no thanks.

I sometimes like to get up early on vacation, especially if the weather's nice, and double especially if I manage to drag my ass outside into it.

This morning I was up at 6:45, it was indeed beautiful outside, so I took a shower, fucked around for a bit, then walked into town (Crouch End I mean). I got there at 8:20 or so, and noticed a long line of people standing around. I thought maybe they were waiting to cross the street, but when the light changed, nobody moved.

Turns out they were in line for the bus heading to the tube station.












Another obvious and nice thing about being awake at unusual hours (unusual for you) is that you see things you don't normally see, like morning rush hour, and it can be a not-so-subtle reminder of how different your current daily life is from what it used to be, and how different it is from a large segment of the population.

To celebrate this difference, I bought a scone.*

* I bought a scone after I saw the line for the bus, that much is true.

But before that: after I saw the line for the bus, I went into Tesco so I could replace the soy milk we'd snagged from our absent hosts' cupboard.

After browsing carefully for 15 minutes or so and filling my basket with odd low-budget British staples, I stood in the slowly advancing rush hour checkout line for a few minutes and was feeling pretty pleased with my morning's accomplishments until I went to pay and didn't have any money or debit cards or anything.

Which is always a shitty feeling I imagine, but the most upsetting thing about this was that I knew I'd specifically picked my paper money off the coffee table and definitely put it in my pocket before I left.

So I slouched back home, hungry and empty-handed, visually scouring the streets for my lost poundage, of course not finding it, it was a windy day, and then calculating how much money I'd essentially just thrown away, at least 60 pounds, at most 100 pounds, which is 150 dollars, etc. Then trying to figure out how to mentally come to a peaceful place with this loss so that I might enjoy the rest of my day.

I'd already been kind of bumming about how much money we were spending, and now this. So I considered possibly pretending that my dental work had cost 100 extra pounds, or adding 100 pounds to the price of the ferry we took here. The sort of questionable accounting practices that happen all the time, right?

By the time I got home I still hadn't found a satisfactory way to lie to myself about this error. I trudged upstairs, prepared to face the undeniable evidence of my idiocy, but no, my undisturbed pile of pound notes was just sitting there in the sunlit mess of the coffee table. I put the stack of bills in my pocket,went downstairs, took a deep breath, and stepped back out into the sunshine to basically repeat the morning's post-shower activities all over again, this time making an extra stop to buy a scone for Le Moop before heading back.

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