I slept very badly again, as I have done most nights of this trip, and for the second night in a row, woke up in the middle of the night unable to breath, and actually shouting with panic. This is not good.

When I got up, Neil and Simon had gone to work and I had their huge flat to myself. It looked like a grey day outside, and that was to be the case all day long. Mind, most of my memories of living in London as a student include grey weather, grey buildings and the incessant noise of traffic.

West Hampstead morning.

A grey London from the Waterloo Bridge.

The first destination of the morning was Picadilly, where I spent half an hour in Starbucks with a big cup of coffee and the Guardian newspaper. Then I walked towards Somerset House through the environs of Covent Garden, where they were preparing for a street telecast of somekind of royal gala at the Covent Garden Opera House in celebration of Her Royal Missus' Golden Jubilee.

Somerset House has a long history, first as a private house, then a royal palace (where Cromwell lay in state after his death), then government buildings (Inland Revenue, The Royal Navy and other departments), until a couple of years ago, a large part of it was converted to house the Courtauld Institute's galleries, the Hermitage Rooms and other public spaces. Since I'm madly interested in the history of the Royal Navy, I pestered a lovely, very English old lady named Marjorie to get me into the locked Naval Board Room. At first she tried to fob me off, saying "just trott up the Nelson Stairs there and take a poke around." I explained that the room was locked, so she took me up some back stairs, mumbling darkly about secret passageways, and let me in to ... the very boring old space which was literally just a square room with windows, completely bereft of furniture, knick-knacks, and paintings.

In the courtyard at Somerset House

I spent most of the rest of the day in various galleries either at Somerset House, or over in the Tate Britain. I saw an exhibition from Russia of a romantic painter named Caspar David Friedrich. The man who took my ticket had a huge, bald dome of a head which reminded me of both a creature from the original Star Trek series as well as one of the socially witless people you used to see on strange quiz shows on the BBC like "University Challenge". Anyway, the exhibition was nice, if short, and I learned a wonderful word "Sehnsucht" - the yearning for the unattainable. It's a good description for the mood of the paintings I saw, which, typically, had images of companionship in front of a mystical appreciation of nature.

I'm starting to realize how much I really love landscapes. My next exhibition was of the Courtauld's collection of impressionists; feasts of color. At the Tate Britain, I spent ages in an exhibition of watercolors by a turn-of-the-19th-century British painter named Thomas Girtin, who must have painted romanticized images of every cathedral and castle in Britain. My Dad would have loved the exhibition - he has many drawings and prints like that at home. Unlike at Somerset House, though, the exhibition was exhaustive - and exhausting. Something like ten big rooms. So by it's end, I didn't have the energy for the other exhibitions.

Not much else to tell. Towards late-afternoon, it began to rain, and since I didn't want to have to take the jam-packed rush-hour train back to St Albans, I decided to catch the second-half of a movie, "Murder by Numbers", whose first half I'd already watched on my New York hotel room's malfunctioning video system. This was at the Odeon Leicester Square - one of the several great cinemas in the West End. What I didn't know is that my movie, which had already started, would be in a tiny, hot cinema on the mezzanine. The big cinemas here are assigned seating, and when I blundered into the darkened room, I could see vague shapes in almost every seat. And of course, my seat was in the back row, on the far side, and there was only one aisle - on the near side. So I had to push through the whole row, blind as a bat, trampling on peoples' feet, to my seat. I'm sure everybody thought I must be crazy, bursting in like that to a movie that had already been running for half an hour. But then, there are lots of eccentrics in London.