Recursive Words

I’m sitting, writing this post while holed up in the junk room at home. I’m sitting in front of a desk with two monitors on it – one connected to a hulking PC that can out-perform most supercomputers, and the other connected to a svelte brushed aluminium slab – a Mac mini. Across the room my work laptop sits on a stand next to a monitor and keyboard, and behind me a Raspberry Pi 500 sits connected to yet another monitor.

The eleven year old me would have loved this room.

When I was younger, I was quite opinionated about computers. Looking back, this was driven mostly by “what we had”, “what others had”, and a healthy dose of “defence of self”. It’s the same defensive countermeasures that kick in when anybody with a Playstation argues with anybody that owns an Xbox. It’s been going on for decades.

I am old enough to remember school friends with Spectrums, Commodores, Amstrads, and various other computers all arguing about what was better. I’m also old enough to remember the Atari ST being compared against the Amiga, and the PC being compared against the Mac (remember the “I’m a Mac” ads?).

Time has brought a certain amount of perspective to all of these debates. I now realise that most arguments come down to “I chose this one, and I’m going to die on the hill defending my decision”. It doesn’t really matter what it is.

I’ve now owned pretty much everything I might have once derided. I’ve stood on almost every patch of greener grass. I’ve learned the hard way that nowhere is particularly better than anywhere else.

I guess that makes me a technology agnostic of sorts, which probably annoys the more opinionated enthusiasts far more than it should. It never ceases to amaze me how much effort some people will put into constructing their own hills to die on.

Just for the record, the Amiga was at least 30 years ahead of the curve. I only discovered this 30 years later – because I didn’t have one back in the day. It was better than the Atari ST, the Mac, or the PC, and very few knew – because Commodore couldn’t have found their own ass with both hands with instructions.

Taylor Swift’s new album “The Life of a Showgirl” arrived this morning. As a fifty-something guy that invariably listens to retro radio stations targeted at people of a certain age, I probably have no business listening to songs sung by a girl twenty years younger than me. Or so expectation would have you believe.

I’ve never been one to conform entirely to expectation.

Do I feel a little out of place in my enthusiasm to support somebody or something that opens me to ridicule from family and friends? A little. I sometimes feel that we are ruled so much by that which is deemed acceptable that having at least something that is our own is kind of important.

It really doesn’t matter what it is.

There’s a part of me that’s utterly fed up with being attacked for my thoughts, opinions, actions or inactions. There was a moment while out with friends a while ago when the entire table turned on me – telling me what I should be doing – how I should be thinking. I can’t remember ever having done that to somebody else – I would never dream of it. I sat and smiled. Inside I was furious.

So yes. I’ll figuratively die on Taylor’s hill. In a world filled with so much hate, division, obligation, and expectation, I’m going to listen to songs I like, watch movies I like, read books I like, eat food I like, and spend time with people I like.

Perhaps if more people invested in themselves rather than trying to shape and bend those around them to their preconceptions, the world might be a very different place.

I’ll be over here, engaging in my quiet rebellion. The music is great. You’re welcome to visit.

Can you imagine what life would be like without a computer? I’m old enough that I don’t need to imagine it – I can remember it.

Our family’s first computer arrived when I was about 11 years old. I was part of the 1980s home computer boom in the UK – the generation that grew up with the BBC Micro, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC 464. We didn’t have any of those. My Dad bought an “MSX” – an attempt by the electronics giants of the day (Sony, Toshiba, Sanyo, Yamaha, Panasonic, etc) to create compatible computers. It didn’t go well.

The MSX was eventually upstaged by an Atari ST, and then a succession of PCs, video game consoles, mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and whatever else. There’s a Raspberry Pi propped on the desk behind me – which many might argue is a spiritual descendent of the BBC that sort-of started it all in the UK (if you’ve not seen the dramatisation “Micro Men”, I implore you to look it up).

So yes. I was around before.

A childhood without computers was filled with all sorts of activities that people with very thick rose tinted spectacles spend inordinate amounts of time reminiscing about – invariably claiming that somehow life was somehow much better then. I tend to disagree, for all sorts of reasons.

Most of the weekends and early evenings during my formative years were spent climbing trees, visiting friends houses, going on bike rides, playing games in the street with neighbourhood kids, visiting nearby play parks, and so on.

My world was small.

Looking back, from the moment we were out-of-sight of the house, our parents had no clue where we were, or how to find us. Our knowledge of anybody in town was via hearsay. An awful lot of local wisdom was the result of whispers, lies, and wild speculation.

If you wanted to find out somebody’s address or phone number, you looked in “the phone book” – a giant printed tome that listed everybody’s phone number in the local area. If you wanted to find a business, you looked in the “Yellow Pages” – a giant printed tome listing every business in the local area. If you wanted to find out how to spell a word, you looked it up in a dictionary.

If you wanted to watch something on the television, you had to wait for it to be broadcast. We didn’t own a video recorder until I was perhaps 10 years old. Before that, if you missed a show, you missed it. Tough luck. I remember staying in one Saturday to watch “The Valley of Gwanji” – a Ray Harryhousen monster movie (I was a dinosaur nut). For whatever reason, the BBC pulled the movie at the last moment. They received thousands of letters of complaint from children across the country.

Those letters of complaint would have been hand-written, or typed on mechanical typewriters and posted in postboxes that still stand on most street corners across the country.

My Uncle moved to the United States when I was very young. Throughout my childhood our only contact with him was either through letters, or a once a year transatlantic phone call that cost a significant amount of money. I remember patiently waiting in turn for a few seconds to say hello.

Banking involved going to the bank. End of story. The bank was only open during certain hours of the day, and there were no cashpoints. Most people were paid in cash, and paid it into the bank to earn interest. If you ran out of money, and the bank was shut, that was it – you couldn’t do anything that involved money until it re-opened. Paying for anything directly from your bank account involved writing a cheque, or filling in a receipt with a carbon paper duplicate kept by the store. Transferring money via paper cheques took days.

My Aunt worked for the family business as a book-keeper. She wrote T accounts, day books, ledgers, and journals by hand. Trial balances and balance sheets were written and calculated on huge pieces of lined paper, relying on mental arithmetic. Did you know that if your answer for a calculation is out by a quantity divisible by 9, it means you’ve transposed some digits somewhere? Well now you do…

All of these experiences have been made immeasurably better by computers, and latterly the internet (computers talking to computers).

At a moment’s notice I can find out where my children are, and can tell them when dinner will be. I can talk to my American family any time I want. I can see and hear them as clearly as if they were sitting in the room with me. I can send messages to the other side of the world instantaneously. I can pay, and be paid to or from anybody in the world, instantaneously, at any time of day. I can find out almost anything about a breaking news story immediately – and get different perspectives on the story from different sources. Accounting has been transformed – with spreadsheets and accounting software changing the world of business immeasurably. I can watch any TV show I want, when I want, and jump to any moment in the show instantaneously. I can listen to any music I want by any artist, at a moment’s notice. I can buy any book I want, and have it in my hand to read in seconds.

None of these things were possible before computers.

Having all of these abilities and opportunities isn’t without cost though. We are never truly disconnected any more. We are never completely offline. We are always aware that a cacophonous, fast, chaotic world is turning all around us, all the time. It’s no surprise that anxiety has become such a prevalent issue.

A few years ago I downgraded from a smartphone to a basic Nokia candy bar phone for a few months. It was glorious. And frustrating.

While racing from one thing to another throughout a typical day, I rarely give any thought to what I might not do – I’m invariably consumed with what I have not done – or what others might be able to accuse me of not doing.

It never occurs to me to not do something – to tell anybody no. I’m not sure if that’s a character failing specific to me, or if everybody suffers from the same problem to an extent.

Whenever I visit the city, I’m always curious about people endlessly rushing to get somewhere – to do something. I wonder what they are rushing towards – what their very important mission involves.

When we travel to visit my parents, we can feel the world slow down – the further we get from London. Perhaps all big cities imbue their inhabitants with the same mania?

In the same way that former professional sports-people seem to have problems with weight when they finish competing (it turns out sitting in an office chair doesn’t burn as many calories as circuit training), I have a similar problem with books. I used to read a lot. For several years I commuted into and out of London each day – four hours on the train – two hours each way. I started by reading the latest books out, and then side-tracked into reading a succession of banned or notorious books – the likes of Lolita, Crash, and Catcher in the Rye. I also read a lot of classics – Anna Karenina, On the Road, and Ulysses among them.

When I stopped commuting, it never occurred to me to stop buying books. I still buy books now – but I don’t make time to read them. I’m too busy trying to do this, that, or the other thing during a typical day.

Just last night I sat in bed doom-scrolling the news on an iPad until 1am. I was back up at 7am, dragging the bins down the driveway, and patting our neighbour’s labrador on the head.

In the couple of hours before work I emptied the dishwasher, half-re-filled it, tidied the lounge up, picked up shoes and coats from the hallway floor, checked email, took more rubbish out, and countless other things.

It’s got to the point where I don’t even realise I’m doing it – I can’t just “be” – there’s always something that needs doing. Something to pick up, something to wash, something to put away, something to throw in the bin, something, something, something…

I know I need to slow down.

Even when I collapse in front of the home-computer on an evening, there’s a hundred and one videos that might be made for the YouTube channel (last night I showed newbies how to borrow a 747, in case they ever come across one with the keys left in it)… They don’t have keys, if you were wondering.

I need to slow down, sit down, and just be. I kind of did a little bit last weekend – but then I had a bad cold, which is perhaps my body’s way of saying “you know those hundred things you were going to do this weekend?” (cue sinister giggle).

Perhaps I should write a self help book on slowing down – and just fill every page with “no, really – slow down”.

After spending much of the weekend hiding from the world with a nasty cold, we ventured out tonight rather than waste the theatre tickets we bought over a year ago and promptly forgot all about. If the theatre hadn’t sent an email reminder yesterday, there would have been two empty seats in row C this evening.

Hiding from the world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, in case you were wondering. If you’re not feeling great, and then shut yourself in the house with somebody else that’s not feeling great either, there’s a temptation (at least for the other person it seems) to berate you for anything and everything.

It doesn’t help that I really don’t like negativity. I’ve written in the past about the temptation to ignore disasters and look at the next thing, and the next.

Anyway.

After surviving an entire weekend of slings and arrows, this evening we snuck off to the theatre together to see Jack Dee.

If you’re not from the UK, or you’re younger than thirty, you’re probably wondering who Jack Dee is.

Jack Dee is a stand-up comedian – only he really doesn’t tell jokes as such – he complains about things. Endlessly. Now, given that I’ve just said I don’t like negativity, you’re probably wondering why I might be able to withstand a couple of hours barrage of his misgivings and misadventures.

There’s a difference between complained at, and being witness to somebody complaining to nobody in particular. A huge difference. And my word were his complaints relatable. My face hurt from laughter as he descended further and further into a rant laden monologue about anything and everything.

By the time we left, we both agreed that laughter really is the best medicine.

After a few days of feeling pretty rotten and driving each other up the wall, we wandered out of the theatre with toothy grins and endless recollections about this bit, or that bit, or the other.

Of course that all came to a screeching halt after climbing to the sixth floor of the multi-storey car-park filled with every other audience member, who seemed to be suffering from a collective case of “you’re not pushing out in front of me – I’ll die on the sixth storey of the car park rather than lose out on moving my car ten feet further forward before you do”…

Honestly – how do these people function in a normal world? When I used to ride a bicycle to work I became de-sensitised to it – I guess in the intervening period I’ve forgotten just what colossal assholes people can be.

Deep breaths.

Six days have somehow passed since I last wrote – there’s quite a lot to unpack. I’m not really sure where to start, if I’m honest.

Somehow a visit to London last week completely escaped the blog. The company I work for has moved offices – to a space near Paddington Station. Finding the new location was something of an adventure, given that I’ve rarely if ever explored the area around Paddington – my usual exit has been out towards Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park with the children.

It’s always interesting – meeting up with co-workers. Because I work from home I’ve only met the majority a handful of times in the “real world” – we predominantly meet through video calls. Somehow it’s ok for people to remark if somebody is bigger than they thought (I’m quite tall) – but I would never dream of telling anybody “you’re far smaller than I thought”… Maybe this is a part of the “law of the giants” ?

I survived, and was back home in time for tea and medals.

On Tuesday night I met up with old co-workers for a night out. We used to share an office together – before the pandemic – and before “working from home” became a thing. Since then a lot of water has passed under the bridge – the company was acquired, and we have slowly migrated from being important cogs in a small machine to somewhat insignificant footnotes in a leviathan.

Having known each other (for the most part) for over a decade, we became far more than just co-workers. We know each other’s families, and have shared the stories of meeting partners, getting married, and raising children along the way. My other half accompanied me – and worried she would be the only woman there. Thankfully another partner arrived a little later.

Before we knew it the pub called last orders, and we all looked at our watches – surprised.

“I thought it was perhaps 9pm – how is it 11pm already?”

We looked at each other and laughed.

You know the funny thing about meeting up with people you haven’t seen for ages? You catch everything off each other. Within twenty four hours I could feel my body going down-hill. I guess the up-side to working from home is you rarely catch whatever is doing the rounds – but the downside is you lose out on the immunity against all the rubbish that’s doing the rounds. You can’t win.

The next day – against every sensible thought in my head – I went for a run.

I had started back on the “Couch to 5K” programme a little while ago, but stalled after work and home pretty much trampled my life (a long story I won’t be telling here).

Following encouragement from a friend, I pulled my running shoes back on, and headed out. I won’t deny – it felt good – even though I got worse the next day. A part of me was sticking my fingers up at the virus I knew I had – asking it why it had shown up the moment I planned to do anything for me?

It’s funny how the universe does that.

I’ll survive. It’s only a cold. I do feel properly rubbish though. In tandem with it, my other half then caught (we think) the same thing at her work too. I hadn’t said anything about how bad I had been feeling – because what does that achieve – but when she came home on Friday feeling rotten, I confessed.

While feeling sorry for myself on Thursday night I took it upon myself to do something about the multitude of parallel blogs I had conjured a month or so ago. While not able to make my mind up about Substack, Ghost, WordPress, or Tumblr, I invented a Hydra of sorts – and started posting the same content to all of them. A proper “fuck around and find out” tactic if ever there was one.

It’s amazing how feeling rubbish concentrates your mind on doing as little as possible though – and wielding a wrecking ball to anything outside of that became unexpectedly freeing. I said goodbye to Ghost (which was lovely, but slow and expensive), and Substack (which is slowly morphing into the same hell as every other social swamp on the internet).

So yes. I’m back at WordPress. Back where I started.

Actually – that’s not entirely true. Back before 2003, my blog began as a hand-written PHP script (which you can still find, if you know where to look – the last time I looked, it had been downloaded half a million times!). There’s a back-story that I won’t bore you with.

If you’re reading this via email – your subscription was automagically transferred (by me – so not really magic). You don’t need to do anything.

Today… Saturday… Today has been a slow day.

I did make it to Wetherspoons this morning, to grab a cooked breakfast and perhaps write this. I arrived an hour later than usual though, and the entire place was filled with young families not controlling their children. Normally my patience is pretty good – but add a cold and a temperature to the melting pot, and I was kind of “out of fucks”. I ate my “small American” (which still makes me laugh, writing it down), and left.

We both know that chasing our own tail and ignoring being sick never ends well, so have taken our own advice for a change.

We were supposed to go to the pub to watch the rugby this afternoon (well done Red Roses!), and were supposed to visit a neighbour to help celebrate his birthday this evening. Instead we’re holed up at home, wrapped up warm, sipping hot drinks, and watching rubbish on the TV. Well… my other half is watching the TV – I’m obviously writing this.

I don’t really watch much television any more. Sure, the occasional series might catch my interest, but it’s rare. In recent years Mr Robot, Halt and Catch Fire, Westworld, the OA, Silo, For All Mankind, and Fallout have been the only stand-outs that come to mind.

Instead of force feeding myself a steady diet of forgettable television, I tend to spend my evenings tinkering with content for YouTube, or reading. Not always books – quite often the news. I have a free trial of Apple News+ at the moment, which scrapes stories from all corners and removes the worst of the advertising that typically pervades modern journalism. It doesn’t get rid of it entirely – because news organisations sold out a very long time ago – but it’s infinitely better (at a cost) than the web.

The worst part about reading the news? You quickly realise which side each journalist or network is on – and how they have re-framed every story to fit their narrative. It’s tiring – picking slivers of truth from bias, spite, vitriol and hubris.

Anyway.

After not writing for six days, I’ve ended up writing several hundred more words than I was planning to. I’ll shut up now.

I hope you’re well, and will try to write more often in the days to come – because nobody wants to wade through a blog post his long. As Norah Ephron once wrote – blogs are sort of like an exhale – not an opera with encores.

How on earth did I get from listening to tunes and hanging washing out to tip-toeing around the edge of gender politics and hate speech?

I’m having a day off from everything today. Well… I say everything, but I’ve filled the washing machine three times. Who knew that chores are a great excuse to avoid getting on with other things?

I’m half expecting somebody to notice the title of the post, and write an acerbic email about J K Rowling without reading far enough to find out the post isn’t about Harry Potter. Maybe I’ll attach a picture of Hogwarts to tip them over the edge. It’s almost like an angry minority spend the greater part of their free time searching for opportunities to vent their fury.

I’ve always found it interesting – how the “social internet” seems to amplify minorities, rather than sizeable majorities – about all sorts of things. It seems the louder you shout, and the less you appreciate any view or opinion other than your own, the more your nonsensical rants become amplified.

People with an axe to grind preach to their favourite echo chambers online, and the rest of us have to put up with their noise as we might a noisy neighbour – mostly because we’re busy getting on with our own lives.  That doesn’t mean anybody in particular is right or wrong – or that we should take more notice of this or that happening – it’s just that we all have our own battles – our own challenges.

I can’t fight everybody’s battles.

Now and again something happens, and I can’t help noticing how it re-factors what is seen as important. Mass starvation, civil war, or the rise of a dictatorship tend to re-calibrate the news cycles – rather than circular arguments about the importance of using the correct pronoun.

Anyway.

How on earth did I get from listening to tunes and hanging washing out to tip-toeing around the edge of gender politics and hate speech?

I guess it’s difficult to ignore the news at the moment – especially when so many friends are affected by their own friends and relatives “fucking around and finding out” at the ballot box – or things not turning out the way they might have wished, and spending the next few years spouting anger and bile at anybody that will listen.

It’s happening everywhere – not just in the US – where the most vocal presume the rest of the room is on their side while standing atop self-made soap-boxes spouting poorly informed nonsensical rubbish.

Maybe artificial intelligence could not only check spelling and grammar, but also estimate how much anybody might care about what’s being written? That it would refuse to publish this blog post is not lost on me.

None of the principal characters ever died. The robot almost always malfunctioned. The suave leading man always kissed the girl.

The clock ticked past 11pm a few minutes ago. It’s been six days since I last posted. I’m not entirely sure where the week went. I haven’t been out running. I haven’t even made it out of the house at lunchtime most days. It’s just been a slog from one day to the next – working, doing chores, and slowly going backwards.

It seems a little ridiculous, listing things I didn’t do – I may as well start writing “I didn’t fly to the moon”, “I didn’t solve general relativity”, or “I didn’t get bitten by a radioactive spider and gain super-powers”.

The whole Peter Parker thing has always mystified me.

How does radioactivity translate into super-powers? It’s almost like the comic-book writers thought “most people are too stupid to realise that if this works, then so does ‘cup of tea girl’, or ‘slightly indecisive man’”. I can only guess at their powers.

I grew up obsessed with monster movies – typically filled with giant ants, spiders, or whatever else radiation had caused to inflate, expand, or explode. Isn’t it interesting how radiation always caused things to become super-sized in old movies? How come there was never a B movie where the US bombed Japan, and then got absolutely decimated by half a million 200 foot tall angry Japanese folk looking for revenge?

I grew up consuming a steady diet of black-and-white science fiction movies. There was invariably a suave leading man, a shapely girl in a short skirt, a robot, an extremely annoying young boy, and a decidedly untrustworthy old scientist whose nefarious plans would lead to all manner of scrapes and disasters.

None of the principal characters ever died. The suave leading man always kissed the girl (causing her to swoon theatrically). The robot almost always malfunctioned. The scientist invariably got eaten, melted, or fell off something high, or into somewhere deep.

The world used to be so much more simple.

Don’t even get me started with the “Incredible Hulk” always managing to have enough denim jeans left to cover his bits and pieces. Have you ever seen a She-Hulk comic book? Her shirts and knickers were obviously made of the same censorship imbued denim.

Anyway.

Enough idiocy.

I should go sleep. I’ll try and find time over the weekend to empty my head properly, rather than pour further idiocy into the keyboard.

I’m pretty basic. I don’t like fussy food – I can’t be bothered with it. I like warming, filling food. Home cooked food.

There’s writing prompt at WordPress today asking “what are your favourite types of foods”. To be honest, it would be easier to list the foods I don’t like, rather than foods I like best – because I’ll pretty much eat anything (within reason). We’ll ignore that they have written both types and foods as plural.

On various holidays I’ve tried snails, octopus, squid, buffalo, and ostrich. Bizarrely, the ostrich was a Chinese takeaway in a small fishing village on the Firth of Forth in Scotland – figure that one out.

Over time I’ve figured out that I’m mildly allergic to fish. I can eat it if forced, but it has the bizarre effect of both making my nasal cavity hurt, and emptying the entire contents of my body within an hour (lovely). The nasal cavity thing has always struck me as strange – perhaps fish doesn’t get on with the alien implant or something.

I do hope there’s an alien implant up there – it would explain a lot.

I guess I really should answer the question at hand – what food types do I like?

Freshly baked bread. Oh my word. We bought a bread cooker years ago, and had to stop using it because we were starting to upset the balance of the planet’s gravity. It has a timer, so you can have it mix, prove, and bake it’s contents overnight – so when you wander into the kitchen in the morning, it’s filled with the smell of freshly baked bread. Magic.

Pizza. I think the predilection for pizza really comes from the software development background – where food becomes fuel – and the less obstacles between having something that needs cooking, to something you can eat (and that tastes amazing) makes a difference.

Next up would probably be Spaghetti Bolognese. Famously the first thing that young men learn to cook in order to impress their suitors. Later on you also learn that most kids love spaghetti bolognese too, and that it’s one of the cheapest, most nutritious, filling, tasty, and unctuous meals you can make. It can easily be modified to become vegetarian, or gluten free too.

Cottage pie. I’m not sure if it’s the same thing everywhere – the British version is essentially a beef and vegetable casserole topped with mashed potato, baked to brown with grated cheese across the top. It’s a winter favourite – for all the same reasons as Spaghetti bolognese (and a great way to trick kids into eating vegetables).

Lasagne. Oh my word, what I’ll do for a well cooked lasagne. Layers of pasta filled with meat, roast vegetables, or both.

Curry. It seems a bit wrong to just write “curry” because you’re grouping together all manner of cultures and cuisines in the same word. I do love curry though – probably siding with either Thai, or Indian curries above others. I don’t choose the really hot ones, because I don’t like paying for them the next day – but love the social side of curry – tearing and sharing bread – perhaps with a drink or two to accompany it.

One thing that has stayed with me from my earliest days living on my own – and that I sometimes make for my own children (and they love) is beans on toast, with cheddar cheese grated across the top. When I first met my other half, she was aghast that I pretty much relied on beans on toast several times a week, and set about teaching/forcing me to eat several other things – which is how I learned to cook bolognese, chilli, curry, and eventually roast dinner too.

I suppose, being British, it would be remiss of me not to list roast dinner too. After a cold day, sitting down with family to eat roast potatoes, steamed vegetables, and a roast meat of some description is hard to beat. Yorkshire puddings are probably the Crown Jewels of roast dinner, but incredibly difficult to make consistently – thankfully they can be bought ready-made these days.

Just reading back through the food above, I’m pretty basic, aren’t I. I don’t like fussy food – I can’t be bothered with it. I like warming, filling food. Home cooked food. It’s a running joke that I’ll often read a menu no further than “Stake and Ale Pie” in a pub. Don’t laugh – you can judge a pub or restaurant by their steak and ale pie.

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

After setting the alarm clock to go off at 7am this morning – affording me an hour to have a wash, get dressed, and get to the railway station, my wonderful body of course decided that 6am was a much better time to be waking up. I’m not entirely sure how it achieves this kind of feat so reliably. I wonder if it’s linked to our cats ability to start asking for food on the stroke of 3pm, and 11pm?

Actually – scratch that – our old ginger cat – George – asks for food whenever anybody goes anywhere near the kitchen – because why else would anybody be going anywhere near his food bowl, other than to feed him?

So. I found myself up and at ‘em, showered, dressed, and on the first weekend train to London – destined to meet friends visiting from California to help give them some bearings. They wanted to do something British, so the British Museum naturally came to mind. They worried that I would want to spend the day there until I volunteered that the British Museum is perhaps my favourite place to visit in the entire city.

The only problem with the British Museum is its size – meaning that “meeting at the museum” is something of a logistical nightmare. I arrived on one side of the museum – they arrived on the opposite side. Both sides have columns. I ended up asking for a screenshot of the map from their phone – minutes later they jumped out of the crowd at me with toothy grins, and tales of their journey from America while we waited in the queue.

I don’t envy visitors to London from America. Their cities are organised into straightforward grids – blocks – where most roads are parallel or perpendicular, and clearly named at each junction. London looks much more like somebody spilled the entire contents of a saucepan filled with cooked spaghetti on the floor and then stirred it around for a while before hiding half the road signs.

Thankfully GPS was our friend throughout the day. Thinking back, it’s quite shocking to think how many skills were required – taken for granted even – when visiting cities in years gone by. If you couldn’t find your way with a pocket spiral bound A-Z map book, you were pretty much lost.

We spent much of the morning wandering around the British Museum – gazing at, and reading about the collections of stuff wealthy benefactors had pilfered from the rest of the world (I’ll give credit to a good friend for “pilfered” – coined during a walk with her around the Victoria and Albert museum a year or so ago).

There’s only so many Egyptian statues, Roman fertility frescos, Byzantine weapons, or dark age long boats you can look at before either your feet start to hurt, or you get hungry.

We got hungry.

After visiting the Lewis chessmen, we made our way out into the city once more.

Where to take international visitors for something to eat in an international city where anything and everything is a possibility around every street corner?

One of our merry band opined that fish and chips might be rather lovely.

Ok. So where to get fish and chips – and sit down – and get a drink? Wetherspoons.

We walked “a few blocks” in their parlance across the city towards Leicester Square (which required a pronunciation lesson – yes – English makes no sense – it’s “Lester”), and a little pub tucked away in the corner of the square that’s part of the mighty Wetherspoons chain – where we could hopefully get fish and chips and a drink without too much fuss – and get an authentic British pub experience into the bargain.

We lucked into a table – against the odds I must say – the pub was FULL – and put our order in through the mobile app. We somehow managed to choose a drink that was a single shot – causing much hilarity around the table – pouring it into other drinks, and ordering a further drink. Thankfully Wetherspoons are fast.

After eating ourselves to a standstill, and talking about our life and careers (I always find everybody else’s stories far more interesting than my own), we set off once more – for a little sightseeing at Trafalgar Square.

The weather had other ideas.

It wasn’t so much “the heavens opened” as “somebody kicked a planet sized bucket over in the sky”. We ran for cover under a hotel awning, and while wondering how long the wind might take to blow the deluge away, lucked into the kind of entertainment you really can’t plan – an actual, live, enormous, raucous protest march by perhaps a hundred thousand people through the middle of the city.

The theme of the march wasn’t lost on my American friends – pretty much denouncing everything and anything right wing, fascist, sexist, or patriarchal. As the legions of people walked past – flanked by hundreds of police officers – I found myself looking across their ranks – trying to figure out if there were any particular skews among them. There really weren’t – it was young and old, students, professional people, families, couples, friends, all colours, all races. All demanding an end to the very thing we can all see coming in the news each day.

We decided to call it a day after the excitement of the protest march, and picked our way through the back streets to the apartment my friends had rented. I stayed for a little while – it really was a wonderful apartment – before saying my goodbyes and descending into a nearby underground station to begin the trek home.

What a wonderful day. Perhaps a reminder that each day is what we make of it – and that unless (as Mr Baggins famously said) we step outside our door, we might never discover quite where our feet will carry us off to.