Laurie R. King

(Apologies–I have a new machine that is proving shy about interacting with the blog program, so this post, from Thursday, is just finding its way to light.  Laurie King Inc: the place to come for cutting edge technological wizardry.)
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Romance is gone from the world.

A journey that should be recognized with drama, import, or even just a brief acknowledgment of its globe-spanning scope has become an exercise in hauling easily damaged and irritatingly vocal freight from here to there.  Food and entertainment choices betray a desire, not to nourish or amuse, but to make the freight units shut up.

However, not even United airlines can change the essential loveliness and humanity of England.  I am here, and until I commit myself again to the gentle ministrations of the air industry, I am free of their cold and corporate embrace.

Today I drive from my family’s house in the western edges of London up to Cambridge, a journey of ninety minutes or nine hours, depending on the humour of the M25, London’s–not ring road, which was long swallowed by suburbs, but the city’s “orbital”, a massive, six-lane Saturn’s ring of a road that takes nothing but a hesitant granny or a stray nail to reduce it to a parking lot ten or twenty miles long.

What was I saying?  No! Adventure is not dead in the age of modern travel…

At the end of this (insh’Allah) will be the city on the Cam, and the treasure palace of Heffer’s Books which, under the excellent guidance of Richard Reynolds, holds an annual salon of crime called Bodies in the Bookshop.

A grand way to start off the God of the Hive Tour, UK edition!