Prince of thieves

Today we came to Nottingham, UK, for the annual e-Science All Hands Meeting. All my recollections of this city are as a pre-teenager, when we'd often come up during holidays to visit my parents' friends, Fizza and Inayat Emadi.

During these visits (from what I can remember of them) we'd drive out on lazy Sunday afternoons to Nottingham Castle and Sherwood Forest, or we'd spend the days indoors (especially during the Christmas break when it'd be too cold to go out) and play Monopoly until 4am in the morning. It felt so carefree and relaxing and fun.

Yet, I don't really feel as if I've seen Nottingham. I feel indifferent to her. It's not a city that I could honestly add to my collection (some people collect stamps, I collect cities).

And this current visit, for the AHM2004, doesn't count. We're couped up in the East Midlands Conference Centre for 8-hours a day, for 4-days. We'll hardly get time to sight-see. :(

I think once Tasneem and I are married (Inshallah, next year) we'll try to travel around the UK more, and we'll come up and explore Nottingham in all it's glory.

In the meantime though, it's back to preparation for the next couple of days. I'm presenting my paper on Thursday and yet Powerpoint keeps crashing on me -- Argh!

Oh, current Windows wallpaper: Paul Klee's Insula Dulcamara. It has a strangely soothing yet vibrant appeal to it. Beg, borrow or steal a copy now! Preferably from the rich, to give to the poor! ;)

BookCrossing

BookCrossing sounds like a really neat idea. Basically you buy a book, read it, and then register it with BookCrossing. They provide you with a unique BookCrossing identification number (a BCID) and let you write a little review of the book on their site. You then write the BCID and the BookCrossing URL somewhere in your book, and leave it somewhere for some random person to find. Starbucks, Waterloo Station, on the Tube, anywhere is fine. The person who finds your book is then supposed to read it, log into BookCrossing, enter the BCID and enter their own thoughts about it. They then leave it somewhere for someone else to find and the cycle (the epicycle?) repeats. Neat, eh?

I have a heap of books I need to get rid of from my bookshelves, and I think BookCrossing will be alot more fun and interesting then giving the books away to charity, friends or eBay addicts.

So if you find my handwriting scrawled in a copy of Lawrence Krauss's Quintessence that you picked up randomly on the tube, go to BookCrossing and let me know what you think.

One sign of rain

It took me 4 hours to travel the typically 40 minute journey home today. 4 hours! All because of the rain.

The weather in London has been pretty hot (about 30C) and humid over the last few days, so it wasn't very surprising that it was so muggy this morning. You could tell it was going to rain. And rain hard at that. However, it was dry all day until about lunch time when the special effects began.

I love storms. I don't know what it is about them, but I'm always the one who goes about counting the seconds between the flash and the bang to figure out how far away the from me the storm is. You basically count the seconds from the lightening to the thunder and divide by 5. That gives you the distance to the storm in miles. I dunno, someday I'm going to refine this formula to take air masses into account (since the speed of sound in high pressure regions is greater than the speed of sound in low pressure regions). But that's a geeky divergence right now... ;)

So like it rained at lunch time but it wasn't that bad. I've seen worse storms. This one was all bark and no bite.

I left college at about 5:30pm and went to the bus stop (which didn't have a shelter I might add) to wait for a number 70 bus to Notting Hill Gate. By this time the air was muggy again, the ground was dry and you could feel the electricity in the air. They say that animals can sense impending storms. Well I can too! And I could tell this one was going to be big...

So I was waiting for the number 70 with a bunch of other people and suddenly there was alot of lightening and thunder. I did my calculation and figured that the storm was 3 miles away -- no reason to panic. Sometime after the special effects had started then the rain started pouring down. And it was hard! It actually started pretty slowly but then suddenly became harder, with these big huge drops (as rain drops go), and then just as suddenly it became calmer again. Could this have been the eye? (I dunno, I'm still obsessing over The Day After Tomorrow.)

It rained and rained and rained. And then it rained some more. :P

All this time, we (the people at the bus stop and I) were standing beneath the parapet (spelling?) of one of the houses down Queen's Gate. Every now and then some tourists who were caught out in the rain in their shorts and t-shirts came and joined us. And then as the rain calmed down they would leave towards their destinations, drenched to the bone.

After about half an hour I got bored of waiting. The bus hadn't arrived yet and the rain had calmed down a little. So I took out my super small folding umbrella, opened it, and walked south to Gloucester Road tube station. Here I waited about 15 to 20 minutes for an Eastbound Circle line train.

When the Circle line train arrived at Gloucester Road tube station it just stood there. It never moved. The driver announced that the rain had caused signal problems further down the line and consequently this train would have to wait here for a while. 5 mnutes later the driver made another announcement: the Eastbound Circle line was now suspended. This train wasn't going anywhere. Argh!

So everyone got off the train. I had remained on the platform all this time and after the second announcement procedded to take a District Line train to South Kensington. At South Kensington I decided to forsake the tube system and try my luck overground. Big mistake.

My plan was to get the number 70 bus from here (the bus that I had originally intended to take before the storm began). I waited for like half an hour among the hussle and bussle that is the entrance to South Kensington station but the number 70 was a no show.

Oh, BTW, all this time it was raining and thundering and lightening. Very apt. :P

So I had a bright idea (which didn't turn out to be so bright as you'll soon discover). I decided to catch the number 49 bus (which also departs from South Kensington) to Kensington High Street where I could get a number 52 to Notting Hill Gate, and thus home.

Unfortunately I caught the wrong number 49. It was going in the opposite direction. I only discovered this after about a mile, when the bus was about to cross Battersea Bridge. Ack! I quickly departed, crossed over the road, and stood at a bus stop among some other people waiting for a number 49 going back towards South Kensington Station. I felt sooooo stupid! And so wet. :P

So we waited and waited and waited for a number 49. A nice couple at the bus stop told me they'd been waiting 40 minutes but the 49 that I wanted was no show. Aaaarrgghh!

So I walked back to South Kensington Station. Oh, and did I mention? It was about a mile away. Oh, and it was raining all this time! Grrr...

Back at South Kensington Station I went down into the station and proceeded to catch the Eastbound District Line to Ealing Broadway. I considered walking from there to Notting Hill Gate, to catch the Central Line train home, but was put off when one of the assistants at the station said, "Erm... basically that line doesn't exist anymore." :P

So I took the District Line to Hammersmith. I got off here and took an Eastbound Piccadilly Line train on the opposite platform, knowing that it would reach the next station, Acton Town, much faster than the District Line train. And it did. But the train was bound for Heathrow Airport, and I wanted the branch going to Uxbridge so that I could get off at Sudbury Hill -- a hop, skip and a jump away from home.

Oh, it had stopped raining by now.

So I got off at Acton Town. The train on the opposite platform was bound for Uxbridge but alas it was completely full. I was actually scared that the people inside would get crushed when the doors closed. That train remained on the platform for ever. After about 20 minutes it still hadn't moved and the people inside were still crammed in there. I was so glad I didn't get in.

All this time two other Eastbound Piccadilly Line trains came and went but they were both bound for Heathrow Airport. Eventually the overfull Uxbridge bound train left. I hope it reached its destination.

Eventually the District Line train that I had originally left at Hammersmith rolled into Acton Town station. I knew it was the same train because I noticed the same faces on it. And thus I took that train to Ealing Broadway as originally intended. Ho hum.

At Ealing Broadway I took a Thames Link train to Greenford. Home. Yay! :) And the entire journey only took me about 4 hours...

It was tiring and fustrating, but it was a little bit of an adventure as well. I felt like I was in Planes, Trains and Automobiles or something. And I certainly know how Charlie Quibler felt in Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain.

Except who needs forty signs when one will suffice?