london at last

Highlights from my first trip for fun to London:

In Soho Park, the cool kids haunt where everyone has stylish hair or is gay or—shocker—both, I saw the statue of Charles II that inspired the movie "Face Off."

In Trafalgar Square there's a statue of an toddler spewing.

On Neal St I saw this video-game inspired tile work, the same kind of stuff I'd seen in Paris and that my friend Nick in San Francisco does.

And nearby in Neal's Yard, a colorful little plaza, outside the super-indy music shop Rough Trade I found this cool mini-mural.

Since I've been feeling scattered and disjointed lately, I bonded with this chair that's in a quantum state of superposition at the Tate Modern.

When I got back to Cambridge, I found out what people must feel like when becoming born again Christians: a sense of hopelessness and lack of direction, then revelation at finding the vehicle to the promised land.

That was how I felt when I got back from London on Monday and couldn't find my bike outside the train station. I figured it was stolen and I lost my faith in humanity. I got caught up in ruminations over how I would deal with it (I'd borrow my friend's derelict bike, I thought). But I kept searching and a cute girl said, "Sometimes they're hard to find, aren't they?" and looked over quickly and said, "Yeah—or it's stolen or something," in a voice I immediately thought came out shrill and annoying. So much for my self image of suave Mason. According to a book I'm reading on the English, for that girl to talk to me was a strange break from the usual way people ignore each other in public, especially when in the vicinity of trains or buses. But, I read, one of the few exceptions to the rule is for whinging.

Then I realized I hadn't looked over in another area because I was quite sure I had parked it in the bank of bikes closest to the station. I found it and spontaneously said out loud, "Thank ya Jesus!" even though I think Jesus was not a god but only a guy, albeit a special one. But I had found my way home and I vowed to never park my bike at the train station again.