In which Helen takes an early morning walk

After staying up all night to watch the election stuff, I decide to take a walk around London at 6:30 in the morning. Have never walked around a city so early in the morning. Very few people on the streets. Mainly joggers. People cleaning windows and hand rails. Coffee places setting up chairs, brewing coffee.

I walk down the Waterloo Bridge. Up the Strand. There is only a hue of blue in the sky. The street lights are still burning bright. Continue on Fleet Street, known for its journalist and lawyers, still steeped in Dickensian buildings, narrow streets. Still men in ultra serious suits rush along, sometimes with a newspaper under their arm, invariably talking to another ultra suited barrister, or journalist. After 5, they smell of warm beer, are no longer talking about court cases, politics, or the latest scandal, but laughing, their shirt collars loosened.

This is the London I love.

Continue on Fleet Street, you end up at St. Paul's. Even further, the City. I take a right before St. Paul's, walk one block, and with another right, I am on the Embankment, the river to my left. After a short walk I can see Big Ben in the extended distance. I walk twenty minutes on the Embankment before reaching Big Ben. It may actually be longer, but time doesn't disturb me on my walks. It is now bright morning but the sun is not seen. It is cloudy, and just as I cross Westminster Bridge and pass the London Eye that leaps up above me, it starts to drizzle.

I enter my little room, shut my curtains -- which even on the sunniest day bars out all light -- and sleep until 4:00 in the afternoon.