Been Missing.
November 12, 2009
Hello.
I do apologise. It’s been a while since I wrote anything on here. I went through a time when I felt very annoyed with university and subsequent work. I wrote about it here but there’s been a lot more added to it.
There are times when we are reminded that we pay £3,150 per year for our tuition. Even more so when we know there’s a new campus being built and possibly every last penny is going into it, nevermind any other grants the institution might be receiving. I’ve seen the election barometer and it looks a bit funny – not sure whether to be happy that I’m only paying three grand or that I’m in university at all. For what it’s worth it is a privilege at times when I feel like I’m making good use of the facilities and grey matter of lecturers.
But sometimes I feel I am being cheated. That the breakdown we’re being told, of one lecture missed being the equivalent of about 90p out the window makes me angry.
I mentioned in the last entry that we’ve had assignments recycled from past years. Which in itself isn’t such a bad thing. If I had a cracking assignment to hand out to students to see how they measure up year after year I’d do the same. But the problem is some people have not bothered to update them – not so much as the cover sheet that says “This is a case study from 2007″.
It leads to worse problems like old hand-in dates. Old marking criteria. What was worth 40% last year is only worth 20% this one. The 5th of November last year was not mid Reading Week. There comes a need to check and then double check with everyone, and worst of them all, some assignments hadn’t even been ready when they were announced. “We will have the assignment up by X date…” meant fewer and fewer days to have a go at it when everything’s been cramped up around the same dates.
There’s nothing left to do but to sigh, grab the laptop with one hand and the pen in the other hand and do everything on your own. Tell whoever you can and help whoever you want to help through the year because for the first time since I came to university, they don’t seem to care about us as much as they used to. And by care I mean having the decency to give us information that isn’t misleading.
So yes, it’s not been great.
In Wales
October 19, 2009
…we got nearly no Welsh mud, but had an awesome weekend. Still not sure how I managed to
a) sleep about 5 hours and leave at 6.30
b) eat so much in one day
c) climb up the Llanberis path and then down the Watkin path with my level of fitness being null and all that
d) eat so much the day after
I just want some bacon!
0.5 degrees
Crib Goch & lakes (apparently means red peak)
Sugar high
Not enough sleep? Nevaaaaaaa’
Mountain unicycling
My future office
Getting late
A Girl has to be 2 Things
October 14, 2009

Coco Chanel says she has to be classy and fabulous. Modern life says she has to be busy and still look fabulous (or at least composed).
Busy because you’re busy by default and apparently women spend on average 76 minutes to get ready in the morning. We hate it when men wake up 10 minutes before they have to leave because, at least for me…
- Showering and scrubbing takes 7-10 minutes
- Hair maintenance: also about 5 minutes
- Foundation: 2 minutes (worse for those who do wear make-up)
- “What am I going to wear today?”: 8-10 minutes
- Breakfast: 4 minutes
- Read emails, answer emails (why at 6.30 don’t ask): 5 minutes
- Washing up and other hausfrau duties: 2 minutes (or more)
- Find bag, find papers, notebook, chargers and shove into bag: 6 minutes
Which is an awful lot and I don’t even have children. But it just seems like you can’t make it any shorter, unless you skip breakfast, emails and have some clothes ready the night before. It doesn’t happen though or rarely does. By the time it’s 10 I’m tired and by 2 I’m tired of those asking if I’m ok. I’m still just tired.
So this brings us to a very overlooked detail surrounding habits after work rather than before: Mintel says that nearly 30% of women see going out for dinner as the perfect way to avoid cooking and washing up.
When you have to be classy and fabulous, who wants to get down and dirty? Not many of us. So either we don’t eat properly or don’t eat at all but it’d be brilliant if someone cooked for us or decided to take us out more often.
Bringing the Familiar to the Unfamiliar
October 13, 2009
A while back I went to the IMAX to watch Star Trek but due to some technical difficulties, the lights in the cinema just wouldn’t go off. Because it was a premiere day, the fans with badges and t-shirts had already filled up the place and were probably very much eager to see the show.
First half an hour and they tried a lot of combinations, like you do when you’re in a big meeting room with complex lighting systems: this switch turns this off but not these, you flick all of them and some go off but others stay on and so on and so forth. You just never get it right.
A member of staff or the manager (can’t remember) came in the first 5 to 10 minutes and said they were really sorry and explained what the problem was, as improbable as it sounded at the time. He thanked us for being a nice, civil audience and understanding the problem and props to him, he was honest and prompt about it.
Some minutes after the first half an hour, the problem still hadn’t been fixed but the audience wasn’t too bad; they weren’t shouting or whistling which was refreshing for once. Same manager came in from time to time to let us know they were still working on it and again thanked us for being understanding. A man shouted from the back this time and said “Just leave the lights on, it’ll be like at home watching telly in the lounge!”
We all laughed and yadda yadda, everyone took it in good spirit and the manager even joked and said that at home you don’t pay £8 to wait so long to watch something and that they want to deliver the full IMAX experience etc.
But what amused me was the fact that the idea didn’t sound so bad after all that waiting. Apart from ‘just cut the power cord’ suggestions, this was a semi-desperate ‘I don’t care how you deliver it, just deliver it’ message.
Then I got on a train and saw this:
It’s a XCountry toilet with a bunch of newspapers inside. It’s sad enough that I took the picture but I was about to get off anyway. To me it was just a way in which people have responded to either bad train service (Virgin gives you a free magazine at least) or just a boring train journey. Just a small thing to keep you sane and distracted from stuff. The newspaper in the loo.
It’s brilliant if you ask me -at least whoever left it there was a nice chap who thought about others too. It’s a tabloid nevertheless but the gesture matters. Bringing a bit of the familiar to the unfamiliar or at any rate, unfriendly. And if you want, a way to add ownership to a place that’s not ours. Or just how we impose our own identity on borrowed spaces in order to regain power we see being taken from us.
Proof that we can keep calm and carry on!
Was it the Tight Pants?
October 12, 2009
Here’s some really, really good stuff on a subject that’s really embarrassing to talk about but will probably never see any recognition in the UK if it’s to be judged by the small print in the bottom. In Bed is a website from Bayer Schering Pharma AG that hosts a few videos on how to overcome problems down there. It’s got some brilliant thoughts in it to address both those who know the myths everyone talks about aren’t true and those who still think some solo activities make you go blind. Plus it’s animated and hand-drawn as a bonus to eliminate common myths around the subject of potency and background.
It’s a shame it’s only for audiences outside the US and the UK but I can’t blame them. I just wish the NHS would stop popping out stuff like Fight Back and start talking some sense into people in a way that they can relate to. I bet everyone feels like they get beaten up real good when they smoke, too.
A Burning Question
October 11, 2009
With the comforts of modern living, will we all live to be 100?
Fiat 500
October 10, 2009
The tiny Fiat 500 that’s meant to be the world’s cutest car with a retractable roof and all has some really nice advertising which seems to cash in on small feel-good things of day-to-day life. The ashes won, back in the UK from after the hols, leaves under foot, smiles, ice-creams and cream cakes. Which is all very nice.

So they let people create a ‘feel good’ playlist on Spotify – The Fiat 500C Feelgood 50 Playlist (spotify http link). I’m taking this with a pinch of salt – it’s got music like Abba, A-ha, Aerosmith, Bowie, Bon Jovi, Dire Straits and some others. It makes you think this dates back from a while ago and not that I can’t appreciate that but it makes it hard to pin down. Is this Spotify audience or is this Fiat’s audience? And apart from being just a nice playlist, does it actually make anyone consider a Fiat? Fiat’s ’young stylish and affluent’ (and ‘no-frills’ if you want but I hate the word) consumer who wants the car to make a statement about himself or herself might not be on spotify. And the ones who are might be a tad old for the car. Think Fiat might be in for a surprise soon.
There and Back #1
October 9, 2009
This is the sort of entry where I don’t know what I’m trying to say but there are some thoughts that I might elaborate on later. I just have this newly discovered spare time before uni actually starts so there was something about The Eurostar vs. Airlines thing that got me thinking.
Disclaimer: I do travel a bit and spend reasonable amounts of time in airports, train stations and what not;
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Eurostar stop, Gare du Nord
Andrew talked about the convenience & hassle-free travel that the Eurostar to Brussels gives you and rightly so; if I could go to where I want on a train that doesn’t ask me to drag my luggage across terminals, I’d be very, very happy. But it’s still ‘one train station to another‘ because trains are already ingrained in our culture. Live in a country where train travel is nearly unheard of and trains become an exciting adventure. Trains are usually meant to drop you off ‘there’ but still ‘here’ unless you’re on the Eurostar or Orient Express. You get off and you know you’re in the same country.
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Manchester International, some time late at night with a phone camera
Planes on the other hand – I don’t think it’s the airport itself that makes the difference but the nature of travel itself. It’s probably the waiting that makes you feel like you’re doing something unusual. Waiting at London Heathrow (5) I overheard two ladies discussing the loo so I went in there to check it myself see what the fuss was about but it was just a motion-detecting flush system that got them excited. It was something they had never seen before; something I take for granted because I see it in shopping mall loos was new and brilliant to them. Which is part of the magic of the airport for some people.
Then there’s the passport control gates and I won’t talk about symbolism but there’s a change. You don’t have a plane ticket and luggage and passport, you can’t go any further. Everyone else stops here. You enter (even if you don’t think about it) a place where other people like you have a purpose – they’re all going somewhere and doing something and you stop thinking about the outside world. It infuriates my boyfriend and family whom I always forget to text to say I’m at the airport. If I haven’t before I went past passport control, I’ll only remember on the plane. Too late. It transcends how crap the airline might treat you and its equivalent, the first class lounges in train stations don’t give the same feeling.







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