Bluewater

I went to visit Ginger on Tuesday. In the past, when I've gone to see her we've often gone to Bluewater shopping centre because it's quite close to her. There's been plenty of time for that because I've usually stayed two nights. This time however I couldn't spare that long because of my project. So since we still wanted to go to Bluewater I proposed meeting her there, as otherwise by the time I'd arrived at the nearest station to her house, dumped my stuff, and we'd got the bus to Bluewater, there wouldn't have been much time to actually do anything. Luckily there is a station on a different line that's closer to Bluewater, with a good bus service that only takes five minutes to get there.

In the event, my train up to London was delayed by an hour, but we still had time to do everything we wanted- and I still had time to pop into Foyles while I was transferring across London to get her a birthday present as it's her birthday today. We had lunch in Bluewater at, in a strikingly novel departure for us, not the Amoy restaurant, and I splurged on a whole 5 DVDs (but the most expensive was only £7, and the least expensive £3), and got some new clothes as well, including a shorter skirt than I've ever worn before (but it's still only ten or fifteen centimetres above the knee). We also tried on some plain silly clothes, just for a laugh. And while we were waiting for the bus home we ended up, for some reason, pretending to be happy slappers by pretending to hit each other (without actually hurting) and videoing it on Ginger's phone. No, it doesn't seem in the best of taste, and goodness only knows what the other shoppers thought, and I'm really not sure now how it started, even, but we had a good time doing it. We carried on on the bus, moving on to impressions of the man in a film Ginger told me about who was given the hand of a murderer in a transplant and it tried to kill him. Sadly though I was using the book I'd brought with me as a prop in my rendition of this, which involved dropping it as the attack of the hand stepped up, and I realised later that evening that I'd forgotten to pick it up again. It was the second copy of that book I'd bought as well, because I couldn't find my copy when I wanted to read it a few weeks ago, and succumbed to the temptation to get a new one.

I couldn't work out whether it's just that it's the first time I've been shopping since Christmas, or whether Bluewater is the Heelies capital of Britain. Every other child seemed to be whizzing by on a pair, but it may be that everywhere's like that now as they've all been asking for a pair for Christmas since June and have now finally got them.

We ended up watching three of the five DVDs I'd bought at Ginger's: Flightplan and The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the evening and TransAmerica the next morning. I'd never seen any of them before, and nor had Ginger, but they were all really good. Which was a relief, even at £7!
I'm terribly behind with my project- I'm still doing all that stuff with the list of Super Output Area Middle Layers, and haven't even started on the actual analysis of the data- but I'm hoping that I just allowed far more time than necessary and that once I've got all the data in the rest will take no time at all. Hmm.