Pie in the Sky

In a grumpy mood this morning through lack of sleep… The students upstairs were slamming doors till all hours. This sounds worse than it actually is. HMO (Houses of Multiple Occupancy) licensing apparently insist on having self closing ‘fire doors’ with aggressive mechanisms that make sure all doors are kept shut - ie slammed shut. As students keep odd hours, and are always nipping to the fridge, to the toilet, to other flatmates etc to distract from study, this adds up to sustained loud bangs for several hours with four of them criss-crossing the flat every few minutes till 1:30am, when they all settled down. This is not acceptable for normal people.

I emailed the landlord this morning - actually, I wrote it at 1:07am, but amended it this morning before sending - and he immediately contacted the factotum who manages the flat. They have contacted me and confirmed that some of the door mechanisms hadn’t been 'working properly' (Councilspeak for 'slamming shut'), so during the recent Council HMO inspection, they tightened them all up. Hence the sudden slamming - it’s never been a problem before. Hopefully the doors can be re-set to just click shut. I'm so glad the landlord and the factotum are on to this straight away. It would be awful if they weren't bovvered.

I went to see Gravity. What a fantastic movie! I hadn’t realised it was a 3D version today, and I was worried about a relapse of my labyrinthitis with all the spinning around. But it was brilliant. What clever clever people. In one scene, she is crying in the space ship, and a few tears float off and blob around between her and the camera. One blob floats right up to the lens and we see the scene in the blob, inverted. Amazing!!

I even waited right to the end to see The Diva’s name credited!

This advert was nearly as good as the film: Sing it Kitty!!

On the way I spotted Lawrence, standing by his pies. I asked if I could take a photo ('new camera'... etc). He gets up at 5am every day. His shelf wasn’t wonky - it’s my wide angle lens!

PS Though I'll miss all your bon mots, I’m turning comments off for a while till I catch up with myself.