For Christmas this year Tom and his parents invited me to stay with them again, which I last did in 2009. It was the same characters as 2009 (including his neighbours who are close friends of the family), plus Jess and her parents and Tom's dad's friend for dinner, and Tom's cousin Lune from Montreal, whose presence as a fellow houseguest/outsider ( Read more... )

It was last Tuesday, or I guess it was two Tuesdays ago, that I started the day with a trip to Marylebone Station (really a nice and charming little train station as far as London stations go) to take a surprisingly bucolic journey to Solihull, a suburb of Birmingham, in order to make my application for indefinite leave to remain, otherwise known ( Read more... )

The building I live in is over 200 years old. It's Georgian, in the sense of George III, and was built in his reign and before the regency. It's got big windows; my bedroom gets light very early in the morning, and the kitchen and living room get substantial and warm light in the afternoon. The building looks like every other building in the block ( Read more... )

In the next few months I need to start packing things up around here. When I started writing on here almost eight years ago, my pictures were hosted on my uchicago directory, but within a few months I moved everything over to my umich directory, in much the same way as I moved myself. When I made the subsequent move to London, I didn't move any ( Read more... )

I'll tell you about Simon. He was a partner at our firm. He was relatively tall, had wire-rim glasses, wore beat-up jeans and sweaters in the office and was the most English partner I've had the opportunity to work with. A lot of partners at my firm are former rugby lads who happened to grow up and find themselves partners at a law firm. My ( Read more... )

I can't believe it's been over two months since I've updated here. They haven't been great months, but I've done a lot of travelling. After Bath and Cornwall I made a couple of trips to Brussels for work, then I went to Guernsey for a few days, then I made a small trip to Stockholm (work), and then Mom and Dad arrived and we went to Paris for three ( Read more... )

One relevant aspect of the perception of place is the sentimental or emotional one, or perhaps I am putting it badly and should just reflect on it as the purpose for being in a place and what we associate the place with. And in that way when we go to places where we don't live, we can get skewed perceptions of those places and have irrational or ( Read more... )

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I made an appointment to visit the Tate Britain's modern print room on last Monday. The museum has a good interface (here) for reviewing its collection and determining what is where before you go to visit, so that you can tell them exactly what you want to look at before you go. In my case, I wanted to see their Norman Stevens prints and a few John ( Read more... )