I've been trying to make my mind up for days on whether to stay longer in London before heading up to the Northeast, and whether to switch my hotel to Newcastle now that my parents have moved away from South Shields, my home town. Today, after a rather pathetic 20 minute run, I made some phone calls to find out my options. I finally decided to stay one extra day in London, and to switch my hotel to a gay Georgian mansion just outside Newcastle. The only problem was that having decided all this, I discovered belatedly that the Newcastle hotel didn't have direct-dial phones in the guest-rooms. So I was back to square one. If I wanted to shift hotels to Newcastle, I'd have to go out and find a guide book that listed Newcastle hotels.

That chore, and others, formed my day today. I first dropped off my laundry at the wash & dry in the Brunswick Shopping Center. Under a steel-grey sky, the down-at-heel shopping center was not a pretty site. I took the tube to the West-End to go to Waterstones in Trafalgar Square, where I sat at the cafe and read guidebooks looking for hotels in Newcastle, and some information about things to do in Edinburgh. London has always had great bookstores, but now there are some wonderful new additions; like the Waterstones on Picadilly, a gleaming, seven-decked battleship of a store.

At another impressive store, Stanfords, a specialist in maps, I found some detailed roadmaps for the Northeast, Cornwall and Wessex, as well as a guidebook and a walking map of the Lake District.

Next on my shopping list were the specialized batteries for my digital camera, and a new supply of protein bars. I found both, after some searching; but the cost! In both cases I paid twice what I'd have paid in the U.S. I suppose the main reason for the contrast in prices is the relative size of the markets. Yet salaries seem smaller here too - I can't imagine that I could afford to live in London: even just being here two weeks, I've noticed my savings starting to dwindle in my bank account.

Finally, I went to St. Pancras Station to change my train seat reservation for Newcastle. I've heard enough about the chaos of England's denationalized train system to know that I can't leave seating to chance. I miss the old British Rail (:

You know, I'm really enjoying taking photographs on this trip - I suppose you could say "I'm getting into it". I tried to capture some of the industrial, gothic, dirty majesty of this old Victorian railway station, but, as usual, I got shy and embarrassed when people stared at me and my tripod. It wouldn't be so embarrassing if I wasn't frequently photographing myself. But I feel that I need to be in some of the photos, for two reasons: first, to personalize the journal, obviously, and second, it makes the photos trickier (and hence more interesting) to compose, in that you have to balance foreground and background in terms of focus and lighting, and find the appropriate frame.

At St. Pancras, with its great arch of glass over the tracks.

My next chore was to call up a few hotels in Newcastle and try to find a room. But I guess I've hummed and hawed too long. There's some big racing meeting or something this Saturday, and there wasn't a room for rent anywhere in the city. It was nice to hear the Geordie accents of Tyneside over the phone, but it would have been nicer still to hear one say, "weyy, ah've got a room fer ye hinney." So I'll have to stay in South Shields, instead, which isn't too bad. I'll be next to the sea, and I'll be able to take morning jogs along the beach.

By 5.00, everything was done, and I could rest my feet, and take a coffee at Caffe Nero in Seven Dials, people watch, and do a little bit of writing. I was sitting there enjoying my coffee, but I confess I was thinking that it would have been great to share some of this trip with my friend Brett. I wish he'd have been able to come with me, like we'd hoped.

At Caffe Nero with my coffee and notebook.

My energies recaffeinated slightly, I visited some of the clothing boutiques around Covent Garden, but gave up when I realized that nearly all of them sold clothes heavily influenced by the skate-boarding scene. I've seen this phenomenon in New York too; mass conformity to a particular style from people living in supposedly cutting-edge urban areas. I remember I was in New York a couple of summers ago, and everybody had to wear silly wollen hats at the gym! It must be some effort to carve a self-identifying niche to counter the anonymity of such a big cosmopolitan city. Or something :)

A skateboarder-clothing emporium by any other name - Thomas Neal's, in Covent Garden. Notice the complete lack of any skateboarders.

By a happy coincidence, the one movie I want to see right now is playing in the one movie theater I have nostalgia over. So I went to see the 8.00 show of "Gladiator" at The Empire, Leicester Square, paid my $14.00 (!), and settled down in my comfy seat, clutching a big bag of Maltesers (diet be damned!)

One of the reasons I liked going to this theater is the showmanship of it all. They'd play futuristic music by Jean Michel-Jarre, and the lights, hidden in the massive folds of the ceiling would change color in coordination, now bathing the entire hall in cool blue light, then green, then red. The last few chords of the music would play perfectly in time to the slow opening of the giant curtains, as the screen would light up. There was a sense of ritual about it which made it more of a glamorous event than an evening out at any old multiplex. It still displayed some of that glamor for me even tonight.

I thought the movie was pretty good - an involving, satisfying, complete story, convincing performances, great music (even if it was stolen from Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War" from his "Planet Suite"). The opening action sequence was wonderfully panoramic and involving - until they got to the hand-to-hand fighting, which, throughout the movie, was confusing and looked almost stop-motion - you could never figure out what was happening. Other problems were the occasional isolated bursts of obviously contemporary dialogue and behavior, the thoroughly unconvincing vistas of ancient Rome (apart from the scenes inside the Colosseum), and the slave-trader whose accent and demeanor were lifted straight from that of the flying spacecraft-parts-trader in "The Phantom Menace". Fortunately, there were some wonderful old British actors to make up for these failings :) - Derek Jacobi, Oliver Reed and Peter O'Toole.