Black Tea with Milk and Sugar

nice side of a very rainy november ..

After three weeks it’s still surprisingly hard for me to find back to my ‘daily life’.
I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking, where am I? and why?

I remember every detail of my stay in London. Every tiny detail. From what I was wearing when i stepped into the plane in Frankfurt and out of it at Heathwor airport, I remember all the poor fast food chains and the really amazing dinners we’ve had. I remember shedloads of red telephone cabins that made my heart jump with silly touristy glee, that made me rummage through my handbag to dig out my crappy point&shoot because I just wanted to remember without bothering about aperture, light, dropshadows, dof… I just snapped.

I remember dozens of young men in red uniforms with huge fur heats, looking stern, looking like 25°C in such a suit wouldn’t do them any harm. I could feel the tension as the trotted by though, and I thought it must be a very dreadful job to walk up and down the same path every day. Resting for a few minutes just to see hundreds of tourists rushing towards you to snap pictures or trying to make you laugh. I carefully and quickly snapped, and I did notice a smirk. Very faint but it was there nontheless.

I remember shopping at picadilly circus, turning my map up and down to find the green spot that I marked near Fortnum&Mason. I remember Dieu et mon droit being displayed in one of their windows, and everything just felt the way I imagined it 15 years ago when we started English in secondary school and I was just blown away by its amazingness. I wanted to go there. And i went there after all.

And I remember Jackie from Canary Wharf, who I met in a pub directly next to Big Ben. Who gave me the warmest ‘Welcome to the UK’ I could have imagined. Who gave me handfulls of confidence. Who made my trip there extra special and made me feel much less like a stranger upon thousands of tourists.
Who made me realize:

And indeed I do.

I tried to make use of the 2 1/2 seconds of sun we’ve been blessed with today, to take some evidence of the, indeed very nice, fall colours we had this year. It’s shocking how fast the year has gone by, and hard to realise that it is already mid-october! ‘What a long, strange trip it’s been’ indeed.

My brothers at the medieval festival yesterday. Discovering this seasons winter acessoire must-have.

Robert James Waller

My last two dreams were strongly related to horses. A horse in my room that I had to carry downstairs, and then, bizarrly, ride it to the takeaway to get dinner for the fam..

Last night I dreamt I’d have flown to New York to (wait for it) ride a horse down the time square. And go shopping for Halloween supplies, even though over here we dont even celebrate Halloween. If I’ll dream of horses again tonight, something is clearly wrong because, altho they’re very pretty animals, I’m quite intimidated by them!

My heart aches when I look at this. Greatest time of my life so far. I wish one could captivate luck in a jar and take a whiff every now and then when you miss it so much, its almost unbearable.