Another day where I got surprisingly little done

Considering that I got up at 8, cleaned my room, did my washing and got all papers organised in preparation for the 'read-a-thon' I somehow managed to falter and wind up pretty much wasting the best part of a day. Got two volumes of Freud to read tomorrow: Art and Literature, and The Origins of Religion, which look to be an interesting read, especially that when you consider that it's the old boy's 150th anniversary.

I'm still reading Bleak House, which I fervently recommend to anyone with a taste for Victorian literature or the Gothic tradition. Like so much of Dickens' work you find yourself sinking into a fetid, rotting vision of London with its opulent landed classes and miserable poor. I have no great fondness for the capital, so this novel feeds right into my dislike for big cities. Large numbers of people put me on edge and fill me with an unsettling feeling of paranoia; I half expect something terrible to happen at any minute, or else find myself hopelessly lost in some forsaken district miles from familiarity. I'd much rather live in a foreign city where such anxities merely blend into the general malaise of being out-of-place. For some reason I never feel the same degrees of uncertainty and anxiety in foreign cities, and actually enjoy the feeling of geographical alterity.

Went down into the cellar today looking for a bucket. I live in an old coverted retirement home with a rag-tag collection of other students. I think the building dates from the late Edwardian period, although I'm probably wayout with that speculation. Needless the say the cellar is vast and closeted. There a number of rooms which have been bolted shut with their vision panels painted over, so I assume that are home to some hideous starving monster, or perhaps the video surveillance room. The last room on the right is absolutely filled to capacity with bric-a-brac and verious other useless bits of tat that would no doubt fetch a pretty penny on e-bay. I also suspect there are rats down there.