In London we eat at all the places. You ask me for recommendations when I come home and I tell you I would drop everything and fly back for meals and or drinks at the following: Berenjak, Planque, Discount Suit Company, Dishoom, Ozone Coffee Roasters, Omotesando Coffee. I also tell you that we ate at Rovi, from Ottolenghi, with a sniff.

London №1

Most of what we do in the UK is bear witness of ancient relics representative of hoary and inscrutable cultures past.

London № 2

London museum grindr profiles of yore.

Stopped at Present & Correct after maybe literally 13 years of following them online.

T-minus seven days until we’re back in the UK. A week in London with John before I take off for Wales by myself for a week-long immersive Welsh language program on the Llŷn peninsula. I will now do the thing you’re apparently not supposed to do and talk about my plans before hand to the invested scamming public lying in wait to theft my identity.

We’re starting in London, and eating our way through the better parts of everyone’s recommendations. Then, off to the Salisbury Plain, by train, not automobiles, to see a man about a henge. (Today I was at Aesop buying face-stuff and semi-precious soap, and at checkout the clerk magnanimously offered me a spritz of their latest fragrance, to be sprayed on my bag. She told me, with a straight face, that “Ouranon* has notes of frankincense and is reminiscent of ancient monoliths” so I guess we’ll fucking see, bitch.) After Stonehenge we’re back on the train over to Oxford and then bussing back to London. On Friday I will be tattooed by a person named Mouse, on my forearm and up onto my hand against literally everyone’s better judgement, after which we will go see Abba Voyage for the second time.

*She couldn’t have known, but another Aesop fragrance, Hwyl, would have been too on the nose, as it’s Welsh for “goodbye!”

At the end of the week John heads back to LA, while I board a train to Holyhead/Caergybi on Angelsey/Ynys Môn where I’ll spend a day so I can have a head start the following morning to take a train Bangor, then a bus to Pwllheli, then a cab to Llithfaen, then a 1.5 mile walk down the side of a mountain to the edge of the sea to stay for the next 6 days at Nant Gwrtheyrn. I’ll spend every day from 8-6, learning to speak Welsh and making little excursions to taverns and coffee roasters to talk to locals, and I’ll spend every night sleeping in a row of converted miner’s cottages from the 1800s. I am terrified and excited and cannot wait.

After that I’ll retrace my steps back up the peninsula to Caernarfon where I’ll crash for the night before taking a 6 hour bus ride down the Ceredigion coast to Cardigan/Aberteifi where my great great great grandparents lived. I’m spending a two day breather there in a bougie converted-maritime-warehouse inn, before heading by bus, then train, then subway back to the airport to fly home to LA.

On the otherhand, today while scoping out spots to grab coffee in Aberteifi, I saw that this ultra cute bakery and cafe was hiring full time baker positions, no experience required, so maybe I’m never actually coming home at all.

Books read in August. I give up on River Enchanted & London Seance Society about 100 pages in, both algorithmically recommended via Goodreads, the first and last time I’ll be trying that. The Salt Grows Heavy comes recommended from a friend with gushing praise and is the single worst thing I have read… ever? Absolute dreck, I persevere out of sheer hatred and incredulity and rage. Verbal gooning and bating from an author who surely had a formative sexual experience in a Hot Topic, after hours deep in the American McGee’s Alice merch section.