it’s rather annoying that i have a nice new shiny bicycle to ride, but the rain keeps stopping me from making full use of it.

dammit.

rain, please stop before 6pm so i can ride my bicycle instead of having to brave the snarly traffic around holborn/covent garden to get to the seemingly yummy portuguese cafe.

also, my sister is in town for now. she’s such a jet-setter, going off to nottingham and then to paris and nice and madrid and barcelona and then back to london again. and, she just returned from cambodia. pfft.

i’d better start making real travel plans for my 3 month south east asian holiday.

life happens. as you know.

so, things have been in a bit of a rut. i think bad feng shui caused by laziness was to blame. now that i’ve tidied up the flat, the fog seems to be lifting. although that might just be because i can actually see the floor now.

i’ve been planning my holiday plans whilst trying to co-ordinate exams and revision and projects.

showing off my flat to potential future tenants is weird. i probably do a better job than the agent in showing them around the place. i am not looking forward to hunting down a place in december - winter, wet, snow, christmas, argh.

in other news, i’m 24!

Nick Cohen in the Observer on blogs and the Web 2.0 phenomenon:

“Anonymity may give free reign to spluttering buffoons to write without being held to account for their words, but it also allows police officers and NHS doctors to describe the faults of the public sector without the fear of their bosses firing them. The medium’s unlimited space allows millions to drone on in blogs that no one but their friends will read, but the same lack of constraint allows professors to bring their knowledge to a general audience without adhering to the stultifying styles of academia.”

last night on the bus, 2 stops from my house, i thought ‘what if i never got off’.

i knew where it’d end up, but where will it end, really?

i’ve never sat on buses from one end to the other before, much less in london where they travel pretty faraways either way. although i do remember being on a feeder bus when i was in primary school, and taking it from the wrong end, and almost going a whole cycle around before getting to my stop.

i miss the feeder buses, with their dirty scratched windows and red vinyl/plastic/mock-leather seats, the shiny handbars rising out the sides of the seats, the mock-wood veneer. the grooved floors of the bus, the coin collecting machine, the feel of the afternoon sun heating up the bus, making schoolshirts stick.

they don’t exist anymore, do they? even the other type of buses that run only during peak hours and are orange and beige. they’re all gone now. everything’s air-conditioned and nice. clean and sanitised.

it’s the dirt and the grime and the unique way in which only that place can produce that out-dated, out-moded, not nice and shiny and new anymore junk and garbage that makes somewhere somewhere.

isn’t it ironic that singapore imports vintage things from places like bangkok and japan, when honestly, there is the same shit there as well? but then again, singapore IS a very ironic place.

one day all the colonial and pre-colonial buildings will be bulldozed, no more moulded archways and shuttered windows. and when that day comes, the government will probably try to buy the 5 or 6 malaccan streets from malaysia, install it somewhere in the outer reaches of the island and turn it into a theme park. for tourists.