Yo Blair!

Apologies for the gaps in recent postings. Life has a way of taking time away from distractions like blog-writing, and as blog-worthy events pile up, it's hard to know where to start to unpack them.

This week, the surreal life.

University in the early 1990s were dominated by the usual strident leftie politics, especially after a decade of Thatcher, Reagan and A-ha. I didn't feel that strongly about things, or rather, I didn't feel I knew enough to pick a side. Nevertheless, by the time I left England for the USA in 1997, even I felt it was time for a change in the UK Government.

Ten years later, after Tony Blair's rather dramatic fall from grace, Gordon Brown took office this week. Wednesday, the day of the hand-over, I cycled through Westminster and up Whitehall, past Downing Street, to see if I could glimpse the action. There were a lot of press around, and police; a few more demonstrations along the way, but otherwise, a normal day in the area. The person who is likely to feel the most change is probably Blair himself. I have been tempted to point out that Blair came into government three months after I left the UK and left a few months after my return. Nothing to see here, no conspiracy, move along, move along.

The following evening, Thursday, I was wandering the streets of Soho going from bar to bar, pen and paper in hand. A purely fact-finding mission for an upcoming bar crawl, you understand. I must have looked a little odd, walking from place to place, quizzed by bouncers, walking in, taking in the space, the atmosphere, the always young and living-it-up crowd, walking out and scribbling a few notes down.

For now, however, I was enjoying the walk. Arriving at Great Marlborough Street, it was mostly empty but for a small group of men coming towards me. In that way in which subconscious recognition precedes actual thought, my celebrity-meter started to twitch. Surely that wasn't who I thought it was strolling towards me? Looking every bit the off-duty movie star, Kiefer Sutherland, aka Jack Bauer, strolled right past me. He was smiling and chatting, in a t-shirt that showed off both his arms and the tattoos that they try hard to keep hidden on the show.



I meant to stop him to say hello, and capitalise on a few tenuous connections that we share to engage in conversation, but before I could turn slippery thought into action, he was gone. If you're a fan of '24' as we are, this was a major sighting. Despite his already long career, he will probably forever be defined by his role as Jack Bauer. Bauer has become an iconic figure, the epitome of American certainty and action in an ever more uncertain political world, always at great personal cost.

That night I had a dream that I was pregnant and at the same time that the center of the geographic world was Kansas City, Utah. I wrote a lot more about this and deleted it all.

Friday morning we woke up to news of the foiled car bomb in London. On Haymarket around the corner from work, quite literally. I was a little skeptical at first (on the news it was variously Al Qaeda, Islamists, IRA, and was judged to be potent enough to mildly frighten three people or destroy most of West London), but I couldn't suppress a shudder when I thought of how I cycle down Haymarket on my way home. Still, the biggest problem was that the re-routing of the buses caused a rush of people past our normally empty Starbucks (yes, I admit it), and it was packed out with displaced commuters. Damn terrorists, messing up my morning coffee!