I always listen to KEXP when I go to Seattle, and I invariably discover some new band or hear some new song that I love. One of the many brilliant things about KEXP is that they publish time-stamped playlists on their website, so if you hear a song you like but don’t catch the name of it, you can write down when you heard it and then track it down at kexp.org.

Another great thing about KEXP (and I should perhaps add here that I am in no way affiliated with the station, I just like it a lot) is that they offer a lot of stuff to download on their site, including live performances and their song of the day—which, if you download the entire back catalogue of song-of-the-day podcasts (as I did), will give you a grand total of 283 full songs to trawl through.

Unsurprisingly for such a web-savvy station, KEXP also lets you listen live online. Surprisingly, I didn’t start taking advantage of this service until fairly recently—and now I’m hooked. Every day at 2 P.M. I turn off iTunes, fire up RealPlayer (I know, I know…) and tune in to The Morning Show with John Richards. Obviously it’s not morning for me, but I like imagining my little brother waking up in Seattle, making himself some good coffee, and listening to John in the Morning as he gets ready for work while I sit at my desk in Brighton listening to the same thing. I consider it a part of that ambient intimacy that becomes very important when you’re far away from the people you love.

For me, there’s an added bonus to listening to KEXP: For ages now, I’ve been content to listen to my favorite old music and just pick up the occasional new music through Jeremy and friends like Richard, who are more immersed in current music than I am. For someone who was all but obsessed with music as a teenager, I’ve become rather apathetic about it in recent years (apathetic and unforgiving—if something didn’t catch my attention right off the bat, I didn’t give it much of a chance). But now, for the first time in a very long time, I feel like I have some idea of what the “kids” are listening to. And—who would’ve guessed?—I like a lot of it too.

So, my interest has been rekindled and my music collection has been enlivened by an influx of new bands. Right now, I’m particularly liking The Bell from Sweden for their breezy 80s-inspired pop, Pela for their anthemic indie rock, the noise-pop of A Place of to Bury Strangers (who will be playing in Brighton next month), and the melodic melancholy of We Barbarians. Maybe it’s not all brilliant stuff that will stand the test of time, but it’s certainly entertaining me for the moment.

Though it’s located right near London Bridge station, which is very convenient for Brighton, we tend not to visit the market unless we’ve stayed overnight in London for some event. But on Saturday, we forced ourselves to get up at an ungodly hour (well, like, 8 A.M.—that’s ungodly for us, especially on the weekend) to catch the 9 o’clock train to London.

We had loose plans to meet up with other people at around 10:30, but since everyone else was running late, we plunged into the market by ourselves to take advantage of the fact that the massive lunchtime crowds hadn’t shown up yet. I’m glad we did, too; at 11:00 the market was quite manageable, but by 1:00 it was so crowded that it was almost impossible to move.

Borough Market is popular for good reason: it’s a foodie’s paradise. You can pretty much feed yourself for free by wandering around and trying the samples from all of the stalls, but if you have money to burn, you can pick up some really fab foods both to eat at the market and to take home. I had scarfed down a cinnamon danish, a smoothie and a coffee on the train up, but that didn’t stop me from sharing a venison sausage with Jeremy, eating the most amazing, gigantic, delicious roast pork sandwich with apple sauce and really salty crackling, drinking a big cup of hot apple cider, eating some chocolate brownie, sampling numerous different cheeses, testing different olive oils and vinegars, and then having a pot of tea and a piece of plum cake at a nearby tearoom.

We also bought quite a few things to take home with us: sirloin steaks from wild, grass-fed cattle; some Stichelton blue cheese to go with the steaks; a small haunch of wild venison from the West Country; some oak roasted tomatoes from the Isle of Wight; two packages of German sausages (Krakauer and Thüringer); and—most remarkably and unexpectedly—a six-pack of German beer.

This was not just any beer, mind you. As Jeremy and I wandered through the market stalls, we suddenly saw a familiar figure looming ahead of us on a banner, namely:

The Schwarzwaldmädel who graces the label of Rothaus beer from the Black Forest!

When Jeremy and I lived in Freiburg, Rothaus Tannenzäpfle was our—and pretty much everyone else’s—beer of choice. It seems that, since we moved from Freiburg, the rest of Germany has discovered just how great this regional beer is. And now, thanks to Veesand importers, who had this stand at the market, it looks like Rothaus is poised to hit Britain as well.

This is great news for two people who have never really come to terms with the warm, murky brews favored by the British. As much as I might enjoy the occasional IPA in a pub, nothing beats cracking open a fresh, frosty, slightly bitter Tannenzäpfle. We did that just last night to accompany a yummy bean soup I made with smoky Krakauer sausage, and it was scrumptious.

There are a lot of things I really don’t miss about living in Germany, but I’m happy that the equally long list of things I do miss has just gotten somewhat shorter—thanks, surprisingly enough, to the quintessentially English Borough Market.

One is Mark Kermode’s Friday afternoon movie reviews on BBC Radio 5 live, which Jeremy and I usually listen to while eating our Friday night pizza. I love Mark Kermode; he’s so wickedly acerbic that, even when I don’t agree with his opinion, he’s a riot to listen to. And he plays double bass in a rockabilly band as well (“Trains and death a speciality”), so really, what’s not to like?

The other is the Radiolab podcast from WNYC. I’ve never listened to a Radiolab show which hasn’t, at some point, taught me something, given me goosebumps, or just made me utter an astonished “Wow…”

Like In Our Time (another good podcast), Radiolab tackles big ideas—memory and morality, laughter and lies, life and death. But unlike the rather staid In Our Time, Radiolab intersperses its interview and storytelling segments with artsy sonic landscapes, and the team often leaves the studio to hit the road, talking to musicians, psychologists, poets and physicists in their natural habitats.

The most recent episode, about “War of the Worlds”, offers a particularly fascinating insight into media manipulation and mass hysteria; it had Jeremy and I just looking at each other and shaking our heads in amazement. The episodes on music and space are another two of my favorites for the way in which they cast a new light on two subjects close to my heart.

If you’re in the mood for a good curmudgeonly rant about the state of popular cinema, you should check out Mark Kermode’s movie reviews. But if you’re looking for some real aural, intellectual, and emotional stimulation, I highly, highly recommend listening to the Radiolab podcasts. Don’t be put off by the occasionally too-clever-for-its-own-good sound editing; the shows are never less than outstanding.

A few days ago, I was talking with my mom about the book she just finished reading, The Mitfords, and she mentioned a passage in the book in which one of the Mitford sisters refers to reading as a “selfish” act at heart. On reflection, we both agreed that there’s something to that. Assuming you’re not reading aloud to someone, reading is certainly solitary, if not downright selfish. In burying your nose in a book, you are essentially rejecting the world around you—and the people in it—and choosing instead to immerse yourself in an imagined world which only you can experience.

Reading—well, good reading—takes you far away from your immediate surroundings. I suppose that’s why I would so often get utterly lost in books as a teenager. What shy, awkward 15-year-old wouldn’t want to escape the slings and arrows of adolescence and flee into—in my case—fabulous worlds of faraway kingdoms and brave princesses? Deep down, I am still that shy, awkward adolescent, and maybe that’s why I still like a good fantasy or SF romp. I’m a fan of escapism, I admit it. I hesitate to speculate on what that really says about me.

Speaking of which… The book review section in the New York Times today featured an essay entitled It’s Not You, It’s Your Books, which addresses the issue of judging people (specifically, potential romantic partners) by the books they read. Though judging someone by the contents of their bookshelves (or, indeed, the lack thereof) seems to be rather harsh, I can understand the impulse. When a guy I was dating in college said he “didn’t really read,” I have to admit that my opinion of him slipped several notches. But I was 18 at the time, and when you’re 18, your personal predilections play a much larger role in your relationships with other people than they do when you’re a bit more mature.

Nowadays, I like to think that I can separate the person from the chick-lit novel they’re reading. Nowadays, in fact, I’m friends with several people who “don’t really read,” or who never read fiction. I don’t share their tastes, but I don’t judge them for them either (just as I hope not to be judged for the fact that I can plow through trashy science fiction at an alarming rate).

While other people’s reading preferences might not matter as much to me these days, my interest is naturally instinctively piqued by people who read books which do resonate with me. I recently saw a guy on a plane reading Kant and the Platypus by Umberto Eco, and I was immediately intrigued. Had he been sitting next to me, I may have even broken my rule of not conversing with seat-mates on a plane and asked him what he thought of the book. Reading may be selfish in that it takes people into separate worlds, but books themselves can bring people together.

The New York Times article concluded that “for most people, love conquers literary taste.” As a bibliophile, I count myself lucky in that, with Jeremy, love and literary taste have largely gone hand in hand. We don’t read exactly the same books—he reads a lot more about network theory than I do, and I read a lot more Margaret Atwood than he does—but for the most part, our bookshelves are overflowing with books we’ve both read and enjoyed. And, at the end of the day, when we’re sitting side by side in bed, with our noses buried in our respective books, it doesn’t really matter what we’re reading; though we’re in different worlds, we’re together in our mutual love of literature.

Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite literary passages on the subject of reading. It’s from If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, perhaps the ultimate book about reading. I read it years ago in Germany (and in German, in fact), and though I got completely lost in its book-within-a-book-within-a-book structure and, in the end, wasn’t quite sure whether I had enjoyed it (or even understood it), this passage stayed with me, and it never fails to move me:

“Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, each reads in the other the unwritten story. Tomorrow, Reader and Other Reader, if you are together, if you lie down in the same bed like a settled couple, each will turn on the lamp at the side of the bed and sink into his or her book; two parallel readings will accompany the approach of sleep; first you, then you will turn out the light, returning from separated universes, you will find each other fleetingly in the darkness, where all separations are erased, before divergent dreams draw you again, one to one side, and one to the other. But do not wax ironic on this prospect of conjugal harmony: what happier image of a couple could you set it against?”

Indeed.

Gatwick is my airport of choice, for obvious reasons. The difference between getting to Gatwick and getting to Heathrow is the difference between a half-hour train journey and a two-hour bus journey. Then there’s the matter of the airports themselves: while Gatwick is compact and easy to deal with, Heathrow is a confusing, sprawling mess. Heathrow is not convenient in any respect, so I avoid it whenever I can, even if it means taking a less direct route to get to my final destination.

I distinctly recall my dismay when British Airways moved its Gatwick-Phoenix flight to Heathrow several years ago—a dismay rivaled only by that which I felt when it became impossible to fly from Gatwick to Cork on any airline other than Ryanair. And there was another blow yesterday when I found out that both British Airways and American Airlines are moving their respective Gatwick-Dallas flights to Heathrow as well.

Gatwick-Dallas is a route I often travel several times a year to see my family in Arizona. I can’t stand DFW (though Terminal D is pretty nice), but I’ve put up with it because it’s convenient leaving from Gatwick and then going from Dallas to Tucson.

If I’m going to have to go to Heathrow anyway now to catch a flight to Arizona, I guess I might as well take a direct Heathrow-Phoenix flight and avoid the hassle of Dallas. But here’s the rub; whereas Tucson is an hour and a half from my parents, Phoenix is three hours. So between the two hours to get to Heathrow from Brighton and the three hours to get from Phoenix to Sierra Vista, I’m faced with a total of five hours of extra traveling if I fly between Heathrow and Phoenix (not counting the time actually spent on the plane). Compare this to the two extra hours it takes if I go from Gatwick to Tucson, and you can see why I’m irritated.

All is not lost, of course. Continental still flies a Gatwick-Houston-Tucson route, and I reckon I can probably get to the east coast from Gatwick and catch something to Tucson from there. It just makes me nervous when airlines start pulling their flights from Gatwick, because it increases the likelihood that I will have to make the long haul to Heathrow a lot more often, and I hate that. I know that, in the greater scheme of things, this is a minor irritation. But air travel is miserable enough as it is; anything that compounds the misery just makes me miserable.

Jeremy has always said that nothing can really compare to your first time at South by Southwest—so, did the conference live up to the hype my second time around? Well, yes and no.

Things got off to a very shaky start: We landed in Dallas in the middle of a snowstorm which subsequently caused all flights to Austin to be cancelled until the following day. To cut a very long story short, thanks to Twitter, Jeremy and I were able to catch a ride from Dallas to Austin in a golden van rented by the lovely Erin and Peter (thank you again, guys). Our luggage was not so lucky, however, so my first two days in Austin were spent wearing the clothes I had flown over in. Yum.

As it happens, I spent those same two days largely confined to bed with what felt like the flu, so it didn’t really matter what I was wearing. I can’t remember the last time I consumed so much Dayquil or felt so dreadful from head to toe. It was really not fun and certainly not the way I had envisioned spending the opening days of the conference.

Eventually our bags arrived, the worst cold symptoms subsided, and things started to look up. But even then, I found this year’s SxSW a bit…funny. I’m going to attribute it to the fact that 1) there’s probably no way the conference could have lived up to two years’ worth of expectations on my part, and 2) even after I shook the flu symptoms and emerged from quarantine, I just didn’t have the energy to throw myself into the thing whole-heartedly.

After my first year at SxSW, I was really fired up about everything: about all the great people I had met, the exciting stuff I had learned, the cool things that were going on in the online world. I was so inspired that I found myself wondering what it might be like to switch professions and become a full-time Web geek (that was just a fleeting thought, however; words are my passion, not code, and I’m no designer).

This year, while I saw some interesting panels, only one (The Web That Wasn’t) had me frantically scribbling notes so that I could remember all the fascinating ideas that were discussed. As for the parties, even the nice ones just left me feeling overwhelmed as soon as I stepped in the door, and I had almost zero tolerance for trying to hold shouted conversations while being buffeted by people on all sides. I felt like a bit of a lame-o heading back to the hotel early every night to curl up with Cryptonomicon while (most) everyone else boogied the night away, but I just couldn’t do it. And the one night I did stay out later than I really wanted to, I had a migraine by the time I crawled into bed. That’ll teach me.

It’s not that I didn’t have a good time; I had some really great times. But what I enjoyed the most were not the panels or the parties, but the nice leisurely lunches and dinners I managed to have with old and new friends. I far preferred going for an intimate meal with a smaller group of people than trying to make connections among hundreds of people at a loud party. Maybe it was just my general lack of energy, or maybe I’m just turning into an old curmudgeon—whatever the case, my fondest memories of this year’s SxSW are of friendly conversations over really good food.

But for all the ups and downs this time around, I reckon I had more fun being there than not being there, and I’ll definitely be back next year.

I intended to keep a detailed journal of everything we did in Thailand, but that didn’t really pan out. It was so much to take in that I just couldn’t process it all, and even now the whole trip feels a bit like a dream. It was amazing and exciting and beautiful and exhausting, and there’s no way I could put it all into words—not words that would fit in a single blog post, anyway.

If I had to boil it down to the essence, I’d say that apart from the obvious pleasure of seeing old friends and acquaintances again and attending a lovely wedding, two incidents stand out most prominently in my memories of Thailand. Appropriately enough, one is urban and one is insular.

The insular one is something of a cliché, but it’s a lovely memory nonetheless: As I was snorkeling around on our second day on Koh Tao, clouds moved in and it started to rain. The beach emptied as most people headed for shelter, but I didn’t mind being out in the rain (I mean, I was wet already), so I swam to one of the bamboo rafts tethered further out in the water and hoisted myself onto it to enjoy the tropical shower.

I had a perfect, quiet moment out there, with cloud-shrouded islands behind me, brightly colored fish nibbling at the edges of the raft, and rain pattering all around me as I bobbed alone in the clear water. It was one of those moments that you try to burn into your mind so that you can recall that feeling of utter peace later on, when life has gotten hectic again. That never really works, of course; when the moment’s gone, it’s gone. But it was nice to have had it anyway.

My urban memory is quite different: When we arrived in Bangkok on our first night, it was almost 10 PM and we were exhausted, but we were also so excited to be there that when we got to the hotel, we dropped our suitcases, washed our faces, and immediately headed out again into the muggy night to explore the city a bit.

After poking around the narrow streets surrounding the hotel, we came upon a food cart on a street corner, with a small row of plastic tables and chairs next it. Jeremy was determined to have some street food, so despite being somewhat intimidated by the language and the strange surroundings, he bravely marched up to the vendor with a smile and a sawadee krap and asked what the cook recommended. The nice young girl manning the cart didn’t seem to know what to make of us at first, but when it became clear that we would happily eat whatever she suggested, she pointed us in the direction of a table and started bringing us a selection of dishes.

We had no idea what any of the food was called or how we were supposed to eat it, and we knew that we were somewhat running the risk of getting “Bangkok belly,” but it was all so delicious that we didn’t care. We tucked in with gusto to grilled beef and pork with a spicy dipping sauce, hot papaya salad, and tangy minced meat with lemongrass. We ate sticky rice with our fingers and cooled the chili fire with crisp raw cabbage and crunchy green beans. When we were done, we paid a grand total of about 3 pounds and wandered back to the hotel feeling full and thrilled to have gotten our first taste of Bangkok life.

When we arrived back in Bangkok from Koh Tao almost a week later, it was midnight and I could barely keep my eyes open, but once again we felt compelled to hit the streets. We made our way back to the food stall on the street corner, which we were delighted to find was still open despite the late hour. When we walked up to the cart this time around, we were greeted with big smiles of recognition and a warm chorus of hellos from the vendor and her friends assembled around one of the tables—it was like a little homecoming. And this time around, after a week in Thailand, we were able to ask for at least two dishes by name—som tam (papaya salad) and larb (the minced meat dish)—and then tell her that the food was delicious in Thai. She beamed and told us that she was so happy we had come back, and we told her (in all honesty) that her food was some of the best we had had in Thailand.

When we finally left, after another street feast and a few frosty bottles of Thai beer, I felt a wonderful glow all through me—and it wasn’t just the chilies. I think Jeremy put it best when he said that he felt we had made our own little mark on the vast sprawl that is Bangkok. We made a connection with someone, however fleetingly, and for a short while we weren’t just tourists or farang, we were a part of the city. And for me, that’s a big part of what traveling is all about.

As for everything else between touching down in Bangkok and taking off again, it’s all a bit of a blur. When I think about the past week, I see images of palm trees and tuk-tuks, of people crammed into the back of open pickup trucks or piled on four to a motorcycle, flying over twisty island roads or through harrowing Bangkok traffic. I remember the smells: lemongrass, fish sauce and car exhaust in Bangkok; grilled fish, flowers and salt water on Koh Tao. I think of pineapple daiquiris, banana coladas, and drinking coconut milk straight from a coconut. Snorkeling through glinting shoals of fish; being bitten by said fish. The sea breeze wafting over me as I enjoyed an outdoor massage. Night markets. Street food. Spices and heat. Muddy rivers and reclining Buddhas. Hanging with the high-tech kids at the UrbanPark. Trying to speak a tonal language for the first time. Spending a rainy afternoon on the verandah with my nose buried in a book and reveling in the feeling of not having to be anywhere else or do anything else besides that. The chaos of the city streets, and the peace of the sea.

It was, as predicted, a really good trip.

I’ve been so busy the past few weeks that I’ve hardly had time to be excited about this trip. But now my work is done, I’m (mostly) packed, our flights and hotels are booked and confirmed, and all that’s left to do is pick out a book or two, lock up the house, and take off.

We’ll be flying in style on Emirates via Dubai to Bangkok, where we’ll have just one full day to wander around before hopping on another plane and then a ferry to the island of Koh Tao, where our friends Scott and Cheryl will be tying the knot on the beach at the Charm Churee resort.

There’s so much I’m looking forward to on this trip, which will be my first to an Asian country: the food, of course; the warm weather and beaches, though it looks like we may be in for thunderstorms most of the week; the new sights and sounds; the chance to kick back and do absolutely no work whatsoever; and the opportunity to see a lot of the friends I met in Australia, who will all be there for the wedding.

It’s going to be a rollicking good time, I think!

Though I’ve always thought it would be great to be able to make my own clothes—or at least to be able to change the hems on my (always too short) trousers—I never had the gumption to actually buy a machine and teach myself how to do it.

But after a trip to the Creative Stitches & Hobbycrafts fair just over a week ago, I found myself in C&H Fabrics with my friends Relly and Steph, and Steph (who is an excellent seamstress) was looking at dress patterns, and Relly and I were looking over her shoulder and cooing at all the wonderful designs, and before you could say “Butterick,” we managed to cajole Steph into teaching us how to sew. We picked out a simple dress pattern and some fabric, and then the only hitch was my lack of a sewing machine—a problem which was quickly remedied by a subsequent trip to Argos.

I wanted to at least be able to thread the sewing machine on my own before going over to Steph’s for our first sewing session, so the day I got the machine was also the day I started my first little project: transforming my men’s XL Metropolitan Museum of Art t-shirt into something a bit more “girly.” With very little idea of what I was doing, I went after the gigantic shirt with my brand-new fabric scissors and sewing machine, and in a remarkably short period of time, I had a shirt I could actually wear out of the house. Success!

But the day before yesterday was the biggest success so far, because the day before yesterday, after three sewing sessions with Steph and Relly, I finished making an honest-to-goodness dress from scratch. A dress! It was tough going, and without Steph’s patience, encouragement and help there’s no way I would have gotten the thing done. But it was a great feeling to finish off that final hem—and an even greater feeling when I tried the dress on at home and found that it not only fit, but was actually quite cute as well. Success again!

So I’m on a bit of a sewing high right now; I’ve already bought another pattern (a skirt this time), and I’m hoping the sewing sessions can become something of a regular thing. I’ve never really done crafty stuff with other people before, and I didn’t realize just how productive—and how much fun—it could be. Bring on the next sewing bee!

(I did this one myself this morning!)