Fake memories

Later this week I’ll be spending a night in a Holiday Inn – which normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but when it comes to Holiday Inns I tend to get a little sentimental, since I spent 3 years living in apartment buildings owned by (and right next to) the Holiday Inn in Beijing.  Now [...]

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What Next?

In Bath there’s a great bookshop called Topping and Company in a part of town called the Paragon.  It’s slightly outside of the centre of town and so not a bookshop that I tend to walk past very often.  Monday happened to be one of those days when I do walk past it however and [...]

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Storms

One of the things I like about the Mediterranean climate is the weather. Obviously, yes, it’s sunny – about 300 days a year on average. But what I almost prefer are the storms. You occasionally get a dreary drizzle like in the UK, but more often during the summer you get spectacular [...]

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The Beijing Olympic Games are Open!

I just watched the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games – visually it was spectacular, and I have always been a big fan of the Olympics, summer and winter. Although you could argue it’s just another tournament like so many others and that it’s being tainted by doping like so many others, I somehow [...]

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You can take the boy out of Texas, but you can’t take Texas out of the boy

I decided to ‘go back to my roots’ (or at least to where I was born) this evening by making fajitas for dinner. It’s been almost a year since I last had them (they’re a summer-ish food anyway, especially in a relatively mild European climate), and maybe this is just my inner-Texan speaking (let’s [...]

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Kite Flying

On my way home from work today, I was riding my bike on the paquier past the lake in Annecy. It was a nice day with a gentle breeze and so there were a couple of people out flying kites. For some reason, I had this incredibly strong flashback – one I’ve never [...]

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