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Today we packed up at our B&B and headed into Cambridge relatively early. We wanted to go on one of the guided two-hour walking tours of Cambridge. We thought these started at 10:30am. We'd found on Saturday that tours were limited to 20 people, and that you could not buy tickets more than 24 hours in advance. As we hadn't been into the city itself yesterday, we did not have tickets. So this morning we arrived at the tourist information centre around 9:30am, intent on buying tickets early. However, we found that the walking tour did not start until 11:30am, and the Tourist Information Centre itself was closed until 11:00am.

Most of the shops being closed, I was unfortunately prevented from spending this spare time shopping. I decided instead to make a visit to a local Pret a Manger. (This is a shop a bit like a Starbucks, that seems to focus mostly on lunch.) Having purchased my entry with a bottle of their water for 65p (the cheapest thing I could find on their menu), I set up at a table and wrote some of the entries you see below, detailing our last few days. Meanwhile Bronwyn, ever the resourceful one, managed to locate some women's clothes shops that were already open. It turned out to be more "nothing gained" than "nothing ventured", but still... (They tell me that window shopping can be fun, though it's hard to see how this would apply out of work hours.) Well anyway, we went back to the information centre at 10:45. Focussing on those tickets, I stood directly in front of the door and about a foot away. As expected a crowd gradually banked up behind me. When the doors finally opened I was first through and straight to the ticket counter. I needn't have worried though since they ran two tours this morning, and ours was only half full. In any case, our guide Rosalyn was excellent and the tour was interesting and well worth while. I took a wodge of photos and if we'd already gone digital you'd be seeing them now. Thanks to Olympus' delayed shipping date on a camera they originally announced would ship in April, I haven't. I'm waiting, so you'll have to as well. On the tour we saw King's College Chapel again, the Wren Library at Trinity College, and a number of other sites of interest. Right in the centre of town we saw St Benedict's church, whose tower dates to 1027 and is the oldest structure in Cambridgeshire.

After the tour we paid £2 each and went up the tower at Great St Mary's church in the centre of Cambridge. All measurements in Cambridge are made from a copper plate embedded in the base of this building, across the road from King's College. All Cambridge undergraduates are required to live within 3 miles of this plate. Undergraduates are also not allowed to keep a car or motorcycle within 11 miles, which is why there are estimated to be 13,000 bicycles in Cambridge. The view from the tower was good. (As with everything else, pictures to follow...) We descended to grab a 2:30pm lunch before heading back to the B&B to pick up our luggage and then round the corner to catch our train. On the way home I had my laptop on and was entertained to watch the wireless internet networks flash up as the train sped past. In all, the computer logged 46 wireless networks, 34 of which did not require any kind of username or password to access. Security is for wimps?

We woke earlier than we would normally plan to when on holiday. Other guests in the Bed and Breakfast were loudly calling out to each other outside our door at 7:30am. Bad form, but the blame partly lies with the local management, who only serve breakfast between 7:30am and 8:30am. This might be understandable on weekdays perhaps, but I feel this is a fairly Victorian rule for Sundays and bank holidays. We rose in any case, unwilling to look a gift breakfast in the mouth. After leisurely preparations for the day, we visited an Assemblies of God church 3 minutes down the road. The sign outside said "Worship: 10:30am. Teaching and Ministry: 11:30am." We arrived at 10:30 but found the place practically empty. We wandered down the road and admired creation in a local park for a while. When we returned at 11:00am we found about 40 people there and things in full swing. We stayed through for the rest of the service. (There was no noticeable break at 11:30am, incidentally.) The singing and music was excellent, especially for a small group. The message one that was meaningful to us, echoing themes we feel like we're hearing wherever we go lately. Perhaps we should be taking notice? Anyway, we felt quite at home. An experience of the way the church is a family that spans geography and traditions.

After church we set out on the popular walk along the River Cam (hence Cam-bridge) to Grantchester. This small town is famous for its associations with Cambridge socialites, especially the poet Rupert Brooke who was resident there for a number of his 27 short years. As is tradition, we had afternoon tea at The Orchard, sitting under the apple trees. We then walked through the tiny village. For part of Brooke's time in Grantchester he was resident at The Orchard, but later at the nearby Vicarage to St Andrew and St Mary church. We visited this church this afternoon. The church building was mainly built in the 14th and 15th century, thought the core of the north wall is believed to date from around 1100. The names of the first rectors are unrecorded, but the list of names of rectors and vicars on the wall extends from 1294 to the present. Again struck by the age of so many things here. It makes New Zealand look like it's built of prefabs.

Planning to head home to the B&B, we discovered that the bus route we were going to catch back to Cambridge did not run on Sundays or bank holidays. We didn't feel like walking back particularly. Buoyed on by our success when in a scrape in Thailand, we settled on hitchhiking. After 25 minutes a Grantchester local heading into Cambridge picked us up and drove us right to the door of our B&B, off his route. Thanks to the unnamed friendly Grantchestian!

With our plans to head away for the weekend, we rose reasonably early today. I in particular was pretty disorganised, and we departed the house around 11:00am. From Wimbledon station we took the ThamesLink train, an overland route and the only train to cross the Thames by bridge. For £2.40 each this 45 minute train ride deposited us at Kings Cross station on the other side of London. From there we transferred to a non-stop fast train to Cambridge, which also took 45 minutes though this time we paid £10.50 each for the privilege. (Quality of train and speed difference do make this a thoroughly unfair comparison however.) We were thus deposited in Cambridge at 1:00pm.

Bronwyn had done her research well. Our Bed and Breakfast, "The Six Steps", looked like it was close to the Railway Station on the map. It took us less than five minutes on foot to get there and couldn't have been easier. So, safely installed in our spacious accommodations, we set out to explore the city. My initially confident navigation was fortunately later corrected by careful observations of bus signs that said "towards somewhere else" when we wanted "towards the city". After consulting the trusty urban compass (a must have if you ask me) we crossed the road to another bus stop and thus caught a bus that actually got us into town. We spent the afternoon wandering the city centre, looking at buildings and soaking up the atmosphere. I enjoyed sitting in a local park with Bronwyn, watching the birds, the people streaming by, and reading a book. This whole weekend was about finding some quiet time out, as I've been feeling quite pressured in various ways lately.

In our wanderings we'd seen that there was an evensong service at Kings College Chapel with their choir at 5:30pm, which was open to the public. We therefore headed there late afternoon. Just across the road we came across the Cambridge University Press bookshop, and spent a few minutes pouring over the impressive line-up of weighty scholarship. We then headed around to the relatively obscure side entrance to Kings College, where the public can pay to enter and visit the college for £4.00 at certain times. By 5:15pm when the gates were supposed to open for the service there were only perhaps 20 people waiting with us to enter. This seemed strange until we entered the grounds and walked round the (cathedral-sized) "Chapel" and discovered a queue of hundreds of people streaming in the main gates that are normally closed to the public! Anyway, we got in, and were treated to an hour of the impressive boys and men's choir, singing with the pipe organ and a capella. A highlight of the day. The chapel was beautiful.

We bought pizza for tea, which incidentally should demonstrate to Nick and Hayley that I'm not sick of pizza yet. (Why would I keep demanding he make it, after all?)

Last night we went to see Matrix Reloaded. It was clear from the outset that it would be difficult for the sequel to live up to expectations, with The Matrix being my favourite movie. Well, without giving away anything about the plot, the new movie took the story in an interesting direction. It forced the viewer to re-think what they knew about the characters and the plot. Four years on, the sequel's special effects are more sophisticated, but are really just a logical progression and lacked the "wow" factor the first movie had. There also were a couple of moments where it felt like the scene I was watching was there to enable them to make a computer game, rather than for purposes of actual plot. If I've "woken up" from being engrossed in the story and have thoughts such as these I regard that as a bad sign. Despite all this, I did enjoy the movie. They certainly have made the right choice in releasing the final two parts of the story within six months of each other, rather than making us wait another four years. The story doesn't hang well at this point. I'll be there November 5.

This weekend is a bank holiday weekend here, as well as the start of Bronwyn's week long half-term break. This is the second to last bank holiday before Christmas, and we've decided to go away. We've booked into a bed and breakfast in Cambridge. By reputation Cambridge is attractive, interesting, and less touristy than Oxford. We'll catch a train up there tomorrow morning. We're looking forward to our short break.

Over here in London I stop traffic. I don't think I'm getting any better looking, though my appearance has changed somewhat during the journey from New Zealand to London. It's just that people in cars give way to pedestrians. I'm not talking about pelican crossings here (yes, that's what they call them...) I'm referring to just me walking along, wanting to cross a side street during the peak hour traffic. I don't have the right of way. Yet traffic will stop and wait. I was particularly taken this afternoon by one situation where a woman was waiting to turn right across the traffic, but instead waited for me to cross the road she wished to turn into. Traffic banked up (briefly) in both directions, while I walked on... It's not like this everywhere, or all the time. But when the traffic is at the heaviest, they are more likely to stop. Less to lose perhaps? They weren't going to get anywhere very fast anyway. But it's a nice face to a big city.

I mentioned appearance changes, and I've received a couple of emails on this topic. Previous photos on the site have not been very clear, so this should leave you in no doubt. I made a gleeful pact with Geoff Troughton when I was about to leave New Zealand that neither of us would shave until I arrived in London. (Recall we took a six week detour to get here.) I have been unable to confirm to date whether it was Adrienne's frustration at his shaggy appearance that led to a certain extreme haircut for Geoff. The suggestion appeared to be though that he hadn't continued with our ("childish"?) plan. In any case, I did, and by the time we were due to leave Melbourne I'd sprouted an almost (dis)respectable beard. I trimmed heavily but have kept to date a goatee. My current workmates have never seen me any other way, which in itself bends my mind. (This isn't really what I look like...) Bronwyn is keen for it to go, but I think sees the motivational value of disinterest on her part in this case. I blame Mike Tate-Davis for the original encouragement.

The Matrix Reloaded opens this week in London, with preview sessions this Wednesday and Thursday. It opened in the States last week and I hear in New Zealand as well, so London's not always up with the play. We hope to go this Thursday night at our local, the Odeon. In the lead-up to the movie there has been lots of press coverage of course. I was particularly struck by this article on the BBC web site, which talks about the religious themes in the movie. More particularly, I was struck by the comments of one person who described the article as "mindboggling", and reported he had seen the movie "many times" but this had never occurred to him. Now, this particular person may well be speaking with tongue firmly in cheek, but he may not. In either case, I am sure there are some who do fail to see these connections. But an even stranger thought: rather than seeing the movie as having parallels to Christianity, my guess is there is a whole generation of people out there whose perspective will be that they see Christianity as having parallels to the Matrix. The Matrix is well known; few people seem to know much about Christianity these days.

The first thing to say is we've settled on a church. The search has been interesting. It was only when we were already in the midst of church hunting that it occurred to me I'd never done this before. All the previous churches I've joined, I've gone there because of a particular person (Leath Powell at Titahi Bay Gospel Chapel, then Stephanie Halse at St Albans). I've then just stayed on. Well, I last wrote about our church hunt in late April. Since that time we've visited one more church here in Wimbledon, Kairos, and then returned for further visits to Queen's Road Baptist Church and Worple Road Church. After deliberation, we've now settled on Worple Road. The key decision point was me attending the Men's breakfast at 8:30am yesterday morning (which was good!). I didn't want to go to that unless we decided we were going to stay at Worple Road. We did, I did, we are. It's good to have a spiritual home again.

On our way into the city yesterday we stepped off the tube at Tottenham Court Road station, and walked straight into Hayden Allen. He and his wife Tanya been in London for about a year now. We were planning to contact them but hadn't got to that point yet. We sat as the people and the tubes rushed by and caught up for about 20 minutes. I was fortunate to have Nick and Hayley's digital camera with me, so could record the moment for posterity. We're looking forward to catching up with them properly soon...

In town we picked up a piece of equipment that Bronwyn's been feeling the lack of with her music teaching - a stereo. This is the first time since we were married we've bought a stereo, though we had the use of my parent's one for the last year or so in Palmerston North. The model we ended up buying was the Denon D-M31, after reading an enthusiastic review in "What HiFi?" magazine. ("Wot? eyeFie?" magazine... ?) Standard advice from that magazine includes buying "as a minimum" cables that cost as much as this entire system. However, the predecessor to this model (the D-M30) won their Product of the Year award in 2002. They report in their current issue, "The D-M30 was exemplary... The D-M31 is even better, making it phenomenal value for money." The tiny package incorporates CD player, amplifier and radio, as well as auxiliary (read computer DVD-player!) inputs. In preparation for the upcoming sequel, we watched The Matrix on DVD again last night. The sound through the Denon was fab.

You have to understand that London is at 51.5 degrees north latitude. In terms of distance from the pole, the southern equivalent would be something like the subantarctic Auckland Islands, which are between 50 and 51 degrees south, some 460km south of the South Island of New Zealand. You wouldn't think London was that far north from its weather. It is undoubtedly cold here in winter and infamously damp, but London also has lovely spring days and can apparently become unbearably hot in summer. That isn't a climate characteristic of this longitude. Apparently it's something to do with the gulfstream, although how a few executive jets could alter the climate is beyond me.

In any case, one thing that is determined by latitude is sunrise and sunset times. We're yet to experience the joys of winter here. It is routinely reported though that you will arrive at work in the dark, and it will be pitch black again by late afternoon. As we move through spring into summer, we've discovered an unfortunate flipside effect. It's lovely to have it still light at 7:30pm and beyond (and this will move much later into the evening as the summer progresses). We're starting to resent it rising at 5:10am in the morning however. Unfortunately the door from our room out to the garden is facing just east of south. (I'm still getting my head around the fact the sun comes generally from the south here... that is so... wrong.) In the morning light, we're waking earlier than we'd like most days. Worse still, each day the sun is rising one or two minutes earlier (or so I am reliably informed). Mind you, with Bronwyn's new timetable, that's not all bad (more on her timetable another day). Bronwyn has rigged up a quite effective makeshift blackout curtain behind the main curtain to try and deal with the light. In any case it is confirming what I've always suspected: that I am solar powered. Even in Palmerston North, not renowned for its sunshine hours, I used to find it considerably harder rising in winter than in summer. I'm therefore in some trepidation about the fall of winter here.

Over the weekend we had the unexpected opportunity, under sad circumstances, to catch up with Georgie Bailey. Georgie's grandmother died early last week. Her grandmother lived here in Guilford, where Georgie spent her first few years growing up. Georgie was fortunate to be able to fly over from Wellington with her Dad for the funeral. The funeral was last Friday, and amidst catching up with her relatives Georgie came and visited us. Guilford is some 35 minutes by train southwest of Wimbledon, making it a relatively easy link-up. We met her at the station and spent a relaxed afternoon at the flat enjoying her company. Georgie is officially our (i.e. Bronwyn and Duncan's) first New Zealand visitor, although Hayley's brother and his wife were the flat's first out of town visitors. No doubt there will be many more, though hopefully under happier circumstances. Georgie's visit has reminded me of my own grandfather's death, nearly two years ago. We were fortunate to have been able to travel to his funeral in Sydney on that occasion. In my view, Georgie's visit here honoured the memory of her grandmother, a woman Georgie loved dearly.

Technology-wise, today has been a fun day. Tuesday last week I placed orders for a couple of things that have come to fruition over the last 24 hours. The first arrived yesterday by courier. It's a Netgear DG814 DSL 4-port router...

Of course, a router might be fun (well, not that fun really...) but to get any use out of it you have to plug it into a high speed internet connection. Fair enough, can't disappoint the masses. So at the same time I ordered the router, we put in an order for a 512k ADSL broadband connection to be connected with freedom2surf. (To drift even further into geek-speak: we selected freedom2surf because they offer a static IP address as part of their standard package at a good price, with the UK-standard of no volume charges, and also because you don't have to sign up to a 12-month minimum contract.)

So what does this mean? Well, it means that while I am writing this, I'm listening to the BBC News Hour over the internet. At the same time, I'm surfing to various web sites. Nick and Hayley in the other room are also wirelessly surfing the net (we've plugged Nick's Airport Base Station into the router). They're watching a New Zealand television programme being streamed over the internet. While all this is going on, the computers are checking email every couple of minutes. Bronwyn's on the phone to her sister in New Zealand at the same time: if you ring your calls won't go straight to the answer phone anymore because DSL doesn't tie up the phone line. This connection is ten times the best speed of a dialup connection, and it is always on. In New Zealand we could never have afforded a service like this. Here in the UK it's (relatively) inexpensive. And the effects can be summed up in the fact that I accidentally downloaded a 50 megabyte file this evening, and didn't realise I'd triggered it to download until it had finished. (It was still 20 minutes later, but it happened in the background while we were doing other surfing, and nothing else noticeably slowed down). It's a happy geek day.   : )

Over the weekend we've been busy. In the last two days Nick and I have spent some time to bring you a less lingual slice of our life here in our flat. Hopefully for those of you who aren't in the UK, it will help you to place us a little better when you're thinking about us. It was a good collaborative effort of Nick's skill and my photography. We had fun doing it. We hope you like it! Go have a look.

The page you're currently reading, and the whole dblog site is hosted on the .Mac homepage servers. However, the floorplan page discussed above isn't, as you can see from the URL's domain: "www.kiwisinlondon.f2s.com". As it turns out, there's a story behind that. I've been playing the International Man of Mystery over the weekend, refusing to tell Nick and Hayley what I was doing on my computer most of Saturday (whereas Bronwyn didn't care!) I was playing around with some uber-geek stuff including CGI, PHP, and "Server-Side Includes", teaching myself the Perl programming language as well. I'm not sure where all this is leading me really; it's not something I "need" to know, at least at the moment. I enjoy the learning process anyway, and have always had a fascination with all things computer. (Hardly surprising given the genes, I guess.) From a Christian point of view though, it's funny the way God can use in the future skills you developed when you never knew you might need them. Anyway, there is an interesting (?) story to tell behind the kiwisinlondon site linkup, and our shared page being there. While I've let Nick and Hayley in on my immediate CGI project from Saturday, I remain (I hope frustratingly) elusive on the story with the kiwisinlondon site. Well, I've always been one to want to include people, so consider yourselves officially not let in on the story too. I'll get back to you in a week or so!   : )

Over the last few weeks, I've been feeling the pressure of having too many projects outstanding. In particular I have a number of largely completed but unpublished research projects that I brought with me from New Zealand. While I had to work on Anzac Day, today is a bank holiday here (people looked at me blankly when I said "public holiday" at work last week). Therefore, I sternly designated the day as a chance to work on writing up research... Now, the fact that you're reading this update indicates that I haven't spent my entire day on work, but I've done a reasonable amount. I've been re-working the article that presents the main results of my doctoral research. It's a shock to me to realise that this month is three years since I submitted my dissertation. I'm finding it hard to understand how it's taken me this long to get to this point (my supervisor doubly so, no doubt). However, I'm getting to a good product that I believe has something to say. The main text is still around 12,500 words, which is far too long. (Realise though that the dissertation I started from was nearly 100,000 words.) I'm still working to boil it down to the essentials. It'll be a great day when I finally submit it to a journal for review.

This month's sidebar quote is dedicated to Geoff Troughton. Happy May Day.