london

Waterloo Station. About to tube across town to Kings Cross (which makes me think of an Eliot Smith song that is very good) to hop a train to Edinburgh and destiny (huzzah!) Have been staying in Wimbledon with a friends (including a hell of a nice chap who bears an unfortunate physical likeness to Dawson Leery). Alarmed (or perhaps pleased) to note all this latent verbiage emerged the second I arrived in London - a vocabulary absorbed from watching too many BBC Austen adaptations, loosed by hearing the correlating accent (plummy tones lend themselves to pulling out words like 'exemplem' 'rarefied' and 'vexatious').

In Wimbledon I saw the following stereotypical British icons:

* a man dressed in full cricket whites despite it being 24 degrees out, having a go at bat during a game on Wimbledon common.
* squirrels
* an English stately home holding a garden party handing out Pimm's, and later featuring 18th century English folk dancers. Oh, and a coconut toss. I won a coconut. Many Monty Python jokes ensued.
* a British pub with standard issue "the noun & noun" moniker. This one -disappointingly - had the rather sensible epithet of "The Fox & Grapes." Made far too much sense to me.
* a 1920s, open-top, ash-framed vintage motorcar complete with driver wearing leather cap and goggles.

I've also had my first celebrity siting - Simon Callow, best known as the boisterous gay bearded man what dies in Four Weddings and a Funeral. I'm not sure it counts as a celebrity when you have to explain to everyone who he is though.