London

With hundreds of thousands of Swifties heading to Wembley Stadium for the superstar Taylor Swift show, our family arrived at London one day ahead of her record-breaking Eras Tour at the capital city.

The joy of revisiting London, after my last one almost ten years ago, is not limited to my daughter's affection for the artist singer. With so much to see and do in London, my time-pressed travel during the conference last time has left plenty of to-do-list unchecked. 

The National Gallery and bookstore Waterstones were closed by the time my conference ended then. I was able to visit both this time. Yeah.

Hamilton

I hope you'll pardon me for not knowing Alexander Hamilton: I didn't study American history and haven't heard of George Washington's aide-de-camp in the Continental Army until my recent London trip.

When a good friend of our family bought us tickets for the multi-award winning musical based on the life of Hamilton, I borrowed the biography written about this man. The eight-hundred-page biography by Ron Chernow attests to the rise of an illegitimate orphan from the Caribbean. He was probably born in 1755 in the West Indies, where he was "surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people." His mother was unhappily married, and was soon deserted by Hamilton's father. With determined pursuit, six months after starting his self-education, Hamilton passed the bar exam at the age of twenty-seven and was licensed as an attorney before the New York State Supreme Court.

The rest of his story has led us to think about the Gatsby curve; that is about the height of economic ladder rungs. The farther apart each rung becomes, the much more difficult to climb. If not because Hamilton was born more than two hundred years ago, he could not have become the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.

Not any more. With time, the degree of income or status inequalities has climbed higher and higher. That means our economic prospects are determined by our parents' wealth rather than our own success.

Bookstore

Eating pizza doesn't make us Italian, any more than playing baseball turns Japanese into Americans. That said, I concede that, visiting London can turn you into a book-lover. Indeed, reading culture is deep-seated in London. So much so that we see bookworms everywhere in London, from underground to cafeteria. 

That's why our family headed to London's famous bookstore on the very morning of arrival, even before we think of Westminister Abbey. 

The Edwardian bookshop close to where we're staying, Daunt Books, is arguably the most beautiful one in London. It boasts long oak gallaries and stained-glass windows, and is home to travel guides and literature arranged by country. A bookstore so large, so thrilling, and so inspiring that we spent more than an hour.

I daresay that visiting bookstore like Daunt Books or Foyles is a must when you visit London.

Tranquility

If you happen to be an amateur birder, you may have the habit of chasing kingfisher like me. What draws kingfishers to be watched again and again come from their bright plumage and strikingly fast flight. 

As if to further cement my passion of kingfisher, I have learned about its connection with the Shinkansen bullet train during my viewing a virtual conference in Milan today. 

Eiji Nakatsu, like so many other of us with a passion for birdwatching, has been the engineer looking after the technical development of the Japanese high-speed bullet trains. He wasn't the first person to be frustrated by the noise and vibration created by their trains. So much so that sonic booms were heard by residents 400 metres away from the train tunnel. And then Eiji got his eureka moment after being inspired by kingfisher's vertical high-speed dive silent enough to score ten in the Olympic diving events. He was curious enough to explore the shape of its bill. In other words, the key is to prevent buildup of pressure wave by reducing the cross-sectional area of the Shinkansen. 

Eiji finally figured out to redesign the nose of bullet train like the bill of kingfishers. That's a romantic story of biomimicry to reduce power, fuel, money spent, and yet, create a quieter journey.

Reset

Does there come a day in every man's life when he finds a transition from the upslope straight line to a peak and then decline? I can't be alone in this, can I?

The pattern is universal, according to the social scientist Arthur Brooks who wrote From Strength to Strength. After the age of fifty, you might find your reaching peak performance. Your decisions might not be as crisp as they once were. Your instincts are less reliable. Your productivity isn't as high.

Maybe you can relate to the decline mentioned by Arthur Brooks. I can (yes, it hurts). And I realised that I have also experienced a diminishing skill to recall names. Is it true that, by the time we're fifty, our brain is as crowded with information as the New York Public Library? The answer is: Yes. Mind you, your personal research librarian is also getting creaky, slow, and easily distracted. This is part of the story of growing old, and I wish it was not, but it is.

I won't kick myself for forgetting the name of any acquaintance, or even the name of my patient for that matter. Years ago, I could precisely name each and every patient of mine. I can't now. I know I shouldn't regret. This is what Arthur Brooks has taught me. As we age, we should not cry for the decline in our fluid intelligence (such as the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems); we are simply entering a life reset to gain our crystallized intelligence (referring to the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past).

To go back to the metaphor of a vast library, we won't have to regret how slow the librarian is. This does not matter. What matters is that we marvel at the size of the book collection our librarian is wandering around in.

Chocolate

When my friend returned from her Swiss trip, she brought us chocolate resembling the iconic Matterhorn Glacier. That's pyramid-shaped chocolate with a dash of white colour at the top.

That reminds me of the memoir of Trevor Noah, who was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother. As a kid, Trevor didn't know what race was. To him, people were like different types of chocolate. His dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and he was the the milk chocolate.

True, life is a box of chocolate. I like the way Trevor thinks we're all just chocolate. 

Simple and fair. 

Carrie

For the past few years, the American author Taylor Jenkins Reid has been carving out a unique literary space, mostly novels of women characters. And it's almost impossible to read them without wondering if you're reading a biography or a fictional story. Nowhere is this better illustrated than byThe Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. The story character is so real. So much so that I think it has come from the journalist work of Walter Isaacson.

Taylor Jenkins Reid's recent novel Carrie Soto is Back is even more authentic. Carrie Soto is a fictional tennis superstar who simply wanted to be the greatest tennis player in the world. When her friend suggested that joy was more important, she laughed. "Winning is joy," she said.

Carrie Soto, once the leading figure in women's tennis with a record of winning Grand Slam titles for twenty times, retired at 31. She decided on a comeback at 37, when another upcoming tennis player had tied that record. To reclaim the world record for most Grand Slam singles titles, Carrie returned to play all four Grand Slam events, including the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. Over the course of her lifetime, she was living in the dream that her body or skills didn't have an expiration date.

At the end of each chapter, I'd have to remind myself that being the very best is antithetical to being happy, but in the next chapter Carrie would convince us otherwise. Such debate, to and fro, is like moving our head right and left, left and right, chasing the tennis ball. By itself, it's downright satisfying. This is the reward for reading Taylor Jenkins Reid's book. 

The pearl didn't all come from Carrie's obsession; the rebuttal from her friend or opponent is entertaining. Competing against people half her age, as her friend mentioned, is going to face people with brand-new knees, brand-new everything including brand-new hearts. I love the metaphor about old hearts: It's like an old mattress that's been bounced on so many times that now, if you put your hand on it, it leaves a permanent imprint. Just a big old mattress showing every dent.