Out with my camera down Gloucester Road and Cheltenham Road, Bristol. It’s Sunday, so the shops are mostly shut, which means I can take pictures of the reflections in their windows without drawing too many funny looks.
I’m toying with the idea of getting a new camera for Christmas; a digital SLR. The difficult question is which one, and how much do I spend?
The graduation ceremony on Friday was fun, but a bit like Christmas: a little too over-commercialised and over-hyped, so that in the end while it was good it wasn’t quite as good as it had been made out to be.
I got a bit frustrated with the silly costume so took it off shortly after the ceremony. My dad did take lots of photos of me wearing it before the ceremony - most of which make me look very silly (and rather fat).
The “official” graduation photo (£36, and you get to hold a bit of white plastic pipe which is meant to be a “scroll”) takes 4-6 weeks to arrive. Can’t wait…
Last week I had my last “holiday” before I start work (i.e. the next time I have a holiday I’ll have to book time off and use up a relatively short holiday allowance and so on); a comparatively short three-night break in Paris with my brother. I’ve been on holiday in France several times in the past, and I even worked there for 10 weeks two years ago, but I’d never been to the capital city. Since Easyjet fly there comparatively cheaply from Bristol, and I’m still slightly wary of travelling somewhere where I don’t understand any of the language*, I decided that Paris would be a good choice of short break.
The weather wasn’t brilliant, but it didn’t rain much, so we had a good time walking round the usual tourist venues without having to visit a single museum.
My photos from the trip are on Flickr.
*I got an A* at GCSE French, which means I can just about fumble my way through buying a beer or lunch or train tickets without needing too many hand gestures. I can also decipher most roadsigns, food packages and menus without too much trouble. Which all seems a bit pointless, because as soon as a native French speaker hears me mumbling Franglais they respond in brilliant English, and most of the menus in the sort of place we were eating in Paris are bilingual. At least I can figure out which toilets are the gents without too much trouble…
The last couple of weeks of my have been particularly turbulent - not necessarily in a bad way - except that all change is inevitably stressful to some extent. When fate throws a couple of curveballs into the mix, I guess my stress levels rose a little more…
Just under two weeks ago I was moving out of my slightly grotty but well-located student flat in Clifton, Bristol, across town to a more upmarket one-year-old flat in a slightly less smart but still nice area of town (just off Gloucester Road). I’d spent a while packing boxes, throwing away rubbish, making lists of all the organisations I needed to inform of my change of address and so on. I was confident that by the Monday morning, when I’d planned to move out, everything would be ready.
At about 8:30 am on the Monday, I was still feeling rather tired after a weekend of night shifts for St John Ambulance (two of the biggest university balls) so when I heard a large lorry trying to get down the narrow road I glanced behind the curtain at it and promptly rolled over and dozed off a bit. An hour later I was up and dressed, pulled open the curtains, and noticed that my car, parked in the street opposite the flat, had a flat tyre. Marvellous. Just what I needed.
So I went out to look at the tyre, and found scratches all down the side of my three-month-old car, a chunk taken out of the tyre, two chunks taken out of the alloy wheel, and note on the window left by a neighbour who witnessed the lorry I saw earlier damage my car and drive off. So I spent the morning phoning the insurance company and visiting the police, and by about lunchtime could finally start the move.
The very British “it could have been worse” attitude kept me going - at least it only damaged paint and plastic and a wheel, not denting any metal, and so on…
The new flat is brilliant, especially after making a trip to IKEA (yet more stress) to get some furniture to store all the junk I’d brought with me in. However, due to a change of service provider there was no internet connection, meaning for over a week I was only able to read my email on my mobile phone. More stress.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, two weeks later and the car has been fixed (I still had to pay £150 insurance excess, which hopefully I can claim back from the other party when the legal expenses people get their act together) and I now have internet access, of sorts, by paying extra to T-mobile to use my phone as a 3G modem. (The broadband ISP apparently isn’t going to connect us until 4 July, and I couldn’t live much longer without proper web access). My stress levels have returned to normal, and things look good for the future, though I am still a bit pissed off about the car…
[coming soon]