Thursday, October 27/2016

A hundred and nine miles from London. Can smell the coffee. There still is coffee. Can faintly remember when there was breakfast on international flights. Think that there are faint memories of hot breakfasts - but perhaps that was a dream. Meal consists of a slice of very cold cake, 8"x5.5". Very sweet. Wonder what they do if you've ordered the diabetic meal. Substitute dry bread? Withhold the slice? Suspect that this is in preparation for abandonment of free meals entirely. Have noticed that when other airlines do this half the commentary is about how outrageous the omission is while the other half is along the lines of what rubbish the food was and how little it will be missed. In all fairness, though, the coffee is fresh brewed and a great improvement on the stewed cigarette butt flavour of years gone by.

Stewardess passes out landing cards to be filled in by anyone whose passport is neither UK nor EU. Or EU citizens practising for post Brexit? One more government expense post Brexit. And queues at Heathrow lasting long after your luggage has disappeared from the carousel. Indeed after a ten minute walk to immigration and a forty minute wait in queue our carousel has long ceased moving and our suitcases, with a half dozen companions, are waiting in a lonely clump. Not stolen, anyway, though it must be getting easier to do so. Can't blame the immigration clerks either. Ours is friendly but says when we suggest more staff and higher pay, that the opposite has occurred - her pay has been cut twenty percent. Amazing amount of patience and good humour about. Though maybe not always, as there are plenty of signs warning against abuse of staff. Things can only get worse when the other EU countries join the immigration lines.

Walking from Bayswater tube station to our temporary home in the heart of London, zone 1, a large, healthy looking fox tears across the road in front of us, at an intersection just off Queensway.

Wednesday, October 26/2016

Ian kindly drops us at the airport, so we're off. Well nearly. Flight half an hour late and oversold. Must have found a volunteer for their $400 compensation in return for waiting for the next flight though, as they don't reannounce the offer. Flight from Ottawa not overfull, though. Electrical connections at each seat, which is good because there were only two per departure lounge at the airport. Dinner tasteless nursery food, but wine quite drinkable.

Tuesday, October 25/2016

Visit Anna and Jeff and the little boys, who are in the process of moving into a newly built house in an endless east Winnipeg conglomeration of same, colonising the prairie for miles. Some houses already sporting green lawns, though, and trees with bundled roots lying by drives ready for instant landscaping. House full of light and still smelling new. Boys busy with toy trains on the floor. J and Ian spend considerable time installing a baby gate with obscure instructions at the bottom of the stairs, hampered somewhat by four year old Riley's removal of two bits of hardware to an upstairs bedroom.

Our last taste of pickerel for the year as Susan, somewhat unfairly as she was the only one at work today, produces a lovely fish fry.

Monday, October 24/2016

Technically it's Monday, as the train leaves at nine minutes after midnight. And it's on time - in fact early - which is nice, since VIA sees fit to provide info only for the Windsor Quebec corridor, hundreds of miles to the east of us, after business offices close for the day. Relatively easy to find the info for making claims when the train has been several hours late, an obvious admission that this happens frequently, but no method for avoiding spending said hours in the station instead of in the comfort of your one's home. Actually Patrick, who is seeing off a friend, says that, surprisingly, if you keep calling the number that professes to be for business hours only, eventually (and presumably randomly) someone may answer. 

Notice the sign on the toilet wall requesting that passengers refrain from flushing while the train is in the station. But surely raw sewage is no longer spewed on the tracks? No? Well, googling reveals that this is indeed still the case. Not only here but in The UK as well - and quite probably most of the rest of the world, to which my computer set up is less sensitive. VIA claims it would take government millions to acquire holding tanks, the British papers are full of complaints, railway workers are subjected to disgusting effluent, and the Atlanta centre for disease control insists there is no health hazard. There you have it.

The train is warm enough - not a given - and only half full, so we have the comfort of two facing double seats. Almost lying flat space as the footrests can be made to meet at seat level. 

Train in at 7 - an hour early - and we're allowed to disembark at half past, once the station staff are on duty. Ian kindly picks us up after dropping Susan at work. Our first  visit since he retired. Some advantages here, as he heats potato soup made with potatoes from Susan's garden. Very nice.

Friday, April 29/2016

You can't go home again. Or can you? Final leg of our journey home. The train is late in arriving at the station in Winnipeg - not unusual - and we get talking to a soft-spoken man who is moving home to the Gaspé after an absence of forty-two years. He's retired now and just made up his mind. Didn't even tell most of his mates. Speaks affectionately of a woman he knows who has sent him birthday and Christmas cards through the years. Just a friend or is he hoping for more? He's not from Winnipeg. Thompson maybe? Spent the afternoon at Polo Park Mall where friends were supposed to meet him but they never showed up. You can only drink so many cups of coffee. And what will the Gaspé hold for him after the decades? He's injured himself and is walking with a cane so they pre-board him when the train comes in and we don't see him again. One unfinished story from tonight's train. 

The train, due at five in the morning gets in about 8:30. Final blog until we resume our roaming life.

Thursday, April 28/2016

Jet lagged, so that six AM feels like the noon it is in London. Get up after an hour. Ian and Susan at work but lunch with Janet and Dave, Judy and Dino. Dino just out of hospital and the restaurant chosen for its wheelchair access and accommodating staff. Dinner at home with I and S. Then Ian takes us to the station, as the train, originally meant to leave at 10:30 is delayed. Know the delay is definite when we're offered tea and biscuits.

Wednesday, April 27/2016

Airports and security. Montreal is nicer than Toronto - less hostile, politer, smaller. Luggage trolleys free. Remember for future trips. Before security at Montreal dispose of water acquired after security in London. Some unseen passenger had to dispose of what they couldn't finish of a bottle of Baileys. Empty and half empty bottles accumulating on the benches before the security queue.

Saturday, April 23/2016

To Thames Ditton to see Jenny and Doug and family. Farmers' market on outside the George and Dragon pub, so we have a quick look and a couple of tastes while the rain makes up its mind and decides against. Our first view of Morris dancers - entertaining, though rather in the vein of a Black Adder parody? Everyone there for lunch - Jenny's mum, Laura and boys, Emma and Giles and girls - thirteen of us altogether, not including two dogs and a cat. Jenny and Doug the only people we know with a table that can accommodate such numbers, symbol of their open hospitality. Jenny off to China next month with a friend. 

Train to Waterloo instead of Wimbledon so we can stop off on the South Bank and catch the end of the Shakespeare festivities -  screens set up at intervals playing clips from the plays, all 20 plus.

Friday, April 22/2016

Last weekend coming up. A number of anniversaries this week. Yesterday the queen's ninetieth birthday. Tomorrow Shakespeare's birthday, as well as the four hundredth anniversary of his death. 

Revisit the warren - a complexity of shops behind the store fronts at the Bayswater end of Queensway. You enter through one of two shops with carry ons or similar and one small room or narrow corridor leads to another. The shops change hands over time, tracing the waves of immigrants. Possible to buy Russian dolls, or Brazilian food, have your computer repaired or your mobile phone unlocked. A unisex Polish hairdressing establishment - signs in Polish as well as English - will cut your hair for £7 (€8.75, $12.65 CAD), compared to £25 for a shampoo and blow dry in a shop on the street outside. A watch repairman has a corner den overwhelmed by its contents - which seem to include every saleable curio that has come the watchmaker's way,  Dickensian surfeit.

Thursday, April 21/2016

To the Wellcome Collection, which we remember best for acnoon hour presentation on vitamin D some years ago. The exhibit we've come for is on the human voice. Probably the most interesting bit is the opening theory, which suggests that speech began prehistorically with song, for purposes of bonding rather than conveying information. Obviously unprovable, but a great deal of speech in our time is essentially bonding rather than information - just listen to any two teenage girls.

 We're in the area of the Mary Ward Café, part of an adult learning centre. They have a cosy little vegetarian café that we've used in the past because of its proximity to the London School of Economics, where we sometimes go for evening lectures. Tonight there's a very nice broccoli and cauliflower quiche, which we both choose, or a vegetarian moussaka, which also looks good.

The presentation we go to after supper isn't at the LSE but at the London Review of Books shop, where veteran maverick journalist Seymour Hersh is interviewed by LRB editor Adam Shatz. Hersh is famous for having broken the stories of the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib abuses. More recently, and more controversially, he has written on Assad and the poison gas issue (he argues, plausibly, that the Syrian Army wasn't responsible for the Ghouta incident) and has refuted the official American version of the killing of Osama bin Ladin. Tonight he's in good form, entertaining and reminiscing on his decades as a reporter and journalist. Shatz is a little too gentle in bringing out the genial and skimming over the criticisms - which mostly come down to sources that were intimately involved but reluctant to be cited publicly. Hersh claims that if they are not willing to confirm their accounts to his editors he doesn't use them as sources. And certainly in the past the official story was cover up bs and Hersh was right. Small shop, but sold out. Anyway, Hersh enjoying himself, audience uncritical, glasses of wine. 

Wednesday, April 20/2016

Stunning day. As J says, it's a shame to go inside, but there are two exhibitions we want to see at the Imperial War Museum. Stop at Trafalgar on the way. Our UK bank is there and confirms that the bank card has been mailed out. Current one expires at the end of the month. The replica Palmyra arch is on display now, attracting plenty of sightseers. 

On to the War Museum. Thefirst exhibition we're here for is photographs by Nick Danziger. It's on the theme of women facing war and features pictures of 11 women that he photographed about 2001 and then returned ten years later to see how they had fared. We'd heard him speak on BBC5 - so compelling that I'd found the program I'd heard in the middle of the night and replayed it for J. Quite a remarkable man, Danziger. He had been a photo journalist, always on the road and often in war zones, and had found he had to protect three young victims of war in Afghanistan, eventually adopting them rather than abandoning them. As the UK did not allow single parent adoptions at the time, he ended up making a home in Monaco, which was accommodating and helpful. This exhibit includes a short film featuring each of the eleven women - or more accurately ten women and a girl, fulfilling the rôle of a woman as she tries to feed and protect her two younger brothers after her mother died and her father abandoned them, sometimes reduced to eating grass - and what then, she asks, sand? From Israel and Palestine to Bosnia to Africa and  Afghanistan, he finds them all, except for the young girl, who he believes has died. There's a short but moving film sponsored by the International Red Cross about the women accompanying the photographs. Often sad and occasionally inspiring. A profound anti-war statement. 

And the next gallery presents an equally profound and even more un-nuanced message. It features the work of Peter Kennard, "unofficial war artist," with mixed media works, posters and collages covering decades and protesting the means and results of war. Sometimes bitter, sometimes witty, sometimes clever.

Tuesday, April 19/2016

Back to Covent Garden to reload ipad from the Cloud. A great deal better than attempting it from the Starbucks office. Then meet up with Jenny, who has been collecting a visa for China. Catch up lunch at the Museum of London and a quick look at the pre-historic gallery - striking in its similarity to native North American Indian museum galleries elsewhere. Stone tools, and a hunter gatherer existence. 

Back to Kilburn, where one of the corner fruit and veg stands is shutting down for the day. Any two baskets for £1.50 (€1.89, $2.72 CAD). We get a basket of small oranges - 20 of them - and one of cherry tomatoes - must be a kilo. Where are they from? Morocco, they're always the sweetest. Roses at supper time. The owner, it turns out, is Kurdish, from Turkey, and we chat. What is it about Erdogan, I ask. He's crazy. Pretty much our own conclusion.

Monday, April 18/2016

Down to Covent Garden for the Apple Genius Bar, which has treated us very well in the past. And a nice young man who wipes the older of the ipad minis in order to refresh its software. The good news being that its quirks do not appear to be signs of imminent demise. 

Then to the National Portrait Gallery. Rather thinking of taking another look at the portrait of Shakespeare, the one believed to be the only one done during his lifetime. Turns out that the 400th anniversary of his death is being celebrated by lending said painting to Moscow. Pay a visit to the Stuart gallery anyway. And renew acquaintance with the genealogical chart that shows the transfer of the crown from the Stuarts to the Hanoverians. Had always supposed that the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie were romantic dreamers, but the chart suggests otherwise. He was the only son of the only son of James II, and the obvious royal choice, had it not been for anti Stuart and anti Catholic sentiment. In the light of which a tenuous link led to a German monarch who disliked England and spoke virtually no English.

In Trafalgar Square they're setting up the 3D 2/3 size copy of the Palmyra arch, recently destroyed by ISIS and soon to be on proper display for 3 days.

Sunday, April 17/2016

Wake up to the Shanghai Grand Prix on BBC Radio5. Once upon a time it would also have been on tv, but that is getting increasingly difficult without pay channels. Somewhat like boxing. Previously BBC alternated with Sky in tv race coverage, but it has given up its contract before it expired, so now we can rely on Channel 4, for about every second race. No way to acquire a new generation of fans, but there it is. Pretty chilly out.

 To Camden Town in the afternoon. It too is changing. The fruit and veg market that was on Inverness Street is gone, of course. There's an interesting division. Come out of the Camden Town Tube station and turn right and you are in the middle of Camden market - all youth, counter culture, live music, tattoos, incense, t-shirts, piercings. Turn right and you're in the world of small supermarkets, charity shops, fast food restaurants, hardware shops, mobile phone unlocking services, and pound stores. The people at this end of the high street are local - careful shoppers trailing kids or stopping at a pub. A Lidl store here, with queues showing how it and Aldi are running competition to the traditional supermarkets, though this one is neither as big nor as busy as the Kilburn Aldi.

Saturday, April 16/2016

Things change. Along Queensway the East European grocery shop has become a Mediterranean grocery shop. Other shop fronts (including the currency place where we watched the fire a year ago?) seem to have combined with flats above to become a hotel. We've watched this street for over a quarter of a century. The luggage shop on the corner across from Whitely's once sold roast quarter chickens, though that was a very long time ago. It's gone upscale a bit too. Restaurants and pubs more expensive than they once were and pretty posh cars as well. 

Kilburn High Road is our other street. A bit like Queensway used to be. Rough and ready, multi-ethnic. Good local theatre and still some cafés that aren't chains and do attract working class locals. Two of them are on our must try list, but this time we find ourselves drawn back to Roses, where they do both the best lamb kleftiko (though only on a Thursday) and the best fried fish - perfectly done and longer than the plate.

Friday, April 15/2016

Rainy, as promised by the weather persons. Debate which indoor venue to go to and end up falling asleep. Waste of London time, but resetting internal time clock. And always behind reading stack of newspapers and tablet pocket articles all for "later".

Thursday, April 14/2016

Tube to West Harrow to visit Jean. Take our umbrellas as the forecast is iffy, but this is sufficient to ward off rain until we get back. Reminiscences and chat, about family, friends, politics, books - and wine and Cornish pasties, the first since Cornwall. We sit in the dining room! Where the french doors let in the sun and look out on the garden. The garden is looking good, with azaleas in bloom and a robin visiting, as well as two of the neighbours' cats sizing each other up. 

Wednesday, April 13/2016

Starbucks office to set up for the day. J spots a comment on Twitter from Ben Judah. He's going to be interviewed at the Waterstones bookshop on Hampstead High Street tonight. Attempt to buy tickets online. Bizarre site involves filling out forms printed in black on charcoal. Eventually give up and phone bookshop. They have plenty of tickets so we arrive early enough and then poke around the antique shops. Lovely, and expensive, area. Young couple are operating a coffee shop out of a disused red phone booth and kindly let me photograph their operation. Reluctant to ask them to stand back while I set the shot up properly so it's a bit substandard. 

About 25 or 30 people there for the interview. They've clearly done the routine before, but it's good. X asks the questions to get Ben started and then the performance is on - explanations, background, readings "in character", accents and all. Energetic and engaging. Like Judah's. book, This is London, the various migrants he met telling their own stories. Perhaps too much reading from the book. He does it well and it is compelling - but presumably everyone in the room has recently read, or is about to read, the book, and his method and insights are interesting.  Over a third of Londoners were born abroad, half of them having arrived since 2000. This has nothing to do with the current issue of war refugees, who would in any case be a drop in the bucket, and is also different from past waves of immigration here - the Huguenots, of whom there were 50,000 over 20 years, the Irish following the famine, the Jews (including Judah's grandparents) with 200,000 immigrants over 30 years. These people, large numbers of East Europeans, Africans, and Middle Easterners, are changing the character of the city. They are also living very difficult lives, often without the communal supports of the past and without much realistic expectation that life will be better for their children. Personally Judah sees London in a historical tradition of cosmopolitan trading cities of past and present - Venice, Hong Kong, Krakow, Calcutta, Alexandria. Cities with a varied cultural and ethnic presence and power. The hour passes quickly. A glass of wine, the signing, and we're on the tube with our new book. Have wanted it ever since first seeing excerpts. It's only disappointment being that the many photographs that were in colour on the internet are, in the hardcover book non-gloss black and white. The real loss not the black and white but the lack of sharpness.

Tuesday, April 12/2016

Packing done, but there seem to be odd piles of things that belong nowhere. Little piles - a half lemon, three plastic bags, some lids. Nothing important but causes of micro decision making. Boxes - embarrassingly rhere are now 7 of them - down to storage in the mezzanine. Actually 7 plus the rack for drying clothes. Three oranges that don't fit anywhere in the luggage, which is sad as we know it will be six months before we taste any half as sweet. Suitcases stuffed and down to turn in the key in reception. Drama begins. Are we really leaving? One moment - Chris (next door at the travel agency) will want to say goodbye. (He never has done before). And the young man on reception - whose name we never did learn - has to pick up the gift for us, from the whole staff! Chris is busy: can we wait? No, sadly we have a bus to catch. Young man returns with bottle of wine, clearly hastily purchased round the corner, to which Lefka hastily attaches  sentimental note. We express extreme gratitude - but we have no room at all for an extra bottle. But perhaps Chris ( who is still busy next door) could arrange for them to seal it at the airport so we could take it as hand luggage? Seems unlikely, but, worse, we really can't carry more weight. And it has to be carried further at the London end than the Larnaca end. Don't explain all this. J just says, very that, grateful though we are, it is impossible. Can they keep it for our return in November? We will be happy to see it then. And so, with hugs and kisses, drama ends - and we catch the bus with about thirty seconds to spare.

 Plane extremely full. Our usual trick of booking aisle and window of a threesome at the back of the plane fails, so as fallback I trade and sit in the middle when the plane fills up. Decent meal and quite drinkable wine. Window Seat Passenger next to us leaves to visit the loo - and doesn't return. Have, naturally, not timed his visit, but he is gone so long that eventually we cease thinking that it would be wise not to follow him too closely into the same loo and begin wondering first whether he is all right and then whether he might have died. Have visions of being delayed endlessly at Heathrow as airline staff and police question us about his final moments in the window seat. How long has it been - half an hour? At least. Presume that the now endless queue for the toilets must all be using one facility, the other being permanently occupied. Then J joins the queue and notes that  WSP is happily drinking water in the galley. No disaster. 

Back to Bayswater, and favourite of our rooms. Little things matter - radiator rather than portable heater means it's possible to dry a pair of socks. Definite asset. Genie greets us as usual, but since our last visit she has broken arm (shoulder, elbow?) in three places. Will undoubtedly never be the same again, and she's much younger than we are. The fragility of life.

Monday, April 11/2016

Packing. Boxes packed like Chinese puzzles to store in the mezzanine housekeeping area until next time. First few years we stored nothing, but now we've acquired a large soup pot, a ceramic frying pan, mugs, glasses, CDs....makes for a nice winter but the packing is time consuming. And inevitably once the boxes are taped and tied there is something we wish we could retrieve or add. Maggi and her friend Sama stop so M can say goodbye.  Sama is Sri Lankan and works as an underpaid and overworked housekeeper for a Cypriot family. Mistreatment of foreign workers unfortunately endemic in Cyprus, from denying time off to assigning extra work for friends or relatives, to delaying pay. Sama cheerful nonetheless.