I woke up on the loveseat this morning knowing that it was going to be a dismal day. It wasn't because I slept on the couch, fully clothed, since that's where I sleep more often than not. But there's waking up on the couch and there's waking up on the couch, and this was definitely the latter. It wasn't that I was angry (though there have been moments today when I've been furious, at all the usual suspects). I just knew I'd be miserable. That I wouldn't get anything done, once again. That the whole day would be suffused with a sense of dread and heaviness.
It's probably because the sun was out today.
Anyway, after forcing myself down to the library, I finally realized after staring out the window for a few hours that I should just give up and head home. And so I dragged myself down the stairs and began the 4.5-mile trek home.
It turns out that once you manage to dodge all the tourists and the shrieking, carefully sullen eye-linered teenagers populating the blight that is Camden, head up the very long and gradual hill of Kentish Town, skirt by the last of the die-hard British punks as they carry their amps into the Boston Music Room, and begin the penultimate leg of your journey through a motley jumble of off-license shops, take-outs, and cozily wall-papered pubs (at least through the windows), you happen upon a tiny slice of dairy heaven on Fortess Road. Sidestep the babbling toddlers and the enormous prams (takes only two to fill up the minute storefront), and order a hot chocolate. It will seem ages until the cheerful but slightly harassed-seeming (the toddlers are loud) girl brings your chocolate out, but that gives you plenty of time to lust the salted caramel ice cream and the blood orange sorbet (or is it the rhubarb ice cream and the lemon and cardamon sorbet?). And then she finally brings it out and you take a sip and it turns out that the whole thing is nothing but melted chocolate--no milk, no sugar, just gently melted straight chocolate, for less than starbucks' burnt-coffee-insult-to-humanity--and as you make your way through Archway, pausing every three steps for another glug, suddenly the moments don't feel so excruciating after all.
And then you stop at the charity shop and find nestled among the trashy romances and pseudo-historical novels a copy of mimesis in danish, which strikes you as hilarious.
