Immediately I thought of three new friends I’ve acquired in London. They love the Brontës’ writing, and Jane Austen’s, as much as I do. It is one of the strongest bonds, I think, that can spring up between people: sharing a passion for certain books and their authors. Alas, my friends are not Nabokov-lovers. Ah, well, you can’t have everything. Love, Alice I arrived in London in early July, just after the hot dry weeks of Wimbledon, when the summer had turned rainy and cool. Cold, actually. The shops up and down Sloane Street were filled with tourists buying sweaters and wool blazers. “First the heat and now the cold,” said an American woman trying on jackets in Harvey Nichols, the fashionable department store. Everyone, including me, had been hoping to put off purchasing anything until the mid-July sales, but it was just too cold. Why was it, I wondered, searching through racks of coats, that no matter how carefully I packed for a trip, I never had the right thing? It was only my second day in London, but already I knew my unlined raincoat wasn’t going to work, no matter how many layers I wore beneath it.
What do You think about Without Reservations (2011)?
