You went off swinging London and forgot to come back

July 4, 2010

I woke up early, walked for hours, returned home and slept until 1:00 p.m. Apparently, I am more jet lagged than I had previously thought. Another half hour of inefficient shuffling around the apartment and hopped on the tube to Covent Garden to meet up with Josh, EM's friend that I met at her Norfolk, VA wedding in 2008.

The Covent Garden stop gave the option of waiting in line for the elevator to the ground or a spiral staircase. I figured the latter could not be too bad so gave it a try. It was a very, very long staircase, and after emerging in the hot London sun, it was a while before I stopped sweating. This trip has so far been a workout, much more so than even my best days at my fancy Los Angeles gym.

Josh walked me around some places he likes London, all of them very good. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of most of the locations we visited. Those I do remember are the Tate Modern (we each had a beer at the 5th floor cafe and looked at some photographs of recently birthed babies and their mothers), Brick Lane, the South Bank, Old Street and the Barbican. We stopped at a large outdoor area full of shops and cafes and drank apple ciders (Magners) and talked about how people in London are maybe better looking than people in the U.S.

I took the tube to Oval and a small party held by some of Joe's friends. All of this went very well for a while. I talked to this guy Jay about the Alamo theatre in Austin, Texas, and ate two burnt bangers. We all sat on the grass and drank proseco and laughed. Everybody measured their waists, wrists, noses, heads and height with a computer cord and tape measure and compared. I had the room laughing by pitching the plots of already existing bad movies with an exaggerated naive enthusiasm (I realized halfway through this that I half stole this idea from the Scared Straight sketch from SNL). Everybody was happy until the host's cat sat on my chair for the moment I stepped out of it and I blew in its face to get it to leave. The cat became terrified and ran out of the room, the host screamed at me for scaring the cat and the room cleared to find it. I still haven't completely recovered from the shame.

The three of us made our journey back to Notting Hill Gate and they reassured me that it wasn't really so bad, that no one was mad at me and that it was just that the host was an animal lover and overly sensitive, but I am still not entirely convinced.

* Magnetic Fields -- "Swinging London"