Raise your hands and yell “hallelujah!” because the girl, she has Internet. Oh yeah oh yeah. I have an Internet connection, I have a phone, I even have cable TV. The TV, I was not so interested in, but it came with the telecoms package. Turned it on for the first time yesterday, two days after the installation, and there was a shopping show, a dance competition show, six thousand news channels, and “Friends”. Oh, RIGHT. Now I remember why I hadn’t watched television in the last so many years. This officially confirms that I have paid the hundred-and-twenty-six-pound television license fee to watch “Little Britain”. Do me proud, boys.



Schmio came to town for the briefest of international visits, count ’em—in, out. The in involved the handing over of a bag of treats from Ladurée: a box of macarons, a dark chocolate hazelnut bar, and a jar of delicate rose confiture. We broke into the macarons late Thursday night, home from a rowdy dinner squished in the back at The Cow. “Try this one.” “Hazelnut, mmm.” “Vanilla.” “Mmm.” “Try this, I think it’s the rose.” “Oh. It’s the rose.” “Oh. Mmm.” “Mmm.”

And I am getting distracted by the macarons, (they are plenty worthy of distraction), because I see I have not yet mentioned that dinner at The Cow involved the sighting of one Orlando Bloom, exactly as pretty as you think he’d be. But you know what?, also: short. Yes! It’s true! When I told my mother this the next day (on the phone, my new phone, from which I can call ANYONE, O joy), she said: “How short?” “Well,” I said, “he’s not a midget.” “I dunno,” I said, “I didn’t stand next to him or anything, but he seemed short.” “He’s short?” “He’s short!” “But they never talk about Orlando Bloom being short, it’s always Tom Cruise.” “Yes.”

Orlando Bloom and we were there till they turned the lights on bright and started putting the stools legs-up on the short wooden tables, and then Orlando Bloom and we were there still. He was hanging out with his guys on the pavement, and we were hoping against hope for a taxi to come rumbling down the empty street. Times like this, all a girl wants is a catbus. “I can’t believe Orlando Bloom didn’t offer us a ride home in his Mercedes,” I said, as we got into an unlicensed cab. “Yeah.” “Yah, that was really not cool of him.” “No.” “Yah.”

The in involved, the first evening, a table outside on Frith Street, because Schmio’d brung with her the warmest October day in a hundred years. A bottle of red and a bottle of sparkling (water, that is), while the blue deepened into night. The Bar Italia clock was lit up green and red, as always, and the time read 12:16, as always. And something about it, everything about it, really, except our location, was the good ol’ days.

The in also involved, O, unsettled tummy!, the violent and fascinating emptying of the contents of a night out. I want to say it was the mussels, because that’s what happened the last time I had mussels in a restaurant, which is why I’d closed the window on mussels from there on out. But the fish stew was so tasty, so hot and steamy and gorgeous, with a hunk of lightly grilled toast, and a rakish slather of rouille, and I ate it all, I did, I did, and how I was made to regret it later. In the interests of journalistic integrity, however, I will volunteer that two bottles of wine may also have been consumed that night. Hum.

The in—for it is possible to do it all in two days, when London’s for the taking—further involved a drop-in at the Tate Modern, where Rachel Whiteread has managed to give solidity to empty space. She has made casts of nothing, and she has piled nothing upon nothing, so much nothing that it reaches higher than our heads, nothing stacked all the way up the steel girders of the Turbine Hall. We walked down her alleys hemmed in by emptiness, and children beat on boxes filled with invisible.

Upstairs, Jeff Wall’s massive lightbox photographs glowed, still and tense. He measures the weight of a moment. In his “Picture for Women”, the girl stares, the camera stares, you, too, and click. In “The Flooded Grave”, vermilion against grey and grey, the vision could disappear the next time you look. His “An Octopus” suggests an immobility—or does it?

We walked along the river and across the Waterloo Bridge. Seven o’clock and the dusky sky. We were sitting outside the Curzon on Shaftesbury, and I thought I saw a human-sized sunflower coming out of the evening, but it was a man with his yellow-clad daughter on his shoulders, her little arms wrapped around his neck.



Schmio’s in involved mornings of apples and Red Leicester, of yoghurts mixed with spoons of thick fig jam, of dark coffees in pink cups. One morning, two mornings, and then she was gone.

This morning, it’s Dimitri from Paris into the cool blue. Vous dancez, mademoiselle ? Mais oui.