Recently in Cambridge Category

I’m thinking I should take up blogging, again. Some things seem too precious not to share.

Case in point: Yesterday, I saw a man in a coonskin cap. I wanted to laugh, but this guy wound up being the scariest-looking dude I’ve ever seen on the streets of Cambridge.

He was tough enough without the hat. For starters, he was real weathered-looking. Like a big mean sailor. Something about him conveyed (and quickly) that this gentleman had already “been there, done that” when it came to speedy resolution of conlicts. Pub fight, street fight, prison fight — check. Fists, beer bottles, butterfly knives — our man was clearly familiar with all the above.

And, as I have mentioned before, he was lumbering around Cambridge, England wearing a coonskin cap. Now, that’s a disconcerting choice of headgear on anyone, but here the effect was downright chilling.

I mean, where does one even procure such a thing? What haberdashery still stocks this item? The souvenier shop in Frontierland, for one, but that’s back in Anaheim, and I’m convinced this man had not been. He wasn’t the Magic Kingdom type, in so many words. Plus, his wasn’t a costume-shop racoon hat, it was gen-u-ine mammal. I think.

This was not a fashion statement. Nor an anachronistic affectation. This coonskip cap was, quite simply, one of Nature’s Little Warning Signs; a distinct cue for other members of the species (human and raccoon, in this case) to keep walking ahead, eyes fixed forward, never looking back.

Or laughing, either.

It’s stating the obvious, I know, but for the record, this blog is officially on hiatus.

We’re still in Cambridge, though student life seems eons away. (I’ve joined the commuting masses, instead, and am now part of the Google team in London.)

Life is good, though. For all three of us.

Bye!

After 8 long days in the hospital, my wife Azure and our newborn daughter have finally come home. Despite some shaky moments, they are both fine and healthy and beautiful, and I am the happiest dad on the planet.

I’m not sure if it’s a ‘skill’, a ‘knack’, or maybe an ‘art’ (by this point), but I can say that my procrastination abilities have become quite well-honed at B-school.

Case in point: we just wrapped up our MCP project. The MCP is a full-time effort (and then some); there’s no classes in April because of it. While every group scrambled to finish on time, my group’s project was especially back-loaded; lots of analysis couldn’t even get started until last week.

Goes to figure, then, that I’d decide last week was also the perfect time to ‘tag’ my entire iPhoto library with comments and keywords. Doing so is the digital equivalent of rummaging through a shoebox full of old photos and writing helpful notes on the back of each picture, explaining who’s who, etc. It’s exactly the sort of ridiculous undertaking that nobody ever bothers with — unless, of course, there’s other, more important work that needs doing.

But it brings me around to this: one thing you hear, working in the web industry, is that “Metadata Is Expensive”. In other words, “scribbling notes on old photos is time-consuming monkey-work”. And I can say, from recent experience, that that’s true, regardless of whether the photographs are digital or physical. (Metadata, incidentally, is defined as ‘data about data’; on the web, metadata helps classify, describe, or organize web pages.)

You hear this ‘metadata is expensive’ maxim especially in regards to search. Google, for example, gives a cold shoulder to metadata — AFAIK it reads only the regular, visible words on a web page, and ignores any behind-the-scenes attempts to categorize a website. There’s a bunch of valid reasons for this, namely:

    [A] Google patented software techniques which make their current setup pretty awesome     [B] Early web history showed people will cheat and write deceptive metadata to lure an audience.
    [C] The notion that ‘metadata is expensive’ to create. It just isn’t worth the time.

Obviously, there’s a bit of a vicious cycle with that final point: I can now imagine plenty of people crafting nice, careful metadata code for their websites, if they thought Google might actually use it.

The main reason I’m increasingly confident in the above statement comes from my own recent behavior vis-a-vis iPhoto: apart from the procrastination element, I did have some good reason to slather metadata across my entire iPhoto library. The soon-to-be-released Mac OS X Tiger will supposedly allow me to search against it. Given how I value those pictures greatly, it struck me as being worth the effort to organize my photos. However ‘expensive’ it was. (Just a few hours’ work, really.)

But Google isn’t going to start acknowledging metadata, I think, largely because of reason [A], above. They’re on top of the search-engine world right now, and won’t benefit from rocking the boat. As for [B], I think the web today is capable of solutions that weren’t on the radar in the ‘90’s. And regards [C], well, like I said: ‘expensive’ is relative. People will gladly bear the cost of metadata on things that they personally value, and that extends off the desktop onto the web. See Flickr.com.

So. I’m increasingly of the opinion that if Google doesn’t do metadata, somebody else will. In fact, it seems like one of the obvious avenues for second-tier players like Yahoo, MSN, and Jeeves to gain some competitive advantage in the search space.

And I want to see what that strategy looks like, if it happens. Especially if it provides me new opportunities to put off doing real work.

Seems England can’t completely shake off winter, much as I can’t free myself from this particularly nasty cold. It’s brutal, really. Cambridge was grey and drizzly all of last week; meanwhile, I was shuffling across the cobbled streets doubled-over and coughing, like some Dickensian pauper doomed with the consumption.

Well, not quite that bad.

In fairness, there have been intermittent bursts of Spring, about. (And I, in truth, am largely on the mend.) The oft-truant sun swung our way a few weeks ago — staying long enough to push up yellow daffodils and scatter cherry-blossoms all across Cambridge. Our garden hedgehog also returned right about then, and has since proceeded to enjoy his evening ruckus in our shrubs. And now there’s another woodland creature hanging about our place: an impressively plump Toad who crawls into our conservatory, since it’s warm there. After relocating him back to the garden, we’ll spot him from time to time; he sits under the fern, mostly.

That’s mostly it. School’s out — April is the month of our ‘Major Consulting Project’. Half the MBA class flew the coop to places like Singapore, Norway, and Venezuela to work for various multinationals. My team of four hasn’t left town, not much, but our full-time gig is with Apple, which suits me fine.

Now, if somebody would kindly pass the mentholated cough drops…

Unintended consequence of the Cambridge MBA: Bond movies aren’t the same, anymore.

Actually, 007 hasn’t mixed the martinis quite right for some time now. The whole franchise slipped past ‘tired’ to ‘exhausted’ with The World Is Not Enough. But this is beside the point.

No, what happened is this: I hung out with Britian’s previous ‘M’ (James Bond’s boss, remember?) for the better part of an hour, chatting about his old job and present-day geopolitics. The requisite dash of intrigue was provided early on, when our MBA class was told to show up for a guest lecture — but wasn’t told who’d be speaking, for ‘security reasons’.

The former ‘M’ has a name, of course: Sir Richard Dearlove. (And, in reality, apparently the title was ‘C’, not ‘M’.) Sir Richard spoke about leadership and organizational management — from the perspective of somebody who’s managed and led a very unique organization. That said, the core topics he discussed — training, development, managing culture — are pretty standard fare in B-schools; I suppose the trick lies in adjusting those ideas to fit your own corporation, or Secret Intelligence Service, what have you.

Anyhow, the regular guest-speaker rigamarole followed the lecture: mingling, chatting, and a few glasses of hey-not-bad-given-that-it’s-free wine on the 2nd floor of the Judge. And that’s where I wound up having a real conversation with Sir Richard and four or five others; much of it centered on the Middle East. To craft an SAT analogy out of the whole experience, I suppose it was like talking about meditation with the Dalai Lama — the key relationship being that the other guy is operating with some insight that’s very much unavailable to you. Or so you’d imagine.

Of course, if you read the Judge Institute’s press release, it’s also clear that this went down in early February. So I’m getting seriously behind on the blogging…

Oh, and speaking of managing organizational behavior: ever wonder why those useless buttons are on the sleeves of men’s suits? You know, the ones sewn by the cuff, without a buttonhole, even?

This actually cropped up in Strategy, of all classes. Turns out the sartorial invention is credited to Napoleon, who’d observed his lieutenants nastily wipe their snotty noses with their jacket sleeves. Disliking this vulgar habit, Napoleon immediately mandated that sharp copper buttons be sewn along the sleeves of his uniforms — serving as a visible (and tactile) reminder not to rub your jacket across your face.

Must’ve worked.

About a month ago, I finished Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”, though I didn’t really put the book to rest for three weeks after. It’s a massive tome; I wasn’t about to re-read it from the start, but the book demanded immediate re-visits, first a page here, then a passage there. And so it stayed atop my nightstand, getting better and better.

It’s a hard book to describe: the 19th-century atmosphere feels as cold as a lake in winter, and a gothic kind of melancholy hangs on every page. The tangled plot grows like a vine, not a flower; the story doesn’t discretely blossom before the reader, so much as it entwines itself around one’s ankles. And then, of course, there’s the magic – this is a book about magic – which feels inarguably historic, resolutely English, and dangerously fey.

Whatever it is, this book is not your run-of-the-mill fantasy.

There’s joy in it, too, but that’s mostly found in Clarke’s language, not the story itself. Her publisher has been aggressively hawking this book as ‘Harry Potter for Adults’, but where J.K. Rowling channels the warm and infectious spirit of Roald Dahl, Clarke delivers a piercing, Victorian wit and humor that’s better compared to Austen or Dickens. And while her book deals with the dire, fantastical and otherworldly, the needling jokes are usually sourced closer to home – like the following, where Stephen Black is unwillingly whisked to a chilling setting by a malevolent fairy king:

The light was watery, dim and imcomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant.

“This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?” he said.

“My kingdoms?” exclaimed the gentleman in surprise. “Oh, no! This is Scotland!”

And so forth. Anyhow, the book gets a big thumbs-up, from me and Az both. (And we’re not just saying that because the author lives here in Cambridge, too.)

The days are short of late, and the sky unduly enamored with cold, metallic colors. Brushed aluminum, powdered magnesium, gunmetal steel - ah, ‘tis a chic palette, very Euro-styled and all, but frankly I prefer a bit more yellow and blue, up above.

Alas, the only alternative on offer is White: Cambridge’s first winter snow started coming down in clumps three nights ago. Az and I live adjacent to the train tracks, near a railroad yard which houses a grove of halogen floodlights, and the sight of the snow floating past those towering lamps was remarkable. The flakes were larger than silver dollars, and all sopping wet when they hit the ground - I think that by some fluke it had part-ways melted, then weirdly re-amalgamated in the atmosphere. Watching the snow chunks swirling around the orange lights, you’d swear they sky was storming with locusts, or something equally sizeable and threatening.

(For all I know, maybe that’s just what snow looks like, here in England; the only true winters I’ve ever known were high up in California’s Eastern Sierra, where the snow gets delivered in an exceptionally dry, light and micro-sized format. It certainly doesn’t thud onto the ground like this local stuff.)

Anyhow, because of the season, I’m finding that afternoon classes are becoming a touch difficult; it’s heartbreaking to stare out the oversized-porthole windows of the Judge and see evening fall somewhere near 4pm. And since we’re now in the midst of our ECP project (the ECP is a part-time consulting gig with a local tech company, clients vary according to your study group; my own group is working in the industrial inkjet market) there’s often group work or travel after the last class. So like I said, the days are terribly short, but then, they can run awfully long, too. Wicked chronological cocktail, that.

(Incidentally: Does complaining about the snow show that I’m a spoiled, stubborn Californian? Or, rather, does my introductory grumble about the weather imply that I’ve actually embraced a bad British habit? Tough call…)

And speaking of the cold, a more serious cold: I cycle past the Scott Polar Research Institute every day, since it’s around the corner from the Judge. The museum there is small but good; I visited with my parents, and the laughably crude equipment on display makes you realize just how outrageously tough and hardened explorers like Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott must have been. It’s worth a visit.

What’s really chilling, though, are the final handwritten letters from Scott and his company, penned after they’d realized their imminent doom on the ice. I spent some time staring at them, under the glass. There’s an unflinching stoicism there that I found so impressive, so moving, and at the same time, unfathomable and almost alien. After all, I’ve just spent a semester hearing the word ‘risk’ being cautiously applied in the context of Excel spreadsheets, and then to come across a quote like “…we have missed getting through by a narrow margin which was justifiably within the risk of a such a journey”; words plainly written by a man freezing to death… well, it provides perspective. Which is a good thing to have.

I found a note scribbled in the margins of my spiral-bound notebook, “lifetime pizza customer value 10K”. Now, whether I was skeptical, impressed, or just a tad peckish when scratching those words, I no longer remember. But I did just bother to look up the pizza bit on the ‘Net.

Turns out the lifetime revenue stream generated by a loyal pizza customer is actually $8,000. Give or take a slice.

Anyhow, my point is that it’s these things neat, small, and clever which are most easily forgot, if not written down. Thusly follows a quick list of not-blogged events from the last month at B-school, which I’d always intended to jot down, somewhere:

Kings of Convenience + Call & Response, at the Cambridge Corn Exchange. Ooh, what a show – a girl-fronted S.F. Bay Area rock band opening for a Norwegian duo whose crooning gets compared, constantly and aptly, to Mssrs. Simon and Garfunkel; the entire shindig rocking a converted corn warehouse/market facility left over from some bygone era here in England. I did the college-student thing, and bought a concert T-shirt, even.

Hedgehog, in natural habitat. Right, so there’s a hedgehog living in our garden. Frustratingly, I’ve only glimpsed the creature once so far, when I was up late in the conservatory, studying Finance.

The Master’s Lodge. The lushest accommodations in Cambridge are the Masters’ Lodges of various colleges. And since the Master at Magdalene also happens to be director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, his pad hangs plenty of name-brand artwork, to boot. A few times each year, he kindly opens his home to all the grad students; on this particular occasion, we got treated to wine from the cellars along with some medieval motets from the Magdalene choir. ‘Twas all an eminently civilized affair, and, yah, I’m grinning as I say that.

Clare Formal Hall. One of the friendlier traditions at the Cambridge colleges are the formal hall exchanges – play your cards right and you can wine and dine in the great hall of every college. Azure and I hopped over to Clare for a bite on a Friday night (no gown required), and couldn’t help but be amused at being seated opposite a looming portrait of Gen. Cornwallis, a.k.a. the old arch-nemesis of George Washington & Co. Cornwallis looked just like he did in my elementary-school history books, red coat and all. What I wondered about, most of the meal, was what went through Cornwallis’ mind, sitting for that portrait: Did he fathom, then, how many future generations might dine beneath, and still recognize, his picture?

Evensong. Still on the college kick, I attended Evensong at Magdalene’s diminutive chapel the other Sunday. Not as glorious as King’s College, maybe, but what’s remarkable is how little space there is in the church – the choir numbers roughly 15 students, and I’d wager the additional seating hardly holds twice that. So it’s an intimate service, and personal, and really quite lovely.

And now it’s November, already.

The first real lesson from business school isn’t about supply and demand or Net Present Value. Forget Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, even, because it’s with French existentialist philosophy that B-school truly begins. Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion that “Hell is other people” is the inescapable starting point of the curriculum, here.

Other MBAs will recognize, I suspect, that I’m talking of ‘Group Work’, a method of learning and assessment rather unique to B-school. Sure, everybody works in groups, in almost any discipline, but business school takes the practice to a whole new level.

Do I dislike my group? Nope. Dislike my classmates? Uhh, negative. (In fact, I just wrote a fawning little piece about them for Cambridge’s student web diaries, and was being remarkably honest throughout.) But the tortuous fact is that all these initial projects assigned to our five-person ‘study group’ can really be done faster and easier on one’s own. There’s that adage about how one farmer can build a barn in a year, two working together in six months, three in four, and so on - but that heartwarming model doesn’t apply to five students poking and grabbing at a laptop crunching Excel spreadsheets. The law of diminishing returns in action? Recipe for disaster is more like it.

The school admins wickedly love this stuff. They’ll readily confess that they engineer study groups to be as fractured and as contentious as possible - and with 104 students from 33 countries, the Judge Institute operates with a massive advantage over its peers in its ability to assemble volatile mixtures of geopolitical / social / cultural / professional backgrounds. I suppose that, for them, the entire exercise is a thrill not unlike high-school chemistry - mixing and shaking all sorts of stuff, hoping it will go boom.

‘Course there’s no swapping or shuffling of teams allowed - the mantra is always ‘Work with it’. And so you do.

Mostly.

My group has actually been quite the breeze to work with. We’re a surprisingly good crew. There’s rumors, though, talk-in-the-hallway about other groups less fortunate. Some have gone begging and appealing right up to the Director, searching for a mediator. As for myself, I’ve watched other groups out of the corner of my eye, especially during high-pressure, time-constrained assignments, and spotted, here and there, dynamics like Tom and Jerry in a tussle - just a twirling, indecipherable blur of conflict, radiating cartoon stars, smoking squigglies, and technicolor exclamation points. (Almost.)

I’d congratulate myself on avoiding this, but I’m just lucky, so far. Conflict is unavoidable when working under pressure. But I suppose the whole ‘learning to work together’ bit will be equally inevitable, for all of us. Meanwhile, be glad there are no pots, pans, rolling pins or gigantic wooden mallets hanging on the walls of our study area.

That would be a bad scene.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a Webmonkey article asking where metadata might be headed next. What hidden information should we add to web pages to make them more searchable? For example, G.P.S. coordinates (longitude & latitude) would be an obvious boon for smartphone / mobile surfers - imagine standing on any street corner, and searching for all restaurants within walking distance.

The question remains unresolved, but it’s increasingly visible. Notable in the last few weeks were Jeff Bezos’ talk at the Web 2.0 conference, along with this ‘Metadata for the Masses’ essay over at Adaptive Path. And, as anybody with a few thousand digi-cam snapshots knows, the metadata issue applies just as well to individual photos as it does to web pages.

I like the small ideas, though, always have. That’s why I was a fan of super-simple GeoURL; ‘twas a great trend, at least until the site went kaput. Finally, though, I’ve found a replacement: A2B.cc - another location-based search engine which parses a variety of geographical markup, including old GeoURL tags.

On an entirely different note, we just learned our new row house came with a one-way cat door. Kitty-cats can come in, but can’t leave. And that explains why, yesterday, upon arriving home after a long afternoon stroll through Trinity and St. John’s, a heretofore unknown black-and-white tabby was lounging on our sofa. Meow!

Punting is tougher than it looks. It’s certainly harder than the guides ferrying tourists up and down The Backs make it seem.

Arrive in Cambridge on a warm, sunny weekend (happens every few years, I hear) and you’ll see punting’s gnarlier side: the ‘self-hire’ crowd. Once these all-too-literal boatloads of amateurs take to the water, the whole British notion of a ‘jolly riverboat jaunt’ is replaced by a tourist blood-sport that’s more akin to log-rolling or demolition derby. It’s best to watch from the shores of The Backs, I think - you might wince occasionally, but between the crashing, splashing, and multi-lingual shouting, you’ll at least remain dry.

My own punting skills are no better, likely worse. But last weekend, I managed to elude the rent-a-boat crowd, at least, by punting away from Cambridge, towards Grantchester. (Actually, I rode down, then punted the way back.) It’s a 90-minute push either way - plenty long enough to leave me cold, soaked, and pretty well tired. I lost the pole twice (the river bottom is like clay, in parts), and then got rained upon, to boot. Happy I went, of course, but I’m done punting ‘til summer returns.

I completed another journey this week, and one which took me far longer - sixteen years, if I count correctly: I finished Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, the very week the last installment was published.

Can’t complain about the time - after all, it’s taken King 30 years to write those books, and he’s said this final volume heralds the end of his massive writing career. I can believe that - almost every book he’s written ties, somehow, into the nexus of The Dark Tower, and now that it’s done… where can he go?

So how good was it, at the end? Tough to say - his yarn was obviously good enough for me to read one after the other, and year after year; I’d also agree with the author’s own conclusion that the tale was ‘not entirely successful’. The big concern, of course, was the ending, including the author’s sudden, interjectory warning not to read it. (I’ve read a lot of books, and never have I seen an author pop into the narrative and lecture me against turning the page.)

King was right, of course. I should’ve closed the book. The journey is the reward, etc. - and any ending would have to be more bitter than sweet. This ending, though - man, after thousands of pages, a decade and a half… it just left me crushed. King says endings are heartless, and so this was. Almost.

No spoilers, here. All I can say is that choice facing the reader and Roland were one and the same - dare you enter the Tower, to finally see and know what lies inside? Or would you sit on the doorstep, deep in that field of roses, knowing there that the quest is good and true, and already complete?

I’m entering B-school with one eye open.

See, Mod gave me a Daruma on our last visit to Oakland. It’s a Japanese thing, Daruma, a paper-mache figurine of the monk Bodhidharma. He’s a round, roly-poly guy, the backstory being that Bodhidharma’s arms and legs fell off after he meditated for seven years straight.

Daruma dolls have no eyes - it’s up to you to paint them in, yourself. One eye gets painted when you start working towards a goal, and the other eye can only be painted if and when you complete that goal. Unsurprisingly, it’s mostly a New Year’s thing, though I’ve heard Japanese politicians make a big show of drawing Daruma eyes during political campaigns.

School’s started. Which means our once-blind Daruma now sits winking by the telly, and I vaguely suspect he’s watching more BBC than he should.

(And a year later…)

Just north of the Cam, past Magdalene College, is Kettle’s Yard. From four 17th and 18th century cottages, Jim and Helen Ede built foundations for a single house, and a singular home.

It’s an art museum, now - though I suspect Mr. Ede (himself the curator of the Tate in London, once) would agree that the scale and setting make it something altogether different. Above all, Kettle’s Yard remains simply a home: you need to tug on the doorbell to enter, and once inside, you can grab a seat anywhere, and pull a book from the shelves. And that’s how it went for us, yesterday afternoon.

Of course, art is the big draw: when you’re a networked fellow like Mr. Ede, I suppose it was easy to gather up pieces from ‘artist friends’ like Ben Nicholson, Gaudier-Brzeska, even Miro and Brancusi. However, the personal authenticity of the collection is what impresses the most — knowing that behind every piece was afternoon tea or a handshake, the ties of friendship and patronage.

You can feel how the house was all slowly assembled, truly built — not simply bought at Sotheby’s. In that sense, Kettle’s Yard reminds me of Jim Thompson’s house in Bangkok: like the organic shell of an extraordinary life. That, and then there’s the fun of traipsing through the tiny bedrooms, hallways, and winding staircases, so unlike the squared halls of most museums.

Best of all? At Kettle’s Yard, it’s the arrangement and selection of every piece which matters, not cash value; some of the most important features are pebbles, plates, and lemons (just ask), each item placed properly, and just so.

Oh — and it’s free. Next time it really rains, I’m heading back.

I bought my gown last week. I couldn’t help but grin, trying it on: the long robes are probably one of the more peculiar and quintessential images associated with Oxbridge colleges.

Actually, the first time I glimpsed a formal Cambridge robe was in Berzerkley, of all places; one of my undergrad professors was a Cambridge (and Oxford) don, and at graduation he’d ambled onto the stage wearing colorful garments which looked like a cross between a rodeo clown’s outfit and the Vatican Guard uniform. Amidst all our cookie-cutter rental-quality black robes, and the tattered business-class upgrades worn by most Berkeley profs, his outfit was… brilliant.

Americans generally associate gowns only with graduation; here, it was a more important part of your daily outfit, once upon a time. I needed to purchase mine before school starts (T-minus 2 weeks, ack) because it’s still mandated for nightly dinner at my college.

Thankfully, I won’t need to strut about town always looking like Zorro, or a wayward Renaissance Faire vendor - graduate-level gowns are simple, uniform black affairs - and anyhow, I gather it’s a thing to keep stashed in a locker or backpack right until you walk into Formal Hall. Perfect compromise, in my book.

All it takes is a little Murphy’s law: the day after local papers led with “WETTEST SUMMER IN 50 YEARS”, this place starts feeling like California. In a sunshine-y sense, that is.

We took a most civilized stroll out of town yesterday, and walked alongside the river Cam towards Grantchester. The footpath dips and rises through hyper-pastoral meadows, and it offers exactly the sort of scenery you’d hope for: grazing livestock, starry-eyed punters, and rolling farmland in the distance. It’s quiet, verdant, and all feels (relatively) isolated, especially for a route that starts just twenty minutes’ walk from the city center.

An hour later, we stumbled across Grantchester, and its tea-room of some repute: The Orchard. As the name implies, the outdoor grounds are sprinkled with apple and pear trees; Az and I entered from an adjacent meadow by first squeezing past some cows and then climbing a cattle-fence. I’d hoped to congratulate myself on my little discovery, but turns out this is a place Cambridge students have flocked to for 100 years; The Orchard even offers a glossy brochure listing its famous tea-takers, beginning with Virginia Woolf and ending with John Cleese.

Closer to my own heart, they claim Alan Turing ‘first conceived’ the idea of Artificial Intelligence whilst strolling from Cambridge to The Orchard. I don’t entirely buy it: I’m no genius, but do I spend an inordinate amount of time daydreaming about computers, sci-fi, and othersuch nerdworthy nonsense, and I can say that bits, bytes, and computer cognizance were the last thing on my mind during that pleasant walk. To me, it’s like arguing that Thoreau penned Walden whilst riding the London Underground. Doesn’t jibe, somehow — but, then again, I’m no genius.

The local weather report is lately prefaced by so many apologies, and so thoroughly riddled with qualifiers, that it’s tough to tell just what the day’s weather is actually supposed to be.

“Not nearly as nice as it ought to be,” is how the weatherman sheepishly started his routine Sunday. By the end, he was preaching stridently about how things could really be “much, much worse”. The end result, I found, was one of those days where it’s too brisk for a T-shirt, but you’d sweat when wearing a jacket.

I suppose this can’t all be the meteorologist’s fault; things are uneven, recently. It’s like George Lucas was allowed to direct England’s climate — not original-Star-Wars-George-Lucas, but lame new-trilogy-George-Lucas — so that we see only occasional admirable moments, an hour of warm sunshine glimmering on the Cam, maybe, but it’s mostly grey dross and unremarkable rain showers.

Hey! You know the one restaurant in town that never seems to make it? The name changes, the menu’s shuffled somewhat, and day-glo vinyl banners proclaim Grand Reopenings, Under New Management, and so forth… just for a few months, until everything goes dark, again?

Yep, and so it goes with this oft-mothballed blog. Still the same management, alas, but other items are moving around — us, namely — as we’re translocating to England.

It’s a year move, at least, and we’re allowed just four suitcases. All are empty, at the moment, save for a single frying pan that’s nestled in one. (Experience has taught us that most furnishings can be cheaply IKEA’d across Europe; obtaining well-seasoned, hard-anodized kitchenware is another story.)

Our saucepan might be a nice addition, too, but unlikely. I’m considering wearing one, Johnny-Appleseed-style, right onto the plane. (“What ma’am? Oh, it’s my Calphalon Safety Helmet. They say Chairman Kaga wears one made of gold, you know.”) But then, what if the overhead luggage spot fills? It’s hard enough to sleep in Coach Class, as is… could be uncomfortable.