September 2009

Sunday morning. There’s nothing quite like a decent Sunday morning with nothing at all on the daily calendar, is there? A day to wake up, wander around the house, avoid showering, have a leisurely breakfast and read the Sunday newspaper. Then, maybe about 1 o’clock, after spending the day flipping through every section of the massive Sunday press, then maybe its time to get outside and do something.

Back in Toronto, when I would wander around the house, eating my breakfast and reading the newspaper, it would be the Toronto Star. A good, decent solid liberal newspaper (by Canadian standards).

The question I faced when I first arrived in London is what newspaper I should read. There are a lot of choices, and what you choose to read says a lot about who you are, or at least who you think you are.

During the week, of course, I don’t have time to sit around a leisurely read the paper. I, like most of the rest of London, read the same thing on weekdays.

The Metro.


The London Metro is a free newspaper distributed every weekday morning. It has just about enough news to digest in about 20 minutes, and if you are feeling really ambitious or want something to do at lunch or on the evening train home, there is a Suduko.

Everyone who commutes in London seems to read the Metro newspaper. Comedian Michael McIntyre commented on this in his Live at the Apollo appearance.

And everyone's reading, you have to read, you can't be on the tube without reading, reading is very important. You get on on the morning and every single person is reading the Metro. Everyone, everyone. Why doesn't one person just read it to the carriage?

if you want to see him do it (much funnier with his delivery), check out this clip on Youtube, starting at about 2:30. Stick around for the bit at about five minutes in, when he talks about the guy trying to get on the crowded tube train. Classic stuff.

We used to have a free Metro newspaper in Toronto, one of many cities with a free morning newspaper called the Metro. The London Metro is not, however, one of that brand. The Metro papers in Toronto, New York, Philly, Paris, Sydney, Rome et al are run by a Swedish company based in Luxembourg.

The London Metro, along with the other Metro editions in the UK are run by a separate company, though they stole the name from the Swedes, so the papers are named the same.

So that covers me on the weekdays and my commutes. On weekends, though, that’s where you are faced with the decision. Saturday and Sunday editions of the many newspapers available in London are numerous, and the local news agents counters are groaning under the weight of all the editions.

As I said, what paper you read says a lot about who you are.

If you like sports, gossip and boobies, hate immigrants and have little patience for big words or long articles, then the tabloids are for you. The tabloids, also known as red-tops due to the fact many have a red banner at the top of the page, include The Star, The Sport, The Mirror and most famously the The Sun, and her Sunday companion “The News of the World.”

The Sun is one of the most read newspapers in the world, with a daily distribution of almost 3 million copies. The Sun is famous for coverage of celebrities and the Royals, Sports coverage and the Page 3 girl. The Page 3 girl is usually a comely lass who is pictured after misplacing her top and bra.

It is often said of The Sun that it is read back-to-front, as the Sports pages are at the back of the paper, and many of the readers of The Sun are football fans drawn to their extensive football coverage. Of course, in reality The Sun is read in this order - Page 3, and then back to front.

While Page 3 is enticing, for real thrills you’d have to check out the Daily Sport. The Daily Sport ditches the concept of news entirely, simply publishing pictures of naked and near naked women instead and writing a few words of copy around the picture. I must admit that I was tempted to become a Daily Sport reader, but I do occasionally like to read some real news, so decided to go for something a little more high-brow.

The Daily Express or the Daily Mail are a little more high-brow than the tabloids, though at times not much more. The Express is fond of conspiracy stories regarding the death of Princess Diana, and the Daily Mail ran a headline in 1993 entitled “Abortion hope after 'gay genes' findings,” suggesting that if there was a “gay gene” pre-natal test, then parents could choose to terminate the pregnancy. A strange suggestion for a newspaper who is editorially anti-abortion.

The Daily Mail published a story on the seventh of January 1967 called “The Holes In Our Roads” about potholes. The story looked at the crumbling infrastructure of British roads, specifically quoting the example of Blackburn, Lancashire, where it said there were 4,000 potholes. In the same issue was a story about the death of John Lennon’s friend Tara Browne.

Lennon, when writing about the death of his friend, picked up on the story of the potholes to pen the lines, “four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, and though the holes were rather small they had to count them all. Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall,” for the song Day in the Life.

Despite the historical link with my favourite Beatles song, The Mail and the similar Express, often called “middle-market” papers, tend to be conservative and euro-sceptic. As you can tell from my blog, I am pretty Euro-positive, so I decided to look for something a little more in line with my values.

That left me with the Broadsheets. These are the classy papers, the ones that fancy people read. Oh, and me, as well, even though I am not too fancy.

Each paper has a definite political slant. The Telegraph, sometimes called The Tory-graph, is conservative, while the other broadsheets tend to be more liberal. Well, the Financial Times isn’t really liberal, per se, but rather is so focused on business and the stock market to give too much care for liberal or conservative thoughts on social policy. Anyway, I am more liberal than conservative, so I decided to pick one of the other broadsheets.

The Independent is a centre-left paper, an out-growth from The Dublin Independent, but no one really reads it, so I was able to dismiss it pretty easily.

The Guardian and its Sunday edition called The Observer are left of centre and socially liberal.

The Guardian was originally published in Manchester, with the most early editions being sent from Manchester to London. I didn’t know this, but apparently the later runs of newspapers have less errors, because they are being caught and corrected as the run continues. To get the paper into the shops for the morning commuters, London papers sent their early editions to the North of England, whereas early editions of the Guardian came down to London.

Because of Londoners getting the early editions of the Guardian, many folks in London would find spelling errors in the Guardian, leading to it being dubbed the Grauniad, after an urban-myth of the newspaper’s name being misspelt on the banner.

I don’t mind the Guardian, and their headquarters aren’t in Manchester anymore, but rather down in King’s Cross, London, just a block from my flat.

However, I finally settled on reading the Times on Saturday and Sunday, mostly because my current flat mate reads The Times on Saturdays and Sundays, and therefore we can share the cost of buying the papers.

So, on Sunday mornings I get up, throw on a pair of jeans, a t-shirt and a pair of sandals and walk half a block up Caledonian Road to the News Agent. There, in exchange for two of my hard earned pounds, I get a thick newspaper that’ll keep me busy for the next four hours, plus a few hours here and there during the week thanks to the magazines.

I return home, make myself some toast and peanut butter and settle in to read the Sunday Times.

So, what does this choice of paper say about me? Well, officially, the paper is centre-right, so I guess that means I am a little bit conservative. I suppose that isn’t surprising. After all, I do tend to meander over the spectrum of voting. Mostly though, it says I like the concept of not always having to buy the paper.

Perhaps, though, it is best to leave it to others to determine what it says about me. For that, I turn to 1980s sitcom Yes, Prime Minister and their episode entitled “A Conflict of Interest.”

Prime Minister Jim Hacker: I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mirror is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.


Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about people who read the Sun.


Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as she's got big tits.

I've been cocooning recently. Working from home and a spat of cooler weather has meant that staying in has been quite an attractive option. So for the past few weeks, other than the one day a week when I head down to my office, my life has pretty much taken place in a small radius of my flat, the outer limit of the radius being the N1 centre, which has a Sainsbury's, pharmacist and movie theatre. With the N1 centre, I want for nothing.

The other day I was re-reading some of the notes I had made after reading about Existential Migration, which I wrote about in my entry I'm not a Traveller, I'm a Migrant. Reading my notes at the time reminded me that I should be taking advantage of the opportunity I have created for myself by moving to England, and getting out and enjoying life in the city.

To that end, I have (for the past 4 days at least) made an effort to get out and see London. On Wednesday I walked up Caledonian Road and checked out Pentonville Prison, which I will admit isn't very high on the tourist trail, but it is a mile from my house and thought I should check it out, in the event there is ever an escape. On Thursday, after taking the train back from my office in Egham, I walked from Victoria Station to my house (about 4 miles), taking in Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus and Soho along the way. Friday I walked around Camden for an hour.

Yesterday, I headed over to Liverpool Street station and the nearby Old Spitalfields Market.

Spitalfields used to be a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, but that was moved in 1991 to the new Spitalfields Market out near the Olympic site in Stratford. Today, the old Spitalfields Market is used as a space for restaurants, shops, bars and the occasional small festival.

Yesterday, there was a Japanese festival called Matsuri.

I quite liked Japan when I was there in 2006. I found it an interesting mix of the familiar and the strange. It is a very modern country (at least the bits I saw of it), and other than a proliferation of neon that you wouldn't see anywhere in the west, the cities seem pretty similar to those of Europe or North America. On the other hand, some of the customs are very strange to Western eyes, and I always had a strong feeling that I was an outsider in Japan. I've read accounts of those who spent more time there, and they all point to this - no matter how long you spend in Japan or how well you speak the language, you are always an outsider.

I was mulling this over while wandering around with my first cold Asahi beer, and realized that may be why I liked it so much. The research on existential migration focused my attention on a potential driver for wanting to live abroad being that I often felt like a bit of an outsider at home. I was popular and had lots of friends and good relationship with my family, but there was a nagging little bit inside me that always seemed to indicate that perhaps I didn't quite belong. In moving abroad, I haven't changed that opinion - I still feel like I don't quite belong. But that doesn't bother me now because I actually don't belong. I am a foreigner, so it is fine to feel foreign. In effect, I have changed my external circumstances to make them match my internal feelings. If you feel like you don't quite belong, move somewhere where you don't actually belong. Then everything is fine.

Anyway, I'll come back to the idea of existential migration in more detail in a future entry. For now, let's just wander around the Matsuri festival and enjoy it...

There was a lot of Japanese goods for sale.

I was mostly there for the food, though. I enjoyed a couple of Asahi beers, had a nice plate of sushi and some yakitori.

There was Japanese entertainment. The drummers were good, and I liked the children's martial-arts-cum-dancing display. There was a Shamisen player from Brazil. The shamisen is a 3-stringed lute. I found it a little too plinky-plunky.

Lots of people got into the spirit of the day and dressed in traditional Japanese dress...

...and taking pleasure from the Japanese activities and art.

It looks like love at first sight!

All and all, a good day. I got out and got some exercise walking back and forth from my place and Liverpool Street Station (which I needed after the Japanese food and beer), I got to remind myself of the great time I had in Japan, and I got to ruminate a little more on why I undertook this adventure to live abroad in the first place. To experience a culture other than my own. Which I did at the Matsuri Festival, even if it wasn't quite the culture of the country I am living in.

It was good to get out the house and look at other lands.

Oh, and because I am a great flatmate, I bought my flatmates some presents. I present them to you now in haiku.

White cartoon feline
Hello Kitty Candy box
a gift for flatmates

Dewa mata atode!

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.

"You'll have to wear a suit every day."

I heard that numerous times when I told folks I was moving over to London. Not just from folks whose experience of London was from the movie version of Bridget Jones' Diary. (That Mark Darcy, always sharply dressed in a suit, wasn't he?). Actual English people from England (originally at least) told me that.

"Everyone wears suits. Much more formal than we are over here..."

(The "in the colonies" was implied)

I believed all the hype because my experience of London working was from the movie version of Bridget Jones' Diary. I mean, sure the Hugh Grant character didn't wear a tie, but he worked in media and was a cad...

What I figured I would be wearing

Anyway, that prophecy turned out to be mostly false. Unless you work in banking... actual banking, not just working for a bank even... you probably will be dressing much like folks in North America. "Business casual." Usually I wear a collar shirt and slacks to work. Occasionally I'll throw on a tie or jacket, but never both at once. Sometimes, when I go down to my office in Egham, I even wear jeans. It's craziness.

Turns out even the bankers don't want to wear suits any more, though a lot of the coverage of this in the media tends to concentrate on the fact that they don't want to be identified as bankers, lest a stray G20 or climate camp protester starts pelting them with ecologically and ethically grown eggs. No, bankers are eschewing the pin-stripe suit for "more versatile styles," like "a plain suit, or a linen one, which they can wear outside the office."

When I wear t-shirts and jeans, I used to feel under dressed a lot here in London, but according to fashion expert Nick Foulkes, "multi-million pound hedge fund managers have always been more likely to wear jeans. They see themselves as financial artists rather than workers, so they love to wear creative garb." Therefore, if I get any dirty looks for wearing jeans and a t-shirt, I'll just claim to be a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager, and all will be forgiven.

Anyway, gotta run. I'm off to the opera tonight, and have to start getting ready. Despite casual wear being allowed in the opera house nowadays, I think I should dress up a little. After all, it's opera, so it is a special occasion.

Besides, I am likely to make an ass of myself by falling asleep and snoring, so I figure there's no point in dressing like a slob and doubling my embarrassment and shame.