abba

It's odd, all these days without the internet. I don't miss it exactly. It's more a sense of being disconnected from the world. Not that I worry about that because this feels very comfortable, being in my mother's house in the middle of the Chiltern Hills, surrounded by damsons, mallow, roses and large green beeches. Los Angeles seems worlds away and I only think that I have woken up now, at four in the morning, because J will be landing there soon or has already landed and it's very strange waking up in a bed where he isn't for the first time in two weeks. I really don't know that not having the drudge report and cnn at my fingertips enhances anything about me as a person and only really creates more anxiety in an already anxiety-prone soul. My mother reads the daily mail where the top story yesterday was whether or not Zara Phillips was dressed appropriately to give out the prize at Goodwood. "Do you actually get your news from this?" asked J rather pompously I thought, and my mother flashed back, "that, and the BBC." Say "BBC" to an American and they really have no recourse. It's almost as good as "Jane Austen."

So he's gone back home to the dogs and the chickens and the hot weather and that means no more pork and leek or cumberland sausages for breakfast, no more picnic pudding of Cadbury's whole nut chocolate and certainly no more strains of Nick Lowe and Brandi Carlisle emanating from the bathroom. He was lying in the big white tub this morning, staring out at the trees, his arms folded behind his head, happy, I thought. "We're not going to live in LA forever, you know" he said finally, after a rousing chorus of I can't take another heart-ache.

I think what woke me too was the worry that neither of my children had brushed their teeth once ever since we've been on holiday. But that's just silly. Isn't it?

The zoo was fun. Where else, as J shrewdly pointed out, can you eat a picnic of egg & cress sandwiches, tomatoes and pork pie, while watching the white rhinos graze? Yes perhaps the Serengeti but I don't think pork pies are big there. I found myself in tears at the elephant show for reasons that I will find it hard to describe but it was something like the big, kind, trusting creatures slowly and gracefully going through the motions of their "tricks" in front of a crowd of screaming, ice-cream slurping, trainer-wearing morons. Not to put too finer a point on it. The children were very amused to notice that even my most pronounced mid-Aylesbury accent could not hold a candle to some we witnessed that day. A poor unsuspecting woman with a push-chair and two other children became our unwitting victim when she pronounced loudly "Yeah, the hippos are nice but they're a bit smelly." And thus, for my two American children and me, every single thing in the zoo that day became "noice buh a bih smellay." Oh what delight, was singular, unadulterated pleasure do I take in listening to and imitating the Hertfordshire twang. It brings me inordinate, unprecedented joy. I feel like the Americans who say to me, "Oh say something! Please say something!"

Nighttime is the right time and we found ourselves front and center in a loud, overacted, brilliant kitschy, quite divine performance of Mamma Mia! at the newly refurbished Prince of Wales Theatre on Coventry Street. It was a hot day, the hottest maybe of the year and the tourists were out en masse. I love London. I realize that I miss London enormously and I wanted to leap out of the taxi and breathe it all in, twirling Friends-style around the fountains, playing games with the faces (she said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy). For the encore (Waterloo, Dancing Queen) we all stood up, even the grumpy brothers ("Seriously, baby, can you imagine any non-gay male enjoying that play" he says to me afterwards but I know what I saw and he and N were the first to leap to their feet in our row for the rousing finale) and sang and boogied our elated way through as many songs as they could muster, the forbearing cast who have been doing this very thing for other delighted tourist-filled audiences for the best part of ten years. It's a run not walk. Low-brow, silly, embarrassingly addictive. The girls were beaming from ear to ear in the train ride home. Show me a man that doesn't love ABBA and I'll show you a man without a soul.