8 Nov. 2025

A few weeks ago my friend Q was visiting London from Philly with her family. Every time I pick up a guidebook claiming to describe the best [blank] in Britain there's a 50-50 chance that Manchester, the country's second largest city, will score even a single mention so rather than try to sell them on soccer and Marxism-related attractions I suggested we go to them.

Early morning train ride of about two hours, then a bus across town. We met in the Princess Diana Memorial Playground, which is really nice and crucially located next to a coffee bar. Extremely well-heeled parents, some flanked by nannies. Walk across Hyde Park to the Prince Albert Memorial and Royal Albert Hall (below). Something about the proportions of this building made it feel absolutely enormous, like I had just gotten off the turnip cart and had never seen something of this scale. The sumo wrestlers were in residence for the week. Sadly we didn't see any in the wild.

Photo: Panos Asproulis

Next stop was the Natural History Museum, which is free but there is a massive line on a Saturday unless you booked timed entry tickets as Q had prudently done. Despite the crowds it's a great museum and squarely up the alley of small boys so it was unmistakeably a successful outing. That said, I'm going to put it out there that at minimum 85% of what you're going to see in a natural history museum is location-agnostic. Q and I fondly reminisced about previous visits that we had made separately to the nearby V&A, but unspoken in these reflections was the fact that if we had tried to bring our kids there now the whining would have been loud and endless. But I'll steal away at some point this year, and Q had her own solo expedition planned for later in the week: to the premium outlets in Bicester.

Nice Mediterranean lunch where my younger son unknowingly (I think?) ate a staggering amount of chicken liver. Q very firmly told me that lunch was on her, and we are still recovering from a particularly dirty round of check jiu jitsu at our last meeting so I did not argue. Hit a few charity shops which had some very high end stuff. Not much in my size per uzh, but that just made the amount of money I have spent on yarn and books feel more justified. Cardomom tea from Chapati & Karak which I had to leave on a counter on entering a luxury resale shop. The boys were becoming restive and a game of hide-and-seek amidst the racks led to a few stressful moments when I could genuinely not find them. Luckily we found everyone and left before anyone could mess up a £900 coat.

Down the street was Harrods, where the security guard told me that the tea now would have to either be abandoned entirely or downed in several gullet-scorching chugs. The store was absolutely packed, especially the food halls where even the proles can spring for a package of shortbread. Q's wife was looking for a limited edition Jellycat, but there was a line wrapping around the building to get a ticket to have the privilege of buying it. Still a successfull day all in all. We parted ways after mutually promising that we will not wait until someone has moved to another country to see each other again.

My husband hadn't come because he was at a conference. There were many moments when I wished he was there. There were many moments when I'm sure Q's wife wished he was there so she wouldn't have to wrangle all the kids herself while Q and I jibber jabbered. There only moment when I really felt my preferences being exercised unchecked when we had our dinner of £6 Marks and Spencer Simply Food meal deal sandwiches at the train station. The supermarket sandwich meal deal (a pretty good sandwich, a snack, and a drink usually for £4-£6) has become something of a standby when I'm out solo with the children. My husband meanwhile is a red blooded American male who could accept a refrigerated sandwich only as a complement to an actual hot dinner that would cost more than £6.

The train station was a buzzing hive of humanity. All manner of special occasion outfits: South Asian wedding (her: sari, him: kurta), English wedding (her: fascinator, him: very tight suit), women in their sixties having some kind of night on the town (Nice jeans and a Nice top plus the guest of honor had a golden sash). Our train was canceled and we had to scramble for our replacement, which was in turn so late that we later got almost half the cost of the ticket refunded. Once we were settled N and B polished off hefty bags of candy and we all passed out for most of the ride home. Manchester Picadilly was likewise abustle when we got in around 11. Some evenings were ending (running for departing trains), others just beginning (tottering on dramatic shoes). A couple in their fifties frenched passionately. A final ten minute leg home, two block walk, extremely perfunctory teeth brushing, collapse.

7 Nov. 25

Our minimalist footprint encountered a challenge. B had a stomach bug Wednesday, never fun, and less so when we don't have our full battery of extra linens and it takes three days for a towel to dry. On the plus side, one of the classes at their school was learning about the Great London Fire with a dress-up activity, so at pickup and dropoff there were a bunch of girls wearing mob caps and aprons and boys in flat caps with their pants tucked into knee socks. I wish I had not filled out copious forms promising not to post pictures of random students from the school, otherwise I would show you. Several girls seemed to be wearing very similar Ye Olde Outfits. What did those parents punch into Amazon in to yield something Great-London-Fire-appropriate?

31 Oct. 2025

The hourlong drive to Stoke went great, let's go on a real trek! Number One on my list of annoying-to-get-to places I wanted to see was Castle Howard, filming location of the 1981 Brideshead Revisited miniseries and now site of pilgrimage for Masterpiece-Theatre-heads.

Come visit, we have loads of room!

Howards are still living in this house. It's quite an operation. Besides the house there are many gardens, an "adventure playground" (too rainy, luckily we were able to conceal its existence), a garden center, a shop selling fancy produce and groceries, and at least four restaurants.

The children were 100% locked in on a scavenger hunt and will remember nothing about this house except the hidden ceramic pumpkins

If anything, seeing the house seemed like a little bit of an afterthought which I guess makes sense when you consider that people have to live there and go about their business. The parts you can visit probably comprise about 30% of the structure.

You can see the above hall, a few reception rooms, an exhibit about a fire that destroyed part of the house in the forties, a bedroom and dressing room.

OK full size image here because there's a lot to discuss. The dark wood cabinet is a toilet. The dangly white thing is the pull chain for the flush, which was just added in the past few years because the Howards, per the docent, thought they needed a few more bathrooms that actually function. So people use this????? Imagine!!!

A wall of china that might have seemed more impressive if we had not seen china Mecca the previous day. The room where they keep the Reynolds, an artist who I have only ever heard about in the context of distressed aristocrats selling heirlooms to pay the inheritance tax. I told a volunteer docent that, and she pointed to the painting and said the Howards had sold it to the Tate to pay the inheritance tax. The Tate decided not to display it, so the painting stays here unless they change their minds.

Between two meals, the house, the children whooping through the garden pretending the hedges were "portals," and a visit to the garden center for Granny (karmic payback for the time my kids have spent trailing behind me at fiber festivals), we were there for about 4 hours and easily could have stayed for double thathad the weather been less bleak and I less nervous about driving home. My Brideshead Revisited dreams are now fulfilled, even though the very fact of being able to visit it at all makes that world seem even more distant.

Time to drive home. Traffic had picked up and with Daylight Savings arriving a week early here it was dark at about 4:30. Then the fog rolled in. For fifteen miles or so we crawled along a back road, everything further than a car width from the side of the road completely hidden. We were probably passing farms or moors but it looked uncannily like a sheer drop on either side. Folk horror took on new resonance. My lack of a UK number* meant that I couldn't order pizza for dinner online but I could still call and order it from a human. What a time to be alive. Granny Froggered across a busy road in the rain to retrieve it. I could have laid down and kissed the driveway (where we could not actually park) on our return.

*I caved this week because it is almost impossible to interact with the NHS without one. But the 919 number still works!