A quiet week in London

This week I have decided to go down to London. I love the place almost as much as I love my home town of York. I am going to be staying at a cheap and cheerful place and having a great meal.

London is the capital city of England and can also be considered as the capital of the rest of the world, apart from Yorkshire of course. I just love the place. Every Time I go down there I come away feeling invigorated.  I get filled with the vibrancy that flows from every corner of the city.

For me a trip to London starts at Kings Cross hotels. The reasons for this are simple. Most of the main railway lines stop here. Also from here you can get to anywhere in London easily. There is the tube station if you are coming from other places or want to go other places. It is the perfect starting position.

I usually stay near here in the Euston Premier Inn. It has a great location within walking distance of Kings Cross and has lots of local pubs around it that are great to enjoy a pint in. We also find the local people in the area nice to deal with. It had been a while since we were last here so we asked a local shop keeper for directions to one of the pubs. He smiled at us and said yes, there are many local pubs, but <pause> you are far to young to get it. Well I could not help but laugh. He then raised his arm and said, yes just down there they let kids in until 5pm and smiled. Well we followed his directions and came to where we wanted to be. The response was friendly, amusing and unexpected, to say the least. 45 and 60 year old people don't expect this sort of thing.

So now we are here it is time to get going. We have a meal booked at a fab place called the Goring. This is not the like the cut price place we stayed in but a luxury London hotel. Its speciality is Beef Wellington and man was it good. The only thing was they did not use any pate between the meat and the pancake that surrounded it before being enclosed in a lovely pastry crust. The fillet of Beef inside was divine. Red in the middle and tender almost like butter between the teeth. Pastry was well prepared with a good texture to it. If only I had been given a knife with some form of serrated edge on it the meal would have been perfect. When I got one that could cut, it was better.

Incitement to Jimi Hendrix, turned up to 11 - York Friday

The morning was fine. Got up and was quite excited with a new concept I have been thinking about for some time (more about that later). So I started a brain storming session with it. the ideas were flowing, the pen was scribbling the ideas down (yes I sometimes use a pen). Then it happened.

There was a horrid shrieking sound from next door. I was appalled. So in my fit of horror I yelled, "No! Not again! He cant sing! He has not figured out since his voice broke he sounds like a howling cat!"

Next, he turned up the music and proceeded to howl even louder. This was just to much for me. I took this as an incitement to Jimi Hendrix album Voodoo Child (side 1). Even with this on, I could still hear the classic sounds of "Howling Cat" (his new nickname) next door. So, I had no recourse except to turn my own sound system up to full volume (the metaphoric "This goes up to 11" from Spinal Tap.

Within moments, "Howling Cat" had stopped. Oh the relief. The beautiful sound of Hendrix replaced it. Slowly, but surly, I turned my sounds down and the album continues. Have got as far as "The Watchtower".

All quiet on the front line. For now.

Thursday in York UK

Well I missed Wednesday and had a real late night with it. I don't quite know what happened but there we have it. It may have been that I missed going out into York on Tuesday, which is what I usually do. But I am trying to stay away from the fun a frolics of downtown for a while and see if I can make a go of other things.

The real issue here is I was not making the best of the time I had available. The key to that is getting up and going to bed at regular times. So having stayed away from the beer, I found I was up till 430am and doing very little all night/morning. Although I did make good use of the daytime, it was still pretty much a disaster.

So, Thursday I was rudely awoken in the morning by the phone only to find i was due to do some cooking at the weekend. This is fine although the broken oven I am having to use is going to be a problem. We were planning to have a Mexican evening. This would be a trial for a larger group at some point in the near future.

The Mexican evening would include my fabulous Yorkshire salsa and some superb Yorkshire guacamole on top of some incredible chicken fajitas. Now it has become a regular thing with me, fajitas but, when I do the condiments myself, it really improves the flavour of the packet stuff available. Also, when I use my own fajita spices, again it really makes a difference. I will still be using packaged tortillas because i don't know how to make those lovely textured pancakes at all. Still have to learn.

So that's perhaps this weekend. Today on the other hand has been quite a busy day so far. I have been playing around with a few designs and have now completed. Some more javascripting was called for to make a slideshow. It is very simple using the KISS philosophy. I am hoping to improve my income with this and will be testing it  for a while yet. the slideshow wont roll out for a while and it only going to be tested on some pages. We will see how it goes. I have some hopes but am not overly optimistic. My pragmatism showing through here.

Tuesday

And so Tuesday morning arrives. A a glass of orange juice and one weetabix for breakfast. The sun is shining in a clear blue sky over York, but it has been raining over night at some point. The roof is somewhat wet.

BBC news tells us about Bankers, again, and is also saying we have not paid enough PAYE tax. Oh yea. Thanks, just what I needed to hear. Of course they are blaming the computer systems for this. However, last year I did note a huge bill that came in and my accountant sorted it out. Perhaps some of us paid to much.

Anyhow, let us see what today brings. JQuery and Apache are on the menu. I am quite excited by both of these. Lets see what they bring. I may go into York city centre tonight, but I am not to sure. There is enough here to be keeping me busy really.

Monday afternoon in York

So the paper was read and it was good. Next it was time to hoover the house and so I did. Clean so clean the ridings are being.

I decided to go out to Morrisons in Acomb. Got hold of some lovely fresh veg to make tea with. We seem to be living on baked beans, carrots, celery, onions and tomatoes at the moment. But, thats the way it goes when you are competing with multimillion dollar turnover web sites and you have got just about got enough money to eat. ho hum.

None the less. Morissons is one of the cheaper supermarkets in York and ther produce is, well, OK. Not a greaqt shopping experince to teel you the truth but it is better value than the corner shops and it get me out of the house for longer.

So, all back and accounted for. All the gorceries put away. Now it is time to sit down again and get re re re reading my History of Britain books by Andrew Marr. A good read and will fill more time until I get to fill my stomach later.

Mondays in York

So here it is. What did I do this Monday in my city. Well the day started with a leishurly get out of bed card, do not go past the toilet, do not collect any benefits from the local council.

After a small breafast I managed to get a cup of coffie togther and then, sit in the feront room. The front room faces East so I can get a good look at what the weather is doing. Today, it is a bit breezy this monring, but a clear blue sky means quite a bit of sunshine is coming through.

Next I decided to pick up and read the remainder of the Oberver which I usually get on Sunday. There is just so much in it that I cant get through it all in one sitting. Thats good for me as it means I dont have to do anything else for a few hours.

More later after the paper.