Letters from London, and Elsewhere

That American barmaid at The Warrington?

2007-06-22T11:57:00.001Z

Now that I don't live in London anymore, it's impossible for me to work at the Warrington, or to keep up on the latest info on the Gordon Ramsay progress on our beloved Maida Vale pub.

The last word I can give you is delays still continue with planning permissions to the feisty, Grade-II listed girl. This, in the long-run, will benefit locals who want The Warrington to stay as true to her skirt-tossing boozer self as possible. After all, no one wants a repeat of the Elgin gutting... Although that old place certainly needed an update, it's a good example of gastro-pubbing-gone-IKEA. It's the kind of revamp that, while interesting, will never truly capture the heart of locals and has all the staying power of a Top Shop t-shirt.

As for me, I've found another chef, restaurant and big project to slave over. Look for the details on my new blog, or come for a bite to eat at Dressing Room, a Homegrown Restaurant, whenever you are this way.

Cheerio!

Where to Eat in Maida Vale whilst waiting for Gordon Ramsay and Holdings to get the Warrington Sorted

2007-05-20T20:45:00.001Z

Or... Hello, lovely Idlewild, so long dodgy Truscott Arms...

Somewhere between the time Gordon Ramsay circled the Warrington last autumn in his 4x4 and this week's first big test match at Lord's, the Ruby Group of London has SOMEHOW managed to buy, close, gut, decorate, and re-open the council-housing hangout Truscott Arms on Shirland Road as the gorgeous Idlewild.

It isn't a miracle. It is just planning.

The Idlewild menu is British , with a range from Neal's Yard cheeses to Nettle Soup. It's available at socialable hours (usual lunch and dinner hours, and on Sundays you can eat from noon to nine), and the look of the place is elegant, (unlike the newest shade added to Dulux's "Colours that Don't Go": Skiddaw Purple).

In fact, Idlewild breathes sociability, with the doors cast open wide and the staff helpful and charming when you stop in.

Meanwhile, back at the Roundabout.... there's a new dartboard. And look! We've found all the old Truscott Arms kids, too! Ah, it's good to see the youth of today emulating the ways of their elders: smoking, sucking back Sambuca and whinging about everything around the beer-soaked bar. Now, the Warrington! That's what a boozer should be!

Yeah, it's true... the day of the traditional boozer is passing. And whilst I enjoy the good old British tradition of the empty-stomach swill-up on a warm evening, what I am really glad for, most nights, is a proper meal. Serve it with a truly great beer (looking forward to the selection of bitters and Belgians the Warrington will have on offer after this week) and you are close to achieving Nirvana. If only that idiot in the corner would stop smoking.

So whilst you are patiently waiting for a taste of Ramsay's pig cheeks -- due to Grade II listed building delays, the Olympics might be sooner -- then keep it in the neighbourhood and see what Idlewild, on Shirland Road, has going for it.

Psst... I'll let you in on a secret the French have been keeping from you: you can drink more and longer, if you would only eat! Eat isn't cheating.

The idiot who said that? The half-dead, single guy, smoking in the corner.

What the pub did for me

2007-05-18T09:32:00.000Z

At a pub, I learned the English are hard to get to know.

But once you know them, it's hard to let them go. And they don't let go easy. They are like old dogs. Completely faithful. But they probably won't leap up when you come in.

In a pub I learned how beautiful cigarette smoke is, filtered in the late afternoon sunlight, or swirling around an old geezer's face, as he grips a warm bitter. He licked the paper of that cigarette himself. I watched him tuck the tobacco in with his thumb.

In a pub, I learned that some people don't live in their homes. They only exist there, alone and bored. Lonely and sad, making noodles for one. At their local pub, they have friends and there is always someone to drink with.

If I lived in London, I lived in a pub. If I drank in London, I bought one for the guys at the bar, and one for the barmaid serving me.

If I lived in London, I was happier in the pub with no music. I was honored when the governor himself served me, and wiped the bar up with a towel after the pint dribbled. I was glad because the doors were propped open 9 months of the year, the air blowing through, and dogs lay content and miserable all at once at the feet of their wobbly people.

The pub is home for anyone who is British, however temporary. I had one of my own, in Maida Vale, but there are plenty of pubs to go around. Everywhere you go. One for you and one for everybody.

There must be, because a pub is home.

Maida Vale is our Local

2007-05-11T10:52:00.000Z

If you must leave someplace, you should leave it sad to go.

After we left our Randolph Avenue flat, we were desperate to stay in Maida Vale. It isn't the best place in London, just as any single person isn't the best person in the world.

No. Just like a person, every nook of London has something charming and warm, someplace worth nuzzling. If you've made that place your own, you get attached, no matter how gritty or posh.

Maida Vale is our local.

It's where our halal, Soloman Supermarket, is.

It's where, at the Starbucks, I wrote two books.

It's where the recreation ground is, the one where I played tennis and made friends with Fiona.

It's where Leslie and his dog Thomas walk everyday, and we stop and chat.

It's where Frances and I found each other.

It's where we found another Canadian Colin, whom we like very much.

It's where we ran into the Bannermans on their way out, Steve drenched in sweat from his cycle commute.

It's where Tim and Peter lived on Elgin, and cooked for us, before they got married and moved to the country (not in that order).

It's where we lived, practically, with Soren for a year, who loved the Cubs and Wisconsin and one very long hallway and who helped up moved twice, and called Trivial Pursuit: "T.P."

It's where our London friends are, on Lauderdale, Essendine, Castellain, and Widley Roads, and Sutherland Avenue, Warrington Crescent.

It's where we met Penny, on the first day, who got me the job at the Warrington.

It's where I found my feet, and learned to appreciate a cloudy sky.

It's where we lost a baby, and Colin lost a job, and where we drank with our neighbours, who all walked home the day the bombs exploded.

It's where bowling became something done on a green,and al fresco parties were held on the rooftoop.

It's where foxes were our neighbours and horses trotted past our morning windows.

It's where we discovered how the question "You alright, mate?" could be a greeting.

It's where we drank too much and ate many packets of crisps for supper.

Maida Vale is our local. No blue plaques to mark the places where we've been. Too busy, too many others to remember and deal with and forget again.

Anyway, we'll know we've been here.

The Bell Ringers of Westminster Abbey

2007-05-08T13:22:00.000Z

Aimee came to visit me and, so, I did what I do when people come to visit... I made plans.

Came across a listing in Time Out London magazine (the website is useful, but nothing beats the actual publication... it is original, poignant and catches the exact tone of London's edge. Not just a calendar.)

Back to the story... Caught my eye that the Westminster Abbey Bellringers were offering "An Evening with..." sort of thing... Wasn't sure what it would be but I am always game for anything "behind the scenes."

Turns out it was the some of the best spent money I have doled out in London. The event was not only intimate and informative (only 30 or so people attended) but they served wine and hors d'oeurves after. Here's some tidbits we learned:

1. Change ringing as such is different that the bell rungs at standard campus-type campaniles, which is actually an instrument; If you are interested don't ask me to explain it... click here and read this.

2. A "peal" is over 5000 "changes" long and takes about 3 and half hours to do... The Abbey ringers (who are volunteers) only do them for special events like the Queen's Jubilee, Prince William/Harry's birth; Royal weddings, etc.

3. The bells in Westminster Abbey are hung upside down and rotate once, all the way down then up again, on one "change"... Each ringer is only ringing one bell... the guy on the box is ringing the "tenor" bell, which is the largest bell (and the heaviest).

4. Most of the bells at the Abbey have been recast recently, but one of them hundreds of years old and dates back to Elizabeth I.

Oh, and it wasn't too loud in there... there is a chamber between the room we are in and the bell chamber, built to reduce the sound considerably. We did get to go up into the bell chamber for part of the talk and they did ring one bell for us while we were up there. It was VERY loud, so loud it was better with our fingers in our ears.

And yes, they did serve drinks and food after. It was all very civilised!

Treading Water at the Warrington

2007-04-28T15:37:00.000Z

God, it's gorgeous right now in Maida Vale... I just glanced down Clifton Gardens one afternoon and, suddenly, every tree is in leaf and the air is full of the smell of hyacinths in bloom.

Ahhh, spring... a time for freshness, renewal, of kicking open doors, shaking out rugs, polishing windowpanes, letting in the light.

Meanwhile back at the roundabout ... Ramsay Holdings' poor, ignored Warrington, with the same beer-soaked carpet. The same dilapitated picnic tables. The same chained-up restaurant, windows tarped over. The sad dart board with its stuffing oozing out.

An odd sort of time warp that is draining the poor life out of Miss Thing right now. Increased drink and snack prices; a revolving door of trial staff members; a string of formerly barred customers and stragglers from the closed Truscott Arms breaking glasses and raising the volume and aggression level; and the latest round of confused Ben's Thai customers, still lost.

It's true, I know, that the execution of change -- and all great ideas -- never happens quickly. Impatience is the primary cause of stunted growth, I believe. There is something to be said, however, for attending to passion and feeding a flame. Once the locals were mildly convinced (and it did take some time and genuine enthusiam on our part) that although John Brandon could never be replaced, the Warrington would have a good life ahead, it was time to strike. Opening in April or May would have done that.

Now, as we Ramsay minions stare openly into the face of No-Plan-Land, I can begin to feel myself -- and my colleagues -- tiring, losing hope. We were in for the long haul, but with little support from the head office and the man himself, I can see us all starting to sink from exhaustion.

When one customer last night asked about the delay in the restaurant opening, I repeated, again for the thousandth time, with a worn but hopeful smile, the story of planning permission and listed building status. "We hope it'll be ready by the end of the summer."

"So," he said, grinning gleefully, "looks like your boss didn't plan things too well."

I didn't respond. My plastered on smile didn't move. I just shrugged. I couldn't help myself. Was it true? Probably.

He turned to his friends and said, "You hear that guys? Gordon Ramsay's %ucked it up! Haha!"

I would have argued. I always do. But we were swamped and understaffed, chasing ourselves coming and going. When we weren't explaining where Ben's Thai had gone, we were schpeeling about where the new restaurant (opening in April!) had gone, or where Martin had gone. Soon we'd be explaining about Justin, too.

I left it at that and didn't worry. My boss is a divisive character. You can't convince everyone you meet to like Man United, the New York Yankees or the Dallas Cowboys.

I'll go back to treading water better, on Sunday evening. For now, I'm going to barbeque with my friend's in the sun, in Maida Vale. And if anyone asks me anything about the Warrington, my response will be: "Get me another drink, will you?"

Ben's Thai London... Now Dang!

2007-04-22T13:37:00.000Z

For those still looking for Maida Vale's favourite Thai restaurant, Ben's Thai, formerly of the Warrington Hotel, don't worry, it hasn't gone far.

Under the new name, Dang at Ben's Thai, Dang and her clan have moved above another pub, the Robert Browning, on Clifton Road. This gritty old man's boozer, situated on a properly posh throughfare, can only be improved upon with the addition of W9's most beloved Thai family.

And if you are wondering about the menu, have no fear. Colin and I ate there the other night. The duck spring rolls were just as crispy; the panang just as creamy and the pad thai as sweet and sour with the right spicy kick as ever. In fact, we think the cooks have stepped up their game even, probably not harmed one bit by a beautifully refitted kitchen.

The dining room, by the way, is gorgeous with its lemongrass-green walls and homage to lovely Mrs. Barrett Browning. Be warned, however, that it is only half the size of the old Waz space, with absolutely no smoking in the building at all (except the woks, of course). This means bookings will become even more vital as this place gets its feet under it. Prices are still as reasonable as ever.

Dang at Ben's Thai on Clifton Road... Yeah, it's moved, but it hasn't changed so much. You still have to pass through unsavory pub sort to get to, as one customer called, "a great cheap feed."

Dang at Ben's Thai
15 Clifton Road
Above the Robert Browning
London W9 1SY
Phone: 020 72663134

Glad Tidings!!

2007-04-11T14:24:00.000Z

Days and days of beauty and wonder in London...
Shhhh!!
Can't talk just now...

Too busy exchanging ideas with this flower...

"All the lights on and you are alive
But you can't point the way to your heart
So sublime, when the stars are aligned
But you don't know
You don't know the greatness you are

"Cause Blue Eyes
You are destiny's scene
Cause Blue Eyes
I just wanna be the one

"I just wanna sing a song with you..."

--Cary Brothers "Blue Eyes"

Gordon versus the Empire

2007-04-03T13:15:00.000Z

Bill Buford's recent article on Gordon Ramsay's slog in the U.S. ("The Taming of the Chef: Can Gordon Ramsay make it here?" April, 3, 2007 ) has me thinking again about the sins and virtues of the Ramsay Holdings pub venture, and the exhausting drive my darling head chef is taking into my homeland.

I discussed the issue of the Ramsay brand back in October, with Fiona, a brand consultant friend of mine. This was just after Gordon and company bought the Warrington Hotel in Maida Vale and just after his tie with Thresher’s was launched, thus plastering his mug all over every corner of London.

I said: His brand needs revising. It needs to be pulled back. He is in danger of over-exposure with a limited audience. His edge will lose its charm, and it is in danger of suffocating his skill.

Fiona said: No, not necessarily. He is highly-identifiable. He reaches a broad market with passion and strength. His brand is on the up.

Gordon Ramsay, the Shape Shifter
The difference between our viewpoints is global exposure. Whilst Fiona was thinking about the European market, where Ramsay’s history is known, I was thinking about the American market, where Ramsay was about to turn the American concept of London on its ear.

In New York, Ramsay is investing millions of dollars trying to convince a very limited American audience – and very particular one, the finicky New York restaurant crowd – that Great Britain makes Great Food and Great Chefs. Well, at least one.

Unfortunately, The Great Chef is busy building himself up as the next Posh, the Great Celebrity, and his modus operandi of training up other Great Chefs (or hiring them, in the case of Angela Hartnett at Claridge’s) is slowly waning, as was seen at the almost ignored opening of the Narrow in Limehouse.

Ramsay is spreading himself out in London, to make the most of the limited time his brand has value. He is turning his obsessive eye to the original Frontier, as if it were virginal, as naive as most Brits believe it to be, back then and now. He assumes his same concepts of conquest will work in the U.S. market. And that the same cooks will succeed in a U.S. marketplace.

The Grand Delusion
Why, you ask, is this occurring? Gordon is a certified celebrity here in the U.K. and a hometown boy. Whatever the individual opinion of him, there is still a staunch dedication to his essential Britishness. And naturally there will always be hangers-on willing to splash out the cash to eat at a table marked by his name, even if he hasn’t set foot in the place for months.

And whilst the Brits look the other way, for the next phase of his life, like his friend Posh, Gordon is interested in the new America, to expand his empire. The realization I believe he is slowly finding over there, is that his “eff-ing” brand won’t sell his tranquil and modest food to Americans, even if they would surely love the stuff if they ate it.

Expectations are a funny thing. We can get food anywhere, but it's the show that has us hanging on. Delivering American palates from the divisive foul-mouth/fine-food paradigm will be his biggest challenge.

I Heart New York
Buford’s observation in his long and complex New Yorker piece of Ramsay’s London opening paints our Gordon Ramsay exactly right: a manic chef with a spotted history who— like so many Brits— doesn’t understand America but is obsessed with owning their ideal of New York. They have to have it.

But it isn't American New York they want: it's some movie image of the city, their New York, with its glittering wet streets, luminous yellow cabs, the dizzying heights of sculpted metal. The tough parts: the muggings and the race issues and the insufferable English tourists, they are always hidden from the postcards.

And, of course, when you have a particular British attitude of suffering and privilege, and you live on a particularly isolated small island where the currency is particularly strong, well.... all of this can lead to a particularly big surprise when your Big Chef head doesn’t fit into the four-star mold of New York fine dining.

Not there, or in any part of America.

Behind my eyes

2007-03-25T18:13:00.000Z

"The past is never dead, it is not even past." ~William Faulkner

A woman I served at the Warrington said hello to me on the street today. I was walking to Starbucks to get started working. I thought, as I saw her: She drinks gin and soda and fresh lime, loves a man who drinks London Pride ale. They'd both be so much handsomer if they didn't smoke so much. I don't know her name, offhand.

We exchanged a little holiday small talk. Then, pause, and she asked me the question everyone seems to, finally, ask:

"So how's the book coming?"

It's just a question about work, really. "So Elizabeth, how's your job?" only more specific. My job is something tangible and intangible all at once. "Elizabeth is writing a book. I've seen loads of them in Borders. I am even reading one right now. Well, actually, its a magazine." Like knowing the local weatherman, stopping him on the street, then asking him how the weather is. Only slightly less interesting than that.

So, Elizabeth, how is the book coming?

The book is coming. The book is here. The book is written. The book is waiting for me to find the answer, to stop dawdling, to decide that I, in fact, do know what I am doing, since I have been doing this for 15 years. The book is living, and lives in my memory and actions, a part of who I am. It died over the summer, or so I thought. It wriggled itself out of its cocoon and is sitting on the branch now, fluttering its wings.

It is memory, carrying it forward, and me backward, on the days I am working. I remember scents, and patterns and voices and numbers, and I want to write them. I want to write about the texture of a back of neck under my fingertips, or children's bodies crammed on a carousel spinning, or the sound of a heart, straining toward love.

"It's fine. It's going really well, thanks."

She wants to know when, of course, and so do I. I have to practice answering that question, while not listening to it. It is all here, in front of me, and trapped, behind my eyes.

"Was there ever in anyone's life span
a point free in time, devoid of memory,
a night when choice was any more than the sum
of all the choices gone before?"

~Joan Didion

Off Season

2007-03-23T16:27:00.000Z

In the off season, all things gay and wild and full of choleric swirl give way to a hangdog mood. No pink flying discs or overturned sandcastle buckets.

In the off season, there are silences in unexpected pockets. Silences filling the wide open days, broken only by a gull cry, a car door, the once or twice splash of a startled, choking wave on the sand.

Off season there are no shoeprints. Only birdtracks.

Off season, windless day, sunless day, empty sea. A sea on its back, floating and unconcerned, staring at its reflection in the empty sky.

In the off season, the moves are subtle, pleasures simple. Enjoy the beach. The sand, the grit of pounded coastline, years of pressure, eons of battered edges, pliable edges, corroding one into another. Soft and softer, saturation of one element into another.

All this will be noise. All this will clatter again, soon, with the slashing of plastic shovels, rubber rafts humping the tide.

But in this day, the off season licks the salt from the rim and sips. Time is down and the beach is here, to enjoy.

Another Reason to Back-up (Suicide Blogger-style)

2007-03-22T16:13:00.000Z

I wrote a really beautiful and eloquent post here, but I once misplaced piece of html and when I posted it, Blogger ate my post.

My post, in case you're curious, was about melancholy and sadness. Now I am even more depressed.

Excuse me whilst I ponder drinking poison. )-:

Anyone Seen Ben's Thai???

2007-03-15T17:00:00.000Z

Despite the fact that Ben's Thai in the Warrington closed JANUARY 31, and Ramsay Holdings have owned all of the Warrington Hotel since October 31, 2006, many guests are still caught unawares, wandering up the stairs of the saloon bar for that reliable local Thai in Maida Vale.

If you are one of the many who hasn't noticed that Ben's is no longer "THIS WAY ►" in the Warrington, here's a hint on where to look. The beloved ol' standby is rekitting out the old Robert Browning on Clifton Road, only one street away. I hear they should be opening end of March, but call and ask them.

If you are wondering where the Robert Browning is, there are probably one of a few reasons for that:

1. You don't like Sam Smith's beers.
2. You don't like being insulted for asking for a clean glass for your drinks.
3. You don't shop at either Tesco or any outrageously overpriced organic food markets.
4. Your other local is the Chippenham, and you are too drunk/high to roll all the way down the "HILL" into the Vale.
5. Your other local is the Elgin, and, you are too stiff/paralyzed from sitting on footstools to walk all the way to Clifton Road.

Any of these reasons might have caused you to overlook the Robert Browning, one of the three most prominently located pubs in the Maida Vale (the Warrington, naturally, being number one and the Elgin dribbling in at second on that list).

So, since I work for the competition but I love my old friends from Ben's, that is what you get in the way of info. That's all I am going to say about it.

Enjoy, and oh... if you get lost, it's fine to go eat at Street Hawker. Their spring rolls are delish!

Amsterdam in Three Days

2007-03-05T15:15:00.000Z

Amsterdam
Click above to view Photos

At the last minute, Colin and I decided we couldn't leave Europe without a trip to Amsterdam.

This is the sort of trip that makes me wonder about all those OTHER places I haven't seen yet: what IF? What if I am missing out on the place of my dreams? What if home is around the corner, or in this case, just over the North Sea by 40 minutes, and I never ever knew?

Amsterdam, it seems, has officially usurped Paris (sorry Mme. Ségolène Royal) at the top of my list of favorite city... Or, rather, I think the list should be renamed, and here it is, with the top five, or so:

Top Cities that Are Better to Me than London,
(in My Poor Hacked-off and Sadly Jaded Opinion)

1. Amsterdam
2. Paris
3. New York
4. Salzburg
5. Kansas City, MO

I also have had minor love affairs with cities like Minneapolis, Florence, Luxor, and Colorado Springs, but the scale of my attachment to these cities hasn't quite been the same. With them, it was always more like a fling, not the sort of city you'd like to take home to Mom.

Amsterdam, though? It's the perfect combination of pretty virgin and secretly dirty girl.

I have more to say about Amsterdam, but for now, enjoy the photos and please send me your own Amsterdam stories, love or otherwise.

In Love with the Warrington

2007-02-27T00:18:00.000Z

It's a good time to be sentimental about the Warrington. After all, the bar staff hasn't changed much. The regulars like Bill and Tony and Stan are still propping up their ends of the bar. It's smoky and that one ceiling fan always looks like it is ready to fly off and shoot across the room.

Old pubs... old, grade-two-listed pubs -- no matter who owns them -- are all the same. They are bitchy and sweet and demanding. And they take a hell of a lot of time getting ready to go out.

These are the days of the time warp, like those last seconds before you open the Tardis door, not sure at all what will be on the other side. It is scary, but aren't you curious? Isn't it going to be good?

Now that Ben's Thai has found itself a new home at the friendly, ne'er-do-well boozer the Robert Browning (or at least, so they say), things have settled down. The less-than-regulars still stream in on a Friday night, clomp upstairs, and turn back again, befuddled and wondering. But they have a drink, both of the booze and of the atmosphere.

The more the time goes by, the easier it is to love the Warrington exactly as it is now : not John's, not ours, not Gordon Ramsay's, not theirs. Right now, it is a ship at sea, with old barred customers drifitng in as new, posh guests are finishing up. New quiz nights and wine lists are coming in as broken fittings and useless furniture -- inanimate and human -- are going out.

It's easy to love the Warrington right now, while the past and the future are right here , sizing each other up.

There's nothing tastes as sweet as a well-mixed drink.

All the Lonely People

2007-02-22T17:31:00.000Z

I tried to make it into Starbucks today, to my usual table.

It was so full. Every table, with a long queue too, of all sorts of people in grey and chalk blue and black.

It must have been the wet day. We were all chasing our heavy spirits inside, somewhere warm, with warm drinks. If we huddle close, our stranger bodies will still make enough fire to keep each other warm.

So I passed on that. Instead I went around the corner. I left a note for the woman I miss, the woman I've been wanting to talk to, now for weeks. She won't get it until next Wednesday, and by then I will have forgotten. By then, probably, the sun will be shining again. But I've left it anyway, and it helped to write it.

I stopped outside the Elgin Bar, looking at all its empty tables and stupid footstools. I opened the door to go in. Empty, all except the wall of grey smoke that hit me. I fell back and ran away quickly.

Crossed the zebra crossing and stopped the other side for the wild-eyed girl and her slumpy boyfriend. "Boosz? Boosz to Weemblee Centraal?" I didn't understand her, two times. She stirred her finger around. I had to look at their map.

They wanted a bus to Wembley Central and I just wanted to give them 10 pounds to take the Tube six stops instead, but they wanted a bus and I wanted to shake her and shout: "It's all too hard to explain, in the three or so words we mutually understand! Take my money!"

"Number 16," I said, and pointed toward Maida Vale Road, because I knew they wouldn't take the money and they wouldn't let me walk them there, no matter how much I wanted to.

I walked on, hiding myself under the tiny umbrella. When I don't have anywhere else to go, I go to the Warrington.

The grey man came over and sat down next to me, even though I was working, and I was wearing my earphones.

"I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt." And then he went on, for an hour, while I listened, twisted in my seat, my back aching. The sailboat to Antigua. The NHS doctor who didn't care. The years of undiagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome and the 150 aspirins he swallowed and vomited again. The black blood and the rotting longboat and solicitor who charged £88.13.

The hard breaths between the sentences and his refusal to hope. The 13 courier jobs at 5 p.m. that made him so angry. I listened, and so did the others, eavesdropping nearby, those other singular men drinking alone, the ones who knew me from the pub, who were near enough to hear. To keep watch and take care.

He left because I made him. He would have talked until he was empty. And he was packed full, stuffed with sadness and despair. I looked outside and couldn't hold anymore of that. Not today. Not this week. Not this year.

It's the hard season. You wake up and look out into sameness, so same it blurs. After days of that, years of that... it becomes simple, unkind water torture. No one is immune to it.

It's harder to see. You can look, but the reflection erodes.

If it is cloudy and raining, there are clouds and rain in my soul.
-- Jerzy Kosinski

This Bud's for You

2007-02-20T18:48:00.000Z

There are lots of good reasons to love guys... My husband is SUCH a guy.

He and I went to meet the OTHER Canadian Colin for coffee Sunday lunch-ish... I didn't stay long as I had to go to work at the pub. "Well, guys, I'll leave you to it," I think were my parting words.

So I go home, change, fluff my hair, etc. and pop out the door round about 2:45 p.m. I am about to take off left but for some reason, I look right. What do I see but Colin and Colin (peas in pod) coming toward me... I've recorded the exact moment here for your delight. Colin's words were "I thought you'd be gone by now, hee hee."

Guy's will be guys...

Oh and just to ease the minds of all you proud Canadians out there... Colin's -- the other Colin-- partner Kate won a year's supply of Bud at her Christmas party. Hence the reason they are drinking Bud.

Free beer is the best beer!

What I am Reading… Orion Magazine

2007-02-18T12:21:00.000Z

Or… Exercises in Different Thinking

I've been a rabid subscriber of Orion Magazine for over two years now. It's that sort of relationship, the kind you can't remember how it started, and you never ever want it to change or end.

There's all too much going on the in world. So much so that word itself has become overinflated, then squashed, a overcooked soufflee. Bart Simpson has more existential meaning to us than our own political leaders. I love Bart.

I wonder, why. But then as I sit with the latest issue of Orion, I understand again why. Bart, the South Park gang, Trailer Park boys, and Orion magazine. They do things for me that mainline politics don't. They make me think.

In James Howard Kunstler's article "Making Other Arrangements" -- with stunning photographs by David Maisel -- he talks about the American view of the future as "wishful thinking," a wonderful analogy to the psychological concept of "magical thinking" -- that kind of denial that people go into when they face horrible grief and pain. Kunstler is talking about America's inability to imagine a world without cars -- and to plan for it. Not in a gloom and doom way, but in a practical way.

American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. Period.
These ideas, this kind of direct speaking -- without the dance of idiocy, without the ridiculous fear and grovelling that seems to have overtaken mainstream media -- makes me want to sing. It makes me want to walk to work, ride a bike, plant my own sustainable garden (and yes! -- my family -- learn to eat from it!).

Most of all, it makes me realize that I am responsible.

"Ask not what your country can do for you..." one President said, and a country answered.

My mom always reminds me that when the oil crisis hit in 1973, President Nixon persuaded Americans to drive less, to get rid of their gas-guzzling automobiles for more fuel-efficient cars. And people listened to him. People do listen to their leaders, if only their leaders would lead and say useful things. The environmental crisis today is far more serious than the oil crisis of the 1970s.

But for me, reading Orion isn't about environmental issues. It's about Different Thinking.

People often ask me -- especially now that I live in England -- who I voted for, what party I represent, where I stand. The more I walk, the longer I live in the EU, the more I read, the more consolidated my understanding of my own "politics." Here, so you know I am using this definition: "the process and method of making decisions for groups. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions including corporate, academic, and religious." Because words have the meaning you assign them. You. The reader.

My politics are not party defined; they are not about governments or about power, per se. But they are about thinking differently, so in that sense, they are "liberal." Here I defined that as "tolerant of change; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition."

Conversatism is often used as liberal's antonym but it isn't. It is suited for many areas of the social and governmental arena -- the definition I found that works: "in politics, a loosely defined term indicating adherence to one or more of a family of attitudes, including respect for tradition and authority and resistance to wholesale or sudden changes."

For sudden change is not always good. However, being unwilling or closed to it -- the name of family, tradition, religion, or worst of all, freedom -- does no one favors. Just as wild change and reform in response to fads or knee-jerk reactions, also does not suit us.

That is why, I think, I have become obsessed slightly with Orion. It represents the kind of politics that work: the politics of personal revolution, of Gandhi and Jesus. The writing is defined not by "traditional liberalism" or even "radical conservatism," -- two hybrids which have gotten American politics stuck in the flat, slap-happy, name-calling, do-nothing state that it is in.

The people behind Orion are people acting, then writing or showing in it, in complex terms. They are everyday leaders and activists and artists, whose politics are not governmental. They are personal. They use that complex, critical thinking we are taught in univeristy, then seem to ignore forever, as we spend our days cultivating friendships with the same photocopied people: overselves, in different clothes and different houses.

I am one of those contrary people. I like to argue. I like to meet people and poke at them until I find the similarities in our differences. Even in a city like London -- 280 languages -- I have managed to survive.

Read Orion... But don't think the writers are on your side... and don't think they aren't.

Because for each other them, it isn't politics. It's personal.

Hyde Park in Winter

2007-02-17T17:25:00.000Z

Colin and I went for a walk to Hyde Park last weekend. We've been having beautiful sunny weather here so far for most of the winter. Temperatures in the 40s and 50s . We can't complain. It's hit or miss, of course, as some days it pours with rain and there is even the occasional snow. But this is winter in London and it really is the best time to be here.

The city is empty of tourists and Londoners come out to walk and enjoy their city. Sure they go and escape on holiday too... it is that time of year, when the sameness of the weather can start to make you a little bonkers. But on days like this when the sun is starting to stretch itself back out long into the later afternoon, Londoners are out everywhere.

I've never been a huge fan of Hyde Park. It doesn't have the soul of Central Park in New York. Parts of it are wild and unkempt, but some of it, like this area, it is just flat, open and empty, with views of the buildings and the traffic around. Guys play football here and it's the area where they hold concerts in the summer. But it is sort of gaping to me, too empty. Green Park and St. James Park, which carry on from Hyde Park, are more modest in size, more treed, and more beautiful.

Still Hyde Park has all kinds of charms and weird beauties, like horses, a rowing lake; Speaker's Corner; an elusive putting green -- which we have never found; a lovely rose garden; and even a lagoon, for swimming in the summer. Hyde Park is the center of London, and if I were a famous celebrity, I'd come here, because it would be easy to be anonymous in all this space, on roller blades, on bicycle, or at the Saturday and Wednesday running clubs.

The Big Issue

2007-02-09T11:42:00.000Z

Why do I get up early on Friday mornings? Am I gunning to save my soul?

What do I really LIKE getting up early on Friday monrings?

It's a good cup of tea, really. At The Passage.
Now that two years or more have passed here in London, I can say one thing I love about London is going to the Passage.

Volunteer work is a weird sort of thing. It's a hard thing to talk about.

Sometimes people think you are so good for doing it. They sort of coo when I tell them about my two days at the Passage. I can tell people that I volunteer at a soup kitchen and that excuses the fact that I don't have a "real job."

Or some people immediately leap with excuses for why they don't do it. Or can't. Or won't. I don't mind, I think. You do what you can, or what you will yourself to do.

But if I ask myself why I go, it's really because, I like it there. I like everything about it. I like the people at the Passage: the chefs and the staff, David the volunteer coordinator. I like the other volunteers: Francesa who comes in to wash the pots and pans; Mary, the cleptomaniac, Brian the toast maker; Andrew the nervous CFO; Tom, the full-time volunteer; Nishi, the "hot-hot-hot" mute wonder; Anita and Patrick and Sr. Joan and Sr. Patricia and all the sisters whose names I get mixed up but, when I think about them, I know exactly who they are in my mind.

I love the clients too, the mumbling cranky, smiling blokes who still want their hot toast served on hot plates, who pay for their tea, just like you and me. They look so happy after they have had a shower. They remember my name and ask about politics, just like the boys down at the pub.

Is it alright, to love, selfishly, the work you do selflessly? I suppose that conundrum is the best part about it.

The Big Surprise

2007-02-04T11:58:00.000Z

It's my birthday week (yes... I do get a whole week. Why? What do you get?) so naturally friends have been gearing up for a month or so with plans, even though I told them not to (ha ha).

Actually, in light of the developments surrounding my dysfuntional body, I wasn't feeling much up for any kind of celebration reminding me of my age progressing naturally. But fortunately Frances didn't listen to my morbundity talking. She had a "just us" girls night planned for Saturday, the 3rd (she was leaving town the 5th and wouldn't be here for next Saturday) and ordered me to make sure I was dressed up.

I had no idea what was planned except I had to get dressed up. As my raging hormones have ensured that I am 15 pounds heavier than I would like to be (what woman isn't though?), I had to go shopping for something that fit. Fortuately I found not just one, but three cool, hip-forgiving dresses at H&M ... a shopping coup if ever there was one.

A lovely black taxi avoided traffic and wove its way through Marylebone and Mayfair to the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz (the first surprise), where not only did we throw back a couple Dirty Sanchezs (served by gorgeous foreign men in white jackets), but we walked through what could only be described as a scene from a Bond film.

On the settee in the lobby bar, an aging Duchess in a pistacho silk gown and ruby and diamond tiara sat with a much younger nephew/consort/son?, dressed in full foreign military regalia, flowing hair, and handlebar mustachio. They held court to a half dozen or so friends, while the room spun with men in tuxedoes and overcoats. Tuxedoes that they clearly owned and wore often.

As we left the Ritz for our second destination (while Frances was texting Alex about the babysitter -- he and Colin were going out for a movie together), a little Spanish doorman in a grey tails and striped waistcoat held the door for me. He had a spanking white pair of gloves buttoned to his shoulder. "Thank you," I said, "Nice gloves."

He chuckled. "They are only for show. The ones I wear are in my pocket."

My head was spinning over the glitz. It was London and it was like nowhere else. We crossed Piccadilly and headed up a sidestreet. For me, already it was pure luxury. It was people-watching to the hilt; I was dressed up and wearing gorgeous shoes with three inch heels that were somehow, miraculously, comfortable; and best of all, I was so completely and utterly NOT in charge. I didn't have to think. I didn't have to decide. I just had to follow Frances. And, at the end of the night, another black taxi -- that most magical of time and space portals -- would whisk me home.

We didn't have far to walk, but on the way, Alex called again. Frances answered him in clipped phrases as I watched my feet and the taxis go by. "Here we are," she said, opening the door for me.

Alloro was the restaurant name, I saw as we walked to the desk. I only had time to think "Oh, good. Italian," as we approached the hostess.

The couple in front of us handed their coats to the woman who disappeared with them, then returned a second later. As she was returning, Frances pointed at the bar, in the room to my right, and said "Why don't you go wait in the bar and I'll take care of the coats?"

I don't know why I didn't argue, but I did what she said. I just slid off my coat and handed it to her and walked into the bar.

And there they all were: Colin, Alex, Tim, Peter, Michele and Michael, just hiding in the corner, waiting for me. I was dumbfoudned. For a second I just stood there with my mouth open. Then, naturally, I started jumping, and jumping, and probably squealing too. The English men smoking a cigarette just in front of me slid away as I sqealed and jumped more: "I win! I win! I win!" There were even a gifts!

I am not sure if you have ever considered hosting a surprise party for a friend or loved one. But I can tell you, if your lover or friend is anything like me, they will never forget it. I think, because I was single for so long, living a "city life," my friends in my life are very important, I consider them family. Only they can say, for sure, how important I am to them and this was a great way to show it. Gosh it sure was nice for all of them to come out for dinner with me. Especially when they are all hiding in a bar and I had no idea they are going to be there and I looked good in my brand new dress.

I should say that the restaurant, Alloro, and its staff played a big part in how much I enjoyed my evening. Being a server and control freak in terms of service, I was literally floored at the style and sophistication at Alloro. And the cake, as you can see, was gorgeous. I even got to make a wish and blow out the candle, something I haven't done in years.

Of course, you know the best part of the evening was Frances. Not because she booked the evening and made diabolical plans behind my back. Not because she was so thoughtful and knew EXACTLY the kind of night I would want out for my birthday.

No. It was because she was just there, sitting beside me at the restaurant, the same Frances after everything. My friend, who opened London up to me. Happy birthday to me!

Warrington Days

2007-01-26T14:01:00.000Z

It's been three months since Gordon Ramsay Holdings took over the Warrington Hotel and everyone still seems to be on pins and needles about the changeover.

Last night was packed to the gills with regulars, neighbors and new friends, everyone trying to catch hold of a piece of what they fear might be lost as restorations/renovations go ahead in the next few weeks.

They ask me questions about the future, variations on the same theme of "What is going to happen?" but I know what they are really asking: "Elizabeth, please tell us it isn't all going to be gone, won't you?"

Anyway, I smile and tell them about the dates (they keep changing) and the plans for the decor (they keep changing) and try to soothe them with any information that will help. But none really does. 'Cuz we all know the Warrington won't be our Pretty Woman, that same old high-class call girl of a boozer we have all been frequenting for a many odd decades.

After all, Eliza Doolittle was not the same cussing flower seller after Henry Higgins did her in. Probably Holly Golightly had to change too.

Holly Golightly: Ahh... Do I detect a look of disapproval in your eye?
[spays perfume in Paul's direction]
Holly Golightly: Tough beans buddy, 'cause that's the way it's gonna be.

Estimated Warrington-Ramsey makeover end date: end of March.

London Snow 2007

2007-01-24T10:25:00.000Z

It snowed in London overnight... the first time Colin and I have seen it in three winters.

The view out my office window, over the tennis courts at the Paddington Sports Club. Guys were playing tennis just yesterday, in the 34 degree temps.

The tree and the BBC studios out the front window. The cars had about a half inch on them. And, for some reason, of course, there were major delays and closures on the Underground. Guess it snows underground here too!

Those Pesky Rose-Coloured Lenses

2007-01-07T13:26:00.000Z

My good friend, disgruntled commuter has been having a hard time these days being disgruntled of late. I know the feeling.

I was out, with a friend at a gallery. We were talking loudish (comparatively, as Americans are wont to do) about the American-themed exhibit, when behold, a stranger.

"So," he said on his distinctly British accent, gesturing at the photo, "how are you finding it?"

Hmmm... I am still in London, am I not? The city of cold, reserved, angry people who wouldn't talk to you on the Tube if you were politely "ahemming" in order to indicate that their knapsack was on fire?

Since the autumn, as the days have started to shorten -- and I have known we won't be living here much longer -- I have begun to notice the rosy flush in London's cheek. Of course it doesn't surprise me. This is how I have always lived my life: looking back in with longing, with perfect rose-colored hindsight.

Michele and I stopped and chatted with the man, who was (don't worry) not a Londoner after all. But suddenly I was glad to be out and to be in the city. And I find, now, each day, I want it more, like a drug.

So I'll be busy, these next few months... out and about with my old lover, this new found fling, gitty and gritty London. Never liked its smell or its grey old creak, but something about it has a twinkle.

Besides, you know what they say: love the one you're with.

Bound for Glory: America in Colour 1939-1943

2007-01-05T14:49:00.000Z

Where: Photographer's Gallery, 5 & 8 Great Newport Street, London, WC2H 7HY
When: Through 28 January 2007
How Much: Free

In my mind's eye, The grapes of wrath are not purple or red or green. They are always charcoal grey.

I must have imagined that the days before color television the whole world was an absence of color. I thought Dorothea Lange was working in the palatte of the Industrial age. Cars were black. Movies were black and white. Even the history I learned about that time had two shades. Like the people too.

Michele and I went into the Photographer's Gallery just talking about our colorful Christmas holidays with our family. The usual crises of life: fathers and uncles and cousins dying; sisters arguing; friends bashing it out and mothers and daughters sighing over each other.

That is what was on my mind, looking at these photos. They were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) -- just as Dorothea Lange's iconic black and white images were -- to garner support for Roosevelt's New Deal.

From 1939 on, all the photos were taken with a new cutting edge technology: Kodachrome colour film. They were taken,says the curators, "to show the improvements the New Deal had made, whilst acknowledging that there was still work to be done."

The curator uses the words "immediate" and "fresh" for the way the colour strikes you when you see it. But it is more than that. Looking at the history of my home country in such perfect color, with faces so familiar, it isn't fresh at all: it is like looking at an adverstisement. It is modern and weird.

The clothes (four sisters wearing dresses cut from the same piece of fabric) and the set pieces (cars, old farm equipment, mule-pulled wagons, silos, juke joints) look so perfectly unreal, as if staged. The boys fishing with cane rods... it is almost as if they are being iconified. It is hard to believe that these are real boys at all, and that they might still be alive, and still be living in the wealthiest country in the world, in poverty. Maybe even ignored and left to die on rooftop after a hurricane.

I am not sure what the title of this show wants to glorify, most especially as it is staged in the UK, a country that seems to despise American values and politics more and more.

Is the glory in for the individual art? If so, these photos are only marginally interesting as photographs. That they were taken in color signifies a striking intersection of art and history perhaps, but this should not give greater value to the art itself.

Is it for Roy Stryker, who ran the Information Department of the Farm Security Administration and who hired the FSA photographers. Is his idea to record the time in photographs seen as any more visionary in this show as it had been in other photographic exhibits of the era? What is his value as the original curator of the Great Depression?

I wonder, maybe, if the "glory" isn't a this show curator's longing for a bygone time when film photography was still untouched by computer media and digital imaging systems. Still the prints in the show are slide film printed digitally. Photography is a stolen and changing art, and the poor and the downtrodden are always an easy subjects. It isn't a particularly surprising or challenging show to take on.

I am not saying these photos should have been left in the Library of Congress archive. They are beautiful and true to life. But it chills me a bit to see them on the walls of an international gallery under the titled "America in Colour." Because somehow it feels as if the curators want to say "This is the truth of America," as if they have any idea.

I can tell you, we all have our own truth. But own thing I do know: there is no glory in poverty.

Other info:
The Photographer's Gallery
"Bound for Glory on AOL Pictures
Buy the Book: Bound for Glory

Home for the Holidays

2006-12-31T01:25:00.000Z

When you go back home, it isn't quite the same.

I drove by 4245 Wyoming today. It was still brick and stucco and the porch that was all mine was still there.

Yet it was like an amputated body part, lifeless and still, in the wet December rain.

You cannot go back, I think. Even though I love old things: old house, used cars, antique furniture, vintage clothes. What is left in your hand is only the dust molecules of the past, like dead skins cells.

I am safe, right now, inside Ford's new house, and inside the moment. That is, after all, the only safe time. This breath. This blink. This sigh. I listen to Ford and Colin laugh in the next room and I am safe: between today, yesterday and tomorrow.

Tell me what it is I am supposed to do, when I come back. When I step back, inside the fast-forwarded, ongoing lives of my friends, left here.

I never know.

I still love them like brothers... I just don't know if we can make music again. --Beanie Sigel

Mia the Meek

2006-12-24T13:04:00.001Z

Here's the first of the Mia Fullerton series, Mia the Meek, by an old school mate of mine, Eileen Burke Boggess.

There is something about life in Catholic school that is both iconic and precious. If you were part of it, maybe you loathed it and loved it all at once.

If you are one of those people that have only experienced Catholic school through movies and TV, here's what I have to tell you: it's wild and wonderful and probably just as torturous as any other high school experience. Only, in concentrate. Smaller school. Everyone knows everyone's business. Nowhere to hide, not in study hall or the library (Sister Liz had eagle eyes!) and least of all for a 14-year-old girl.

Mia the Meek... Can't wait to read it. Hope you will too. Buy the book here.

Christmas Trees in London

2006-12-10T13:44:00.000Z

Christmas in London is here... though it isn't quite what I am used to from home in Iowa.

This weekend, my sister and her family (and likely my parents too) are out on the hunt for their Christmas tree.

They do it the way you see in old movies: out to tree farms in their boots in and coats and hats, all bundled up. The kids run ahead as they wander the rows and rows of evergreens until they find the perfect tree. Then Dad rolls in the snow under the tree (or maybe now it is the guy who works there, in his snowsuit) and they tree comes down. Some contraption -- maybe a sled with runners -- is used to drag the tree back to the car.

Christmas in London is noisy and less colorful, but it is still throbbing and joyful. Eyes still shine -- adults and children alike. Trees unnaturally spring up in tiny forests on tree corners and in front of pubs (like in front of the Old Cock in Kilburn). Dads and sons, like this one here, come and choose the perfect tree and carry it home.

I agree with dry old Ben Stein who, as a lifelong Jew, has never been bothered by a Christmas tree or a "Merry Christmas" greeting. Any holiday that makes people happy to greet each other, to decorate their homes and gather with family and friends is a good one.

So if you ask me how I greet people at this time of year, yes, Ms. Liberal from Iowa will always say Merry Christmas! Because to me, the holiday isn't defined by a word made flesh ie,"Christ" a concept that has been hijacked by fundamental Christians in the same way the wonderful American flag has been kidnapped by "patriots."

Merry Christmas is a way of saying YES! to the actions of the season: yes, I will participate in peace, love and hope for the future.

So sorry folks... for me, Season's Greetings just does NOT cut it.

P.S. Click here to read about the false Ben Stein email that has been circulating.

Why Gordon Ramsay Buying the Warrington is Good... And Bad

2006-12-05T16:07:00.000Z

I work behind the bar at the Warrington. So, theoretically, I should be able to answer questions about the future our beloved Maida Vale pub.

We do get such strange people that come in.

"Um hello. Is the Gordon Ramsay restaurant open yet?"

Both Miriama and I are standing there when the woman asks. Miriama takes a deep breath and says to me, under it: "You answer Elizabeth. I can't take it any more." And she walks away.

I smile and lean across the marble bar."No. Sorry ma'am. The restaurant will open upstairs in February."

"And what about down here?" She looks around at what is clearly a pub, not changed much at all since John left.

"The pub will be undergoing refurbishment, but it won't be closing."

Sigh. "Oh. All right then. Thank you."

And she leaves. Without so much as ordering even a single Campari and lemonade.

There are two things that come along with a celebrity chef: money and idiots.

Having been listening to whispers of plans, and also studying the Ramsay track record for refurbishment and dedication to pub ideology, we staff are beginning to be less concerned about the fate of the Warrington. Ramsay Holdings have made a big investment in the Warrington Hotel. It has always been a moneymaker. It isn't sad little place that needs saving, but it can use a cash infusion for refurb that a cow like Ramsay Holdings can afford. So celebrity power isn't all bad. It isn't Wetherspoons after all.

Still, even the most handsome, prizing-winning cows are followed by a wake of smelly pies. Hence the idiots: the fame seekers, the clutchers, the hangers-on, the name chasers, the overly-sensitive man snobs and the huffy-puffy ladies who sip and gawk. The irony, of course, is that Gordon and his partners would not be in a position to buy the Warrington, if it weren't for such people. Thank god for tiresome turds and all the energy and money they spend at hyped new restaurants.

So Gordon can have his pub and eat it too. The food will be Ramsay-delicious and the Warrington will always be beautiful, a glorious centerpiece to a charming neighborhood. And the work the Ramsay design and refurb team does, we can only hope, will preserve the life of a beloved pub for a hundred years more.

The dark cloud the local sense is this: That while Good Gordon is accustomed to the dance of fools, Maida Vale is not. This nook of London, while a bit swank, has always been a secret. Local celebs could come and go without any fuss. Name dropping wasn't our bag. Being at home and having a pint, then wandering home. That was the charm of the Warrington.

Unknowingly, Gordon may have just sh*t all over that.

A London Underground Poster

2006-12-04T15:16:00.000Z

Or... Life, Waiting to Happen

On the Piccadilly platform at South Kensington, I wondered. Which work is more meaningless?

a. The (nearly) blank poster box, pictured here.

b. The person whose job it is to make a sign that says "Awaiting Posters"?

This is not to say that meaningless work is useless work. Ironing is circular. Iron, wear, wrinkle, wash. Repeat. The tao of ironing.

Even with food, I sometimes think "Why bother eating, when you are going to have to do it all again later?"

Still, I am thinking about an apple tree again. I look at this poster box, see myself in the glass. I count. The tape and the ink and the paper. The printer, the printer cartridge. The desk and its chair , the computer, and its Word program. And finally, the woman -- or most likely, the woman -- who sat down and turned it all on and typed it and printed it. Then handed it off, with tape, to be hung.

And it keeps me thinking about apple trees.

The Abominable SNOWMAN!!

2006-12-01T17:06:00.000Z

...Or, More Love-Hate Consumerism at Christmas Time
RARR!!!
Spend bad. Me no like spend.
Jesus baby manger good.
RARR!!!
Plastic Baby Jesus manger, made China, Wal-Mart shop! BADD! RARR!!!
Errr... err...
Star sky night...good ... err..
Lights, many, hole ozone...eRRR RARRR!! Make ice melt!
Make Snowman melt! RARARRR! BAD!
Snowman?
Light?
Err... err...

Me confused.

Zen and the Art of Temping

2006-11-30T10:49:00.000Z

If you are wondering what a little slice of hell is, it's this: being in the office, as a temp, and having the person you are replacing show up, unannounced.

Then having her say: May I have a hanger please? as she stares at your coat on the rack with disdain.

Then having her say: Well, I think I'll just check my emails whilst your steaming coffee and peanut butter bagel -- and all your work for the day -- are all still sprawled on the desk.

My days as a replacement human are waning, and as I look back on my time here, I can give this sage advice to all people who work in an office.

We are all post-it notes: easily stuck on, used, and pulled away again.

For the days I am/was/or may again be a temp, I know what I am. Temps are an odd mix of Saviour and toilet roll. Necessary, gloriously redemptive, but undeniably disposable. You are always just one or two moves away from being on the receiving end of the diving hawk (pictured).

I must say, I was glad to be the sumo wrestler on the bottom for a while, though. In the past few months, life has dealt me some tough blows. My temp job has put me in the ring -- if an odd one -- and let me sweat it out, to distraction.

And anyway, you know...sometimes it feels good to just lay there and take it!

Eat Your Greens!

2006-11-25T23:16:00.000Z

So you are tired of your tree? Sick of all the WATERING?

All the pouring of water, the dampening of soil, and the decreasing of naturally dry dirt surface area bringing you down?

Are you just too poncy and lazy to water your plants, and nothing else?

Getting carpral tunnel from lifting a water jug once a week?

Feeling the pressure of a commitment, the hard core suffocation of being sucked into a long-term relationship with a palm you hardly know?

Don't worry! Freedom is at hand!!! You can take control of your life again!

Just toss that unwanted life form into the nearest bin!

Why waste precious TIME and energy on follow-through or unwanted obligations? The City of Westminster's spacious and accomodating Big Black Bins take any sort of wildlife plant! The bin, in fact, we think actually BENEFITS from your ridiculous inability to care for nauture. Compost, studies show, help break down garbage faster!

So when in London, do as the Londoners do: Toss your living trees in the trash! After all, those silly garden/farm folk can always grow more!

The Warrington-Ramsay Waltz

2006-11-23T16:46:00.000Z

Or... Living the Limbo Loco in W9

I still work at The Warrington Hotel, a couple days a week. So naturally friends and neighbours and locals ask, confidingly, what my new boss, Gordon Ramsay is up to.

Life is conjecture, really. Most of it. After John Brandon stood up at his leaving drinks that October night and said good-bye, everyone about the Warrington became a sort of inane string of meaningliness rumour and hearsay.

Martin keeps the faith and tells everyone how wonderful it will be. The underlying implication of hope from him, naturally, is that he will be a part of it. The underlying implication of hope, from most everyone else, is that he will not.

The rest of staff: we tread water and smile. Life is conjecture. Life is full of hills and valleys we cannot see around. We make friends with John, the incoming chef, and Adam, the representative of Ramsay Holdings, who is around to manage in his hands-off way. Gordon, Georgina, Renee, Miriama, Julia and I: we soothe the souls of the regulars and the locals by being familiar. We know your names, or at very least, your face and the jug or the straight glass you like your pint of Young's or Stella in. We are the bridge and the bandage.

Still, I am taking photos, now and then, of the things I believe won't survive the Ramsay sledgehammer. It's hard to hold onto a memory, I've found.

After enough time in the water, even the strongest bandages wear away.

Tempus Fugit

2006-11-19T11:59:00.000Z

I am standing still on the platform, but time is whipping by me.

There are thousands of minutes left in this week, but not that many days remain. I am thinking about loss of time, because 1) I am losing it, 2) it is being eaten away, 3) it abandoned me and never asked if it could go, and 4) it comes and goes and will come again.

London
By some time early next year, I won't live in London any more. I'll be as I always was, once again: an American living in my home. I'll have room to move and a car to drive. I'll walk less and get fatter. Everything will be much less green and the accents--the sing-song sounds of people talking-- will no longer be an everyday pleasure. I want to go home, but I will miss this home too.

Family
Nothing can stop the family growing, and the family shrinking too. My uncle Don is dying: a tumor is growing on his brain. I am so far away and I cannot do anything, except look at the color of the autumn light on the leaves and think about him.

Don and Mary Ann have 13 children. They did not set controls on their family the way everyone does now. They married and they had sex and they had children. Children of their children are all around him now, and he, too, is looking at the autumn light on the leaves, feeling time tick away.

Children
It's a strange tall woman who told me I would have none. She has glasses... no one has glasses anymore. She has done all these tests and she is telling me that I am 36, but my body is finished with cycles and my hormones are trying to make egg follicles but there are none. And I am listening and all I can think of is all the years that have gone, all the months that coincided with all those tiny pills I swallowed to say no to all those eggs that came and went and now there are none.

I am Edwina, Raising Arizona, making jokes, considering a life of crime, ridiculous and barren.

Autumn
It has hardly rained, but when it has, it surprises us. All day or all night, maybe, it is quiet and clear and lovely. Then, we are sitting and we hear it: the wind suddenly whipping up like a mood swing, the plane leaves slapping around the air. Water is pouring in through hidden holes around our front window. We hang beach towels to catch it. In the morning, again, the sun comes in the room and the tree is thinner, gaunter. More leaves have been ripped away. It makes room for weak winter sun in our front room.

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
For some they come in with the tide.
For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.
That is the life of men."

--Zora Neale Hurston

Karaoke King

2006-11-12T23:00:00.000Z

Colin Phillips, Karaoke King.

K-Box, Cranbourne Mansions
Private Karaoke Room
The Berlin Room!
Leiceister Square
Saturday Night

Colin did Sinatra and ABBA proud, and sang along with gusto. Maybe it was the Tsingo Taos talking. Or the influence of our Chinese friends we were with. Or maybe Colin really IS the next American Idol.

Anyway, it just goes to show you: you just never what you've got in you until you let it out.

Cubicle Days

2006-11-09T17:44:00.000Z

Seems like just yesterday I was that awkward, gawky new girl in the office. Now, Temp-days are ending.

What can I do, to fill my time now?

No more hole punch cocktails.
No more stapler wars.
No more chair spin competitions.
No more "ARRARHCCHHGH!" from the copier room, as the feeder jams again.
No more rainbows of post-its, in every shape.
Good-bye to labels, Avery 7163.
Ciao to that printer I love, the one that just grumbles and moans, suddenly, for no reason.
Au revoir to long walk, from here to the tea room. Ah, it's good to get exercise.
I'll miss that leaning-bag of shreddables, the view from my desk.
And Pens, oh pens! That cupboard of unending pens...

After tomorrow, it's back to life, back to reality.

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
-- Pearl S. Buck

Gordon Ramsay Eats the Warrington

2006-11-06T20:32:00.000Z

...or The Emperor's New Pub

Bonfire weekend has fizzled out with word that our new man about the Vale, Gordon Ramsay, was skulking about the bar Saturday evening.

Apparently, he's been getting an earful from the locals, who despite being British, aren't too shy to tug sweet ol' Gordo by the ear and fill his canals with a few words of their own.

One friend, V., said Gordon told her (and this is only second hand, so generally from the horsey's mouth himself) that the pub "Needs some love" and that he didn't plan to muck about with it too much on the ground floor. Sounds promising, but I'm still holding my breath. The Warrington will be closed in Feb.

Meanwhile, the old staff is generally still in place, meaning Georgina and Gordon and Mirama are running the place while customers are left waving 20 pound notes uselessly at the cute but clueless Simon. Martin is hanging on by his fingernails and sucking up for all he's worth. Temporary new manager Adam, while a sweet man, cowered in the micro-office during the big rush Saturday night, so I ducked behind the bar to help out.

The eternal question does remain: how many more restaurants, establishments, cookbooks, TV shows, advertising, and pathetic attempts at comedy (ie host of "Have I Got News for You" ACKK!) will the Emperor take on before he realizes the weight of it all has stripped him bare?

Oh, and Gordon (and friends)... if you are listening, will you do a teeny-tiny favour for your new friends in Maida Vale? PUH-LEEEZ get the guys in the Maida Vale Threshers to peel your face out of the window? It really is a fright and just too much to take right now.

Thanks millions, doll face. Kiss kiss.

Bonfire Night

2006-11-05T19:50:00.000Z

We stood at least 15, maybe 20 feet away from the flames. Yet it flung heat at us without trying. Hot on our faces, on the leather of our coats, on the woven threads in our blue jeans. The rubber in our shoes braced itself, ready in case it were forced, by the heat, to changed its shape.

It lit up the face of a girl, brown hair around her face, a hot dog bun at her lips. It coated a triangle of inky sky, and spilled all its steamy orange glow onto strangers in the blackness.

In its core, the embers. Once wood, now lifting and drifting, soft, dusty, as if it were only newsprint. In as much as it might have been the news of the day, burnt and gone and nothing left to hold but charred ash, muddied by the morning dew and, then, washed away in the rain.

The fire danced and all the people, in this triangle green, boxed in by house-boxes, cut into apartment-boxes, raised their eyes up at the sky.

The night burst with light. Pops, fizzles, squeals, bangs, and the oohhs of breath, holding it all up.

The fire burned on. He and I came and we watched it sway and swirl... a dance of the seven veils, diminishing.

On bonfire night, light licks itself out. Autumn sputters, claps and finally, is quiet.

The wind agreed, reluctantly, to bear all the smoke away.

London Morning Light

2006-11-02T20:45:00.000Z

I leave for work at nearly 8 a.m. The light is falling lower and lower on the horizon. It lives below the equator now. My shadow stretches long and tall behind me. I cannot see, but I don't care. The sun is on my face and I would rather be nowhere.

The only thing, really, between me and piercing golden rod of sunlight are the leaves. Most are still green, or maybe their edges are curling brown. Others are shimmering yellow.

They drop down, like a soft veil between me and the sun. I share the sidewalk spaces with the black-umbrella shapes of trees.

I don't mind the intrusion. I am in a city, but I am alone, too. With the sun and the leaves, and the morning.

Me vs. the Minutes

2006-11-02T16:55:00.000Z

I'm supposed to be typing up minutes. But I'm not. As you can see.

Big round table. Men in suits... Ties everywhere. Nice cup of tea, getting cold.

Mumble mumble. Scratch on pad. Quote:
"MUMBLE. MUMBLE."
Now I'm at my desk and now I have to type up MINUTES.

Minutes are the Brussel sprouts of the secretarial world.

What I am Reading: Wild Dogs

2006-11-01T16:34:00.000Z

Mary Flanagan brought me this book to workshop this week. "I just thought..." she said, then her voice trailed off. I started reading it this morning, on the Tube.

This isn't the cover of the book I have. Books have all sorts of different covers, in different markets. Probably the one here is the American market. Here is the one I am carrying in my bag.

Listen to Wild Dogs:

"We come out to the woods every evening and call to the dogs, and they never come back. And it is not about love, although we love the dogs fiercely. But the dogs didn't understand love when they lived with us and certainly don't understand it now. Whatever they felt for us then wasn't what we know of love. No, it wasn't about love. It was about belonging. Once we belonged with these dogs, belonged to them, and now that they've left us we don't know who we are."

When we get to Connecticut, Colin and I will be ready for a dog.

Lovely Carter Lane

2006-10-28T12:05:00.000Z

If I hadn't taken the temp job at the Kuwait Investment Office, I am quite sure I would never have found Carter Lane.

Lovely, narrow, winding Carter Lane, which is most certainly a ghost of itself on the weekend, when the City empties. But this City of London lane, stretching from the south side of St. Paul's down to St. Andrew's Hill above Blackfriar's, is the perfect City street on a weekday. The barber shop alone has many perks, as you can see: with staff that speak British, Americanish, and Australianish, it offers free Halloween sweets and beer, and no appointments.

I also found Wardrobe Place, a tiny courtyard of former homes, now offices, once the site of the The King's Wardrobe, destroyed in the 1666 fire. The Rising Sun pub, a shining red and green place that I can see out the window of Janis's office, the huge sign over the top of the buildings on Addle Street.

There is Shaw Booksellers... not a bookstore but a great old curvy pub on St. Andrew's Hill, around the corner from the barber shop. Across the road, you'll find The Cockpit, a wee sort of place, yes, that has a sign by the door warning you not to bother trying to enter if you are wearing dirty boots or clothes.

If you turn right out Wren House, where my office is, its just a few steps to the walkway down to the Thames across to the Tate Modern. But although I know it is there, I hardly ever walk in that direction. Instead, I am drawn to the backroads of the City and the Churchyard of St. Paul's. At lunchtime, I sometimes brush past the queues inside St. Paul's and attend 12:30 lunchtime mass underneath the enormous dome that Christopher Wren had constructed, and which withstood the bombings of the World Wars, even when nearby Ave Maria Lane (and the millions of books stored there) did not.

I have free lunch inside my office, but even if it is raining, each day I find a reason to go out and wander around. Next stop: the shop around St. Mary-le-Bow and Cheapside, Bread Lane and more.

How to be a Proper Pubman

2006-10-27T23:11:00.000Z

This is John. For 25 odd years, John has been doing just what you see here... serving pints at the Warrington Hotel.

It isn't an easy thing, to be a landlord. Sure, on the surface, it seems like a cakewalk. Hire a few Aussies, order barrels of bitter, decide between black or yellow shirts, and work some late nights. But serving your friends, your neighbors, tourists and strangers, day in and day out, year after year, is not easy.

At the 11:00 chuck-out, there is always someone begging for a lock-in. You have to be gentle and patient and kind, but firm. And you have to do it flair, because by 11, the effect of alcohol is pronounced. Rowdy, noisy, sloppy, sentimental, grabby, belligerent, mean or sometimes just plain inert: moving a customer out is not as simple as it seems. Especially when they don't want to go.

But why would they want to stay? Why would anyone want to hang around past bedtime, at, say, the Warrington, rather than the Elgin, or the Robert Browning or any other respectable pub in the area?

There are words for what the Warrington has got. Buzz, some people call it. Vibe. A history, or a "feel." But where does that come from?

Is it the marble bar with bits of it dissolved away over 150 years, from the acid in cider and the pressure of the taps? Or the lovely sirens dancing over your head, casting a spell of temptation?

Maybe it is the music? Not a hi-fi, but the songs from the bar staff or the regulars, singing when they feel like it, or the music of glass-on-glass, and voices piling on top of each other.

Is it the heavy cherry tables, or the newly-upholstered chairs, lazy and langurous, carved and shapely? Maybe its he cut of the crystal ashtrays, deadweights that have been knocked around so much, they each have their own shape?

In the Warrington Hotel, they all rest here, at ease. There isn't any pressurised, nuovo "ambience." It isn't rather any grubby unease; the local watches the tourist gape at the ceiling and smiles, letting their gaze follow again.

The old place, after 25 years together, looks like and feels like its old governor: soft and kind, a little hard to know, but always welcoming and gentle. Casual yet well groomed and put-together, it sits back on its heels and flirts quietly. There isn't any flash: even its gorgeous spectacle is lovingly subdued. Like John, its hides itself behind the people inside, lets the life glimmer, waft, and roar its way around out the narrow doors in its own time.

In the afternoon in August that I came into the Warrington, that I first met Penny and gave her my number to give to John, how could I know what would come of it? And how could any of us know we would be here to watch it come to an end?

I learned to pull an English pint of beer from a right proper pubman in a beautiful old London pub. If that is the only story I have left in the end, that is saying something.

All the Plastic in the World

2006-10-26T20:48:00.000Z

Lately I've been thinking about Little House on the Prairie. Not the books, but the show, with Melissa Gilbert and her pigtails flying.

One of my favorite characters was Mr. Olsen. Not because he was so nice and long-suffering, with the noisy wife and spoiled children. No, I remember him because of his store. Inside there were rolls of fabric, barrels of flour and buckets of hard candy. If you wanted bread or eggs or something else, you brought in your basket, and wrapped it in a flour-sack towel and carried it home.

Even when I was young, we used brown paper grocery sacks. We had a bag of bags, in a cupboard underneath the counter. Mom always kept potatoes and onions in sacks in that cool, dry place too.

I went shopping, for tomatoes and salad at Marks and Spencer Food. They were all sealed in plastic. Six vine tomatoes from Kent, in a plastic box, wrapped in cellophane. Rocket salad in a bag, triple washed for me, ready to eat. The cashier swiped my plastic card and put my plastic groceries in a plastic bag.

In the morning, now, I put on my make-up. Or at night, I take it off. I wash my hair and condition it, then I put more glop on it, to give it shine. I tone and I floss and I deoderize. I shave, brush, spritz, scrunch, mousse, and spray. Plastic razor, plastic bottles, plastic tubes.

All the wonders of the world, all the secrets of beauty, the perfection of nature, encased forever, like Eva Peron. The contents are lifeless: it's the container that gives it meaning.

I tear at and twist the bottles, boxes and bags, then toss them in the bin. It seems, if I close the lid, they aren't really there.

I want to plant an apple tree.

Health Care Perspective

2006-10-25T08:43:00.000Z

295,734,134 = Current US Population
15.6 = Percentage of Americans without health care coverage
46,134,525 = Number of Americans without health care coverage
60,441,457 = Current UK Population
100 = Percentage of British citizens/residents and EU residents with health care coverage in the UK
0 = Number of Communist plots concocted as a result of universal health care in UK
28 = Number of other "normal" (ie Westernized) countries that offer universal health care (including Canada and Australia, places that we like)
1 = Number of Westernized, first-world countries not offering universal health care to its citizens(United States)

read more here

T-E-M-P

2006-10-24T11:23:00.000Z

Where am I, you might be asking?
I am in a temporary place.

It's really pretty. I have a glass box--well glass on two sides, that I sit inside for 8 hours. I type things on letterhead. I make coffee and tea.

I am in T-E-M-P land. It's nice here.

This particular version of Templand is populated with the nicest ever of computer guys. They still work in the big CITY so, they are all wearing their tie and shirt uniforms. I am still just a secretary, so I sit with other secretaries at lunch. We talk about Madonna and her Malawian baby, and shopping, and reality TV.

I wonder if they are busier than I am.

Then I get those emails, the Q&As: tell me all about you: If you were a color, what color would you be? I don't think they are all that busy either.

Here's my Templand poem:

Templand is nice and quiet and really very clean.
It's mostly beige and file-cabinet grey.
The people here are never mean.
I like it here, but I don't want to stay.

Days of Wine and Dial-up

2006-10-07T11:28:00.000Z

Seems like just yesterday I was hanging upside-down from the arm of the sofa, reaching into the mass of cords behind our computer, to unplug and plug the phone cord.

Seems like only a day or two ago, I was tapping my foot, watching that little bar in the bottom right hand corner slowly fill up with blueness while a photo of my niece opened.

Seems like just a week ago I watched the Prince and the Muppets video on YouTube—all three minute and 37 seconds of it—in 7 second bites, over the course of three hours while it loaded, slowly, loaded.
But now, those days, those good ole days, when life was… slower, less hurried… are all gone now.

Now, it rush rush rush. Now if I want to know the weather, I don’t raise my eyes to look out the window. I don’t wait till seven minutes past the hour on the BBC radio. No, it comes to me one megabit per second, like a cat blinking its eyes.

Rush rush rush.

Yes, broadband has come to Howlips house. The good old days are gone.

And it only took two and half months for UKOnline customer service to get a number from us then we call them again then they escalate it and then they ignore it, then we call again and they give us another date (and blame it on British Telecom), then the date passes again, and then we call again, and I tell them that yes I am in fact Mr Colin Phillips and how dare they say I sound like a woman and they give us a new date and say there’s nothing they can do … the fault is with BT and the date comes and it goes and all that time Lane comes to visit and she goes and meanwhile the in-laws are here for 32 days and they are still here and all that and poor BT just can’t find the which cable goes where and what switch was it and they moved to WHERE? Down the street? What street again? What number? Now I’ve lost the cable again…

Ahh… broadband in the land of customer service-free, technologically-Victorian, whats-in-it-for-me London.

What ever happened to Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Launching a Mistress

2006-09-29T20:01:00.000Z

At Random House last night I met Lily (not her real name) and it reminded me of a story I want to tell you.

But before I tell you, you have to know about last night. Lily and I and a roomful of disconnected people milling, the spaces filled with small talk and wine. We ate mini quiches, but we were there because of two people: Kate Williams and Emma Hamilton.

Kate has been writing about Emma for years. Last night at Random House, the two women had a kind of “coming out.” Not the gay definition, but the social one, the debutante style.

“England’s Mistress” a biography of Emma Hamilton, was launched onto the world with a speech and a bouquet of white flowers. And, on that same raft floated my new friend Kate Williams, Emma’s alter ego, her hand servant, her device, her mother, her author.

I wondered, if someone wrote my life story someday, how much like each other the author and I would become.

While Kate floated in a new author’s dream, I did what I thought I should be doing: networking. After all, I was, somehow inside Random House. Who knew when or if I would ever return?

So I pushed poor Zack out of the way-—in my charming way—-so I could talk to Lily. It was, after all, in the name of “business.” But as Lily and I talked, I felt the uselessness of my moves, and I thought of a story, not entirely fiction.

A young woman--let’s call her “Aye”-—met a man. His name is Richard. Aye wanted Richard and he liked her too. So they flirted and did all the things people in lust do to lure each other in.

Then Aye discovered Richard had another lover. We’ll call her “His Wife.” His Wife was very angry and confused. She shouted. She was under the impression she should come first. Aye acquiesced. Aye saw that Richard was torn but that His Wife was more important to him. She had more experience and, to him, she was more real.

Richard and His Wife disappeared into the horizon and Aye was left to wonder what she did wrong and what to do differently, next time.

* * *

So this was the story I was thinking about when I met Lily.

Lily is an editor’s assistant at Random House. Her business is taking a writer’s work and breaking it down, then putting it back together, in some other form. Meeting her, feeling myself going through the mechanizations of the business of publication, I felt like a call girl. And I wondered, too, why I was so afraid of her. Why should I, along with my friends, that huddled mass of talent-- Charlie, Michael, Diana, Zack and other writers in the corner—be so terrified to speak to Lily or her boss? After all, we are their commodity.

But then, I looked at Kate and I knew. She was not me. She was “the wife” and I was the mistress. She had mastered the house, while Emma left by a back entrance. She was the recognized, the validated, the known quantity. We, the huddled writing mass, are the whores, the chattel, the consorts at the edge of the room.

Rough and unproven, alluring but frightening, still.

After that, I relaxed and Lily and I just drank wine and talked about life and Texas and girl things. I dropped my mantel. After all, I thought, Kate didn’t find herself in the middle of a Random House launch party by accident or from a bit of networking. She did it by working hard.

There is, in the end, a difference in execution, between the wife and the mistress.

This book of poems was given to me by a girl I used to know
I guess I read it front to back 50 times or so.
It’s all about the good life and staying easy with the world.
It’s funny how I loved that book,
And I never loved that girl.
--"Step Inside this House"

The Parental Invasion

2006-09-13T06:58:00.000Z

My in-laws, Henry and Linda, have descended upon us in London. Henry is a proper old limey, having been born here. Still, things are somewhat different since the World War II days, so I've been taking them around the town. Here we flying high in the London Eye... The weather has been spot on and even too hot, much to Linda's dismay, as she didn't pack for hot weather. Who would? It was 85 here on Saturday.

We had a big night planned for them Friday night after they arrived, a surprise, though Henry guessed it, naturally as he's been keeping up with my blogs. We went to dinner at Smith's of Smithfields (seen here, where Henry tried the local beer) and then to the Tower of London to meet our friend, the Yeoman Warder Robin Miller, for a quick VIP tour and the Ceremony of Keys, followed by socializing at the Yeoman Warder's club with Robin and his wife, Heather. It was great, and a good excuse to dress up. Too bad you can't take Henry anywhere.
In an attempt to wear out my tireless guests, I took them to Kew Gardens, South of the Thames. This is the Royal Botanical Gardens that is nothing at all like a park or a greenhouse. It is HUGE, acres and acres of land, with about 12 enormous green house, an orangery, cafe, shops, a palace, etc. They even have an "Explorer" train similar to the conveyances they use to get you from your car to to the gate at Disney World. But we had none of that.

I am trying to convince H&L that this is actually a weight-loss regime for all of us. We walked all over that afternoon, and even did the stairs in the steaming hot tropical humidity of the Palm House. Linda smiled through it all, of course, though as the Kew has that effect on people, especially on a sunny day. Then it was on to the enforced walk to Richmond along the Thames, where we spotted crane and dodged cyclists on our brisk mile and quarter hike. It all ended well with a cheeky half-pint at The Prince's Head on Richmond Green.

On the weekend, when Colin was around, he took them on a rousing tour of the inside of their eyelids, the inside of their books, and the park in our own neighborhood, Paddington Recreation Ground. I guess Colin has some sympathy for his parents and figured they needed a day off from my regiment to rest and take in the diversions of people watching and local cricket matches. Anyway, the weather was perfect for lounging around in the shade with nothing to do, something you can't always say in London.

More to report in days to come.

My Run in Hyde Park

2006-09-05T18:13:00.000Z

2006 Women's HydroActive Challenge
September 3rd
London's Hyde Park
Finish Time: 40 minutes 31 seconds

The HydroActive Challenge 5K is a race for women and there were woman all around me. But even so, I didn't feel like talking to anyone. Almost everyone there was running for some charity or other, so the other runners were travelling in packs of matching shirts. I saw a few people wearing the "Mind" shirts like mine, but I didn't care to talk to them.

When I worked for Michael Forbes restaurants many years ago, my boss and friend Kate Riley said she'd always wanted to run the San Diego marathon, but she'd never gotten around to it. So I signed her up for it one day. I remember her face when I told her. I remember saying to her, "What? So just do it now."

And she did. She didn't complain or even hardly talk about it. But the next week she just started training, running in all her free time, which wasn't much. I was really proud of her and boggled by it. Even up until recently, I couldn't imagine running for longer than a minute or so. I'd tried it on treadmills and despised it. And here was my friend, who went home, after a 10- or 12-hour workday of work, laced up her shoes for a 8, 10 or even 20-mile run in the dark.

Kate Riley ran the San Diego marathon, and even though I had some feeling of credit for getting her there, I knew I didn't do any. All that ever happened was I carried even more respect and awe toward her. She became a superwoman to me.

I don't have any intention to try and run a marathon. I really only have enough attention span for one mile or two and then finally the three point two I ran on Saturday.

There isn't any reason for you to be proud of me or to think what I did was interesting. I raised money for Mind merely because I signed up too late to get my own spot and had to go through a charity to get one. I ran 5K, which isn't far: Colin ran the New York Marathon in 1998 in four hours and 54 minutes... that's four hours and 14 minutes of running more impressive than my run.

The only thing I can say about this run is that it-- along with the morning runs that led up to it-- showed me something different about myself. It opened up a little space inside myself that I never knew of before, something I'd never seen. And even though maybe no one else can see it, I can. It isn't about "healthy" or "fitness"
or anything. It individual and it is quite unexplainable.

Thanks, by the way, to all the people who are in the big huge pyramid of support underneath me. You may not even know you are there or know what you did to keep me running around the park every morning, but even though I ran all by myself in that crowd Saturday, I was not alone.

My Left Slipper

2006-08-30T08:55:00.000Z

On Thursday, we were just fooling around in the bedroom before bed. You know. The way people do.

I never wanted this. I never wanted to become so attached to--

Well, anyway. I tossed off my slippers. One foot, two foot. Barefoot, blue foot. Like a Dr. Suess rhyme. I tossed them away.

It's Wednesday now. And look at it. Even the cleaning lady has come and gone. And no left slipper.

I wouldn't wear just one out of the room. Would I?

I didn't toss it out the window, did I?

Colin checked atop the wardrobes (and nearly broke his leg falling off the bed).

We just can't find, my left slipper.

We're not sure, but... we think it might have gone caravanning.

Any-hoo, if you see it, let me know. My feet are cold.

Notting Hill Carnival: The Corporate Mob

2006-08-29T13:54:00.000Z

We went for our third Notting Hill Carnival yesterday. Didn’t plan to, just like we didn’t plan to be in the city for the bank holiday weekend. But it has always been the right idea in the end.

Sarah and Tom planned the day for us and I suddently remembered what it was like to have friends. Sarah texted us that we should pop by at one for drinks and nibbles, then we’d all head over to the Carnival together, to the secret spot new The Cow pub where the frantic crowds wouldn’t smoosh us, where we’d get a good look at the dancers and floats.

At the parade, I did what I always do: made myself small and got a spot right up the front. Sarah, Kate, Colin, Tom and Georgina and the others stood at the back, on the curb, and looked over the heads. I can’t see over heads, so I regress into child-status and make my own way to the front.
The wall-less semis turned the corner, speakers stacks aimed at us. The bass vibrated in our chests. Participants, on the other side of the barricade, walked, chatted, danced. They went by. Most everyone on my side of the cattle gates just stood and stared, watched. No one interacted. Only one DJ or two said “Let me hear you scream,” then a half-hearted “Ahh!” would drift upwards. No one waved or called to us. No one ran close and slapped our hands or threw candy. The semis and the strings of dancers just went by as if we weren't there at all.

One lorry after another went by, packed to the ceilings with hi-fi equipment more fit for stadiums than street corners. The little girl next to me plugged her ears and watched as a truck passed by: a man lolled on top of a speaker, looking out at all the people, unsmiling.

One truck growled toward us, its grill covered by a huge yellow banner “sponsored by Western Union.” Dancers chased after it and swarmed around it. A few girls wore carnival costumes, but most dancers were just covered in yellow bandanas and red t-shirts, everything wrapped, tied and torn around them. Everywhere the fabric read: Western Union. And I wondered as the dancers chased the moving speaker wall and we stared at them going by: whose Carnival is this?
After a little while, we retreated away from the frontline and camped out on a curb, closer to The Cow. We formed a circle in the sunshine and gabbed, people-watched and drank expensive beers. Buying £3.50 Red Stripe from The Cow gave us loo privileges.

It was Carnival, written about and touted the world over, one of the largest street festivals anywhere. A celebration of Caribbean culture and alternative liftestyles. Tom passed around a joint. The cops on horses nearby called out to us: not to stop the use of illegal substances, but to mind ourselves as a truck needed to turn around.

Sarah scratched the horses’ upper lips and they loved it. We all seemed to enjoy their company more than the corporate mob—all sound and the fury, signifying nothing—turning the corner nearby. The horses rolled their eyes and they clicked their teeth. One mad man walked right up to the white mare and licked its face all over, until the horse licked his mouth back.

Children reached their hands up, then squealed and jumped when the horse used its nose to look for a snack in their tiny hands. Orientals and Caucasians and Blacks, in all kinds of clothes, stopped and stood with the animals, for a photo. The horses peed and defecated on the cobbled street and we just watched, minding the stream didn’t come our way. In way, it was soothing to have them near. We weren’t worried for our safety. We didn’t care whether we had police protecting us. It was just the lovely sight of gleaming horseflesh, and the sound of wet snorts in the crowd and noise: it was comforting.

The glorious creatures, you never realize until you stand next to horses just how enormous they are, or how well made for man they are.

Old West End, to the Nines

2006-08-27T12:10:00.000Z

Last Chance Londoner, Part III

Closer, closer. Quiet now. Listen.

It is dark and the night is over us. I am hiding here, but not because I want to. London swallowed me, and I am sunk, sinking into her marshy fields, her fetid greens, the old, rubbish-strewn streets. Find me, around this corner, and that one. I am a poor girl, with only this wick to light your way.

It’s Friday morning and I am walking across Green Park, against the grain of the tourists streaming toward the Changing of the Guard.

It is still August, and London, teeming with strangers, is still oddly empty. A guard, in his tall fur hat and red coat, passes me. He’s alone and he seems late. He doesn’t belong here, either. Where is his childhood bedroom? North Yorks? Aberdeenshire? Isle of Man? I wonder. Two women, on their way to Buckingham Palace, laugh out loud at him as he rushes by.

I am in the embrace of Green Park and it is Green, the towering trees bending their leaving branches over the walkways, dappling the light, making the wide space feel like private coves of open air. I watch a Metropolitan Police on a grey mare clop-clop across the tarmac. The day is one blue, glorious, hot and cool, under sun-day, smooshed into a cloud-and-shower-chased August. North Atlantic Summer is tired and ready to go.

We are all meeting around the Tube stop on Piccadilly, around the Ritz. I’ve done it, this week: become a tourist again, in my own town. What have I done to myself? I am discovering the London in me. I am finding out what I know, and what have discovered in myself.

We walk along the Queen’s Walk, then steal into a low and narrow side passage, cut there as if by Potter magic. You’d think only our leader, good ole Hilary and you know this way. But discovering London’s secret alleyways is like loving a discreet and lovely whore. You are the only one, until you pass someone coming in, as you go out.

This is the Old West End and it suddenly makes me feel funny. I am 5 minutes from Piccadilly Circus, from the ugly, 1960s F-R-A-N-C-E building, from the clattering of buses and press of car fumes. Yet here is this tiny, old pantry window, with its single metal bar-—the "child’s thief box"-—and the London I live in has disappeared.

There are no streetlights in the 18th century. There are no sewers. What falls from the horses is left in the street, along with everything else that is tosses there, from the bedpans and dishpans.

Street children are pushed through tiny windows of these wealthy houses. “Link boys” earn money by carrying lanterns for the gentlemen as they walk from one house to another. Inside the rounded window of White’s gentlemen’s club on St. James, Beau Brummel is sitting, dressed to the nines. Under his gorgeous waistcoat, he wears a corset, certainly, smug that he convinced good and smelly King George IV to wash off that make-up. He isn’t an icon: he is a real man, with his cravat in fine, boisterous form.

The windows over the doors of these houses are not décor: they are “lights,” a way to identify a house before houses were numbered, those hundred years before the Post existed. Light the candles and lanterns inside and the fan lights illuminated the streets outside: It was drawn in detail on the invitations for parties, so guests could find the right house.

The men are in the coffee shop (now a wine merchant), dressed or undressed. The shades are drawn discreetly. They are piling themselves on the grand scales, checking their weight, sometimes before and after lunches, such is their vanity. The women never weigh themselves then.

We make our way, in and out of the streets, getting closer and closer to St. James’s Palace and the city home of the Prince and his new wife. I am reminded I am in Modern London. "Fish and Chip Dinner" a board reads outside a centuries-old pub, "Just 6.99!"

Grey dust rains down from the scaffolding, everywhere around us, in this millionaires’ quarter. Above our heads and from behind temporary wooden work-fences Polish workers watch us file past. They aren’t hidden in the dirt and darkness, below the street, as they would have been hundreds years ago. They wear bright yellow vests. We see them and we are reminded how we can visit, but we cannot stay.

Under the Stafford Hotel, under these chi-chi Mews Suites named for beloved horses, are hidden rooms where the richest people secret themselves for private dinners. The Queen, the Thatchers, the old money set dresses up the old cellar to hide from us. Where once only servants and horses dwelled, the best of London call their own.

Hilary rounds us back to the Queen’s Walk in Green Park. Green, it is said, because a King once plucked a flower there while walking with his Queen and presented to his favoured mistress. Hence, the Queen decreed, there would be no more flowers planted.

Closer, closer. Quiet now. Listen.

Poor girl… put the wick out. We have arrived to our destination and you are no longer needed.

The lantern flame extinguishes and she disappears, a smudge on the sky, into the city skyline, another secret.

Old West End
Original London Walks
Fridays, 11 a.m. Green Park Tube (Summer Schedule)

The Feel of London's South Side

2006-08-23T09:42:00.000Z

Last-Chance Londoner, Part II

At Coin Street, Gabriel’s Wharf, you are finally there.

The gross cement casings of the new theatre parade are behind you. You can see Old London rising up across the Thames, behind its bridges. The clatter of the skateboards has died underneath the Waterloo Bridge.

At Coin Street, South Bank yawns and kicks. The tide lashes the banks and the pier. Tourists walk by on their way from one sight to another, hardly looking at to the land they are anchored on, this side. Their necks swivel toward the London they know, across the way.

Over there, on Monday, in Clerkenwell, taxis roared by. I could not see the Smooth Field of the past. Maybe if I tried hard I could still hear the strains of Italian sopranos singing in closet rooms, practicing in exile from their homeland. But connection to the older past, under all that steel and Wetherspoon-progress, seemed severed, like a head at the chopping block.

But the South Bank, here in Lambeth, feels its ghosts, the marshy upbringing—work, sweat, toil, space and filth. Like Bermondsey, the working-class southeast neighbour, redolent of its long-gone tanneries, where no one WANTED to live, for the tools of seasoning were animal waste: urine and faeces. Waterloo, its belching industrial waterside until the Wars, when it became a queue of bomb craters.

Culture climbed out of that rubble and now trapped in horrific 1960s cement architectural prisons are the National Theatre, the National Film Theatre and Festival Hall. Bunkers of subsidized cultural evolution.

It’s strange, for me, taking these “Original London” walks now, after living here two years. I am not a tourist, so sometimes I hardly need to look at what is pointed out. I’ve seen the awful hulking slabs of morbid grey cement that are the “balconies” of the National Theatre. I’ve visited the funky, cooperative, low-rent shops at Gabriel’s Wharf. I know the tale of OXO Tower, with the “windows” that spell out O-X-O, even in an advertising-free area.

Yet why does the South Bank feel so beguiling? It’s as if these rows of buildings on the waterfront are a movie set façade with all the good workings behind. The ugly tower blocks still loom even though the Coin Street cooperative managed to save their little square of London. The Waterloo train line cuts through the houses overhead, even though the flower boxes at the King’s Arms still overflow with petunias. Meanwhile, the old flat-fronted workers’ quarters at Windmill Walk—where, in the early 1800s, “night soil men” came before there were sewers to take away the privy waste—are selling for £700,000.

Maybe it is the way you can stand in the streets here, away from the River, away from the main roads. Maybe it is way that tourists have dissolved, and Londoners—brown or white—walk in ones or pairs and eat, talk and look at our hoard as if we are lost souls. Maybe it is the way the water table here is ever-rising, so the Underground pumps must work 24 hours to keep the Jubilee Line from flooding. As if the old rural marsh is whispering “I’m coming back for it.”

Or maybe it’s the clear, unbroken connection to the machine—man to shovel to horse to tractor to forge to crane to pump. This side of the river has always been working hard. So if a bus or a screaming ambulance soars by, it doesn’t seem quite so out of place. Step into a garden, surrounded by gorgeously outfitted council flats, and the reedy bushes also have their place, holding the soil, using the water, filtering the air.
The South Bank is wild and sweaty and filled with true dirt, from the Pig Trotter Lady at the Old Vic and ravenous Hello editors to the Irish navvies building the railway and the distracted minds inside Bedlam. It is work and it is hard, and in South Bank, you feel it.

Original London Walks
“Somewhere Else” London
Tuesdays 2 p.m. Embankment Tube (Summer Schedule)

A Walk in Clerkenwell

2006-08-21T21:30:00.000Z

Last Chance Londoner, Part I

London holds its secrets like a favour. You are only rewarded if you go look for them, and if you ask.

I walked today between raindrops, between eras, between churchyards’ gasps of silence and the blat! of a city beside them.

I went to St. Paul’s Tube and the City of London to meet Jean and 30 other tourists more green than me. Only 7,000 people live in the City of London. I came here, not to see its steel finance, or to meet its residents, or even to feel the weight of its long-laid cobbles. I am looking around: spying young tree growing on rooftops, imagining lives dead and gone and wondering how—from just a glance like this—I am supposed to know how to hold onto London after I go.

London loves her history. She wears it under her skirt like six or seven or 70 silk and muslin petticoats, some rougher and heavier than the others, all there to make her look grander, more important. Like Smithfield Market, now not much more than a tarted-up iron-work trellis, it is loud and busy in the mornings with diesel fumes, farm-raised carcasses, refrigerator trucks rumbling—all surrounded by ugly, post-war buildings. No more dirt or grass, the 700-years of blood-soaked “Smooth Field” not even a faint memory. Bloody Mary burned thousands of Protestants on this spot. Now there is a roundabout and a plaque. History becomes something imagined.

We followed Jean along the streets, one called Cloth Fair. Her story of the poor tailor, pushing back through the crowds at the market, shouting at the dodgy vendor over the rotten bolt of fabric sold him: I could see it in my mind. But still my mind was busy as it watched a young woman get out of a man’s car. Her white denim mini-skirt hung from her pubic bones. “Bye darling” she said, and licked her painted lips. Her flip-flops smacked the wet pavement as she walked away. Where does she live? Not here, in this white-collar island, where businessmen abandon the city like a mistress on the weekends. The history hangs around, like this girl, a misfit in the hidden lanes.

Although there is still traffic and people, it’s quiet in London right now. It’s just the tourists. It takes a Londoner to notice that. The bank holiday marks the end of kids’ school break, so families are away, tourists themselves in some other land. We are all walking blind, when we go to a place like Clerkenwell.

The city workers scuttle by Charterhouse Square wearing their Ipods, clueless to the thousands of plague victims buried under it. And the tourists who visit, bite off tiny chunks of history without any sense of daily life in London: the misdemeanours of the living world that spins by, on two feet, or two or four wheels.

It’s hard to look, hear, to take it all in. Even one little village, like Clerkenwell, with the peasants revolt, the martyrdom of William Wallace, the New River, necessitated by the filthy drinking water in the old one, the Courts of Dusty Feet in Cloth Fair, Handel’s sly performances in the home of the musical coalman Thomas Britton, all of Henry the VIII’s Catholic destruction, and the bombs and evacuation in the Blitz. Here you find a tiny corner of the world that hosts thousands upon thousands of layers of lives which are no bigger or smaller or less complex than mine. They are just past.

The past changes, like the Fleet River. It cuts through a city, then it goes bad with rot and decay. It gets covered over and, then, when it refuses to be hidden, it explodes and shows itself. Open, exposed, redefined. And then it is covered over again. But it is always there.

Crazy Homies Mexican Dream…

2006-08-18T17:27:00.000Z

Or, Eating Whacked Burros in a Basement

The lengths I will go to for tequila and salsa.

We threw a flat-warming for our friends (which meant we had to actually MOVE. I am still suffering dial-up for this.) The result was a very good restaurant recommendation, inspired by our featured drink.

The beverage de la casa? A homemade VERY BERRY Margarita, created from a recipe book named— oh sweet hey-soos! —Margarita ROCKS! It did rock, taking me back to my sombrero-wearing days of slinging chimichangas at Chi-Chis.

It must have been serendipity. Our wide-eyed Atlanta friend Amity said “Have you tried Crazy Homies yet?” as she licked the sugar from the rim.

“Oh yes,” I said. “Alex gets his hair cut there.”

Amity tried not to look too confused and pressed on with her review.

See it’s just plain “Homies” in Bayswater where all the hot Polish chicks cut your hair, but it’s CRAZY Homies in Bayswater, on Westbourne Park Road, where they serve enchiladas and margaritas that will finally curb your edgy craving to run for the border.

See, it isn’t our families that make Americans overseas long to come home. It isn’t driving on the right side of the road or even the joy of being blasted with air conditioning when you enter a building.

It’s the number 3: two enchiladas and one tamale, with rice and beans. It’s tacos de carne asada served with warm four tortillas. It’s baskets of hot, greasy tortilla chips (not French-fry-based ones), bowls of mild and spicy salsas, bottomless cups of Pepsi, and icy cold glasses of lime-tequila goodness, rimmed with salt. All served within 8 minutes of when you order it by the smiling-est Mexican guy with a little mustache and a bright pink shirt.

Oddly, however, Mexican food isn’t popular in Britain. Sure there are the odd Mexo-Brit converts. But not many. Several factors may influence this: One, Britons go to Spain for a warm holiday, where many of them eat tapas and other traditional Spanish food. And fish and chips. Mexico is too far away.

Two, Mexican food is too spicy and exotic. It’s an unknown. What’s a taquito, Alex asked? It’s hard to describe it without reference to a chimichanga. Try it.

Three, there aren’t any Mexicans in London to make it. Mexican food made by Indian guys (a la Texas Embassy in Trafalgar Square) is just not the same. Which means what you get is not very authentic. In fact, it’s usually pretty bad. Chi-Chi’s is sounding pretty good right now.

Entre Crazy Homies. It’s menu featured tacos, tostados, and “burros” (fortunately we were not serve any donkeys), a close, if not more delicious call, to the standard burrito. There were enchiladas, quesadillas (called “gringas”), taquitos, and even fried calamari. The names were right, and the slow-cooked pork, the smoky enchilada sauce, the kick of the salsa was all right too.

The prices were reasonable (6-10 quid for a main), the margaritas were shaken! (what?!) with fresh lime juice, and the bar stocked with a fine and reasonable selection of anejos and reposados. They even made “frou-frou” margaritas (Espresso anyone?) for the more—or less—adventurous.

But, really the conclusión feliz was sinful cinnamon-y churros for dessert with a CUP of layered vanilla and chocolate sauce to dip them in.

Madre mio!

Crazy Homies
125 Westbourne Park Road, W2 5QL
Tel 020 7727 6771

Different

2006-08-16T14:57:00.000Z

One Afghani mini-cab driver said in Time Out this week that what surprised him the most when he arrived in London was that "so many people here aren't white.

"I thought that all the men going to work would have the round hat and a stick. (Londoners) have learnt certain attitudes, that have a certain confidence that is partly about having learnt the language, but also the result of mixing so many people from different backgrounds... In a way, you could say that being a Londoner is a state of mind."

On the 10th of August, we'd been here two years. What has living in London done to the state of my mind, I wonder? Why do I keep wanting to take photos of people on the Tube, like this?

I think, just like this Afghani mini-cab driver, I can sense a separateness from myself and the average Londoner, as if there is such a thing. I think, just like him, I am fooled into thinking that "Londoners" exist. Sure, there are kids who live here and grow up here. People are from here. Some people stay here. But just like any city, London has more than its fair share of people just like him, just like me: outsiders who "live here now." Estonian? Afghani? Nigerian? Italian? Canadian? Bangadeshi? Chinese? Iowan? When we all land in London, we are all different, and we are all the same.

It's easier, when you are alone and cut off and far from home, to think that your experiences are somehow harder, meaner, colder than anyone elses. "Jobs are scarce, people are closed-off." For some reason, it's easier to see the differences and to blame them, than to work within the language of similarity. I don't know why.

Our lives are inconvenienced, lately, by fear and threats. Life is getting shaken up and we are being forced to do things differently.

But we said yes to forcing others to change their lives. Why should we not be expected to reciprocate?

Clear Plastic Bag

2006-08-11T15:59:00.000Z

Lately I’ve been reminded a lot that I don’t have a child.

Mom went to Newton, Kansas to be with my sister. She said my sister needed help with her new house. I said, “I guess it’s a good excuse to see Maggie (her granddaughter), too.” “Well, there is that incentive too.”

My only girlfriend in London is cuddling with her new baby, sweet, sweet. But my only friend, when she is talking to me on the phone, often suddenly cries out, as I am mid-sentence: “Are you waking up? Are YOU waking up?” I try not to feel like she isn’t listening.

My ovaries haven’t recovered, I guess, since the miscarriage. So we think. So it’s just that futile spinning of schedules and numbers and another month goes by. The doctors -- aren’t they sweet? -- say things like “You’re not that old.” But “a family,” to me, isn’t just Mom and Dad fawning on a solitary kid. They are kids and dogs and chores and chaos, all rolling over each other. Lots of noise.

And, no matter who I say anything to, including you, I am the bad guy. I am the broken string on the guitar, the discordant twang complaining. It is right, really: Moms are right. If you say anything about any one of them--friend, sister, mother-- and you have no "experience" then you might as well be a turd that learned to talk.

“Just wait till you have one. Then you will see what it is like” all the horrible mean awful women say. All those women who matter and have meaning to the world because their child didn’t get flushed down the Paddington rail station toilet. The ones who “know things” when I am stupid and clueless and evil for wanting my friend to still be my friend, and my mother to still visit me, and for the world to stop revolving around all the babies that, for some reason, I don’t have.

I don’t know why I thought of that. I guess it is on my mind.

Amber asked me a question. She said, in an e-mail to me today,

“so, that's all we're talking about today, airport security and how to put everyone who plans to fly this month in total angst. we're flying west in three weeks- i'd really like to have some crayons and a coloring book with us. so much for carrying my bride's maid dress on the plane with me...

any thoughts there in London?”

These are the thoughts that go through my head, me, this selfish pillar of salt who would never think of crayons because I don’t have a two-year-old:

1. I am not afraid to fly. Maybe I am too stupid to be afraid. But, now, I don’t want to get on a plane without Colin. Because if we go, we’d like to go together.

2. If I had to pick up and walk out the door forever, live in a concentration camp or where ever--leaving everything behind, what would I take? I don’t know. A photo of my family. One favorite book. A pen and paper, if I could. A good pair of shoes and socks and a warm coat and hat. You can do pretty well with good socks and a warm hat.

3. People don’t want peace. If we did, we’d act on it. We'd spend more time in the garden. We'd walk places, instead of driving. We’d sit out on the front porch at night and listen to the cricket, or the children playing or the cars passing. We’d turn off the Playstations, the TV and the news. Because there is so little of the mess you can change or control.

4. We can only love our family and our friends, and we just try not to be mean and judgmental in our minds about the way we think about anyone. People are people, period. Just like you. They need forgiveness. I believe, when you walk into the light at the end of your life that that is what you will know. Doing those things is hard enough, really. I know, because it's hard for me everyday to not be mean and small. No need trying to solve Israel and Iraq’s problems. Just try to solve your own.

5. Eat a grapefruit today, or maybe some watermelon. They are so juicy and delicious. I never ate them before, and wow, are they good.

I want a baby, and when will I have one? I don’t know. I just know when he or she gets here, that we aren’t going to make our decisions from watching CNN.

Fruitstock Juices Us

2006-08-08T10:22:00.000Z

Colin and I were lured by the people streaming through Regent's Park. I told Frances "it looked like the Trail of Tears, with strollers and picnics." Colin and I were heading home, from a missed attempt at the Marylebone Farmer's Market when we stumbled on this.

The thing I really like about Innocent Juices product is their marketing. They are precious and funny. Their team sells their juices and smoothies (and their No Barbeque-ing signs) in a way that makes you want to curl up on the sofa in the evening and eat a pizza (vegetarian, naturally) and watch "Anchorman" with them. They'll think it's so hilarious, too, when Steve Carrell, says "I killed a man with a trident!"

Sheesh. What is it about red double-decker buses that makes you want to lay out in a big red lounge chair and drink a refreshing cocktail with a cucumber floating in it? I didn't locate any signs that said "Don't drive big red bus after consuming Pimms." Those kinds of warnings are definitely more of an American thing.

My friend, Robyn, in Kansas City, is getting started on a online candy business that she is calling "Eat Me." I pondered whether that name might put some customers off. But, I never said anything, because really, the cheekiness of the name suits her personality. And, clearly, other businesses are getting away with it. Organically.

People were cramming to eat, lined up all around at the "Gourmet Food Tents." We had to walk by them all to get where we were going. But, alas, look. See the second to last tent? It's a fish and chip tent. A huge queue. And this one? Nearest us? The one on the end? It's a burrito stand, with two or three measly customers. Not even a proper queue. "Say, Alastair, old boy? What do you fancy eating here at Fruitstock?" Why, Nigel, my good man, I think I shall have a healthy plate of fish and chips!"

We nearly made it home and then I spotted this.

Well, it's just a minivan, right? Ummm... Now after much struggle and Colin's verbalization of my thought, I was able to say to myself: "This minivan's name IS "eh-MEEN-uh" and not what I, naturally, thought it was, originally.

We had a great weekend. Colin said, when we walked under the "Hello everyone" banner: "This is what we'll miss when we leave London. We were just walking through Regent's Park and, bingo! Here's a festival we didn't even know about."

It is great, and we will miss it.

But the greatest part, really, is having a husband who says, just as you are thinking it, too, "It's not 'enema,' honey."

Under My Feet

2006-08-03T17:19:00.000Z

One thing that you lose, when you live a life with a car, is your connection with your feet.

I miss my Mazda Protégé. I miss it a lot. I don’t love my life in London, and in lots of ways I can’t wait to be able to just hop in a car again—preferably a zippy little five-speed—and drive to Target or Publix or Old Navy for whatever it is that I think I need.

But, I don’t long for that. Why? Because I love the life under my feet. I love walking and I always have.

It all started when I was a kid. I grew up in Davenport, Iowa, as some of you know. We didn’t live far from our school, St. Paul’s, so we walked there everyday. About six or eight blocks. In the mornings, the whole neighborhood of kids just poured out of their houses, rain or shine, snow and wind. We all met up and walked together. My cousins lived down the street and we walked with them. Cars honked full of older siblings driving to the high school. Even when I was in kindergarten, I walked to Washington School by myself—but with other kids all around—everyday for my half-days with Mrs. Corsiglia. Yes, I can still spell and pronounce her name right: cor-SEE-lee-yuh. I think it might have sparked my love for the Italian language and long walks in the Italian countryside.

When I was older, I used my bike to get around some, but I still walked a lot. I worked during the summer for Junior Theatre in Davenport—even at 14 I was teaching 6 and 7 year old acting—and I walked from home to my classes and rehearsals there. We’d finished up and it would be dark, but it didn’t matter. Mom would say, “Come straight home.” And I did. Where else did you need to be, other than home?

When I was in high school, my Mom was on a health kick (she taught where we went to school at Assumption High) so for a while she would walk to school in the mornings: it was at least 3 miles or so. My brother John would drive to school early for band practice and sometimes I would go with him, or sometimes I would walk with Mom. It took almost an hour.

Nobody walks anymore, least of all in the Midwest. My sister and her kids live as close or closer to the schools we went to as kids, and she drives them or they get rides. Everyone claims it’s because of “bad strangers”—that nothing is safe anymore— but I don’t buy it. My 12-year-old niece is smarter than most adults I know, and walking in a group with her friends, there’s slim to zero chance of anything happening if they know the ground rules. “Go straight to school” and “Come straight home.” Easy.

So maybe I get claustrophobia in London, but at least it gets me walking. England is a nation of walkers, with public footpaths and right-of-ways everywhere. London makes me walk. If I want to take a bus or a Tube or a train, I have to walk to get to it. And I don’t mind at all. If I want to buy groceries, I have to walk to get them. And I don’t mind. I even walk home with the beer I want to drink, or, instead, I walk to the pub and drink it there. Along the way, I do my best to encourage a friendly ‘hello’ from my neighbors (working at the local pub helps in the recognition department) or I walk with my MP3 player, lose myself in the music and turn every step into a musical.

By the way, if your excuse is that you can’t walk in the States, you can. I walked everywhere in Kansas City, from the Plaza to the 39th Street, through the Volker neighborhood to the Art Museum and UMKC and back. I loved living in Midtown because it still had sidewalks, god forbid. Imagine: a neighborhood with designated places to walk.

Walking isn’t an “activity,” a mode of transportation or even a workout: it’s a state of mind. And, like everything else that feels right, it becomes you. Feel your legs and you feel your feet. Feel your feet and your feel the earth underneath them: the sponginess of soil, the heat of the cement, and the texture of the grass, to start. On those feet we are upright and we are evolved.

Hope you enjoyed the photos of the latest place we walked, the Lake District in Northwest England. I know William Wordsworth did, for he lived there all his life. If you want to see more pictures, click here.

The Black Hole

2006-07-26T11:29:00.000Z

Socks. Keys, sometimes. Requests at a restaurant for a lemon in your water or a side of extra sauce that just never arrive.

We all know where these things go. They go into this dark place.

Well, if you live here, in the United Kingdom, and you move from one flat to another, your request for basic technical services also, it seems, land in here.

Like "Hi. British Telecom? Yeah, hi. In a couple weeks, I'll be moving down the road, four doors down. I need to move my phone. Date? 18 of July. Great. Thanks."

But alas. As we all know, it is a futile, sad attempt at believing all will be well.

In Africa, they have what are called Third World countries: poverty, tribes often still living a similar existence that generations of their ancestors did for thousands of year.

In the more developed areas of Asia and North America, it's the First World, metal and plastic and speed.

Here is the lesser-known "Second Dimension." Continually trapped in the a varying and ever-changing past decades (some weeks the 50s, other days, the 80s... most days, the Victorian Age), the beleaguered 21st century floats across the surface. It supposed to look like a glossy sheen, but really it's more like that layer of grease that floats on the water that comes out of the tap here. Eventually, you have to own a filter to deal with everything: the sullen or gutted customer service, the despicable fees for second-hand technology, or, in the case of the water, the pollution.

So if you wonder where I've been lately, I've been swimming in the Black Hole.

Tower after Hours

2006-07-21T10:58:00.000Z

Well. If you make friends with a yeoman warder, then, eventually, you’re going to have drinks with a yeoman warder. It’s bound to happen.

The best place to do that, I guess, is the Tower of London.

After we hooked up with Robin at the Pink Martini concert, he invited us to come down the following Saturday for the Ceremony of the Keys and for drinks at the pub.

His pub is slightly harder to get into than the average pub, as it is fortified with 25 foot stone walls, has about 250 CCTVs, lasers and porticullis and other stabby and pokey things. Oh, and a staff of 34 retired sergeant majors (or higher) living inside, and a regiment or two of British regulars stationed in the Guards’ House.

All that was well and good, because Colin and Ginny and I just wanted a drink and a peek around. We weren’t planning an Ocean’s 11 heist of the crown jewels.

Turned out, it wasn’t just an evening out for a drink at the pub. It was Resident’s Night, a monthly get-together for the “inmates” at the Tower: not prisoners, but the families and friends of the warders, most who live inside.

Robin met us at the gate at 18:00 hours sharp, right after they kicked the public out. He gave us a tour of some of the private and off-limits areas, pushing open old doors and gates that looked like they shouldn’t be hanging from their hinges anymore, much less still work. The Tower was not abandoned: kids rode around on their bikes; a couple guys walked their dogs; a young couple strolled by hand-in-hand on their way out for the evening. In the green area, a bride and groom were getting their photos taken, either just come out or getting ready to go into the chapel for their wedding.

No, there were people about, but it was empty of tourists. With Robin, the Tower became, for a short time, a home again, a castle and a fortress.

We opened the bar. Robin’s wife, Heather and his daughter, Marnie, were on the rota that evening to serve—it’s a private bar, unlicensed, so everyone has to take their two-week shift working it. Robin hadn’t lived here for long, and he and his wife have a love for Canada. They’d travelled all over the country, and fell in love with Nova Scotia on their last trip.

“I guess that’s why I am always attracting Canadians,” he said. Heather is Scottish, and found the people in Nova Scotia as Scottish as the could be, without being still in the homeland.

Robin took a liking to Ginny as well, whose specialty subject is medieval literature. Yeoman warders have to learn a lot, fast, about not just the history of the Tower, but the history of England. It’s an intense course and Robin finished it early. The youngest of the warders, he’s also one of the most educated, with a master’s, and nearly completing his Ph.D. “Can’t tell you my dissertation topic,” he said the night we met him. “You might nick it.”

It was barbeque night at the Tower. Robin is a confirmed vegetarian, but he still encouraged us to try the mixed grill, and kept our pint glasses full. All around the picnic tables, the kids kicked a soccer ball, jumped on a pogo stick, threw around a rugby ball and chased each other. The sun went down, and the music came up. Robin told us a four-star American general was there tonight and he’d be going with us up to see the Ceremony of the Keys.

The Tower gets locked up, of course, every evening. And as part of that ritual, the guards on duty perform the Ceremony of the Keys, which involves an old story of the last time a guard was allowed to go and secure the Tower alone. Of course, he got beat up, so now Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s keys always have an escort, and, promptly at 10 p.m., a very bad bugler plays a song to herald the closing of the Tower.

Only the Tower guests, and about 50 members of the public are allowed to see the ceremony. It’s free, but you have write away for tickets about two months in advance to get them. One of the yeoman warders, in shorts and a polo shirt, walked us down to the area in front of the raven’s cages. He stood, a little wobbly after a few pints, on a bench, and gave the guests the short history of the ceremony. Then we went out into the courtyard to join the public ticketholders and wait.

The days are still fairly long here, and it wasn’t until we joined the public that I noticed it had gotten fully dark. We walked through the archway and a small group of tourist stood huddled near the traitor’s gate, watching the west entrance. We joined them.

The cobbles were lit by old gas lamps now fitted with electrics. There was little sound, except the slapping of the heels of the guard to our right who stood on duty. Then we heard more footsteps echoing on stones and the jangle of keys. A man in uniform came through the arch, passed by us and walked down to the west entrance, where he was joined by four soldiers. They had a series of paces they performed as the door was shut. Then, together, two armed soldiers, another carrying a lamp, and the guard with keys, marched back toward us. The guard, who had been stomping around to our right came out and stood in front of us. As the four approach, he called for them to “Halt!”

“Who comes there?” for as the yeoman warder told us, you never say “who goes there” since they are obviously coming and not going.

“The Keys!” the guard.

“Whose keys?” he calls back.

“Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth’s Keys!”

And then the guard with the keys and his escort are allowed to pass up into the courtyard, where the bad bugler plays.

It was very atmospheric, except that while the sergeant and his regiment were presenting arms and the bugler was playing, a young Spanish couple was making out like crazy behind us, and their tall friends who were standing in front of me thought it was hilarious and kept poking all their other friends and pointing it out.

Afterward, we rejoined Robin and Heather and eventually we were joined by Barry and Nick, two of the soldiers who took part in the Ceremony and who were stationed at the Tower. We had a good old time chatting it up with them, though Barry was pretty serious and it took some time (and some pints) to crack his veneer.

One of highlights of the evening, by the way, took place as we were leaving. Robin walked us out to the West Entrance and as we approached the huge wooden door that was, supposedly, secured for the night, we saw that it had a smaller door inside of it that was just hanging open. So much for security, we remarked as we stepped through it. Of course, there was the minor point of the security guard and the huge iron gates outside that we had to be let out of.

Crikey! Cricket!

2006-07-18T11:30:00.000Z

Just when I thought it MIGHT be safe to go to work at the pub again.

Nawp. Sure every other pub in town is sighing with relief at the death of England in the World Cup, but not in this neighborhood. Things are just getting HOT here, and when I say HOT, we aren't joking.

I took this photo across from the Warrington Friday night, just before I entered to start an evening of work. This is just ONE side of the pub. Around the corner, which you can't see, is the ACTUAL outdoor area, where there are about 15 huge picnic tables under umbrellas and lofty maples, and about twice as many people as you can see here.

Also, there are 14 cases of Magner's Cider bottles, 22 cases of Corona bottles, about 100 pint glasses, about 50 half-pint glasses with mint and limes and lemon stuck inside, about a dozen wine buckets with bottles floating in the former-ice, and, everywhere, the shiny silver lining of crisp packets shoved between the cracks of the picnic tables. Oh, and the shiny, clear shards of broken glass. Empty glasses are everywhere: stacked, strewn, shoved aside, toppled, hidden, tucked against table legs and pillars, cast aside, even lining the curbs on the street. And, of course, kicked, stepped on, tripped over, and smashed.

You see, if you head down Randolph Avenue a block and then up the hill a few more blocks, you arrive at Lord's Cricket Ground, where England, this past weekend, took on Palestine. I think. For me, it doesn't matter. It only matters that, combine that with lovely sunny weather, and that equals the biggest occasion for drinking in Maida Vale's most popular pub. Every pub in the area will be busy, but not every pub has such a vast outdoor area, and such charming staff. (-;

Yes, the pub does get filled during football matches, but it isn't really that busy. People are there to watch the match: that's their main goal. Drinking is something to keeping your palm cold.

But cricket... well, the after-party at the pub for cricket is almost identical-- in reverse-- to tailgating. The goal is to drink. The purpose is to be outside, enjoying the weather, to wear ridiculous clothes, get wasted, and, eventually, stumble home. Game first (drink then too... you know that drill) then drink after too.

Remember... these people are BRITISH. You think you know how to drink? HA! You've got NOTHING on this lot.

Pink Martini and Heavy Hats

2006-07-11T08:33:00.000Z

If you weren't at the Tower of London this past Saturday night, you missed two beautiful, and very different things. In no certain order.

Pink Martini at Tower of London

I believe it may be that communications still occur, via the Atlantic, by Dixie cup and string. And that, my friends, is why the Dionne Warwick packed the place on Thursday night, but still the poor sweet Londoners don't know about this lovely, gorgeous, lip-smacking Portland outfit.

Outfit? Gang? Band? Orchestra? It's hard to put a fixture on Pink Martini. They feature the pippish Thomas Lauderdale (rural Indianian) on a very grand piano, the gloriously carved China Forbes on vocals-- singing in French, Japanese, Portugese, and, occasionally even English. The ensemble twinkles with the light of classically-trained musicians on trombone, trumpet, congas, cello, violins, timps and snares, even the clashing of cymbals. Just to add a little of "the usual" they round out the sound with bass, guitar, and tambourine, and chimes, as needed.

How did I find you, Pink Martini? How did this sweet Iowa girl, who lives in London, come dancing in the posh seats in a moat, in a prison, in the second most expensive city in the world?

Thanks, first, to my husband, who has a British passport and that traveling itch like me! Thanks most, though, to Suzanne, my "cosmopolitan" friend, who put together the fab mix CD "Bobbin' with Bob Scott" before I left Kansas City for London two years ago. Featured on that CD was the cut "Amado Mio" (click here to listen to a bit) by some unknownsters. I caught up with it and, thank goodness, the Pink Drink and the Tower of London Music festival caught up with me.

Oh, and I got the good seats, I think, because of karma.

Sergeant Majors and Uncles in Law

Meanwhile, back in the moat, before the concert, Colin and Ginny and I had the picnic spread going on-- all the best from the best Lebanese deli and grocery in London: Green Valley. We spotted a Yeoman Warder making his rounds, chatting up the picnickers when summoned (or maybe just checking baskets for Guy-Fawkes-like devices.) Anyhoo, as he came our way, Ginny piped up, "I wonder how heavy his hat is." So I called him over.

Well, his name is Robin, if you please, and his hat was VERY heavy. Inside, the lining was rimmed with pins he'd received from guests and visitors, from all over the world. Robin was 41, one of the youngest Yeoman Warders (you must have been a long-serving senior non-commissioned officer in the Army, Royal Air Force, Royal Marines or, more recently, Royal Navy.) Robin joined the miliary when he was 18. He lived with the 36 other warders and their families, inside the walls of the tower.

Robin could have gone on to talk to others, but he didn't. He dropped down onto the grass and stayed with us until the announcer advised us to pack up and head to our seats. Ginny is a professor of Medieval Literature, so she had some good stumper questions for him. Colin's uncle-in-law, Jack Chaffer, was also a Yeoman Warder, back in the 70s, so that lit Robin's fire too. And Robin loves Canadians ("I'm always attractin' 'em!") so I guess, even though he felt the urge to slip in and out of his shpeels on the moats and the kings, he was pretty relaxed with us. He even ALMOST told us about his dissertation topic. I reckon if we got a few pints in him at the tower pub later (he invited us) we might have gotten it out of him.

I sometimes wonder what happens to "normal" Londoners. The Londoners who go to their pub every night, who talk to the same group of friends, who listen to the same play list all the time. I know, of course, that London is not completely populated with these people, but I see them, from behind the Warrington bar. I serve them.

I wish I could slap a pair of headphones on them and make them listen to Pink Martini. I think, if you hear music like that-- if you just meet a man like Robin once-- you can't help but feel that straight, narrow road before you dip and bend.

5-7 Units

2006-07-08T11:30:00.000Z

I'd like to stop. I'm not addicted. I don't have to have it.

The problem is, I don't, technically, have to give it up yet. No zygote. No pregnancy. No excuse. So why say 'no' to just one glass? Just one pint? Just one dram?

Sigh. And one, plus one, plus one and, well it's just a few. Oops... But then there are those pesky "units". A pint is two, and the dram was three fingers, so that's two. And I think, well, the glass was really a carafe. That might have been three.

So that's 5-7 units (the amount I said I drink in a week) in the course of a very nice, relaxing evening. A great evening, with my honey-pie, who knocked back 5 pints and a 2 fingers (11 units, or so).

Ain't nothing like it, drinking in England. Institutionalised and prescribed nationalistic peer pressure. Home isn't that expensive flat you work all day to pay for. It is the pub, and it is Pavlovian in its instant ability to generate two singularly unique responses.

Relaxation

Not just the "Phew! The work day is over!" effect, but an almost surreal removal from the outer world. The Brits are obsessive in their love of all Dr. Who references so I will join them: to walk through the pub door and order is to enter the Tardis, fiddle with the knobs, and then step out again. You arrive, blinking, into a wood-panelled yet alien place, a spa resort where cigarettes, liquor and crisps are the prescribed tonics for perfect harmony. The more you indulge, the closer you come to Nirvana.

Loss of Control

We aren't talking loss of limb function (though that frequently happens by the end of the evening if there are more than four in your group). No, by this I mean the pure and joyous OBLITERATION of thought and responsibility. Personal ability to decide anything dissolves like sugar in tea and he who enters succumbs to the ages-old custom of "rounds." Think?!?! BAH!! Bite your tongue. There isn't any need to think!! There isn't any need to consider fertility or health or whether you will be in rough shape for that job interview in the morning! Remember, you've passed through the portal! This is the spa and all you need to do is relax and let it take you.

"Four for rounds this evening? Excellent sir/madam. Your bill will be (approximately, based on quantity of peanuts/crisps preferred and number of women taking the LARGE-house-dry-white-option) 15 pounds. All you have to do is sign here. ... What? Why certainly sir/madam. Of course there is a contract. To enter the "spa" you must commit to at least four pints/shots/glasses, and the time it takes to consume them. Initial here for optional tequila/Sambuca shot afterward. Oh, and please deposit your brain in this bucket. Here's your brain-check number. Thank you."

I think the reason the Queen has arrived, quite healthily, to the age of 80 (her mother lived to 102) is that she is the only living Brit who does not partake of the rounds custom two or three times a week (she only made her first trip to a grocery store last year). When she does have a nip, it's a healthy Campari and OJ. One unit, plus a hit of Vitamin C-packed juice. And I doubt they serve her that crummy Britvic crap.

Cut back? Cold turkey?

If only they had a patch for all those lovely units.

Me and My Bathmat

2006-07-07T12:54:00.000Z

There are two things I needed to get while I was shopping today: bagels and a bathmat. I got neither, but still managed to spend £200 ($370.50). Such is the dire predicament of shopping in London.

I have no bagels, which is fine. I have bread, instead, and we can eat that. Or we can survive without a bread product at all, until I make the trek back to the one and only store that sells sesame bagels.

I have a bathmat. I inherited said item from my husband's apartment in Kansas City. It also lived in his previous house, and, I think, might have even made the trip from Brooklyn, N.Y., his previous residence. It's seen lots of different kind of water run off. And for the last two years, it has not once seen the inside of a clothesdryer. It's time has come.

How do you buy a bathmat in Iowa or Kansas City or any other average American town? Easy. Three steps:

1. Get in car
2. Drive to Target/Bed Bath and Beyond/Linens n Things/Walmart/K-Mart/Kohl's
3. Buy bathmat, in a variety of colors.

Not-so alternative step 4. Also buy lots of other mostly unnecessary things, such as matching towels, matching fluffy toilet seat cover, matching fluffy U-shaped carpet thing that goes around the toilet to catch any wayward man-urine, cute duck-themed soap dish and tooth brush holder, half-priced Martha Stewart Bed in a Bag, two t-shirts, a pair of shorts and/or shirt for your husband/Dad/any other man who doesn't buy clothes for himself. Oh, and some make-up. And earrings. And a Kit-Kat. And microwave popcorn. And that REALLY cute set of plastic margarita glasses, on clearance. And Us Weekly.

Time elapsed, driveway to driveway: Roughly 1 hour and 10 minutes, depending on whether children are along.

God I miss Target. Shopping in London is definitely designed as a form of torture on the working classes. Here's why:

1. London, particularly Oxford Street, is like one big shopping mall. Hundreds of individual stores over miles of territory, all very specialised. Need a cheese grater? Well, you'd better go to the kitchen supply store, where they will have, probably only one. And it will be £20.

2. Department stores, such as Harrod's, Selfridges or John Lewis/Peter Jones may have everything, but who can find it??? These places are the size of Maine, and no matter where you go, you have to walk through the perfume department, a hazard to the lungs and the stomach.

3. Everything, including the exact same products you might get in the United States (ie. Gap or Esprit clothing) costs twice as much. Hence the reason Colin and I arrive through Chicago customs with empty suitcases and roll back through, hardly able to lift them.

4. Certain meat products, such as pork, are just missing from some stores, because they are owned or run by Muslims. This is fine, but it does make patronizing your local shop owner difficult. Bacon? Sorry, got to visit the evil empire, Tesco.

5. Research/Travel Time: It takes a serious commitment to not just "shop" but to go out and get something specific. Here's how it plays out.

Call shops to make sure they have what you want (includes at least four conversations with people who are either monkeys or robots): 45 minutes.
Walk to Tube: 5 minutes.
Tube to Oxford Circus: 20 minutes;
Time to walk to shop you want and find the item or items you want (average, including interacting with more monkeys and robots): 27 minutes;
Walk back to the Tube on crowded Oxford Street (avoiding tourists and rude Londoners): 15 minutes;
Tube home (barring delays): 20 minutes;
Walk home from Tube: 5 minutes.

Total time to get one item: 2 hours and 17 minutes. And that assumes you didn't veer from your course at all. No stops into the drugstore or the shoe store or the card store or the beauty supply store or the grocery store or the top shop.

As for the bathmat, well, there are solutions.

I could order one online, which is rapidly becoming the shopping outlet of choice for us. However, I have vowed that this bathmat will not make the journey to our new flat, and time is running short
I could make the trek to John Lewis and spend £30 on one ($55.47) but I just can't do it. I'll use a towel for now
I could take the LONG bus ride to IKEA (1 hour and ten minutes each way) but I can't get up the energy.
I may get lucky and have a friend buy one at Target and bring it back for me. That is, IF she has enough room in her suitcase, packed in around her OWN purchases.

Until then, moldy-old-faithful will have to suck up the limescaled waters for a little while longer.

How Britain Made Me a Patriot

2006-07-03T15:49:00.000Z

Nothing about former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s snarling smile, his closed mind, and his Patriot Act could make me proud to be an American.

Nothing about our President/Commander-in-chief waving on the side of an aircraft carrier could make me proud to be an American.

Nothing about the pathetic two-party system, or the state of our “democracy” could make me stand up in a foreign country and shout loudly that I am American.

In fact, I don’t say it. I don’t use the “A” word.

But don’t worry. If people ask, I don’t lie and say I’m a “pseudo-Canadian” (married to one). I say “I’m from Iowa, but I live here now.” It turns their minds away from the big, socio-political wasteland between us and, I hope, reminds them that we are all coming from home, and trying to make ourselves at home someplace else.

Still, in the last two years, in my absence from the United States, I have defended my country, verbally, more than most Americans will in their lifetime. And it has made me realize: I am a patriot. A real patriot, that no “Act” will ever define or defy.

I don’t need to wear a flag T-shirt or drive a Chevy to prove it. Want to know one way to find out how American you really are?

Try standing behind the bar in an English pub and answering these questions, once or twice a night, sometimes more.

“You aren’t American, are you?”

“You sound so intelligent. Are you Canadian?”

“Who did you vote for? Not Bush, I hope.”

“Where are you from?... Iowa? Is that the good part of America or the bad part?”

“Is Iowa near Montana?”

“Why don’t Americans have passports?”

“Why do Americans eat so much?”

“What kind of accent is that? You don’t sound like any kind of American I’ve ever heard on TV.”

Not all the questions are this inane. Some of them are direct questions of political relevance, like why Rumsfeld made a particular offensive decision in Iraq, or do I think Hillary will get elected, or why Bush said something offensive to Mexican immigrants again.

Of course, since most of you know me well, you know that I don’t, for a second, back down or let any comment like this slide. I don’t get tipped at the pub, so there isn’t a lot of extra incentive to be overly nice. I am, of course, polite and I joke around, but I call them out on it.

Questions I ask back:

“Oh. Wow. So you've travelled alot? Where have you been in America? (common answers: NYC and Florida, or “I haven’t been there.”

“Have you studied U.S. political science?”

“Do you know that Iowa and Montana are about as close together as London and Moscow?”

“Do you know that Iowa and England are the same size, in square miles?”

“I haven’t talked to Rumsfeld/Hillary/Bush today, but when they check in later this evening, I’ll be sure to ask.”

“As many Americans have passports as British do.”

“Have you seen the size of the portions of fish and chips lately?”

It is easy to get lulled into the idea that the United States is great, the best place in the world, especially on a day like today. The U.S. isn’t the best... of course. it’s just different. For most of you reading this, it’s your home, and home is where the heart is, as they say.

Right now I live in a country that is OLD. It’s been around. It’s seen empire come and go. It’s stood through thousands of years of invaders and language shifts and settlers and immigrants. It’s been around the block. In just the last century, it's been bombed so badly that it had to evacuate all of its children from London to strangers in the countryside. Those children included my father-in-law.

The U.S. is young, big and brash, a teenager who knows it knows everything. But it is beautiful and complex, too. It is naïve and it is learning it's lessons. Over time, just like Great Britain, it will see how much it didn’t know, and how many lives—- human, animal and plant —-that were lost as a result of too much confidence or too little thought. Meanwhile, too, there is so much fun and joy, being a big kid on the playground, playing with the best toys, and being full of joie de vivre, as the French call it: joy of life.

I love my country and its people, but I see my reflection in my new neighbors too. I love England and all its battlescars and imperial wounds. It holds its history in the palm of its hand and never crushes it. My hometeam squashes yesterday like a bug under a heel. Which is worse? Neither. As Michael Stipe says, “Everybody hurts sometimes.”

So, now I am a patriot of the world, and of home. Home is Iowa, home is the United States. But home is also the place where I live. I have respect for that, and I love the people who let me stay, no matter how ignorant they may be of my beginnings.

We are all ignorant. That, it seems, is that hardest thing to learn.

Full English Breakfast

2006-06-28T14:29:00.000Z

After Renee Zellweger made the first Bridget Jones movie, she was quoted in an interview as telling the world how much she liked beans on toast.

I don't like beans on toast. I don't eat them. I think baked beans on toast are gross, most especially in the morning. It isn't the beans that offend me: it's that yucky tomato sauce. I'd eat lentils on toast. Or even black beans on toast. But Heinz Baked Beanz on toast are a no go.

Recently, while picking up eggs and extra mature cheddar (the British love all kinds of cheddar-- you can hardly find any cheese BUT cheddar in the grocery) at the local shop, Colin and I discovered this hearty little treat: Hunger Breaks All Day Breakfast.

I just have one question for you: what IS that round thing on the can label? Is it bacon? A tomato? A sausage patty? I just don't know.

The can says it contains: Baked beans in tomato sauce with sausages, button mushrooms, chopped pork and egg nuggets with cereal, and bacon. So that poses another key question: what kind of cereal are we talkin'? Cap'n Crunch? Kellogg's Post Toasties? Shreddies? It's going to make a difference with the consistency and flavour.

Also, I'm kind of unclear in the "egg nugget" department. Button mushrooms I get... egg nuggets I just don't have a visual on.

I'm still considering buying this, just to get Colin to eat and tell me what he thinks. I know he will like it: that's what I'm afraid of. Apparently the good-morning-goodness can last all day.

Hunger Breaks can also be found in something called "Kebab Attack." For photos and a review of THAT beauty, read here.

The company that makes this succulently-convenient tinned delight is Crosse & Blackwell. They were established in 1706 in Britain as a pickling and canning company. They are now owned by Premiere Foods. Apparently Hunger Breaks falls into their "convenience foods" category. Something like good ole Chef Boyardee.

They also have something called "The Full Monty," "Bombay Balti Beans," and another dinner delight: "Sausage 'n' Wedges." They don't specify what the "wedge" is. I think it might be a potato product. Also, you can get (see here the wide selection) something called the BIG BRUNCH: MEAT FREE! ... perfect for those vegetarians out there looking for a handy convenience food.

Mmmm. Wedges....

Chris says...

2006-06-20T11:29:00.000Z

Chris is leaving.

Why does that matter?

People leave London. They go to Spain. It happens all the time, and you’ll believe that most especially if you watch “A Place in the Sun” or “No Going Back” and the half dozen other copycat shows like it. Brits want out.

Chris is loud and demanding. He thinks war is acceptable and he argues with me about everything. He doesn’t watch movies, so he never EVER gets any of my movie references. He drinks way too much and refuses to eat when he drinks, thus often going for 24 hours without eating.

Why do we love the people we love? I think, sometimes, it’s our own reflection we see. It’s the only way to love ourselves.

Jeez, he laughs really hard and loud when I am funny (and I am VERY funny), and that makes me oh, so happy.

In another post, I mentioned that someone told me I should talk more about London, less about myself. Chris was furious about that when he read it! Why? Because Chris and I had had a HUGE argument about the content of my weblog many months before that. After he read that post he said “I told you to do that AGES ago, and yet you give the credit to some other bloke! That’s rubbish!”

Chris reads my blog regularly. He reads all of it. And he criticizes what I write, disagrees, pushes my buttons. He drives me bonkers. I love him.

So below is the copy of the original post that I wrote, back in December, after that conversation with Chris, I didn’t post it, because I didn’t finish it. That happens with a lot of things in my life—-it’s my worst failing. But Chris doesn’t have to worry about criticizing me about that (or the American spelling of “criticise”)...I beat myself up about it all the time.

By the way...I don’t write long posts like this anymore... Why? Because Chris said (suggested? recommended?) that I write things shorter.

15 December 2005

“Chris says I should tell you more about London. I told him he should go jump in a lake.

“He said people back home want to know more about what life is like here, not about me baking cookies! I said, up until recently, life SUCKED here (yes, Mom, I used that word you hate) and I just couldn’t bear to talk about it. I didn’t want to tell anyone about anything because I felt so negative about it. Why disappoint them if, by any chance, they are living vicariously through me? Vicarious, I thought, sounds an awful lot like precarious.

“Chris and I argued about this quite loudly last night at smoky pub called The Chandos. It’s a good pub, right off of Trafalgar Square, around the corner from Covent Garden, and conveniently located two or three steps from the nave of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields Church. After the Candlelight Concert, you can stumble in for a few.

“So I met Chris out last night, along with his sister and a few others. Colin was busy playing poker. (If you want to know more about that slice our life, you can read about it here.) He’d been reading a few of my recent posts and liked them. Do more of that! He said. Good god I hope I never have an editor like him.

“I think about how most American people react when I tell them I live in London. For the first year, I didn’t know what to say.

“Them: London?! Ooooh… Wow. That is so cool! What do you do there?

“Me: Do? uh, Nothing tangible?… Cry a lot. Sit in a funk of depression for six months. Smile at people who ignore you. Yell at my wonderful new husband, then apologize, then make up. Then beat myself up about it. Sit at home and watch the telly. Write all day. No, I HAVEN’T gotten published yet or found an agent yet.

“But lately, after the worst of the worst passed by, details some of you know and others don’t need, something has happened to me. And, you know, Chris is right— ugh. …I hate saying that.

“That’s Chris in the photo there next to me. Not a bad looking chap, for a Welsh-English type. He’s the little brother I never had. We met at The Passage, where I volunteer a couple days a week. I scrub pots and pans and serve tea, chop broccoli and fend off advances from manky-smelling men (and a few staff members), and, well, near as I can tell, Chris just runs around and talks a lot. And he gets paid. Most of time, he seems very stressed about all of it.

“And what fun it is to torment him.

“But lest you think I may be too hard on him, don’t worry. Chris isn’t the typical, soft-spoken English gent. He says things like:

I read your blog. I thought that baking thing was absolute rubbish. All that “I am making a cookie. Should I put a chocolate chip in?” Blah blah blah! It’s BORING. No one wants to hear that crap!

and

Yeah, well, I watched that movie – what was the name? the one you said was good – Lost in Translation. God, it was absolutely HORRIBLE! I mean, nothing happened! It’s just ‘Hey I think I’ll call my wife and swim some laps and eat sushi.’ I fell asleep halfway through it. It was crap.

“Look again at the photo, though. You’ll notice that I am grinning. Yeah, he wears me out and pushes my buttons, but I like Chris. Why? Maybe it’s my penchant for Muppets. Or maybe it is masochism. Or maybe I like him because he pushes me, all the time, to think about things differently.”

END

And that is all I wrote. I told you I never finish anything.

“They say Spain is pretty though I never knew…”

Why Go to England?

2006-06-12T11:33:00.000Z

Here's one reason to be in England in June.

The weather has been dry, so dry they've installed a "hose pipe ban." But in the official parks and gardens of the city, apparently they still water.

Thank goodness.

Colin and I both stopped to smell the roses. I am not sure what these are called, though they look something like a type of rose called "Phyllis Bide." I don't think they are though.

World Cup, Au Naturale

2006-06-10T23:53:00.000Z

Colin, Chris and I were just hangin' out at a pub on the Strand, just moments after England won their first World Cup match, when we heard a commotion on the street nearby.

Police escorts and everything for these 750-plus in-the-buff protestors/celebrators. They were protesting oil dependancy while celebrating the individuality of the human body.

You have to give a guy credit for climbing onto a tiny bicycle seat, bullocks to the breeze.

My most favorite part of this whole affair-- and my biggest regret-- was the woman standing next to me. I was cheering them on, waving, snapping photos. The woman standing next to me was just standing there, watching, with her arm wrapped around her 9-year-old daughter's head, her palm cupped over the poor girl's eyes. My regret is that I didn't capture a photo of THAT.

Tales of May 06: Tampa-rriffiic!

2006-06-02T15:04:00.000Z

It wasn't a "vacation." It wasn't a "holiday," as they call it over here.

It was an epic event of travel.

With that in mind, I've decided to break up the Tales of May 06 into bits, for easier consumption.

It all began, really, existentially, at the House of Meats. La Casa de la Carne.

Timeline-wise, Tampa, and the visit my friend Mike's was nearer the middle-end of our trip. But, for me, The House of Meats sealed it. My brain was officially on vacation.

Now this photo isn't anything to write home about. It's just a snapshot. But click here and here and you will see that I am not the only one who finds this Meat Discount Bonanza a true American Dream.

THIS, my friends, is what I miss about home. Weird and wonderful capitalism, sprawled out, with its own parking lot, right next to the freeway exit. I don't miss the ubiquitous strip malls and commercials for prescription drugs and fat people who can't figure out why they are fat when they drive everywhere and eat fast food all the time. I miss THIS: MEAT FOR LESS. A real American small business, in the sunshine!

But it isn't just the House of Meats you see in this photo. Look behind it, and you see the sky. You see space. You see sunny, hot days, where mirages rise up off the pavement.

And yes, home for me is America in summer time. Summer should be HOT, not wimpy, limpy mild. I may be an Iowa girl, but to me, Florida defines American summertime. It is steamy. It requires sandals and shorts and screens on the windows. It's hottest days will knock you OUT! It is sand in your bathing suit. It requires a car, of course, that you throw everything into, including towels, snacks, a cooler and sunscreen. Why? I'll tell you why.

Because the rewards are as wide, lovely and endless as its beaches. They are cool breezes, clear, blue water, and SPACE. The rewards are sprawling and open and free. They are wading into the Gulf at Fort Desoto National Park off of St. Pete's Beach and seeing your toes through the water. Watching the pelicans dive into the seaweed for lunch, then watching them at rest, on the waves, silent and singular. Hopping back into the car and you are transported through palm-lined roads, over bridges and past salmon-hued condos and sandstone-colored dream homes to Pass-a-Grille and The Wharf Restaurant, where we sit inches from the harbor, peeling shrimp, drinking COLD beer, and staring into blue skies and bluer water.

It is Florida: Tampa to be exact.

It is stopping at a 7-Eleven (yes, they still have them in Florida) for a real Slurpee.

It is eating meals outside-- breakfast, lunch, and dinner-- in the shade of the lanai, or a sturdy canvas umbrella, or just under the starry sky. Mexican food: enchiladas with mole sauce, salsa music, and sangria.

It is wearing a sleeveless shirt, and a skirt and little strappy sandals to dinner, and not much else. Except mascara.

It is hot and oppressive at 10 a.m. when you take the little dogs for a walk. But then you duck back into the that lovely cinder-block box of air conditioning, toss yourself across the cool bedcovers, and read "Cloud Atlas" or "Skinny Dip" under the ceiling fan.

It is WARM! The wind feels like a child's breath, not a dog's bite-- finally! So we sweat-- our skin tastes like salt. Our faces are shiny-- as shiny as a naughty schoolboy's! Our skin is burnt-- but we don't look like bread dough anymore! And, in Florida who cares anyway? The sun is out and she is lazing around, not going anywhere. She isn't a diva, self-important, and stingy with her appearances. The clouds busta-move, rolling fast, like break dancers, tumbling-rumbly over each other.

And in a few hours, maybe it will thunderstorm. Flashing, crashing noise, the fireworks of nature.

Before you know it, you've had a nap, margaritas, and what's for dinner? Let's grill out, maybe. Pick up a rabbit, or a hog's head, or cow feet... or maybe just some hot dogs, at the House of Meat.

Yum.

The World Should Be Flat

2006-05-10T09:58:00.000Z

I recently had my first proxy visitor to London. She came in the post.

Here name was "Flat Stacey" and she was a friend of my niece Grace.

Grace is one of many school kids involved in the Flat Stanley project. It's an international literacy and communications project based on a kids book about a boy who is squashed by a bulletin board.

Well, I was all for this. Combine the darker side of children's literature with screwball ways to get kids to study cultural geography?!? I am in!

So here are a few of the highlights of Flat Stacey's trip to London. Sure we saw Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, but living in London is also about meeting and living with people of every color, race, religion, political viewpoint and odor you can imagine.

Flat Stacey went with me to visit the Passage, a soup kitchen where I volunteer near Victoria station. Most of the volunteers are women who "don't work" according to many of the staff members and clients (most of the clients are men.) However, the female volunteers are primarily nuns, or women who are retired from raising their children. Some, like me, have flexible work lives. We also have many students who come here during their school breaks. And there are lots of German nannies who use their days off to volunteer. Some of the women who volunteer are in their 80s and carry tray after tray of dirty dishes back and forth. They are tough old Irish gals!

These two guys are clients from the Passage who Stacey met outside the Cathedral. They are Eastern European, I think probably Polish, recently emigrated to London. Since the EU welcomed the Eastern bloc to its group, thousands of immigrants have flooded England. They are looking for work and a better life. Many British people are angry about this (just as many Americans get angry about Latino immigrants), but as members of the EU, they have rights to live and work here.

Stacey met John, a black taxi driver, outside Westminster Abbey. John and Aunt Elizabeth had a great conversation about Londoners and "America." The English call the U.S. "America", not the States or the U.S. John wanted to know why Elizabeth lived here. She gets that question alot from English people, especially those who have been to the States. Even though they don't like American politics much over here, many Brits long to escape their own country. They like "America," particularly New York, which is usually the one of the few places they have travelled to in the States. John said he'd been to New York and he liked it alot. He been to Florida too, but it was too hot for him. Elizabeth told him she liked New York too, but that it wasn't very typical of America.

Stacey was walking around Parliament and spotted something going on, so she went to investigate. This is Brian Haw, England's most famous peace protestor. He has been at this site, outside Parliament, since June 2, 2001. He initially was protesting sanctions against Iraq, but expanded that protest after 9/11. The Home Office has been suing to have him removed. You can read more about him on his website here.

Stacey got to see this new memorial for women who contributed during WWII. It was placed in Whitehall (near Number 10 Downing Street) just 200 yards from the Cenotaph, the memorial that commemorates those killed in war since World War I. This memorial was installed last July, nine months after the memorial for "Animals in War" was unveiled in Hyde Park. The memorial shows the many uniforms the women wore during the campaign but does not feature any women.

Stacey learned how to get around on public transportation during her stay. Elizabeth and Colin don't have a car, because in London, you don't need one! There is always a Tube, or a bus, or, if need be, a taxi to get you where you need to go. Oh, and the best mode of transportation: your legs! Colin uses his to fuel his bicycle to work and they both walk everywhere! Visitors from the States are often surprised at how quickly they "get in shape" after being here a few days: with a combination of long walks and expensive food, it's easy to drop a few pounds!

The best thing about public transport (besides helping the environment and saving money)? The view! Skipping a ride on the Tube and riding in the front seat of the double-decker bus instead, Stacey discovered, was the best way to see London. You can see the architectural details of the buildings, the leaves and the birds in the trees. And, at night when it is dark, you roll alongside other buses, all lit up from within, and see other people just like you, floating in the air.

OK, time to get outside! The sun is shining and Stacey wants to see the Thames!

Colours of Spring

2006-05-08T13:09:00.000Z

Rhubarb... A naturally occuring pink food,
found growing underneath enormous green leaves.
Good in pies.

Why do I like this image? Note the top left...
In this market (Borough Market, South London) there is a "Turnip" aisle.

Oddball pub in the heart of Soho. Serves Italian food but reminds me, with the oil can ads on the wall, of greasy spoon bars in the Midwest. And it is a gay patrons establishment, with Karaoke on the weekends.

In a doorway near Oxford Circus...
Bicycle messengers lounge around waiting to score a gig.
The next morning they were edged out by thousands of little girls lined up
to audition for the Sound of Music.

In the Paris Metro...
I can't understand how he can possibly look so unhappy.

You don't think anything can look like this, or be this lovely.
But suddenly, it is everywhere.
The dampness, the coolness, the green thumbs.

A Walk 'round Bayswater

2006-04-25T10:13:00.000Z

It isn't possible that I have been more relaxed lately? How is that possible?

Colin and I went a-walkin' again this weekend. It is getting warmer these days, so we are getting off our butts. This excursions took us west from our flat, generally in the direction of Notting Hill, though we really only made it as far as Bayswater.

To go west, unfortunately, you do have to find a way under the WESTWAY, the 700-lane motorway (it narrows to just one if you are driving on it). There are a few places to get under it, here and there. You just have to know where to be.

Saturday was outrageously gorgeous here: meaning it was almost 60 degrees and the sky was a milky blue. Having such weather coincide with a weekend day requires every human (between the ages of 16 and 68) to rush immediately to the nearest pub, buy a pint and drink it on the pavement out front, as seen here. Now Colin and I have come to see this as a rather charming part of the London lifestyle. However, when I arrived at work at the Warrington later that afternoon and there were (literally, not figuratively) 37 Corona bottles circling one lamppost, I thought it was a bit less precious. Londoners feel entitled to get smashed and leave their glasses on the curb (or "kerb" as they spell it here...) instead of taking it to the bar when they get another. Lazy, poncy bastards.

But it really was a great day to be outside. It was a great day to take a stroll. We found a lovely little square off noisy Porchester Road, and the moment you stepped inside, you felt tranquil. We had a snack and sat on a bench, gazed in awe at the gorgeous flowers. There are two things they do really well here in England, things I will miss when we leave it. One is flowers: with all the damp, temperate weather and the natives inability to hold a conversation with another person without insulting them, it's no wonder their gardens look so good. The second thing is sausages. Colin tells me all the time "You'll miss those sausages!!" And I will... mmmm... sausage....

We strolled around the garden. A woman across from us was alone on a bench. Then she was, oddly, joined by a man in uniform. I said to Colin "Oooo! Rendezvous with a copper! How romantic!" But Colin shrewdly pointed out: "That's no copper. That's a parking warden."

They didn't hold hands. They didn't look at each other. They spoke out of the sides of their mouths. I held up the camera to photograph the "flowers." I wanted to see this transaction go down. After all, parking fines are serious business here: £50 at a minimum. What was she arranging? What dirty secrets was she tarnishing that lovely little square with. We'll never know.

God, there is a lot of money in that area where we walked. Trust me, you have to HAVE as much money as Hugh Grant to live in Notting Hill, or just about, unless you live in council housing. No way that rangy flatmate of his could have afforded it (though that actor Rhys Ifans surely can now). It's so hip, it hurts. But I love it, and I would live there if I could. Except that we can't. There really is just no good place to park our OTHER Ferrari.

We walked back along the canal, preferring the dirty waterway to the noisy crush of traffic. A few guys were fishing in the canal. They looked pretty dejected. Now, my brother-in-law and sister, Jay and Mary, fish in the Mississippi, which is famous for being muddy, but I don't think that kind of dirt is the same. The only current this waterway gets, generally, is the occasional garbage sledge or canal boat passing through, giving the water a little stir with its tiny motor.

Still, the canal has its beauty spots, especially along the areas in Little Venice and Camden where all the boats are parked. People live on these low-riders, which don't travel much more than a few miles an hour. We walked by standard boat, in fine shape, tied up just before this bridge. An older couple, probably retired, were lounging about. They had gorgeous little flower boxes on planted top of the rig and he had his lawn chair out, relaxing on towpath in the sun while she read the paper on the deck. They were listening to the footie match on the radio.

We were out for a couple of hours. Came home with just a loaf of bread. Colin fed me dinner before I had to go work at the pub. It was a good afternoon.

Michael Dale David Sebastian

2006-04-15T14:13:00.000Z

Navigating a new friend is like discovering a new museum.

What is new about it, anyway? It's been here for years. Yet it is new to me and I am new to it.

Michael told me, casually, offhand, that he cleaned objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. It was over a pint of beer, after writing class. Our little group was still gelling. We didn't really know what we were all about, except drinking, and writing. And breathing.

Michael doesn't look as old as he is. He also doesn't look as handsome as he is. That last sentence doesn't make a great deal of sense, except that you know what I mean. You've met Michael, or someone like him: that person who shouldn't be gloriously beautiful, except that they are.

Adding all the parts together, maybe, gets something quite usual. It's like looking at an object with one eye squeezed shut. But with both eyes opened, there is that depth, that character of light that draws you in. The cloudy repression and, then, sudden glimpses of blue sky. That is Michael.

I asked Michael if I could come to see him at work. It mattered to me, to see this piece of London through him. It doesn't cost anything to go inside the V&A. I had been inside before. But I wanted to go inside with him.

You can't see his age, unless he tells you. Michael has been walking on the hard, marble and stone floors for 18 years. He says "I'm rubbish giving directions in here. I can't tell someone how to get somewhere. I just have to show them." I wanted him to show me. I wanted to squint a certain way and see what he was seeing, in the way he was seeing it, everyday. Beauty and age, yanked from awe, cast in its everyday form.

"What do you want to see?" he asked me when we met in the foyer. He was wearing a sky blue shirt and blue jeans. Michael is tall and thin, with chiseled features. He could be standing on a pedastal, with some other object cleaner dusting him. Except for the life in him.

I kissed his sculpted cheeks in that repressed English way, then hugged him in my effluent American one.

"All right," I said. "I want to see your three favorite objects."

I was remembering my friend Larry, a clay artist. He lives in Connecticut now, but when I knew him, to earn money, he worked as a security guard at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. He stood in doorways and corners all day. He wore a cheap blue sport coat. He eyeballed backpacks and chewing gum. And he gushed over the "Waterlillies" by Claude Monet. "Elizabeth," he breathed, "I could stand in that room forever."

"Well," Michael said, looking up "Your standing under the first one." I gazed up.

The Chihuly chandalier dangled dangerously over the heads of informants at the rotunda desk. "It's a bitch to clean. You can't see it from here, but it is really dusty."

He led me up the stairs to the next level and we hung over the balcony like school children. I wanted to drop spitwads on the unsuspecting visitors, but I didn't. Instead I tuned in.

"They used to use scaffolds and build them up all around. But they've built that desk there and it doesn't move. So now they hire one of those mechanical things that go up and down. A cherry picker. I don't do it. I'm dreadfully afraid of heights."

His eyes darted around, and I tried to follow. I took in everything: the rooster, the Jesus, the women vacuuming the 400-year-old Persian rug, the scaffolds around the staircase.

"Just look at it. It's filthy. They clean it once a year."

"Have you ever met him?"

"Who? Chihuly? No, but I saw him here. With great, wild hair and a patch over one eye. He looks like a pirate."

I wrinkled my nose and laughed. I told him about the Kew Gardens Chihuly exhibit, where the glass grew like glinting hard fossils out of the dirt and bobbed in the lake like beach balls.

Then he clapped his hands. "Right. Number two."

We wound back down the stairs, around and through the bodies gazing up at the glass sculpture. Michael stopped.

"It came in two parts," he said, remembering. "The lower part was here, and then, later they added that top part. Apparently, one of the most popular questions asked about it is 'how do they clean it?'"

We turned the corner into a cavernous orange room made small by its objects. Sculptures and friezes lopped from the guts of churches and casts of gargantuan ancient pillars covered the floors and the walls. Tiny humans mingled among them, even tinier mouth hanging open.

"Number two." Michael said, clasping his hands in front of himself and looking up at the young man, naked.

I had seen this man before, in Florence. His name is David. There are Old Testament stories about him. He is a saint. He is a ruler and a musician. He is art.

The veins in his hand, his bulging eyes, the thick, luscious curls stop you in your tracks. He is enormous. It is impossible to understand his size unless you stand under him. From this angle, you can't see the slingshot tossed carelessly over his enormous shoulder. You not only forget, but you cannot imagine that he was the little one, facing Goliath. You only see a king.

Michael didn't say much.

"Have you seen the original," I asked "in Florence?" He shook his head. "It's so white," I tell him. "And as you approach, you see Michelangelo's sculptures Il Prigione."

"Mmmm..." Michael listened, but let the words fall away. He was thinking of something else. I waited, interested. He turned around.

"It's really a very different experience," he said pointing up at a high balcony overhead, "to see him from up there. You can't go there. I can't even go there anymore. But we can go up there." He pointed to the gallery overhead.

I followed him out. He walked, and talked about the fig leaf that David had to wear when Queen Victoria came to visit. It's mounted on the back of the statue. "Silly Victorians."

We passed through a hallway lined with wall-sized mural paintings. Michael breezed by. I glanced at them, but scrambled to keep up.

"Michael," I asked him as we stopped and hung over another balcony, gazing down at David from the far end of the room, "your life must be very different, being around art every day, after all these years."

"Oh, I don't think so." He said quickly, waving his hand. Then he stopped. "Well, I suppose maybe."

He was quiet for a moment. I glanced at him, but mostly I watched the people swarming like ants underneath the feet of the David.

"I suppose, being around beautiful things everyday... maybe it does change the way you look at things." He paused. "See. He looks much different from this angle. The proportions change."

"Yes," I said. "His head looks too big."

"He's meant to be looked up at, I think," Michael concluded. We gazed a while longer. I wondered at the orange walls, but forgot to ask.

"OK, then. On to number three."

We left the Cast Courts, which were on the front of the museum and wound up and down and up again, I think. Eventually we passed through a corridor building that connected the front building to the back. The windows of the corridor looked out over the courtyard, not yet open for the warm season. Men were banging and digging. The fountain was silent.

Inside was dim, lit in a deep, brilliant rainbow of liturgical colors. It was a room of stained glass, windows encased in boxes and lit from behind. Michael sailed through, stopping only for a moment to talk about the outdoor cafe and glance outside. I gazed at the solemn faces, holding staffs and wearing long robes, then rushed on.

We stopped in Sacred Silver.

"I love this."

St. Sebastian, pierced with arrows. He was not killed by the arrows, so then he was clubbed to death. It was a sacred silver requilary, holding a piece of the Sebastian's bone inside. He gave protection against the Plague.

The piece was German and it was "acquired," which means that someone at the museum who loved silver and sacred silver longed for this piece. He or she-- a curator by title-- researched and searched and wrote documents and memos and asked for money, all so St. Sebastian could be purchased and live here.

I didn't have anything to say about this piece. It was beautiful. "Perfect," Michael said, "except for the missing arrows." I looked at it. I mumbled something about St. Catherine of Siena's head enshrined in the church there.

I wondered, after the enormity of the first two pieces, why this one touched him. I didn't ask.

We walked back out and stopped by a back window. The windows on the back of the building looked out over the churchyard of the Brompton Oratory next door. "You really should go in there. Have you been?" I shook my head. "It's beautiful. I go in there, just to light candles." His arms were crossed against his chest, but he released a hand and pointed. "A community of priests live here. It's very odd thing. It isn't a convent. ... Just look at that gorgeous magnolia tree."

I looked at it. The branches spread wide, heavy with the weight of the pink-white flowers.

Michael had to get back to work, so he let me into the Modernism exhibit and kissed me goodbye. I was glad he'd worn that blue shirt: it made his eyes, whether grey or blue or changing, sparkle and reflect the blue from his shirt. I missed him when he was gone.

I rushed through the Modernism exhibit, intellectually impressed, but uninterested in factories and socialism and cranes hoisting cement. I wanted out of that cage and back into the sensibility of the museum of Michael.

New Year's Resolution Update

2006-04-07T21:17:00.000Z

I've had one of those days: first, that other damn volunteer, Sue, at the soup kitchen, is horning in on my territory. I mean, back off! I do the till on Fridays in this town!

Then my temp gig fell through, so I was deprived of another noisy day in Soho, at the corner of Dean and Carlisle, entering Finnish and Danish and Swedish email addresses into spreadsheets (favorite: ing@dong.dk) while listening to cars on the Very Small Streets below honk and honk and honk.

Then, I get home, and on the way, I have to walk outside. Normally, in April, that's a good thing. But jeez, I just have one thing to say:
ENOUGH ALREADY! Enough with the cold! Enough with this pseudo-winter and faux spring. Enough with English crap weather.

Then I hung out and didn't do the work I should have done at home. Well, I did do the dishes, and I ate leftovers (aren't I a good girl?), but I didn't get much writing done.

Then, at 7:15, no word from Colin, I call him. There is no hope in his voice. He is giving me that "I am never coming home, maybe" sound. "Or maybe I'll be there in 20 minutes." I go dead inside.

At 9:00, no word from Colin. So much for our evening having a little dinner and going to the pub. I go mental and get talked down from the ledge by Frances.

She sends me this photo (above) in my email to cheer me up. It's her parents, Joe and Claudette, on New Year's Eve, and it reminds me:

MY NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: Try and be more positive.

UPDATE: For general review of how I am doing, see Joe's face (pictured).

So, how are you doing?

Around here

2006-04-04T08:09:00.000Z

I find myself looking up and around a great deal in the walk from our flat to the places we go every day and every week:

The Tube
The Dry Cleaners
The Coffee Place
The Pub
The Bank
The Shops, for food
The Wine Store
The Corner Eatery

Here are a few images of what I see, around here.

I was heading toward the Maida Vale tube area, where all the shops, bank, everything are gathered together. We used to live much closer to it; now it is a good 7 minute walk. I usually listen to music on my MP3 player. At the moment I saw this woman, I was listening to the theme from "Ghostbusters." I recommend you download and add it to you mixes. You'd be surprised again what a great song it is. ... How is she carrying this big cardboard thing? It was very windy.

I was standing in the queue at the ATM and I was about to take THIS photo:

Just the shops, you know. Harlequin Dry Cleaners, where the VERY spiffy middle eastern man always just says "Folded or hangers? ... Leave it to me, Miss Howard." And everything is perfect. And the bank, where I cried so hard that they finally gave us an account. And the Tube, where inside the nicest Filipino man and his son have a newsstand.

So I was pushing the shutter on my camera phone to take that photo-- obviously standing in the middle of the "pavement" as they call it here-- when someone brushed by me. And THIS was the photo that I got:

Hell-LO! I call him ERNIE. I like his glasses and his puffy green jacket.

Across the street are a few very important places that we frequent alot.

One is the Halal. I guess I can see by looking at this photo that it is called Solomon's, but I never knew that till now. We always just called it "the Halal." It's a food shop, the one with the blue awning, but the key is the meat. Man do Middle Easterners know how to do meat. Of course, there isn't any pork or beef (you can't even buy bacon flavoured crisps there!), but Colin has mastered the art of lamb-burgers, and we love chicken, so that is fine with us. We don't exactly have anywhere to grill out anyway. You can get great nuts at the Halal too. And yummy frozen samosas.

Next door is another funny place, the place we used to never go. We couldn't figure out why we would want to. It's the "News Agent." But I do occasionally go in there for envelopes and candy. They have alot of magazines, but I prefer to buy them at from the guys at the Tube. There are always school kids in here, being rowdy. I think it's funny that it has a magazine name on its awning.

Next to the Halal, you see, is "Vale Antiques." A guy named Peter owns this place and it is CRAMMED with stuff. We bought our friends Peter and Tim a decanter there as a house warming gift. It has the ship name "P.S. Irani" on it, which we discovered is sunk in a river somewhere. It isn't easy to go inside this shop, but it is fun. China and silver and glass and wood everywhere. Peter, the owner, keeps boxes of used books outside... they aren't antiques, but they are great for getting people to stop and browse. When he goes on holidays, a really cranky woman watches the place for him.

Oh, and note the crazy, custom-painted Mini parked there. I can't believe it was there when I took this. I tried to hurry because the owner was just getting in as I went to take the photo (you can just see her inside it). She is as crazy-looking as the car. She lives up on Hamilton Terrace, or as Colin refers to it "that REALLY posh street." That's the same street where, one day Colin said, when Frances, Alex and I were walking home along that road: "Well that answers the age-old question: Where do you park your Bentley? Next to your Ferrari."

We also occasionally see Hummers parked on H.T.

I was hungry, so I went around the corner to Street Hawker for lunch. Now some people might eat at the Asian restaurant in their neighborhood just because it is there, it's close by, it' s easy. Not in this case. We (not the royal We, but I mean Colin and I) have cravings for this place. It is delicious. And the Express Menu is available all afternoon.

Now there are two really great things about Street Hawker, aside from the food. One is its location:

It's right built into the end of the Tube station, with windows all along. You can watch everybody go by on their way into the Tube.

The second thing is the owner. I think he is the owner. He is there all the time. I don't know his name but he is great.

One evening, he ran after me on the street about a block to bring me the chili oil the waitress forgot to put in my take-away bag. He always waves at me and smiles when I walk by, too. Not in a creepy way, either. That's him in the blue sweater. I took that photo on the sly because I didn't think he would go for me taking his photo. He is kind of shy.

After I ate, I walked down to the Warrington. I had my laptop with me and I wanted to do some writing. Some days I go to Starbucks but somedays I can't deal with all the kids and moms and the hard chairs and the tea. Sometimes I need this:

For those of you who are concerned, that is a "Shandy" -- its half beer and half "lemonade", what they call Sprite here. It's quite tame and refreshing. And sweet. I can only drink two (equal to one and 1/3 American bottles of beer) over the course of an afternoon, and I pretty bleched out. I drink water too.

So this is the Warrington. Here's some more of the Warrington:

That guy standing at the bar is Ron. He's a local. I've been running into him a lot in the neighborhood lately. He plays tennis, so I sometimes see him at the tennis courts when I am playing with Fiona. He's a nice guy. I joke that he is stalking me, but he thinks I am stalking him.

I like working at the Warrington, both working on my book and working as a barmaid. It's a great pub. I get to work with people like these people:
Gordon... Gordon is Scottish. I can't say how much I like Gordon because I might get in trouble. But we like to have fun listening to the MANY different ways the customers pronounce our Caledonian IPA Deuchar's. (Our favorite is the guy who asked for an IPP-uh ). In the background you can see the back of Martin's head. He's the "supervisor" barman. That's why he wears the WHITE shirt! Martin is OK, but he can be quite stroppy (go look it up).

Then there's the lovely Georgina...

Georgina is a welder, although she, for some reason, always tries to deny this. I don't know why. She has a great big motor bike and a really cute boyfriend. She also looks great in a tux. She made an excellent Gomez last year for Halloween.

I'm sorry I don't have a photo of John. But I don't. I'll tell you about him another day.

I love the pub; it's big and full of character. Everyone has story about it. It was a brothel. It was owned by the Church of England. It is haunted. It hires crazy American barmaid. The bar and the staircase used to be a part of the Lusitania. I don't know what to believe.

I do get writing done while I am there. I DO! And just so you'll all stop BUGGING me, here:

Go ahead read it! Enjoy. Let me know what you think...

I ran out of battery power at 6, so I headed home. It was pretty cold still, but we are getting more "sunny intervals" lately and the sky is so bright even until 7 p.m. It's rewarding to look up and around, too, because you never know what you might see.

Well, that's a walk around my neighborhood, around here.

A long-played note

2006-03-29T16:18:00.000Z

One day it rains. And then you walk by a tree and you see this.

The winter in London is a long played note. Yet, there are reasons to love it here. Three are:

1. Green grass, no matter how little rainfall
2. Yummy Chinese food
3. Live music everyday, even in the Tube stations

But the winter is long. It is that song you didn't like very much when you first heard it. Then that damn DJ played it again and again. Then you started to like it. It caught on. Sang along. Then, ugh! Still playing that damn song.

But then, one day, it stops. It feels good, the empty sound.

Then the sound feels, well, just empty.

That's February. And the song metaphor might have sung its last note.

I was walking back from the coffeehouse where I go to write today. I hadn't worked on my novel for a few weeks. But yesterday both Grace and Charlie had talked to me about it. They were gentle and soft and reminded me it was mine, and nobody else's, to dance with.

And Stuart pushed old buttons, made me uncomfortable. When I went to bed last night, I felt my grip again.

Look what gift I got, after five straight hours of writing.

Now I'm going to print something out for Colin.

In Plastic Armour

2006-03-27T11:41:00.000Z

I was walking back from the Passage to Victoria station the other day and I came upon, well, this.

They gave me an orange from a basket. I could choose, actually. Apple or orange. They were promoting a website, a site to change your life.

The tall one was funny. He asked, after he heard my accent, if he might carry me home. He'd love a green card. He was Australian and looked, I think exactly like some movie actor whose name I can't think of. I am sure to think of it in a minute. I asked if I could take his picture, and that's when his friend wandered over and posed.

It was odd. Everyday on the street, underpaid foreigners thrust things in my hands: "free" phone cards, flyers for night clubs, plastic bags of free mouth wash, tampon and yogurt samples, or vouchers for free coffees at the new Pret or Eat or Mange or Plough or Munch or Chew or Masticate or whatever the name of the latest chain of quickie food stops is. Usually the pushers wanted me to buy something or try something. This was the first time a knight in shining-- albeit plastic-- armour offered me the chance to change my life.

Too bad I lost the card. At least I have the photo to remember him by.

Who loves me, baby?

2006-03-23T18:42:00.000Z

THEY do! This is Tony and Bill. They are my buddies at the Warrington. I love this photo. I took it with my new toy, my camera phone. Sigh... I remember the days when I said I would never, EVER had a cell phone.

Well, don't worry. Here, I have a "mobile" phone.

Tony drinks bottles of Becks, which he pours into a half-pint glass. He's quite handsome and always very gentlemanly. But he and Bill and the other guys get quite rowdy, when they want to.

Bill is the best of all the regulars at the pub. He is great ol' Irish guy who goes to the same Church as me. When he comes around to take the collection, he jiggles the bag in my face whispers, "Come on! Put some in!"

Bill was thrilled because Ireland beat England in the 6 Nations rugby match. As he says "Everybody is glad when England loses." I don't think that is exactly accurate, but I know what he means.

Anyway, aren't they great? Bill always says, when he sees me "You're like an orchid in full bloom" and "Miss America!"

I love the Warrington.

Surviving a blue day

2006-03-22T17:41:00.000Z

One blue day isn't just that.

It's the culmination of hours, days, weeks, holding on, fingernails biting into that last saving grain of wood. Fine, fine!. I laugh, I am fine. I am hiding it from you. What is just "blue" is ripping up in me, nearly dead and bleeding on cold cement, in an alleyway.

Mom always said I was too melodramatic.

Yesterday was one of those days. So I tried to make it better. I tried to wring it out, like a tired old dishrag. I piled some... things in a bag-- notebook, water bottle, pen, magazine, tourist map, rubber gloves-- and went out.

I made it as far as Paddington Station. One stop. I got off and went out of the Underground, into the train station. It was afternoon, early. I thought I might go to Guildford. I looked at the monitors. Reading, Swindon, Twyford, Oxford, Heathrow. Nothing to Guildford. I remember Bryan maybe said Waterloo Station or maybe Charing Cross. I bought a chocolate chip cookie from a girl who didn't speak very much english. I looked at the station, then walked around a little. My head felt full. The skin on my face felt heavy. I let it hang there. I stared at the sushi at Yo! going round and round. I saw the sign that said how Yo! worked, but I didn't read it. A man was drinking a Coke, sitting at cafe table. Nearby, there were some couches. The coke, and the couches, looked good.

I followed a man with a big backpack. He got in the cafe line. I got in line behind him. I ordered a pita, with chicken and rocket and pesto. And a water. I sat at table, even though the couch area was non-smoking. The girl came around and put black plastic ashtrays on every table. But not mine. I would have told her not to put it there, in a not very nice way, if she had tried to put it there. But she didn't.

I tried to read the excerpts for class that night. I read one. It had too many run-on sentences in it. I finished it and decided not to go to class that night. I decided to go to Charing Cross and get out and walk around.

On the Tube, I got on the front car. It's noisier than the other cars, closer to the engine. I had to turn my music up louder, even though it is killing my eardrums.

I got off at Charing Cross, and walk out of the station. At the top of the steps, on the corner of the Strand, two guys were looking at a print-out map and trying to find their way. I hesitated, then walked on.

I wanted to go see Fiona Shaw in her bra again. I ended up staring, for a long time, at Seamus Heaney. It was warm inside the gallery. I kept my headset on, listening to music inside the Portrait Gallery. I sat on the bench, the wide bench, and stared at Seamus Heaney.

The artist who made the oil had a name that didn't have a gender: Tai-Shan. The placard gave the artist no gender. I walked up to it, read it, sat back down. I stared for a long time at his face, at brush stroke mouth. One strand of hair, unblended titanium white. The almost invisible eyeglass frames.

Beowulf, he wrote, or rewrote, I considered.

Then he who had harrowed the hearts of men
with pain and affliction in former times
and had given offence to God
found that his bodily powers failed him.
Hygelac's kinsman kept him helplessly
locked in a handgrip. As long as either lived,
he was hateful to the other. The monster's whole
body was in pain, a tremendous wound
appeared on his shoulder. Sinews split
and the bone-lappings burst. Beowulf was granted
the glory of winning.

I left that room, and looked more in the gallery. The day did not lift much. I left and wandered more. I went home, eventually, and waited for my husband to come.

It was a blue day. I spent it alone, and with Seamus. I did nothing but not die that day.

Alex doesn't read this weblog

2006-03-14T18:50:00.000Z

This is Alex. Hello Alex!

Alex lives in London. He's my friend. He's married to Frances. I talk about her lots, but I don't talk about Alex very much.

Alex, like many of you (especially those of you not here right now), does not read my weblog.

Why do you care whether Alex reads my blog or not?

It says something, doesn't it? It says something about the nature of the world, about me, and my essential human flaw.

Here YOU are, a perfectly good human, reading this. You are at "Letters from London" and you are interested in London, and Elsewhere. You like pictures. You like stories. You like living vicariously. You read my weblog. You're good.

But who am I moaning about? Alex. What else am I moaning about? My ex-boyfriends. What else? The dandy weather in Kansas City, and my ex-job and my ex-porch and wide grocery store aisles, and all the things I miss from home.

Look at Alex. LOOK at him. Isn't he cute? He is. Why am I featuring photos of Alex here, and not photos of my husband, or even Frances? Not a good question. But a relevant one.

It seems my wiring is mis-wired. It seems, sometimes-- often-- I can't see things. It isn't a problem with forest or trees. It's that I've got my fool head craned around, trying to see anything I might have I missed. What I am missing. What was and what could have been. Forest? What forest?

Ow. Who put that stupid tree there?

Ah Alex. You are so funny. I like you.

So I'm just blathering on about Alex, who doesn't read this, and won't even know he has a webpage featuring him, even though all he ever does, besides eating rice, is stare at computer screens (lame).

I SHOULD be telling you about Amber, who always is the first to respond to my posts. Or Bob Barnes, my friend in Lawrence, who stayed with us here, and who tries to put comments on the blog, but gets foiled by technology and clenches his fists in the air and says "Damn you!" like a cartoon character. Or Greg, my unicycle-commuting brother-in-law, who had my blog on his RSS feed before my husband did. Or Grinder,
aka Rod, whom I've never met , but who lives in Madison and who personally started me a mini-following there.

I should be telling you about you. The readers. The people who matter.

But ahh... Alex.

Big Green Men

2006-03-06T14:30:00.000Z

The worst thing you can do-- if you are me-- is read the New York Times's review of the Oscars afterward.

The funny thing is, why do they watch? Why do these stupid, joyless journalists watch, if they don't have any idea what entertainment is for?

I wonder if Alessandra Stanley has any idea how self-righteous her article sounded on how self-righteous and self-important the Oscars were this year. Yawn. Did she SEE Ben Stiller? Damn that self-important Ben! Maybe she missed it, too busy typing away on her very P.C. Macintosh.

Ugh.

For anyone who knows me pretty well, here is my quote: "The Oscars are my FAVORITE day of the year!" I love it more than my birthday. I love it more than Christmas. I love it more than Jesus rising from the dead again to help me look for my Easter basket. I LOVE the Oscars.

From the time the nominees are announced until the day of the awards, I scramble around, trying to see the movies I'd missed that had been nominated. In my Kansas City days, I also scrambled around, coming up with a theme, making just the right guest list, and sending out ballots for my annual party. Not so easy to do in London, with coverage at 1 a.m. It was serious for me, because love like that is serious! WHEEEEE!

Why do I love the Oscars? Why do I sit, mesmerized with a big stupid grin on my face, for three to five hours, waiting to hear which movie a bunch of people I never met voted for?

Hmmm...

I wonder. I think it has something to do with Jon Stewart in bed with George Clooney. And Ben Stiller in a green unitard. And Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin's dueling monologues. And Tom Hanks getting clocked over the head with a viola. And Dolly Parton strutting around, at age "sexty," getting all of Hollywood to clap along. Phillip Seymour Hoffman winning and looking like a stuttering fool; then Reese Witherspoon winning, and speaking like fine, poured honey.

Movie stars are aliens. They aren't anything that belongs to us. But their art belongs to us. We give it the only meaning it can have, by seeing it, by becoming the other side of it.

And on award nights, when the actors and the filmmakers and all of the artists arrive, they are naked to us. They try to cover it up with designer clothes and jewels, but we get to see them. Longing, just like we are, when we sit at home on that couch.

For that night, we get to look at them as they are: mothers and fathers, children and grandchildren, getting pushed along in life.

It's the crack in the mirror, the crack where we see ourselves. And I love it.

Under "The Tent"

2006-03-04T19:38:00.000Z

Authors really shouldn't be celebrities or figureheads. Not really.

Instead, they should be heroes.

Margaret Atwood just fills a chair, like any other person. She is right there in front of me. She is little. She is older than the image sketched on the side of a Barnes & Noble handbag.

But she is epic.

Behind me, there are 400 other people, authors in waiting. I can feel them straining out to her, their longing like tentacles in the invisible air.

But she is epic. Her humor is dry, like Canadian winter air. She effuses fluffy warmth, like the cat she tells us about, now toying with souls in heaven. She talks; yet her force, in the room, is silent.

She is unanswered questions. She is a dream answered. She is forgiven quarrels and feuds that heave and flame at boundary lines.

And, then again, she is just Margaret.

Other authors sat in chairs on the stage. Other authors gave advice, and answered questions. They said great and good things.

But Margaret Atwood filled the space, and emptied it again.

Some authors are celebrities, with fans. Some authors are figureheads, with cults.

And some authors are heroes.

Lost in Love

2006-03-01T08:48:00.000Z

Was it the beer or the sunshine? Or just escaping London for a while that gave me the nerve to talk to Air Supply?

Or none of that?

I was on my way to Nashville, with three hours to kill in the airport, when I spotted two guys that looked alot like Russell Hitchcock and Graham Russell. Granted, Russell's hair was silver-y now, but it was still them.

I didn't think much of it. I was still laughing to myself over the conversation I had just had with my mom over the phone:

"Hi Mom. I'm in Chicago."

"Hi Sweetie. Good you made it. How was the flight?"

"It is was fine...Holy crap. There's John Kerry!"

Pause. "Who's John Kerry?"

Gulp. "John Kerry! JOHN Kerry, Mom?!?"

Pause. "You mean Jim Carrey?"

Sigh.

As John Kerry, sans any kind of secret service (for obvious reasons), drove off in his VIP golf cart and Mom rattled in my ear, I watched Air Supply come out of the same jetway area.

Hmmm. I don't think I'll try that one on her either.

I was back in the Midwest. O'Hare terminal 3 is all glass panes and the sunlight was flooding in. I drank in the sunshine and talked to every stranger I could. I told the Mom-John Kerry story to the cashier in the book store. He thought it was funny. I told it to the cop from New Jersey (yes his name WAS Vinnie!) who sat next to me at the bar. Vinnie and I chatted about a lot of things: the mafia, travelling, our spouses, his goatee. But we really enjoyed listening to the banter of the waitstaff.

"Hey Amber," one waitress said to the bartender, "who do you think that guy at table 112 looks like?" Vinnie and I followed the direction of Amber's gaze. I chuckled. Sure enough, it was Air Supply.

Amber, who was about 22 (and had carded me), furrowed her brow and said, "Rod Stewart?"

The waitress giggled and raised her eyebrows. She nodded and Amber's face got a little flush. "NO!"

Then the waitress laughed and said, "It isn't, but it looks kinda like him."

I didn't say anything. I wasn't sure they would know who Air Supply was anyway. Later, though, she came back with an autographed photo, so she must have found out.

I finished my soup and my second beer, said good-bye to Vinnie and wandered down to my gate. Of course, the gate had changed again, so I wandered down to the other end of the terminal to my new gate.

You know, I was beginning to think Air Supply was stalking me.

When I spotted them, standing in my gate area, I didn't even think. I just walked right up to them and started talking.

"You know," I said, "I saw you guys coming off your plane earlier, right behind John Kerry."

"We spotted him too!" Graham said. "He seemed so approachable."

"I thought you guys should have had the VIP cart with the striped awning, instead of him," and I laughed.

"Aww, aren't you sweet," said Russell.

Then I told them the John Kerry-Mom story and they laughed about that. I didn't tell them the Rod Stewart-waitress story. I didn't think they would find that quite so funny. Graham asked where I was from. "London!" they exclaimed. Everyone exclaims that. Well, except people in London. I told them I thought they lived in London, too. But no, they don't. Graham lives in Utah, and Russell lives in L.A.

We talked some more, but then I sensed we were going to shortly run out of things to say, so I said "well, it was nice talking to you." And I introduced myself, "I'm Elizabeth, by the way." And they said they were Graham and Russell. Is that funny? And then they said that I should be sure to come see them backstage at their next concert in London, that they would remember me.

So I wandered off and sat down next to a woman who I at first thought was talking to herself, but then realized she just had one of those fancy earpieces for her phone, hidden in all her hair. I watched as Air Supply went to a new gate area for their flight to Philadelphia. Gates change alot in O'Hare. And I struck up another conversation with that woman next to me, once she hung up the phone.

It was nice to be back in the Midwest.

By the way, in case you are still wondering, this is John Kerry.

Evening song

2006-02-28T18:19:00.000Z

It's gone, isn't it?

When did it leave us

Or when did we leave it?

Did it go

When the blue light came down?

Or the night I said no

When you said yes?

Did it leave

When I said yes to him

And you to her?

Did it go when I left

Or when you stayed

Or when you moved

From Neptune

To some other planet?

When I wasn't a drive-by

Anymore?

When did it leave us?

When did it go?

When did we leave it behind?

Without warning
as a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart
-- Sappho

Hobby

2006-02-20T08:23:00.000Z

“I have an idea!” I think.
And so it starts.
I begin something new.
Learning guitar
Is the latest,
That dust collector in the corner.
Yoga practice, once a week, once a month,
Or sometimes only in my mind.

For about two days one February
On the steps of the Nelson Art Gallery
It was Kung fu
(I still miss it, though I cannot stand on my hands).
"I think I’ll start jogging!"
And so I run to the corner
And around it
And then I walk home
And put the shoes away.

Mom bought me a Christmas cross-stitch, years past,
A snowman, giddy, on a sled.
I still have not finished it.
It isn’t even counted cross stitch!
When I was single,
Different men looked like pastimes
Matt, who made me dinner
On Valentine’s Day
And bought me a scarf.
I kicked him out early
So I could go to Will when he summoned.

I buy empty spaces,
Books and journals.
They cram into shelves.
They all look different,
Like the men did.
I fill a page or two, eventually,
But never with the idea that caught
When I bought.

“I have an idea,” I think
“Something for all this time,
For this body,
This mind.”
Each passing day, I want to fill it.
Yet, each morning, I wake
Empty again.

Sunny Intervals

2006-02-15T10:25:00.000Z

London is blooming this morning.

It rained last night, the drops crackling on the plastic sheeting that covers the bricks outside our front window. We fell asleep to the lullaby of water rushing down the black iron downspouts.

But this morning, London is dripping with sunshine.

It won’t last. In England, this day will be patchy with storms and beloved sunny intervals. But I cling to this lovely moment. I twist back the curtains and watch commuters and schoolchildren hustle by the window, eastbound toward the Tube, the light glowing on their faces.

Though the sky overhead is blue, the sun on the horizon hasn’t burned off the haze of wetness; it casts a sheen of golden filigree over the air.

I am not outside, but I can see it is cold from the damp night: hands are jammed in pockets, hats pulled down to eyebrows, scarves tied up to chins. But the sun warms the edge off the morning and the commuters walk with a swing in their gaits.

There are two Londons on any day: the scabby, homeless miserable coldsore of a day, when light refuses to reveal itself from under piles of past-date, clotted cream clouds. The night comes welcome on those days, obscuring the misery and giving the city’s inhabitants an excuse to wile away darkness in their own perversions, habits and slovenliness.

But then there are the sunny intervals, the sun breaking free of its captor, glorious in its hour or two in the yard. It carves space for itself in any corner: entwined in the leaves on the ivy plant, on the folds of a bundled coat, between the lapping waves on the pond in St. James Park, on the tiniest drop of dew on a petal of a drooping pink germanium in a flower box in Queen’s Park. It makes warm love to miles of brick and mortar, then flirts with years of paint on the wrought iron gates and balconies.

It floods into a chorus of rooms simultaneously, harmony in color and light; and then, suddenly, like a child snatched to safety by its mother, it disappears again.

This morning, outside this window, the sun is reminding the wet, blacktopped road of its molten tar days again.

London is chilly rain and miles of buildings and cold people pushing ahead.

But then an interval strikes, and London is brilliant starlight in the daytime and ribbons of emerald and sapphire and burning hearts dreaming of illumination.

London Style

2006-02-14T16:04:00.000Z

We live not according to reason, but according to fashion.
--Seneca

From the beginning, one of the things I liked about London is one simple fact:

You can wear anything here!

And when I say anything, I mean it. Gone are the polished days of London Fog trenchcoats, black bowlers and Burberry plaids. (Well, the Burberry knock-offs are still everywhere-- yuck).

Now I cannot claim to be a fashionista, but I do know a FASHION DON'T when I see one. Put simply, it is that person that makes you say "What?!" to your friend/spouse/self the moment you see them.

So, in honor of London's renegade style, its obession with chasing celebrities no one anywhere else has ever heard of (Davina Mccall? Dannii Minogue?), and because I have a new, subtle, quiet, Sony Ericsson camera phone, I have launched a spinoff:

The People's Paparazzi©

Have a look! And don't let me catch you!

Dry Milk

2006-02-07T11:19:00.000Z

Frances laughs at me. “You love being poor!” as I reminisce again about my childhood.

Now, though, I am not poor.

I open the cupboard now and look at that little plastic tub of semi-skimmed dry milk. It’s cheerful, with it’s red cap and coffee and bread imagery. “Ideal for use in breadmakers, cooking, tea, coffee or as a drink in its own.”

A drink on its own. Yuck. I remember dried milk. It didn’t come in a tub. Mom didn’t buy it as a thickener ingredient for the Kashmiri Lamb Kofta she was making for dinner, like Colin did this past weekend. The only breadmakers we knew of then were the old ladies at the Mount Ida Bakery or the machines in the big Wonder bread factory at the foot of the hill, near the river.

Powdered milk came in boxes, so big that they didn’t fit in the overhead cupboards. The box had a little metal slide spout on the side. I’m not sure why we had it in our house: none of my siblings has fond memories of it. Maybe my mom made us drink it, for the calcium.

We rarely had real milk. At least I don’t remember ever seeing any in the fridge. Maybe sometimes at school I drank the mini cartons. I’d guzzle them down quickly when I got one. The taste was so unfamiliar to me that I could only bear to drink it when it was very cold. It never was at school. The little cartons had been sitting, stacked on their sides in the milk crates, outside the classroom door for a while before they got passed out to us.

I don’t eat milk on my cereal now. People think that is funny, but why should it be? It seems counter-intuitive, like unlearning to make your bed.

I saw one of those “The Making of the Milk Ads” articles. The milk moustache is on all those stars’ upper lips is actually glue. Of course you can’t get a real, serious milk moustache like that to stay put under the hot lights in a photo shoot. I understand that. Still, now every time I see one of those ads I think “Glue. It does a body good.” And I think of horses. And glue factories. I don’t think of milk.

Jeannie lived in Paris for a while, before I ever moved here to London. She told me about the milk that sits on the shelf in the grocery stores. I couldn’t really understand it until I saw it for myself. “It has some hormone in it, I think,” she said “that preserves it.” Hormones. Yum. Just what you want on your Cheerios. Or stirred in your espresso. I found it here. It’s called UHT, or “long-life” milk or cream.

I discovered that UHT actually stands for “ultra-high temperatures”— the dairy product is sterilized at temperatures in excess of 100° Celsius then packaged in air-tight containers. I guess the milk was already at least 98.6° F in the cow, but it does seem upside-down to what I were are used to. Anyway, this process gives the milk longer shelf life, up to six months. The up side is that there are no hormones in it like I thought, except what the cow put it in. The down side is that probably the heat killed any hormones anyway, and anything else remotely healthy in it. But at least you won’t have to go back to the store for six months.

I dreamt about milk last night. I’m not sure if that is why I am thinking about this. In the dream, I was milking a cow. I can still feel the soft, warm udders in my hand, see the pool of white on the grass and dirt under its belly, where I missed the pail. I remember I was worried I was tickling the animal, and because it was a dream, I made it happen. The cow began to squirm from being tickled. I kept glancing at its foot, afraid I was going to get kicked in the head. I knew, though, that the cow would be very unhappy if I didn’t finish, so I tried to hurry. The more I hurried, the more the cow seemed to dance above me.

My dad’s uncle had a dairy farm in the hills outside of Reading, Pennsylvania. We went there when we were kids. I am unsure of the memory, because I have seen photos of it. I don’t know if I remember actually being there, or if I have just imagined the memory from the photos. We walked through on wooden boards, holding our noses from the stench, and watched the machines suck the milk from the cows. There were piles of crap everywhere. I can’t remember my great-uncle at all.

I do remember the powdered milk in my glass. Milk solids are supposed to dissolve, but the never quite do, especially if they are the cheapest brand in the biggest box that has been sitting under the counter for who knows how long. We only got a thimble-full of orange juice when we were kids, so I don’t know what we drank at breakfast otherwise. Probably iced tea. We drank a lot of iced tea. But there was the powder milk, a mini-foam on the top of the drink, obscuring the lumps. It isn’t exactly white, in the way that a smoker’s teeth aren’t exactly white. There is a yellowish tinge to it. When you drank real milk, if there were lumps, you knew that something was wrong with it. But with powdered milk, it was the status quo. Just try to relax your throat and let it go by. Or chew it up.

I did like being poor as a kid. I like making blanket forts, banging on pots and pan with a wooden spoon, and playing outside in cardboard refrigerator boxes. Maybe I had other toys, but I don’t remember them much. I even remember eating thin, soggy Chef Boyardee pizza fondly. But I never liked powdered milk.

Counting Backward from 1000

2006-01-31T10:10:00.000Z

It’s black and dull in the room, but my mind shoots through with lights, flashes of bodies, voices shouting, tipping and wheeling around.

I roll over and feel the body, warm and snoozing, next to me. I huff and sigh, my eyes following the crack on the ceiling. I could read. I could get up, watch TV. But I am tired. I feel it, just over the edge of this restlessness: the exhaustion waiting for the apprehension to relent.

I remember New Zealand. I remember turning my head, on approach to Queenstown airport, looking out the window after 16 hours in that seat. The brown sugar mountain loomed a few feet, it seemed, off the 737’s wing. We curled like smoke around that hill, and glided into a tiny airfield. The lovely flight attendants, in their green bowler hats, saluted my mother as we disembarked onto the barren tarmac.

I remember the shearer, cuddling the baffled sheep against his thighs and chest. He spoke easily, without eye contact, explaining how sitting the sheep on their bum, in this position, put pressure on a certain spot, in the back of their brain. It made them relax, loose. The sheep hung there in the man’s arms like gristle, its eyes lolling over the crowd in the barn, unconcerned. The wool fell away from its skin, like skimming cream off of milk. Then, slowly, kindly, the man placed the sheep back on its feet. Like a switch flipped on, its feet crackled on the wood floor in a panicked scramble. The shearer guided him into the pen.

I remember the border collie, a streak of fur on green, shooting out across a paddock on the man’s command. The field, open and wide, impossibly huge between the lake and the looming mountain face, held crevices filled with beige lumps. The dog, in fits and starts, dashed in one hollow, disappeared for a minute. I squinted in the sun. In the distance, a piece of the hill itself seemed to move on its own. The collie though flitted out from behind it. A mass of sheep scuttled around a bend, bleeting in protest. The dog froze at a sound from its owner, dropped belly to the ground, then skulked around the flank of the group. The sheep shuddered, en masse, their heads pressing into each other’s butts. A sound from the man, a move from the dog, and the sheep rose up, quivered, and shot down the hill, a raucous pile, into the paddock. The man clicked the gate shut behind them.

I roll over again, and the duvet continues it slow march over to my side of the bed, and the floor beyond. I stare at the numbers on the clock. There is a 2 and 3 and a 4. I forget the sheep and remember the counting.

I start at 1000. I inhale through my nose, let my mouth fall open, pay attention to the breath. I close my eyes. I can still see the blue skies over Lake Wakatipu, but I try to let my attention go to the numbers. 999. The long bus ride, through the south island landscape, to Milton Sound. Breathe in and out. 998. The full moon hung on low sky. It wobbles as I breathe. 997. Water bottles filled in the stream. 996. Breathe. 995. Flash of deep brown seal flesh under the water. 994. 993. 992. water… skipping rocks on the lake …991…

The breath moves on its own now, the numbers have slipped away. The body slumbers. The mind lifts and drifts, then, into the memory, into the dregs of the day.

What YES! gave me...

2006-01-26T18:56:00.000Z

I did NOT want to go on this ski trip. Go skiing in the Alps? In Italy? No thanks!

Some of you may think: That is BONKERS. Some of you may think that is just plain out of character. (Elizabeth LOVES to travel!) Some of you are cursing me for not appreciating the luck I have!

But I am willing to bet that some of you understand. Skiing is not for everyone.

First of all, ski boots, as everyone, even skiers know, are serious, non-gender-specific, torture. Cruel, horrific pain of the plastic-est kind. If you can't ski for crap, as I cannot, you can rest assured that you will spend a great deal of time walking in the killer boots from hell. It's the only other option, besides walking back down the snowy slopes in your socks.

As for skiiing, well I don't much like roller coasters either. Or crotch-rocket motorcycles (though I am dying for a Vespa). And I don't want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. So, yeah, careening down a slippery, 22-degree slope with a pair of waxed boards strapped to my feet, aiming for either that tree or that cliff, or those rocks, or that building at the bottom, has never been high on my list of things to do.

BUT, I went. Why, you ask?

Was it because Colin wanted me to go? No, not really. Yes, he did want me to go. Yet, despite our wedding vows and his continual proclamations of love, I still have a hard time believing he will want me around when I know I won't be in top form. (I can be a loud, whiny complainer.) He says he does, though. I say I believe him.

Was it because I was worried that Henry and Karen, our ski buddies, and Colin wouldn't be able to afford it if I didn't go? Uh, no. Henry drives a Porsche Carrera 4. Karen drives an Audi TT. IN LONDON. Sure, Colin rides a beat-up bicycle, but that is because he chooses to!

So was it because I felt guilty? Hell no! I have mastered the art of guilt long ago! Didn't get 12 years of Catholic school for nothing!

So, why go? Well, I'll tell you.

Frances and Alex were supposed to go. (This is Frances and Alex, here, pictured at right at the Warrington when Ann and Mary were visiting. Alex would hate this photo... he doesn't usually dress like that.) But then Alex got "sick" (appendo-colo-reducto surgery, or whatever) and Frances seems to think the welfare of her unborn child is more important than apres ski. So Colin and I got recruited.

I said NO. Nope. Not going. Don't want to. Can't make me. Colin just nodded and looked at me with those big, sweet eyes. He tried to say "But--" and I just said "Nope." I wasn't going to be stuck in some ski town in plastic death boots with a bunch of crazy Italians and Germans.

But THEN, I remembered something: my New Year's resolution. I had said it out loud to Colin.

"I am going to try to be more positive."

I didn't really notice my negativity until I met Colin. He is so cheerful. So upbeat. "Say, Colin. Want to (fill in the blank)?" -- Want to flambe a goat? Search for the lost underworld of Atlantis? Stand on your hands and yodel?-- "Sure," he almost always says, without hemming or hawing. He is so easy going.

It's not that I want to be like him. I want to be like ME, only more amenable.

So, here was this ski trip. My mind was set negatively.

I was remembering that last ski trip, to Snow Creek in Weston, Missouri. Also affectionately known as "Ice Lump". I fell, trying to snowplow, and hurt my knee. It hurt alot. I got bundled into the ski patrol sled and dragged, humiliated, down the lump. The girls I came with let me wait around, in the shed, while they skiied the afternoon away. Bitches.

So in contemplating ever skiing again, I shuddered. I didn't want to risk certain death. In fact, I didn't really want Colin to go either, to die flying over the edge of a mountain, leaving me a pathetic, childless widow. I guess I was scared.

But I told Colin, yes, I would go.

I changed my mind.

Being in Selva Gardena, in the Italian Alps, where they speak German and Italian and Laden, is like being surounded by a kind but very energetic (and very oddly dressed) alien race. Or maybe you have been asked to join a cult, something you don't understand. You are thrown into lessons, and just left there, constantly battling your urge to RUN, although you feel safe, mostly happy, and the sun is shining.

There was goulash soup and gluhwein, the sun mercilessly warm in the cold air, reflecting off the snow. Fluid Italian overlapping with the gutteral sound of German while milk foams in the espresso machine. Tired legs thud forward in the hard plastic boats against the tiles. Chalets perch like birds nests above the roads, darkened timber balconies stark against whitewashed stucco walls. Up the side of the mountain, from this valley, dry, soft pine firs point to the sun, defying gravity, crawling out of the dirt and rock, to the sky. Caraway seeds in brown bread taste like licorice. A man wobbles in a one-piece mint and magenta snow suit, twitching his moustache. Above a bar, brown ceramic 1/2 litre wine jugs hang from hooks, the spouts and handles curved gently, the name of the restaurant hand-painted in blue: Keller Laurin, Selva Garden. Behind the guest house desk, piccolo bambino stands at his easel, jabbering in Italian and drawing with Crayola.

Helmets and goggles and poles and gloves and trousers and boards and earbands and snoods and shades and long underwear and lip balm and down coats and wool sweaters and sunscreen and hats and skis.

I spent alot of time on those slopes, falling. Poor Henry, such a gentleman. He stood next to me on Risaccia, not wanting to help too much, trying to help as much as I would let him. "Just point your skis this way and then put your hand that way, and it will be easier to get up."

I looked up at him with daggers. I was on my bruised right hip for the fourth time down that slope, slowing myself the best way I knew how. "Please, Henry, please. Just leave me here (to die, I thought). I'll get up eventually. PLEASE, just go. I'll be fine." My gloves were soaked. My knees were screaming. My calf muscles had seized up hours ago. My toes were solid ice. I was miserable. I sat there a while longer as people shooshed past. Then I pulled myself up and finished the slope, gliding down to the three, waiting for me patiently in the sunshine.

But each afternoon, at Bar La Stua, over gluhwein or weissbeir and reports of the day, I could feel the pull in my muscles. I looked back over the day and then forward out over the day tomorrow and thought: "Why not? So, yes. OK. Again. I'm here."

Karen would smile and say how much I was improving; Henry would gently enquire how I thought it was going. And I would look at Colin, his sweet eyes and say, "Yes."

"I'm going to sign up for another lesson. Order me another beer in a few minutes." And I walked up the road, paid my 30 euro, and committed to another day of ski boots and frozen toes.

In saying yes, I faced steep slopes and terrifying chair lifts and humiliations galore as I scooted, skiless, down a red slope on my bum. But I also earned hours in the Italian sunshine, the fresh mountain air, watching scores of ecstatic people in their element. That beats lead skies and miserable faces on the Tube any day. I pushed myself and succeeded, conquering my fear, even if just a little bit.

Oh and the food was great too!

Let the Sun Shine!

2006-01-20T16:38:00.000Z

For those of you ooohhing and aahhing over the excitement of life in London, I can tell you that there is one downside: the season they call "winter."

This isn't really a "season" or anything like "winter" (except that Christmas takes place during it); no, it is just a VERY long extension of the worst possible day you can imagine during your average late Midwestern autumn (snowfall not included).

For example, the sun has not shone here, not in any interval longer than, say, 5 seconds, since December 28. (Yes, that is 23 days). Until TODAY! Yippee! Well, sort of.

It might have been longer than that. I can't say for sure, as I was in Canada, enjoying the beautiful weather (and no, I am not being sarcastic). I can say, however, that the last time I saw the sun, until today, was at approximately 36,000 feet and descending into London airspace.

Absence makes the heart lonely. Sometimes it makes it frustrated and tired and sad. Perhaps fonder, too, but it is not at the top of the list.

The winters in London are known, primarily, for being indiscriminate. Remember that guy, his name was Todd, and he sat next to you in social studies in ninth grade? Kind of a sad sack with a moon face? No? Well, such is London weather. Indiscriminate, soggy, and flavorless. Not entirely unlike most English cooking.

Weather is only worth having around, I think, if it keeps you on your toes.

For example, in Ottawa, Ontario, while we visited for 10 days at Christmas, we would have been very bothered if we hadn't brought our sunglasses. The glare off the new snow is like hearing a high C from a opera diva. But the weather never lets up, thankfully. We bought new hats to keep our ears warm, a must in the continual, minus-freezing temps. We had to add extra time to our plans to go anywhere so we could run out and warm up the car and scrape off the frost or ice. We had to adjust the way we drove so we didn't fishtail into the Clemont family's mailbox. We wore our boots to drudge through the snow and slush that was everywhere. And we packed our slippers to keep our socks dry and our toes warm in the house after we pulled off our boots.

London weather decision: Tiny umbrella or no?

But then, that really isn't much of a decision, as it seems to rain at least a little bit everyday. Umbrellas are compact and easy to carry, there is usually a building, doorway or taxi nearby if you get caught out in it without one, and we are wearing our coats anyway.

But it isn't just the lack of sun, for me. Lately, I've been feeling closed in too. The clouds, plus the cold-damp, plus the oppressive grey-brown-beige buildings on every side: they start to box me in after awhile. A few days ago, I pulled on a turtleneck-- my standard dresscode-- and found myself strangling. I tore it off and frantically texted my friend Frances.

"Help! Fed up with turtlenecks!"

We went shopping, bought a few V-necks and some T-shirts. I felt a little better.

What I realized, though, as I felt the sun on me today, finally, was I really miss the Midwest. I hear it when I listen to some of my music, especially the country folk songs that I like.

Lately, I listen to Shawn Colvin sing "Wichita Skyline" and I want to be driving out across the flatlands of Kansas to see my little sister. Although I always loved her, I didn't see her enough when I lived nearby.

And although I always loved the change in the sky, the clouds cutting across the muggy Missouri afternoons, I didn't love them enough when I was there.

Wichita Skyline

Down at the train they go to Independence everyday.
But anywhere else now... seems like a million miles away
And I must have been high to believe that I would ever leave
Now I'm just a flat, fine line, like the Wichita skyline

I rode on the airstream across the great lonesome afternoon
I wished hard enough to hurt, drove fast enough to catch the moon.
But I must have been dreaming again,
'Cause there's nothing around the bend
Except for that flat, fine line, the Wichita skyline

As far as Salina I can get that good station from LaRue
I'm searching the dial while I'm scanning the sky for a patch of blue
And I watch the black clouds roll in
Chasing me back again
Back to the flat, fine line, the Wichita skyline

-- by Shawn Colvin & John Leventhal

Spiral-bound Woman

2006-01-16T17:47:00.000Z

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
-- Joan Didion

I'm sitting at my oak table, one I use as a desk. I am glancing up, now and then, at the bookcase next to the door. I can't keep my eyes away.

On the second shelf, there's a red notebook. It's blank. I know, because I bought it myself, not too long ago, at a shop on the high street. It was cheap, probably not more than a pound.

I am typing these words, but it just takes a half thought to imagine the feel of the virgin paper under my fingertips, the feel of the ballpoint tip as it presses into the recycled, pulpy flesh.

I look at that blank, waiting notebook, my palms itching, but patient.

I believe I know, slightly, what it is to be a man who craves women.

It is easy to fill it up, the notebook. I've done it with many. I've torn them apart, ripped out their guts, left them alone to decompose in dark places, cardboard boxes in crawlspaces. I've skulked badly-lit aisles for the next one, breath quickening. Open them up, peeling back the covers, peeping inside to see what there is to offer. Investing in one, money, ink, time. Tears.

But not quite happy with the result. Unsure, afraid to expose myself. I close the cover again and put it aside. I caress the cover, tuck it away, first in the bottom of my knapsack. Then, on the corner of the desk, under a stack of papers. Later, onto the bookshelf. Then finally, into the box, into the hole in the floor.

Time to move on.

I hide my failures. I don't want to revisit them, to fix them. Man doesn't want to be friends with his mistakes. But, oh, did I love them once.

Remember all the times in Barnes & Noble, I spent gazing at you, lusting and teasing? Walking by, stroking you, picking you up and taking you home, finally?

Remember? I took you to Italy! We got lost on a train between Rome and Florence. Together we carried secrets in English, all the way from Sicily to Soprabolzano, up the Dolomites nella funivia... Remember the afternoons in the piazzas?

Remember the dark night in the jazz club, that corner table where we huddled together, listening to blue music and exchanging ideas? I drank too much. You showed me that.

Remember how I clasped you to my breast and told you everything?

I am looking at the black metal spiral. I want to touch it, feel its coldness. I'll stroke it and make it warm. Shoved between books on the shelf, its pages are closed and secretive. I want to crack it, to set it free.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
-- Joan Didion

Everybody's got a darkness...

2006-01-16T10:00:00.000Z

Everybody's got a darkness
They're not going to show it to you.

It's Monday and grey again in London.

I dreamed of you last night. I sat in a cafe over cappuccinos with some friend. He told me the flat I used to live in on Randolph Avenue was going to occupied again soon. By you.

Everybody's got a shadow
Following them around
Clinging, clinging to their footsteps
Dragging them to the ground.*

In the dream, I felt you coming here like a rocket shooting to the moon. I thought, in the dream, that suddenly you realized you could not be away from me anymore.

Darkness...
Shadow...
Secret...
Hear them rattlin' bones

My friend, well, he didn't know I knew you. He said your name like he was reading it off a marquee. I listened, then I blurted it out. Who you were to me.

Darkness...
Shadow...
Secret...
Hear them rattlin' bones

There was silence over the wobbly wooden table, as we stared down into the dregs of our foam. It was strange to him -- as it is to everyone -- the thought that you were mine once. He stumbled a laugh, one that I mimicked. We changed the subject. But I wanted to leap up and run to 115 Randolph Avenue and sit on the step, petting Missy the cat, and wait for you to arrive.

Everybody's got a little secret
Something they never gonna tell
Gonna take it right down to their grave
Up to heaven or maybe to ...well,

I tried to go back to sleep after that dream. It was 2:53 a.m. I flipped on the blue pinlight of my booklight and tried not to wake Colin. He rolled over and reached for me but did not wake. I read for a while, then got up, and laid on the couch. There was a rumble, deep inside of me, pulling down, down.

I watched BBC. In the middle of the night, they rebroadcast shows with a sign language interpreter in the corner. I watched the face and the hands and didn't listen. I watched until 4:15. Then I went back and read some more.

I finally slept, maybe around 5:15 or so.

There is a skeleton in your closet
Do you hear, do you hear it rattlin' bones?
I think you better look the thing in the eye.
It's never gonna leave you alone.

This morning, I walked from our flat on Delaware toward the shops at Maida Vale. I carried my laptop on my back, heavy and full of stories I am having trouble telling. A thin, dark man walked toward me. His coat was too big for him, his eyes looming large behind his glasses. The weight hanging from my heart swung and loomed, pulled down again. I walked by 115 Randolph Avenue under lead skies.

I wondered what that man, walking by me just then, carried inside him, the color of his darkness. "Tell me your secret," I whispered to myself, a dirty proposition. I wondered what he dreamed last night.

Darkness...
Shadow...
Secret...
Hear them rattlin' bones.

*Lyrics from "Darkness" by Kelley Hunt

Ghosts in Grey

2006-01-04T09:29:00.000Z

I woke from a hard dream this morning.

Colin and I were driving on a snowy road, a mountain face along one side, a river rushing along on the other. I must have been half-asleep, dreaming, because even as I dreamed, I could feel him curled against my back. In the dream, the sky was bright blue with just one or two puffy clouds.

I looked out the window from the back seat to a high cliff on the other side of the river.
I could hear children's voices pealing out in play from the clifftop, but I could not see them. A pink and white-striped beach ball suddenly appeared off the cliff top and fell slowly -- more like a balloon than a ball. A little girl's voice raised in protest, but I still could not see the children.

As I watched the ball, I felt the car fishtail underneath me. I turned my head forward, catching sight of the sunshine on the water in the river, the snow on the road as I did. Colin was in the front seat, but not driving. The inside of the car was not usual: it was just an open space and he was facing me... something like the space of a backseat of a limousine, fitted into a 1970 Chevy Chevelle.

"Colin!" I said urgently, locking my eyes on his and pointing out the side window in the direction the car was moving. The car's backend slid away from the mountain's face and onto the slope toward the river. Colin turned to look out. I felt the back of the car, so close behind me, strike the water with a thudding splash.

The alarm clicked on. I woke up.

I lay there, listening to a song I recognized, half-remembered. It crawled up inside of me while the remnant of the dream hung on.

Shadows and shape mixed together at dawn
But by time you catch them simplicity's gone
And so we sort through the pieces
My friends and I
Searching through the darkness to find
The breaks in the sky.

And the reason that she loved him
Was the reason I loved him too
And he never wondered what was right or wrong
He just knew - he just knew.

The BBC2 announcer reminded me, after it was over, of David Crosby and Phil Collins' odd duet, "Hero."

I had been dreaming, half-awake all morning, since 5:35 when I got up to go the the bathroom. I dreamt about Ford Kistler and Brian Wilson, aka B-Love, hiking to a rundown old house in the desert. B-Love wore cool sunglasses and smiled and smiled, the way I always remember him.

I dreamt I was floating inches above the floor of the smallest bedroom of the house I grew up in, 2328 Adams Street, Davenport, Iowa. The room was still painted Inca Gold, the color my brother John, chose. And because I could still feel Colin against me, asleep, I was carrying him on my back as I floated above the dirty carpet, face down.

I dreamt I was at a reception in a large hall, having dinner with some important business contacts, when suddenly I realized my high school biology teacher, Sr. Donna Donovan, was at the next table with my mom. I climbed over the table to hug Sr. Donna, and found all my former nun teachers there too: Sr. Stasia from fifth grade, Sr. Genevieve the music teacher, Sr. Joan from first grade, Sr. Carmel, who gave me my first detenion, and others, whose faces I can see, but names I can't remember. I hugged them all.

A few days ago, I caught sight of my reflection in the window of the Bakerloo Line train. It was Friday. I was coming home from The Passage, the soup kitchen where I volunteer twice a week. I felt happy but very tired, as I always do when I leave the Passage. The work is hard, but joyful. I am more content there than any place.

I was moving my eyes over the other passengers, as I am wont to do, when I caught a glimpse of my own face in the window. I shook for a minute, staring back at the grey ghost as she fixed her eyes on me. Wild hair poking out from under a stocking cap, freckles she always forgets she has. Another dream ...

London in winter is a town of ghosts. The fog is not a soft mantle, but a million-billion particles of broken memory, lost dreams, and yearnings. London mourns its losses deeply, its plagues and fires and violent deaths, in winter, where, grey -- like dreams -- hangs like a pallor in the morning.

Danny speaks!

2005-12-30T12:48:00.000Z

I had the nicest e-mail recently from Danny Wallace... the only personal note I have ever received from a king, I must say!

After I wrote that last post, I thought it would only be fair to let Danny know I had written it. I am a Joinee and a Lovely citizen afterall... It is good and fair thing to do. So I sent him and e-mail with a link to this weblog, thanking him for stopping to pose for the photo and letting him know I'd written a little bit about him . Here's his swell response:

Hi Elizabeth

Thanks for the e-mail. I was a little surprised by some of the comments in your blog, though. You make it sound as if 'power' has changed me! Well, you'll be pleased to hear that I have no actual power. The Leicester Square event was rife with irony and tongue-in-cheek self-importance - it was for the final episode of what had been a series full of the-joke-being-on-me, and so the final scenes are a counter to that and a feelgood end where we finally meet the citizens. There certainly was no sense of 'moving up the totem pole', as evidenced by how I talked to people and how they talked to me between takes! I went to the pub afterwards to hang out with as many people as I could and thank them. If you're going to be a King, and you're me, you're partly playing a character. I think most people do pick up on that and I'm genuinely sorry you didn't. I'll try harder next time!

I'm still actively involved in both Join Me and Lovely, on a ground floor level. Last Saturday I turned up at the pub to hang out with a couple of hundred citizens and had a great time. The week before I turned up at the pub to hang out with a couple of hundred joinees, and also had a great time. Nothing's changed, really. I'm just on telly more.

Hope you're well, and that you enjoyed Jon Stewart. Sorry I seemed surprised and nervous - I was chatting to an old friend I hadn't seen in ages when you came up, so my head was elsewhere!

Cheers!
Danny

Too bad more leaders of largish nations aren't equally as pleasant and generous! I am reading Danny's latest book, Yes Man and I can tell you, being pleasant, positive and open-minded -- his latest experiment -- can have its up side. I am going to try it more! Just say NO to negativity and meanness and cold-hearted snakes. Say yes to funny guys in mint green cars, women with PEACE GEESE flyers, and homeless folks selling The Big Issue!

Have a lovely day.

Elizabeth

P.S. Don't forget to do good deeds on Fridays!

Perils of a "Lovely" Life

2005-12-14T23:29:00.000Z

Colin and I were out Sunday evening to see Jon Stewart in a live performance at the Prince Edward to promote his book, America the Book.

You know, I've been moaning and complaining lately because I never meet anyone famous around here. Madonna and Gwyneth and Kate all live practically on my doorstep -- so does Jude -- but do I ever run into them? Nope! Why are they avoiding me? Sure, I saw Tom Hanks, but lunging toward him with my camera, along with 4,000 others, cordoned off in Leicester Square at the Polar Express premiere isn't quite what I was imagining. If you pay THIS MUCH to live in London, it should come with free, accidental celebrity meetings included.

So, as I mentioned, Colin and I were out Sunday night in Soho. We were in the queue to pick up our tickets when I spot a familiar head in line ahead of me. I backhanded Colin on the chest (poor Colin's chest... I did the same thing when we spotted Louis Walsh two feet away from us on Maida Vale Road. Maybe it's better for him if we don't see famous people. I might collapse a lung.) Hey! I whispered loudly, turning my back to the famous spiky-haired guy, DANNY WALLACE is right in front of me!

Of coures he wasn't right in front of me; Colin was. But fortunately, Colin is a spatial mathematician with Elizabeth-to-English translation capability.

There are two oddly odd things about this scenario:

98.289 percent of you (and obviously the rest of the people in the lobby), even after looking at this photo at right, would have no idea who Danny Wallace is.
Well, number two is basically the same as number one, only a more explained out version of it (see below).
(I know there were only supposed to be two, but isn't this next part also interesting), most of you, even after reading the Wikipedia link, STILL don't know who Louis Walsh is, or why anyone would care.

Danny Wallace has a picture of me. It's in a drawer or a box somewhere, with lots of other pictures (see proof at left). He knows that my laptop got drowned in uber-storm last autumn. He even expressed sympathy about it in an email to me. He lives along a train track in Bow, and though I have never been to his flat, I have seen inside of it. I saw it on TV. I guess he must live in the cruddy part of East London by choice, because he certainly, by now, could afford better.

For the Anglo-Amero-pop-culture savvy, Danny is Dave Gorman's other-half. (Now, don't get all homophobic on me... they were just roommates. ) Gorman made himself most famous for his Googlewhack adventure.

Danny, not to be outdone, formed a cult -- by accident. He wrote a book about it called Join Me. It was exceptionally funny, and suddenly, in reading it, more people joined his cult (or "collective", as he prefers to call it). I read it and I joined. Colin read it, and he joined. The book made Danny a semi-recognizable person in London (Mostly in this way: "Hey that guy looks familiar, woman thinks while sitting on train. Where do I know him from? Is he the guy who delivers sandwiches to the office?). Danny connected with his collective by e-mail and website. It created a group of groupies for him. They got together sometimes, at Hyde Park and at pubs across the Anglo-land. Sometimes Danny came, sometimes he left the Joinees to fend for themselves. Together, though, they were all working to do good deeds. On Fridays.

So what's so oddly odd about that? Nothing. Read the book. Buy the book and have some laughs. Pass it on. It's great fun and will make you want to join. It has pictures! What, I think, was odd was Danny's next "boy project" (as he and Gorman refer to them). He created a country and made himself a King. King Danny of Lovely. A real, honest-to-goodness micronation.

Colin and I watched the show about the making of this nation on BBC2 this autumn. We even recorded it on DVR and ate dinner by it. My friend, Chris, was following it too. He mosied by the unveiling of the country's name, held in Leicester Square and reported back some ominous news. It wasn't good.

Let me tell you it is an odd thing to watch this spunky, cute-in-a-dopey-way, writerly guy suddenly worshipped by a bunch of people who saw him on TV. While the concept of "Lovely" -- just like the concept of "Join Me" -- was founded on genuine altruism and whimsy, I watched in discomfort as the nation building, along with poor Danny, got tainted by exposure and power: the power of media, the power of position, the disconnect between him and his people, and the temptation to buy into the trappings that are tied to government hierarchy: Saville-Row tailored uniform included. His uniform as leader of Join Me? A big black parka and ratty blue jeans. The book, Join Me, helped to preserve a sense of mystery and harmlessness around Danny. All that fell away with Lovely.

So, in a way, when I touched Danny on the arm at the Prince Edward to say hello, to introduce myself after all this time, I was hoping it would be like it might have been in the Joinee days: fellow comrades on a mission to bring niceness to the world. I had high hopes: after all he was wearing a section of a parka, even if the sleeves were missing. But I knew it was too late. Danny had moved up the totem pole: once a real leader -- The Leader of Join Me, asking people to buy presents and cups of tea for the unsuspecting -- he was now KING (and TV star), wearing designer rags and ordering his citizens to Be Good. What a difference a uniform makes.

I have a lot of sympathy for people made famous, even when they have their own hand in it. It is impossible to realize how slowly the subtleties of life are stripped away. Even the small joys begin to crumble, like meeting someone new. Poor Danny; he might never get to know a person without them already feeling like they know his story, like they've got his number. And, he might never know what he missed, passing up the chance to have coffee with me.

Oh, I should mention: Danny was very nice when I introduced myself (if surprised and slightly nervous). I, apparently, was insanely happy to meet him. But you can see that in the photo. Maybe he had reason to be nervous.