Weather

So the weather, which has been so lovely, so much of the time, has finally caught up with me. The whole last week has been chilly, grey, and rainy. It's raining right now in fact. It complicated my plans to go to Hampstead Court this weekend. I don't want to bother with a day trip when it's damp and miserable. Day trips are stressful enough, what with train schedules and so forth. So instead I did a bit of shopping (it's so nice to shop in pounds and not a dollar conversion) and discovered the British Film Institute. The BFI is really fun, it has a film archive where you can explore British film for free, and all sorts of weird things. I watched a bunch of silent shorts, Jude Law's film debut, and random other things. But they also have three movie theatres in the building, art pictures mostly. I saw "McCabe and Mrs Miller" last night, a Robert Altman (of MASH fame) film. What a crazy director, but he makes beautiful work.

Then I went to a coffeeshop to finish the play I was reading. An old man saw me reading it and came over to start a conversation about it. Which quickly turned into one the weirdest conversations I've had in quite some time. I find myself having quite a few in-depth conversations with strangers over here. It's a lot of fun actually. Like the one several weeks ago, with a Turkish man who was telling me about the torture practices used by the police.

This weekend I also bought my train ticket to Paris, so I now have physical proof that I am indeed leaving London. Which is both wonderful and sad. It's been a remarkable few months, living and working in London. Life-changing.