I have a bit of a pre-Christmas blog backlog to clear before our upcoming holiday to the States, so for once I’m actually using my laptop as a laptop (!) and trying to make productive use of the 20.27 Lumo train to Edinburgh. [Editor’s note from the future: I failed, because I don’t have Randi’s superpower of being able to work from a train. But hello from Katie and James’s sofa the next day.]
To start, let’s hop back a few weeks to the outskirts of Regent’s Park, on another dark and wintery Friday night, as I made my way to join Randi outside the shuttered entrance of London Zoo for one of the most amazing and generous couple gifts we’ve received: a sleepover in the zoo itself!
“But wait…” you ask, “where in London Zoo can you sleep?” The answer is in one of a small cluster of little cabins just opposite the lion enclosure. After a brief pit stop here for welcome drinks, our group assembled for the first part of our exclusive nighttime tour of the zoo. Spoiler alert: this is absolutely the best way to see the zoo. Our guides were not only super friendly and knowledgeable but they were also happy to bounce around between biology, sociology, architecture (mostly in frustration at the absurd rules over listed buildings) and the philosophy and ethics of zoos and conservation in general.
It’s just quite wonderful to be led around by people who are so passionate about what they do, and could explain so much more about the animals we were looking at than a self-guided visit. We also took part in some of the ‘enrichment’ activities to keep the animals stimulated, such as stuffing nuts into logs for the porcupines to find. If you have the money, I couldn’t recommend this experience enough.
We broke for dinner served in the main zoo café but fancied-up with bonus mood lighting and music. Afterwards, our tour continued – including a peek into the backstage food kitchens – before settling down for the night in our cabin. Finally, after breakfast, we had a final hour to ourselves with one last daytime tour before the gates opened to the general public. Our favourite might have been the gibbons, Jimmy and Yoda, whose spot overlooks the Saturday morning football matches being played in the park. But here’s a short compilation of some of the others too, including the naked mole-rats which – Randi was entranced to learn – are led by a Queen who viciously smashes all of the other rats to prevent anyone from growing too big to challenge her. “Better to be the smasher than the smashee,” as I recall.
(Not included: the Komodo dragon, although she was awesome and we learnt amazing things about parthenogenesis, and the gorillas, because they are so close to humans in their mannerisms that it felt genuinely uncomfortable to film them.)
A massive thank you to Kirsty for such an amazing gift!
On the way home we also stopped by the Tube Map exhibition at The Map House, because of course we did, of which the coolest thing is probably this annotated proof of Harry Beck’s original diagram from 1932. (Note that almost every article I’ve read about this exhibition refers there being a note about ‘Willesden Green’ at the top, because this is what it says in the gallery notes, even though you can see with your eyes that it says ‘Willesden Junction’.) Sadly, the original costs £75,000 so we declined to purchase one, although in pure value for money terms that makes more sense than trying to flog a Tube map from a few years ago for £35.
Talking of Tube maps, the new Overground line names (which we started spotting in October) have now officially rolled out and we are loving life on the Windrush line. Seriously, for everyone who’s visited us in London over the last few years and has had the same criticism about confusing Overground line maps: your problems are solved.
Last month we also saw our final play at the Bush for 2024, Wolves on Road, about two enterprising crypto chancers whose wild rise and inevitable crash was predictable but fun to watch. This was a mostly light-hearted affair, of which the best part was the chemistry between main characters Manny and Abdul, although not all parts of the production met the same high standards.
In November we also braved stormy weather for the (very short) walk over to Angela’s for drinks one evening – which were lovely – while I very much enjoyed a work lunch at Granger & Co and am making a mental note here to go back.
Next time on dom.blog: An emergency flight to a Christmas Market…
Exactly eight years ago, after watching the Cubs win the World Series, I wrote:
I fully expect the election of America’s first female President to follow next week. But just in case…. here was the high before the low. Look how happy we were!
So, OK, lesson learnt. This time I’m not expecting anything. But I will stay very hopeful for all of our friends and family who have been working, volunteering or raising money for Kamala. We appreciate you! 💙
Going even further back in time, I have a whole collection of nostalgic memories from my late teens or early 20s filed under ‘being dragged to a gig in Camden’ in which Josh, Abbi or some combination of the two had a band they really wanted to see playing at the back of a pub. So it was very strange a few weekends ago when we popped over to the Fiddler’s Elbow to see Randi’s colleague Terrie, and her band The Red Queens, for a Sunday night set.
It felt like very little had changed – aside from not needing to take out cash to cover the entrance charge anymore – with the same restrained nodding from the black t-shirted crowd around the stage. But I really enjoyed it – not least because Terrie’s band was great! – and I hope we see them again soon.
There were more blasts from the past this month at Matt and Rachael’s wonderful wedding, including reunions with former Groupon colleagues Sam and Ben as well as Matt and Clark’s old flatmate Emily. Unfortunately, Emily had to run home early to look after a nervous dog, so the following weekend I headed to Crawley for a proper, unhurried catch-up in her local pub plus a first-rate tour of Crawley’s third most impressive park. (I only have this ranking on Emily’s authority, and I have to say I was surprised at how nice Crawley’s third best park actually was.) This was a super fun evening and a good reminder that you never know when you might see someone again!
Finally, I’ve seen a few things:
- Coherence, the latest film recommendation from Katie from the “when Randi’s away” list. I really, really liked this sci-fi thriller about a dinner party gone awry when a mysterious comet causes its guests to start shifting between alternate realities, even if it did leave me a little paranoid that an alternative reality Dominic would try to break in and murder me overnight. Would recommend, especially because the director has been willing to answer many detailed questions about the plot in helpful YouTube videos.
- The Real Ones at the Bush theatre. My first thought immediately after seeing this was “maybe one of the best plays we’ve seen here?”, and then I had to second-guess myself because maybe I always feel that way. Regardless, this was a fantastic production centered on the friendship between Neelam and Zaid, two British Pakistanis from Ilford who we originally meet as 19 year olds before their lives spin off in different directions. It’s hard not to love these characters, even if Zaid is ultimately more self-destructive, and there’s something very moving about a play which treats the rise and fall of a platonic friendship with the same seriousness as a grand romance.
- Statues, also at the Bush, in their smaller studio space. This is a two-man show about loss, grief and code switching, as English teacher Yusuf is shocked to discover that the silent father he’d known had once been a boisterous rapper for life, love and liberation. This felt like a very personal play, written and performed by Azan Ahmed, and together with Jonny Khan he shifted between the characters with incredible skill. I especially appreciated their endearing portrayals of teenage speech and body language, with just the right balance of affected nonchalance and earnest self-expression.
Well, this is it. I’ll hit the publish button, and then by next time we’ll all have discovered which future those critical swing voters in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Nevada had in store for us. Good luck…
Last week I returned to Amsterdam for Booking.com’s annual Travel Tech conference for software partners. The event itself was great, and this year I was super happy to be joined by Kira who (a) could split the technical roundtable sessions with me, (b) was willing to indulge my late night craving for pizza. Thank you!
Since the conference finished on a Friday, we took advantage of the weekend by having Randi fly out to meet me in Amsterdam on Friday afternoon and then catching the train tother to Haarlem, a nearby city which Randi’s parents had really enjoyed on their recent trip to the Netherlands. (And when I say ‘nearby’ city I mean really, really nearby – this is a small country and nothing is far apart.) Anyway, Haarlem is lovely! As it happens, Randi had just upgraded her phone so you can appreciate it through some artfully refined photos which I have stolen for this post.
After an evening stroll along the canal to the local windmill and a great Italian meal, we retired to our boutique hotel suite (the ‘sardine’ suite – probably not the name I’d use for any hotel room but actually very spacious) and slept soundly before waking up for an early-morning run into the countryside and\or sleeping some more.
Later that morning we enjoyed some tasty savoury crepes from a café on a pretty little side street while watching the cyclists go by. The centre of Haarlem follows the typical Dutch street layout where the ‘road’ and ‘pavement’ aren’t sharply delineated from each other, which sounds scary but works because the cars have been completely tamed. Sure, there are a few going by, but for the most part everyone is on their bikes, with many kids either cycling alongside their parents or sitting happily in a trailer. It’s both beautiful and a little infuriating. This isn’t a fantasy utopia! It’s just the Netherlands!
Afterwards we took the bus to the beach resort of Zandvoort, admired the plaques commemorating the great and good of Zandvoort (often with local notes along the lines of “his uncle still lives in Zandvoort”) and took a stroll along the sandy beach. We got very lucky with the weather this whole weekend, and despite it being October could enjoy cocktails at a beach bar as if we were on some tropical island (with jumpers).
On Saturday we also admired the interior of the local church, popped into a board game café and had dinner at Kokkie Londo, a Javanese restaurant with a set menu, delicious food and a very cheerful chef who tours the tables to talk about his food with an infectious laugh. Finally, back at our hotel, we curled up on the sofa with some complimentary wine and chocolate to watch a Norwegian police procedural (with Dutch subtitles) and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (which still throws me with the new lifelines). It makes me a bit sad that enjoying random TV from another country is now archaic, and I don’t suppose anyone younger than us would ever think to do it. Still, Google Translate was very helpful for translating the quiz questions, even if we still didn’t know whose cabinet was brought down by the Night of Schmelzer in 1966.
We spent most of Sunday at the nearby Zuid-Kennemerland National Park and decided to rent bikes from the visitor centre. Despite several staff members reminding us that helmets aren’t compulsory in the Netherlands – and basically nobody thinks to wear them – we insisted on paying extra so that all the other cyclists would see that we were stupid tourists.
While I definitely got quite sore by the end, riding around the park was so lovely and peaceful, and the occasional detours out of the park onto nearby roads only underlined how exceptional the cycling infrastructure is here. For any main road there’s just always a dedicated cycle lane, with no awkward missing gaps or theatrening car traffic. It felt completely safe, and quite magical.
The price for such a relaxed Sunday was a very late flight back from Amsterdam and then a taxi from Heathrow, but it was a price worth paying for such a full and enjoyable weekend in Haarlem. A final word of appreciation goes to the German-themed Wurst & Schnitzelhaus near the station before we left, with some fine German beer and the staff all complete in dirndl and lederhosen. In fact, the Dutch seem to be particularly fond of dressing up in restaurants, with everyone in Indonesian outfits on Saturday night at our Javanese place. It feels vaguely inappropriate, but is obviously considered to be a critical part of the theming.
In retrospect, flying back to London on Sunday night was a stupid plan because on Tuesday morning I was back out again on a stupidly early Eurostar to Paris for a work event. In mitigation, Eric was over from the States so it was great to see him in person again and catch-up as we caffined ourselves up to being fully awake. The event itself was fantastic – always excellent to meet some of our customers in person, share what we’re working on and gather feedback – and in the evening we all went to the famous (and joyously French) Moulin Rouge cabaret show.
Back in London again, on Thursday we gathered almost all of eviivo’s R&D department in person for an offsite meeting, roadmap kick-off and pub evening together. It’s always a bit surreal when this happens, as seeing everyone from Zoom in person feels a bit like a reunion with characters from a computer game. But I really enjoyed chatting to everyone – too many to name here! Finally, this weekend Randi and I congratulated Caroline and Josh at their pre-baby bash, before joining Reema at a nearby pub in Streatham for a catch-up and general work\life updates. Sadly, we could not cycle home afterwards. But if we were Dutch, we would have cycled home. Sigh.
After having their original London travel plans scuppered by Covid back in 2020, last month we were finally able to welcome our New York friends (and regular companions on European jaunts) Mike and Melissa to the city. Melissa came armed with a list of food recommendations from a friend, and happily our inaugural pub dinner at The Mayflower was able to tick off both ‘fish and chips’ and ‘sticky toffee pudding’ in one outing. Later – partly because Mike got confused about the currency exchange situation and thought we were still in the Liz Truss era – we also enjoyed fancy dinners together at Rovi and Dishoom.
Our other big outing together (unless you’re counting the Bakerloo line) was to see Hadestown, a musical retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice which was recommended by my colleague Annie and has actually been floating around for many years without quite entering my consciousness. In case you’re unfamiliar with the Ancient Greek myth, Orpheus is a musician in Ancient Greek mythology who loses his wife, Eurydice, after she is bitten by a snake and dies. (Well, this is what I learnt in my children’s illustrated book of Greek myths as a child. In some tellings, Eurydice only steps on the snake because she’s fleeing from a satyr who is half-man, half-goat and fully obnoxious.)
In this musical the journey to the underworld is a little more interesting, as a desperate Eurydice bargains her life away to Hades while Orpheus is simply too distracted by his music to make enough money to survive. Either way, a grieving Orpheus uses the power of his music to travel to the underworld and persuades Hades and Persephone to let him take Eurydice back to the world of the living. The answer, surprisingly, is yes… as long as he doesn’t look back at Eurydice on his journey until he’s made it out of the underworld. Orpheus takes the deal and is almost back home when he faces a crisis of confidence and turns around to check that Hades hasn’t tricked him. Fleetingly, he sees Eurydice behind him for one last time before she is pulled back forever.
As you might imagine, both Randi and I find this moment incredibly frustrating and exchanged a mutual look of exasperation in the theatre when it happened. The game theory is not exactly complicated:
| Look back | Don’t look back | |
| Hades is honest | No Eurydice | Eurydice |
| Hades is lying | No Eurydice | No Eurydice |
But this irrationality is Orpheus’s fault, not that of the musical, which was lots of fun despite the inherently downbeat ending. For me, the central couple were a little outshone by the secondary characters such as Hades and Persephone, and my absolute favourite performance was the messenger god Hermes. This role was played in the West End by Melanie La Barrie, and it’s a little jarring on the Broadway album to hear it in a man’s voice.
Awkwardly, the show also includes a song from Hades entitled “Why We Build the Wall” which feels like a painfully unsubtle anti-Trump statement, even though the writer is at pains to point out that it was written back in 2006 and wasn’t intended as a reference to Trump at all. Still, Hades in this musical is a brutal industrialist – ransacking the natural resources of the planet and exploiting the labour of the masses – and in general it’s done well, even if sometimes it teeters on the brink of becoming a generalised anti-industrial critique. And I’m always suspicious of anti-industrial critiques becoming performed in expensive West End theatre shows.
Anyway – back in this industrialised land of the living – some of our other exciting London outings during this jam-packed weekend included a trip to the Crystal Palace dinosaurs and an impromptu stop at Gordon’s Wine Bar! Hopefully we will get a chance to see them in New York in the not-too-distant future, especially as I discovered that they now live near the New York Transit Museum…
Talking of transport, the following weekend Randi and I were back in Crystal Palace for the open day of the restored Crystal Palace Subway. This was a beautiful Victorian walkway linking the old Crystal Palace High Level station (closed 1954) with the actual Crystal Palace itself (burnt down 1936) and it was very cool to see how much work has gone into the space. That evening, completing the theme, we headed off to the London Transport Museum to see The Truth About Harry Beck, a strange two-handed play about the inventor of the Tube map (sorry, diagram) and his wife Nora. It’s a bit of a sad story, with an obsessive Harry losing all credit for his design, which is also told brilliantly in Jay Foreman’s video. But there are also lighter moments of audience interaction, and the relationship between the pair is very sweet overall.
September also included Reema’s birthday tapas (including her super-cool mother and aunt) and a weekend away to stay with Randi’s friends Andrew and Mark, who live in a village about a 20 minute drive from Nuneaton. Their house, which is the kind of massive classically-inspired renovation project they feature on Grand Designs, is so incredibly tasteful and beautiful I felt obliged to change into a buttoned shirt when I arrived.
By a great coincidence, I happen to be reading The Odyssey at the moment, so having Andrew on hand as a fully-trained classicist to answer all of my stupid questions was incredibly helpful. We were also fed with Mark’s delicious homegrown vegetables fresh from their garden and taken on a tour of where the Battle of Bosworth Field took place. This is no more my area of history than Ancient Greece, but helpfully the partisans of Richard III have placed their own signs around the site to lament his loss of the crown to Henry VII. It’s unclear to me why they still feel they have a dog in this fight.
This basically wraps things up for September. In my next post, I’ll catch-up with our October travels!
Hello blog! I’m typing this on my delightfully fresh new laptop, which – thanks to the really decent longevity of my former laptops – now joins an impressively short list by becoming only the fourth I’ve ever owned. It’s also my first non-Intel laptop, using an Arm-based processor instead, and the good news is that Windows now does a decent job of emulating most older software so making the switch is pretty seamless.
The big exception is supposed to be gaming, and although I’ve never done much of that, the process of setting everything up did make me think “hmm, but what game would I even want to play anyway?”. And then it hit me: Crash Bandicoot. I have a childhood memory of staying up all night with my sisters at someone else’s house – I forget whose – watching them play Crash Bandicoot on PlayStation and being quite envious that we didn’t have a video game console at home. But surely now, with an exciting and expensive machine from the far-future sitting in front of me, I might finally be able to play it? And the answer is… yes! It turns out the series was remastered a few years back, including for PC, and my Arm laptop is able to pretend to be an Intel laptop cosplaying as a PlayStation without any complaints. Of course, I am obviously quite rubbish without all those childhood years to practice, but while Randi’s been in South Africa on a work trip over the past week I’ve been having a great time smashing boxes and jumping over things.
It didn’t take Randi and I quite as long as this to crack open the Dominion: Empires expansion we were gifted a few years back, but now that we’ve had more weekends together we’ve finally had time to play a few games, and it’s been really fun diving back into Dominion and – in this expansion specifically – wracking up debt to buy new and exciting cards. We also had an indulgent tapas dinner together at Good as Gold in Brockley, which Randi had been eyeing, ordering almost twice as many dishes as the more restrained couple next to us. I’ve also been able to enjoy watching Doctor Who all over again! (Memo to the universe: there’s no law saying that Doctors are term-limited to three seasons, and I’d be very OK with Ncuti pushing the boat out here.)
For the August Bank Holiday weekend we went to see mum in Exmouth, where Randi felt an influx of holiday vibes and suggested that the three of us take a cycle ride together along the river to Topsham for a drink. As only a very occasional cyclist I was still slightly nervous on the way there, even though the route is almost entirely along a quiet cycle path, but fortunately it turns out that having a pint is immensely relaxing and I enjoyed the ride home with a lot more breezy confidence! (Note: this is not driving advice.) Shout-out also to the pub in Lympstone where we broke for a very enjoyable dinner on the way home, before quickly taking to our bikes to avoid losing all the light completely.
On Sunday we reverted to our feet for a circular walk around Otterton, and then settled in for the evening to watch Nyad – a biopic about distance swimmer Diana Nyad who successfully made it from Cuba to Florida on her fifth try in 2013, aged 64, after an initial attempt back in 1978. There’s very much a Steve Jobs-like quality to Nyad, which means you can either sit back and admire the incredible achievements – and sheer force of will – or you can start to unpick things by noting that she sometimes treats other people very badly, and isn’t always completely truthful about her accomplishments. To be clear, I don’t think this is a problem we need to stress out about: the world does need people like Steve Jobs and Diana Nyad, and even if there are a lot of grey areas around the events of 2013 (Guinness World Records later renounced its certification of the record as an ‘unaided’ swim, not that you’d know from the film) nobody disputes that Nyad is an incredible athlete who made it through shark-infested waters after swimming for over two days straight.
Other recent things have included a fascinating conversation with fellow QPCS alum Munnawar (in which we definitely went way, way beyond the scope of what the phone call was supposed to be about), serendipitously catching some of the Paralympics opening ceremony with Tash and Cormac (after buying nine Magnums, to make a point) and catching dinner with Bronwen and Josie at the Honor Oak.
With Randi, I also finally watched Mean Girls. It’s been a least a decade after I first said something like “hmm, I should actually watch this film so I can appreciate all of the memes better” and by this point half of the fun of watching a teen comedy from 2004 is laughing at all of the many, many things which would no longer be deemed acceptable in 2024. (Hey, that’s the nature of comedy, after all – for something to be funny it normally has to lie somewhere on the boundary of good taste.) But it was good. I endorse Mean Girls, at least the original, although I do not endorse serving school lunches in brown paper bags.
Without Randi, I also followed Katie’s recommendation and watched Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters. As you might deduce, it’s a documentary about a group of people who are really, really good at Tetris. What’s interesting is that the whole thing is self-consciously inspired by The King of Kong film from a few years earlier (which I also watched recently) but the people taking part in this one have clearly taken notes and don’t want to come over as “cheats, sycophants or sanctimonious self-appointed referees” (©Me). Instead, for the most part the Tetris community comes across as much more supportive and lovely than those Donkey Kong bros.
Finally, I’ll leave you with this fortuitous last-minute meeting of the ways at Casa Tua, James’s spiritual home near King’s Cross!
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
