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Showing posts from March, 2017

Above Ground on the London Underground—Day 65: Jack the Ripper is Alive and Well in London

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We're back on track. If it's Friday we're back in London, taking  a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Think of me as an armchair traveler, using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings. We're currently following the  District Line.  Here are the previous days . This is Day 65 Not far from Tower Bridge, we’re close to Aldgate and Whitechapel, home to the Jack the Ripper murders. To be honest, I never bothered with the BBC Ripper Street television series and it’s possible if I weren’t so hooked on contemporary British police shows, that I wouldn’t be interested in Jack the Ripper at all.  But I did get hooked on the 2009 Whitechapel television series starring Rupert Penry-Jones as D.I. Chandler—tall, aristocratic, posh and absolutely neurotic—with Phil Davis as D.S. Ray Miles—who many of you know as

Carry On London: Sending Love and Support

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If it's Friday we must be back in London.   Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings We've just finished following the Central Line, took a detour to the Tate Britain. This week we're following the  District Line.  Here are the previous days .  I can’t really carry on exactly as usual today, not after the terror attack that struck London this week, killing five (including the attacker) and wounding another forty people when he crashed his automobile into a gate at the Palace of Westminster. Among the dead is unarmed policeman Keith Palmer who was stabbed by the attacker, Khalid Masood. Masood was then shot dead by armed British policemen. Yes, in the sensitive area near the House of Parliament, the policemen do carry guns. The attack is the worst

Above Ground on the London Ground—Day 64: The Tower of London

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The Tower of London, view from the Thames image via Wikipedia If it's Friday we must be back in London.   Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings We've just finished following the Central Line, took a detour to the Tate Britain. This week we're following the  District Line.  Here are the previous days . This is Day 64. The Tower calls. You can take the tube, either the District line (which we're following this week) or the Circle line to the Tower Hill stop. From there it’s a wee walk to the Tower of London. Outside of Buckingham Palace, the tower has to rank as one London’s top tourist attractions. I’m expecting crowds. A crush of people from around the world eager to see the spot where Ann Boleyn was imprisoned and beheaded, the spot whi

A + for The A-Word: The most authentic look at Autism on screen.

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I worked for several years with a succession of autistic childre n—which mostly means boys—kids who were mainstreamed in regular education classrooms, with a classroom aide assigned to shadow them. That was me, the shadow.  We also lived next door to a family who had an autistic son who became one of our son’s closest playmates, until we moved away at the end of elementary school. Chris, with his funny idiosyncrasies is the source of some very sweet memories, as well as moments of high drama. That’s what you get with autism, children who can be deeply involved when their needs and passions are directed and shared but who can sometimes find it frustrating when those needs are brushed aside.  It’s typical for an autistic child to want to talk about dinosaurs—or whatever the passion is—and be frustrated while the rest of the kids have moved on to another topic. The autistic child is focused on that stegasaurus and exactly how cool it is, just not quite getting that the others don&#

28 years later. Dreaming of France

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Me, Climbing the steps of Notre Dame, 1989. Twenty eight years. That’s how long it’s been since I’ve been to France. I was there as a single woman in my middish-thirties, traveling with a female friend, a EurailPass in my waist pack and—in those pre-internet days—a copy of Let’sGo: Europe in my backpack. I had barely enough cash to cover what would turn out to be a ten week tour of Europe. That trip remains one of the great adventures of my life. After 28 years I am finally going back. This time I go back as an old married lady in my sixties with an equally old hubby in tow. Almost equally, I’ll be celebrating my 64th birthday in France, my ‘younger man’ just turned sixty. We’ll have been married twenty five years in October, a fact we’re using as an excuse for taking what feels like an extravagantly long trip abroad. Thirty days with stops in England, France and Italy. We haven’t finalized anything except our flights—we land and depart from London. The other thing that hasn’t

The Sense of An Ending: British Isles Friday #BriFri

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It’s British Isles Friday which usually sees me taking a weekly walk around London, sharing the sights from my armchair here in Los Angeles. Last week we visited the Millennium Bridge , the pedestrian bridge that takes you from the Globe and the Tate Modern, over the Thames towards St. Paul’s Cathedral. As I shared in last week’s post, the bridge has already taken a role in several television shows and movies. This week, preparing a post for my other site Chapter1-Take1 where I cover the world of book to movie adaptations, I discovered the bridge making another onscreen appearance.  The Millennium Bridge can be seen in the new screen adaptation of Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sense of An Ending starring a dazzling cast of British stars, old and young, Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling, Emily Mortimer, Joe Alwyn, Billy Howle, Michelle Dockery and Freya Mavor.  Let me know what you think of the trailer ... and don’t forget to watch for the bridge.

Above Ground on the London Underground—Day 63: Millennium Bridge to Sky Lounge

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If it's Friday we must be back in London.   Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings We've just finished following the Central Line, took a detour to the Tate Britain. This week we're following the  District Line.  Here are the previous days . This is Day 63 I think I first saw the Millennium Bridge in an episode of Black Mirror , the British sci-fi series you can catch on Netflix. It’s a dramatic looking structure, especially when it’s empty. At the end of the very first episode of the first season (titled National Anthem ) the solitary figure of the kidnapped princess, a beloved Royal, is seen wobbling back across the empty bridge. The show was great but it’s the suspension bridge created expressly for pedestrians, with the dome of St. Paul’s Cath