PinkyB

Aw, thanks for the thanks about my "Tiny Little Things..." thread! I hereby return the favour. Nothing beats waking up, turning over and looking at the clock and realising it's only ten past five and you can go back to sleep for another nearly two whole hours! (Conversely there's not much more annoying than waking up half an hour before the alarm goes off. Not enough time to get back to sleep properly, but just long enough that you'll be yawning at your desk all day.) I think you should change the title of the thread though - apparently you get more hits with a title that sounds like a Fall album!

I went to see a house a few months ago that advertised itself as being in West Dulwich. In actual fact it turned out to be so close to Tulse Hill that you could see the platform at Tulse Hill station from the window of the room. On the way home I waited twenty five minutes for the one bus out of there that only runs 3 times an hour, and then witnessed a violent argument between several strangers that ended in death threats and the bus driver barricading himself behind his little glass door and threatening to call the police. West Dulwich itself (not the bit that's actually Tulse Hill) has some nice streets, and NOTHING ELSE GOING FOR IT WHATSOEVER. No shops, no nightlife, no restaurants, no buses out of the damn place. It's also dead as a dodo at night, and therefore not a very nice place to find yourself waiting for that three-times-an-hour bus. Unless you drive, and thus have an easy means of escape, I wouldn't bother.

And their "free bag" is so pathetically tiny you can literally only get a sandwich and a banana in it. If you buy anything larger than this (like, ooh, 99% of everything else in the shop), you won't get it in and will thus be forced to ask for a larger one that you have to pay for. I actually don't object at all to paying for carrier bags, what pisses me off is that they've got round the objections from customers who do by providing a free bag that no-one can actually use. Utterly pointless all round. On an entirely different note, I can't quite believe this thread is still going! I posted it in a fit of annoyance and it seems to have taken on a life of its own. I suppose it just goes to show how many tiny little annoying as hell things there are in the world. A new one: people from The North who keep bringing it up in conversation as though its in some way relevant. Usually in the context of trying to show how "real" they are. "I'd never heard of polenta until I was thirty. Mind you, I am from the North..." As though everyone South of the Watford Gap grew up eating polenta for breakfast every day! Honestly, I can't tell you the number of times people have made assumptions about my background purely because I'm from the South of the country. Hey, we have sink estates and unemployment and went to normal schools and ate normal food too, you know. Some of those rundown little towns along the South coast have some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Actually, Devon and Cornwall have the highest unemployment rates in the country... It's just as bad as someone from the South assuming that everyone in the North keeps coal in their bath and races pigeons (and has anyone actually really believed that since about 1936?) Grrr!

Except that the bus to Oxford Street currently doesn't actually GO to Oxford St, it only goes to Tottenham Court Road. This will continue until the area around the Astoria is redeveloped for the Cross Rail project, so at least a couple of years! Obviously if he works at the TCR end, that won't be a problem, but I wouldn't fancy walking the entire length of Oxford St in rush hour twice a day.

Damn, really? another Somerfield? Isn't one crap supermarket in the area enough? Oh, and I did search for "supermarket", but nothing relevant came up. Mind you, not one search I've ever done on here has ever worked, so it's not exactly a surprise.

About 4 shops have been knocked into one just down from the Plough on Lordship Lane. I was told by a man who lives opposite that it's going to be a Tesco Local or similar. There's no official sign or other indicator as to whether this is true, but it does look the right size. (Unless it's going to be another unnecessarily enormous branch of Foxtons, of course) I reported it back to friend who said he had also heard this rumour, which suggests to me that maybe it's more than a rumour. Obviously it would mean death for the various Costcutter type shops in the area, but handy for the people who live nearby and don't want to have to get a bus up to FH Sainsburys to get their shopping or down to Somerfield in ED. LL is a very long road, after all! Anyone heard anytihng official?

Saw an unbelievably obvious drug deal on similarly leafy Underhill Road a few months back. Two teenage boys ostensibly waiting at bus stop but incredibly nervous and jittery, ten seconds later a black Beamer pulls up on other side of road, one of the kids runs over, gets into passenger seat, is there for less than ten seconds, then gets out and runs back to the bus stop again, while car drives off. What made me laugh was that shortly afterwards the P13 (which only runs 3 times an hour) pulled up and the boys got on. I like to think that they arranged the time of their drug deal so they didn't have to wait too long for the bus home afterwards.

Oh, God, cider and black! It's the devil's own concoction! I was also at Leicester Poly, although the first year it changed its name and tried to pretend it was a proper university. Perhaps there's something in the water in the Midlands? I also distinctly remember a cocktail bar called Gaudi's on the ring road that only let you in if you were a student or a nurse, and seemed to have a permanent happy hour. I remember once drinking four Long Island Iced Teas, going to the loo, throwing up, and then coming back out again and immediately ordering another four, because happy hour was about to end. Leicester was also where I learned that it's better to stick your fingers down your throat as soon as you get home and at least get a decent night's sleep afterwards, than wake up two hours later and projectile vomit on your shoes. I didn't learn much else there, it has to be said. And even happier, twelve years later, I'm still paying off my student loan! Thanks to the Tory Government for bringing in that one. That's basically a twelve year long hangover, I suppose.

It would be the time I attempted to throw a party in my first term of university,to which precisely eight people turned up. The highlight of the "party" itself would have been two girls wrapping a bloke in toilet roll for a laugh - that's how dull my party was. After this I attempted to drown myself in the sink in shame, and then decided to leave my own party early because it was so bad. I then attempted to get into the back of a Mini with a strange man who was about to drive all the way to Cornwall (I lived in Leicester at the time), spent an hour in the kids playpark on the roundabout (advice to everyone: don't combine alcohol and roundabouts), and staggered home at the fine late hour of only half past eleven to find the house deserted, the door wide open, my front room full of loo paper and peanuts and a strange girl asleep on the sofa. The following morning (or possibly afternoon) I awoke (or maybe I didn't), crawled up the stairs on my hands and knees to the bathroom because things were spinning so bad I couldn't lift my head off the carpet, threw up, and crawled back to bed again. I then hallucinated that the neighbours had complained about the noise (well, to be fair, the Dead Kennedys aren't exactly easy listening) and the one broken bottle of Kiwi fruit 20/20 that someone had left in the gutter, that a witch-hunt had been formed to report me to the landlord, and that I'd been evicted and all my belongings thrown out in the street. I woke up absolutely convinced that this had genuinely happened, weeping, hysterical, unable to move my head, and in a bedful of sick. I haven't had a party since. Or touched Kiwi Fuit 20/20. I've had other hangovers, of course, but nothing has ever come close to this, mainly because usually when you have a hangover, you at least know that you had a good time first. Sadly, in this case, I can't even say that.

I think this thread has started to venture into the realms of great big things that nobody could possibly have a problem with, eg: "rude people". Getting back to the teeny tiny trivia: When I'm drinking a bottle of something in the street and the lid falls off and rolls into the gutter so then I have to walk around for the rest of the day with a bottle with no lid on and assistants glaring at me in shops in case I spill water on their goods. When you buy a pint at the bar and they give you your change on a tiny little tray. This is not New York, you are not Tom Cruise in Cocktail, and I am not leaving you a tip for pouring me a pint, stupid little tray or not. When you buy something in Boots and they insist on giving you a pointless discount voucher for something you didn't want in the first place. And then seem incapable of understanding that not only have you not got a Boots card, but you don't want one, either. Shop assistants who man the doors and say, brightly, "Good morning!" and "Thank you! Goodbye!" when you enter and leave the shop. How about you concentrate on making sure the clothes are on the right size hangers and there isn't a 20-person long queue for the till instead? People who tell you that they're sorry, they've let the room to "a friend of a friend" and then continue to advertise the room on Gumtree, Moveflat or the ED Forum for several weeks afterwards. Why not just be honest, for ****'s sake? Chances are I didn't like you either!

Xena, they're very different styles indeed. Art Deco is all streamlined curves and simplicity, whereas Art Nouveau (a style that flourished at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, mostly in Europe) is a wonderful combination of elaborate decoration, flowing lines inspired by nature, and austere modern design. Not that many examples in London, unfortunately. In Britain arts & crafts style (William Morris, etc) took hold more than art nouveau, and those artists were mostly interested in furniture and textiles and small design rather than buildings. The Black Friar pub opposite Blackfriars station is definitely the best example, but there's also the tiling in Harrods meat hall (seriously!) and the Fox & Anchor pub in Islington. For the best Art Nouveau architecture experience you should go to Vienna if you can, it's an amazing city. I went a few years ago and spent the whole time staring up in awe at all these incredible buildings. It's not even just major public buildings, it's in the shop signs and lifts in old apartment buildings and park benches and especially the metro stations by Otto Wagner, which are some of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. I hope to go back one day and see them properly, especially as my camera broke last time and none of the pics came out, grr. List of most famous European Art Nouveau buildings with lovely pics: http://www.greatbuildings.com/types/styles/art_nouveau.html

Hi Asset, Apologies if I inadvertently offended you by posting this in the wrong section, I have only recently discovered the forum and this is my first foray out of the Property & Wanted sections. Thanks for the lovely warm welcome, though!

People who wait at pedestrian crossings and don't press the button. Do they think they're so important that the traffic will just stop for them of it's own accord? This is especially annoying when I'm trying to cross the road at Forest Hill station to catch a train that leaves in 1 minute, and even more so when I arrive at the crossing to find a small crowd of people all apparently too stupid to realise they need to press the button to get the traffic to stop and thus cross the road. Aaargh!!!

Just went for a recce (I live round the corner) and couldn't see anything obviously dfferent. No new signs up, no sign of building work, nothing. Perhaps MissPiggy79 saw some people from the council just coming to have a look round or something? Who knows!

I hate the self-service checkouts; never use them. Having said that, I also hate ED Sainsburys - too big, too chaotic, too many people, long queues. I go to the smaller Sainsburys in Forest Hill. It has everything I want (and if it doesn't I don't know any different!), I can whizz round quickly because the aisles aren't blocked with families doing their weekly shop with massive trolleys, and I don't end up spending hours in there dithering over the vast amounts of choice you get in the larger place. It's just a much more pleasant experience all round. I know, imagine, someone sticking up for Forest Hill on the ED Forum! (Their train station's better too!)