I am tired and a bit teary and generally feeling not like some epic mountaineer but like the epic mountaineer's sherpa. Dissertation writing is lonely, heavy business and I am s-l-o-w-l-y going insane. My days run something like this:
8.30am: alarm goes off
8:40am: snooze button
8:50am: snooze button
9:00am/9:10am/9:20am: snooze button
9:30-10:30am: shower, breakfast, faffing, 1st visit of the day to the Costcutter for Redbull and Diet Coke
11:00am: Sit down at computer
11:02am: Get up and find something else to eat, struck by pangs of procrastination masquerading themselves as peckishness
11:05am-2:15pm: write, struggle, smack head against wall, (optional 2nd visit to Costcutter), write some more
2:15-2:45pm: Half Hour of Shame (read: Home and Away)
2:45-3:00pm: miscellaneous faffing
3:00-7:00pm: write, struggle, write some more, smack head, (optional bout of tears), (optional 3rd visit to Costcutter)
7:00-11:00pm: all or any combination of the above, plus occasional guest starring events such as movie dates, dinner dates or, as happened this week, a Prom date.
One of the myriad adventures LB and I added to our list several weeks ago was a date to the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall and so on Tuesday we headed off to Kensington for some high brow culture. And by high I mean Up in The Gods high, back row, count the bald heads below high. It was so fabulous. A bit of Mendelssohn, a bit of Sibelius, a bit of schizophrenic pretentious contemporary and we had ourselves a ticked box. The whole point of the Proms is that for not very much money (our tickets cost 11 pounds) anyone and everyone can come and experience classical music at the Royal Albert. While the whole experience is designed to be unpretentious and relaxed I'm still not sure how I feel about seeing someone in their tracksuit pants sipping a glass of rose at the interval. I think I feel, well, "just no."
It was really so good to get out of the house and do something totally different. Apart from wearing down a particular strip of pavement between my front door and the Diet Coke fridge at the corner store I haven't really strayed far from the house the last fortnight.
Last weekend though LB came to stay at mine for the weekend and on the Friday we stayed in and cooked this ridiculously amazing meal before settling in for a night of dedicated holiday research (I'll get to that). Saturday was a late, late breakfast before an impromptu decision to see a film, and so, list at the ready, we took off for the British Film Institute on the Southbank. Drink and film at the BFI? Tick.
After the film, The September Issue aka Wow Anna Wintour is one tough-ass bi-atch, we wandered along the Thames back towards London Bridge. It was only then that I remembered the day marked my 12 month anniversary - it had been exactly a year (and a few hours) since I had landed in London. That took some reconciling because jeSUS has it flown. And speaking of flying (tenuous leap muchly?) that night, toasting my 1st London birthday with some champers, LB and I booked a week-long holiday to Majorca for the beginning of October. He's excited, I'm excited and I want to go noooooooooow. My dissertation won't be finished by then, but the complete first draft will be so I figure a week of swimming and sleeping while my computer (and brain) stay behind will do me the world of good. Hurrah for living in Europe and holidays in the Mediterranean.
Apart from that though really, little else of consequence has been happening - writing my dissertation has sucked my life somewhat down the plughole of boring but once I have this first chapter finished I will feel muchly relieved. I just hope when I go to hand it in to my tutor on Thursday I don't slip and fall down the escalators like I did last week at Liverpool St station on my way to hand in my introduction. Fuck did that hurt.
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