The Apple Store on — in — Regent Street is like all the others, not just in layout (it's a wider version of the one on Michigan Avenue in Chicago), but in that when they saw my card, they knew my name and email address. Please God this new charger works (it does, or this would have been my last report). Very crowded at six on a Wednesday evening.  
 
Oxford Street is a major thoroughfare and commercial corridor. It is two and a half lanes wide, and at least ten bus lines keep the outer lanes stopped at all times. This is crazy.  
 
Taking the bus down Oxford Street to the Apple Store was interesting. For further interest, I shall attempt the walk down Regent to Piccadilly Circus, and the Comedy Store nearby. Perhaps it will be dark enough to make a good picture. I think my camera has a setting for night landscapes. (No-ooo, it isn't fast enough.) 
 
Everything is so small! Piccadilly Circus has incomparably more going on, but I don't think it's any bigger than Monument Circle in Indianapolis. Finding Oxendon Street among the twists, angles, and spotty signage, however, was a trick. I had to resort to iPhone mapping. The map booklet I'd been relying on didn't catch that Rupert became Oxendon. Google knew.  
 
The Comedy Store Players were almost all games, rather like Whose Line is it Anyway? There was a longer scene, with something of a plot, and improvised songs, at the end. Second City's improv aims at scenes that might become sketches, and iO at least says it wants to develop improv as a form of theater. I have a snobbery about jokes and moment-to-moment entertainment, and I didn't enjoy the show as much as I should have — it's not just the players who have to remember to stay out of their own heads.  
 
Josie Lawrence is still luminous, and uninhibited, which is the way to go if you can avoid being cheap. 
 
English audiences are as apt to suggest "dildo" as Americans. The principle of accepting whatever the audience offers is long-dead.  
 
I have yet to get through my first full day here. I feel I've been busy.  
 
[Morning] The Morgan's bed is comfortable and its breakfast generous. I must now head for Buckingham Palace at 9:30, Parliament at 3:00, and the Cabinet War Rooms somewhere in there. At 8:00, Spamalot. Being organized is truly the easiest thing a lazy man can do. 
 
I thought I'd lost my tickets for the day, which confounded me as I'd been methodical in arranging myself. I don't know what led me to examine my inner breast pocket, but there they were.  
 
The Queen's Gallery came as part of Buckingham Palace package, and I took it as the spinach course, but I was wrong. I was nose-up to sketches by Leonardo! They were part of an exhibition of studies by naturalists. In the general gallery, there was Judith with the Head of Holofernes, depicting the Hebrew seductress with the severed head of an enemy general. The notes say the head is the artist's self-portrait, and the (hot) Judith, the girlfriend who had just dumped him. I've been there.  
 
The State Rooms of Buckingham Palace are magnificent. My interest was in the statecraft of the place — they had laid a full state banquet, and explained the logistics. State banquets are an instrument of statecraft. I was also interested in the palace as an emblem of the British people. In token of that, I kept my hat in hand; there was no question of not having a hat. Nor of not wearing a jacket and tie. I was surprised to find I was the only such man there.  
 
Security at both places, and at the London Eye, was airport-style, the necessity of which is sad.