London Homesick Blues

Hello blogging world.

Three-night trip to London: redeye Monday night, meeting Tuesday afternoon, meeting Wednesday morning, fly home Thursday.

Books consumed: The Survival Game. Lamb. Krakatoa. Mental soundtrack: Jerry Jeff Walker, London Homesick Blues. I'll substantiate the rumor that the English sense of humor is drier than the Texas sand...also Lions by Dire Straits.

Virgin Atlantic is a great airline. Flight was packed going over - Monday night flights across the pond always seem to be crowded. Someone who is a better statistician than I am ought to calculate the odds that I'd get 42C on one leg of about half my overseas flights. "Dinner" was chicken tenders, corn, mash. Actually better than most airplane food.

90 minutes to clear immigration. At least they had the heat turned waaaay up and it was humid in there. Hell. 90 more minutes of train and tube and walking to get to my hotel, which turns out to be in the Chelsea FC football stadium complex. Clean, cheap, highspeed net, five minute walk to the tube. But a lousy bed and a lousy shower.

Fitful nap, good afternoon meeting, fitful nap.

Dinner with a colleague who is also a good friend. Brick Lane Road in the East End of London is just about heaven on earth if you like curry. I Love Curry. Forgot to take my camera on both my nights eating, which is a downer, but ooof, this was good. Light and airy papadums. Perfect hot pickle and condiments. Crispy, lemony fried onion balls. Lamb chili mossala. My friend had the veggie plate and the dal makhni was extraordinary. Washed down with two pints of Cobra, a truly perfect meal against a damp, dank London January night.

I tried out a new strategy for jetlag management - brewed a nalgene bottle's worth of sleepytime extra tea, triple strength, for drinking on the plane and after arrival. When the jetlag wakeup call came at 3AM, I had a third of the bottle left. Chugged it, did some breathing exercices, and though sleep didn't come for a while, I was very much aat peace and got rest. I'm going to keep experimenting with this one.

Morning meeting in north London. Normally I don't care for the Starbucks infestation across the world - the one in the Forbidden City really gets my goat (if they're gonna put it there, it should have wifi, dammit) - but London needed better coffee. At all the train stations now they have starbucks and krispy kreme. Weird. Small, black coffee and a cornish sausage roll for pre-meeting sustenance. Good meeting. Working lunch in a cafeteria.

Fitful sleep, conference call, then out to meet with an friend from the seriously old days. The 80s. He's lived in London for seven years and really knows his way around. Met up at an old, old pub in Clerkenwell for pints and conversation. St Peter's Cream Stout is insane, by the by. French dinner of potted duck rillettes and seven-hour braised lamb shank. Good, good stuff.

Slept right through the night. The sleepytime experiment worked pretty well. Flight home was a lot less crowded. Mental note: check in online and choose only aisle seats on the outer edges of the plane. Many of the aisle seats in the interior row have big chunky boxes that make it even harder to stretch legs.

Back to London in just eight days.