I went to Fenwicks today to buy a set of shoe laces and a some nutcrackers — an eclectic mix, I'll grant you. Fenwicks is a department store which specialises in confusing geographical layouts. It's taken me quite a while now, but I do have some basic idea of the organisation there; when I first arrived at Newcastle, I used to get lost and once had to phone the fire brigade to come and rescue me, entering in the morning and leaving in the early evening.

Today, I went first to the kitchen section, forgetting that it now sells shoes, and that the toy department downstairs sells kitchenware. So, I popped downstairs to the toy department for the nutcrackers, came back upstairs to the kitchen department to get some shoe laces. Sadly, they didn't sell shoe laces — this would have been considered too logical and, therefore, against standard retail practice. Instead, they directed me to either the haberdashery department or the in-store Timpsons — people who cut keys and mend shoes. I decided against the haberdashers on the grounds that "haberdasher" is a stupid word. The Timpsons is to be found, straight-forwardly enough, in the food court, where I found the shoe laces (75cm, black, round). Sadly, Timpsons is not Fenwicks, even though the tills said "Fenwicks departments store", so while they could sell me the shoe laces, they couldn't sell me the nutcrackers. So, I walked through the sushi bar to the perfumeria which is convieniently located next to it (raw fish and perfume being natural bedfellows) and paid for the nutcrackers there.

The shoe laces are a bit short.

Got struck down last night with a major bout of insomnia. I was still awake at 4am, staring at the ceiling. I guess I was a bit stressed about work having come back from holiday last weekend, travelling a lot, and then straight to work.

In the end, I got up and watched my latest Amazon DVD; luckily it was light and breezy — An Inconvienient Truth. Actually, it was pretty good; wildly American-centric of course, although I guess the temperature graphs look more impressive in Farenheight as the numbers are so much larger.

This set me to thinking about my Christmas and New Year. Christmas was at Worcester, then I went to Tuscany for New Year. Most of the time, we stayed in an Agriturismo in Sinalunga. These agriturismo places don't have an equivalent in the UK; basically, you get a farm building, kitted out for living, on agricultural land. They get tax breaks so they can be pretty cheap. They are very popular because they help you get back to the rural idyll; at this time of year, this roughly translates as the freezing cold. So, we got through a ton of wood (literally) between 10 people for 5 days. Adding it all up in terms of fuel assuming the fuel is all carbon (wrong obviously).

Newcastle -> Worcester 15kg C (based on 20 litres consumption)
Birmingham -> Milan 55kg C (based on what it said on the plane door).
Milan -> Sinalunga 10kg C (shared with others, based on 30l).
Sinalunga -> Milan 10kg C
Milan -> Birmingham 55kg C
Worcester -> Newcstle 15kg C

Wood, 100kg (1 tonne by 10 people).
Kerosine 40kg

Makes a round 300kg of Carbon emited, or around 4 times my body weight (well, okay, 3.5 times then).

Which is about 1/30th of my Carbon footprint for this year, in two weeks, not including food and everything else.

What can I say? I was feeling much more relaxed about work stresses afterwards, so in a wierd way, I guess the film worked. I managed to get a whole 2 hours before I got up to give a lab meeting talk to four people.

Well, back in one piece and in Newcastle. The Claremont Tower is cold and dull. I have 300+ emails. I think I want to go back.