Tea &c.

I fell asleep last night watching a real estate show on the BBC. Can’t imagine why…. Shows about buying and selling houses have been very big over here the last few years, and I have to confess a strange train-wreck sort of fascination with them. Anyway, my other choice was watching a retrospective on “Alive!”, and I’m a vegetarian. I managed at least six hours’ sleep before my Yank Time body clock rang the alarm on me, and by 0600 Real Time I was up and making tea.

However mean the accommodations in this country, I’ve never seen a room that didn’t come with a kettle. The alternative would clearly be barbarism. Knowing I’d quickly exceed my hotel-provided tea ration, I picked up some tea at Tesco last evening: Thompson’s Punjana for day, Tick Tock Rooibos for night.

Rooibos, or Redbush, tea is an African tradition I first became aware of while reading the abovementioned (28 March) books by Alexander McCall Smith. I’ve never seen it for sale in the U.S. except online, but over here one can bring it home from the supermarket. Africans have apparently been brewing this stuff off the bush since the discovery of fire, but it’s only been about a hundred years since it’s been available for the rest of us. It’s quite tasty, caffeine free, and loaded with antioxidants. Just what I need right now.

The first thing I often do after arriving here is catch a cold, which is not surprising given a 9 hour plane ride with several hundred strangers in super-dried recirculated air, then stepping off into a world of viruses one’s body has not yet been introduced to (Yes, I ended that sentence with a preposition. Sue me). One man on the plane – not Asian, strangely – wore a face mask the entire flight. To be fair, he did look a bit delicate, but it was only as we were deplaning that I saw his protective facegear in good light, and it appeared to have been sewn from an old washcloth, and exceedingly grubby. Hard to imagine what it might do for him besides making him look like a total git. Being somewhat less of a git, I brought along some Emergen-C, a couple of daily doses of which should keep me cold-free until my immune system can bluff it out with the locals.

Stepped into the breakfast room this morning and was assailed by country and western music, the popularity of which in the U.K. can probably best be attributed to the awfulness of mainstream British Pop. British Pop, in turn, seems to owe a lot to British advertising jingles, which are likewise pretty dire, even when not accompanied by animated bulldogs. The Geico gecko emigrated to the states so he could do better ads. You knew that. Breakfast in digs of this calibre consists of corn flakes and toast, juice, and your choice of weak tea or horrible coffee. If I’d been willing to pay £20 more a night I could have landed at a place that gives you a boiled egg on top of all that, but it hardly seemed worth it.

Following breakfast I walked up to Gloucester Road, since that was close to the first letting service I was visiting, then attempted to take a tube to the second. That went something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, due to a security alert at Bayswater there will be no Circle Line service to that station. If your destination is Kensington High Street, Notting Hill Gate, Queensway, Bayswater, or Paddington, please take the District Line train to Earl’s Court and change there for the Edgeware Road train.” Still with me? Okay. Fade to Earl’s Court: “Ladies and Gentlemen: If you are waiting for the Edgeware Road train to go to Kensington High Street, Notting Hill Gate, Queensway, Bayswater or Paddington, please get on the train that’s on the platform now and get off at Gloucester Road and change for the Circle line.” I was afraid I might end up doing this all day, but this time the train I needed was running from Gloucester Road, all so I could show up and be told that nothing could be done within my budget at that particular service. So tomorrow I’ll revisit the first service if I don’t find anything in LOOT, the local rentals paper. They, at least, were more encouraging, though I may have to stay further out and still pay more than I wanted to. The problem is that I’m not staying six months – Worldcon gets in the way – and short-term lettings are rarer and more expensive.