Category: Diary
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Lessons in Humility
Saturday, 10 December 2022 Up at as near to dawn as I could manage, out into the coldest I’d yet experienced. According to the weather app it was zero degrees but felt like minus five. It felt like zero to me. The temperatures don’t have the bite the raw numbers suggest, perhaps because of the…
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Manhattan on Foot
Friday, 9 December 2022 Up and out of bed as early as I can manage, trying to force my body into a new time zone. On the street at roughly 9am and start walking, first up Lexington Avenue to a café that the internet told me is a slice of Melbourne transplanted to NYC. My…
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The Longest Thursday in the World
Travel across this many time zones is almost everything, if not all at once, at least within the one package. Numbing and thrilling, it consumes your attention while being profoundly boring. The hours are interminable, while the individual moments are absurd and absorbing. The hours I will elide – they bored me at the time,…
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Fragment – Farmers’ Market Diary
A snippet I found lurking on Google Drive, part of a project that (like so many) apparently started with a certain sparkle but failed to live long enough to have a part 2. It’s maybe three years old. Liz is in Dublin now, and I haven’t seen much of Heidi since, but here it is.…
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Self-incompatibility
Spring is springing, and with it the quotidian miracle of new life on many fronts, not least in the fifteen centimetres of unpromising dirt that hems one side of our house block. Hard by the corrugated iron fence that daily prevents violence by separating me from my neighbours has sproinged into existence a minor forest…
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Europe 29 – Le XIIIe siècle
A day in la Cité de Carcassonne. Some reading up on the Albigensian Crusade (C was a redoubt of the Cathars, I learn) and a short lecture is delivered in two versions for the boys on the feudal system and mediaeval military logistics, then we’re off to the walled city. Which is every bit as…
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Europe 28 – Goodbye to Berlin
I have left this too long, partly because it was such a waste of a day. Forewarned that Schönefeld Airport is a national joke and to be early to allow for inevitable delays, we were early, and were evitably processed with efficiency and rapidity. That left us with the best part of three hours to…
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Europe 27 – Babylon
The way to do museums, with kids, is hit ’em early, while they’re still waking up. Also, audio guides. “That queue will be at least an hour,” said some bloke to some bloke I met in the queue, who relayed the message. Bloke didn’t know what he was talking about, blessedly, and about half an…