Let's All Meet Up in the Year 2000

The scope of things can be so subjective. My freshman year of college I dated this kid Justin who was from the middle of nowhere Maine. It was a Friday night early in the courtship and we had stopped in Copley Square in the shadow of the Hancock, and I remember looking around at the overall lack of skyscrapers starting to think I’d made the wrong choice opting for school in Boston instead of in Manhattan, and basically at the same time we expressed our respective awe and dismay over the size (or lack thereof) of Boston. It felt to me like a city where your past would be inescapable. Later I’d get a real lesson in your past being inescapable when me and Justin broke up and had to live in the same small dorm together which was painful. I decided quickly after that to not date classmates. Sometimes I wonder about all the things that hallmarked my moving to Boston and how much pain there was, the kind of pain only an 18 year old can feel, and if that contributed to my lack of love for the city. In the end it was just never a good fit, one I just struggled to make work, something I’d be guilty of in a lot of other arenas.


When I first came to Ireland in the 90s I was similarly whelmed. I had met up with some friends and we backpacked around the west coast staying with their extended family or friends of their extended family or friends of friends of friends of their extended family, exchanging work for housing in some cases, and it was dreary. Most of the places we went were quite poor, higher education wasn’t a thing people aspired to, and thus seemed uninspired and often drunk. Happy, but isolated and ok with it and it was something that teenage me couldn’t relate to at all, I was so intent on looking forward that I was often ignoring my present, and it was especially bad the summer before I moved away for college. I just felt at the time that I kinda got why my family left. I came home to my mom and the aneurysms so I don’t remember a lot of the trip but I remember it being kinda eh, I have tons of video I shot somewhere, I should find it.

When I first saw London in 2001 I was awestruck or starstruck or something inbetween. It was beautiful and simultaneously modern yet honoring its grandiose history. I immediately knew that I’d want to come back on a student visa after I finished college. It was so metropolitan, so effortlessly chic, so grungy and bougie and I loved it. I hated the presence of the royal family and I was put off by the testament to colonialism that was the British museum, but I was also totally enamored with the Tate and the Globe and Slimelight and all that stalls in Camden. I’d go again less than a year later with an entire gaggle of friends and again just loved it. Two years later when I lived in Cambridge I went a bunch of times and it never lost its luster. Prior to getting laid off, Ethan had been in the process getting transferred to a team in London, our plan was to move there for a year or two before Ireland just to have fun and be metropolitan. We figured we’d try living in Barnes or Richmond and it would be an adventure.

Now, in what feels like many many many many lifetimes later I find myself digging my toes into the ground around Dublin while finding myself kind of very overwhelmed by and disinterested in London. London may be the only city I’ve been to that just feels significantly bigger compared to when I first visited. All cities change they are basically living organisms so I get that, but I’ve never felt so outpaced.

So the past weekend was about indulgence, a much delayed trip, with two things in mind: eating at a specific restaurant and picking up a bougie bottle of perfume that was meant to be a Christmas present at Harrods.

Somehow we’d found out about Hind’s Head in Bray. It’s now a Heston Blumenthal restaurant, but it’s also a pub that has been around since the 1400s. I’m pretty sure it’s the first Michelin star restaurant that I’ve been to, when I got to a point in life where I could afford fancier stuff, my bone marrow rebelled and reigned in my formerly adventurous palate, which was quite rude. I don’t even remember how we found out about this place, we’d gone down some YouTube rabbit hole about Irish and British cuisine and found a video about Blumenthal’s recreations of historic British cuisine and from there found out about the Hind’s Head and their famous fish and triple cooked chips.

I know someone who manages a finer dining establishment and they often write about their frustrations with accommodating people with food allergies and truthfully over the years it got to me and made me even more apprehensive about contacting restaurants to see if they could accommodate me since I’m complicated and I don’t find it fun to deal with, I doubt most restaurants would, and seeing someone I know, who knows me and people like me, kinda dragging “difficult” customers just made it less and less appealing. Plus when I’m traveling to places like London, that used to include trans Atlantic flights, so fucking around and risking a possibly trip derailing reaction seemed even more terrifying. But now this is like, a *45 min flight away, maybe it could work for a long weekend?

It turned out basically nothing on their menu was me friendly BUT, since Western Europe is actually phenomenally good about food allergies, leagues ahead of America, and they were eager to make me a meal that I could safely enjoy. They made me my own batch of fish and chips and a wasabi beetroot salad that was heavenly. I also got a delicious virgin mojito. Oh and we shared bread and cultured butter. Everything was just the best version of that thing that I’d ever had which I assume is par for the course with Michelin star places. It was all fantastic, no one ever seemed remotely frustrated with me, and it was all a delight. The only issue was since I rarely eat out, the heaviness of the meal was kind of a shock to my annoyingly precious system, but it was so totally worth it.

Before dinner was our trip to Harrods to see their insane perfume halls. In the 90s I used to just get perfume oil in St Marks or Times Square, then in 2004 I got into Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, a small perfume oil house out of Los Angeles. I got more intense about it the more I started dropping more significant but unhealthy vices and also seeing my diet get more and more restricted. I think it was a way to still indulge in something decadent. There’s also a whole long and storied side quest with Lush products. But I started to get more into actual perfume in 2014 after my dad died when I lived in Hollywood. That morning I walked across the street to Sephora to distract myself and stumbled upon Theirry Mugler’s perfumes which were weird and unique. Later I’d try LeLabo and all the stuff I couldn’t afford at The Grove. It was an on and off again thing that went in tandem with BPAL until a few years ago when niche houses just were getting more interesting and BPAL less so. Plus the pandemic made us all get weird about hobbies which is a whole other thing.

ANYWAY while I’d been to Harrods a few times I’d never been to the perfume halls, which are beyond insane. Which is really saying something because Harrods is insane on its own, it is just this absolutely repulsive monolith to overconsumption. It’s enjoyable in small bits but when you step back and look at it all it’s so gluttonous and grotesque it seemed only fitting when we were walking out someone pushed past us to outside and started vomiting copiously outside the Prada cafe. While I feel awful for them because norovirus is all over the place and throwing up absolutely is horrible and I hope they’re ok, it just kinda fit the overall vulgar vibe. There’s just a level of privilege that, to me, is disgusting and I think that’s the level of privilege that really shops there, it goes beyond getting a fun bougie treat and just dives into what I assume is some bonkers entitlement. I know I know a lot of well off people but none of them were “go buy baby clothing by Gucci” rich or if they were they hid it. Because that kinda shit is peak conspicuous consumption and is gross.

We secured the bottle of perfume we came for and a jellycat shaped like a raindrop with little galoshes. We also hit the food hall so I could get Ethan a ton of fancy chocolate because he’d never get it for himself and also for Valentine’s Day. So that part was fun because Ethan is impossible to shop for but chocolate is a sure fire win.

I had honestly been hoping for something more sensory exciting and less tacky extravagance perfume hall wise, which I found at a niche store in Covent Garden. There they sat with me and went over notes and brands that I liked and kind of understood my goal of smelling like a piece of vanilla cake inside a burned out church, (which sounds sacrilegious and edgelordy but I like vanilla, incense, and smoke and want to smell like or just smell those things all the time) , and sent me packing with a bunch of decants. This will be fun and something I can dive into for a while since there really isn’t as much a perfume scene here. But that’s ok because not feeling the need to buy stuff is also pretty great.

London itself just felt so beyond overwhelming this time around. We also went to the museum of natural history, soho, covent garden, Liberty (as insane as Harrods was this was more like the quiet luxury cousin) Selfridges (which honestly was worse than Harrods, I feel like people who shop there are probably at the “in the Epstein Files” or “hunt other people for sport” level of extreme privilege related sociopathy), and just plain old meandering, but between Valentine’s Day, Lunar New Year, and the 89 thousand protests going on that shut down massive swaths of the city, it just felt difficult to navigate and massive and somehow I found myself feeling more like more of a country mouse visiting now that I live in another city than I did when I last visited 2 years ago and lived in the burbs. Which surprised me because this isn’t a city I’d consider myself unfamiliar with, but suddenly I am.

For now I love my little city where I can see the mountains from my porch and i think some of my values and wants are adapting to this life, something that never really happened in Boston OR Los Angeles. Those were situations where I felt like I was constantly trying to make myself fit the city and felt pressured to be someone else, here, at least for now I just am and I am happy.


*(SIDE NOTE: 45 min flights are great but the planes are smaller and you can feel gravity nipping at your ankles and it’s totally terrifying, so that’s a whole thing I’m gonna have to learn to deal with bleargh.)