Monday, February 9
Possibly The Best Day Ever
Why, you ask?
- The weather was amazing. A proper February day, all sunny but yet crisp and chilly. Fleece and scarf weather, but glorious, glorious sunshine.
- My German Law class was pretty entertaining, and once again I found myself understanding a hell of a lot of it. The language, that is, not the law...
- I've discovered my new favourite way to relax for an hour each day. It's called a Cafe Mocha at Cafe Nero on the corner of Strand and Waterloo Bridge Road. I've decided to try to make it there every day that I'm in at uni (which is every weekday), and to spend £2.50 each day on a copy of The Indpendent newspaper and a large Cafe Mocha. Then I'll sit at the window, reading the vast majority of my newspaper and watching the world go buy. Heaven.
- Embankment Gardens are amazing. I sometimes get off the Tube one stop early on my way to uni if I have time, so that I can walk through these Gardens of a morning. It's a small idyll in the very centre of London, and is beautiful. I ended up in them today because Cafe Nero is pretty much halfway between Embankment and Temple tube stations, and I was fed up with using Temple station about 50 times each week. When I got to Embankment, I figured that the weather was so fantastic that I just had to walk down to Westminster station, especially as that didn't involve any Tube changes later in the journey. I'd never walked down the side of the Thames to Westminster before, and I found to my pleasant surprise that Embankment Gardens extended for a bit further on that side of the station as well. That part of it is just as nice as the part that I already knew.
- The sheer amount of stuff to see as you walk along the side of the Thames in central London. As you get closer and closer to Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament, there are statues and monuments everywhere. My particular favourite is the RAF war memorial, overlooking the river. It's this huge gold eagle, wings spread, atop a big stone pillar, on which is inscribed "Per Ardua" (the RAF motto) and a small tribute to those who died in service during the two world wars. It's quite a sight, and I can't believe that I never knew it existed before. What annoyed me was that I didn't have my camera with me. I could have taken a thousand pictures today, no problem. And I bet there isn't another day like this for ages!
- Big Ben. The sun was directly behind Big Ben as I approached it, and it looked the dog's bollocks in silhouette. I also managed to get to its base just as it chimed for one o'clock, quite loudly...
Basically, I just fucking love London at the moment, and I'm having a wicked day.
There's also a guy in our house at the moment, sorting out our floors. We've got our landlord to get them sanded and painted, and the appointed handyman has duly arrived. Another example of my housemates' laziness / self-centredness (if that's a word): in the two or three occasions that he's been here recently, I'm the only one who has ever offered him a cup of tea and a friendly word. Surely they realise that it is a matter of course that you offer workmen who are at your house cups of tea and the like? How rude is it to let them get parched!? Fuckers.
I also had a quick chat with him about what he was going to do, because we were told that the entire floor in the hallways, on the stairs and in the living room was going to be sanded and painted a slate grey colour. I'm not overly fussed about the colour, because anything is better than the current mismatch that we have, but a couple of the others are a little concerned that grey is going to look nasty. He said that he might paint it white, because the white that he has has a slight grey tint to it, but he also said that he's going to do the living room in pure varnish. That's a big relief, because that's where we spend most of our time. I should probably tell the others that, but I can't be arsed right now. Too busy typing all of this up. He'll be back tomorrow to finish it off, which means sacrificing my only lie-in of the week, but so be it. Anything for a pleasant living environment!!!
