QUEEN AND COUNTRY AND ALL THAT...

As an anglophile, I am excessively excited about starting on a trip to London tomorrow evening. I am travelling with my advisor, and only hope that we don't sit next to each other on the flight...just kidding; I am sure that my advisor would be one of the few advisors who don't make for an awkward conversation partner on a plane. Plus, this is one of the few times that I would get to make sure that he listens (or at least pretends to listen) to my boring talk about career aspirations (or the lack thereof), the beneficial effects of crystal meth (knowledge gained purely through armchair cogitation), the droll charm of 1950s textbooks, petty rivalries between staid Nobelists, and family values in the cultural strongholds of Pune. But most importantly, he has agreed to review my manuscript on the flight! At last, after months of playing cat and mouse, I have him cornered.

While we will be there for a business trip to meet with our collaborators at Imperial College in London, I am of course going to take every opportunity to explore the place where everything from stones on sidewalks to statues to fountains to tailoring shops has sometime seen the presence of Darwin, Nelson, and Shakespeare. For any history lover, London would be a cornucopia, and while I know I won't be able to get enough of it in one week, I hope to hungrily mop up whatever I can.

Also, my friends there have promised me to get me drunk in some exquisite English pub. Ther are Germans studying in Britain, so I can hardly doubt their ability to imbibe unheard of quantities of ethanol (I knew it was a mistake to offer one of them a treat to drink "as much as he wanted" when he was here...). But in any case, since I don't drink and they are honourable men, I am sure they will be content to let me contemplate the composition of 400 year old English pub table wood. And I do hope they bring their wives along to keep them from going overboard. Behind ever pub man, there is a woman, to catch him when he falls back.