It’s 1:52 pm on Monday. I’m sitting on a Southern train heading back to London, my last week in the city before I begin my journey home.
It’s a bittersweet day, these travel days. I’m always anxious about what’s next but surrounded by the sadness of what I’m leaving behind.
This weekend was yet another welcome respite from the rigors of traveling.
Sunday was brilliantly lazy. Aleks talked me out of my morning run, which she did my steadfastly refusing to leave the house. It was a brilliant tactic, one which I couldn’t counter since it wasn’t my town. It’s difficult to simply leave out the front door when you have no idea where you are going, how to get back or where to run in the middle.
It’s the first Sunday I haven’t run in months, which concerned me. (We made up for it today on the most brutal run I’ve yet had, plagued by tired legs and stomach cramps.) Eventually we meandered through downtown with Max, cafe-hopping while tracking down more photo opportunities for Aleks’ 1984 project. Once again, I became an unwitting accomplice:
But wait…
We did a minimal amount of work (despite our best intentions) before retiring home to eat pizza and watch television: East Bound and Down, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The IT Crowd. It was, in just the few short days I was here, the perfect evening ritual. There was little of intellectual value shared during these quiet times, which brought no count-able amount of joy.
Sadly, though, it led to my last sleep in Brighton. We did go for a run (and Max joined us for part) before eating a late brunch. We jetted to the train station, where Aleks met a student from Singapore who was here visiting his girlfriend.
In the intervening hour, we discussed politics and the state of technology around the world, a topic of which we could all apparently spend hours exploring.
But the train waits for no one.
So I’m rumbling towards London Victoria, where I will make my way back to the EasyHotel Victoria. Tonight I’ll meet my friend Fiona, another South by Southwest Interactive friend, to watch a play (my second in England).
And tomorrow I will head back to The Soho Theater for the last sprint in our workshop.
But that’s not yet so I’m still wallowing a bit. Having left my friend back in Brighton.
