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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

I loved Handbagged. Absolutely loved it, even by the high standards of the Tricycle. But then, you’d expect me to, right? The comic imagining of the weekly audiences between the Queen and Thatcher is a rollicking blast through 80s politics, but without the superficial clip-show feeling of The Iron Lady, and was laugh-out-loud funny and terrifying in equal measure. In a small theatre, having Thatcher march onto the stage and start hectoring the audience is genuinely scary, like finding yourself trapped in a cage with a wolf. To have escaped living through it in person is a relief, of sorts, although Kinnick’s famous ‘I warn you’ speech is sadly still as prophetic as ever.

And so having enjoyed a second dollop of left-leaning British political theatre and\or silly songs (we’d seen News Revue a few weeks back), Michele and I both spent the rest of the week working in Milan. (Italian geography lesson 101: “Milan seems much less crazy than Rome… is this where businesses usually base themselves now?” “Usually, unless they’re connected to the government. In Rome they all stop at 3.”) Anyway – the food, oh, the food! The food was so good

Dining out in Milan

Back in Britain, we spent last Sunday wandering around Cambridge to find out which bits Yale decided to steal, getting nostalgic about libraries and meeting up with Simon for pub drinks so we could mock the people’s government of the United States of America collectively. (Which is still closed, incidentally, although all in a noble effort to halt the march of national socialism and ‘the worst thing that’s ever happened to us as a country‘. I salute your stoic sense of perspective, anonymous vox poppee! America has endured terrorism, killer bees and the finale to the first season of Heroes, but clearly health insurance for the poor requires a whole new level of fortitude.)

A pretty English moment

The Fridge of Journeys

Oh, come now dear Americans, I’m only being mean as a defence mechanism to convince myself that this drizzly island is still the best place to call home. Because (as our glorious fridge of many faraway magnets nicely demonstrates) all paths still lead back here, and the last couple of nights have proved what a good thing that is. From dinner at Andrew and Bonnie’s, to pizza, beer and impromptu Year 6 test-marking with my parents, to a wonderful flat night at ours punctuated by lots of shouting between Brits and Yanks about whether ‘porn’ and ‘pawn’ are homophones (they are). To Thai lunch followed by milkshakes with Lucy, to a determined march up to Highgate only to baulk at paying £4 to see Marx’s grave (look, I never said I was against price signals…), to a wonderful farewell-to-London evening for Michele in the corner of – where else? – a local pub, so many of the people and places I care about are here.

This is not a reason to stay rooted to one spot forever, but a good reason to enjoy it while I am

‘Your Christmas card this year’ – Lucy

Something significant has happened. Yes, there’s been another month gap between posts, but in that month I have laid my hands on a shiny new smartphone which has the significant advantage over its predecessor of actually taking nice photos which aren’t blurry, indistinct, or tinged blue like a world permanently bathed in flashing police lights. So this means I barely have to write anything at all, to be honest. I can just stick on the sideshow and leave you to it.

(Except, yes, you’ve probably all seen these already on Facebook, in significantly higher quality than I use here. Originally, leaving my blog in this early 2000s design timewarp was simply laziness, but as the years go by I’m increasingly going to pretend it’s a conscious artistic design, in homage to the era of its creation. So squint, dammit, squint at the photos and just be grateful they’re not blue anymore.)

But let’s start by going back to the first weekend of August. It was hot: hot enough to pass that critical tipping point where cider becomes my default drink over beer. Oliver and Abi were back from their American adventures, so we had an afternoon of incomprehensibly-complex board games and Shakespearian quizzes. The next day there was a family BBQ, and some nice photos:

Matt Smith-era Self Family

And then just a few short hours later, we gathered on the sofa to learn that Malcolm Tucker Peter Capaldi is the next Doctor. Gasping ensued. Really? Like, really? Because this is going to be awesome. And especially awesome because over the next few months I have the weighty task of introducing Doctor Who to a newbie, which is a frightening responsibility to have, so it’s nice to have a new era to go into together. But which episodes to show? Which episodes to hide? How early do you get to Blink? (These are not rhetorical questions. Tell me. I’m scared I’ll mess it up and end up with somebody who thinks the Doctor is half-human.)

Gosh, that was a lot of rambling and we haven’t even got to the surprise Berlin trip yet. But first!

Josh and Anna

Flat Night

Me and Nour

Please observe the little trains snaking through the background

It has been a good month: chilling out in beer gardens with Josh and Anna, celebrating our flat’s anniversary, stealing Michele’s friend Nour and somehow persuading him to go see Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (our mutual reaction was haha that’s hilarious and haha Hollywood couldn’t pull that comedy off aren’t-we-smug) and journeying up to the top of the Shard on a last-minute invitation from a mother burdened with a spare ticket. Two notes about this, actually:

1. I could hear a somewhat-sarky Diamond Geezer in my head the whole trip, especially when we got to the gift shop. Which of course just means that he’s become a ‘valuable brand’ for ‘curated experiences’, and someone should stick his endorsement on trendy ‘alternative’ tours of the view from two-storey office blocks and slightly rising hills. But face it: the Shard is tall, and you can see a lot from a tall building, and that’s that.

2. My mum’s instant reaction on emerging into the upper viewing deck was to stare down for a few seconds before saying “you do realise we’re looking at South London this side?” and move away. Hah.

Photos a bit like my old phone used to take

BERLIN!

It’s only been a year, and now I was back on a work trip. Which itself was interesting and rewarding, but then a bunch of us stayed for the weekend too, and then it was really time to enjoy ourselves. Berghain isn’t a place I would ever naturally go in my life, and indeed I only lasted until a pitifully early 3am before crashing out, but it was so worth going for the out-of-this-world atmosphere, with shadowy dark corners and spooky steps like something from a video game ‘abandoned factory’ level but filled with cool Germans and techno.

We ate the best food in the nicest places. We drank crazy German beer where the price is determined by a live stock exchange of beer purchases but it doesn’t really matter because it’s Berlin, not London, so beer is always cheap. We properly chilled out. We did the touristy sight-seeing bits. And I confronted an American tourist on his lack of enthusiasm for Ampelmann. (“But why is it a thing?” “What do you mean? It’s Ampelmann! It’s the glorious marriage of Soviet-era graphic design and gift shops!” He looked unconvinced, but he was in an Ampelmann gift shop, so I think I was well within my rights.) The bottom line is: Berlin is now about #3 on my ‘list of potential cities to flee to if London is flooded or attacked particularly badly by zombies’.

Not the best food I ate, but certainly the longest

And bringing us right up to date with ‘stuff that happened just now’, I spent this Bank Holiday weekend with Cat and Matt in Norfolk in the lovely family home of the Hurleys. (Her mum could seriously run a B&B off the back of those breakfasts ) Kings Lyn Lynn is not Berlin, but it was actually no less lovely, as we celebrated Cat’s birthday in advance with her homeland friends (sorry guys, we’ve stolen her forever), rambled through the countryside (“this field has a horse in it!”) and unearthed some incredible VHS tapes of Cat’s pantomime past.

(Traumatically, these village performances always culminated in a spirited rendition of the national anthem, which is more than enough to mark the very marked difference between growing up in Norfolk and growing up in Willesden Green.)

Norfolk: beautiful in its own way

This is getting on for a treatise, so I won’t carry on through the very many other lovely evenings this month with Matt and Caroline, with Simon and Ellie, or with my mum dining out in Angel. I will say a massive congrats to Katie for her scary A-Level results, and how excited I am getting for Canada…

Oh, what, Canada? That’s right guys: 2013 is shaping up to be a lot more travel-heavy than I had planned

Feeling nicely relaxed and chilled after a week in Tuscany with Grace, Oliver and Abi, so before Real Life intrudes again on Monday I thought I’d do an old-fashioned “here look I went on holiday look at me!” photo post:

Florence

Witches’ Brew, (Mint Based) Poker Chips and Cards

We’ll always have gelato

So this was weird…

Hot tub

The final ingredient to any holiday, not pictured above, is obviously reading. I’ve been back in a good reading groove of late, and this holiday managed Zadie Smith’s new novel NW, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Life Of Pi. A word about this last one. I vaguely remember when everyone was reading it, roughly a decade ago, so was slightly disappointed all these years later to discover that the world had not in fact been gripped by a mathematical treatise. Disappointment hardened into disdain for the first section, set in India, which is a tedious ode to religion interspersed by the kind of ‘wonderings’ worthy of Elizabeth Gilbert. Thankfully, the bulk of the novel is a great yarn, including plenty of tense moments, a genuinely creepy episode on an island and a deft ending, so after a while I was actually a happy and captivated reader again.

But, Yann Martel, please: you don’t understand agnosticism. Really, really, not at all. And if people were so blown away by the philosophy of Life Of Pi, then it strikes me that they don’t either. Which is a shame, is all.

I was totally expecting to love Berlin as a city, so thankfully I did! We crammed in a lot of touristy sights and museums, fell in love with Ampelmann, ate a healthy amount of currywurst and schnitzel, had a slight overdose of Nazis\Communist history (there comes a point…) and also went out to Potsdam for the day on trains with absurdly upbeat jingles. (Seriously, watch it: why is it so happy?)

All tourists fall in love with Ampelmann

Little bits of remaining wall

Die kleine Raupe Nimmersatt. Obviously.

Beer tasting with friends from Groupon in Germany

I seem to remember it was pretty cold by this point!