Industrial strength shopping

Bank holiday by myself saw me at an eerily empty Oxford Circus at 9.45am. Moped around outside Nike town waiting for it to open and blazed through to Covent Garden via Oxford Street in a whirl of changing rooms and shopping bags the second the clock struck 10. I didn't spend horrendous amounts of money, but the rate at which my bank account ticked down was scarily efficient. I was back at Earl's Court by 3.30pm with heavy bags and a persistent shoe-shaped hole in my heart because everyone knows that you never find what you initially set out to buy.

I can't help but feel that all British highstreet brands are pretentious and really not worth the blinding amounts of money they charge for what is clearly Chinese merchandise. Take, for instance, a pair of £140 pumps at Russell & Bromleys that maybe, sorta, kinda look like last season's Salvatore's. Without a second's thought, I would definitely pay that extra £100 for this season's originals, except for the fact that my conscience forces me to wait for the Boxing Day sales to make the guilt-ridden acquisition.

There's nothing to watch on TV now that the Olympics are done. The closing ceremony was as awe inspiring as the first. I felt the slightest stirrings of resentment in defence of the mother land when some British anchor person on TV pointed out that the IOC president didn't say that the Beijing games were the best ever, just 'truly exceptional'. More amusing, however, was the reiterated message about how hosting the Olympic Games is not about putting on the most expensive show ever. The London Games will have a budget of £9Bn compared to the £22Bn tab the Chinese have racked up, and based on inflation rates and the spiralling economy, that'll be something like £40 and a tin of baked beans by the time 2012 rolls around.

Anyway, I'm out of here. Weng is napping on the cushion next to me (very stressed out about not being stressed out about his impending exams, go figure) and is giving off an uncomfortable amount of heat in our sweltering 22 degree weather (there is no aircon!).

Fantasy Football: Arghh

It's back to the new EPL season, the first weekend of which was overshadowed by Britain's unexpectedly good medal haul in Beijing. After being out of touch with the Premiership for the better part of last year and most of the transfers over summer, I completely bombed the first weekend of Yahoo! Fantasy Football through a mixture of injuries, poor choices, and unfamiliarity with the new layout. Anyway, I'm sitting cozily at the bottom of the table, a real positive start to the season.

Couch potato eventing at -7 Beijing time

The Olympics is owning me. I eat, sleep, and breathe live text updates. Because of a horribly twisted confluence of technology-related circumstance, we cannot stream anything from anywhere in a time when all of the biggest television providers are raving about their 100s of hours of live coverage now available online. The rest of England, however, must be streaming every second of the Olympics because our connection speed is horrendous. Live morning finals for the convenience of the American public and us sitting in that awkward timezone between Beijing and the eastern seaboard have conspired to leave me fighting unconciousness for the rest of the day.

Having been inspired by the swimming feats in the Water Cube, I finally hit the gym last night. It was a really good feeling for the first six hours while my body was in shock from the sudden onslaught of exercise; less welcome was the ravenous hunger that made up all hours between breakfast, tea, lunch, tea, and dinner today, and even less welcome, the deluge of guilt following my high-calorie cravings, all of which have finally been sated after a huge KFC dinner. In the words of the immortal Donald Duck, "Ah phooey."

On other fronts, I am getting better at foosball and will one day beat the German and the American.