Unsurprisingly there hasn’t been any interesting new blog material during the second national lockdown, and our December is now fully consumed with just trying to navigate the house buying process. Nobody wants to read about that stress; it’s the same for everyone who does it, although a personal highlight was taking delivery of two enormous bean bags in anticipation of moving without any furniture. (If I do manage to publish any Annual Review this year there’s a pretty high chance it will be written on a bean bag.) We’ve also been scouting for sofas in retail outlets along the Croydon Tramlink (come for the sofas, stay for the trams!) which led to the happy conclusion that Randi and I have pretty compatible philosophies on sofas. So that’s good.
Another bright spot for me has been the second series of His Dark Materials which I am really enjoying and works especially well on dark winter evenings. Randi and I also enjoyed The Heat this week as our Friday-evening “collapse onto the sofa while we still have one and watch a movie” entertainment, with catering by the newly opened and talk-of-the-area Brockwell Kebab. (They do know what they’re doing at Brockwell Kebab. We will be sad to let them go so soon.)
Sadly Thanksgiving was a far cry from last year’s sterling effort but we did at least order American-themed burgers. We’ve also had a long overdue catch-up with Jason and Carrie (plus a truly astonishing Brazilian jiu-jitsu doll) and welcomed Katie and Kim into the Dominion Expansion club. I also had the pleasure of attending Caius’s virtual Empire & Slavery in the Age of Revolution event a few weeks back featuring none other than Michael, another historian in my year at college who used to put us all to shame with his essay-writing and has now written a book, which is very exciting. Congrats!
