POST-SCRIPT WE ARE PUTTING AT THE TOP: Yesterday we were on a Circle Line train, and there appeared this American family with four hyperactive blond children screaming and jumping up and down and racing from one end of the car to the other. A nice British man asked the father, “Is that the child’s ticket?” pointing to something that fell from one of the horror-rapscallion’s pockets, and the father barely acknowledged his niceness. And they shouted, just shouted and shouted, about everything from how to work the digital camera to which stop they’d be alighting at, and when they finally did leave, two British people, one of whom looked exactly like Martin Freeman, made fun of them for the next five stops, and we were like, “We are perfectly fine with that. You just go ahead as much as you like.” We don’t mind tourist-hatred as long as it is particular and individual, rather than sweeping and general-like.

Er, back to the original post:

Today we were quietly walking down Oxford Street, minding our own business, doing our best to keep our imperalist tendencies and our braying American accents to ourselves, when a woman in a terrible pair of red clown pants shouts, just shouts: “I can’t wait until summer’s over and all these Americans go home.” Now, we’ve never walked down Broadway and said, even silently, for that matter, “Goddamn fucking British tourists,” because we absolutely love the British. Their words, their ways, their chocolate snacks. Their sandwiches. Really, everything about them. The way the Tube tells you how long it will be until the next train comes. We love our yoga teacher, Joey Miles, who should be everyone’s yoga teacher. (And if you are looking for a yoga teacher in London, we could not recommend him, or his partner Laurel Sutherland, more highly.) We love the number 210 bus that takes to Brent Cross. We love Topshop and Selfridge’s and all the museums and all the parks and even, quite possibly most of all, Sunday roasts and Yorkshire pudding and Big Brother and the Great North Eastern Railway. We only hate, and we just hate, that one woman, who could not even be bothered to be subtle in her disdain. Really, the subtlety, the quiet resentment, is all we’re looking for. We’re used to the eye-rolling when people hear our accent. We’re just not into the open, shouty whining. Argh. We would have beaten her with the nearest available stick, but that would have been too much of a cliche.

Anyhoo, that is a rather crap beginning to our little mini-series of our favorite stores in London. Today we are talking about Habitat, which we adore, like we do everything single British thing except for the America-hating woman in the red clown pants. What we love most about them in the moment is their Very Important Products line, with celebrity designers like Eley Kishimoto (above right), Matthew Williamson (above left), and Orla Kiely (at top) making wallpaper. (Moderately less brilliant: Ewan McGregor, though we love him, designing a director’s chair.) Otherwise: brilliant!

So of course, and annoyingly, none of this is available in the U.S., but there are some very nice things available on eBay. But, as our friend so cannily, and loudly, noted, there are Americans all over London at the moment, and all of us would do well to bellow our loud, braying voices throughout Habitat’s new store on Regent Street, which is unbelievably beautiful and also includes an organist (picture below) and a public bathroom (picture not available) in its nice cafe.

The details:

Store: Habitat
Address: 121-123 Regent Street
Phone: 020 7287 6525
Our favorite thing: The Orla Kiely wallpaper, about $20 a roll

What we were thinking this morning was: Aren’t we quite in the mood for some Sufi poetry? And then we saw this piece by Hassan Massoudy at the British Museum’s Word Into Art exhibition. It reads:

I follow the religion of Love:
Whatever way Love’s camels take,
That is my religion and my faith.

We had originally read this to be about how love was important than organized [read: scary] religion, which we would have few issues with. We then read about how it pretty much means the opposite. Whatever! In any case: lovely!

Okay, that dog is like a cartoon dog, and yet he lived. Where, we demand, is his cigar? We are obsessed with the Animals at War exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, not least because it includes pictures of jauntily posed bulldogs, hats askew, peeking out of an aircraft carrier.

And a cat on a hammock.

Seriously, how could this shit get any better? Except for the fact that they were animals at war, rather than animals at the most amazing theatrical experience ever? Animals at War 2007 calendar, $18