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I'm back in the office after ten traumatic, exhilarating, sad, joyous, fun, blissful, conflicted days in London. I keep thinking that at some point the magic must end, that I can't keep going home. But I can, and that's what makes London so special. It's a fixed point in time, to which I have the magic powers to return to. I keep thinking that I should ditch the idea of school, stop moving around, find a nice boy in London to get married to, settle down and bear children in the 'burbs behind a white picket fence with a Jack Russell-like mongrel. But somehow the lure of adventure, of the unknown, of the fact that "Beware, for beyond here lie dragons" is irresistible. Perhaps, as Rushdie says, I am one of those inveterate, incorrigible frontier-crossers. It is always better and worse than imagined.But London was especially bittersweet and poignant seeing all my friends, having a best friend get married, walking down the aisle behind her bearing flowers in bloom in springtime in an old church, reading Yeats and Khalil Gibran on the invitation, wearing flowers in our hair and posing lackadaisically next to lakes and trees as the wind blew our saris wild. It was Sri Lanka from the 50s transposed and we never stopped laughing. Someone said that they should take a video the four bridesmaids laughing their heads off and rename it as a soft-porn flick "Bridesmaids gone wild". Had violent arguments on the tube with random French and Irishmen over the World Cup. Watched in frustration as Zidane's head of steel met Materazzi's middle, ostensibly for a remark calling Zidane a terrorist. Walked the streets of Kensington until the sun went down, talking endlessly, pausing on stoops straight out of a Woody Allen movie, existentially-so. And parts of me which I thought had been dead for ever so long started to bloom again, and under the weak , wan, life-giving British sun, I began to feel alive in a different way, in a way where all the despair and angst, pain and joy of Sri Lanka was far behind me and I came to be a child again, believing in love and life.