Emergency Vase Delivery

We are back home again, safe and sound in West Hampstead. When Dave originally planned this trip I questioned the wisdom of flying all the way to the Canary Islands for something like 36 hours on the ground. But it actually proved to be a nice little break -- a dose of sunshine and semi-tropical beauty, and lots of time for offline reading in the air! So bravo to Dave for cooking up this idea.

(I know it was terrible for our carbon footprint, and we stayed at a golf resort to boot. But hey, we have no kids and we don't drive, so our overall footprint is still pretty small.)

We left yesterday in late morning, after breakfast at our hotel. I had bought some milk at the Hiper-Dino on Thursday to put in my "cowboy coffee," and I wanted to use it up before we left, so I brought it to the restaurant and put it on my cereal. Dave made fun of me for bringing my own milk and I'm sure the waitress wondered what the heck, to the extent that she noticed. But I used it up.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you about the Emergency Vase Delivery. Dave and I were lounging on our hotel room terrace the afternoon before when a knock came at the door. We'd already dismissed the maid and told her we didn't need cleaning, so we couldn't imagine what this was about. The knock came again. Dave had been sunbathing and had to put on his pants to answer the door (I was still outside because I didn't hear the first knock) and when he opened it, a maintenance man was standing there with a big ugly white vase. "This for apartment," he said in broken English, and came in and set it down on a cabinet in the living room (where we already had at least five other decorative vases and bowls).

"We were missing a vase!" I said to Dave in mock horror.

The maintenance guy just shrugged sheepishly and let himself out. The whole thing was so strange. Why didn't they just wait until we were gone to deliver their completely unnecessary vase?

Sunset from the airplane window, seen off the coast of Morocco or maybe Portugal. Somewhere out there.

The flight back was uneventful. I read about half of Gary Shteyngart's book "Super Sad True Love Story," which is entertaining and weirdly prescient. It was published in 2010 and depicts a near future where the USA is an authoritarian dystopia that has invaded Venezuela! I KNOW! Shteyngart must be feeling like Carnac the Magnificent right about now.

We finally got home about 9 p.m., just in time to order chicken from Nando's and then fall into bed. But after a good night's sleep I feel totally normal, having not changed time zones or disrupted our sleep schedules. I see the appeal of Tenerife as a British vacation destination!

A Look Around Tenerife

Finally -- I can show you what this place looks like in daylight!

Yesterday was our only full day in Tenerife, so we had to make the most of it. I managed to fit in a long photo walk, a swim in the pool, some reading, a massage and a trip into town -- all fun or relaxing activities, it's true. I'm certainly not complaining.

That's the coastline, above, down the hill from our hotel, with the island of La Gomera just barely visible on the horizon. You can see the scrubby native vegetation, just as Barbara Kingsolver so memorably described it in the essay I mentioned yesterday.

But first things first -- breakfast and a surprise (to us) wedding! Dave and I walked to the Atlantico restaurant, which is where our breakfasts are served. We chose a table on the terrace overlooking a small green lawn, and saw that a marquee had been set up below with rows of chairs. I saw the marigolds tumbling from the urns and thought, "This must be a Hindu event." (I saw similar marigolds everywhere when I went to India years ago.)

In very short order, people were showing up dressed in colorful oranges and yellows, the bride and groom sat at the front of the group, and the ceremony began. All of us in the restaurant watched from the terrace above. You just never know what you're going to see, do you?

From there I took a car down to the tiny beach that serves both our hotel and the nearby Ritz-Carlton. (As you can see, I wore the Eastbourne dashiki!) I explored the beach area itself and then decided to walk back. The cliffs and hills are quite steep and there were steps to climb, but it was good exercise and offered some panoramic views.

I saw this dinosaurish-looking flower vine growing up a hillside. The blossoms were huge and stiff or waxy-looking. I thought: "What the heck are those?" Thank goodness for my plant-identifying app, which tells me it's a vine called Cup of Gold, or Solandra maxima, a type of nightshade.

I also passed this ravine containing a little memorial. Intrigued, I got out my zoom lens...

It looks like a memorial for someone who died in 1963 at the age of 20. Surely it's not a grave -- it seems to be on solid rock. Perhaps the scene of a tragic event? Anyway, very curious that the marker is down there all on its own.

I crossed a beautiful shadowy golf course -- inadvertently intruding on the fairway and causing a golfer to scold me, not wrongly, for being in a "dangerous" place -- and eventually got back to the hotel. After all that exertion I was ready for that swim and massage afterwards!

Yesterday evening Dave and I wanted to get away from the resort, so we had a drink at the bar in the Ritz and then took a taxi into the nearest town, Playa San Juan. We found a waterfront restaurant where we ran into two students from our school in London! What are the odds?! We chatted with them and their father, marveling that our paths should cross so far from home.

We had fish soup and I had seafood (shrimp and fish) on skewers, while Dave had pasta with clams. That's Dave above, outside the restaurant after we ate, wearing the new pink shirt he bought so he'd have something fresh to wear.

Back to London today!

Nearly Naked in Tenerife

Well, here we are in Tenerife, a tiny volcanic speck in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of the Western Sahara. When I lived in Morocco many years ago, I was conscious of the presence of the Canaries out in the ocean -- not that I could see them -- but even then I was farther north than we are now.

Years ago I read Barbara Kingsolver's book of essays, "High Tide in Tucson," in which she wrote partly about the Canary Islands. Apparently she lived here for a while, and although I haven't re-read that particular essay in years I did save it in my file of favorite writing. I should look at it again. I remember her describing the arid, rocky environment, the cactus and low-slung thorny plants. It's a very weird landscape, though to be honest I haven't really seen it yet (except from the plane, above). It was dark by the time we emerged from the airport and the sun is just coming up now.

It's already been an eventful trip. Dave and I got ourselves launched about 9 a.m. yesterday after putting our stuff in a single backpack. I thought we packed amazingly well until Dave said to me on the Thameslink train on the way to Gatwick, "Guess what I forgot?

I was thinking a toothbrush, or deodorant. "What?" I said.

"Clothes!"

Yes, you read that correctly. Dave managed to pack his medicine and some underwear, but he packed no outerwear at all. The only clothes he has are literally on his body. How this happened I have no idea but I can't stop laughing about it. Fortunately we're only here for two nights.

On the plane I plowed through the final 150 pages of "The Old Curiosity Shop" and finished it just as we were preparing to land. I get some of my best reading done on airplanes, when there are no distractions and I'm able to simply sit and concentrate. I didn't hate the book, and there were some good moments and colorful phrases, but it wasn't Dickens' best. It was basically a long meditation on mortality. I still wonder if I'd have felt differently about it had I not read in the introduction that Little Nell was going to die. I still can't believe they gave away the ending.

We're staying in a secluded resort community called Los Jardines de Abama, just up the hill from the Ritz-Carlton. I think these are really residences that are meant to be purchased, but they're used for tourist accommodation until they're sold. We have a swanky, fully-furnished place with a terrace overlooking the ocean and a Hiper-Dino grocery store within walking distance.

There are three restaurants within our complex, which seems mostly devoid of people. Last night, tired and hungry and without any supplies, we tried to go to the one closest to us, which supposedly serves typical Canarian dishes such as seafood. The concierge at the hotel told us with a downcast look that no tables were available. He went downstairs while we contemplated ordering room service, but then came bounding back up and said he had a table after all.

We were taken downstairs to a restaurant that was at least three-quarters empty, and that seemed to have one maitre'd and two servers. There were, I think, four other occupied tables. We sat down, were treated well and had a passable meal, wondering where everybody else was. (Granted, it was about 7:30 p.m., which is probably early for Spaniards to eat dinner.)

Look at those stars! I don't see anything like that in London. As you can see from the top picture, the island was socked in when we landed, but the sky cleared pretty quickly.

Oh, and making coffee this morning was an adventure. The coffee machine is this cheap-looking Nespresso pod thing, so I decided to make "cowboy coffee" with supplies from the Hiper-Dino (whose mascot is, of course, a dinosaur). I got up, boiled some water, added a few spoonfuls of grounds and the coffee promptly boiled over. I pulled it off the heat and let it brew a few minutes before straining it into a bowl, French-style, because our only cups are these tiny little pretentious things that I could empty in three sips. So now I'm sitting with my bowl of coffee looking out the sliding doors onto our terrace and, beyond, the lightening ocean and the neighboring island of La Gomera, which I think is actually the island Barbara Kingsolver wrote about.

Fortunately we have a washing machine. We may need it for Dave's one shirt and one pair of pants!

AI and a Police Policy

Here we are on Thanksgiving, the best of all holidays. Nothing to do but eat and hang out together! OK, and cook and clean, too. But seriously -- compared to the insanity that is Christmas, Thanksgiving always seems so even-keeled and responsible. It's Bud Abbott to Christmas's Lou Costello.

We worked a half-day yesterday, but there were no kids. We had Professional Development devoted to issues surrounding Artificial Intelligence, which our school's powers-that-be have determined we should all learn how to use. My approach to AI is to ignore it as much as possible, but then, I am not a teacher and so don't need to worry too much about recognizing AI use in my students' papers and that kind of thing.

I went to a webinar about AI and energy use, which I thought would be interesting, and it was. We've all heard about massive server farms that suck up energy and endanger the environment, but this webinar -- by a former MIT librarian who now works for the University of Arizona, I believe -- took the opposite view. She said the amount of energy expended on AI is actually fairly small, and also gave several examples of ways that servers can be powered in an environmentally friendly manner. It was the techno-optimist approach, I'd say.

About lunchtime I walked home via the pedestrian bridge over the West Hampstead tube tracks, where I found these three giant graffiti eyes peering at me.

And today, Dave and I are off to Tenerife! Our flight doesn't leave until around noon, so we have the morning to pack and get ready. Not that there's much packing to do. We'll only be there for two days.

The British police have started a dubious new policy that I have to call out for being more harmful than positive. After the Southport stabbings in 2024, when a British man of African descent killed several little girls in a dance class, there were riots over rumors that the assailant was an illegal immigrant and/or asylum seeker. He wasn't, but that didn't stop people from threatening immigrants housed in temporary accommodation.

So the government decided to try to head off misinformation about such attacks by announcing the nationality and race or ethnicity of arrested individuals. Which is what led to two men recently arrested for stabbings on a train to be described as British, one black and one of "Caribbean descent." (The second man was subsequently released.)

I get announcing the nationality of offenders. It's still debatable whether it's a good idea, but I can see how it might avoid fueling unwarranted attacks on innocent immigrant populations.

But when I was a newspaper reporter, our policy was to never state a suspect's race in a news story, unless it was directly germane. After all, what purpose does it serve? Unless the police are trying to catch someone and they have a detailed description that includes race, mentioning race simply triggers racist responses in readers. If the offender is white, readers may imagine the crime as a result of someone's drug problem or schizophrenia. But if an offender is black, it often merely confirms pre-existing prejudices.

Unsurprisingly, anti-racist groups are saying that the new police policy is harmful. It seems to me that if the goal is to avoid needless violence against immigrants, it ought to be enough to say an offender is British. (Or not, which is the flip-side of this policy -- if police in any country announce a suspect is an asylum-seeker or immigrant, as is true in yesterday's shooting of two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., doesn't that risk fueling more violence and prejudice?)

A suspect's race or ethnicity -- separate from their nationality -- is entirely irrelevant.

Sex with Napoleon

Someone asked the other day to see a photo of the library Monstera. Here it is. One of the maintenance guys, Jose, who cares for the library plants, always calls it a "she." He'll say, "She has been here a long time," or "She needs some new soil." I would add that "she" seems to thrive on neglect. She just hangs out in her corner and Jose waters her now and then. She has lived in the library as long as anyone can remember.

Our library windows desperately need a cleaning.

And as long as I'm uploading random pictures from work -- I walked past a colleague's office yesterday morning and caught a glimpse of this scene out of the corner of my eye. I thought, "Did they hang up a Ukrainian flag?"

But no.

In the Lower School, the kids celebrated their last day before Thanksgiving Break by wearing pajamas and bringing their favorite stuffed toy to school. Most kids had stuffed animals, but one kid had a stuffed plant! I was very impressed and asked him if I could photograph it.

Despite all these fun and games, yesterday was crazy busy. Just more of the same, but I did not have a spare moment except at my lunch break. Today, fortunately, is only a half-day and there are no kids. It's devoted to professional development involving AI. I will limp through it even though I don't really need or desire professional development at this point in my career. I suppose I must remain open to learning new things.

Last night Dave and I went out with our friend Chris to see a drag show in South London. A few weeks ago, Chris spotted an immensely tall drag queen standing in front of a tube station promoting her one-queen show, in which she time-travels and performs comedic bits. We decided to go. So yesterday we schlepped down to a pub for dinner and then a nearby one-room theater for Coco's performance. You could tell her act was still a bit "in development" but it was quite funny. I've never before seen a drag queen feign sex with Napoleon and sing "I Dreamed a Dream" while stuffing her mouth with cakes. Surreal!

Annie at the Barbican

Last night, after a long and exhausting day at work that is better not spoken about, I went with some friends to the Barbican to hear the photographer Annie Leibovitz talk about her new book, a two-volume set dedicated to portraits of women. My friend Colin offered me one of his extra tickets on Sunday, and I jumped at the chance because -- photography! (Even though the kind of portraiture that is Annie Leibovitz's specialty isn't really my kind of picture-taking.)

We met at the restaurant in the Barbican overlooking the central reflecting pond. Another co-worker, Mike, came as well. As you can see above, the church across the way already has its Christmas tree up and lit. We had a good dinner -- fish & chips and a gin & tonic for me, two essentially British pairings!

I tried to photograph the unusual round, concrete restrooms at the Barbican, but I couldn't get the whole space into a single frame. So I took a pano shot, which distorts things, but I think it turned out pretty well! The toilets themselves are around that curve at left. You can even see me in the mirror. The space looked like something out of "A Clockwork Orange," but I guess it must be incredibly easy to clean. You could just hose it down.

Anyway, the Leibovitz talk was a bit disappointing. As I told Mike and Colin afterwards, some people are visual communicators and some people are verbal, and Leibovitz is definitely the former. She started by showing slides of her earlier portraits of women, which featured in the first volume, but some slides contained about a dozen thumbnail pictures and it was hard to see them. She also basically just ran down the list of who was featured -- Elizabeth Taylor, Martha Stewart, Dolly Parton, etc. -- but she didn't tell many stories or talk much about the processes she uses to take her portraits. I would like to have heard more about how she gets people to relax, to reveal themselves.

Then she went through slides of the photos in the more recent volume, and then took a few questions in a disastrous Q&A. She declined to use the pre-submitted questions the Barbican had collected, and instead had the poor host trying to pass a microphone from the stage out to the audience, where the questions were often unfocused and Leibovitz was obviously having trouble hearing and understanding them. The questions rambled and the answers rambled.

So I wouldn't call it an altogether successful evening, but it was still interesting to see her and see her work. I suppose at the end of the day the pictures are supposed to speak for themselves, right?

She did talk about how London felt lighter to her, and less oppressed, than the United States does right now. She is clearly opposed to Trump's governance and threw in a few somewhat political remarks here and there. For example, she showed a picture of a room at the White House featuring portraits of the first ladies, and said something like, "Who knows if it still exists?"

Little Green Oranges

The Hellebores are coming out again. Mrs. Kravitz's Polish gardener used to call them "Christmas roses" -- before he vanished, as all Mrs. K's gardeners eventually do. I think she fires them all. Anyway, I still think of Hellebores by that name. The white ones are blooming now -- the red ones haven't appeared yet and always come a bit later. 

Speaking of Mrs. K, I haven't seen her in ages, or even heard her being belligerent with her gardeners. Of course it's not exactly a gardening time of year, so she may just be indoors, but normally I see some sign of her. I think she must be away again. And our neighbors upstairs are so well-behaved we barely know they're there. It's quite a change from how things used to be around here!

No Olga, no noisy neighbors -- what's my blog coming to?!

We had a bit of a scare yesterday. I was going through the bank statement when I found a charge for $31.72 -- yes, in U.S. dollars -- that I did not recognize. The debit was named UNHYYTERJP2, which was not helpful, and the charge came from Hong Kong. Of course this sent up alarm bells right away. I hadn't ordered anything online, and I asked Dave if he'd ordered anything and he said no.

It seemed a very weird and specific amount to be fraudulent, but I racked my brains and could come up with no legitimate reason this would be on our bank statement. So I tried to call the bank. This led to a vortex of automated phone hell that eventually told me their fraud office was closed (!) and I'd have to call back on Monday. I couldn't report it online unless I had their app, which I do not because I don't do any banking on my phone, ironically for security reasons.

When I Googled that payment name, I found a discussion thread of people questioning transactions with similar names, and they all had to do with Apple Pay. I don't use Apple Pay, but Dave does. So I suggested he go back through his payment history to see if anything would explain that charge. He wasn't sure how to do it, but he figured it out -- and BINGO! It turns out he ordered a board game online for his Dad and then forgot about it.

I was so relieved I forgot to be mad at him. I had visions of reporting fraud and having our cards canceled just as we are about to go to Tenerife later this week. What a headache that would have been.

I moved our little Mandarin orange tree outside again, now that the weather has warmed up. It has numerous little oranges on it (above) and seems to be having a very productive year. That spidery thing to the right of the fruit is a fallen leaf from the Russians' miniature Japanese maple on their terrace upstairs. (Yes, they moved, but they left all their plants behind with an automated watering system.)

Otherwise yesterday was quiet. I read more, took care of all the houseplants, and did some minor housework. Aside from the banking scare, a nondescript Sunday.