My life as an invalid

A few days after my return from the Lake District what had been a cold on it's way out became some strange strep throat/flu hybrid on it's way in, and I've been out of commission for most of the past week. As most of my congestion has drained away and I've gotten peppier over the past two days, I figure Eleanor could tell Mrs. Dashwood "She's out of danger," but I'm still walking around the house and running into people I feel like I haven't seen for weeks. A few highlights of my Oxford-style immersion in learning how to take care of myself:

Making scrambled eggs with cheese and a peanut butter crumpet works for all meals. I feel good about my protein intake as well as my domestic skills while stuck in the house, and all the coughing makes people avoid my food like the plague--no more theft!

You can get out of any awkward/irritating conversation by feigning (or actually having, I guess) a coughing fit.

If you can't get out and see England, you can take a pretty good tour of the country by watching some carefully selected movies. Some of my picks were Wimbledon, Bridget Jones's Diary, Notting Hill, The Holiday, and Arrested Development (oh wait, that was Wee Britain in Los Angeles, not the real thing... could have fooled me :P), as I watched between two and three movies per day.

And my personal favorite tip: Most cold remedies need to be drunk, not eaten. I went to Shakespeare tutorial on Monday in pretty shabby condition, if no longer contagious, and my super-sweet don said "Lauren, I'm worried about you. England doesn't seem to be doing you right in the health department. Take a few of these--and let me know if you suddenly feel like a new woman, because my mum swears she always feels like a new woman when she uses these." The little atomic yellow Tums- or Smarties-looking tablets were called "Hairy Lemons" and come from Australia, where that kind of blend of caffeine, guarana, and strange vitamins I've never heard of before is legal. I got home a little too excited to try one and took a big bite while sitting at my desk. Big mistake. Imagine me biting into an Alka-Seltzer tablet--my mouth filled up instantly with yellow foam, and I was laughing too hard along with my roommate to be able to choke it down quickly. I had fun putting the other half in a glass of water and watching it fizz for two minutes before it had dissolved, thinking about the similar fate of the bitten half bobbing around my stomach.

I felt a bit better and way too cooped up by Wednesday morning, so I got up early, stuffed a big pack of "tissues" (TP stolen from the housekeeping closet) and cough drops in my purse, and took myself to London to see the Millais exhibit at Tate Britain. I studied my underground map while on the Oxford Tube and knew right where to hit the ground running (or, rather, walking officiously) at Victoria Station. One stop up to Pimlico (sounds like a gas station, I think, but is a station in a snazzy riverside part of town) I followed the amusement park-like street signs to Tate Britain, a huge, blackened white stone building that looked like a sculpture itself on the banks of the Thames. The walls were painted with "Millais -->" directives like the ones I smile at at the High in Atlanta (wouldn't it be a fun job to officially vandalize the walls of a museum every time a new exhibit needs some explanations?), and I quickly found the stuffy part of the basement where about 150 of one of the 19th century's most popular artists' works sat to be swarmed by a lot of old people, art students, and me. I have to say that, as much as I usually don't like or "get" art exhibits, I really enjoyed this one. Millais was this crazy child prodigy--they had this photograph-like sketch he did of a Greek sculpture when he was 11!--and his early work with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is precocious and vivid like the Romantic poetry I like best. He could capture women's faces with this incredible sensitivity to emotional shades--"Ophelia", the painting of the Shakespearian heroine that graced the tiles of many a London subway station wall the past few months, has the most haunting expression of a person giving herself up to suicide, and Millais's wife's sister, Sophie, posed for a portrait that made me wish I had that much magnetism, now let alone at age 14. I considered buying a print for my new apartment, but I was too frustrated at their quality--when Mariana's dress on the poster looked just navy, whereas the real 150-year-old painting has her in this warm, jewel-like cerulean that looks just like velvet, I just couldn't bear it. The makings of an art snob...? Probably not, but I'm definitely on a quest now to seek out the PRB works around Oxford, since the Ashmolean has a lot and Keble Chapel itself has the original "Light of the World" by William Holman Hunt. They are just too intriguing not to see in person!

I had been wanting to see Kensington by day, so after my leisurely amble through the six rooms of the Millais exhibit I flew up several blocks and several connecting trains below them to get to the High Street Kensington station as my base of operations for a much less erudite afternoon. It probably would have been cheaper to just go to McDonalds outside the station (even the classy folks need their Big Macs), but I was itching to explore the Whole Foods we had seen on our night tour of Kensington a week or so earlier. They really do have everything like in the States--including shelf upon shelf of Emergen-C sachets near the checkouts for the germaphobic vitamin junkies (me, the past few weeks!), and reusable jute grocery bags that say "Whole Foods-Kensington" that I should have bought to look cheeky at Whole Foods-Alpharetta--and I got a blood orange tonic and a plate of food from the hot lunch line to take to the upstairs cafe and brood by a window. (Again, kidding!) The salad I got to go with my mac and cheese was made of red onions, sugar snap peas, and purple potatoes! Purple like easter eggs! I had to enjoy their color and crisp texture, since I still can't taste anything very well with my sick nose (dead from too many tissues) and tongue (dead from too many numbing cough drops), and I ate slowly while watching nearby tables of some posh high school girls grabbing lunch and Facebooking, a young couple having a muffled fight over fresh fruit smoothies, and two young mothers breastfeeding (?! in public?! I still think it's weird) over the sushi they could finally eat again.

I had time before nightfall (at 4!) to zip into some of the classy, white plastic and metal (iPod-looking!) shops outside the Whole Foods windows. Urban Outfitters was a funny stop, because I realized that all the over-priced, flimsy, boho (hobo?) clothes are actually staples here. That's how the cute, pixie haircut, super skinny and pale British chicks dress. I felt like I wouldn't find anything unique there. I skimmed through Zara, but the crowd there was a bit too rich-looking, bouffant-haired, middle-aged brunette--for all my fast walking and studied nonchalance, I felt too much like a preppy college kid to be smelling perfume and trying on trenchcoats with them. Uniqlo, the Tokyo import next door, totally did the trick. Their clothes are a lot like the Gap, classic and preppy, but they fit better and are a lot cheaper than British Gap! I took a long time trying on a pile of clothes I had to shift in and out of my dressing room to stay under the try-on limit, and I modeled lots of cute mini-skirts, skinny jeans, and floppy sweaters to a great soundtrack of John Mayer, Jet, and other poppy folks that really cheered me up. I left with a great sweatery minidress for only 18 pounds (they had a student discount) and merrily carried a big shopping bag on the Tube like any young woman in London before I hopped the Oxford Tube to get home, have a few coughing fits, make scrambled eggs, and pass out at 8:30.