In the Strangers' Gallery
Mood:  lucky
Now Playing: "Free Four" by Pink Floyd
Ten years ago today, I was in my favorite city in the whole world: London. I spent maybe a month there at the Palace Hotel, a cool old youth hostel near Notting Hill Gate. What an incredible time in my life. I wouldn't trade those memories for anything.

In the afternoon of St. Patrick's Day of 1995, I went and visited the British House of Commons and even went up into the Strangers' Gallery for a while. What a beautiful place!

That evening, I came back to the Palace and asked aloud for an Irishman to go get drunk with. A young man from Nova Scotia, who was in London on leave from his duties as a peacekeeper in the Balkans, volunteered that he was "half-Irish". And I said that'd do.

Damn me for not remembering his name. He was as decent and good-natured a young man as I've ever met abroad. If I ever come across his name in my stash of memorabilia, I will tell it here. I hope he some day finds me or I him.

We had a great night on St. Paddy's Day a decade ago this very hour, going from pub to pub and drinking snakebites and pints of Guinness.

"The deeds of a man in his old age
Are the deeds of a man in his prime..."

Erin go bragh.