The biggest television show in England this year is “The Great British Bake Off”. It has gotten the biggest audiences and is on the front page of the papers. It seems so very British (there is not much of a chance of “American Baker”). The really cool thing is that is was won by a Muslim woman in a head scarf named Nadia and that everyone seemed to be rooting for her. Since I drafted this yesterday, the New York Times has had an article about Nadia, so she is now an international phenomenon.

The Conservatives have been having a conference in Manchester this week. I’ve been going on and on about British politics lately so I won’t go into details, although it was bizarre with Cameron lurching to the left, while other members of the cabinet lurched to the right. It seems like Cameron might have made a tactical error by announcing that this is his last term. It appears to be leading to a lot of posturing by potential contenders (with five years to go!!).

At noon today I went into the Ace Hotel, the extremely hip hotel on Shoreditch High Street. Philippe is playing in the lobby there on his last night in England to conclude his tour and I figured I would check it out as I was walking past. There must have been 30-40 people in the lobby and all but about five had his or her head buried in a laptop. There was a long table that you would think would be for lunch, but every space was filled by someone looking at their laptop. See the photo. Very strange and oddly quiet. No WiFi in the rooms???

The Underground here uses something called Oyster card, which are like NYC Metro cards with a brain. It work by some sort of radio transmission, so that you simply touch it to a reader at a station or on a bus and it deducts the right sum of money. And if you register your card, you can set it up so that you can direct it to reload the card when you touch the reader or automatically reload when you touch the reader when your card has less than £10 on it. Pretty neat technology. And then I lost my Oyster card. But no worries. I just had to buy a new one for £5, then go on line and cancel my old one and move the balance on the lost card to my new one! This has the Metro card completely beat!

And finally, Full English Breakfast! (Except I made it for lunch.) Actually, this is a light version, since it doesn’t have sausages or potatoes.I  guess in America, we would substitute pancakes for the baked beans, which might be the only thing you could do to make this more fattening.