the next visit of OMG, administratively declared one point something

So, there was Wednesday morning, almost late enough to be Wednesday afternoon, when I had spent most of the hours previously in bed and it was still raining outside because in Oxford it has done nothing but rain for the last five hundred years and then jacinthsong rang to say results were up and there was a mixture of flailing and extreme do-not-want; and then there was an evening, sometime, in a café in the late-evening sunshine with a man in the background playing the glockenspiel, in San Francisco, and from my increasingly loopy perspective, this was all the same day.

Um. It took a very very long time for me to get here. I left Oxford at half three in the morning, having not really slept for quite a while - I had a couple of hours' worth of nap, and then shimgray came down with me to Gloucester Green, treating me to his crackpots-and-these-women face, special sleep-deprived Extended Edition, and then it was four o'clock and the sun wasn't quite rising and I was gone. Heathrow was an education. I was random-checked twice in a couple of hours - first by an army of beagles, and then when I was so close to actually getting on the plane I could see it, they stopped me a few steps away and made me turn out my bag. Hurrah. Etc.

In Detroit, I was fingerprinted prodigiously, and the immigration official asked me what I was doing in the States. Visiting a friend, I said. "How do you even know someone in San Francisco?" he asked.

Deep sigh, take a deep breath, do not say to the man from the US Department of Homeland Security (urgh), "The Internet."

"We were at Oxford together," I said, after a while. But, I don't know, why shouldn't I know someone in San Francisco? Why shouldn't I come and visit her? Nowhere, I think, is it more evident how politically strange this country is than the long queues at immigration. People are tired and miserable and cranky and children are crying and everyone is being barked at by officials to shut up and stand in straight lines, and then after they've done this for an hour, you are asked intrusive questions and treated as though you are a criminal. Maybe it's different for white people, I don't know, but I don't think so. It's all homogenous and strange. And then again, at customs, all over again.

And then the actual airport, once I got there, was quite spectacularly unexciting - for one thing, there was no food. One would think that an international airport would have, I don't know, eating establishments. (On the flight, they had served me plastic-inna-sauce and runner beans.) But, no. There were people selling food with beef in it, and places where you could go if you wanted to drown yourself in salad cream, but nowhere where I could buy something even remotely appetising. So I sat around and was sleep-deprived for three hours, and then onwards.

I am conditioned, I think, to believe that domestic flights are short hops. (Manchester to Heathrow, thirty-five minutes, for example.) This flight, however, was nearly five hours long. It was astonishingly bad - no food, no food - and I was something of a wreck by the time arrived. But gamesiplay came running up to me in baggage claim and it was so utterly wonderful to see her. We retrieved my luggage and proceeded to fail at mass transit. It was just utterly great. And the sun was shining! There is sun! It's not actually hotter here than it would be on one of the hottest days at home, but I've been rained on for a week and it's just lovely, warm but not still with the air all laced with sea breezes and lovely, lovely. (I saw the Pacific for the first time in years on descent. It was a joy.) And yes, we failed at mass transit! And saw layers of fog with more sun underneath them descending as we came into the city. And geeked about Shakespeare and underground train systems. And then real food, and live music featuring a glockenspiel. And Leigh produced a bottle of champagne like well-aerated magic from the fridge and we toasted each other and how we have both, after all this time, survived higher education. And the sky stays bright late, but I had been awake for nearly thirty-six hours and oh, sleep, sleep is so good.

This morning, I have had breakfast, I have had a shower, I have slept for nearly twelve hours and thanks to the wonders of modern time zones, it isn't four o'clock in the afternoon! I look, feel and smell human again. Leigh has gone to work for today, and I have a familial duty to discharge; much as I am disinclined to spend much time around my family at the moment, I have an uncle I must see today because, well, I am here. It might well be fun, I should not be uncharitable. In the meantime I am pottering quietly about, marvelling at being six thousand miles from home and sitting next to a view for which the focal point is a rainbow flag. I made it! And Leigh and I have an entire week together in which to wreak glorious havoc on a third city.

Thank you all for the comments you left on my last post, they're very much appreciated. I'm probably a little difficult to contact this week, but should anybody want me for anything, email is fine.