My dear Family & Friends
I don’t write a diary (unless you regard this letter as a type of diary, in which case, yes, I do write a diary.) My theory is that if I can’t remember what happened or what I did, then it’s not worth writing about. What that means is that I don’t have much to write about this week. But that doesn’t mean that nothing happened though.
High on the event scale was a trip into London for dinner last Tuesday evening. Lucia had to go into the city for work, so I emailed Becky (whom we met in Zanzibar two years ago) to find out if she and her partner, Katie, would be free for dinner that evening. Becky and Katie will be celebrating their civil union this weekend, and we were particularly keen to meet Katie before the big day. We had tried to meet up before, but circumstances had mitigated against this. So, after a couple emails backwards and forwards, we agreed to meet at a pub called The Woolpack near London Bridge station.
I caught the train into London in the afternoon to take advantage of the cheaper rate. The return fare for arrivals in London (from Leamington Spa) plus a London Travelcard before 10h00 is £75, from 10h00 to 14h30 it’s £29, and after 14h30 it’s £21. Travel is very expensive in this country. Anyway, I arrived in London some time after 16h00, leaving me with just over an hour to kill before I met Lucia outside the Yahoo! offices on Shaftesbury Avenue. I took the tube from Marylebone Station, the London hub for the Chiltern train service, to Picadilly Circus, and then zigzagged my way through Soho, Chinatown, around Leicester Square and Covent Garden to the Yahoo! building. I walked past the building several times; given the company’s profile on the Internet, I had expected it to be emblazoned with big neon signs advertising Yahoo!’s presence, but it was actually all very English and understated. You had to know what number you were looking for on Shaftesbury Avenue.
I love the vibrancy and feel of London and I’d love to live there if we could – maybe we still will. It would certainly be interesting trying to find a property to support a small family which includes two big dogs. You might then be able to catch the hint of a glint of hope in my eye as I watch property prices begin to slip in the midst of this credit crunch.
When I met Lucia after her presentation, we walked down Charing Cross Road to Leicester Square tube station and caught the Picadilly line to Holborn and then the Central line to Bank in the middle of the financial district. We had intended to catch the Northern Line the two stops to London Bridge from there, but we hadn’t considered how busy Bank station would be at peak hour. It was hot and stuffy and jam-packed with bankers and brokers crowding around the pedestrian tunnels down to the Underground platforms, and so we decided to escape to the open air and walk the last bit instead. Our route took us past the Bank of England and across London Bridge as the gloom of night began to settle in. I had to consult my London map book several times under street lamps to make sure of where we were and where we were going, but we found our way to the pub easily enough.
We had a great evening. We really like Katie, the food and wine were good, and we could have stayed and chatted far longer if we didn’t have a train to catch back to Leamington Spa. The last train from London arrives in Leamington way past midnight, so I had targeted the second last train which departs Marylebone at 21h30. We made it with just a minute to spare.
Let me jump from there to Saturday. We had a longstanding arrangement to meet Richard, Anne and (daughter) Polly at Snowshill Manor, one of the National Trust properties near Broadway in the Cotswolds, for the Snowshill Apple Day. The day was advertised as a big event for Snowshill, but, I must confess, I was expecting a bit more. I was expecting tastings of apple juice, cider and, of course, apples, and a big sort of party atmosphere. What it actually consisted of was two smallish marquees, each with a long table of every type of apple one could possibly find. There must have been more than 100 different types of apples which was quite surprising for someone, like me, whose sole experience of apples was the fruit aisle at the supermarket.
After the apples and strolling through the garden, Richard and I, followed one of the gardeners for a short talk on compost heaps. Did you know that the temperature at the core of a compost heap rises to around 55C during the most active part of the composting process? No, me neither. Make no mistake though, we still enjoyed ourselves; it’s wonderful to be outdoors when the sun comes out and there is a bit of blue sky above you as autumn turns to winter.
From Snowshill we tracked back to Richard and Anne’s home in the little hamlet of Winderton near Shipston-on-Stour for dinner. I loved watching the sun set across the hills from the warmth of their glass enclosed sun room. Over coffee after dinner Richard, Polly and I started an impromptu drumming session on the goat-skin drums that they brought back from SA. I don’t think we were very good, but Lucia and Anne smiled anyway.
And that’s it for the week really. I also started reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the follow-up to Fooled By Randomness. One of his theses that I find particularly interesting is the retrospective distortion of written history – call it 20:20 hindsight. Along with historians, journalists are also particularly guilty of this – after all, you’ve got to fill those pages somehow, and there’s a new page day after day after day. Simply stated, it is that humans have a habit of fitting reasons to behaviour and events after the fact as if those events were then predictable. So, for instance, it’s easy now to say that it was obvious a Credit Crunch was coming, yet most people were still surprised when it arrived. Even though I believed that the crunch was coming, I couldn’t tell Lucia when it would arrive and what would be the spark that lit the tinder. If I’d known that, I would have shorted the shit out of the banking sector and I might have been writing this to you from a palm-fringed beach somewhere in the tropics. But I’m in Warwick and it’s raining outside. I buy lottery tickets every week.
That’s it for now
L
There are a few more pictures at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones
I don’t write a diary (unless you regard this letter as a type of diary, in which case, yes, I do write a diary.) My theory is that if I can’t remember what happened or what I did, then it’s not worth writing about. What that means is that I don’t have much to write about this week. But that doesn’t mean that nothing happened though.
High on the event scale was a trip into London for dinner last Tuesday evening. Lucia had to go into the city for work, so I emailed Becky (whom we met in Zanzibar two years ago) to find out if she and her partner, Katie, would be free for dinner that evening. Becky and Katie will be celebrating their civil union this weekend, and we were particularly keen to meet Katie before the big day. We had tried to meet up before, but circumstances had mitigated against this. So, after a couple emails backwards and forwards, we agreed to meet at a pub called The Woolpack near London Bridge station.
I caught the train into London in the afternoon to take advantage of the cheaper rate. The return fare for arrivals in London (from Leamington Spa) plus a London Travelcard before 10h00 is £75, from 10h00 to 14h30 it’s £29, and after 14h30 it’s £21. Travel is very expensive in this country. Anyway, I arrived in London some time after 16h00, leaving me with just over an hour to kill before I met Lucia outside the Yahoo! offices on Shaftesbury Avenue. I took the tube from Marylebone Station, the London hub for the Chiltern train service, to Picadilly Circus, and then zigzagged my way through Soho, Chinatown, around Leicester Square and Covent Garden to the Yahoo! building. I walked past the building several times; given the company’s profile on the Internet, I had expected it to be emblazoned with big neon signs advertising Yahoo!’s presence, but it was actually all very English and understated. You had to know what number you were looking for on Shaftesbury Avenue.
I love the vibrancy and feel of London and I’d love to live there if we could – maybe we still will. It would certainly be interesting trying to find a property to support a small family which includes two big dogs. You might then be able to catch the hint of a glint of hope in my eye as I watch property prices begin to slip in the midst of this credit crunch.
When I met Lucia after her presentation, we walked down Charing Cross Road to Leicester Square tube station and caught the Picadilly line to Holborn and then the Central line to Bank in the middle of the financial district. We had intended to catch the Northern Line the two stops to London Bridge from there, but we hadn’t considered how busy Bank station would be at peak hour. It was hot and stuffy and jam-packed with bankers and brokers crowding around the pedestrian tunnels down to the Underground platforms, and so we decided to escape to the open air and walk the last bit instead. Our route took us past the Bank of England and across London Bridge as the gloom of night began to settle in. I had to consult my London map book several times under street lamps to make sure of where we were and where we were going, but we found our way to the pub easily enough.
We had a great evening. We really like Katie, the food and wine were good, and we could have stayed and chatted far longer if we didn’t have a train to catch back to Leamington Spa. The last train from London arrives in Leamington way past midnight, so I had targeted the second last train which departs Marylebone at 21h30. We made it with just a minute to spare.
Let me jump from there to Saturday. We had a longstanding arrangement to meet Richard, Anne and (daughter) Polly at Snowshill Manor, one of the National Trust properties near Broadway in the Cotswolds, for the Snowshill Apple Day. The day was advertised as a big event for Snowshill, but, I must confess, I was expecting a bit more. I was expecting tastings of apple juice, cider and, of course, apples, and a big sort of party atmosphere. What it actually consisted of was two smallish marquees, each with a long table of every type of apple one could possibly find. There must have been more than 100 different types of apples which was quite surprising for someone, like me, whose sole experience of apples was the fruit aisle at the supermarket.
After the apples and strolling through the garden, Richard and I, followed one of the gardeners for a short talk on compost heaps. Did you know that the temperature at the core of a compost heap rises to around 55C during the most active part of the composting process? No, me neither. Make no mistake though, we still enjoyed ourselves; it’s wonderful to be outdoors when the sun comes out and there is a bit of blue sky above you as autumn turns to winter.
From Snowshill we tracked back to Richard and Anne’s home in the little hamlet of Winderton near Shipston-on-Stour for dinner. I loved watching the sun set across the hills from the warmth of their glass enclosed sun room. Over coffee after dinner Richard, Polly and I started an impromptu drumming session on the goat-skin drums that they brought back from SA. I don’t think we were very good, but Lucia and Anne smiled anyway.
And that’s it for the week really. I also started reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the follow-up to Fooled By Randomness. One of his theses that I find particularly interesting is the retrospective distortion of written history – call it 20:20 hindsight. Along with historians, journalists are also particularly guilty of this – after all, you’ve got to fill those pages somehow, and there’s a new page day after day after day. Simply stated, it is that humans have a habit of fitting reasons to behaviour and events after the fact as if those events were then predictable. So, for instance, it’s easy now to say that it was obvious a Credit Crunch was coming, yet most people were still surprised when it arrived. Even though I believed that the crunch was coming, I couldn’t tell Lucia when it would arrive and what would be the spark that lit the tinder. If I’d known that, I would have shorted the shit out of the banking sector and I might have been writing this to you from a palm-fringed beach somewhere in the tropics. But I’m in Warwick and it’s raining outside. I buy lottery tickets every week.
That’s it for now
L
There are a few more pictures at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/llewellynijones
