What is better than anything else in the whole world? London in the sunshine. I discovered this when we were blessed with an entire week of London sun. Suddenly I was incapable of doing anything—cleaning my room, revising for my exam, writing my blog, all of these became onerous tasks because they meant staying inside for more than half an hour at a time. As a result, I am behind in all of the things I should have been doing this week.

My dad comes on Tuesday, and I was hoping to have finished studying for my exam by the time he arrives (I have to take it the day after he leaves, this semester has been a masterpiece of poor academic planning on my part,) but now I fear I will have to send him off to a museum while I sneak away to read Henry Fielding for a half hour here and Johnson for fifteen minutes there. Still, it’s been worth it. At my college at home, the campus is small enough that the entirety is connected by a series of underground tunnels, and during the winter months, if it is cold and wet, I have been known to go for days without seeing the sunlight, moving from class to class underground. But I’ve never felt as sun deprived as I have this semester, when I had a long walk in the open air to get to school. I’m pale normally, but I’ve now reached a state of pallor so extreme that small children run when they see me because I resemble creatures they know only from storybooks and Scooby Doo. So now the sun is irresistible to me. Slowly it’s repairing the long winter damage. The other day I noticed that my usual sickly shade of pallor had been upgraded to just plain pallor, and thought, well, it’s a start.

I’ve been using the sunshine to explore London’s park system. There are a series of beautiful parks in and around the city, which come alive in the nice weather. A typical day for me involves taking a blanket, a book, and a Diet Coke and heading West of Trafalger Square where three of the big parks are in easy walking distance. Hyde Park is the grandest, and on a Sunday people are still known to “promenade” through the park in their Sunday best, but it’s also the farthest away, so I don’t tend to spend a lot of time there. Instead, I like to go to either Green Park or St. James’ Park. Actually, Green Park and St. James Park are connected, and I’m never quite sure which one I’ve ended up in, but as I can’t make distinction between them I can say that they are equally lovely.

There are the requisite lakes and flower beds and soft ice cream vendors, along with the bird poop covered statues that seem to exist in every park in London, but I prefer to stick to the large open grassy spaces, fringed with trees that provide shade. I’ve taken to spreading out a blanket under the trees and reading the non-school books that I’ve been buying for a pound from Oxfam. I’m reading PD James right now, who I never really enjoyed before (I’m not really a huge mystery fan,) but now I love reading her work because it’s set in London. It’s great to read a scene and realize I had lunch there just the day before. Reading in the park is fun because I can look around at the other sunbathers, most of whom are couples in their twenties and thirties who seem to enjoy bringing bottles of wine and feeding each other various kinds of fruits.

There are also kids playing Frisbee or football (the British kind) while their mothers and baby sitters read or gossip nearby. These could all be terrible people, but I have no notion of it. Everybody looks kinder, gentler in the sun. I get the urge to buy strangers ice cream, and to join in the football games—we’re all emerging from the blah’s of winter together and there’s a sense of camaraderie between us.

St. James’ Park has a pond, actually all of the parks have several ponds, but there’s a particular pond in St. James’ Park that has been set aside as a bird sanctuary. For the record, I just want to state that I hate birds. I’m fine with all manners of creepy crawlies—snakes, lizards, spiders—these don’t really bother me, but birds freak me out. It’s an irrational, but strong, fear. My least favorite types of bird are waterfowl, particularly geese and swans who are both vicious and strong (not to mention disease ridden; I think flue can be passed between ducks and humans). For some reason, though, people decided that a duck and geese filled pond would be a good thing to have in the middle of a park filled with vulnerable children. I tend to avoid the pond whenever I can, but it bears mentioning because the variety of waterfowl the park has managed to acquire. I’m used to seeing the typical green-headed mallards and their brown-feathered lady friends that inhabit both the Thames and the ponds of Central Park, but there seem to be an endless variety of ducks and geese here. My favorites (from a safe distance) are the ones with bright blue bills, maybe because the vivid colors make them easy to spot if they should chose to come after you. But St. James doesn’t stop with the ducks, there are also much less exciting pigeons and sea-gulls (pond gulls?) and other city birds taking a break with their fellow human Londoners in the quiet of the park, not to mention partridges and other types of game fowl that enjoy the human free banks of the pond, and pelicans. One of my favorite signs warns park dwellers not to feed the pelicans—feeding the disease-ridden ducks and vicious swans and geese seems to be perfectly all right, but the pelicans are taboo. Go figure.