Made it to the U.K. in one piece. OJ-Simpsoned across the concourses of Atlanta’s airport to barely just make my connection because of a flight delay from San Francisco. (That’s OJ Simpson, like the old Hertz car rental ad with the yardage-gaining sports here. I didn’t stab anyone.)

Sadly, while I made it from Terminal A to Terminal T in Atlanta and sweating and out of breath jumped as the last (or possibly second to last) person on the plane, fate decided my luggage needed a soujourn below the Mason-Dixon line. A polite, Scottish accented courier dispatcher says my bag will be here where I sit between now and 12 p.m., maybe 1 p.m.

As a consequence, I spent a jetlagged, smelly bit of dazed and confused yesterday in search of pants. I learned that apparently Scottish babes must embrace the camel toe like nobody’s business. A dozen pair of pants were tried, hundreds examined and for fuck’s sake they all had that hoochie 1- to 2-inch zipper that barely covers a chick’s pudenda.

On top of that, I’m apparently approaching plus sizes on this side of the pond, or I just couldn’t work it the fuck out what size I was. And, a lot of the knees and thighs were tight. Until yesterday I never worried about the relative obesity of my knees.

Moments before taking a straight razor to my jugular in over-tired despair, I found a mildly frumpy, outdoorsy store with plain, normally genetalia covering, black trousers.

For fuck’s sake.

Apart from that adventure, it was an uneventful-ish day of sleep deprivation.

Here’s the basic rundown of the past 24 hours, where I may have slept two hours on the plane max.

9:45 a.m. leave my home (and start missing M.)
11:05 a.m. get all settled into a completely full plane
12:30? p.m. plane finally takes the fuck off an hour or so late
7:50 p.m. finally get off the plane from San Francisco vaulting through hurdles of shitheads who completely and selfishly ignored the request to let people with connections off first (Oh, how I hate watching morons struggle and block the aisles slowly getting their carryon shit together.)
8:05 p.m. after running from about gate A30 down to A1, taking a turn down a long corridor and vaulting down a series of escalators to get on some kind of mono-rail train contraption to be transported to Terminal T (14 letters down the alphabet) got on the goddamn plane
8:06 p.m. mini seat dance when I realized I was alone in my seat block
9:05 a.m. landed in Edinburgh (and watched the luggage carousel gradually empty before filing the inevitable lost luggage report)

From there, which was with the 8-hour time difference already a 16-hour adventure, it all got fuzzy as I met up with my old friends, walked the streets, shopped, drank tea, called home, tagged along to the performance venues, saw their shows, drank some beer, ate some chips with curry and had what they think is a fruit smoothie but was warm juice, threw myself on stage for a short set of tired and rusty (but funny) shit, drank some water and ended in a comically bad haunted walking tour let by a foppish goth boy and highlighted by a woman in the tour group upchucking in an agent vault below the city.

One day, and I’m already exhausted.