Monday, 10th October

I had a rough night. I kept on tossing and turning and having strange dreams that I can barely remember. Also in the middle of one tossing session I got woken up by a searing pain in my leg than took half an hour to subside, and when I finally woke up bleary-eyed in the morning it was hurting dully. I must have pulled a muscle.

I woke up at 9:30 and dragged myself out of bed to have a shower, and after chatting to a pal on the Internet who's a long lost friend who went through a really rough spot and seems to be coming through (keep on troopin'!) I headed off to Costcutters to get some milk so I could have some breakfast in the hope that the walk would make me feel better and more woken up. It did, and it also wore off the horrible pain in my leg. I bought some bread, some snacks, some milk and a sandwich.

I got back to the kitchen and my Branflakes had gone AWOL. Bloody hell, I'd bought some milk especially. How desperate can people be to take some Branflakes? They're about as nutritious as cardboard. Instead I had Marmite on toast again whilst watching a somewhat fascinating Channel 4 documentary on the Millennium bridge and the fact that its wobbling was caused by the synchronity of footsteps of thousands of people. Apparently an oscillating structure encourages people to walk in step to the oscillations, a phenomena never seen before. Anika came in the room so I chatted to her a bit about her phone, which was an impressive piece of kit. I then tried playing Prince of Persia: Sands of Time for a while but I'd lost the knack.

I finally managed to haul myself out of the room and hunted down the central laundrette, which all the other halls of residences use except Arthur Vick. It was absolutely packed and had a brilliant buzz in it, but by the time I found it I only had around 10 minutes to go before my lecture started. I checked the price of the spincycles, it was only 20p for a drying cycle! In the Arthur Vick residences (when they were open) it was 50p a drying cycle! Bloody hell. Lucky I was forced to come here.

I lugged my wet clothes over to my lecture, which mercilessly was in the MathStat building, or the absolute further building from the point I was in, full stop. By the time I got there, despite stopping off for a few minutes midway at the library for a breather and to get a Five Alive, I felt like I wanted my clothes to be thrown out… soggy materials are so heavy, and a plastic bag digs into your hands so much that they go red. Owch. Anyway, I got into the Programming lecture. These lectures are really easy, but Dr Jarvis is so amazingly funny that I go to them anyway, though eventually I had to stop putting my hand up in audience participation to give the others a chance. Dr Jarvis seemed rather impressed that I'd managed to bring my wet laundry to his lecture. It's not been done that much before.

After the lecture I met up with Olga and chatted to her a bit as we headed towards the Arts Centre. We talked about the gaming sessions (apparently she'd gone, though I didn't see her… I was in the corner of the second room with Dementia most of the time) and a few other things, but she had to part ways to go and buy an iron. I sloped off to the Rootes laundrette and put a load in, and went to CostCutters.

I have found five things about CostCutters:

• People laugh at you if you go down the wrong aisle.
• It has nothing you need.
• But it has everything you like.
• At obscenely high prices.
• It's physically impossible to retreat from there spending less than £3.

I met Anika and her friend in the queue and chatted with them a bit, as they were both doing Computer Science. This passed the time of the obscenely long queues and I realised that I'd managed to exit the store with my un-tumble-dryable indecently flowery shirt and the boxes of cereal in the same bag. By this time, I had parted ways with Anika and her pal and there was no-one I could plead with for a carrier bag. This was a dilemma and a half! However, when I got to the laundrettes I found a plastic bag discarded on a washing machine. Looking shifty, I pilfered it and put my groceries in there. I retreated to the lounge area of the laundrettes and felt guilty for at least 20 minutes. I guess I'd make a really crappy thief. After my laundry was done, I took it back to halls and fetched the next set, which I had to take to my next two lectures in two bags as it was too late. Darn! I'm going to be getting a reputation as the laundry guy!

The lecture was interesting but I really struggled to keep awake through it. I don't know why, but it's only Mathematics for Computer Scientists where I have to actually squirm in my seat to avoid falling asleep. It must be the fact that the lecturer's voice, albeit jolly, is constant or something like that. I decided I best actually look at the homework due in for Friday some time soon. It reminded me that I needed to chase the guy who was working on the Mackie presentation with me. After the lecture I joined up with someone who is in charge of the CompSoc gaming server and asked them if they could run ET on it, though I doubt we'll ever get enough players interested to play a decent game of ET (you need at least 8). We chatted for a bit before I realised I'd walked with him to the CompSoc building. Sigh… it was a long and winding road to the the Rootes laundrette, but when I got there a very kind girl said she'd put too much in a drier and I was welcome to use up the extra ten minutes. As it was a large load, I put in an extra 14 minutes on top and sat in the lounge being nice and antisocial with my laptop.

I headed back to my room (noticing on the way that someone had put bubble bath in the fountain in front of Arthur Vick 1 – seriously) and went into the kitchen to cook. I created a random pasta and sweetcorn dish with those pasta parcel thingies. It was a bit boring but nice. I then retreated to my room for a while to write up some stuff and to talk with a few Internet friends. On a whim I headed into the kitchen at around 21:30 and there were people playing a game called Articulation. It was a fantastic game, and I was glad to join in. The rules are that you're given a subject and the other person on your team has to guess what's on the card, but you're not allowed to say the item itself. We got one exceptional corker: "Big, large, long things.. druids! Salisbury plain has them!"

People filtered off to the Top Banana dance promising to get drunk and play another game later on. I got my maths homework and joined the rest in attempting some of the questions. I decided to bring the Martini, and interestingly after one shot the questions got easy, after two they got tricky and after three I just joined in watching TV (Little Britain). At that point Will commented I was just drinking Martini and looked somewhat surprised. I just grinned, and after stomaching as much Little Britain as I could headed off to my room, bidding the others good night. The fabled drunken game of Articulation never happened.

PS. Ernest is now mostly black and looks half-way to the grave…

: 10 Oct 2005 23:34 |  Comments (8) |  Report a problem