"London Town" Dept

The Princess forwards me this link to "You Know You're from London When..." I particularly like, "You wouldn't want to live anywhere else until you get married," since (a) the Princess sent this on to me, and (b) she announced while we were still living in Westminster that she would like to live in London as long as she wasn't married.

We Americans who have lived in London form a sort of secret club, you know. I was in the middle of an e-mail conversation with a friend who's currently in London and who doesn't have to be told where the Texas Embassy is, when I tossed in a quote from "London Homesick Blues," with which ditty my family sings along enthusiastically whenever we hear it on the radio here in Texas, because it makes us homesick for London. This is not, I think, the use to which Mr. Nunn intended it to be put when he wrote it; but hey, call us deconstructionists, I guess: the text has the meaning the listener assigns to it and if the original author doesn't like it he can go soak his head. (I could use any of several expressions more appropriate to a Londoner but this is intended to be a reasonably family-friendly blog.)

At any rate, I casually tossed in the line, "And where in the world is that English girl / I promised I would meet on the third floor?" And my friend fired back something like, "You have no idea how wonderful it is to know somebody else who actually gets that joke." Ah, but I do, I do, because now I know somebody else who gets that joke, viz., her.