Déjà-vu

My step-father’s mother spent much of Boxing Day afternoon recalling her memories as an evacuee during the second world war – fascinating stuff, though my inclination towards sleep for much of that day may have had something to do with it… But anyway, I had a strong feeling of déjà-vu this morning, as I checked my [...]

Fighting Fit

Last weekend was my second-last sojourn with the army: there’s gap between phases over December and January such that by the time they restart in February I should be far, far away. I’d told my recruiting sergeant-major that this might happen, so he didn’t seem too fussed. In fact, his eyes positively lit up when [...]

new and old

 

Four Carolina students, four thousand miles away from Chapel Hill, in one of the world’s greatest cities. What do we do? Bash Duke and bask in our love for all things sky blue, obviously.
 
 

It’s been a hectic weekend: I had a friend (Libby Longino, Carolina ‘10) visiting from her studies in Geneva, an alumni event Sunday, [...]

Filling in the blanks

Everything seems to converging to fill up all those free moments right now. I think I put 20 hours at work over the weekend, which is good news for the Mark Laichena spring travel budget, but has left me a little frayed around the edges… add to that finally getting my schedule for Army training [...]

Okay, so it’s going to be more work to keep this going that I thought… still, it’ll help me make a better use of my time here.

Notting Hill Carnival was interesting, as much due to the hordes of police, all shapes and sizes, as the costumes. The weather was typical-ish London: not too cold, not [...]

si se pu… maybe

The photo’s fairly convincing, right? It played host to what turned out to be most depressing events I’ve been to in a while. Picture a whole bunch of middle to old-aged “democrats abroad” still not quite aware that Obama isn’t just Howard Dean a couple of years later, combined with a whole load of well-meaning [...]

City boy

I’ll be the first to admit, there are worse places I could be than London (not to mention worse companies or placements). I mean, I’ve done the tourist stuff thrice over in about as many weeks (see last two posts), but it’s nice to be finding a more sustainable social niche, going for drinks with [...]

Over the wall

I’ve found it hard to know how to continue this blog, whether as a random collection of my thoughts or as more of an outside perspective into my time away from Carolina, and rather busier than expected has made it easy for me to delay posting. Still, I’ve rediscovered my camera from under my UNC [...]

So what do you do?

I started work at Wilmerhale (a US law firm) on Monday – according to the telephone list, I’m a “summer student”, but I’m still not entirely sure what that means. So far, it looks like I’ll be divided between the paralegal people (think document support stuff: research, archiving, case file preparation) and the intern crowd [...]

Back in the warm

It was odd to be back at Christ’s Hospital (old school) last week, though hearing the National Anthem near the end of the end-of-term program turn out to be “God Save Our Gracious Queen… [et al]” certainly was a welcome change.
Wales was a welcome change to Jordan in many ways – everyone spoke English, for [...]