I am getting ready for my “Lunch in London” trip.

I call it “Lunch in London” because I see no reason to get up before lunchtime.

My plans are:

1.  Sleep till noon, lounge in pajamas, and then eat cereal out of a box, or possibly a sandwich.

2.  Rush out and embark on one of my many sight-seeing ventures. (I am the queen of tourism culture!)

And then do something vaguely fun.

Fun?  What is fun?  Do I ever have fun?  Have I ever had fun?  Google “London Fun” and you come up with the Vikings exhibition at the British Museum (I can come up with that kind of fun on my own), something called Bookbed (a solo exhibition by  artist Ruth Beale featuring a book-shaped bed), and the musical of From Here to Eternity.

Actually, I quite like the sound of From Here to Eternity.  Deborah Kerr!  Burt Lancaster!  Oops, that’s the movie.

Doesn’t  Bookbed look like something I should see?

Then there are various literary events and festivals I can attend if I feel inspired.  I am such a fun person…

My husband wonders if I understand that the cats can’t do without me. Well, I’ll Skype them.  A typical conversation with a cat goes like this:  “Who’s the prettiest cat in the whole wide world?” and “Who wants crunchies?”   Maybe they’ll like Skype.  Probably they’ll be indifferent.

And now on to Nancy Drew.

I went to B&N and stocked up on paperbacks, including George Saunders’ Tenth of December, winner of the Folio Prize.

And then I also bought Nancy Drew, The Secret of the Old Clock.

Like countless other American women, I was raised on Nancy Drew.

My late mother, who really spoiled me, bought me possibly 20 Nancy Drew books.  Looking in the back of the book at the Complete List of Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, I remember the first 10 titles and then must have  bought some out of order, because I recognize later titles like The Clue in the Old Album (# 24) and The Secret of the Golden Pavilion (# 36).

You don’t really have to read The Secret of the Old Clock as an adult:  skimming tells you all you need to know.

In the opening chapter, Nancy saves a little girl who runs out into the road and is almost hit by a van.  Nancy returns the child to her great-aunts, seamstresses who are struggling to raise her. The great-aunts had counted on their cousin Josiah Crawley to leave money for their niece. Inexplicably he  left all his money to a rich family.

Nancy is sure something is wrong and intends to find a later will Josiah made.

Now when I was nine or ten I believed every minute of these mysteries.

Here’s an example of the exciting writing.

The elderly woman’s lips had begun to move.
“The clock!” she whispered.  “That was it!  The clock!”
Nancy gripped the arms of her chair in excitement.  “Josiah Crowley hit the will in a clock?”  she prompted.

Wow, the power of the verbs of saying!  Characters were always “whispering,” “exclaiming,” “prompting,”  and “screaming.  Their “eyes danced” a lot.  Throughout my childhood I happily wrote fiction using such verbs, and possibly it wasn’t till I was an adult that I noticed characters in novels mostly “say.”

I love it that Nancy rides around in a blue convertible “roadster,” and that her mind is on mysteries even when she picks out a dress for a country club dance.

Unfortunately, this book is one of the revised versions: the 1930s versions were censored so that words like “roadster” were deleted, and so that the books were shorter and cheaper to publish.

Alas, my mother, gave my Nancy Drew set to my nieces.

The nieces found my 1960s editions old-fashioned.  They wanted an SUV; Nancy drove a roadster.  As my mother pointed out, they didn’t read much: they were always being rushed around to classes and  sports.  “They can’t entertain themselves,” she said.

I grew up in a quieter time.  The only sport I liked was jumping rope.  Thank God no one ever made me play sports.

I do wish I had my old set of Nancy Drew, which they sold on Ebay. (I wonder if I could buy it back!)  The fiction writer Bobbie Ann Mason wrote a book about these mysteries,  The Girl Sleuth: On the Trail of Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton and Cherry Ames.   I very much enjoyed Cherry Ames, though I didn’t know Judy Bolton.

My favorite sleuth of my childhood?  Trixie Belden.  Trixie’s ghostwriters, under the names of Julie Campbell and Kathryn Kenny, had a better sense of humor than the ghosts of Nancy Drew, who wrote under the name Carolyn Keene.