It didn’t start out good. I went to the post office to buy stamps for a letter I really needed to mail and it was closed. I was dumbstruck for a minute. But it’s Friday? Good Friday. That’s a “bank holiday” in the UK. Apparently a postal one as well. Then I went to the grocery store and got caught in a downpour. It was …

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After touring “The Wizard’s Attic” at the Hove Museum, Sam had lunch with two of her new Brighton pals.

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For the last day of March and the last day of our Gibraltar studies, we made Gibraltar’s national dish: calentita. It was a good recipe for a 4 year old to handle. There are just four ingredients–chick pea flour, water, salt & pepper. Mix that up (250 grams of flour to 1 liter of water) and pour in a pan coated …

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Instructor David watches Sam as she comes down the big bouncy slide at B&H Gymnastics Club. They set the inflatable slide up as a treat for the kids since this week begins the Easter Holiday, or “Easter Hols.” I love the ways that different languages truncate certain words and expressions. My favorite English ones …

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The view from the living room of our flat on a rainy Monday.

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This afternoon I took Sam to see a one-man show called “How the Koala Learnt to Hug.” And yes, that’s not a typo: “learnt” is the acceptable past participle for “learn” in British English, and also, unsurprisingly, in Australian English. Steven Lee, the one man of the one-man show, is Australian and so we spent an …

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We took AC up to the Moulsecoomb Wild Park today so he could see it and the crazy ladder course for himself. After clambering around some and imagining what he would have to do to his mountain bike to make it survive the course, he said, “Now I can see why they call it the Wild Park.”

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On Friday I felt the need for forest. Brighton isn’t a large city, but it is bustling and dense, and since the sun was shining, it seemed like a good time to get out of the city and into some green, far from people. A look at the map revealed an enticingly titled “Moulsecoomb Wild Park” green blob, north of the city on …

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Mossy trees at Moulsecoomb (pronounced “muls-comb”) Wild Park, just northeast of Brighton.

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Sam and I wait for the bus after an afternoon at the Hove Home Ed playgroup. She’s leaning against an ad for Bombadier beer–an English brew. These ads are everywhere and they feature a hodgepodge of English icons like Queen Victoria, Sherlock Holmes, and Winston Churchill, all mashed up with other symbols and in poses …

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