A wonderful day that completely made up for the mattress debacle last night! 

I wandered from Charing Cross Station through Trafalgar Square, Chinatown, Neal's Year, the British Museum, Russell Square, the British Library, and then back down through Bloomsbury, Charing Cross Road, Soho, and down Regent Street to Picadilly Circus.  My feet hurt (now). 

I've remembered the smell of London, and the way my heart beats faster here when I encounter something particularly wonderful.  I am overcome with the fact of being here.  How I love to simply sit in the middle of a small square, on a bench, watching the fallen leaves and the tiny red flowers blooming from beneath them, the statues, the sunlight coming in and out, the men in pink button down shirts eating lunch, the fountains, the skeletal trees, the old buildings with their faded brick and rows of white windows.  Or in the cafe, where I had tea from white china, and you never have to ask for milk, it is just understood.  Or in the British Library, where the beautiful old books live, where I heard Gertrude Stein reading a poem, and T.S. Eliot, and looked at manifestos from the 1910s, when everything seemed possible, when that century was as young as this century - only now we are postmodern, and believe in nothing, certainly not ourselves. 

Pictures of the day here.

Off to bed.