Goldfish Revisited

I'm getting a bit of a slow start this morning because I slept a little later than usual. Last night Dave and I went to see our friends Gordon and Donna in Leyton, East London, and we were there until about 11 p.m. That is a positively insane hour for me these days, so now I need some recovery time!

Yesterday was pretty slow, consumed with reading and household errands. I did all the usual stuff -- laundry, gardening -- and read about 30 more pages of John Rechy's "City of Night," which I hadn't picked up all week. I like this book -- I keep thinking it must have created a heck of a scandal when it was published in the early '60s -- but I can see it's going to take me some time.

We didn't head out to Leyton until about 5 p.m., and neither of the most direct tube lines -- the Jubilee and the Central -- were running. I don't know if that was a prelude to the tube strike, which is supposed to start today, or an unrelated problem. We caught the overground instead, which got us to Stratford without too much trouble, and then we started to hoof it to Gordon's. We passed an idling taxi and grabbed that to save ourselves the walk, because Dave was carrying a banoffee pie and schlepping that around East London wasn't the easiest thing. The taxi let us out on Leyton High Road so I could photograph the buildings above, which I've been meaning to do for a while. Isn't that a crazy paint job?

Anyway, Gordon made dinner and we had a great time catching up. I asked if they'd recently seen the neighbor boy with the goldfish, and they weren't sure who I meant, so I read them the last few paragraphs of my post from January 2012. We had a good laugh. That kid is in his mid-20's now. How time flies. But I have never forgotten Alan John the goldfish!