This week includes the 32nd anniversary of my delivery into this manifold life, which is to say, my birthday.

Some of you might be thinking about getting me something, though I suspect a large percentage of you potential gift-givers are my parents, to whom this post almost certainly does not apply. Just in case you wanted to express your birthday wishes through generous materialism or filthy lucre, though, I am happy to oblige you with easy venues.

First, take note of this, my Amazon wishlist, and its atomic components: Max Headroom DVDs and a William Gibson novel. Don’t pay too much attention to the order of the contents, though. Lower items just mean, in some cases, that I’ve wanted the thing for longer.

Of course, I welcome unasked-for books and DVDs and games, as you no doubt have exceptional taste and, hey, who am I to pass up free stuff?

Or, in light of my upcoming and unexpected trip to PAX Prime in Seattle, you can just donate cash to keep me fed and drunk, or, rather, watered. Or rather drunk. I’m on a shoestring budget for this show, with big plans to donate blood (to get the cookies) and to rent myself out as an experienced Fiasco player. That these are terrible ideas, doomed to financial failure, should tell you just how ill-equipped I am for Seatown. So, equip me. Slip me ten bucks and I’ll drink coffee in your honor.

Here’s that donate button:

If you get me something, be it a nice comment here on the blog or a few dollars to eat in the Emerald City or some kind of spinning media disc, thank you for taking the time and effort to do that. Really. I make fun of my materialism (and my birthday, and my pauperism), but I appreciate you coming by the blog and reading what’s here, truly. That’s already some kind of gift to me, so thank you for that. Happy birthday, me!

But, seriously, I’m also out of cigars. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

A few minutes ago, I was struck out of the blue by a vivid recollection. For some reason, a block of central London reformed around me, here in my house, conjured out of my memory of London from ten months ago. I don’t know why it came to me, but there it was, a stretch of Londontown just south of the Thames, just up the stairs from the Borough Market, from just before I shot this ambient memento:

Borough Market Moment from Wordwill on Vimeo.

This being the future, though, I can reminisce without having to dive into my own vacation photos (few of which were taken during our walks to and from places, really, anyway). Instead, I go to Google and tap into our collection information network for whatever Google maps tells me is the mass collective memory of Borough High Street. Click, click, there it is—the building with the name that had slipped off the edge of my memory and was dangling, just out of sight, by the letter B. It was the Barrowboy and Bank, an empty pub (or perhaps outright restaurant) near the London Bridge tube stop, whose name may have struck me at the time because of the Decemberists’s song.

Sara and I crossed at that pedestrian crossing and walked past the pub there toward the stairs behind the photographer in this shot. We’d just stepped up out of the tube, and this was probably the closest I’ve ever been to London Bridge (for some reason, I’ve never gotten to it), and we were just about to visit the much-praised public market beneath the rails there. Maybe it was the anticipation that made this memory stick — the oily smell of street food and the gurgle of an espresso machine came up through the crowd below, as I remember it — but I don’t know what it was that brought this one stretch of pavement out of my mind this morning.

But I’m making use of it. I’m writing down the details that waft up with this memory — the jet-lag dizziness and the cheek-reddening chill on my face, the pale glimpse through the Barrowboy’s windows into a building I’ll probably never enter, the ache in my pores of London air, of being so close to so much, and the twist in my insides that said “Live here! Live here!” and felt very truly like hunger — in the hopes that I can use them later in some bit of writing. In the hopes that I can hope to return.

Noise: Telefon Tel Aviv, “Mostly Translucent”

I wouldn’t say I’m an Angle, but I’m Anglish. Our Anglophile streak continued this past weekend with an attempt to create the kind of English breakfast we never got around to on this trip.

We ate on the run most mornings. Most of my breakfasts were coffee and WiFi at Starbucks followed by a sandwich from Pret A Manger — the All-Day Breakfast and Mature Cheddar and Pret Pickle were favorites of ours. (I love Pret A Manger to a stupid degree.)

So this is what I made the Saturday morning after we got back:

That’s fried eggs served on herb-garlic toast, vine-ripened tomatoes, fried mini sausage patties, baked beans with ginger and brown sugar, plus a dash of rocket (arugula). For the second plate I put the tomatoes through the still-warm frying pan, over no heat, just to snag some of the fried-egg flavors. They turned out great.

(There are a couple more pictures of these at Flickr, if you just can’t get enough.)

The night of the crisp party we made Coronation Chicken for everybody, starting from the original 1953 recipe, which uses mayo and whipping cream and no raisins. (Added the raisins anyway.) Now, listen: I’m not a fan of chicken salad. I’ve pretty much cut mayo out of my life and mixing it with the worst chicken in your sandwich shop isn’t going to change my mind about it. Coronation chicken, though, sings a siren song.

The day after this, I ritually returned us to the American South with a full chub’s worth of sausage for biscuits & gravy with red pepper and fennel. I had pictures, but I think I mistook them for more sausage and gravy and ate them.

It was Sara’s idea. We brought back seven oddball flavors of British crisps and turned them into a little game.

Six of the flavors were odd even to the Brits, offered up in bundles by Walkers as part of a promotion to vote-in the next weird snack food for the United Kingdom. Obviously, we had to bring them home and share them with people, but we weren’t sure how to get folks to actually, you know, eat them. Answer: a game.

The seven flavors were dispersed into anonymous cups, each marked on the bottom with a number written in black Sharpie. Two cups for each flavor yielded fourteen cups. Every player got a note card on which to record their guesses. Once everyone had made their guesses — and eaten however many chips it took to make up their minds, bounded only by their tolerance for the taste — I revealed the answers from my master card:

1. Onion Bhaji
2. Builder’s Breakfast
3. Crispy Duck & Hoisin
4. Prawn Cocktail
5. Fish & Chips
6. Cajun Squirrel
7. Chilli & Chocolate

Winning scores were a couple of ties, at four right answers. You’d be surprised how little Cajun Squirrel tastes like squirrel (or cajun) when you don’t know what it is.

We didn’t get any kind of consensus on the best or worst flavor. The fake-egg savor of Builder’s Breakfast (with its sausage and spicy tomato back-up flavors) was so peculiarly rank that it made my hands shake — and still I had to taste it three or four times to get over my fascination with it. Some liked the Fish & Chips flavor just fine. Sara declared, “It tastes like under a bridge!”

I have audio for that, but Vimeo’s having a smoke, so that’ll wait. Here’s a clip:

Crisp Party Excerpt from Wordwill on Vimeo.

There’s a handful of pictures under the “crispparty” tag at Flickr, though.

Borough Vignette from Wordwill on Vimeo.

When we walked through the whole Westminster/Parliament area on our way to the Tate Britain, it was full of tourists and rainy mist. On our way back, after dark, it was near empty. The soundtrack to this is the noise of traffic going by on rain-slick streets.

Borough Market, London.

Borough Market Moment from Will Hindmarch on Vimeo.

Underground Ad Cat from Wordwill on Vimeo.

Borough Market, London