Postcard From The West End Boys

[Tottenham Court Road, near Oxford Street, WC1]

[A blessed moment of quiet, even in this two-story postmodern mall of an internet cafe. John awoke in a foul mood just as the little screen on the seat back showed our plane was over the Irish Sea. My lack of patience and his excessive fatigue bickered us thru a temporarily misplaced passport, customs, and an excessively long shuttle ride from Heathrow to Covent Garden, to our 70's-vintage (20th c., not 19th, alas) hotel. The room not good enough, the front desk incompetent, and the phone not working. Maybe Swing Out Sister was wrong after all.]

[We almost didn't make it to Camden that first night to meet Maria Gomez, our whole reason for hitting London right now, but once we did (she was so happy to see us!), and once a few Carlsbergs were swallowed, and once the terrible live band did a few well-worn covers, things started to look up. An after-hours basement club near this cafe, run and patronized mostly by Spaniards, added a surreal coda to a very long day.]

[Yesterday, I think we got most of the shopping out of the way, the mall that is the West End being too much to resist. A late-afternoon performance of My Brilliant Divorce, starring Dawn French, followed a quick trip to our old stomping grounds in Bloomsbury, where John and I both got haircuts at the little salon in Marchmont Street where John had gotten the Best Cut of His Life exactly one year ago. We were too tired to show them off at the clubs last night (the Siobhan Fahey show in Brighton was cancelled, so no train trip), but I still had trouble getting to sleep. Ah, staring at fire-resistant ceiling tiles at one a.m., thinking about life: my favorite!]

[We're avoiding the big tourist attractions until tomorrow, when we hope to clash with fewer of the obnoxious couples from Cedar Rapids with whom we shared our shuttle from the airport.]

[Question: Why does every newspaper here give the same column space to celebrity "news" (currently, whether Justin Timberlake shagged Dannii Minogue after having groped her sister's bum onstage at the Brit Awards) as "news" of, say, Tony Blair visiting the Pope? Or is it the kinds of papers we're buying...?]

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