Thursday, 30 April 2009

I guess a page is turned




Today I have been made truly free! University is over. It’s scary, because of the looming question – now what? I look back on my time there with fond memories, particularly the last year when I lived in halls, in Brockley.

I lived on the fourth floor and spent a good amount of time on my friend’s windowsill sunning myself while we chatted.

We had breakfast at the breakfast place down the road, usually at 4pm nursing a hangover. It’s a lovely little place, that doubled as an art gallery. It was nice to see the pictures change, and talking about them made you feel a little cultured. It has three rooms, we had a favourite, the first one. An out-door seating area where once we sat under pub garden umbrellas even after the heavens had opened up on us, that day we even saw a rat scurrying around the garden.

The lamb chop place, that has the huge tropical fish tank that we could stare at for hours, watching the fish with the big lips.

The day we got the pet rats. We had two rats, a black one called Jack Daniels and a white one called Kebab Star, one big cage, a giant bag of saw dust, a big exercise wheel, exercise balls and other cage toys, and one big problem – no pets. The usual way to our rooms was through the main building, past the security guard to the lift. To avoid the security guard we went into the next building, lugged all the stuff up the stairs, through that building, through the connecting passageway into our building, in the lift and up to our floor.

The day we brought home traffic cones. Everyone at some point has done it – was my reasoning! For some reason the weaker girl, me, got the heaviest one! Making our way past the security guard ‘whispering’ to hide them and to keep quite very loudly.

The midnight fridge raid. We did this once! Hitting all four floors, each floor has two kitchens and each kitchen has two fridges! We were buggers for stealing food! But this was a massive haul! Alcohol, salami sausage, dried fish and anything weird and wonderful.

This halls had a garden, which is very plush indeed. I loved stretching myself out on the bench reading or sleeping in the sun. One day we went to the local Costcutter grabbed anything and everything and had a huge picnic in the garden. We had little plastic cups in the shape of cocktail glasses. We raced each other, crawling, along the grass.
Photos are of (hopefully) joke warnings that were put up in halls, Brockley

Thursday, 23 April 2009

Thanks! I love lemonade!


I would LOVE to say a huge thank you to Rebecca Woodhead for the Lemonade Stand Award. It is given to people with a good attitude or sense of gratitude! It was really sweet of her to think of London Belle:
'I am giving it to London Belle as she has been supportive and she maintains an optimistic outlook despite the impossible employment situation in London at the moment of which she paints a vivid picture on her blog'
I try to stay optimistic and its great feedback that the optimism shines through. Also my wonderful friends have told me that my blog and writing are good - but they have too! So its nice to see people enjoying the blog.

Friday, 3 April 2009

A quote about the London underground map




Taken from Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island:

'the London underground map. What a piece of perfection it is, created in 1931 by a forgotton hero named Harry Beck, an out-of-work draughtsman who realised that when you are under ground it doesn't matter where you are. Beck saw - and what an intuitive stroke this was - that as long as the stations were presented in in their right sequence with their interchanges clearly delineated, he could freely distort scale, indeed abandon it altogether.'

'Here's an amusing trick you can play on people from' outside of London 'take them to Bank Station and and tell them to make their way to Mansion House. Using Beck's map [...] they will gamley take a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, change to a Circle Line train heading east and travel five stops more. When eventually they get to Mansion House they will emerge to find they hace arrived at a point 200 feet further down the same street.'

'Now take them to Great Portland Street and tell them to meet you at Regent's Park (that's right, same thing again!), and then to Temple Station with instructions to rendezvous at Aldwych.'






Pictures of a street performer taken on Oxford Street, near Oxford Circus tube, on a Friday night