Over the summer, more than one person had been telling me to take a holiday at some point and I just went "no, no, I'm fine," which turned out to be a mistake, because in the end I saw very little sun indeed and it now feels like it's been winter for a solid year. So last week I decided to take a week off work because I'd been working continuously since May and needed some me-time. Cunningly, I gave my temp agency roughly five minutes' notice - I called them at five to five on the last Friday I was going to work. Luckily, as I'm awesome, and the School of Education wasn't going to need a replacement for the interim, they let me off.

So I was going to arrange some kind of holiday for this period but instead I ended up doing two things. The first weekend I went to London to meet the college buddies again. Now, the amount of communication that goes into a London meet has steadily deteriorated over time so it seemed like nobody had a clue where everybody was supposed to be meeting, or when, so I ended up arriving around lunchtime instead of dinner time. However, this worked out in my favour as I have been wanting to do some interesting touristy things in London for a while now and the free time made that possible. I took a lengthy wander through the British Library to start with. Now: the British Library is pretty gigantic. The architecture inside is interesting, and it's also a nice warm place to spend a few hours. But while it does contain a stunning number of books, only a very small percentage of them are actually available to look at or read. I registered for the reading rooms (luckily I had enough proof of identity with me to do this on the spot) and checked out their mathematics section - there was hardly anything there. I kind of expected there to be literally every mathematics book ever written in there, but it was just a few regular-sized library shelves. The city library in Nottingham probably has a comparable selection; the one at the mathematics department library in Cambridge is easily fifty times bigger. Same for computer science and every other section I tried. I flicked through a few interesting books, but quickly decided to move on.

After that I thought I'd try Trafalgar Square for the National Gallery. It turned out there had been some combination protest-slash-concert in Trafalgar Square which was breaking up just as I arrived. I made it into the Gallery okay, but then I realised that not a lot had changed since I visited the place for secondary school Art. Either I'm a philistine who can't appreciate fine art, or all the pictures were just... pictures. Of people and places. People and places. No creative colouring, no exciting painting techniques, no interesting composition of any kind, just people I don't know or care about (many of them mythological) slouching around. And fields. And rivers and crops.

I'm exaggerating massively, of course, but after ten minutes in the National Gallery the fact remains that my feet were hurting and I was bored out of my skull. I left. Still with some time to kill, I briefly visited the statue of Eros at Piccadilly Circus - it's not worth it - then met Chris and Jenny at Covent Garden. The original plan for the weekend had been to have an American-themed party, but this had fallen through and become a restaurant trip once it turned out not enough people were coming. Unfortunately, Chris hadn't been told, and had lugged his guitar down for nothing. Lack of communication again. Next time, we must do better!

You can tell Chris is a mathematician just by looking at him now, because he has grown a beard.

A lot of tedious walking and waiting and confusion and poor communication later (although Jenny did get some nice night-time photos on the riverside, using her digital camera which apparently has a mode for everything up to and including "Thames river scenes, night") we finally met up with Mike, Dan, James B. and Mark at a pub near London Bridge. There was beer, and Texas-themed presents for Mark, who is going to Austin for six months with work, and may actually never return. Hopefully he will find the Guide To Texas Cemeteries he was presented with as useful as we all assured him he would.

We headed along the south bank of the Thames in search of sustenance and wound up at an Italian place which I believe was called Strada, located in one of those areas of London which is made entirely out of elegant grey concrete and stunningly spacious because the businesses based there can afford it. The table we ate at had possibly the best view of any table in any restaurant in the world (with the possible exception of the one in the CN Tower): looking directly over the Thames at Tower Bridge, with Canary Wharf in the distance and the City Hall on the right. It was spectacular. No, really.

Dinner was relaxed and tasty. Halfway through our meal we were shocked to realise that Tower Bridge was opening. Dan and I ran out to watch a paddle steamer pass underneath it. At the time I was under the impression that this was a pretty rare occurrence but apparently it happens several times daily.

We finished and paid and headed back, crossing the Bridge on the way, which had closed by now. Chris, Jenny and Mike headed to their various homes while I returned to the Isle of Dogs with the others. We ended up watching Donnie Brasco on DVD when we got back - very good film, highly recommended.

Julian turned up the following morning, having flown back from his own work-based trip to America at around 9am. This was why the original plan was for an American-themed party, as it was the juncture between two trips to America. We chatted idly until I headed off. I wanted to check out two more places on my touristy plan before heading home - the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, which are conveniently located right next door to each other. The Science Museum is not nearly as interesting as I remember it to be from primary school - none of the exhibits really grabbed my attention once I was done with the space travel section, although the mathematics displays were surprisingly imaginative and there were some interesting Klein bottles. In fact a lot of the supposedly interactive exhibits - you know, the ones with coloured lights and stuff - were really quite dull and uninspiring. Maybe it is better if you're a kid.

Natural History was a little better - the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton was being cleaned but there was a Diplodocus instead which was equally impressively huge. The big Earth sculpture made of metal was also very impressive. Less so was the blue whale model - quite frankly, it wasn't nearly as big as I was expecting it to be and it didn't look very convincing.

To be honest, when you get right down to it, both of them are actually just museums.

Both museums had people who checked my bag on the way in. Which was REALLY strange. Mainly because they didn't do a very good job of it. In what sense, then, was anybody safer for having had their bag checked? Answer: they weren't. Which makes the bag-checking process nothing more than a waste of security staff and an unnecessary invasion of privacy.

The only other thing I wanted to do was ride the London Eye but by this time I needed to catch my train. In any case that can probably wait until I buy myself a digital camera. On the way home I finished reading my book, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. It was okay, I guess, but the spiders/gods/magic/reality theme didn't grab me, the plot seemed clichéd and predictable, and the way it was written it didn't seem to be pitched towards adults.

I spent the rest of the week relaxing and recharging and writing. I didn't get quite as much time to myself as I wanted because my brother gets home from school at 3:30, earlier if he doesn't have a full day of lessons or - as he did that week - takes a day off for a doctor's appointment.

The following weekend (which is currently last weekend) contained my birthday on the Sunday, and was much more interesting, because I went to my first nodermeet. You can find my account of what happened here. Mine is the writeup by sam512. SharQ's writeup provides more of the actual nuts and bolts details, to be fair, mine is more like edited highlights, largely meaningless to anybody who wasn't there, but oh well.

All in all, a pretty interesting and productive week, but I still returned to work exhausted. Tomorrow I'm back at Cambridge for a formal which should be interesting. The week after that I have a job interview (!)...