Back Home…

One of my ‘lovable’ quirks is that when I travel on planes, in addition to gripping the armrest tightly for most of the duration (whether it’s one hour or nine), I come prepared with an iPad stuffed to the gills of vintage television. Whilst everybody else is watching orange and teal, flight attendants often get a good eyeful of something like Gangsters or a World In Action episode from 1984 featuring miners’ wives from Nottingham and Yorkshire having a slanging match¹.

The star of this week’s trip home was this frankly terrifying episode of QED, where they investigate the somewhat frightening levels of drinking in some 16-18 year olds. Barrels of beer a week are mentioned. Entertaining in itself, but two amazing highlights: they give a bus driver doubles until he can’t judge how wide a gap he needs to drive his double-decker bus through two traffic cones, and at 24:00, the interviewer asks the teenagers ‘well, what do you think about people that don’t drink alcohol in pubs?’, leading up to a wonderful unguarded reaction from one of them at 24:25, then immediately realising what she just said on national television. I don’t know how that survived the edit.

My parents had a quiet 50th wedding anniversary, but it was lovely to be back there to celebrate it. Hopefully next year, we will stay long enough in Bicester or meet up with a bunch of people. It is a luxury that I can do these things, and I’m grateful that we could pull it off…as well as get hold of the largest card that Moonpig offers.

London is always London; never quite the same, but not all that different. The IBM building on the South Bank somehow is still standing, the Croft thrives, restaurants come and go. Sava and I had a great long conversation over whisky in the Melody Bar during the afternoon, and in the evening, having evaluated a few quite different options, I went off and found an Irish pub serving spice bags. And then Dishoom in the morning, which obviously marks me out as a filthy hipster (I even went to the Shoreditch location, but this was mainly just so I could visit the Barbican on my way there), but I can’t deny the power of the egg and sausage naan roll after a considerable number of drinks the night before. Oh, and a secret visit to Fortitude Bakery to surprise Tammy with a few sweet treats on my return.

I’d just point out to the rest of the team that there is more to London than concrete.

— Sava, saying bizarre things in our team’s Slack channel. I suppose there’s also tube stations…

Now, I’m flying across the ocean, laden down with Percy Pigs, mixed fruits, books, and a giant poster of the Los Campesinos! concert we went to earlier in the year. I think I’ve done all my travelling for 2025; it’s time to put a head or two down to sort out some things at work, but more importantly: the desserts at Christmas time are simply not going to make themselves…