Y'know, I love my pal Kathy, but recently, whenever she turns up, there's trouble with geography. This morning, I had a meeting in Westminster, and I was meeting Kathy back in Kensington for lunch. Now, longer term readers will know that I often walk from Kensington to Westminster after work. This was the same journey...only in reverse.
Anyone who remembers the last time Kathy featured in this experiment will also remember that when she did, the world started behaving like a Rubik cube, and east became west, because we pretty much discovered that whichever direction I'm facing, something in my brain tells me it's north.
I came out of the hotel where the morning event was, and navigated by the House of Commons. Then there was a street junction. I blinked like Bambi in the headlights, but fortunately, there was a Commons policememan to ask. He pointed me back towards Victoria. Now, to Victoria, it was pretty much a straight line. But about four minutes further on, there was a crossroads, with roads leading in four directions. I tried going North...
After five minutes, I ended up at what was very clearly Buckingham Palace. Wrong. I tracked back to the crossroads, peering at the options I had. Nothing looked...familiar, exactly, because North had turned into not-North by being turned around. I shrugged, and turned North. That's Second North, for those who don't point North whichever way they look. Five minutes later, I was clearly in unfamiliar territory. North Three, as it turned out, was particularly galling - for the smple reason that in the process of going North and Second North, I'd forgotten which of the four available Norths I'd come from. In fact, I didn't work this out until I ended up...erm...back at Victoria.
North Four, clearly, the last conceivable North I could have chosen, turned out to be the real North...or at least the real direction in which I needed to go, whatever conventional magetics said it was. Ended up being ridiculously late, but went for what turned out ot be an unlikely lunch - my first salad since the summer.
Clearly, Kathy led the way. When we parted outside the restaurant, she said she had to go off to a meeting of her own, and went off down the street to go to it.
I blinked. Where the Hell was I??
"Kathy!" I yelled, and she turned around. "Which way back to the office?!"
She rolled her eyes at me.
"North!" she said. I put my hands on my hips.
"Turn around one hundred and eighty degrees and walk!" she explained...
As it turned out, she was right. Not for the first time in my life, I had been entirely lost in a single straight line from where I was supposed to be.
As it turned out, having a salad for lunch was a staggeringly - and I use the word advisedly - good idea. Caught up with d in the late afternoon, and she was in tears. It was Thanksgiving today of course, an American holiday which the world could probably take to its heart without batting an eye. For d, it has a special resonance, in that it's currently one of those particularly American experiences, and it tugs at the stars and stripes holding her heart together. It's also, as she puts it, the biggest holiday she recognises, because above all, and more than any other, even Christmas, it's about the food. About the cooking. And that's what gets my girl all kindsa hot and bothered. So she was miserable that she was a) away from her best friend Lori, again, on Thanksgiving, and b) stuck on a culinarily impoverished island where the idea of good Thanksgiving feasts is not something that has hugely caught on.
We spoke at four o'clock. By 4.30 I'd been turned down, laughed at, and made to feel like a colonial weirdo by restaurants all around the capital. Then I tried a place just up the road from me, and they booked us in for their Thanksgiving special.
Not bad, since you didn't ask, but...lots. Lots and lots of food, and I did a bit of an Aristotelian experiment - I had fried food! Not much fried food, I grant you, but when the waiter brings something called an 'onion loaf' and it turns out to be two whole housebricks of battered and deep fried onions...you've got to find out what it's like, haven't you, or you're not properly alive.
So, that's Thanksgiving...thunk. For me, I'm thankful for whole worldsful of stuff - including friends who take me to lunch, and the woman who is my real compass. You may need to remind me of all this on Tuesday morning, when the onion loaf expands into a wall of grease and flubber that drags me screaming backwards to higher numbers. Right now, I'm not stressing out about it at all. I didn't sleep very well last night, so I'm basically on auto-pilot now.
In fact though, I don't think I'm gonna stress about it Tuesday either. I think I'm gonna be thankful tomorrow too. And the next day. And the day after that. S'gotta be worth a try, hasn't it?
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