Today, Diane and I visited London's Freud Museum, the house where Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life after fleeing Nazi persecution in Vienna in 1938.

The residence in Hampstead in northern London was also home to his daughter, Anna Freud, a pioneer in child psychology. After Anna Freud's death in 1982, the house was converted into a musuem (Admission: £5).

We live about five minutes' walk from the museum. And, after 3-1/2 years in the neighborhood, finally got around to visiting it (It's like going to see the Statue of Liberty or another sight you take for granted when you live in New York.).

The Freud museum's centerpiece is his ground-floor study and library, which contains THE couch where Freud analyzed patients in Vienna. Along with scores of books, the room contains many of the antiquities the psychoanalyst collected. Freud would sit next to the head of the couch, out of the patient's sight and facing some of these artifacts.

Upstairs, there is a room devoted to Anna Freud. It includes a picture of a 1978 ceremony at Columbia University at which she received an honorary doctorate and was the commencement speaker. And at which I got my master's in journalism. It was a nice surprise to see the photo.

Unlike U.S. newspapers, British newspapers (and many Continental newspapers, for that matter) do not hesitate to take a stand in their news coverage as well as their editorials.

So, the coverage of the U.S. election result spanned the spectrum from pro-Bush to anti-Bush (or pro-Kerry to anti-Kerry).

At one end, The Daily Telegraph, a broadsheet which tends to be pro-American and pro-Conservative Party, ran a headline Thursday reading:

Bush returned in triumph
President appeals to the nation to unite

The Telegraph front page also featured a favorable photo of Bush clasping his wife, Laura, and saluting.

On the other hand, the tabloid Daily Mirror, which was among the biggest opponents of the Iraq war, had a front page dominated by a photo of Bush with his fingers on his forehead and eyes closed. The top of the page had a small headline reading

DOH! 4 MORE YEARS OF DUBYA

And a larger headline reading:

How can 59,017,382 people be so DUMB?
U.S. ELECTION DISASTER: PAGES 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 & 9

Like I said, they take sides.

Diane, Jay and I went to see Diana Krall tonight at Royal Albert Hall. She gave a great concert. We have several of her CDs and love her voice.

But I don't think I really realized how well she can play the piano until I saw her in action in a jazz quartet that also included guitar, bass and drums. And, like anyone who spends a fair amount of time hitting keys -- whether a keyboard or a Steinway -- that woman has power in her arms. We were lucky to be in the 5th row, center, and you could see the muscle definition clearly.

Krall made at least two references to her singer-songwriter husband, Elvis Costello, and played at least one piece by him. At the end of the concert someone sang out, "Good job, Diana." Could it have been .... him?

In her encore, she introduced her last piece by saying it related to the "current situation ... facing us ... today." And, then, two days after Election Day, she started singing, "There may be trouble ahead," the opening line of "Let's Face the Music and Dance."

A correction: last night I referred to BBC anchor Huw Edwards as "Hugh."

"Huw" is a Welsh name and less familiar in the United States.

I could have just fixed the spelling and silently reposted. But good journos admit their mistakes.

Sorry, Huw.

Friends recommend the following U.S.-based blogs tonight. Some of the bloggers, like Wonkette, are already semi-celebrities:

• Wonkette
  
• Daily Kos
• Joshmarshall
• talkingpointsmemo

BBC News at 10 p.m. leads with our election, with anchor (they call them presenters) Hugh Edwards in Washington. After more than four years here, I continue to be impressed with how interested people outside the United States are in our affairs.

On ITV News, one of the prime commercial competitors with the Beeb, star presenter Sir Trevor McDonald is also broadcasting out of Washington.

The U.S. Election Day is front-page news in many of today's British newspapers and, as was the case four years ago, a British colleague asked me who I think is going to win.

My reasoned reply amounted to a shrug, given polls that mostly show the Bush-Kerry race to be a dead heat.

But, if the contest produces a clearcut winner, we expats in London won't know until morning, if then. The first results from the East Coast will start coming in around midnight here.

If there is no clear winner -- and there appears to be a good chance of a repeat of 2000 -- I fully expect co-workers from Britain, New Zealand and elsewhere to ask me to explain the wrangling that follows. It won't be easy.

A big day in journalism history on Monday. London's Times, once the quintissential British broadside, went tabloid only. The 216-year-old paper nicknamed "The Thunderer", which added a tabloid edition a year ago (they call it "compact," not "tabloid") had decided to ditch the wide-format paper.

Read all about it in The New York Times.

I prefer broadsheets for the way that story placement on a front page or section front gives you a view at a glance at what the editors think is important. But I have to admit that a tabloid -- sorry, compact -- paper is easier to cope with while commuting to work on a subway or bus.

Better still, a PDA.

OVERHEARD

On my New York vacation -- which ended with my return to London last night -- I faced the usual choice between having fun and blogging. So, I had fun. Now, to blog.

New Yorkers are not shy about expressing themselves in public. I was waiting for a bus when a black man standing nearby pulled out his cellphone and began chatting happily with a friend.

As our bus pulled up, the man told his friend, "Let me tell you something, let me tell you someting! black man voting for Bush is an oxymoron! A black man voting for Bush is an oxymoron!"

Another day, I was on the 34th Street crosstown when it passed by the largish Victoria's Secret lingerie shop on Herald's Square. In one window was a mannequin wearing nothing other than a sheer bar and panties.

In the seat behind me, an elderly lady with a classic New York accent piped up, "I don't think Victoria has many secrets left."