My Celebrity Lookalikes

Lol, cheers for the link bigblue! Hours of fun to be had with this website.. basically, what you do is load in a photo of yourself, and it throws back a list of celebrities that you look like(!), well, apparently! On my first attempt it actually said my top matches were Pierluigi Collina and Deep Roy, now that's scary.

Back again!

So, we got back from Cornwall yesterday. We somehow managed to stretch the journey back to approx. 12 hours, stopping off at Tintagel, Cheddar gorge and Stonehenge along the way. Needless to say, now even more tired than before! So much for a rest down in Newquay, lol.

Oooh!

The graduation video turned up whilst we were on holiday! You know, I think that camera guy was stalking us; there's more footage on there of us than anyone else I think - he just kept creeping up and grabbing more embarassing pictures, lol. I think he was on a hunt for eccentric looking people, so we obliged whole-heartedly. I've put some screen captures up on flickr so you can take a look, they're quite funny!

Oh yeah, I also managed to grab a close-up of me shaking hands with Richard Attenborough, how exciting!

Travels with Zippy

Hello! We just got back from the first leg of our UK tour! In the last four days, we have been up to Nottingham, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Bathgate, Windermere, Kendal, Blackpool, Llandudno, Llanberis, Snowdon, Much Wenlock, and Ironbridge! I'm not entirely sure how we fitted it all in, but we did, and have the photos to prove it, lol, all 300 of them! ;P

Anyway, more later, I have some pictures to upload before we head off down to Cornwall for the second leg!

We took this photo yesterday: after climbing Snowdon; this is the road running from Llanberis back towards Wrexham and Shewsbury!

Lorimers

I heard on the Oxted grapevine the other day that a new Sainsburys local is going to open on the high street. On Monday, James wandered over to J H Lorimers to buy some paint only to discover that they were in the process of moving across the road to where the card shop 'Something Special' used to be; an interesting choice because it's a much smaller building. We reckon the new Sainburys must have paid off Lorimers to shift premises, so that they can nab the bigger building! It's a shame actually because they now only stock half the things they did before, and have completely done away with their toys section, and modelling paints! Noo! I'm going to have to go to Croydon for those now! What they actually appear to have done is merged the two shops together, so now its pretty much the same as Sussex stationers, only without the books. I just hope this isn't a sign of Oxted changing in the same way that Reigate did, into a giant eatery. Hmm.. oh well, it might be nice to have a Sainsburys down the road I guess!

Gerald Kipper

Hmm.. I'm not entirely sure who Gerald Kipper is but I seem to be receiving an awful lot of his junk mail, lol.

Job & holidays

So, on Monday I walked about 30 metres from home for an interview @ friendsreunited, and walked out again 20 minutes later with a job, starting in September. Hooray! That's me sorted for the next 6 months then =) . This also means that we can now go on holiday without feeling too guilty about spending money. We were planning to head off to the south of France; that was however, before I checked my passport and noticed it expired in June! Apparently they can rush me a replacement if I go up to London next week and pay them 80 odd quid, but it won't get here until at least the 22nd which is pretty much the end of our time off anyway!

Being limited to only the UK, we have decided to do it properly: a grand tour. We are thinking of going all the way up to Edinburgh and back again through Wales, and then down to Cornwall for a bit of camping. It should be good, and we can see if we really do agree with what Bill Bryson had to say along the way! Ooh, he's actually doing a show at the Harlequin in Redhill in October, I think I may have to get tickets.

London photos

So this is what we saw on our wanderings..

This was taken in Westminster, sums up London in a strange kind of way.


This is the Royal Academy of Arts; we passed it when we were trying to find Oxford Street. This very large pregnant woman, with peeled back skin (The Virgin Mother by Damien Hirst) towers over the courtyard, it is part of this year's Summer Exhibition, along with some kind of red wooden structure that looked a bit like the foundations for something.


This is inside the Queen's Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue: the stage.



And the ceiling..

London baby, yeah

On Wednesday we decided to go up to London for the day. We haven't actually been there to look around for over two years now, so we thought it was high time we visited! It actually turned out to be a bit of a long day, as I find is always the way with London, you just keep thinking of more places you want to see. I worked out on the train home, we had actually been on our feet for near on 12 hours, as we had been walking everywhere instead of catching the tube! Well probably a little less than that because a couple were spent in the theatre, lol - we managed to grab some half price tickets for the evening performance of Les Miserables from a place on Leicester Square. Excellent! (if a little sarcastic when I asked for cheap tickets, grr).

So anyway, this is the route that we took. We arrived at Victoria, walked through Westminster, past Big Ben and Westminster Cathedral, went past Downing Street and all the hoardes of tourists, and in to Green Park.

I think you can see Buckingham Palace through there across the water if you really squint! The place was absolutely packed with armed guards: both the proper soldier types with cool swords that people try to

make laugh; and the scary ones with big machine guns, who have a 50 metre radius of non-tourist filled space around them.. hmm, no-one fancied posing with those ones for some reason. There were also military helicopters flying above the city the whole time we were there.

Next we headed over to Trafalgar Square, and lunch in the crypt of St Martin in the Fields; a very unexpected place for a restaurant! The food was really excellent there actually, I would definitely recommend eating there if you pass by; I had a nice veggie tart thingy with an amazing salad -figs and slices of orange and all sorts in there, it was delicious and not too pricey either. That is what we like!

Then on to Leicester Square to grab our tickets, Regent Street, Oxford Street, Hamleys and Portobello Road. We took a bit of a detour trying to find Oxford Circus, ended up at the Ritz, and then had to turn back on ourselves, but we did stumble across this random thing that blogger won't let me upload a photo of, sorry!

Then, back to Leicester Square, China town, got lost and ended up in Soho, lol. Back to Leicester Square, then Covent Garden -watched the street performers --there was the guy on stilts that always seems to be there -- and looked around the market as it was closing up for the day! I can't believe the Doc Martin's shop has gone though.

Anyway, on our way back to Leicester Square for dinner we found this camping shop that downstairs has an ice climbing wall! I really think that is the coolest thing I have seen in a shop! I would definitely like to try that one day. The other thing we found was the Australia shop which sells all kinds of stuff ranging from touristy Oz/Nz stuff like cuddly koalas and boomerangs, to special Australasian food as can be bought from Cybercandy. I think we did quite well to come away with only a miniature Aborigine boomerang and a mint Freddo. I love that shop.

We grabbed a slice of pizza and a Planet Hollywood smoothie for dinner before going to see Les Miserables at the Queen's Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. That is such an excellent musical, I've been putting off going to see it because the title does not inspire confidence in a good time, but we really enjoyed it, despite the morbidity! We were also surprised to see Jon from the band S Club 7 playing one of the leads, and then slightly embarassed that we recognised him, hrm.

This is the view of Big Ben we saw on the way back to Victoria. James reckons the speckles are dust particles in the air that the flash is bouncing off. It wouldn't surprise me! We managed to get back to the station just in time to catch the last train home!

Brighton Pavillion

Brighton Pavillion
Originally uploaded by kipperfrog.

On Saturday we popped over to Brighton for a bit of shopping, and a BBQ thingy at Tom's new house, and I spied this view of the Pavillion that I hadn't noticed before. Very picturesque!