Everybody is going crazy about fish pie apparently...

I took a turn around London today. Officially the reason was to do some dissertation research, but actually very little of that was achieved. I popped into the Museum of London's thing about the victorians (pretty good) then walked along Holborn (of Bleak House fame). I then got a little lost (in order to look as little like a tourist as possible I refused to look at the map, and just used the in-built sense of direction I feel I must have being a sort of almost kind of near Londoner as well as a Devonian) and eventually found the Dickens museum. To be frank (and I don't say this about many places) it was rubbish, not at all worth the £4 I paid to get in. I thought it might get me all excited again about Dickens (I do love Dickens but at the moment I am thinking he is a little too overdone to be dissertation material), but it didn't really.

Later in the afternoon I popped into Stanfords, the best travel book and map shop in the world, and got quite excited for while at all the possibilities the globe has to offer. The world is quite big, it turns out. Incidentally I am currently reading a brilliant book about Paraguay. Paraguay it seems is a much more colourful sort of place than you'd imagine. Here's a fact...Did you know, 80% of Paraguay's population was wiped out in a single seige in the 19th century...

I ended, of course, with a trip to Foyles, the best bookshop ever known, where I had a mooch around for some time.
I do like to dissappear to places like London alone some times. I think a lot of people get mixed up between enjoying your own company once in a while (some people can't live with themselves, which is sad I always think) and being antisocial. The two are very different.

Lastly, Mum told us at dinner that everybody is going crazy about fish pies. I'm not sure I am, unless I am repressing my crazy fish pie obsessed self.