The London Eye

Well, that's the first couple of weeks or so in London over with, then. It's been a familiar story -- a few days of excitement at being in the Big City, a few days of "wtf am I doing?" wild regret and homesickness when I went back to Torquay for the first weekend, followed by dropping into the new routine as the old home ceased to feel so much like home. All this is of course entirely as might be expected, but I guess you have to go through it any time you move.

While I'm on the subject, are there any HP or general fandom meetups going on in London? It might be interesting to actually attend one of these events rather than hearing about them, and it would doubtless do me good to get out more and not stay in my room. :)

Actually, that room probably didn't help with the settling-in process, being rather less satisfactory than I hoped! As is my wont, I left the actual finding-a-place bit to the last minute, and took this one because it was the best option of three -- one was the same rent but required a minimum three-month contract, and the other didn't but cost half as much again. It was fairly bare when I looked at it the previous weekend, but perhaps naively I was definitely expecting the bed provided to include bedding rather than just the mattress ... The first night was thus spent with an impromptu pillow and using a bath towel as a makeshift blanket (There you are, you see, always know where your towel is). I should also have taken a closer look at the kitchen, since it proved to be missing a number of useful little items -- such as a toaster, crockery, cutlery etc. Still, I've gradually filled in the gaps with stuff from my own flat and regular trips to the Argos store conveniently situated across the road from the place I work.

There's a bit of a studenty feel to the arrangements (except that the self-catering halls at Exeter Uni had more faciklities) -- I have to get up fairly early to make sure I can get a shower in time to catch the train ... At least there's a handy wireless broadband connection, so I'm able to post this sort of thing via the new laptop that I acquired after the first week! That week and various train journeys have been used for a re-read of ASOIAF -- doubtless there will be a post on that to follow at some point. (Currently towards the end of A Clash of Kings, so a long way to go yet.)

(Why stay? I don't want to go traipsing round again trying to find somewhere better, and I'm not good at effective complaining. I don't want any deposit problems due to losing my temper -- cash in hand, which I didn't inquire about too closely -- and basically, I'm hoping to get a flat swap arranged before too long anyway, given that there are more people wanting to move from London to Devon than vice-versa. Hence I don't want to be tied to a fixed length contract.)

The job itself seems remarkably well suited to what I can actually do, in that it mostly involves Perl scripting (there are a large number of data feeds that probably need reorganising) and web development -- in other words, the two things that I'm most familar with, and happily even after the long break the skills I have appear to be adequate to this particular job, which helps to rebuild a little of the confidence lost over the past few years.

I know I've been patchy in commenting and posting recently, but hopefully will be back into the flow before too long. :)

Doctor Who: Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead

Yep, that was another good one, Mr Moffat. Not as scary as previous efforts, but very intriguing.

( Spoilers for recent Doctor Who and speculation on where they're going with this )