Charing Cross and Old Friends

Had a slow sunday sleeping in after the marathon mahjong session of the night before. Pottered around Adrian's place a bit before heading off to my favourite place in all of London - Charing Cross Road. For the uninitiated, Charing Cross is the mecca for book lovers all around the world, with a street basically dedicated to bookshops. It was made famous in a book and subsequent movie called 84 Charing Cross Road, charting the correspondence between an American bibliophile and a second hand bookstore owner. It is a measure of the times that many of these quaint old second hand bookstores have been forced to close (84 Charing Cross is now a fast food outlet) and that is a shame - one can spend hours just browsing the old and dusty shelves. Its sad that Charing Cross is now replete with many discount bookstores, though one must admit that they have a value in themselves - I certainly cannot complain at some of the bargains that I managed to find in their midst, including a copy of a book by William Styron for a mere 3 pounds, and Richard Pipes Communism: An Introduction for a mere 4 pounds and its not as if they are selling utter rubbish, but they do not have the same sense of timeless charm that the older shops do. The fact that they have licensed sex shops in the basement (no doubt the major source of their revenue) adds to the sense of disillusionment. Charing Cross Road is also home to the site of Foyle's, one of the largest bookstores in Europe if not the world, and definitely one of my favourites. Foyle's is an independent bookstore and not a chain, and is a huge sprawling warren of shelves - I love the way one can wander from the section on books on sport and games and find yourself in the section on electrical engineering.

After reaquainting myself with Charing Cross, I met up with Vernie for dinner. Vernie is an old friend from school who is doing a Phd in History at Harvard with Akira Irayae as her supervisor and she was in London for a week because she wanted to get out of the US and found a cheap flight. It was really lovely meeting up with Vernie as I had not seen her in ages, and we had a nice dinner at a pub. It was brilliant just chatting to her about all sorts of random things, and we shared opinions in a great number of areas - and its always nice to know that there are other liberal-minded Singaporean intellectuals out there! It was also nice to have another person to share my concerns about issues such as whether to return to Singapore or not, and it was very interesting to see that she shared my dream of being a so-called international citizen, comfortable in a city almost anywhere, a young cosmopolitan professional. Yet, admittedly, the more I have thought about it, the more uncertain I am about anything. If I were to ask myself the question of whether I would be willing to marry and settle down in Britain now, it would be a lot of considered and certainly less conclusive than before I had left for the UK.