Before it all slips out...

...I shall blather a bit.

Broadstairs is a great beach town and I am lucky to have an Aunt who lives right up by the water in a large home which used to serve as a hotel. She still rents rooms to travelling students sometimes but generally I can always count on there being a spare room for me to sleep in. As mentioned earlier, this a great thing!

Over the course of the weekend I spent a lot of time with a very intense relaxation ("intense relaxation"?) program which I drew up on the margins of something more important - which was in turn written on the back of the train ticket which took me there. Going to Broadstairs is about the same as going to Toronto, in terms of distance. You're looking at about three hours of transit in total if you take the train, which I always do. Thanks to the tube and the national railway system, English buses are still a mostly unknown thing to me - not unlike unicorns and being succinct when I speak.

There isn't a whole hell of a lot to say about Broadstairs other than the sea air is wonderful and it's a rather typical tourist town - not that "typical" is a derogatory term here. You've got lots of sand, places to drink and eat by the sand, a great bookstore (Albion Books) so you can buy something to read by the sand, swimwear stores where you can buy trunks to fill with the sand and on and on. Meanwhile, the family I have there (my mother's sister Liz, her husband Phil and their children) are very friendly and kind. True story!

Coming back into London on Tuesday, I felt very refreshed - which is good because I am now in a frantic rush to get a job which isn't total shit (re: retail/food) and a place, preferably with post-Dickensian amenities, by the end of the month. If this does not happen, then I may have to retreat to Reading and stay with some old University pals of my parents - who, funny enough, are the parents of one of my own pals in Reading. All hope is not lost if I have to go down that path - I'll just earn some money in Reading and then tunnel back into London. Luckily Reading is only about a half hour on the train headed west out of Victoria station, which is roughly in the heart of London...so I am not super worried. It would take some pretty outlandish events to send me packing back to Canada, that is for sure!

Reading, meanwhile, is a perfectly nice town - though maybe not as glamorous as London, there is still plenty to appreciate about it. Most of it reminds me of Kanata, which is fitting because it might wind up being absorbed as a suburb of London as the latter continues to roll across the countryside in search of smaller cities for sustenence.

Anyways, I won't be hitting up Reading this weekend so as to save cash - but I will instead make that planned trip to the heart of London which seduced me in my ill spent youth (of two years ago...). I caught glimpses of it through the high arched doors in Victoria station and even that lifted my spirits a bit - though I had to laugh at how the sun was shining just perfectly so as to suggest that you might spot a winged cherub hiding behing the weathervane on a nearby roof, reading the London Times and complaining about immigrants.

A stand up comedian from the early '90s might say "Ya see, people on this side of the Atlantic are like that and people on this side eat their toast like THAT"
1) Roads are generally much narrower and the single lane's can sometimes feel almost like a tunnel with a sun roof. The breadth of Bank street seems like a footbal field by comparison.
2) Temp employment agencies in London are very popular and numerous. Unlike the ones I encountered in Ottawa, these actually seem to be competent and specialized in a variety of fields. My cousin Suzanne tells me that all of her work in England has been attained through these agencies and that it was been fine for her. Encouraging!