Now, look: it’s the middle of May and it’s the middle of the afternoon. You take the dog for a walk. What do you expect? Well, a la Brighton, what you get is you and the dog repeatedly being almost blown off your feet. Literally.
If this was an isolated incident, fine. Hm, okay, today is particularly bad, and you normally get this of a night. But still. I didn’t get anything like this in the depths of Winter in London (or Brum, very often).
Read More »Lotsa Weather
Hmmm… haven’t felt much like writing on here for a while. Real life gets in the way sometimes, have had a really, really weird three weeks, sometimes very depressed and generally disorientated.
Well, the move to Brighton happened. And about five seconds after, I realised it was a total, fucking mistake. You can’t begin to imagine what an amazing mind-fuck that is. This is what happens if you’re stuck in a too-expensive place on your own—you don’t think things through properly.
How can I detail my problems with Brighton? *sigh* Let’s try a bulleted list…
* I actually have friends in London.
* I miss them.
* It’s not as quick/easy to get to London as I deluded myself.
* It’s even harder to get to anywhere else in the country. Travel from here is just a total pisser.
* I got shit on by a bird for the first time since I was about seven years old within a couple of days of coming here.
* The coastal winds are utterly vicious, especially at night.
* And the nights are cooooooooold.
* Spiders and woodlice and bugs generally… lots of them. Everywhere.
* Nothing resembling a ‘proper’ city locally.
* Most of the buildings are ancient and in a shockingly awful state of decay. Even the really expensive ones. Double-glazing hasn’t been invented here yet.
* Living in an ancient, conversion-job building with a shared entrance and paper-thin walls really sucks. I don’t want to know when someone in the floor above farts, but I pretty much do.
* This Hobbit-hole won’t even allow a single divan through its doors. I still have neither a proper sofa to sit on or a bed to sleep on.
* Fresh coastal air, yes, but tons of earthy dirt and grime and dust nonetheless. Everywhere. Poor pooch Fred had a totally black belly within a week of being here.
And on and on and on. Think you get the idea. Brighton’s a beautiful place to visit, but man, living here is another matter entirely.
Read More »A Farce, You Say?
Right, so I went to Brighton yesterday (meaning Wednesday). That’s the moving situation. I’ve decided that, as Brighton is just 40 minutes away from London (the city centre) on the train, the air is a hell of a lot cleaner, and most importantly, you can rent quite nice places for about the same as you can get squalid dumps in most of London… that’s where I’m gonna relocate to.
The irony is that this is where mom and I planned to move to. We were still talking about this a year ago. It was roughly a year ago that mom started to show symptoms that led to a grim diagnosis and the end of her life. That’s been on my mind a fair bit, for obvious reasons, but I’m trying to not let it get me too down.
I do like Brighton, anyway. The seafront’s a major attraction, and as it’s not all that large, you’re never too far away from anything. I have to go into the city from here if, say, I want to browse a large music store… the only local option is a tiny HMV in Wimbledon. Yeah, Wimbledon turned out to be much smaller and less impressive than initial impressions suggested. :-/
Read More »Brighton
We had our fourth monthly London Comics meet yesterday, which was cool. With that and several people urging me to stay in the London area, I guess I’ll be looking for somewhere in this vicinity to move to. Where, I’m not sure. Last minute attempts to find a sharer here have failed to elicit any response per se, and I’m sick of being on my own in a place far too large/expensive for one person, so onwards we go.
Sarah, who was at the meet yesterday, has posted her page for the Freedom anthology, which I think is fabulous. Hope you agree.
Read More »Freedom and Stuff
Okay… one more stab before making a final decision on whether to move from here.
I’ve had problems finding someone to share this place. There were a couple of possibilities, but ultimately they wanted somewhere cheaper and nearer the city centre. (Bit of a contradiction in terms, that, unless you want to live in a complete dump. The centre is only a 25-min tube ride away anyway.) The other problem is that I’m a bit ‘funny’ about who I’d share with.
Absolutely no religious nutters, no crack addicts or hookers, no Nazis. Etc. I don’t suppose those objections are so unusual, thinking about it. 😉 But no doubt I can be cranky and eccentric sometimes, which isn’t to everyone’s liking. And I’m quite nocturnal more often than not.
Read More »To Move or Not?
Oh, for the sake of balance: there is a huge, fuck-off Sainsbury’s round the corner. The clothes are rubbish and the Sound & Vision selection is about as tokenistic and paltry as you’d expect, but the food on offer (it is ostensibly a food store, after all) is nice and extensive.
And they sell Cote d’Or chocolate. *sigh* There goes the blood pressure again, but what the hell. I like it. It has a pretty little elephant on the wrapper (also embossed on the choc segments). The noir variety comes in 70% cocoa and nuclear-strength 86%. I’ve given in to temptation twice. I was awake for days.
Read More »The Big Buzz
Another thing about London (well, this small pocket of London I’m in right now): fish and chips. Like, where?
I don’t have fish and chips often. A handful of times a year. But occasionally one does get the urge. And this is especially true if you can’t have said meal. In the approximately local vicinity, there are loads of eateries. Millions of them. Bazillions. But no fish and chip shop. What’s that all about?
By far the most common kind of eatery, around here, and perhaps London generally (I mean the cheaper bits of it, to be honest), is the fried chicken bar. You know, the one that offers stuff ‘just like’ KFC only half the price. Which is quite neat, because for half the price you get twice the calories, twice the cholesterol and twice the artery-hardening grease and fat!
Read More »Want Some Fat With Yer Grease?
On the other hand, I heart my sound & vision system. My new DVD/CD player came today from Richer Sounds. Like the amp/decoder (also from Mr. Richer’s emporium), it’s a Sony model. The whole system, including speakers, as it stands, cost 240 quid, which is a good deal.
Sony’s name speaks for itself, but what I like about their gear is that they’re so user-friendly, and the manuals (for once) are really comprehensive and helpful (rather than the usual badly-written sketches in several languages). For instance, the player was not automatically sending a 5.1 signal to my amp, but the manual pointed the way in seconds. I have so many issues with instruction manuals that this makes a big difference to me.
The new player is impressing me a fair bit. While the old player was perfectly acceptable, the Sony’s sound output has a definite edge. I am hearing things on my CDs I hadn’t heard before. The amp is not a powerful one (you couldn’t shake the walls with it, but in a residential setting, this isn’t a great idea anyway), but I love the complete ‘wall of sound’ I can get from the set-up, which includes a cheap-but-effective sub-woofer.
Read More »Listen to This
One thing you London types don’t understand at all, and for completely different reasons us Brummie Provincials find hard to grasp, is the milk thing.
I really miss milk in glass bottles. Back in the stix, even if you didn’t have it delivered, you could stroll to your local corner shop, et voila, bottles of milk! Glass bottles. Loads of them.
London’s too ‘trendy’ and ‘high-speed’ for that. I have the most corner-shoppish corner shop you ever saw in your life down the road, but… no milk in glass bottles. It comes in plastic bottles. Very small ones, medium ones, huge ones. All plastic.
Read More »Milk!
Quiet round here, innit? I was thinking about making my obligatory Christmas Humbug posting, but I can’t be bothered. Haven’t felt much like blogging since… Read More »Everything Under the Sun