On Saturday I saw the Queen.

She didn’t look too cheerful, sitting in the full sun in a purple suit and hat next to Philip in his furry black bearskin and red suit. But there she was, preceded in carriages by Prince Harry, the Duke of York and his daughters, followed on horseback by Anne and Charles, and surrounded by a few hundred guards on horseback. The Mall was lined with union jacks and London metropolitan police, while red guards with bayonets and swords marched up and down the long straight road leading up to Buckingham Palace. At 1 p.m., after the gun salute, convoys of planes—spitfires, red arrows, and bombers of various descriptions, filled the sky with red white and blue above the palace as the royal family watched from the balcony and we watched with thousands of others from the edges of Green Park and St James’ Park.

Afterwards we made our way to the British Library to sit in the cool silence leafing through thick volumes, pencil in hand, waiting for the call lights to indicate the arrival of more research material. Three hours of study seemed to redeem the day of the morning’s heat and crowds, and the Saturday evening buzz of Leicester Square came as a shock when we arrived at a restaurant on Charring Cross Road. The little Italian place we keep returning to had all its windows open, so our mealtime conversation was punctuated by squealing sirens. I remembered the last time we sat in the same restaurant, eating cannelloni and ravioli and watching the police interrogate a homeless drunk across the street as tourists stepped around the scene.

We spent an hour in Waterstones at Piccadilly – Europe’s largest bookshop and a must-do element of any London visit – where I sat quietly again and thought about space travel and politics, clouds and the great American adventure. Thirty minutes later we made our way through Russell Square, past another homeless man covered in pigeons, to spend almost two hours staring through sheets of glass at Michelangelo sketches: bulging muscles, the hand of God, cross-hatched drapes of material, Christ’s limp body on the cross, and, in the corner of one piece of paper, a defecating man (one wonders).

Friday had been a day of fingernails (a gift voucher... the manicurist cut a hole in my finger) the most delicious roast lamb, and one of those realisations that borders on epiphany about the earth turning and air travel (the things one learns from trainee pilots…). Sunday was a barbeque with my family, a Father’s Day event at which I realised my taste for potatoes is seriously offensive, and that I miss talking to my Dad.

This weekend I thought about Concorde and jet packs and space exploration and how the world has changed. What we imagined only a few decades ago—even when I was growing up—would be a relentless progression into the future has given way to a type of nostalgia for the past combined with a fear of the future. Perhaps it’s that we have lost our inquisitiveness, or perhaps it’s just that our objectives have changed. Back in the age of lunar landings the world was desperate to expand boundaries at all costs, particularly when space exploration coincided with national interests in the Cold War era. Since then our realisations about global warming and the environment are necessary boundaries that we have to respect. And yet we still can’t come up with an efficient vehicle that combines progress with respect for the environment.

So there are this weekend’s thoughts.
And some pictures of the queen below (more here).

The Queen, looking a little grumpy. See more here.

There are more pictures on my flickr page, here.

This is Piglet, a precious white cat that keeps showing up out the back of our apartment building and who "came inside" (okay... so he had some help) one day and fell asleep on my knee. He has a little pellet around his neck with a slip of paper in with his name and address.














And while we're on the subject of animals... here's Benji, Mom's puppy ;-)

Sitting beside an open window
reading poetry to the click clacking
of the vertical blinds in the summer wind
I just watched a tent marquee,
billowed out in green and white stripes,
pick up its leg and attempt to climb
over the neighbour’s garden wall.

A blackbird, watching this giant spider
bend one white plastic leg over the brick wall
continued his rooftop chatter,
and at number 17 the boys were ready set
go for an after-school race on red tricycles.

The same gust that snapped poles from pegs
in the neighbour’s yard
hissed through the trees behind the house.
A tunnel of wind from front to back
and a cacophony of doors slamming shut.
The England flags billow from upstairs windows at number 5
as someone’s television announces kick off,
and in the distance I hear a train
hoot into St David’s station at rush hour.

The gust subsides for a moment
leaving the marquee suspended in motion,
back-broken and caught in an attempted escape
from the prison of barbeque and washing line.

All is still but the clicking of the blinds and the keys.

Walking home today from the quay I watched a seagull tap its crooked little beak against a mirrored shop window, completely obsessed with the seagull that tapped back. After a few moments of tapping, they would both flap around a bit, turn to one side and hit against the window like a fat man trying to beat down a door with his shoulder, and then squawk in frustration at the hard-headed copycat that wouldn’t play. Lori and I stood and watched the confused little gull for about five minutes, laughing. As we drove past after collecting the car I noticed the bird was still there, carrying on a silly little jig with its imaginary mate, and I began to think it was actually quite sad. Perhaps I should have walked over and shooed away the little guy. There was no way to make him understand that the reflection was himself. In my imagination he’s still there right now, at 9:30 at night with the sky still bright, obsessed with the ideal friend that he just can’t quite reach.

Yesterday we drove to Wales to the last day of the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival, where we listened to Vickram Seth talk about his Indian great uncle and his German Jewish great aunt and their relationship during the 1930s and 40s and then to Salman Rushdie talk about the legacy of books and the frustration of politics. We had originally only bought tickets to the Vickram Seth event, having read and enjoyed An Equal Music years ago and having heard he was an interesting guy. We sat beside a man in his 60s who had travelled from India just for the Hay Festival, particularly to see Vickram, whose family he knew intimately, and Salman Rushdie. This man had such a fascinating face: a sloped nose and an expression that seemed to be perpetually smiling. He asked about us – what we were doing, why we were here – and told us to buy tickets to the Rushdie event. Walking out of the marquee, we decided to comply.

Rushdie was interesting. To be honest, I’ve never read a whole book of his--only excerpts--and, of course, news articles. It was an issue he addressed, actually: the fact that the one thing he cares about leaving behind him – the books he has spent his life writing – are not the true legacy he will leave, since the way everyone knows him is as the most hated author in the world, a man whose life was valued at about $3 million, I believe, and who inadvertently caused the death of publishers, translators, and immense hatred before terrorism was something we all heard about on the television every day.

If there’s anything I came away from the talk with it was a conviction in the importance of keeping our minds open to others, even if what they say doesn't fit our own views of the world. For instance, he openly declared his view on all religion: that it is a close-minded attempt to view the world with some meaning; that all attempts at purity of any kind, whether religious or racial or cultural, is faulty; and that religion is at heart flawed. This is not something I can agree with; my faith is important to me. But I do think it’s important that those of us for whom religion is important listen to and try to understand, on some level, those who think quite the opposite, so that we don’t become close-minded. Because isn’t that the charge they have against us – that we are closed to every other possibility? Now I’m not saying that I’m open to other possibilities that refute the existence of God, because my faith tells me there aren’t any, but I have to at least be open to listening to others and trying to understand why they don’t like my faith. I have to convince people that I am a Christian and yet I am also someone who believes in freedom of expression, of religion, of lifestyle. That my views on the world do not have to be other people’s views on the world and that I would never try to force anyone to believe what I do, because that just isn’t the way it works. How can we combat the opinion displayed so openly lately in the media over here that evangelical Christians are out to conquer the world with some very well placed Bible beating (oh what turn of phrase…!) if we just turn around and point fists. Just as people who have this view about Christians need to realise that we are not all going to condemn you to hell for not believing the way we do, we need to realise that reading scripture about how those who do not believe are condemned to hell to someone who doesn’t believe the Bible is anything but a book is not the right way to go about things. It’s the contents of the book – love, charity – that need to be displayed, not our angry and narrow-minded voices against theirs.

Rambling again…

Anyway, we met Vickram Seth and Salman Rushdie and went to countless bookshops (there are nearly 40 available, so we had our pick).

It’s getting late. With the summer upon us (it was 84 Fahrenheit the other day) the evenings are a lot lighter, and the sky doesn’t get completely dark until about 11, so it’s hard to really believe it’s late until it hits you hard.

It’s movie night.