Current mood:	okay
Current music:	Gregorian - Silent Lucidity
Entry tags:	accommodation, egham, hazel close, housemates, life, london, london underground, meals, midland mainline, music, trains

The House at Hazel
Heh, the internet here is verging on the useless. During the occasional periods when it actually works, it’s slower than a snail en route to a dentist’s appointment. Hopefully once we get the router down at the Hazel House, as I have dubbed it, I’ll have broadband which actually is broadband. Gah.

It’s odd. I’ve mentioned before how I seem to be living in two worlds: Nottingham and Egham, and how I can only seem to be in one or the other. Walking along Arndale Way past Egham Tesco’s feels normal, but in a very different way to walking to the Somerfields here on Bramcote Lane. This week has thus been confusing through mixing the two worlds in two days, although I still have difficulty linking them within my mind.

Monday morning was a bit of a rush to get a few things packed for my trip down to the Hazel House and back. Yet I made it to the station on time, and found my train waiting at the far end of the station. I noticed with some surprise that, for once, the reserved seat next to mine actually had someone in it, in this case, a girl about my age. I had the window seat, and thus spent a lot of time staring out of the window at the increasingly-familiar landscape of Middle England come sliding past. I was already listening to my iRiver as we sped out of Nottingham, and barely stopped during the whole journey South, musing on plotlines and the passing landscape. I kept smiling, for no other reason than there was no reason not to, and I figure it comes across better to others when you smile rather than when you frown. Of course, granted I was staring out of the window a majority of the time, it wouldn’t have made that much difference. The girl next to me was also listening to her music player, and I can’t blame her, as a group of ‘Sex & The City’ wannabes were making a horrendous amount of noise a few seats up.

By the time Luton sneaked past, I was enjoying the DDR Disney Eurobeat songs, ready to prepare myself and my luggage for the Underground, but somehow I never stopped listening to my iRiver, singing softly along to Nightwish as Wembley Arch appeared on the horizon. I realised with some degree of satisfaction how used I had now become to this route. Once, over a decade ago, the train to London was akin to a rocket to Neptune, full of wonder and mystique. A few years ago, when the family went to see a Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, it was an experience, made more special through a thunderstorm on the way back. Now, however, I was familiar enough to know the announcements on the train and I could tell how long was left by the landmarks outside the window…the M1, the cinema, Kentish Town Thameslink station, the shining new Channel Tunnel linkline…and then the wide glass of St. Pancras coming to envelop us. As only Midland Mainline trains use St. Pancras, it remains a bastion of the East Midlands in London, but as soon as you step through the doors, the Capital is in your eyes, ears and, usually, nose as well. I left my iRiver playing as I stepped down onto the platforms, and singing along, the smile on my face was genuine. So that’s what life tastes like…

There were few problems getting to the Underground, as I knew the routine by now, and even left my iRiver playing. During my time on the tube, however, it chose to play soft ballads, and with me not being able to change the tracks without taking it out from my protected pockets, I could barely hear anything over the roar of the Victoria line. The train was crowded, and I had to squeeze and shift, but the open window gave much welcomed air, and it thinned out after passing Victoria. My tickets told me to catch a train from Vauxhall, and so that is where I alighted. I had half an hour to spare upon the platforms of this odd station in the shadow of MI6 and with trains passing through all the time but rarely stopping. Using this break, I phoned people to arrange a pick-up in Egham and bought a packet of crisps to curb my hunger, which came around through only having a packet of dessert allsorts and a few slices of marmite toast earlier that day. It was a brief period of silence from my music, and I heard only the rush of trains echoing off the glass windows of British intelligence. I realised that my train would be the slow one via the Hounslow Loop line, but as I’d be arriving in Egham around the same time as Anna’s car, it didn’t matter.

In fact, it was quite relaxing, listening to music softly on a near-empty train gliding along quiet lines in West London, over the leafy, lofty Barnes Bridge and past the green schools of Chiswick and shining offices of the M4 corridor at Brentford. It was almost a jolt when the train left Staines and I realised that not only would I soon need to halt my journey, but that I was back in University country. I almost burst into laughter upon seeing Anna and Amy arrive at Egham station at the same time as I did, and as familiar streets slid past, we were able to briefly catch up before arriving at the new house, Hazel House, where Brian had already been waiting for a few hours, which I didn’t find surprising. Prem, our landlord and a eccentric South Asian pensioner, was also waiting, and soon enough, we were sat on the black leather sofas of the living room listen to him go over the contract. Holly arrived a little later, with a hairstyle the same as my primary schoolfriend Rachel Taylor’s, causing me to do quite the double take.

After the talk, we went on a tour of the house. Helen’s room seemed larger than before, being narrow but long, and Anna’s had gained a futon, which she wanted out, but a few of the rest of us wanted for our beds. Upstairs, Holly’s room had lost the femme exuberance it displayed upon our previous visits, and now was a wide expanse of white with a lovely view. Brian’s room was huge, with three cupboards in the wardrobes alone, whilst Amy’s was small, yet full of shelves, drawers and cupboards, thus setting the scene for a veritable Aladdin’s cave of books and fabrics. My own room was somehow not included, but when I went to have a look, it seemed smaller than I remembered. I noted with some dismay how little shelf and desk space there was, and how hard the mattress was. The ceiling was a nice shade of indigo, yet the shower in the corner will present problems as it is communal, and thus I’ll probably have to vacate the room anytime someone wants a shower and the upstairs shower is in use. It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if I weren’t male-bodied (blast you, body!). The furniture also was too white and sharp for my liking, but then again, I was looking for faults. The garden view is nice, and the position besides the kitchen is moreorless ideal for snacks and my probable position as one of the chefs. Amy’s room would have been brilliant for me, but I’m prepared to make sacrifices (Anna did for me too), and as a survivor of Williamson, I can live with accommodation below the ideal anyhow. That’s life.

So, after we’d had a look around our rooms, we did the obvious thing, and collapsed into frenzied running-around, giggling and shouting at each other from windows. I am pleased to note our high level of maturity in such a situation! Before too long, we were engaged in a group discussion as to how we were going to manage the meal that night, and I outlined a few options before we decided to go to Tesco. Anna, Catherine Mavis, Anna’s sister and schoolfriend of Holly, Brian, Holly and myself thus all set forth in Anna’s car, bustling our way down to the familiar aisles of Arndale Way to get supplies. Anna and Mavis were going back to Mayfield that evening, so they were buying for themselves, and Brian had declared he would only buy for himself and keep his food separate. Amy had outlined plans for a communal usage of food, which was the plan I was running on, and thus purchased primarily for the house, including materials for a meal of pizza, pasta and peas, as well as a variety of spreads, and a few other things, which ended up costing me £22 and left me wondering upon what methods I would be reimbursed, if at all. This may be a system that will require some development. In any case, it seemed relatively moot when we returned to Hazel House and found the oven was not working. With the pizzas thus relegated to the freezers indefinitely, Amy opted to cook the Chinese ready-meals I’d bought as backup, and thus we tucked into microwavable meals of chicken and rice. Holly needed some prompting to eat, as a sleepless night had left her in some state where caffeine alone was all she believed she needed, but otherwise, we ate and discussed parental politics, of all things, as well as families.

Amy left for an early night, and Anna and Mavis had departed sometime before, so the rest of us ended up in Holly’s room for a while, talking about various topics and watching moths flutter against the window in the twilight. Sarah had texted us from her new house, just around the corner, but neither of us visited the other, and at some point, both Holly and I ended up half-sleeping on the futon in Anna’s empty room. I tried getting some rest on my own bed, but with no bed-sheets (leaving me on a hard mattress with many hard loose threads), no pyjamas (I need pyjamas…sleeping in my clothes is blah and sleeping naked is personally abhorrent) and very little of me imprinted on the room, I could barely relax. Brian, Holly and I were thus still awake at midnight, chatting quietly in Holly’s room, although Brian grew quickly exhausted, whilst Holly was more active then she had been since arrival. I’m not sure how awake I was, as I started giggling on the stairs when Brian came to ask me why I’d been staring into his room and I had no real idea that I had been. Holly had given me a sleeping bag to use for my bed, but my mind was in such a state that I ended up using it as a pillow, getting a certain degree of rest throughout the night, but awakening with a stiff back and a slightly off-edge feeling, often caused by distorted dreaming.

To be continued...