Side Salad

A (Wrong) Day in the Life....

Let me tell you about today... (not turning this page into a log or anything - I'm just adding things when I feel like it and a lot is happening right now...).

Today, I awoke at the ungodly hour of 6am to resit DEN108 Dynamics module exam for engineering - but more on that in a minute.

I usually wake up slowly, having slept like the dead, but this morning was different - I had hardly slept at all the night before, due to lots of thinking (unfortunately not about the exam) and so paradoxically, i woke up as soon as the alarm went off and trudged downstairs to prepare for the day - in other words, have a large mug of tea to recharge those caffine levels. This was jinx number one: there was no "real" tea left, just the decaffinated stuff. In my mind, decaffinated tea is like candyfloss without the sugar; an impossibility.

With no caffine available, I had the next best thing (a very distant second), some fresh orange juice, semi-warm since it had been left on the worktop overnight and "blasted" in the freezer for 10 minutes by mum in a vain attempt to get it just like they do in those expensive hotels (although I planned to have it in something a little larger than a shot glass).

After drinking a couple of glasses of that and giving the dog his requisite amount of cornflakes with just the right amount of milk (too much and he won't eat them, not enough and he'll wait till you pour some more on) we departed for the station. At first we decided to use the Uno, the nippy litte runabout that my mum uses all the time, but outside temperatures of 5°C and a driver's window that was stuck in the "down" position persuaded us otherwise, and we thieved the keys to dad's Scenic (with a token shout of "we're borrowing the car" up the stairs on the way out). Even with the extra 5 minutes added to the journey while mum figured out where the indicators were, we still arrived in plenty of time to make the suit train, so called because of the high proportion of rotund gentemen in Armarni suits heading into London at that time of the morning with the obligatory copy of the Times suffed under one arm and the complimentary Midland Mainline cup of tea and/or coffee (sometimes both) in the other hand.

The journey itself was no major event, although travelling on the train this early in the morning was new to me and consequently the scenery was a little different. It was a little misty in parts and the spooky, but nontheless picturesque, scene of heavier mist hanging deathly still over a lethargic river was straight out of a movie (don't ask me which one, I have no idea - it's just the kind of thing people say when they see that sort of thing). With all this commuting back and forth you'd think I'd just live down in London, oh wait, I already do...

In these sort of conditions, cows develop the ability to levitate, since the ground is far less visible than they are with its blanket of mist and hence blends in to the sky, leaving the unfortunate animal floating like a novelty blimp at a sporting event.

I got to St Pancras station about 43 seconds late (cue "you give me road rage" in a Carribean accent for those who get the reference) and I headed for the underground on a trip I've done countless times before. At 9 in the morning though, it's a little more crowded (something about a rush hour, although I didn't see either Jackie Chan or Chris Tucker, so I have no idea what they were on about). I still managed to get a relatively uncluttered portion of real estate on a Hammersmith train on leg one of the journey to Mile End. Now, you'd expect a lazy student like me to stay on the Hammersmith train since it does go to Mile End. However, defying apparent logic, I always change at Liverpool Street and take the Central Line to Mile End. This is to eliminate about 29 hours from the journey time since the Hammersmith line runs on the same tracks as the Circle and District lines and is consequently as slow as glacial ice in winter. The Central Line on the other hand, could outrun the USS Enterprise (although to be fair to Scotty and Geordie, only on a good day, downhill and with the wind behind it). The Central Line also has far more copies of the Metro conveiniently left on the seats for me to swipe for something to read when I've got nothing else to do.

Anyway, arriving at Uni in plenty of time I head over to admin and check the board, finding all the info I need for the upcoming exam. Arriving at the designated place (the rather grand "Great Hall"), I sit down outside and get out that copy of the Metro I obtained earlier. Looking at the front of the paper there was something that didn't quite hit right, and it was only after some hard thought (more than I was likely to have put into the exam) that the date was Thursday August 24th, and the exam was on the 25th....

Suffice to say, I feel somewhat stupid, although quite chuffed that I didn't have an exam anytime in the next 10 minutes. Never mind, I'll just have to come back tomorrow...