What a mixed-up world we live in ...

So I went to London this past weekend, went to maybe half a dozen gay pubs and clubs over two nights, and found English beer on sale at exactly one of them.

Kronenbourg, a French beer, was on sale at almost every one.

I have yet to visit a gay bar in France that sells Kronenbourg. Here, they carry mostly Heineken.

Sometimes world trade just doesn't make sense.

Other notes from London:

I hadn't been there in 12 years and was astonished at the changes. And not in a good way. It hardly feels British anymore, and not just because of the beer. The people on the streets, the shops and restaurants, the products for sale, are all sort of generically cosmopolitan/urban. In fact, it felt a lot like New York except for three things: the damp, cutting chill; the architecture, which includes a lot of new construction as in New York but is still generally lower-rise and lower-density; and the joy the English still take in the artful use of their own language.

Paris, for all the changes here over the last decade, still feels distinctly different from New York.

Londoners do still have their IRA-induced paranoia about public trash cans, which are insanely difficult to find in a lot of places. They still queue, for everything except alcoholic drinks. They still have the Thames, and have actually done a nice job with a riverfront walk, which does however resemble New York's Hudson River Park in places. The river seems narrower than it used to, but that may just be my memory playing tricks on me. It still is wider than the Seine.

And of course, they still use pounds sterling, rather than the euro. Though the current financial turmoil may make it more difficult for that to continue. And maybe it's just me, but the new design for pound notes makes them look somehow less impressive than they used to, more like a secondary currency like the Danish krone. How the mighty have fallen.