Happy (palindromic) birthday, man. We love you....   (read more)

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Very many thanks to all who came out. And lots of love to those far away....   (read more)

Our third day in Cinque Terra dawned with us lounging long in bed, gazing out the thrown-open patio doors, listening to the gulls wheeling and calling over the harbour....   (read more)

Awoke to the sound of the surf crashing gently on the cliffs below. Sleeping and waking to this was, frankly, beyond price. We listened to the church bells while we had our coffee on the balcony....   (read more)

She said she had just gotten back from this cracking place in Italy called Cinque Terre (literally: "Five Lands"). She said it was five little rustic villages all stuck on the face of the mountainous Mediterranean coastline, and you could hike from one to the other, and it was just a totally lovely place....   (read more)

So of a recent Saturday, Anna and I decided to head into town and act like we just hit London. Herewith, the results....   (read more)

This morning, on a single circuit of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, I personally counted 144 snow persons....   (read more)

So in a regularly occurring feature, Anna and I intrepidly departed Kensington & Chelsea to soak in the vibe of Christmas-time central London. (Well, okay, Mayfair.)...   (read more)

Video games are now fairly widely recognised to be an art form. And, perhaps in the same way that a movie trailer can condense a lot of emotion and adrenaline down into a 90-second speedball, video game trailers seem to have gotten pretty damned good while no one was looking....   (read more)

A few photos from Leo Fife's very lovely very first birthday party....   (read more)

'I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.' - Emerson...   (read more)

Anna and I made what's sort of turning into maybe our quad-annual sortie out of Kensington & Chelsea - this time to check the Christmas lights, the Christmas window displays, and the general Christmas vibe of central London....   (read more)

Okay, this is pretty damned cringe-making, but here are a huge number of photos of me....   (read more)

"Whether at Naishapur or Babylon, / Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, / The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, / The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one....   (read more)

11) You could for instance pick up a bad head cold in NYC, probably while shouldering your way through herds of insalubrious New Yorkers, which will later find its full flowering in DC. (Ah-CHOO!! Crap!!)...   (read more)

"The city brings everyone up a notch. Or down ten notches. Or up a hundred notches. It sorts them out....   (read more)

Sunday morning and Alex came in all geared up for business battle, and the three of us lay around chatting happily (me in a towel), and then we hit the road...   (read more)

So Tag Zwei opened with the traditional free hotel buffet breakfast....   (read more)

And so Alex rang up and said, Dude - I'm going to be in Munich for a few days if you want to cruise over, and I thought, Hey - Random jaunts to the Continent are precisely what Americans living on this side of the Atlantic are supposed to do...   (read more)

Well, you finally get around to booking a big holiday - and on the exact same day here comes the worst disruption of commercial air travel since WWII....   (read more)

This, right here, just a few minutes ago, was - not only the only household in the world - but almost certainly the only household in history in which Democracy in America (unabridged) was being read aloud while Sir Mix-A-Lot played in the background....   (read more)

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Fucking great. Now not only are we going to be assailed by sidewalk-hogging, escalator-blocking, over-foot-rolling, twice-the-space-of-normal-people, thumpity-thump-goddamned-thumping, draggy luggage people - but now they're all going to be stopping periodically to get at their coffee in their draggy luggage-mounted *cup holder*. ...   (read more)

I told him that really a Tube Strike is pretty much like the weather - no one can do anything about it, so everyone just works around it, and I like running, anyway. Well, by the end of yesterday, I've changed my position. My position now is: Frack TFL....   (read more)

"Britain comes to standstill after 1ft of snow" - The Daily Telegraph...   (read more)

Well, it was the last walking day, and all we had to do was climb out of this strangely industrial Shangri-La. That of course meant Up....   (read more)

Morning, breakfast in an amazing upstairs room with, reassuringly (to, you know, me) several guns on the wall. Rather less reassuringly, there was this countour map of the West Highlands, which our hosts thought they were being helpful in pointing out to us....   (read more)

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So, Danielle, in her inimitable way, suggested "you should take off your sunglasses for at least one damn photo." I've scoured the entire set - and this is it. A tiny, silly photo taken in a mirror at the back of a restaurant. That's the one photo of me from the entire trip not wearing sunglasses. Oops....   (read more)

Morning took us by the street Anna always stayed on as a girl. And then, naturellement, for coffee, on the Boulevard Saint Germain....   (read more)

"Bon voyage, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys." - Homer Simpson ... I'm going to hell for opening with that quotation. The French, even (in particular) the Parisians, have hardly ever been anything but nice to me. But, hey - who can resist?...   (read more)

Saturday picnic in Kensington Gardens, beer and olives and blackberries, sun and breeze, perfect day, video goofiness....   (read more)

Today it's February, and the sun is shining bright. We made it....   (read more)

No, I don't mean the Saturday that's Ian McEwan's novel, though it's really rather good and you should probably read that, though not at the expense of reading Atonement, which is just amazingly good....   (read more)