London and its Layers

I once thought that all London consisted of was my house, Brent Cross to the north, Ealing to the west, Fulham to the south, and the paintballing place far to the east, with Hyde Park and Edgware Road somewhere in the middle. And that's it. But recently that all changed; during (yet another) Palestine demo at Trafalgar Square, I took a friend to my favourite place next to the Thames, and after he left early, I had the freedom to go virtually anywhere I wanted to with the rest of my friends at home 'revising'. I began with the National Gallery, looking at a few decent Van Gogh paintings, and where I bumped into another friend, whom I also took to the Thames. Then, going away from Trafalgar Square down a narrow alley-like side road, I discovered a small looking Waterstones. But inside it was massive, and I stayed there for about half an hour scanning mainly the humour section. It was the Covent Garden branch, and when I stepped outside, I found myself in a completely different place; it was like magic! Waterstones was so big that it had multiple entrances, and so I carried on with my adventure, soon finding myself on the Strand. I was actually in search of somewhere to eat, and this was the perfect place with restaurants everywhere, but I settled for the usual Pret a Manger dolphin-friendly tuna baguette :)

I then backtracked looking for my way to Leicester Square but found myself wandering into a comic book shop, expertly flicking through a few comics as if I knew what I was doing, before stepping out into another seemingly different street, even though it was the way I had come in; I'd realised I had no idea where I was, just the way I liked it! I'd always heard of a chinatown in London, but never actually knew where it was, but I somehow stumbled across it, and I found it quite enchanting! The roadsigns were in chinese, the smell of oriental food wafted through the air, yellow-skinned people everywhere; as if I'd walked into Imperial College China itself! There were a few street 'magic' performers doing the old 3 cups and a coin trick, and after I witnessed a hapless woman losing the £20 she bet on a cup, I thought it was time to move on, venturing down more side roads and discovering more wonders until I found myself back at Piccadilly Circus (where I took note of a Cinnabon tucked away in a corner). I then walked around HMV and Trocadero for a bit, which has somewhat lost its girl pulling reputation amongst the gangster-wannabe community.

Regent Street next, and I slalomed my way through the crowds of tourists; Hamley's toy shop my destination; I hadn't been there for more than ten years, and once I stepped inside, I felt like a child again, spending ages exploring its many floors, admiring the new wacky inventions to pull in kids' dosh, as well as spending a while pic 'n' mixing my jelly beans. Once outside, I thought about walking straight to Oxford Street and eating at Cinnabon until I discovered an almost uninhabited side-alley place, with an arty rainbow structure standing in the middle! That's what I love about London; you have all the standard attractions: the streets, palaces, monuments, aquarium; but then you have all the small hidden things tucked away that tourists regularly fail to pay attention to; the quaint little bookshops, the age-old bakeries, the hidden-away parks and gardens; and on top of that, you have the history of the whole place; a layer underneath another layer, all proudly documented with plaques and memorials. And on another level, there's Southwick Mews :)


My journey continued through more side-streets in the general direction of Oxford Circus, past some amazing street performers, through places I never knew existed! Carnaby Street: there's something about it, just its character, a place rarely found elsewhere in the world, a place that remains untouched by outside influence, like (and I can't find a better example) Hyrule market in The Legend of Zelda! It clings on to what makes it, it.


After thoroughly enjoying Cinnabon on Oxford Street, it was a walk down to Edgware Road, and then Paddington through (yes, you guessed it!) Southwick Mews, from where I took a bus all the way back home... a lovely day! There is still so much of London I have yet to explore, and my daily bus journeys to uni, peering out of the window have made me realise that; all the places seamlessly flow into each other! Just today I walked from Edgware Road through the posh back roads to Kensington Gardens and stumbled upon picturesque scenes, childhood memories and Kensington Palace!

My Bloomer of a Tumour

About 2 months ago, I was diagnosed with a pituitary adenoma after receiving results of an MRI scan I had in January. I was taking part in some research into psychosis at Cambridge when I had the scan, otherwise I still wouldn't have known about it until too late and I was suffering from symptoms. But what is an adenoma? A good thing about having medical student friends is that, unlike a GP, they don't tiptoe around something when you ask them, "What's an adenoma?" I ask, pretending to help with their revision, "It's a tumour of the gland!" They reply unhesitantly. So yeah, I have an 8mm wide (and growing) lump on my pituitary gland in my brain, or as a friend so aptly put it:

"You got a pink kink in your think."

There's a long list of (mainly hormonal) symptoms associated with it, which, alhamdulillah I'm not feeling the effects of just yet, but the two ways to remove it are by surgery (through the nasal passage :S), the most effective, and by drugs. So how am I feeling? I don't know. I'm always putting on a brave face in front of my friends, but there's a hint of uncertainty that everything might not turn out alright in the end. I've had blood tests, I have to see an endocrinologist (hormone guy) on Monday, and I don't know what to expect. It'll probably end up with him saying I need more tests and another MRI scan, and then I'll have to wait another month or so before the next appointment, by which time I'd probably have enough prolactin to start my own dairy farm!

April, again.

In the end I couldn't resist not writing an April 'poem'... plus I want to see what it feels like to actually have a short blog-post, so here it is:

April: a month of rest, play and paintballing.
My friends' attendance is too appalling.
My arm covered in pen,
Oh no, not again!
Now the psychiatrist is calling.

April Awesomeness and Apathy

I was thinking of summing up my month in poem form since I've been in that kind of mood, but I think that would be long, especially since I'm into rhyming ones. But it's funny; when I have things to do, I manage to get on here and write a blog-post in an attempt to avoid doing them (the best times are on lab-report deadline days), but I've had four weeks of holiday, admittedly with one lab-report to write (which I don't plan to), and have had the chance to go on my *new* laptop and come on here, but just ended up doing more holiday-ish things, like paintballing!

After alot of umming and ahhing as to whether I should trek it all the way down to Upminster, early in the morning, with 25 of my brother's testosterone-pumped friends and spend a fortune on paintballs I'd be shooting at random "what am I doing here?" English kids, those "I finished Halo on legendary so I must be good at this" teenagers, gangsters who wear their hoods up even over their helmets, and those annoying "I brought in my own gun so I'm better than all of you put together" losers... did I want to go? No. I tried to get some of my friends to come but they were conveniently all busy, so in the end I said no, then I said yes. Those people needed to be taught a lesson, plus I thought it would be amusing to hurt some of those ultra-aggressive friends of my brother's who'd be in the other team. I'm glad I went, and after a dismal first round where some random team-mates at the back were using the old hide-behind-barrel-and-blindly-stick-out-gun-and-shoot technique towards us near the front, there had to be some harsh words exchanged (by me, surprising I know), and we got our act together. There was still some maniac shooting his own team, but we absolutely merked the others (we were the orange team :P). For some reason I was made a leader, and they all huddled around me like students waiting to hear wisdom from a guru on a mountain-top. I didn't come up with much of a plan, apart from 'kill their president' or 'capture their flag', doing what they don't expect, and not fearing getting shot. Some of my team took it literally and suicide-missioned it, which did help by providing a melodramatic "Chaaaarge!" decoy on the other side of the field. But I was quite chuffed that 3 of us managed to sneak to their side (behind the double-decker buses) and pump a few bullets into their fear-stricken president before their team knew anything... within a minute of the game starting! :D We were awesome mashaallah, but then our group were kinda kicked out (after a few warnings) because one of us brought their own paintballs and kept on using them. But we chilled outside the place for a while, climbing up scaffolding (and on the 'don't climb on this vehicle' tank) and throwing spare paintballs at each other... so it was a nice day in the end!


Getting my new laptop was a relief as my old one was starting to get annoying; I could've just re-installed Windows, but I wanted the touch screen so I could entertain myself in lectures next year by drawing cool pictures annotating lecture slides. It's already got a virus thanks to my impatient efforts trying to download a game that I didn't check beforehand, but I still love it, plus the new Windows 7 release candidate (a kind of final final test version) is out, so I can download that and start anew!

I also tried to organise football for Good Friday at Regent's Park like we'd been doing for a couple of years now, but out came the excuses from my friends; that there was a funeral prayer they had to attend (that takes 5 minutes max!), exam revision, or that it was raining (and to be fair it was pouring buckets, but still)... I can just feel my secondary-school friends and I slowly drifting apart, making our own friends, and not finding time to see each other. Sad, but for the few friends who did come, we went to Pizza Express and luckily I'd brought my Where's Wally books, so our spirits weren't that dampened, plus I had a chance to talk to a friend of my brother's (and mine I suppose) I hadn't seen since year 5... nearly 10 years!



There was also this Pokemon platinum publicity event thing going on around the country, and the one day that I was busy (chilling with friends probably), it came to Harrow, and this wasn't just a random get-together of sad geeks pokemon fans and 6 year-old children battling over wi-fi, they were giving out a new legendary pokemon called Shaymin! This was the kind of event I'd missed as a child (getting Mew); no regrets this time! So I got my little 7 year-old brother to take both of our DS's and get it (not alone, I obviously got my mum to take him!)... he'll thank me in the future. But it seems that the advertising I'd been bombarded with as an 11 year-old still has an impact on me; Gotta catch 'em all! Erm, yeah...


Another thing that made my month was a new episode of Doctor Who; the easter special! It wasn't particularly that good, but it's something the whole family relates to, and even though we're sitting in different rooms watching it sometimes, we all ask each other "Omg did you see Doctor Who?! That was wicked!" And Lee Evans was in this episode, with him being a scientist on the phone to the Doctor, who's stranded with passengers in a double-decker bus on a desert planet. It was alright. Anyway moving on... ¬_¬

And then there were my dear friends (well, the ones who actually turn up!). The weather wasn't too harsh on us as we had a picnic thing in Hyde Park, but finding their picnic spot at the beginning was another issue completely; the one friend who's phone number I did have didn't have reception, so I ended up scouring the whole park, doing a lap of the Serpentine, stopping to help "Can take you photo please?" tourists, until finally I get a call with vague instructions as to where they were. But once I turned up, out came the joke book and Where's Wally (again), and the frisbee, which I hastily abandoned in favour of climbing trees and playing with sticks. Oh and blind man's bluff and charades were quite funny too! But I do feel a bit bad about these holidays; not only did I come into uni quite often (no, not to really revise), but I may have disturbed my friends revising, as well as getting blocked by the Imperial network for downloading too much :S But I made some effort to compensate by letting my arm be drawn on to help with anatomy or something... yeah, they're medics.


And finally, we had an unofficial Woodhouse reunion which was quite cool, held at a dutch pancake shop in Holborn. I opted for smoked salmon with mushrooms in a pancake (I obviously picked out the mushrooms!), and I won't be having that again! But it was nice seeing old buddies, and at the end the waitress handed out leaflets to a Holland day at Trafalgar square that saturday coming, which I obviously went to (alone), and to my delight, everything was orange! :D They had lots of stalls including a clog stall, some random dutch food, ALOT of holland-shirted people sitting in the sun drinking listening to the people on-stage. So all I really did was tiptoe around everyone, clutching the orange tulips I'd bought, exploring a bit before going into the National Gallery and receiving strange looks just because I was wearing a raincoat, army trousers and trainers, cradling some flowers... peesh! People never seem to appreciate my artistic expression!



Oh and on that note, I just discovered that Van Gogh actually didn't cut his own ear off; someone (probably with phenomenal accuracy, if he was aiming for it) sliced it off with a sword!

March Merriment and Malady

Again comes that time of month where I feel I have to fulfil my OCD-istic tendencies and title a blog-post with the month name and then two opposite-ish words beginning with the same letter that the month begins with. Not excellent planning, as I only initially intended to write about January because it was a particularly different month to all the others, but now I feel having written about February (and its frivolities and failures), March might feel a bit 'left out' if I didn't write about it too. I'm always critical of people not planning ahead, like with Imperial and it's board of all the heads of faculties or presidents or whatever over the years; what happens when they run out of space? Or the Fulham branch of Sports World, where they felt they had to display all the winners of the football league on a board since it started about a hundred years ago; they too are running out of space! Or asians people sending more wedding invitations than the hall has oxygen atoms. Poor planning. I'm trying to think of another example that doesn't involve space...

March began with Islam Awareness Week, which resulted in me, a first-year guy with practically no experience in this kind of stuff, knee-deep in random tasks to carry out... actually more like head-deep! My inability to say "no" to people's requests to carry this table there, or organise this event, or check if all those chairs are comfortable enough for these sisters, ended up in me kind of re-evaluating my whole personality; are people sometimes just too lazy to do things themselves and see me as an easy tool to get it done, do I actually enjoy helping out? Yes, yes and yes :) Not only because I get some sort of 'buzz' after helping people, but because I would hope people do the same for me when it comes to my hour of need.

There was a point where I hadn't seen my mum for two days, even though we were living in the same house! Leaving home early and arriving late was a recurring theme this month, even after IAW was over, and it may (according to my parents who have long been campaigning for midnight bedtimes) have contributed to the illness I suffered from over the two weeks. I was coughing and sneezing so much, even the viruses were starting to get annoyed. I think if the flow of content from your nostrils depends on the angle your head is in, you need time off... which I didn't exactly have; changing people's lab results just by putting my forehead too near someone's test-tube (actually the results are nonsense anyway :P), and eating ice cream almost every day didn't help either!


Other rather eventful things that happened, apart from doing an all-nighter in the empty library cafe starting my essay, hearing the echoes of the facebook chat 'pop' reverberate against the large windows, through which the dawn light begins to shine through with the occasional Chinese student peeking (Peking, get it?? ah forget it) in to see if there were any study-buddies about, I made loads of friends from again just sitting in the library cafe getting into random conversations... I also ate a raw tomato (and hated every second of it), and watched 'A Beautiful Mind' again after many years... what a film! It's just the caring and patient nature of his wife that really gets to you, dealing with a husband who's convinced that he hasn't got a mental illness. A similar film I also watched is a Korean one called 'A Moment To Remember'... absolutely perfect in every way; it starts off quite slow, but then we learn of the girl's suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and how her husband sticks by her despite her not even remembering who he is... an amazing film, perfect delivering of lines (even though it's all subtitled), photography... everything. The best films are probably those that access basic human feelings, like care and attachment, ambition and survival, or just Gladiator :)


Oh, another example of poor planning (which must have happened, by probability), is the building of a hospital without disabled access... I think that you couldn't find more irony in a hospital that hasn't got disabled access!

Change

Things 'happening'... Once upon a time something didn't happen, then it happened... strange. And then after that, it can't be undone; no-one can 'un-happen' something that's happened. And when it has happened, it will never re-happen. Being in a shopping centre lift with a group of people; it'll be the first and last time you will ever be with exactly these people in this situation at this time! Same with spending time with friends; you may hang around with the same people over and over again, but conversations or events won't be replicated exactly, what people wore, what they ate, who walked past, or the exact hour and minute all will have changed. People don't say goodbye to strangers they've just been in a room with, in the same way that people don't try to absorb every moment they're with their friends; things just happen, and people get on with their lives, but maybe that's why people keep diaries. I always get that feeling of 'this could be the last time I ever do/see/experience this!', even if I'm alone, and it may seem depressing to always think that, but I feel it helps me live the moment more, and it makes me a happier person knowing that I've 'taken advantage' of every minute of my existence. But it's saddening to think that every second that has ticked by, or every heartbeat that I feel against my chest, I won't be getting back.

Change. One moment someone is rich, then they're poor. Someone is young and healthy, then they're elderly and ill. Someone is alive and active, then they're deceased and lifeless. With the passing of Jade Goody, although I didn't really care much for her, everything will be different now; in the same way when Princess Diana died, things will just feel different; she won't play a part in society any more, things won't 'happen' because of her, and the world will be everything minus her. There are lots of events that had a 'before and after' sort of effect, like I remember the 1997 election making me see things differently, like a blanket had covered the world around me; same with 9/11, starting a new school, Woolworths closing down, or friends leaving my life.

My friend getting married just woke me up to the fact that everything is changing rapidly; no longer were we practicing our secret handshake together, or wearing holes in our uniforms playing football. He is married, will hopefully have children, grow old, and then die. But we are too absorbed in our lives now, in the present, to realise how quickly everything is changing; how 'now' is becoming history, and how the future is becoming 'now'. Young people walking the street, strutting their stuff probably don't realise that they will grow old one day. We don't associate old people with being once young, and they're probably as shocked to realise how time has flown, how their friends have moved on and passed away, how their youthful appearances and ambitions have worn into wrinkles and worry. Change is probably the thing people are most afraid of, but don't realise it's already happening everywhere around them! The question is, how would you spend your moments with someone you KNOW you won't be seeing again?

Maybe that's how you should spend every moment.

A Weekend of Wickedness!

The weather over the past few days has been too amazing to just sit indoors and write a long blog-post, but I have to mention it... last weekend was just wicked! Friday evening saw Imperial ISoc-ers play LSE at an 11-a-side footy match, and we won 6-3 (I guess me scoring a hat-trick helped)! The next day I went with a couple of friends to BodyWorlds; just a load of corpses artistically arranged to make us 'ooh' and 'aah', then going on a stomach-wrenching ride (AFTER Pizza Express!) as well as bumper cars. It doesn't take much to amuse me; as long as I'm with company I enjoy, doing something (like jumping through fountains :P), I'm happy. But Sunday was the cherry on the cake for me: competition! Imperial's marrow society organised a fun run, with a choice of 3km or 8km to compete in, with a superhero costume theme, and as our family has a history of winning fancy-dress competitions, we weren't about to disappoint; I went as Turbo Snail :)

The massive golden shell strapped onto my back plus the helmet delicately balanced on my head and the throat-strangling cape didn't really give me a great running advantage over my competitors, but I thought that fourth place (out of 35!) was pretty good for a snail wearing insultation material and a brown paint-spray smelling overall on a hot day. 14 minutes 30 seconds was my time over 8K, which I think is impossible because just the day before I managed 5K in half an hour! So someone must've made a mistake somewhere, or maybe the cardboard-tube exhaust pipes protruding from my shell did actually work! But I did win the prize for the best costume (thanks to my legend of a mum): a dinner for two at a top London restaurant!

After the race I just chilled with my friends in Hyde Park, sword-fighting with sticks, and relaxing in the sound of the gushing water of the Princess Diana memorial fountain, with the thought of a million deadlines coming up not bugging me at all. This week so far has also been legendary, with the Queen's Lawn full of happiness and relaxation, frisbee players, and the water-fight I organised over Facebook :) I'm trying to get sticks for our Friday Night Project tomorrow, so we can just sword-fight the night away... ^_^

"The best things in life aren't things."