My Mom Went To London, And All I Got Was This Lousy Post

I’m currently on an overseas business trip, and since I had a Friday meeting, I put in a requisition for a weekend layover with Manager Dad. It was promptly authorized because a) he’s a really, really good guy; and #2, he had been granted a similar waiver about a year and a half ago when he had to go to Paris on a weekend which happened to coincide with my 36th birthday.

So I've been here since Thursday afternoon. I’ve had some quality alone time, defined as "time not spent cooking, picking up family detritus, or laundering clothing."

But as delighted as I am to hang out with my own self, I miss everyone. The youngsters get angry with me when I travel and don’t want to participate in the perfunctory dinnertime phone calls home. So I try desperately to engage them in conversation as they breathe heavily into the receiver. (The Girl ended our conversation today with “I’ll talk to you when you get home, mommy…I’m giving the phone back to your husband.”)

And because I had the bright idea of taking a red-eye over in order to maximize my time here, the jetlag is starting to get the better of me. I am so exhausted that I'm having Jacob's Ladderesque hallucinations; physically, I’m starting to resemble Estelle Getty on a crack bender.

But I've been having a fantastic, rejuvenating trip. I've taken tons of photographs, frightened scores of shoe salesmen with my horrifyingly ugly, not-yet-pedicured, mangled runner's toes, and generally stopped at whatever places caught my eye. I'm an art fanatic so I made a point of hitting Tate Modern and a few other contemporary art museums featuring images that would be considered hard-core pornography were they not displayed in a building designed by a distinguished architect.

And since I cannot force my beloved spawn to eat at any restaurant that doesn’t include the word “pancake” somewhere in its name, I took the opportunity to try new cuisines- Indian food and Dim Sum in Chinatown. Now, I’ve eaten plenty of Chinese food in my day (after all, I am American) but never dim sum. I'll definitely repeat the Indian food but dim sum is a delicacy that I fully intend to deprive myself of in the future. I’m no linguist, but based on today's meal, I would guess that ‘dim sum’ is Cantonese for “fried dumpling filled with miscellaneous ground up kitchen leftovers.”

I am also preparing to break my strict 'no-bringing-home-presents-after-a-business trip' policy. I implemented this after witnessing the way a former boss was treated by his children when he forgot to bring them a gift after a day trip. But in this case, I have been gone for a long time, and the guilt machine is running on a double shift.

Plus, we have been working hard to brainwash The Boy into becoming a fan of English Premier league soccer, and I found a logoed wallet from Arsenal, which is his favorite team. (He doesn’t have any money but he has an extensive collection of my hotel room keycards that he likes to carry around.) So I had to preserve family Feng Shui by making a complimentary purchase for The Girl, and Harrod’s had some miniature British licensed character fuzzy animal set, so all should be well.

But hands down, the best part of the weekend: I was wandering through Sainsburys grocery store. (I am a horrible cook, but I love to grocery shop - must either be guilt remnants from my Catholic upbringing, or good old-fashioned masochism) when I decided to buy a single-serve bottle of wine to keep me company in my hotel room. And I got carded! With no apparent irony! By a female cashier, who was wearing a wedding ring!

Just think… if live in a world where THAT could happen, maybe we CAN reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and solve global warming. Maybe the Buffalo Bills WILL win the Super Bowl in the same year the Cubs win the World Series! Maybe we will see Obama & Clinton running on a joint ticket!

Or maybe, just maybe, I could bring home some dim sum, and get the family to take a bite from a deep-fried mystery dumpling.