Law haunts, the British Museum and the Old Vic

My plan was to watch the world cup final for a while, maybe about 9pm or so, with the intent of going to sleep after that - while I certainly *could* have gone to sleep straight away, I didn't want to, since I knew that if I did that too early I'd wake up well before I'd want to and struggle to get back to sleep.

And that, of course, is almost exactly what happened; I drifted off before the game even started - which is impressive for me, since I can probably count the number of times that's happened in recent years on one hand. I don't as much 'fall' asleep as I do force myself in a downwards direction.

So, I woke up at 3.30. The almost part above is about getting back to sleep - I was able to, without that much difficult. Flying halfway around the world and getting practically no sleep over a 40 hour period will do that to you. I woke up again when my alarm went off at 7.30, but I (foolishly) decided I'd 'just rest my eyes' for a minute - always a terrible idea - went back to sleep.

I then woke up in a panic, since I'd agreed to meet a friend for lunch at 12, and I had no idea what the time now was - I'd shut the blinds to my room to keep the sun out, and it was pitch black. After a lot of frantic scrabbling and no small amount of swearing, I found my phone and determined that it was 9.30. A relief, though it did mean what I had planned to do before lunch - go on an open-top bus tour of the major sights of the city - wasn't going to happen, since I still needed to get myself a local SIM card for my phone.

Once I'd done that - very straightforward, and definitely cost-effective when you consider the insane rates Australian telcos charge for overseas roaming - I decided I'd just wander around for a while until I needed to be at Holborn station to meet David for lunch.

Okay, I've realise I'm being too descriptive for the amount of time I have. Apologies; I have to be less colourful if I want to catch up.

I found David, and he very generously took me on a mini tour of the legal district around the Holborn are - he's a barrister, so he's exceedingly well-informed about the history. So we saw Lincoln's Inn and the streets around there which the English/British/UK legal profession has practised for many hundreds of years.

After lunch we went to the British Museum (not all that far from where we were) and wandered around for a while together before he had to leave for a work-related meeting; I stayed on for a couple of hours - that just wasn't enough; I have to go back to see all the things I couldn't get to the first time.

By this time I needed a bit of a lie-down, so I went back to the hotel to rest up for the evening's entertainment, and my first London theater experience: The Crucible at The Old Vic theatre, starring Richard Armitage.

I met up with my friend Ele Stankiewicz, who - in what I can only consider one of the weirder coincidences I've been exposed to - happened to be in London at the same time. Once we'd realised this a few months back we of course decided to go and see shows together; I love theatre but she's an actor by profession (NIDA graduate; she just appeared against Miriam Margolyes in the hugely successful STCSA production of Neighbourhood Watch). Even more coincidentally, the one show we'd acted in together? You guessed it, The Crucible. I was Thomas Putnam and she was Mercy Lewis.

In the interest of keeping this short, I've decided to put all the actual theatre reviews in a separate post. But for now I will say it was a brilliant production.

After the show I had my first tube trip to get home (albeit only a one-stop journey) I'd walked to get there but I wasn't feeling all that energetic after a long day and a three-and-a-half hour long theatre production), stopped by a 24-hour Sainsbury's on the way back to the hotel from Charing Cross station and collected the following morning's breakfast - a bag of mandarins (which, incidentally, they appear to call 'satsumas' as a generic term here, rather than a variety) and a cup of instant porridge, which has become my staple morning meal.

And then it was time for sleep. Wonderful, wonderful sleep.