In which your narrator belatedly discovers the value of having a camera embedded in a mobile phone

Happy Friday! Happy November! It’s another unbelievably gorgeous morning here. It will be hard to focus on writing papers when the sunshine and blue skies beckon, but focus I must... in a moment. First, I need to flex my writing muscles and get my best thinking brain on. So I thought I’d warm up with a long-overdue blog entry.

Not that I could have posted anything in the meantime anyway. Mercury retrograde has kicked in with a vengeance. Digital Village Idiot, our hall internet “service” provider, keeps perfect time with outages every 5 minutes on the dot to keep us logging back in at regular intervals. In the interest of improved service I am posting the e-mail address of the offending company and its corporate parent, so that you can spam them mercilessly, I mean write to them and ask why their service is so pathetic. Tell them you’re writing on behalf of all students at the University, because they obviously don’t have connectivity. Tell them how worried and upset you are, and that it’s costing us a fortune to call home because we can’t post to our blogs or send e-mail.

Once again here’s the address for Digital Village Idiot: info@digi-vill.co.uk

And Catalyst Mismanagement: enquiries@catalystmanagement.co.uk

Go ahead, slam their servers. Let the spambots do their worst. It’s not like it’s going to make any difference to us, is it? So please, Harriet B. Cleanliness (z.mensendiker@gmhlczzplzt.com), "Quilter Q. Glycerin" mmvxmttflr@spzzikzimxim.co.uk, and Chaining U. Overachieve (istolyergf@glbrnzksttfkbntt.com) -- send ‘em your Weighty letters, Significant notes, and Grand letters that they simply must to read!!! Clearly they take no notice of us, their users.

* * *

Sorry, where we we? Oh yes. Last Friday, the 27^th, Ian and I took a (ce)mental health day out and went CD shopping in the Portobello Road area. Showed me the location of Trevor Horn’s Sarm studios and the famed Westway near where Mick Jones used to live with his Gran, apparently. (By amazing coincidence I only got around to borrowing The Clash: Gateway to the West from the uni library a few days earlier, so it had that much more relevance.) And where Mick Jagger chilled while hiding from adoring fans in Performance. Ian has an amazingly capacious brain. How he remembers all this trivia I do not know, but it’s like having my own personal (and very much alive) Lonely Planet Guide. But with more bad puns.

Luckily for my wallet I didn’t find much I really wanted in the indie shops – they tend to be very niche-specific in their clientele and product. And it would be pointless for me to start collecting more vinyl at this stage, since I don’t have a turntable in residence. (One shop had an entire section devoted to “power-pop bands from Toronto,” if you can believe that.) Actually, scratch my previous comment. There was plenty I wanted. I just exercised the most excruciating self-control I may have ever experienced.

Ian could make no such claim. Before we’d left the very first shop he’d invested in some vinyl. (Note to Ian: ten pounds please, or I tell everyone the name of the artist featured on that 10-inch brown coloured vinyl. The amount goes up by one pound for every day you don't cough up.) By the end of the day, though, I did manage to drop about 30 pounds on a load of catalogue. “Fifty-quid man,” indeed.

After a long afternoon’s retail therapy we made our way to the the London Bridge area and the Menier Chocolate Factory, which is an old coverted, er, chocolate factory and where we ate a wonderful dinner (choosing from two amusing set table items on the specially concocted “kids menu”). It was a fine prelude to the Jeremy Lion show, which took place in the adjacent theatre, a cozy 200-seater. Jeremy is not, in fact, a children’s entertainer but rather an accomplished Fringe actor (Justin Edwards) portraying one; read the review here. Thanks for the treat, Ian. And thanks for the warning about the props.

Afterwards, in partial repayment for the Theatre Record’s kindness, we stopped by a venerable old – and I do mean hundreds of years old – pub called the George for a nightcap. And it was good.

Fire alarm! Gotta go.

* * *

False alarm. Or rather, fire drill. At least they had the decency to save it until the morning of a glorious sunny day to do it. (More on that in a moment.)

Speaking of drinks, it’s hard to overestimate how important drinking is to the British national culture. Wednesday evenings, being the last of our two full days of classes interspersed with group meetings, usually end in a trip to the pub. This would normally not be a problem since Thursdays are usually research and paper-writing days so a little lie-in afterward, if required, is always possible. But the trouble is that Wednesday’s classes start with Finance & Economics. This usually calls for at least one or two grande double shot cappuccinos to get us through, but by the time we get to the pub and these are complemented with one or two pints of Guinness... well, suffice to say it results in a weird sort of simultaneous coming-and-going buzz, not to mention plenty of bathroom miles to the gallon. An effect not unlike what I imagine a Red Bull with a shot of cough syrup might be like, only tastier.

It sure gets dark early, now that daylight savings time is here...

But as I write it is bright and sunny once again. Yesterday I kept thinking, “This would be a perfect day to take photos and show them to everyone back home, if only I had a camera.” And then I realized that I do, in fact, have a camera – on my mobile phone, or at least the Canadian mobile phone that I subsequently stuck in a drawer and turned off as soon as I got my local mobile because the first half-dozen text messages cost me $30 last month. So I used it as an excuse to get out of the house and go for a very long walk, which I may also do after lunch today. I took some snaps along the way.

Remember, the pictures I’m about to share are taken with a cell phone camera – which is probably about 1 megapixel or so, and has no real zoom or other features to enhance the picture quality or focus. But they’ll do for this blog.

When you get here, this is most likely how you’ll arrive: via the Northwick Park tube station.

The first sight you’ll probably see is the entrance to the halls of residence which, as I’ve said before, are practically right on top of the tube line.

If instead you turn a quick left as you come out of the tube, you’ll face south and east towards Northwick Park. In the background you can just barely make out the top of Wembley Stadium. Despite this image, it's actually a lot closer than it appears. It's only about 2 tube stops away on the Metropolitan Line. New Order played there last week.

This is a shot looking across Northwick Park, westward towards the halls of residence, the Harrow campus, the adjacent hospital, and if you squint very hard you can almost make out the spire in the distance (middle of frame), Harrow-on-the-Hill.

Let’s take a short walk along the pathway through the campus, from the halls towards the main school buildings.

My window is hidden just behind the Sports Hall. My view is half brick wall, half open sky.

This is The Street, the main pedestrian thoroughfare connecting the campus buildings. It’s partly open-air, partly covered...

...and there are various nooks and open space such as this courtyard. Pleasant as it is, the sad thing is I don’t actually have any classes at this campus. They’re all at Marylebone, which I’ll have to shoot some other time.

Exiting the other side, this shot looks back (i.e. facing east) toward the main entrance:

The entrance is near the roundabout that connects Kenton Road with the Watford Road (toward where Reg Dwight a/k/a Elton John grew up) and Sheepcote Road that will get you into the Harrow town centre in about ten or fifteen minutes by foot...

...and when you round the corner, you are greeting by this scene. You can’t see it very well in this shot, but the wrought iron archway welcomes you to Harrow’s centre. A little further down on the left is the St. Anne's and St. George's shopping district.

And there you have the quick tour. As indicated I’m probably going to take another break from my interminable round of papers this afternoon and try to get up to Harrow-on-the-Hill, which I’ve never been to yet. So maybe I’ll have more pictures to post tomorrow. See you then.