15 years ago today I arrived in London for the first time. I had been to London Heathrow before, on the way to the U.S. and Ireland but never visited the city. And I wasn't just visiting for a few days but planning to stay for a couple of years.

It had all started in the autumn, when one morning I walked into HR and asked to be sent abroad somewhere ( Read more... )

It's Adrian (london1952 )'s birthday on Monday and I'm taking him away on a surprise week-end trip (leaving tomorrow and coming back on Monday night).

I told him that we're going to Bognor Regis but of course we could be going somewhere completely different (bluff) or indeed there (double bluff) [and the writing of this post has now made it into a triple/ ( Read more... )

A scrunched up £10 note found in my pocket brought back a flood of memories.

I was telling Adrian the other day how, at times, I have partial recollections of a face or an event, but cannot place it correctly and I'm not even sure whether it is a true memory or part of a dream, or of what I feel could be a parallel reality. 
Sometimes this makes me ( Read more... )

The broccoli and almond soup that we had tonight at The Stockpot is repeating on me.

The Stockpot near Haymarket is a cheap restaurant and a strange place, full of taxi drivers, and lonely and slightly loony customers, some talking to themselves or to some imaginary friends, some reading the paper and some drowning their dining companion in a flood ( Read more... )

It is funny how my mind works.
Often I cannot remember names and it's hard to find a specific memory that  I was looking for.

But it's very common for me to have random reminiscences surface unexpectedly.
Surprisingly, at times they are not even associated with prominent events, in other words they are not something I would particularly choose to ( Read more... )

On January 25th 1997 I moved to the UK!
I remember it was a Saturday.... landed at Heathrow and took the tube to Warren St. tube station: the company I was going to work for, put me in a hotel for a month.
It was my first time in London, actually in the UK (apart from stopping at Heathrow for connections - but that doesn't count).

What brought me to ( Read more... )