It is said that there is an old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” I am feeling particularly cursed right now. In addition to the current Brexit soap opera and the implosion of the British parties, there is the Hilary/Trump horror show and an incipient race war. And if that wasn’t enough to make me crazy, there was the terrible attack in Nice followed immediately by the wild night of the attempted coup in Turkey. I thought about lighting a candle at New Unity on Sunday hoping for a week without news. But with the party conventions approaching in America and the Labour Party here sharpening their swords in preparation for hari kari, I am probably hoping in vain.

Judie’s Big News: Speaking of interesting times, one the things that has made the last couple of months extra interesting is that Judie has been exploring the possibility of leaving Bryan Cave, her law firm for the past eleven years. Well, the exploration is over. Judie is leaving Bryan Cave and moving the K&L Gates, another huge multinational law firm. Judie just told the people in the BC London office and they were predictably very nice and understanding about it. It is a very long story that Judie should tell, but, basically, BC had stopped appreciating her. It is a wonderful law firm and was the perfect firm for Judie in mnost ways over the past decade.But now, she needed a firm that could better deal with the kind of tech companies and startups that seek her out. K&L Gates seems to fit her practice much better than the current BC. (The Gates in the name is from a Seattle-based firm that was absorbed into the legal conglomerate. He was a named partner whose son got very involved in the computer industry. You may have heard of him.) The next month or two may be a bit chaotic and bumpy (“interesting”), but this was a move that needed to be made unless Judie wanted to simply coast into retirement. It doesn’t affect our London stay.

George: This bit of news in “interesting” in its worst sense. George Griggs is someone I’ve known since the fall of 1970. We have kept up over the years, talk on the phone and see each other and our families periodically. We are close friends. We hadn’t heard from him for a while and since we are going to be back in the US for two weeks pretty soon, Judie sent him a note asking if he was around. When he wrote back, he revealed that he had some kind of weird cancer in and around his eye. He recently underwent an operation which removed one eye, leaving him somewhat disfigured. This is shocking and distressing news for me and for our many mutual friends. I have so many memories about him, which I’d relate but I don’t want to make this sound like a eulogy, since he is very much alive and hopefully cancer-free now. But I am shaken.

Back to Lords: I wouldn’t have predicted or believed this, but I ended up going to a second day of the Test Match. One of Judie’s partners had access to an extra pair of unused tickets. I thought that they might be in the pavilion area, which would have been truly fun, but it turned out that they were in the in the first row of the upper grandstand. Much better seats, if for no other reason than they were in the sun and it was a beautiful summer day. We were surrounded by people drinking champagne and eating sandwiches as I tried to explain what was going on to Judie and our neighbors filled in some of the gaps in my knowledge. Behind us we two gents with those sort of landed gentry accents that comedians make fun of. They were wearing the orangish and yellowish Lords ties and spent the day talking about hunting, real estate, the “good chaps” they knew in powerful positions, their cricket memories and other things that the upper crust types discuss over the course of a long afternoon. Listening to them was like being upstairs in Downton Abbey with Lord Grantham. The cricket was spectacularly cricket-like. There was one stretch of well over an hour in which Pakistan, who were now batting again, made absolutely no effort to score a run, just tapping balls into the ground or letting them pass. I imagine that there was some kind of strategy involved, but it escapes me. It didn’t seem to work that well because Pakistan didn’t appear to have added enough to their first inning lead, giving England a real chance to win the match when they ended up batting the next day. But the English batters crashed and burned and didn’t even make it to the fifth day. The television commentators were disgusted.

Abbey Road: We left a little early and went out the back of the Cricket Grounds and walked down Groves End Road to the intersection of Abbey Road, where the Abbey Road Studios are located. There was the street crossing from the Beatles album with lots of people walking across the crosswalk and taking each others pictures. We of course did the same and the photos are below. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to drive down Abbey Road since traffic was backed up due the constant pedestrian crossings, which made it tricky to get a good picture.