Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

It was my last day at Nokia on Tuesday, and it was Zaras last night in Tokyo, so we met in Shibuya and went to Christon Cafe, a final visit before leaving the city. Then on to meet Charles and retire to the Pink Cow for a quick half before leaving too late to catch the train home…

Then wednesday was mostly spent packing and cleaning, with a bit of final shopping for toys in the evening and a last night out with Tracey, Damien and Peter.

“There are some things you’re gonna miss about Tokyo, right?”
“Like neon”
“And musicians on the streets”
“And punk dogs…kawaii”

Yesterdays flight was unexciting, except for failing to land on the first attempt, the previous plane hadn’t cleared the runway so we aborted approach at 500ft, to circle around again. This seems to be happening more and more at Heathrow these days, which suggests their pile-em-high, sell-em-cheap approach to airtravel is cutting it a little too close to the safe limit of what can be achieved with their current runway resources. Terminal 5 can only help this situation….wouldn’t it be better to build up Luton or Stanstead or Gatwick instead? Especially given the traffic situation on the M25 in the Heathrow area. M25 full of holes again.

Then, as a demonstration that the UK can be crazy too, if it puts its mind to it, we passed a bunch of rods on the way home, the most spectacular being a kustom hearse with cruise lights. Wrong, so wrong. I love it.


15 comments

  1. When we came in to land from Chicago to Heathrow last year on our way back from Vegas I looked out of the window as we started banking and climbing really hard and saw a plane coming towards us!

    Which no-one else seemed to think was worrying!

    • They made an announcement that we shouldn’t worry about any planes we can see out of the window since they’re more than 1000ft away…which at 300mph doesn’t take long to cover.

  2. Welcome back! What are your post-roast dinner plans? Will you be at Ed’s party and St. Giles’ Fair? I’ll be in London for all of September, and would love to meet up again, either there or in Oxford.

    • I am, for the moment, staying in Kent with my parents, so London is easy to get to but would have to be daytime/early evening since the trains are crap.

      Whens Eds party?

      • The weekend of 9/11, although I’m not sure if he’s twigged that yet!

        I’ll be doing work experience while I’m in London, so I don’t know what sort of hours they’ll expect me to keep, but I know that weekday daytimes will be out. Weekends and early evenings would be good, though – I haven’t seen you since Roppongi!

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