I wouldn’t say that the last few weeks have been quiet exactly, but we have settled into more of a routine, finally getting some proper decorations up in the flat (I think this is outing #5 for my venerable Underground to Anywhere poster, which has made it across the Atlantic and back with me) and enjoying a few weekends in a row without any major travel. Naturally we’ve used this time to plan future travel, because otherwise there would be nothing to blog about later.
We have had several welcome guests (and two unwelcome ones), starting with Katie (in the welcome category) who came with Tash and Cormac to inspect our flat and local pub before staying overnight for an intensive Saturday of Grand Austria Hotel. Also still in the welcome category is Villy, who popped in on one of her head-spinning globetrotting tours to sample the delights of Herne Hill Market and Brockwell Park. My favourite moment was in the walled garden when she exclaimed, in a real burst of national pride, that Bulgaria was the world’s biggest exporter of rose oil. So now you know too.
Rounding out the welcome category are Sophie and Irfan, who stopped by for tea after we all had dinner together at the Mercato Metropolitano food court. (If you haven’t been just because it’s south of the river, you should go! Although it was worrying to hear from Irfan that after 5 years of living nearby his North London identity has totally slipped away.) It’s been two years since I last saw Sophie and god knows how long since I last saw Irfan, but it was reassuring just how quickly we slipped back into our old uni patterns of bullying Sophie for not knowing enough about the Tube. Even after I marched us around in circles in the rain looking for the wrong bus stop.
The two unwelcome visitors? A pair of mice, which clearly approve of our decorating because they suddenly saw fit to explore the living room. We may have gone a tad over the top in response, culminating this afternoon in a protracted stakeout, a large saucepan and some extraordinary rendition to a neighbouring road. Don’t worry, we’ve got this, and you should still feel free to visit us.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve also had lovely catch-up drinks with Peter Mandler, a work-organised steak night in which I didn’t eat any steak, ‘lunch’ (i.e. the feeding of the five thousand) at Carolyn’s with Aussie cousins Deb & Rob as well as Cindy and little Isaac, amongst others, and a long night out with Clark where I grilled him about Brexit as if he had been summoned to a select committee. (Sorry, Clark! Just catching up!) After a two-month break – for which you can blame railway engineering works – Randi and I also completed our fifth section of the London Loop walks. That name is slightly misleading for a route which stuck mostly in Essex, but I’ll forgive it because it yielded our first (delicious) blackberries of the whole endeavour.
It’s the first day of Boris Johnson’s premiership and all I can bring myself to feel is sleepy. I don’t think it’s his fault, for once, but it’s hot and I’ve done quite a lot of social running around recently. (Only once until after 2am on a school night, when the lights came up in the bar and I realised it was probably time to go home, although I hope Amanda is reading this and taking note that I didn’t roll in until 3 for once.) Although I will note, for all of the gruesome cabinet decisions which Boris has already made, I am choosing to find a moment of serenity in the fact that Chris Grayling is no longer running the trains.
Anyway, last week was Katie’s birthday and we celebrated on the night itself with an Asian fusion sharing feast in West Hampstead:
Katie’s semi-surprise birthday present from me was already in the diary for Sunday, but first Randi and I went up to Chelmsford on Friday night to hang out with our favourite Chelmsfordians Abbi, Paul and Jack. Jack very generously lent us his room so that we could stay overnight after devouring Paul’s veggie Balti pie with our initials on top (“it’s a curry AND a pie!”) and playing quick-fire games like Mind the Gap (I was good at this one) and Selfish.
It’s funny that after all of these years of knowing each other Abbi and I both ended up working in product, but now that we’re (almost!) living in the same city again it feels insanely good to be able to sit back with a glass of wine and have conversations about shared work experiences. Just making the different strands of my life feel a little less separate, I guess.
We rolled back into town on Saturday in time for the Lambeth Country Show. It’s no Minnesota State Fair, but it is a pretty impressive two-day festival within Brockwell Park with multiple stages, plentiful food and some pun-tastic vegetable sculptures like Marie Anncourgette, Kaleing Eve and a very impressive and timely Apollo 11 enabling one giant leek for mankind. It was definitely enough that I’m going to get excited next year to see what new vegetable creations are in store.
And then on Sunday, Team Adipose (of valiant past attempts at glory) set out for Oxford for the only birthday present which made sense: the Doctor Who-themed ‘Worlds Collide’ escape room! As escape room designs go this was probably middle of the pack. There were some nice touches, including some Cyberman parts which made me instinctively jumpy when handling, but overall it was not as immersively Doctor Who as it could have been. But what made it really exciting was that – with about a minute and a half remaining on the clock – our team finally solved all of the puzzles and notched up an escape room victory! We were therefore able to enjoy a hearty pub lunch and wander around the city as tourists for a couple of hours on a high of achievement rather than under a cloud of failure. Go team!
Finally, to round off another busy post, mum treated Randi, Katie and I to the musical Blues in the Night at the Tricycle last night, starring – among others – Grace O’Brien from Doctor Who and Duke from The Story of Tracy Beaker. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, ‘immersive’ theatre but to me it seemed like it was halfway there, with a very lightly-plotted story taking a backseat to just invoking and sustaining the atmosphere of a smoky New Orleans blues club and hotel. (Don’t worry, the scene-setting was successful enough that I did move on from Grace and Duke after a while.) The musical performances were incredible, supported by an amazing band, and Randi and I were both humming tunes to ourselves as we made our way back once more to our little Tulse Hill hideaway via the magical shortcut of a Thameslink train.
One of the things I wanted to do after moving back to London was to get a book printed of all of the blog posts I wrote while living in Chicago. It’s partly because of a nagging fear that’s been in the back of my mind since a long-ago conversation in secondary school where Sanna remarked that all of my digital backup stuff was all very well and good while we still have electricity but would suddenly become useless if that ever went away. But mostly it’s because it’s really nice to flick through. If you ever showed up in my blog during those years then you now sit on our coffee table, like it or not. And this is sort of an apology in advance for a post which is a bit of a random summation of the past two weeks. One day these days will be showing up in a sequel book, and I wouldn’t like to forget them.
Last week began with a family outing to Toy Story 4. I still maintain that the ending of Toy Story 3, where a grown-up Andy puts his arm around the shoulders of the mother who’s now shorter than he is, is one of the most emotional pieces of cinema ever made – perhaps because I had just graduated from uni and was sitting next to my own mum at the time. In comparison I didn’t think the new film was quite as good although it was definitely a fun adventure. At times it did seem that they had completely forgotten about making a film for children, although it was genuinely lovely when some of the few kids scattered among the audience did find things for them like mimicking Forky by spontaneously yelling out “Bo!”.
Flush with being back in the land of legalised gambling I briefly considered putting a fiver on England to beat the US in the World Cup semi-final. But I didn’t, and I still have that £5. Nevertheless Randi and I enjoyed watching the rest of the competition (well, obviously Randi would) and it’s cool how widely enjoyed the Women’s World Cup seemed to be. For example, the other (seemingly much less exciting) semi-final was being projected in the background of the pub where Matt, Laura, Caroline and I whiled away many hours after work on Wednesday evening before we all realised it was time to go home. I was very amused to discover that thirtysomething Londoners (that’s who we are now!) who do actually know how to drive end up wanting to retake driving lessons because they feel so out of practice.
We’ve had a couple of great Friday night get-togethers recently too, including with Randi’s colleague Esther and her flatmate Kass and, last night, some Chicago-style pizza with Steve, Simon and Fleur at Japes. We were all a little unclear why this place picked such a British name but it was actually a pretty good and faithful rendition of Chicago-style pizza, although for my own order I sacrificed authenticity for a ‘carbonara’ variant and then got even crazier by adding sweetcorn. This is when you know you’re definitely not in Chicago.
Last weekend I was at the QPCS Summer Festival, bumping into lots of old teachers (about whom it still feels weird to use first names on this blog) and hanging out at the dual-purpose Alumni / Pride stand which was a very “not in my day” moment. Later in the day we migrated even further north to celebrate the annual ‘Roe Green day’ in Josh’s small, cosy, rural village which just happens to be smack-bang in the middle of Kingsbury. (His dad actually showed me aerial photos of Roe Green in the 1920s when it was completely surrounded by fields.) Josh also inducted me into my thirties, not with driving tests but with a plush Vladimir Putin doll and an inspirational Noel Edmonds book about positivity.
From one village to another, I did briefly want to mention the nearby oddity that is Dulwich Village which Randi and I encountered during the first of our new weekend series entitled ‘visit nearby parks and compare them to Brockwell’. (Dulwich Park was nice! Just not quite as nice.) Anyway, while the village is cutesy there was something unsettling about the area, and the discovery that all residents and businesses must pay a forced tribute to a shadowy ‘charity’ which owns the land and disperses funds to local private schools tells you a lot. Tomorrow we’ll be heading in the opposite direction to Tooting Commons which I doubt will raise the same concerns.
Finally, this afternoon I very much enjoyed seeing my first Ibsen play – Rosmersholm – in a new adaptation. Randi and I both suspected that being able to translate a play written in a foreign language does give the director a little extra leeway to make it ‘fit’ for a contemporary audience (although I can’t be sure) but whether that’s true or not it was – even though I feel guilty just using this word – astonishingly ‘relevant’. Maybe one reason why we love so much drama from the nineteenth century is just because so many of the themes of modernity, with its mass politics and mass media, started there. Either way, the performances were absorbing and it’s really great to be getting back into the theatre habit.
I’ve just finished the last episode of Years & Years, the show which so traumatised me (but in a good way?) when I started it a month ago. As the series went on I adjusted to the terrible bleakness of this very-near-future Britain and focused on the momentum of a good old-fashioned story – which was good, because I couldn’t have coped with six episodes at the same intensity of the first – but I do highly recommend if you get the chance.
It was certainly more relaxing and joyful experience seeing Education, Education, Education with Tash on Wednesday night. This was her birthday gift to me and it couldn’t have been a more perfect choice: an education politics-themed play set in a secondary comprehensive with a great 1990s soundtrack and lots of undisguised nostalgia about going to school at that time even if everything was falling apart behind the scenes. (OK, sure, I was still in primary school but I had a Tamagotchi too! A fancy, later-generation 8-in-1 which included an alien and about which Olivia and I got into trouble for discussing during an assembly rehearsal… but I digress.) The German teaching assistant, narrator and breaker of the fourth wall was a particularly funny touch. But it was also heartfelt, with sympathetic characters and a thoughtfulness about education if not an incredibly precise point to make about the path from 1997 to today. I’d recommend this one too.
This weekend we headed up to Norwich for Biff and Christa’s wedding. Randi turned out to be very pro-Norwich, scolding me for not having enough faith in their bus network which, be fair, did deliver us to the right place at a fraction of the cost of Dover’s buses. We had a really good time at what was – for me at least! – largely an excuse for a mini Groupon UK reunion. The Star Wars philosophical poem during the service was also magnificent, while the food – as you might expect from the owners of Biff’s Jack Shack – was top notch. I particularly enjoyed sitting in a group on the grass outside after the sun went down and munching happily on a vegan jackfruit burger which somehow preserved all of the greasy fast-food deliciousness as anything you might hope for from a late-night food van. In truth, it was also a moment of great relief since I’d just managed – on my third attempt – to find a cab company with any cabs left to pick us up. Ah, Norfolk.
The next day I headed straight to Cambridge for PuntCon, Bill’s annual gathering on the River Cam which I attended for several years running before I left for Chicago and kept begging to be kept on the invite list each year so that I could eventually make it back some day. I finally did, and it was lovely to see Bill, Katie and Max again as well as enjoy the usual stimulating conversations over a picnic which makes the hayfever all worth while. (Although I was not at all pleased to learn that the UK is now home to some kind of evil spider whose bites can rot away your skin. This is not the kind of change we needed.)
Having watched both England and the US progress through the quarter finals at the Women’s World Cup last week, Randi and I now have a difficult week ahead. It’s pretty unfortunate that the one-in-a-million sporting event which I happened to watch has thrown up this collision… 😬
On Wednesday morning I received a 30th birthday e-mail from my 19 year-old self. It was sweetly good-natured as well as containing an alarmingly prescient warning about Boris Johnson, and it feels rude not to reply. To be fair, my 19 year-old self was just procrastinating from essay writing so it would probably be a bad idea to distract him even more. To make up for it, I will find some time to write a reply forward in time to my 40 year-old self instead, who I really hope has just enjoyed a birthday at least half as good as the one I’ve just had.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, and I don’t want to skip over the final few weeks of my twenties which – as promised last time – were all about settling down in our new flat and jobs and building the foundations of a routine. Our move to Tulse Hill was remarkably smooth (thanks partly to my mum who drove down a car loaded with suitcases and boxes!) and although we’re still waiting on some painting before we decorate properly the flat has slowly been filling up with everything it needs to feel like a home. In fact, on the very same day we moved in we also hopped down to IKEA Croydon to fill our backpacks with domestic essentials… and my very first journey on the hitherto mysterious world of London Trams.
In Chicago I really enjoyed my half-hour walk to and from work – not only as a chance to clear my head, but also as the perfect podcast listening time. So I’m really thrilled that I’ve been able to reproduce a 30-minute morning commute walk by heading to Brixton rather than just using the nearest station from our house. And as a bonus, I’ve swapped the industrial vibe of Goose Island (which, to be fair, I now have very fond memories of) for the breathtaking Brockwell Park. We are going to get an awful lot of use out of this park, especially on Sundays when there is an amazing farmers’ market just outside the park at Herne Hill station.
While Josh has the distinction of being our very first dinner guest, I was shocked to realise that the first people to stay overnight in our spare room would be Chicago’s very own Catherine and AJ! As I discovered when I walked into a pub on Wednesday evening and found them waiting at a table, our ‘surprise birthday weekend’ which Randi had organised for my 30th was actually for the four of us, which was both an incredible surprise and very touching that they would fly all the way here for only a couple of days. That night we joined up with my family for a plate-sharing extravaganza of Peruvian food (I was really hankering for some ají de gallina) before heading home together for the night.
On Friday morning we ate a variety of English breakfasts at our new (and currently favourite) local café before catching the train to the coast for a long weekend in a small village near Dover. I have taken the Eurostar along the High Speed 1 route before but this was my first time riding the domestic high-speed service and the incorporation of this particular bit of railway nerdery into the birthday plan seems to have been a happy accident. We were all suitably impressed by how fast it was and as we shared cans of M&S cider and snacked on Percy Pigs it was galling to learn that a similar high-speed rail link connecting Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee and Minneapolis very nearly went ahead in 2010 before being scuppered by the asinine Republican governor of Wisconsin.
I had never been to the White Cliffs of Dover before and we were incredibly lucky on Saturday to get a perfect sunny day for a long stroll along the clifftop. The clear view of France across the channel really does bring home how geographically close the two countries are and, as if to make a point, my phone kept latching on to a French mobile network and pretending it was an hour later than it was. I challenge anyone to stare down at the port of Dover from above and casually opine that the single market is a trivial thing to mess around with. Once we got to Dover Castle we appreciated the usual medieval castle features (such a sentence is much less common in the US) as well as the Roman lighthouse and a tour/exhibition on Dunkirk presented in the ‘secret wartime tunnels’ which are signposted all over the site.
When not walking we did a lot of eating and drinking, from tea to vegan sausage rolls to three different chocolate caterpillar cakes (Charlie, Colin and Connie) which are not a staple of American birthday parties but ought to be. We also binged on Channel 4 (The Secret Life of Kids USA is notably didactic about parenting techniques compared to the UK version) and played an extensive game of Grand Austria Hotel, my board game birthday present from Katie. Predictably I also got upset about the cost, frequency and general demeanour of the very-non-London bus from Dover back to St Margaret’s at Cliffe… but I must admit that they do (finally!) take contactless card payments now, which is a real gamechanger if you find yourself relying on an unfamiliar rural route.
My 19 year-old self couldn’t have predicted how I would be spending my 30th birthday or who I would be spending it with, but he did have a hunch that I’d be enjoying myself. I’m really grateful to everyone who proved him right and made it so wonderful, kicking off my thirties in an exceptionally happy way.
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
