Back Home Again

I made it back to London early this morning, and despite the transit strikes didn't have any trouble getting home. I had to take the Heathrow Express nonstop train into town, which isn't the cheapest way to get here, but it's convenient and fast and there's something to be said for that. Especially after you've been sitting on an airplane for six-plus hours and in an airport for three hours before that.

We flew home on a slightly more northern route than usual. (John Gray -- we passed right over your house!)

I spent the flight mostly reading. I finished Michael Finkel's book "True Story: Murder, memoir, mea culpa," which was a compulsive page-turner. Finkel was a magazine journalist before he wrote, in a fit of editorial desperation, a somewhat fictionalized piece for The New York Times Magazine that killed his career. This book was an examination of that incident, interwoven with an account of Finkel's simultaneous professional involvement with a notorious murderer in Oregon, whose own loose relationship with truth enabled his life of criminality. So the whole thing was an examination of honesty. Very interesting and SUPER good!

I also watched "All the President's Men," one of my favorite movies and appropriate for continuing the truth-and-journalism themes.

I did meet up with my friends and my cousin in Washington, which was fun. It made me think I should do this kind of thing more often. Why, when I fly, do I not build in an extra day for a layover if it's somewhere I'd like to visit? My only regret was that I didn't have time to go into central Washington, which I always enjoy.

Now I need to catch up on blog-reading and comments and spend some time with Olga, who was very excited to see me come through the door. (Oh, and Dave too, of course. 😀 ) The garden is looking great. Lots of photos to come, like the ones of our teasels above.