I arrived in London around 8am yesterday morning after a sleepless flight. Organisation at the Montreal end was a little bit haphazard at best, but in the end the flight was only delayed by 55 minutes, and walking straight through customs, and straight onto the Piccadilly line underground to King's Cross I suppose I didn't really understand what all the fuss made over the difficulty of finding your way around Heathrow was referring to. Got to King's Cross, had a Harry Potter moment at Platform 9 and 3/4 and got onto the train to Cambridge, where I was met by the intrepid Felicity. We walked back to her apartment and jettisoned all my stuff, ate some fresh focaccia she'd made and then went for a walk.

Okay, people who have spoken to me in the last few weeks will know I wasn't sounding too keen about England, though I knew I didn't have any rational or justifiable excuse for not being "in the mood" for a place I'd never been. As it is, we're still going on a little adventure for a fortnight, but I'll get a week kicking around in Cambridge, with a day trip into London to see the Tate Modern and one or two other things, and the rest of the time watching people punting of the river and making my way through all the bookshops, of which there are many. My two favourites of the many we have already visited are as follows (though not in order of preference, because they're too different from each other for that):

The Haunted Bookshop, which is in a narrow little laneway, and has an enormous selection of Boarding School fiction upstairs. Heaven. Anna bought me a nice little stash of Chalet schoolbooks recently, and one of them was the first half of a two volume story - A Genius at the Chalet school ended, and I was left hanging! I finally bought the next book, The Chalet School Fete at the Haunted bookshop, and have been busying myself finding out the fate of Nina Rutherford, the aforementioned genius. (Temperamental pianist, always worried about practising at least four hours a day, and quite grumpy about participating in games which may injure her.) Quite smashing.

The other shop is G. David - Bookseller. Oh my, the room out the back has the most amazing old volumes and bits and pieces. For £2 I got a page of a bible (from Judith) printed in Venice in 1519. I went back today and bought something I knew I'd always think about if I didn't - a single leaf from an illuminated manuscript, from France, 1500. It's beautiful, and such an amazing thing to now own. I think I need to keep pinching myself. I'll definitely need to get it framed when I get back.

I've also chosen my next book - Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady. I take back every since bad thing I've ever said about Henry James. I find Isabel Archer the most compelling figure, because her quest is for knowledge, and the right to choose for herself what she will make of her life. The book is also moving in the same direction as me - Isabel going from America to England, and later to Florence. She has just been put in the way of Gilbert Osmond. My prejudice against Henry James, for what it's worth, derives from the fact that when I was 13 (in year eight) we studied The Turn of the Screw, which at that stage seemed rather dull. We didn't really understand the layers of a psychological reading of the story, and as a ghost story - nothing happens. So I'd always thought he was a bit overrated. I know his sentences can get very long and involved, and that Portrait of a Lady comes comparatively early in his career. I'll be interested to see how I like the later book, which I've now quite decided I will read.

Cambridge