doughnuts – Louisa Parry

1. I go downstairs and Tom is there. He arrived with John, via Paul’s housewarming party, in the early hours of the morning, after I’d long gone to bed. Over breakfast, we discuss art history and laugh raucously.

2. Later, we get the bus into Leeds together. Under the snow, the first part of the journey feels even more like being in the middle of the country. Everywhere we look is a scene from a Christmas card – except for the racist propaganda stickers stuck on the adverts above the windows. They unpeel easily and we screw them up into little balls.

3. We say hasty goodbyes to Tom as he runs off the bus to meet a friend. Alone for the first time since in what feels like weeks (our illnesses were like unwelcome house guests before actual, more welcome, guests arrived), John and I have the afternoon together, indulging ourselves – lunch at Art’s, our beloved doughnuts & coffee for dessert, then drinks at North Bar. Good food but even better company. ;)

20 – cost, in pounds of our return train fare (each)
15.1 – miles walked (above the surface)
16 – painkillers popped by John (who hurt his back on the way to the train station in Leeds)
7 – cost, in pounds, of a sundae in the Haagen Das restaurant (worth it)
5 – drinks drunk at The Chandos pub
4 – doughnuts eaten (between us)
24 – amount of doughnuts bought by the woman behind us in the queue, stocking up for her six hour journey to Devon (she is our new hero)
2 – meals eaten in Chinatown
5 – amount of times (out of 11) that Big Ben rang while we were standing DIRECTLY underneath it before we actually realised it was ringing
3 – scarves bought: one pink/blue, one turquoise and one green/orange
7 – cost, in pounds, of a small bottle of beer and half-a-coke at the Hippodrome bar while watching La Cirque
10 – inches, the diameter of the tennis racket that Captain Frodo of La Clique squeezed himself through
1 – number of joints he had to dislocate to be able to do that
0 – the amount of laughs the ‘Viva Croydon’ song in La Cirque elicited from us
32.50 – cost, in pounds, of stalls tickets for Spamalot from the tkts booth in Leicester Square
2 – the amount of people who pushed in front of me in the drinks buying queue at the Spamalot interval
2 – museums visited
3.50 – cost, in pounds, of our British Museum guide book
2 – time, in minutes, spent looking at British Museum guide book
10 – tube stations visited
2 – maximum time, in rounded-up minutes, that we had to wait for any tube train (probably more like 90seconds)
6 – number of times I jokingly complained about the waiting times on British public transport when arriving on a platform exactly as a train arrived
3 – amusing overheards*
1 – potential punfolio submissions about ghee

* #1 – “Did you tell her about the death? Oh good.”
#2 – “If we all thought like that, we’d all live in poverty.”
#3 – something in Spanish which we didn’t understand but accompanied by a spanking motion

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Tagdoughnuts

3BT – laughter, beauty/ugly, alone-together time

Our weekend in London in numbers