Embarrassingly, I had never been to Ireland before my one-night-only work visit to Dublin last week, our flights in and out carefully tucked between major storms. Obviously I could barely glimpse the city during this short window, especially as I spent a good proportion of the time in fancy multinational offices, but even our quick lunch in a nearby café bolstered the stereotype that people here might just be… friendlier. I will be very happy to come back for a proper visit and see! In the meantime, it was great to meet some people in-person who might previously have existed solely in the realm of Slack.
A week before I had an emotional rise-and-fall in my very brief career as a platelet donor. Since coming back to the UK I’ve been excited to be able to give blood again, and at one of my last sessions I was invited to test my blood to see if the platelet count was high enough to safely donate platelets instead. For years, I think I’ve been mixing up platelet donation with bone marrow or something else because I’ve associated it with something a lot more intensive and painful. Actually, donating platelets turned out to be easier and more enjoyable than regular blood donation. To get at the platelets, a machine removes your blood, separates out the platelets and then returns the rest back to you via the same needle. This means you’re much less likely to feel faint, since you aren’t losing much whole blood at all. The whole process does take longer (54 minutes in my case) but you can eat, drink and chat to staff while you wait.
Anyway, I was all excited that I had been inducted into this secret platelet club and then I got a call saying that my platelet count had dropped below the minimum threshold again and I had to switch back to whole blood donation. Boo. I commiserated with Joshua that night in a pub in our newly designated zone for North-South London meetups of West Hampstead. (Yes yes, I realise this is very much on the North side but it’s great for catching the Thameslink home again.) Thankfully Josh was able to cheer me up again.
Later that week I was back in North London for the QPCS Careers Celebration Evening, a networking opportunity where I tried to encourage every Year 12 student I met to become a Product Manager (we may end up with a surplus) but also gossip (which is basically networking) with former teachers over wine and sandwiches. Memo to the public high schools of Wisconsin: it is perfectly acceptable to provide wine at your public events.
This week, Randi and I have been on staycation. Hurray! I’ve never done this before, but we both had holiday days to use up (thanks, EU) and already have a big US trip planned in April, so we ended up replicating the aura of a rainy February half-term week only without the children. Our first act was to go see Parasite at the astoundingly good-value Peckhamplex cinema. Since this has already won the Oscar for Best Picture etc. you’ve likely already seen it and don’t care about my opinion either way, but I thought it was excellent – three-dimensional characters in a film which balances light and dark moments perfectly. Unsurprisingly, the intensely gory scene was too much for me, but I was glad that it came so close to the end that I didn’t miss much…
Otherwise, most of our staycation has centred on some very muddy walks. We completed our thirteenth London LOOP walk (Section 3), walked off brunch waffles through Verulamium Park in St. Albans (where I got nostalgic for the Romans) and were joined by my mum for a tour of deer-laden Richmond Park. On Wednesday night, we also saw my colleague Tabi on stage again as part of a Soul Stripped Sessions performance with three other artists: Natalie Duncan, Katie Coleman and Lisabel. The twist is that the venue was the basement of a Pizza Express in Chelsea, which means my life in attending gigs has progressed to “standing because that’s what all my friends are doing” to “hunting for a seat” to “sitting at a table eating dough balls”. Excellent. The performances itself were incredible, and Katie Coleman’s poppy Not Your Pin up Girl is actually still stuck in my head.
Oh, and our Would I Lie To You? episodes from May finally aired!
At 20.30, two and a half hours before Brexit, I bowed to the victory of the Brexiteers by sitting alone in a Wetherspoons pub and ordering British pie and British mash through the Wetherspoons app. (Thirty minutes later I realised I had ordered it to the wrong pub, but the staff kindly saved me from my own idiocy.)
At 22.00, one hour before Brexit, I was sitting on a plane with my seatbelt fastened, waiting to take off.
And by 23.00 I was safely in the air, somewhere over France…
I’d love to pretend that this was all carefully planned, but it was just a happy coincidence that Randi was working in Barcelona last week and suggested I joined for the weekend. Obviously I was happy to do so, because (a) it’s Barcelona, but also (b) the city has always gotten a raw deal on this blog. I visited twice in 2003 – once on a school trip and then later with my family – but alas this was a year before I started blogging so it left an annoying hole on my virtual scratch map. Until now.
Since we had both been here before – albeit a while ago – we didn’t feel any pressure to rush around ticking off all the tourist sights. Instead we did a healthy amount of walking and wandering: eating tapas, marvelling at how different big cities can feel from each other (there are no houses!) and saying silly things to each other like “this reminds me of Buenos Aires”. I was also pleased to confirm that, after over a year of Duolingo, my Spanish is definitely in a better state than it was in 2003. And sure, nowadays I’m even more aware that you’d be wiser to speak Catalan here than Spanish, but I hope that the bar for British tourists is sufficiently low that I passed.
The one attraction we did pay for was the famous Park Güell which consists of a small ‘Monumental Zone’ of Gaudi sculptures and a much larger free area with rewarding views of the city, the sea and the mountains if you climb to the top. We sat up here for a while in the sun, basking in the warm glow of an unhurried weekend trip and the knowledge that Europe is still right here, just over the water, and it isn’t going anywhere.
Last week, Katie and I supplemented our regular Doctor Who outing with the first episode of the new Picard series. It seems strange now but I didn’t discover Doctor Who properly until I was a teenager, while Star Trek was deeply woven into my childhood: my mum (the only one who knew how to program the VCR) would always make sure it was set to record if my dad and I weren’t going to be home to watch it live. It should be noted that my dad loved both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine the best, but for almost opposite reasons. The former is a utopian fantasy of peace and flourishing, the latter exposes the darker underbelly at the fringe. One is a manifesto, the other is a reality check. Both series need each other, and play off against each other.
From a dramatic perspective, however, you can’t tell any interesting stories if all you have is peace and flourishing. That wasn’t a problem for The Next Generation because it was set on a spaceship exploring new life and new civilisations. As long as those civilisations were violent and warlike then you had yourself a plot. But Picard is set on Earth, so it can’t play the same cards. Instead, the first episode features the perils of celebrity, xenophobia and a manipulative media… all good elements for a high-budget science-fiction show, but they also makes it feel like a show set in a higher-tech vision of Future America rather than a genuinely bold and radical imagining of a different social order.
This isn’t a complaint – I enjoyed the first episode and I’ll try to watch more – and even if it wanted to, the makers of Picard couldn’t recreate the The Next Generation anymore than my mum could still program a VCR. It was just a strange feeling, that’s all, that the vision of the future from the past now feels so much further away than our newer imagined future.
As for visions which look backwards: last Thursday I saw Tom Stoppard’s new play Leopoldstadt with my mum and cousin Alix. I had never seen a Tom Stoppard play before but apparently he has a reputation and the official reason for inviting me to tag along was that I might be able to “help explain what I thought it meant” at the end.
Leopoldstadt tells the story of a wealthy Jewish family starting in early twentieth century Vienna. Some of the family members have converted to Christianity for social reasons although everybody is still very much culturally Jewish, and together they debate questions of assimilation vs. identity etc. One member of the family acknowledges that anti-semitism is still present but optimistically argues that “pogroms are a thing of the past” and things will only get better. The audience is supposed to feel haunted by the dramatic irony, I suppose. As staged, it just felt like a cheap trick.
I have a big mostly-Jewish family on one side, studied mostly-modern history at university and have seen an above-average number of plays. So maybe I’m not the target audience here. But I’m going to trust my instincts and just assert that this isn’t a very good play. The characters are given a huge amount of clunking historical exposition (the British Mandate in Palestine one moment, Bolshevik revolution the next) for no good reason, the plot is full of clichés and the script abounds with arched contemporary references to make the audience feel worthy and knowing. There are so many powerful and moving works about this topic, but this isn’t one of them.
Once upon a time, I had a website on Geocities. Then I got my own domain instead, because that was obviously pretty l33t. To justify this minor expense to myself I started blogging so that it wouldn’t be going to waste. But the blog needed a name, and after not-very-extensive deliberation I went with “The Musings of a Red Dalek”. (Ever since, I regretted picking something which would show up alphabetically under T for ‘The’. Don’t do it, kids!)
Now we live in the future: we all own flying cars, nobody remembers Geocities and my hastily-picked teenage blog title has become increasingly confusing to anyone who reads this. So today, the loyal Red Dalek is entering retirement and this whole silly exercise is simplifying to something short and sweet: dom.blog. Many thanks to the kind people at the dotblogger program for entrusting it to me!
The last few weeks have been quiet blog-wise because Randi and I have been taking very tentative steps into the fun world of buying a flat. (Yes, the aim for 2020 is yet more change!) No one in their right mind would enjoy reading a running commentary on this process, but in these early days it has actually been a nice excuse to explore different areas of London where we might want to live and/or actually afford to be able to live. And along the way, I was strangely amused by this sign:
Along with these explorations, this month I had drinks with Clark and surprise special guest Matt Hull, stayed overnight at a fancy hotel in Windsor for a work event and very much enjoyed breaking open the Dominion: Dark Ages expansion with Randi, Katie and Kim. We also watched Hunt for the Wilder People – which was a lovely film and has been filed away in my brain along with Flight of the Conchords as evidence that New Zealanders have a great sense of humour – and, this weekend, hosted Oliver & Abi as our latest overnight guests. There’s no better way to recreate the feeling of university than beer and sleepovers!
Happy 2020! Randi’s parents have now returned home, but I need to dip back into 2019 quickly to round off their visit with our trip to the Peak District. Randi and I enjoyed our visit two years ago so much that we decided to take her parents to stay in the exact same B&B/pub – The Cheshire Cheese Inn – and rejoiced when we confirmed that they were still serving the same incredible cheese and potato pies. Don’t even think about staying anywhere else in Hope.
As we had already done the walk to Mam Tor, this time Randi and I used Saturday’s limited daylight hours to hike from the villages of Hope to Edale, which are also conveniently one stop along the railway line from each other so her parents could hop on a train and meet us there. The next day we took the shorter but muddier field route to Castleton. As I say, the prime motivating factor for this visit was the pies, but it’s important to work up an appetite.
After a couple of hours in Manchester (just time to visit an American restaurant and see the Piccadilly Gardens fountains impressively still going) we returned to London and the next day, on New Year’s Eve, I popped out with Cat and Matt for catch-up drinks and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in a ‘4DX sensory cinema’. Essentially, this means the chairs move around and occasionally some water is sprayed, although wussies can opt-out of the water via a control panel on the seat. (This option is clearly aimed at the same sort of people who ride log flume rides in ponchos.) Even though this is clearly all ridiculous, the pseudo-rollercoaster experience is at least quite well suited to Star Wars with its myriad chase sequences. I object more to 3D glasses, which always remind me of Bounty chocolate bars: every few years, I try them again just to confirm that they aren’t very good.
We had a quiet New Year’s Eve in together this year, but did at least manage to stay awake until midnight which – given past performances – is not a guarantee. And on New Year’s Day we watched Doctor Who, of course, with its rather thrilling ending. I am gleefully anticipating the second half tonight.
Finally, today Randi and I walked the ‘first’ section (our eleventh) of the London LOOP from Erith to Old Bexley. We are still a very long way away from the pretty fields overlooking North London, but I have some hope that we have started to clear London’s industrial eastern edge and may soon return to parks, forests and meadows. And if not, at least we keep uncovering more unexplored fringes of the city!
Well, that was a memorable end to the decade. 2019 was a year of amazing travels before returning to London to find a new home and a new job. Words can’t really do it justice… but here are over 2000 of them anyway. It’s the review of the year!
January
It’s New Year’s Day, 2019. We’re in Puerto Varas, Chile, up bright and early on our rented bikes so we can reach the town of Frutillar for lunch. Of course we’re total fools, and it isn’t until dinnertime that we finally get there, but in a sense our crazy cycle ride was good preparation for the most spectacular phase of our travels: hiking the W Trek in Torres Del Paine National Park. When people ask about the best part of our travels this is always my answer, especially since we got significantly faster and more competent over the course of the trek. Other highlights of January – and it’s crazy to speed through so many – were spending more time with Francisco and Carolina in Punta Arenas, eating the officially best cake of 2019 (looking at you, Café Inmigrante!) and beginning our time in Argentina, from the awe-inspiring glacier at El Calafate to the amazing waterfalls of Iguazú where we avoided the perils of yellow fever. That’s probably enough for a year already, but there are still 11 months to go…
February
Our time in South America came to an end in February – after some more time in Buenos Aires and a quick diversion to Montevideo, Uruguay – and we then started on the South East Asian portion of our adventure in Singapore. This was definitely the ritziest part of our travels, but I won’t suppress my joy at actually swimming in the pool at the top of the Marina Bay Sands hotel, and we were both blown away by the Botanic Gardens. Plus I got to see Stephanie again! Next up was Malaysia, where our itinerary was interrupted by the exciting news that Randi’s UK visa had come through and she had to briefly exchange Kuala Lumpur for Neasden to pick it up. Otherwise we were busy staring at the monkeys at the Batu Caves, being captivated by the lights of the Kek Lok Si Temple, randomly running into Adrian as I dragged Randi to the upside-down house and eating a lot of roti.
March
For some people, the perfect holiday is lying on a beach and doing nothing. This sounds pretty fantastic to me, too – as long as I can have my Kindle – but in practice I always choose to run around and see something new. That’s why staying at the Ten Moons Resort on the tiny Thai island of Koh Lipe was so wonderful: there really was nothing else to do but relax on beautiful beaches and watch the sunset. After this incredibly luxurious stretch we returned to a more active schedule, reaching Bangkok via Phuket (and the sea caves!) and then on to Chiang Mai where we went on an awesome jungle trek, fed happy elephants and laughed at each other during the non-gentle type of massage. It also made me very happy to start relying on overnight sleeper trains to get around! Later in the month we arrived in the calm and soothing city of Luang Prabang in Laos on a slow boat and then flew to Hanoi in Vietnam. Despite the crazy motorbikes Hanoi ended up being one of our favourite cities of our travels thanks to its historic streets, pedestrianised lakefront and incredibly filling food tour. Finally, we spent a couple of days by the Imperial City at Hue before reaching lantern-lit Hoi An.
April
We kicked off April with a less stressful bout of cycling through the Vietnamese countryside surrounding Hoi An. From then on we were into the final few weeks of our travels, continuing south to Saigon and then through Cambodia with stops in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap for the famous Angkor temples. Finally, we wound our way back to Bangkok for the three-day festival of Songkran and its giant public water fights. This was a good note on which to fly home and start the surreal process of returning to real life, including a flurry of reunions and checking out everyone’s new flats. Randi and I also welcomed Melissa to Brighton, celebrated a highly suspicious Passover Seder and kicked off our (genuinely!) long-held ambition of walking the 242km London LOOP.
May
I had two obvious goals in May: finding a job and then finding a flat. Looking back it all seems to have happened quite quickly, but it felt differently at the time. Randi and I did set up an efficient CV/cover letter/interview/flat hunt operation for ourselves, based first out of Carolyn’s and then as we housesat for family friends. Interspersed with all this we saw Small Island at the National, Rocketman at the Lexi, spent a weekend on Sally’s amazing houseboat, attended two recordings of Would I Lie To You? (which played a part in the oddest job interview I had up in Nottingham) and enjoyed a low-key Eurovision with Josh and Anna. I also caught-up with Diamond Geezer for drinks, swapped Midwestern stories with Cat and Matt and was both captivated and deeply traumatised by Years & Years. As you can see, this was a bit of a rollercoaster month, and the worst part came with the news that Rod, Sanna’s dad, had died. Josh and I were privileged to attend his funeral and share in everyone’s warm memories. A happier occasion, and my own highlight of the month, was my mum’s surprise 60th birthday weekend in a cottage on the Essex coast where my sisters and I could finally present her with our long-planned book of childhood photo recreations.
June
And so, with an almost suspicious neatness, June was the month I turned 30, moved into a new flat in Tulse Hill and started a new job at eviivo. Everything felt like a fresh start as we swapped the clothes and camping supplies out of our backpacks for plates and wine glasses at IKEA to be ferried home on the tram. Tash took me out for my birthday to see 90s nostalgia-fest Education, Education, Education, Oliver and Abi hung out with us at the Natural History Museum and I finally made a return appearance at PuntCon in Cambridge. And as I entered a new decade, two things really put into perspective how lucky I am to have spent time with so many amazing people. One was Biff and Christa’s wedding in Norwich, which was obviously lovely in its own right (vegan cheeseburgers!) but also a great excuse for an amazing Groupon London reunion. The other highlight was my birthday itself, when I walked into a pub to find Catherine and AJ nonchalantly chilling out. We shared some excellent Peruvian food with my family that night, before heading to a village near Dover for the weekend to hang out, play games and walk the White Cliffs. The best birthday surprise!
July
Although July began with a disappointing England vs. USA match in the Women’s World Cup semi-finals, Randi and I mended fences and continued to be impressively social despite, y’know, going to work again. For me this ranged from deep-dish pizza night with Simon, Fleur and Steve to pubbing with Caroline, Matt and Laura, catch-up drinks with Peter Mandler and brief visits from both James and Villy. We also combined the QPCS Summer Festival with Roe Green Day (celebrating the cosy rural village which Josh and Anna have somehow found smack bang in the middle of Zone 4), enjoyed our own local Lambeth Country Show at Brockwell Park (especially the pun-tastic vegetable sculptures), stayed overnight at Abbi and Paul’s and saw both Rosmersholm and Blues in the Night. As a family we also had a movie night out to see Toy Story 4 and celebrated Katie’s birthday with a delicious meal in West Hampstead. Later, Randi, Katie and I celebrated some more with a day trip to Oxford to battle and defeat the Cybermen.
August
It’s hard to remember now, but in August the evening sunlight was plentiful and one of my favourite memories is Randi issuing mysterious instructions to meet on a specific platform at Blackfriars so that she could introduce me to Sydenham Hill Wood. We did a lot of good walking in August, actually, from the London LOOP installment with the sequoia trees to our Bank Holiday weekend in Dartmoor where we found enough local trails to justify our enormous B&B breakfasts. We also met up with Sophie and Irfan at Mercato Metropolitano, saw Daryl and Ermila and enjoyed a two-for-one family reunion lunch at Carolyn’s with some Australian cousins plus Cindy and little Isaac in attendance. I also bombarded Clark with questions about Brexit (sorry, again), saw Harriet for the first time in many years and was totally blown away by The Lehman Trilogy.
September
In September I revived two traditions which had been broken in Chicago: giving blood (which I wasn’t allowed to do in the States!) and watching classic Doctor Who stories with Katie (which was impractical because she refused to fly over for the evening). I also got very attached to the ‘activity fox’ at the John Lewis maternity department, reluctantly parted with said fox at Frankie and Anya’s baby shower, had a great pub evening with Tash, poured a healthy dose of custard over my mum’s blackberry summer pudding, was briefly but unsuccessfully IDed outside of Tabi’s amazing gig in Hoxton (as I’m now too old for anyone to really follow through) and played many wonderfully violent games of Worms WMD in Stockport with Rob and Sara.
October
I was really excited in October to finally visit Amsterdam on a jolly jaunt with Randi, Simon, Fleur and Steve. From our beloved waggon in the middle of a farm we ventured out to discover pancakes and stroopwafels and desks in trams and the amazing Madurodam in the Hague… and I loved it. (I’m even drinking tea out of an Amerstam mug as I write this.) This month I was also back at the National to see Translations, dragged Randi to The Day Shall Come for a remembrance of Four Lions, learnt a lot about Russian noun declensions from Kira, persuaded my old piano teacher to go the pub with me and got way too emotionally invested in having trick-or-treaters visit on Halloween. Randi and I were also given a personal tour of the challah bread of Golders Green by Harriet and Zach and saw Henning Wehn perform live at the London Palladium.
November
In early November Randi and I got up to Suffolk to see my cousin Julie and her family, and were joined by Tash and Cormac for a nostalgic wander around Coney Weston (including sneaking round our grandparents’ old garden) and a fireworks display at the Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds. Back at home we hosted a wonderful Thanksgiving feast at our flat, met adorable baby Lena for the first time and started watching the new adaptation of His Dark Materials. I also joined Andrew and Bonnie for an incredible evening of Tim Minchin performances, and – as the festive season approached – popped up to Chelmsford for Abbi and Paul’s Secret Vegetarian Festive Dinner whereupon Randi and I became proud carers to Clive the unicorn.
December
As I finish writing this on New Year’s Eve, the whole ‘December election’ nonsense feels so long ago already. But yes, that’s how December began, with Randi and I feeling sufficiently civically-minded/confused to attend our local hustings. I really hope I never have to attend a Christmas party the day after an election ever again. December also came with plenty of fun, however, including Simon’s incredible stag do (highlight: Crystal Maze!) and Simon and Fleur’s wedding a few weeks later. We also celebrated Leonard’s 80th birthday, jammed our front room with a beautiful mix of Christmas and Hanukkah decorations, walked our last London LOOP of the year and crashed overnight at Sophie and Naomi’s fancy flat. But the main event this month was Randi’s parents visiting from California. We all enjoyed London outings together from Come From Away to Christmas at Kew before spending Christmas Day proper with my family and then escaping to the Peak District for a couple of very well-fed days. And if all goes to plan, my final day of the decade will be spent watching Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker with Cat and Matt before a cosy New Year’s Eve in with Randi’s parents before they have to go home again.
As Tash and Katie have pointed out to me – whatever else happens in 2020, at the very least we can now go back to having proper names for the decades again. So I wish everyone an amazing start to the 20s and a very happy new year!
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
