bridge to Embankment, where we found Cleopatra's needle. (Did you know it was abandoned in the Bay of Biscay during a storm??? How could you abandon something that massive?!) Then all of a sudden we found ourselves at Charing Cross Station, which was a bit weird and unexpected, then skidded through some puddles up to Trafalgar Square, where Doodle nearly got us arrested/asked out on a date by two lovely helmeted policeman by saying "'Ello, 'ello, what's going on 'ere then?" at them, but unfortunately they just smirked at us and carried on past us. Trafalgar Square is really pretty at night time, though. They light the fountains pretty shades of pink and blue, and the National Portrait Gallery is lit up so that all the pillars and stuff along the front of it cast amazing shadows. There are also no pigeons flapping about and shitting everywhere, which is a bigger bonus than finding a Malteaser in your packet made of solid chocolate.

London's weird though. It's like a big adventure playground where nothing's quite real. Even all the big business workers don't really live in the real world, they think doing business in bars drinking champagne and hardly having to walk anywhere is the real world. It's normal to live in a massive jungle of buildings, breathing traffic fumes, and sitting in a city park during summer, thinking it can't get any better than a picnic in an icebox on a smog-choked patch of grass and trees - even if it is Hyde Park. It can get better. You could be chilling out with some cider next to Gullet Quarry, where the air really is fresh and the water really is ice cold, ven when it's thirty degrees (it happens!) and there's ten people you can see and talk to around you, instead of ten thousand that you don't even know the names of. Isn't it so much nicer in the evenings to go to the pub with your mates and know most of the people in there, and to be able to sit outside by the river and watch the sunset as you drink your pint, instead of being stuck in a hot, busy noisy bar, where the only escape outside is a little cordoned off smoking area? I don't know... maybe I'm being a grumpy country-dweller who hates anywhere bigger than Tewkesbury and anything busier than a farmer's market.

It's taken me about 3 days to write this blog, namely due to distractions such as Facebook, BBC iPlayer and actual university work (!), but I think now it's maybe a lost cause. I've just been trying to think of a title for it and can't, because it isn't about anything in particular... Hmmmm. I shall think of something shortly, and then hopefully write something better soon. Ciao.