After five years, I have decided to consign the old site design to the archives and move frogcake.net over to WordPress.
The old site worked ok but it wasn’t the easiest to update with new articles or pictures and until yesterday the RSS feed was updated manually by hand! It was as I was incorporating a new RSS class into my site that I realised it was time to either rewrite a whole chunk of code, or move the site across to a more professionally built product.
It was interesting looking back over the last eight years’ worth of posts and seeing how my attitudes (and writing style) have changed.
Back in the summer of 1999 we were a couple of young Aussies just off the boat. I seemed constantly surprised by the scale and cost of everything and I remember we were literally down to our last £50 when we both managed to get jobs (we used to share a ready-meal to save money).
Over the years we’ve been to most parts of the British Isles and a fair chunk of Western Europe as well. We’ve been to the west coast of Ireland and the north coast of Scotland. We’ve seen castles in Wales and the Pyramids in Egypt. We’ve strolled through Central Park and cruised down the Grand Canal in a gondola.
We’ve seen Mozart at the Coliseum, Strauss at the Royal Opera House and Beethoven at Glyndebourne. We’ve been to the Last Night of the Proms and seen the Medici Quartet play in the Reform Club on Pall Mall.
I’ve conducted concerts in St Pauls’ Covent Garden and Kathryn has sung in the choir at the Royal Hospital. We’ve recorded Beethoven with the Corinthian Chamber Orchestra and sung Rachmaninov with Collegium Musicum of London.
We got married, became British citizens, I got an MSc and Kathryn works for an architecture practice that has had more influence on the London skyline in the 20th century than any other.
We are both a bit older and wiser now but London is still an amazing, fascinating place to live. Looking back on what we have achieved, having arrived in the UK with not much more than a couple of suitcases, I’m actually rather proud.