Today marks the first time in ten days that I have gone into a shop, and that's only because I needed food. Up to that point, I had managed to miss every shop in my way going about my daily business.

This was particularly hard for me, seeing as I live on the opposite end to town as my university, and even though that was pretty much the only place I needed to go this week it caused no end of problems. As I am one of those poor sods who can't afford lessons/test/petrol/road tax etc., I have no car to help me and as such the three-mile-both-ways walk takes a good forty minutes and gets boring after a while... My usual solution was to walk to the town centre and catch a bud from there, but as the stop was outside a shop and the streets the bus passed down had shops on them, this was a definite no-go. So walking it was, and with the required detours it takes near enough an hour to get where I want to go...

As you can see from these pictures (courteously provided by Google Earth), the route I normally take and the distribution of shops has a scarily strong correlation... This was going to take some planning.



After talking it over with some of my colleagues in the area, I worked out a route that not only would get me to university without hitting shops, but would also lead me to any other places I was planning to go that week - meetings, pubs, and the like. Of course, this was slightly marred by the fact that it went past about a dozen shops. Back to the drawing board.

It has been incredibly hard to follow this path, as after uni I'm usually too bored and tired to want to add another twenty minutes onto my journey