The Underground is full of posters featuring women with perfect lips, noses and breasts. A confidence-building start to a Monday morning, I imagine.
I secretly admire those a(d)ctivists using chewing gum and stickers to ‘customise’ these posters.
This one, featuring a maori inspired monster of a face, was spotted at Old Street.
…from a lovely walk in Hampstead Heath. London is feeling more and more like home.
There comes a point in the life of a doctoral student where the weight of the thesis becomes so unbearable that the mere sight of it leads to a state of nausea.
Then life moves on slowly and sooner or later, it becomes possible to say the word ‘thesis’ again, without any visible signs of discomfort. I am gradually making my way into the latter territory, and this weekend marked the passage of a key event in this healing process, graduation day.
At Oxford (and elsewhere, of course), this is a big thing. My brothers stole my camera for most of the day and took some jolly pictures.
Here are my favourites:
If one day they decided to organise themselves in unions, my life would become much more difficult.
At some point in the future, I really, really want to return to Northern California and spend a couple of years there. Whenever I experience that craving, the foremost remedy that comes to mind is French toast…
Aside from the unique summer light and the fit people, one of the great things about Norway is the unspoilt nature. People tend to asume that Scandinavia is all pretty much the same but unlike Denmark, Sweden and Norway are packed full of mountains and forests - and not so much people.
Along the mountaineous fjords outside Stavanger and beyond, the landscape is dotted with cabins within walking distance of each other. Many of them unstaffed, the door is never locked and everyone can enter anytime. They are clean, tidy places equipped with wood burners, food and all reasonable amenities. Best of all, they are run according to an ‘honesty principle’, whereby people leave the place as they would like to find it and pay for whatever they have consumed. And that is it. (more…)
Thighs like spaghetti but well worth it. How wonderful it is to get out of London and reconnect for a while…
This weekend I followed in the footsteps of many a great poet and went to the countryside. Not just any place in the countryside, but to a site so unique and beautiful that I better keep it a secret. The place was a favourite of Arthur Conan Doyle and W. B. Yeats, and the movie adaption of Pride and Prejudice was shot here.
Where else would you find a quote like this one, inscribed into the floor of a mausoleum:
The poets who loved penns
W. B. Yeats
Walter de La Mare
W. I. Turner
Ruth Ritter
V. Sackville West
Dorothy WellesleyThey learn in suffering
what they teach in song
As a foreigner, I plead guilty to complaining a lot about the standard of living and quality of life on this island, especially in London. BUT, there is no use in denying that English gardens and manor houses are made of the same stuff as dreams. Unfortunately, pictures cannot convey that message.
A walk in the countryside - the day spring came to the shire.
Copycat? Check the itinerary here (pdf).
It is normally quite a delight to step out of the train at Paddington and enjoy the kind of splendour that can only be afforded by a grand railway station. This morning, however, there was something eerie about the light; it appeared more like a tunnel than the usual cathedral of old-style grandeur and mobility.
Hyde Park, on the other hand, presented itself as an all-encompassing source of white, interrupted only by the occasional fellow human being or companion species. A nice but demanding bike ride indeed.
On Trafalgar Square, the Admiral stood in his usual place, silently watching the crowds passing by. When I finally reached the office, I was one of the few people actually turning up. My otherwise reliable colleagues P. honeline and Int Ernet even decided to take the day off so I embarked on the return leg right away.
Sometimes the journey is the destination.
Update: Stuart Jeffries has a nice piece on the ‘day of innocence‘ in the Guardian:
In London, this doesn’t happen often. We trust our dour reflexive, self-poisoning moaning as a lifestyle philosophy instead. We like it that way: strangers are strange and Britain, damn everything about it, doesn’t work. Why don’t the buses run on time? Why are we so hopeless? Why can’t something be done (usually by someone else who we can blame for their shortcomings)? And this chorus of self-immolation is taken up countrywide: why, non-Londoners ask, is the capital brought to a standstill by a little snow? Why can’t you southern ponces get your act together? And the cry is international too: as I walk through the St Pancras Eurostar terminal, a French couple consulting the warnings about the tube, roll their eyes as one. He said: “Typiquement anglais. Rien ne va plus!” They both laugh, as if to say their Gallic expectations had been confirmed.