February 20: Sunday

I decided to sleep in this morning and go out shopping by myself in the early afternoon. Literally as I walked out the door at 1pm, it started to rain. Good thing I had brought my trusty umbrella (or, as they pronounce it here, my "um-ber-ell-er"). I walked down Kensington High Street (a big shopping district just blocks away) and browsed a few stores, looking for shoes that I can wear in Italy for Spring Break, which is just days away. I had no luck, but I saved the most promising for last, a place that some friends had said was a decent place for well-priced clothes and shoes. I got very lucky in the clothes, and found a few things that I really liked, and just as I was walking over to the shoes, a lady trying on a pair of super-high heels stood up, tripped, and slammed straight into my back, sending me careening into a boot display with boots hung on metal hooks coming out of a portable display wall. It hurt. A lot. A whole lot, actually. I had hit the display head-on, and knocked most of it down. The metal hooks had hit me all over as they came crashing down on me, so I have bruises in weird places. The worst damage was to my left knee, where I had landed, and to my chest, where one of the metal hooks hit me like a lance. Everyone in the store came rushing over saying "Oh my goodness! Are you ok? Did you hurt your head? Did it poke your eye?" At least, everyone except the lady who had shoved me. She just looked at the mess with me on the floor in the middle and the nice ladies trying to extract me from the metal hooks which had tangled with my hair and scarf and coat, and said "Oh" and walked away, took the shoes off and left. I hope a pigeon poops on her.

Anyway, I was pretty banged-up so I came straight home and iced my knee. I'm disappointed because I really do need new shoes before Italy, since I ruined my boots walking through puddles in Dublin a few weeks ago. Hopefully I'll be able to go later in the week. On the plus side, I stopped in at Marks & Spencer (which has a ridiculously good food hall) just before the store where the nasty lady pushed me, and I had a whole package of wonderful Marks & Spencer cookies, which was a perfect pick-me-up (somewhat literally).