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London :: 28/03/10 ~12:45 :: Comments: 0
category: random
An update! I do remember I have this website after all.
I got home yesterday from London, was down there for a couple of days just to get away from Glasgow. I do quite like London in all honesty; I have frequently said I hate the city, and the reasons I state are still true. It's really dirty, it's ridiculously busy, it's not particularly safe*, it's bloody expensive, and it's got some really quite scary people in it. No one, regardless of anything, should be allowed to wear pink jeans on the subway.
Anyway, I went round a few shops as you do. In particular I went to Dover Street Market, an 'upmarket' (read: thoroughly pretentious) clothes shop, and the Bape shop. Dover Street Market was quite an interesting experience, to say the least. I saw some nice stuff there, by a few brands I particularly like, but I'd need to be pretty much insane to buy anything from there. A Neighborhood x Fragment hoody is not worth £275. In fact, no item of clothing not made of the skin of a dead cow is worth £275. It was entertaining if nothing else. The Bape shop was more normal, very much like every other trandy designer shop in that it's a fairly small shop with bugger all in it (a rack along 2 of the walls and a table in the middle, that's pretty much it.). Those 2 shops scared me enough though, I wandered round normal places like Selfridges after that.
Speaking of Selfridges, they have a section in there for Edible, home of the ants from my last blog post. Couldn't resist investigating what was there. The oven-baked tarantula is smaller than I expected it to be, but I wouldn't in a million years consider eating them, it looked fucking terrifying. They didn't have too much stuff there, I was quite tempted by a wee bottle of vodka with a scorpion in it (I appear to have developed a taste for vodka lately, after hating the stuff for years. No idea why.) but in the end I opted for a packet of BBQ worms and a scorpion in toffee. The worms, well, I'd not advise people to try them. They don't really taste of anything, and they have a pretty vile aftertaste. I think that's more the BBQ flavouring than anything else though really. I've not had the scorpion yet, but I liked the last one I ate, so it should be good.
So the main point of why I went to London in the first place was to go somewhere I'd been planning on visiting for absolutely ages - Highgate Cemetery. It was pretty quiet when I was there, maybe only 10/15 other people wandering the whole place. Admittedly I've not heard of the majority of the more notable people who are interred there, and buggered if I could find Faraday's grave, but it was an interesting afternoon all the same. Have some photos. I took about 30 decent photos in all, which I'll stick up on Facebook. A few choice ones for here though.
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Karl Marx
George Eliot
Patrick Caulfield
Random graves
*On Thursday, a kid got stabbed in the middle of the platform at Victoria station, in front of about 14 million people. Well that's a bit fucked up, isn't it? On top of that, on Friday night at about half 12 I got slightly lost walking home, and ended up walking past Bedford Square, which was cordoned off and guarded because someone had been murdered there earlier that night. Hmm.
Finally, Twitter is being an arse for me and keeps deleting posts. I'm leaving that twitter feed there for now because I do actually quite like it, but I might take it down and just stop using the service if it keeps this nonsense up.