As a ritual of the usual first post shenanigans, let me introduce myself to Imperial College London’s blog readers.
I’m a current Master of Public Health (MPH – Global Health) student here at ICL from…wait, don’t ask me that. I won’t be able to tell you my hometown…you see, I’ve been moving around too much and am a typical Third Culture Kid (TCK) where I identify with too many places as home. So my usual formulated response to people is that ‘I’m Singaporean, but Indian at heart and went to college in the USA’.
If you think I must be sick of moving around by now, not quite. The problem with us TCKs is that as much as a nightmare constantly being on the go can be, we get so used to this nomadic life. Navigating airports, dealing with jet lag, rattling time differences off your fingertips and constantly finding forgotten currencies in your wallet are a norm. And it feels weirdly out of place when we’re not living this life; these little characteristics become our identity. That’s why after graduating with my Bachelor’s degree in May in the USA, and getting too fidgety with the prospect of comfortably settling back down in Singapore a la working life, I jumped at the opportunity to move to the UK for this MPH. There was plenty more for me to see, plenty more to learn and plenty more to do, and this was the perfect opportunity. And after a whirlwind four weeks of organising my move and settling down here, London is now my current home.
I identify myself as a ‘global citizen’ and its quite apt then that I’m here studying global public health, learning to tackle global health challenges and striving towards ‘mind’ing the global equity gap – be it social, economic or access to resources – that contributes to these challenges. I don’t associate ‘health’ with only just the treatment of ill-health, but with all the things that jeopardise your health in the first place.
Whilst in London, I intend to make the most of living in this gorgeous, historic city. London’s diverse and multi-cultural environment strikes a chord with the international student in me; I’m falling in love with this city. There’s just something about being in your twenties and living in a hustling, bustling yet historic city like London and meeting people from all the world in your everyday life; there’s always something new to offer.
So do follow the blog as I make my way through the course and explore the city’s hidden gems (read mostly as stumbled upon hole-in-the-wall cafes doubling up as my caffeine fix/study spots after I get too tired of the library) when I’m not in class or dancing Bhangra with the Imperial team. There are plenty of posts to come about my journey as an international postgrad living in my fourth country in twenty two years (yet another culture shock!), while studying the best ways to keep our world population fit as fiddles, and keeping my passions of dancing, culinary feasts and travel blogging alive. You get the gist, there’s so much to do but so little time…vamos!!
Well, I could pretend I’m the next Chris Nolan and that this is all part of my grand plan to create an anachronic blog which will eventually make sense when someone in the far future decides to piece it all together. In reality, it’s more an administration issue and this blog will most likely continue in chronological order after the first two posts.
With that out the way, I’m proud to say that I’m officially an Imperial blogger! I’m Abhishek, an aspiring mathematician with a list of interests far longer than it should be. If I’m not trying to convince you that maths is awesome, I’m either jamming to The Strokes on my guitar, navigating through my seemingly endless backlog of anime, or taking photos around the streets of South Kensington. One of my more recent endeavours is in-line skating which has so far been a hell of an uphill climb. If you’ve ever wondered why humans have yet to evolve to have wheels for feet, the first session of in-line quickly teaches you why. Long story short, I spent most of the first session on my back, which only got more painful as the day went on. Frustrating as it may have been, it’s been great to actually improve over the past few weeks and be able to build up a decent pace. Hopefully, I’ll learn to stop sometime soon.
I also woke up today to the somewhat startling realisation that there are only two weeks left of this term. It really feels like Fresher’s was just last week! Managing uni life can be downright crazy at times but, on the bright side, I’ve taken home some very important realisations:
1) Between sleep, work, and socialising, sleep always loses out. If you’ve been gifted with the ability to power nap, you’re already winning.
2) Nothing good happens after 2am. Turns out, HIMYM had a very valid point and sleep deprivation is a big no-no.
3) Setting multiple alarms is usually a life saver.
4) Panopto is always a life saver. It’s terrifying to imagine a time when lectures weren’t recorded.
5) Washing dishes night on night requires an unprecedented amount of mental fortitude.
The most important thing I’ve learned is that it’s important to do as much as you can. There are next to no consequences if you decide something isn’t up your alley, but there’s everything to gain if you find a new sport or activity you really enjoy and a whole bunch of new people to meet! Thankfully (I guess?) mathematicians don’t have any tests until the start of next term so I have a multitude of Christmas dinners and Maple coursework to look forward to over the next fortnight. I leave you with an inspiring image of our bustling union:
I think I might be the only person I know who wishes Christmas wasn’t so soon.
Don’t get me wrong; I LOVE Christmas. Christmas trees are appearing everywhere (including one that randomly appeared on the kitchen table today); Secret Santas are being arranged; and I’m having lots of Christmas dinners in the next few weeks with lots of lovely people. But I still don’t want Christmas to come.
Kitchen Christmas Tree 🙂
By Christmas, I will have finished my first term at medical school.
Meaning that I only have 17 terms left, which suddenly doesn’t seem very long to learn a lot of stuff.
And then I get to go and be a doctor – eek :O
I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was about ten. I was first influenced by my mum’s addiction to Casualty and Holby City. Since then I’ve had to come up with some better reasons for wanting to study medicine to put in my personal statement. All the generic (but true!) stuff such as ‘I’m really passionate about science’ and ‘I want to help people.’ I feel a bit sorry for medicine admissions tutors, having to read pretty much the same thing thousands of times. Although I don’t feel quite so sorry for the ones who decided not to give me an interview. But I don’t care because I didn’t want to go to their medical schools anyway 😛 (ICSM love <3)
The first time I applied to uni I decided that there was no way I was ever going to Imperial. My mum, two aunts and two uncles all studied here; so I, of course, decided I definitely didn’t want to – I wasn’t even going to bother with the open day. Long story short, I applied elsewhere, received four rejections and decided to take a gap year and rethink things a bit. It was then I realised I quite liked the idea of going to study Medicine in London – this was of course because ‘London’s such a diverse city, offering medical students a far greater variety of clinical experience’ – definitely nothing to do with the music scene…
Me (far left) and my friend Mew (far right) with Gabby Young & Other Animals in November. This (London-based) band had absolutely nothing* to do with me wanting to study in London. *I may not be being entirely honest here…
So, I went along to Imperial’s open day and, despite all intentions, fell in love (cheesy, but true). Over the next few months, my purpose in life was solely to get into Imperial – personal statement, BMAT, interview, etc., etc., etc.. It’s been more than nine months since I got my offer, I’ve been here two months and I think that maybe it might possibly just be starting to sink in that I am studying Medicine at Imperial College London!! 😀
I’ve been here for two months and I love it even more than I did at the open day. I’ve learnt a lot (mainly outside of lectures), spent more money than I really should have, deprived myself of sleep and vitamins (until some vitamin tablets arrived in the post – thanks Mum!) and made some wonderful friends.
Some of the most important/useful/random things I have learnt so far:
– Eight hours sleep a night is really not necessary. Five hours at night and then three the next day during lectures works equally well.
– Even if you have had eight hours of sleep the night before, there are some lectures that are impossible to stay awake in *cough*Epidemiology*cough*
– Freshers’ Flu is real (see coughing above.) I’ve been ill since week 2. During the first few weeks, every lecture was accompanied by a constant cacophony of coughing.
– The violin parts for all the songs in ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ (I’ll blog about this soon!)
– A LOT of drinking games
– Looking at stuff under a microscope is actually kinda cool. Or maybe I’m just a nerd…
– It is a bad idea to realise as you step outside in the morning that you’ve left something that you need in your room … on the third floor… up six flights of stairs… (d’oh!)
– When the label on an item of clothing says it shouldn’t be tumble-dried, it’s honestly okay to ignore it.
– ICSM is like one big, happy family – some of the older years told us this when we started, which at the time seemed really cheesy but actually turned out to true… ICSM love <3
Medical students are well known for their motto ‘work hard, play hard’ (or, at Imperial, ‘work hard, play harder’.) At the moment, the first years are neglecting the first part a bit but making up for it by focussing on the second. Far too much fun has been had to write about everything here (i.e. I’m being lazy) but a few highlights have been:
– ICSM MusicSoc’s Weekend Away in Bristol – 48 hours during which we took the ‘Fun Bus’ to Bristol, where we spent a lot of time in various Wetherspoons across Bristol and rehearsed a bit to justify it being a ‘Music’ weekend. The best bit was Saturday night – going for dinner and then to Thekla in our ‘Firms’ and all dressed in scrubs. Depending on year, we were ranked from ‘Consultants’ (6th years) to ‘Work Experience Students’ (1st years e.g. me). My firm was ‘Obs & Gynae’ so our tasks for the evening involved educating people on STDs and contraception… and, randomly, building lots of pyramids (out of ice cubes, ‘wet floor’ signs, people)
– Opera Invasion – a group of us from Light Opera Society went round London trying to complete a list of tasks. We ended up fitting a lot of us in a telephone box and even more of us on a (stationary) Boris Bike; playing hide-and-seek in Harrods; and singing songs from musicals outside of the relevant theatres, amongst other random, crazy, fun things.
Yes, there is a bike under there!Rainbow! Minus orange… and green… and indigo and violet..Light Opera Society creates true works of art.
– Halloween – I never did much for Halloween when I was younger, so dressing up for the Halloween Bop at the Reynolds (Medics’ bar) was very exciting!
Creepy cracked china dolls for Halloween. Left to right: Me, Catkin, Mew.
If my first term is anything to go by, the next 17 are going to be amazing. I used to see medical school as something I had to do to become a doctor, but it’s actually a lot more than that. It’s an amazing experience, and an education (not just in lectures!) Best of all, it’s a wonderful family.
“This is Victoria”, the now familiar recorded message says as I step off the train at my namesake station. “Yes. Yes, it is”, I think to myself.
I am one of 28 students starting PhD research at Imperial College’s new Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet (SSCP) Doctoral Training Programme. This is hosted by the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, although most of my research is at the Natural History Museum, one of the SSCP partner institutions, where I was based for my MSc last year. I will be modelling human impacts on soil biodiversity, combining two of the things I love most: playing with computers and digging for earthworms!
Me outside the Natural History Museum at my MSc graduation
It’s been six months since I was offered a scholarship on the training programme and during that time I have often felt like I am a) dreaming or b) having a huge practical joke played on me. Now I have arrived back in London, reality is setting in and my emotions are careering between the excitement of adding to the pool of human knowledge of my topic; and trepidation, both academic (am I ever going to fully understand statistics?) and mundane (how do I look after myself now I do not live at home?).
I’m sure such feelings are normal at the start of university, but perhaps are more acute for me, since I have a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome – a ‘higher functioning’ form of autism. This affects how a person makes sense of the world, processes information and relates to other people; in particular I find social situations, and noisy crowds very difficult to cope with (yes, London is strange choice of city to study in!).
London’s Oxford Street at Christmas “shudder”
But I’m not on my own; Imperial College has an excellent Disability Advisory Service with their own Autism and Asperger Syndrome Support Facilitator. Together with support from Disabled Student Allowance and my supervisors, these are difficulties I can learn to overcome in the same way I can learn statistics or computer coding.
For me disclosure is the key to success, and I would advise any prospective students ‘on the spectrum’ or for that matter with other conditions, to consider doing so. Just knowing that I have the option to take a break from activities and hide in the toilet if I need to boosts my confidence, and if I’d realised this earlier my undergraduate studies may have been less traumatic.
Given my difficulties, you would not have found me checking out the Fresher’s Fair and bars during my first few weeks but that’s not to say I wasn’t busy getting back into student life at Imperial. At the Grantham Institute I was treated to lunch (free lunches are one of the best parts of being a student) and met the rest of the SSCP students to begin our first joint activity. One of the strengths of the training programme is that it brings together students from diverse disciplines – my group also comprises engineers and earth scientists – and, although I may feel a little out of my comfort zone the expansion of my world view is sure to be a positive thing.
I felt more at home at my induction at the Natural History Museum, especially when given a tour of the ‘tank room’ where the largest fluid preserved specimens are stored. Feeling quite like ‘a fish out of water’ myself over the last few days, I felt an odd sympathy with them.
As I wave goodbye to my tearful mother, it finally dawns on me that I am actually going to live all by myself in a completely new environment, that I will have no choice but to become independent. Which means washing the dishes, grocery shopping and (gasp!) doing my laundry all for the first time. You might think I should add ‘cooking for myself’ to that list but-I am not going to lie to you- I cannot even boil water. Therefore, throughout my three weeks in London, I have depended on cereals, sandwiches and pizzas-in short the diet of a typical student.
Silly me, I forgot to introduce myself: Hi, I am Bayan Al Balushi, a first year Chemical Engineer student. Being 17 means I am practically a child here and, no matter how many times I point out that my birthday is next month, people still perceive that I am too young. I am from Oman (that is a country in the Arabian Gulf, you know, bordering the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia; you would be surprised that only a handful of people know where it lies) where it is warm all year long. So carrying an umbrella and zipping myself in more than 2 layers is quite unusual for me.
Despite the fact that I’d rather stay home with a good book than go out, I tried my best to participate in most of the events. I met a few interesting people at the boat party my hall organised. We chatted the night away huddled in our coats and jumpers but somehow we were still shivering. Seeing the Tower of London and its poppy garden made me realise that I have so much to discover in this great city and I really couldn’t wait to get started. Of course that would mean I would have to take the tube for the first time of my life and perhaps get lost once or twice but that is what makes an adventure.
Freshers’ Fair was a fantastic experience. Everybody is trying to sell you their own society and club with such hopeful faces that you cannot say no to and by the end of the day you would have signed up to some twenty societies and return home only to find that your e-mail is swamped. I was slightly more sensible; I was determined to sign up to only those that I could actually see myself committing to. In retrospect, I might just join a few more as I didn’t have the chance to see every society and club. So wherever your passion lies, you best believe they’ll have something for you at Imperial. And if not, you could just start your own club anyway.
I have to confess that it has been difficult to shake of the lethargy that swept over me during my four month break and get back to work mode. I don’t think I have completely lost my laziness yet, though it was much easier to slip into a new routine than I have anticipated. Hopefully, when I get buried in work I’ll be able to stop procrastinating, have a nervous breakdown and then get on with it.
Overall, it was an amazing start especially since I have been able to make new friendships (not an easy thing for me as I am quite awkward and shy). I know that Imperial’s motto might be ‘work hard, play hard’ but right now just focus on recovering from ‘freshers’ flu’!
Woah, I just checked my timetable and we’re in 9th week? How did this happen?! Time has flown by. It feels like not that long ago I was on the CU stall at freshers fair handing out free washing up liquid to slightly dazed looking freshers. The amount of deadlines that I have coming up are making me cry inside a little but there’s still a lot to look forward to in the remaining three weeks and I’ve had such a lovely weekend.
On Saturday, I went for Thanksgiving dinner at my friend’s house. There are a few American students at my church so they educated the rest of us about Thanksgiving traditions and cooked us the most incredible dinner, including the biggest turkey I’ve ever seen, mashed potatoes, candied yams (essentially, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top that make a crust when you bake it in the oven. It’s as weird as it sounds), green beans, stuffing and pumpkin pie. It was so nice to spend time with close friends and think about how lucky we are to have so much in our lives. I would definitely recommend befriending Americans so that you can share in this fun holiday.
On Sunday I went to Oxford to visit a friend from home. I should have taken photos to post here because it was really beautiful! We walked along the river by Port Meadow which was all misty and mysterious looking, went to church and then did some Oxford sightseeing. This included going to Christ Church college (where they filmed some of Harry Potter!) which was pretty fun because lots of tourists were queuing to pay so they could get in but my friend can bring in a +1 for free because he’s an Oxford student so we just walked in. Christ Church is very very beautiful, it has a gigantic, very stately quad, a meadow, a boat house and a cathedral. It was nice to be able to look around but I imagine that it’s pretty annoying for the students who live and study there to constantly have tourists coming in and out (although apparently they charge the tourists loads during the summer so I doubt the college minds too much). We also visited the Ashmolean Museum which apparently was the world’s first university museum. I learnt a lot about the history of Oxford this weekend.
This week it’s back to lectures after a week of mostly doing a genetics practical. One of my deadlines that’s coming in is writing up my practical in journal format. I found the theory quite hard to get my around so I’m a bit worried but also excited as this is probably the only time I can write myself in as the lead author of a paper 😉
I hope you all are doing well and are looking forward to Christmas xx
I really was not one of those people that “wanted to study medicine since I was 2 years old and had a toy doctors set from my parents”. In fact, I wanted to be a librarian/café owner/ hotel owner for the early years. As I grew older (not taller), I managed to build up a giant selection of teddies. These were soon to become my unexpected patients. My teddies and dolls went though the most horrific traumas and it was my absolute joy to care for them. Granted, the traumas were normally part of some sort of crazy game me and my siblings would play: for example one time there was a “fire” in the bedroom and we had to “evacuate” all the teddies. Much to my mums joy, we tied skipping ropes around the teddies necks and lowered them out the window into the garden. There, the teddies were met by a wheelbarrow that would ferry them over to the hospital.
(Oh yes, the “hospital” was an area of grass in our garden where traumatised dolls would rest and recover before being recycled back into the fire to be dropped back into the wheelbarrow again.)
Perhaps this mock A+E centre in my back garden was the reason I wanted to initially study medicine? The apparent care I took for teddies may reflect into the care for patients…but this is probably completely made up and I was probably just a very strange child.
Come to think of it, it may have been the illnesses I actually went through growing up that convinced me into medicine. I had allergic reactions, dislocated knees, hernias…sigh the list goes on. I loved seeing what the doctors were up to and had a fascination for the work they were doing. Again though, this may have contributed…probably only mildy.
In my interviews, of course the reason I wanted to study medicine was because “I have an interest in science and caring for people…blah blah work experience…blah blah emotional tale from work experience…conclude with a summary line”. But actually writing this blog post and trying to figure out the real reason is racking my brain.
I have asked a few of my friends too, and it just seems that no one really knows. Seems that everyone goes into medicine for a massive mix of noble reasons and influences (cough parents that are doctors cough). I don’t really think I will ever work out what made me want to do medicine initially, what made me doubt going into medicine and what eventually convinced me it was the right thing. What I do know is that I love studying medicine now (most of the time), and I really can’t wait to be a doctor one day.
For now though..this picture below pretty much summarises my medical degree so far.
I’ve been taking part in a Bloomberg journalism class over the past couple of weekends, and this week the homework was to write a blog about our real passion: what we would still spend our time doing if we had all the money we wanted. As you might have suspected, mine is science, so this seemed like an ideal blog for me to post here as well…
Super-energetic super-massive black holes spinning billions of light years apart, from across opposite ends of the universe, seem to have somehow aligned themselves. Time freezes as your spaceship approaches such a black hole.
A quasar! Credit: Space Telescope Science Institute
A digital worm is currently being created that will be an exact cell-for-cell copy of the real thing.
Is it possible to teleport yourself from one place to another?
Is it alive? Credit: http://browser.openworm.org/#nav=0.3,-0.83,20.72
What all these things have in common is that they are all science. They are also all things I have learnt about in the last week, some from my degree and some from outside reading. They are also all really, really exciting.
Science is more than just a list of cool statements and questions though. It is a whole complete and rigorous way of thinking that will allow you to give the best possible answer to any question thrown at you, be it ‘how many molecules of water have passed through that T-Rex’s fossilised footprint?’ or ‘how exactly is the floor holding us up?’
I think science is the most exciting and important discipline of all time, but especially so in recent history. We are living in a world where everyone has computers in their pockets, is connected to every person and all information at any time, using robots constantly held in free-fall around our earth, a world where people without legs can run on super advanced prosthetics, a world of vaccinations, where child mortality is dropping lower and lower.
All those things came about because for thousands of years we have been trying to understand the world around us, and because science works.
Even given all that, saying that science is the most important human endeavour is controversial. And of course, it can’t exist in a vacuum- philosophy and art and empathy are still necessary and fun, but none of those things could have made the Internet or been able to recreate a living worm from scratch. I love to read and write, but no novelist has the imagination to dream up facts and scenarios more extreme and brilliant that those that science can reveal.
And the great thing about science is that it isn’t subjective—a model might be superseded by one that takes into account scenarios not thought of at the time, but if an experiment or an equation is proven, it can be repeated by anyone, anywhere, and at any time in the universe. (Or, at least in theory: some people currently considering burning their lab books might disagree with me.)
It turns out that the facts are really quite nice ones too. Take even something trivial that you might have learned in school – Newton’s laws, for example, that you might remember as the whole F= ma rubbish and endless particles rolling down endless slopes.
Well, it turns out Newton’s laws and so the equations that describe pretty much everything you can see happening around you right now, can all be derived from this simple statement: ‘stuff is lazy’, or more scientifically ‘an object takes the path from time a to time b and position c to position d that minimises the action’.
That statement can be expressed even more simply in this line:
Credit: Me & Lagrange (mostly Lagrange) 😛
Using those few symbols (minus the flower and the bee) you can fire a missile that will land with accuracy on your enemies, or set a pendulum in motion in such a way to prove that we are on a rotating earth spinning at over a thousand kilometres an hour. And a lot of stuff in between that too.
Another great thing about science is that has something to offer everyone. Its whole ethos seeks to improve and better itself, and it encourages people of all ages and talents to ask questions and think for themselves. Anyone can contribute to big science projects with hugely ambitious goals online in citizen science projects where you can discover exoplanets or help machines learn what cancer cells look like.
Zooniverse Credit: https://www.zooniverse.org/
Also I’ve been to loads of science events and seen people cutting up hearts, playing with magnets, chasing people who are dressed up as cancer-killing cells and playing the piano while a robot drums. Science is sufficiently robust to put up with people taking a relaxed and playful attitude towards it— it doesn’t need to be put behind a glass case and only commented on by people who feel suitably well-versed in Post-modernist sculpture (for example :P).
Science has created some of our species’ most memorable moments— be that walking on the moon, or discovering just how remarkably similar our genetics is to every other species on the planet. It requires only a willingness to improve and change your mind based on the evidence, and determination to follow logic. And it is the closest we can ever get to the truth of anything, our best chance to understand our place in the universe and just what it means to be human.
Further reading of exciting things I mentioned 🙂
See a future blog of mine for more on the derivation of Newton’s laws 🙂
Quasars aligned from opposite ends of the universe: article, and paper
Starting this blog, I wasn’t sure how to begin. Do I write an entry about myself? About who I am, what I do? Or do I write about something that’s just happened? Consequently undecided, I put off my first post for a while. However on Friday an event presented itself that I just had to vent about and let out my frustration. Trains suck.
This weekend was my Dad’s birthday, so I was travelling back to my home, Newcastle, for a meal out that night with family. Simple. However, a series of mishappenings resulted in two of the worst hours of my life.
It all began after a day of labs and tutorials, with a frantic, last minute packing of bags and run to the tube station. Upon arrival at the tube I realised something…I’d forgotten my rail card. Too late to return for it, I began to get looks from various people on the tube as my face resembled that of someone who’d just been told a family member had died. “Do I have time to go back? Should I tell the train people when I get on? Can I get a photo of it and show them that? Maybe they won’t check?” I quickly scrambled towards the train, planning to get on, phone my roommate and get him to send me a photo of the rail card. Sorted.
This is where the second problem arose. The train was virtually empty, not a soul. The ticket inspector approaches me and asks “are you on the right train?” to which I reply “yeah the train to Newcastle, right?” The man pauses, “oh you’re on the wrong train, this one doesn’t leave for a while, the Newcastle one was over there, it just left…” The frenzy of swear words that exited my mouth next informed the man that this was not good news. After a confused and loud phone-call with my parents, I make my way to the ticket office to somehow fix this mess. This is a good summary of the conversation that came next:
The earliest train would be 7pm, arriving at 9 45, meaning I would actually be able to make it to the meal. Brilliant. It was already 5 45 and getting to halls then back to the train station would take at least an hour and a half. Not so brilliant.
What ensued next was a high speed chase back and forth across central London to retrieve my rail card, buy the cheaper £80 student ticket and get home. Here I was, at rush hour, three heavy bags in tow, running through King’s Cross tube station praying for a machine gun to mow down the droves of tourists/Christmas shoppers infesting the Piccadilly line. With my prayers unanswered, I was forced to battle my way out of South Kensington tube station, splitting my shoe open in the process and grazing my foot. Five minutes to halls, grab my rail card and my credit card, confuse my roommate who thinks I’m already half way home, run back and board the tube. It was now 6 30 and the tourist infestation had worsened.
Running up and down stairs and escalators, through underpasses and streets, in a coat and scarf. My originally nice dress clothes were starting to become rather moist and creased. I don’t like moist clothes. I don’t like the word moist. I arrived at King’s Cross at 6 50…the train would be leaving in ten minutes. At this point I was going to give up, I wouldn’t make it, even if I ran, all it would do is further moisten my clothes. I should just go to a café, get a coffee and wait for the next train, and just see my family after the meal.
But I wasn’t going to be defeated. I jumped out of the tube doors just as they opened, sprinting up to the station and miraculously making it to the ticket machine for 5 54, and haphazardly bought what was hopefully the correct ticket. Onto the platform, I was mindful to actually board the correct train this time. One positive thing happened at this time. In my rush, my phone slipped out from the pocket in my coat which I was carrying. Having sighted the correct platform I quickened my pace. At the same time I’m chased down by a man waving something in the air. It was my phone. The joy on my face when the man handed over my baby. If you ever read this nice man in coat, thank you so much!
I kept my phone tightly clenched in my hand and boarded the train, asking about three people on it that it was going to Newcastle and that my ticket was the right one. I took the only available seat, the disabled one (great legroom), and collapsed into it, blasting music into my ears for the next three hours in an attempt to banish the last two hours from my memory. I had won. Sat in the chair, tired, angry, my arms in spasm, sweating profusely, my shoe broken and £80 down, I had won.
I arrived at the meal two hours late, but I made it! I had my food…my drinks, and saw my family. A great time was had by all.
So I’ve learnt a few things from this experience, mainly that trains probably aren’t the best material for an introductory blog post (that will come in the foreseeable future), but also some others:
Trains suck
Before you travel remember the most important thing you need to travel
A nice man in a coat is out there somewhere
The predicted time of journey on citymapper is a lie
I’d just like to introduce myself – my name’s Nebz and I’m a postgrad student here at Imperial College doing a master’s degree in Preventive Cardiology.
I love blogging, but I’m afraid to say I’m a bit of a mixed bag, and over this academic year I’m sure I’ll be putting up a random spread of posts on different topics. So while a lot of my posts will be about graduate life at Imperial college and my adventures around London, if you’re also interested in reading about:
faith
music
fashion
dance
drawing
creative writing
Japanese culture
Skateboarding
science (in particular cardiology *cheesy grin*)
Then please drop by every now and then because I may talk about these things!
By the way, you might not be able to see what I look like now, but I can assure you pictures are coming soon 😀
