Tag Archives: London

On holiday, laptop down

I’m currently on holiday in North Berwick. It’s been fun but not quite as relaxing as hoped. Liam has started waking at night again after two months of sleeping through the night.

I’ve been getting up early to do a couple of hours work each morning, but this laptop’s hard drive has started hard crashing after a few minutes. Hard drives fail too often. Hopefully it will give me time to finish this blog entry and hit Publish. I guess I’ll be offline until I get back on Monday.

Things I brought back from the UK

I spent a few days over New Year in the U.K., visiting my sister in Swansea (on the Gower, with beautiful moorlands, stormy cliffs and surfer beaches), friends in Oxford (much prettier than expected), and shops and friends in London.

Things we brought back from the UK:

  • Bagels from the Brick Lane Beigel Bake (various online pictures: 1, 2, 3). About £2 for a dozen, wonderfully simple and chewy. You could actually make a profit by flying these to Munich and competing against the boring 3-euros-or-so-each bagels that a few cafes, such as Coffee Fellows, all seem to get from one bakery. Or someone who knows how could just make proper bagels in Munich.
  • Alpen” breakfast müsli. Named after the alps, but not to be found in Europe. Actually, they started selling small German-language packets of the non-sugar version in upmarket supermarkets, but not the regular version, and not in big enough packets.
  • Garibaldi biscuits
  • Murray Mints, not my idea.
  • A furniture brochure from Unto This Last. They now box stuff up for sending outside of London, so we should be able to place a large order and have UPS collect it and ship it over to Germany, though that’s not really compatible with their ethics.