England

Round about lunch time today, I left my flat. Recently, leaving the flat has been a rare occurrence, at least for something other than going to the local Sainsbury’s or the News Agent to pick up the day’s issue of The Times.

One of the problems working from home is that it becomes very easy to find oneself spending all the time in the warm, comfortable cocoon that is one’s home and castle, and ne’er venturing out.

The desire to stay home has doubled of late, as the weather has taken a decidedly more autumnal turn the past week. The t-shirts have gone into storage (i.e. shoved to the back of the closet) and the sweaters brought out (i.e. dug out from the back of the closet, given a quick smell test, and then either washed or worn, depending on how dank and musty they smell). Just as an aside, they call sweaters “jumpers” here. In North America, a jumper is someone who launches themselves off a bridge.

The desire to stay home was give another boost today as well, for I looked outside and to see that London was experiencing some “wet weather.” That’s the Met Office’s euphemism for rain. The weather forecasters seem to use it a lot. “Today the South-east will experience some wet weather.”

I’m not sure why they don’t just say rain. Perhaps there is a subtlety that I am missing, the difference between rain and wet weather. Much like the Inuit apparently have half-a-million different words for snow, perhaps the English have developed multiple words for rain. Maybe I just haven’t been here long enough to understand the difference.

Despite the rainy, cool weather and internet access, I had to go out today, for I had an appointment at my local doctor’s office, called a surgery here even though there is little cutting and blood involved. MPs call their local offices surgeries as well, though given the state of the economy I can understand why that makes more sense - lots of cut and boiling blood, no doubt. I should have registered with a local doctor back when I first moved into King’s Cross, but was lazy and just got around to registering with my local surgery last week.

Hopefully this doesn’t start a whole “socialist health-care versus private health care debate,” but the way things work here is that you have to register for a doctor’s office near your home. I can choose any doctor I like, as long as they are within a few miles of my home. Some might claim that is a lack of choice, but according to the NHS website I have over 100 doctors to choose from, so I am not too fused about the lack of choice. What I find more limiting is that you can’t choose a doctor near your work. Obviously it doesn’t make a big difference to me, working from home as I am, but if I went to a regular nine to five job, I probably would be less excited about having to pick a doctor back near where I lived.

So today I had to trudge out and get my introductory consultation, which involves getting weighed, measured, blood-pressured and then lectured on how you are a fat, old, alcoholic with a lousy diet (at least, that’s my experience of it...). To do that, I had to head out into the rain. So I put on a rain coat and got out my brolly.

Now, I haven’t always had great luck with umbrellas. Back in September 2005 I wrote the following after returning from a rainy weekend in Boston:

I’m not positive that I really know how to use an umbrella. I see other people walking around with umbrella held steady and level above them, keeping them dry. I find myself struggling with keeping my umbrella above me as the wind reaches underneath the lip of the umbrella and lifts it up and away from me. I get wet, my arms get tired and the umbrella gets battered. On Saturday night, the wind took its final toll on the umbrella, snapping 3 of the arms of the umbrella, collapsing the umbrella. I deposited the umbrella in a garbage can and calculated its utility to me. I bought it in September, used it perhaps 4 times in France, a couple times in Toronto and twice in Boston. 8 days of use for 10 Euros doesn’t seem like a fantastic deal to me. I think in the future I’ll stick with raincoats.

That was then, though. Now that I have lived in the UK for a year and 3 months, I’ve had a fair amount of practice with my brolly, and I think I’ve got it sorted out. The key thing is to keep the umbrella slightly tilted towards the wind direction. This way the wind harmlessly shots over the umbrella.

Now, most people reading this will have probably already known that, or perhaps live in a desert and thus never had reason to learn it. I’m not most people though. It’s taken me a long time (almost 39 years) to figure this umbrella thing out. I like to think I am smarter than your average bear, but it appears that in fact I’m only slightly smarter than bears who never figure out how to use an umbrella.

Now that I have the operation of an umbrella as a weather protection device down pat, I think I’ll start working on the next level of umbrella use... I just have to figure out if it is more impressive to be able to fly like Mary Poppins or to administer a spot of poison in a busy crowd.

I spent the better part of 2006 working in Rutherford, New Jersey, just the other side of Lincoln Tunnel from New York City. Right outside the hotel I was staying at was NJ Transit bus route that, in only 40 minutes, would whisk me to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in central Manhattan. As you might imagine, I spent a few nights and many weekends catching the NJ Transit 192 into Manhattan to see the sights.

At some point during that year, when I was back in Toronto, I was out with my sister. “So, how you are enjoying New York City?” she asked.

“It’s good. Really cool,” I replied. It is a curse of mine that while I can come up with stuff like…

“I hung out in Times Square, wandered around Rockefeller Center, Marvelled at the Chrysler Building, went up the Empire State Building, got choked up at the World Trade Center site, worshipped and prayed to the gods of money at the New York Stock Exchange and wandered across the Brooklyn Bridge in the rain. I ate hot dogs from dirty water and mile high sandwiches at the Carengie Deli. I stared at subway maps, more than a little overwhelmed at the options. I started to talk about places as intersections, not addresses, hoping that the locals didn't catch on I didn't belong.”

…when I write my blog,, but when people ask me in person what I think of a place, I can never think of anything interesting to say. “How was Tanzania?” you might ask me one day, and I would likely reply, “Yeah, neat. Grassy.”

Despite my verbose and encompassing declaration that New York City was “cool,” my sister felt the need to probe to get more information.

“What have you seen?” she asked.

“Ummm. I saw the Empire State Building and Rockerfeller Centre and Ground Zero,” I offered.

My sister frowned. Obviously I was missing the gist of what she was asking. “When someone in the theatre asks you what you have seen, they mean what have you seen at the theatre, Greg,” she offered by way of an explanation. My sister is an actress and singer, and thus was interested in how I was taking advantage at being in New York City, the home of Broadway and theatre that is “usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.” (At least, according to a completely unsourced statement on Wikipedia).

“Oh, right. Well, I stayed at Times Square once, and SAW theatres from the outside,” I offered as an olive branch.

My sister frowned again. Obviously seeing the outside of buildings which probably contain stages is not quite the artistic experience she was hoping I would have had. “Greg, you are in New York City, you have to go and see something,” she pleaded.

And I did… but I am not sure it really counts. I went and saw Spamalot, which I will admit I only really went and saw because I like Monty Python and people said it was funny. I am not sure I can really consider myself much of a serious theatre goer if the play ends with a sing-along of “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life.”

Times Square, Heart of New York City's Broadway Theatre District

I am afraid that when it comes to making me a cultured theatre goer, my sister is probably fighting an uphill battle. After all, I am almost into my fourth decade of life and haven’t really taken to the habit yet. I am creeping towards being a gray haired dog, and you know what they say about old dogs. They fart a lot, and you can’t teach them to sit.

I do think though she was hopeful when she heard I was moving to London, which contains the “West End Theatre” district, and is “usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English speaking world.” (At least, according to a completely unsourced statement on Wikipedia.).

When I was home recently, my sister and I had a similar repeat of the 2006 conversation. “So, what have you seen,” she asked.

This time, however, I knew what the question meant, so I didn’t answer with what tourist sights I had seen, but rather with a list of all the theatre I had been to. “I’ve seen nothing,” I replied.

Unfortunately, understanding the question and having a satisfying answer are two different things. My sister frowned again. “Greg, you are in the middle of the greatest theatre town in the world!” (Obviously, she hadn’t read the Wikipedia entry on Broadway Theatre, otherwise she would have said “one of the two greatest theatre towns in the world.”) “You have to go and see something,” she pleaded again.

“I once saw a homeless man yelling at pigeons on Shaftesbury Avenue,” I suggested.

“Something inside a theatre, with actors,” she clarified.

“I was thinking of seeing Avenue Q,” I offered up by way of an apology, though again that’s mostly because it has puppets and lots of people have said it was funny. I am not positive that seeing a play whose cast includes Gary “What you Talkin’ About, Willis” Coleman really counts as serious theatre.

Piccadilly Circus, in London's West End Theatre District

I haven’t yet seen Avenue Q, but I did something this last weekend that allows me to at least answer the question “what have you seen?” with a more satisfying answer to the theatre types in the world. I have now seen an opera.

Actually, it is even better than that, I’ve seen two opera. For the price of one! Though, admittedly at one act each, they were pretty short operas.

This past weekend I and some friends went to the Peacock Theatre and saw the British Youth Opera perform Rossini’s Il Signor Bruschino and La Scala di Seta. As you might expect, this wasn’t my choice for activity, but rather a birthday treat for a friend. I simply ponied up fifteen pounds for a ticket and tagged along.

The Peacock Theatre is a thousand seat (less one) theatre near The Strand in London. It is, in actuality, a lecture hall for the London School of Economics (LSE), who lease it out to the Sadler’s Wells Theatre to put on shows.

The LSE teaches economics and politics and is quite influential. It’s most famous attendee is probably Sir Michael Phillip Jagger, better known as Mick, though you probably know him because of his work with The Rolling Stones rather than his work on anti-inflationary policies and their impact international trade relations. Could you imagine though if Mick had stuck with the LSE and become a professor of Economics? That first day in the class room and the prof comes strutting in like a peacock, singing “You can’t always get what you want, but with some quantitative easing, you just might find, conditions are in place for green shoots of recovery!”

I did notice that the seats provided very little leg room. I suppose that if you are attending an economics lecture, you probably wouldn’t notice, as the torture of having to listen to someone drone on in a monotone for an hour about supply and demand curves would cause enough discomfort to overwhelm any feelings of pain in your legs. If you are at the opera for three hours, though, it sure would be nice now and again to shuffle the feet around a bit.

Both operas were in Italian, but they had subtitles on an LED illuminated reader board, so I could follow the gist of what was happening. The two comedies were both one-act farces, pretty close to the typical British sex farce, but with a lot more singing in Italian than your usual Carry On film. The singers were all good (to my untuned ear), and they did a good job of having the right level of camp for the comedic material.

The set design for the second play (La Scala di Seta, which is Italian for the Silken Ladder) was interesting. Instead of furniture on stage, they had people wearing black clothing and white masks to act as closets, coat racks and tables. Whenever anyone hid, they just held up a frame in front of their face, which quickly became the short-hand for hiding during the play. There is a lot of hiding in La Scala di Seta. I’m thinking of carrying around a picture frame to hide at work. “We need a volunteer to organise the birthday lunch for Sandra,” someone might say in a meeting. I’ll just hold up my picture frame, and poof, I’ll have disappeared.

I think for the untrained opera neophyte, one act comedies are probably a good place to start. Not so serious, you get to laugh and they are shorter than something a little more serious like Wagner's Ring Cycle. The Ring Cycle is 18 hours long, and despite not being prime comic fodder, I would probably start laughing anyway, as the music would most likely recall to my mind Elmer Fudd singing “kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit!”

So there you go. I’ve actually seen something now in London. Maybe… I’m not sure that going to the opera counts as seeing something.

See, when I emailed my sister to tell her I was going to the opera, she replied, “does this mean that someday you may actually go to the London THEATRE?” I’m not sure what the difference between opera and theatre is, after all they both take place on a stage, but sounds like I still may not have seen anything in London.

The last day of July was my last day up in Birmingham, and after returning from Toronto, I have been working on developing some internal systems training for my company, which has me working at home most days, but with the occasional trip down to my company’s HQ in Egham.

Getting to Egham requires travelling for about an hour and a half, transferring from the London Underground to Southern Trains at Victoria Station, and then transferring to South West Trains at Clapham Junction, the self-proclaimed UK’s busiest train station.

I snapped the photo yesterday when I headed down to Egham because I thought about writing a blog entry that incorporated Clapham Junction. Either I was going to go all mythbusters on the claim about being Britain’s busiest station or write an entry about commuting.

I tried writing an entry about Clapham Junction, but after reading the though the first paragraph under “Today” on the Wikipedia entry for Clapham Junction, I realized that I really had nothing to add. So I decided to try and tackle an entry on commuting. I figured it seeing as “The Esoteric Globe” has (nominally at least) become a blog about me living abroad, I guess it would make some sort of sense if I gave you an idea of what my commute is like. After all, commuting is part of living abroad.

After writing the introduction for the blog entry though, I re-read it and realized it was as boring as tweets regarding chicken breast deals at Co-Op or ferries in my line of sight. Not that things have exactly been overwhelming interesting in my other blog entries this month - an entry on how flying internationally in economy is annoying (not exactly a novel observation given the 1.5 million hits that come up on Google on the subject), an entry comparing weather forecasts and another entry on flying, though this one having nothing to do me actually flying...

Sigh.

In all honesty, I almost didn’t post my last entry on The first scheduled international flight. I read the article on it and thought it was a vaguely interesting fact. The kind of thing that one should sock away in their brain in the event they are ever at a pub quiz and one of the questions is asked “When was the first scheduled international flight?” It is not, though, the kind of thing that is deserving of its own blog entry, surely.

The fact is that earlier this week I looked at the blog and realized I hadn’t posted anything in a couple weeks and felt I needed to post something. So I posted something tediously dull, and I almost did it again today.

Fact of the matter is that life here in London has become somewhat boring. Not much travel other than the morning commute, and so little to write about. My life has become very domestic of late...

...and I love it.

I realized about a week ago that I was really starting to feel settled here in London. My life is filled up with things that normal people with normal lives do -

Work during the week and relax on the weekends; poker on Friday nights; the pub on Sunday; Wednesday night pizza night; the occasionally film or concert; putting together flat-pack furniture; going to the bank; going to the dentist; watching Top Gear.

The above mentioned concert - U2 at Wembley

It is like I’ve become a real person now, after living much of the last year in a kind of disconnected from real life state.

Before I was experiencing London, but not part of it. It felt like I was a ghost, floating through the town. Now I am here, I am employed, I have a place to live, I have friends, I have plans in my social diary (I am even going to the Opera next weekend). In the past few months it feels like the immaterial and disembodied life in London is becoming corporeal and real.

Back a year and 3 months ago, when I first arrived here, I wrote about floating on the surface of London. I said that, “If the first day I felt like I was floating on top of London, not at all immersed into it, the second day I felt that at the very least I had a toe in the water, slowly sinking into my life.”

I’m no longer floating. I am on the ground - solid and real. The streets are crowded, the tube trains too hot, there are workmen banging on metal like a steel drum band outside my window. It’s dirty and hot and real.

...and I love it.

90 years ago today, the first international, scheduled passenger air service started up, flying between London and Paris. The Aircraft Transport and Travel flew a little four seater bi-plane between a field just outside of London and Le Bourget, just outside Paris. Flights cost 42 guineas, about 3 months wages for an average working man, and worth about £7000 in today's money.

It wasn't long until international air travel took off, of course. Just 30 years after that first flight, The De Havilland Comet was introduced, the first commercial jet entered service. Today, flying 'round the globe is pretty commonplace, and in most cases, a real pain in the ass.

All that being said, its pretty amazing when you think about how far we've come in 90 years since a little 4 seater took off for Paris. Makes you wonder where we'll be flying in 90 years time.

Last call for Passenger Wesson for Virgin Galactic flight 508 to Mars. If you do not board within the next 5 minutes, your luggage will be removed from the flight and you will be denied boarding.

Today was my last day of my contract in Birmingham, so to celebrate I brought in a box of doughnuts of the team I had been working with. Always a nice gesture, I think, to thank all those who helped you during your time on your contract.

More importantly, though, it was also a celebration of my birth country, Canada. Because I didn’t just bring in any old doughnuts.

No, I brought in Tim Horton’s.

Now, if you aren’t a Canadian, I will forgive you for not knowing what Tim Horton’s is. If you are a Canadian, though, your primary questions will probably be, “where the heck did you get doughnuts from Tim Horton’s in Birmingham, United Kingdom? Is the coffee as good? And do they sell Timbits?”

Tim Horton was a Canadian ice hockey player who played for the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1950s and 1960s. In addition to playing for a series of Stanley Cup winning hockey teams, he also started up a little doughnut shop in 1964 in Hamilton. The chain quickly grew, and today has more than 3000 stores in Canada and over 500 in the United States.

Tim Horton's is immensely popular in Canada, with line ups out the door in the morning for a cup of coffee and a cruller. They are also well known for their Timbits, small balls of dough deep fried and coated with sugar, like doughnuts without the hole.

Here in the UK, Tim Horton’s made a deal with the SPAR convenience store chain where they sell coffee and doughnuts in small kiosks in the store. I previously ran into one on Haymarket Street in London, but they recently opened a SPAR with a Tim Horton’s kiosk in the Paradise Forum in central Birmingham. The store sells doughnuts, but no Timbits. The coffee is from a self-serve machine, and I am told it is not as good as the fresh brewed stuff back home.

So as I presented the box of doughnuts around to the team, I was proud to say, “you know, these are Canadian doughnuts.”

Of course, by that I mean they are doughnuts made by a Canadian company… Not doughnuts flown in daily from Canada.

I hope.