Day Seventeen: how many days til I'm a London-child?

How many days til I'm a London-child? I think I may have lived here in another life.

Today I sat in Pret a manger twice, made luxury scrambled egg for lunch, sat at the table and worked, ate one ice-cream, made some coffee, ate another ice-cream, felt brain-dead, and thus went shopping. I bought some stuff I needed from the pharmacy, and after that I wanted to find somewhere to sit and write, but unfortunately, had not I the energy to walk the distance. Serendipitously, a marvelous haven magically appeared in front of me. It was a stationery shop. I went in. How could I not? I wandered around, the brightly coloured pens and pencils and papers soothing my soul with liberal applications of imaginary strokes of colour. Stationery makes me happy. I bought some water-colours, after much agonising. How to choose just one thing?

Then I came home and concocted a fabulous dinner of pasta and mushroom. This may not sound like much, but on my honour I do declare that it was delicious. First, I retrieved my ingredients from the fridge and the cupboard. Garlic, mushroom, pasta, milk, spice, salt, pepper, coriander accumulated ion the counter in ravishing fashion. I flattened the garlic with an almighty swat of the knife blade, like Auntie Lynn taught me, and followed up the attack with a violent chop chop chop. I placed the diced white blocks in a frying pan, already simmering with a slab of butter. Next to the frying pan, a pot of water boiled away, sending sparks of life into the air. I added a handful of pasta to the pot. Then I sliced the mushrooms, with perfect precision, and slipped them onto the bed of tanned garlic, following this up with a dash of milk, to keep the mushrooms from capitulating to the heat. I sprinkled some spice and some salt and what not into the frying pan, and whilst I waited for perfection to emerge, I separated the leafy coriander from its stringy stem, making it ready to garnish the masterpiece, as an old French valet would have prepared the wig for his master's head. Then the mushrooms called to me. They were ready. By then I had rescued the pasta from the volcanic depths of the pot, and placed it delicately in a bowl. I raised the frying pan to the lip of the bowl, and waited for the mushrooms to rush out to greet it. They clambered over one another in frenzied excitement. Finally, I flourished the coriander atop the work of art, and all was well.

Okay, it wasn't as amazing as all that, but it did look pretty good, and I am rather proud of how edible and actually quite yummy it was! 

Now I'm going to bed because we're going to the Museum of London Docklands tomorrow, EARLY. Oh and also I watched a bit of the Wimbledon Final on the live stream on BBC Sport and I was so excited when Federer won! His children are adorable!

Then this was something I wrote while I was sitting, at a window of course, in Pret a manger.

Also, I thought of something I'd like to say: my soul had plumbed the depths of time and realised that it's better here. And that's the same for everyone! Everyone's soul chose to be present in this life! No other, not right now. And maybe death is simply the soul deciding it needs to move on. I have always thought that the soul comes from Heaven, and I don't often talk about this, because I think people might think I'm mad, but here it is anyway! So the soul is a sliver of Heaven on earth. Heaven is an infinite mass of colours, a pulsating entity of uncountable volume. And the colours there are vivid and beautiful and bright and strong. And at some point, God sends off slivers of the rainbow to earth, to bring colour to the world. These slivers are souls. That is why people are different - they are from different parts of the rainbow. I'm not talking about race-colour, because the colour of your soul is a different story. There is not one colour soul which thinks it's better than another colour; it just isn't possible, because if every soul comes from the same rainbow, God's rainbow, then are we not all, before we even come to earth, equal in worth? What we look like is irrelevant to our intrinsic worth: instead, it is how we care for our soul that dictates how we perceive our worth, and how others perceive us. Of course, anyone who doesn't care about souls will obviously not care about the equal value of all souls. But those people are missing out.

When you arrive on earth, your soul is bright and shining, showing its true colour, as it were. But then the evil in the world tries to tell the soul that a pink soul isn't fashionable at the moment. It isn't cool to be indigo. Pastel souls are the new thing. None of that is true: all souls come from God, so they are all fashionable, cool, the in thing. But we don't remember that often enough. Instead, we try to change the colour of our soul, and because that isn't possible - God created us specifically one colour to fulfil a specific space and place in time and eternity - we really just dim the beauty. If we keep going at this rate, we'll all end up empty. 

Dear sweet boy on a scooter zooming past, just like his dad.

I just met the ex-minister of Higher Education in Mauritius LOL LONDON IS GREAT. (This is true. He asked me for directions!)