On the trains

You are commuting again.
And just as you think that your reverse culture shock has delivered all the after tremors possible, you find yourself consumed by irritation once again.
Because British people do not know how to use the underground properly.
Obsessed by this personal space nonsense, even at peak time rush hour they are insistent on maintaining that [...]

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On Remembrance Day

You now no longer have any grandparents.
You miss them.
You were interested to discover yesterday that your new packet of paracetamol came encrusted with Braille, but it reminded you that you will now not be able to ask Grandma whether she finds the little bits of Braille on the buttons you press on the buses to tell the [...]

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On the buses.

So the contractions you were displaying proudly for the world here on the 20th, weren’t.
They were, according to the midwives, ’tightenings’ and, officially, did not hurt. 
A comment which, by your third visit to the hospital for monitoring, after you had had a night of napping for five or ten minutes before being catapulted upright by a [...]

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On bad habits.

By and large you have not embraced the mobile phone.
The last time you had to use one, you spent ten minutes swearing under your breath and had to punch every button on the thing at least three times before you could remember precisely which combination was needed in order to get it to connect with [...]

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On being lost in translation.

Having discovered that you had slightly misinterpreted the setting of the book by a Spanish author – with large chunks of it set in Spain simply because Spain is the centre of the universe, as opposed to somewhere suitably Continentally decedent for odd Art to take place – it got you thinking about the other series [...]

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On dark desires.

So there you are last week sometime standing at the bus stop in the early morning gloom, leaning on a lamp post and waiting for your ride to come by.
Suddenly, there it is, lumbering slowly and reddly down the road towards you. You stand up a bit straighter, brace yourself for action and prepare to put out a [...]

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On the rewards of persistence.

After turning on the TV, the second thing you and B did in Moscow was visit B’s newlywed friend A and his bride. Which was a lot of fun.
About halfway through the evening, A said, giggling, “Do you remember the time we went to the monestary?”
Sure do:
The social call to B’s monk at his monestary had [...]

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On the importance of noticing shoes.

A young colleague once told you that the people of L___ - the next small town over from the small town in which you both lived and worked – are ‘not the same as us’.
This, of course, tells you everything you ever need to know about how wars, pogroms or ethnic cleansing get started. However, while conceding that if [...]

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