Oliver isn’t three years old yet. He has 16,074 Aeroplan miles, enough to fly to New York City and back for free. And he can climb out of his crib at will. Watch out world, here he comes.

There’s going to be a very low tide at 8:25 p.m. tonight in Charlottetown.

What is it with the English and their ribaldry? While we get a sense of this by comparing the English to the American versions of Who’s Line is it Anyway?, you can’t really get a complete picture until you watch a good dollop of BBC and ITV. While conventional wisdom sees the English as Victorian prudes, reality, at least as reflected on television, suggests completely the opposite. One program we watched a couple of nights ago, for example, was a David Letterman-like “chat show” running in prime time. One of the sketches on the show saw spouses revealing to the public the secret pet names they had for various of their partners’ body parts. The descriptions thereof involved liberal use of phrases like “when Bobby comes…” And they weren’t talking about coming home after work. Not the kind of thing you hear on US television, or on Mike Bullard here, unless it’s very distantly approached with the broadest metaphor.

Of course this is tempered by the prevalance of gardening shows running in prime time.

The best programme we saw was on BBC2 and was in the mold of the CBC programme Venture. Called I’ll Show Them Who’s Boss, the programme — which ran, as seems to be the case with the BBC generally, without commercials — concerned the exploits of one Gerry Robinson, well-established corporate turnaround artist, applying his business skills to small family enterprises. The episode we saw concerned AMT Coffee, run by three warring brothers. Robinson led them through a discovery exercise, trying to figure out which of the three of them should become CEO. At the end of the programme he made his recommendation, which came as a surprise to all of them. In the end, through a postscript, we learn that they choose to ignore his advice completely, but it was still a very interesting programme, and had wonderful production values.

More life in the U.K.: Catherine and I decided to start making up new British-sounding words and phrases for common everyday things. My favourite was “oatey cake,” which is the word we came up with to describe something the British otherwise call a “flapjack,” and which we would probably call a “granola bar” if it wasn’t so laced with butter and treacle. Mmmm.

If you are a parent travelling in Europe, here’s a small glossary: a “stroller” in North America is a “buggy” in Spain and a “push-chair” in Britain. A baby’s “crib” in North America is commonly a “cot” in Europe, but sometimes “cot” seems to mean, well, “cot.” There are no “high chairs” anywhere in Europe, at least as far as we could tell: in Spain you just let your kids sit in a normal chair, or on your lap; in England you are supposed to put your kids in the back shed while you eat (or something). One more thing: kids under 5 generally pay nothing for anything in Europe — trains, museums, hotel rooms, etc. “Under 5” in Europe is the same as “under 2” in North America.

While people much smarter than I have commented on the differences between Macs and PCs, I will hold out this humble observation: I put my PC in the basement in December, and have used a 17 inch iMac as my day-to-day computer for the past 6 months. For the past two weeks I’ve been connecting using a variety of Windows-based machines at Internet cafes — mostly Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Tonight I fired up the iMac for the first time in a couple of weeks and I gotta tell you: the Internet is a far more beautiful place when you look at it through a large, beautifully anti-aliased screen with a Macintosh UI wrapped around it. It makes using any version of Windows seem akin to trying to paint with socks on.

Just an observation.

Today has been one of those amazing “did I really do all that in one day” kind of days. We woke up at 7:30 a.m. in Swiss Cottage, London. Black cab to Paddington Station, Heathrow Express to the airport, Air Canada to St. John’s, then Halifax. Drove home to the Island, arriving 7:30 p.m. Atlantic. By all rights this kind of thing should take several weeks.

Our vacation was fantastic, and I’ll pour more stories of our exploits here as I have time to digest it all.

In the meantime, my anti-spam filters have been working busily away, and there are 2,344 messages in the “probably spam” mailbox right now. I’m going to throw them all away, so if you’ve sent me a message that contained phrases like “guaranteed free” or “enlargement like you’ve never seen,” don’t expect a response.

We arrived here in London on Wednesday from Barcelona. Woah momma, what a difference a day makes. Hard to summarize the differences, but the British and the Spanish could inhabit two different planets. My initial reaction to London was that everyone reminded me of my tightly wound and tightly buttoned Grade 12 English teacher, Miss Jullion. Who, in turn, always reminded me of Mrs. Havisham from Great Expectations. This effect has lessened as we’ve been exposed to more of the populace. One initial impression: the British owe a great debt of gratitude to those on the Indian sub-continent they colonized, for without them they would have little food or kindness to strangers in the societal DNA.

Today we switched hotels from the impossibly swanky Renaissance Chancery Court, which felt like staying in a boarding house for investment bankers, and moved to the Marriott Regent’s Park, which is an incredibly kind hotel and perfectly suited to our style. We toured the Science Museum, which Oliver loved. Admission to public museums in London is free. Which is good, because everything else, if you are spending Canadian dollars under the hood, costs an arm and a leg. I think I paid $5 for a Diet Coke today. Which is sad, because I don’t even like Diet Coke.

As I type this, I am sitting under Picadilly Circus, which is making children memories of a trip with family 31 years ago flood back. I strongly recall wondering why there were no lions, togers or bears in this Circus.

Questions for my UK-literate readers: (a) what is a “quid”, (b) why are the aforementioned Circuses call so, (c) why is the husband of a reigning Queen called “Prince,” while the wife of a reigning King called “Queen?”.

One more day on this Island, and then back to our own.

I leave the continent, and what happens? The Old Man in the Mountain collapses. Last summer, during our extended sojourn in New Hampshire, we had to drive north to collect our friend Stephen, and we drove through the area where the man formerly known as “of the mountain” hung. But, somehow, we missed the view, and returned south without having witnessed this natural miracle.

With Elephant Rock (in Norway, PEI) gone, and now this, I fear the natural wonders of the world are disappearing.

Speaking of which, correspondent Ann calls in with the shocking news that Tweels, the small gift and magazine shop at the corner of Kent and University in Charlottetown is moving to West Royalty. I’ve purchased a copy of The New Yorker at Tweels almost every Monday for the past ten years. With their move out of the downtown we’ll all be left with the paltry selection of magazines at the Bookmark as a last resort. I cannot for the life of me figure out why Tweels would do this. Granted their business, based as it is on selling magazines (which my friend Stephen says is a horrible complicated business) and Anne curios has never seemed to make a lot of sense. But does it make more sense in West Royalty (aka the suburbs)?

I think that when we return from Europe I will have no choice but to turn entreprenurial and start to help fill the ever-growing business gaps in our downtown. Otherwise Oliver will inherit 100 Prince St. and he’ll have to drive 10km for a quart of milk.

Sigh.

One more day in Barcelona, then London until Saturday, and back in Halifax for the weekend.

As at this typing, the folks at EasyGroup have made money from our vacation three ways. First, we flew from London to Bilbao on EasyJet, second, we rented a car for two days from EasyCar. And now I sit in the EasyEverything Internet cafe in Barcelona, they get their third stack of money.

All of our experiences with this company have been positive: they run the kind of no frills, no bullshit company that makes you look at other companies and think “why on earth would they ever do that?”.

EasyJet offers very cheap flights within Europe. It’s like JetsGo or WestJet, but with many more flights, and a much more mature set of policies. Web booking accounts for 95% of their reservations. No advanced seating (unless, like us, you have kids in tow, in which case you get to board first). No peanuts or free drinks (although you can buy both). Quick turnaround of planes. Our London to Bilbao experience was quick, efficient, and very bus-like.

EasyCar exposes the costs of renting a car to you, and lets you absorb those you want to, and offset others. For example, if you wash and clean the car before returning, you save 16 euros. If you return the car within a given hour-long window, you save 24 euros penalty. You can only book a car on their website, and all their internal applications are web-based as well, meaning, presumably, they can quickly fire up new operations when and where required. We rented a little Toyota Yaris to take us south of Barcelona. While it was about 1/2 the size of the Jetta we drive at home, it was more than enough car for the task and, indeed, its small size made navigating the insanely small alleys of Spanish villages possible.

Like cars and jets, EasyEverything’s web pricing model is based on demand. They have 300 terminals here in their Plaza Catalunya facility, and the more free terminals there are, the cheaper access is. I’m paying 80 cents an hour right now — presumably the person who came in after me is paying a little bit more. You buy tickets from a central machine, take your chit to a terminal, and enter a code. And then you’re online. As far as I can see, there are no staff. An industrialist’s delight, and Leo Cheverie’s worst nightmare.

They only way to get a grip on what this means on the ground is to dig in for yourself; fortunately this is cheap to do if you are in Europe. And, with luck, some day you’ll be able to fly Easy from North America too.

So we decided to brave the roads south of Barcelona and have been touring since Friday evening. Our base has been the excellent Hotel Victoria in Segur de Calafell, a nice older place where we are, I think, the only guests. Yesterday we drove high into the hills and ate bread and cheese halfway up a mountain at a small rest stop with ornately tiled fountain. Does it get better than that? Later in the day we came back to sea level and Oliver swan in the ocean. Today we head back to take another stab at Barcelona.

We made it to Barcelona. But there’s nary a hotel room within 10km of the city centre, so we are renting a car and heading off into the sunset for the weekend. Warm here. No rain. Zaragoza was amazing. Internet running out, so must sign off.