Saturday, October 29, 2011

Moving flats and a giant white dome

My walls are now bare. Well, almost - I still have some pictures of squirrels in Underground stations to take down, but that won't take too long. It took over an hour to wiggle all the photos off the wall and put them into neatly (well, maybe not quite neatly) labelled envelopes, in order.

The reason for my blank walls? I have a new flat! I will be moving this week. Hopefully it won't take too many trips (though it's amazing how many bits of paper you can amass in five months), so by this time next week I will be properly established in my new room, with photos back up on the walls.

The new flat has fairy lights in the living room.

This makes me happy.

Another thing that made me happy today, strangely, was taking down all my photos. There's something about staring at lots of smiling faces that makes you smile yourself, and I took so long taking them down and making sure they were in the right order (I plan to beat my previous time of three and a half hours for putting it back up) that I spent a lot of time staring at lots of smiling faces.

(Why do the photos have to be in order? some of you may ask. See my post here for background - scroll down for the pictures)

I went to the O2 for the first time this week. The O2 used to be called the Millennium Dome, and is a giant white dome in a bend of the Thames. James Bond slid down it once, and some people say it can be seen from space (sure, but where does space begin? I don't think it can be seen from the space station).

I'd forgotten how absolutely huge it is. I went to the Millennium Dome twice more than a decade ago, so my memories of it are a bit fuzzy (I do remember it was absolutely awesome, though). They have the O2 Arena in the centre, where they had Cliff Richard playing on Wednesday night and Britney Spears on Thursday night, and they also have lots of bars and restaurants and a thirteen screen cinema and a museum of pop music. The Dome is in North Greenwich, and they have a big line made in paving stones to walk along as you approach it. Being so close to Greenwich, I wondered if this was the Greenwich Mean (0 degrees of longitude), so I amused myself by wandering back and forth across it and muttering 'Eastern Hemisphere, Western Hemisphere, Eastern Hemisphere..."

I don't think it actually was the Greenwich Mean. I'll have to go and find that one day and jump back and forth across it.

Today is the last day of daylight saving, and I'm staring out the window and thinking that, this time tomorrow, it will be 4pm. It seems too dark for 4pm. The sun is going down. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but still.

Stupid upper latitudes.

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