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Tomorrow the British Grand Prix kicks off at Silverstone but last month we went to the most glamorous Grand Prix of them all; Monaco.

We went with Jonathan and Louise who had managed to arrange for us to use a friend’s flat in Monaco-Ville for the week.

Also known as La Rocher or ‘The Rock’, the old fortified town sits high above the harbour of Monte Carlo and is where the Prince’s palace is located.

Although it is only a short climb up the hill, La Rocher couldn’t be more different from the glitzy Monte Carlo.  While Ferraris and Lamborghinis roll past the high-rise buildings and massive yachts down at the harbour, La Rocher is a quiet medieval town with narrow cobbled streets and pretty buildings.  The flat we were staying in was in a little square, not far from the Palais Princier with plenty of cafes and restaurants nearby.

We arrived on Thursday night and went to Ingrid’s flat for a few drinks.  This is where we got our first view of Monaco Harbour and it was amazing.  The yachts were all lit up and there was clearly a party going on down there.  We could see all the way across the harbour up to Monaco-Ville on the other side.

Later that night, as we walked home along the race track, we found the party.  It was being held on the Force India team owner’s yacht and it looked amazing.  It had lasers and everything!

I had grandstand tickets for qualifying but we were planning to watch the race on Sunday from Ingrid’s flat.  However, when we walked past the ticket office on Friday and saw there were race tickets still available, it didn’t take much discussion before we had tickets for Sunday, too.

These tickets, we discovered, also gave us access to the pit lane that day and as we walked past the garages, we could see the engineers working on cars in various stages of disassembly.  It was cool.

On Saturday I went to watch qualifying while everyone else went to Nice.  I had a great seat in grandstand K and could see all the way from the exit of the tunnel, through Tabac, past the harbour and swimming pool and down to Rascasse.  It was my first experience of how close to the cars you get in Monaco.

That night we went to a party high, high up in the hills surrounding Monaco.  It was in an old estate with an incredible view all the way down to the sea and the lights of Nice airport up the coast.

Sunday was race day. We all wore the McLaren team kit and even bought a Union Jack to wave at Lewis and Jenson as they screamed by.  It was hot in the sun but I didn’t care.  Our seats on Sunday were even better than I had for qualifying.  The track ran right around us and we could see the cars fly from the tunnel into Tabac corner just metres away before hearing them thunder down the straight behind us and up the hill toward Casino Square.

Lewis didn’t do too well but, of course, Jenson won so we had the chance to wave our flag.  I had such a great time.

On Monday we chilled out in Nice before hitting Monte Carlo casino late that night.  The casino is quite different from what we had experienced in Las Vegas; a bit more classy and a lot less busy.  We did well on the blackjack table though and everyone came out with more money than they went in with.

Monaco is a crazy place.  Supposedly it wasn’t as busy as it usually is during the Grand Prix but it still had an amazing atmosphere.

But Monaco is also a city of two halves.  Monte Carlo is all yachts, Ferraris and parties but up on La Rocher it’s another world altogether; one of cobbled streets and little squares to have coffee and crepes.

Check out the pictures in the gallery.

I’m waiting for my flight to Australia after spending the last couple of days in Singapore.  First impressions of Singapore are good.  I like it.  The city is nice and the people are friendly.  It rains a lot here.  In fact it has rained every day since we arrived.  And not the London drizzly kind of rain.  It’s more like the biblical forty days and forty nights kind, accompanied by spectacular thunder and lightning.  The kind where (even if you have an umbrella) you are soaked within a minute.  Awesome.  I love thunderstorms.

We stayed at Raffles Hotel which was really fantastic.  Yes, it was super expensive but it was also super excellent!  All the rooms are suites but we were upgraded on check-in to one of the Palm Court Suites and it was amazing.  Very big, very quiet.  The suites are built around a lawn covered courtyard and each one has a little table out the front where we drank cocktails in the warm evening and ate breakfast in the morning.

We had Singapore Slings in the Long Bar, where supposedly the last tiger in Singapore was shot and we had the curry buffet in the Tiffin Room although didn’t really do it justice.  I would love to have gone back for more but reached my curry intake limit disappointingly quickly.  Today we ended our stay with high tea in the Tiffin Room again.  It was nice but pretty touristy.  Not quite the same as the Savoy.

We only really had one full day in Singapore and most of that was spent in the shops on Orchard Road (great dumplings at Din Tai Fung in the Paragon shopping centre!) but when you stay in a place like Raffles you don’t want to leave the hotel.  I highly recommend at least one night there.  From the fabulously moustachioed Sikh doorman to your personal butler, the staff are excellent.  And the building itself is beautiful; all dark wood floorboards and whitewashed walls stretching up to high, high ceilings.

Unfortunately we won’t be staying there on the way back but luckily they have a shop so we have the souvenirs!

Isn’t she sweeeeet!

Riding through Hyde Park on a clear spring morning when the sun is rising above Wellington Arch, the daffodils are a bright flash of yellow on the ground and the Household Cavalry are riding past, their drawn swords glinting in the sun.

Horse Guards in Hyde Park

The Boston Globe has an amazing set of aerial photographs of London at night by British photographer Jason Hawkes.

Taken from a helicopter using gyro-stabilized mounts, the pictures provide a new perspective on the city I live in; from 100ft up, the O2 looks like some kind of bio-luminescent deep-sea jellyfish, the Christmas lights on Regent Street are a procession of star-fishes and training at Stamford Bridge looks like a table-top football game.  The street lamps turn the roads into a spider-web of electric arteries joining the Albert Hall to the London Eye and Canary Wharf to Waterloo Station.

In big cities we spend so much time looking up at the buildings it’s nice to be able to look down for a while.

There’s more of Jason’s work here.

It started snowing yesterday and by the time we left to drive Matt to Heathrow it was coming down heavily.  It didn’t stop all night and in the morning London woke to a thick covering of snow.

It snowed all day today, too and thanks to the heaviest snow fall in two decades there was almost a foot of snow in parts of London.

The buses weren’t running and I wasn’t about to ride my bike through the snow so while Kathryn was able to walk to work I worked from home.

This was good because it meant I could wander over to Battersea Park at lunch time and see it transformed into a kind of Winter Wonderland.  There were people having snow fights, small dogs getting lost in deep snow drifts, and snow men of all shapes and sizes.

Of course we took loads of pictures.  Check them out in the gallery.

While the Prime Minister said “We are doing everything in our power to ensure services, road, rail and airports are open as quickly as possible”, I preferred Boris Johnson’s response.  Speaking from the wind-blown rooftop of the GLA, Boris showed the typical Londoner’s fortitude and ‘Blitz Spirit’ by cycling to work, congratulating “hardy drivers” who were braving the conditions and saying that heavy snow was not an excuse for a “mass skive”.

Mum and Dad are over here at the moment and we wanted to go abroad for a few days. So where did we decide to go, you know, it being winter and all? Spain? Morocco? No. We went to Germany. Turns out Berlin is rather fracking cold in January.

But that didn’t really matter because the city is so stuffed with culture and things to see that we didn’t spend a lot of time outside. And besides, the snow on the ground made everything look prettier and the sub-zero temperatures made you glad you brought the long underwear.

We got started as soon as we arrived with an extra-special behind the scenes tour of the Reichstag. Foster+Partners were responsible for the transformation of the German Parliament building so Kathryn managed to arrange for one of the chief architects to show us around this amazing building. We started by bypassing the huge and ever-present queue of people (even in sub-zero tempartures) to enter at the side of the building. Once inside we saw the Russian graffiti that has been preserved on the walls from when Red Army soldiers took the building in 1945. Even though I had no idea what it said it was amazing to see the scrawls of charcoal made by many different young soldiers’ hands more than sixty years ago. The reconstruction has been done in a way that turns the Reichstag into a kind of living museum of German history. Much of the insensitive reconstruction work that was done in the sixties has been stripped away and the original grand proportions have been restored. Everything inside is on a massive scale; doors are over two metres high, window panes are the size of terrace houses and the couches make normal chairs look like doll’s furniture. But within the context of the building it all fits perfectly.

We got to see many other areas of the Reichstag that are normally off-limits to visitors and as we were accompanied by one of the architects responsible for the building he could provide insights into why things had been done a certain way and how the building is used. Of course we finished with a visit to the huge glass dome that provides views from east to west as you circle higher and higher up the walkway that traces the inside of the glass.

That evening we went to the Philharmonie to see the Berlin Philharmonic. Yes, they were great, although they seemed to get better as the night progressed. The first piece, Three Illusions by Elliot Carter, was quite a challenging work (both to listen to and to play) and there were a few hesitant entries when the firsts weren’t together. But when Murray Perahia joined them to play Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto they were back in familiar territory and played with such sensitivity from the first note. I particularly loved the way Perahia played the Rondo. So did everyone else it seemed as they demanded he come back for an encore. I don’t know what it was but it was simply stunning. Then in the second half the orchestra doubled in size and let rip with the Strauss Sinfonia Domestica. I didn’t know this piece but it was typical Strauss; huge orchestra (8 horns!, 4 saxophones!), and big lush melodies that seem to go on forever. In fact the whole piece does go on forever as there are no breaks between movements but I really liked it. It was my favorite, actually. The piece supposedly represents the goings on in the Strauss household:

My next tone poem will represent a day in my family life. It will be partly lyrical, partly humorous – a triple fugue will bring together Papa, Mama and Baby.

The next day we saw Checkpoint Charlie which, although there isn’t much there now, remains a distillation of pure Cold War. There are reconstructions of the iconic wooden guard house and the signs informing that you are “leaving the American sector”. You can also pose for a photograph with US and Russian ‘MPs’ and get historic stamps in your passport, which of course we did. In one of the buildings next to the guard house is a private museum called Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. This is a really interesting museum packed with stories of escapes and Wall memoribilia including the original American sector sign.

On our last day we visited the Pergamon Museum on Museum Island or Museumsinsel which contains such monumental antiquities as the Pergamon Altar, the Market Gate of Miletus, and the Ishtar Gate. While it might not have as much loot as the British Museum what it does have is of great interest so it’s worth a visit.

Looking out the window of the plane as we swept over the snow covered fields on approach to Tegel I was a little worried whether Berlin in mid-winter was such a great idea. But as it turned out it’s a great time to go. Everyone else is either skiing or waiting for the warmer weather so the streets are quiet and when the sun shines on the snow-covered rooftops Berlin can be quite beautiful.

More pictures in the gallery.

Oooh, someone reads my blog!

Another year, another forecast of the death of traditional media. “Digital guru” Clay Shirky says:

If you pick a magazine at random, it will not interest you. For people who care about quality, it’s easier to find it online. If it’s a highly qualified niche magazine, something aimed at surgeons or firefighters, it’s going online. There’s no reason those things should exist.

I don’t disagree that readership of newspapers is likely to decline further and like most people I certainly get most of my news online now. But there is one magazine that I really, really hope doesn’t go online only. Wired magazine has a website with a lot of the same content as the magazine (as well as extra stuff not suited to the magazine format) but I almost never visit the site. It’s not even in my feed reader. I always buy the magazine, though and not just because it is nicer to read long articles on paper than a screen. The graphic design of Wired provides almost as much pleasure as the articles themselves. The brilliant use of typography and graphics, the way the page numbers are styled in a way that relates to the article. All this stuff makes reading the physical object much more pleasurable than reading text on a screen.

As long as a magazine provides a compelling reason to buy the dead tree version there will still be a market for traditional media.

Contextual advertising is great. It makes sense that if I am viewing a web page about cars it’s fairly likely I would be interested in advertisements for cars. Sometimes the algorithm gets it wrong, though. Or if not wrong at least a bit inappropriate.

Today the Guardian ran an article about Steve Jobs’s unprecedented letter about his health; he has been suffering from a “hormone imbalance” that has caused him to lose weight over the last year. The Guardian run AdSense at the bottom of their articles and what ads did Google select?

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