Times Traitor

 In switching countries I've switched allegiances - to hometown newspapers.  Scandalous, I know.

My new favorite weekend read is the London Times.  I'm literally counting down the days until we move into our new place because Jon has promised me that as soon as we have officially changed addresses we can subscribe to the Sunday Times.  Love, love, love the Sunday Times.  (FYI, you can't get the Times online for free anymore; you have to pay.)

A bonus to being at Jon's parents' house is that they subscribe to the Times (and the Telegraph, but I'm less interested in that).  We've spent a good part of the weekend pouring over the papers, and there are a few nuggets I want to share with you:

1. Alain Ducasse, celebrity chef extraordinaire, had a recipe included in Saturday's Times magazine for a summer cookpot of tomatoes, aubergines, and courgettes.  Essentially, it's the same as Ina's Vegetable Tian that I made back in May (and will be making again for a dinner party this coming week).  I'm overcome with smugness brought on by the idea that I discovered a recipe before Alain Ducasse made it famous.  Take that, celebrity chef extraordinaire!

2.  In the Sunday Times culture supplement, Mike Bradwell, the former Artistic Director of Bush Theatre in London, writes that "the new breed of arts bureaucrats" is not only unnecessary but counterproductive to the running of a theatre.  "In the past twenty-five years," he complains, "the biggest single area of growth in theatre, and indeed most other walks of life, has been the relentless expansion of the administrative and entrepreneurial classes... all of whom believed their worth in the marketplace was greater than that of the artists whose endeavours their jobs were created to support.  It is now common practice for individuals to be paid more to advertise a play than to write one.  This has got to stop."  I wonder if this thinking is why he's the former and not still the current artistic director of the theatre?  (I will, I promise you, post more on this in the coming week.  Be warned.)

3.  Saturday's property section of the Telegraph has a cute article on the rise of London villages, which includes a blurb about our new neighborhood!  We will indeed be living "between the commons" - which is, apparently, much swisher than I realized.  Based on the rent we're paying I didn't think that we were in the nicest of nice areas, but I guess we're at the bottom of the rent chain for where we are.  Upon reflection, I think I'd live in a slightly crappier house/flat in a really nice area than a really nice house/flat in a slightly crappier area.

(Clearly I don't read the paper on the weekends for actual news...)