These things happened today:

1. At McDonald’s for breakfast (the only place to get decent American-style pancakes in all of London, sadly), two boys in their late teens got into a fight with the cashier over an Egg McMuffin. I’m not clear on the details of the dispute or I’d share them. It ended poorly, though, with the boys storming out of the store. I took the table near the door and started eating my pancakes, and one of the boys ran back in, grabbed the orange juice from my tray, and threw it with great velocity at the counter. No one was injured; many were wet. When I went to the counter for a replacement bottle, they tried to charge me for it. I argued successfully that, if they had been able to resolve the Egg McMuffin dispute peacefully, there’d have been no need for violence, and thus I did receive a new bottle of orange juice.

2. Visa, along with Lindsay Lohan, were sponsoring an event in Covent Garden called visa swap, where people who brought old, unwanted clothes to the site during the week received points for them, which could be redeemed today for the other stuff people brought in. Cool idea, right? Except the men’s section was sparse and crappy, so I decided to pick out some things for my wife in the massive women’s section. I learned that women are fucking animals in that sort of setting. The men’s section was kept relatively neat and orderly; the women’s section was like a fucked-up scavenger hunt where things were constantly thrown on the floor, seemingly with glee. I got the feeling that they all felt they were in competition with one another, and tried to make it difficult for each other on purpose, to win.

3. My seventeen year old sister-in-law and her best friend are visiting from Texas. On the bus today, a man turned to her friend and insisted, you’re a very foxy lady several times, in rapid succession. She moved to the front of the bus and he called after her not to go. I turned to him at this point and said, sir, you have to leave my friend alone. He snapped back at me, you have to leave me alone, and then insisted that he had been having a conversation with a Russian friend of his about soccer, and why Tottenham were a bunch of bastards and Arsenal would win the Carling Cup. I wished I knew enough about soccer to go with it, but I’m pretty illiterate there. After about ten blocks, he said, i’m going downstairs. i have to piss, and i’m tired of holding it. He reached the bottom step and peed all over the floor of the bus, then got out and bummed a cigarette from a man outside a nearby pub, trousers still dripping.

4. Outside my window, for roughly an hour this evening, three extremely drunk Irish men brought a boombox onto the corner and blasted Pogues songs, singing along at the top of their voice. Their singing was as bad as you might think.

We leave London for good five weeks from today. In three months, I will re-read this, and miss it terribly.