Remember last year when I kept complaining about my crappy phone camera, and I swore that next year I would have an awesome new camera that took decent pictures, or at least pictures that didn't look like they were taken under water? Well, guess what! Same old camera phone. This trip crept up on me. But with Instagram, I can trick you into BELIEVING that I have a fancy camera. Or at least that you are looking at the album of an awesome hipster trip to London in 1974. It's the best I can do. Just give me a good photo op and a side dash of Hefe and we've got a blog!!!
I have to say that my flight over was really smooth. Not traumatic at all. Sometimes it is! The only trauma was my one hour layover in Atlanta,
the country's busiest airport, when I had to deplane and get all the way to the International Terminal in 10 minutes! Which I did smoothly and effortlessly. This is why you don't lug around giant carry-ons, friends. A little man purse is all you need, especially when your trip involves quick dashing.
I don't remember anything about my flight from SLC to Atlanta, except that I had a lump in my throat from saying goodbye to Lisa at the airport. We had such a great conversation on the drive up, and she looked so pretty, and she was so positive and wonderful. And you know when people are pretty and wonderful and then you leave them for a month and they seem 10,000 times prettier and more wonderful when you're sitting on a plane? So I distracted myself by watching
Love Never Dies on my phone. Which I
already saw live a few years ago, and didn't really love, so I don't know why I watched it again. I guess because I watched the PBS Great Performances version of
The Phantom of the Opera with my kids a few nights ago, so I was really jonesing for another slice of the music of the night. I forgot that it's not that great of a musical. There are some great tunes, but the whole thing is really way too earnest. Everyone is furrowing their brows and sobbing into their sleeves the whole time. And maybe my memory is wrong, but when I saw it in London I swear everyone died at the end. That's my memory. Love never dies, but everyone else does. But in this version only one person dies (Christine. Surprise!)
On the flight from Atlanta I got to sit in the center seat between two other bald men. It was coincidental and funny. One of the men just played Bejeweled on his ipad the whole time (EIGHT HOURS) and the other one provided me with two bits of conversation:
Me: Hey! Look! Three bald guys. We're like a club.
Him: O-ho! You did not go there.
6 hours later, he's watching
Hugo and freezes his screen on a shot of Sacha Baron Cohen:
Him: Hey! Aint that Bur-rat?
Me: Yep. That's Borat.
Him: Well, what the hell's he doing in this Hugo movie?
Those were my two conversations.
I watched two movies:
Young Adult, which I saw in LA back in December, but missed the first twenty minutes of. It's amazing what you miss in those first twenty minutes! Like, all the exposition.
The Iron Lady. Meryl Streep is fantastic in this, but it doesn't really go anywhere, does it? She just sort of stumbles around as an old lady and then she puts on some scarves and some coal miners bang on the roof of her car.
We landed in London and I felt groggy but not horrible, thanks to this special app I have on my phone that plays nice sounds like waves crashing and trickling fountains until you fall asleep. I got three good hours, thanks to that app and some sleeping pills. I breezed through Heathrow, zipped down the Piccadilly Line and was here at my flat on Queens' Gate Terrace in no time. I'm upstairs this year. And the good people of FIE are always so kind to provide fruit in the fridge and flowers on my desk. I had a few grapes and then collapsed on my bed, dreaming for three hours of Margaret Thatcher ripping off the Phantom's face mask.
