Week 6

As a nod to our former days as good ole American connoisseurs of Halloween, this weekend I attempted to set up a visit to a farm to pick some pumpkins from a field. This vision came to a grinding halt when the first local I asked looked at me sideways, and said, “You know you can get pumpkins in the grocery store, right....?!” Right then. Moving on. Instead, I went furniture shopping. And might I add, selfishly enjoyed myself WAY more than driving multiple hours to find said farm in the middle of nowhere only to spend five minutes tromping around a glorified mud puddle ISO perfectly shaped pumpkin (which of course doesn’t exist to my ever specific, detail oriented 4 year old), and paying large sums of money for a large pile of imperfect pumpkins (because according to 4 year old, if you can't get quality, go for quantity) that rot roughly 8 hours after we carve them. Call me scrooge if you must, but secretly (and not so secretly as I confess to unknown amounts of people at this very moment), as an adult and parent, I despise Halloween and was relieved to hear for the most part, Brits fancy it just as much. Brilliant.

Bonus - the furniture shopping was an extreme success. I left the boys at home on Saturday and went on a little adventurous excursion by myself. Apparently, vintage furniture is synonymous with gritty neighborhood shops so I had quite the back alley tourist experience. Loved every minute of it. I felt as though I was blazing my own trails from shop to shop, throwing caution to the wind, and paying no heed to Frommer . . . because let’s face it . . . sometimes the best thing you can do in a city is to run as fast as you can away from the sites in the guidebooks (unless of course, what you want to do in a new city is fraternize with a bunch of other American connoisseurs of Halloween). In the meantime I managed to find a couple of cool little neighborhoods I wouldn’t mind taking Keegan and Liam back to AND currently I am sitting in a proper chair, NOT on the floor, and my computer is sitting on a proper desk NOT on a cardboard box. Now how the hell am I going to get this desk home on the plane . . .

Photographs of Tube stations just never seem to get old . . .