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March 13, 2007
London: Cherns, stones, bloggers--and Anne's chesnut tree.
Anne Frank would have been 77 this year. In 1992, I first visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and was quite moved, for lack of a better word, to discover that Anne, who died at the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1945 at 15, had pinned up on the walls of her attic room the photos of same American film stars of the 1930s and 1940s my mother had also worshipped a teenage girl. My mother and she are the same age. On the plane on the way over here, I read a piece in The Times, the London paper, that the chestnut tree she could see from her attic while her family was in hiding is now going to be chopped down, despite efforts to save it. The tree, now 27 tons, is in danger of falling over--but cuttings of the original are being nurtured in hopes of replanting a healthy tree.....I had lunch today in at King's Crown Row with the infamous but celebrated and talented (to say the least) barrister and mediator Cyril Chern, an American lawyer and ex-Los Angeles judge, who I've known for 6 years. His mother is British--and he is here to stay. We met in Budapest, or maybe Vienna, in 2001 --and it was like the shock of recognition when two similarly "unusual" people meet. And then, walking down Fleet to Cannon Street, not far from Tower Bridge, I visited the London Stone, a day early.... Quick trip to London. But tomorrow, I have the honor of meeting UK lawyer-bloggers Justin Patten and Charon QC. And it will be an honor.
Posted by JD Hull at March 13, 2007 02:32 PM