By coincidence, I’ve read two books on about British social history since 1945 back to back recently. (Actually, I read the excellent “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold in between but I was ill and got through it in less than a day so it didn’t really feel like a long break between the other two books.)

Anyway, the books I read were “Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-war Britain” edited by Simon Garfield and “Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain” by Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips.
(more…)

I saw a very cute thing this morning that I had not really seen before: I saw Carbon fall asleep.

I’m ill at the moment (Fresher’s-Flu-come-early) so spent most of yesterday and this morning in bed. Carbon and Sili (and later Carla) volunteered for nursing duty. I was nursing Carbon too: along with his little sister, he’s having a skin allergy problem at the moment and his response to the itching is to lick and nibble constantly which damages his skin. While he sat with me, I tried my best to break his licking obsession. When he started licking, I put my hand between his head and the itchy body part; sometimes he’d lick my hand then stop licking, other times he would stop straight away and seemingly forget about the urge. I tended to leave my arm gently wrapped around him afterwards to stop him starting up again and this time, I had my arm over his shoulders with his upright head in the crook of my elbow and my hand under his chin.
(more…)

The flight didn’t leave until 16.30 so we only had to leave for the airport at about 2pm. Our plan for the time was: bit of a lie-in then check out, breakfast at The Idiot (because we couldn’t be bothered finding anywhere else in the mainly residential area), go up St Issac’s as a goodbye to the city, then pick up a car from the hotel.

We woke up about 10am and looked out of the window, expecting the sunny weather we’d had previously to really get the most out of a trip up St Issac’s. It was foggy. So foggy we couldn’t see St Issac’s itself. “No, no,” I had assured John the day before, “it’ll be lovely weather. We’ll be able to see for miles.” Bah to my weather-predicting skillzz. We checked out anyway (the hotel cost about the same as the Moscow one but it wasn’t as much of a shock this time as we expected the tax) and headed up to The Idiot, thinking the fog might clear as the day went on.
(more…)

Friday was our main full day in St Petersburg; time-wise, Thursday had been a full day too but by the time we had got up and had lunch, it felt too late to start anything major.
(more…)

The train was due into St Petersburg just after 7am (ugh) so our alarm went off at 6am to allow us time to have a bit of breakfast and get sorted before arrival. (We could have just woken up when it arrived and got sorted then but we wanted to be at the hotel before rush hour). Considering we only had about two or maybe three hours sleep at an absolute maximum, we felt reasonably fresh.
(more…)