A Map or Descriptione of Thamesis and the Citie of London: A Series of Tragi-comical Sketches of Troynovant.

 Yup kids.  That’s what they called London when they were setting up for an Ancient Bloodline and they were still feeling rather backwoods to the Continent.

Did you miss me, dear reader? (Actually, readerS.  I have four official followers now!! Now I just need to collect disciples and I can start a new religion!)  It’s been little over a week since I last wrote and I’m sure you’re all desperate to know what I’ve been up to. (Of course you’re not, you’re busy people. But you’re my captive audience, so pretend you are.)  Anyway.  Have I been up to things? Yes, loads.  So much so that sometimes I feel I need to spend a whole WEEK staring at a wall in my bedroom and recovering.

The thing is, I know my time is limited, and I’m living in a FABULOUS city that has about 5 million different wonderful options to pursue Every. Single. Day.  And being the obsessive perfectionist I am, AND because I love adventures, I want to do it all.  Simultaneously.  I can see this is going to be the major hurdle to overcome while I’m here.  Because I both long to hunt up every scrap of paper in England that has ever mentioned pageantry and the Thames, plus every bit of interesting Old Stuff also lying around (seriously, see last post. I LOVE old things. You know that Atwood book (Lady Oracle?) where her main character’s lover thinks she’s having an affair because she’s so obsessed with the various fascinating oddments in Portobello Market that she sneaks off there for hours every day?  That would be me.)  In the meantime, there are pubs, shops, teashops, galleries, shows, historical sites and parks which are all calling my name.  And the River.  SO, I have been keeping a schedule that runs from about 8am (out the door) to 1:30am (in bed but probably still reading and/or plotting what to do tomorrow), because, yes, in case you’re wondering, I’m still pouring lovingly over old books and maps at the library every day as well.  I stay at the Library until 5pm, then take off to walk along the river or visit one of the many lovely churches in the downtown core.  Then it’s errands and home, quick dinner, out to a pub or show, home to skype my dearly beloveds and finally bed. Repeat.   

Now perhaps you have more energy than I do and scoff at my limping pace, but I don’t think I can keep this up forever.  My problem is that I need to be up early to catch the archives, but I am physically incapable of going to sleep early. So my sleeping hours get shorter all the time.  The other day I felt so exhausted and discombobulated (K, wasn’t this like, our favourite word find in high school?), that I simply stayed home and brought the inner chaos into order by cleaning, organizing and decorating my room.

Anyway, I plan to burn the candle at both ends for as long as I can.  This may mean that by the time I return to Canada, I am catatonic with information overload, but you’ll put up with me, right?  SO, I have, since arriving….

 Wandered along a fair chunk of the Thames (and documented its infinite variety obsessively in endless photos), and London.  Partially in an attempt to teach myself how not to get lost *quite* so often.  Checked out Camden Market.  And by the way, I am IN LOVE with Camden Market.  It and Portobello Market are my truest of loves here. It has everything I love best. Antiques, fascinatingly patterned tights, cheap quirky clothing, a bewildering array of food, and just… a general atmosphere that I love.  It’s like what Kensington Market is trying to be, but three times the size with three times the amazing stuff and people.  Plus you can take your food and eat along the canal.  Poked around there one afternoon until my head nearly exploded with joy and over-stimulation.  Was in very great danger of buying THE ENTIRE MARKET.  Luckily, my wired money hadn’t come through yet, so I didn’t dare by anything but vitamins.  But next time, heaven help me.  I may singled-handedly resuscitate the stumbling UK economy. Last Sunday I rambled around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and by the way, when stumbling around London, do you ever suddenly get the unmistakable feeling that Queen Victoria is watching you?  Well She IS. 

And Albert.

Creepy.  Stumbled across his memorial in the midst of the stereotypical English parkland and wondered if I’d accidentally transported myself to some bizarre mash-up of Ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence.  A little to Popish for proper Victorian Protestants.  The puritans would totally flip.

Looked at the Tudor portraits in the National Portrait Gallery (Oh Henry VIII, you weren’t all that bad-looking until you got that leg injury and became an overweight crazy-pants), and stopped upstairs for tea and scones (scones AMAZING.  Hot and crumbly apple-raisin, with clotted cream, naturally. Tea, not so.  Fine, but K, I think Secret Garden still wins for cream teas. Although, I admit I was a bit frazzled by the time I got there, so perhaps I didn’t do it justice). 

When I am not having Important Cultural Experiences, I am meeting the other Shakespeare/Ren people at King’s College (they’re all lovely) and catching up with the various friends I have known that happen to be in London now.  For example, my good friend Sean was in town the week I arrived with his band, Blood Ceremony (currently on their European tour), so naturally I had to go say hi.  They were AWESOME and their fans were super adoring which is really great to see.  If you happen to have a love for bands who pay loving and playful homage to Black Sabbath, and seventies euro-vampire films, you should definitely check them out.  

http://www.myspace.com/bloodceremony

Meanwhile, D is working on an album of her own, and I’m having a great time watching her work with photographers and makeup artists as she and A craft a music video for her songs.  Seriously, why didn’t I come up with a career that required me to dream up awesome costumes to wear and get photographed in them?  Clearly made the wrong choice there.  Definitely hoping I get to see her perform her own stuff somewhere official before I leave (although it’s also just great to have someone around the house who plays the piano fabulously. 

Um, what else? Went out to Soho the other night with D and her sassy friend from the Savoy, and discovered that when people are out dancing here, they sometimes buy each other a round of Champagne.  Of the fancy kind.  Apparently that’s a thing. Kinda hilarious.  Also the club was playing all the nineties standbys, so it was kinda like being back in undergrad in some sort of alternate reality that didn’t involve cheap beer and paralyzers (how did I ever drink that?).

D and A have been introducing me to their favourite pubs, and I had a very Educational Experience the other day involving cider, mould and ginger beer.  Let’s just say, cider here is more deadly than it appears, and if your stomach feels a little rocky the next morning, DON’T try to settle it with mouldy toast. Admittedly, the mould part was never part of the plan, but take it from me, it does NOT help.  Ginger beer, on the other hand, is magical, magical stuff and everyone should ALWAYS have some, cuz it totally saved the day for me.  Also, I have learned my lesson and will stick to whiskey from now on.

And now it’s time for a Things I Love About England Moment:

I’ve being paying tribute to Marks and Spensers.  It will always hold a special place in my heart since we had it in Victoria until I was about 11, and I had some of my favourite early dresses from there.  But their food is what’s so exciting here.  English food in general, like everything else, fascinates me.  Like, you can get boil-in-a-bag kippers!! It sounds kinda revolting (not the kippers, my Newfie Grandpa used to give me them on toast), but also fascinating, so naturally I want to try it.  And Lemon curd, and oh, many things.  Like, “Christmas Pudding Wine.”  Does it taste like Christmas pudding, or does it go with it? Is it worth £20 to find out?  Marmite I’ve tried, and honestly, I don’t hate it.  Black pudding I’m still working up to.  I will try most anything once (as long as it’s not bugs), but…well, technically I have tried it.  Once.  And it wasn’t a good experience.  When I was living in France my host mother made it.  Without telling what it was, she stuffed a spoonful in my mouth and asked me if I recognized it.  There was something about the metallic, salty taste that seemed vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place it.  Her response: Pointing to a vein in her arm, “C’est le sang!”  To make this all the more dramatic, and my mental image all the more revolting, she’d just been describing the blood test she’d had that morning in graphic detail, so suddenly I had the impression that I was eating HER blood.  Fantastic.  Haven’t tried it since.

Oh and TEA.  Just as France ruined the North American pastry for me forever, England is utterly spoiling me for tea in the NA café/resto.  Having always been a tea snob, how wonderful it is to get a half decent cup for cheap no matter WHERE you go? Wonderful enough to write a hymn about it.  Or design an Entire Map Dedicated to Tea Drinking.  Which Winston Churchill DID for the Brits to cheer them up in 1940, during that unfortunate little incident with the Blitz.  Really.  A map of how tea sustains people the world over.  And it accidentally calls Vancouver Island Vancouver.  AND it’s for sale in the BL shop.  All of which makes me more happy than I can possibly say.  How long can I resist purchasing this gem?  Only time will tell. 

Why Real Life Often Confuses me and Seems Less Plausible than Fiction: A Study

Sitting around with friends the other night, we were discussing how everyone who’s anyone is getting kidnapped by pirates in Africa right now.  Now this is horrible, both the economic circumstances that set this up and for the victims involved, and I would NEVER want it to happen to anyone (apparently there are over 300 people being held as hostages even as we speaking).  BUT, as G and I were discussing the other night, when you say the word “pirates” my head goes to a very different place.  I CANNOT take the word seriously.  I instantly think of Muppet Treasure Island and Errol Flynn and I’m all like, ooh, pirates! YAY!  They’ll kidnap me, we’ll sing a song about cabin fever on the bounding main, Johnny Depp will drop by for whiskey, someone will have a pet anteater called Flaubert and I’ll finally get to learn how to fence.  Before I know it I’m smiling dreamily and planning my pirate wardrobe.   Which is terrible, and G and I would both like to petition that we come up with another word for these people.  Because Hollywood has totally skewed my sense of reality, even though I know that both pirates now and Ye Olde Swashbuckling ones were horrible, and richly deserved to be drowned by three tides, chained to the Thames riverbed.  Okay, no they didn’t.  Nobody does.  But that’s what they did, AND I saw it yesterday (the spot not the pirates, although OOH PIRATES… wait… here we go again…) when I took my three hour tour up river to see the flood gates and Greenwich Meantime, and they pointed it out. 

AND the pub across the river where the naval officers responsible for their arrest would have a pint and watch them drown.  Reportedly.  Doesn’t surprise me.  People in general are horrible when it comes to stuff like that.  Just look at all the pictures of Dead Gaddafi.  I mean seriously, is this Ancient Rome? Why don’t we put his head on a spike and skip around a bonfire and be done with it?  But anyway.  Pirates.  Find a new name.  This is your task for this week.

And the Thames was as gorgeous as can be in the sunshine, and I had a lovely and entirely research appropriate time.  And froze myself solid cuz I refused to go below deck to get warm in case I might miss something.  And got so irritable about it all that I started grumpily thinking to myself that I didn’t really see what the big deal is about the damn river that everyone from Kipling to Woolf to P.D. James and Sansom can’t stop writing about it (Sansom seems particularly obsessed with describing the E. Mod. River, and yes, even in my downtime I am reading mystery novels that reference the Thames.  Because I am THAT dedicated).  Now, after I warmed up I confessed to myself that I was probably just hypothermic and tired, but, can I confess a heresy? The River Thames doesn’t fascinate me.  What has been done on and along it fascinates me.  That people seem endlessly rhapsodic about it fascinates me.  The river: not so much.  Maybe I’m just being a North American Snob here, but, yeah, so what, it’s big, it’s tidal, it can be treacherous.  Couldn’t it at least manage a waterfall or a rapid or two?  I mean, you want to see spectacular rivers, go to BC.  Or Quebec.  Like the Duke of Queensbury, I can’t help thinking sometimes, “"What is there to make so much of in the Thames? I am quite weary of it: there it goes, flow, flow, flow, always the same."

Apropos nothing, had crazy dream about fighting a a giant lion on the Heath, defending the other walkers with the fire-poker battleaxe, and awoke in a sweat having slashed the lion’s tongue (didn’t want to kill it, but it wanted to revenge or something, and anyway I felt terribly guilty about the whole thing).

Now what makes this interesting, is that apparently the super rich of England’s favourite thing to do in the eighties was keep large jungle cats.  But recently the laws changed and they had to give them up. Did they turn them in to zoos? Oh no, they just released kitty into the English wild.  So to speak.  D has just informed me that there has been a “big cat” sighting in the last couple of days on the Heath.  Awesome.  Also, I’m psychic.

I frequently visit Hampstead Heath and I love it in all its moods.  It always provokes fits of philosophical musings on Mortality and Destiny in me –  they take me like sudden agues. Something about wandering around the same wild land that I know Keats, Freud and countless others paced, and leaving as little trace as they.  Came across this house over a rise and felt very Elizabeth Bennet for a moment. 

I like to go up to Kite hill and watch the skyline of the city.  Legend has it Guy Fawkes planned to watch the explosion of Parliament from here, and it would be a perfect spot.  This morning, I actually say Parrots. Or parakeets?  I’d been pretty sure I’d been seeing them, but I finally got a picture. 

They seem to run wild on the Heath.  I don’t know how they survive, but then there’s a number of things scampering around the Heath that shouldn’t really be there (See above).  I am beginning to see a pattern in fact.  I think there is a secret plan in the UK to transform itself into a Tropical Paradise, in time for the polar ice dissolution.  A tells me tigers or something have been sighted in Wales.  Can you imagine if I see one there?  I’ve been to places that actually HAVE tigers in the wild, so how hilarious would it be if I’m poking around the seashore in Wales, being all broody and Arthurian, and I happen to see a tiger stalk by? 

I see quite a lot of English wild things out this way too.  Foxes, swans, Kestrels and so on.  Apparently history records that Richard I brought swans to England as gift from Queen Beatrice of Cyprus, and I’ve no doubt he did, but they can’t have been the first swans, or the Saxons wouldn’t have been going around calling their mistresses “Swan-neck” all the time.  Ooh, and an owl flew directly over my head the other day and I thought irresistibly of Harry Potter. And how much do I love the foxes?  They always seem so apologetic, glancing back over their shoulders at me as they lope away.  I keep wanting to befriend them, so we can have melancholy-wise discussion when I leave about how becoming unique to one another in all the world has done us both good, although we shall cry…

By the way popped by Trafalgar square the other day, and saw THIS atrocity.  Apparently in aid of a "fan rally" for football.

Poor Trafalgar lions, eclipsed by an inflatable bear.  The lions are wonderful. Maybe it’s something to do with my early obsession with Narnia (oh, and by the way, apparently the Heath is supposed to be CS Lewis’ inspiration for Narnia.  So I am literally wandering around the land just past Ward Robe and Spare Oom Every DAY.), but the lions always make me want to climb up between their paws and go to sleep.  I feel like this happens in one of the books (K?).  SEE how I’ve been brainwashed by early literature?  Yes, I know, I’m crazy.  We’d already established that, right?

Anyway, it’s long past time for me to Shut Up.  I have overstayed my welcome in a tres posh Italian café in Hampstead Village, where all the poshest of the posh people seem hang out, and must away cuz we’re off to Richmond for D’s birthday this afternoon. 

George Michael sightings: Still Zero

PS Though my roommates have seen Boy George twice this week, so that must count for something, right?

Kisses and Kippers

To begin my trip at the beginning of my trip, I record that I survived.

This blog begins, like all great stories, in medias res, at the British Library.  Well, just post-library, since what on earth would I be doing at the sanctum sanctorum blogging?!  Yes, yes, you’re asking yourself, but is this really going to be a great story?  To which I reply: that is hardly my responsibility.  It’s the record of what I’m up to right now, and if you choose to read it and it bores you to tears, you have only yourself to blame.  Also my infernal pride for daring to post to begin with, but that’s another story.

Meanwhile, I am totally CONSUMED with book-lust.  For people like me, who are not only bibliophiles of the “it was bound and has pages and therefore deserves to be loved and protected even if it is the STUPIDEST BOOK EVER” kind, but who also adore things simply because they are old, the BL is probably the most dangerous place on earth.  Good thing they have high security, or I’d really be in trouble.  Heh.  Anyway, now not only do I want my very own illuminated manuscript (Any takers? My birthday’s coming up) because I have just been reminded how truly lovely they can be, but the BL book store is luring me with its siren songs of fresh crisp books of various stripes. Books I often already own, but with prettier, more pretentious covers.  Notebooks with covers from the Lindisfarne Gospels.  And oh, most of all, MAPS.  Of LONDON.  And the THAMES.  Many of them.  I WANT THEM ALL.  (Coffee may cause ¾ of this post to be in caps.  Just to warn you).  So far, the fact that the money wired to my brand new UK bank account hasn’t come through yet is keeping me honest, but it’s only a matter of time… And the maps are necessary to my research, right???

And naturally, when I’m not lusting after the books in the store or coveting BL Treasures in their permanent exhibition, I’ve been happy as an obsessive clam, poring over every depiction/map etc that I can find of London or the Thames.  This is just a jumping off point, but it occurs to me that nothing could orient me to early London better or give me a clearer sense of possible jurisdictional battles over the river (since those who map, usually seek to delineate boundaries and assign ownership, no?) than its early maps.  Plus, I love pouring over pictorial layouts of things exhaustively.  Always have.  

I put this down to the fact that

A) As already mentioned above, I’m totally obsessive (which fortunately for me, works wonderfully when it comes to research. Most of the time).  Used to drive my Mum absolutely INSANE by refusing to allow her to turn the page on whatever picture book she was reading me until I had absorbed and traced over with my finger Every. Single. Detail of the picture.

B) I have no sense of direction whatsoever.  Therefore maps fascinate me.  This may seem counterintuitive, but I think I have the vague sense that if I can absorb a map of something into my very pores, I will FINALLY know which direction I’m going in.  It’s not really that I don’t have a sense of direction, it’s more that I have a completely wrong sense of direction.  For example, wherever I am, intuitively, north is directly ahead.  I have no idea why.  Cuz it’s usually at the top of maps?  Because that would be really, really convenient for me? Because I am the centre of the universe? Who knows?

If you don’t believe me, I have early proof of both my total lack of spatial organization, AND my fascination with maps of the world.  Granted, I think I was about seven when I made this, but observe below.

I have no idea what the connecting lines are for.  Latitudes? Suspected affinities my seven-year-old self traced between nations and… err… “the prairies”?  Anyway, I rest my case.  In a side note, in case you’re wondering at the somewhat eclectic appearance of world nations, cities, etc, my Mum read me a lot of Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology, which is why "Rom, Gres and Ejipd" appear directly around the Northpol, the Most Important Place On Earth. Clearly.

But I digress.  Which is all I will do for this ENTIRE BLOG.  Welcome to my strange stream of consciousness monologue.  Mind you, if you know me already, (and if you don’t, why the HELL are you reading this?), you already know that.  Back to England.

I’ve been here for just over a week now, and it pains me to say it was only this week that I finally made it in to the BL.  Apparently moving across the world and setting up an apartment, bank account, mobile and internet take a little longer than the three days I optimistically assigned them.

The first day I arrived I was a little bewildered by the time difference and the Total Lack of Sleep I had on my Budget flight over (not quite true, probably managed 2 hours. Because I have magical powers and can sleep ANYWHERE).  See, once aboard, they announced sheepishly (this is Thomas Cook, AirTransat btw), that since not ALL the seats were able to recline, to make it fair for everyone, they’d fixed the seats so that NONE of them would recline.  Personally, I can think of another solution to that conundrum, but I guess they did their best with the wits they had.  There was a six-foot something guy crammed into the middle seat beside me, and I must say he put up with travelling like a folded up deck chair remarkably well.  (And if he did take half my seat as well, he also let me borrow his phone when we arrived.)  Also the in-flight entertainment didn’t work.  Now to be perfectly honest, I totally expected my budget flight to be Hell, so really, I wasn’t surprised and would probably have been a little disappointed if it had been otherwise.

At customs, the lady seemed deeply suspicious of the fact that my university was funding my research trip to England (this seemed easier to explain then a national research grant), but eventually she let me through, after making sure I hadn’t forgotten about eating while I was here.

Agent: Yes, but who’s paying for your FOOD?

Me: Oh food.  I FORGOT about that.  Damn. Guess I’ll have to go back to Canada.

On the train into town I was adopted by a slightly odd but lovely woman who told me that the people in Camden Market would love my hat.  Also, that heroine was what finally did Amy Winehouse in, so to avoid that.  Noted.  Speaking of which, I must say all the Brits I’ve encountered have been perfectly sweet to me so far.  Either British people are much nicer that reports claim, or I have charmingly helpless down to an art.  I prefer to believe the former, but fear the later may be more accurate.

D and her boyfriend collected me at Victoria station and spent the rest of the day shepherding me around and feeding me.  Really, London put on its very best for my arrival.  It was 29 degrees out, and crystal clear.  From the street where I live, I can see the whole cityscape stretched along the river, and with Highgate cemetery one side, and Hampstead Heath on the other, I feel about the luckiest temporary resident of modest means ever.

The place I’m staying is super cute and has about as much character as one flat can safely have.  There are many ways I could describe it, but let me leave it at this.  Essentially, I am living in a set piece from La Boheme (well, an updated version).  All hardwood floors and peeling paint, funny little nooks and latched windows.  We have a hotplate, an electric wok, a bar fridge and a washing machine, and I feel like I’m finally getting a chance to live out the undergrad “first apartment” experience I never had.  You may think I’m being sarcastic here, but I’m not.  I never lived in Res, my first university was in the same town I grew up in, so I stayed at home.  By the time I got a proper first apartment (omitting the ghastly “fully-furnished” rat-infested, pink-walled, muppet orange shag-carpeted-couch having one – remember M?), my roomie had means and a decidedly classy sense of taste, so I never did the threadbare, bargain basement routine. So I’ve actually been having a wonderful time visiting the Poundstretcher, finding and furnishing my place with the cheapest things I can find.  A few scarves and prints from Camden Market and I’ll be set.   D and A, my new roommates, are respectively a musician and an artist, below us lives a photographer, and across the street a girl arrives every morning with easel and palette to paint the prospect of London.  So I’m basically living in an accidental artists colony.  More and more La Boheme than ever.  I don’t know what I bring to all this.  I’ll have to start posting sonnets on trees or something to earn my keep. 

Strictly speaking, if we stick to the script, I guess the roles I most closely inhabit are the roles of the philosopher and the poet.  Honestly, it’s all so perfect I kinda keep expecting the landlord to show up and demand the rent so we can all have a blazing row, get him drunk, promise to pay him later, and then race out to profligately spend our meagre All at the local pub.  Naturally, I will soon encounter a lovely but hapless (and consumptive) young tailor, who I will fall madly in love with, abandon, and then return to just in time to weep over his dying moments so that I can write a tragic and highly commercially successful story about his untimely demise.  (If this is going to work, given my limited timeline, I should meet him about next week at the latest).

Anyway, D and A have taken me very firmly under their wings, and A especially has been a kind of magician at procuring deals for me every which way I look, from sales on mattresses to pay as you go mobile with endless internet deals.  A really needs to write a book called How to Survive in London on £15 a Month or something.

Still, all of this has taken time, and the main hitch has been the bank.  I think I’ve finally got that sorted, but last week, when I went in and began the process of setting up an account, they promptly went ahead and LOST all my information.  Including a photocopy of my passport.  Not thrilled about that, but hopefully it actually got shredded as they claim, and is not currently being sold across the internets.

Which speaking of, I FINALLY got on Monday, and was so incredibly euphoric about it that I may need to see a doctor about email addiction.  Although in fairness to me, these days literally EVERYWHERE assumes you’re wired in, so it’s nearly impossible to get things done without it.

This post waxeth long, so I won’t go into detail about my more frivolous pastimes till next time, but I HAVE been having fun, in addition to being industrious.

Finally, and then I promise to shut up, for those of my friends who are naturally wondering WHY I feel the need to blog about this, three words: I AM LAZY.

I love you all and I desperately want to keep in touch, but I’m also a total recluse and tend to get overwhelmed when surrounded by new experiences, so I have to balance my desire to stay in touch with you all and keep you filled in, with my inability to write a whole bunch of newsy emails individually every week (I’ll still try for short ones), and my absolute need to sometimes sit quietly in my bedroom with a cup of tea staring at the wall.

Thus, the evil necessity of the BLOG arose.  Normally, I am against blogs on principle.  This is for several reasons.  One, everyone else is already doing it, and I have always been the kind that, if everyone else was doing it, I wanted to do the opposite.  Seriously. I was super into environmentalism when I was little until Fern Gully came out and it became THE THING for Socially Conscious grad six girls to emote about.  Then I decided to hate it on principle, and may have even been head advocating clearcut logging (something that utterly bewildered my forester father, since I had scowled my through the entire impromptu clearcut field trip he took me on the year before).

Second, I’m a luddite.  I hate, fear and suspect new technology of every kind and anything occurring on a computer falls under that bracket (my love of email notwithstanding).  If writing your memoirs on papyrus or stone tablets had suddenly become a thing, I would probably have been the first on board, unable to resist the lure of Old Things despite the regrettable fad-ishness, but blogs?? Bleh. 

However, this really IS the most expedient way, AND I get to have a wholly captive and imaginary audience, which suits my vanity JUST fine.  Plus, I get to assign it a ridiculous and misleading title (although I can’t take credit for it.  Thanks V for the suggestion). 

You see, although I am just as poverty-ridden and raffish as the next travelling scholar, by pure accident I have wound up living in one of the poshest parts of London.  When googling the area, I discovered that nearly every celebrity (British or otherwise) has a place in the area, including, as Wikipedia likes to particularly note, George Michael.  And thus, George Michael Watch 2011 was born.

I have absolutely NO celebrity spotting-radar, so all this celebritydom is probably wasted on me (It should be you, M.  I swear, with your magical abilities you could spot Jude Law in Antwerp or Antarctica.  Cuz if you were there, somehow, he would be).  But, I will do my best.  And if I spot him, I will let you know, dear reader.

George Michael sightings as of this moment: 0

Note to self: Must remember to remind myself what he looks like these days.

xo