Back home

I'm just back from a short trip to New York and Roger, finally, from Africa. Roger is still jet lagged; I'll let him tell his own story.

I'm sorry that I have no New York pictures to show; it's such a contrast to living here that it would have been nice to have a snapshot from my early morning walk there as a contrast for the posted ones of leaf color here. I worked in New York for two years just before retiring (academic 1999-2001) and am very glad to have had the experience. It's an exciting city and fun once you know how to navigate. I found myself confused all over again this time--took a very cumbersome route to my first meeting, involving a change within the subway (from the 7th Avenue line to the shuttle, for those who know the city) that involved an amazing amount of walking up and down stairs. On the way back, I was kindly pointed to a stop right near the meeting which took me back across town and down to Washington Square without a change using the E--I could have used it instead of the shuttle if I'd read the map carefully. I visited a friend's class in international development and had a very pleasant conversation with the students mostly about my time in Mozambique.

New York is filled with foreign tourists, no doubt illustrating in a concrete way the fall of the dollar--in midtown they were everywhere, speaking in tongues, clumping in great groups, giggling and holding their cell phones up to take pictures. It is nice to think of them all sending instant pictures back to their mothers in Shanghai and Stockholm of a lovely October day in Manhattan. Down in Greenwich Village at NYU there were fewer tourists although the students are also from everywhere in the world. I enjoyed the fact that, if you looked carefully, you could spot the parent-and-child pairs, walking slowly through Washington Square, debating whether or not this really would be a good place to go to college. Those were interesting times; I remember them with Theo.

Back here we are beginning to have frosts--not hard yet but enough to kill most of the basil last night. More on that to come.

Helen, many thanks both for the recommended blog (which I am just about to try) and for the accurate list of Frances Partridge. I think perhaps all of the diaries were not published in the US; perhaps also they were not originally published in chronological order. What I am reading now, Love in Bloomsbury, is not a diary but a memoir, starting with childhood and ending after the deaths of Lytton Strachey and Carrington--which I notice is several years before the first published diary. It becomes more and more diary-dependent as it goes on and is very good; you should try it if you haven't read it yet. The only diaries I can get from Connecticut's excellent interlibrary system (which includes the state Universities) are Everything to Lose and Life Regained. I suspect that I shall have to settle for the collected version, even if it is edited.