Damn. August already. Really didn’t see that one coming!

The nice thing about checking e-mail from here is that new e-mail doesn’t keep popping up, because most everyone in the US is still asleep.

Gah. I’m five days behind on this journal. I guess I know what I’ll be doing on the plane home! I have notes for each day, but need to write up the details. Oy.

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We went to the William Morris Gallery today, because William Morris and Pre-Raphaelite and Craftsman and Victoriana are now our new obsession. Ken is so wonderful. He’s just as interested as I am—we discussed the merits of various wallpapers and fabrics, etc. The exhibit was fascinating, with lots of original stuff (like the actual wood blocks used to print the wallpaper), but the house was very stuffy because of the overall heat, so I wilted fast. We bought a huge hc book on WM for only £15.

We drove back to Fiona and John’s and regrouped, then took the Tube into the centre of London to go to the giant Virgin Megastore in search of a few DVDs, like the Eddie Izzard one we discovered we don’t have. Alas, they were out of _everything_ on our list except “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on DVD, and we determined that it was too costly. We tried to go to the HMV down the street, but they were closing, and we were informed by the security guard that it was against the law to let anyone else in (even though there were still shoppers in the store). Yeah, right.

So we headed back to F&J’s, where we ordered a mess of Chinese food. See, back in January, we had Chinese takeout that included some amazing crispy beef. I’ve been trying to find it again ever since. I haven’t, in fact, found a Chinese place that even offers crispy beef, much less good crispy beef. So I’ve been craving it since January, and by gum, I was going to have some more now that I was back.

It was still great, although perhaps not quite as perfect as my memory had built it up. Yum. We chowed down, then watched F&J’s wedding DVD (they got married in Malta in May—the flights from the US were prohibitively expensive, alas). And that was our somewhat lazy day, partly productive and partly not, but overall lovely.

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I’m in one of those mindsets where I’m seeing themes in things; connections and correlations and links. For example, it was interesting reading about Morris’s anti-industrialisation comments, and comparing them to Tolkien’s. It’s also struck me how although we had several disappointments this trip (like not seeing the Godiva portrait or the motorcycle museum) there were several fortuitous events (such as being at Sarehole Mill the one day a month it’s in operation, or being able to get to the WM Gallery on the one Sunday a month it’s open).

I don’t believe that Fate is something over which you have no control. Certainly there are some things you can’t control or predict (often being the actions of other people), but you can certainly control your reaction to what happens. Take the new house, for example. We could’ve not even bothered to find out the original price, or to follow up and find out the owner might be willing to drop the price significantly. We could’ve acted like total schlumps and made a bad impression on the owner. So yes, there was a fair deal of effort on our part—but the circumstances fell together rather conveniently as well. Thank you, Lady Fate. :-)