CITY & AWAY · LONDON

What Came Home From London

The weekender, the books, the gifts and the things I deliberately left on the shelf.

I am very capable of turning a vacation into a shopping assignment, so London came with a list. The interesting part was watching the list get edited in real time.

A BEIS weekender came home with me. Gifts for Jojo and family were handled. Bookstores were always going to be dangerous territory, and the special-edition hunt was part shopping and part sport.

Then there were the things I did not buy. The Jellycat pilot bear I wanted was out of stock. Liberty fell off the final-day itinerary. There were plenty of beautiful things that stayed in London because liking something and needing to own it are two different experiences.

That ended up being one of my favorite lessons from the trip. Souvenirs are better when they remind you of the place instead of reminding you that you panicked in a gift shop.

The full shopping notes live here too, including the places I actually visited and how I thought about the budget.