Living in London

Hey, hey!
A week and a half since my comeback and I've already posted?! Oh my, something's changed. I suppose I just have a lot to complain about, and thus a lot to write about, now that I live in London and have to experience its horrors on a daily basis. Okay, okay, I'm kidding! ...kind of.

The thing about London is that it's both the best and worst place in the world. On the one hand, it's the world-famous capital that most people in the world dream of visiting if they can afford to. It has history, fashion, art, literature, music... and some of the most insufferable inhabitants that you could ever have the misfortune to cross paths with.

So here we go, a few things I hate about London:

1. Businessmen/women on scooters: I don't know if this is a nationwide phenomenon, but within my first week of studying on the Strand, I discovered (to my detriment) that some businesspeople consider the most practical form of transport to be their children's scooters. Now, I'm not going to judge them simply because they look ridiculous as they glide down the street in their suits, the wind gently blowing their briefcases - if anybody knows anything about me it's that I hate laughing at people embarrassing themselves! No, the issue is that these people have the audacity to scoot on the pavement, my pavement. As a pedestrian, it's both a nuisance and a danger to bump into such people. C'mon, Boris, where's the Boris Scooter? And the extensive plans for a Boris Scooter Path? Oh, you have no plans to introduce it? Because it's a stupid idea? In that case, could you let all those scooting morons know? Cheers.
2. Smelly people on the tube: There are a few different categories of smelly people on the tube who are all pretty difficult to bear:

• People with B.O. on the tube: This is particularly bad during rush hour, when everybody's pushed against one another with about as much space as inside that tiny bag which somehow holds a sleeping bag (until you take the sleeping bag out and can never get it back again). As a girl of frankly diminutive height, I have found myself to regularly encounter a sweaty armpit to the face, which is the last thing I need after having two hours of German speaking and grammar.
• People with bad breath on the tube: Although this problem doesn't affect me very often due to the fact that I rarely am at face-to-face height with another person, I have discovered that morning breath on a packed tube travels through the minimal amount of air which circulates. Nobody wants to breathe in the scent of somebody else's old coffee or their curry from last night. Nobody.
• People who fart on the tube: These people are just sadists. They know what they're doing, tactically farting on the tube so that it spreads to every corner, sparing no souls in the process. This is particularly bad when you're sitting down and a (normally larger) person is standing in front of you. You know where this is going: fart in the face. The worst thing is, though, that then you want revenge. You suddenly get this overwhelming urge to fart in somebody else's face so they know how it feels. Usually that urge dissolves before you're able to muster anything up, but I've heard stories. And so the cycle of sadistic farts continues.
  
  
3. The Northern line: Oh God, the Northern line is so awful. It's slow and rickety, it's in constant need of repair, some of the seats perpetually smell from all the years of enduring the sadistic fart cycle and it's really noisy. The only good thing about the Northern line is that it inspired this song:

Don't get me wrong, guys. There's a reason I chose to study at King's, and it wasn't purely the course and the fact that Ben Schofield works there (I might mention him again later, but we'll see). Living in London is the best decision I've ever made and I genuinely love it. Unfortunately, there are very few things that I love which I don't also complain about all the time. It's pretty much just cats and McFly.

So on that note, I think this is an appropriate time to stop complaining. Expect more complaints about London in the future, because I haven't even been here that long yet. It's a four-year course, so there will surely be an abundance of rants to be made in the future.
Bis später!
x,.

I'M BACK!

I'm going to ignore the fact that I've had a 2-year hiatus and just continue with my upgraded edition of my blog which will, for now, be named GRACEBOOK 2.0.
No, don't worry, even I'm not that square. Nothing has changed, nor will anything change. I still don't like people and enjoy complaining about whatever I can, I still listen to the same music that I did between around 2008 and 2010, and I still have an unhealthy obsession with McFly and cats.

There are a few things that have changed though, namely:

• I've got older, and so I've gone to university to study German with English at King's College London (a course which people still respond to by saying "German? Really? Wow. Good for you, I guess."). Thankfully, I really enjoy it and I don't live with the type of people I was dreading, by which I mean those turdy students who like to go clubbing every night, make lots of noise upon their return and throw up in the sinks. Instead I live with people who enjoy watching The Great British Bake-Off and listening to S Club 7 and Busted. Somebody's clearly looking out for me up there.
• I have a new laptop! This is one of those things that is massively exciting for me but really doesn't translate to the readership of a blog. I had a turbulent relationship with my past laptop: 3 of the keys fell off and the right-click button broke, there was the Mystery Jets-induced virus of 2010 which forced me to re-install Windows and everything else with it, and it often made an unhealthy whirring which made it sound as though it was the electronic equivalent of a sweatshop worker. Yet, despite all this, I had a long history with my old laptop, so it's an emotional situation. Plus, I very slightly miss it purely because Windows 8 is literally one of the worst things that has ever happened to my life, but I'm sure I'll mention that in more detail in a later post.
• What else has changed? Oh yeah, GLUTEN-FREE GRACE AND HER GLUTEN-FREE LIFE. This will undoubtedly be the subject of many a rant on this here blog, predominantly because I can't eat KFC anymore and although I didn't even eat it that much in the first place, you always want what you can't have. It also has led me to dislike people even more than I did before (I know, nobody thought that was possible!), especially vegans. They're even worse than turdy students.

So that's it, really. Expect to hear more rants from my mundane life, as well as the odd music-related post, in the future! As I said before, I haven't really changed very much, so don't expect my posting frequency to improve either. It might be another 2 years until you hear from me again.
Until 2016, ta-rah!
x,.