if i had become a lawyer, would i still love my life?
read a brilliant book; and while in london, rediscovered my inner child. the time between the two found me and a fellow historian friend walking along the South Bank with ice lollies, hands blue with november and still the dazzling sun whipping the thames up into light-speckles and the trees into an autumnal blaze. it found me at the national archives at kew, hour after hour reading through reams of tea-coloured moth-eaten documents, surrounded by these clipped and hoary voices from the dissolved past, and feeling, as though for the first time, like a real historian. it found me lunching with old friends, making new ones, running my fingers along the innumerable bookshelves at foyles, reading poetry on the tube, cupping my frozen hands around the best latte in london, running for the train back to cambridge. it found me, also, devastatingly ill on thursday morning, when I opened my mouth and quickly discovered I had laryngitis. small price, i've decided, to pay for such happiness.