I am sitting at
the dining room table waiting for my coffee to cool down to a
non-tongue-annihilating temperature. I face a grand difficulty: because there
are so few days left, I want to stay up super late and get the most out of
London that I can, and yet I know that I need to go to bed in good time, so
that I can enjoy fully conscious the London I am awake for. Ah well. Today we went on an epic
train journey, all the way to Bradford. “Bradford?” you ask, wondering if maybe
I haven’t got the sleep I just claimed I needed. “What... where is Bradford?”
Bradford is a two-and-a-half-hour, two-train journey away. It is an old
industrial town (apparently) up in Yorkshire, and it is home to the Bradford
Media Museum. It is a surprisingly active and lively museum, considering its
middle-of-no-where location!
I woke up at the
monumental hour of 0600. I am seriously impressed with myself because I don’t
think I have woken up at 6am more than a handful of times since I left Zimbabwe
last year! And I’d set my alarm clock for 6:25, so waking up at 6 was all my
own doing. I think I must really dislike waking up to an alarm clock, because
I’ve found that most days I set an alarm, I wake up just before it goes off. I
mean, it could also be that I’m sleeping so deeply that I miss it the first
time it goes off and so it goes into automatic snooze and then I rouse myself
and I’m ready for it when it goes off five minutes later… I hope that’s not the
case, but who knows. I did wake up, though, and I like to believe it was of my
own accord. Does anyone else find that a bed grows magically more comfortable
early in the morning than it was when you got into it the night before?
I made it on
time to the train this time, and settled in for the long haul. I adore train
journeys: trains are like moving libraries! I did some work, edited some
photos, read a little bit about the Albert Memorial, and watched the beautiful
fields out the window. Our professor was there to meet us at the station when
we arrived, and while we waited for Min – who had gone to the wrong station – I
bought a Mocha. It was not the best, but the experience of buying a drink at a
station and drinking it while the trains rolled past was worth it. Eventually,
we trekked to the museum. Our professor walks at a running pace, so we were all
rather breathless when we arrived! After our experience in Oxford, we knew we
had to stick close to him, so that we don’t get lost, a mentality which entailed us sprinting
through the broad streets Bradford. The museum was fascinating, but after being cooped up
stationary in a train for such a long time, I struggled to stay still after the
first hour. In fact, I did a little twirl moving from one of the photos to the next in
line - and my professor asked me if I was alright, and if I needed to sit down.
NO! I need to move dear sir, but thank you for your considerate query.
The trip back
was pretty much exactly the same as the trip there, just backwards. Except, no,
actually, it was the same for me because I sat facing the other way this time,
so actually I saw things in the same order I saw them on the way there, just a
mirror image. I liked to think that I couldn't sit facing the other way,
because I would get sick or something, (as the slight hypochondriac I think I
am), but I discovered about ten minutes into the ride that I was indeed facing
the other way, and it had made absolutely no difference to my well-being.
I got home and
made supper straight away – an interesting egg-broccoli-onion-mushroom-baby-spinach-leaf
dish, with cashews on top. It was scrumdiddlyumptious (I love the fact that the
dictionary on my laptop doesn’t highlight ‘scrumdiddlyumptious’ as a
misspelling! Go Roald Dahl!) Tomorrow, I need to write my essay and see Laurie!
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