27th April 2012 Washington DC, USA
Last night I hosted an event for former Marshall Scholars at the Embassy with a brilliant talk by Jeff Rosen on Google, the internet, and privacy. This is of course a hot topic at the moment – for the public, for Governments, for NGOs and for businesses. I’ve also got a keen interest in it as […]
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6th April 2012 Washington DC, USA
On our very first visit to DC, a chilly weekend last October, to scope out the city as our imminent home, we crawled jetlagged onto the metro at an unpleasant hour of the morning. It might have made sense to start house hunting, or to embark on some general meandering to get a sense of […]
5th April 2012 Washington DC, USA
And so I am just back from very sunny Boston. It was a day spent being grateful to people for tactfully ignoring my black eyes. It was also a day spent envying my partner, Layla, for having spent a summer working at Harvard when she was a medical student. Even in my very brief visit, […]
3rd April 2012 Washington DC, USA
When I saw my diary for last Wednesday, I realised that a snapshot of my activities that day would be the perfect way to answer that ubiquitous question posed by friends, family, old colleagues, and assorted others: “what do you actually do?” Business Minister Mark Prisk was visiting Washington and our plans for his visit […]
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19th March 2012 Washington DC, USA
It was pretty much impossible to look at a newspaper, news programme, tweet or blog last week without being met by numerous photographs of David Cameron and Barack Obama sharing a joke, or their quotes about the essential relationship shared by the US and UK. They even wrote a piece together for the Washington Post. […]
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7th March 2012 Washington DC, USA
My mother’s mother was born early in the 20th century in a small Welsh mining village. She was the third of 11 children and she left school – illegally – at 12 to work in a factory. This was not uncommon – indeed only her very youngest sister finished school. Married at 17, to avoid […]
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1st March 2012 Washington DC, USA
Last week I took a very belated Christmas holiday to Puerto Rico. It was very lovely…even if it has meant that one particular friend and colleague has sung West Side Story’s “America” (which compares the perceived pros and cons of living in NYC to San Juan) every time we’ve bumped into each other since my return. But […]
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17th February 2012 Washington DC, USA
I have become very fond of the US, despite having been here less than 3 months. But I have to acknowledge that life keeps foiling my penchant for romantic gestures. It’s not that, I should hasten to say, that the US itself lacks romance. I found the soaring skyline and raised L trains in Chicago […]
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13th February 2012 Washington DC, USA
It’s a steep hill from our apartment in Georgetown to the Embassy in DC. In the mornings, I’ve tried to reconcile myself to this by reminding myself how healthy it is to start the day with a walk up a hill. I’ve had some success. But the journey home was less enjoyable for the first few […]
6th February 2012 Washington DC, USA
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… going to the UK this weekend. Flying into Heathrow on Saturday morning, I found Britain in great excitement about Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday. So it was clearly the best of times to head to Broadstairs, Dickens’ favourite holiday destination where he spent his […]
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