Like many others this month I’ve enjoyed playing with ChatGPT, burning vast computational resources in order to simulate an argument between my sisters over the last roast potato (pretty good), write poetry about the long-standing family in-joke The Curse of the Blue Farmer (very bad) and have weird self-referential arguments where it tried to lie about its own word count. Despite all this, I am still hopeful that this friendly chat bot could soon take over my job, so here’s a first step:
In terms of tone and style I’d say it’s basically there.
Content-wise, however, this human still has a bit to add, starting with the extraordinarily generous wedding present we received of an overnight stay (and seven-course dinner!) at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire. A surprising number of people seem to be familiar with this luxury boutique hotel, and even I had heard of Raymond Blanc. Suffice to say, it’s not the sort of place that Randi or I would ever dream of eating or sleeping at, so having received this gift we decided to make the most of the weekend by travelling up to Oxford on Friday night and exploring a little more of the city first before our check-in to Le Manoir on Saturday afternoon.
I’ve been to Oxford a few times on short visits, but this time we roamed slightly further than the “picturesque streets” and “historical landmarks” (thanks, GPT3) of the city centre. In particular, we loved the picturesque winter vibes of University Parks, which were further enhanced by staying within the expansive grounds of St Hugh’s College, which Randi discovered offers its student accommodation as a relatively cheap bed for the night (at least during the holidays) and also throws in a hot breakfast in the dining hall the next morning. Would recommend.
Anyway – if you have infinite money, I’d also recommend Le Manoir because it was rather nice. The dinner itself was incredible, as you’d expect, but – just as importantly – our waiter made us both feel relaxed and was happy to chat about his experiences working there. My only regret was that by the end I was too full for the optional bonus cheese course. Fortunately we could opt for room service breakfast the next morning (plus the FT), which was carried in on an enormous tray and contained a number of bonus items which its bearer (correctly) judged would make “nice additions” to the meal. We agreed.
I do realise that you’re supposed to expect an ultra-luxury hotel to be nice but we still felt very grateful for everything we received there, including the warmth and friendliness of the staff. And I was also pleased that they weren’t so fancy to not stock a selection of nearby walks for us to pick from on Sunday morning, allowing us to walk off some of Raymond Blanc’s cooking by meandering along snowy country roads through various pretty villages before making our way back home again, ‘bon voyage’ bag in tow. (If this all feels a bit like an influencer post, I apologise. Standard disclaimer: we enjoyed a free stay at Le Manoir, but all thoughts, opinions and greedy bites of their complimentary lemon cake are my own.)
Back in the real world, December has been packed with fun stuff. While Randi was gallivanting in Edinburgh I went along to our neighbour’s primary school Christmas fair with Angela and her family, which was delightful (a) because I’d heard a lot about them already, and (b) because it’s hilarious how immediately recognisable any primary school hall is, from the climbing frame to the little red handheld beanbags.
I also spent a lovely morning in West Hampstead with Josh, Anna and Cora, attended a high-spirited work dinner (in which I learnt everything there is to know about Rutland) and chatted away merrily at the office Christmas party. Since my team is mostly outside the UK, we also enjoyed another virtual board game night to celebrate a productive and successful year (7 Wonders: Architects was particularly fun!) although, as usual, the only way to beat Kira is to choose a game like Ticket to Ride which she’s never played before… and even then, it was too close for comfort.
Meanwhile, Randi and I briefly hosted Esther on the first snowy night of December, who rather magnificently managed to arrive on the last train before they all stopped. One Sunday afternoon we also played at being proper grown-ups and went along to one of our neighbour’s Christmas gatherings for mulled wine, cheese and controversial cocktails. The couple who hosted have a good neighbourly track record, having successfully organised the installation of some bike storage along with the planting of some street trees earlier this year, and I’m really excited to see the latter grow next year.
But on top of all that, two huge pre-Christmas highlights of December were going to a couple of live shows! You’ve almost certainly heard of the first one, Six, in which the six wives of Henry VIII reclaim their narratives through an 80-minute musical/pop concert of catchy songs, historical revisionism and dirty jokes. I’ve wanted to see this for ages, ever since Spotify snuck one of the tracks into my Discover Weekly playlist, and it didn’t disappoint. The tone is fun and light-hearted – Hamilton this ain’t – but it really works, especially if you grew up in the British school system. And of course I’ve had the album on replay for the last week.
Even better, though, was A Sherlock Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve Eve. This is, as the name suggests, a mashup of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes, which is a sentence so laser-targeted at me that I bought tickets as soon as I read it without reading anything else. Everything is woven together perfectly, with some lovely touches to knit the universes together (the boy Ebenezer Scrooge pays at the end of A Christmas Carol to fetch the turkey for Bob Cratchit turns out to be a young Watson) and excellent performances from the cast throughout.
With the Christmas spirit well and truly unleashed, everything was set for our family’s annual gathering at my mum’s. As usual, we played games (Shout Out, Balderdash & Sushi Go Party) and continued our new morning tradition of Secret Santa on the big day itself (many thanks to Cormac for my gifts this year!), followed by a stupendous lunch at Carolyn’s, a format-bending edition of the infamous Christmas Quiz and a closing party game of Empires which Tash introduced us all to. The next day, my mum was inspired to make tacos for a Boxing Day brunch – if this turns out to be a new tradition, I’m definitely not complaining – before we set off for Hampstead Heath.
If you’re a regular reader – and let’s be honest, I don’t think anyone is picking up at this point – you’ll know that this is usually the week that I churn out my annual reviews and roundup of the year’s books. Everything was all planned out for a mammoth blog-writing session yesterday, with Randi having safely departed in an early morning cab for a solo trip to New York and Chicago to see friends. And then, in a single gatecrashing text, came some very exciting news: Nolan and Rebecca had just flown into town that very morning, and did I fancy a pint? Hell yes.
A few hours later we were gathered around a pub table in Camden with their wonderful friends Celia and Parrus, swapping life updates and lots of laughter after a multi-year gap. It may have cost me my blog writing timetable (and therefore some spillover into 2023 – sorry!) but it was worth it for such an unexpected and delightful reunion. I hope that you’ve all had a chance to spend some time with people you love over the holidays, and I hope you’ve enjoyed “our December update” for 2022.
Studies of flashbulb memories – your memories of hearing about major news events – show that even though people remain very confident that their memories are accurate, their actual stories change dramatically as they get further and further from the event. So, as an experiment, I want to put in writing that confirmation of Queen Elizabeth II’s death on Thursday came to me as a BBC Breaking News alert – as I was midway through writing a message in one of our family WhatsApp groups – while crossing the car park area between the Waterlink Way and Catford’s two railway stations on a post-work evening walk. There – done – and now we can revisit this in a decade and see if I’m still sticking to the same story.
Back in March we were thwarted in our attempt to visit Katie in Glasgow, but on the August Bank Holiday weekend we succeeded on our second spin of the Wheel of Fortune (Scottish Cities Edition) and had a lovely long weekend with her and James in Edinburgh. Hurray!
Obviously everyone else visiting Edinburgh that weekend was there for the final days of the Fringe, and we did go see a handful of shows – more on those in a bit. However, given that the weather was so nice, our priority during the daytime was to go on some mini-hikes, admire the city from suitably high-up and (at least for me and Katie) distract ourselves from the climbing with lots of hypothetical would-you-rather-style questions, although I’m not sure that James or Randi were as enthused as we were.
But yes, alongside the hiking, the dodging of uncollected rubbish during the city’s bin strike (which, to be honest, only added to a festival atmosphere) and a failed attempt to acquire khachapuri, we loved the atmosphere of the Fringe and we especially loved the first show which Katie had booked tickets for us in advance: Shamilton, an improvised Hamilton-esque hip-hop musical about a public figure nominated by the audience at the start of the show. This was an extremely similar vibe to the Improv Shakespeare which was our favourite thing to take people to in Chicago, and the all-American cast did a superb job after the audience landed them with the life story of Nicola Sturgeon. I felt very sorry for them at the beginning as they tried to read the room, quickly realising that this was potentially dangerous political terrain, and still pulled together an amazing performance which (I think!) everyone enjoyed. As Randi says, it’s just so rewarding to watch people on stage being both incredible at what they’re doing and clearly enjoying themselves too. I will go see this again whenever I get the chance.
The next day, Randi, Katie and I saw another improvised show – this time with a Doctor Who theme! – which had a more gentle, family-friendly vibe. More silly, less sharp, but still very enjoyable to see the first (and last) performance of The Last Turnip set in the thrilling confines of Killington Lake Services on the M6. Afterwards, the three of us felt we had one last Fringe outing in us and blindly picked Jolly Boat’s 10 Songs for Geeks on the basis that it was (a) free, and (b) starting in a few minutes nearby in the basement of a bar. This was the perfect way to wrap up our brief Edinburgh experience and felt very authentically Fringe: a pair of brothers singing about D&D, Game of Thrones and Harry Potter to a happy, drunken crowd of nerds. Bonus laughs came from the unplanned comedy callback of the “battery low” and later “battery critically low” warning messages on the laptop they were using to project until for the final few songs it gave up the ghost altogether.
Even though Randi and I are supposed to be planning a wedding in, ooh, less than two weeks, the following weekend we still took time out to travel all the way to Amersham in order to ride part of the way home on a 1938 stock Tube train. (Sadly this sub-genre of nerdiness did not make it into Jolly Boat’s Fringe show, but maybe next time.) Promoted by the London Transport Museum as the ‘art deco’ Tube train, it is just quite charming to ride along in something which is obviously antique (just look at these delightful wooden panels) but also still immediately recognisable as the Tube. We also had a good wander around Amersham beforehand, which boasts many great lunch spots and (unrelatedly) also the world’s most aggressive anti dog-fouling signs.
And yes, of course we have also been busy on the final wedding preparations – as Tash knows from having lunch with us amongst the dinosaurs at Crystal Palace Park on Saturday – with perhaps the strangest part being the collection of 38 paper tickets for the train to Hereford. As a reward for our productivity, however, today we treated ourselves to the opening section on a fresh rewalk of the London Loop (carrying a guidebook this time, like real walking pros) followed by the season two finale of Succession once we made it home again from Bexley. The first part of the Loop is certainly not the prettiest, but we’ve missed our long Zone 6 walks.
As trailed in my last post, we spent last weekend in Valencia to link up with Randi’s uni friend, Mike, on his post-Bar exam holiday to Spain. Spoiler alert: it was lovely!
Despite it being a quick trip we managed to pack a lot in, starting (for me at least) with a walking tour of the city centre on Friday morning. Our guide was great, and – in my personal favourite moment – did not seem fazed when Randi decided to clarify whether all of his references to the church’s statue of “our virgin” actually referred to the Virgin Mary and not, y’know, some local virgin. Close runner-up favourite walking tour moments included the history of the still-functioning Water Court of Valencia (which is both considerably older than the US Supreme Court and much more sensibly selected) and how the old course of the Turia river came to be turned into a public park. I actually remembered this fact from a Jay Foreman video (thanks, YouTube!) but I wasn’t aware of the government’s Plan A for the river’s replacement: a giant multi-lane motorway. I think Randi and I shuddered in exactly the same way.
Although it may not feel like we live in the multiverse’s best timeline right now, at least we do live in the world where Valencia has a long park rather than a long road, so the next morning we took advantage of this fact and walked through it down to the City of Arts and Sciences. This open-air complex is quite hard to describe – so perhaps just look at the surfeit of photos below – but essentially it’s like stumbling across the headquarters of the United Federation of Planets, with a cluster of culturally worthy institutions linked by open walking areas and glistening reflective pools of water. All of the buildings share a stunning modernist architecture, and I really do mean ‘stunning’ in the sense of ‘stunningly good’ rather than the stunningly awful 60s British modernist buildings made of concrete. (Dear British architects: why couldn’t we have done this instead? Is it the weather?)
Our ultimate destination in the complex on Saturday morning was the L’Oceanogràfic – Valencia’s aquarium – where we dedicated a solid morning to staring at the pretty jellyfish, watching the dolphin show, sadly not coming anywhere close to the top in the pre-show dolphin quiz aimed at 8-12 year olds, holding our hands up against the penguin ice block and, relatedly, regretting holding our hands up against the penguin ice block. Then, in the late afternoon, it was beach time! Reader: the sea was so warm. It’s been so long!
This would have been a great trip in itself, with only minor disappointment at my failing to secure any Agua de Valencia (gin, vodka, cava, orange juice) at our slightly-too-snooty-for-cocktails tapas restaurant on Friday night. Fortunately, help was at hand on Saturday night, because – by fortunate coincidence – Randi’s ex-colleague Sam also happened to be holidaying in Valencia with her friends at the same time we were there, and they were extremely on-board with the plan to go for dinner and then touristy drinks together. We all bonded immediately over the challenge of finding a vegan-friendly restaurant – and massive kudos to Randi for having an American’s instinct to bail out the indecisive Brits from the first not-vegan place we sat down in by paying our €12 water tab and getting us all out of there again – and then afterwards we finally found a bar willing to provide jugs of promised Agua de Valencia. Hurray!
Oh, and since you asked, Metrovalencia is a very nice transport system. This summer it’s also free to ride every Sunday, so many thanks to the man who stopped Randi and I from throwing away money trying to top-up our cards on the way back to the airport. And thank you to Mike for letting us crash your Spanish trip for a long weekend!
Last weekend we spent a gorgeously sunny weekend in Cardiff – a place which Randi has now totally fallen in love with and is angling to move to, despite my warnings that the weather might not always be so spectacular. Still, nothing beats the Friday evening feeling of catching a train out of London to begin a weekend adventure, and although I’d been to Cardiff once before my main/only memory of the city was hanging out at the Torchwood fountain. This time, we stayed in an Airbnb in the trendy Pontcanna area, and we were both impressed by the massive expanse of rolling parks which surround the banks of the River Taff nearby.
Our primary purpose for visiting was to spend time with Randi’s former colleague, Tom, and his family. After meeting up near the castle, we caught a boat/bus down to Cardiff Bay, walked along the coast, stared enviously at people with tickets to the Aqua Park (basically a bigger and better version of the infamous WoahZone on Lake Michigan which we also failed to get into) before making up for it with ice cream sundaes. Finally, Tom, Demelza and Ralph invited us back to their house for a highly impressive barbecue production, over which- since we’re basically all transport nerds – we all swapped notes on Geoff Marshall videos. Thanks, guys!
The other surprising thing to note about Cardiff was that somehow we fell into eating delicious Mexican American food – not once, but twice! Not only did we enjoy the “unauthentic” (but still delicious) tacos at La Pantera, but for breakfast on Sunday morning Randi scouted out the American diner-themed Hard Lines café, complete with breakfast burritos and by far the best huevos rancheros Randi has found this side of the Atlantic.
All the talk of buckling steel on the railways made us question whether we’d actually be able to get home on Sunday, but thankfully (or regretfully) we did make it home before the extremes of the heatwave on Monday and Tuesday this week. It wasn’t unbearable (thanks to our fan) but we still celebrated Tuesday evening’s rainfall with a bottle of white wine on Blythe Hill. Today we were back to pleasantly-sunny-but-not-absurd temperatures, prompting Randi and I to lie and read in Hampstead Heath for a bit before moseying down to the other exciting part of this post: this afternoon’s escape room adventure, Underground 2099, set in the abandoned South Kentish Town tube station!
An escape room in a disguised Underground station was my extremely well-targeted birthday present from mum, Tash and Cormac this year, and as a group we were in boisterous enough spirits during the orientation that our game master seemed a little taken back. (“I’ve never seen a group start arguing about Tube facts before the game has actually started… I don’t know whether I love you or hate you.”) However, once the game got going we settled down into some excellent teamwork to defeat the radioactive King Rat in a time-travelling trip to a post-apocalyptic 2099. It was a lot of fun, and I’m thrilled that we actually succeeded in our quest with barely a minute and a half spare, although I’m not ashamed to say that I jumped more than once as the mutant hordes advanced. London Supper Club 1, Rats 0.
In my job I’m lucky enough to work with a truly awesome development team, based in many different countries, and for a long time I’ve tried to get a group together for an in-person meetup. For a while this was impossible thanks to the pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine, but last week were able to gather in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, which meant that I could finally hang out with Kira, Maria and Hanna IRL and (spoiler alert) drink a lot of wine.
The scheduled options into Tbilisi’s airport are not fantastic, so by the time Maria and I had completed our overnight flights, met up at the airport and taken a Bolt back to our Airbnb it was already 5am and the sun was coming up. Thankfully, Kira was waiting for us with our inaugural bottle of sweet Georgian red wine, and we all sat on the terrace pretending that we’d all had more sleep than we’d actually had.
A few hours later Kira took us on a short tour of Tbilisi’s Old Town, which at 9am on a Saturday morning felt more like a film set than a real city. The streets are narrow and hilly, with plenty of quirky street art and gorgeous views over the rest of the city, but almost no other people to be seen. It soon became clear what should have already been obvious by looking at a world map: Georgia is pretty far south, hot, and therefore has the same late-rising, late-sleeping culture you’d expect anywhere else at this latitude. Only tourists would wander around in the morning, duh.
Still, I hadn’t brought my hiking boots for nothing, so the next morning we made another early-ish start so we could meet up with Hanna and climb up to the ancient fortress which overlooks the city before it got too impossibly hot to walk around. (Don’t worry, we’re a good team. Everybody came prepared with hats and sun cream.) After a while on the hills we descended into the National Botanical Garden, which was beautiful, even though I’m sure we only saw a very small portion of it. Shout-out to the large group of children, all dressed up in matching outfits, who were being filmed singing and dancing by the base of the waterfall where we were sitting, and apologies to whoever’s job it will be to edit us out of this particular music video.
Tbilisi is a fascinating place, and if you’re looking for a relaxing balance of nature plus tourist amenities in a friendly atmosphere then I would totally recommend it as a city break option. It very much feels like a place in flux. For example, the streets are lined with Soviet-era apartment buildings which feel a little abandoned on the outside, but also house one or two shops, bars or restaurants inside which are buzzing with energy and life. I was fascinated by the haunted-house foyers of these buildings, and I very much wonder what they will look like in a decade or two.
During the week we were, of course, working from our (thankfully air-conditioned) apartment, so we only scratched the surface of things to do in Tbilisi. That said, we did manage to tick off some other items, including a visit to the Gabriadze theatre on Wednesday night to see a marionette performance of Ramona. Ramona is a beautiful locomotive engine who is separated from her lifelong love, and – despite the meddlings of an officious Soviet bureaucrat – joins a travelling circus troupe and learns to walk the trapeze. It was genuinely extraordinary and moving, and although obviously the English surtitles aren’t capable of communicating all of the history and nuance of the text, listening to the Georgian voices was also beautiful. My only recommendation, if you decide to visit, is to sit further back than I did so you don’t have to crane your neck to combine the text with the puppetry!
We also made it to a jazz club on Friday evening, which I also really enjoyed. And, to make this a fair cultural exchange, I also tried to provide the very best of Britain in return: namely Jelly Babies (which went down very well, albeit with initial qualms that “it seems weird to eat babies”), Dairy Milk, Crunchies, multiple episodes of Would I Like To You? and a rewatch of one of my very favourite films – Four Lions – on the last night with Kira. Oh, and of course everyone thought I was weird to add milk to my tea.
We also watched Encanto together (which was good and all, but I’m not convinced that it’s OK for poor Mirabel to be put through intense childhood trauma just because it serves some cosmic bring-the-family-together ends-justify-the-means grand plan!) and I introduced everyone to Dominion. Since Kira is a highly competitive board game expert, this inevitably led to several more games of progressively more drunken Dominion until she could beat me – but I did enjoy my brief winning streak while it lasted.
The other obvious reason to visit Georgia is the food, which is both (a) very delicious, and (b) extremely affordable for tourists. We ate very well, including a decent fill of the ubiquitous cheese-filled khachapuri!
Overwhelmingly, though, the purpose of this week-long adventure was to spend time with some of my favourite people beyond the confines of a Zoom call. I’m super-grateful to everyone for making the effort to congregate in Tbilisi, and I hope it won’t be too long before we can all play Dominion together again.
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
