They are announcing the Mann Booker Prize tonight (Tuesday), which is for the best fiction published in Britain the past year. The BBC has live coverage of the event and has been having stories about it for the last week. Can you imagine any American network giving any coverage at all to a literary award–especially one where a none-American might win?

I am part of a small group that is trying to introduce “Standing on the Side of Love” to the UK. It can’t be a simply Unitarian thing, since there are pathetically few Unitarians here. So It will have to be a coalition. It is a daunting challenge and one that I suspect may fail, but it is exciting to try to start a movement.

I actually watched the entire Met game on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. After about the sixth inning, I told myself that I’d give up and go to sleep if the Dodgers scored another run, but they never did. And then LA took out Kershaw to start the eighth, so it seemed like the Mets might have a shot. But it wasn’t to be and I ended up crawling into bed at around 4:00 AM. If I try to watch all of Game Five, I won’t get any sleep, since the taxi comes to pick us up at 4:00 to go to Naples.

Remember the scenes in “Harry Potter” with the night bus? I didn’t really appreciate the significance until we moved here. The Underground stops around 1:00 AM and the only way to get around London after that is to take the sporadic night buses, which I assume are not exactly like the ones in the books. They keep talking about extending the tube service, but the management isn’t crazy about the idea since that is when they do all the repairs to the system (which apparently needs lots of fixing all of the time) and the union guys want a pay increase if they are going to work in the middle of the night and occasionally go on strike to make the point even though it is unlikely to ever happen.

Here is a picture from the other day at Old Spitalfields Market. This group of old ladies in red were there for some reason and they were so cute that everyone wanted to take their picture. The didn’t seem to mind, so I joined in.

One of the reasons that they stood out so much is that it sometimes seems like everyone here wears black–the hipsters in their black jeans and leather jackets, the businessmen in their black suits, the police and just everyone else. It is sometimes a little monochromatic. In Elizabethan and other old times, wearing black was a sign of wealth, since they really didn’t have good black dyes and black clothes were specially made with imported dyes. If you weren’t rich your black clothes quickly faded to gray and if you were poor, you wore brown. Of course, it is not a sign of wealth now, just conformity.