Monday, 22 August 2011

Bonjour Antoine

Tonight Ally and I watched a couple of episodes of Michael Sandel's "Justice" course, which he teaches at Harvard. It's awfully good, although by the end of the second episode my brain was beginning to nip a bit. Interestingly, there is an urban legend (denied by the writers) that the character of Mr Burns from The Simpsons is based on Michael Sandel because of some similar characteristics, which of course is deliberately ironic because Mr Burns has no morals and Sandel spends his life seeking the meaning of justice! He is a very charismatic speaker and enjoys interacting with his students.
Antoine has arrived back in our lives today, I collected him from Belmont at six. He is David's French exchange student, and he first visited us a year ago. David has been twice to France to visit him, and his lovely family has made David very welcome. Antoine is fairly deaf; he wears two hearing aids and it helps him to lip read too. He tries hard to speak a bit of English so we converse in a mix of the two languages. He is a massive football fan so we have booked not one but two Rangers matches for him to go to in the next week, he was really excited when we told him.
Jamie arrived back in London today from his travels in Australia, it was so nice to hear his voice! He has loved his time there and says he has lots to tell us when he comes back up to Glasgow. But first he is going to spend a bit of time with friends in London and Brighton. I feel that this trip has turned Jamie into a proper traveller; he has always followed our itineraries until now but now he has learned to devise his own plans in a way that I think he would have found difficult before - he used to have half-baked plans for trips with friends that usually fell through. I am so pleased for him and I can't wait to see him. 

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