A bad day in London is still better than a good day anywhere else.
-Unknown
“When exploring London, you will come across lots of excitement by chance, so try to take everything in rather than just rushing around to all of the major tourist haunts.”
– Richard Branson
“I travel continuously, and I see many cities, but there is nowhere like London.”
– Norman Foster
“In London, love and scandal are considered the best sweeteners of tea.”
– John Osborne
“London is a modern Babylon.”
– Benjamin Disraeli
“London is a bad habit one hates to lose.”
– Unkown
“In London, everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in.”
– Paddington Bear
“London opens to you like a novel itself… It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, doors and passages. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.”
– Anna Quindlen
“If London is a watercolour, New York is an oil painting.”
– Peter Shaffer
“I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.”
– Ben Okri
“I’m leaving because the weather is too good. I hate London when it’s not raining.”
– Groucho Marx
Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
– Samuel Johnson
![[Stories, pt. XI] The only guy I ever fell for in Los Angeles was an Emmy award winning producer of documentary films. At least, that’s how his LinkedIn profile reads.
Let's start with the Saturday we met on Sunset Boulevard. It sounds cliché because it was. Doing this story justice feels like a hefty task - plagued by my own bias, naturally. But when your story ends in a foreign country alone on Christmas Day having been left in the middle of the night, you earn the right to tell the tale. And tell it I did - to every air hostess who would listen on that 30 hour flight path back to Australia on 26 December 2018.
This may take a while (you've been warned). I had decided I would only date older men - a phase? Perhaps. Convinced age must have been the downfall to my previous failed relationships, I swore on a 30’s or 40’s kind of guy. Statistics show 60% of men prefer dating younger, so if nothing else, the stats were on my side.
I was introduced to Simon (names have been changed) at an inconvenient time. There are cute foods to be eating when you meet a man and then there are acai bowls. My teeth covered in a layer of purple soup, I smiled and introduced myself. I was with a friend and her beau - used here as an adjective because in LA a “boyfriend” is as good as a lifetime sentence. He happened to walk by and, caught by surprise, noticed his work colleague was sitting with us. “Hey Brian, fancy seeing you here”. I would later come to learn that the meeting was as set up as a Hindu wedding.
Later that evening I was the 4th wheel in a double date to an emo band playing at a venue in Highland Park. In a haze of vodka sodas and white wine, we stumbled into the uber and darted across town. Uninterested at first, my eyes darted around the room to a sea of eligible bachelors. It could have been the white wine or it could have been the laser beam lights that framed his face, but I caught myself lock eyes with his and for a split second, I really noticed him. “He’s won an Emmy” Brian announced the next day. “And he’s into you” he finished. After a series of first dates that apparently weren’t into me, my ego got the better of me.
To be continued...🍷🍿](http://www.worldofwanderlust.com/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)