My vision's down, my teeth are sorely unsound, I had to take a little pill in Kingston town...

I had a few days in Kingston (London) with Han-Ley.

Amittedly, a lot of this involved staying up late trying out his new cocktail inventions and then staying in bed very late the morning(s) after, but we did actually leave the house on occasion, and I have an Oyster card and various other bits and pieces from running around central London to prove it. :)

After navigating the sweaty hell of the Underground, we went through Harrods; in my case, for the first time - at my suggestion, but with zero protest, we spent a significant amount of time staring at the chocolate and cake displays (they really do have to be seen to be fully appreciated), both of us about one praline away from regressing to the childhood thing of slavering with noses pressed to the glass. Then, after a floor or two, we hit the toy department - remarkably, the inner child stayed in check while looking at massive stuffed animals. Perhaps I have an inner nanny for these occasions.

I should also mention that Harrods has "luxury washrooms", and that while I was investigating the ladies' Han-Ley was drawing much amusement from watching a very loud American making his wife and daughters look at lingerie that had caught his attention. It was described to me later as "fetish gear".

Once we'd exhausted all the interesting parts of Harrods we hopped back on the Tube, got slightly lost on re-emergence ("Ooh. The Above-Place. I see sss.. skuh... sskaaiiiieee?") and found Hamley's.

As you might imagine, the inner child had a minor seizure of the "TOY-EEEEEEEES!" variety as soon as we entered. I'm still not entirely sure of what we did in the toy shop either - I may well have passed into a walking, saucer-eyed coma at some point, with only the presence of vital signs and the occasional squee to mark me out from the zombies. Damn zombies. They get everywhere these days.

One (sadly not great) meal later, we found our way to the theatre for Avenue Q.

Yessssss, I have seen this wonderful, silly, ironic and insightful production in the West End. It was amazing: I've had the soundtrack for a while now and know pretty much all the songs, but as good as they are they are SO MUCH BETTER as part of the full experience. Many, many times better. Times infinity to the power of awesome. If you have the means, go and see it.

The sad thing about the day out, however, was that the theatre trip - the part of the day I'd been most looking forward to, and that I definitely got the most out of - was the point where as many things as could possibly go wrong, did.

Going down an escalator in the Underground, on our way to see the play, the right lens fell out of my glasses.

Let's stop and think about this for a moment. While I was standing still... The lens. Fell out. What the fucking crapping hell on a donkey?! Stupid cheap frames.

And of course, this being the bottom of an insanely busy escalator, it was trodden on multiple times before Han-Ley found it. He got it to sit back in the frame despite the fact a corner of the lens was now missing altogether, but I was afraid of it falling out again so opted to put the glasses in my bag, saving my sight for the musical - even if this did mean having to be meekly led around until we sat down.

We also got lost more than once, with (we thought) not much time to spare. I couldn't exactly help - I couldn't even read street signs at this point.

Then, during about the second-to-last song, my teeth started hurting - all of them on one side, all at once, blindingly (blinder-ingly?), with no apparent trigger. I really did enjoy the musical, and I'm extremely pissed off that I had to spend the last moments of it in unexplainable pain.

Better yet, the pain kept coming, in handy travel-sized pockets of agony, not only during the journey home, but also for the next two days. This may not sound like much, but bear in mind that I was on the maximum dose of ibuprofen continuously over those days, and was still getting the pain, and that those were the last few days of my stay. There are not enough expletives in the world to vent frustration at that toothache.

Although, I guess if it were possible to make the toothache listen to the Picard song continuously on loop for two days or so, we might be about even.