In which the heroine travels to the country’s capital and experiences snakes and doughnuts, and returns home in order to battle the Brown Envelope of Doom, eat Thai food and temporarily become a werewolf.

It was a hot Friday when the heroine and her friend Sarah boarded the train to London. The heroine refused to embark on the journey without first purchasing a gorgeous fairtrade organic caramel milkshake, which was definitely worth the wait. After the heroine and her friend exchanged several months’ worth of gossip in two hours, they arrived at St Pancras. They managed to finally flag down a taxi, but proceeded to get completely ripped off on the longest-journey-with-the-most-detours to Bloomsbury ever. When they arrived at the Ambassadors hotel, they checked in and were pleased to find that the hotel room was very attractive and included a flat screen TV. The heroine was also excited to note that they were staying near Tavistock Square, made famous by Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and the like.

After dropping off their stuff, the heroine and her sidekick went shopping, and entertained various shop owners and workers in Bloomsbury with their witty comments and banter. One of the best shops was a French chocolate shop – but this features later on in the adventure.

The heroine’s sidekick decided that they should go to see a West End show, and so they went to Leicester Square in order to purchase tickets for later on that evening. The queue was very long owing to the retro system of calling up theatres to book seats and also stupidly allowing people to decide what they wanted to go and see when they got to the *front* of the queue. But the heroine and her sidekick waited very patiently behind a normal-looking woman.

I say normal-looking, dear readers. But in fact the normal-looking woman turned out to be a crazy Irish woman. She began talking to the heroine and her sidekick about Harry Potter. Then started talking about a wide range of musicals, acts and actors in an almost completely one-side discussion that lasted half an hour. She then proceeded to pull out a camera, with a rather random comment of, ‘That’s my bird’. The heroine looked at the sidekick in bewilderment, and the sidekick returned the look.  ’What bird?’ ‘MY bird, of course’, the woman replied. Of course. Crazy Irish Woman then showed our heroines an assortment of random pictures, including ones of her 2,000 Euro snakes having sex. Snake porn. Our fearless and beautiful heroines are somewhat freaked out by this, but manage to successfully purchase tickets for the musical Chicago. They then escaped back to the hotel using the superpower of the underground to outwit Crazy Irish Woman.

Later that evening, the heroine and her sidekick went to the theatre and watched the tale unfold with lots of fantastic singing and dancing. The only flea in the cheesecake was that their seats had been double-booked due to the non-superhero powers of the retro booking system, but luckily the performance turned out not to be of the Futurist variety, and the heroines were not expected to fight for their seats. Rather, they were expected to be all British and cling on to them in a righteous, smug and thoroughly unassuming way.

Upon arriving back at the hotel, the heroines decided to go for a drink in the bar, which involved paying £10.50 ($20) for a pineapple juice and a malibu and coke. After this, they were so shocked at the extent to which they had been ripped off, they went up to their room and watched Big Brother.

The next day dawned bright and sunny for our heroines, who were running around like crazy trying to prepare for the photoshoot they had come to London for. Once all the bags were packed and clothes sorted out, they left their stuff downstairs and went shopping again, where the sidekick bought a £17 flower arrangement for her new room, and the heroine bought a dozen Krispy Kremes (which ended up being hell to carry round as they had to be flat in their cardboard box, and invited a lot of comments from randomers). After sitting in a park where the heroine plucked her eyebrows, they collected their stuff and made their way to the photography studio.

Once there, they proceeded to wait. And wait. And full out some forms. And wait. And then they got their nails and makeup done. And then waited some more. And then got their hair done. By this point they had been waiting for hours, with the monotony only broken by talking to the other girls there, including one from New Zealand and another from a random eastern European country who was working as a nanny in a rich part of London.

Finally, even though people who had arrived hours after them had nearly finished, the stars of our story were called for their photoshoot. The sidekick’s flower arrangement was unfortunately spotted by the photographer, who assumed it was a prop and invented a Greek goddess theme involving random sheets of fabric. The heroine was horrified, immediately assuming everything was going to go really badly and all the time would have been (even more) wasted. But everything worked out well, and before she realised it the heroine was having a lot of fun and was jnot nervous at all about changing outfits and posing as required by the photographer.

After the shoot was finished, our stars were told to come back to the studio in an hour, so they wandered off and found a lovely little Italian restaurant. Here they were told about the times Michael Jackson and Simon Cowell came to visit by the lovely waiters, and ate their food quickly in order to be on time.

When they approached the studio however, they were made to wait another hour or so, and they were getting pretty fed up by this time. However, the photos were (almost) worth waiting for, and after bargaining with the woman, they bought a few of them.

Unfortunately, they had missed the last train and were forced to ask the heroine’s dad to rescue them (a 3 hour drive to London which he wasn’t happy about). By this time our heroes were exhausted, but only managed to sleep for 5 hours before having to get Sarah on the train to Sheffield.

The Brown Envelope of Doom was soon to appear, containing the heroine’s exam and essay results. She battled fiercelessly, much to the admiration of her tutor Jo, who was very pleased and told the heroine to consider doing a Master’s. At which point the heroine made a hasty exit, as she no longer wants to stay in Nottingham.

The heroine also went to a Thai restaurant for her friend Yex’s birthday, and enjoyed Thai sweet and sour chicken and spring rolls, and also lovely birthday cake.

A few days later, she went to Richard and Tabi’s BBQ (after getting a lift from lovely Chris), which became an indoor BBQ because of the rain. As the vast majority of the other people there were in the uni’s RPG society, the heroine quickly became involved in a geeky game involving werewolves, werehamsters, and lots of other exciting people. The heroine also enjoyed people saying things like ‘for the win’ and ‘owned’, which is normally only seen on teh Internetz. She then taught the others Tom’s lovely game of psychiatrist, which was lovingly embraced and quickly became an established hit.

The heroine then went to bed.

The end.

EDIT: Photos are here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

So I have shot myself in the foot once again, so to speak. I called work back yesterday after they called me two weeks ago, and so now I’m working tomorrow. On the plus side, I could do with the money and I’m working for a guy I like. On the minus, I won’t get to sleep in or go to the gym. Oh well.

I’ve lost quite a bit of weight recently, which is good except for the fact that I bought a new pair of jeans a couple of weeks ago that are now way too big for me round the waist. I’m very pear-shaped and I lose weight most quickly from my stomach and gain it quickly on my upper arms and thighs. I’m not actually sure why I’m losing weight so quickly, it started about a month ago when I was working 19 hour days and drinking loads of energy drinks. I put it down to the fact that I was working much longer days than usual and yet not eating any additional food. Then I went through a phase after my exams/essays where I detoxed (apart from dairy), drinking nothing but water and eating lots of fresh food because I felt guilty for abusing my body with so much sugar and caffeine. Additionally, I was doing almost 2 hours of cardio in the gym regularly, burning around 600 calories a session, including walking to the gym and back. When you add that to playing Wii for several hours straight, it starts to build up.

Now, whilst I’m still going to the gym, I’ve been eating really bad things that I don’t tend to eat normally, like chocolate and Doritos and some cream cake things Alana bought yesterday. Damn my sweet tooth. The weird thing is, my sweet tooth has gone into decline now: I’m getting cravings for things like fruit and tuna, which is mildly strange. Maybe it’s a lifestyle change thing. More likely it’s just a temporary thing. My problem is what I call ‘goldfishing’ – I just eat whatever’s in front of me. I’m not particularly tempted by things in shops, and if something is packaged I usually check the fat/saturated fat/sodium/calories and will feel too guilty to eat it if it’s really bad, but put something unwrapped in front of me and I will eat it, even if I’m not hungry. I had some of my friends over a few days ago and I’m still finishing off the crap I bought for us to eat, so once that’s gone I’m not buying any more!!

For the fashion shoot thing I’m going to London with Sarah at the weekend. If I get some good pics, I’m gonna go all self-centred and maybe make a layout of moi, because I don’t think I’ve done that before. I’ve also tidied up some pages in the ‘You’ section, and I’ll be working on fixing the games shortly.

Today I showed a girl round the house as a potential tenant, because there is a spare room waiting to be filled for the next academic year. She seemed really nice and keen on the house, and she’s called Jen. I was pretty surprised to find out she was shorter than me (I’m 5′2 and a half), so I may end up being the tallest Jen in my house lol. She just needs to meet my other new housemate for next year at some point (who’s coming round later today), and hopefully things will be sorted. I have no idea how it will/would turn out though because we are all completely different. I’m crazy and hopelessly impractical except when it comes to computers, Reenu is a clean freak who is way into designer clothes, and Jen likes poker and fishing. It should be interesting anyway. My house is definitely going to be like Big Brother over the summer, because there will be a random combination of Alana, me, Reenu, Jen (theoretically), Richard and Tabi staying at varying times. I’m still praying it’s not all going to overlap, considering the house has 3 bedrooms. The temptation to put video cameras up BB style is pretty strong lol, especially as we are all completely different people and Richard and Tabi like playing strip Monopoly. There are going to be some legendary moments this summer, and I may well miss out on them!

Everyone is having BBQs at the moment, with varying success! I’ve got another 2 that I’m planning to go to, and a potential one of my own, if Hwan-Min finalises the details about having one for one of our friends whose birthday is in the summer. What with that and bars/clubbing at night, it’s a good way to catch up with everyone, because exams officially finished and most people are now free. Yay.