Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

I am seriously considering cycling to work most mornings. When you start to think about it, there are so few reasons why I shouldn't and so many reasons why I should:

1) I'll save time. Cycling to work will take approximately 50 minutes, the same as commuting by train, but I would normally spend two hours three times a week exercising in a gym. By cycling to work I will combine exercise and commute in one easy step.

2) I'll save money. Bikes cost somewhere between £300 and £500 probably. My monthly travel card costs £109. I'll very quickly save money, even if I do still do some journeys by tube (e.g. when it is lashing rain -- there's no point making myself miserable). I can't really imagine myself ever spending more than £50 maximum per month on tube journeys if I'm mostly cycling to work.

3) I'll feel healthy. Because cycling 16 miles a day just does that for you.

And everyone is conspiring to make that journey as easy as possible for me. There are showers and secure bike storage at work. There's secure bike storage at my apartment. There's a Cycle to Work tax incentive scheme. TFL have sent me free cycle route maps and signposted lots of cycle paths around London. There are even cycling training schemes to boost my confidence.

So I really can't think of any reason why I shouldn't cycle. It means all my evenings are free for all the other exciting things to do in London since I've already done the exercise part of my list of things to do.

And if all those reasons weren't good enough, here's one more:



Yes! I could be the proud owner of a Pashley Princess Classic!

Today I got my hair cut. I thought I'd try out a place in Merton Abbey Mills that looked rather nice. And it was. Very nice, in fact.

The lady who runs it only opened it about 3 months ago. She's only 30 and had worked as a hairdresser for nine years before taking a year off on maternity leave. When it came to going back to work she decided she'd rather open her own place, and I'm very glad she did. It's a small little place so you don't have to shout over other people having their hair dried and she was really friendly and chatty. She was very impressed with our choice of flat, and told me that a certain rather famous England footballer lives in our apartment block too. And also that a bakery and a Thai restaurant will be opening in the Mills in the next couple of weeks, so maybe I won't bother getting a breadmaker after all.

I also attempted to give blood in St George's Hospital in Tooting. They've got a full-time clinic there which is terribly convenient, but I hadn't realised just how important it is to book an appointment - I thought that was just an option if you were very short on time. But the receptionist wasn't very impressed with me just turning up, and icily ignored me for about ten minutes after I told her I didn't have an appointment. Then, oddly, she suddenly melted and was really warm and chatty. Maybe she felt I had completed my penance.

Anyway I couldn't give blood because my iron levels aren't high enough. It's not that they're particularly low, they just need to be quite high before you can give blood. And apparently I can't go back now for four months even though I didn't give any blood! So that's frustrating. I'm thinking of donating platelets too, and mayyybe even bone marrow but I hear that's very unpleasant. Then again, so is dying, and I think I could put up with some unpleasantness to stop someone dying.

Off to Salisbury for the weekend, it's due to be unseasonably warm. Lovely jubbly.

I've been had. On Monday I met up with my cousin Ed in Covent Garden. Whilst I was waiting for him opposite the tube station (initially under Oasis's awning to shelter from the rain until they rather cruelly retracted it) a chap with a clipboard approached me to ask if I'd help with some market research.

As I had about ten minutes to fill and as he was offering me a fiver I was happy enough to help him out. There were various other guys around doing the same and they had a film crew too, apparently for a programme to be broadcast on Sky.

So he got me to answer some questions about my internet usage and stuff and then he gave me my voucher and got me to put my name and phone number on a form so the head office could contact me to check I was happy with how the survey had been conducted. And actually it transpired that it wasn't just my name and phone number, they also wanted my address, so I gave them a rough approximation of it.

But reading thelondonpaper [sic] yesterday, I find that it was actually a survey designed to test how easy it is to get personal information from people in exchange for a £5 voucher. At least I'm not one of the '120 idiots' who actually told the survey person what their password was: there was a list of options such as mother's maiden name, dog's name, date of birth etc so I just ticked 'other' and when he tried to ask me what kind of password I did use I just told him it was a random word. Phew!

But what did startle me is that I gave him even some of my address AND my date of birth -- he asked for my date of birth at the start so by the time we got to the end of the survey and I had this extra slip to fill in almost as an afterthought, I had forgotten I'd already given out some sensitive information.

It was all very cunning. I think it was the fact that I had time to kill as normally I wouldn't even stop for someone wanting me to fill in a survey, and the chap was so nice and friendly, and the fact that they were trying to persuade me to speak to the camera about what they'd questionned me on and insisting it was for Sky (I'm glad I refused, presumably they'd have jumped out doing jazz hands and shouted 'SURPRISE! You're an idiot!') made it seem like it was a reputable sort of survey.

But I've learnt my lesson and I feel stupid. And it gives me a good reason to not give charities my contact details either when they try to con them out of me. I'm just so bad at lying to people and also no good at bluntly refusing.

This weekend Mum, Andy and I went on an exciting adventure to Bristol to bring my ickle brother Ian to university. It was exciting and nerve-wracking and lovely and terrifying and also quite sad. Because now both me and Ian have run off to the UK, which makes me feel quite homesick.

I was very impressed with UWE. People turn up their noses a bit when I say he's going there, not to Bristol University, which is stupid because UWE is one of the best places to study his course. I suppose I still get that from people when I say I went to Bangor. But everyone's wrong because Bangor's great and UWE may even be better. It's got a very modern campus, very green and homely with lots of 'hello and welcome' signs all over the place. Admittedly it probably looked especially nice in the blazing sunshine, but I did feel that Ian might just be happy in a place like that.

His bedroom is enormous. I was perfectly happy slumming it in Llys Tryfan when I were a lass but Ian's doing the halls experience in style. He's got an en-suite room which is bigger than any bedroom I've ever had (apart from that hovel I lived in in second year) with a very manageable six people per flat, most of whom we met yesterday when hanging around his halls trying to make his phone and internet work.

Bristol's quite a lovely city, although we felt like we'd arrived at the party five hours late when we went for a wander yesterday. There were young people draped all over the quays, sitting in the sun with lots of empty bottles of wine and beer. There was a live band in one courtyard and a sort of converted Landrover in another with a guy DJing from the roof, and a party boat went by with people hanging out the sides dancing and shouting. It was very bizarre and we couldn't finger out what was happening until we saw signs advertising the Rave On Avon. Some further research tells me that it was all part of the Bristol Festival, and not just a standard weekend of debauchery for Bristol.

Andy and I went to visit the SS Great Britain this morning while we waited for Ian to wake up. It was well worth the £5 we paid with our almost-expired student cards (probably the last time we'll be able to use them), especially since the ticket is valid for an entire year. It's a really good museum, with a fantastic dry dock section: the ship sort of looks like it's floating because it's surrounded by sheet glass with a thin layer of water on top of it, but you can go down into the dry dock and see what the hull looks like in its un-restored state. Very interesting stuff.

Ian seemed very relaxed and happy when we left him today. He'd had a sociable evening and a good night's sleep, and really just seemed very content. But I felt sad leaving him, and I think Mum was sad too. It's going to be quite odd for them at home having had Ian around for the last six months, and I don't know what the dogs are going to make of the whole situation. Good thing I'm going home again in a week, we can all mourn Ian's departure together.

Today I went to Wimbledon and Kingston to shop for a new coat. Not that I have any money to buy one if I found it, but at least I'd know it was there for when I do have some money. Actually, maybe I'd throw caution to the wind and buy it anyway if I found one good enough. Maybe that's the test I need to apply to these coats.

I didn't find one that was good enough. But I did go get my eyes tested. My long-distance vision has felt a bit blurry lately; I used to have exceptionally good eyesight so it annoys me not being able to see everything without squinting. So I went and got it checked.

Turns out I'm absolutely fine, I've still got 6/6 vision (did you know that European opticians tend to use 6/6 instead of 20/20 because the numbers refer to distance and we're all metric in Europe?), but my right eye has deteriorated very slightly so in the sub-category 'sph' in the distance category my right eye is -0.25 and my left eye is Plano. Yes, it means nothing to me either.

But apparently I don't need glasses and the blurriness is probably due to tiredness. Therefore (and I don't think I'm coming to hasty conclusions here) I need to stay in bed longer ever day. So that's what I'll just have to do. I've been very disciplined so far and have been getting up between 8am and 9am even though I have no appointment at such an hour, just because staying in bed is slovenly (or so my in-built Protestant work ethic inherited from my mum tells me). But, well, if I'm damaging my eyesight, I suppose I could sleep a little longer.

Gingerbread (in biscuit form) is one of my favourite types of biscuit. Even though it's mostly full of sugar and eggs and things, it feels like it's very healthy because it has ginger in it, and ginger is full of health-giving properties. And there's something about gingerbread that makes people want to cut it into shapes and decorate it with icing sugar and chocolate buttons. That doesn't happen with other types of biscuit.

Well I had two nice gingerbread experiences on Saturday. The first one was at the Feast on the Bridge. Just before getting onto the bridge proper there was a baking kitchen set up with loads of children all sitting around small tables on small chairs like you sometimes get in activity areas of museums, except they weren't colouring in pictures, they were making and decorating gingerbread men and gingerbread pumpkins, and the chef people were baking them for them in portable ovens. It was very lovely, I wished I was small enough to pass off as a child and bake gingerbread on the bridge in the sun.

Then we went to Selfridges on our crockery hunt and we got distracted by all the other exciting things in the Selfridges kitchenware department. And they had the best thing ever: moulds for making gingerbread houses! Isn't that great? When I am rich again I'm going to buy one and bake gingerbread houses and a gingerbread witch and a gingerbread oven and stick the gingerbread witch in the gingerbread oven in the gingerbread house.

Then there was today. The day didn't start all that well with an awful visit to HSBC in Wimbledon. We got there at 10.20 and were presented with a ticket saying there was a 38 to 52 minute wait. We asked if we could go away for a few minutes and come back and were assured that we could but advised to be back within half an hour just in case.

So we went and bought a few sandwiches and admired some crockery (one of our main occupations now we've finished flat-hunting) and got back at about 10.40 at the latest. And we waited and waited and after about half an hour I asked someone what was happening. Turns out they called for us whilst we were out (so within twenty minutes) and since we weren't there we'd been wiped from the list. So if I hadn't asked, we could have gone on waiting all day.

But did they bump us up to the top of the queue to make up for this? Nope. Right back to the start again. Eventually we got to see someone. She was very nice, but when I mentioned my paying-in book was out of date because my graduate one hadn't arrived yet she told me I still had a student account. So that visit to HSBC in Brighouse was a complete waste of time, she hadn't converted my account to a graduate account after all, apparently because I need to show them my graduation certificate (first I've heard of it).

So I feel fed up with HSBC and tempted to change my account, but the whole point of my visit was to open a joint account for convenience, so I just don't know what to do at all.

Well, then we went to a different sort of bank, the South Bank, for the Mayor's Thames Festival. It was really very lovely, there were performers and food stalls and the Co-operative Bank was there so I got a leaflet. If you've read about yesterday's walk you'll know my feet are blistered, and my back ached today too. So I didn't really want to walk very much at all, but everything was so exciting that I had to.

And we went to Southwark Bridge to the Feast on the Bridge which was absolutely wonderful, it reminded me of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party with its lovely golden chairs. There were two huge tables the length of the bridge with these seats all along each side, and everyone was eating the food they'd bought at the lovely food stalls beside the bridge. I had a falafel wrap, it was deelicious. And a woman was selling strawberries and cream but I was too full.

It was only one o'clock by this stage and the Great River Race wasn't due to pass until about four so we decided to go to Oxford Street to see what that was like. And to go to John Lewis to look at some crockery we'd seen on their website. So we did. It was very bustly and the John Lewis crockery wasn't all that nice but we found some very nice stuff in Selfridge's, quite pricey as you'd expect but ticked all the boxes so maybe we'll just splash out, and Andy got the iPod dock he's been going on about for ages.

Then we walked down Regent Street and went to Hamley's to look at the Lego and I found a bright red Mary Poppins coat which was very nice but quite expensive so maybe I'll wait til I get paid to buy that. But our poor little legs and feet were sore and tired so we gave in and went home. And I comPLETEly forgot about the Great River Race until we were all the way home which I was very disappointed about since I'd been looking forward to it for weeks. Oh well, these things happen.

Oh but I missed a bit: when we got to Wimbledon we walked around Centre Court (which is a shopping centre, not a tennis court) and guess what they've got? A Hawkin's Bazaar shop! Oh it's so exciting, it's like Christmas a million times over. What a lovely day.

What a fun couple of days! Yesterday I finally had my hearty walk along the Thames Path; on Thursday it was raining quite a lot and frankly I couldn't be bothered getting wet. So I waited, and yesterday I started from Waterloo at 10:45 and finished up at Hammersmith tube station around 2pm.

It was quite a jolly jaunt really. The sun was out, the sky was blue and I was pleased I had had the foresight to apply suncream despite the grey clouds when I left Wimbledon. I mostly stuck to the north bank, so I passed Westminster Palace, walked through Victoria Tower Gardens, passed a very grand but utterly unsignposted building which turned out to be MI5. Skirted along the edge of Pimlico (I want to live there when I grow up), passed the Tate Modern, gazed at Battersea Power Station. Passed MI6 (much more ostentatious than MI5), watched a ginormous marquee being erected in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea (at least that's where I think it was) and reached Albert Bridge, my original destination.

Albert Bridge is really very pretty, and it's pretty rare to see a bridge sign warning troops to break out of step when crossing (you might have to click on the picture to see that). My map tells me it is not deemed strong enough to withstand 'modern traffic'.



But I had started at Waterloo, not Tower Bridge (because I've already walked between Tower Bridge and Waterloo), so it really wasn't very far to Albert Bridge. So I had sort of decided before I started that I would go further than Albert Bridge. My handy A to Z informed me that Putney Bridge would be a good place to aim for since it had a tube station nearby. But I got there and the sun was blazing, there were informative shows on Radio 4 and there was a satisfying-looking stretch of path ahead on the southern shore.

So I headed for Hammersmith instead. I passed the London Wetlands Centre on my left, although I couldn't see it, and passed all the rowing clubs I'd seen at the end of my Beverly Brook walk too. And some precariously parked cars, whose owners obviously have a lot of faith in their handbrakes.



By the time I got to Hammersmith my feet ached and my legs ached and I was fed up with walking. So I headed back to Wimbledon, where I discovered three giant blisters: one on the inside of each of my heels, and a very sore whopper on the ball of my left foot. So I lay on the floor and read my book in the sun for a while, looking up at some lovely sunflowers and the roof and stuff.



And that was that. If you're interested, here's my route.

Today I'm bored and feeling a little bit unwell. I woke up with what may have been a temperature this morning, although it may also just be that some rooms in the house were drastically overheated and others quite cool, and now I have a big bad headache. So I'm still at home, I haven't ventured forth into the exciting world of London yet today.

Actually, I'm losing my enthusiasm for sightseeing. I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to get up and look at things all day on my own. Anticipating days like this, I visited the big tourist office in Piccadilly and picked up lots and lots of leaflets with lovely names like 'Your Guide to the Big Smoke', 'Be a free range Londoner', '101 Reasons to Love London' and, bizarrely, 'Quizzle', a novel concept combining sightseeing with puzzles.

So I've spent most of the day reading these exciting guides and looking up websites they mentioned, and I'm getting some of my enthusiasm back. For example, I hadn't visited the V&A because I thought it was going to be terribly arty-farty, like the Tate Modern. But now I've had a thorough look on their website and although some of it sounds dull there's also lots of interesting-looking bits.

Oh how exciting, my phone has just rung and it was Nick who has invited me to The Oval this afternoon to watch some cricket! Surrey v Hampshire, that promises to be a corker. I'd better read up on how it all works before going. Oh this will be lovely, I'm terribly excited!

Well I probably have time for another hour or so of attraction-researching. Tomorrow I've booked tickets for the BBC Television Centre tour, and on Thursday I'm considering doing the Thames Path from Albert Bridge to Tower Bridge. That's 6 miles on the south bank or 5.2 or something on the north bank. I'll probably weave between the two. I do fancy a bit of walking. All this rain has been such a nuisance, it makes you not want to sit in parks, and if you don't want to sit in parks you have to either keep walking all the time or pay people for the privilege of sitting in their building.

So there. This weekend is the Thames Festival and the Great River Race so there's still exciting things to look forward to.

Actually I started doing other things EVEN BEFORE I FOUND the flat, that's how daring I am. So let me tell you some tales of what I have done in London.

Last Thursday I started my exciting new hobby called Being A Tourist. And I kicked off, somewhat unconventionally, with a trip to the London Transport Museum. It was very good (if you like trains, which I do). I found out lots of interesting facts, such as that Mrs Beeton was probably the first female commuter on the Tube, and that the first tube trains were steam-powered with big condensing tanks on either side which did some of the cooling but they also needed big grates in the footpath (the first Tube lines were constructed using the cut and cover method, so are very close to the surface) to allow the leftover steam to go whooshing up someone's trouser legs. And they're planning to introduce some air-conditioned trains on the Jubilee line in 2009, which would definitely encourage me to take the slightly longer Colliers Wood - London Bridge - Westminster route (incorporating the Jubilee Line) instead of Colliers Wood - Stockwell - Victoria (using the Victoria line). Anyway, I might get shot for being foreign in Stockwell. Always a risk, always a risk.

On Friday I continued my adventures with a trip to meet my cousin Miranda. We had a rather delicious lunch at Wahaca, a Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden, followed by a spot of shopping, then we parted company (she had some big boxes to carry home) and I decided to pay a trip to Westminster to see where I'll be working. I must say, it is rather snazzy:



And it is also just around the corner from Westminster Abbey, so since I had some time to kill I decided to go to Choral Evensong. I want to tell you a little secret about Choral Evensong but you're not to think I'm cheap, okay? Well it normally costs about £10 to go into Westminster Abbey, but if you go to any of the services, they're free. That's only as an aside, it's not the only reason I went: I actually really like Choral Evensong, and I was rather hoping I'd get to hear the Westminster Choir, but I'd forgotten they were on holiday. So a crowd from Nottingham were singing instead. They were very good, but I'm going to have to go back now term has started so I can hear the real choir. It was an incredibly moving experience going to a choral service there, the acoustics are absolutely phenomenal and it was quite horrible having to leave the building and go out into the noisy traffic when it was all over.

So that was Friday. On Saturday, Andy and I met Mark-from-Bangor and went to Greenwich for the afternoon. We went to the National Maritime Museum but we weren't really paying enough attention so I'm going to go back in a few weeks I think -- I'm hoping that Nick will be there next time I visit. Oh and we had dinner in Covent Garden right opposite Westminster Quaker Meeting, which (it turns out) is in the City of Westminster, not Westminster itself.

Sunday was a rainy day, so we hid indoors until about 3pm, then we headed to Bayswater to meet Diarmuid and his girlfriend Connie. Quite a coinkydink, really: Diarmuid moved to London about five days before me to take up a job with BCG (whom Andy has also applied to work for) and his girlfriend is joining the Fast Stream with DIUS, so we shared stories of the tedious application process.

On Monday I was back to being on my own as Andy went back to work. Except I wasn't really alone because I met Tom and John for breakfast near Old Street -- I was very chuffed to receive a visit, especially since they had to get up at 5am to allow time for our breakfast meeting. I had done lots of research on the London Review of Breakfasts and found a place that looked very nice. Except it wasn't open, and wasn't intending to open until 12 (seems a little late to start serving breakfast), so we went to a cafe we'd passed on the way. It was fine except for the distinct lack of black or white pudding. White pudding I can understand but there's no excuse for leaving out black pudding. Speaking of which, the 'OpEgg' on LRB at the moment is completely wrong when it claims that people don't normally eat black pudding at home. I always have black pudding when I'm having a fry-up, it's the best part!

Tuesday spelled a return to sight-seeing. I headed into town (can one refer to London as 'town'?) and spent a few hours at the Tate Modern. I think I enjoyed it more last time I was there: this time quite a lot was either not open that day or only opening to paying visitors. And there was rather too much rubbish, like the big red painting with a white stripe down the side, or the piece of canvas with a slit in it, otherwise known as Lucio Fontana's Spacial Concept 'Waiting', of which I learnt that:

In 1959, Fontana began to cut the canvas, with dramatic perfection. These cuts (or tagli) were carefully pre-meditated but executed in an instant. Like the holes, they have the effect of drawing the viewer into space. In some, however, the punctures erupt from the surface carrying the force of the gesture towards the viewer in a way that is at once energetic and threatening. Although these actions have often been seen as violent, Fontana claimed ‘I have constructed, not destroyed.’

Er, yes. Or, almost worse, Barnett Newman's Eve, which is basically a red canvas with a stripe of darker red down the side. Apparently,

the vast expanse of unmodulated red paint in this work is both absorbing and disorienting. It is interrupted by a single, narrow band of purple running the length of the right-hand edge. This 'zip' generates a tension throughout the canvas between presence and blankness, solidity and fragility. Its verticality also echoes the position of the viewer, helping to fulfil Newman's concern that 'the onlooker in front of my painting knows that he's there'.

Well it's certainly a good thing he painted that stripe, otherwise I definitely wouldn't have known whether or not I was there.

By the way, I didn't memorise this, I've found the precise paintings and text on the Tate Modern's most excellent website, which allows you to explore the gallery online.

We didn't go to 8 out of 10 Cats in the end: we got there early but not early enough -- it was already full by the time we arrived, with a massive queue still outside. We weren't particularly upset though; we didn't want to see it enough to queue for several hours in advance. Damn groupies.

Wow this is getting to be a very long post, but I'm sure you're finding it gripping so you don't mind. On Wednesday I didn't see many sights -- I spent the afternoon with my cousin Phelie who was visiting on his way home from Australia. He was pretty tired from the flight, so we mostly went to the pub followed by a walk through Hyde Park followed by another pub. He's off to Brussels next to do exciting things with the EU.

Finally, yesterday I walked the Beverly Brook walk through Wimbledon Common, Richmond Park and Barnes Common to the Thames. Very pleasant it was, and we had a surprising amount of sunshine. I must explore the Thames Path in the coming weeks. Oh, and I went for dinner with some friends in Canteen Spitalfields. I had an extremely delicious chicken pie with big, tasty pieces of chicken, lovely gravy, perfect mash and fine hearty cabbage. I was very impressed to see their cheese board for the day featured St Tola -- I don't think I've ever seen St Tola outside Ireland before. I'd definitely recommend it -- plain-ish dishes (including macaroni cheese) served very well.

So there, now you know everything I've been doing. Today I'm going for lunch with Katy, then who knows where the day will take us. My only prediction is that it will be very wet.

I've got the flat! I swooped in there and stole it out from under another poor woman's nose. I felt a bit mean for doing that initially until I remembered I was supPOSEd to be top of the list, so she shouldn't even have been shown the property. They should have known from my grit and determination that I wasn't going to let anyone else have the flat. It's not my fault her hopes and dreams were dashed.

Anyway, here's the grand unveiling (these are off my phone camera as my other camera's broken so excuse the poor quality):

TA DA!



This is the living room/kitchen looking one direction. Note the large, airy windows and high-quality blinds. There are more big windows on the right the same size again.



This is the living room/kitchen looking the other direction. Note the modern units.



This is the bedroom. There's a very large wardrobe hidden away in one corner, and a chest of drawers identical to the set we already own -- I'm not sure whether they come with the flat or not.

So we're moving in on October 4th which is rather later than I had hoped, but it's still before I start work. It's going to be a hectic week though, moving in on the 4th (which includes driving to Yorkshire and back to get all our stuff) then starting work on the 6th. I'm due to go to a JYM committee meeting in Dublin on the 11th but I'm having second thoughts about that -- I really don't know if I can manage all that stuff in one week without falling over.

Let me just tell you some more about the joys of Colliers Wood/Merton Abbey Mills. The highlights include, obviously, Merton Abbey Mills, the ugliest building in London (quite a claim to fame!), the CAMRA Pub of the Year 2007 for South West London (as with Merton Abbey Mills' main site, please don't judge it on the poor quality of the website) which is absolutely teensy and only two minutes walk despite claiming to be in Merton, the Making Colliers Wood Happy community project (modelled on Make Slough Happy, although I don't think anyone has written poems about friendly bombs falling on Colliers Wood), the River Wandle (although the stretch running past our flat is apparently man-made) which some people like to explore in drains and it's all very near to Wimbledon which has a watersports centre which offers 'pay and play' sailing (ie pay £10 and go sailing for an hour).

So there. Worries over, now I can get on with enjoying myself.