back in London

My first return to London since leaving four-and-a-half years ago, my first time in the city instead of hurtling around it on the M25 in a small rental car, couldn't have come at a more apposite time.  When I lived in London, right to the end I think, Boris Johnson clowned his way from event to meeting, from PR stop to self-inflating pronouncement.  He bounced around erratically, bumbled through pompous speeches, entertained with generous buffoonery, and was generally indulged by Londoners like a harmless wayward child that everyone hopes will eventually come to his senses.

He was indulged because he was correctly perceived as harmless.  As Mayor of London he couldn't hurt the city much because he didn't have all that much power and was surrounded by sensible advisers.  The Garden Bridge, a horticultural folly across the river in central London, which he sank £43 million of public funds into before it died a silent death in the murky waters of the Thames, was the biggest damage he did the city.  A few years later he campaigned for Brexit, and everything before, good or bad, was instantly forgotten.

The gorgeous day, airy, warm and sunny with just the right amount of fluffy white clouds against an expanse of blue, belied London's reputation as dreary and grey.  The city's weather is much better than non-residents believe, but such days as today are rare nonetheless.  It would have been perfect to wander around and reminisce in my home of eight years – not for a few hours or a day, but an entire extended weekend – but I had come for work and the best I could do was look out the windows of the Dockland Light Rail that took me from the airport to town.

The City Airport is the best way to arrive in town.  It's the fastest, and it affords the best views.  Heathrow depresses with endless rows of drab Victorian terraces that always look as if it were raining.  In the east, lots of poverty has been pushed out of sight.  Dismal 50s housing, charmless two-up-two-downs, and industrial shanties have been razed to make way for nice but soulless apartment blocks, lively and livable, and different from anything in the center of town.

It's at Bank station that the London experience truly begins.  The first-time visitor will be baffled and scared by the maze, the crowds, the airless heat, and the pulsating power.  At rush hour, people are disgorged from jammed trains and pushed down narrow corridors, up and down stairs that cross invisible Underground lines, shoulder to shoulder against their will.  Decisions concerning the eventual destination are taken early and irrevocably.  This is what toothpaste must feel like when it is squeezed through the nozzle.  Maybe that's how the Tube got its sobriquet.

I caught a train towards the center, the last one on, with just enough space for my slim body and obese daypack.  The spot by the door has the benefit of slightly less stale air, but this comes at an enhanced risk of decapitation.  The doors of the deep-level trains curve inwards at shoulder height to let the trains fit through the narrow round tunnels.  Getting off unharmed I noticed a curiosity of London Underground corridors.  Every third or fourth ceiling panel is missing, as if someone had realized this project would never be finished, so why create the illusion.

Around my hotel, a faux-historic palace with confused decoration – statues pretending to be Egyptian and Greek key motifs throughout – that can only be explained by its proximity to the Museum of Imperial Pillage and Loot (a.k.a the British Museum), traffic pulsates and people run in throngs.  Any new arrival is in awe, gaping at the incomprehensible, trying to see meaning, figuring out where is left and where is right.  The contrast to Switzerland is staggering.  I had half-forgotten about this, maybe not about the fact but at least about the effect, but I reconnect fast.

The Evening Standard, still gloriously clad in a coat of paper, is handed out every evening in front of Tube stations.  Fopp still sells music the old-fashioned way, on disks silver or black, with geeky shop assistants so in love with song that they'd rather share their passion with an equally fanatical customer than move on and serve the next two that wait in line to pay.  Maybe it's good business to culture fervent customers even at the cost of losing the occasional shopper.  I outlasted the wait and, at the ripe age of 45, bought my first, and then my second, Rolling Stones album (Beggars Banquet, Aftermath).  In the Standard, Boris grinned from every page, innocence and fun drained from his face.

Boris had just been humiliated by Parliament.  Members, including some of his own party, don't share his excitement for an exit from the European Union without a deal to manage it and have sent off legislation to outlaw it.  It is not necessary to understand British politics to be entertained by it from the safety of another country.  It's a bit more delicate in the UK.  I decided not to make a Brexit joke during my talk the next day.

another conference

Periodically I launch the project of a daily diary.  Of course, etymologically a diary is already daily.  The fact that I need to emphasize this (to myself) explains in a nutshell what's wrong.  Even without this you know what's wrong from looking at a recent list of posts.  Going back a handful of entries will send you back to May.  I'm not good at keeping book.

The other day I bought a book with a few blank lines per day.  A diary, but with a twist.  Every page had space for the same day recorded over the course of five years.  You could note down your thoughts for the day and, down the road, directly compare them to thoughts from one year or two years ago.  I found this quite intriguing.  If you're trying to improve certain aspects of your life, it's good to look back and see how things have developed.

I started filling the top fifth of the pages when I went to Berlin earlier this month, but my enthusiasm has already petered out.  I didn't take the book (a sizeable hardbound volume of nearly 400 pages) on my trip to Cincinnati for this year's annual meeting of the American Crystallographic Association, which is now drawing to a close.

I had smaller, more travel-friendly notebook but didn't add anything after the first day.  When I started looking back tonight, after the closing banquet on a boat in the Ohio river, the last few days have already passed into the haze of half-forgotten memory.

Conferences are hard work.  If you're a regular delegate, conferences can be good fun.  You attend the session you're interested in and skip the rest.  It can be quite relaxing, depending on how strict you are with yourself.  The drawback is that no one's doing your research while you're away.  This sword hangs over your head while your heaving fun.

If you're a regular exhibitor, conferences are good fun.  You spend your days at the booth, chat with people that come your way, give away freebies, catch up with things back home via email, and go for nice dinners at night.  As being at the conference is your job, there's not much work that accumulates back home.  On the flip side, you have to show some achievements for the money spend on the conference.  This means sales, new leads or business connections.

My situation is halfway between the two.  I'm an exhibitor, but I'm also a scientist.  This can kill.  With no research project of my own, my interests are broad, and many sessions are tempting.  I could spend all day listening to presentations and learning new things.  But I also have to be at the booth for the commercial aspect of my job.  During coffee breaks I try to catch people I set out to talk to or am being stopped by random strangers.

I record these conversations on pieces of scrap paper that accumulate like dirt in a college dormitory.  At night I try to sort and digitize these notes.  There is no spare time.  With the last bit of work done late at night, I collapse into bed and sleep soundly and without dreams.  I do not find the time to summarize my day in a few lines that might help me figure myself out and see patterns.

Does that sound negative?  I love my job!  I'm a well-known part of a community that I didn't really get into by myself.  People tell me about their work, and I hear about the latest trends.  I contribute posters and presentations as if I were a scientist.  Coming from a company representative that's maybe not always taken entirely seriously, but I'm trying to be rigorous and leave the marketing bullshit to others.

Nevertheless, there's only so much rigor I can put into the job.  It's like doing three things at once – being a scientist, being a salesman and being a marketeer.  The scientist part required preparing two oral presentations and two posters and paying attention during talks relevant to our business (X-ray and electron detection – essentially everything at the conference).  The salesman part requires keeping track of conversations, faces and personal details.  If I know fifty people out of an attendance of 500 and I speak ten minutes to each one of them, that's nearly ten hours right there.

The marketeer part would have liked me to conduct an interview for a success story with one of our customers, fill social media with morsels, and interview a business partner to understand his needs and desires better.  For lack of time, I didn't do any of this.  I also haven't copied a few dozens of notes into my computer, and I haven't added any words to my every so hypothetical diary, even though it's midnight already.  It was a busy conference.

my words

Today was the girl's forth birthday.  She's big now, and she knows it.  For dinner, she refused the booster seat that lifts her head above the surface of the table.  Without it, she remained half hidden, but she enjoyed her new status as one of the big ones.  Teaching her useful chores should now be on my list.

The birthday was jam-packed with presents, activities and merriment.  It started early when the boy decided the night was over and demanded his milk.  The girl was the only one left sleeping, but she got up soon enough to discover song's sung in her honor and a living-room floor full of boxes wrapped in pink paper.  She had her own milk and then tore through the paper with delight.

Flucha had prepared and organized everything.  Not every detail but all aspects of the day – from the food over the activities and the presents to the cake.  She had also planned the party that will gather four of the girl's friends with their siblings and parents and the extended family of a neighbor in our backyard.  To say that my contribution had been humble is a bit of an understatement.  I had brought two little presents when I visited my mom the other day and assigned another one to my dad.  And yet I expected the day to follow a pattern I'm familiar with.

Here's what I remember about birthdays from when I was young:  I couldn't sleep the night before and got up early to discover the presents.  They were humble back then but made me happy.  I would leave them on the small sideboard where they had been waiting for me and come back periodically – and certainly the next few mornings – to make sure they were still there.

At breakfast there was always a cake with candles.  We didn't sing.  I blew the candles and we ate the first pieces of the cake before finishing the rest off in the afternoon with grandma.  I don't remember any big activities or trips taken on the occasion of my birthdays.  They were largely normal days.

Things are different now, more opulent, with countless elements coming together to build a beautiful whole.  Beholding these changes – driven by time and culture and abetted by my passivity – I suffer pangs of loss and disappointment and cannot always be as elated as I should be about my daughter's birthday.  This frustrates Flucha and me in almost equal measure.

There are a few obvious answers to questioning the elements of my daughter's birthday.  I had never realized this with such clarity up until now, sitting in the quiet of a half-empty living room, the entire family asleep with complete exhaustion.  It's really not difficult and the key to happiness in other aspects of my life as well.

Flucha organized everything, prepared everything, took charge and took care.  Without saying much, I judged her as overdoing it and absolved myself of involvement – trying to compensate for her high energy with apathy.  We didn't discuss the day except in the broadest terms.  Most presents were as much a surprise to me as they were to the girl.

There's a better way, and it's really quite simple:  We need to talk about what we do together.  We do too little of that, and it's mostly because of me.  I'm not much of a communicator, especially of things I don't like or consider unwise.  I hold back too long and often burst out aggressively or negatively.  How Flucha and I have remained together for more than ten years is a mystery.

I don't take the time for considered and constructive discussions, but that's really what is needed.  I need to speak about my wishes and tastes, not with an eye on imposing my will or rejecting Flucha's ideas but with the aim to understand her reasons for preferring one thing or another and make her understand mine.

The boy's second birthday is coming up in just about four weeks.  I've got something to work on until then.

aging gracefully

During one of the laboratory rotations during my first year of graduate school in Utah, just about 20 years ago, doing real-time PCR to determine expression levels of some genes implicated in aging, Bernadette, the senior graduate student or junior postdoc who took me under her wing, told me she felt the first ill effects of old age when she turned 25.  At 23, I considered this utter nonsense and indeed, turning 25 didn't change my life.

Thirty didn't have much of an impact either.  The day I reached that milestone, after a journey on the night train down from Grenoble where I was by then living, I rode my bicyle up the Col d'Aubisque in the Pyrenees, the Tour de France hot on my wheels.  I had never felt better physically.

Forty didn't bother me either.  Among my friends, only one had deemed this birthday worth a grand celebration.  He invited his companions over the years to a bash in Jena where he and I had gone to college together.  I didn't see anything special in the date.

This was four years ago, and what a difference four years can make!  I was young back then, relatively independent, accountable to no one and responsible for nothing. Life flowed, and I let it take me with it.

Since then I have acquired two children - amazing creatures that no one and nothing could have prepared me for - and a woman that might very well be my wife.  I share responsibility for my little family, am a teacher to my children, a hero in their young lives.  I have aged in the process.

Riding my bicycle to work this year has been an exercise in pain.  My average speed is more than 3 km/h lower than in earlier years.  When I go running on business trips, I hardly ever faster than five minutes per kilometer.  Sometimes I take more than six.  I might as well be walking with a cane.

Dashing up the stairs at work, I can quickly exhaust myself, as if doing Olympic-level interval training.  When I played football for the first time in many years the other day, I was rewarded for my animation on the field and the goals I scored with a sustained back pain so piercing that it felt like being perforated with knives.  I lay in ruins for more than a week.

Maybe this shouldn't surprise me.  Aging is nothing to complain about or bewail.  The arrow of time flies one way only.  But it is frustrating nevertheless.  I'm falling apart physically.  Forty-four is my personal tipping point.  Halfway through my statistical life expectancy, the forces of destruction are gaining the upper hand.

How do I live with this?  Will I finally break down and buy a car or even a TV to support age-appropriate listlessness?  Probably not immediately.  The new flat, which we'll finally move into this weekend, is much closer to work than the old one.  Cycling won't cause me to break a sweat.  I could even jog.

A friend of mine who sensed impending doom a few years back signed up for CrossFit and reached the best shape of his life at the age of forty.  He put more hard work and suffering into this than I'd ever be able to sustain.  With some regular exercise, I could probably also raise my fitness levels and feel better when I move, but it's more important that I learn to live with the inevitable.  I might be able to slow down my decay, but I know that it is unstoppable.

the new situation

We've got the flat.  Everything went smoothly.  A week after applying, we got the yes.  I'm still not convinced it's the right flat for us, but it's ok, we're going to survive, and the school's really close to it, a short walk away.

Getting rid of the old flat was painless.  In Switzerland, leases are taken seriously.  You rent because you want to live somewhere.  You can make long-term plans based on this, as can the landlord.  When I lived in London, one month's notice sufficed.  Here you can move out only twice a year.  Choose any date beside the end of March and the end of September, and you're liable to pay for the remaining months.

We didn't want to wait until September.  Kindergarten starts in August, and it would be good to get the move done before we fly off on vacation in July.  We gave notice for the end of June, leaving us with three months' rent to be paid for nothing.

The way around wasting all this money is finding someone to take over the lease.  Given the tight rental market, which we experienced ourselves over the last year or two, this should be easy.  I had mostly been searching on homegate.ch, and I figured I'd advertise there as well.  This idea seemed less sensible when I found about the listing fees.  At around 180 Francs, I didn't even bother to find out how many photos were included.  There had to be a better way.

tutti.ch offers online classifieds that let you find anything but not search very specifically.  Size of the apartment, price tag and number of rooms, that's for you to glean from a long list of hits matching your town of interest.  The large majority of ads are probably obsolete, as are the two I put on (one in English, another in German), but after I'd listed them I got a call the same night and a viewing the next evening.  There was only ever this one call.  It was enough for a family very similar to ours to secure a flat for July.

We have since registered the girl for kindergarten and identified daycare options for the boy.  An after-school program for the girl is a bit more of a challenge.  Baden doesn't combine this with kindergarten, for whatever bizarre reason.  There's a central daycare for all children with working parents, in the old town, close to but not right next to some of the kindergartens.  Children will be walked between daycare and kindergarten, at least at the beginning.  But how much will they be taken care of?  When we visited the place today, it looked slightly abandoned, with most children out and about, out on their own, it seemed.

The apartment situation might be sorted out, but daycare is a bit unsettling.  I'm far from freaking out, though.  Other parents are facing similar challenges, and many more will have gone through and survived this situation over the years.  There will be an obvious way, and we will find out.

The 7 best chocolates

Earlier today in California, between two lectures on basic concepts of crystallography, I spoke to one of the other teachers of the workshop on the topic of chocolate.  Chocolate is a fine topic for a crystallographic lecture itself, but the different phases, how transitions change the texture, and how heating it too much causes it all to go to hell weren't on our minds.

There is, of course, plenty on the internet on the science of chocolate.  If you're crystallographically inclined, you might appreciate the talk by Elspeth Garman (fast forward to 15:15 min).  Coincidentally, she used to teach at the same workshop as my chocolate-loving friend and I.

Chocolate comes in many guises.  Switzerland is famous for milk chocolate, though they didn't invent it.  Thirty years before M. Nestlé and colleagues stirred cocoa powder into condensed milk in Vevey by Lake Geneva, gourmets at the court of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden had already been enjoying something very similar, concocted by the company of Jordan & Timaeus, and found it rather delicious.

I frequently get into trouble for this, but I don't like Swiss chocolate much because I don't like milk chocolate much.  Since that random discovery all these years ago, I much prefer darker varieties.  They have so much more to offer than the sugary sweetness of milk chocolate.  Somewhere between 60 and 75% of the right cocoa gives delicate flavors without being too tart.

Good chocolate can come with eye-watering price tags.  I remember a little shop in St-Rémy-de-Provence, full of tiny delicacies expensive enough to make you want to cut your ear off.  (If you're lost, use the Google to make the connection.  Better yet, visit this beautiful town.)  Some are advertised as luxury products, better flaunted than enjoyed.  Do not purchase chocolate by price!  Purchase it by this guide:

1. Valrhona Ampamakia 64% – This single-estate chocolate comes with a vintage, which always cracks me up a bit, but it tastes like heaven.
2. Madecasse 70% – A chocolate with a story to match the taste.  Two Peace Corp volunteers in Madegascar see the value in turning locally sourced cocoa into locally produced chocolate.
3. Grenada Chocolate Company 71% – Purchased at Rococo Chocolates' Kings' Road store in London mostly because I was working with a student from Grenada at the time.
4. meiji THE Chocolate 70% – A random purchase in one of the few proper grocery stores in Tokyo, this turned out to be a much better pick then the matcha milk mix I bought at the same time.
5. L'Amourette Grenada 75% – This bar and the next shouldn't be on this list, but I need to reach seven. I've bought this in Palo Alto just today to see whether Grenadian cocoa is a thing.
6. L'Amourette Nicaragua 80% – Another purchase from today.  This is a bit outside my comfort zone, but one needs to be adventurous to be rewarded.

If you read this far, do you still remember the title?  Internet wisdom has it that listicles sell best, that links with a number in them get the most hits.  It said 7, there's only six.  Two shouldn't be there.  I wonder how the views will compare.

big decision

Moving house is a pain.  There must be very good reasons to do it, to uproot one's life and start again.  There's so much effort and time involved, before, during and after the move.

We have been looking for a new flat for about a year now.  Finding one isn't easy in Switzerland.  The real estate market is rather tight.  Not being Swiss probably doesn't help.  And my standards are high, one of the perks of living here.  I've seen a few nice flats but not a single one where I was devastated when I didn't get it.

I like our current flat a lot.  There's not much wrong with it.  It's large enough for the four of us, relatively new and in good shape, close to the train station and the childcare right next to it, and halfway between my and Flucha's places of work.  It has a large garden that the children love.  It doesn't get much direct sun but is very bright nevertheless because it has more windows than surface area.

The things I don't like about the flat are the relatively small and impractical kitchen with insufficient counter space, the lack of a separate freezer compartment, the sad balcony that has never invited us to spend much time there and the single curtain rails.  If this sounds like nit-picking, it's because it is.  Were it for the flat only, I would not seriously consider moving.

A bigger problem is that the flat is in Dietikon.  Dietikon is a town without attractions, at least in my eyes.  Besides a lovely little library, there's nothing that makes me want to spend time there.  The neighborhood where we live, north of the train station, is even worse.

It's a new development that has grown over the past ten years to cover a former industrial site with rectangular buildings of concrete and glass, in the style of international tedium, with no obvious flaws but no charm either, disconnected from the place, entirely without identity.  There's no decent café, the bakery is closed on weekends, and the few restaurants are pathetic.  With two thousand people living here, our neighborhood should be thriving but it just doesn't take off.  The main square epitomizes all that's wrong.  A gravelly expanse of nothing, it seems abandoned, though it's more likely that no town planner was involved in the design of the neighborhood in the first place.  None of this matters much to us.  We're a happy family and we'd happily stay.

The real problem, the issue that will drive us from this place in the end, is the lack of a school.  How you can build an entirely new neighborhood and not think of a school is beyond me.  (There's word of one for 2026, but don't hold your breath.)  School children as young as six currently have to walk to and then through the train station and then a fair bit on the other side, across the busiest street in town to reach the city center schoolhouse.  It's not something I'd like my children to do every morning.  A kindergarten – more relevant for the next two years - is only a few steps from our flat, but it's a depressing, sterile place in a lifeless courtyard, surrounded by concrete, artificial.

Here's the deal.  After months of looking for a flat, we've finally got a yes.  It's in a thriving small town a few miles downriver, so close to work that I could ride my bicycle no matter how poor the weather, and right next to a nice kindergarten and school.  I should be jumping up in the air but I can't.

The flat is by far the worst I've seen in Switzerland.  The kitchen is so old I keep joking it would be like moving back to the UK.  The kitchen is obviously much better than that.  Maybe it's what a Swiss person – ignorant of the true extent of the misery – would imagine a kitchen in an English rental to be.

The flat isn't bigger than ours but 10% more expensive.  No big deal, but it doesn't feel right.  There are fewer windows than we're used to, though there's direct sunlight in the mornings.  We wouldn't be on the ground floor and the children couldn't just run outside when the sun's shining.  No more garden.

The basement is a frightening little dungeon – with washer and drier for our personal use but not inviting to store anything delicate.  I'd have to find some place else for the wine.  Bicycles were scattered all over the parking garage when we viewed the flat.  There was no dedicated space for them.

The floor of the living room is stone tiles, the floor in the bedrooms some sort of worn out plastic.  This might require carpets.  And while I'm traditionally a fan of carpets, I must admit that I've grown rather fond of the hardwood floor in our current flat.

I wouldn't think the flat worth a second look, but here I am considering signing a lease.  The flat is the least of the arguments pushing me in that direction.  School and kindergarten in close proximity, and the center of an enjoyable, happening little town within walking distance weigh much heavier.  Will I say yes tomorrow?

Saying yes would send us down a mad scramble of a few weeks to pack up our possessions, disassemble our furniture – not much, but not much for four people is still a lot – and deep-clean the flat.  We'd need to have the appliances checked, a job that I'd think in the responsibility of the landlord if I didn't know better, and find new childcare places.  Then we'd need to find replacement tenants or risk paying twice the rent for several months.  This is probably easier than it sounds because our flat is nice, but it will take effort.  Lastly, we'd need to organize the move itself, which I can't see as a walk in the park with two small children.

I'd much rather just sit on my sofa and update my blog, but this is not getting the children the education they deserve.  Strange how even big decisions aren't my own anymore.

phish me

Yesterday I got an email from my PhD adviser.  He seemed to be in a bit of a pickle and asked me to help him out.  How could I not?  I wrote yes and hit reply.  Then it dawned on me.

The email wasn't written in his usual tone.  The urgency, the request no to contact him by alternative means.  He's never ended an email to me with regards.  Alarm bells all over, yet I had gone ahead and replied anyway.

The thing that made me reconsider was the return address.  dptdirector.sector@gmail.com isn't his.  I hit undo in Gmail, stopped the time-delayed sending of my email, and send one to his real email asking what was up with this.  Hours later came the response that I hadn't been the first one getting such an email, and that he had had no hand in sending it.

A day later, I wish I had followed up on this email.  What was the purpose?  What kind of information was I supposed to be tricked out of?  Are scams almost sophisticated enough now for me to fall for them?

kindergarten

Hard to believe that the girl is getting ready to go to kindergarten.  Hard to believe because it wasn't all that long that she was a tiny screaming bundle of a few pounds that we didn't have the faintest idea what to do with.  All that long?  It's actually been more than three and a half years.

In Switzerland, school is mandatory from age four.  This sounds harsher than it is.  What would a four-year-old do in a school?  Turns out kindergarten is part of the school system, and its attendance is mandatory from age four.  This is something I can deal with.  To help me prepare for the rest, I attended an information event organized by the municipal school system last night.

Before a slide highlighted students from 76 nations (across all grades) who speak 32 languages, the audience was warned of potentially distracting noises because of simultaneous translation of everything that was being said.  On the walls of the hall were big banners for all languages with translators present: Serbo-croat, Portuguese, Albanian, Tamil, Italian and Turkish.  Native speakers of these languages were invited to gather underneath their banners to get information in their language.  Throughout the presentations, there was a constant polyphonous whispering at the periphery, but it was really only noticeable when one was really listening for it.

This level of diversity could be a big benefit for children.  Languages and cultures of a round-the-world trip without having to leave the classroom.  The drawback is that not all immigrants came for high-paying jobs.  Some are refugees, some are just scraping by.  Those who only speak their native language face additional challenges.  Our town has one of the highest ratio of welfare recipients in the canton.  A tinderbox of dissatisfaction and anger?  Maybe it's just another aspect of diversity that we in our privileged lives should be thankful for.

We're definitely thankful that we won't have to pay for childcare anymore, at least for the girl.  Kindergarten is free.  But it's not all golden.  Kindergarten only covers the mornings.  What to do with the afternoons?  Both of us work.  Turns out select kindergartens, among them the one closest to our home, offer after-school programs.  They aren't free, but they feed the kids and keep them entertained.

Like any school, kindergarten has school holidays, an ungodly amount to a working parent.  Good thing the after-school activities are extended to optional full-day activities during holidays.  I don't know how prices are adjusted, but at least we don't need to take 12 weeks off work every year.  Only two weeks in summer remain when everything is closed.  This is exactly as it is now, and largely compatible with our routine of jetting off to Argentina for a few weeks on Christmas.

One speaker mentioned a few of the things children should know when they enter kindergarten.  Go to the toilet, brush teeth, use scissors, dress and undress.  These are not challenges for the girl.  All would be good were it not for an overambitious dead.  By the time she'll set foot inside kindergarten for the first time, the girl better know how to read and write.  Seven months to go!

bizarre

During the drive back from the workshop near Oxford, the pundits on the radio were arguing whether the government should reveal, for the sake of transparency, what it considers state secrets, and whether revealing them would compromise Britain's position in the negotiations with the European Union over Britain's exit from said Union.  Like almost everything that has happened in the UK since that fateful day in June, this discussion is a bit bizarre.

It is bizarre because a deal for the exit of the UK from the EU has been laboriously negotiated over the last year and a half.  The negotiations are now over.  A deal has been agreed on.  It's up to the British parliament to ratify it and sever for good the ties that many were not happy with.  That many fewer consider this deal a good one is beside the point.  Negotiations end in compromise – or they end in tears.

When it comes to Brexit, the idea of compromise is not popular in the UK.  Those who voted against leaving the EU still don't want to.  Those who did would rather cut all ties, whatever the cost, rather than remain, in whatever way, associated with the EU and bound by its rules.  The leavers, as they are called, talk of sovereignty and strong borders and control over their own affairs without foreigners' interference.

Bizarre then that one of the sticking points during the negotiations was the Irish border, which the UK doesn't want for fear of upsetting those in Northern Ireland who identify as Irish – and the smooth flow of goods.  The latter is of course one of the key principles of the customs union that's at the heart of the EU.  Bizarre that the idea of strong borders loses appeal as soon as it is to be put into practice.

The border issue is actually trivial to resolve.  There are three options:

1. Stay in the customs union.
2. Hand Northern Ireland over to the Irish.  Whether they'd want to pay for its maintenance is a different question, but it would be in keeping with the Olympic spirit.  In the Olympics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland competes as Team GB – as if Northern Ireland had nothing to contribute.  Unifying Ireland would risk upsetting those in the North who identify as British.  It might be construed as democratic, though.  Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU by 11 to 9.
3. Build a strong border.

It's really not that difficult.

It wasn't difficult from the beginning, and yet the process is drawn out, unclear and unresolved.  By the time my flight back to Zurich was ready to board, the parliamentary debate hadn't ended.  Even if it had, the Brexit saga would go on.

reluctant immigrant

Over the twenty years that I’ve lived outside Germany, I’ve never seen myself as a migrant.  I was first a student, then a mercenary of science, drifting to where the opportunties were, signing with smart laboratories in interesting cities.  It worked out well for me, life was exciting, and even though I stayed rather long in some places, I didn’t have permanence on my mind – even when my job in London finally offered it – and I never grew roots.

I left Germany as an exchange student, only to become a regular graduate student within a week.  When you spend all day in the lab and whatever is left riding the trails or hanging out with friends, you don't think about migration.  As long as you're in status, as immigration language has it, graduation is much more important.  How far off is it, and would you please stop asking me how things are coming along?

Once I had reached that goal, I moved to Grenoble – at a time when France started treating citizens of other European Union countries almost like their own.  The carte de sejour was a thing of the past and with it the dreaded annual renewal at the Prefecture.  I don't remember if I voted in European and local elections, but I think I could have.  This didn't make me French and didn't light in me the desire to settle in France, but it made life easy.

A few years later in London I did vote.  Don't judge me too harshly, but I helped Boris the Clown become mayor.  This didn't make me British, and I didn't need to be.  Living in London, not belonging was normal.  London is a city of foreigners.  Meeting the first British person took me several years.  Life in London is transitory, and for me it was good.  This was of course before the idiocy (or, depending on where you live, hilarity) of Brexit.  When I moved to Switzerland, everything changed.

What changed primarily was my personal life.  Instead of a free floater without any responsibilities, I suddenly found myself with wife and kids, almost like a normal, boring family.  When things had calmed down – the child born and a flat furnished – I found myself in yet another foreign country but much less at home, the foreignness of my existence forcefully impressed on me.

Switzerland is not in the European Union.  Foreigners are different.  I have a special identity card that I need to renew every five years.  The administration is efficient, but it's obvious that I stand apart.  I'm barred from voting in elections or referendums, no matter how much tea I throw into the Limmat (taxation without representation, anyone?).  I'm more of a foreigner in Switzerland than I've ever been before.

With my children growing up here and, frighteningly, speaking the local dialect like all their friends, I find this situation difficult to stomach.  I live in a country where I plan for a future but don't belong.  How's this gonna work out?  What am I going to tell me daughter when she asks me whether she's Swiss?  Not by birth and not by nationality, but certainly by habit.

Habit counts for something here.  For the first time in twenty years abroad, I started reading up on the regulations surrounding nationalization.  Habit has something to do with it.  The details have already escaped me because it's not relevant yet, but I need to have lived in the country for a certain number of years, somewhere between five and ten, to be eligible for Swiss nationality.

That I would even consider this freaks me out.  I'm not a nationalist, but I like my country and feel a sense of attachment.  My German passport has always served me well.  Why would I want to supplement or replace it?  But once our children start going to kindergarten here and then to school, I think I'll need to help them fit in better - and formalize what they already feel like.  And before that happens, I'll need to start thinking of myself as an immigrant.

hands or feet

This afternoon I sent my daughter off into a dilemma unwittingly.  We were having tea out in the garden, one of the last days of summer if the forecast was to be believed.  The winds were already howling fall.

As a treat on a Sunday, the girl got a chocolate egg, a Kinder Surprise.  The surprise was less the egg itself than who had bought it.  I don't normally do this.  For decadence such as sweets and cartoons, I rely on Flucha.  Normally.

This time, I had bought the eggs.  A generous pack of four advertised a guaranteed two collectible figurines, two out of a total of ten urbanized smurfs (or is it smurves?) going about their business in town.  My days of collecting are long over (and weren't overly long to begin with), but one of the smurfs on the picture did X-rays, and I wanted this for my desk.

The girl unwrapped her egg eagerly and started eating the chocolate halves. "Open, please", she said, handing me the yellow ovoid container previously hidden inside.  I shook it.  It rattled.  Not a smurf.

Except it was.  It was a smurf in three parts, to be assembled like a sofa from IKEA and with similarly dubious resilience.  Back in the days, all Kinder figurines were monolithic and from much heavier material.  Plastic, sure, but solid.  People used to collect them because they were cute and exuded durability.  What I unpacked was utterly worthless.

The girl wasn't interested in it either.  She had finished her chocolate and took off to wash her hands.  "Shoes off before you go inside", I hollered after her.  Her head appeared from around the corner, then her body.  She pointed at her sandals, then held her hands up in the air.  What to do?

Her thinking was flawless.  To go inside, she had to take off her sandals, but to take off her sandals, she needed clean hands.  To wash her hands, she needed to go inside, and thus she was stuck – until, seconds later, I rescued her.

I undid her sandals and sent her in, mighty proud that she had seen the dilemma and acted accordingly.  That almost called for another egg.

tonight in Sweden

This morning, I got on the plane with considerable trepidation.  The trip to Lund could have been the start of a major disaster.  Thanks to recently unearthed high-level intelligence, disseminated during a speech that attracted global attention, Sweden is a failed state, a basket case, worst place to visit in Europe (where catastrophe and collapse is never far off anyway), a total mess.  In Sweden, Islamic terrorists roam freely, rapists own the streets and assorted immigrants riot nightly.  How criminally irresponsible of my employer to send me there.

The last time I was in Sweden, a few months ago, the situation hadn't quite deteriorated to the same degree, but it was already bad.  While I survived, my telephone fell victim to a heinous attack by a terrorist stretch of pavement.  I went running one morning, as I usually do when I'm traveling.  It was still dark outside, cold and snowy.  For the first time ever, I took my phone.  I had just downloaded a running app and wanted to start tracking my activity.

A few minutes into the run – I wasn't even properly cold yet – the attack happened, out of nowhere.  Thereafter it was utterly ignored by the mainstream media.  No surprise, maybe, but remember:  Here's the only place you'll read about it.  Share freely to show that your voice won't be ignored!

From one nimble step to the next, my phone slipped out of my pocket, innocently and without guile, choosing, with charming naiveté, the ground to break its fall.  The ground, probably shipped in from abroad and laid down in this very place by a team of illegal immigrants, took wicked advantage of the opportunity, whipping the poor phone around and cracking its screen into a million bits.  The cost to repair it still brings tear to my eyes, but this time around, I fear for my life, not my phone.

Sweden is lost to civilization, a total nightmare.  The airport serving southern Sweden needed to be moved to Denmark for safety reasons.  These days, you fly into Copenhagen.  Before letting you on the train across the Øresund Bridge, fierce immigrants with bushy beards check passports where only a few years ago one could travel freely.

In Sweden, I wasn't immediately confronted with mob violence or street violence, and I have no injuries to prove the danger I was in.  Society seems to be hanging on, but the thread is thinning.  To buy a bus ticket with a value I could just touch-pay with my credit card in Switzerland, I had to give my pin, then show an ID and finally sign the receipt.  When I was asked for an iris scan, I ran off and walked to the place I had to be.

Tonight, after dinner by the train station, still peculiarly undisturbed by the mayhem that was surely going on outside, just out of sight, I saw that the Islamists had taken over a pub.  Their first act of business was pricing all beer out of every infidel's consideration.  Bastards – but what a way to make Switzerland look cheap!  I had a local stout anyway, dark and cold like the night outside but much sweeter and more wholesome, pondering with friends and colleagues the sad state of the world where a deranged tweeter is taken more seriously than all the wisdom in the world and where assorted absurdities are taken at face value when a simple check would reveal their falseness.

I hasten to say that this post contains its own share of prevarication, though maybe less than the critical reader might think. Not all of it is nonsense.

so close

There are essentially two grocery store chains Switzerland, Migros and Coop.  Both are organized as cooperatives and don't compete all that fiercely.  Their selections are meager and their prices high.  They also pay their employees exceptionally well.  This is how Switzerland works in a nutshell.

As do grocers in other countries, Migros and Coop organize periodic competitions to get customers to spend yet more money.  One just ended.  For every twenty Francs spent, Migros handed customers a little booklet that held, out of sight, two stickers.  Fill the card with stickers and you'd win a pantry.  Look at the ticket.  We were so close to securing our grocery budget for at least a year.  Just one sticker missing.

Almost winning

Halfway through the excitement of the game, I first realized the postmodern self-reflectivity of the game and then the simple point behind it.  That excitement I felt was supposed to cloud my vision and make my shop at Migros even though what I wanted to buy was slightly cheaper elsewhere, or it would have if there had been an alternative.  With two grocers comfortably sharing a customer base suffused with affluence, competition is not part of the strategy and price not a selling point.  The game seemed to be more about giving something back to generous customers than to entice spending.

To build excitement, the game was exceedingly well designed.  Look at the picture again.  The card on the left promises 25,000 Franc to those who fill all twelve spots with stickers.  A few weeks into the competition, we were two thirds done.  Then only two stickers were missing, then only one.  At this point, I realized what was going on.

The point of the game is of course to get the winning sticker.  It's a game that's played in infinite varieties, with more or less fluff around the main objective.  The simplest version is to raffle off the prizes directly, printing a line on the receipt that would say, "Big loser!  So sad.", most of the time and announce the big win when it happens.  So far, so boring.

Not much better in terms of customer engagement is providing a code and a web address.  Barclay's Bank in the UK used to do that on receipts from their ATMs.  There's a bit of excitement while you navigate to the site and a light buildup of tension while you wait to have your code verified.  There's also an element of play to it, but it's still bad.  I never even looked at the codes.

A step up is handing out tokens of some sort that need to be opened or unwrapped.  The activity will draw people in.  But if all tokens are losers and only three win the big prize, participants will soon tire of the game.  Who wants to be a loser every day?

Migros doesn't call its customers losers.  With every colorful sticker one gets for shopping, one fills the card and feels like getting closer to the big win.  But these stickers are only padding.  Reduced to its essentials, the game is nothing more than three winners and a million losers.  The brilliant thing is that the losers aren't called such.  Quite the contrary, the losers are steps one needs to take on the way to the win.  Instead of spreading frustration about losing, the game keeps building hope.  Only three stickers matter, but this fact is cleverly hidden in the design of the game.

I am reminded of a book I've been reading on and off for a good two years now.  Among many other amazing and thought-provoking things, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow describes how the brain reacts to observations and triggers, and how different ways of presenting the same information can get drastically different reactions.

For example, when a patient is asked to consent to risky surgery, the response will be much more positive when the risk is framed as a survival rate of 90 percent.  Alerted to the mathematically identical mortality rate of 10 percent, the patient is much more likely to decline.  By collecting stickers, I had fallen into the same trap.  But what fun it was!

stability

Here's a post I wanted to write a while ago.  I let the opportunity pass, but today it came back with a vengeance.  The post is about Switzerland and money, but it's not what you think – no matter what you think.

This morning, like most mornings in winter when it's cold and foggy, I bought a ticket at the train station for my commute to work.  For some reason my card wasn't working, but a ten-franc note did the trick.  Among the pieces the machine spit out as change was one particularly dark and grimy.  Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be minted in 1884.

spot the difference

I give you some time to digest this.  A coin (like anything else) from 1884 is 133 years old.  The little ten-cent piece has been circulating since the time the first Gotthard tunnel was dug through the Alps, doing duty like any one of its much younger cousins that gather in wallets and registers.  If it didn't look exactly the same, it would be on display in a museum.

Some of the trams in Zurich or Basel could also rightfully claim their place in a museum, maybe the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne.  Some regional trains might also make the cut, not to say anything of the historic mountain railways.  A casual visitor might infer that Switzerland is too poor to afford modern transportation.  A better explanation is they're taking good care of things and don't need to replace them so often.  The money saved helps make them rich.

They might take good care of their coins, but care of coins is not what makes them last more than a century without being replaced.  The 133-year old coin tells you that there was no change of economic systems that required new money, no devaluation, and essentially no inflation.  It sounds like the world's most boring places from a historian's point of view.

As such, the ancient little coin is an apt symbol for the country.  Switzerland is a collection of villages.  Though painstakingly on time, things move slowly.  Not much is happening.  And even a coin minted 133 years ago probably doesn't have all that many stories to tell.

---

The reason I wanted to write this post a while ago is that I found an old coin in my wallet before – and before.  The first one was a twenty-cent piece from 1919, from right after the end of the First World War.  The second was another twenty-cent piece from 1926.  These two identical coins neatly bookend a period that saw twelve zeros slashed from the currency just north of the border.

remain

Gibraltar has just declared. With overwhelming majority, they decided the UK should stay in the European Union. Why they would have a say in this matter is an interesting question, but not one for this post. I'm sitting in the bed of a hotel on the side of motorway north of Cambridge. What anyone would want to do north of Cambridge is another question that's not one for this post, but the drive up from town this evening took twice as long as predicted because of heavy traffic, so there must be something about it. What is also not a question for this post is why there has been no activity in this space in four and a half months because that answer is clear, not very surprising and utterly consuming.

Tapas celebrated her first birthday two days ago. In a scary development towards petite bourgeoisie, I used the occasion to install a sandbox in our recently revegetated backyard. Tapas took possession of it and started eating the sand almost immediately. And that was another evening when, in the past and in another life, I would have added a post to this blog to comment on what moves me but didn't.

There was also the aspiration, at some point in the past when all this was new, to keep the memory of business trips by writing about them in an oblique way. This fizzled out after half a year, but now there's a good moment to resuscitate that – though sadly not this blog.

While I'm sitting in the bed of this ambitious though ultimately dreary roadside hotel, the TV high up on the wall opposite is reporting on the first results of the British EU referendum. By a fortunate coincidence, I'm experiencing this momentous evening right here at the source. A pub would of course be better than the bed, but at this advanced hour and by the desolate motorway, the options are few. As Newcastle has just decided to remain, it's unclear to me how this referendum could be contested at all.

I've lived and worked in France for two years without being bothered by bureaucracy, visa requirements or the obligation to justify my residence, and I've subsequently done the same in England for more than six years. I couldn't have done this as easily without the EU – and was in fact asked to leave the US at some point in the distant past. As if it were a kind of geography trivia, the results keep trickling in. Orkney is in and Crickmannanshire is in. Sunderland is out, and the pound has tanked.

I'm probably not a good benchmark for the average Brit. I've worked long years for a good education, and I have a good job now. Polish plumbers don't threaten my economic comfort, nor do Romanian baristas at the coffee shop where I pick up overpriced caffeinated beverages, and not only because I rarely pick up overpriced caffeinated beverages.

It is probably the share of the population that doesn't pick up overpriced caffeinated beverages either that is concerned about the presence of foreign labor in Britain and particularly, maybe because that's closer to their frame of reference, the hypothetical presence of foreigners on benefits, sponging this country, and I'm paraphrasing here, of its hard-earned wealth.

Wealth often drives elections and referenda but this time the big story is power. The Prime Minister, despite a history of frustration with the EU, threw his weight behind the Remain campaign and all but staked his political future on its success. In a display of implausible opportunism, Boris the Clown, the ex-Mayor of London who presided for eight years over one of the world's most colorful cities, led the Leavers, risking parochialism in the hope of overthrowing the Prime Minister after a win. The London Borough of Lambeth, incidentally, voted to remain by 79%.

It is almost 2 o'clock now and, as the BBC doesn't tire of saying, still too early to call. Besides upending my retirement account, piled up during my seven years at Imperial and valued in pounds Sterling, the referendum should have minimal effect on my life. In all likelihood, I'll be able to leave the country tomorrow to return to Switzerland without needing an exit visa or official travel permit, and things will remain like this. Good night.

curious country

Since Flucha and Tapas are still in Argentina, enjoying 90-degree heat while I have to content with snow and frozen sidewalks, I had the weekend to myself.  Yesterday, I purchased some pieces of furniture to deck out a flat that's still empty two-and-a-half months after my moving in, among them a table of dubious value.  After two hours of assembling, the table stands strong and serves me well with its large surface, but Flucha has already logged complaints about material, color and shape.

This morning, later than I usually have a coffee at work, I sat down on the new table for tea and a newspaper that spread open without interfering with my breakfast.  I had bought the NZZ, the most respectable Swiss daily, and so I got, with bread from the bakery across the street and Ovomaltine chocolate spread, a heap of Swiss news that set the course for the day.  Switzerland is such a curious country, it's a shame I haven't written anything about it yet.

Take the market for agricultural products, for example.  It is highly regulated and protected to a degree that would make French farmers turn green with envy.  Competition is excluded and prices are commensurate.  On the upside, consumers are promised quality without compromise.  This is something the Swiss value more than a bargain.  A suggestions was floated a few months back about imports (in general) having to conform to Swiss environmental and labor standards to prevent cheap products from giving good Swiss farmers and manufacturers a hard time.  This was received quite positively.  If families on tight budgets struggled, it would presumably be their own fault.  They could go and do their weekly shopping in Germany.

Back to agriculture.  Nectarines, grapes and oranges arrive from Italy or Spain, but of the fruits and vegetables that can be grown here, most that are sold in stores are Swiss.  The same is true of meat, which is said to be excellent.  I don't know if there are feedlots, but I doubt it.  Cows graze everywhere, in small herds of content animals.  Last summer on one of my few bike rides I saw a pasture with pigs, with little huts for them to sleep.  My boss told me later how it works:  Cute little piglets arrive early in summer.  Great fun for the children.  Many Sundays spent watching them play and grow.  Then, at Christmas, they're all gone all of a sudden.  And the children have learned an important lesson about life.  I don't know where the poultry come from.  I haven't seen chickens roam freely yet in significant numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's how they spent their days.

Meat of any provenance is incredibly expensive.  Just a few weeks ago, the new Argentinian government cut export duties on beef.  This was reported in the Swiss media, with the happy corollary that one will soon be able to buy good Argentinian steaks for less.  The reports chose to ignore that the import duty Switzerland levies on beef is 23 Francs per kilogram, easily outweighing any export duties abroad.  The decision far away will have no effect on prices in Switzerland.  And anyway, even if the Swiss started buying their beef, they would still not know how to barbecue it like the Argentines.

None of this was in my newspaper this morning.  What I read was that the hot and dry summer had pummeled potato fields.  The harvest was correspondingly poor.  Now there aren't enough potatoes in the country for everyone.  The larger ones, critical for frying and baking, are especially rare because the lack of water had stunted their growth.  The idea surfaced that potato imports might be necessary to ensure an adequate supply.

In Switzerland, this isn't so easy.  You can't just go and drive a few trucks over from Germany when you see unmet demand.  There are quotas and duties and permits, set or handed out weekly by a ministry in what looks to me like a bureaucratic nightmare.  The Economist would call this restrictive system incompatible with prosperity, but the Swiss don't seem to read that magazine or heed conventional economic wisdom.  Rail transport here is government-owned, as is the postal service, which also runs one of the country's largest financial institution.  Retail is dominated by two players that don't act as if they were in competition.  Both are cooperatives, as is the largest insurance company.  Trade is restricted and the currency overvalued.  There are rules and regulations for everything.  The country is highly protectionist and suspicious of international integration.  It joined the UN in 2002 only and stays apart from the EU, even though it's surrounded by it on all sides.  One could assume that globalization happened elsewhere.  It's a curious country indeed.

halftime

The book I'm reading at the moment, Sechseläuten, got me onto the football metaphor of the title.  It's soaked with this stuff.  The sections are called First Half and Second Half.  I've progressed all the way to Extra Time by now.  But the book isn't about football, and I didn't buy it in the mistaken belief that it was.  I bought it, during a layover in Mannheim on my way back to Heidelberg last weekend, because it had it big red sticker on it proclaiming it to be the number one bestseller in Switzerland and because of its title.  I want to learn about the Swiss from it.

Sechseläuten is a public holiday of long tradition in Zürich that took place last Monday but passed me by nearly completely.  I live in Aargau, the neighboring canton, and had to work that day.  Then, on the bus back home, I read that the Böögg had lasted for twenty minutes and that summer would be miserable.  I was as clueless as you probably are reading this.  What's the Böögg, and what does it have to do with summer?

The book, a crime story set in Zürich, enlightened me in as much as its first major scene is the burning of the Böögg during the Sechseläuten ceremony.  I learned that Sechseläuten initially celebrated the beginning of summertime when the workday would end at the ringing of the six-o'clock-bells and not at nightfall as in winter.  The Böögg is a cardboard effigy of winter, in the shape of a snowman, its head filled with explosives.  To chase out winter and celebrate the arrival of spring, the Böögg is burned on a big pyre near the shore of Lake Zürich.  Originally separate, these two events are now conflated. 

The time it takes for the cracker in the Böögg's head to explode foretells the quality of summer.  A quick explosion means a hot and dry summer.  The average over the last half-century is 16 minutes.  I didn't check how the numbers correlated with the weather.  I haven't written much over the last month and a half either.  Too busy.  The new job is different from the old one and takes some getting used to.  It's the first time I work for a company.  The contrast to academia is striking.  You know the cliché of the cog in the wheel.  That's what I am.

In all my previous jobs, I was working for myself, doing my own projects, with failures and success depending primarily on myself and eventually coming to rest on my shoulders.  This is not to discount the contributions of others or to deny that science is collaborative.  It's just to say that at the end of the day, everyone is responsible for himself.  If you don't get your projects published, you're not going anywhere.

Except into industry, possibly.  In a company, your interests are not the primary driver of your work.  There's a strategy and objectives and milestones and a lot of novel lingo.  There are different departments that work towards shared goals, with continuous interdependence.  I still organize my day (around frequent meetings) and prioritize and come up with things to do, but I can't kick back and read the internet anymore because someone else depends on my work.  It's rather exhausting.

It's ok when I do things I know, when I process data or think about crystallography.  But most of the time, the things I'm dealing with are totally foreign to me.  When I changed labs before, I would start contributing almost immediately – ideas, jokes, nonsense.  The science was a bit different, but I had read up on it, and the environment was familiar.  Biochemistry is biochemistry.

At the new jobs, it's different, and I'm rather quiet, trying to ease in without anyone noticing that I haven't got a clue.  What do I know about integrated circuits and their readout logic, or the finer details of memory management?  And what about ptychography?  How am I supposed to highlight the advantages our detectors offer in such experiments when I can't even pronounce the technique?  There's so much learning to do, I could spend all day reading and listening to experts.

I used listen to podcasts while walking home from work in London.  I tried this on the bus here.  My commute takes the same time, but I am not the same.  In the mornings, hours before I would roll out of bed in London, I'm not awake enough to hang on to spoken words.  Even the Bugle is too much sometimes.  In the evenings, I'm just zoning, dinner and the sofa on my mind.

Tomorrow I'll find out how well I've adjusted. It's halfway through my probation period (though without a halftime break) and I have a meeting with my boss to discuss my performance so far.  I think I've been doing all right, but I'm curious to know what he thinks – and criticizes.

last day

On Monday, the population of London rose to its highest value in history, 8.615 million.  On Tuesday, it was one fewer.  I jumped onto a plane towards the continent and was gone.  As the plane rose over my former home, I felt relieved, probably mostly due to the dissipation of the tension of previous day.  When East London came into view and then, increasingly distantly, the Thames Estuary, a pinch of loss spiced my farewell, but my heart wasn't heavy.

The day before had been exhausting.  I didn't do much all day, but I had never been so tense over such a long time.  I'm not one to grind teeth, but when I sat in the pub at the end of the day with the last Doom Bar in front of me, my jaws hurt.

In the morning, I carried a third of a metric ton of belongings down to the ground floor and stored them in the hallway that is the building's fire escape.  Collection was promised to take place between 9 and 5:30.  That window was a bit wide for my taste.  Around ten, I called the local office of the shipment company to see how they were getting on with the job.  The lady was responsive to my predicament but of little help.  I'd like to have the collection time narrowed down a little because I have no food in the house and need to step out to eat, I explained.  She said 1 to 4 but there was doubt in her voice.

In the morning I had to stay in the flat anyway.  I needed to finish cleaning kitchen and bathroom.  According to the gospel of Perl, laziness is a virtue.  The desire to minimize work makes one efficient, leading to better code and a better life.  I see the value of laziness, but my philosophy is procrastination.  Doing things the last minute avoids unnecessary work.  Something done prematurely might be superseded or become obsolete.  Something done when it's due is done at the right time.  The later one starts with a task, the less time it takes to finish it, simply because more time isn't available.

I had finished taping up all the boxes only the night before.  I had hoovered the living room and the bedroom, but the rest was a disaster.  At noon, the property administrator was supposed to stop by to inspect the flat and give his verdict on the likely distribution of the deposit between me and the company.  In the half hour before noon, I started seeing real progress.  The bathroom came to life, the kitchen looked better.  With ten minutes to go, all was done.  It would have been a wasted ten minutes, except I had nothing else to do but wait.  And then the admin was two hours late.

Neither cleaning nor the admin had anything to do with my tension.  The tension came from the slow ticking of time and the immobility that this forced me into, waiting for something to happen while hoping that it hadn't happened yet.  The tension was then exacerbated by what I saw outside my front window.  North End Road runs a market every day except Sunday, with fruit & veg stalls all the way from the Lillie Road roundabout to St. John's Church.  With the stalls, wheelie bins, rogue parking and deliveries to local businesses, there's hardly any parking in the street during the day.  Where would the lorry fit?

I had booked the move on the cheap, through a third-party company that collects payment and then tenders the shipment to companies more suited to the task.  I was told that the driver would not carry a phone.  Be by the door at all times, I was warned.  If the driver cannot get to you, if the driver cannot park, I understood, he would abandon the collection.

My doorbell was broken, but I had left a note on the door with the request to bang hard and my phone number just in case.  Upstairs, I left my door open and got worried every time I turned the vacuum on or the hot water with its explosive boiler.  When the cleaning was done and the admin had come and gone, all that was left for me to was pace between door and window like a tiger in a cage.  Looking outside was not uplifting.  Parking spaces opened up from time to time, but only momentarily.  And with every minute that passed, I got more convinced that I had already missed the collection, that the driver had gone by and seen that there was no way of stopping in front of my building and just continued driving.  It was way past two, five hours into the initially specified collection period.

It got so late that I made peace with the failed collection attempt.  No need to get worked up, I told myself.  Won't change a thing.  Better come up with a plan B.  I dug up my car sharing membership card in case I'd needed a van to move the boxes myself.  It should be possible the next morning to find storage and leave the boxes there before rushing to the airport to fly out, I schemed, before running back to the window to not miss the collection lorry, should it drive by that very moment.  The fruit sellers were praising their produces by the price, as always.  A pound a bowl, a pound a bowl.

By three o'clock I couldn't take it anymore.  I went outside and stayed there.  It was cold, but there was no point staying inside.  I remained a tiger, pacing from the Goose along the bus stop next to it on one side of the road and back on the other in a neat rectangle, watching traffic, counting vans and buses but never getter further than one before abandoning the task due to preoccupations and fogginess of mind.  By half past three I was getting cold.  By four I started to shiver.  Then I got a call.

It was the driver, who had just driven by.  I directed him back and occupied a double parking spot that had mysteriously opened just a few moments earlier.  It was the only time during the day that this much space was available, and it was dearly needed.  When the driver arrived, he didn't do so in a van.  It wasn't a moving van either.  It was full-size lorry, and it barely fit into the spaced I had claimed.  I moved a wheelie bin into the road, which was half blocked by the parked truck.  Five minutes later the boxes were loaded and the driver on his way.  All worries fell off.  I needed a beer.

In the Goose, the late afternoon crowd was having a good time.  I got my last Doom Bar and joined two tiny octogenarian ladies who bantered and laughed, a wheelchair parked inconspicuously next to the table.  One table over, a rough-and-tumble couple, with stained clothes, wild hair and an acrid smell, were having their beers like everyone else.  Further back, three Chelsea fans in blue garb a few days away from the next game had their eyes on the TV screen that followed the inaction of the closing of the winter transfer window live.  The ubiquitous loner with a smartphone, a pensioner with white hair in this case, couldn't care less.  He stared at his little screen as if mesmerized.

trust and consequences

An hour from now, I'll be out of work. With the end of January, my employment at Imperial ends. At almost the same time, my five-year tenancy at North End Road is coming to an end. Getting my life into boxes turned out less difficult than I had feared. I don't have all that much stuff after all, despite the best efforts of my friends who kept giving me leaving presents.

Getting rid of furniture took a while but wasn't all that difficult either. Some things I put on Gumtree. People then called me and offered not only to pick them up from my flat but also reward me monetarily for the privilege. That was good, but it didn't work for everything. Other things I put on Freecycle. This community might be rather small, despite even me heaving heard about it. My shoe rack and my stereo rack were picked up by the same person, about a week apart. I wonder if she'll react to the ads I've posted just now.

Much to my relief, the most difficult sell wasn't the sofa I had brought over from France. It was already broken when I bought it second-hand nearly ten years ago and then almost broke Flucha's back when we hauled it up the stairs to my flat. I dreaded the effort of getting rid of it, but a couple who had just moved into a flat were happy to give me a hand and then drive off with Klippan to make their new home homelier.

My dining table, solid wood and with four matching chairs, was more persistent. The ad languished on Gumtree for a good week with no response. Then, today, there were two expressions of interest. Heather was quicker and definitely more eager. She called, asked for my bank details, and five minutes later an amount matching the asking price showed up in my account. In return, I gave her my address and told her when to pick up the set.

The speed of the banking transaction should be enough to take my breath away, but what really stunned me was the trust this woman put in me. On Ebay, at least there's feedback. You can have some confidence that the person behind the ad is legitimate. With Gumtree, there's absolutely nothing. I could be a complete scam. There might be no table, or at least not at the address I gave.

And yet, this woman was ready to part with her money on nothing more than a phone conversation, nothing more than my word, essentially. In times when religiously confused nutters rampage through Paris to fight the pen with guns, it's most comforting to know that civilization has not died. Maybe I should buy Heather chocolates for being such a good neighbor.