Splurge. For my sophomore winter term I chose a month-long outing called Theater in London that was highly regarded among my theater arts friends. The tuition included lodging in walkup flats, most meals, group meetings to talk over what we were learning etcetera, and tickets to at least one play a day. Sometimes two, matinee and evening. There were also scheduled audiences with actors, directors and tech people. It was an exhausting schedule, and I became very happily exhausted. With airfare it cost a bloody fortune, but my parents didn't complain, god bless 'em. They treated me well.
One shilling at a time. I was billeted into a little flat with a couple of other guys. The rest of us were in the same building. It was a nasty cold damp winter, par for the course I guess. Heat was provided as parsimoniously as possible: you fed shilling coins to the heater. You'd think if you were rich you could keep your flat warm by surfeiting the heat miser with coin. We soon found two shillings did not twice the heating give as one. I was awash in Shakespearean syntax and prosody that winter. Any increase in the number of shillings deposited brought diminishing returns; one shilling at a time was the best deal by far. Whoever the punctilious miser was who came up with that should be freezing in hell by now. Freeze on, bro.
Onion rolls. I had my first real bagel in London. Wolfies must have had bagels but I paid them no mind. The Jewish girl who introduced me to Wolfies knew just what she liked: a lozenge-shaped loaf of white bread with a golden crust, preferably still warm from the oven, and a hunk of muenster cheese, both to be pulled apart and eaten with your fingers, with a dab of real mustard. The bagelry I frequented in London often had still-warm bagels, marked with a little sign when they first went into the glass counter. I soon fell in love with boiled dough, particularly when smeared with plenty of cream cheese and topped with lox and paper-thin red onion rings. Exploring further I found their onion rolls. Sweet gummy rolls topped and filled with minced onion and poppy seeds, just heavenly. I tried many time to recreate those onion rolls at home, but I could never get them to come out right. The onions were too sweet or the texture wasn't just the right gummy. I never got it right. Nobody can. Those onion rolls had the one flavor no one can ever quite recreate: nostalgia.
Judi. I fell in love with the artistry of Judi Dench in London that winter. Like most of the world outside Britain I'd never heard of Dame Judi, Britain's National Treasure. But there at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater and the Old Vic was a tiny woman with a striking oddly husky voice who made all the other actors seem insignificant. I saw Alan Bates as Hamlet that winter and he was great but he didn't begin to measure up to Judi.