Oliver Jeffers' picture books are remarkable – stunning, really. One of my favorites (and that of my daughter's) is The Day the Crayons Quit .

We all giggled when we read the colourful story of Duncan opening a box of crayons. One after another, Duncan's crayons protested and shouted aloud.

Imagine myself as the kid Duncan bringing the box of crayons to Greece, and I can immediately tell which crayon is going to be the most short-lived. And no prizes for guessing the blue

We are taught to buckle our seat belts, lock our doors, arm our houses against intruders. We worry about the weather, obsess about cleaniness, block the mosquitoes and moths.

All this sounds complicated, and it is. But it is also important to break the rules now and then. Before I visited Greece, I borrowed a story book about the British naturalist Gerald Durrell's family moving to the Greek island of Corfu. Written over half a century ago, the autobiographical book My Family and Other Animals makes

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

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.

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'

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