London’s weather this week has been wild and woolly, necessitating a desperate search through my lightweight t-shirts and capri pants for something appropriate to wear. On Wednesday, Maria and I set off in our jeans and trenchcoats to Kew Gardens, where an exhibition of no less than 28 monumental sculptures by Henry Moore are on display in the grounds of this beautiful World Heritage Site.

Moore at Kew is on until the end of March 2008, and for anyone in or near London it’s well worth a look – and probably more than one visit, to observe the quiet gravity of the sculptures in different seasons and conditions. The official photograph above was taken on a day quite different from the one we visited. Occasionally we ducked into a nearby glasshouse to avoid the rain, but then made new discoveries such as seeing for the first time actual vanilla bean plants, arabica (coffee) trees, and sources for other ingredients I smugly take for granted.

More photos to come when I ask Maria politely.

What a slack blogger I’ve become in my “vacation” month. Anecdotes, photos, experiences, sights and sounds and smells are piling up one on top of each other like pages from those free newspapers that litter the Underground daily; yet I have failed to gather them up and post them in a digestible fashion. Very remiss of me.

I use the term “vacation” loosely for a few reasons. One is because I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve lost the ability to have an absolute break from work and the computer, which is a bit sad and hopefully wrong. The other is because I’ve had several business-related meetings while I’ve been in London (more soon when I have news to report).

Today I had a very enjoyable lunch with Andrew, a former Freehills colleague and fellow book publishing “refugee” who now works in London. He took me to one of the city’s oldest pubs – rebuilt hastily in 1667 immediately after being destroyed in the Great Fire, as any great city must have its priorities right - for nothing less than bangers and mash. By crikey, they were perfect.

So much for my waistline – on Sunday, during an overnight trip to Winchester (absolutely beautiful and not just for its Cathedral), I managed bangers & mash for lunch in a gorgeous renovated pub, then a prawn curry a few hours’ later at the home of my friend Amanda’s parents. Cor blimey guv’nor, was I glad that I slept alone that evening…

The locals always look slightly quizzically at me when I recall my recent meanderings – NY, London, Pisa, Bologna, Siena, Pisa, London, Bilbao, London – but to an Australian these distances are literally of no consequence. We have to travel such an enormously long way to get anywhere that is not still in Australia, so a couple of hours to reach a new country is endlessly impressive. Winchester, of course, is not a new country, but it’s a part of the old country I had never seen before and suddenly had the opportunity to experience by a personal tour. For the first time this month it rained heavily, and I had only some sandals or well-worn ballet flats to choose from. The ballet flats turned out to be so well worn as to have holes in them.

These treats are what the residents of Basque country call pintxos (pronounced pinch-oss), the delicious and colourful treats that pass for dinner in the far north of Spain. Here, lunch seems to be the main meal of the day, so by day’s end the locals are looking for light and tasty mouthfuls to wash down with one of their region’s white or red Rioja wines. In this selection of one dozen pintxos, Maria and I identified ingredients as varied as stuffed squid, omelette-wrapped tuna with some sort of cranberry garnish, prawn and roasted red pepper, and wafer-thin slices of artichoke and cured meat.

This is no country for vegetarians.

I might be writing from London, I might have returned this afternoon from the north coast of Spain, but my first US byline has appeared today in a NYC publication – see this Time Out New York piece about Cory Treadway’s photographs of ice shanties that are part of an exibition at the International Centre for Photography. It has my name on it! I shouldn’t be so shamelessly excited, but I am. I met Cory at Cheryl’s Cafe in Brooklyn where she works part-time, and where I have worn down one of the benches through sitting on it so regularly.

Today I feel far away from New York, far away from Sydney, and a long way from knowing what’s around the corner. But I kind of like that, too.

Wow. I don’t think I could have been more impressed if I were standing directly across from the Pyramids. Having always been in awe of Frank Gehry, seeing his Guggenheim Museum up close and personal in Bilbao, northern Spain, was almost spiritual in intensity.

My London-based (and thankfully Spanish-speaking) friend Maria and I spent three nights in Bilbao this week and despite some damp weather to begin with, had what you might call a marvellous time. The eating was fabulous in a town known for its gastronomy, but the highlight for me was the Guggenheim building. The building is such a powerful experience that the art within the Museum itself is something of an anticlimax – an argument put forward by more than one of Gehry’s critics. I was saved any aesthetic judgement on the Museum’s holdings on the day of our visit due to most of the galleries being closed in preparation for new exhibitions.

Maria and I are planning to put together some travel articles about our adventures in Bilbao to take advantage of her way with a camera and my penchant for the pen. Fingers crossed…

On the left is the entrance to an actual villa in Tuscany - technically Chianti country, a provincial region in itself - with a bona fide Tuscan out the front. The landscape on the right is the view from the back of the house.

This blessed place was my accommodation last week. Apart from the sunshine, hospitality and regional delights of a Tuscan holiday, I must confess that being away from a computer for almost five whole days was one of the most delightful aspects of this retreat.

I have a good excuse for my absence for the past week: I have been eating and drinking my way through Tuscany courtesy of my friend Stefano Maccianti, whose second novel is about to be published in Italy (more on that soon), and whose parents happen to own – yes, you guessed it – a Tuscan villa. So when the opportunity arose to stay in said country house for a few days, and to take a wine tour of the region with a local … well, it would have been rude not to, wouldn’t it?

First stop was Pisa Airport, just 20 minutes’ drive from the famous leaning Tower, above. I joined almost every other tourist there by posing for this trompe l’Å“il. More posts and photos to follow. Although with another side trip on Monday afternoon - this time to Bilbao, in Basque country in the far north of Spain - I’m not sure when I’ll find the time …

Sitting in the balcony of Islington’s Almeida Theatre last night, it seemed bizarre that I had flown from New York to London only to watch a great American actress at work. My friend Maria had procured me a ticket to the London season of Clifford Odet’s play Awake and Sing! which was revived in New York last year. Even the casting of Mark Ruffalo had not persuaded me to venture to see the show in the city I lived in. But here I was in London among old friends and new, watching one of my favourite actresses in the flesh. Stockard Channing’s central character, the domineering mother of a three-generation Bronx household in the 1930s, was a compelling mix of artistry and pure hard work. I couldn’t take my eyes off her; she responded acutely to everything happening on stage around her, completely inhabiting her character. Our small theatre party agreed the second act was more interesting than the first – well, more actually happens, which always helps – and the ensemble seemed to shift into gear as the drama unfolded on stage.

The play capped a long afternoon in Islington that included the purchase of jewellery before the theatre, and a pizza afterwards. It’s great being on holiday.

Here are two reasons why my Prospect Heights neighbourhood has been such fun during the year I’ve been living here – the eponymous Cheryl of Cheryl’s Global Soul Cafe on Underhill Street (literally around the corner from my apartment, my home away from home) and Derek van Gieson, artist, illustrator, short-story writer, sometime photographer, and part-time barista…referred to elsewhere on this blog as DvG.

Another cafe regular took this photo of us last Friday just before the cafe closed for a couple of days (last weekend in August is the official end of summer and the long Labor Day weekend). Kindred spirits are found in the most unlikely places. Thank goodness.

Between last Thursday night and Sunday night, when I flew from JFK to Heathrow, I packed for my trip, packed up my apartment, successfully reclaimed my security deposit from the reluctant landlord, gave away many items too cheap to ship to Australia but too valuable to throw away – much to the delight of a friend who lives across the street and whose kitchen is now enhanced by both furniture and glassware – advised various institutions of my change in NY address now that I’m no longer tied by my lease to Brooklyn, rescheduled my flight back to Sydney, and made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Which was a huge relief as I had mountains of unidentified paperwork to trudge through, rip up, file, or otherwise process, and had finally a spare and uninterruptible hour in which to do it.

So here I am in the north of London, in the company of my fine friends Maria and Paul, who I haven’t seen in two years. Photos to come – last night at a dinner party I even briefly wore a black wig; but then so did everyone at the table. I’m still sorting out which cords and plugs and things can be used in the UK without shorting my US laptop and electrical accoutrements.

Today Maria and I saw Germaine Greer in conversation for a BBC4 radio show to be aired on Friday; she was highly entertaining, self-deprecating and unflinchingly honest about herself and others, which is always refreshing in our air-brushed culture. She has a new book out about Anne Hathaway, aka the wife of William Shakespeare. We then had to balance ourselves out by going to Selfridges for a spot of shopping, although my most exciting purchase was a pair of pyjama pants and an adapter plug for the aforementioned US-UK appliance transfer.

Having just received the production schedule for the Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement, it’s going to be an extremely busy couple of months as the manuscript evolves from Word document to printed book. But what a surreal and amazing sort of “busy” to be. Do send me a note – I’m on my usual email address or just post a comment to this blog, I won’t publish it unless you ask me to!

Very excited to report that I will have my first New York byline shortly courtesy of Time Out New York, where my short piece about a young photographer whose photos of wooden cottages on sleds on Lake Champlain (four hours north of here) form part of a forthcoming alumni exhibition at the International Center for Photography. I met Cory (the photographer) at the cafe around the corner that has been my home away from this dark apartment in which I wrote my book. I’ve been desperate to get my first local ”clip”, as they’re known, because the first one is – or should be – the hardest-won.

As I’m piggy-backing illegally on someone else’s internet connection, I must fly. Off to London tomorrow night for a few weeks, so forgive the erratic postings from here on in. Back in NY on 10/2.