My mom is here. We have a good time together. I met her at the Charing Cross station after a forty-five minute wait (I am perpetually too early; alas, it is my curse). It took her a moment to recognize me in my new alpine hat and polka-dot playsuit. So different I must have looked from the timid twenty-year-old she left back in January on the frigid edges of Southeast London, when I had hair down to my armpits and wide, wet eyes that betrayed an outer confidence. Yesterday, we hovered over lunch at The Breakfast Club in Soho and later gossiped in the leather-lined confines of the Royal Albert Pub. We are mother/daughter, older woman/younger woman, and long-lost soul-mates all at once. It is an easy reunion made spectacular against the backdrop of this most wonderful city. 

She is staying with me in Loring Hall and has gotten a true sense of life in a college dormitory. Neither of us slept much last night. My fellow students squawked away outside the window until long after midnight, words slurred and voices pinched unnaturally high: the sounds of uncivilized youth. Then, at 3 AM, the fire alarm went off. It is a wounded animal noise that no one (let alone my dear mother) should have to endure in the midst of a cycle of sleep. “It’s alright, don’t be frightened,” I told her in my most soothing voice as she scrambled into her clothes. Just like she used to whisper away my thunder storm nightmares. 

We could have slept today away after the fitfulness of last night, but we had a date at the Victoria and Albert Museum with Mom’s friend Rosie. They first met in London forty years ago, when both were leggy adolescents at teaching college in Richmond. It was the Sixties; they were hopelessly hip in their fur coats, teal boots, cropped haircuts, and wide-brimmed hats. I was suddenly pitched forward into my own future, when I’m flashing photographs of my youth in London (i.e. now) to my own incredulous progeny. “Mom! Were you really that thin? That beautiful? That cool?” And I will smile mysteriously and say, “But that was a long time ago, dear.” 

Rosie brought along her wry husband Andrew and their friend Reza Mahammad, a “flamboyant Indian chef” (so says the inter-web). Something of a TV celebrity, Reza has hobnobbed with the likes of Hugh Grant, Elton John, and the late Princess Diana. He slyly tells us that, judging from personal experience, Gordon Ramsay really is as awful as he seems onscreen. After we toured the Grace Kelly exhibit at the museum, Reza treated us to lunch at his restaurant, The Star of India in South Kensington. Here is my shameless plug, not just for a new friend, but also for a frankly fantastic place to eat: you will not be disappointed by the delicate flavors that The Star of India serves up with its twist on traditional Indian fare. The food is surprisingly light, a sophisticated offering of standard regional dishes like saag paneer, yellow lentils, and fish wrapped in banana leaves. Such delicacies couldn’t be concocted by a nicer guy.

I continue to meet the most fascinating people in London. And I will no doubt continue to meet them up until the day I leave. That is the beauty of a city: the constant opportunity to change the angle of your everyday, shifting the crystals within your kaleidoscope so that no moment is ever patterned the same.