Rain, crepes and more kitten action!

Hello chaps, Tom "the scab" says hi! I am right now in London, but not for very much longer as I'm off to gay Paris tomorrow. Enough of this English-speaking bizzo and there are way too many Aussies in the UK, London especially. It's like they're shaken Queensland upsidedown like a salt shaker and all the 18-30 year old idiots/yobbos/bogans have fallen out and landed here. And now, since Rachel left about a week ago, and Marnie (who was over here from Finland just for the weekend) left tonight, and -dare I say?- once I leave tomorrow, the Average Collective Intelligence of Aussies in London will drop dramatically. I'm surprised the Poms can stand it, but I guess it gives them something more to whine about! (Hee hee! Xenophobic AND un-patriotic me!)

So anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Since last I wrote, I been completely, utterly and pointlessly drenched in Glasgow. Which was kind of fitting, seeing as it was my last day in Scotland. It didn't help that in an attempt to avoid a small lake of a puddle in getting back to my youth hostel, I took a different route and ended up getting lost. I wandered round for a while, cursing my pathetic and increasingly failing sense of direction, the wind giving my previously trusty H&M umbrella a beating, and my jeans getting a free wash. Oh, did I mention it was raining? Eventually, I startled a kind Scottish postie who, once having realised I wasn't a walking drowned person, pointed me in the right direction - a new rival for my affections against the Scottish ferryman perhaps!? I got back to the hostel and within the hour it had stopped raining. If only I had stayed in the cafe/library at the bottom of the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art for another 3 hours on top of the 4 I'd already spent there and done even more Sudoko! Ah well, that's the price one will pay for lack of weather forcasts and forward planning. And for being in Scotland. And for not wearing one's trusty flasher-esque plastic Mack. *sigh* If only I had been planning some flashing that day...

Anyway, from Glasgow I went to Manchester to visit Rossage the Sausage who lives in a very nice terrace house where I felt right at home. His housemates are cool but cooler still was that while I was there, they got a kitten - a tiny, little, black, slightly fluffy kitten who they called Audrey, after Audrey Horn in Twin Peaks! She was so utterly tiny and cute and first timid and then playful... Perhaps this trip is a tour de kittens, rather than the tour de crepes I originally predicted?! No, I had crepes today and I will have nothing but crepes in Paris! Crepes AND kittens perhaps? Anyway, then in Manchester we all went out for Ross' housemate's birthday after having downed roughly a bottle of red wine each, then danced (to at least one Cure song!) and drank lager and then stumbled home in the rain, and then I woke up with a massive hangover and vowed never to drink again... which I sustained for roughly 48 hours when here in London we had some Baileys. And also beer. So a sad and sorry hungover me caught my superfast swish Virgin train to London - catching it with only 5 mins to spare! - gradually recovered enough to digest solids and got to London, where I have been staying with my buddy Karien who lives in Wimbledon. Marnie made a flying surprise visit on us and we went to the Tate Modern (which I loved), Borough Market (where we ate so many yummy cheese samples), and today I had a repeat performance of the famouse Hampstead crepes. Which were well worth the 50 min trip on the tube there (then 50 mins back), and the 50 min queue for the crepes themselves. Parisian crepes have a lot to live up to!

I should really leave it here because it is kind of the middle of the night and I have to catch a plane tomorrow and want a little more than 5 mins to spare this time! Plus I reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally need to sleep.

Hope everyone is bonza. Please write me and tell me what you're up to.
Love, E.
xxx