See Me Now

         On the morning I left London, while killing time in my hotel room, I fired up The New Yorker poetry podcast which, shame on me, I rarely do. It’s a podcast in which a living poet, who has been published in The New Yorker (good luck with that), reads a poem by someone else that was published sometime in the NY’s history. It gets discussed between the reader and the NY’s poetry editor . In the end, the reading poet gets to read one of his own poems too.   Really, it’s a podcast I should listen to routinely; new resolution! Anyway, I picked an episode at random, which turned out to be   Richard Blanco reading a poem by Elizabeth Bishop .   Here it is:     Published in the print edition of the January 21, 1956, issue             What serendipity! There’s a lot to unpack in this poem but in it, Bishop is considering what makes us want to travel, whether it measures up to what we imagine, is...

         Today was my last full day and I spent some of it shopping in an attempt to use up the British cash I over-brought.   I purchased a few things and got in a good long walk at the same time.   After a chill afternoon packing, I decided to take one last walk to see the man in the clock .    I had heard about this before coming and realized yesterday that the clock is close by – just on the other side of Paddington station. I’ve walked to Paddington station countless times in the past two weeks but had never ventured on the other side. Sure enough, it was right there!   I continued walking around this part of Paddington and acquired a better appreciation for this area.   There are some lovely, residential streets lined with Georgian style row houses and overhung with beautiful trees.  I would have felt much more like I was “living like a local” had we been able to stay in this part of Paddington, but I get it that it...

  As I mentioned in a recent post, a bunch of us were interested in attending a football (soccer) match while here and learned that the English National team would be taking on Czechia at Wembley Stadium. After lots of trial and error, we figured out how to buy a batch of tickets, expecting that their modest price would mean we had seats high up in the nose-bleed section.   The prospect of this outing was daunting; Wembley holds 80,000 fans, the tube to get there and back would be crowded, and it would be a late-ish night.   Kickoff wasn’t until 7:45pm. As the night approached, a few of our group bailed out but five of us braved it.   We have no regrets!               Getting to the Wembley Park tube station was easy, involving only one changeover from the station near our lodgings. Once you exit the Wembley tube station, there is a sea of humanity making its way on a wide walkway to the enormous st...