Well, a day later and quite a bit to tell. Spent the evening on a cruise on the Thames with Pedro and his London girlfriend. Wasn't much fun to start with, given my penchant for motion sickness, but gradually grew almost tolerable. I managed to cross over into the eastern hemisphere for the first time in my life. Felt great.

The other item of note was a somewhat frantic call from Ann in the Bahamas at around midnight. Syd wanted to take the school guinea pig, Gracie, home for the weekend. Well, Gracie was "sleeping" all the way home but it became clear after a couple of hours that she wasn't going to wake up, which is when Ann called for the teacher's phone number. I was still a little sleepy at the time so my contribution to the conversation pretty much consisted of playing Michael Palin's part in the dead parrot sketch. ("Are you quite sure he's dead? Maybe he's pining for the fjords")

One good thing from this trip: Liza's always been a little annoyed at what she calls my "gay" characteristics. After a few days here, she declared, "I guess you're not gay, just part British."