Well, the day began far 8:15 when my iPhone clock went off, and I have to admit that I am a perfect candidate for a laziness trophy. My alarm clock has been on the floor for almost a week now it has just occurred to me dear readers, that perhaps now would be an opportune moment to time reverse this.
There, all mended. My alarm clock is not a particularly new or expensive one. I bought it when I was 14 for a camping trip, it still tells the time though, save for the second hand which does tell the correct time, provided that that time is precisely 30 seconds past the minute, gravity has once again proven its mettle to be greater than that of even the passage of time. Its black casing is dusty, and the light that on occasion may power is weak, but it has been a trustworthy companion for so many years and still resolutely tells the time true enough. And that dear reader, is a very good thing.
Beside it, is a china saucer that I painted myself over the Christmas holidays. I was never the most artistic of children and this small saucer exhibits that perhaps righting the wrongs of one's childhood is an altogether bad idea. I keep my Phone and keys on it overnight, exactly the purpose I had in mind for it when I first laid eyes on it.
But I digress...
I got on my train, having already listened to all my Radio 4 podcast downloads. It took me 5 minutes and 3 miles to garner sufficient intellectual fodder to feed my mind for the remainder of the journey, the free commuter newspaper as always was a marvel, simultaneously vacuous and intellectually arrogant about it. As I read it, the words of an Iranian correspondent giving me testimony of the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution rang in my ears for some reason. It was 9:43.
The rest of the journey into London was uneventful, the roar of the train broken by the general boisterousness of the children granted a weeks reprieve from their school desks.
At Victoria Station, the faceless masses all gathered around the Underground entrance, huddled up despite the almost balmy Winter heat. The children who were in London gazed in awe at the prospect of a train that goes under the ground. It has amazed myself on numerous occasions, and continues to do so today. As usual, the service on the Underground was impeccable, I was only waiting for 15 minutes for a train which was crammed full of a mixture of commuter, child and student. It made for a slightly more jovial day's proceedings as each child tried to crack a smile from even the most hardened of commuters. How the children laughed when a man got his bag trapped in the train door, forcing me to grab and haul it in before the train left.
At Temple Underground Station, I disembarked and completed the last part of my twice daily joy. There was a man there, must be about 55. He sells the Big Issue, and every morning he greets me and my fellow commuters with the same cheerful grin and hello. I should buy a copy of his magazine and thank him one of these days. I heard from a friend that he was once arrested by the Police from his roost for being drunk, this may explain why he had a shiny black eye the following day.
I arrived on time for lectures. Barely. The additional effort I exerted transporting my laptop the 50 or so miles proved fruitless as the lecture material proved too formula-heavy to make a computer any more efficient than writing by hand. My friend Mira spent much of the lecture writing on my notes to pass the time and note errors in the lecturers notes. Not a notable lecture. The subject matter was answering exam questions on particle in a box potentials and potential wells.
I'm not very good at socialising as a rule, so when lectures are over, I generally find 1 or 2 people who are willing to tolerate me and stick to them like flypaper. Today it was the turn of Mira and Nini who elected to visit the local Student tavern before retiring to the computer rooms. Now for those of you who are not aware of what the KCL Waterfront bar (Even though tavern would be more appropriate) is, it is a bar to be true. However it has quite simply the most extraordinary views from any student venue I have visited in the country, when staring out of the main south windows, to your left is the City of London, Blackfriars Bridge and its assorted skyscrapers, with the Docklands and Tower Bridge visible in the distance. To the right is the London Eye and Parliament, and to the south you can see the North Downs, and I thought to myself with a wistful smile that home, as remarkable as it seemed, was twice over the horizon. I get a tweet from a recent addition to my contacts, asking me what sort of nerd I am, science-y or computer-y. So naturally I check with Mira and Nini, who insisted on reading the message for 'hidden meanings' before they passed judgment on my geek caliber and I reply that I am both sorts of nerd.
Then I ended up in the KCL computer rooms on my Vaio, helping the aforementioned contact with a few bizarre requests, having a conversation with an Occupational Therapy Student in Canterbury (map link for those unfamiliar) and trying to improve my conversation simulator program in Perl. Yes that's correct dear reader, such are the depths of my depravity, that computer simulations of human contact have now become enticing. Then I spent time configuring google desktop search for a 64-bit system, realising the limited value it has for me and attempted to uninstall which took far longer to accomplish than to install.
Finally my last lecture took place in a room that is a veritable Faraday cage, absolutely no electromagnetic signal can penetrate it, not Wi-Fi, not cellphone, nothing, outside it, signal isn't great but it's there. And our incredible Maths lecturer decided that, because he has torn his ligaments in one knee and thus requires regular medical attention to heal properly, he would give us our full 2 hours of lectures in one go, so that he can spend Friday concentrating on getting better and seeking medical attention. Unfortunately, that meant the lecture was rushed to a larger extent and we had to refer to his typed notes for the final third of the lecture. Despite this, it was an excellent lecture, and I know he has garnered my vote for the lecturer prize.
On the return leg home, the train departed from Victoria approximately 17 seconds late, now this is quite a trifling matter, but the trains at Victoria have a chronic inability to leave any earlier than 17 seconds late, this is based on experimentation on multiple days with multiple train times. Nonetheless the journey was fine, somehow all the children who got the train into London this morning had been converted into commuters by the evening lending a hushed, eerie atmosphere to the journey. And at the end of the journey, I came across this beautiful vista:-
And marvelled, yes marveled dear reader, at how beautiful the world can be, even on an uneventful day.
