What you must understand when you walk past what looks like a derelict shed, is that Billy Bunter’s is not for you or I, it is not for perambulators. By day, there are few signs of life. The hut has turned its back to the street and has no time for the Tesco Metro that lurks behind it. Sports Direct is also of no interest. The little window from which customers are served faces not back onto the pavement, not back into our mortal realm, but outwards, outwards over the timeless expanses of the A11. And sure enough, who should I see parked outside her, late that night, lined up in the glow? Taxis. The London cabbie, come to refuel.

They will serve you, even if you don’t have a taxi, but tread softly – they have no time for your ironic moustache. We’re not in Dalston anymore. Creep closer; examine the menu. You will find options like ‘The Gutbuster’ for £3.80, or ‘The Breakfast Box’ at £4.25. That’s right, ‘The Gutbuster’ isn’t even the biggest option. Sometimes a busted gut isn’t enough. Think about that.

I approached cautiously; the local kebab shops and fried chicken joints had long since closed, but Billy Bunter’s grimy lights shone like a beacon in front of me. The neon sign that once said ‘Open’ now only says ‘Ope-’, but to me this was no circuitry problem. That ‘‘ope’ had dropped an ‘H’, not an ‘N’; it was a cockney ‘Hope’. I felt good. I had a cheeseburger. I took a bite. Instantly I found myself at the other end of the A11 – transported by the magic of Bunter’s straight back to my childhood. Back to watching Cambridge United on the terraces of the Abbey Stadium and eating the exact same burger, among the exact same burly, slightly intimidating men. It was very intense.

I was still reeling when one of these silent men appeared next to me and said to the window, ‘Bill, I’ve got no change – I’m sorry.’ The face behind the glass, framed with grey hair and spectacles, sighed, but nonetheless made the man a cup of tea. I thought, then, that he might be the actual Billy Bunter. Mr Bunter, still there today, hard at work in his hut. He must have noticed me staring because he stared back, suspiciously. He looked a bit like Samuel Beckett, albeit after a couple of gutbusters.

‘Any ketchup?’ I said, and felt like a fool.

I recently returned to London after an absence of two years, two years spent living in a Caledonian penury. Have you ever read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Exactly.

Only joking! Scotland’s great. Seriously, if you say things like that the Scottish Tourist Board will come after you with their claymores (old Scottish swords).

I have noticed that things have changed while I’ve been away. Where is The London Lite? Where is The London Paper? Where is Metro? Oh wait, there’s Metro. Good old Metro; the turd they couldn’t flush. The light-weight lifestyle freesheets that used to be handed out at every tube stop, and which I pretended not to read, have been swept aside, clutched at only briefly by that famously drowning man, print journalism. But what has replaced them? Well, once a week there is Stylist, and once a week there is Shortlist. Clothes for the ladies, footie for the fellahs, what could go wrong? So the marketing men must have thought. And, to be fair, they may perpetuate some gender stereotypes but I actually think that both are a decent read. Definitely an improvement.

What I find troubling, however, is the new (to me) omnipresence of The Evening Standard, which is now free and run by the well-loved Russian oligarch, and puncher of his enemies, Alexander Lebedev. I dimly remember at the time some vague attempts to rebrand the paper as less rabidly right-wing. Those attempts clearly didn’t take root, because the Standard remains the most gleefully union-bashing, protestor-belittling, Boris-loving rag in town. It seems a shame that the only free newspaper left is so nakedly and unpleasantly political. I preferred the innocent days of watching the drunken children of celebrities fall out of nightclubs. As The Evening Standard shows, when you give your product out free you don’t need to care about the opinions of ordinary readers. Or maybe Londoners really do love bankers and hate teachers.

Anyway, who knows what the future holds for newspapers – I really hope they survive in the wake of all this technology and phone-hacking. Can you do a crossword on a kindle? Well, yes, but it’s not the same. Go paper! A luddite shouts in the brightness.

I like Ryan Gosling. I think he’s cool. I liked him when he was playing a man who embarked upon a loving relationship with a blow-up doll (Lars and the Real Girl), when he went through a painful break-up with Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine) and when he taught a struggling Steve Carell how to seduce beautiful ladies (Crazy, Stupid Love). My all-time favourite is the one where he moves to a quiet Cambridgeshire village and becomes friends with a fair-haired British man and they roam around the countryside having adventures (my imagination). But why do my instincts tell me that I would get on with Ryan Gosling, while at the same time remaining comparatively unmoved by someone like James Franco, who has a PhD at Yale, sawed off his own arm (127 Hours) and likes literature? Franco is just like me (apart from the PhD and the arm), but it isn’t the same.

I believe the answer to this and many other questions lies in Ryan Gosling’s perfectly symmetrical face, with its soft yet masculine features.

It is a handsome, reassuring face, but it has the kind of blankness onto which you can project almost anything. While I might like him because he seems a bit ‘thoughtful’ and reflective, others may look at him and see a real tough guy Gosling, a man’s man (like in Drive), and others will see the total babe romantic Gosling we all know and love. Who could forget his divine performance in The Notebook, officially the girliest film ever made. His face is versatile, it contains multitudes. He makes for a very believable feminist. He can be both the guy that guys want to be mates with and the guy that girls want to go with. In that respect he reminds one of George Clooney, with whom he appears in Ides of March and to whom he bears a rather striking resemblance (above). Theirs is the true Hollywood face. It is a face that could play a president or a thief equally convincingly.

It is also the face of Ronald Reagan, the movie star who became a president. In his open face, people saw themselves. And they were convinced enough to vote for him, time after time. Blankness has power. Many people have remarked that there is a convenient blankness in Stephenie Meyer’s descriptions of Bella, the heroine of Meyer’s Twilight books. She is given very little discernible personality or appearance. This absence of character means that any young, female reader can project herself into the story – learning all kinds of rather unsavoury ‘lessons’ about sex and relationships as she does so (or so I hear). The result? Millions and millions of sales. Yet I am sure Ryan Gosling would never stoop to this kind of thing. He has a perfectly symmetrical face, with soft yet masculine features.

When Herman Melville considers the ‘Whiteness of the Whale’ in Moby Dick the whiteness is so disquieting as it manifests simultaneously the absence of colour and all the colours mixed together. His blank is something that defies comprehension. Our modern blankness, on the other hand, begs to be be whatever the onlooker wants it to be. At its root there is a narcissism – we fill the blankness with self. It is too comfortable. We better watch ourselves (irony intended).

With apologies to James Franco, a good kid doing his best.

Last weekend was actually a bank holiday, which makes little difference to me but meant that those with a job also had yesterday off, so we all went for a nice little wander near the Cambridgeshire village of Bartlow. Bartlow is interesting as the site of a collection of Roman-era burial mounds (pictured above c.1900) that are very impressive but not at all well-known. The ‘Three Hills’, as they are now known, were once part of a group of seven mounds, four of which gradually fell victim to either agrarian innovations, or the needs of expansionist aristocrats demanding space for their various gazebos and greenhouses. These same landowners did, however, recognise the priceless archaeological value of these mounds and, in the 19th century, performed several excavations beneath them, uncovering pottery, bones, jewelry, relics etc etc all that good stuff. Sadly, these discoveries were stored in a nearby country-house that promptly burned to the ground, destroying everything inside.

It struck me that at the time the unfortunate people who owned the house were probably happy that they had at least managed to save themselves from the inferno, while modern day archaeologists must secretly be a bit disappointed that our Victorian forebears spent quite so long rescuing each other when they could have been saving these irreplaceable mound artifacts. It’s all about context, I suppose.

Some mild trespassing also revealed that times are rather harder for English landowners nowadays than back then. The country house at Bartlow once had its own railway line, now mossily defunct, and the several enormous old Victorian greenhouses still standing are totally overgrown and abandoned, inhabited only by a local old man growing some plants that I can only assume were ‘medicinal’. There was also a rusty old circular saw, seemingly straight off the set of Final Destination 5. The manor house itself, which we could see only at a great distance, was immaculately shuttered and well maintained, but clearly empty. These days it is probably owned by a banker, rather than anyone with the remotest connection to the surrounding estate. It was a bit spooky, but somehow the place retained an air of strange magnificence. England is a curious country, and that sometimes makes up for the weather.

I should clarify that I used a bucket to do the scooping, rather than my bare hands, and that the neighbour’s garden has a convenient patch of wasteland for just this sort of emergency. Luckily we are between neighbours at the moment (why don’t people want to live next to us?), so no-one saw my entire family go all hands to the pumps or complained about our methods. The next day a plumber came round and charged an obscene amount of money to fail to fix the problem – typical. I’ll be going Polish next time. We just have to hope there won’t be any more torrential rain; East Anglia is supposed to be in drought.

I have also started driving again, after an interlude of about five years. So far it has gone ok, a couple of hairy moments and false starts aside. I drive like an old lady, but at least the streets of Cambridge remain safe-ish. For some reason the terrifying adrenaline-rush I feel when I get behind the wheel translates in to a strange urge to sing and crack jokes that some might say borders on hysteria. Is this normal? If you see a cackling man driving a clapped out old Saab around Cambridgeshire you’ll know who it is. Other than that, I’ve been doing a bit of jobseeking and relaxing a little. I even went to an assessment at the BBC last week. It was for a role with the BBC Arabic service and, as far as I could tell, I was the only non-Arabic native speaker being assessed that day. I was also the only person not wearing a suit, which the nice BBC lady had assured me was acceptable. The language assessment was very difficult, but it was good experience.

I’m sorry, I realise that because of our technical gremlins you guys may not even have known that we had to say good-bye to Edinburgh in the last couple of weeks. It was a great couple of years up there and I hope to return for visits in the near future. For now, though, it seems more likely that the future will hold a return to London. I just need to find a job. You heard anything?

In a brief interlude from worrying about this, last night I went to see a comedian called Josie Long perform at the Fringe. Josie Long is a prominent young UK comedian and she does lovely stuff, which I guess you could describe in hackneyed-cliches-that-do-no-justice-to-her-work as being about making people smile and the joy that can be found in everyday things. You might think that sounds a little tame for my hard-living, no-shit-taking tastes, but it is actually right up my alley and her hour-long set was a great pick-me-up.

It was unashamedly political, but not in a strident or intimidating way, and I think that even most conservatives would be able to enjoy the show, provided they could handle being shown how almost everything they or their government stand for is unfair and making people miserable (!). Long is, I think I’m right in saying, usually in no sense a political comedian and you could sense that it had been a struggle for her to put the show together in a way that was still funny and not depressing. That she succeeds in this is testament to her incredibly warm and friendly style, she welcomes the crowd in to the venue herself, and to the cue cards she uses to remind her of the (many) things that she still likes in the world.

Like I said, I really liked it – there was a couple of skits about the Bronte sisters and another about Jedward that had me roaring with laughter. Have you noticed that John is still really in to it, but Edward clearly isn’t? I hadn’t until last night. It was also great to see someone get enthused about her cause and her work with UK Uncut and others made me think and hope that a new, lefty force may soon be making itself felt in UK politics.

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(I wrote this blog a week or two ago, but technical problems meant I couldn’t put it up until now – don’t worry, I finished the dissertation.)

The festival is a lot of fun and there is always plenty to see. The problem this year is that I still have a dissertation to finish! From my window seat in the library I can see that George Square has been filled with stages and lights, and these will in only a couple of days be combined with raucous crowds of merrymakers, drinking cider and waving brightly coloured flags to distract us poor Masters students (maybe). I will watch them enviously from my lair as I rewrite my introduction for the tenth time, wondering why I put myself through these things. It is unfortunate that the festival coincides with this rather stressful academic period but ‘c’est la vie’, as the Italians say.

My dissertation is actually going alright, I guess. I have 12,000 words done now, although some of them needs to be rewritten, and, once I add my conclusion, footnotes and bibliography, this should be enough to reach my 15,000 word target. At the moment I think it has the potential to be good, but it is not there yet. I think a few rereads and edits are in order, after which I hope it will all cohere in to something that makes a bit of sense. I am sorry that I have been going on about the essay so much here; it’s been preoccupying me a bit this Summer! It feels good to have got most of it done, but now I really just want to get it done. Then I’m going to drink some cider and watch some comedians.

Hope you’re enjoying some sunshine!

My personal highlights included the fantastic PJ Harvey, Canadian yelpers DD/MM/YYYY (pronounced Days, Months, Years) and this band called The Books who combined their musical set with films cobbled together from 90s instructional videos and old VHS home movies, which they had created as part of each song. Here, for example, is one about golf. And another one about, I guess, taking your time. Watching them live was amazing, funny and weirdly hypnotic. The whole thing was great, although I think it is time for a new rule governing concert attendance – if you are over 6 foot tall, or have hair of a diameter of 18 inches or more, you should be forced to stand at the back of the crowd. Or maybe we could even rank the crowd in order of height, shortest at the front, tallest at the rear. That would mean we could all enjoy an uninterrupted view. Think about it. A modest proposal.

I also stood in the longest queue for falafel I have ever experienced – why is falafel now so fashionable, I wonder? Yes, it is tasty and healthy, but is it hour-long queue tasty and healthy? Answers on a postcard, please.

The weather in London was also extremely nice, which meant a day spent sitting in a park topping up my sunburn and seeing a few old friends. It was bliss. We were staying with friends in Camden and were only a hundred yards or so from the house of poor Amy Winehouse, the street outside of which is now covered with flowers and tributes from her fans. It was genuinely very sad news. In the second year of university I actually lived on Camden Square myself, although on the shabbier side away from the nice houses (!), and never knew that an, at that time, infamous london celebrity lived so close. That is city living, I guess. She was certainly a big local character and a fixture of the artsy Camden-ite community; I’m sure she’ll be missed.

Thanks for reading, I will let you know how the next big dissertation push goes…

This weekend we’re gong down to London, which I am really looking forward to. We have a couple of tickets to the ATP festival at Alexandra Palace, so we’ll be seeing PJ Harvey (although I prefer Brian), Portishead and a host of other bands. It has been a while since I saw any live music so I hope I can handle it and the Portisheads don’t play too loud. Then, after we return on Monday, I will take arm against a sea of troubles (Hamlet approx.) and crack on with the fourth and possibly final chapter of my essay. This week I am going to research and read about it, so that everything will be ready when we come home. Wish me luck.

I have also been continuing to monitor the events in Egypt and I have read several articles talking about how the ‘Arab Spring’ seems to have lost its way. Certainly the pace of change in Egypt has been extremely frustrating for many of the protestors, but I don’t think that we should abandon the sense of optimism these events engendered just yet. When you consider that these societies are throwing of authoritarian shackles that have been in place for decades, it is inevitable that this process will not be without problems. In Egypt it certainly seems that the protesters won’t be giving up any time soon, so let’s hope that stability, progress and democracy triumph.

Have you seen any Parks and Recreation yet? Get on it!

Lots of love, Ed