Then we both slept for about 14 hours (good lord) and woke up feeling human. I took Maddy for a walk down to Covent Garden, bought her shoes (light blue Converse high tops) and fish and chips then wandered up to the British Museum and we had a cup of tea in the courtyard. I showed her the Reading Room, and failed to explain to her why it was so magical for me, or why getting my first Reading Room Card was so unutterably cool and important (I was about 21 and wanted to read rare James Branch Cabell stuff, and to research Caspar Hauser, for, I think, a radio play I was writing). She sort of took it on trust, and I hauled her through the Egyptian Room trying to explain why the Rosetta Stone was cool, but mostly she just wanted to be back in the hotel talking to her friends back home on the hotel computer. I bought a new cell phone (a Nokia 6230i) in the warren of electronics shops on Tottenham Court Road.
Maddy's now gone off to spend the night with her cousins, and I'm settling down in the hotel room to finish the last round on a script for a short film I'm writing. Tomorrow's a batch of interviews in the morning, then wander in to some Stardust casting, then out to Pinewood.
The beard has been, regretfully, consigned to the plug-hole of history, but my hair has decided to just get weirder to make up for it, and has sproinged off in several directions at once.
The most exciting thing I did today was successfully manage to copy the phone book off my old phone and onto my new one. (The most exciting thing I saw were Leigh Baulch's original 1987 character designs for SANDMAN, which he dug out for the Absolute Sandman collection, along with my first drawing of the character, which I gave Leigh for reference back then.) Given that it was a very quiet sort of recover from travel day, it was all the excitement I needed, and I have no doubt there will be a lot of excitement over the next three weeks to make up for it...
(From the hotel room above me comes a noise that sounds exactly like someone using a file to saw through prison bars. I just thought you'd like to know that.)