Disconnected

If I’d written this even an hour ago, it might have had a very different tone. I know how fast things can flip from bleak to better (or the reverse) and yet it’s dizzying every time.

London apparently was colder today than it was on Christmas Day, and I’m still a little jetlagged and wondering what the hell I was thinking, coming here, and worrying about the fact that I haven’t done any work for several days, and also the loneliness factor. I’ve had plans for this Saturday for a week now, but the rest of the weekend seemed… empty, which is crazy, when you consider I sometimes have weekends like that in NYC and it’s all fine. (Maybe because I have more of a routine there.) But then came a lunch invitation for Saturday, and a last-minute dinner invite for tomorrow, and suddenly things seemed brighter.

I had to go to the letting office today in Marylebone to deal with some problems with my flat. It was an hour’s walk there, partly through Hyde Park. It’s strange to be in a new area of London, though I know it a bit from my old Saturday runs from Putney to High Street Kensington. (I actually live about five minutes’ walk now from my old favorite workout studio, the Pilates-on-crack place, though I don’t recognize a single instructor on the schedule and haven’t been yet.) I forgot my A to Z and don’t yet have an English smartphone, so making my way across town was a combination of instinct and the occasional map I spied on a Boris Bike docking station (can we still call them Boris Bikes?) Then I walked through Portman Square (where I used to go almost every day) and down to Piccadilly. I suppose I could have stopped at a Starbucks to check my email or send messages, but I didn’t, and so felt separate from the world – so, well, disconnected.

Today’s victory: I didn’t stop at Ben’s Cookies just because it was there and smelled delicious. The place I have to go for treatment is actually a couple of blocks from one, so I’ve told myself there will be plenty of chances.