The PENguin Blog

For some time now I have been meaning to write about British food and the miracle that has occurred. When we first came to England in 1971 we quickly learned to eat Chinese takeaway, Indian, anything other than English. Yeah, you could get the occasional decent steak and chips and garden peas in a pub, or decent food in Scotland, but England?? The food doesn't bear description. And it was not much better in 1980. When Sharon came here briefly on business about five years ago, she said that there had been a food revolution in England but they were not quite all the way there yet. Now they are. Whilst eating out, we’ve had one mediocre meal in the last five weeks, one meal that was spectacular and a lot of excellent to very good meals. Moreover, as we have shopped we have noticed a much greater awareness and appreciation of food, not just Italian, which has become the global lingua franca, but good English food. The grocery giant Sainsbury’s has come to garner our respect. They ...

This week’s tour took us to Oxford, the fount of education in the English speaking world. Higher education here is quite different than in the United States or even throughout the rest of England where the predominant model is the German university. With its ancient colleges, Oxford evokes medieval education as developed here, in Paris and Bologna a thousand years ago. We began the day with a fairly unstructured walk about Oxford, but for most of us, the highlight of the day was a “backscenes” tour of Christchurch, the largest of the Oxford colleges which took us through the college and into a few places that most tourists do not see. Everyone agreed that a single day in Oxford did not suffice, for me, if only because I did not get to visit Pens Plus on the High Street. In April Sharon has a conference in Oxford and I shall tag along, looking to crawl the city, take more pictures and prowl for pens. For now, this is Oxford, part one. Carfax Tower is the centre of the city and is all...

Now that the weather is better we seem to be getting a bit of river traffic out our front window. I'm told that some folks even rent barges and travel the rivers and canals on holiday. Pretty cool, I think.

It’s been six years since we were first in Ireland and I had almost forgotten why we love this country and its people so much. In fact as we left for Dublin last Friday morning, both Sharon and I were concerned that maybe Dubliners would not be as warm and welcoming as people in Connemara, in the west, where we were last time. We need not have been concerned. Even with the metric system, its own language and a state religion, in many ways Ireland feels less foreign than England. Maybe it’s because there are so many freaking Americans (and everyone else) here. It is impossible, for example, to get lost in Dublin. The moment a Dubliner sees you standing pondering at a bus stop or with a map in hand, he or she, regardless of age, will stop to offer help and always in the nicest way possible. As soon as we decided to come, it was clear that our “must-do” was not the Guinness Storehouse, much as I used to love the stuff, but Yeats’ Abbey Theatre (founded along with Lady Gregory in 1904...