Despite a slow start, we arrive early and circle London until it's six a.m. And we can legally land - first in the queue. Tube to Bayswater and a slow coffee and internet stop at Starbucks to allow the little hotel time to have a room ready. Starbucks has done some room changing. Gone is the seedy and probably unhygienic comfort of the basement cave. All clean, square, desk-like little wooden tables. Neat and cold. Same friendly staff but gone too are the characters - the man who brought his own toast and the mentally afflicted man who sat for hours with a single cup off tea his ticket to warmth. Gone where? Miss the cosy muddle.
Small jetlag nap and then out to Camden High Street. By half past three it's getting dark. So much farther north than Winnipeg.
BBC announces that Yasser Arafat may have been poisoned, while Al Jazeera says almost certainly poisoned - 83% probability. Interestingly they're both reporting on the same set of findings by a Swiss forensic team and choosing totally different quotations from the findings. The BBC feels obliged to point out that the polonium poisoning verdict was one that Arafat's wife would have wanted. Undoubtedly true, but irrelevant, one would have thought, to the findings of the (presumably unbiased) Swiss team.