facttime

For the second year running , rather than picking my top five leaps  of the year, I've picked five stories that sum up my travel highlights of the year. It has, of course, been a year with very little foreign travel. It's also the first year in 15 years where I haven't been to New York a single time. I miss the city so much and can't wait to return. But I'm grateful that I was able to travel to one new country ( Malta ) and one new European city ( Porto ), as well as taking short trips to  Edinburgh and Canterbury . I've also spent time with family in Oxford and Walsall, and spent a little more time in Birmingham , usually on the way to Wolves matches. My motto for the second half of the year was carpe diem — if a trip or event was possible, I would try to do it as soon as I could, before the situation changed again. 1. Leaping into Malta's Blue Lagoon Like many people, I had to cancel a lot of travel plans last year, including seven international trips, a...

1.  Silver Sparrow  —  Tayari Jones Like many people, I enjoyed Tayari Jones's acclaimed 2018 novel  An American Marriage , and a friend recently recommended I check out  Silver Sparrow , which was published in 2011.  Silver Sparrow  tells the story of two sisters, Dana and Chaurisse, growing up in Atlanta in the 1980s. They are the same age and have a lot in common, but there's a catch: their bigamist father James Witherspoon married Dana's mother Gwen out of state having already married Chaurisse's mother Laverne years earlier. And although Dana knows who her father is and spends time with him in private, this secret must be closely guarded. The asymmetry of information results in dramatic irony in the second half of the novel, when the narration shifts from Dana to a blissfully unknowing Chaurisse.  The narrative presents some other interesting questions, such as which of James's families, if any, is really better off. Gwen and Dana like to thi...

This post is rather more personal than usual but I wanted to write down some thoughts during these most uncertain COVID-19 times. Normal coffee- and travel-post service to resume...at some point, I hope. “I never realised you were so into football,” a colleague said to me last year. It was a fair point: although I had mentioned the game and my team — Wolverhampton Wanderers — periodically over the five years we’d been working together, I'd also been inflicting my updates on my non-football-following co-workers with increasing frequency. In fact, I’ve followed Wolves for as long as I can remember. My family are from the Black Country and Wolves are a ‘family team’. But my interest has waxed and waned over the years, rather like Wolves’ own fortunes. For much of my childhood and teenage years, their performance could perhaps best be described as ‘underwhelming’ or ‘frustrating.’ Jumping more solidly onto the bandwagon during the recent (old) golden period could be seen as glory hunti...