London Calling, Take Three, Day Three

My third day in London a couple of weekends ago found me forcing myself out of bed at 10:30 in the morning to throw myself onto the tube so as to be at Waterloo in time for Titi de Paris’s arrival. Titi de Paris had been speaking at a bad conference in Munich, where he had eaten several meals of gamy meat. He arrived starving, and coursed through the train station in search of Hula-Hoops, that super crunchy London-specific snack. I, as you’ll remember, had been riding out a washing cycle of insomnia the night before. We were hardly, in other words, fresh.

But we had a cultural agenda to fulfil. So off we hoofed it to the South Bank as I tried to fill Titi de Paris in on all of Justin Bond’s jokes, on the drink that ended up in my lap, on the Turner Prize contenders, on life at The Cock. Being on continental time, though, Titi’s stomach was empty for our noontime rendez-vous. The combination of his hunger and my sleep deprivation almost brought us to separate paths, as our priorities—art and food—seemed fatefully to diverge. We somehow miraculously concurred on sandwiches at E.A.T., which were yummy even if the conversation between us was, um, difficult.