Honestly, Beautifully : honey blade

2002-04-08 - 9:27 a.m.

Argh, I've been neglecting the diary >_<

I'm very sorry, everyone. I'd write now but I need to get into uni. I'll be back when I'm done there (no official lecture, see) so I'll write about the stuff I've been doing for the last few days when I get back.

Later!

Update: 11.54 am

OK, I'm back. Been back for a while, just been looking for cheap flights to Tokyo and pining. Found one that'll do a flight for �350 without tax, as long as I fly between the end of August and the beginning of December.

I think I could save that much up by then. I think. Not sure if going to Japan this year would be such a good idea though, with my final year fast approaching.

I could always save up for the summer of my final year, of course. Right now I'm paying X back by giving him �50 every fortnight, after I get paid. I figure, once I've paid him off if I kept taking that �50 out of my bank account every fortnight and putting it into my savings account, where I won't touch it, I'll have quite a bit of cash saved up by this time next year. �50 a fortnight works out at about �100 a month or so, so I'd have �1200 saved up by this time next year. At least.

I soooo need to go back to Japan. I'm getting increasingly impatient.

Anyway, stuff I've been up to recently. On Saturday I met up with my aunt, who was back in London doing family tree research. She'd finished all her research by Saturday and just wanted to do touristy stuff, so she and I met up and wandered around.

Here's a weird thing; just lately, I've been eating more. I've been forcing myself to eat full-sized meals even when I'm not hungry. And on Saturday I spent much of the day eating. And yet, somehow, I have managed to lose weight. It doesn't make sense.

It has been theorised that I'm really just storing it all up in another dimension somewhere, until the day that the other dimension explodes and I'll suddenly become morbidly obese. And then I can make my debut on Trisha. Go me.

Anyway. We didn't really look at anything much - we went to the Tate Modern but didn't actually look at any paintings or anything, we just headed straight for the cafe where they gave me hot chocolate in a bowl. Truthfully, we only wanted to go there so we could walk across the Millennium Bridge - the one that famously wobbled after it was first opened. They've fixed the wobble now, more's the pity. My mum, my aunt and I would all have loved to have tried walking across it while it was wobbling. It'd be like crossing the rope bridge at the Giant's Causeway. It was amusing to note that the word "STABLE" had been sprayed onto the floor of the bridge, perhaps to ease the minds of those of a nervous disposition. Wish I'd brought my camera, I could have taken a picture for the comedy value.

After the Tate Modern we headed back to Trafalgar Square and went to a Thai restaurant. I don't think my aunt has ever had Thai before so I was looking through the menu and pointing out the dishes we serve at work. The way they serve the food is interesting though - they give you a clean plate and then put all your dishes down in front of you, so you just serve them onto your plate as you so desire. Handy really, since my aunt and I were both quite keen to try each other's choices.

So, we ordered a portion of chicken satay to share, then we had both plain and sticky rice, Panang chicken, and something called Jungle curry.

Having had Panang before, the Jungle curry was my choice. It caught my eye by giving the meat options of "chicken, beef or venison".

"Ooh, venison," I thought. "Not had that in a while."

Anyway. The curry arrived in a little bowl, as opposed to the Panang which was served in a rather large, flat dish. My aunt tried it first, actually, and she reported that it had a nice kick to it. So then I tried some. She wasn't kidding.

You know hot food is good when you can still taste it after you've had a couple of mouthfuls. Brits seem to have this odd fondness for just making food insanely hot so that after a couple of forkfuls your mouth goes numb and you're just tossing this tastless, textureless thing around in your mouth. The best Indian and Thai food is the stuff that's spicy but stays flavoursome. And this stuff tasted absolutely divine. It did need to be eaten with either rice or a cold drink though, such was the kick.

Apart from venison there were a lot of other interesting-looking ingredients in the sauce. I was quite pleased at finding a rather large piece of chilli pepper in there, but there were also these curious-looking pea-like things in the sauce. My aunt tried one and declared that it was definitely not a pea.

These things were only pea-like in terms of looks. I attempted to stab one with my fork and it resisted before flying out from under the fork and across to the other side of the plate. So instead I just scooped it up and stuck it in my mouth.

You know how, if you bite down on a pea, it just sort of crushes and disintegrates? This didn't. It actually burst when I bit down, and it tasted really quite vile. My aunt had described it as tasting "bittersweet", but I'm not sure if I'd use either word to describe how this thing tasted. It was not pleasant.

When the waiter came along I asked him what they were, and he said they were aubergine peas. Which I had never heard of. They certainly didn't taste like aubergine - last time I had aubergine it was notable for the fact that it tasted of nothing.

It was a great meal nonetheless. I would go back to that restaurant if it weren't just a bit too pricey for a student budget. Maybe I could just look through the window and look out for that one really cute waitress...!

Ahem. After the meal, we went to St. Martin's In The Fields for a concert. I went to a similar thing with my mum, aunt and uncle in January, but they played Vivaldi last time and this time it was mostly Handel. Because they played a lot of Handel's choral works, there was a choir this time too, and a soloist who was described as a "countertenor".

Now, I'd never heard of a countertenor before. As far as I know, they're not that widely used, but Handel wrote a lot of parts specifically for countertenors as opposed to altos, which is the closest thing. So we got a countertenor.

The pitch of that man's voice was truly amazing. If I hadn't been sitting in the aisle, near the front, I might have sworn that it was a woman with a slightly deeper than average voice singing. He hit some notes that made the hall reverberate, I swear.

It was a great performance though. They performed the Hallelujah chorus in the first half and it sounded wonderful. They also did Zadok The Priest, which I will confess to not being overly fond of but it sounded incredible.

My dad reckons this is an indication of me becoming more cultured. As if I'm only getting into classical music now. Silly dad.

Sunday was rather uneventful by comparison. Went to the LAC, stared at a Pyocola plushie for a long time (much to the bemusement of the people standing on the dealer's table it belonged to), then came home. Almost tripped over some kid in the tube station and then had its mother swear at me when I got pissed off about it.

If you let your stunted brat walk out in front of me unexpectedly then you should be thankful that all you get is an exclamation of "oh for God's sake". On numerous occasions I have almost kicked children that have done this, which would no doubt result in some kind of serious bodily injury and maybe even brain damage of some description, especially if I'm wearing my boots. If I'd have kicked this kid he would have gone flying forward, smacked into the ticket barrier and there would have been blood everywhere. So wise up.

OK, venting over.

Only other eventful thing to happen was on the bus home. I normally get the E2 because it's a shorter journey and it drops me at my door, but because I just wanted to get home yesterday I just got on the first bus that was going my way, which was an E8.

The E8 pretty much follows the E2 route along the Uxbridge road, but instead of turning down towards Northfields it keeps following the Uxbridge road, cuts through Hanwell and passes Boston Manor, which is the next stop down from Northfields. It's a longer journey and a longer walk back, which is why I don't take it that often.

Anyway. On this occasion, as it was turning towards Boston Manor in Hanwell, the bus got a bit stuck. The road it drives down normally is very narrow, and cars park along both sides of the road. On this occasion, someone had parked their car so that the front was sticking out into the road and obstructing part of it. Wouldn't have been much of a problem for a normal-sized car, but for a bus this made the road impossible to drive down. So the result was a long line of cars stuck behind the bus and the bus driver honking his horn very loudly until the owner of the car showed up and moved it, which took about 10 minutes.

While we were sitting there, I saw a group of three people with a DV camera, like the ones that are hired out to Video Production groups by my uni. So I suspect they may well have been students. They looked like students. Anyway, don't know what they were meant to be filming, but they decided to film the stranded bus.

So they started at the front of the bus and panned all the way down to the back. Where I was sitting. There was also a group of four or five teenage girls sitting at the back and as soon as the camera started pointing in their direction they all started screaming and looking away and so on. So as a contrast, I grinned at the camera and started waving like a maniac.

The students seemed to like this because one of them started pointing at me and the one with the camera walked right up to the bus to film. So I kept waving and pulling faces until they left.

If I'm right and they were making a film for assessment, the lecturer's going to get an interesting surprise :)

Anyway, that's about all I can think of to write about for now, and I've been writing this for ages so I'm going to go now and try to encourage Neko out of bed so we can eat breakfast or something. Wow, that's a long sentence...

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