Where can you begin with London? Well, I didn’t know London terribly well so I began by getting a bird’s eye view of it. London’s ‘Eye’ is its pre-eminent tourist attraction, and for good reason. On the day I rode into the skies, London was having uncharacteristically great weather: 28 degrees, not a cloud in the sky and that pleasant level of humidity that makes your clothes stick to you like glue paper.

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Every day I have been in the UK I have taken public transport. That is hardly unique. Being in London, one can hardly avoid taking the tube. Additionally, I took a plane to get to London and will take a train to get back there.

I mention this seemingly mundane aspect of my adventures partly to draw attention to the ubiquitous nature of all forms of transport delight and partly to marvel at the names that the English have come up with for their tube and train stations.

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Where else will you see men wearing dinner suits riding bicycles down the main thoroughfare, but in Oxford?

Oxford is a unique city. Its strong association with the university marks it out as the place for intellectuals and those will little or no fashion sense (and those two groups are often one and the same).

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By any standards, Bath is a spectacular city. It is for good reason it is one of the World Heritage Sites. Its most obvious attractions are its Roman baths and, care of the voice of Bill Bryson, who provided the audio commentary on my tour of said baths, I got some sense of what it meant to be a Roman at bath-time.

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Lincoln Tan: Denying immigrants work will destroy NZ bit by bit

Monday September 18, 2006 - New Zealand Herald

Two weeks ago, I wrote about barriers skilled immigrants faced when finding employment here.

Prompted by stories in the Aucklander, I questioned employers who used the excuse of lack of Kiwi experience to bar immigrants from getting work in their fields of expertise. The headline put it more bluntly: Good job opportunities for immigrants just a big fat lie.

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It’s about 6am in the morning (or 12pm at night or 6pm at night depending where in the world you are) and I’m wide awake. I expect this is jet-lag and that sometime after lunch I shall be hit with this heavy sense of tiredness and collapse into some exhausted heap somewhere. But for now I’m reasonably coherent.

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Flying is endlessly entertaining in many inexplicable ways. I shall never understand what possesses people to have hand luggage the size of small animals and then, just as they board the plane, with a queue of waiting passengers behind them, decide (a) they desperately, at this very moment in time, need to get something from their pack that clearly they were unable to retrieve in the two hours they’d been waiting at the airport, (b) their small animal bag is, frankly, a little to large to either life or fit into the overhead lockers and requires at least three passengers and most of the crew to haul it up and then contort it in such a way that it fits into the locker and shall not be moved, or (c) they approach a seat with confidence and swagger and prepare to sit themselves down when they realise that the seat number of 33a is not actually the same, or even remotely close, to the seat number on their boarding pass of 54a and so, sheepishly, and under the gaze of annoyed crew and passengers alike, move down to the cabin and into their rightful seat. Read more…

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Planes might be amongst the greatest inventions of the twentieth century, but for all the great physics that goes into keeping a large jumbo jet full of hundreds of people in the air there is still something extraordinarily confusing about the in-flight entertainment system.

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Job hunting tough for migrants
   
Sep 15, 2006 TVNZ

Many new migrants are falling victim to discrimination and the worst offenders seem to be employers.

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Review of Orpheus Choir “Venetian Splendour” concert, by Lindis Taylor, Dominion Post, 15 September 2006

In the 16th century the wealthy states of Italy, and especially Venice, developed music of great opulence and splendour. In Florence opera evolved, and in Venice it was brilliant church music, inspired by the configuration of the Basilica of St Mark which led to divided choruses and brass ensembles that lifted the liturgy to unprecedented heights.

The singers and brass players at St Paul’s, divided into two parts in front of the choir stalls, brought this music vividly to life. The performances, directed with precision and idiomatic sensitivity by Michael Fulcher, were aurally and visually exciting.

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