hull in my head

After Sligo I was off to London to meet up with my little brother. I hope my friends don’t take offense to this, but out of everyone who came,  he is the person I was most excited to see. He and I are pretty close, a byproduct of being blood, and of sharing a room together for over 14 years.  And it had nearly been 9 months since I had seen him.  By far the longest time apart despite the fact that I hadn’t been living at home for quite some time.

We met at Paddington station and I took him on a tour retracing my initial steps into the UK. We walked to the nearby pub house, the Rob Roy, for a full English breaky and a pint, then to Hyde park just as I had done months ago.

And for the next few days I took him to all the bits of London I thought he’d like most, or should see. Rather quickly I realized that he didn’t so much want to see a place or famous landmark as he did what to have his picture taken in front of it. And specifically a picture taken from an angle that his biceps looked bigger. He told me that he envisioned a wall of just these types of pictures, pictures of him in front of all the famous stuff in the world. And when I laughed at the idea and told him that was a ridiculous life philosophy, just to do something so you could brag about it at parties, he said England had warped me and made me condescendingly European. Yes we were back at it!

You see, David and I have a unique way of communicating our love. To the uninformed listener it sounds as if we are constantly arguing or picking on each other, but it’s really just how we have grown to express ourselves. Once you get used to it, it actually makes for a pretty funny comedy duo. We think it’s funny anyway. But we’ll never laugh too much at what the other says because then it would “go to their head” and for the past 6 years we have been trying to figure out who is funnier…. The jury is still out.

Anyway I gave Dave the royal tour and we had fun despite him insisting that I was his personal photographer for the adventure. I think one of the highlights  of London though, was we met up with Jon and we three had an American guys night out, crawling from pubs, and recanting the long list of American foods we loved so much and missed so dear. Even David, only having been gone for 3 days, joined in full heartily. So we went to Jon’s favorite place, an American style BBQ house. That even had a REAL American waitress!

The food was pretty dang good and I could see why Jon spent so many days there. Essentially it’s his mistress, he tries to sneak away to it whenever his wife isn’t looking.

It made me imagine him coming home, denying where he had been, only for Anna to see a BBQ smear on his collar.

I’d go on but all this talk of American food and I’m getting hungry…..