Montage of Homepage Photos
Minor side-note: for about five years, I changed the main picture on the home page pretty regularly. So consider this a montage homage.
Coupley wintery Chicago photo
My first thanksgiving was lovely 🙂 As promised: lots of delicious turkey, sweet potatoes and cranberries, unexpectedly adjoined with a boisterous game of charades. This only reinforced the impression that Thanksgiving is basically a dry-run for Christmas day, which is fine as long as you don’t suffer any major family falling-out the first time around. Still, on discovering that Americans don’t have Christmas crackers, I propose a swap: we’ll all take days off work to eat, drink and be merry late-November time, as long as they wear little paper hats at Christmas to differentiate the meals. And because Christmas cracker hats are cool.
The other highlight of my trip so far was seeing A Clown Car Named Desire at Second City last night. The inspiration to go came from looking for a Chicago counterpoint to News Revue although the whole thing is bigger, more polished and less topical than that. Apparently Second City is particularly famous for its improv and last night there was a whole extra third act of improvisation tacked on to the end which was a lot of fun.
If I lived in Chicago, I expect I’d be back again before very long…
Taking advantage of some ‘on holiday \ crashing in office’ time to finally revamp this website. It’s definitely way overdue to admit that I’m never going to have the time or expertise to rebuild something from scratch again, and so my inner archive nerd is content with migrating everything from Nucleus CMS (so long, but thanks for everything!) to WordPress. And, for the time being, a very very standard, default, boring, minimalist theme. I’d rather keep blogging quickly than be weighed down by something complicated and outdated, and hopefully this will make me a more frequent blogger of bitesize chunks too.
So long, old home page
Aldwych
I have form when it comes to dragging my mum along to geeky Tube adventures, whether it be trekking out to the furthest station, nudging cub scouts out of the way at the London Transport Museum or envying up the offices at 55 Broadway. Last Saturday we added Aldwych station to the list, which closed in 1994 but is still open to occasional tours, filming and training. Down on the platforms you’ll find posters including, amongst other things, the rules by which reluctant officials agreed to allow Blitz-era sheltering. (Why do I have the feeling there’d be a 30p charge for it today?)
In case you were wondering why Aldwych closed, by the way, it’s because it was a stupid station – with platforms only reachable by lift – on a little branch line from Holborn from which it’d be quicker to walk. So that’s that.
One of the abandoned platforms
Also recently: we celebrated Anna’s birthday at Big Red, provided a large chunk of the audience up top of a pub for a new pilot comedy show heading (if all goes well) to Dave, and saw Gravity with Josh. I wasn’t blown away, I have to say, although it was a cool cinema experience and probably the only time I’ve felt 3D added much. You don’t really see this film for the story, or the characters, or the dialogue – you see it for the moment of terror as you imagine what it might be like to spin uncontrollably in space without being able to stop.
The rest of the last few weeks has been increasingly punctuated by Doctor Who to the extent that I can begin to imagine how normal people feel before an English World Cup final match. (I mean, clearly that’s fantasy – I meant how they would hypothetically feel.) Sunday lunch at Abbi and Paul’s: whooped at the return of Paul McGann. Stay in with Cat: enjoy Brian Cox’s surprisingly dense lecture on the science of time travel. Go home: get emotional at An Adventure in Space and Time. The climax tonight will be watching The Day of the Doctor at the cinema. (Also in 3D, actually.) I’m heading to Chicago for two weeks tomorrow to have my first Thanksgiving experience, and can’t think of a higher note to leave the country on. Forget about pilgrims or overly-trusting Native Americans: I give thanks to the Doctor.
The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.
This blog is turning into a bit of a travel diary… 
So last weekend I just had fun with Simon and Patrick in Paris, while trying (but not always succeeding) not to be those obnoxious Brits abroad. True, there were moments of unintended hilarity at our botched attempts to pronounce French menus, while Simon narrowly avoided causing an international incident on the Metro with a party of grumpy New Zealanders. But I did manage to see all the stuff which I’ve missed before: the catacombs, Musée d’Orsay, Versailles, the Conciergerie, and all still within that curious but delightful French paradigm of “people under 26 really shouldn’t have to pay for anything”. They’ve also recently pedestrianised a former main road right by the river, which is now rather lovely to walk down, and another sign (if any were needed) of the joys of freeing our cities from as many cars as possible.
Voila, catacombs
Voila, Versailles
Simon and Patrick
(There’s nothing like wandering around Paris, of course, for reinstating a feeling of European togetherness. Yes, we are yoked to France in the perpetual rivalry of squabbling neighbours, but isn’t it better for this to stay within the big EU tent? Maybe I’m just bitter because of the absurd double-checking of passports which Britain insists on at Gare du Nord when getting the Eurostar back home, as if we can’t possibly trust the standard of French passport-checking a few metres earlier. It’s needlessly unfriendly, especially after moving within Schengen for a week.)
(Having said that, we really need to stop flogging our public utilities to their state-owned multinationals.)
And, yes, I spent the week in Stockholm and then Helsinki for work (and reindeer-eating). Which was pretty awesome, because I’ve always wanted to visit Scandinavia, and this got me two in one go – albeit not for very long. (Nit-picking: Finland is not necessarily Scandinavian, I know, I know.) It did surprise me how different they felt from each other, both in terms of people and general atmosphere, with Helsinki very obviously showing its Russian influences. But both are so wonderfully sane, with the sole exception of their airport food prices, which are not.
Obligatory American anecdote: as we left the excellent Masculine / Masculine. The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day exhibition – and take it for me, I’m not a natural art exhibition fan – we did pass one unimpressed visitor who was complaining to her friend that “if you want to see a lot of naked butts you can just look them up online”. Which very neatly allowed us to pretend to ourselves that we hadn’t been murmuring bawdy jokes to each other the whole time, and adopt the traditionally smug pose which Paris brings out so very well 
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
