My travels in early 2001: Andrew Hodges

Re-entry to America 

Gran Canaria: pages 1 | 2 | 3
America (east): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
America (west): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 and page 10
More pages will follow.

Monday 5 February 2001

Ideal?
Real?

Am I really here?

I'm at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

I'm talking to students on its interdisciplinary Tutorial College program.

They've read my book and now meet the author in what I suppose must be reality.

The campus is unreal, like a film set of Oxford.

The students have a very wide and demanding reading list, quite the opposite of the narrow maths course my Oxford students follow.

They are eager but seem overwhelmed by post-modern problems of cultural and personal identity, and quote lots of stuff I don't understand.

This is Jeff, whose email to me about his dissertation set this visit in motion.

 I have Mexican lunch with lesbian and gay faculty. Talking point: was Princess Diana assassinated? I'm slightly unnerved that American intellectuals so readily assume that our governments bump off inconvenient people.

My research-level talk on Turing and Penrose is cancelled because of the very heavy snowstorm that started during the lunch. Actually I'm happy to spend the evening chatting with the students in the campus restaurant instead.

Tuesday 6 February 2001

 This is the breakfast table in Smith House, where academic visitors stay.

I watch the ice thaw in the winter wonderland outside. There are catastrophic crashes as icicles melt in a gradually warming environment...

I say No to Snow

In daylight I can see that Trinity College is in an enclave of ideals within the reality of inner-city Hartford. The cab takes me through streets heaped with snow, and full of signs saying SAY NO TO DRUGS. So obviously a lot of local folk are saying YES PLEASE to drugs.

The snow continues to melt away at my command but I suspect the drug-market economy is a more permanent fixture and less amenable to wishing away.

Here I am at Hartford bus station.

The limo takes me on highways through Danbury and White Plains, then over the great bridge into Long Island to La Guardia airport, where I wait for my flight to St Louis.

The flight takes me over Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois. At St Louis airport I am met by the driver who takes me the hundred miles west on the flat Insterstate 70 to Columbia, Missouri.
This is it:

motel,
main street,
America.

In the real world: Sharon becomes prime minister of Israel.




my Second Home Page

Continue to:

two days in Missouri
my images



A D V E R T I S I N G

Doing research? Try us for books, computers, scanners, or monitors.
Or try to relax with a chart CD, pop CD, dvd, video, or bottle of wine.
Escape it all with flights, a hotel, holidays in europe, or short breaks.