the rain it raineth

... but not quite every day! There may be torrents lashing my window as I type, but yesterday I was catapulted - in that strange, overnight-flight way - into a glorious, sunny, cold day in London.

I put myself back into the right time zone, in the course of a lovely drive home from Gatwick, by climbing up the hill at Greenwich, the Epicentre of World Time, and visually recalibrating. London's panorama of east to west, and also through time, spread out in front of me like - like - like a sweet shop window, as I've written elsewhere - one of the most bracing sights. You could almost touch it. The light was sort of liquid and gold, strangely complicated after the clean, empirical white light of North America, so that the different buildings took on almost a quality of activity as they occupied their little spaces. On the film of my mind this view is superimposed on the soft caressing Catskills that cradled me as a baby,* and New York State's stark grey winter trees. The grass in Greenwich Park seemed extra green, and the Gherkin and St Paul's and Canary Wharf were poignantly foregrounded by England's naval history. In a bookshop there was a seven-volume set of Nelson's Logs and Letters: "Dysentery again..."

I'm now in my lovely bed - yes, still! - having slept for almost 11 hours and woken up at the perfectly appropriate time of 9.45. I have to be at the hairdresser in three hours, before my roots start looking like those trees.

* Go on: am I in Pseud's Corner yet?