I'm in a muuuuuch better mood right now, having spent last night at a fancier hotel and drinking beer and trading Notes — don't be dissuaded! It ends so happily — for British women's magazines, which I'll be filling you in on as the day progresses. But before I do:

1. Free shit: An old friend of mine at the Journal who covered the fast food industry once told me the watershed moment in the McDonald's corporate history was the invention of the Happy Meal. The promise of a cheap heavily-advertised ever-revolving toy instantly turned the restaurant into the favored purveyor of crying children and by extension their parents and as a bonus instilled at the most impressionable age a taste for the company's distinctive brand of caloric substance. I mean, duh, but still. Anyway every magazine in the UK seems to come with a free toy. Eve and ELLE came with canvas tote bags that smell vaguely of petrochemicals, COMPANY came with a novel called "Angel" ("But then she meets Mickey, the lead singer of a boy band, who is as irresistible as he is dangerous, and Angel realises that a rising star can just as quickly fall…"), Tatler came with a pair of sunglasses, and some other magazine I didn't buy came with flip-flops. Which brings me to a thought: I don't really want free shit with my women's magazines, but I always thought incorporating more free shit into the shrink wrap section of the Sunday papers — you know, little packs of cereal, large samples of warming pore cleansers, cigarettes or something mildly addictive — could be the business move that saved the newspaper industry. Maybe I should discuss this at tonight's panel…

2. Beer: I like beers wherein the bitterness manages to seep through to my blunted taste buds. IPAs, etc. Not sure what to drink here.

3. I am not saying this because they paid for me to be here but: I highly enjoyed this story.

"But this is London!" marveled one guy, an agreeable but astonished Australian. Admittedly, I am in the financial district, and I realize there are neighborhoods where alcohol and food can be found after eleven p.m., or where you can get a tampon of your preferred absorbency on a Sunday morning, but a rather epic walk through numerous neighborhoods on Saturday evening became almost spookily quiet at times, and yeah, it's enough to make you appreciate New York, but if it weren't there would also be: the hackery-smothered newspapers, the $8 public transportation fare and the weird almost compulsive devotion to being "green," which began with an offer to offset my carbon emissions through the Virgin Airways Duty Free service — I actually would have done this, but after takeoff was delayed five hours I slept through it — and even riddles the menu at this pub, where the rolls are all organic and the tuna is allegedly "sustainable"…you would think it would not be a sustainable business model to serve food this crap, but whatever. Anyway, I should point out here that I don't really have a problem with the environment, nor do I have a problem with London, but in the same way that I wonder why people so slavishly devote themselves to something as vast and nebulous as the environment with so little mention of its inhabitants, I feel like London would be better if it felt more inhabited. Maybe it's the weather; even Primrose Hill on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon felt a bit desolate.

Anyway, I'm here for a Guardian-sponsored panel on Tuesday, and until Wednesday I'll be doing this job from unseasonably cool Brittania. Please don't whine about how this post is biased and unfair to the empire because obviously there are a lot of good things about London if you can get past the whole "no grid" thing, such as: it's obviously fucking gorgeous and shit; I will get to that later. In the meantime, London Jezebels, if you have anything you'd like me to weigh in on now that I'm here, or any thoughts about the future of journalism I should incorporate into my talk tomorrow, you know how to reach me.

Love Moe