14 Jan. 2026

Last night I went to a meeting of a book club that focuses on post-apocalyptic plots. This group jumped out at me not so much for the genre itself, which I think is fine but not one of which I feel driven to make an exhaustive survey, but because in my experience the book clubs with a very focused remit tend to be much more engaging. They read a book every two weeks and meet on off-weeks to play board games, so I will never reach the status of a regular. But like the Women's Institute, they struck me as a group of people who could give extremely granular and knowledgeable answers to specific topics which can be very helpful for a newcomer.

We read The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. It was fun but extremely dense and shaggy, and the weeks since I'd read it had rubbed away memory of the many, many plot particulars, so I didn't have too much to say about it. It was a lively conversation nonetheless, since about half the group hated it so much they hadn't finished it. During the scheduled bar break (I have gone to a lot of book clubs, and none in America have had this feature), I gave my 90-second story about why I'm here. I said I was glad I didn't have to pick a football allegience. Someone leaned forward and said "Actually this is not really a crowd where you're going to have that issue." At the end, everyone rated the book out of ten. Two different people were logging the scores on spreadsheets, and there was a brief sidebar as they conferred over their differing means and medians. All in all, aside from the bar break, the evening had no major deviations from what I would expect from its Boston equivalent.

13 Jan. 2026

1.3.26

Since we arrived there has been a constant thrum of complaints from the children about the proportion of their weekends spent traipsing around looking at buildings. Their grievances ratcheted up after Christmas, when their new Bey Blade arena and Lego beckoned, and T taught them how to play Halo. I gave in for a few days- it's not like much was open anyway- but by the Saturday after New Year's I couldn't take it anymore.

I got an email about discounted tickets to The Moonwalkers, which is a sort of 360 degree video experience narrated by Tom Hanks about the Apollo missions, and thought that might be an easy-ish sell. In this audience full of British people, I wondered what it was like to be a non-American listening to Tom Hanks talk about we achieved this the triumph of the human spirit. As for me, I started crying during the clip when Kennedy says we're going to the moon for the same reason Rice plays Texas. It is a sad state we're in today if the rhetorical impact of a football metaphor was enough to move me to tears. What is the British equivalent? What would be the specifically British triggers for the combination of pride, disappointment, and blinding rage I was feeling? Not at you, Tom Hanks, I could never mean you.

After the show, we went to the Manchester Museum. There were many cases of taxidermy, a vivarium with (live) reptiles. Every museum with a natural history element has got to have their Big Ceiling Skeleton, it seems.

There were also some mummies and a handful of rotating anthropology exhibits. Any time there is a video at a museum my kids are going to stop and watch raptly, regardless of the subject matter.

1.10.26

Chester is about an hour west of Manchester near the Welsh border. That means that some buses show stop names in English and Welsh. Would you rather tell people you live in Mold, or in Yr Wyddgrug?

The major site of interest is the Cathedral, which was really lovely.

A constant low-grade gripe I've had since we got here is that there seems to be no amount of food I can bring on an outing that will have a noticeable effect on the amount of food we end up buying. Case in point: As soon as we got on the train the children claimed ravenous hunger despite having finished breakfast at home less than an hour previous. I brought out the sandwiches I'd made, thinking that if we had a substantial snack maybe that would last us well into the afternoon and we'd just get a late lunch before going home. Nope! An hour later we were in the Cathedral, where our first stop was the cafe. But if we hadn't eaten there, we would not have seen this very cool contemporary stained glass window. Maybe I should just tell myself that lugging around snacks is still worth it, because no matter how much we buy anyway there's always the chance that we might bought even more if I hadn't brought anything. Anyway. Curmudgeon time over.

There was a model of the church in Lego which the kids were very excited about, although they were disappointed that there was not a tiny model of the model inside the model. As for the church itself, I can't tell you much about the transepts and naves and so on, but there were some very interesting decorative elements.

Note the ancient iron heater in the lower right corner, which was not effective.

Many of the stained glass windows had recent (relatively speaking) dedications, including one to Cheshire native George Mallory of the ill-fated Everest excursion. A depressing number of them were for twenty year old lordlings mown down in the flower of youth during WWI.

I probably spent 45 minutes just looking at all the plaques on the church walls. Some had left space for inclusion of future descendents who must never have materialized, while others had family members crowding in for centuries. So much fodder for the imagination, like this man who wanted to be memorialized along with the two wives he outlived.

Maybe a little hint of passive aggression here below?

And doesn't it seem like the last line here is directed at a specific individual?

This one deserves full size. The late Rebellion in North America! The Usurped Legislature!

The city center is very picturesque, and judging from the retail options they must get fairly upmarket visitors. Chester's Christmas markets are supposed to be great and we'd thought about going, but like York I think I would have found that crowds dimmed its charm. The walls built by the Romans are restored and intact. T reflected that a shivering Roman soldier on duty, probably feeling like he had been sent to the desolate edge of creation, would be bemused to see the coffee shop and Clarks store now operating on the wall. We proceeded to the ruins of the ampitheater, where the kids horsed around and got Quavers crumbs all over the spot where some gladiator probably bled out. History!

1.11.26

Went back to the Elizabeth Gaskell House for their monthly book sale. T is going back to Medford in a few weeks, and I'd been packing up all the stuff he needs to bring back. When he went in October the flow was mostly forgotten items from home that we needed here, but now the direction of objects is reversed. This time it will be mostly salvage fabric from the scrap store, the yarn I got in Shetland, and books. A lot of books. It's a real problem because there are so many books in this country, and I'm going to need all of them. In my defense: a. they have nearly all been paperbacks, b. they have nearly all been used, and c. of the ones that I actually read since I've arrived, I've given all but one away. But still, it's a lot. Anyway, I bought four more.

Afterwards in the tea shop, I heard some elderly patrons discussing the state of the world today. Can you believe about Venezuela? And what's this about Greenland? "It's like if we went over to America and said 'You used to be ours, now we're taking you back!'" I felt like going over to them and saying "Honestly, you would hate that so much more than we would?" but I thought maybe that might just make them worry that now Britain was going to be the next target on the takeover list!

Later that evening I was on eBay trying to buy more cutlery in anticipation of imminent houseguests. The dinner knives, according to eBay's interpretation of UK law, place silverware in the category of purchases that require age verification. For tedious reasons I cannot complete this process. Will have to look in the charity shops where presumably I can just show ID. I think of the people I heard in the EG Museum tea shop and can imagine them contrasting this mild inconvenience with the 75 school shootings that took place in America in 2025.

31 Dec. 2025

Dec. 23:

T and I had dinner at Evelyn's. A woman at the next table fed her tiny dog from her fork. Passing by the bars there was a very "Wednesday before Thanksgiving " crackle in the air.

Dec. 24:

Walked to the corner store for a few last items, realized as soon as I got home that I forgot the eggs, walked back. This experience confirmed my finding these past few months that a 5 minute walk is less annoying than a 5 minute drive. I got the sides and dessert from Marks and Spencer so other than the ham, which I didn't do much to, I didn't really cook lunch so much as warm it. Not having a microwave, that was somehow still a complicated experience that took much longer than anticipated.

The 7 pm Mass (10 pm too late, Christmas morning would be a lost cause) was packed. We sat in the loft next to a guy who said he is there every week and it is usually not that crowded! Unclear whether he was more annoyed that the C and E types don't come more often, or that they were there at all. Music accompanied by a single violinist which is really an unfair lift, but the priest was upbeat and pithy. Since we were at the church that is part of the kids' school we saw a lot of their classmates and their families, and it was easy to feel like we were part of a cheerful hive on what might have otherwise been a slightly subdued and lonely day. Our local was full and festive, all the more so after Mass let out.

After everyone else had gone to bed, I had to stay up for a little while for operational reasons. To kill time, I watched "A Ghost Story for Christmas" on iPlayer. I'm not a big horror person but was only 29 minutes and the guy from Starstruck was in it, how creepy could it be? TURNS OUT VERY. Luckily there was a soothing plate of cookies on hand.

Dec. 25:

I forgot the crackers at lunch the previous day, so we did them at breakfast. Contents from the M&S crackers I picked up on Black Friday (which in Britain seems like it could be any random day in November): a mini cheese grater, a mini whisk, measuring tape, keychain with bottle opener, keychain with ruller, keychain with a token the same size as the 20p coin you need to get a shopping cart at Aldi. These in addition to the gold paper crowns and jokes which are now engraved permanently in the childrens' (very lean) joke lineup. Lunch at The Wharf, v. good and enjoyed all the more because the payment had been made weeks ago and could now be comfortably forgotten. When we arrived, there was a package of chocolates next to each child's place setting. People who had brought their dogs (seated in a separate uncarpeted section) got a package of dog treats.

Special celebrity episode of Bakeoff including Olivia Colman, who cried "Oh, bums!" when she realized she'd made a mistake with her biscuits. My children have been been understandably drawn to emulate this national treasure.

Dec. 26:

Long drive to Brighton. I woke up with a red and gunky eye possibly because a young person coughed directly into my face. Through the private health insurance I get from work I was able to get a quick video appointment with a doctor, although setting up this appointment required an app that you can only get if your app store location is set to the UK and it was a tedious process untangling all that. He told me I would have no problem getting antibacterial ointment over the counter at a pharmacy.

We stopped for dinner in Cambridge. The streets were full of tourists trying to figure out what was open (chain stores, maybe half the restaurants) and what was closed (anything of cultural or educational value). I went to Boots to get the ointment but met unexpected resistance. I asked for the ointment, but the guy at the counter thought my level of gunk was insufficient to establish bacterial rather than the viral conjunctivitis. We discussed the gunk and its progression throughout the day, but he remained skeptical. Luckily the video doctor had sent a report to my email and that settled it, and when I think about it maybe there was a little less gunk than the many other times this has happened to me since I had children, and perhaps in light of the crisis of antibiotic resistance it made sense to be cautious? But moving on! At my mom's request we ate at the Eagle, the pub frequented by James Watson when he was at Cambridge. At this point I think I can clock a family in which a parent is a scientist with some accuracy, so without understanding the Portuguese conversation at the next table I am fairly confident a father was trying to psych up his son about the location.

Getting to your AirBnB at night is always such a vulnerable moment. Which is the key to the gate and which is the key to the front door? Am I leading my children down the right dark narrow alley, or to our doom? Will the fob to the parking garage work, and will it indeed be only five minutes' walk from the apartment as stated in the listing? On the latter two points, the answer was no. Other than a very brief visit about ten years ago, I hadn't been to Brighton since I was there as an exchange student at the University of Sussex in 2005. Driving through the dark city, I hadn't recognized anything. The day ended on a note of disorientation.

Dec. 27

The narrow lanes around the apartment were hushed in the morning when my mom and I went out to get groceries. The shelves were very Soviet looking as several quiet days' worth of expired products were being cleared away. Nowhere more melancholy than a beach town on a winter morning, no lives more unknowable than the people walking alone through the damp chill. I felt ghostly pangs of the tedious anxiety of those old days of $1.98 to a pound. But by the time everyone was fed and watered and we headed back out, the stores were all open and the streets were packed. Unlike 2005, I had a job, and the dollar had rallied. Not everything about 2025 is terrible.

Lunch in Portsmouth. Lots of naval stuff if you are into that sort of thing. For my part, I perked up when I saw the logo of a charity shop that raises money for mental health services, but was disappointed to learn that this particular location was where they actually provide the mental health services.

The Hard (??????)

Dec. 28

We took a tour of the Brighton Pavilion. I couldn't remember whether I had ever been inside, but as soon as I saw the pink wallpaper I thought OH RIGHT YES.

The Wallpaper

I did not take many pictures because it was such a bombardment of Georgian chinoiserie madness with Christmas decorations to boot that I had a little bit of an aesthetic short circuit, but it is...something. There was an exhibit about the Indian soldiers who were brought there to convalesce during WWI because it was thought the setting might make them feel more at home which is...something.

The children wanted to go ice skating on the temporary rink outside. I was under the impression that my younger son could skate well enough that my husband could focus on keeping me steady (N zipped off immediately). It turned out that B still needed plenty of steadying, so I did a solo lap clutching the rail and then just observed.

We'd made it through skating without anyone's ankle snapping, so why not tempt fate further with a scramble down the pile of Twinkie-sized rocks along the water. At home, I'm always telling myself I should go to the beach more often because once I get through the schlepping and hauling it always feels worth it. In Brighton in 2005 I remember making one token trip. In 2025, I realized why I'd left it at that.

THIS IS THE BEACH

The ghostly remains of a pier that burned down in 2003 were still standing. The main pier was still in operation and abuzz with activities that would have been more or less recognizable to a Victorian. The log flume was running which felt reckless in this weather.

We passed through campus on the way home. It was built in the sixties so it didn't take the splendors of Cambridge for comparison to make it look a little underwhelming, although there had been enough progress for my old dorm to be torn down with several large towers under construction in its place. At this point I realized I had spent all day feeling twitchy and ready to go home. I felt like I was back on tired and well-trod ground, but without any glow of familiarity or nostalgia. Along with the strictures of the weak dollar, I associated Brighton with the crushing revelation when I arrived that there was no place on Earth where I could show up and discover that here I was cool, actually. But it had been an adventure, by my sheltered standards at least. I learned so much about myself and the world, and I'm still friends with some of those people today, and it's possible that without those months in 2005 I wouldn't be back here now. Looking back on it from my desk in Manchester, I think maybe the biggest issue is that I am more of a northerner at heart.