SHARDS OF MEMORY Stopover 2

I’m the last to board. Very noisy propeller plane to London Gatwick and mushy veggies, because I don’t want to eat eggs and bacon for breakfast. Landing at Gatwick shortly after 8 am. Connecting flight to San Francisco at 1:10 pm on J 25 from Heathrow Airport. I have to take the Speedlink shuttle bus there. Over an hour’s drive. Heathrow has no lockers and only luggage storage with attendants. Gunther thinks that’s because of the bombings in Northern Ireland. Oh, Schiphol will always be my favorite airport! I’ve seen Jenny Holzer’s neon installations and lots of cool art there. Everything is so convenient. Just a quick train ride to Amsterdam Centraal station. Here, British complicated, even the far distance between terminals is confusing.

I had prepared myself with my travel-smart matryoshka system and stuffed my small backpack into a larger one. I put my camera, reading glasses, money, comb and tissues in the small one and the large one in the luggage storage. But don’t want to leave my PowerBook on the open metal shelf. I take it with me to the tube.

I change a hundred-mark bill, enough for the layover on the return flight too. At 9:30 am I’m standing on the platform at Heathrow Underground station. I have to be back at 12:40 pm by the latest to have enough time for passport control and a long walk to the gates, plus picking up my large backpack again.

An American retired couple traveling in Europe thinks I’m very brave. They sit next to me and I can only hope that my amber beats the wet camel. They say it takes almost an hour to get to the center. I calculate that I have thirty minutes on London’s streets. Now I have to decide where that should be.

Sloane Square Station to King’s Road in Chelsea is out of the question. I would have to change trains. It has to be a station on the direct Piccadilly Line. Earl’s Court, for example. Sous Sol Restaurant in 1966/67, where we ate our hot meal at three in the morning after our shift at the Whisky A Gogo. Or Gloucester Road … four of us lived in a bedsitter and ate mainly // rice. When we ran out of sixpence for the hotplate, we had rice al dente. South Kensington. There was the Biba store where I bought my clothes a few years later.