I got a slow start in the morning, meaning to errands and things, but never quite managing to take a shower. So I was a bit surprised then when the Young Dutchman DID call, asking how long it would take me to get to Hyde Park. 20 minutes? Damn, one more reason one should be prepared to go out by 2 PM!
As I was running late to our original meeting spot, the Young Dutchman called me to tell me it was over-crowded, and to meet him by the Round Pond in the Kensington Palace Gardens instead. At least I got there just before him, we greeted each other, and then decided to grab some food from Whole Foods to eat in the park. He didn't have his bank card on him, and didn't have a bike lock either, so we agreed that I would get the food and he would stay outside entertaining himself on his phone.
I raced through the store and picked up olive bread and pancetta for him, and a sandwich for me. Took ages to get through the check-out queue, but eventually made it out, and we walked back to the park.
I had to laugh as we walked, saying, "You know how you'd had 'no comment' on why you didn't get any sleep the other night? Are you aware that you have a giant hickey on your neck?" That cracked him up, even as he moaned, "Why is it that every time I do something great in bed, I get abused? Seriously, after every night it's either my neck or my back that's in bad shape." I had to laugh, because he acts like he's complaining, but you know that he loves it... And I had to sympathise, for after my little run-in with the chap before I left for New York, I had quite a few marks and bruises in some pretty hard-to-explain spots. All part of the price of fun, I suppose!
So we sat in the park for hours, talking about jobs, housing, life... He's taken note of a few new girls on the staff at the club, and was musing about whether it was bad form to keep hooking up with the staff. He certainly works his way through them, making me think that if we had been back in the days of manor houses and servants, he would have been one of those sons of the lord of the manor who slept with all of the servants.
Yet what I love, as we talked about our various hook-ups, a little bit of graphic detail the things we experience in bed, job and housing plans (he says he plans to continue living with his father, although they're going to look for a two-bedroom place) and life in general, you realise that none of these peripheral relationships are as important as our relationship with each other. Hence why we'd taken time out of our day to meet up in the park, because despite how we see each other at parties and had even seen each other on Friday and spoken on the phone yesterday, we really needed some time for just the two of us.
Later the wind picked up and some rain blew in, so we kissed each other good-bye and went our separate ways. As the rain turned out to be brief, I decided to walk home, where I ran into a tourist couple who stopped me to ask a question. At first I thought they wanted to know where Notting Hill Gate station was, but that wasn't quite it. The woman speaking to me was obviously struggling with English, and something in her accent made me ask, "What language do you speak?" When the man with her said, "Spanish", I laughed with relief and broke into speaking Spanish myself. You could see they were pretty stunned by that, the fact that the one person they'd stopped to talk to happened to be reasonably fluent in Spanish. And then when the woman repeated her question to me in Spanish, it was much easier to understand that she had a question about the Zones on her travelcard, and I explained to her how they worked and that she could get on a Notting Hill Gate with a Zone 1 travelcard. Made me feel quite smart for the day to be able to use my Spanish like that!
I related this story to the Young Dutchman when wrote to me later when I got home, saying how smart I felt to pretend to be bi-lingual like him. (His fluency in English and Dutch is that of a child who grew up bi-lingual, it's both impressive and annoying). He was writing to me however, to say how glad he was that we'd decided to do that. Getting out and enjoying the sunshine, and just spending time together. I couldn't agree more.
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