God, the indignity of getting yelled at while standing in your socks. Getting dressed down because you put your bag in a bin or you did not. They’re constantly changing the procedures, and it’s so much wear-and-tear on the human spirit, these systems we’ve created. How many terrorists are captured each day at a Midwestern airport? How many plots foiled?

Night flight to London, and I spent six hours looking down at the Atlantic, hunting for the distant lights of boats, imagining a different life of shipping lanes and navigating the Labrador Sea.

London was breathtaking at six o’clock in the morning and ten thousand feet: a glittery sprawl without any discernible grid that slowly revealed itself beneath threads of low-flying clouds.

Our luggage went missing somewhere in the depths of Heathrow, so I bought a cheap change of clothes at a discount chain called TK Maxx, which has the same logo and chaotic atmosphere as TJ Maxx in the States. Only one letter was different. This minor tweak captures the uncanny sensation of being on the other side of an ocean, yet everything feels more or less the same now that we’re living in the shadow of an end-game corporate colossus. Also: I almost get killed every time I jaywalk, and the power jacks are large and ostentatious, like something an American would have come up with. They have chicken Big Macs here.

I’m sure other quirks and delights will become apparent after I get some sleep and our luggage turns up so I can install new contacts and see properly. But oh, I love this fifty-degree gloom. I also love the new Brutal Minimalism extended player from The Black Dog: