Spring and the Long Weekend: Monday was a Bank Holiday, giving everyone a long weekend. (Well, everybody but Judie, who still had to deal with American clients who were unaware that England was off work.) No one seemed to be able tell me precisely why the first Monday in May is chosen for the holiday. Maybe it is is honor of May Day (International Workers’ Day), although that doesn’t sound like something banks would want to celebrate.

Fortunately for everyone, Spring decided to arrive for the Long Weekend. OK, maybe not spring in the sense of beautiful days in the mid 70s, but at least it was pushing 60 and wasn’t cloudy or drizzling. As a result Shoreditch was an absolute madhouse. My sister Sally and her husband Alan arrived on Sunday afternoon from Denver (just as Linda left to visit Chris, her new friend (and possibly more) in Harrogate). We took a walk around the neighborhood and it was actually tough to walk down Brick lane, which was jammed with people drinking beer, eating street food, listening to street musicians and shopping at pop-up places. It was like a giant, impromptu festival. (See below.) At the same time, Old Spitalfields Market had been cleared out of the usual vendors and they were replaced by a Barcelona Boqueria food fair, with all kinds of ham, croquettes, fried fish, sausages, padron peppers, anchovies, paella and mass quantities of Estella beer.

I went out with Sally and Alan the next day, saw an exhibit about Georgione at the Royal Academy and then walked around London. Green Park and St. James Park were both lovely. The trees finally are starting to have leaves and there were tulips and other flowers everywhere. We walked past Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, The Eye and all the way down to London Bridge along the south bank of the Thames. On the way back to the flat, I took the wrong bus and we had to get off, so we walked by the Bank of England and Mansion House. We took a detour to see the Ai WeiWei sculpture under “The Gherkin” and discovered a work crew taking it down. That was a little upsetting since I really liked it (and the Damien Hirst one that was already gone). The workers told me that the sculptures were only supposed to be there for six months and would be replaced shortly. Incredibly long (22,000 steps) walk though and my feel were killing me that night.

     

Mayoral Vote Approaches: The mayoral election to replace Boris Johnson will take place on Friday. It has not really gotten the kind of exhaustive coverage that I expected. Perhaps all of the fury (and colorful name calling) about the upcoming Brexit vote has overwhelmed this election. Or it might be that there is a perception that the election is not going to be all that close. It seems to me that Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate really should win, but there has not been extensive coverage on the BBC about polling for the election (making it very different from a US election). It would be nice to say that the lack for focus on polls means that the news focuses more on the issues. But that hasn’t really been the case. Hopefully, the desperate and racist attacks on Khan by the Conservative (about which I have previously written) will backfire. It will be interesting to see if a Khan win gives any boost to Jeremy Corbyn, who seems to be besieged yet again, this time over anti-semitic comments made by a Labour MP. Corbyn and the Labour leadership came down hard and seem to have said the right things, so it is a little hard for me to see how that has become a leadership issue. I suspect that the still-irate losers from last year’s leadership vote (the Blairites) are just looking for any excuse to trash Corbyn and create a series of phony crises in hopes that they can eventually topple him and get back into power.

Leicester City Wins the Premier League: It is hard to describe what an enormous upset this is. Leicester City has been playing 132 years and has never won anything of significance. This is more incredible than the Cubs finally finning the World Series. I can’t come up with a good American analogy. The bookies are apparently taking a huge bath, since they gave incredibly long odds of this happening before the season (5,000 to 1). Everyone loves an underdog, so this has gotten tremendous coverage (and not just in England–all over Europe).

Mets and Yankees: Part of my routine now is to get up in the morning and see what happened with the Mets (and watch the MLB.TV highlight package). I sometime see the beginning of the games and, very rarely, a whole game if it happens to be a day game. (I really miss the Mets announcers.) It is all looking pretty good for the Mets and their pitching hasn’t even been as good as it should be. If the Nationals stay hot, the Mets may not win the division, although my bet is that they will. But I’m certain that both team will make the playoffs, in the absence of a bizarre series of injuries. The Yankees, in contrast, are off to a terrible start. It is a team of formerly great players increasingly past their prime and for the past couple of years I’ve been waiting for the wheels to fall off. Until this year, the Yankee superstars, even diminished, could play well enough for the team to contend. But now it is beginning to look like the clock has struck midnight and they are all turning into pumpkins (or mice or whatever you like in your Cinderella analogy). It could be an ugly summer in the Bronx.