New Boots vs. Cute Flats vs. Ruby Slippers: Clear Winner

It’s been a tense week but it’s starting to look like I might get home okay. Let’s not be excessively optimistic, but Heathrow is open. I’m mainly attributing it to the ladybug I found on Tuesday, which was clearly magical lucky.

The sad thing is I find myself not much able to appreciate these last few days in London, so badly do I want to get home. I want to see my family and my friends and my cats, of course, but I have renewed appreciation for not just the little things about home but the tiny, the miniscule. I cannot wait to do chores and errands, laundry in a machine that actually works and grocery shopping for familiar brands.

I will tell you the thing about London, because I know you’ve been waiting, thinking anxiously to yourselves, ‘Whenever will Sarah tell us the thing about London!?’. The thing is this: it’s a terrific background for a life. It’s got everything you could ever want… if you have a life, with work and engagements and obligations and people to see. As a city to just loaf around in its indisputably better than most, but even still, there’s only so much. I have done all the London-y things I wished to do, seen the museums and the markets and the landmarks and the parks, the West End shows and the pubs. I have skimmed the layer of tourist things and got to the semi-native activities and it’s been spectacular, but the past week has been like living on icing and Swedish fish. A day with nothing more to do read in the sun is great (environmental damage to my skin notwithstanding) if it’s recovering from a full week of activity, a well deserved respite, but if all I’m resting up from is a previous day in the park and all I’ve got to look forward to tomorrow is another day in the park, for me at least it’s significantly less enjoyable.

So that’s what I’ve been up to, Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park and Regents Park and Primrose Hill and some devastatingly beautiful novel I found in the CAPA library. Also the farewell class of Understanding British with the inestimable Professor Fosdal which took place at a pirate themed pub in Covent Garden (of course it did). I took two exams and turned in three papers today and I’ve got one more exam tomorrow, then the goodbye dinner and what’s being billed as a killer night at ISH before the hazy nightmare that is transatlantic travel commences. And, of course, thanks to my new Murad products, I have been taking wicked good care of my skin.