A washed watch

Not mine, luckily!

I got up later than I meant to this morning, surprise, surprise. I'd meant to do some work before going with some People and Planet people to see Black Gold at the NFT (a documentary about fair trade coffee), so I didn't manage that, but at least it meant that waking up late put me on time to meet everyone rather than being late, as I would have been if I hadn't planned to do anything first and had then overslept. Actually I was ten minutes early, and everyone else was late. I succumbed to the temptation to browse through the open air second hand book stalls outside the NFT while I was waiting, and bought a book about a man's travels through West Africa investigating sorcery- at £4, I have to say I was obeying the letter rather than the spirit of my rule that it's ok to buy second hand books but not new ones. Yes, £4 is ridiculously much for a second hand book. But I have run out of reading material and the local library doesn't seem to be open at weekends, otherwise I'd join that.

We had lunch in the cafe (quite nice but quite expensive)*, then went in to see the film- there were five of us. It was really good, and I certainly know more about fair trade than I did before- hopefully it's all applicable to tea and chocolate, as I don't actually drink coffee. There was a question and answer session afterwards with the film directors/ makers which was being filmed for the DVD extras. It was hosted by Jon Snow, who was wearing some very dubious socks indeed (yellow, red and light blue stripes).

Back at halls, I phoned my dad to ask him about using LaTeX- as promised by one of our lecturers**, LaTeX became my friend during Final year as we had to use it to type up our project, but I haven't used it since and have thus forgotten it to the extent that I couldn't even remember what programme you were supposed to type the command to convert the file you were working on into the LaTeX version in, or what the command was. I thought it might be usefull for the Computational Statistics group project. With his help, I worked out what editor to use and what command to type and where to type it, and managed to produce a pdf document consisting of a single delta, which I was very pleased with.

I then settled down to the hard task of actually continuing to write up what we did on the project last time. I took a break after a couple of hours to go and do some laundry- I would have continued to put it off but I really have run out of clothes now and this time I can't just go and buy some more (what with no longer having a wardrobe gap that needs filling, well, except for vest tops). This took a long time as first I had to wait for a machine to become free, then I had to do the washing (and that took longer because I had enough for three machines and the first one was available quarter of an hour or so before the other two), and then I had to hang it all out. And then I had supper. I finally got back down to the Computational Statistics and just finished it- only to find that the document was 65MB, because I'd included loads of graphs generated using the functions. My email wasn't happy about that so I had to go back and get rid of all but 2 of the graphs. I really should get a data stick, then I could just lend it to everyone tomorrow and let them copy the 65MB file to their accounts. But it's too late now.

My brain's so scrambled that I've only just realised I forgot to mention the washed watch. It was in amongst the clothes that I took out of one of the washing machines when it finished doing its stuff so I could put mine*** in, along with a mailbox key and a 1p coin. And no, I looked out of curiosity and it wasn't still going. The owner didn't seem too bothered when he turned up though...

*over which I ended up getting carried away and going on far too much about the problems with my course (in terms of lack of teaching of interpretation of statistics) and the details of where I was living each year during my undergraduate degree and why I had to move- they asked me questions and somehow I didn't know how to stop, or how to condense.

**Unless I imagined that. It sounds more like something our head of sixth form at school would say- she who refused to let us use the word 'not' in our personal statements for our UCAS forms, on the grounds that it sounded too negative. Six years later I'm beginning to see her point of view, which I find rather worrying...

***My clothes, that is, not my watch. I don't have a watch (sniff!). It fell off my wrist without my noticing when I was crossing London on my way to Portugal for a holiday with my family over the summer.