13 days after I sent them an email, I did actually get a reply from Thames Water about the closed footpath.
“I have been advised by the Site Manager that the footpath you are referring to has been closed due to engineering works taking place at the site. We are looking at reopening the footpath for a short period in around 20 week’s time, but will close again once we start work on the new Desalination Plant.”
Not quite the reply I’d hoped for, but I thought it was nice of a large company such as Thames Water to actually even reply! I wish though that they would put this information on the big fences they have erected to block off the footpath so that the public know what’s going on.
My cousin Karen has been over for the last couple of weeks. It was a great couple of weeks!
It started at 6am on 17 October. Bleary eyed I walked to the tube, caught it to Heathrow and met Karen as she came through.
Then Hannah picked up in her fantastic new Fiat. Well, new as in “different”. It was so wonderful that I couldn’t bring myself to take a photo of it for some reason. Oh well, next time.
We went straight to Stonehenge, and stopped at the Welcome Break on the way to sample the delicacies – cupcakes, bacon and eggs, and mushrooms that smelled like vomit.
Stonehenge looks the same as the last two times I went, but I still don’t mind seeing it because it’s cool and not too expensive to get in.
Sam came to visit at Hannah and JK’s house, which was cool, I hadn’t seen him in years.
We went out for a few drinks, which was fun. I didn’t care much for Smokey Joe’s (the place we went to in Maidenhead), but the company was good.
Another day we went to Thorpe Park (an amusement park in London). The best ride – Stealth – was closed, but it was still a great day out.
The last picture is of the tea-cup ride, which sounds so tame but was so fun because you spun it yourself. We got up a lot of speed. Hannah said “wouldn’t it be funny if the ride had stopped and we were all still pissing ourselves laughing?”, and it turned out she was right! I took a video on my camera… you can see it here:
Youtube has been having problems all day. At the moment I’m getting YouTube is down for maintenance and will be back shortly. If you can’t see the video please try again in a bit.
Karen spent a few nights staying at my house, it was good to have the company. Also she spent a couple of days in Paris, Eastbourne and Brighton. It was clearly all very tiring:
I left Karen and Hannah in Slough yesterday (October 31) at 4pm.
Gee, it felt like just yesterday I wrote a similar post apologising for the lack of updating my blog! But actually it was 3 weeks ago! Perhaps I should set aside a whole category for apologising for the lack of updates.
In that way it seems time is going fast, but I’m looking forward to my trip back to NZ on Jan 7 that time generally seems to be going very slow. I think I need to get out more.
I’ve always been happy that on the 20 minute walk to work each day, there’s very little in the way of food places from where I can drop in and buy junk food. But, just in this week, a large Costcutter has opened, and a Nando’s is just about to open on Middlesex St:
The Costcutter has AWESOME Tomato & Mozzarella bites, and Chicken Tikka Masala bites, plus every type of chocolate bar and junk food that exists in Britain. I have a feeling that I’m going to have to either take a different route to work (not easy), or face facts that my diet is going to go steeply downhill.
The Aldgate pedestrian subway system in Tower Hamlets is a forboding place at the best of times.
It’s a series of complicated underground tunnels to get around all the busy roads near Aldgate Station.
I walk through them every day on the way to work. I’m guaranteed to find at least 2 or 3 homeless people down there each time. But today, in amongst all the trash they leave down there, I had to smile when I saw this:
Next to a place set up for sleeping was a “How to use Durex condoms” booklet.
It’s reassuring to know that even the homeless are getting more action than me. (I hope my Mum is not reading this!)
But it’s okay. Because I get to go to work! Woohoo!
Last weekend I went on a walk that I’ve always meant to – I wanted to walk east along the Thames past City Airport and up Barking Creek. If you click on this link to see where I mean on Google Maps (and zoom in), you can clearly see what looks like a public footpath along the Thames and then up the west side of the creek.
But I walked everywhere (about 14km, shown to the right in red) and every access to this footpath was blocked off with big metal spiked fences, with no explanation as to why. Every time I was walking along what looked to be the right way, I would encounter a big spiky wall.
I later learned that the thing that takes up the big space between where I walked and the creek is the Beckton Sewerage Works, the largest sewerage treatment plant in London. But from Google Maps it really does look like the path goes around the outside of the plant! I even emailed Thames Water (who run the plant) to see if they could tell me, but haven’t got an answer [EDIT: 13 days later I did get an answer - see here]
But I did take a couple of photos from my mobile – I wish I had’ve taken my camera!
The walk took me right beside London City Airport, right by the runway.
I love airports, because they make me feel like I’m about to go somewhere interesting. I like the idea of going somewhere, but not the idea of flying. Anyway, that’s not the point.
Here are the University of East London student apartments that have just opened (first picture). They’re very cool, and they’re brand new, but I’m not sure how the students get any work done being right across the water from the airport – the second picture is the view from their window. It’s so noisy when the planes land.
I just realised I never actually wrote about the last week on the Velocity Diet, which ended on 6 September.
I didn’t stick too well to the “two healthy solid meals per day” that I was supposed to in the last week, although I did eat mostly healthy from memory (it was five weeks ago).
I never did the last V-Burn challenge, because on the last day of the diet, I got a bad cold – I don’t think it was from the diet, I think it was because I had hung around someone with a cold the day before. But I had that cold for a week, then the next week I was coughing up a lot of phlegm all week, then the next week I got a bad headache which felt a bit like a migraine. That lasted two weeks, then the day after that went away I got a horrendous stomach ache 30 seconds after I ate anything. That is unfortunately stil going on now.
So I got really sick for 5 weeks with all sorts of things, and it’s made me rather depressed because I haven’t been able to get out and do anything for the last month. It sucks.
Okay, I realise updation is not a word, but people at my work use it all the time!
My friend Dave pointed out that I haven’t been updating my blog, but I was happy to realise that people are actually reading it! It’s been close to a month since I wrote anything, but let’s see if I can keep it up to date from now on.
Suddenly, on the 6th of September (the last day of the Velocity Diet) I got sick with a cold, then two weeks after that I got a headache, then two weeks after that I got a week-long stomach ache – I haven’t been well. I’ll write about that in another post.
Although in theory, being sick means that I’ve been staying in more which means I should have had more reason to update my blog!
One of my friends on facebook is doing “Project 365″, where he takes a photo of something in his life every day for a year. I thought about doing that, then I thought I don’t think my life isn’t interesting enough to have an interesting photo every day! Which made me think I really need to get out more.
Is anyone else watching this on Channel 4 right now?
His fallacious maths and logic is making me CRINGE! People will believe anything you tell them!!!
Although, you’ve got to hand it to the guy, it makes for entertaining viewing, and I bet C4 will be paying him as much as he would have won on the National Lottery anyway.
If he really predicted the numbers on Wednesday night, he would have shown us his predictions BEFORE the draw. I mean, COME ON.
But I’m disappointed with myself, there’s a tiny bit of me (like 0.01%) that thinks that what he’s saying might possibly be true. Oh god, what sort of mathematician am I?
What he said about one set of coin tosses coming up being more likely than another was actually true. However, that bit where the guy was stamping on the cups? Simple… he told him which cup had the knife in it off camera. Hard? I think not!
Tell me this people… if he predicted the lottery numbers… then why didn’t he buy a ticket and win the money! “Because Channel 4 wouldn’t let me”? Give me a break!!!!! Why didn’t he let his family know the prediction? Ridiculous.
I recorded Wednesday’s show, and watched it back over and over again… you can see that even though it appeared to be filmed on a hand-held camera, there was a split screen involved. If you looked really really closely on a large TV, you could see one of the balls (the number 39) jump up a fraction at one point. Not easy to see, but possible if you were looking for it.
Since I started eating solid food again, my weight has gone back up by 1kg or so, I’m not terribly surprised but can’t help be a bit disappointed, I’m now only 1.5kg lighter than before I started eating only liquid food for 28 days. Still, my new measurements back up my observations that there has been some change.
I was only supposed to eat one healthy solid meal a day this week, I got half of it right, I’ve only had one meal per day but if I’m honest it wasn’t always super healthy.
My VBurn challenge for week 5 was 22m 32s – another improvement of a minute from last week’s challenge.
