Exotic London

London is many things. London is glamorous and grungy, cosmpolitan and stodgy, imperial and workaday, futuristic and ancient, exhilarating and oppressive. But one thing London is not is exotic.

Highlights so for: stopping on a country road to go into a stone church where one wall and window date from 800 A.D., and where I stroked my hand over the smooth alabaster effigy of the sister of Richard the Third that sleeps in peaceful eternity on top of the stone sarcophagus which conceals her bones; walking among the ten thousand daffodils in a friend's garden; lively dinners with a variety of hyper-articulate, enthusiastic and most of all very funny British friends; trudging through rainy London byways under my black umbrella with the Beatles blasting on the iPod; hearing the bells peel from the spire of a 15th century church late one evening and following the sound up a narrow stone spiral staircase to the bellringers loft, where for a happy hour I watched the motley collection of parish bellringers--grandmothers, hipsters with piercings, slick attorneys--pulling on the ropes and ringing the changes as they have been rung in that church for 500 years.

Today is laundry, maybe a little work, and my flight to Jaipur, India at 5 P.M.