Warm spell

I hopped on my bike today to ride over to Mill Rd to visit my favorite Asian grocery store, and amazingly, I didn't need to wear either hat or gloves. Nice mild temperatures-- things have definitely warmed up. Can spring be on the way??? I hope so (and having written this, I hope we don't get a snow storm tomorrow). The shopping trip was a bust, unfortunately-- the store was completely out of tofu. I'll have to postpone my "mapo tofu" dinner until next week.

Amy is biking in to work this week, since I need the car to drive the kids up to the Chesterton Sports Center for their half term entertainment. She has been borrowing my bike for her commute, since it is in slightly better shape than hers (I took hers for my trip to the market). Both our bikes are a little elderly at this point, but hers seems to "complain" the most -- it has a whole repertoire of weird creaking and clicking noises. Time to buy her a new one... although maybe not until we get back to the USA.

Apres la Neige, le Deluge

After the snow fest last week, we had heavy rain, which resulted in a bit of flooding around the areas closest to the river Cam. The Cam is surprisingly meek and mild-mannered as rivers go-- the actual river bed is not very large at all. I get the sense that it just doesn't ever rain very heavily here, since it's clear that the river doesn't have the capacity to carry much flood water without jumping its banks.



Here is another shot of the river from the bike bridge.

Snow!

We got about 2-3 inches of snow tonight, much to the kids delight. The newspaper and radio are filled with dire transportation-related warnings, of course; there was one article saying that people should "not attempt to drive anywhere on the highways without bringing food, water, and extra clothing" (heh). Here is a familiar scene; you can easily imagine that this is New England if you squint:



Here's another photo, this one of Lydia. I took this halfway through our bike ride to school, just after we crossed the footbridge over the river Cam. You can't see it, but I know for a fact that there is a big grin on Lydia's face underneath her wraps. Saint Faiths was open in spite of the snow (somewhat surprising in fact, given that many of the staff and the kids have to travel a fair ways to get there each day).

Political Scandals

There have been two news items in the papers this year in the UK that I have found particularly interesting to follow.

The first has been the Damian Green affair, a scandal in which a Tory (opposition) MP was arrested this fall as part of an investigation into "leaks" (details of various government plans and programs given to the media). Green had his office in Westminster searched and was arrested, along with suffering various other indignities. Virtually everyone (with the exception of a few members of the Gordon Brown administration who had been the target of the leaks) agreed that the arrest was politically motivated and should never have happened; it was clear that Green had been acting in the best interests of the country by disclosing issues/problems with the way the government was being run. On the other hand, there was not, in fact, any law preventing the arrest: the police were completely above board.

The second item is the so-called "cash for amendments" scandal in which a newspaper (Sunday Times) arranged for a collection of "fake" businessmen to meet with various members of the House of Lords; during these meetings the peers (House of Lords members) offered to delay or amend bills/legislation, in return for substantial yearly retainers (anywhere from 25 to 100 thousand pounds). There was again universal agreement that if the newspaper accounts were correct, the peers in question should be removed for corruption. As it turns out, however, there isn't actually any law that provides for getting rid of a peer who has done something dastardly-- members of the House of Lords can be scolded & reprimanded, but not removed.

Seeing this aspect of the UK political system in action does tend to make you reflect on the one back home, and how such things would be handled in the US. On the one hand, the US Constitution (as I understand it) does insures that legislators can't be arrested while Congress is in session and they are actively engaged in their jobs. Once a legislator gets in her car to go home, however: fair game for arrest. With respect to tossing out "bad apples": clearly the Constitution has explicit procedures for impeachment, no problems there. In the UK it seems that there are more gray areas. This isn't to say that the system doesn't work, of course. The "row" following the Green arrest was substantial, and it seems certain (at least to me) that he won't be prosecuted. For the House of Lords scandal, it also seems extremely unlikely that the peers in question will be allowed to continue on-- people will figure out some way to get rid of them or force them to resign. So the system functions properly, just without the same degree of explicit legal backing.

Long Distance Banking

One of the worries that we had when we embarked on our big trip across the pond was the whole problem of banking, e.g. being able to manage our financial affairs in a reasonably efficient fashion from a distance. I am happy to say that so far things have gone fairly well. Direct deposit makes a big difference of course, and the bank that we use has a very good online banking web site-- we can do nearly anything we need to via the web. The one thing we had been concerned about was depositing checks, but in fact, we have discovered that you can now deposit checks on-line as well, if you have a PC and a scanner. This morning I took a smallish check made out to Amy, got her to endorse it, wrote the appropriate magical incantations on the back, ran it through the scanner, and voila, transaction complete (or at least that's what the web page says-- we'll have to wait a couple of days to make sure). Makes me wonder whether I'm ever going to wind up setting foot inside a bank office ever again (at least after the account is opened).

The local banking scene is of course still pretty grim. Just when you think that there can't be anything left to melt down that hasn't already melted down, there is a new gloomy story in the paper about something bad happening to some British bank somewhere. Our own bank (RBS, which owns NatWest) is supposedly getting ready to accept a humiliating second major cash infusion from the government, and it is rumored that it will be posting a 20 billion (yes, billion with a B) pound loss for the quarter. Ugh.

Attack of the Peculiar British Dishes

Amy and I were invited to a Burns Night dinner this past weekend at the house of one of Ethan's classmates. It was a very nice dinner indeed, although the centerpiece of the meal was, of course, haggis. This was actually the first time I had ever been served the dish, so made an honest effort to ingest as much of it as I could. Amy chose to bathe her portion with whiskey, but I decided that I would just have it plain this time around (mental note for next time: try the booze). The particular haggis that we ate was a McSweens, which from what I hear is a fairly authentic and even somewhat upscale rendition of the dish, so I suppose that's a good thing. Verdict? Hmm, I think I may stick with the nice British sausages here...



Meanwhile, on the vegetable front, I bought my first bag of Purple Sprouting Broccoli at the Cambridge farmer's market stand this morning. It's definitely a weird name-- every time I hear it for some reason it makes me think of the Monster Raving Loony political party. From what I have been able to find by looking online, PSB has a long history (the Romans apparently grew it) and has recently begun enjoying a sort of renaissance in England. It has a distinct season (winter only) and is very "local"-- all of the PSB you find in stores is grown in the UK. I nibbled a little bit on the way home (not terribly exciting so far); I'll wait to wait and see how it turns out tonight at the dinner table.

Newspapers

The newspapers here in the UK have been fun to read and experiment with. Back in the states, you typically have to decide between getting the "local" paper like the Boston Globe (the obvious benefit being that you can keep up to date on city politics and regional happenings) or opting for one of the more national papers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, etc) that has more expansive national coverage. This has always been a tough choice.

Here in the Cambridge, there is no such dilemma-- pretty much all the papers are national (it's a small enough nation), and there are scads of them: the Sun, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Times, and so on. So far we have bought mostly the Times, although every now and then I buy the Guardian just to be contrary. The Times is now owned by Rupert Murdoch, so I am constantly on alert for signs of "Murdochish" influence in the editorial pages and the coverage. Ethan likes the sports pages in the Times, and I have to agree; they do a lovely job covering football and rugby. They also have a very lavish Sunday edition (maybe even a little too lavish-- it almost seems like a different paper, with huge color photographs of this and that).

The Guardian is an interesting paper-- it is very left-leaning, of course, and always focusing on various liberal/progressive causes of one sort or another. It does tend to get a little dry, but every now and then they publish something that really knocks your socks off. In this Tuesday's edition they had an extraordinary article written by Lasantha Wickrematunga, the editor of the Sri Lankan newspaper "The Sunday Leader". This guy suspected that he was going to be a target (the media is under immense pressure from the government there), and sure enough, he was indeed killed, at which point they published a piece he had written just a few days earlier, specifically penned for posthumous publication. Whatever other bad things you can say about the USA, at least we don't have to worry about having our journalists bumped off.