Of all the posts I've written this, I would say, is the most blog-ish yet, in that I don't really have any kind of conclusion thought or major change to announce. This is just me telling you (and, more to the point, my future self) what happened today. Ho hum.

The plan was made for folks to come down to London on Saturday and have dinner. By folks, that's folks from college - James R., Dan, Abby, Julian, Rob, Chrismo, Christorian, James B., Koki, Elliot, Elliot's lady friend Megan whom I'd never seen before, Mark, and another guy I'd never seen before, who I think was called Ben. I left the house ridiculously early on Saturday, planning to run some errands in Nottingham, errands which turned out to take all of ten minutes, so I spent some time browsing comic books and wound up reading Edge in Nottingham station for several warm but boring hours. Lunch was a ham and cheese baguette from which I effortlessly removed the cheese.

Reached St. Pancras. Needed to get to Russell Square station which was literally one stop down the Piccadilly line and I was a little early so I decided to kill some time (but not, actually, save any money, as I already had a day ticket) by walking instead. I was working from a street map outside St. Pancras station which ended at "Russell Square station, five minute walk" and a map I had showing me where the restaurant was which ended precisely at Russell Square station, leaving a big gap between maps. Faith in my direction-finding ability and blind optimism won the day. Fifteen minutes later the rest of the gang arrived from a wholly unexpected direction (I was expecting at least some of them to have taken the train). Mark had run through a fountain to win £40 from Julian, but appeared surprisingly dry and didn't seem to have received any money either...

The restaurant, Waterfalls, turned out to be somewhat posher than any of us had been anticipating given the stated price of £18 apiece for a three-course meal and a glass of wine. I, for one, felt underdressed. The food was very, very nice, and there was plenty of it. There was chatter. We finished up and tried to find a pub.

Let me say that again. We spent about fifteen minutes wandering around central London, trying to find a pub. We weren't even looking for a specific pub! Zarquon. I don't even remember where we ended up. The majority of the gang called it a day and headed home or back to Cambridge after a drink or two - Koki and Chrismo, for starters, have finals rumbling rapidly towards them. The rest of us returned to Dan, James and Julian's flat, had a few more relaxed drinks, and eventually fell asleep.

I had arranged to meet Andrew "The man, the legend" Pearson for Sunday lunch but that left me a few hours free in the morning, so Rob and I elected to follow the orange lamp posts (cool!) and check out the Tate Modern. This was pretty interesting. The drinking game I came up with was basically "everything you see something you could do yourself, take a drink", but there wasn't as much of this as you might imagine. Most of the abstract stuff, I decided, would actually be pretty tricky to get right. There is a lot more to composition than you might imagine, as I know well from my B in GCSE Art. I think it's Piet Mondrian who has a piece which is just a circle filled with horizontal and vertical black dashes of varying thickness. They programmed a computer once to create pictures according to exactly the same principles, but when you put three computer-generated pictures alongside the real one you can still tell which one was created by a human being, because computers have no sense of art.

But there was also a lot of guff. And a whole gallery of surrealist stuff which frankly I didn't have time for.

Between a bent balcony railing set high up in the gallery wall (yeah, that's art) and a wooden handrail which you couldn't use even if you were allowed to touch it, because it's cunningly bent so it touches the wall (also art) was a fire exit set into the wall, just a door-sized groove in the wall with a green fire exit sign above it, which, I discovered, was not art, but actually a fire exit. I had the idea of performing a sort of reverse art theft by creating a little sign like the ones next to all the other works in the gallery listing the fire exit as "No Exit - Hughes, 2000. Hughes challenges our perceptions and elicits feelings of panic and fear by redressing a real fire exit as a work of art which, according to the rules of the Tate Modern, cannot be touched or used in an emergency." and then surreptitiously sticking it to the wall next to the door.

The more I think about this, the more I want to do it. Or for someone else to do it. You! Reading this! Are you going to the Tate Modern soon? Consider my suggestion!

We saw a startlingly realistic three-dimensional image of a bridge over the Thames to St. Paul's Cathedral with lifelike people walking along it, but then realised it was just a window. I also spotted a sculpture which looked a lot like one of the hollow, Combine-mangled humans from Half-Life 2. Eventually we left and decided to take the scenic route to the Tube station and crossed the aforementioned bridge, passing some curious people in pig masks. Rob and I decided this simply supported our hypothesis that we were still inside the gallery. This was further proved when it turned out most of the wall of St. Paul's that was facing us was actually just a canvas with the cathedral sketched on it, draped over some scaffolding.

Rob and I separated at St. Paul's tube station. I met Andy P. at Mile End and we had what I have to say was a superb lunch - roast beef - at his local pub. Beer was pricey though - that's London, I suppose. He's approaching the end of his teacher training course and seems to be in the process of teaching every possible age of child at once. His flat - shared with three people who weren't there at the time - is very nice and spacious although the steps up to it are treacherous in the wet (and it was getting very wet by this point). We listened to some well-chosen music, burned a CD-R of it for me to take home, and I left just in time to miss my train back to Nottingham. As they were operating on a so-called "engineering timetable" I had to wait 90 minutes for the next one, which ticked me off no end. As it was a Sunday I also managed to miss my bus when I got back to Nottingham and had to wait half an hour in the middle of town as well. All of this served to put me in a stunningly bad mood by the time I got home which was a shame as the overall experience was rather great.

Exhausting weekend, though. I could use a couple of days off work to recover.

The laces on my trainers keep breaking.