Break

First things first – a few people have asked where I’m living, and I’ve found my address. It is:
Armégatan 32-825
171 71
Solna
Sweden

I think that’s how you’re meant to write it, anyway. The name on my little postbox is ‘Tim Ruffner’. This annoys me verily.
So anyway, I’m enjoying a break today. I think I’ve been feeling so tired recently, because I’ve known since January that I won’t be getting a long break until June. Everyone else at Uni has had this week off, is having next week off, and the following week (and some people have the week after that as well). I’ve got today off, and next week as well as the following Monday – which is a nice 11-day rest. Except I have to do numerous assignments in that time. Still, I’m gonna make sure I relax this weekend; I can have a traditional Saturday, listening to Radio5 on the internet. Tradional-ish. So I began my break by getting up at the rather leisurely time of 12:30 (was up past midnight last night watching Family Guy season 5 – it’s SO much better than season 4. Which, frankly, sucked), and watched a bit more crappy TV. Desperate Housewives, followed by Top Gear, followed by Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I don’t really know what channel that would be in England.
Coca-Cola are launching their ‘Coke Zero’ advertising campaign here. So there are loads of adverts saying things like “Don’t you wish you could have weekends... with ZERO end?” And then it says the website, zeroismore.com or something like that. But no mention of the product. I feel a slight sense of smugness in already knowing what it is, but mostly I feel sorry for anyone who might be excited (or even vaguely curious) about what this incredible new thing is going to be. Coke with less sugar. Doesn’t exactly set the pulse racing. I always found the English adverts strange, in the way they were trying to appeal to a male audience (Girlfriends, with ZERO drama); like it’s really tapping into the male psyche to be offering a sweet drink with decreased sugar.

A few people have asked me if it’s snowing here – just to clarify, I haven’t seen a single cloud since being here. It’s been consistently bright and sunny; although I’ve been informed that it’ll cool down pretty soon. But the locals say that it won’t get wintery-cold again, until... well, winter. There aren’t any clouds, but in the far distance, the sky looks kind of grey; if I was shown only that bit of sky, I’d think it was going to rain. But that dank grey colouring gradually fades into the light blue of the sky above me. Just looked out of my window (my HUGE window – they like large windows in Sweden, because they like to let the light in), and I can see the moon. It’s nearly 6pm, and still completely light outside. I can’t recall ever seeing the moon at this level of brightness, at this time of day.

Hang on, I haven’t talked about playing at the Fox yet, have I? I played last Sunday, the night before coming here. It was really good, quite a few people came, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Carl said something along the lines of “I consider you satisfactory enough to perform here again another day”, which really pleased me. The band after me were called Coppers for Karma (www.myspace.com/coppersforkarma), and they were really good. The bassist was happily dancing around, and the guitarist handled the heckling well.
Drunk man: Here we go again, another depressing song.
Guitarist: What? Life’s not all butterflies and bubbles y’know.
I don’t think I made that exchange sound as entertaining as it was. I had to leave before the headlining act, Nathan Persad, because I wanted to get more than 3 hours sleep. Anyway, overall – it was good playing there, and I hope I can do it again; in fact, hopefully Katie and I will play there together in the summer, I think that would go down really well.

I’m missing home a little bit. I miss Tamsin a lot, obviously, but that feeling has been lessened by the colossal e-mails we’ve been sending each other. I miss E a bit as well (sorry I forgot your flower on Sunday, E); shopping by myself sucks. I want to go to Tesco, and justify why I should buy an expensive cheesecake, and then find a packaged tub of ‘Fresh Mashed Potatoes’, and say “How can they call it ‘fresh’, when it’s been processed and then packaged?”

Oh yeah, one last thing – nothing goes off here. I mean, the sell-by dates are really far in advance. My milk actually says Bäst Före 21/05/2007. And some bread rolls were left in my cupboard, which are still good for another 3 weeks. 3 weeks from now, anyway – I don’t know when they were bought.

OK, that’s everything for now. I’ll leave you with a picture from inside a train – an example of how the default colours for anything here is the colours of the flag.