Week Notes 31-26 London Edition

It’s summer, hot and dry, and we spent the week in London, not quite the right place to cool down. A week of dunking ourselves from the almost too cold air conditioned hotel room near Finsbury Park into the stuffy, iron smell of the underground where the tunnels were hazy with a dark fog of dust and rust, and back. It was Y’s first visit, seeing things like red double deckers she only knows from watching screens. I remember my first London visit (in February 2000) when like my first NYC visit in 1992 with steam rising from the subway, I experienced the sort-of magical overlay of a place that is at once totally new and totally familiar. Even if for us it does not have that overlay anymore, and our older eyes now see things our younger eyes glossed over, it was good to visit again after a long time (2018 for me, 2013 for E). Y’s main attraction for this visit was not the city though, but our visit to the Harry Potter Studios on our first day in town. We stayed at a hotel at Watford…