With St Patrick’s Day on the approach, let me tell you about a little cocktail I invented with some charming Irish barmen. It was a friend’s birthday. We were on pub #2, or possibly #3, I’m not entirely sure. What I do know is that we were somewhere a hair north of Victoria Park in … Continue reading
Tag Archives: London
Nesta’s Future Festival
Nesta recently held the two-day FutureFest covering innovation in a range of areas like work, play, and love. With talks and roundtables interspersed with interactive, immersive experiences, there was certainly plenty to stimulate the curious mind. There were several sessions on the future of education. Most of these were slotted into the ‘Work’ theme of … Continue reading
Dancing Graph
Recently I’ve been exploring Neo4j, a graph database that makes it easy to see the connections between things. It’s a great way to visualise Twitter data, for example. Yesterday I went to see the McOnie Company’s Jekyll & Hyde at the Old Vic. I had the pleasure of reviewing the McOnie Company’s original show Drunk … Continue reading
Adventures in coding-land
I dreamed about a canvas painted in thick smears of black, spread so thickly the strokes seemed to move, roiling over and around each other giving depth and heft to the obscurity. Smudges of color which never quite resolved into shapes blossomed and faded on the surface, giving the impression of sinister figures shrouded in … Continue reading
Paperweight
Smooth, dark and perfectly square with beveled edges, the unexpected small chunk of marble peered out of my mailbox. No address, no label, no packaging, no explanation. Just a two-inch square cube of marble. It’s moments like these, when confronted with a hitherto unimagined circumstance, that I am reminded how ripe the world is with … Continue reading
Diary of an Expat Lady: Winter Edition
A few years ago I discovered E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady and various sequels. With its whimsical epistolary style underscored by deeper ruminations on feminist social themes of the 1930s and 40s, Delafield’s writing is a clear forebear to Bridget Jones’s Diary and similar works. Her influence is also the reason that … Continue reading
Another Madcap Adventure at Brasserie Zédel
You may recall that back on Bastille Day last year my friends Paul, Hannah and I hand-made some berets to get dinner on the house at our favourite French restaurant in London, Brasserie Zédel. For La Fête des Rois, Brasserie Zédel offered the same deal for anyone who came in wearing a crown. Naturally, we couldn’t … Continue reading
