I’m not entirely packed yet, but the car to the airport isn’t coming for another four hours, so it’s not quite time to panic. I think everything’s pretty much taken care of, but we’ll see. I’ve dealt with enough bloody logistics to last several months, at least. Phone company, gas company, electricity company, shipping company. So many minutes on the phone with UPS finding out what brown cannot do for me.

Those were the crappy logistics.

Good logistics include getting in touch with this girl Elizabeth, who was holding on to the keys to the London flat. Friday I headed up Mulberry to her place, upstairs from a storefront playing Dean Martin into the afternoon bustle. On the third floor, she opened the door, and two ginger cats turned to look. They sat in the middle of the living room, fat and ginger as ginger cats should be, and they turned, with the barest of interest, to look.

The London keys are three on a ring, and two of them are heavy and gold and round, as if they open the door to everything that is good, like many-colored Chinese paper lanterns hanging in a room of sunlight white.

In the last few days before I leave, there have been things old and new, which sounds like a spot-on description of life anyway. Amid the flurries and the phone calls—the wining and the dining. And, oh, I embrace it all, because what can you do, and because, well, I am good at being fêted.

Thursday night at Giorgione with Cheryl and Mike and Brian, with fried artichokes and pastas and desserts all around. A post-dinner drink at the Ear brought an almost-celebrity sighting: Where once upon a time I swore I saw Harrison Ford, this time I swear I saw Ethan Hawke.

Friday afternoon in NoLIta, after an outside lunch at Bistrot Margot, Jazon suggested a rice pudding digestif. We like Jazon a lot, because I have been walking by Rice to Riches for months, a little curious, but never going in. Who knew?, rice pudding is big, people. Big. We split some mango rice pudding and some chocolate chip rice pudding, and Jazon later said it was rice pudding tinged with sadness, but Jazon, don’t you worry, because surely there will be rice pudding a-plenty for us in London, failing which I think a fried Mars bar will do us nicely.

Friday night Kat and I met on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow to try our luck at ’inoteca once again. I have tried to go to ’inoteca two or three times in the past so many months, but I have never made it in because I cannot be bothered to wait two hours to be seated. The Lower East Side’s good-bye kiss to me Friday night was a manageable hang-out on the corner, while the sun set in a brilliant blaze over in the west. We eyed the front window seat, with its giant windows open to the balmy evening, but the three girls in the space, all cotton dresses and cleavage, were dawdling over candy-colored rosés. Inside, eventually, plates of meats and cheeses, rucola and preserved onions, beets with orange and mint and hazelnuts. We had to excuse ourselves and pretend to stand outside for a smoke, but really we were stretching and readying ourselves for chocolate budino and a plate of roasted fruits. “I wish I smoked,” I said, and not five minutes later, a smiling, wrinkly Chinese uncle came up to us hawking Marlboros out of a black nylon sack. It’s almost like that day I picked up the phone and it was some guy, speaking Chinese, who’d dialed the wrong number. I wonder what the chances are that—say you don’t speak English—you dial the wrong number and the person on the other end speaks your language. Man, it’d be something if you could just pick up the phone and have a loud Chinese person on the other line. Mm. Well. It’d be somethin’.

The weekend before I leave, this is a Saturday morning:

Almost ten on a Saturday morning, Marius stops in at Café Regular for his first coffee of the day. Me, I’m on my second cappuccino, and, huzzah, someone’s left a copy of the June Vogue.

In Chinatown, at the Hong Kong Supermarket, tubs of wriggling eels and fine, blue-legged crabs, and a basket of frogs—frogs!!!—sitting, piled one on top of another in a pool of muddy water. Frogs green, spotted, and still, but for the shiny black eyes, blink blink blink. Are you squirming??? I was squirming Saturday morning, and I am squirming now.

Saturday morning on East Broadway, Sa Sa Cosmetic Skin Care has a poster out front saying I can get my lips done in styles such as Arousing, Pretty, Trendy, Dreamy, or Paris.

Saturday morning on Forsyth, the scallion buns are hot and fragrant, and the only thing stopping me from snarfing one was that I was heading to dim sum at Golden Unicorn. Cheryl and I can be perfectly socially acceptable in mixed company, but when the balance tips so that it is not just Cheryl and me against a bunch of Americans, but is instead Cheryl and Kumix and me, and we have all grown up in Singapore, then the aunties come out to play, and there is hand-waving and Hokkien-shouting, and Mike, bless his heart, Mike sits and smiles.