Wide Awake.

[Garry and I arrived in London on Tuesday.  Did I mention that?  I don’t think I did].

Since 4am this morning, I’ve been tossing and turning, huffing and puffing and generally being a nightmarish bedfellow.  My brain is buzzing. And when my brain isn’t buzzing, my face is itching. I think I am allergic to feather pillows. Unable to settle, I called time at 5am. I got up, tucked my computer under my arm and set off  on the downstairs journey to the kitchen two floors down. I was pretty sure that I would have some sort of terrible mishap during the trip – on account of the stairs being a bit scary (too high, too narrow – at least for a person whose ability to negotiate walking and standing up straight is iffy at the best of times) and my jammies being too long.  I predicted I might get one foot stuck in the bottom of the other leg of my trousers only to tumble to my breakage.  This has happened before.  Nurse Betty will testify to it.  And when it happened before, I was standing stationary – on a carpet.  With the lights on.  Anyway – having successfully made it from the top of the house to the bottom of the house, here I am.  I’m sitting here at a giant kitchen table in a beautiful kitchen – in a beautiful house in Kentish Town that isn’t mine.

Things I have learned since Tuesday…

1.  £20 on the Oyster card gets you quite, quite far.

2.  I can happily negotiate public transport  alone – but maybe not in the most time-efficient kind of way.  It took me an hour and ten minutes to make a journey that, it turns out, ought to have taken half an hour.

3.  I can happily browse the fabulous wares at the vintage/antique market at Spitalfields without spending any money.  Who knew?

4.  I have learned not to drink strawberry beer. As much as I really enjoyed it at the time – I did not care for the aftermath.

5.  It seems (apart from those people who own beautiful cats) pretty much everyone owns a scary dog.  This is not good news for me.

6.  I like Turkish food.  Though not such a big fan of the bellydancing as I eat.

7.  I could definitely get used to living by a canal.

8.  Garry and I are much more sociable than we think we are.

9.  We definitely can’t do without digital TV.

10.  I love tea.  I miss drinking tea with Garry in the morning round our kitchen table.  I miss our daily Maclennan family Team Talk. We’d have to integrate that into London life.  Maybe we could drink our tea by a canal?

11.  It seems that everything I’m interested in happens here.

12.  I love my cat like she was a person.  I definitely think she’d like it here.