Visit London to see your friends from home

Slept OK again today. In fact I overslept. By several hours. Guess I must have needed it. Today Kate from down the hall asked me if I was kept awake by last night's racket, but I was blissfully ignorant as I hewed a large tract of arboreal forest. (I hope she wasn't referring to my snoring.)

Just got back from dinner at my new friend Stephanie's place. Like most of the western hemisphere, she is a single Degree of Leonard away from me. She has now been living in London for the last year and a half. I did actually meet her (sort of) in Vancouver, but never really had the opportunity to chat and of course it's only natural that I move several thousand kilometres away in order to finally get to do so.

Similarly, I will get a rare chance to see my friend Helen when she visits from Vancouver this week. I have not seen her in several months, so it's only natural that I should move several thousand kilometres away in order to see her for the first time in a long while.

And just yesterday I received an e-mail from Sue, whom I have known since high school, and who lives with Ali and their daughter (whom I have not had the pleasure of meeting) in North Van. So it is only natural that I come several thousand kilometres away so that I can see them for the first time since their wedding a few years ago.

* * *

Spent yesterday helping my good friend Ian -- who has never even been to Vancouver, as far as I know -- move into his new house in Tottenham Hale, east London. I was shocked at how large his house really is, partly because it looks so small and unassuming from the outside, and partly because "large" is not an adjective I tend to use in the same sentence with British real estate, except perhaps in reference to price tags or the city of London itself. Needless to say it was great to see Ian again, and I'm looking forward to spending more time with him in the coming months.

As supremo of Cemental Health Records, Ian told me a very interesting This "Blue Piano" story, or rather, news of a fan from central Canada who has recently been seeking to buy TBP recordings. In and of itself this is perhaps not entirely unusual, except that I do not know the individual in question.

Spent Saturday -- another mostly sunny & hot one again -- largely without food. This did not help my mood in the least when I started to get lost around Tottenham Hale which, if you know anything about London, is not the kind of place you want to get lost in, hungry or not. Eventally I did manage to locate his house, though, and finally at around 3:00 and in dire need, I set out to find some snackage in the vicinity of Ian's new house and found a few odds and sods to munch on, all of which I promptly forgot at Ian's place.

Needless to say I was not in the best of shape, then, when we hit the Shaftesbury Theatre to see a production of "Daddy Cool," a musical based on the music of... wait for it... Boney M. (a/k/a Frank Farian). You see, in addition to the many other cool things Ian does, he is a theatre critic for the Financial Times, so he gets to attend all sorts of plays -- some good, some bad, some indifferent -- and last night he offered to bring me along as his guest.

Given that I was already going all hypoglycemic on his ass, and I was still lugging around a backpack full of personal effects and a plastic bag containing assorted (non-food) purchases which I couldn't park in the coat check/cloakroom because the damn theatre doesn't have one, I wasn't exactly brimming with confidence regarding the rest of the evening's entertainment, to be honest. Then when Ian's chair broke I felt sure that was an omen. But as it turns out the play was quite fun, that if you don't mind being plagued by mindless kraut-pop ditties for hours afterward when they become inextricably and infuriatingly lodged in your brain.

Perhaps it was a classic case of expectation management, i.e., if I had any expectations at all about the play they were so low as to be subterranean, and thus anything above that was guaranteed to please. So even though I was starving and it was stiflingly hot in the theatre, I still managed to have a good time, albeit with a couple of minor qualifications. Spoiler alert: I thought the giant parrot was an odd touch, and I thought the gigantic snake was a fun but pointless diversion. The pyrotechnics (!) were somewhat unexpected, too.

Can't wait to read Ian's review.