In my job I’m lucky enough to work with a truly awesome development team, based in many different countries, and for a long time I’ve tried to get a group together for an in-person meetup. For a while this was impossible thanks to the pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine, but last week were able to gather in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, which meant that I could finally hang out with Kira, Maria and Hanna IRL and (spoiler alert) drink a lot of wine.
The scheduled options into Tbilisi’s airport are not fantastic, so by the time Maria and I had completed our overnight flights, met up at the airport and taken a Bolt back to our Airbnb it was already 5am and the sun was coming up. Thankfully, Kira was waiting for us with our inaugural bottle of sweet Georgian red wine, and we all sat on the terrace pretending that we’d all had more sleep than we’d actually had.
A few hours later Kira took us on a short tour of Tbilisi’s Old Town, which at 9am on a Saturday morning felt more like a film set than a real city. The streets are narrow and hilly, with plenty of quirky street art and gorgeous views over the rest of the city, but almost no other people to be seen. It soon became clear what should have already been obvious by looking at a world map: Georgia is pretty far south, hot, and therefore has the same late-rising, late-sleeping culture you’d expect anywhere else at this latitude. Only tourists would wander around in the morning, duh.
Still, I hadn’t brought my hiking boots for nothing, so the next morning we made another early-ish start so we could meet up with Hanna and climb up to the ancient fortress which overlooks the city before it got too impossibly hot to walk around. (Don’t worry, we’re a good team. Everybody came prepared with hats and sun cream.) After a while on the hills we descended into the National Botanical Garden, which was beautiful, even though I’m sure we only saw a very small portion of it. Shout-out to the large group of children, all dressed up in matching outfits, who were being filmed singing and dancing by the base of the waterfall where we were sitting, and apologies to whoever’s job it will be to edit us out of this particular music video.
Tbilisi is a fascinating place, and if you’re looking for a relaxing balance of nature plus tourist amenities in a friendly atmosphere then I would totally recommend it as a city break option. It very much feels like a place in flux. For example, the streets are lined with Soviet-era apartment buildings which feel a little abandoned on the outside, but also house one or two shops, bars or restaurants inside which are buzzing with energy and life. I was fascinated by the haunted-house foyers of these buildings, and I very much wonder what they will look like in a decade or two.
During the week we were, of course, working from our (thankfully air-conditioned) apartment, so we only scratched the surface of things to do in Tbilisi. That said, we did manage to tick off some other items, including a visit to the Gabriadze theatre on Wednesday night to see a marionette performance of Ramona. Ramona is a beautiful locomotive engine who is separated from her lifelong love, and – despite the meddlings of an officious Soviet bureaucrat – joins a travelling circus troupe and learns to walk the trapeze. It was genuinely extraordinary and moving, and although obviously the English surtitles aren’t capable of communicating all of the history and nuance of the text, listening to the Georgian voices was also beautiful. My only recommendation, if you decide to visit, is to sit further back than I did so you don’t have to crane your neck to combine the text with the puppetry!
We also made it to a jazz club on Friday evening, which I also really enjoyed. And, to make this a fair cultural exchange, I also tried to provide the very best of Britain in return: namely Jelly Babies (which went down very well, albeit with initial qualms that “it seems weird to eat babies”), Dairy Milk, Crunchies, multiple episodes of Would I Like To You? and a rewatch of one of my very favourite films – Four Lions – on the last night with Kira. Oh, and of course everyone thought I was weird to add milk to my tea.
We also watched Encanto together (which was good and all, but I’m not convinced that it’s OK for poor Mirabel to be put through intense childhood trauma just because it serves some cosmic bring-the-family-together ends-justify-the-means grand plan!) and I introduced everyone to Dominion. Since Kira is a highly competitive board game expert, this inevitably led to several more games of progressively more drunken Dominion until she could beat me – but I did enjoy my brief winning streak while it lasted.
The other obvious reason to visit Georgia is the food, which is both (a) very delicious, and (b) extremely affordable for tourists. We ate very well, including a decent fill of the ubiquitous cheese-filled khachapuri!
Overwhelmingly, though, the purpose of this week-long adventure was to spend time with some of my favourite people beyond the confines of a Zoom call. I’m super-grateful to everyone for making the effort to congregate in Tbilisi, and I hope it won’t be too long before we can all play Dominion together again.
Greetings from Warsaw airport!
I’m just passing through on a long layover on my way to another adventure, but (naturally) this presents a great opportunity for a blogging catch-up over a pierogi lunch. I last posted in final run-up to the Eurovision Grand Final, for which Randi and I were very excited to be joined by our neighbour Angela, who hadn’t seen Eurovision in years and – for UK purposes at least – picked a very good year to dip her toe back into Eurovision waters. (As everyone says, I really don’t think it would have been a great idea for anyone to have beaten Ukraine so coming second was the ideal outcome…)
A really lovely thing for us recently has been a resurgence in theatre-going. Over the last few weeks we’ve seen not one, not two but three things:
- For Randi’s birthday, I got us tickets for The Book of Mormon. I last saw it in 2013 (my blog from the time reminds me that I had a work trip rescheduled around it!) and it had been a similar gap for Randi, but we’ve both found ourselves listening to the soundtrack off-and-on over the following decade and it was so much fun to be able to go back and relive it. There’s something very relaxing about seeing a musical for the second time – when you already know all the songs – and then of course you’ve forgotten all the dialogue between the songs so it’s a mixture of familiarity and surprise.
- At Angela’s suggestion, the three of us went down to our small local pub theatre – the Brockley Jack – to see surrealist comedy Flightpath: a play about “things falling out of planes” which begins with the audience being invited to make a paper aeroplane out of the programme and launch it towards the stage… something I did not excel at. Nevertheless, this was an extremely entertaining three-person romp through many interlinked stories (and accents) – and thankfully not so surreal that it put me off. It was also the closest we’ve come to a really intimate Chicago-style theatre since moving back to London, so I’m excited to come back soon.
- Finally, my mum blocked out our diaries long ago for a Friday-night surprise which turned out to be Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem. This turns out to be a revival of a 2009 smash hit with the original lead stars, Mark Rylance and Mackenzie Crook, but since I had never heard of it I had absolutely no idea what to expect until the curtain went up. And… it was just fantastic. Such a rich, layered play – often hilarious, sometimes chillingly dark – which leaves you with so much to think about (especially, for me, about Englishness and national myth) without being pretentious. I loved it. And, happily, so did my old supervisor Peter Mandler who I spotted in the audience during one of the intervals. If you have a chance to go see this, please take it.
As you’ve probably guessed already, another May highlight was the long-anticipated opening of the Elizabeth Line, albeit without Bond Street / not on Sundays / not yet connected up at both ends. But none of that matters. It’s here, and it’s beautiful.
Obviously, Randi and I took some highly unnecessary trips on the opening day – Tuesday 24th May – although we waited until after work rather than joining the 6am morning queues for the first trains with the cool kids. That evening we rode from Whitechapel to Paddington, where we picked up our souvenir purple Oyster cards and – as recompense for having to wait a few minutes for a member of staff to come and link Randi’s railcard to her Oyster – some fancy collectible Elizabeth Line pins to boot. But it’s genuinely true that I’ve used it several times since, for mostly-legitimate actual journeys, including to get to Heathrow this morning. (And I do find it highly amusing that by day 3 the 2012 Olympic-style aura of good feelings and wonder had been totally replaced on the train by a sea of hardened commuting faces, whose expressions suggested they had been riding this train every day for the past twenty years.)
Meanwhile, my team at work enjoyed another virtual board game night in which I forced everyone to learn Carcassonne so that I might have a chance of winning something. (I say ‘enjoyed’ – I enjoyed it!) I also spent an afternoon going wedding suit shopping with an incredibly kind and patient Adam, who has strong credentials as “somebody who knows about suits” and agreed to translate back-and-forth between me and, y’know, the people who sell suits. I’m genuinely very pleased with the result.
Randi, Erin, Diva (Erin’s dog) and I were treated to beautiful, sunny weather last weekend for our latest countryside walk along the River Mole – which included a refreshing beer garden pub lunch near Box Hill along the way. I’m very fond of our tradition with Erin of sitting in exhausted silence together on the train home, all feeling reassuringly worn-out and struggling to stay awake. The next day, suitably recuperated, we headed to Andrew and Bonnie’s for lunch (delicious, obviously) and were joined by Frankie, Anya, Lena and family friend Lauren – who I apologise for making sit through my batch of questions about football in which I learnt that Anya has strong feelings about Ipswich.
Recently we also grabbed drinks at the Mayflower with Randi’s colleague Dan, while I am delighted to have successfully introduced Randi to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy original radio series. I have no idea how it came up in conversation, but I really loved Douglas Adam’s classic comedy when I first discovered it (via a Radio 4 repeat in 2001 or thereabouts) and it’s amazing how many references and in-jokes have their origin point in this show.
And finally, my sister Tash turned 30 this week – happy birthday! – and I decided to mark this by constructing a GPS -enabled scavenger hunt along our beloved Waterlink Way. (If you are reading this and thinking “ooh, I would also like to construct a GPS-enabled scavenger hunt” then may I recommend Actionbound?) This was a lot of fun to make and came off smoothly, in large part thanks to Randi agreeing to playtest the whole thing after work one evening even though it was chucking it down with rain. Afterwards Cormac joined us at our favourite local restaurant, Sparsh, for their amazing Indian food, and the next day we reunited – along with many, many others – at my mum’s house for a big 30th birthday party with friends, family and neighbours. It was so wonderful to see everyone there and a perfect end to the UK half of this very-long bank holiday weekend…
It’s time to wish this blog a happy 18th birthday – a little belatedly, because it officially reached adulthood on 27th April 2022. For years I’ve had an annual tradition of linking to the various stages of child development and later legal rights by age, but 18 really is the big one. dom.blog is now free to get married as it wishes, vote, buy alcohol, sit on a jury, acquire as many tattoos as it wants and be elected to parliament to represent its fellow blogs. Hurray! It’s sorta wild to think that this is the equivalent length of time it takes to parent a child…
Anyhow, at the final hurdle I’ve been a neglectful parent since my last post was about Easter in Malta and there’s a lot to catch-up with. After Malta, Randi and her parents continued their holidays in Italy with food-filled trips to Rome and Florence, but I returned home to work and so – since this is my blog – you’re going to have to come with me down the less-exciting Choose Your Own Adventure path and skip out on the Colosseum, pasta making classes and wine tasting in Tuscany. Sorry.
Instead, Katie came over and we caught up on the disappointingly flat Doctor Who Easter special (which was a shame, because I really liked the New Year episode) before making up for it with 1966’s incredibly entertaining The Gunfighters in which William Hartnell’s Doctor blunders into the events leading up to the shootout at the OK Corral in America’s Wild West. Most notably, the episodes are tied together by a very-very-very-long and repetitive song, Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon, which forms both an off-screen narration (to confirm that what you’ve just seen happen has indeed happened) and – even more bizarrely – also performed on-screen in the eponymous saloon by companions Steven and Dodo after the bad guys decide that to threaten them at gunpoint to play the piano and sing. Point being: this is a totally marvellous story and it is my official view that Legend of the Sea Devils would have been greatly improved if Yaz and Dan had been forced to do a musical number midway through for no apparent reason.
The other highlight of my Italyless week was a virtual board game night with my team at work on the (excellent) Board Game Arena – shout out to Kim for first introducing me to this – in which our engineering lead Kira crushed Hanna like a bug, and then crushed me like a bug, and then defeated Maria in a somewhat-more-competitive spirit before we all decided it might be best to try playing a cooperative game instead. In all seriousness: it was really fun, and we’re planning on a follow-up soon.
And then on Sunday, before Randi and her parents arrived back in the UK, I nipped up to Golders Green with Josh, Anna and Cora to buy some surprise welcome home challah and play in Golders Hill Park. There is something magical about seeing Cora dance around in the same ‘Gazebo’ sculpture thing which we all enjoyed as kids ourselves.
A few days later we held the funeral for my great Uncle Leonard at a Jewish cemetary up in Hertfordshire. The service itself was short and impersonal, with men and women separated and lined up on either side of the hall which (given normal actuarial disparities) made me feel like I was on the losing side of a particularly vicious game of dodgeball. On the other hand, the building was much less oppressively ‘indoors’ than any other funeral I’ve attended, with doors opened to the outside throughout. “It’s beautiful out here” said Leonard’s closest friend to me as we walked through the open air to the graveside. “Leonard would have hated it – he never liked walking through the countryside.”
This is definitely true: Leonard was a city person – a London person – and while he enjoyed the popular pastime of bemoaning the current state of <insert institution here>, he never showed the slightest inclination to escape to the country. He was much too connected with the family for one thing – at every birthday and Christmas I remember, always bringing the biggest and most exciting gifts when we were young – and when I got older I would visit his flat, close by Pimlico station, to answer his latest computer questions before he took me out for lunch.
In fact, Leonard was always impressively determined to keep up with technology and was specifically a big collector of digital and Internet-connected radios, back in the day when this was all new, because it thrilled him to be able to tune in to some local station from an obscure US town. We enjoyed arguing about most political topics (I once printed out some British Crime Survey data and brought it round to him in person to prove a point) although I’m not sure I was ever very successful at persuasion. But he always indulged all of his nieces and nephews with a lot of time and attention and love, and I’m grateful for that, so thank you.
Back in the semi-present day, after getting back from Italy we enjoyed a couple more weeks in London with Randi’s parents, including a trip with my mum to see the much-acclaimed musical Dear Evan Hansen. To be honest, I’m probably the one in our group who enjoyed it the most – the others sounded a little more lukewarm afterwards – but I have been looping through the soundtrack a few times afterwards, which is always a good sign for musicals.
On Sunday night we reunited at my mum’s for a scrumptious dinner with an impossibly large number of desserts because everyone decided to bring their own. Not complaining. Indeed, the food situation while Beth and Stewart were here was particularly indulgent because along with taking them to our local favourites (including a return to Two Spoons with Tash and Cormac, and amazing Georgian food at Kartuli!) they also took it upon themselves to become our personal chefs while we were working, cooking up delicious evening dishes in our kitchen. This was a very good deal.
We celebrated Bank Holiday Monday by returning to the Oxleas Wood café – a favourite discovery from the Capital Ring walk – and then walked a fair chunk of Section 2 together. Later in the week we celebrated the thrills of municipal democracy by going to vote together: it was a tight race, but Labour in Lewisham continued to squeak ahead of the opposition by clinching a mere 54 out of the 54 available seats, plus the mayoralty. (I should clarify, in case Priti Patel is reading this, that I was the only person actually voting.) I’m not unhappy, exactly, but it’s a reminder that only a relatively small portion of the country really counts for determining who’s up and who’s down.
Finally, on Beth and Stewart’s final Sunday in London we went down to Richmond and basked in the beautiful sunshine as we walked along the river. Special thanks to the couple sitting opposite us on the District line on the way there for reaffirming my faith in Russell T Davies’s impeccable judgement: when everyone on the Tube suddenly got the same BBC News alert that Ncuti Gatwa had been cast as the next Doctor, the woman gave a happy yell of recognition and declared that she was now excited to start watching the programme again.
But wait, there’s more! On the week that Randi’s parents left for home, we were thrown into the joy that is Eurovision week. I know, I know: you don’t watch the semi-finals. Why should you watch the semi-finals? The UK is guaranteed a place in the final anyway, so, really, what would even be the point of watching the semi-finals? Well, (a) you’re wrong, and (b) you’re probably to blame for Brexit. We do watch the semi-finals, and this year we were joined by a very exciting last-minute guest: Cat!
It was so exciting to have Cat stay over at ours, and together we ordered mountains of Indian food and cheered on all the best performances until all of the best performances were eliminated by the terrible, terrible public voting. (Same deal with the second semi-final on Thursday night, too.) Still, not to lose heart, we’re readying ourselves for the Grand Final tonight. Actually, as soon as this epic post is over my next task is to start hunting for the peculiar collection of flags I stole from the Groupon office many years ago. Europe: you’re good to go!
Before I start, I wanted to note that my great-uncle Leonard died suddenly a little over a week ago. He’s been a part of my life since I was born; indeed, one of the first photos I ever took was of Leonard, snapped from the vertically-challenged perspective of a five-year old. I will wait until the funeral to gather my thoughts and memories, but it’s a strange feeling to have someone disappear without warning. We’ll miss you.
“Let’s move to the UK!” I said. “We can go travelling all over Europe! Everything’s so close!” And for a hot minute this plan worked out great – we did make it to Amsterdam and Barcelona, after all – but then Covid happened, and after that we wanted to prioritise seeing old friends rather than exploring somewhere new. This is a long way of saying that it’s been a long time since Randi and I visited a new country together, but now the spell has been lifted after a long Easter weekend with Randi’s parents in a brand new destination for us all: Malta!
Malta is a fascinating place. It’s the smallest EU member state, by both size and population, and everyone we spoke to had a clear pride in their country. For a century and a half Malta was a British colony and some of that influence is obvious: English is one of two official languages, there are British-style plugs and red telephone boxes, Randi could order a ricotta qassata from a ‘Crystal Palace café’ and we even spotted a mysterious Clapham Junction on a map. Meanwhile, the country’s nearest neighbour is Italy – no doubt contributing to all of the delicious Italian food available – while the Maltese language itself is descended from Arabic, and when you’re walking from Mdina to Ir-Rabat it’s very easy to feel like you’re in the Middle East. To be honest, I already want to go back.
Valletta
Despite a late arrival, Randi and I forced ourselves to get up on Thursday morning for a walking tour of Valletta. Malta’s capital is very small, highly pedestrianised, immensely walkable and incredibly beautiful, with an impressive gorgeous-buildings-per-square-km ratio and photogenic streets which curve up and down before reaching the sea on three of the city’s four sides. Valletta was built as a walled city, established by the Catholic ‘Knights of St. John’ who ruled Malta from the sixteenth century until Napoleon’s invasion in 1798, and unlike most cities has a very clear ‘entrance’ over a bridge and through the no-longer-an-actual-gate ‘City Gate’.
Once inside, the first thing you’ll see is the new Maltese Parliament building – which was only completed in 2015 – built in a ‘controversially modern’ architectural style which Malta should be very grateful isn’t just a euphemism for ‘terrible’ but is actually quite striking. In fact, prior to its construction this plot of land was a car park, so this seems like a big improvement, and we were amused to spot a few designated car parking spaces which remain nearby, tucked away on a side street, reserved exclusively for the following named positions only: Prime Minister, Leader of the House, Opposition Leader, Minister for Family and Social Solidarity, and Parliamentary Secretary for Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Active Ageing.
Valletta is also a hub for buses on the island, and since it’s only a half an hour from where we were staying in St. Julian’s we ended up coming back a few times – especially to eat! Special thanks to Lee and James at work for sharing their curated list of Valletta’s restaurants with me. We tried a few places, but in particular I have to mention the amazing tasting menu we enjoyed at Legligin on our final night as our farewell to Malta.
(Since I mentioned the buses, here’s the low-down: they were mostly very good, and easy for tourists as they accept contactless card, but the big downside came when a bus was ‘full’ and refused to let us on. We could have totally squeezed on.)
Gozo
On our second day we headed to the island of Gozo for a quad-biking tour around the main sights. As the non-driver of the group my role was mostly to not fall off the quad bike while Randi was driving – which I managed with a 100% success rate – and occasionally risk taking photos.
Mdina & Marsaxlokk
The two other places we visited during our trip were the fortified city of Mdina (Malta’s ancient capital city prior to the construction of Valletta) and the fishing village of Marsaxlokk. Mdina itself is teeny tiny and feels like a well-constructed film set, with a population of less than 300, although it’s surrounded by the larger town of Rabat. From here Randi and I tried and failed to go for a hike through the countryside, having been assured the the path was ‘obvious’, although it was not at all obvious to us where the path ended and the strawberry farms began. Still, we totally forgave everything because the landscape was like walking through a tabletop of Carcassonne tiles.
Two weeks ago I popped over to Amsterdam for a work trip to a Booking.com partner event with my colleague, Lee. Lee is the ideal travelling companion because he will generously offer to arrange all of the flights / hotel / dinner reservations for the trip, and although I was probably pushing my luck by recruiting him as my emergency personal shopper at Gatwick Airport (“Lee, I’m not sure I own enough shirts…”) he rose to the occasion with aplomb.
Amsterdam is such a inviting city to walk around, and although we didn’t have time for any sightseeing we did manage to get dinner at Moeders (Mothers) restaurant, a Dutch comfort food institution in which the walls are covered from top to bottom in photos of mothers provided by previous guests. (Sorry, mum, I should have planned ahead.) Rest assured that I also secured a healthy number of mini-stroopwafels during the trip.
Back in the UK, last weekend I was feeling a bit restless so Randi and I had a skim through those “lists of things to do in London” written for tourists and decided (helped by the free entrance) to give the Tate Modern a whirl. I haven’t been to the Tate Modern in either (a) a very long time, (b) ever – I am genuinely not sure – and I am really not in their target demographic. But we had fun browsing through several galleries before admiring the latest Turbine Hall exhibition from a safe distance. Currently this is Lubaina Himid’s Dream Buildings in which families can work together to build their own play area out of wood, and it’s actually really cool and uplifting to see relatively young children working with real saws and hammers to construct their own world. Kudos to whatever team shepherded this idea through what I can only imagine were inordinate risk assessment procedures.
In contrast, no impromptu museum visits were required this weekend as we already had a packed agenda – starting with a very special Friday night to celebrate Randi’s final day at her current workplace! (For this we picked Two Spoons, an incredible slice of New Orleans in Honor Oak which we were both very excited about.)
The next afternoon we headed up to Norwich to join Oliver, Abi, Kat, Helen and Jason for dinner followed by a production of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe in which Oliver’s dad, John, played Professor Kirke (my favourite character) and Father Christmas, amongst others. I’ve known Oliver’s parents for years but this was the first time I’ve ever actually seen John on stage, so I was really excited about finally correcting this after such a long time.
The production itself – which was part musical! – was wonderful, and it’s especially great to be in an audience which includes children becoming enraptured in theatre for maybe the first time. And the Narnia stories don’t pull their punches. One of the reasons C.S. Lewis will always be high on my fantasy dinner party list is because he had serious things to say, and I respect the fact that, in amongst the fun and fauns, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is ultimately a story where the child protagonists bear witness to the humiliation and murder of Aslan, the Christ-figure. This is a religious allegory which cuts to the core of Christianity, not a twee morality tale.
But precisely because it’s serious stuff, Narnia has always aroused strong emotions in me and they all came flooding back last night. It’s a massive cliché that atheists are all secretly angry at god, and it’s not true. But since Aslan undoubtedly ‘exists’ within the world of Narnia, I think it’s reasonable for me to admit that I really, really can’t stand Aslan. The White Witch has been ruling Narnia for one hundred years. If Aslan is the ‘true ruler’ of Narnia, what has he been doing for all that time? Does Aslan have responsibility for Narnia or not? If he does, it’s hard to think of a greater abdication of leadership, especially if you are all-powerful. This isn’t an argument about ‘free will’. The White Witch isn’t a regrettably-successful populist. She’s a tyrant who uses magic to turn people into stone. Aslan has the power to free them in a moment, and for a century he chooses not to, and nobody ever asks him why.
Obviously this reaction makes me sound completely mad when we’re all standing around afterwards enjoying some post-show ice-cream, but so be it. (Nobody went for the Turkish Delight flavour, which was a missed opportunity.) Then, since Helen and Jason had very kindly agreed to host us all overnight, we went back to their place and stayed up talking until 2 in the morning in a lovely re-run of Oliver and Abi’s wedding. They are one of my favourite groups to stay up and chat with, even though I only get the opportunity once every few years.
The next morning, Randi continued her campaign from the last time we were in Norwich of convincing me that Norwich’s buses are actually pretty good, and we rode back into town for an incredibly fun breakfast with her former colleague Rachel. And then we meandered our way back along the rails to London, hop-scotching around some engineering work but still arriving back with plenty of time to enjoy a sunny Sunday afternoon in the city. No endless winter for us yet 😉
Next week Randi’s parents are arriving in town, and together we have some more travels planned!
Jeff DuBowe on Haarlem globetrotters: “One of our favorite spots. Super walking city. I think we were the ones who told your In-Laws about it…” Oct 14, 15:15
