Breakfast on Saturday 18 August was not rushed, although it seemed so. Maybe my capacity for crispy bacon had diminished. Jason prattled on, even serenading us. He was educated, intelligent and interesting, especially when telling us about this/his China in transition, about which he knew more than he felt safe in letting on and about… Read More »
When we returned to rail travel on the morning of Tuesday 14 August, the carriages were more colourful, blue and red stripes instead of the dull matt green we had grown accustomed to. And the train differed from its predecessor in other respects, positive and negative. Strongly in its favour it had superior toilets. Unlike… Read More »
We awoke on Friday 10 August not to flat Siberian wastelands but to a largely unchanged landscape. An unannounced halt caused our toilets to be locked as breakfast approached, so we staggered sleepy-eyed to the restaurant car. This required negotiating several spaces between carriages, which always struck me as a more precarious business than it… Read More »
The Metro journey from Moscow’s Red Square to the hotel saw us back by 11pm. I adjourned to the bar to write a few postcards and read more Hosking. After midnight I was again approached by a couple of escorts. Sociologists are naturally curious, and I had after all conducted research on London’s sex industry.… Read More »
In one of those ad hoc conversations in a local café in the autumn of 2000, two old friends invited Annette and I to accompany them on a journey on the Trans-Siberian railway, starting in Moscow, ending in Beijing. Within what seemed like moments, and somewhere in the midst of a couple of bottles of… Read More »
The 1990s was the last decade that I did not feel under undue institutional pressure to ‘perform’. If only I had known! Of course performing is a contested concept, although management seems since to have broken away and established a clear lead, maybe even lapping us workers. How did I fare in the last decade… Read More »
It has become commonplace among sociologists at the time of writing to lament the growing inequality during financial capitalism and to take the 1% to task for their greed. In 1998 Paul Higgs and I edited a book, Modernity, Medicine and Health, in one chapter of which we addressed the task of ‘explaining health inequalities’.… Read More »
The view of the Pacific from our motel on this twelfth day of our drive across the USA was expansive but disappointing. There were palms and blood-red blossoms but the Ocean’s greyness could have been that of the Atlantic. A couple of Californians with long blond hair cycled past, he exclaiming to her: ‘Gee, your… Read More »
It was during our mid-term break that Annette and I had planned to drive our hired Buick to the Grand Canyon. We both taught our Emory classes in the morning of 6 March, 1998, filled up with bagels and by 2pm were leaving Atlanta and heading west on the I20. In driving rain we by-passed… Read More »
When old friend Terry Boswell became chair of the Department of Sociology at Emory University I suspect life for his colleagues took a turn for … well, whatever! Even his family and closest friends would admit that Terry was a bull in a china shop. He personally decided on the original artwork that should adorn… Read More »