First post in England

Been back over a week now and it still feels a little odd: eerily familiar is the term I've settled for. After finishing university last year I was quite happy to do nothing for two months, but I was feeling restless after just two days this time.

The plane was pretty uneventful (though I suppose that's a good thing), but since you're all obviously dying to know, I watched:

The Stepford Wives - quite entertaining in a silly sort of way, but very annoying characters who refused to act in a consistent manner;

Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban - much better looking than the first film (I haven't seen the second), but the acting was just as wooden and it missed loads of details out of the book - I have know idea whether anyone who hadn't read the book would have known what the hell was going on;

The Sketch Show - I love it;

Creature Comforts - about cats & dogs this time - marvellous!

So much has happened in my life in the last seven months that it's quite a shock to realise that the only way in which Exmouth has changed is that The Matrix nightclub has been imaginatively re-dubbed Matrix Reloaded. As Adam put it, "I wonder how long the finest brains in Exmouth took to come up with that."
That's another thing that's changed actually: I now have a friend in Exmouth. Well, Lympstone. I do, however, have no idea how long either of us will stick around, and I'm considering running a book on which one of us will bugger off first (Adam's probably the 2-5 favourite at this point).

I've been having fun spending lots of money, and getting good service in shops and food establishments: CDs, DVDs, books, clothes. Just call me "Big Spender", or on second thoughts, "Little Spender" lots of times.
I gutted to relay the news that it would cost £70 to fix my camera over here (it probably would have been about a tenner in Dar) and the equivalent camera would only cost 80 quid, so darn it, I'll just have to spend lots of pennies on a shiny new digital effort. Life's a bitch, eh? Unfortunately, the camera I really wanted sold out at a really cheap price on the Currys website just before I bought it. Life is a bitch! This is the sort of thing they should be teaching in infant school: we'd all spend a lot less time being disappointed in later life.

I went into Boots to get my photo negatives put onto CD - I asked them how much it costed, and only then produced the 21 films I wanted to get done. The words "sinker", "hook" and "line" spring to mind. Got quite a good deal too; the negatives, however, were just a teensy-weensy bit scratched, so I've been spending lots of time playing around with them on Photoshop.

This evening we went out for dinner at Donato's (Italian), as a joint birthday dinner celebration for my sister and I. I only mention this because on the dessert trolley they had Sticky Toffee Pavlova, which we could only assume was some kind of pudding-favourite-hybrid, but was in fact just very very sickly sweet.