Londinium

Yes, all right, I was writing an article, okay, I totally was. So I was writing away, tappy tap tap, diligently, writing about national literatures and cultural identity, like you do, when I got to daydreaming about London.

I only have nice thoughts about London, because I have never had to live there and thus hate it with the passion only someone who lives in a place can feel for it. London to me is sparkly Christmas (does anyone else remember the year that Liberty's wrapped the entire building in a big red bow?); showing Canadians around the best bits; doing this great big beautiful long walk that starts at the museums and goes through Knightsbridge and Hyde Park and up Piccadilly and the only thing that sucks about it is that you end up in either Leicester Square or Covent Garden, which I don't like all that much but which are part of the London craziness; eating soup and pudding in the crypt of St Michael in the Fields (it's a cafe; I didn't just take a thermos and a tupperware and sit me down among the dead); visits there with my mum which have always been awesome and memorable days (Royal School of Needlework; the King's Road to shop for the "pretty frock" I was told I'd need for Cambridge); visiting m'big sister when she lived there in a flat whose landlord thought I was her girlfriend; having sushi at one of those conveyor belt places; coming out of St Pancras station after going down on the early train and having to dash across to Euston to get breakfast before you collapse; Foyle's and the British Library and the giganta-Waterstones; having insanely expensive cups of tea in beautiful expensive tea places and giggling about the insanity and the expense...and anyway, I only have good thoughts about London.

If only our internet had stayed "down" (sometimes it kicks us off just to show us who's really in charge). But since I was here at the keyboard, and the modem was flashing its LEDs enticingly, I tappy-tapped in "Victoria and Albert Museum" just to, you know, see if there were any exhibitions about, erm, national landscape and cultural identity in the literature of Canada or New Zealand. Because there might have been.

What I found was a whole section on knitting, which is right and proper for a museum of fine and decorative arts. It's historical and modern and informative and interactive and all the things a museum website, or in fact any website, should be.

Anyway now it's time to go outside and see if the clouds have cleared, because what is a wee bite out of the moon for you tonight in the Northern Hemisphere is nothing less than a Total Eclipse here in the South.

I may write an article about it.