January 1, 2025

Dateline – London, England

Today was a low key day. After last night’s protracted meal (accompanied by a pre boarding the dinner bus cocktail, a glass of champagne when seated, two glasses of wine with dinner, and a night cap), I slept in most of the morning. One look out the window showed that the day was cold, dreary and wet. As it is New Year’s Day, most things are closed so there wasn’t a lot of push to get anywhere. Frank Thompson and I headed into town towards Trafalgar Square to meet up with friends. We ran into the London New Year’s Parade which snarled traffic and made locating anyone a bit of a bothersome chore but finally we were ensconced in a pub (The Sherlock Holmes near Charing Cross) with a clutch of Dinsmores. (Tiffany Dinsmore, George Dinsmore and Seb Dinsmore) enjoying mulled wine and lively conversation.

As darkness fell, I headed back to the hotel to return to the larger tour group for a trip around the London Eye to see the city lights (unchanged from the last time I did this a couple of years ago) and then dinner at Covent Garden. (Frank had an alternate engagement – I ate both our entrees, risotto and chicken pot pie). After double dinner, back to the hotel for some relaxation. Two more full days remain. Both devoted to theater with matinee and evening performances scheduled both tomorrow and Friday before having to board a plane again on Saturday and once again make a pointless visit to Denmark. Tomorrow is musical day. Friday is split between farcical comedy and musical. More details forthcoming.

As there is not much to talk about in the travel department, might as well catch up with ‘In Other News…’ On the viral front, Covid cases in the US have tripled since the beginning of last month suggesting we’re heading into a winter surge. Test positivity and wastewater surveillance are also trending up. Fortunately, death rates remain quite low but, as that’s a lagging indicator, we’ll need to keep an eye on that through January and February as holiday related infections work their way through the population. H5N1 remains a bit worrisome. It’s one mutation away from becoming easily transmissible human to human and if that happens, we could be in for a very rough winter. I’m keeping my fingers crossed and refusing to take on problems that do not yet exist. Then there’s the personal viral front. My little quip from a couple of days ago seems to have leveled off at about 155,000 views on Threads. Amazon sales of the books have ticked up in the last 24 hours. I suppose this is what one would call viral marketing although it was not intended as such. It’s interesting. I put the same post on Bluesky at roughly the same time. There it’s gotten something like 10 views. I have no idea why it would take off on one platform and not the other as I’m not especially active, nor do I have an enormous base of followers on either.

The news out of New Orleans is horrible. We’re not getting a lot of details on this side of the pond so I have done some snooping through American news sites. The story appears to be much more complicated than initial framing would suggest. I’m afraid it will be used politically to attack birthright citizenship and has the potential to harm a lot of innocent people moving forward. We shall see. The Las Vegas story of a Tesla Cybertruck blowing up in front of the Trump hotel is rife with delicious symbolism but there don’t appear to be enough details there to have any informed opinions on anything other than the question of the quality of Tesla products but most intelligent folk have been proffering that one for a while.

My New Year’s Resolution for 2025 is to try and read more for pleasure so I’m off to bed early with a paperback Stephen King novel. Don’t judge…