A New Adventure

Every time I start anything new, I want to sing Les Mis. So here it is, another blog, another destiny! This neverending road to... cookies and Sherlock season 2, hopefully.

For those of you who've missed the story, I've just moved to the UK to do my MSc in Forensic Speech Science at the University of York. I fear that my days of spending ages explaining to people that no, I really do mean York, not New York, are only just beginning.


The flight was surprisingly painless, although that may have been because I took a double dose of my travel sickness pill, which made my brain go all jelly batterycake OCTOPUS OCTOPUS OCTOPUS, so I basically slept the whole way. I didn't have much choice. On top of this, the baby across the aisle was dead quiet! The whole way!* To make up for this, however, I made sure to sleep only at terrible angles, so that I woke up from time to time with a different crick in my neck, so as not to miss out on the long-distance flight experience completely.

Where things really got tricky was at Heathrow, where I spent an hour getting through passport control. And to think I've always been so smug about having a British passport.** Then I had to trek to Terminal 3 to collect Ro, worrying the whole time that I'd be late or that he'd have gone to Terminal 5 to find me, since our brilliant plan ("just go to arrivals... and wait.") forgot to factor in the existence of more than one terminal. Fortunately, Ro spent two hours getting through passport control, so we ultimately managed to find each other, lug our very heavy suitcases onto the tube and head for central London.

We arrived at Nick's place hot, sweaty and exhausted after dragging said very heavy suitcases up far too many flights of stairs for anyone's liking. When I phoned from outside the door, Nick said "Oh, you're early!" (we weren't) and that he'd call to see if his brother was around to let us in (he wasn't). So we changed in the stairwell, left our bags outside the flat and resigned ourselves to venturing out into the heat again. Yes, heat. We were surprised too.

We're so hot right now. You can't tell, but I'm totally wearing shorts. Shorts.

We wandered around central London until we got tired, by which stage Nick was back and could let us in. I was a totally awesome tour guide for Ro. I could tell he was impressed by my in-depth memory of "erm, that old building" and "that pretty famous church", as well as my ability to find my way around.

Ro disobeys the warning against anti-social street drinking.

In the afternoon, I went to the motherf*cking BANK like an ADULT, where I learned that I will have to jump through several hoops to get access to the money in my account after I lost my bank book did something a totally responsible adult might have done too.

But never mind all that, because in the evening we went to see Ten and Donna David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing!

OMG OMG OMG.

The play was very hammy, which worked, since it is a very silly play, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Afterwards we joined the throng of screaming fans at the stage door, but then all the boring people went away and we hung out with D-Ten and Katydid (that's what we call them now), drank tea and played 30 Seconds (we let them win the first round) and now we have all sorts of hilarious in-jokes that you wouldn't understand because you weren't there. That's our story, and we're sticking to it.***

We're separated by fangirls, but our love is real.

And on the way home, Ro discovered that the British youths really are as bad as they seem in the movies.

*Or maybe the pills were stronger than I thought.
**Just kidding. I'm still smug.
***In some horrible parallel universe, they went back inside before we got close enough to get them to sign anything. Luck we weren't there!