27 Jan. 2026

"If you had to go back to America now, you have seen the most English thing," whispered the German mother of one of B's friends. We were sitting in the church hall watching the pantomime. I thought pantos were a Christmas thing, but I am still seeing ads for assorted productions featuring assorted lower-tier celebrities. This one, as the organizers hastened to explain to the audience, was very much an community endeavor put on for charity. I'd gone for the local option over one of the pricier professional productions, our holiday entertainment budget needing to stretch over a much longer period in England than it would at home, and this turned out to be probably the best decision I've made since we've been here.

The plot was a sequel to Cinderella. I need to add some context here, which is that the church and our kids' school where this function was held is about a mile from Noel and Liam Gallagher's childhood home, and they went to high school across the street. The evil stepbrothers oozed onstage in bucket hats and aviator sunglasses to wild applause. We AWWWED and BOOOED as prompted by video screens. I probably understood why people were laughing (so hard, I heard snorts) maybe 70% of the time and recognized half of the pop songs inserted at random moments. There were no references to memes, pop culture of the last decade, or current events. Lines were fed by a prompter. The dame abandoned her sparkly corset after intermission. Notes were not quite hit. Cinderella had an unexplained American accent which was pretty good in a Mid-Atlantic way, avoiding the pitfall of seesawing between cowboy and 1920s Brooklyn newsboy. Everyone on stage looked like they were having the time of their lives.

While I was on line at the bar during the interval, I heard the guy who played the Noel equivalent talking to his friends about his costume. "The sad thing is, this is just what I used to look like," he said. The parish priest was in the audience, he let me buy him a sparkling water. Some of the cast have been in the company since they formed 40 years ago. They closed with She's Electric, and I was electric too.

Saturday we went to Liverpool to see the Vivienne Westwood exhibit at the Walker Gallery. That turned out to be quite small, but the rest of the collection, mostly British art, was pretty cool. Extensive play room for kids, although it was only open at periodic intervals. Lunch at Akshaya Picture Drome, recommended by the Desi Pubs guide.

Lego Damian Hirst Shark

Appreciating the grace of the human form

On Sunday, because we had not been sufficiently culturally immersed yet, we went with the same friend and his mother to his rugby practice. N was too old to join the little kids' practice so he spent most of his time in the clubhouse with a book. I got him a hot chocolate from the snack bar and noted that other offerings included Bovril, which is meat extract tea, and haggis left over from the Burns Night party. Cultural exchange did not extend to sampling either of these items.

In the afternoon, N had his first confession. He sat in a pew with the priest (see above) for a few minutes while B worked on an activity sheet, looking for names of apostles in the word search. It didn't take very long so his powers of condensing must be considerable. Later, took inspiration from one of the songs in the panto and had a chippy tea.

26 Jan. 2026

We were waiting for the train a few Saturdays ago and on the platform an elderly lady started chatting with us. She had been a teacher on a Mercy ship, teaching the children of doctors and nurses as they sailed along the West African coast. When she asked where we were going I said Hebden Bridge, a town to the north in Yorkshire where I'd heard there were good charity shops. It is also the final resting place of Sylvia Plath. Her face shuttered. "It's very New Age there, it's not for me," she said disapprovingly. There was a garden center in the nearby town of Todmorden that was called "Tod Almighty" and this lady was shocked that there could be something so blasphemous. I made some neutral sounds. As we parted, she asked if she could give me something. It was a pamphlet containing the Gospel of John.

City was playing United so the trains were full of uncles being herded by cops. Everyone seemed to be behaving themselves. At least in the mornings, the groups on a train who are clearly headed to a game of some kind are usually pretty upbeat, 8am beers notwithstanding. The one time I ever started to feel unsettled was on a very crowded tram when someone yelled "ANYONE HERE FOR THE ROOGBEH" and a lady told him to shush so her baby could sleep and he pretty much did. Anyway, uneventful journey with a detour to an arts and crafts store in Middleton, home of Steve Coogan and a hotel with a great name.

From our brief visit, Hebden Bridge was not quite the hotbed of countercultural activity I was expecting, but the charity shops were indeed fruitful. One of them sold bags of birdseed which is what my son is flinging at the ducks in the picture below. Maybe some time we'll make a day of it and visit Sylvia or take a barge tour down the canal.

I made a routing error on our way home. If we had stayed on the train for one more stop, we could have covered in 10 minutes a distance that took nearly an hour on the tram. On the other hand, we would have missed Oldham Mumps.

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.