More Retrospection

Six years ago I was sat in the Pret near London City Hall, writing postcards while it poured outside, the beginning of what was going to be a very wet summer in Britain. At noon I needed to catch the Tube to Heathrow to fly back to LA after an amazing three weeks chasing the Scott centenary up and down the country – London, Oxford, Edinburgh, Dundee, Selborne, and my first encounter with Cambridge. I dreaded going back to LA, and in fact the whole next year turned out to be an incredibly difficult one, as I felt trapped in a place and life and culture and climate I couldn't stand, but couldn't find a way out of. I wonder frequently what might have happened if I'd listened to the depression and applied for the visa to come here then, rather than the following summer ... There are things I would have missed, but how much would I have missed them? I'll never know.

I think about this every April 17th, and probably always will.

While in the Pret, writing, there was a song on their playlist with a nice melody but whose lyrics I couldn't quite make out – it sounded for all the world like there was a line about getting stuck in the loo. I jotted down what I could piece together and looked it up when I got back. It was this:

Watch on YouTube

This island really is extraordinarily rich in narrativium.