Finally I got to consummate my love of fossilized bones, ie. we went to see the dino exhibition at Natural History Museum – and what a great place it is. The only letdown was that their mechanic T-Rex was out of order, but that was more than compensated by all the other stuff. I walked around till my feet were sore and bought a bagful of dino stuff. Amazing.

For some reason we then took the tube to Piccadilly which was full of people and therefore very uncomfortable. The scale of London is such that you mostly stop paying attention to all the other homo sapiens; indeed you must do that in order to stay sane. (Sanity in London seems to become a recurring theme for me.) The best thing about Piccadilly was this one arcade where a guy was playing a double game of Dancing Stage Euromix 2 at expert level. Moments before he started dancing I thought about having a go myself but after his stunning act there was no way I would get up on that podium and embarrass myself. It is awesome to see someone do that game properly.

Later that night Tom challenged me for one more game of chess, cos who knows when we’ll next see. We played on Tuesday and I won but it was real ugly, just a few pieces left on the board. This time I beat him fair and square, thus cementing my fame as the brainiac. And I told him to place the board so that the white player has a white square in his/her right-hand corner.

As is customary, I left my packing till the 11^th hour. From then on it would be just waiting, waiting and waiting.