Death's Love Life

So you're looking for the end of the travelogue, and I guess I'll give it to you. I was so wiped upon my return that I couldn't even think about writing. I've caught up on some sleep and readjusted to the clock and even returned to work. So I can try to be unfunny now.

I'm not in a very funny mood. There's an ongoing situation that some loyal readers are aware of, and others would consider trivial, so I'm not going into it, but suffice it to say that it involves the loss of an online home. While I was not overtly wronged personally, others--friends--were, and I must consider the place a thing of history. It's been over a week now, and I'm just not adjusting well to the whole thing. It's an unpleasant and unwanted lifestyle change.

But for you? I'll be as unfunny as ever.

For our last day in London, we hooked up with the ever-popular Doctor Death and headed off to Hendon, which is an outer borough of London, where once upon a time was located RAF Hendon, an important command post for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. That base is now the site of the RAF Museum, which for little-boy war freaks like me and Doctor Death is just stone cool. The museum traces the history of aviation, focusing of course on British interests, but making more than a passing nod to other aviation pioneers. There are tremendous numbers of preserved airplanes, war and otherwise, and excellent sections of this enormous museum are given over to presentations on the world wars. An entire hall is dedicated to the Battle of Britain, and it's a powerful show indeed.

There's a little cafe in the Battle of Britain hall, where Doctor Death and I enjoyed a lunch of macaroni and cheese, chips, and baked beans. The eminently more sensible Ilse enjoyed just a baked potato, but Doctor Death and I were interested in covering all of the starch food groups.

Hendon is way out in the sticks, and we had a long tube ride to get there and back, and a longish walk to get from the tube to the museum (Ilse and Doctor Death would tell you that I'm a fat, greasy, whiny pansy and that the walk isn't that long). The whole thing exhausted us and we tubed back into the city to rest a bit.

Which, after some rest, led to Saturday's rendition of an ever-popular tourist game in England, that being Trying to Find Dinner After 8 PM. Go on, try it, I dare you. Ilse and I had had some difficulty finding food after our visit to the Tate Modern, which has a restaurant wrongly characterized in some travel guide as "traditional" and more accurately characterized by the Landru Guide as "intolerably charmed by itself and worthy of any stars only if they are neutron stars falling on the proprietors' heads, a veritable tribute to the idea that modern cuisine needs a fucking intestinal lavage and a good beating about the head and ears by enraged persons who like to eat." We ended up at some hideous late-night joint with more traditional British fare, which prompted the odes to mushy peas and microwaved roast beef in my last entry.

So Doctor Death, Ilse, and I set out from the hotel at about 8 to try to find a pub dinner, because that just seemed fitting for our last night in town. It's Saturday freakin' night, people. In a city of something like 6 million people. Pub kitchens close at 7:30 PM, and look at you like you're daft if you ask them at 8 if the kitchen's still open. Four pubs we tried, and every one of them seemed quite ready to call the gendarmes.

So we ended up at a casual Italian place over on Yuppy Restaurant Street, where we'd been eating most of the week. It was charming because the waitress was really hot, and Eastern European (I guessed Russian, she turned out to be Polish). She hated me. But she adored Doctor Death.

Now, Doctor Death is not an unattractive or unpleasant man in any sense whatsoever. He's a tad shy, but he ain't ugly, and he is wicked funny and smarter than any couple-three dozen of me put together, being an actual doctor and all. And Polskette is almost literally dripping all over the guy. If you're reading this, Doctor Death, please tell me you went back to hit on her some more. Or tell me you're gay. Because the speed with which you tucked and ran when she got your zipper down and her hand inside your fly was just disturbing, dood.

And then it was time to come home. The flight back was less daunting; there were no geezers kneeing us in the back, and the movies were okay, although the food was a war crime. We zipped through Customs despite all those condoms full of China White that I swallowed and later recovered for street sale. My only complaint is that it took me until today to feel even tokenly human.

Okay, I'm not funny. I'll go start mining political sites for stuff to rant about. Maybe a Supreme Court justice resigned while I was gone. Or maybe Rick Santorum published a really offensive book, the sole purpose of which was to supplement Eddie Klein's partisan whackjob attacks on a Senator from Santorum's neighboring state.

Oh, wait, this just in:

Santorum Sodomizes Scouts, Licks Self Clean Afterwards