Onward!!

I swear I’ll put pictures of the new place up soon. Most likely that’ll be when I’m procrastinating over the insane mountain of work I’m struggling under during the next 3 weeks. And, yeah, when my room no longer looks like a mess of laundry, bags and random “temporary” piles of stuff.

Every now and then, if the house is otherwise quiet, I hear and feel this quiet rumbling from somewhere. It’s definitely a train due to the clatter toward the end of the run, but since it doesn’t seem to come from the direction of the (several) overland tracks around my house, I’ve come to the to the tentative conclusion that it’s probably a tube train going through a tunnel somewhere near my back garden. If I had time, I’d investigate. I wonder if TfL (or anyone else) has geographically-accurate maps of the tube tunnels?

My mom was due to fly back home via Amsterdam today. I don’t know whether her flight got delayed or diverted because of the Turkish Airlines crash. Hope not – she deserves to get back home safe and easy.

I coughed up for a cab to get the rest of my stuff over. Luckily it fit exactly and I only had to scrounge up extra plastic bags. The cabbie was nice, telling me that I was bound to return to South London because that’s just how it is – where you first end up in London (whether it be by birth or by other means) is where you’ll feel at home. That may well be true, we’ll have to see.

Driving through Stamford Hill, watching the Hasidic Jews walk down the high road with their furry hats and long dark coats, the cabbie remarked, “It’s like a regular Jerusalem, driving thru here on Saturday. I used to live dere, on de other side of Stamford Hill.”

It is such a beautiful early spring day today. The sky is a light blue and the sun is bright. People seem visibly happier. Even the ugly mustard brick so prevalent in London seemed somehow pleasant. I have a feeling I won’t be going down Brixton way regularly anymore, and in a way that’s sad. I will miss the Common close to my house, as well as the winding streets that change in character during their course. I can’t believe that I only realised a few days ago, on the eve of me leaving that area, that this house up the road from me had an Aston Martin parked in the yard, with a Jaguar in the driveway of the next one. You only open your eyes when things are about to end I guess.

I did, a year ago. Tomorrow night, new house, new flatmates. They seem nice, and the room, though small seems good. North London, here I come.

From this week’s edition of The Beaver:

“LSE will halt the growth in student numbers of recent years to repair the quality of life on campus (…) The school had ‘paid some penalty’ for its rapid growth, [Director Howard Davies] said. ‘The school does risk becoming more impesonal as a place’.

Well I never. I’d say with sufficient investment in actually improving the place and the student experience, assuming student numbers are kept constant, this might be a worthwhile institution to apply to in around 5 years. Don’t get me wrong, the teaching you do get is good, it’s just that there’s not very much of it (at least at the undergraduate level) and the personal support is laughable.

But I really did try. I wanted to catch up on some TV (come on, I do allow myself a little bit of brain-relaxing luxury) from last week since on Thursday I spent the evening looking at a damp dive in Shepherd’s Bush and trying to get something coherent onto paper for the next day’s class. Channel 4 hypes up their catch-up service which is similar to the BBC’s iPlayer. Only problem when I click on last week’s episode of Skins?

“Channel4.com currently only supports Windows PCs using Internet Explorer 6 or 7. This is due to restrictions with the rights and technical protection measures required.

However, if you are using Firefox 2+ (on a Windows PC) you can get a plugin from here which should allow you to watch the programmes on Channel4.com.”

What. No, really. How many young people (as in the target audience) don’t own a Windows PC these days? I’d say I see almost half and half macs and windows laptops at Uni these days. They’re just shooting themselves in the foot with this. People are just going to click onto a website that lets them download a pristine-quality copy of the show without bothersome ads unless the networks make it really easy to watch it online.