If Only I Could Have Skipped the Morning

Delayed jet lag arrived in Bedfordshire with me last night but didn't really sink its teeth in until the alarm went off at 5:30 this morning.

Work days usually start early in the movie business, but this one found me hot, sweaty and bleary in a new hotel room (which is devoting itself to righting the karmic imbalance caused by my plainly too-nice accomodations in London).

Activating the air conditioning last night required a multi-step process on a tiny controller in a dim hallway, and I had apparently managed to turn on the heat instead. A sodium floodlight mounted squarely over my window (why?) meant opening the drapes for a breeze was out, so I sweltered through 4 or 5 hours' broken sleep before dragging myself into the shower stall at dawn, where I stood blinking at the wall above for a long, stupid while, trying to work out how to make water come out of it. Finally, the absence of actual plumbing impressed itself upon me and and I stumbled instead to the sink, where I remembered I'd left my toothbrush in London.

This is not how I prefer to meet 120 new co-workers, but I piled into the crew bus anyway -- only later, in the downpour, realizing I'd forgotten my raincoat. Also that my laptop had not charged because I'd failed to flick the switches that turn on each individual electrical outlet in England.

People who know electricity tell me England boasts markedly safer electrical conventions. I say what is the point in eschewing, for instance, bathroom outlets when it only means you have to buy 20 feet of extension cord to drag the blowdryer into the bathroom where you can still throw it into the bathtub if you're so inclined, only now you die poorer by the price of one extension cord? You can't defeat human nature; it is human nature to dry your hair where you can see it, and that's that.

Bedford is famous for its swans, which I am given to understand all belong to the queen. Why she wants them I don't know, but I guess it's not to shoot them because there are any number of them floating on this pretty and unpronounceable river that runs by our hotel.

And there is a statue out front dedicated to the local men who fought in "The South African Campaign" at the turn of the century. There's an odd inscription that says something like, "War Declared 1899. Peace Inferred 1902." I swear this is true. Or trueish -- it's the best I can manage today.