London+birthday

Showing mom around London and birthday pleasures…

Dear Friends,

Happy Saturday!

As you all know, a few months ago I started working at King’s College London. I have loved my time there so far. One enjoyable thing about the job has been developing a closer and more personal attachment to London. I had been to London countless times before. It’s a hub for the trains, a good day trip, and the best of tourist cities. But until January, whenever I was in London had the feeling (and, indeed, it was the case) that I was passing through. I was a tourist, a visitor, a neighbour even, but I did not belong in London.

I’m not sure I belong in London now, but I have begun to feel more membership in its teeming streets. In those early months, each time I boarded the underground, I thought to myself: I’m not a tourist. I’m going to work. As such, slowly but surely, I’m getting to know this city a little better, to have my sunshine corners in the courtyard where I eat my lunch, my favourite little holes in the wall, my frustrations with the public transit, my tricks rituals for the daily grind.

And this week I got to take my mom around London, show her some of the little things I’ve been learning, places I’m learning to love. I thought I’d share a few pictures from that experience today. We started off with a Mediterranean lunch at a branch of a place I like. The food was exquisite, but we nearly got stuck there because of the confusing bathrooms.

I used to have a perverse desire to grow up and have a hallway in my house entirely covered in mirrors. Perhaps I didn’t really want this but the idea was transgressive and delightful— I wondered what it would be like. Well, now I know. Dangerous. Impossible to navigate.

Then we went off to Liberty London. Liberty is a luxury department store, where most of what you do is ooo and aaa and shudder over the prices of things. The store was started in 1875 to sell fabrics and ornaments and objects from far away places, and it still boasts an astonishing collection of fabric which literally caused me to gasp the first time I saw it. It is housed in multi-story a Tudor revival building, with a central open hallway where you can stand and look up (or down) all the floors with their different wares. After you’ve despaired over not being able to buy a designer wedding gown, the top floor has very affordable cloth journals. One is consoled.

Then we stopped for a coffee at Prufrock coffee, which affords me the opportunity to quote the appropriate line in the T.S. Eliot poem, “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”:

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

I then got to show my mom around King’s College London, which was a real delight.

We ended the evening with a snack meal and summer cocktails. It was a good day.

And yesterday was my birthday! A waiter gave me free molten lava cake for breakfast, my dad sent me a customised weird al birthday e-card, saw people I love, and I listened to the new Paul Simon album on my new (customised) AirPods! I call that a good day. :)

Well, that’s all for me today. What will you do with your Saturday?

Much love,

Joy

p.s. please consider giving me a late birthday present and subscribing :)