Car

We are no longer in London and I am going to need a car to work, so I went to a Jaguar dealership...

and got a Vauxhall Corsa!

Photo Credit: Tasker & Lacy

Tavares

Back in 2012, I passed a kidney stone.   Almost to the day, I was booked for a routine kidney scan 2 years later.  In the waiting room was playing SmoothRadio… the Tavares version of More Than a Woman came on and whoosh, I was in a space-time wormhole. Anyone old enough will be aware of the requisite forcefield around memories from the late 1970s: it's there for everyone's protection.

The string of Tavares pop hits were unremarkable for me at the time.  It wasn't until almost a decade later that Tavares became an anchor to my hometown of New Bedford, when a schoolmate made a casual mention of the group while he was tuning his ham radio into a transmitter on The Azores. He warned that if Tavares were rehearsing, we would have to do the radio some other time. The perplexed look on my face prompted the response: they live next door and when they rehearse, all you can hear is them.

Three decades and 3,200 miles away from that moment all I can hear is Tavares again.   And they highlight so much about where I am and from where I came.  In the wormhole, I am in multiple places and times at once:  I'm in New Bedford, that city full of Portuguese immigrants from various island communities, mine The Azores, theirs Cape Verde; I'm in a metropolis on this giant island by way of my Portuguese heritage; I'm in my teens; I'm in my midlife; I'm in a room agonising in so much pain I could not even contemplate fear, I'm in a hospital gazing out of a wormhole compromised of sonorous tethers of an American family of Cape Verdean descent.

Lisboa!

I got to Lisbon to present at a conference for work.  It was fantastic.  Here are some of the sites my colleague Dante & I saw.  He took all the photographs except for the last one, which was taken by one of the conference volunteers.

…all but the recollection that such things had been.

The next stop on the adventure is   Leeds. It all happened in the blink of an eye. My wife interviewed on Wednesday, secured the job on Thursday… and just like that we are off to Leeds. 200 miles north of London, Leeds is in West Yorkshire and is home to my favourite English accent (until we move again, anyway). Sadly, Leeds is famous for shopping, banking, and the start of this years Tour de France (somebody apparently needs a geography lesson).

But all is not lost because according to an Holiday Inn Express website, the top 10 Leeds attractions are Pole Position Indoor Karting, Tropical World, Harewood House (a Georgian mansion), Leeds Kirkgate Market (an Edwardian building), Diggerland (an amusement park), Charlotte's Ice Cream Parlour, the National Coal Mining Museum, Xscape Yorkshire (rock climbing and skiing???), Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and Ilkley Toy Museum.



...Farewell, London, for the present; is that all?

Photo credits:

Leeds Skyline
Sculpture Garden
Kirkstall Abbey

Suffrage

I voted in my first election on this side of the Atlantic on Thursday. EU citizens get to vote for MEP and in the local government elections. I was shocked how low key it was. It was in a free church hall and even with the huge polling station sign strung up next to the open door, I was in serious doubt I was in the right place until someone walked out.… no campaigners… no signs…. No convoluted machinery, just a very simple paper ballot that you mark with an X in a large square box with a pencil. A simple act, probably makes no difference especially as I am in a political stronghold. But it filled me with buzz to join the political process and it made me smile.

Photo Credit: Welwyn Hatfield Times

What I saw one Wednesday in April on my way to work

Lots of blue today in the garden to our block of flats

The pathway out of the block feels a bit like an air shaft

The hedge separating our garden from the footpath

Graffiti on the railroad bridge

What's left of a roof on a railroad building next to the railroad bridge

Information display I keep looking at to see if my 1st train will be on time

A person sleeping rough in a subway exit from the station of my 2nd train

View of St George Wharf from the platform waiting for my 3rd train

The train blocking my view of St George Wharf, almost

RIverside building of a property bubble seen from inside a train

Clapham Junction Railway Station seen from inside a train

Waiting for a bus outside the railway station

And another one rides the bus

A blossoming tree not quite concealing the church on the corner

The subway to cross the street

An Author is Born

Who would have thought in 2007 that my beloved would be coauthor of an Arden Shakespeare by 2015.  This is a colossal achievement.

Photo: Bloomsbury Publishing