March 2003 Archives

London is one of the most expensive cities in the world. If you want to know what something will cost here--from a packet of tea to a month's rent on a flat--you need only apply a simple three-step process. One, write down a reasonable price in dollars. Two, erase the "$" and replace it with "£." Three, weep--because £1 is worth roughly $1.60.

As a result, a single salary isn't enough to keep two people in tea and crumpets, but in the half a year that we've been in England, I haven't yet found steady work. True, I've been doing bits and pieces of freelance writing, and making slow progress on finding a more steady writing job. Unfortunately, our landlady will not accept payment in the form of steady progress.

In my latest diary entry, I mentioned that the recent Spiderman movie was "practically a socialist tract." In case my offhand comment inspires any Hollywood producers to go whole hog by creating a movie about a mild-mannered Socialist teen who is bitten by a rabidly Marxist spider, thereby enablng him to combine not merely the powers of man and spider but of Communist and Socialist as well, I would like to propose the following themesong.