Tomorrow is my last exam, but I’ve been awful about studying today. I met up with my closest friends at uni for lunch, and we had a grand time in the beer garden of one of our local pubs. A couple of hours later, we finally parted and I headed home to study. However, a friend texted me and asked me to join him and a bunch of mates at the beach, and I just couldn’t resist. The weather today is just beautiful, and as we’re all about to leave I am loathe to miss opportunities to make memories with people I’m not going to see for a long time.

So I went along, soaked up the sun, took some pictures, laughed, accidentally threw a frisbee into the sea and had to go in after it, fully dressed. Several tidal waves came in and soaked me up to my chest, and the two of us just looked at each other and laughed so hard we doubled over. I ended up getting sand everywhere, and eventually I had to leave the party because I’d regained my sense of priority and had to go study. It was a lovely, lovely break though. Cross your fingers that I pass my exams!

It’s beautiful out today, and I had a really lovely day. I was meeting a couple of my best friends for breakfast, but it turned out the place we wanted to go to didn’t open for another hour, so we took a detour to the library and studied for an hour before breakfast. We had a nice breakfast, talked and laughed, then went to the union together and found a corner with the floor-to-ceiling window and sat there on sofas to study for several hours. We got pizza for lunch, growled about having to get back to work, and split up for the afternoon. I walked down the street, spoke to a couple of people, and then went down to the university quad to lay down in the grass and continue working. I didn’t last long before I started just staring at the clouds going by and the birds chirping. I eventually read a little more before I took a stroll down by the sea and took the long way home. 

I figured if I was going to take time off from studying to reread a book, I might as well go the whole way and do it by the beach. It’s lovely out today, though there was a steady drizzle for a little while. There are rumours that Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman are in town filming, but I couldn’t be bothered to chase a rumour or randomly hang around a set, so I walked around it. It was nice to be outside.

I got some beautiful aerial views of Doha as I was flying back to the UK, and I had to take some photos. I’m pleased with them.

Because I was flown out all expenses paid to Doha (for the Gathering the Tide book launch), when I went home for a week (which I paid for) I flew from there because it made more sense. Unfortunately, that meant that on the way back, I had to fly Bahrain-Doha, Doha-London, London-Edinburgh. It took nineteen hours including waits and I was exhausted by the time I let myself into my flat.