1.  By common consensus, the weather has been unusually good this fall in London–mild temperatures through almost all of October, and even into November, and more clear days than ordinary.  Given that one of the pleasures of London for children are the lovely parks and playgrounds, this has been an especially welcome piece of good luck!

2.  Also wonderful for children (and grown-ups too, of course) are the museums, every one of which we’ve been to so far (Natural History, Museum of London, Tate Modern, National Gallery, British Museum, Wallace Collection) is well-designed, with activities aimed particularly at engaging children.  That they are all free is especially nice, since the best way to see them with younger children is through multiple shorter visits. 

3.  London vehicular traffic is quite a sight, especially for a pedestrian.  Our perception may be skewed, of course, by the number of times we have to cross Marylebone Road each day, but it is fair to say that, especially for those foreigners always wondering which way to look (not every street has those handy "look left" and "look right" signs painted on the ground), being a pedestrian in London requires serious concentration.  Although, in general, the traffic is reasonably law-abiding (e.g., stopping at red lights), its erratic pace (massive accelerations, quick stops, again and again) and its volume make it, in some ways, more hair-raising than the slightly more lawless traffic in, say, Paris.  I am also impressed by the large number of professional folks who, in the midst of all this, are commuting to work via bicycle:  these people must have nerves of steel!

4.  UCL takes the teaching of jurisprudence quite seriously, requiring it for their undergraduates, and offering a variety of courses for their postgraduates, including the year-long Jurisprudence and Legal Theory course in which I participated.  The unusual feature of this course is that it is taught by many different faculty, each lecturing on a particular area of expertise.  The virtue of that approach is that the students learn the material from someone who is research-active in the topic; the vice, at least for any particular lecturer, is that you don’t have as clear a sense of what the students already know as one does in a course taught by a single professor.  I’ve lectured in this course once previously, and both times have found it an interesting and stimulating experience.  The pleasantness of my time at UCL this fall also owes much to the graciousness and collegiality of Stephen Guest, the Professor of Legal Philosophy, and Ross Harrison, the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence.

5.  One of the major academic advantages of England, and London in particular, is the proximity to an enormous number of research-oriented faculty at other institutions.  In one recent week, I enjoyed the visit of Chris Janaway (Southampton) to our Nietzsche seminar, and the legal philosopher Matthew Kramer (Cambridge) to the UCL School of Public Policy (which functions, in essence, as UCL’s Politics faculty).  During the current week, I will have visited Oxford, Reading, and the LSE, as well as had Peter Kail (Oxford) at out Nietzsche seminar. 

But it’s not just that speakers can easily come to London for talks.  It’s also that many faculty from Oxford either live in London, or live close enough that they regularly come to scholarly events and seminars; it’s that in London itself you have four major centers of British philosophy (at UCL, King’s, Birkbeck, and the LSE); and that within two hours you can get to major departments at not only Oxford and Cambridge (each only an hour away, or less), but also Bristol, Warwick, Birmingham, Sheffield, Sussex, and others.  It’s quite a treat to be in the center of so much philosophical "action."

6.  Having received much good advice from readers about restaurants, I feel I should report back on a few of our experiences:

Passione:  excellent Italian on the busy Charlotte Street, expensive (not off-the-charts) and a pleasant setting.

Orso:  good Italian food (but not Passione!), manic restaurant, with overworked waitstaff.  The food is better than the setting.

Yming:  adequate, but undistinguished Chinese, in Soho.  Moderately priced by London standards, which is good, since its moderate in quality too.

Royal China (Baker St.):  readers praised the dim sum, though we only did takeaway dinners a couple of times.  Some of their dishes (especially the Sezchuan ones, ironically, since this is mainly a Cantonese restaurant) are excellent, many others boring.  Alas, when my wife was made deathly ill by one of the dishes (fully recovered since), we called it quits with this branch.

Tsunami (Clapham):  unfortunate name for this *very* good Japanese restaurant, that is expensive, but not ridiculous. 

Red Fort:  very good Soho Indian, something of a "scene" but an enjoyable experience.

St. John:  the best in English cuisine circa 1757.  The strangest menu you’ll ever see, but really quite good (and also VERY expensive).  Certainly when you get that craving for veal tongue, pig intestines, and hare saddle, there is nowhere else to go!  It is rumored that Tim Crane (Philosophy, UCL) eats all his meals here, though I can not vouch for the accuracy of that.

Drummond Street Indian restaurants:  there are, indeed, good, and relatively cheap Indian restaurants just a couple of blocks from UCL’s Bentham House.  That was a particularly nice tip from readers, since the pickings are otherwise slim in the area.

7.  Schoolchildren in England, especially from about the age of 10 or 11 on, are under a tremendous amount of academic pressure, mostly related to testing of various kinds.  Although I gather the tests haven’t the draconian consequences they used to (when a test taken at age 11 essentially determined whether you would go to university or end up sweeping streets), conversations with colleagues here leads me to think that kids find school more sterssful than is probably healthy.  Have I gotten a distorted perspective?

8.  Living in London is "hard," and not just financially.  One sees it on the face of people on the street, who look harried and tense.  Some of this is a feature of life in any big city, to be sure, though it strikes me as more apprent here than, say, New York.  I wonder whether others have had this impression?

9.  Probably because academics here are part of a civil service bureaucracy, academic life is more clearly organized around three distinct categories:  teaching (of course), "research," and "admin."  "Research" is more distinctly defined here than in the US, since it means, at bottom, having the four necessary publications for the Research Assessment Exercise period.  The biggest difference, though, is the "admin" category, which, by some accountings, occupies almost as much time as research and teaching.    We have touched on the problem before.  When I’ve talked to Brits who have decamped for the US, excessive "admin" is probably the most frequent factor mentioned for why they wanted to leave.