I wanna go backwards.

Yesterday was a funny one. Cups of tea and laughing with Emma and Hannah, and some new travelling plans (Czech Republic in July) - it's always the old friends who are somehow still the closest, no matter how far you drift. Then pub with Jay and Rosie; discussions about aliens and dreams and chicks vs. ducklings...

Today was a wet one. But only weather-wise. Tutorial with Carrie went well; seems I have the measure of this Sudden Prose nonsense after all:

"To Those of You That I Have Inadvertently Blanked in the Past,

I am sorry. I did not mean it. At least I did not mean it meanly - when you sailed past me, serenely, in your Land Rover Discovery, and I was somewhere else entirely. And you so pleased to see me.

No amount of frantic waving, honking or yelling could get me to look around and, let’s face it: we both ended up looking a little foolish. You probably more so. I am a serial blanker, you see – you weren’t the first, you won’t be the last, but you can call yourself the best if it makes you feel better.

Now fuck off and leave me alone."

Tomorrow will be a tiring one. I'm travelling to Amsterdam until Sunday to see all the folks I met in Istanbul during my time there - can't wait to see if there's more to the place than smoking and cycling - although I'm sure there'll be a fair bit of that too. Also really looking forward to seeing this bunch of people with whom I have such a strong, strange connection; under any other circumstances, I doubt we'd ever have met. Yet, after 5 months travelling and living together in Turkey, we developed a pretty amazing bond with each other. I'm hoping we can all just pick up where we left off.

Dr. David Starkey: Mind Of A Tyrant.

On 'Question Time' this week: "We do not make a great fact about Shakespeare, like the Scots do about that deeply boring, provincial poet Burns, and we do not have national music like the awful bagpipe. The Scots, the Welsh and the Irish are typical small nations with a romantic 19th century-style nationalism."

Wow, Doctor - way to alienate a sizeable majority of your viewing audience. What buffoon let him on Question Time anyway? He's a HISTORIAN, for God's sake; they're hardly the most qualified of people to discuss current affairs....

In fact, there are so many awful things about the above quote, that I'll just sit back and let you bask in its overwhelming wrongness.

Speaking of history, yesterday I interviewed a bloke about his childhood, which he spent living in a double decker bus (see above). It was fascinating to hear about my neighbourhood as it was in the 1940s - rationing, rag-and-bone men, practical jokes, pedal-organs, and summers that lasted for eight months. But the bus was most interesting: his father had bought it as an act of desperation - the family had nowhere else to live. And over a period of years they converted it into a fully functional home, with running water, heating etc., only for the council to forcibly re-house them on the grounds of 'sanitation problems' - though from what I saw in the photographs, it looked clean and pleasant enough. I suspect the council just didn't want them there. Back then it was not considered strange for families to move into rail carriages and buses; the result of a post-war lack of housing of course - but there is something undeniably seductive about that way of life, to me anyway.

He also spoke movingly about the last time he saw the bus, by sheer coincidence, in 1988. It was sitting in a field surrounded by barbed wire, awaiting the scrapheap.

The cave in.

Christ, has it come to this? I thought I would never embark on a blog - partly because it seems like a lot of work, and partly because 99% of blogs are written by dribbling, navel-gazing, flag-waving, narcissistic, light-deprived, pseudo-manic-depressive tossers. So in fact, I should fit right in. Boom tish.
To be honest I don't know why I've started this now, on the 24th of April, 2009. Maybe something interesting will happen soon to jazz it up a bit. Until then, you'll have to put up with my oft-introverted musings on things.

Earlier I wandered around town with Molly and we sat on the sun-warmed paving slabs outside Bath Abbey, drinking caffeine and listening to somebody playing the guitar in the middle of the square. Then we did our (admittedly rather surreal) shopping and went our separate ways. It was perfect.

Right now I'm listening to 'I See A Darkness' by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, and wondering if anyone will make an album quite as beautiful again. There's just something about it.

And later on I am interviewing a man who lived in a double-decker bus in his youth. More on that next time. Jeez, what a fucking cliffhanger.