Moving

Two or three weeks ago, I read Jeanette Winterson's "Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles". An excerpt:

Atlas let his hands go from the sides of the world. Nothing happened.
     Atlas put his hands down in front of him on the floor of the universe or the ceiling of stars, I don't know which, and then he stretched out his left leg so that he was kneeling on all fours, the Kosmos balanced on his back. Laika was running in and out of his spread fingers. She had never seen her master move.
     Atlas crawled forward and then suddenly fell flat on his face with hands over his ears and the dog clinging on to his thumb. Atlas waited, rigid with doom. The dog waited, her nose in her paws.
     Nothing happened.
     Write it more substantially — NOTHING.
     Atlas raised his head, turned over, stood up, stepped back. The dog's nose lifted. Atlas looked back at his burden. There was no burden. There was only the diamond-blue earth gardened in a wilderness of space.

I'm moving to a new flat tomorrow. It's a small studio, but it's all my own and I like the space. Plus there's a rather large patio/garden type area out back.

It's a bit further from my office than my current place, so I'll no longer be walking to work. The tube is absurdly expensive, not necessarily reliable and probably regular use of it is, to your lungs, the equivalent of a pack-a-day cigarette addiction. So I will not be taking the tube. Instead, I bought a (second hand) Brompton. It is a beautiful machine. I absolutely adore it.

My walking pace around London (I walk fast) seemed perfectly sufficient to me. But now that I'm back on a bike, walking seems so terribly slow. It's lovely to be cycling again and feeling the pleasant stretch of forgotten muscles.

Across the street from the Royal Opera House

In an alley just north of my office

春燕和她先生在亚非学院

昨天春燕和她的先生和我想去大英博物馆。我们下午两点半左右去，可是大英博物馆的外面有太多人。我们没进里面。昨天天气很好，所以我们走路去 Warren Street， 可是墨西哥饭馆儿下午三点关门。 所以我们走路回 Holborn。我们去日本饭馆儿。春燕先生说：《多吃点！多吃点！》然后他买午饭。这么中国人！

在中国，中国人回家过春节。春燕和她先生没回家过春节，所以他们昨天给家里打电话。春燕问我《你今天给你家打电话马？》她想我也是中国人。

Yesterday, Chunyan and her husband and I wanted to go to the British Museum for Chinese New Year. We went around 2:30, but there were too many people outside. We didn't go in. The weather was very nice yesterday, so we walked to Warren Street, but the Mexican restaurant closed at 3. So we walked back to Holborn. We went to a Japanese restaurant. Chunyan's husband said, "Eat more! Eat more!". Then he paid for lunch. So Chinese!

In China, people go home to see their families for Chinese New Year. Chunyan and her husband did not go to China for Chinese New Year, so yesterday they called their families. Chunyan asked me, "Did you call your family today?" She thought I was also Chinese.