New home (again!)

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This morning I wandered downstairs in our new apartment for a morning cup of tea, stuck on the BBC’s Olympics coverage (thanks but no thanks, NBC) and watched Britain beat Canada in a game of women’s rugby sevens. Which was great for three reasons: patriotic fervour, warm memories of London 2012, and the fact that thanks to Jen and my trip to Wellington I now appreciate (and largely understand) rugby sevens.

But to rewind: new apartment! After two great years of living with Billy, last weekend I successfully moved a full 1.3km away into a new place with Randi and our flatmate Amanda. And very nice it is too.

New home!

New home!

Our first guests were Jason and Carrie, with whom we played the Would I Lie To You? board game in boys vs. girls teams. You can guess who won from the pictures below.

There was a master strategy. It just didn't work.

There was a master strategy. It just didn’t work.

No comment

No comment

Last weekend we also saw Star Trek Beyond with Todd and Carolyn, which was great company (obviously) but a disappointing film. There were plenty of enjoyable moments for existing fans, but not enough overall to elevate it from standard action movie sequences if (like Randi) this was your first exposure. My much more successful attempt to indoctrinate Randi into my childhood favourites has been the Robot Wars revival, which we’ve been watching on Sunday nights with great enthusiasm. 3-2-1-ACTIVATE!

It was also great to have lunch with Carolyn’s friend Beric as he reached Chicago on his American road trip, as it was to catch up / argue about market failure with Alex at Oyster Bah. After a bit of a theatre dry spell we also saw This Beautiful City – a musical exploration of mid-2000s evangelicals in Colorado Springs – performed by the ATC’s youth ensemble and produced by the ever-wonderful Grace Cannon. (I write that with some resignation as her Chicago leaving party is next week.) Last but certainly not least, last night Randi and I went out to celebrate her new job… hooray!

The restaurant pretends to be in Santa Monica, but we're definitely still in Chicago

The restaurant pretends to be in Santa Monica, but we’re definitely still in Chicago

Today’s utterly unhelpful and unconnected post title is brought to you by the delightful discovery that it is possible to listen to a cover of Shut Up and Dance in Spanish! So go do that right now.

Since coming back from London, the top priority has been been finding a new apartment (check) followed by persuading someone else to live with me and Randi (check), filling out apartment-acquiring paperwork (check) and persuading utility companies that I am a real person (in progress*). In the meantime we said goodbye to Todd and Carl from Groupon (if I weren’t so reserved, I would just crawl under a table and weep) and Catherine from Chicago (ditto, although since she’s going to war to fight the Trump nightmare, it’s also comforting).

Racing for the galaxy with Jason, Carrie and Randi

Racing for the galaxy with Jason, Carrie and Randi

Also: Lauri and Calvin both had birthday parties, plus Randi and I had consecutive weekends with Jason and Carrie to brunch and play Race for the Galaxy. It’s an excellent card game which Katie got me for my birthday and, despite initially seeming like the most complicated thing in the world, is actually very easy to pick up and play. (Not so easy to beat Jason and win as of yet, but I’ll keep trying.)

Not being people who watch a lot of films, we were slightly at a loss for next steps after deciding on a whim to watch ‘something’ last weekend. After lazily searching for ‘IMDB top movies’ (not really giving the collective wisdom of the crowd much to work with) we ended up with 12 Angry Men, which is a justified classic and makes me impatient to be called for jury service. (Note to the UK: I’m willing to fly home for it.) Jason tells us there’s a Chinese remake – 12 Citizens – in which students at a law school hold a mock jury trial as part of a Western law class. Take that, dramatic tension.

Tomorrow I’m off to Tokyo! ??

(*Sure, it’s slightly annoying to spend one lunchtime queuing up at the sole open counter of an ‘alternative financial services‘ establishment, just for the privilege of paying a registration fee and having my passport scanned. A registration fee to be paid in cash, note, which requires use of the cashpoint in the corner for a $2.75 surcharge. But whatever, it’s a one-time thing. It’s much more sobering to be stood behind folks who are just there to cash regular cheques and buy regular bus passes. It’s obscene, really, to have a financial system which makes the act of using money more expensive for those with least to start with.)

By dint of an unusually straining-at-the-seams backpack – already to blame for some unhappy compromises, most notably the abandonment of two whole boxes of Creme Eggs – I have been forced to carry my laptop along as hand-luggage. Which means, in a silver lining sort of way, that I can start writing up my trip home before I even reach America again.

The Cambridge table at Caroline and Charles's wedding

The Cambridge table at Caroline and Charles’s wedding

The initial anchor for this visit was Caroline and Charles’s wedding in York. They have many, many beautiful photos of their own, but suffice to say it was a beautiful wedding with delicious food, the best first dance selection I have ever seen (Everybody Wants To Be A Cat) and a fancy fireworks display. More importantly, they both looked incredibly happy together, so congratulations!

I woke up the next morning to find myself with no hangover but instead a year older, and spent my birthday morning exploring York (OK, mostly exploring the Railway Museum) with Randi, Katie and Randi’s parents. Then we used the real, actual railway to get back to London, sans Katie, and have dinner in Willesden Green together with my parents, Tash and Randi’s brother Alex. Got that? Good, because the next two weeks were a bit of a blur of working during the day and then shifting combinations of family and friends by night.

Families

Families

One very special meeting was with Jack and his amazing parents, Abbi and Paul, a few hours after he was born at St George’s Hospital. Later on in the trip, we also met Josh and Cindy’s beautiful baby, Isaac, who is a few months older and has learned the twin tricks of smiling and gripping people’s fingers. It was so wonderful to see them both and I can’t wait to watch them grow up.

Last time I was in London I didn’t get a chance to go to the Tricycle – a grave omission – but we made up for it this time around with The Invisible Hand. The synopsis (American banker, Nick Bright, held hostage in Pakistan) made it sound a lot grimmer than it actually was. It’s actually a surprisingly funny play, as Nick is forced to play the market to try and raise his own ransom. A few nights later, we also introduced Randi’s family to the ever-reliable News Revue for some temporary relief during Friday’s grim post-Brexit blues.

Our Harry Potter tickets

Our Harry Potter tickets

But the best stage performance of the trip was, not surprisingly, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I’d been excited about seeing this ever since I snagged tickets on a tense morning back in October, but given the circumstances, it was perfect timing to leave the real world and be transported into JK Rowling’s creation for a combined matinee plus evening showing of Parts One and Two. They rightly implore the audience to keep all of the play’s secrets, so I will do, but it was utterly magical. And the staging alone changed my expectations about what is possible in the theatre.

On top of the (crumbling) world

On top of the (crumbling) world

Wasn't supposed to take a photo of this. Sorry.

Wasn’t supposed to take a photo of this. Sorry.

In blatant thievery of my sisters’ ideas, Randi and I also booked tickets to climb the O2 one night. (As it happened, the last time I was here it was still the Millennium Dome.) Their instructional briefing makes it sound like a feat of endurance, but actually, it’s easier than climbing a flight of stairs. And it’s funny, because while I’m sure the view would have been lovely on a bright, sunny day – or majestic on a clear night – the slightly apocalyptic air of grey clouds and light rain was equally evocative. Especially since you can’t really see much of London from the top, but you can feel like you have a bit role in an action film.

Food, unevenly distributed

Food, unevenly distributed

In the Sir Colin Campbell

In the Sir Colin Campbell

With dad, Daryl and Ermila

With dad, Daryl and Ermila

I have a very long list of other engagements over the last two weeks, including drinks near my old Highbury home with Clark where we celebrated with newly-minted respectable homeowners Cat and Matt. Simon joined me and Randi to complain about Corbyn, update us on his own scandalous life, and plan our upcoming American adventure. I finally saw Oliver and Abi’s flat and enjoyed its proximity to Italian food and wine, ate something like my third burrito of the trip over lunch with Christa (which is absurd, I know) and confirmed – over more drinks – that there is no issue about which I wouldn’t want to hear Melissa’s opinion. (And, y’know, maybe argue about it a little.) Not to mention snatching an hour with Daryl and Ermila, whiling away a night with Josh and Anna in a joyful little pub on Kilburn High Road where an enormous Irish folk band take up most of the space, and having a very brief and unscheduled reunion with Alex Trafford who lamented that my last blog post had made him miserable. Sorry!

Photo courtesy of Villy, Randi's friend who accompanied us to the London Transport Museum

Photo courtesy of Villy, Randi’s friend who accompanied us to the London Transport Museum

Also huge thanks to my family for organising lots of things with the common theme of stuffing me with food: a big gathering at Maggie Jones’s, a great dinner one night at Andrew and Bonnie’s, and one of my grandparents’ famous teas. But I want to conclude with a few more London landmarks which I deployed this year to continue brainwashing Randi:

  1. The London Transport Museum. Obviously.
  2. Dinner on Brick Lane. One of our many Indian dinners, of course, but the only one where you can start to smell the spices as you approach.
  3. A long-awaited sighting of North London’s many, many foxes.
Rainbow! Metaphor!

Rainbow! Metaphor!

I’m not quite done with my trip to the UK, but I wanted to jot down some thoughts on Brexit before flying back. Partly because blogging is much cheaper than therapy, but mostly because I don’t want my upcoming ‘nice things I did at home’ post to be overlaid with lots of doom and gloom about our national implosion.

I stayed up until 3.30am on the night of the result, as it became increasingly obvious that England & Wales had voted to leave. And the feeling in the pit of my stomach was much worse than a disappointing general election. On those nights there is a feeling of gloom, as you watch your country move down a path you wish it hadn’t chosen. But on the night of the EU Referendum, it just felt like nihilism. To feel you have won absolutely nothing from Europe or from globalisation is one thing, but voting Leave also says – with such miserable certainty – that you have no hope for your children or grandchildren either, so pull up the drawbridge and damn the lot of them.

This doesn’t mean that the country is finished, of course, although it’s quite possible that the Union is. But the vote was not won on a manifesto. There was no plan. The leaders of Leave just burned the house down and walked away. There are intellectual arguments, yes, on the right (obsessed, in a rather un-British way, with abstract metaphysics about sovereignty) and the left (keen to prove themselves useful idiots by quitting Europe’s ‘capitalist club’) but neither are why Britain voted to Leave. It’s about immigration, stupid.

I know the ‘elite’ 48% of the country who voted to Remain are now required to humble themselves at anti-migration sentiment. But surrendering to a lie won’t make it true. Reducing migration from inside or outside the European Union will not create a single job, build a single house or care for a single person. No one will win from this. Impoverishment does not enrich culture. When the reckoning comes, and the betrayal is unmasked, the rage that will erupt will be terrifying.

I am disappointed, actually, that Boris will not become Prime Minister. As a lightweight without convictions – just like Cameron – there was a good chance he would choose the easy life domestically and avoid the wilder fringes of Conservative thought. And as the leader of Leave, who never wanted to win, he had the best chance of pulling off the closest possible deal with the EU. Clearly Michael Gove came to the same conclusion, as he knifed him.

Corbyn is not worth more words. Thank goodness for Sadiq Khan.

Polling station photo courtesy Tash, in happier times

Polling station photo courtesy Tash, in happier times

Celebrating Randi (finally!) being done with uni

Celebrating Randi (finally!) being done with uni

  • Following-up my introduction to Indiana Jones with Temple of Doom (truly awful: like some sort of misogyny vs. racism face-off) and then Last Crusade (somewhat redeeming)
  • Saying goodbye to Kevin (off to the West Coast), Nolan (off to the West Coast) and Alex (thankfully not off to the West Coast). Too many goodbyes, really.
  • A wonderful Indian dinner at Ellen’s (who better not ever leave us for the West Coast or I might cry)
  • Eating Ethiopian food for the first time courtesy of Carrie and her mysterious alias. Turns out Ethiopian food is delicious.
  • Seeing Robert and Julie again! This one gets an exclamation mark because I had to wait six months, but it was worth it.
Sharing my extensive baseball expertise with overseas visitors

Sharing my extensive baseball expertise with overseas visitors

Sadly, these are just things you’ll have to go without hearing about, because I urgently need to pack for my flight to the UK tomorrow. So you’ll never know, for example, that at the Sox game I managed three hot dogs to Neil’s paltry two. Sorry!