No Wine for You

This is the view from my table at Starbucks. I tried to have a table at a pub around the corner but it was entirely full of men. Nothing against men, but there were only men. They all had beers. There was no sport on the television -- there was no television. They had no excuse for being gathered in a Hunnish horde like that. I was far too visible, so repaired to Starbucks for tea instead of wine.

The church across the street in the background is All Souls, which looks older than anything in America. Probably older than the dirt in America. There are many such places, labeled with improbable "since" dates: The Royal Geographical Society, the Society of Medicine -- lots of societies. All standing where they are before America was a twinkle in a Calvinist's eye.

Traffic is crazy here. On the road are only white lines -- no yellow to suggest where one way starts and another stops. Somehow they know, the English, but I don't. Nearly got run over twice today because I jaywalked Californianly off a curb, blithely looking left when cars were approaching from the right. Saved both times by a savvy stills photographer who had tea with me. Saw this man in the elevator (closet-sized in typical European fashion -- hard to miss a fellow passenger) and intuited he might be a photographer I'd been told to look for -- friend of a friend. I said, "Steve?" He was quite surprised. Wonder if he was wearing something that gave me a subconscious clue? He didn't have the vest-of-a-million-pockets that stills guys wear to work, and no visible light meters depended from him. Still, he had the look of a photographer. I suppose I owe him some kind of fealty for saving my life -- wonder if he'd take a dog instead? I did buy him a macchiato and maybe that suffices.

Arrived at Heathrow yesterday and it is by far the largest airport I've ever seen. So large that, arriving at 10 on a weekday morning, I appeared to have landed in, say, Memphis at 3 a.m. I didn't pass 10 people in the quarter mile I traversed to Customs. Immigration took 2 minutes. As I told my husband, I'd recently seen the English movie "28 Days Later" and marveled at how they'd gotten London to look so empty. I now conclude they shot the entire thing at Heathrow at midday. Ridiculously, ludicrously large.

Tried to take the tube back to my hotel today after taxiing over to an actor's apartment in Kensington, but could only stand like a rube with my silly, colored money in hand, gawking at the subway map and realizing that, while I knew where I was from the signs, I had no idea where I was going, or even in which direction. It is impossible to keep your bearings while driving in London. Everything is roundabouts and one-way streets, and traffic snakes around in fits and starts like a conga line at a wedding reception. Never do you travel more than three blocks in a straight line. It would be a boggling experience for even my Eagle Scout husband, who couldn't plot by the sun because there isn't any.