Family matters

Almost 50% of my family from my dad's side is based in the U.K. and thus for most of my life I have been somewhat detached from my uncles and aunts and cousins here. Soon after my arrival here, I quickly became acquainted with all of the Micallefs here...and their off-springs.

Very recently, 2 of my (U.K.) cousins had a baby each, a boy and a girl (another in Malta had a boy). And the wife of another cousin has a boy on the way (which relieved the pressure on me to have a son in order to keep the Micallef lineage going!) and also recently found that yet another cousin is pregnant! A lot of hormones running around these days! Anyway, it was time to christen the new boy in the family and thus we headed off to Horsham yesterday for the christening ceremony of Rowan Patrick Maude.

After a marathon of hearing nothing but the wife's thesis project, it was finally a good excuse to leave the house and enjoy the rare bits of summer 2011 in the U.K. We got an early train from Victoria and headed to Sussex and to my cousin's (extremely large, at least by London standards) house and garden. Handfuls of kids running around greeted us! We headed off to the small church hosting the baptism ceremony and soon after back home for the reception.

It was a lovely sunny and warm afternoon and we lingered in the garden, eating, drinking and chatting away till the late afternoon. It was good to catch up with some many relatives and extended family members. It is funny that virtually until 2007, I can shamefully say that I barely known my cousins (let alone their spouses) but, in the last few years, I guess I met my U.K. cousins more than I met those in Malta and am now up to scratch with them too!

After one long day, at 6pm, it was time to start our commute back to London and having said goodbye and downed one final beer, we started the journey back home and ready for another week of work. Well, Marianna's final week as a student as she concludes working on her M.Sc. thesis and also my final working week for August, before I head off to Switzerland next Sunday!

Music in the park

The BBC Proms are an annual event I look forward to. This year was no exception and one particular prom grabbed my attention: film music. So on that late afternoon, Marianna paused from her thesis-ing and joined me at Imperial and soon after headed to the Royal Albert Hall, eager to experience some serious musical indulgence...

What awaited us was a 1000m long queue, snaking around the whole of Kensington Gore! This particular prom attracted more people than anticipated and the 1 hour turn up in advance proved to be insufficient. We stood there, moving slowly at 1m/min until we were almost at the box office. Perhaps 3o or 50 people before us. Then one of the polite RAH staff came out and told us that the hall is filled to its capacity and sadly we had to leave for home. A great dinner and some good red wine took away my blues.

Thus, yesterday we decided to go to yet another appealing musical event: the LSO playing live most of the soundtrack of The King's speech, a movie which we both enjoyed and whose OST is simply amazing. So we headed to the mini Manhattan of London - Canary Wharf - and assembled ourselves on the small grassy bit midst the shiny towers and devoured a packet of M&S jalapeno tortillas, enjoyed a slight breeze and while the musicians took their places.

The music itself was out of this world; nothing beats live performances and my favourite, the 2nd movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony, simply blew me away. I soon found out that this event was only one of almost a 2 month long festival of cultural events at Canary Wharf, ranging from movies, music, drama and art. In the heart of the financial and money-making district of London, a feast of cultural bonanza, all for free. The first thing I did once we got back home was subscribe to the mailing list of the organisation responsible for these events and make the most of it next year!

It is almost surreal how much effort and investment (time and money) Londoners put into setting up such activities. And, of course, I am not complaining!

The uprising

What an eventful week it was in London town! I have been in London for almost 3 and a half years now and I admit that, for the first time, I was on the verge of stating that I feel unsafe in the city...

It all started 9 days ago with a "peaceful" protest in Tottenham after the cops shot a guy there, presumably by accident. In no time, the protests spread like a flu virus to all parts of the city, initially to areas notorious for such activities, say Hackney and Camden and Brixton, and then to virtually all of London: from buzzing Oxford Circus, to busy Clapham and even peaceful Ealing, literally minutes away from our home. A spell of copy-cat behaviour led to similar riots taking place up in Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, where these gangs unleashed a severe spell of violence and theft from high street shops, breaking into any stores and stealing anything from bins to flat screen TVs to phones and wine.

For almost a week, all we could hear were police sirens, helicopters, fire engines and ambulances. The presence of police escalated in stations and the streets and London was transformed overnight from a busy metropolis to what seemed a scary scene in some Armageddon movie.

The night the looters headed to Ealing, we were peacefully asleep and only realised what was going on a few hundred metres away the next day via BBC and first-hand inspection of the broken shops on the Broadway and Uxbridge Road.

What amazed me most was the fact that people were filming these opportunistic idiots stealing and breaking and the police were standing right in front of them but had no right to fire on them, because of human right issues. So these have rights not to be fired on with water cannons? And the other 7 million Londoners do not have a right to feel safe in their city? At times, these Brits amaze me...

I guess these unfortunate accidents confirmed my "theory": it is not enough to have thousands of CCTV cameras all over the place (something like 1 for every 14 persons) and have footage of criminals and then no means of matching a face to a person. What is needed is real police presence on the streets, dressed in civilian clothes, ready for action and nothing else. CCTV may be deterrents but clearly they are not working.

All seems to be back to normal now, but what if this happened in a year's time during the height of the 2012 Olympics? Should they then also wait for the blessing of Cameron or the whole of Parliament or whoever to deploy some sort of retaliative measures? I hope there is no comeback by these gangs...