A chance to look around today. Jerry had kindly offered to take me to their house at Cape Cod, picking me up at 1, so I thought I'd make the most of the morning, taking the T into the city and going on the Boston By Foot walking tour. From coming down for breakfast at 8, to getting into the city was exactly an hour - pretty good going! I had a wander around the waterfront - now open to the rest of the city after the completion of the Big Dig - which put the old...

I forgot to mention in yesterday's entry that I had visited Tom Groome. Those who missed the RE wars in Parramatta will probably be unfamiliar with Tom, but it was his approach to religious education that caused us so many headaches with the lunatic right in my days there. He is a feisty Irishman with a deep care for the church, a great capacity for constructive criticism and a depth of scholarship to back him up. He was sharing with me that the book written by ...

I'm sitting watching Barak Obama making his jobs speech - trying to keep the vandals from the crumbling walls of what passes for welfare here, while proposing to remove some of the privilges of the wealthy. The commentators observed that there was more passion in this address than has been seen from him in his Presidency. What is exceptional is not that he would argue this - and so strongly - but that half of his audience would sooner throw the poor, the sick and...

First of all the picture. Happens to be hanging in my room here and takes me back to reading and watching the Babar stories with Marthese and Beth - when they were very little of course! The promised pic of the front of the B and B is in the album. Another delicious breakfast , then Jerry picked me up to head to Boston College. I have to pinch myself to realise that I am getting one to one access to one of the world's foremost authorities in my area of interest...

Astute readers will recall my raining against the SYSTEM a few days ago. Did you know there is a SYSTEM that goes with longhaul air travel as well? I think it was borrowed from poultry farmers - and I don't mean the free range ones! QF007 - an auspicious number - left Sydney at 1.50pm. Within 90 minutes we had been fed. Presumably because we were flying into the night, they dimmed the lights by about 8pm Sydney time and we all dutifully pretended to go to sle...