I thought it would suck going straight back to work the morning after flying back from London, but after a few days of wandering around a strange city with an open agenda, it’s remarkably comforting to return to the contours your own life. As a non-resident demi-tourist (in the sense that I didn’t do much of the obviously touristy things like visit the palaces or go Madame Tussaud’s or stare at Big Ben), it was hard to find a place in the rhythm of the city, whereas the morning commute Tuesday morning here at home was as simple as sliding down a chute, if not as fun. I drove along Lincoln and Cicero and Touhy thinking, look at my country! O condos and motels and hulking electronics stores! Then I was back in it.

When our flight came in on Monday night, the little TV in the cab from O’Hare flashed the headline that Kate Middleton was pregnant, and I wondered how on earth I could’ve missed THAT news on my last day in London. And so my usual end-of-vacation remorse was infused with bonus regret that in all my scurrying around in the drizzling rain between Tube stops Monday morning, I totally neglected to spot the screaming 72-point newspaper headlines bearing this Monumental English News, or notice all the people on street corners waving around Union Jack onesies in triumph, or overhear one of the Cockney chimney sweeps from Mary Poppins saying, “Wot? The Duchess is up the duff?” and thus I had utterly failed in my quest to experience London with open eyes. But then my cousin told me that the Kate news broke late afternoon, just as my plane was taking off, so I felt vindicated. Plus a little peeved that the British Airways captain didn’t announce the pregnancy along with the fasten-seat-belts bit. Safety, schmafety!

I’m not sure whether I can blame jetlag for the fact that I went to bed at 8:30 last night, since I wasn’t in the UK for very long. But the last couple of days haven’t quite felt like full days (much less Holidailydaysies). I go to work and come home and then an avalanche of sleep falls on top of me and I dig myself out at around 5 am the next day. Hopefully this will stop soon.

I leave you with this photo of some guy rocking out in the Tube. I’m pretty sure he had no idea about Kate Middleton either.

 

You know how it is when you’ve been traveling for seventeen hours and the first thing you want to do when you get home is burn your clothes? I just spent about nine hours on a trans-Atlantic flight going westbound and time lost all meaning but my socks somewhow still accrued filth. I saw two full movies on the plane and three others that always appeared to be just starting. And then getting to the plane in the first place involved a seemingly endless series of trains. Chris came straight from Bristol, so his trains followed a perfect Zeno’s Paradox succession—first the long train from Bristol to Paddington, then a shorter train to Heathrow, then one to the terminal, then oneto the gate. And then when we got to the gate, there were little amusement-park-choo-choo tracks going down the jetway to the plane. Okay, maybe not. But we wouldn’t have been surprised ONE BIT if we’d had to get on one of those little railroad hand-carts in order to make our flight, because travel can be batshit crazy like that.

I’d write more, but my brain still feels like this photo:

I mean all my synapses are like lurchy red buses in rush-hour traffic. I think I need to sleep. Good night!

So I’m in London, or now outside London, on a train that just left Paddington Station, and it’s Saturday, though when I post it it’ll be Sunday, or maybe still Saturday, what with the time zone and my complete inability to figure out this WordPress phone app. There are these gorgeous green velvet swaths of countryside (my mind is screaming ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE! ) out my window. Sometimes it looks like Wisconsin and sometimes it looks like a movie, and sometimes the transformation takes place in front of you like a passing cloud.

The train is to Bristol, where I’ll meet Chris. Yesterday I took the Tube into central London with my cousin and while she was at work I walked around the city in that sort of travel-daze that you get when your level of curiosity about a place is disproportionate to the amount of actual working knowledge you have about it. And also totally disproportionate to the amount of sleep you’ve gotten. So you wander from block to block (and by “you” I mean “I,” though traveling can make one feel so disconnected that it hardly matters) seeing one gray ancient fascinating wedding-cake of a building after another and each time you think is that something I should see? Each time you try to get behind the moment. I went into the British Museum and saw the Rosetta Stone, and marble statues, and a bog man, who was really nothing more than a leathery crumpled heap. Then I left and walked some more. Traveling in a strange city is like being in a dream where the nightmare elements are just barely kept at bay—little wisps of fear and disorientation that don’t show up in the snapshots.

The memories of this trip aren’t here yet. I’m typing on a crowded train where I had to argue with another passenger to get my proper seat and there is a girl in the vestibule crying on a cell phone and the landscape is a blur. Wish you were here.

Why I should not have signed up for Holidailies:

1. I never did them back in the day when I was an “online journaller” at poundy.com, so why start now?
2. Any day now I’ll be getting editorial notes back on this novel draft I recently turned in, and my deadline for revisions will probably be January 1st.
3. Which is also when I’ll have a BUST column due. Oh, and I have to judge a book contest, too.
4. I’m not even going to be in the country for the first weekend of December. I won’t even have my laptop.
5. I don’t really live on the Internet anymore and nobody reads this site.

Why I signed up for Holidailies:

1. I felt a pang of nostalgia when I saw the list of participants—all these people who I remember from ten years ago or more, back when we called our sites online journals and those of us who didn’t have Diaryland pages had to upload each new entry by FTP. (Do I even have an FTP client on this Mac? If I find it and click on the connect button, will bats fly out of my server?
2. You don’t even know how much I can go on and on about Christmas. This time of year, it’s like Bronner’s, The Christmas Superstore inside my head. I NEED AN OUTLET.
3. I haven’t done much to really document the past couple years of my life, which have included the wedding, the book tours for The Wilder Life, the family history stuff that’s been preoccupying me for months and months now, and a lot of travel. I mean, I take photos, I scan stuff, I commit things to memory one way or another, but it feels a little unrooted and I wonder if missing something.
4. For instance, we’re going to be in England for the first time ever this month: a short trip—just a few days, and then we’re straight back to work, and it’ll all get swallowed and go through the gullet of time like nothing happened. I mean, I should do something, right?
5. The word “Holidailies” is not a real word yet it is so strangely cheering to me. It is holiday as an adjective but also somehow a plural noun, a jingly little sleigh-bell ditty giving my brain angel wings for reasons I can’t even begin to explain.

So there you have it. Don’t expect me to be all holidaily every day, but I’ll be around, okay? Ho ho HO.