I don’t know if losing the lead at 4:00 AM is really more painful than losing it at 11:00 PM, but it sure felt like it. The Mets blew  yet another game in the World Series. They really could have won the Series, but ultimately didn’t deserve it. The Royals just played better this week. Here are some thoughts (if you are not a baseball/Mets fan, feel free to skip this post entirely):

It is pretty easy to second guess Terry Collins: The Mets manager was on a great run where everything he did seemed to work and then in the World Series nothing worked. His robotic approach to his bullpen, which is justifiable (maybe) in the regular season, was exposed. Clippard hasn’t really pitched well in weeks, yet Collins brought him in to pitch a crucial inning in Game Four (rather than Familia) because he was the guy who pitches the eighth. Coming into the Series, one of the Mets’ great weapons was Familia, but in the Fourth and Fifth Games, Collins waited too long to use him and ended up putting him in impossible situations. The Fox guys kept comparing leaving Harvey in the game to Jack Morris and the Twins, which is valid, but they might have also referred to Grady Little leaving Pedro in too long and losing to the Yankees, which, as it turned out was the better analogy. I didn’t mind sending Harvey back out, but I would have brought in Familia after the walk. But I don’t really know what he could have done to get them to hit, which was ultimately the biggest problem.

The aliens who kidnapped Daniel Murphy gave him back: The Murphy in the Series was, unfortunately, the one that Mets fans know: He is a journeyman player whose only real skill is making contact with the baseball when hitting (which is a real skill, not to be minimized). But as the Series showed, he is a barely competent fielder and proved it by making some critical errors. He really is not a power hitter either, despite his post-season heroics. I’m not complaining, since his historic home run binge helped get the Mets to the Series to begin with and was a nice cap for his Mets career. I’d be very surprised if the Mets pay him what it would take to keep him as a free agent and I won’t miss him that much.

The Mets never saw the real Cespedes: In the last two months of the season, especially August, he was just incredible. A Willie Mays-like Superman, having probably the best two month stretch of any position player in Mets history. In October, not so much. He didn’t really hit well at all. He was over-swinging terribly and there seem to be holes in his swing that top pitchers can exploit. To make matters worse, he looked pretty bad in CF, starting with misplaying a fly ball in the fist inning of Game One into an inside-the-park homer. He is a much better player than he was during the World Series and for much of the playoffs and not close to the god-like player he was in August. He is a free agent and someone (maybe the Mets) is going to give him a truck load of money. But what will they be getting?

Defense is key in the post-season: And the Mets didn’t play good defense in the Series. Good teams that are playing well (who are the teams that end up in the World Series) are teams that capitalize on mistakes. If the Mets had played tight defense, they would have won the series. But Cespedes kicked the ball around in the outfield, Murphy’s lousy fielding was exposed, Duda threw the ball away when a good throw would have ended Game Five and Wright made a couple of errors. And d’Arnaud and the Mets pitchers proved incredibly easy to run on, playing right in the Royals strategy. The couldn’t turn double plays against a ground ball hitting team. The often-criticized Wilmer Flores, shockingly, was the steadiest fielder on the team.

The Royals played really well: Their pitching pretty much stopped the Mets offense and their defense was good, although they made a few big errors. And you have to appreciate their approach at the plate and their willingness to cut down on their swings and just try to make contact when they have two strikes. The majority of Mets hitters (and the majority of MLB players) just don’t do that. The Royals give up power and are essentially a singles hitting team, which is a tough way to shape an offense, unless you can take lots of extra bases and keep games close with pitching and defense. They are well designed for their large stadium, although I’d have to say that they had the worst bunch of hitters on their bench that I can recall in a post-season. A team with a tighter middle infield that could control the running game would have given them trouble. But they took advantage of the breaks and lucky bounces they got and never gave up. I’d like to say that the Mets blew it, but, really, the Royals won it.

Wait ‘Til Next Year: The Mets are going to be good for a couple of years going forward, simply because they have historically great young starting pitching, combined with a great closer. Conforto has a chance to be a star and you could do worse that Flores at second or short. D’Arnaud is a good young hitter and catcher, but they need to work on his throwing. I’ve come to really appreciate Granderson, who was the Mets MVP this year. Wright’s a pro, but his back is a perpetual concern. Duda is too streaky, but I don’t know that they can really do any better. Murphy is likely gone, but how much money do they want to blow on Cespedes? I’d like to see him back, but not with contract that cripples their budget for years to come. They have some decisions to make, but, for the first time in a very long time, they are starting from a strong position,

It’s hard to know where to start. It has been a bit of lost period, thanks to the Mets and the damn World Series keeping me up to all hours. Fortunately, that looks like it may end tonight and, in any event will end soon. I will probably devote a future post to thoughts about this whole post-season, so I won’t say much about the Series here. But the Mets could as easily be up three games to one as down by that amount and arguably should be. It has been kind of a Series between old-time small ball strategy and more modern sabremetric thinking, with small ball winning, much to the delight of that antediluvian moron, Harold Reynolds. It will be a pleasure to stop listening to him. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of baseball commentators, former players, sportswriters without newspapers anymore and random people off the street who would be so much better than him, that you have to wonder what it is that Fox sees in him. I actually tried to switch to the radio feed for the audio, but it is on a ten or more second delay, so it is too out of joint with the game action on the screen.

Regardless of the outcome and the lack of sleep which has left me “Met lagged”, it has been a wonderful run. A week ago, at the Unitarian Church, when I lit a candle to the Mets, I explained that I was really lighting it, not because they had won, but to reflect on the intergenerational ties that they formed in my family and countless others and to be thankful for the joy that they had brought to my son Alex, to my friends and, if you believe in an afterlife, to my father. It is really the interconnected joys, sorrows and frustrations that are what being a Mets fan is all about. It isn’t about winning. (This may be the essential difference between Mets fans and Yankees fans.) But Let’s Go Mets anyway. It’s not over until it’s over.

Last Sunday, after the Unitarian service, I went to a meeting of the “Sunday Gatherings Team” to see what it was like. It turned out that Rev. Andy likes to get a lot of input form people about what the services should be like and how the congregation could be better. One of the things he did is break us into small groups to brainstorm ideas on each of the upcoming services for the month. He had already chosen the topics and I chose the service that was today on the topic of friendship. It was fun and a few of my ideas found their way into his message (he doesn’t like the term sermon apparently). He also asked for readings and I found two readings from Winnie the Pooh, which I thought reflected on friendship. One was between Eeyore and Rabbit and was about how you have to have real conversations and go out of your way and make an effort to see others and the other was a wonderful excerpt in which Christopher Robin asks Pooh what he likes best in the world and Pooh says:

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best?” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have: and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘What about a little something?’ and Me saying,’ Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”

I ended up actually reciting the the two readings (which brought back repeatedly reading these stories to my kids) and they were incorporated nicely into the message. The people in the congregation loved the readings and came up to me afterward to talk about them. One woman had been to the Hundred Acre Woods with her family in the prior week and played Pooh sticks there (which sounds like something I need to do). Another guy commented that he always thought of Winnie to Pooh as being read with a British accent and the hearing me read it was odd, but not unpleasant. He said that he pictured Pooh and Christopher Robin living somewhere like Vermont as he listened.

It was nice to get involved in this particular service because I have been thinking a lot about friendship in the past few weeks. I’ve realized that what I miss is not my house, or Montclair, or doing things in NYC, or going up to the country, or wine tastings or dinners, or our UU congregation, it is the people. And it isn’t anything big. It is just knowing them and what has happened to them over the years, watching their kids grow up, recalling special moments and just being able to start a conversation in the middle, without an introductory part. It is that sort of deep and regular personal connection that is missing from what is our delightful life here. It is the biggest reason we are going to the New Unity Congregation, which I think is our best hope for making connections of any depth.

I have been thinking about why it seems so difficult to make friends here. Have I been too much like Eeyore, waiting for people to come to me? Not really, although perhaps I could try to get out more to try to meet other people somehow, although I don’t think that mere proximity necessarily leads to any sort of significant friendship. It all seemed so much easier when we moved to Sydney so long ago. Was it because we were different then or that Aussies are friendlier than Brits? The answer to both of those questions is yes, but I think the real reason was Alex. Having a small child is an incredible lubricator in the creation of relationships. It gives you an instant and meaningful connection with other parents and also I think that walking about with a cute, verbal two-year old is a little like walking a puppy. It attracts people who want to come and talk to you and to him. Anyway, we are lacking that lubricator here and Judie working in a smallish branch of a law firm is not like working at American Express in Sydney.

Thinking about our friends in Sydney is a nice segue into the Rugby World Cup. As probably almost no one in America knows, New Zealand beat Australia in a really exciting final yesterday. They are two creative teams that do not play the smash-mouth, run-it-up-the-middle-and-kick-it-away type of game that most teams seem to play. New Zealand took a pretty big lead early in the second half and the game looked over, but Australia came roaring back, scoring 14 straight points, before New Zealand took control at the very end on some wonderful plays and won 34-17. One absolutely delightful discovery that came out of this World Cup was that our old friend Mair Lustig, the Welsh wife of my college roommate Rich, is a fanatical rugby fan. I never would have guessed it, but she followed it all and knows the history, especially of the Wales team. We’ve known Mair for close to forty years and never knew this about her, which I guess fits somewhere into these ruminations about friendship and seems like a reasonable place to conclude.

Midnight was approaching Tuesday night and I was getting ready to watch Game One of the World Series and I got to thinking if I had ever missed a Mets World Series game. (It’s an easier exercise with the Mets because it is a relatively rare occurrence.) Definitely not in 2000 or 1986. I was in college in 1973 and I distinctly recall watching the World Series in the Senior Center at Bowdoin, but it is possible that I might have missed some of the Series or at least part of a game when I had to go to class (this was when they still had games in the day time). On the other hand, I could imagine that I skipped class to watch the Mets games. And in 1969, I know I missed the beginning of a couple games, since they started about when school got out, and I am quite sure that I had a play rehearsal or two that caused me to miss all or most of two games. But that was back when I hadn’t even turned 17 and it seemed like there would be lots of time to see the Mets in the World Series of the future.

One of the things about watching baseball in the middle of the night is that all the little things that make the game take too long are more annoying. I had never completely realized how endless the commercial breaks were–at least two minutes every half inning, which means I spent over a half an hour of Game One staring at a screen which said “Commercial Break”–they don’t show the ads on the MLB.TV service, which somehow makes the breaks seem even longer. And then they stopped the game completely when the TV feed broke down, making me hate Fox even more than simply having to listen to the moronic Harold Reynolds as the main color guy had already done. But, despite everything, it looked like the game would end by 3:30 and I could go to sleep, and then Familia gave up the home run in the ninth and the game went on and on. I finally gave up after the Mets batted in the twelfth, at 4:30. I found out the next morning that they lost in the fourteenth, well after 5:00. I staggered around in a bit of a fog the entire next day. It really does feel a lot like being jet lagged. It was an exciting game, which the Mets really should have won, but I don’t know if I can take another one of these. The Mets have lost the first game of every World Series they have played, for whatever that is worth. I still have faith and, in a way, I am just so happy that they finally got here that everything from this point on is gravy.

With that thought in mind, I tuned in to Game Tow of the Series. The Mets played like they had a plane to catch (a performance that recalled the pre-Cespedes offense–just pathetic) and the Royals basically swing at everything, so the game moved along very quickly. When the Mets fell behind 4-1, they looked finished to me, but I had sufficient memories of August and September rallies, that I hung in there, at least until the Royals scored three more in the 8th to make it 7-1. By then it was about 2:30 AM and I felt justified in throwing in the towel and going to bed, especially after the marathon the night before. It is a little bit of the same calculation that you do when you are at a game and you are trying to decide whether to leave early to beat the crowds. You feel like you should stay until the end as a matter of principle and because Yogi says “It ain’t over until its over”, but at a certain point there is no reason to hang around. It’s not looking good for the Metsies (as Keith calls them), but they have three games in NYC and stranger things have happened. I have not bought into the Harold Reynolds/Fox man crush that they seem to have on the Royals offense. Granted, they are good at cutting down on their swings with two strikes and making contact, but, get real, if a few of those grounders don’t find a hole or a few of the liners or bloops carried another 20 feet to an outfielder, they’d have been gushing about the Mets pitching. The Royals do figure to win at this point but there is no point in acting like they are some super team.

I was walking around Covent Garden the other day and walked into a gallery that was selling Bob Dylan prints and original paintings. (I’d actually been into another gallery in Mayfair a few days earlier that had the same stuff. It turns out that even art galleries in London have multiple locations.) The numbered lithographs went from £1,500 to 3,500 and the only original painting they had went for £25,000. (Doesn’t Bob have enough money?) I spoke to the people in the gallery, who seemed to think that the artwork was OK, but that the real attraction was Bob’s signature. Apparently, he rarely gives autographs and his signature is rated among the ten most valuable in the world. They were selling them like crazy.

Construction of towers in London has already begun to destroy the charm of the city. But, at least the powers that be had apparently decided to confine it to the areas south of the Thames and in the East End (where poor people lived) and in the City (where rich people work). It is mostly ugly, but at least concentrated in a few areas. But it is creeping into other areas. There is a proposal to build an extremely tall glass tube tower over Paddington Station, which would really change the entire ballgame, if it goes through. I guess you can take the attitude that cities are constantly evolving and that London has had layers and layers of renovations, destructions and new buildings over millennia and had its Great Fire and the Blitz, etc. But a big part of the fun of London is the old buildings and little lanes and alleys and finding out that something happened in that exact building four hundred years ago. If you take that away, what do you have? Hong Kong?

One of the things that you notice walking around London is how much activity takes place outdoors. It’s not just the drinkers and smokers outside the pubs. There is al fresco dining everywhere and outdoor markets wherever you turn. I suppose in the middle of a chilly, bleak winter, there will be much less of this outdoor shopping and eating and general living. But it is hard to see how that will work since the whole economy and lifestyle seems to depend on that sort of outdoor living. It doesn’t get all that cold here anyway, so maybe everyone just adopts a “Dress Warm and Carry On” attitude to match their stiff upper lips. I will say that it certainly does get dark early here. It is so far North (compared to NYC for example) that the days are really getting quite short already. Now that daylight savings is over, it is dusk by 5:00 and dark by 5:30. (I read about two weeks ago that the Lord Mayor’s Day–which I have written about–was to end in fireworks at 5:30 and I thought it had to be a typo. Nope.) In two months, I may not see the sun at all….

I just saw “The Hairy Ape” at the Old Vic tonight. It is an early Eugene O’Neill play. After dragging Judie to several versions of “Long Days Journey Into Night” and “The Iceman Cometh” (and more of his plays), she decided that she could skip this one, so I decided to go while she was in Las Vegas. O’Neill is absolutely my favorite American playwright and perhaps my favorite playwright, period (although Shakespeare is in the conversation). I think “Long Days Journey” is the greatest play ever written by an American, with “Iceman” in the top five, along with the obvious choices from Williams, Albee and Miller. I’d never seen this play, although I recall reading it–probably 40 years ago. It is interesting, rather than memorable. It is based on O’Neill’s experience working on a steamer after he ran away from his family, but before he got consumption. (The character Edmund, who is O’Neill in his autobiographical classic, talks about this in “Long Days Journey”.) It doesn’t have the power or structure of his later master works, but “The Hairy Ape” has moments of poetry and I think you can easily spot the prototype of Larry from “Iceman”.

This performance starred Bertie Carvel, as Yank, who I last saw playing Miss Trunchbowl in “Matilda”. (Quite a different role.) I’m not quite sure what to say about the production, since I think it is a flawed play to begin with, even if it is one that is worth trying. I’m don’t know how you can make it coherent and believable. And I have to admit that I had trouble completely understanding the working class accents of the other laborers in the ship’s boiler room, although I am not sure that it really mattered, since I could understand the main characters. They did some nice choreography and staging of the scenes, although it is my recollection from reading the play so long ago that one of the things that tied things together was the beating of drums and the pounding of the engine of the ship. If that was part of the original script (I haven’t bothered to check my memory), they decided to drop it. The play is about the chasm between the wealthy and the working class and Yank’s (Carvel’s) anger and resentment about it, triggered when a rich socialite insists on going down to the boiler room of the ship to see how the other half lives, takes one look at Yank and is horrified at the hairy ape she sees. Yank’s anger, attempt to get even and his ultimate impotence takes up the rest of the play. There are some ideas that make you think and some good speeches, but the whole thing really doesn’t quite hold together. But it is really quite a political statement and has a real resonance in today’s world of increasing disparity between the super-rich and the middle and lower classes. I suspect this is one of the reasons that they chose to stage it. The play hasn’t opened yet. I’ll be interested in what the critics think.

This whole discussion of class disparity segues very nicely into a follow up on yesterday’s post about the Conservative’s attack on the working class and the utterly surprising and strange action of the House of Lords riding to the rescue of people who I suspect they normally wouldn’t deign to be in the same room with. So what happened today? Osborne and the Conservatives realized that they they were beaten and decided to “tweak” their financial plan. It appears that they will drive the working class into poverty gradually, rather than immediately, which is probably enough to mollify everyone, even though it shouldn’t be. Osborne and the Tories are as furious at the House of Lords as a bunch of tight-ass prep school rich guys can ever get. There is apparently some talk of naming a hundred new Conservative peers to the House of Lords to eliminate all dissent (incredibly, they can do that), but the House of Lords is already very, very large and this does not seem to be the preferred course of action. although you can bet that they will be naming peers with more frequency over the next few years. But they do seem to want revenge, so it seems more likely that they will do something to further decrease the power of the House of Lords, although it is a body that doesn’t seem to do all that much anyway. One the one hand, I’m sympathetic with the idea that a group of unelected rich people should not be able to undo the work of the duly elected government, which theoretically better represents the will of the people. But if you are going to reduce them to a completely impotent arm of government, what is the point of having them at all? Tradition? Something for Paul McCartney to do (or not) when he is town?

There have been some interesting political developments here in the last couple of days. The Conservative Chancellor, George Osborne is kind of the Treasurer for the country and said to be Cameron’s pick to succeed him as PM in five years. The Conservatives, having recently won the election and with the Labour Party in turmoil, are moving ahead aggressively on their election pledge to eliminate the budget deficit. Predictably, Osborne wants to do this by cutting support for the working poor. That group has been getting tax credits for years, which keeps them and their children from sliding into poverty. Osborne’s plan would immediately cut this support by thousands of pounds for the people who can least afford it. This got through the House of Commons, apparently based on Conservative support for cutting spending and without a whole lot of scrutiny on its impact on real people. Then everyone began to figure out how awful the plan was and the Conservative back benchers in the marginal seats, who had defeated sitting Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs by presenting the Tories as friends to working people, began to raise concerns in the background. Hypocrisy doesn’t really sell and Osborne’s plan leaves them twisting slowly in the wind. (For extra credit, with what Watergate figure was this phrase associated? And to whom was he referring? See below.)

Then today, The House of Lords, who wouldn’t be anyone’s choice as protector of the working class, made it clear that they were disgusted by the rank unfairness of the Osborne plan. They held a series of votes by which they delayed the Osborne plan and probably forced him to alter it, at least in some way. While not completely unprecedented, this is pretty unusual. The House of Lords doesn’t really do much of substance and almost never overrules the action of the majority in the House of Commons and absolutely never on a matter of financial policy. (In fact, it is argued that they acted illegally because the House of Commons passed an act about 100 years ago which prohibits the house of Lords for voting on budget matters. This was after the House of Lords rejected Lloyd George’s budget. But because of the parliamentary procedure used by the Conservatives to get the cuts through, this law didn’t apply.) So now the whole plan to screw the working class to balance the budget is at least delayed and maybe worse (or better if you aren’t a rich conservative). Osborne could try to to just push it through again, perhaps with some cosmetic changes. But he is going to have real opposition this time and maybe not just from Labour and the LibDems, but also from some members of his own party. There is no question that the Tories will go through with their idiotic austerity budget. The only issue is whether they will be able to shred the social safety net and impoverish the working class as much as they would like.

The bigger picture issue is that Osborne, the heir apparent and PM in waiting, now has all the appeal and popularity of Voldemort, as he is supported only by the Dark Lords. It is a real Emperor has no clothes moment for Conservatives and the public. Cameron is said to hate change and he is committed to Osborne, but how far will he go to support him if Osborne is dragging the party down just when they are on high? Does this encourage Conservatives like Mayor Boris to start angling for the leadership role?

On an utterly different topic: My great Aussie friend, David Lee, wrote me the other day urging me to keep watching the Rugby World Cup and root for Australia, even if I can’t completely follow the rules. So Sunday afternoon I popped open a Cooper beer and watched Australia beat Argentina 29-15. (New Zealand had completely outplayed South Africa the prior afternoon, yet only won by two points.) I still don’t really understand the rules, especially most of the time when penalties are called. For example, the teams are in the middle of a scrum, all grunting and pushing, and then a penalty is called by the ref, which the announcers casually note as if everyone know what just happened (probably since most people do know), but I am mystified. New Zealand almost lost their game due a series of these incomprehensible calls. However, while I don’t really completely understand what is going on, I can spot the good teams now. They are the teams that maintain their position across the field on defense and make it impossible to get by them unless you do something creative. All of the four finalists fit this defensive mold. On offense the mediocre teams just run it straight or try one or two short passes (England does this and it was all South Africa could seem to manage against the All Blacks), while the good teams throw multiple laterals or long and risky passes out to speedy wings and do these clever little kicks forward that are run down by teammates. New Zealand is especially dangerous in this area and the Aussies aren’t far behind and Argentina had some creative individual players. The Finals are next weekend. I’m hoping for a Wallabies upset, but even to my utterly untrained eye, the All Blacks appear to be the best team.

And finally: Let’s Go Mets. I lit a candle for them in Church on Sunday.

Answer to Quiz: John Erlichman, talking to John Dean about L. Patrick Gray

I wonder if it ever gets cold enough for people not to stand outside of pubs drinking their beer. On a Friday evening in particular, the crowds can be quite enormous and even difficult to get by if the pub is in an alley. Since you can’t smoke in pubs and some of them aren’t all that big on the inside, I’d guess that it will continue.

Perhaps it is just the pub scene, but it seems to me that there are lot more people going out and drinking, especially after work, than you’d ever see in the States. And there are a lot more people smoking, certainly that in NYC. It my just be a hipster/Shoreditch thing, but a lot of the smokers around here seem to roll their own. And they roll them with filters!

When I went to the Guildhall Art Gallery, one section was roped off because they were bringing out the Lord Mayors glass mace for display in anticipation of the Lord Mayor’s Show. This is the 800th year of this event, which I mentioned in an early post, and will happen on November 14th. In 1215, King John gave the City of London the right to have its own Lord Mayor, with the caveat that once a year, the Mayor had to leave the safety of the City and travel to Westminster to swear allegiance to the Crown. (At some point the ceremony change and coincides with the swearing-in of the new Lord Mayor, which is done at the Law Courts rather than Westminster.) So the day starts with the Lord Mayor taking an elaborate ornate barge from the City to Westminster. He then returns and takes a coach from Mansion House to the Royal Courts and back. This ceremony became increasingly elaborate as time went on and it is now an over-the-top exercise in pomp in circumstance (at which the British are particularly great) that is televised nationally and punctuated by a fireworks.

Speaking of pomp and circumstance, we are planning to attend Royal Ascot in June. Yes, it is the same horse race from “My Fair Lady” and apparently the Queen loves it and attends every day. She comes in on a coach which goes around the track before dropping her off at the Royal Box. It is quite amusing to read their website, especially the dress code.

Daylight savings time just ended here. Since London is so far North, this means it will be getting dark pretty early. The plus is that, for the next week, the time difference between here and the US is one hour less, which will make watching the World Series (at least the first four games) less painful!

One of the weird things about doing this blog is that I feel like I am blithering away to any number of people (and I get e-mails and responses that let me know that somebody is out there), but I have no real idea how many people are following this. I’m not really complaining or asking anyone to write me about this whole exercise and I’m not really certain that it matters whether anyone is reading it. I’m writing this stuff as much for me as for anyone else…….

I’ve been thinking of doing a whole post about Banksy, who is such an important sensation here, in a way that he certainly is not in the US.

Once of the nice things about our flat that I’ve come to appreciate is the kitchen. It is pretty big, especially for a London kitchen, with relatively large appliances and I will eventually buy enough cooking tools to do what I need to do. I end up spend a lot of time in there since I don’t really want to paint anywhere else in the flat, as I am afraid of spilling paint on the wall-to-wall carpeting. Maybe next spring, I’ll set myself up on the porch.

I went to a cooking lesson on Friday afternoon, It was at L’atelier des Chef, which offers classes at two locations. I signed up for a lesson near St. Paul’s (and Judie’s office). It was on South American street food. I got there and discovered that I was the only person who registered, so I ended up having a private lesson! I learned to make Paco de Queijo, a sort of cheese puff made with tapioca flour, which gave it a odd but pleasant gummy texture, Artichucos, marinated beef on skewers, Peruvian Ceviche in Tiger’s milk and Coxinhas, a kind of dumpling stuffed with chicken coated in bread crumbs and deep fried. The first and last were the most interesting and also the hardest to make. At the end, you sit down and eat what you made (and can order a glass of wine), which would normally be fun, but in this case I was eating alone, so it was a little odd and there was really too much for me to eat (so I took a lot of it home). I’ve included the obligatory pictures of the final product. I’m scheduled for another lesson at their place near Oxford Circus on Monday on Asian Street Food.

On the way to the lesson I had some extra time and was walking past the Guildhall (which you might remember from the story about the birthday party in the crypt) and decided to go the Gulidhall Art Museum. There was a tour starting so I tagged along. It had a great guide and he told one story that was so good I will try to repeat it here. He brought us to two paintings by Sir John Millais, who was guy who had been a rebel studying at the Royal Academy and began the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood with a few of his friends, but while they remained rebellious, he went straight and ended up the head of the Royal Academy. His statue is outside Tate Britain, in a three-piece suit with his paint brushes and kit. Anyway, in 1863, his painting “My First Sermon” (see below left), a picture of his granddaughter at her first Church service, was the hit of the Royal Academy show and was praised by the Archbishop of Canterbury. So the next year the Academy asked him to create sequel and invited the Archbishop again to comment. Millais painted “My Second Sermon” (below right), in which his granddaughter had gotten over the excitement of her first service and was now blissfully asleep. The Archbishop, perhaps surprisingly, was a good sport about it all and made this speech:

I would say for myself that I always desire to derive profit as well as pleasure from my visits to these rooms. On the present occasion I have learnt a very wholesome lesson, which may be usefully studied, not by myself alone, but by those of my right reverend brethren also who surround me. I see a little lady there (pointing to Mr. Millais’ picture of a child asleep in church, entitled My Second Sermon), who, though all unconscious whom she has been addressing, and the homily she has been reading to us during the last three hours, has in truth, by the eloquence of her silent slumber, given us a warning of the evil of lengthy sermons and drowsy discourses. Sorry indeed should I be to disturb that sweet and peaceful slumber, but I beg that when she does awake she may be informed who they are who have pointed the moral of her story, have drawn the true inference from the change that has passed over her since she has heard her “first sermon,” and have resolved to profit by the lecture she has thus delivered to them.

I finished another painting and edited an earlier one. I’ve been wondering to myself why I post these things on the blog, when I am usually not all that crazy about the way that they turned out. I suppose these parts of the blog are more about me musing the artistic process than a demonstration of my artistic prowess. Anyway, having started, I feel somehow compelled to continue. In both of these paintings, I reached the point where I was sick of them and just wanted to finish them so that I could do something else. I imagine that “real artists” must have the same feelings. I suppose I could have put them aside (and, in fact, I did put the abstract one aside for a few weeks), but the portrait one was pretty close to being finished, so I felt compelled to reach the end.

Here is the new one, “Pub Girl”. It is based on a photo I took of a girl at a pub in Shoreditch. She really did have purple dye in her hair. She was sitting outside with others on a cool day. I liked the grouping of different glasses and bottles on the table, which is actually what drew me to the photo in the first place. Maybe I should have just done a painting of that? I was experimenting with trying to create a face in a sort of Picasso impressionist way, since my attempts at realism in faces has been less that successful. It kind of works. If you recall my blog of a few days ago where I mentioned that I thought I was painting between the lines too much and was not free enough, this the painting I was thinking of. Parts of it are OK, but overall it is missing any spark. I also couldn’t quite figure out the background, since the background on the original photo didn’t really work. And then I got sick of it and didn’t feel like spending too much time on a detailed background for painting I just wanted to finish. I’m glad that I did, because there are some things about the finished product that I like.

I went back this week and fiddled around with that abstract painting of intersecting bullseyes I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I added those balls (they are pingpong balls cut in half, glued on and painted) and converted the colors to more primary colors, rather than the original darker hues. And I decided that it worked better as a diamond than as a square. It’s better (it is actually no worse than some of the crap I saw at the Frieze, especially if I bothered to clean up the lines, although it would have to be ten times bigger) and at least I think I am finally done with it. I hung it in the powder room of the flat. (For reasons I cannot comprehend, the Brits call powder rooms “cloak rooms”. When I first heard that I assumed that it was a coat closet, but, of course, they don’t have closets here for anything, much less coats. I looked it up online and the definitions I found were about storing cloaks and hats and the alternate definition is public or downstairs toilet. I did discover that it sometimes refers to the Men’s Room, as opposed to the “ladies powder”. But I couldn’t find the exact etymology. My guess is that, like powder room in the US, it was derived because people were embarrassed to say “toilet”or anything that referred to the actual bodily functions going on in there.) (It occurs to me that this aside is probably the only interesting thing that I have written in this post.)

When we got back from Rome and got off the train from Stansted Airport at Liverpool Street Station and began walking back to our flat, I experienced the feeling of familiarity and ease that said “This is my neighborhood. I’m back home.” It was nice to get back to the flat.

I stayed up last night to watch the fourth (and, it turned out, final) game of the Mets-Cubs series. I’d missed the first two while we were in Italy and fell asleep and missed the third. Since they were all wins, it occurred to me that it might be bad luck for me to watch. But after Duda’s home run in the first, followed by another by d’Arnaud, I stopped worrying. I texted with Alex during the game and got to see the first six innings and the Mets take control of the game. By 3:30 AM, the Mets were ahead 6-1 after six innings and it was unfortunately clear that the game would go on until well past 4:30, not counting the celebratory stuff. I gave in to exhaustion since the lead seemed pretty safe and went to sleep and got the official good news when I woke up.

The idea of flying back to NYC for the World Series has crossed my mind and Judie suggested that I do it. But plane fare and baseball tickets would likely cost $2,000, which seems like too much money to watch a game while jet lagged. I have got a bottle of champagne for when they win. We have met some people who are Royals fans and live in St. Johns Wood, so I may suggest watching a World Series day game with them if the Royals make it, as seems likely. Do they have any day games in the World Series any more? It would be kind of hard to have a baseball watching party in the middle of the night.

I think the fact that Charles Darwin ins on the £10 note says a lot about the UK. Could you imagine Darwin on the $10 bill in the US, a country where something like half the population doesn’t believe in evolution?

In UK political news, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Paul Ryan of England, is the sort of the Treasury Secretary here, but with far more power. He has proposed a budget that would slash payments to the poor and middle class that is so shockingly cold-hearted that even many of the other Tories (not a warm-hearted lot) are suggesting that it goes too far. It is really terrible and most of it will get through, which is the thing about a Parliamentary system. As a rule, they have to govern or there are new elections called. In the US, the Republicans in Congress can’t govern and don’t even seem to be interested in doing so.

And in the Rugby World Cup, for the few of you who are not following it closely, all of the Northern Hemisphere teams are out, leaving New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Argentina in the semi-finals. The All Blacks seem like to best team and are favored to win it all. It would be great to have a New Zealand v. Australia final, which I could at least watch during waking hours.

I love watching the BBC show at 11:30 where they review the front pages of the coming morning.

Judie is gone for the next week, so I’m trying to figure out ways to keep busy. I’m going to take a cooking class tomorrow and another on Monday and I’m thinking of going to see O’Neil’s “The Hairy Ape” at the Old Vic next week.