Move over, Maragarita Pracatan....

I've been reading through the blog of an old friend who's retired from the US to Mexico. Much of what he's experienced sounds familiar to anyone who's visited a Mediterranean country or watched one of those TV series following people who move to another country (though they seem to concentrate on people who make "good television" by being - totally the opposite of my friend - hopelessly unrealistic and unprepared). But it's always interesting to read about the cultural adaptations of such a big move.

And if I hadn't, I would never have found out about a lady who seems to be something of a Fanny Cradock of the castanets, and has managed to clack her way into decades of diva-dom.

Take it away, Sonia!

Back in the saddle

One good thing about cycling (as I'm rediscovering, the weather having turned a little more conducive recently) is that you don't (well, I don't) go so fast as to miss all sorts of quirks and curiosities, and (with due care and attention to other road users, of course) you can stop and investigate.

That's how, instead of sailing past All Hallows by the Tower, I came to put my head inside. The church may have been empty of visitors, but it's certainly full of memorabilia of its associations - mariners (a poignant memorial book listing people lost at sea, as recently as the last few years), famous Americans (Penn, and one of the Adamses married here) and Toc H, a community foundation growing out of a solder's rest and recuperation centre in World War I, founded by a former vicar) - and in the crypt, a room-size expanse of tesselated floor from a house that stood here in Roman times. It's that sense of sudden connection to generations past that is so beguiling: like uncovering old newspapers and photographs forgotten at the bottom of a cupboard, but on a millennial scale.

The City of London is fertile ground for checking out curiosities, since it's still full of by-ways and semi-hidden alleys, and on a Saturday afternoon, it's possible to do a U-turn across Cannon Street or Ludgate Hill with barely a vehicle in sight. Items like this, tucked away by the Stationer's Hall, will make another contribution to a Facebook group I belong to, "The London You Don't Know".

The sun having decided at last to make a comeback, St Paul's (recently cleaned once again) was looking particularly imposing; but more striking still was the way the low late afternoon sun can make stained glass shine from the inside of a building out - here at St Mary's in the middle of the traffic in the Strand:


And the final quirk of the afternoon was that, as I passed All Hallows on the way home, the bells began to ring, not a peal, but a carillon, and, of all unlikely things, this tune I remember from childhood:

It's not about the toys, it's about the spin-off merchandising....

What a coincidence that my superficial thoughts on e-books and readers came just before the hooha about Apple's new iPad device. It all looks as slick as other Apple products, but if it is indeed the case that it won't multitask (no listening to music while you read?) it sounds like a first attempt rather than a finished product.

The meat of it seems to be not so much what the device will do as another attempt to set up a "walled garden" to supply content. On which topic, some recent goings-on at Amazon are of interest.

It all seems to add up to another good reason not to commit oneself (not that I ever need an excuse for that).

Burning issue

Monday being the traditional celebration of a certain Scottish poet, my local Waitrose has (oddly, perhaps, since there isn't a noticeable Scottish community in the area) put out a rather large special display of haggis. It looks like a national promotion, since it comes with a glossy poster proclaiming the day.

Only - someone obviously hasn't bothered to check the man's name, so they're suggesting we celebrate something called Burn's Night.

Does no-one care about apostrophes any more?

Gey few, and they're a' deid.

Report

Name: Cheapo Microwave
Subject	Mark	Comments
Porridge	Tick VG	The best results to date; care and attention needed to prevent natural exuberance from causing entirely avoidable explosions.
Frozen scones	Tick VG	Very pleasing presentation.
Buns and muffins	Satisfactory	Results acceptable, but a little more work needed to arrive at a happy medium between flabby and stodgy.
Scrambled eggs	Good	Results very acceptable, but seems to require close and repeated attention, showing little improvement over traditional methods.
Baked potato	Passable	Timidity tending to excess effort for less than optimum results.
Suet rolypoly	Passable	See Baked potato.
Curly kale	Good	Very acceptable results.
General comments:  A good start.

Intrigued by the mysteriously glowing yellow/orange thing in the sky (what do they call it again? I've forgotten), I dragged the bike out of the garage to see if I - and it - could actually move again.

Where to go? A quiet ride up the Regent's Canal, with a coffee break at the Pavilion Café in Victoria Park (the Sunday clientele here very much the knit-your-own-bicycle antithesis of what you might see around Canary Wharf).

Not so quiet, as it turned out. The towpath was approaching congestion, what with family groups out for a stroll and endless runners - clearly training for the marathon is getting under way. At an emptied council housing block in Hackney, windows are boarded up with photos of former residents, in this installation.

After following the canal to Islington, it's downhill all the way through Clerkenwell to Bloomsbury, to pick up a new book about one of my heroes, what to do? Well, once in Bloomsbury, the British Museum always has something new, and for the moment, it's the "Staffordshire Hoard", a newly-found collection of battered and crumpled Anglo-Saxon gold artefacts found in a field. No-one yet knows what it was all about, though to me it looks distinctly like the quickly-stashed proceeds of looting.

As a relief from all this high-mindedness, just around the corner is the Cartoon Museum, whose current exhibition on the magazine Viz is for the easily amused, but not for the easily shocked.

And on the way home in Shadwell, in the late afternoon sun (ah yes, that's what it's called), a blackbird was singing.

Extraordinary

The temperature may not have been much above freezing for nearly a month, with barely a couple of hours of sunshine in all that time. But, in amongst the dead and wilting remains in my window-boxes, the pelargoniums and petunias are still putting out the odd floret, and I'm sure there's a new clump of nemesia - in full flower.

Toys

The best part of two weeks since I've been home, and next to nothing to write about. I blame the weather, of course: trudging through the slush encourages a sense of trudging through the days.

But there's been some fun playing with my Christmas toys. I've loaded up my spiffy new digital photo frame as far as I can. Once again, I contemplate the thought of digitising all my old photos, and then all the different forms of audio recording I have (hundreds of 78s, vinyl LPs, cassette tapes). After about five seconds of that, contemplation passes to procrastination - indefinitely.

I have another new (to me) toy, the penny finally having dropped that perhaps it would be more economical on electricity to use a microwave for the amount of stuff I freeze. So far, it works excellently on soups and scones, but not at all on crumpets (might as well put those straight into the toaster). I shall leave it to the weekend before I risk experimenting with (if the Internet is to be believed) exploding porridge.

For a while, e-book readers intrigued: Waterstone's have been pushing the latest model of the Sony, and the papers are full of Amazon's apparent success with the Kindle and the new business-oriented Que. Looking at an apparently ever-increasing collection of books (they breed, I tell you), the thought of having everything on one pocket-sized machine is immensely appealing.

But then, so much depends on how one actually uses books. Books are more than just the words on the page. For many, the physicality of paper, illustrations and layout is an important part of the experience. For others, books need to be read in context with others: researchers need to be able to cross-refer, so what would help them is the ability not just to make notes, but to link, and perhaps (assuming e-book files can have a standard set of bibliographic data) automatic construction of citations and bibliographies.

What we have here is the issue of convergence that makes so many new technology developments uncertain: which digital functions do you combine with which in a single device? I know someone who reads books on her i-Phone; the Que runs diary functions, spreadsheets and other office documents, and can download news updates; the Sony not only has an MP3 player built in, but it displays photographs (though the particular screen technology it uses renders them as a rather pale monochrome which soon loses its appeal). If there were a way a user could, on a single device, switch between the e-paper technology of e-book readers, and the backlit screen of a conventional computer (with, of course, full colour).......

And then there's the book-on-the-beach problem: a book can still be used even covered in suntan oil and ice-cream, and it can be left on the towel with far less worry than a £150 piece of electronic kit. And who wants to lose those stocks of abandoned books that some hotels accumulate, providing an opportunity on a rainy day for an in-depth study of the appeal of Netta Muskett?

One of my reasons for going to Krakow was that my father was, as a prisoner of war, working in a coal mine in the area in 1943/44. I'd been able to find in the National Archives a report from the Red Cross inspectors of the time that identified the place (Bory, near Jaworzno) from the camp number, and with a bit of digging on the internet I'd been able to link the German names of that time to the Polish ones.

A bit more digging with Google maps and satellite views, and the local bus company's own online information made it possible to work out how to get there and back by train and bus, reasonably simply.

Jaworzno made a change from tourist Krakow, at the very least. An agglomeration of small villages into modern town planning and development, mixing little streets of one-storey cottages reminiscent of parts of Scotland (a few of the cottages appearing, where the dilapidated render is crumbling, to be built like crude drystone walls) with Soviet-era housing estates and half-hearted shopping centres along modern by-pass roads, and an attempt at a modern town centre. It's actually quite reminiscent of similar attempts in British industrial centres.

Eventually, the bus route ends outside the most likely candidate for Dad's mine. What can I say? I don't quite know what I hoped to find, or what he would have made of it. Had he wanted and been able to visit for himself, he would probably have said - more or less politely - that he recognised bits of it, whether he did or not. It's a mine like many another; the winding gear is spruced up and brightly painted, and most of the buildings are anonymous and undateable. Some of the outbuildings look old and crumbling, but the remains of slagheaps look more like ski-slopes in the morning's fresh fall of snow. The cold at least gives a sense of the desolation I'd have expected to feel in Dad's situation.


There doesn't appear to be anywhere to eat nearby, and if I don't get the bus that's coming, I'll have to wait an hour, since it's Saturday. The only thing to do is to run for the bus, head back to the train for Krakow - and be grateful I've got the option.

I've never been a great one for celebrating New Year's Eve, and even less on a cold and slushy evening after a day at one of the most miserable places in human history. There was a stage show on the main square, apparently, but a pop concert doesn't appeal at the best of times. So after catching some photos of the more striking Christmas lights and decorations, it was an early night in for me, and Sasha the cat (who comes with the flat). I watched some TV, but the English language world news channels don't hold the attention for long, and the main Polish TV channels have a strange habit of not just dubbing foreign programmes, but overlaying the dubbing on top of the original soundtrack, parts of which remain just audible in the background. Maybe it makes for subconscious language practice, but I found it damned annoying.

The obligatory fireworks took up quite a bit of the night - not much to see in view of the general murk, but plenty to hear, not just a half hour fusillade at midnight, but occasional resurgences throughout (and occasionally the next day, too). Sasha the cat (who comes with the flat) hid under the bed - no more to be said (I'd better stop before I start imagining that Sasha the cat has a big hat, etc., etc.).

Apart from the fireworks, it was also possible to hear that rain was clearing the snow a bit, which meant that New Year's Day was misty. It was also very, very quiet. Not much was open, so I waited to watch the Vienna New Year's Day concert on TV before a brisk walk around the Wawel hill and its cathedral (the decorative rain-spouts making their function very clear).

On my way back to the tram, I discovered that the Mariacka church was open to visitors, and stopped to - well, sorry, gawp at the profusion of gilding and the detail of the mediaeval altarpiece:

Oh, how promptly and obediently we stuck on the coloured patches our guide gave us to wear. And oh, how the irony of it completely passed her by.

Krakow in the snow

After the first evening, as in every home exchange, of orienting myself to someone else's way of organising their home (so many keys! no teapot! have I, the invading stranger, put the cat off its food?*) and the neighbourhood (evidently the would-be trendy/arty bit of Krakow), it snowed overnight.

Even under skies that stayed leaden-grey all day, there was a certain extra charm to seeing real snow weighing down Christmas trees and street decorations alike.

As the morning wore on, though, the mixture of slush and occasional rain made this a day for indoor sightseeing. In the Czartorysky Museum, one is introduced to a dizzying succession of Polish monarchs and marshals of the 16th-18th centuries and their various portraits, acquisitions and knick-knacks (the glory days of richly-decorated armour and sumptuous carpets and tents acquired as booty from defeating the Ottomans soon give way to more domestic goods), and then a collection of paintings, which likewise rather tails off after the mediaeval, Renaissance and the Rembrandt.

I had lunch in a cellar which also offered a fortune-teller (no-one seemed to need her services, and she didn't seem bothered - no doubt it was no surprise to her).

In the Collegium Maius, the mediaeval base and current museum and ceremonial heart of the Jagiellonian University, not everything is mediaeval: it's the closest I shall ever come to an Oscar, and Olympic gold medal or a Nobel prize (this must be one of the few places where you can see them all in one cabinet, as they have been presented to the university by former students). The main impression, however, is of the solemnity with which great institutions like this present their history (all the more understandable here, given what's happened to Poland over the centuries); much is familiar to anyone who's seen an Oxford or Cambridge college chapel or library, but there are some really impressive examples of decorative art and craft:

*This is a rhetorical question. There is a cat. There is food. What - by one letter - is the most economical response?

Euphemism corner

Spotted en route to Stansted Airport and the delights of Ryanair (no, there were some things I didn't have to pay for, I made sure I went before I got on the plane):

A truck advertising 'End of Life Vehicle Specialists' - not, I suspect, hearse suppliers, but scrap dealers.

Merry Christmas!

Just to get you in the mood, here are some lovely ladies knocking out (literally) some seasonal music:

Getting there..

These last few days before Christmas are eerily quiet in the office - a bare handful of people under the ever-so-slightly-overplanned ranks of our Space Invader decorations, and round the corner even fewer under our neighbours' efforts (they tried to compete, but it has to be said, Christmas spirit notwithstanding, that it looks like an explosion in a pound shop).

No more tea-point two-step, for these few days. Long years ago, some genius decided a building full of civil servants would need no more than two tiny spaces per floor, each of which might just about pass muster for a one-bedroom flat for those of modest income. As a result, gasp as one might, making a cuppa usually necessitates a polite wait while strangers from other sections exchange mysterious gossip and air incomprehensible grievances, and then a polite excuse-me and might-I-just of manoeuvres between the boiler, the sink and the fridge. Not today.

It's all the quieter because of the snow, the worst effects of which don't seem to have had any effect where I live, but to the south and east of London, people were taking three hours to get home last night, it seems. Less than ten days ago, I was still not using my winter outerwear, the encircling gloom not being that cold.

But with the snow, the Christmas season is at last (and somehow rather late, by comparison with previous years) perceptible; it seemed only appropriate to seek out the seasonal photo-opportunity I missed last year (you may attribute the camera movement to seasonal shivers):

Somebody stop me

Waitrose had a reduction on packs of Green and Black's chocolate yesterday. I thought it might be something to keep me going until Christmas. Won't last till Monday at this rate....

Senior moments

I've never been particularly interested in shoes: all they need to be is comfortable and long-lasting. I usually have a couple of pairs of black and a couple of pairs of brown shoes, in different styles, and wear each pair on alternate days. I only mention this because today, on picking up the waiting pair of black shoes so neatly (for once) aligned in the corner, I realised I must have spent yesterday wearing the left of one style and the right of another.

On a seasonal note, one advantage of the colder weather is that, on a crowded tube train, people are so much better padded and less sharp-elbowed. It's like being gently (but firmly) swaddled in a constricting maze of pillows.

Santa's little stylists strike again

We do occasionally do some work as well.

Desperation

In the hardware and household shop, among the novelty items, tucked in beside the granny race tracks, a box of wind-up condiment shakers, with the slogan: "Passing the salt and pepper has never been so much fun!!!!"

What happens to electoral registers may seem a very dull subject. But did you know the "edited register" (the basic names and addresses, and the electoral ward they're in) has for ten years been on sale to all and sundry to use as they wish?

Last summer, a review for the Ministry of Justice made a firm recommendation that this should stop. Now the Government has put out a consultation - mainly, it seems, aimed at the commercial and charity marketing interests who would be affected - asking for opinions about what should happen.

Well, I've had my say and sent it in.

I may have been less than sympathetic to the idea that direct marketing people would have to set up and maintain their own registers (the word "Tough!" may have slipped in there somewhere).

I may not have shrunk from expressing outrage: Tunbridge Wells can be proud of me.

You may have your own opinions. But if you don't express them now, who knows what they might let the moneybags get away with?