I’ve had a rollercoaster of a couple of days, to say the least. I’m going to explain it in such a way that I’ll drip-feed you the information selectively, to heighten the dramatic tension and make it a better story. Though to be fair if you’ve been keeping up with the annoying Twitter feed to the left, you probably know the story already.
To give you some backstory, a few weeks ago I received a conditional offer from a Top University (I’m not going to name it because this is the internet, and the internet is full of nutters), for a Masters course – to get on the course, I needed to get not only at least a 2:1, but at least 67% to get on the course. A tough thing to do.
It didn’t help that I received the conditional offer a couple of days after my last exam, and with about six weeks to go until results day – so basically my fate was already sealed, and there was no way I could work harder to get it. I felt like Vernon Kay, in that even if I were to cure cancer or stop global warming, there was nothing I could to stop people thinking I’m a gurning twat with an irritating face.
Leading up to results day, it had been a close approximation of a hell where the eternal torture is unbearably tedious – I wasn’t working or doing anything productive, meaning I had little else to do than wait for the results and work my way through five King of the Hill box sets (this latter act in itself unfortunately culminated in me pissing off a genuine American by asking her if she stands in the alley drinking and saying “yerp” and “that boy ain’t right”). What made this more unfortunate was that because I’d finished uni, the stock-joke was that when asked when I was free to do whatever, I was able to reply that I’m free for the rest of my life.
What I needed was direction and purpose.
So yesterday was results day – my university puts all of the results online at the same time (resulting in the obligatory annual self-induced denial of service attack). Barely being able to sleep the night before, I logged on, whilst praying. I’m not a religious man, but so desperate was I to do well that I’d taken Pascal’s wager in order to cancel out the fact that I’d walked under a ladder and a black cat had crossed my path the night before whilst I was walking through a graveyard (true story).
I saw my grade. I’d got a 2:1 – excellent – but, and it was a big but… I’d only got 66%. That’s right, 1% less than what I needed. Its times like that you wish you’d not forgotten to hand in that bibliography, or, y’know, worked 1% harder.
The results went live online at 9:30am. At 9:31am I was on the phone to the admissions administrator for the Masters course. Balls, it was the answerphone. So I typed up a polite begging e-mail, and then rang up again for good measure. “I just got your messages”, said the woman on the other end of the phone, who sounded a bit annoyed that I was bombarding her with communications. She told me that she’d send my application for “review”, and would hear back “in the next couple of days”. There was still hope, but I was feeling pessimistic.
I was like, totally melancholly – I was pleased on one hand that I’m not technically a graduate (and can presumably sign letters “James O’Malley, BA (Hons)”), but then frustrated that my future membership of the liberal academic elite was shakier than Christopher Hitchen’s membership of the same club.
What amplified this was something horrible. Due to a quirk in timing, I’d been invited to an open day at the Masters university, for post-grad applicants, that took place today. As they were still reviewing my applicationtion, I had no idea whether I deserved to be there or not – I didn’t know whether to go just in case they let me in, or not go because technically I failed to meet the criteria they were looking for.
My mum is something of a pushy mum – though not the sort who lives out her dreams through her kids. Her male kids anyway. Which I guess is why I was never forced to join a choir or whatever it is my mum dreamed of doing. But anyway, she insisted that I go today on the basis that if they’re reviewing me, I need to create a good impression, and turning up is a pretty good indication that I’m enthusiastic.
I didn’t want to do this though – what if I didn’t get in, but had already had a look around at how wonderful and brilliant it is? It’d be like waving a delicious fish in front of a cat, and then taking the fish away, and then kicking the cat in the face.
So I woke up this morning with a sense of dread – a feeling that I was about to do something unpleasant. And not the sort of unpleasant thing you can get over, like standing on a dog poo, but something psychologically unpleasant, that would torture me for years to come as I lament my failure to enter into the upper-echelons of academia.
Just before leaving for the open day that I didn’t know whether I deserved to be at, I gave them a quick ring just to check what was happening with the review – if they’d already rejected me then it wasn’t worth me going at all. The woman on the other end of the phone sounded annoyed – probably because I’d rang up again – “I’ve just e-mailed you… you’re in”, she snapped.
I literally punched the air. Multiple times. I can’t really put into words how delighted I was, but basically, I was pretty fucking happy about it. And then the delightful pay-off was that I got to look around my new university only a couple of hours later.
And fucking hell, it’s a bit posh compared to my old uni. Walking through the entrance, the first thing I saw were three blue plaques on one wall – I think that’s more blue plaques than there are in this entire county.
The uni buildings, fitting in with the rest of central London, were of the old-timey variety, with all of the imperial opulence of Whitehall, making for an interesting contrast with my old uni’s flat-pack modernity. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking my old uni on its content (it was decent), but architecturally, my new uni wins hands down.
I mean, just look at the library:
Christ on a bike. Bit much, isn’t it? Not even The British Library looks that important.
The best bit was quite possibly the Student Union bar. Not only did it have a pool table and an itBox, and not only was it not a nightclub, but the view was phenomenal. In that it is positioned on the bend in the river so you can look in one direction and see Tower Bridge, and look in the other and see Parliament and the London Eye and all that. I’m wondering what would be more appropriate in there: drinking or presenting local news?
The only slightly dodgy bit was that, inexplicably, on the tour of the campus, just like every other tour in London, there was an irritating American asking tonnes of stupid questions. But this was only a minor annoyance.
I think I’m going to like it here.
(Oh, and on the way home, I stumbled upon a man giving a lecture at the station about the High Speed 1 railway line… things like this are why I love London. It was almost as good as bumping into some ska.)
On Saturday, whilst in London, we briefly stopped by at the official Nokia store on Regents Street that opened fairly recently, which is incidentally, just across the road from the Apple Store.
After realising that the shop sold nothing but mobile phones, we headed for the exit, when a woman started talking to me. I thought she was trying to chat me up at first when she asked “do you come here often?”, but unfortunately, it turned out she was just doing some market research for Nokia.
She offered me five pounds if I’d participate in a “seven minute” survey, “Sold!”, I said.
It turns out that lying to someone taking a survey in real life is as easy as when you fill one out online. The questions were all about my perception of the brand, and whether I use my mobile phone as a “fashion accessory” – my reply to this question was essentially shooting back a scrunched up facial expression, as if to say “…really? C’mon… Really?”
I think one of the questions was like “what do you associate Nokia with?”, to which I responded “mobile phones” and “Finland”. I assume they were expecting answers like “high-disposable income, urban hipsters” or something.
“Which part of the shop did you go to today?” was a particularly obtuse question, considering it was quite a small shop. “I walked to the back of the shop… then back here to the front”. Like my other answers this was met with a neutral nod and some button pressing on the Nokia phone that was being used to record these answers.
What bugged me was that It wasn’t a very well designed survey – as time wore on (into minute five or six by now), I wanted to point out that qualitative research would be much better at this sort of thing than quantitative methods. “Of the list on the card, what features did you notice on first entering the store today?” “Er…” “The glass panels? The walls that change colour? The music being played?”.
Clearly I am one of those trendy young, aspirational professionals that Nokia are so keen to target.
Survey over, I was handed a brand new fiver. Excellent. When I move to London, I’m going to go the shop every day. Not only could I get a fiver a time, but I could potentially skew the survey results enough for Nokia to sponsor The World at War repeats on the History Channel or get them to bring out a phone with IRC and SSH-specific soft-keys.
Yesterday, I went to London with my friend Bouff. Why? Because London is excellent. And it certainly proved that yesterday.
After faffing about around Oxford Street and Speaker’s Corner, we decided to head to the Science and Natural History Museums – which as every good Londoner knows, are next door to each other on Exhibition Road. Unfortunately, when changing tubes at Notting Hill Gate, we discovered that the Circles and District line were both closed – so we were faced with the choice of either trekking across Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to get there, or going to David Cameron’s Notting Hill home to see if he wants to come out to play and ride bikes with us. We chose the former, obviously, because even if Cameron did commit himself to a policy of coming out to play (unlikely), the car following us on our bikes would cramp our style a bit. Also, Cameron’s a dick.
As we approached the Royal Albert Hall, we heard what sounded like some jazz fusion. Intrigued, we stumbled upon a great big stage with a band on, where the jazz fusion was being emitted from. Ace.
I did stop to wonder who was bankrolling this? Was it one of Ken’s ideas that Boris didn’t have time to cancel in his new role as fun-spoiler? As it turns out, excellently, it was being partially funded by the EU (yet another reason not to hate them). The thing that gave this away was not the EU flags, but the incredibly clunkily name that had clearly been thought up by some top-class Eurocrats: “European Year of Intercultural Dialogue” – which presumably follows on from last year’s successful European Year of Macro-Economic Indicators or something equally dry.
We walked on down on to Exhibition Road itself, which had been closed off, and encountered a couple of men who took the “there’s always a weird old guy at a gig who’s too old for it” tradition to giddy new heights. Witness the following video of them rocking out to a devastatingly average band:
After having a look around the Science Museum for a bit, and wondering why the credit crunch hasn’t done the noble thing and prevented American tourists from entering Britain (I mean, really, who goes to a museum and films everything if they’re not making a stupid satirical video? Are they really going to watch it back?), we headed back outside to perhaps the greatest thing ever.
We stumbled on some ska.
An apparently unsigned band called Brothers Bab were getting a decent reaction from the crowds outside (and the two old guys were down at the front skanking their old, weary hearts out). Surely this only makes the summer of ska all the more imminent?
Museums… ska gigs… being able to namedrop streetnames without having to specify the city… this is why I want to live in London.
My friend Barney is currently on his gap year, but rather than faff about in an impoverished third world hell-hole, he’s done the wise thing, and taken a gap year travelling around Britain (I told him to give Birmingham a miss to make sure that he definitely avoids hell-holes). He’s been in London for the past week, so on Wednesday, I went down there for the day to meet up with him, just for the fun of it.
As you might have noticed – I liveblogged a lot of it on Twitter and my blog’s sidebar.
I met up with him in Trafalgar Square, where, as it transpired, were some sort of St George’s Day celebrations – whilst this display of patriotism obviously sickened me, I was delighted to spot Giles Dilnot from the Daily Politics doing a live OB.
Anyway, after a wander around London we eventually ended up the Sir John Soane museum – he was the architect who designed the Bank of England and loads of other stuff. What was unusual about it, was that aside from it being a small museum (it was Soane’s old house), you had to wait outside for someone to let you in, and then had to sign in, which made it feel all the more exclusive.
You could tell it was an old house – the walls were caked in tat, like all of the paintings and old Roman stuff he’d collected. There was a bit towards the back where there were loads of old Roman head statues overhanging a drop down to where there was some sort of old sarcophagus – it was unbelievably tempting to push them off, but somehow I managed to resist the urge.
After this, and a brief jaunt to the British Museum, we headed to the spiritual home of PKMN.NET meet-ups (this is how I know Barney), The Rocket, where we met up with Mushroom (or “William” as he’s also known). He was somewhat startled when I phoned him and asked if he wanted to go to the pub, considering that both Barney and I both live over 100 miles away from London, in different directions.
After this we headed to another pub, which was something of a personal triumph for us. Only a couple of people reading this will appreciate the significance that we found “The Shakespeare Pub”! On previous trips to London, we’ve (well, I’ve) consisted failed to find The George Inn, which is thought to have been Shakespeare’s and Charles Dicken’s local pub. Considering we were there on April 23rd, it seemed particularly relevant, as it was not only St George’s Day, but Shakespeare’s birthday and death day. It was literally the most relevant place in the world to be at that time.
(Wearing someone else’s hat doesn’t mean that I endorse St George’s Day or the volkisch concept of ‘patriotism’.)
After leaving this pub, we ended up encountering some Morris Dancers just before heading to the pub next to The Golden Hind – the, er, fourth pub of the day, which was the other spiritual home of PKMN.NET meet-ups. Barney bought four pints of a specific drink just to get a free St George’s Day hat. Just goes to show that marketing works.
The Morris Dancers were appalling, have a watch of this:
I had an excellent day yesterday – I went down to London to meet my nerdy mates from my other website. Here are some exciting photos of me looking really popular in the company of other people:
Chris, Lottie, Barney, Kyron, Ant, Me, Sam, William, Shark, Kat and Dan. Not pictured: Katy.
Dan bothering a mime.
It being Easter, we thought we should respect the religious aspects, and celebrate Jesus’ death by recreating Leonardo’s Last Supper.
As luck would have it, Barney looks a bit like Jesus. And Sam looks a bit like Mary Magdeline. And I played the part of Judas. The other apostles were perhaps a little less enthusiastic.
Spending about eight hours with me is difficult enough for anyone, really. Unfortunately, William’s Jamesomalley tolerance was slightly less than eight hours, so he ended up punching me.
But it was fun. I may have another tale to tell about this in a few days.
I went to London today with my friend Bouff, and have unexpectedly got three interesting, yet unrelated stories out of it. I’ve ranked them least interesting to most interesting – which is incidentally also chronological order – to keep you reading to the bitter end.
STORY ONE
Bouff suggested we go to London a couple of weeks ago, and I readily agreed, as I bloody love London. A few days ago when discussing what to do there, I suggested to him that we could, say, go to Highgate Cemetery, and have a look at Karl Marx and Douglas Adams’ graves. Bouff replied “I was thinking of H&M”.
“Nah, we won’t end up simply shopping”, I thought. Then we ended up in the Vans shop on sickeningly fashionable Carnaby Street, so he could buy the sort of shoes skateboarders wear to show that they’re totally sticking it to the man, from a large multinational corporation. Here is an “action shot”, and I use the term “action” incredibly loosely, of a man you don’t know purchasing shoes to validate this story as truth:
STORY TWO
I was shocked this evening when I checked the news earlier and found out about that massive fire in Camden. Why? Because I was there only a couple of hours earlier. Its a bit weird switching on the news and seeing the street you were just on (the one with the shop with the aeroplane on the front) covered in flames.
We went to The World’s End pub, which is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Well, some people do predict that the world’s end will be in a hellish scene with lots of fire and destruction.
Whilst not technically in Camden so not relevant to this half-baked story, but it’s not like it was actually going anywhere in the first place. We also ventured to Holloway Road, which is basically just a suburban street somewhere in north London, but we went there because it was all about the destination: the club Nambucca, which is apparently some sort of famous Indie venue – I vaguely knew of it because its referenced in a Frank Turner song. Yeah, its horrendously obscure, but Bouff was excited, going through his phone book, texting everyone he knows. All I really saw was a closed building. Here is another exciting picture:
That’s right – the main thing in the photo is blocked by a massive shadow. I am an excellent photographer.
STORY THREE
This is the best story. If you’ve skipped the other two to see what’s here, then it was worth the effort. You’ve seen Shaun of the Dead, haven’t you? Well, do you recognise this newsagents:
“Just look at the face: it’s vacant, with a hint of sadness. Like a drunk who’s lost a bet.”
No? Its the one from Shaun of the Dead. Really, it is. That’s why we took what looked like an unlicensed mini-cab half way across North London to a small parade of shops in a heavily residential area devoid of a Tube to take photographs of ourselves standing outside a newsagents.
Annoyingly, the shop was sold out of Cornettos.
Here’s Shaun’s house. It’s changed a bit since the film:
Amazing.
It was dead exciting. See, that’s a pun there. Sort of.
I know what you’re thinking: “how did James spend New Years Eve?”. Perhaps somewhat predictably, I went down to London to watch the fireworks and all that. It was certainly a once-in-a-lifetime event. I mean, sure, you could do it again, but whether you’d want to is another question all together.
We drove down to London, parking at Finchley Central tube station on the outskirts, and caught the tube in. We made our way to Westminster, and more specifically, the excellent pub at the Namco Station on the South Bank. Unlike normal pubs, this pub is built into an arcade, so has a bowling alley, arcade games and dodgems. Its literally the best pub ever. So we spent the last few hours of 2007 behaving like teenagers.
Unfortunately though, at about ten o’clock, they closed off the whole South Bank, because that was where all the fireworks were going to be – so we were kicked out on to Westminster Bridge with two hours to spare. There were no drinks for sale on the bridge, and we didn’t have the foresight to bring any, which meant the two hours passed exceedingly slowly.
I tried to pass the time by doing some Peter-Kay-esque observational comedy. “Remember stuff from years ago? Eh? Eh? Remember when we had to manually type custom ringtones into black and white mobile phones? What’s with that? And when you go in a lift, right, you press the number of the floor you want to go to… but why is there a doors close button? The doors are going to close anyway! What’s with that?”
Eventually, midnight arrived, and some fireworks exploded, that sort of thing. Unlike poor Diamond Geezer, we had the best place in London. Being on Westminster Bridge, we had a full view of both Big Ben striking midnight, and the fireworks display on the London Eye. The fireworks were pretty spectacular, as you’ll see in the video:
After the fireworks display, the organisation of the event sort of fell apart, as nearly all 700,000 revellers descended on Waterloo tube station to get home (Westminster and Embankment were closed). And it turned out that the pub wasn’t reopening after midnight, so we had to join them. After faffing about for about an hour I cleverly hatched a plan to head to Southwark station which was just a bit further a long – which turned out to be a good idea, as there were only around 100,000 people who had that same idea.
But we eventually got back and it all worked out alright. I think being in London was a good idea. Really.
To set the scene, on Saturday night, I was on the last train heading back from London, when I realised that my phone battery had run flat. It was annoying because it was a new mobile phone – a posh one that does everything too: internet, satellite navigation, plays music, takes photographs. I think it even makes phone calls. The only drawback with it is that if you decide that you actually need to use one of its many exciting features, it drains the battery in a matter of minutes.
The trouble was that I needed to ring my parents to let them know that I hadn’t been murdered in London – they worry like that. When it got to about half past eleven, an hour after I told them I’d be home I realised that if I left it any longer, they’d probably start kicking up a fuss and have most of London’s emergency services looking for my battered corpse, so I had to think of something.
I knew I’d have to ask another passenger on the train if I could borrow their mobile phone – which is a ridiculous request. The most you should ask of a fellow train passenger is if you can sit on the empty seat next to them – asking for anything more is breaking a big social taboo. What I wanted was far, far beyond the call of duty.
So I decided to ask an older couple on the train if I could borrow their mobile phone, to call my mum. The difficult thing was the phrasing of the question – I’m not very astute at the best of times, as I tend to just let the key words in a sentence fall out of my mouth in a jumbled order when talking to people. I needed to convey the genuine nature of my problem so that I didn’t sound like I was euphemistically saying “Hello, I’m a scruffy looking bloke and I’m going to mug you for your expensive mobile phone, so I can sell it in a pub and buy drugs with the proceedsâ€.
Eventually, I plucked up the courage to ask, and amazingly, these complete strangers let me use their phone – even though I could have been, say, a murderer, or something for all they knew (I’m not).
I’m dead impressed by this – I’d previously assumed that everyone who didn’t know me, especially those I encounter on public transport, are just out to get me, in some way, but it turns out strangers are really nice people.
So what’s the moral of this story? Er… could it be the complete opposite of what we’re taught growing up? “Talk to strangers more�
On Saturday, I went down to London to go to the pub with some of the people from my other website who are old enough to get into pubs. It was most excellent, because it means I’ve got 90 photos on Facebook like this, which make me look really like a really popular and easily likeable person:
Adam, Rex, Shark’s hand, Me, Dan, Steffan and Sam. Not pictured: Katy, Matt, Chris, Barney, the ghost of Christmas past.
It was also excellent because I got to meet my friend Matt for the first time – after knowing him online for very nearly seven years:
Despite being in London, we didn’t do anything particularly touristy – we just went to three pubs and a Pizza Express like locals may do, largely ignoring the spectacular views of central London around us.
As the day went on, things got progressively louder, culminating in a drinking game in the last pub (which didn’t really work on me, as I wasn’t drinking alcohol), and Barney, Dan, and Sam getting approximately very, very, drunk. They’d been drinking since 11am, having gone to a pub at Liverpool Street Station before meeting the rest of us, so by 9pm, weren’t walking in a straight line. This meant that me, being sober (I’m straight-edge), and Katy (who I’d dragged along for the day), who was only tipsy, had to try and guide them back to their train stations so they could get home.
Today I got up bright and early at 8am for university – I had my usual rushed shower and check of my emails, before heading to the train station little over an hour after waking up. Still groggy, after a few hours sleep, I met Katy on the train and went into university for a lengthy two-hour day. Unfortunately, this exposition was building us up for disappointment: the lecture and seminar were cancelled, meaning that we had both travelled into university for no reason.
It was at this point we decided to be impulsive. This isn’t something I do very often – I like to plan things with an autistic level of detail. If I go to anywhere big, I like to have a Google Map printed out, all relevant details with me, a map book, and a back-up plan for almost every eventuality. And I’ll constantly run through potential scenarios in my head: “What if a terrorist appears right now and challenges me to a short trivia battle to determine whether I live or die?”, and so on.
We decided to go to London, more specifically to the British Museum.
So we spent thirty pounds each on train tickets down to London, plus an extra fiver for the tube, and hopped on to the direct train down to London. 15 minutes into the journey, I learnt why being impulsive doesn’t pay off – quite literally. I remembered that I was going to see Mark Thomas tonight (which has already happened at time of writing, and was excellent, if you’re asking), so had to cut the trip short by a good few hours, decreasing value for money somewhat considerably.
But we got to the British Museum eventually, which was pretty excellent, although we’ll have to go again in order to fully appreciate all of the old tat on display there, given that we were rushed for time.
You’d think what with it being a museum full of all the best antiquities that Britain has nicked from around the world, full of priceless monuments to human civilisation, like the Rosetta Stone, I’d have taken loads of photos and maybe even done another stupid video. Unfortunately due to the ridiculously impulsive nature of the trip, the batteries in my camera were running very low. So the only two photos we managed to squeeze out of the camera were the following:
Me, standing in front of a placard looking slightly worse for wear, in order to make a horrendous, horrendous lolcat parody:
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