It’s December, and the windows of our (hard-won) Percy Pig advent calendars which stand between us and Christmas are falling open with alarming speed. Last weekend we selected this year’s Christmas tree from the tree sellers in Brockwell Park, carried it home and adorned it with coloured lights… photos to follow once we finally get around to adding the baubles, assuming we don’t miss the deadline.
Everyone is certainly busy enough without needing a ridiculous December election thrown in. But since we do, and since I’ve been deeply undecided about who to vote for, I thought I’d do the responsibly civic thing this week by attending the Herne Hill Hustings with Randi to hear from the candidates themselves. As the Lib Dems are standing aside here as part of the ‘Remain Alliance’ with the Greens – and both the Brexit Party and UKIP candidates failed to show – we had four people on the panel: the incumbent Labour MP, Helen Hayes, plus the Greens, Tories and Christian People’s Alliance. Helen Hayes won over 69% of the vote in 2017, so the result is a bit of a foregone conclusion, but nonetheless I was impressed by her performance and – thanks to a generally-reasonable debate – left feeling just a smidgen better about the state of democracy. We live in a bubble of near-absurd proportions, though; the vote to Remain in 2016 in Lambeth was almost 79%.
In comparison to the townhall I attended in Chicago, two things really stood out. The first was that – in the name of the environment – the leading candidate was willing to take a brave position against wood-burning stoves. And secondly, the straw poll at the end was conducted by meringue, as the organisers had prepared a bunch in each party’s colours in advance before inviting us to pick our winners through the power of eating. This is a truly excellent innovation and something that I think could be extended much further.
For more traditionally festive cheer, look no further than the sixth Secret Vegetarian Festive Dinner which Abbi and Paul hosted last Saturday night. (Well, I say it’s the sixth. Strictly speaking I don’t know how many they might have sneaked in without me while I was away, but at the very least it was my sixth one.) As you might remember from many years ago, this was once the annual pre-Christmas party for my group of London friends, and while the attendees have changed over the years (we’ve never had a three year old before) the tradition of tasty vegetarian food, lots of wine and stealable Secret Santa presents continues. The real innovation was that Randi, Josh, Anna and I all stayed the night rather than taking a series of night buses right across London. I’m not sure why we didn’t think of that before, but it was a great idea 😀
Although I keep inviting myself over to Katie’s to watch classic Doctor Who stories (honestly, The Tenth Planet was incredible – the original Cybermen were so much better than anything from the 80s, and the two of us were mimicking them for hours) Randi hadn’t actually seen Katie and Kim’s flat yet, so on Friday we forwent Doctor Who in favour of a more communal raclette dinner. We also admired their very, very fat Christmas tree and failed to help Katie and Kim progress in their stressful video game about making soup. And as we left, to continue the European theme, we discovered that St. Nicholas had visited on his appointed day and stuffed our shoes with chocolates. Thanks, St. Nicholas!
Yesterday was Simon’s stag do: a packed day of enjoyable/exhausting activities which began with The Crystal Maze Live Experience. I have to admit that the most I’d ever seen of the Crystal Maze was the 15 minutes which Katie had hurriedly prepped me on the night before, but that was enough to get the general idea, and the live experience is so well done that – whether by nostalgia or otherwise – you quickly get sucked in. While I wasn’t stunningly helpful to the team with my individual challenges, overall we won a big victory over our rivals and I was very much a fan of all of the excited running/crawling/climbing from zone to zone with the show’s catchy theme tune playing in the background.
From there we moved on to lunch at Simon’s beloved Wong Kei and several hours of Archery Tag, which I wasn’t very good at (I don’t think shooting arrows is really my thing) but I did appreciate the lack of any actual pain, unlike paintball. Finally, in the evening we gathered together for drinks and pizza and one very extensive multimedia quiz about Simon, which my team won thanks to (a) our amazing insight into Simon, (b) the decent amount of material which I had contributed thanks to my tendency to archive everything for future use. (It has to pay off sometime!) Aside from winning, it was just generally lovely to spend time with so many faces old and new. Plus, it’s always handy to be able to bend the ear of the guy who manages your local Tube station…
Finally, today we celebrated my great uncle Leonard’s 80th birthday with the family. Many happy returns!
After five years’ worth of American Thanksgivings under my belt, this Saturday we had a bit of a role reversal and played host ourselves to a (slightly early) Thanksgiving dinner in London. Along with my family we were joined by Tash’s friend Lucy and our American cousin Tessa, who is away from home while studying here, so we tried our best to recreate an authentic Thanksgiving experience with plenty of food, drink and group declarations of thankfulness. (Randi considers the traditional “go around in a circle and say what you’re thankful for” version unacceptably sentimental, so instead we have stolen Catherine’s family tradition of giving thanks for items in alphabetical order.) For games we played the rhyme-fest Obama Llama, and among the many high-quality dishes I think Katie’s pumpkin pie deserves special praise for fulfilling the Thanksgiving brief. Hurray!
This is obviously a great time of year to squirrel away inside on the sofa and watch TV, and recently we’ve been enjoying both David Attenborough’s Seven Worlds, One Planet and the new adaptation of His Dark Materials. I watched the first episode of Lyra’s great adventure to the North with my sisters and it brought back wonderful memories of us all reading and enjoying the original trilogy of books. There are some images from these stories – especially in The Amber Spyglass – that really will stay with me for the rest of my life, and I hope this time (unlike the aborted film series) that they manage to get to them!
Last week I was also delighted to get to see Tim Minchin at the Apollo after Andrew and Bonnie had a spare ticket going. (Side-note: it is a real flaw of English that there is no collective word for ‘aunt and uncle’. A real flaw.) Minchin’s blend of great musical talent, wit and rationalism is wonderful, and I enjoyed every single performance from the intimate to his grandiose rock opera. That weekend, Randi and I were back with Andrew and Bonnie (see, still no collective word for them) – plus Frankie, Anya and Tessa – to meet my newest cousin: little baby Lena and her adorable (but very judgemental) face. With all of the Americans and pseudo-Americans floating around the family, I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up at a Thanksgiving of her own one day.
It’s no secret that the family on my mum’s side is bigger, louder and more addicted to WhatsApp than my dad’s East Anglian contingent. But there was always something relaxing and magical about our childhood trips up to Suffolk, and by some strange alchemy Tash and I both picked the same weekend to induct Cormac and Randi respectively into the joys of Coney Weston and Knettishall Heath. Naturally we had both also asked our cousin Julie to drive us around our old haunts on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and (since she is wonderful and very patient) that is how we came to be loitering together outside of our grandparents’ old bungalow taking photos through the hedges and assuring the new owners that we’d leave in a minute.
As it happens, Randi has been a fan of Bury St Edmunds since her very first visit to the UK and this trip only cemented its reputation as the foodie capital of Suffolk. (In all honesty, good luck finding better toasties anywhere else.) We also hung around for the Bury St Edmunds Fireworks Spectacular, an event which looked to be in some danger of cancellation for the second year running before the organisers determined that all of the undeniable wind and rain was nevertheless blowing away from us all in an acceptable direction. Pretty fireworks, check. First mulled wine of the winter season, check. My only complaint was the lack of any bonfire, which I still need to prove to Randi is actually a core component of Bonfire Night.
After the fireworks, Randi and I stayed over with Julie in the village of Harleston before enjoying a delicious farm-sourced breakfast and hanging out with her partner David, her parents Derek and Ginny and her son Kieron who (shockingly and frighteningly, since in my head he’s about 8) is now an actual adult who can chat to me about work while also very kindly cutting my hair. (This is a professional skill he has, not some odd family ritual involving clippers.) It was so wonderful to see everyone again after way too long and I’m already excited about our next trip up there! Although hopefully next time we won’t have to spend over an hour on the way back stranded in a field between Diss and Stowmarket after our train “hit an obstruction” while the driver went back-and-forth with control about whether it was a better option to (a) empty the last two carriages and proceed on at 5mph without breaks or (b) summon a “rescue train” and evacuate over the tracks…*
Continuing the nostalgic childhood theme, last week I had a delightful meet-up with my old piano teacher, Simon. I’d love to say something normal like “we just ran into each other after all these years!” but the truth is that I was inspired by an old photo to stalk him over e-mail and invite him to dinner and drinks which he graciously accepted despite not having seen me since I was 10. (I wasn’t even a very good piano player, to be honest, but he was too tactful to mention this.)
When not stalking people I have also been seeing a bunch of good stuff recently, starting with Translations at the National which is the kind of complex, multi-layered play (about the colonialism of the English language in Ireland) which makes me wish I was still in an A-Level English class to examine it all. Katie and I continued our classic Doctor Who odyssey in her new flat with The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (a flawed masterpiece) while Randi and I went out to the cinema to see Chris Morris’s new film The Day Shall Come (the spiritual successor to Four Lions which comes close to matching it for enjoyable terrorist slapstick before the brutal ending) and to the London Palladium to see German comedian Henning Wehn in stand-up. (You know him! He’s the one from the panel shows!) We also explored Putney, walked along the banks of the Thames a lot and met up with Harriet and her husband Zach for lunch in Golders Green so that Randi could finally lay her hands on some decent challah bread in London.
This week was also the week that I got a little too invested in Halloween. I’ve never really been a huge fan myself – give me mulled wine over fancy dress any day – but I do appreciate other people enjoying themselves, especially when those other people are young children who have made the effort to dress up and shakedown their neighbours for sweets. So I raced back from work early to put out a few lanterns, affix a scary doorbell to the door and pour out 50 mini bags of Haribo and some chocolate into some large bowls. For a horrible hour I proceeded to pace around our flat, sticking my head out the window and looking forlornly up and down the empty street. But, then, a Halloween miracle! The trick-or-treaters arrived, the children’s demands for sugar were met and the spooky tones of the scary doorbell rang out into the dark for all of Tulse Hill to hear.
*Disappointingly, they ended up going with the first option.
I’ve wanted to visit Amsterdam for a very, very long time and yet the city still exceeded my expectations, even on a grey and somewhat-rainy long weekend in October. So, this is my inevitable fawning blog post about Amsterdam.
We left London on an early Friday-morning Eurostar train from St Pancras with Simon and Fleur, with Steve following a few hours later. I have gushed about the joy of direct trains from London to Paris before, but direct trains from London to Amsterdam are even more wonderful and engender a feeling of European interconnectedness in a way that flying never can and never will. After a pancake and hot chocolate-based lunch we hopped on a bus to a farm just outside of the city and the one-of-a-kind waggon we had chosen to stay in. Sure, we could have gone for a hostel or something, but that wouldn’t have been half as much fun as our beloved waggon.
On Saturday we started with art at the Rijksmuseum and in particular its special exhibition Rembrandt-Velázquez – Dutch & Spanish Masters. As a piece of curation this was easily one of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen. Rather than my usual feeling of ‘wandering through many paintings and feel like I’m not really appreciating it properly’, whoever curated this has systematically selected one Spanish and one Dutch painting on a similar theme (headined, as the title suggests, by Velázquez and Rembrandt) and then invited the visitor to compare the works side-by-side. Combined with excellent historical background text, the whole experience of walking through an art gallery suddenly felt meaningful for someone who loves history but doesn’t really know much about art. And, if you are childish like me, you can also keep a running score of Catholic vs. Protestant? by picking your favoured painting each time. (I think the Protestants won out in the end, but it was a close-run thing!)
After lunch we headed to our timed tour of the Anne Frank House. (Tip: you have to book this online in advance, so check before you visit.) Having finally read her famous diary last year I was really glad that we got a chance to visit the annexe behind a bookcase where she and her family, along with several others, hid from occupying Nazi forces for two years before being discovered and killed. There is not much I can mieaningfully add here, other than that the museum is very well designed and it is both strange and haunting to walk through the rooms which Anne wrote so much about in her diary.
Much of discovering Amsterdam felt like proving that the clichés were true, and not in a bad way. Yes, the homes lining the sides of the canals are incredibly pretty and charming. Yes, there is cannabis everywhere. And yes, cycling has a dominance and a naturalness (no helmets to be seen) which I’ve not seen in any other city in the world. What was especially exciting was finding this was still true even when we ventured outside of the most touristy areas, or late at night. With many cyclists, and few cars, it’s actually possible to have streets which feel calm and quiet without being empty.
Because all other transport modes can flourish together when cars are restricted, all of the other ways to get around Amsterdam were unsurprisingly but uniformly excellent too. The buses to and from our middle-of-nowhere stop by the motorway were astonishingly frequent. The trams across the city were great and – much to our amusement – sometimes contained an entire counter in the middle of the vehicle behind which a member of staff sat and (presumably) dispensed travel advice where needed.
And let’s not forget the Amsterdam Metro with its huge, beautiful stations filled with interesting art to admire in the couple of minutes before the next train would arrive. (To be fair, the line we used was only opened last year, so maybe it’s only fair that the stations look good.) On two occasions, by the way, random members of the great Dutch public stopped and explained the background to a piece of metro art that we were looking at.
We used one other mode of transport: a train to The Hague and back on Sunday, on which we had a bit of a surreal moment when a member of staff walked down the aisle and stopped to check “if everything was OK”. We had assumed she was a ticket inspector and had taken out our tickets to show her… but no, she was just checking if things were good. (On the same train, a young girl was practicing her English by having her mother call out English words and providing the Dutch translation. So we enjoyed a constant and quite adorable stream of pretty advanced vocabulary – “prison!” “pollution!” “pitchfork!”)
Anyway. Why did we go to The Hague in the first place? Why, to visit Madurodam of course! This ‘war memorial’ to a Dutch resistance fighter, George Maduro, is in fact a huge and utterly brilliant miniature park showcasing the best of The Netherlands at 1:25 scale. Although I could easily include hundreds of photos I will try and restrain myself a little, although if you check back in the post so far you may spot several model replicas already. Suffice to say: I loved it, from the intricate historical buildings and streetscapes to the big model industrial areas like Schiphol Airport.
There are so many wonderful little touches here, like the miniature Mars trucks which pick up real mini Mars bars from their mini warehouses, or the stricken cyclist lying by the stopped car. We also had a lot of fun at the immersive ‘New Amsterdam’ experience, which pits the plucky Dutch colonists against the nasty English pirates and – outnumbered – has them totally surrender as New Amsterdam becomes New York. I don’t know how anyone could fail to love Madurodam, and it is definitely worth the extra trip out of Amsterdam to see it.
I haven’t even mentioned the food yet, but this was yet another highlight of our short trip. From pancakes to poffertjes, stroopwaffles to Surinamese food, we all ate pretty tremendously. My only regret was failing to realise that the Van Gogh Museum also runs exclusively on timed tickets and thus failing to get in before our train back home on Monday afternoon. Still, if there’s anywhere I now ‘have’ to go back to, I’m delighted that it’s Amsterdam.
Sadly the train home is not as magical as the way there since there are no passport control facilities (yet) at Amsterdam, meaning that everyone gets chucked off at Brussels, goes through the customary (but absurd) double British/Schengen passport control a few metres from each other and then waits in a too-small waiting area to get on a new train. Not to be outdone, the Home Office then insisted on a third passport check when we came off at St. Pancras. I asked the border agent what on earth this was for, and he responded that it was “only for certain trains”. “But… why?” “Because… well, why not?” On this stellar logic I am expecting passport checks at Brixton tube station in the morning. (Not that I want to give them any ideas.) Can’t we spend the money on someone to check if people on trains are OK instead?
But enough of the Home Office. I hope I have done enough to prove my newfound love for Amsterdam and the dry-humoured Dutch in general. Send me back any day!
I promise I had every intention of taking Randi on a whistlestop tour of the capital of the North when we originally planned our weekend in Manchester. But given that she had just run an eventful half-marathon in Edinburgh a week earlier, I think we can be forgiven for sharing a lazy weekend with Rob, Sarah and their dog Juniper in Stockport instead.
We were legitimately staying in Greater Manchester, at least, with honest-to-goodness tram stops and everything. And we very much enjoyed lunching at Altrincham Market and walking Juniper around the maze-like Walkden Gardens. What really took me back, though, was spending an afternoon trying out all of the crazy new weapons in Worms WMD. Robert was the person who first introduced me to Worms a million years ago at his house one day after school, and it was gleefully nostalgic to pick up the battle again in 2019. The only thing that’s changed is that one of us now owns a house…
Talking of homeowners, back in London we also hung out with nearby Matt and Laura in their wonderful flat which – based on their stories of dodgy electrics and chipboard walls – has clearly been a long, slow labour of love over the past few years. But now they’ve pulled so far ahead in the homeliness stakes (the British definition, not the American one) that they can whip out homemade raspberry ripple ice cream after dinner with homegrown raspberries from the garden. Very impressive!
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
