I'm not your doorman

[aamcnamara]

11779 / 80000

800 words tonight, after getting distracted for quite a while by the Internet.

London is--well. London. Double-decker buses are space-efficient in crowded cities, that's why they make them. Oxford Street in the rain becomes a battlefield between clans of umbrellas; pedestrians without umbrellas receive friendly fire from both sides in the form of cold drips down the neck. Having been nearly splashed and/or run over by London cabs somehow seems like it validates the fact that I Am In London.

The Mob came over from Cardiff for the weekend. We spent an hour in the Twinings tea shop in the Strand; we took pictures of each other by the police-box outside the Earl's Court Tube station; we wandered through the Science Museum; we scored day tickets to see Christopher Eccleston be wonderfully angsty and covered in blood in a Greek tragedy at the National Theatre; and we found Forbidden Planet (despite me not writing down the address), which meant I got to buy books, which means I have something to read on my commutes. So basically, it encapsulated our friendship in the form of a weekend.

I want to live in the British Library for ever and ever. I accept the necessity of the National Archives, but have a complicated relationship with a) the Public Records Office's idea of archival organization ("Oh, someone has donated a group of papers to us, including a bunch of personal letters! We will interfile them with everything else we own in chronological order!") and b) microfilm.

Today was sunny, and I went out to eat my lunch by the bit of a pond that the National Archives has. I saw mallard ducks and a couple of swans, all of which were larger than I'm used to them being (probably because they get fed scraps), and a bird I didn't recognize--black and white with a yellow eye that makes it look slightly startled for all of eternity. Looked it up tonight, and turns out it is a tufted duck.

Life here is good. I'm settling in. And I have begun, finally, to write again. That can only be good news.