Shoes Before Breakfast

No, it's not Bec's personal priority scheme! Let us explain. To celebrate our FIVE YEAR(!) anniversary, in mid-January we headed to one of our very favourite places, Paris. In an extremely pleasant departure from the usual air-travel shambles, we took the Eurostar from the newly-refurbished London St. Pancras direct to the Gare du Nord in just 2-and-a-bit hours. Très bon!

We stayed in a new part of town for us, Saint-Germain, and we liked it a lot. It's definitely a hotspot for shopping and fashion, as we discovered on the Saturday morning on our way to getting some breakfast. In the short time it took Johnny to find and use an ATM, Bec had located a shoe shop and was knee-deep in crazy-January-sale-priced footwear. John had to admit it was actually pretty good, with ladies' leather shoes starting at less than 10 Euro! Incroyable! And so it was that we bought shoes before breakfast. Zut Alors!

We finished up at Les Grands Magasins, taking in the beautiful dome of the Galeries Lafayette:



Later that day we took a dinner cruise down the Seine, recreating a fantastic experience we had had over four years earlier, just a couple of youngsters exploring Europe. Look at us now, slowing down a bit now we're into our twilight years, bien sûr, but still having fun... (and no less enamoured with a certain metal tower!)


Sunday saw us heading to the Musée d'Orsay, with its fantastic collection housed in an equally spectacular building, a former palace and railway station. Magnifique!


We still haven't had enough of Paris (or indeed, its shoes) - so we're booked in to catch up with our friend Bron when she hits the City of Lights in May. À bientôt!

Situation Report

With our 2007 backlog out of the way, we can finally tell you what's going on with us in 2008. We're very happily installed in London, and with the memory of winter rapidly fading (daffodils are out!) things should be getting even better. Bec may have had a touch of the SADs (Seasonal Affective Disorder) due to the lack of sunshine, but as of this weekend we've been having absolutely awesome weather and the Vitamin E production is back up to normal levels.

The big news this week is Johnny finally getting some London contract work. He's been telecommuting for his old employer for almost 3 months and is heartily sick of the isolation and poor ergonomics of hunching over a hot laptop in his Nerd-Nook for hours at a stretch. Continuing his tradition of only working for interesting companies, this new one is based around the idea of self-destructing text messages. No, smoke doesn't come out of the top of your phone. But the effect is the same; great for secure messages between James Bond types. (And also people having extra-marital affairs, you may well assume). He's locked in for 6 months and is looking forward to expanding his London friends-and-colleagues network, which has been all but non-existent until now.

Today was his first day, and the verdict? AWESOME!

2007 - What sucked, what rocked...

We saw an article in Wired magazine the other day, simply entitled "Why Things Suck". Although it sounded very negative, it was actually really entertaining - just a list of things that we as humans are still struggling to get absolutely right - examples: batteries, customer service, and junk mail. To draw our catch-up of 2007 to a close, we thought we might do the same.

Things That Sucked:

• Air travel. Especially "discount" air travel: Massive queues. Luggage surcharges. 100ml liquid limits and resealable plastic bags. Hypersensitive metal detectors. Delays. Last-minute gate changes. Unreserved seating. Full overhead lockers. The list goes on...
• UK supermarket self-packing. In the UK, you pack your own bags at the supermarket checkout. If this doesn't seem like such a hardship, you should try it. The plastic bags are in a clump at the bottom of a ramp. Your purchases start tumbling down the ramp and into each other while you struggle to get a bag detached and open. (A skill both of us seem unable to get the hang of). You then have a mad panic, stuffing everything you can into the bag you finally got open, only to be asked by the cashier for some money. It's dumb, it's double-handling (why can't the cashier put things in bags instead of at the top of the ramp?) and it's stressful. On the plus side, it encourages you to bring your own, easy-to-open bags from home - which is good for the environment.
• Floods. Or more specifically, the UK's apparent inability to deal with heavy rainfall. It seems like as soon as there has been precipitation for more than 24 hours, somewhere in the British Isles is under 10 feet of water, cars are floating down the streets, all train travel to or from the area is suspended, and people have fallen trees in their lounge rooms.
• Smoking in Europe. Or "A nice continent, spoiled". Is there anything worse than getting a face full of somebody's Euro-stinky second-hand smoke? It always seems to happen when you're about to tuck into something Euro-tasty too.
  
• Traffic. UK roads are very, very busy. All the time. The motorways, which criss-cross the country, all seem to be close to capacity. As a result, when there's an accident on a motorway, it grinds to a standstill and you can be stuck behind it for hours. Even if you're not on the afflicted road, if you're anywhere near you'll feel the effect as tens of thousands of cars take to the smaller roads to get around the obstruction.
• Commuting by Car. Related to a couple of the previous points! Commuting by car puts you at the whim of the traffic, makes you a part of the problem, and exposes you to the delights of flood-closed roads - where there is just no way to get to your destination, by any road. But more than that, commuting by car effectively puts a dampener on any after-work social engagement that might involve a drink or two. Boo!

But on the plus side:

Things That Rocked:

• First Class Mail. From anywhere to anywhere else in the country, overnight, every night. Magic. Especially good when you get your rental DVDs by mail - send yours back and the next batch is at your house two days later. Mail even comes on a Saturday!
  
• UK Music. It's poppy, bouncy, unashamedly catchy and you can't get away from it if you try. Luckily, we love it. If you want to hear what we're taking about, seek out Mika, The Feeling, Amy Winehouse, The Kooks and The Fratellis.
  
• Pubs. Sleepy, cosy country pubs; Bold, trendy London pubs; or top-quality Gastropubs, it doesn't seem to matter. England is all about The Pub and happily, they deliver. Best of all, they're now smoke-free! If you haven't experienced a local ale or cider pumped by the arm of the publican (not compressed air) into your pint glass, you simply haven't lived.
• The Countryside. Once you escape the motorways, the English countryside is simply beautiful to behold. Rolling green hills, stone cottages and walls, patchworks of fields and hedgerows, multicoloured forests and birds of prey hovering motionless overhead, seemingly for your benefit. Carpets of daffodils (Bec made me write that!), lambs with black faces gambolling around in spring (that too!). Simply gorgeous.
  
• English Accents. Imagine if a Sydneysider could be distinguished from a Melbournian just by their accent. But then multiply that by ten. Imagine being able to hear a difference between Geelong and Ballarat residents. That's how much English accents change as you move small distances around the country. It's amazing and incredibly entertaining. Get a group of English people around a table and you'll almost certainly get a fantastic range of accents - yet they can all understand one another. Mostly :-)
• Europe On Our Doorstep. Despite being wreathed in cigarette smoke and usually being on the end of a hellish discount flight, Europe still rules. More than forty countries, each with their own distinct culture and attractions, wedged into an area slightly smaller than a postage-stamp, and all accessible within just a few hours. We never seem to tire of it.

The Lake District (sigh...)

After Scotland we made our way back down into England and one of Bec's favourite places in the whole world - The Lake District. The loveliness of this area can probably only be summarised in pictures (by us anyway, plenty of poets and writers have done a pretty good job).

Bonnie Scotland

Also in August last year, we borrowed a Kath and blasted up to Scotland for the Edinburgh Tattoo, the annual celebration of Scottish and worldwide military marching bands and display teams, which you may have seen on Aussie TV on past New Year's Eves. We were a bit worried that we might be the only audience members born since World War II, but this turned out to not be the case, with quite a few of us "youngsters" in the crowd. The evening was very entertaining; here are some highlights.

Blokes in dresses walk around in circles:

Edinburgh Castle looking spiffy while a troupe of performers make their entrance:

Colour-coded horses:


The next day we fled Edinburgh and started a quick driving tour of Scotland, stopping in at some old favourite places, like St Andrews, as well as some new ones such as Carbisdale Castle, a fabulously massive castle in the middle of the Highlands that was actually donated to the Youth Hostels Association by one of Johnny's ancestors. Really! We stayed there - it's haunted, but cool!


With further stops at Inverness, Glencoe and Oban, we covered a pretty good portion of the Highlands, including a possible sighting of the Loch Ness Monster! Look at the tentacles!


Lunch near Ben Nevis:


Castle Stalker on Loch Linnhe:


Be vewy vewy quiet, we're hunting Highlan' Coos!