An American in the Cotswolds

Book Brawl

2012-02-04T22:04:00.000Z

This morning I attended a book sale in the basement of the Boston Public Library. I was there by chance, having seen a listing for the sale in a neighbourhood newspaper over breakfast. I have been wanting to visit the library, and with husband out of town this was the perfect chance.

When I arrived at ten minutes to ten there were already twenty or so misfits loitering in the very grand lobby of the old McKim building waiting for the doors to the sale to open. (I know the architect's name because after the book sale I geeked out even more and joined the library's Saturday art and architecture tour.) The public library is not where the beautiful people hang out on a Saturday morning. We were a motley crew comprised of the elderly, the odd, and the possibly homeless, although winter clothing tends to make everyone look homeless. What we all had in common other than a love of books was sensible shoes. I was surrounded by the kind of people who wear running shoes with normal clothes and almost certainly never to run.

As if to tease us the first room of the sale was filled with romance novels. Dispensing with this genre at least partially explained the oxymoron of a public library holding a book sale. But why was T.S. Eliot on the poetry shelf in the next room, its spine still wearing a Dewey Decimal sticker and a manila pocket still intact on the inner back cover? I nabbed The Cocktail Party and moved on to the New England section.

Despite the sedate surroundings, there was a distinct air of frenzy mingled with aggression as bibliophiles jockeyed for prime position from which to survey the thousands of cast-offs on offer. A man sporting fresh-from-cataract-surgery-sunglasses and a red parka body blocked me from the Art shelf. A middle-aged woman pleaded with a peroxide-haired man to watch the stack of books she had selected from the rolling cart of Music titles. He shrugged as if to say that what she left behind was fair game. People carried plastic shopping baskets full of books or leaning tower of Pisa stacks. My final selection of three seemed downright modest in comparison.

I made sacrifices along the way. Larousse Gastronomique (only $10!) stayed put because it was too heavy to carry around for the rest of the day. A pang of guilt over promising husband I would not buy any more books gave me the strength to resist Confessions of a Prairie Bitch by the woman who played Nellie Olsen on Little House on the Prairie. I regret that one. In the end it was the Eliot plus a collection of essays on New England Life called Here at Eagle Pond and a book by Ludwig Bemelmans called La Bonne Table. (I bought the last because it had sweet line drawings and a chapter on the Tour d'Argent, only finding out after I got home and searched online that Bemelmans also wrote the Madeline books.) I am starting to make friends with my Kindle lately, but for $5 I got all three of these gems. How could I say no?

Letter from Beijing

2012-01-24T02:43:00.000Z

Sculpture from 798 Art District in Beijing

This is not really a letter from Beijing. I would have liked to have written it there, but Blogger is blocked in China. Facebook is also blocked there, which was less distressful than I imagined. I can now attest to the fact that nobody ever died because they couldn't check in somewhere cool.

Of course China has come up with its own version of Facebook, just like it has its own version of Google (Baidu) and Yahoo (Sina) and PayPal (Alibaba), to name a few. It's really a cross between Twitter and Facebook, and it's called Weibo. Last Tuesday my colleagues and I braved the Beijing smog (shocking even by the standards of a former Angeleno) to sit down with a few folks from their team and talk shop. I was there with the Western European, aged, behemoth of a technology company I work for, along with some partners from an American, aged, behemoth of a technology company. Together we easily averaged twice the age of the our Weibo colleagues. We sat listening attentively while Gaofei, Jerry, Terry, and Ianli regaled us with tales of their three-hundred million and growing user base. I half expected them to dab the dribble from our chins and tuck blankets over our laps before they wheeled us out to contemplate how we might capture just a few drops from their overflowing cup. Instead they gave us each a red scarf -- Weibo apparently sounds a lot like the word for scarf in Chinese -- which was promptly stolen from my hotel room by the maid.

There were other memorable if more predictable experiences over the course of the five-day trip. There was the restaurant lit up from the outside like a Vegas casino with hostesses dressed in matching fur-collared camel coats and rhinestone tiaras who ushered us up escalators in a corridor with AstroTurf-lined walls to eat fried fish with a spiked ridge like a dog collar. Then there was the dinner at a restaurant laid out like the villa of a rich Qing dynasty family, where women in elaborate costumes -- embroidered peony pink dresses, fan-shaped head pieces crowned with a single oversize flower, white socked-sandals resting on a squat stilt under the center of the foot -- served us individual carafes of hot, clear liquor alongside a taunting plate of deer tongues. The tongues were redeemed with a duck hamburger, a crisp patty sandwiched between a spongy oyster shell-shaped bun, scalloped like a madeleine.

Culinary miscellany aside, the meeting at Weibo made the deepest impression on me. I feel like I have seen the future, and it coincidentally looks a lot like the above picture I snapped in the trendy Beijing 798 art district. Because of course Beijing has trendy art districts now, just like they have Zara and iPhones and social networks that are on course to dwarf Facebook before the year is out.

Return to Beijing

2012-01-12T22:21:00.000Z

I leave shortly for a work trip to Beijing. The last time I was in Beijing was about eighteen years ago. I was a graduate student in Singapore on my way to visit an old college boyfriend -- let's call him OCB, which sounds pleasingly similar to ODB -- who was working outside of Tsingtao. OCB was too busy to meet me in Beijing, but it seemed crazy to visit China without first stopping in the capital city to take in some of the sights. So OCB arranged to have another one of his ex-girlfriends, a petite French woman named Agnès who was living in Beijing, take me around the city. I was pretty naive at twenty-two, but even I could smell the potential awkwardness in this arrangement. (It was awkward enough that I was flying to China to meet up with an old flame, but somehow that had failed to register.)

Agnès picked me up at my hotel on my first night in town and pedalled me, a large American woman, on the handlebars of her bike to a Muslim part of town where we bought flat breads and beer from street vendors, then sat around consuming them at street-side plastic tables. To this day I don't know if Agnès was trying to give me an off the beaten path experience or if taking me to this dingy street was some kind of joke. Either way, the next day I decided I would take in the Forbidden City and Mao's tomb on my own.

After four or five days in Beijing I flew on to Tsingtao where a private but rickety cab took me out to the tobacco factory where OCB was working. It was a harrowing drive that included having a bucket of worms as a co-passenger (dinner for the driver according to OCB) and witnessing what I am pretty sure was a road fatality but was too afraid to look back to confirm. When I arrived I was introduced to a couple of other ex-pats working with OCB. One was having a full blown breakdown over the fact that his case of Mars bars -- apparently this man's sole daily pleasure -- had been stolen. The other's daily pleasure was hardcore porn; from him I learned that Germans were the filthiest porn makers in the world. Thankfully we left for Hong Kong the next day.

And so it is that my abiding memories of my first visit to China are not of golden pagodas but of golden showers (explained that is) and French girlfriends of old boyfriends. I have no idea what this visit holds for me, but odds are the memories will be improved.

What do people do all day?

2012-01-02T14:49:00.002Z

I recently returned from a week long vacation at my parents' house for Christmas. It included the usual stroll down memory lane as I flipped through my high school yearbooks, dusted off my once treasured Beatrix Potter figurines, and examined the contents of my childhood bookcase. The last includes a book called What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry that my father used to read to me.  According to the jacket, the book "shows and tells what busy people do every day to build houses, sail ships, fly planes, keep house, and grow food." In other words, I am not a busy person.

Nonetheless, the subject of what I do all day seemed to be a favorite of my father's on this visit.  It first came up as husband and I were on our way out the door to see a movie for the third night in a row.

"Is this what you do all day? Eat out and go to see movies?"

Well, yes, dad, we like to do those things.

"We are on vacation," I reminded him before heading out the door for Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol, a movie in which Tom Cruise's character Ethan Hawke breaks out of a Russian jail, rappels off a skyscraper and crashes a car from ten floors up on a parking platform to save the world from nuclear annihilation.  Or, by Richard Scarry's definition, is never really busy.

I am not surprised by father's reaction. Something about going to the movies seems to set people off, especially people with kids. Invariably the news that I have seen a new release in an actual movie theater is greeted with wistful comments from my parent-friends who cannot remember the last time they went to a movie theater unless it was to see the Muppets or Sponge Bob or such.

But there was some subtext to my father's comment, which translates roughly as "Ok, now that you are practically forty your mother and I accept you are never going to have kids but can you please be a little less blatant about what an empty shell of a life you live for nothing but your own pleasure?" In other words, it is ok to busy yourself with your kids, but if you are childless the ways in which you choose to busy yourself are subject to scrutiny by the virtue police. Best not to appear to be enjoying yourself too much; that would just upset people.

Normally I ignore everything my father says, but in the spirit of New Year's Eve I have indulged in some seasonal guilt/self-flagellation. I have asked myself what the point of my life is and concluded only, pathetically, that I need to make some charitable donations.  No, I am not reconsidering my decision not to have kids. Sure, children will guarantee you will be busy for the next eighteen years or so, but even parents are subject to the virtue police. Mothers tell me there is a special force dedicated to unsolicited advice on breast feeding, toilet training, and preparing your infant for an Ivy League. Besides the older I get, the less convinced I am there is any virtue in being busy. Being busy is easy; it's the doing something I am finding hard.

Christmas Letter 2011: A Tale of Two Cities

2011-12-23T02:59:00.000Z

This year's Christmas letter is being written later than usual. I blame Facebook. After a year of prolific posting, I am frankly bored of myself. (I can only imagine how my Facebook friends feel.) Still, despite the never-ending status updates featuring snapshots of husband drinking Riesling, there are a few things left to say about our year.

River Spree, Berlin

2011 is a tale of two cities, one I will tell here in the type of revisionist history that befits a Christmas letter. In other words I will highlight all the best bits and skimover the seething underbelly of marital discontent I provoked by our move tothe first of those two cities, Berlin. It was not exactly a life of hardship, what with the company-sponsored Mercedes and apartment, not to mention all that two-euro-a-glass Riesling. And yet while I revelled in nostalgia from my childhoodtime there in the eighties (courtesy of my father's employment flying shuttles with Pan Am), husband felt like he had gone back in time to the grim environs of northwest England circa 1976.

To cheer him up we made frequent visits back to theCotswolds, like the time we went back to celebrate a little local wedding. We watched from the wine bar -- where else? -- as Kate and Wills tied the knot, then celebrated our own tenth wedding anniversary a few months later in Paris. But returning to Berlin did not get any easier for husband, although it was lightened by a few welcome visits from friends and family. Late in the summer my personal best interest aligned with myprofessional best interest when I finagled a new job opportunity at my company into a move stateside, where husband was yearning to return. And so in October I bid my goodbyes to Berlin -- her golden Lizzy, her Käsespätzle, her nudist Tiergarten sunbathers.

Elterwater, Lake District

We returned to England where we were treated to a special melodrama facilitated by the US embassy inLondon. Husband went in for what should have been a routine visa interview, and yet somehow my plans for post-interview celebratory champagne at Claridge's turned into manic taxi rides around London securing missing paperwork before degenerating into a week of obsessive waiting for his visa to arrive. When it did we finally felt secure enough to start saying our goodbyes tothose places and people we had grown to love most over the past six and a half years, up in the Lakes then back down in the Cotswolds where our last stop before Heathrow was, naturally, the wine bar.

Boston Common

In November we arrived in the second city of our tale of two: Boston. We quickly felt at home -- it's not called New England for nothing. (Husband was, I daresay, a bit miffed to find that his collection of cravats, bow ties, and tweeds would fail to achieve the desired effect of standing out as English in this town.) After skirting our way around "hills" in Europe -- the still-waiting-for-gentrification perimeter of Notting Hill, the 'wolds, and atop an old rubble heap that comprises one of the few rises in Berlin -- we have settled on Beacon Hill, complete with views of the Common and Public Garden. Sure being above one of the busiest crossroads in the city means it sometimes sound like we are sitting track-side at Nascar, but never mind for now. We are told that soon enough the snow will come, nature's welcome muffler.

The year has ended on a sad note. My grandmother, Willie Pearl, passed away at the age of ninety-two. (I wrote a little about her here.) There is nothing nice about death, but the fact that this one happened so close to Christmas forced my family to let go of any expectation about the holiday. There are fewer presents under the tree and no turkey in the freezer. This is all fine with me. At the risk of having an expectation, I'd be happy with scrambled eggs for Christmas dinner.

Merry Christmas to you and yours, whatever your table holds!

Willie

2011-12-16T03:54:00.000Z

My grandmother, Willie Pearl, is dying. Willie is her real name, not a nickname or short for Wilhelmina. It is a name as blunt and bleak as her early life in Texas where she was raised by her grandparents after the Spanish influenza epidemic left her orphaned as an infant. It is not, however, appropriate for the grandmother I got to know when I was growing up.

In my eyes my grandmother was all about sophistication, from her royal blue Mazda RX7 to her beloved Pomeranian, Foxy, to her weekly visits to Doris the hairdresser with copious amounts of aerosol hairspray in between. Her most glamorous accessories were a diamond bee brooch and a matching three-piece Samsonite luggage set in Dijon mustard yellow leather. (The carry-on for the latter was a tackle box-shaped treasure trove of cosmetics mysteriously referred to as her "training case.") She never left the house without lipstick, jewelry, matching knitwear, and three-inch heels -- the last until sometime in her seventies when she broke an ankle at the garden store. By the time I knew her, she and my late grandfather, Woody, had realised the American middle class dream. This was not so unusual for their generation, but what was unusual was that this was not achieved on the income from my grandfather's career alone. Willie didn't just work; she had a career too, culminating in heading a county department complete with headcount and her own office where I remember hiding as a little girl when we came to visit. When she retired it was a big deal. Woody threw her a party at the Arrowhead Country Club with all her friends and the people who had worked for her as guests. It was big as any wedding I had ever been to.

I came of age in the nineteen-eighties, the era of industrial-strength shoulder pads and Working Girl. Society was doing its best to tell me that women could do it all, but I already knew that. I had learnt it from Willie. I will always have more grandmotherly associations with her -- of roses and snapdragons, the strawberry planter and hummingbird feeder on the back porch, her copious supply of Delaware Punch drunk through bendy straws, and shopping, lots of shopping: at Fashion Island, Bal Harbour, Rubel's jewellers, and the Cooper Building. But looking at my life today, I suspect being a working girl is her real legacy to me.

For the past few days Willie has been at home in a hospital bed. Her name has again become appropriate for her as she faces down death, no longer eating or drinking or speaking except for the occasional words summoned to chastise my mother. I am told she is setup with a view out the window to where the snapdragons would be planted in spring. Her roses are just the other side of the bedroom wall.

Post Traumatic Nutcracker Disorder

2011-12-04T23:24:00.001Z

Last night husband and I went to see the Nutcracker. Husband had never seen it and enough years had passed since I had that we were both genuinely excited to be hoisting this holiday cliché upon ourselves. It started well enough. We were both impressed with the Boston Opera House, a vaudeville palace built in the 1920s in a style that apes the best of Euro-gaudy. It was only in the second act when Mother Gigone waddled out on the stage that things started to sour. In a ballet full of dainty, delicate things, Mother Gigone is a man in drag wearing a giant hoop skirt and walking on stilts. Clown children scamper in and out of his/her skirts from time to time, and this is where the trauma comes in. Long ago I too was a clown child.

It wasn't supposed to be that way. I had different aspirations when as an awkward tween I auditioned for my local production of the Nutcracker. I had the good sense to realize that sugar plum fairydom was the preserve of older girls like Francesca, girls who had boobs, wore eyeshadow, and smoked Marlboro Lights between pointe and tap on Thursday nights. All I wanted was a modest role in the opening scene as one of the Christmas party kids hanging out with Clara and Fritz. Instead I got the indignity of clown child.

While I was busy suffering from my PTND, husband was busy enjoying himself. It turns out the Nutcracker is rife with British cultural references, including the 1970s Cadbury fruit and nut case ad and the inspiration for Keith Lemon's Celebrity Juice Russian dance (you have to wait for it, but it does come around 1:30). In the end I found some consolation in the production, mostly in the fact that the role of reindeer-pulling-the-Snow-Queen-sled did not exist in my local production. I got over being hidden underneath a drag queen's skirt, but I may never have recovered from a walk-on part in a white unitard and jingle bells.

Giving Thanks for Failure

2011-11-24T13:26:00.001Z

Some time ago in a fit of writerly ambition I setup a Twitter account and a Facebook page for this blog. I added HTML widgets to its margins so the world could adore me with a single click. I methodically Tweeted and posted each new blog. This is, after all, what you are supposed to do if you have aspirations of going from blog to book: build your platform. I had read the publishing blogs, and I knew a lovingly crafted manuscript was not enough. I had to talk unique visitors and followers and likes in those query letters I sent out to literary agents.

And now, many months in, it is time to admit my failure. It's not like it's a secret. The two likes I have garnered on the blog are there for everyone to see. (Not that I am ungrateful to husband and my friend Bertie, who sometimes appears in my blog as R. number one, for their unfailing support.) On Twitter I have fared slightly better. There I have three followers: a friend from my old L.A. writing group, a Cotswold local and wine bar stalwart, and, my favorite, somebody named Candelaria whose last tweet was "super experience with hooking up with chix." In social networking terms I am a nerd. A loser. A geek. It's like high school all over again.

When it comes to querying literary agents my stats are more voluminous. My rejections positively dwarf my social network admirers, weighing in at nineteen not counting the two queries I wasted on perfectly good agents last year before my rewrite. Still I think my manuscript for Cotswoldia: A field guide to the not so simple life is good enough to be published, even if my percentage odds are about the same as the number of my Twitter followers. I think this because I read a lot, and I have put in the work, and because other people, including a handful of those nineteen literary agents, have read it and told me so. And so I query on, working my way down my ever dwindling Excel list of agents looking for memoir. I suppose I should remove the Facebook Like button from its prominent position on my blog seeing how it practically bleats "no platform" to potential agents with its measly proclamation "2." But I won't, because on today of all days I am thankful for them both.

Rules, Rules, Rules

2011-11-13T11:29:00.001Z

One of the pleasures of reading is coming across a passage where the author elucidates something -- a thought or feeling or situation -- in such a way that you understand yourself better. This is how I felt when I read the following in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories (my one and only attempt to read thematically relevant literature while living in that city):

...Otto is naturally and healthily selfish, like an animal. If there are two chairs in a room, he will take the more comfortable one without hesitation, because it never even occurs to him to consider Peter's comfort. Peter's selfishness is much less honest, more civilised, more perverse. Appealed to in the right way, he will make any sacrifice, however unreasonable and unnecessary...

Isherwood may as well have been describing husband when describing Otto. He habitually takes the seat with the view, and preferably within earshot, of the other patrons at any restaurant. I am the less honest Peter, pretending to be irritated by the implication that my company alone is insufficient to entertain him for the duration of a meal, but really annoyed by not having the view myself. And on the basis of this feigned virtue, I nobly concede the seat every time. What is most troubling about recognizing my marital dynamic in this passage is hard to say: that Otto and Peter inevitably split or that Isherwood is describing the relationship between two gay men.

I was reminded of this passage on the flight from London to Boston on Monday. Lunch had been served and eaten but not cleared when husband decided he wanted to use the bathroom. He stacked my tray on his and, balancing both as he climbed over me, very nearly dumped a quarter of a plastic bottle of Albariño and the dregs of a pot of chocolate mousse that tasted suspiciously of suntan oil into the lap of the woman in the adjacent row. I sighed and chastised him for not being able to wait like a grown up for the flight attendants to clear the trays, but he didn't listen. He returned our trays to the galley and relieved himself long before the rest of the punters, dutifully awaiting tray clearage, formed an orderly and lengthy queue in the traditional post-in flight meal rush for the loos.

Husband's action were selfish, but what bothered me most was his refusal to follow the generally accepted norms of airline etiquette. Surely if all passengers decided to return their trays and trash at their own convenience the flight attendants would revolt, turning on the fasten seat belt sign and demanding everyone wait until they were ready to make their way up and down the aisles with the trash trolley and tepid coffee nobody really wants but takes anyway because they are bored.

You see I am a rule follower. I see the dentist every six months, save for retirement, and generally wait my turn. This is a character trait that has not gone unnoticed amongst friends, one of whom christened me "rules, rules, rules" after a visit to the theater when I nearly had a conniption fit because he was still out bidding on eBay in the lobby when the three-minute bell rang for the curtain. Husband on the other hand abides by no such rules other than, generally, his own comfort. Where he does appear to follow rules, they are a Byzantine code of conduct decipherable to no one but himself. For example, he will casually leave garbage in a roadside motor stop parking lot claiming "there are people employed to pick that up," as if he is doing his part for the nation's unemployment rate, but would chase someone down if he saw them drop litter from their car in the pristine Cotswold countryside.

I am unlikely to ever penetrate the world of husband's rules. Perhaps the best I can do is learn from them. Next time you are annoyed by the woman sitting next to you on the plane who practically dumps her tray into your lap so she can use the loo, it may just be me.

Aspect Ratio

2011-11-04T09:52:00.000Z

Last night we partook in one of our cherished Cotswoldrituals for the last time (for now), a film in the private cinema at BarnsleyHouse. We narrowed our selection down totwo respectable classics, the original Italian Job or A Streetcar NamedDesire. Only when the concierge couldfind neither did husband suggest we indulge in a reprisal of Notting Hill. Two glasses of wine and Hugh Grant at hisfloppiest were promptly sourced, and a few minutes later we had taken ourplaces on the cinema’s candy pink loveseats.

Of course this ritual would be incomplete without husbanddeciding about five minutes into the film that there was something sub-optimalabout the quality of our viewing experience. It didn’t matter we were watching a nineties romcom instead of someBlu-ray sci-fi extravaganza; husband has his standards. Hugh Grant had hardly made his way to work inhis travel bookstore before husband was shoving past me to go into theprojector room. A minute later he hadmanaged to totally disable the picture and we were listening to Hugh’s amiablepatter to the accompaniment of a black screen. Husband declared there was obviously something wrong with the projectorand brought the lights up. I stayedseated, closed my eyes and sighed a silent sigh before offering to call down toreception to see if they could help. Moreflapping ensued, and before long Hugh and Julia were back, this time at theproper aspect ratio as husband took pleasure in pointing out to me.

You see husband has a full-blown obsession with aspectratios. We are not allowed to watchanything on television or at the cinema, never mind if it is our television or cinema, withouthusband tinkering with the aspect ratio to ensure the image is being projectedas the creator intended: strictly no stretched faces, cut off pictures, orfuzzy edges allowed. At worst this is asymptom of control freakdom; at best a sincere respect for the crafts oftelevision and film. Most the time I can’ttell the difference, or, if I can, don’t care. A slightly distorted Hugh and Julia are good enough for me.

This is, of course, emblematic of how we both approachlife. Husband is fussy and precise andunder the illusion that the more he frets the more he can control. I am, well, a little sloppy and prone to letthings happen to me rather than trying to ‘make things happen.’ (In my defense,the things that happen to me have worked out pretty ok so far.) Of course the truth is there are times andplaces more suited to one approach over the other, those times when the aspectratio in life really does matter. Andcredit where credit is due: husband is the one who pushed me to force the issueof moving back to the U.S. when I was offered a new job within my currentcompany, and it worked. I’m not so surehusband has yet taken any laissez-faire cues from me, but at least I can leaveEngland knowing I’ve seen Notting Hill as it was meant to be.

Countdown to Boston

2011-10-22T12:33:00.001+01:00

With only two weeks to go in the Cotswolds, the move to Boston is starting to feel very real. The cottage has been rented, our temporary housing in Cambridge arranged, and all but five items on my thirty-five item strong "to do" list have been crossed off. (I am starting to find new ones though, like buying that box of mini-mince pies at Waitrose yesterday so we can have a bit of England in Boston come Christmas time.)

What remains ahead are movers and farewells. I have meetings in London on Tuesday, so we will say our goodbyes to the city then. I should be doing those things I somehow never got around to doing, like visiting the Soane Museum and walking around the dome of St. Paul's, but instead I am pretty sure we will just have a coffee at Bar Italia, a glass of prosecco at Negozio Classica, and dinner at the Electric, all things we have done tens of times before. It is, after all, the routines that you miss.

In the Cotswolds I will say my goodbyes this way. I will ride my bike to Burford one more time, stopping for awhile at the point that looks like a Turner landscape painting right by the Windrush in Sherborne. I will get irritated at how long the line is at the Abbey Home Farm café near Ciren, but wait anyway for one more delicious vegetarian lunch. We will buy drinks for the regulars at the wine bar next Saturday and the next morning we will go to church, where I will join Dorothy in asking for good health for the queen in the prayers of penitence and, if I am lucky, we will sing a rousing rendition of Christ Triumphant Ever Reigning to the tune of Guiting Power. And then, on our very last day, we will partake in the British institution of Sunday roast with close friends. Like I said, it's the routines you miss.

The Last Supper

2011-10-15T16:53:00.001+01:00

Barring being called back for any emergency meetings, I have now officially left Berlin. Wednesday was my last night, spent in the hotel where we first stayed back in December on our "decision" visit. Earlier that day I had handed over the keys to the apartment to Francesco, our dashing Milanese landlord, who happily informed me a German movie star was moving in on Monday. I was not surprised. It is a great apartment, and yet I hadn't felt emotional when packing it up the previous week.

As I left the red front door of 52 Fehrbelliner Strasse for the last time, I considered if I should stop for a glass of wine at corner wine bar or dinner at one of our old neighborhood haunts. But with husband already back in the UK the idea had little appeal. I had done those things with him, many times, and it felt like just going through the motions to do them again on my own. Instead I took a cab back across Mitte to Rutz, a wine bar and restaurant just down the street from the hotel. Husband and I had drank a glass of wine there occasionally, but the food is fussy sounding and expensive and not his kind of thing. On my own, fueled by a feeling of glamour by association from the news of the German movie star, it seemed like a good choice for my last supper in Berlin.

Once seated, the waitress informed me the three-course set menu was what the chef cooked for the pope when he was in Berlin a few weeks ago. I am not Catholic, but I was tired from all the logistics of the move out of Berlin and the move-in-progress to Boston, and I figured what was good enough for the pope was good enough for me. Soon my glass of Riesling arrived, accompanied by a basket of bread and a small dish of what the waitress called schmalz. It was whipped lard sprinkled with bacon bits, and it was so delicious I didn't even open the bottle of olive oil that had also be placed on the table. Next came a hunk of raw char sprinkled with ground almonds, followed by a plate of fork-tender beef, and rounded off with a chocolate souffle accompanied by a quenelle of sorrel ice cream on a bed of plum compote. I can confirm that like me, the pope had eaten well in Berlin.

The next evening as a taxi ferried me to Tegel, an amber full moon shone over the Spree. This time the emotion came: nothing schmalzy mind you, just a pang of sadness leavened by the satisfaction of having reacquainted myself with Berlin.

Ask and You Shall Receive

2011-10-11T20:18:00.001+01:00

All is redeemed at the Eltermere Inn. On our last morning I noticed the small print on the breakfast menu imploring me to enquire if I desired something not listed. And so it was that this golden treat arrived on my table. (Still no foil packets of Robertson's Silver Shred though.)

One of the things that will be hardest about going back to the States is giving up my laissez faire attitude towards food. I can hardly remember those pre-European days when a croissant was considered a treat rather than a staple, to say nothing of bread fried in lard (admittedly still considered a treat). I know before long I will be back in the land of skinny lattes and calories listed on menus. For now, pass the fried bread.

Elegy to Eltermere

2011-10-09T09:38:00.007+01:00

We are back in the Lake District for a farewell visit, although husband has forbade me from using words like goodbye, last, farewell, and final in the run up to our November departure for Boston. Call it what you will, but the the truth is I am busy soaking up my favorite experiences in England while it is still convenient, i.e., the Atlantic Ocean does not lie between them and me.

We are staying in the same hotel where we have stayed most years since before we even lived in England, the Eltermere Inn. I wrote last year of its gentrification, which has continued unabated in the thirteen months since we were last here. There is more glass-encased taxidermy and our favorite room has been collapsed into the room behind it to form a suite with, what else, a claw foot bathtub in the center of the rear room. Shame there isn't a hot water tank at the hotel large enough to supply two consecutive baths in it (guess who got the first bath?). Never mind, I still had my Lakes breakfast featuring fried bread and marmalade to look forward to. But no, as I found this morning the fried bread is gone from the menu, leaving me to nibble on a delicate eggs Florentine.

And so against all better judgement I offer up the ode to fried bread that this hotel's breakfast first inspired me to put on this blog some years ago:

Fried Bread & Silver Shred

As a Yank I cannot abide
Beans in morning, even on the side
But when staying in the Lakes
Fried bread for breakfast I embrace

Transforms mere grain to food divine
Layering of fat and tart
'Tis a culinary art
Echoed in things much esteemed:
Fruit compote and foie gras terinne

Golden toast and tangy 'lade
Coin in which I'm gladly paid
For my labour up fell and crag
Richly fed I shall not lag

Bye Bye Bertha

2011-09-28T07:55:00.002+01:00

I am a bit ashamed of the last month of silence on the blog, but in my defense I am in the middle of planning another international move. The company I worked for offered me a job in Boston, and I've accepted. The delights of September also included a week-long debacle with the US embassy in an eventually successful attempt to secure husband's immigrant visa, the stress from which shaved several years off each of our lives. Oh and did I mention that despite the fact I have lived in Europe for more than six years, my mother decided last week was the right time to visit?

Having survived US Citizen and Immigration Services and my mother, I now find myself with a moment to reflect on my imminent departure from Berlin. There will be many farewells, but today I said goodbye to Bertha das Benz, who was my first and quite possibly last Mercedes. Our time together was brief but tumultuous, like the best kind of love affair. In her eight months under husband's and my stewardship, Bertha received six speeding tickets (don't let anyone tell you there's no speed limit on the autobahn), two parking tickets, a three-inch key mark along her derrière, had her badge nicked twice, and, just once, was towed away. Nobody ever said we were easy to live with.

But the truth was this love affair was mostly with husband. I only drove Bertha three times (our final voyage was to take my mother to eat crepes at the KaDaWe last week). Husband said this was because I am a bad driver and my driving made him nervous. This is crap, but Bertha is big and a little stressful to maneuver around a city so I didn't mind leaving what little driving was required in Berlin to husband. I am not really a car person anyway, as proven by the fact that my last car was a Prius.

Bertha may not be making the journey across the Atlantic, but Poppy the Pashley will. (No, I don't give all my modes of transportation names. Poppy just happens to be the name of the model of my periwinkle blue Pashley bicycle.) She was made in Stratford-upon-Avon, about forty miles north of our home in the Cotswolds, but I bought her here in Berlin. And so by bringing Poppy to Boston, I take a little bit of both places with me. I've even put the keys to her bicycle lock on the mini-Mercedes badge key ring I kept as a souvenir of Bertha.

Exorcising Europe

2011-08-28T07:09:00.004+01:00

This last year in Europe has been like a long embrace of a friend whom I don't know when I will see again. Husband on the other hand has been distancing himself, yearning to return to America. And on Thursday night he officially exorcised Europe.

It happened at a sidewalk table at Bandol, a tiny, casual, and esteemed French restaurant here in Berlin. It had been on my Berlin bucket list for awhile, and husband was in an obliging mood what with prospect of a return to America looming. I figured it couldn't go too badly; husband can always find a steak on a Paris menu, even if he does risk saliva-seasoning by asking for it bien cuit. But this menu was challenging even for me. The salads came with deer meat or veal tongue strewn amongst the radishes, the Burgundian snails with calves' head. I had finally settled on a traditional fish soup and husband on -- what else? -- a steak when we hit a problem. The entrecôte was too fatty, the chump (veal) too cruel, and the braised beef suggested by the increasingly desperate waitress came topped with steak tartare. After demurely asking for the bill for our already ordered drinks, husband piped up with a declaration: "That's it. I am officially over Europe. I am buying a pickup truck when we move back."

When we left Bandol I decided to let him pick where to eat dinner. He chose Gorki Park, a trusty standby in our neighborhood and, as the name implies, Russian. And not just any Russian: throwback to USSR, super-kitsch Russian decorated with murals of red-tied Young Pioneers undertaking earnest-faced athletic pursuits. So much for his Yankee yearnings. The only thing American about his dinner was the fact that his meat-filled pastry appetizer was exactly the same shape and size as a McDonalds apple pie.

A Real Englishwoman

2011-08-23T14:00:00.003+01:00

Summer in the Cotswolds happened on Sunday. After a week of decidedly undecided weather, the sun finally took control. It shone down all afternoon, including on the little garden party in Ablington where I spent a couple of pleasant hours. There were sausages on sticks and pink wine, although, since I was driving, I stuck mostly to water scented with elderflower cordial and served in a little green glass. The lawn was littered with the usual suspects, including A., who grows increasingly eccentric looking each time I see him what with the cloth Mao jacket and his ring-bedecked fingers. Waving the eccentric banner for the women was J., who is always good for a leopard-skin print accessory. This time it came in the form of her booties which had nothing to do, least of all matching, with the bright red jeans and flower print blouse she was also wearing.

The whole event was one of those quintessential English experiences, like a Sunday roast in a cozy pub or a candelabra-lit picnic on the grounds of a grand old country house. And as I notch each one up, I feel like I am having my own personal Velveteen Rabbit experience, getting closer and closer to becoming a "real" Englishwoman. Maybe one day soon the Nursery Magic Fairy will show up and make me "real" to everyone else. For now, I am pretty sure that to most of my fellow Cotswoldians I remain the loud American.

The Witches' Table

2011-08-18T09:05:00.003+01:00

To get to the barn that houses the main retail area of the wine bar you have to cross the courtyard out back. When the weather is mild, the courtyard is also a pleasant place to sit and enjoy a glass of wine. In the far corner of the courtyard there is a large table fashioned out of an old French door painted blue and mounted on rod iron trestle legs. It is large enough to seat ten comfortably. In fact it may seat ten too comfortably, which would at least partially explain its evil influence. For when one sits at the recently christened Witches' Table, one rarely leaves the wine bar sober.

Husband and I fell under the spell of the Witches' Table earlier in the summer at the sardine bbq. This is the only explanation I have for the ten strips of raffle tickets (charity unknown, but I can safely assume it was for a good cause) and the small cut above my eyebrow that were in my possession when I awoke the next morning. I do recall that the occupants of the Witches' Table that afternoon came up with an excellent outline for a panto we intended to stage at the village hall in winter: a mash-up of "Sin"-derella and Priscilla Queen of the Desert of the Cotswolds in which the struggle is to get Cinders to Pippa and Prince Harry's wedding at the local inn (at which there was no room according to husband's diligent BlackBerry notes and in an apparent misguided effort to weave in the Christmas story). I believe this falls safely into the category of it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time. More recently the Witches' Table cast its evil influence on one half of doppelgänger couple when, after an evening of wine and a misjudged shot of absinthe, he forcibly ejected the contents of his digestive tract via his mouth into the adjacent well. Thus forth it has been known as Crispin's well.

On Tuesday evening we decided to brave another session at the Witches' Table with the fairer half of doppelgänger couple (Crispin was still hanging his head in shame from the well incident). We had dinner reservations in half an hour and so, we assumed, there was no time for anything to go too far off the rails. The table was already in session when we joined, populated by seven of the usual suspects. Things got off to a safe start with a vigorous debate about the proper use of semi-colons that swiftly moved into a vigorous debate over the etiquette of turning an empty wine bottle upside down in its ice bucket. (In the end we agreed it was ok, as long as it wasn't in somebody's house.) Things generally proceeded in this vein of polite banter, with the small exception of when our local Roger Moore lookalike stood up to pour some wine and I complimented his arrowhead belt buckle, causing the entire table to look in the general direction of his crotch. In the end we had an unintended second bottle of wine and were an hour late for our table, which on balance is an excellent outcome for an evening at the Witches' Table.

In Der 'Hood

2011-08-14T18:21:00.002+01:00

My street in Berlin, Fehrbelliner Straße, runs for the best part of a kilometer between Anklamer Straße at the top and Schönhauser Allee at the bottom. It is pronounced Fairbulleener Straw-suh, as if it was the street of fair Berliners, but alas this is not an accurate literal translation. There are some fine buildings, their windows adorned with columns and the various plaster accoutrements of old Europe -- curlicues, bearded or wreathed heads, flowers -- but there are more plain facades, although often in cheery sherbert shades. A few of the dun-colored, pebble dash boxes that scream East Berlin also remain, as does graffiti. I love the doors the most, especially the enormous double ones that open onto interior courtyards and close with a solid thunk.

Every weekday I walk the length of it twice, from home on one end to work on the other and back again. I also eat, drink, and shop on it. It is a far cry from the Cotswolds, but Fehrbelliner Straße is a village in its own way.

At the top end, half a block from our apartment and the on part of the street we frequent least, there is always an armed policeman standing guard outside one of the buildings. When we first moved in I approached him and asked in my most polite inquisitive voice if this was a police station.

"No," the policeman answered and looked away, making it clear that no explanation for his presence would be offered.

Later at work a German colleague who lives nearby explained to me that the building was a Jewish school. I was taken aback that a school would have an armed police presence, but he explained that this was standard practice for Jewish schools and synagogues. I asked if there were specific threats, to which he replied, "No, but given our history it would just be really bad if something happened."

As far away from our flat as the Jewish school but in the opposite direction is Remshardt. It is the atelier of a wedding dressmaker, a man who sometimes sits at his desk drawing with his African Grey parrot perched on his shoulder. Each week he changes the dress featured in the window, lately favoring flowing Grecian things that remind me of Grace Kelly's poolside cover-up in High Society. My favorite, though, was a bulbous heap of ivory taffeta adorned with an outsize beetle brooch.

On the corner, at the busy intersection with Veteranstraße, is Weinerei Forum, known around my house simply as Corner Wine Bar. (Due to husband's limited memory, most things around our house have a different, generic sounding shorthand, like "Frenchie" for Café Fleury.) I've written about Corner Wine Bar before here; suffice to say it continues to be an extension of our living room, as does the pizzeria, La Foccaceria, across the street.

A little further down is ZweiTrad, a trio of bicycling boutiques that dominate the block. Berlin is a bicycle-crazy city, and this place is often as busy as a bustling bistro on a Saturday. This is where I bought my beloved Pashley from the elegant owner. He wears wire-rimmed specs and always has a scarf knotted around his throat, a Frenchman trapped in a German's body. There is some small irony in my acquisition of the Pashley in Berlin given it was made in Stratford-upon-Avon, about forty miles north of our Cotswold town. But the Germans favor Dutch bikes with annoying pedal brakes, and so I reckon I had no choice but to go for the British-built beauty.

Just beyond the cycle shop is Schwarze Pumpe (the black pump). It is one of the first places we ate dinner in our neighborhood and we continue to be regular guests for the käsespätzle and lack of pretension.

This is our grocery store, Kaiser's. I imagine I will leave Berlin without ever understanding why their logo looks like a genie's lantern.

Beyond the playground, two of the best coffee shops in Berlin have clustered together. Kristiania Espressobar, owned by a Norwegian, and Antipodes, owned by a couple from Wellington. The inside of Kristiania looks a little like a mid-century doctor's waiting room, but on balance I favor Antipodes because of the passion fruit yo yos, an Oreo for grown-ups.

Almost opposite the coffee cluster is the site of a former Jewish school. I've written about it before too, a reminder of a very sad chapter in Germany's history. It is marked out by a subtle plexiglass plaque rather than a policeman; the only thing left to guard is the memory of the children and their teachers.

Rarking

2011-07-30T17:51:00.001+01:00

That's right, I've just coined a new term: rarking, as in rural parking. I thought it was in the British spirit of things, like the way they call walking in the countryside "rambling." I noticed this British phenomenon -- rarking, not giving things that already have names new special names -- again today when we were out riding our bikes around the 'Wolds. On a little country lane near Yanworth we passed a couple staring into the middle distance from inside their parked car. I like to think they were faking this zen poise having been wildly necking moments before they noticed someone was coming, but somehow I doubt it.

Such rarking seems to be a bona fide hobby of a certain demographic of Brits, mostly nearly-but-not-quite-elderly drivers of Ford Mondeos. Sometimes the rarkers are eating a sandwich or even an ice cream, but mostly they just sit. They could easily leave the car and go for a walk or even, gasp, lay a blanket outside and enjoy the fresh air. But no, they prefer sitting in the car, as if the steel is some sort of protective shield between them and the possibility of a little too much stimulation brought on by the sheer beauty of the countryside. I want to stop and tell them that stiff upper lip works best when tolerating pain rather than experiencing pleasure, but I just ride on by.

An Angel's Gotta Eat

2011-07-28T07:34:00.001+01:00

Golden Lizzie. She overlooks a roundabout in the Tiergarten in Berlin and is possibly the only thing husband loves about this city. She also features in the opening scene of Wings of Desire, an angel resting on her shoulder eavesdropping on the humans below.

Yesterday I was minding my own business, reading the paper and eating a chicken schwarma at a falafel joint on Torstraße when in walked an angel of sorts. He was young and looked tired, like an overworked angel might. He was dressed in a leopard print Addidas jacket with what appeared to be three carefully hand-cut vertical vents in the back, a pair of gray, abstract patterned, mock-camoflauge trousers, and white leather high tops...with wings: big, chunky, leather wings protruding off his ankles. I had just worked up the courage to ask him if I could take his photo when he slipped out the door, presumably to attend to his angelic duties.

Berlin '82 in Pictures

2011-07-22T08:17:00.001+01:00

Say cheese! This cheery Checkpoint Charlie family portrait was the crowning glory of my entry -- a slideshow on the Berlin Wall -- in the 1982 Lee County Media Show. Despite the unfair advantage of my on-location shots of the Wall, some kid who was actually talented and had created a claymation Super 8 film won.

The Checkpoint Charlie snap comes courtesy of a disk of images my dad just mailed me. They are all from our Berlin trip in the summer of '82, and there are some interesting comparisons with how things look now. The Wall is of course gone -- in fact it's pretty hard to find any sign of it except for a few pieces still on display at Potsdamer Platz and the double-row of cobblestones that traces its route in some parts of the city (Berliners, understandably, wanted it this way).

The Reichstag looks shockingly drab pre-Norman Foster's glass dome.

And the Wall and watchtower-lined Spree gives new meaning to Berliners' current fondness for pop-up riverside beach clubs. Then...

and now...

But if I'm honest, my favorite part of looking at these pictures is admiring the fashions my family was wearing at the time. My mom is rocking a pair of oversized transluscent-framed sunglasses, my dad has a whiff of Burt Reynolds about him, and my sister and I are perpetually dressed in Izod shirts with high-waisted jeans. My sister also favors a lavender satin bomber jacket with ice cream cone pin that I remember coveting. It was much cooler than the stupid cardigans my mother bought for me. Here are the best of those pics.

Follow Me: Playing Tour Guide in Berlin

2011-07-13T07:36:00.003+01:00

The Summer 2011 issue of ExBerliner features "Berlin's most original tours." While the Trabi Safari sounds fun -- an hour behind the wheel of a Trabant, East Germany's very inadequate answer to the Volkswagen -- I'm pretty sure husband and I have this tour guide thing down pat after two consecutive weekends of hosting guests here in Berlin. The weather was abominable for the first -- coldest day in July on record and wet to boot -- and blazing sunshine for the second. Neither stopped us from dragging our visitors out on bicycles, the transportation method of choice here in Berlin. By now my Pashley has traversed every square inch of path in the Tiergarten and can practically lock itself up outside Der Schleusenkrug biergarten (also, coincidentally, a stop on the Fat Tire Bike Tour). It also knows to slow down when it passes a spot favored by Berlin's band of nude sunbathers. My prudish gawking over the weekend prompted one FKKer -- yep, they have an acronym which comes from a name that translates into Free Body Culture -- to wave at my guests and me from his spot on the lawn. I wish I would have waved back, but instead I just bashfully pedaled away.

I have also been hungover in the Bauhaus Archive (not, as one guest pointed out with some disappointment, the Bauhaus, which is in nearby Dessau), climbed the Norman Foster dome atop the Reichstag, cruised the Spree, forced currywurst on our unsuspecting guests, and visited the DDR Museum and inhaled its whiff of Ostalgia, i.e., snapped a tasteless picture of husband posing in situ on the loo in the authentic recreation of a DDR-era flat. For eating and drinking we mostly stuck to our little enclave on the border of Mitte and Prenzlauerberg, but there was one new discovery along the way. Clärchens Ballhaus is on Auguststraße, a street filled with art galleries, which along with its squatter-chic looking courtyard is why I assumed it was some sort of epicenter of boho. As the name would imply it turned out to be a ballroom, dating all the way back to 1913 and hosting a tea dance that very afternoon. We watched the dancers for awhile and admired the lost-in-time interior, which looked something like the lovechild of the Kibbitz Room and the Derby, then enjoyed a drink in the garden.

In the end we deposited our guests into the charmless arms of Schönefeld Airport in various states -- suffering from a cold, hungover, saddle sore, and/or satiated. At least we can say none left Berlin unchanged.

Johnny Rotten is Following Me

2011-07-04T13:05:00.001+01:00

...By which I mean John Lydon and not some euphemism for my ill-tempered husband. It started more than ten years ago in Santa Monica when I unwittingly bummed a cigarette off of him outside a now defunct record shop on Main Street. Husband put me up to it -- I don't even smoke. We were in the very early days of our courtship and, despite the fact that I had no idea who I was asking for a cigarette, husband was mightily impressed with my chutzpah. And Mr. Lydon did in fact oblige me with a cigarette.

Now news has arrived through the Twittersphere that Mr. Rotten has returned, this time to a room in the inn just up the road from our cottage in the Cotswolds. It seems he is recording at the studio of our local rock star and will be in residence for the next two weeks. We are scheduled for a return visit at the tail end of his stay, and no doubt husband will be busy cultivating opportunities for another chance encounter. Guess I better take up smoking in preparation.

Down and Out in Paris and London

2011-06-27T19:40:00.004+01:00

For several years now I have held the view that London is only for the very young or the very rich, and that therefore Samuel Johnson of the “…when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” quip was full of crap. One place I never expected to tire of, however, was Paris. Thanks to the largess of a friend of my sister’s with digs on the Île Saint Louis and the ease of traveling by Eurostar, Paris has been a favorite weekend destination for husband and me since we moved to England. And we could think of no better place to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary last week.

But things did not begin well. We had flown to England for a few nights in the Cotswolds before heading to Paris, and on that first Saturday we drank too much wine at a sardine BBQ at the wine bar. I awoke on Sunday to find ten strips of raffle tickets in my purse that I only dimly remembered purchasing and had no idea in aid of what (this being the season of village fêtes, the possibilities were endless). Unfortunately this was not the worst after-effect of such indulgence; that was left for Monday when the two-day-deferred-morosity that is the mark of such excess set in on our train ride to Paris.

Upon our arrival the first thing we noticed was the traffic. The midday taxi ride from Gare du Nord to the center of Paris was painstaking, with every hundred-meter progression feeling like a major victory. Once on the the Île Saint Louis we observed the crush of humanity outside Notre Dame and remembered it was June and American kids were out of school. We pressed on, literally, stretching our legs on a jog to the Tuilieries and back. In the early evening we headed to our favorite café in the Marais for a glass of wine. The people watching from a pavement table was still the best in the world, but the man hawking jasmine garlands was more aggressive than usual. This was nothing compared to the affront I felt when we sat down for dinner at the bistro next door and discovered our waiter was Irish. Was it too much to ask to be treated rudely by an old French waiter for your anniversary?

The week continued and so did the list of irritations. The workers at the Musee d’Orsay went on strike closing the museum for the day. There was a hair in my turkey club at our favorite lunch spot on the Rue Cler. It rained. I got bit by mosquitoes. The stench of urine on the cobbled banks of the Seine marred our morning jogs. Of course there were pleasures -- aside from the turkey club we ate and drank very well -- but even those were suspicious given my ill-timed decision to pick up my reading of Down and Out in Paris and London on our last day. In it Orwell expounds on his life as a plongeur in the bowels of a Paris hotel kitchen; I can only the hope the filth has subsided since he worked in the city in 1928. By the time we boarded Eurostar back to London, the mutual feeling was of relief.

Yesterday the Cotswolds had its first true summer day, and we were there. We rode our bikes out through Hampnett and Turkedean, then Notgrove and Guiting Power, stopping for lunch at the Black Horse in Naunton, weaving through the day trippers in Lower Slaughter and Bourton-on-the-Water before heading back through Farmington and home. Poppies rouged the apple-green cheeks of the hills, and fields of linseed blooms in a sheer lavender hue provided the dose of Impressionism we had failed to get from the Orsay. It was by far the best day of the vacation.

Reading back over this I am aware I sound like a spoiled brat complaining about getting to spend a week in Paris. On the contrary, I count my lucky stars every day that I have the kind of life right now that affords me such whims. I know that one day before long we will be back in the U.S. where if we are lucky we will be employed, and such employment will be rewarded with a paltry ten days vacation in a currency that doesn’t go far in Europe. When we decided to go to Paris for our anniversary it was precisely because we were thinking we won’t always have Paris. What I forgot is that, God willing, we’ll always have the Cotswolds.

Living History

2011-06-14T09:40:00.004+01:00

When we first moved to Berlin I remember another ex-pat telling us he liked living here because it was "living history." He was referring to the relatively recent history of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, and indeed in our former East Berlin neighborhood there is plenty of interest. Mauerpark, a public park that is formerly part of the Berlin Wall and its Death Strip, is only a kilometer away. But even closer there are reminders of an earlier tragic chapter in Germany's history.

Today I noticed the sign in the top picture on the outside of the building shown in the bottom picture. It is at the south end of my street, about three blocks from where I live, and I walk by it every day on my way to work. Roughly translated it says that between 1910-42 this building housed a Jewish nursery, kindergarten and children's home. And between 1941-44, at least forty-nine of those children and staff were killed in concentration camps. That led me to this website, which tells the story: http://www.inge-franken.de/fehrbelliner92/introduction. The author, Inge Franken, is indeed ensuring all parts of this neighborhood's history stay alive.

Auf der Autobahn: Berlin to Hamburg

2011-06-08T07:27:00.000+01:00

So we finally took our first roadtrip. Considering the Mercedes that husband deemed to be so essential to our German experience wasn't driven for the entire month of May, it was about time. We chose Hamburg, only about two-hundred and fifty kilometers from Berlin and more or less a straight shot along the autobahn. It's also a place we know well; husband used to take frequent work trips there and we've been there for the Christmas markets the last three years in a row. This includes last December when it was a tack-on to our Berlin "decision trip" and therefore the site of much agonizing, prolonged unexpectedly for three days while Heathrow tried to figure out how to clear six inches of snow from its runways. In other words, we needed to redeem Hamburg.

The journey there was a snap: all blue skies and clear roads along a mostly flat expanse of agricultural land. (The only industry I saw was a Dr. Oetker factory, a company that makes things like frozen pizzas and cake mix. It reminded me of another German brand named after a doctor, Dr. Loosen Riesling. I like how having "Dr." in the label somehow makes eating pizza and drinking wine seem marginally healthy, like how the British call some cookies "digestives.") We soon arrived at the Nippon hotel, our normal crash pad and only a few blocks away from the lake, the Aussenalster. We continued as creatures of habit, making our way to our first lakeside beer stop on hotel-lent beach cruiser Schwinns. For our next beer stop we broke ways with the past and explored the River Elbe-adjacent neighborhood of Altona. There's an historic fish market here, but that starts to wind down at around 7AM so we had to settle for an Irish bar. Doubling back on ourselves we turned into what seemed like a parking lot along the river to investigate the thatched roofs we could see peaking out from behind concrete buildings. Jackpot: StrandPauli beach club, complete with sand, lounge chairs, and piña coladas. It was a little bit of Key West on the docks.

So far this roadtrip thing was working out. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening dropping suggestions for future outings on the autobahn -- Saxony Switzerland, Dresden, Prague, Copehagen via Rostock, Bavaria! -- into casual conversation without so much as a hint of pushback from husband. Maybe it was just the loveliness of our waterside dinner at Harms & Schacht, a favorite of ours and, I am glad to say, successfully "redeemed" with new good memories after being the official agonizing site over Berlin back in December.

The next morning we took a jog around the Aussenlaster followed by bagels and orange juice at elbgold (home of the best veggie cream cheese ever, E. coli be damned), then headed back to Berlin. Traffic was, well, as you would expect for a Sunday afternoon on the last day of a long holiday weekend. What took us two and a half hours on the way out took four on the way back. Somewhere on a self-styled detour around Neuruppin husband snapped and insisted Germany was "one of the worst countries on the planet." When I suggested this may be veering towards hyperbole and that I could think of a few other war-torn examples that may give Germany a run for its money in achieving this title, husband accused me of unreasonably defending Germany, like I was "born here or something." Back in Berlin he blew off steam yelling at Roger Federer in the French Open final and posting things on Facebook about the "lie" of German efficiency. So much for my dreams of a life auf der Autobahn.

The Art of the Anti-Vacation

2011-05-31T15:52:00.004+01:00

I am just back after a week's vacation in the Cotswolds. If it seems to you like I am always on vacation, well, it seems that way to me too. I am now living in the most generous of European countries when it comes to vacation days and get a whopping thirty per year. (Note to US companies: neither your company nor the economy will collapse if you let people off for more than ten days every year.) It's a good thing too because most my vacations in recent memory have been anything but relaxing.

Last week's started with a funeral. Admittedly it was a funeral that was followed by a rather expectional party of a wake, but still a funeral. And up until the minute we walked through the doors of the church in Bibury, husband was furiously tapping away at his BlackBerry in negotiations over two potential job offers, tense negotiations that would stretch well into the week.

There was a lot at stake. After three months in Berlin husband had exhausted his interest in the Betty Draper life of leisure or, as he had taken to describing it, being a work-shy fop. (Mastering the art of frittata making had been gratifying at first, but failed to sustain him.) He decided he would have to get a job and spent the month of May in the Cotswolds doing interviews in the UK while simultaneously turning up the heat on a potential job in Berlin that had been hanging around without a formal offer for far too long. Neither of us was particularly thrilled about the idea of commuting back and forth between Berlin and the Cotwolds each weekend to be together, and the propsect hung over us like a dark cloud all week.

We have a habit of timing career crises to coincide with our vacations. A few years ago we spent a weekend in Venice intended to celebrate our wedding anniversary but instead spent it agonizing over whether or not husband should change jobs, agony tempered somewhat by prosecco and cicchetti consumption. A year or so later there was angst in Breisach am Rhein over the decision to take that job, then more of the same last Christmas in L.A. over the decision to move to Berlin for my job. At the end of this vacation, though, there was good news. The Berlin job offer came through and husband started today. Next month we go to Paris to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. Let's hope it's angst and crisis-free.

Return to Berlin

2011-05-18T06:59:00.000+01:00

When I moved to Berlin in February it was not my first extended stay in the city. That was back in the summer of 1981. I was nine years old and visiting my father, who at the time was flying shuttles back and forth to Frankfurt for Pan Am. He had an apartment in West Berlin that I remember well, mostly because I spent a lot of time stretched out on the living room floor watching Bjorn Borg play in Wimbledon (and thankfully not because, as my mother recently told me, the previous tenant had committed suicide, which is why my father had gotten such a big apartment so cheap).

Actually, I remember a lot of things really well from that trip. It's not that it was my first big trip -- by then I was a seasoned traveller, with regular trips to California to visit my grandparents and a previous European vacation under my belt. Maybe it was my age or Berlin or the combination of the two, but I think I remember a lot of things from that trip because it was the first time I realized there were a lot of people out there in the world living a life a whole lot different than mine. I learned from the squat down the street that not everyone lived in a suburban subdivision with a name, Whiskey Creek, that was much more interesting sounding than the tract houses in it. (I also learned what a squat was and that the residents were called punk rockers, at least by my father.) I learned that there were more ice cream flavors than the 31 Baskin Robbins would have you believe, and subsequently ate a kirsch eis every day I was there. And of course I learned about the Wall, developing a mild obsession with the Checkpoint Charlie Museum along the way, and that just behind it there were people willing to risk death for their freedom while I watched Wimbledon and ate cherry ice cream. I'm not sure what good any of that experience did me, but I like to think it made me a more open or tolerant or at least curious person than I otherwise would have been.

Twenty-nine years later I moved back for another stint in Berlin. Husband is still baffled about why I wanted to do it, and I have undoubtedly made our lives an order of magnitude more complex in logistics alone. But I think there are some answers lurking in my very first visit to the city. Husband has been pushing to move back to California for a few years now, and I promised him I would go quietly if he would give me this, a last hurrah in Europe. Sooner than we know it we will be back in Los Angeles, a lovely, lovely place to live, but one where you might easily forget there are places in the world where the sun doesn't perpetually shine and the waiters aren't actors. I guess I figured we needed to stock up on a dose of the-world-is-bigger-than-you-think perspective before we head back, hopefully more open or tolerant or at least curious people than we were when we left.

Letter to Tina Fey

2011-05-09T21:52:00.006+01:00

Dear Tina,
Were SNL, 30 Rock, more awards than your mantelpiece can hold, and a Vanity Fair cover not enough for you? Did you really have to go and write a memoir (and publish excerpts not once but twice in The New Yorker) just to prove you can write in the book-kind-of-way too? And that women can be respectable celebrities? Don't you know celebrity women are only allowed to be crazy, born into it, or/(preferably) and sluts? We normal women need these excuses to write you people off and feel less bad about our own mundane lives.

But damn you Tina Fey, now you've gone and proven that pretty-smart-but-not-Ivy-League-smart women, women who have actually shopped in Ann Taylor and Contempo Casuals, can be egregiously successful. (Who am I kidding? Everyone knows getting into UVA out of state is as hard as getting into an Ivy League.) So what I didn’t pass your clever little test for being cultural elite. At least I know who David Foster Wallace is, which surely makes me at least a cultural snob.

And worst of all you are more or less (well a little more than) my age. I hate it when people I admire are my age. I like it much better when they're a lot older or a lot younger and then when I compare myself to them I can blame my underachievement on that. At least I beat you on one count. It took you until forty to have to take your pants off when you came home after work. I am only thirty-nine and I have already been doing that for years. Take that, Tina Fey.

PS – Yes I know this post is about Tina Fey, not the Cotswolds, and not Berlin. What can I say? It's my blog.

PPS - To Brit readers, Tina really means trousers when she talks about pants, as in neither of us are talking about a compulsion to take off our underpants when we come home from work.

Free ‘n Easy

2011-05-06T10:11:00.000+01:00

One of the unexpected consequences of moving to Berlin is the amount of time I spend inside the cabins of Easy Jet planes. Since the move in February, I estimate my Sleazy Jet flying time has breached the twenty-hour mark, plus the same again queued up waiting like sheep in a pen for the free-for-all boarding call. That’s two whole days of my life I will never get back, like ITIL training or that afternoon I once spent in Swindon.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Among the long and varied list of bargaining points on the deal I made with husband to get him to move to Berlin, one was that we would return to the Cotswolds for a weekend every month. To break him in, I agreed to once every two weeks to start. And just when I thought I had weaned him down to a compromise agreement of once every three weeks, I somehow find him spending the entire month of May there – admittedly the nicest month of the year to be in the Cotswolds -- while I fly back every weekend to see him.

As such, I have become something of an expert Easy Jet flyer. I have learned, for example, to head straight for the stairs at the back of the plane after several catfights with parents and other entitled types over trying to get the bulkhead seat. I didn’t mind the catfight part (kind of like it, actually), I just realized that you can exit as fast from the last row as the first, while avoiding the discomfort of the front row where you face the Easy Jet flight attendants head on and feel obligated to engage in small talk. And I do feel obligated because I can’t help feeling sorry for them. They never seem to get to spend the night anywhere they fly – surely the main perq of being a flight attendant – but rather just do a couple of out-and-back short hauls each day. I am pretty convinced they get commission for the tat they peddle on the plane (scratch cards for gods sake!), which makes the job more or less the equivalent of working in a 7-Eleven in the sky.

My father was an airline pilot so as a kid, standby gods willing, I got to fly Pan Am first class, complete with cloth napkins, mini salt and pepper shakers, and multi-course meals. Things are different now. Next time you fly Easy Jet from Berlin to Bristol, turn around and see who’s sitting in the back row. If it’s a woman eating Mini Cheddars and drinking a mini plastic bottle of South African rosé on the rocks, chances are that’s me.

Royal Wedding Red Carpet

2011-04-30T16:30:00.014+01:00

All the Cotswolds, even this folly, was decked out yesterday for the royal wedding. Well, that's not totally true. Despite my earlier assertion that the ladies of the Cotswolds would be wearing their finest hats for the viewing at the wine bar, I was the only one (unless you count L.'s floppy straw number and a couple of men in baseball caps). In fact attendance was rather sparse when husband and I first arrived at 9:30AM. In a classic Toff display of the middle-finger-to-the-world attitude, A., one of the scariest dames of the neighboring villages, hadn't even bothered to put in her dentures. I guess she didn't really need them for the coffee with a snifter side car of something or other she was drinking. She did, however, seem amused by my small-pink-bird-just-exploded-on-my-head hat, quipping with a front-toothless smile that there was still time to make it to the Abbey. Vera, the eight-year old pug who had the bar stool next to me, also seemed to like my hat. Or at least my croissant.

By the time I was on to my first Bellini of the morning the place had started to fill up. This provided me with an audience for my running red carpet commentary on the guests, something the BBC broadcast was too dignified to provide. It went something like this:

Pippa the sister should have never been allowed to wear white. If it wasn't for her spray tan she may have stolen the show.
Eugenie and Beatrice did steal the show, but not in a good way. In an ugly stepsisters in a Cinderella panto kind of way.
The Queen looked radiant in yellow. Not a hint of Big Bird despite my initial fears when I first glimpsed her in her car on the way to the Abbey.
Advice to Harry: stand up straight.
Advice to Wills: shave it off.
Advice to SamCam (PM's wife): next time wear a hat.
I shouldn't have liked Miriam González Durántez's (Deputy PM's wife) Cruella de Vil get up but I did. It takes guts to wear a floral turban to the Abbey. Very Sunset Boulevard.

and finally,

Best hat goes to Zara Phillips for her silvery black tilted UFO.

Congratulations, William and Catherine!

All About the Swag

2011-04-26T05:47:00.004+01:00

I admit it. That was me who cleaned out WH Smith's stock of Royal Wedding Commemorative Stickers in Heathrow Terminal 5 last Friday. I mean what's not to love about Royal Wedding Commemorative Stickers? They're almost as good as the pope bottle opener and Virgin Mary travel shampoo bottles I bought in Vatican City. (Or were those holy water bottles? I forget.)

Commemorative stickers aside, I was surprised at how thin on the ground Royal Wedding merchandise was at Heathrow. Other than the stickers all I saw was a very funny My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding spoof book in which Kate and Williams' heads were super-imposed on a Big Fat Gypsy Wedding party (if you haven't seen the documentary that inspired this, get a taste here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2XuqGS1fm8) and a tin of Walker's shortbread with that overused engagement photo on it. (You know, the one that Kate's eyebrow groomer should be fired over.) The London Olympics people already managed to get a whole frickin' shop open in Terminal 5, and their event isn't even until next year. And their logo looks like it was designed by a cat.

Luckily, Tim the cashier at WH Smith informed me that all the really good merch doesn't surface until after the actual event. Everyone is waiting for the money shot of the wedding dress (hopefully accessorised with subtly arched brows). Thanks for the tip, Tim. I'm not even mad you forgot to give me half off my buy-one-get-one-half-off books.

Back in the Wolds

2011-04-21T09:12:00.001+01:00

Arrived back in the Cotswolds on Wednesday night for a few days of rural refreshment before a trip out to California then back again in time for the royal wedding. Enough royal wedding memorabilia to fill a small warehouse had been delivered in the post (tea towels for everyone!), including the Emma Bridgewater mug pictured from which I am currently drinking my morning coffee. I appreciate the way Ms. Bridgewater managed to make the helicopters (emblem of Will's profession as a search and rescue helicopter pilot) look sort of like flowers if you squint, but it's too bad the initials of the royal couple are the same as those used to indicate bathroom facilities in the UK.

Also awaiting me was the May issue of Cotswold Life magazine, a periodical in which I had pretty much lost interest when I was living here full-time. I preferred an essay by Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker to say the monthly Cotswold Pub Dog column in which, yes, a local pub dog gets his own column in which to inform the public of his favourite pub snack, favourite spot in the bar, and favourite customer. But now that I am back living full-time in the big, bad urban-ness of Berlin, I sopped up Cotswold Life like it was some kind of life-prolonging tonic.

In typical idiosyncratic style, the opening article managed to both bemoan the cancellation for the second year in a row of Cheese Rolling down Cooper's Hill, a nearly two-century old Cotswold tradition, and extol the virtues of smoking. The second article was a newish (well, new since I stopped reading regularly) column by a woman who calls herself Cotswold Mother. Very annoying since that is obviously the perfect spot for the American in the Cotswolds column. And then there was my favorite, the property pages, which reminded me how very rich this area is and how very rich I am not. The description in one ad for a manor and estate in nearby Withington included a minstrels' gallery, bothy, and manège, none of which are architectural features with which I am familiar (although the first one sounds disturbingly, to an American, like a venue for a minstrel show). Like the old saying goes, if you have to ask you can't afford it!

Royal Wedding Fever

2011-04-16T17:35:00.003+01:00

I was nine years old when Prince Charles married Diana, and I still remember getting up early in the morning to watch the grainy broadcast in the family room of my suburban Southwest Florida home. I was glued to the television. I wanted to be Diana -- not because she got to marry Charles but because she got to wear those acres of cream puff silk -- or at the very least one of her bridesmaids, who I thought were the luckiest girls in the world. And now that their son, William, is getting married I am just as engrossed.

For one thing I now have a personal, if very tenuous, connection to the royal couple. It was at a wedding in the very church of our very Cotswold village where the couple appeared together in public for the first time in months last October. In the universe of royal watchers, this was a highly significant event and fueled speculation (correctly as it turns out) that the announcement of their engagement was imminent.

My own preparations for the royal wedding are well under way. To start with, I will be leaving a business meeting in San Francisco a few hours early in order to make the 6:55PM flight that will get me back to the UK on time. (If anybody asks, I'm prepared to defend my decision with an explanation that, as a UK passport holder, I am virtually obligated to be present in the green and pleasant land to witness the big event.) I will be taking the day off so that we can watch the wedding from the wine bar, which will be hosting a prosecco and bunting studded big-screen viewing. The ladies of the surrounding villages have already agreed to arrive in hats, and my own, a hot pink number that last had an outing at Royal Ascot some years ago, will soon be retrieved from its pentagonal box in the far reaches of the wardrobe. I plan to pair it with my Target-Lily-Pulitzer-knock-off sundress and a pair of vintage pink crystal strawberry-shaped clip on earrings. I'm sure I'll still be basking in the afterglow when I drink my coffee out of my Kate and William commemorative mug the next morning.

Husband Speaks

2011-04-14T07:10:00.007+01:00

After years of inspiring, reading, and occasionally editing my blog -- not to mention being dragged to Berlin where he has nothing better to do all day -- it seems husband has finally found his voice. Check it out:

http://checkpointchappie.blogspot.com/

Gastronomic Infidelity

2011-04-08T21:23:00.013+01:00

I give up. It seems like for the duration of my stay in Berlin this blog is destined to be a food blog. And why not? Food played a central role in getting me here in the first place. Despite a foot of dirty snow, I was wooed by a perfect pastrami sandwich on our apartment hunting visit back in December; husband fell for the spatzle with gravy at Schwarzwaldstuben. And now even though husband reminds me on an hourly basis that I've ruined his life by dragging him to Berlin, he will readily admit that the restaurant meals in between the complaining are some of the best he's ever had.

The problem is there are so many good places in Berlin that it is impossible to remain faithful to any one. (I am convinced Berlin has the highest volume of value-for-money eateries of any European capital city.) Just when you thought you had found the best flammkuchen, the one with the pear and goats cheese and walnuts on top, you taste Gorki Park's (pictured) speck and zweibelen (onion) version. (To say nothing of their Peasantry Platter -- slice boiled potato topped with pickles is really very good -- that comes with an optional shot of vodka.) I was sure we had found our pizza place, La Foccaceria, early on too. Then I tried the "goatie" -- spinach, goats cheese, red onion, and toasted sesame seeds -- naan version of pizza at W-Der Imbiss (der Imbiss is German for fast food), a dish to which I think I might now be addicted.

The other night I was enjoying a goatie at W-Der Imbiss and feeling only a little bit guilty about my lack of recent patronage of La Foccaeria. The ambiance reminds me a lot of Los Feliz / Silverlake, what with the mixture of the Tiki Ti's interior design (totems mounted on framed leopard print) and the American guy in the corner with the lambchop sideburns and just-stepped-out-of-the-Derby-circa-1995-outfit holding court with a story of how he kicked his Xanax dependency. Everything would have been perfect had the restaurant not run out of white wine.

But then it was perfect.

The chef offered to go get a bottle from the restaurant next door, and before I knew it a wine waiter appeared bearing a bottle of Robert Weil Rheingau Riseling. It cost about three times as much as the pizza, but Rheingau and goatie are an awfully nice match.

Schwarzwaldstuben
Tucholskystraße 48
10117 Berlin, Germany
+49 30 2809-8084

Gorki Park
Weinbergsweg 25
10119 Berlin, Germany
+49 30 4487286 ‎
gorki-park.de

W-Der Imbiss
Kastanienalle 49
10119 Berlin
http://www.w-derimbiss.de/

My Name is Not Roberta

2011-03-27T20:10:00.002+01:00

Late this afternoon husband and I went out for a jog. Instead we ended up eating käsespaetzle -- German macaroni cheese -- washed down with a half-liter of gruner veltliner at a tiny diner called Roberta kocht (Roberta cooks). And how could we not? When we passed by the chef herself was standing outside wearing an apron and knitted cap, smoking a cigarette, drinking a glass of champagne and beaming from ear to ear. She noticed us checking out the place and explained she didn't usually drink champagne on the job. It's just that today she and her neighbors were celebrating the historic victory of the Green party in Baden-Württemberg, the southern German state from which she and the food she cooks hail. I am more or less ignorant of German politics, but even a die hard conservative would have been won over by the ebullient mood. And so we went inside to let the woman we assumed was Roberta cook for us.

Inside there was music playing on a record player and a thimble-sized, gold-rimmed glass of champagne to greet us (I assume the complimentary champagne is reserved for historical political moments). A German doppelganger for kd lang brought us a plate of homemade bread and some olive oil as a precursor for the main carbohydratic event: käsespaetzle topped with fried brown onions. In my three months in Berlin I have become something of a käsespaetzle connoisseur, and though it pains me to play favorites, this was the best -- looser and creamier than the others I've tried, not to mention those onions.

As we heaped compliments on the chef, she told us more about the restaurant. It is only open Thursdays through Sundays because, as she explained, she only has that much love to give. And most importantly no, her name is not Roberta. (It turns out Roberta was an Italian singer, but that's a whole other story.) I don't care what her name is, the lady can cook.

ROBERTA kocht

Zionskirchstr. 5, 10119 Berlin, Germany+49 157 73346020 ‎http://robertakocht.de

Life is Not a Petting Zoo

2011-03-18T09:14:00.002Z

The other night I went to see David Sedaris at a venue here in Berlin. He was signing books in the lobby before the reading started, so I lined up hoping to get a photograph with him. When it was my turn I apologized for not having a book for him to sign but swore I was a big fan, gushed about how many hours of reading pleasure he had brought me, and asked for a pic. "Oh, I never do photographs," he replied before being whisked into the auditorium by a stern German frau.

As I took my seat I was sore at his refusal. After experiencing a few years of obliging authors at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, I had come to think I was entitled to posting pictures of myself with authors I admire on Facebook. I felt like yelling out to David, only three rows away, that Alain de Botton didn't mind having his picture taken! Who did he think he was? Instead, I sat quietly while Mr. Sedaris explained that the book he was there to promote, "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk," had been titled "Life is Not a Petting Zoo" in Germany. OK, I thought, I am being unreasonable. Maybe having his picture taken makes him feel like he is in a petting zoo.

Mr. Sedaris then proceeded to strap on a pair of bunny ears he had bought in a shop next door to his hotel in Berlin. How could he resist, he explained, when they were so perfect for the story he was about to read: a fable about an aggressive bunny who kills a bunch of innocent creatures in a misguided effort to protect his woodland community, failing to notice the real predators until it's too late. In the end the wolves get the bunny, and the bunny gets what he deserves.

As Mr. Sedaris spoke, I noticed a man in the row in front of me surreptitiously videotaping him on his mobile phone. Others snapped the bunny ear-bedecked author from their seats. And in the end, I couldn't help thinking the author got what he deserved.

The Glass Jar

2011-03-12T17:40:00.002Z

The only time I've heard of a pay-what-you-want business model was when Radiohead released In Rainbows in 2007 and let people decide what to pay when they downloaded the album. Although it did garner the band exceptional publicity, to call it a business model seems like a stretch. It was more of an experiment. But it turns out pay-what-you-want is a thriving, decade-old business model right here in our neighborhood in Berlin, in Corner Wine Bar no less.

On a typical weeknight we hit Corner Wine Bar around 6pm for a post-work Riesling or three. We're usually gone by 8PM, but the other night we were there a bit later and noticed the place started to fill up as certainly as Cinderella's coach turning back into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight. It turns out everyone had arrived for the pay-what-you-want buffet dinner -- crocks of braised beef, penne, and red cabbage, perfect for the wintry night -- and self-serve wine bar. You rent a wineglass for €2, but other than that no price is dictated. At the end of the night you just pay what you see fit into a glass jar set out on the bar.

There are two more pay-what-you-want restaurants owned by the same people who own Corner Wine Bar, both within a few blocks of our apartment. FraRosa serves a four-course dinner from 8PM. The first time we went we had no idea it was pay-what-you-want; we assumed the lack of pricing on the menu meant we should expect an exorbitant bill to arrive later. I was shocked when the petite German waiter explained there was no bill, pointed me in the direction of a glass jar, and refused to provide any guidance on what was expected. Thankfully there were some English-speaking Swiss at the next table who had been there before and recommended €20 a head for the food.

Having been through this drill I was prepared when we visited Perlin last night. It's the smallest of the three places and my favorite. Unlike FraRosa, which has a choice of two options for each course, at Perlin you take what's on offer. (Last night it was a pureed lentil soup garnished with fresh coriander and lamb braised in wine.) After a week at work where I was expected to make decisions every minute of the day, there was something luxurious about the lack of choice. Our only decision was to pay €20 a head again for the food.

An Expat's Guide to Making Friends

2011-03-05T17:55:00.032Z

There is a lot about moving abroad that makes you feel like you are back on the mean streets of adolescence, a.k.a. the hormonal halls of middle school. For example, I immediately felt thirteen again upon having to figure out exactly how to use applicator-free, organic cotton German tampons. Then there's the whole problem of making friends because, well, all of a sudden even though you thought you were a well-adjusted adult approaching mid-life, you don't have any friends. At least not in Berlin. In Berlin you are roaming the metaphorical halls of middle school, searching for a clique that you actually want to be a part of and that will have you.

Luckily I had some experience to draw from. I had done this once before, almost six years ago when we moved from Los Angeles to London. And thus I have devised my handy Expat's Guide to Making Friends in three easy steps.

Step 1:
Accept invitations from anyone, including well-meaning work colleagues with whom, upon reflection, you have nothing in common other than work. How else would you end up eating brunch at a Siberian restaurant and listening to aforementioned well-meaning colleague deliver a joint monologue with his wife about how they ended up in Berlin -- via Washington State, Chicago, San Francisco and Munich -- that lasts, unbroken, through three trips to the buffet table? And yes, apparently Siberia has a cuisine, which based upon the evidence of this brunch resembles that of a down-at-the-heels church potluck. Still, it was nice of them to invite us.

Step 2:
Solicit invitations from anyone/place/thing. This is easier than it sounds. Just Google the International Womens Club in your city. I did this in Berlin despite the experience I had with it in London where it was overrun with bankers' wives with a penchant for lunchtime activities that I could never attend because, shock, I actually worked during the day. I also did this despite the fact that the one night time invitation I netted out of the London club resulted in husband and I spending an evening on red leather couches in an apartment in Pimlico surrounded by Republicans in the George Bush second term-era.

Happily, our first outing with the Berlin branch of the International Womens Club went better. It started well enough when we were seated at the fondue restaurant between an American consultant and his antique-dealing wife and a Japanese couple who turned out not to be a couple. Then in swooped Jocelyne of Brittany, a middle-aged, larger-than-life paean to fabulousness. Her career as a diplomatic translator made her interesting enough, then we learned she had previously lived in the Cotswolds (in the town where we had first visited, Mickleton, no less) and her sister lived in Santa Monica. Small world.

Step 3:
Find your local English Language Bookshop and sign up for the mailing list. Yes, I know the poetry reading starts at 9PM on a weeknight which is the time you are normally watching Mad Men in your pajamas, but go anyway. How else would you hear the line "Dave, the radiologist" used to great effect in a poem read to you by a poet over Skype from Brooklyn while you drink white wine from a tumbler? For this pleasure you will have to endure a bearded twenty-something reading you a "sound poem" in which he repeats the same word continuously for two minutes. (I don't remember the word, but I do remember he thought it was important to tell the audience he had studied with an acoustics professor.) You will also have to bear the silent wrath of the poet from Baltimore who glares at you before she mounts a step ladder six-inches from where you are sitting -- how were you supposed to know that was her podium? -- forcing you to stare into the middle distance while she too repeats words, this time different ones in alphabetical order. Her poems are annoying, but maybe we can be friends?

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for Expats: Pizza, Wine, Movies

2011-03-05T12:21:00.010Z

A month has passed since we relocated to Berlin, and, upon reflection, I've come to the conclusion that the key to settling into a foreign country is establishing suppliers of three basic needs: pizza, wine and movies. These three things form the cornerstone of our weekly routine, and I suppose it is the creation of a routine that starts to make you feel at home.

Pizza was easy. In fact, we ate at our local pizza joint, La Focacceria, on our first night in Berlin. I could write a whole blog about this place so much do I love it, but let me summarize by saying enough super-savory pizza to satisfy the prodigious appetites of both husband and me sets you back a mere €7. Wine was also easy, and I have in fact already written a whole blog about our corner wine bar. Finding a cinema that shows English language movies was a little more challenging.

Lonely Planet had tipped me off about the existence of a nearby English language cinema, Central Kino. What they had failed to mention was how hard it was to find once you arrived at the designated street address. Luckily I noticed a small, photocopied sign reading Central Kino with an arrow pointing through an archway. At this point we were only several days into our Berlin adventure, and let's just say we were both feeling a bit overwhelmed. We had been plucked from our bucolic village and thrust into the big bad city in the depth of winter. And as we passed through that archway into a graffiti-covered alley (pictured), things felt distinctly menacing.

Ten meters later I noticed another photocopied sign for Central Kino hanging loose from the wall. I took a guess and led us up a stairwell straight ahead. It was so covered with graffiti it had texture. And smell. Halfway up the first flight of stairs even I, the more adventurous of us, was repelled back into the courtyard by wafts of urine. There we encountered a twenty-foot high metal monster statue staring down at us. Determined to find someone who could direct us to the kino, I marched husband into a bar that somehow managed to be pitch black inside even though it was still daylight outside. "Do you speak English?" I demanded of the barmaid while stealing furtive glances at the clientele, half expecting to see syringes hanging out of their arms. Perhaps concerned for our safety, the barmaid personally led us out of the bar, across the courtyard, behind the monster, and into the lobby of the Central Kino where we continued the theme of psycho drama with a viewing of Black Swan. Like pizza and wine, movie night at Central Kino has since become a regular part of the Berlin routine.

APRIL 2011 UPDATE:
I can't believe I forgot to mention a good hair colorist in my list of every ex-pat gal's needs. And I have found mine in Berlin: Andreas (speaks perfect English and is a charmer) at his beautiful Aveda salon, schönBERLIN.
An der Spandauer Brücke 11
10178 Berlin
030 2848 4780
http://www.schoenberlin.com

Mercedes and Me

2011-02-25T16:06:00.008Z

Yesterday was my thirty-ninth birthday, and I gave myself a Mercedes.

Not really. I mean, I did get a Mercedes yesterday, but the fact that it arrived on my birthday was pure coincidence, as is the fact that the license plate bears both my initials and those for body odor. A company car is a perq of the job and while I would have been happy to take the cash allowance (seeing as I live a ten-minute walk from the office and Berlin has some of the best public transport in the world), a large German automotive experience on which to traverse the autobahns was part of the Faustian bargain I made with husband in order to persuade him to move to Berlin. And thus a large, charcoal grey, slightly menacing-looking station wagon is now parked on the cobbled street in front of our apartment.

But my relationship with Mercedes Benz begins way before yesterday. It goes back as far as I can remember to the almost mythical status it held in my childhood household thanks to my mother's coveting of a two-seater, red Mercedes convertible. It was an impossibly glamorous object of desire, made even more so against the backdrop of our staid suburban track-house neighborhood. She and my father upgraded out of that neighborhood to one with, well, bigger track houses shortly after my sister and I left home, but it took her until just a few years ago to finally get that little red convertible. Perplexingly, she chose a Lexus. It reminded me of how growing up I wanted more than anything to pierce my ears. My parents' rule, though, was that I was not allowed until I was sixteen. Then when I finally did turn sixteen, I decided not to pierce them. I guess it was my way of pretending I had been in control all along. To this day, they're still not pierced.

My second run in with a Mercedes came when I was first living in Los Angeles. I had lent money to my then boyfriend, who was having trouble paying me back. He offered to give me his 1960s Mercedes convertible to pay off the loan. It was Grace Kelly incarnate in a car: navy blue with tan leather interior and round headlights. The catch was that it didn't start. And I was so mad at him for being irresponsible with money that at the time it just seemed like he was trying to pawn me off with a broke-down car. I insisted he pay me back in cash. Penny wise and pound foolish is a phrase that comes to mind.

It only took me about fifteen more years to finally get my own Mercedes. If my mother ever comes to visit in Berlin I'll have to let her drive it. Maybe she can take me to get my ears pierced.

The Corner Bar

2011-02-18T10:52:00.005Z

We have a corner wine bar in Berlin. It has a name on a little sign outside, but I don't know what it is because the moniker "boho wine bar" has stuck in my household. It is as much a coffee shop as a wine bar, but we drink wine there more than coffee, usually Sylvaner or Riesling. It also sells soup, which you serve yourself from two urns that are either opposite the bar or on the enormous curvy dark-wood buffet in the back room. Next to the cash register -- a porcelain bowl filled with coins pinning down a stack of bills -- there is a plate of sandwiches on little round rolls and sesame-seed sprinkled croissants. An enormous cherry clafoutis reliably spills out over a piece of parchment next to the sandwiches. So far nothing I've tried has cost more than €2.50.

Whether your glass of wine costs €2.00 or €2.50 seems to depend on who is working, who is ordering, and how many glasses that person has ordered. The bartender/barista with the long curly locks pulled back into a ponytail who plays bad South American music, for example, is more generous with husband than me.

The interior of boho wine bar is lined with a wall of settees in alternating shades of wine-colored and seafoam green velvet, interspersed with mid-century armchairs, and lit from beneath mustard-yellow floral lampshades. In other words, it's a study in DDR vintage. Just when I thought it couldn't get any better, out she came through the swinging, graffiti-covered kitchen door. She was middle-aged, blonde, compact and wearing a shiny gold bomber jacket, black pleather mini skirt, green tights, leg warmers and faux running shoes -- a Berlin-punked Sandy Duncan à la Peter Pan. She is, I can only reason, responsible for that cherry clafoutis.

Over the weekend we finally ventured a little further afield than our corner bar, into Prenzlauer Berg proper where the Kollwitzplatz farmers' market was in full swing. It's the kind of market where you can get a currywurst with pomme frittes and truffle mayo accompanied by a glass of pink prosecco along with your fruit and veg, and we did. It was a freezing day with a searing wintry sun in a blue sky, and as we wandered along the gentrified, cobbled streets it was hard to avoid comparisons to Paris.

At Café Anna Blum the waitress look confused when we tried to order a mimosa, then a buck's fizz, and finally champagne and orange juice. But she obliged, serving it in two tall glasses with bendy pink straws. I believe it was there on the heated patio with café-provided red fleece lap blankets that we committed the blasphemy of saying that this was better than the Rue Cler and the Rue Vieille du Temple combined. In his predictable grass-is-always-greener way, husband then began to lament that we didn't get an apartment in this neighborhood. In my predictable rationalizing-optimist way I emphasized we were only a ten-minute walk away. Even he couldn't argue when I made the point that for all its yummy mummies and tapas bars, there are no DDR Peter Pans in this neighborhood.

Adventures in Showering

2011-02-05T07:17:00.002Z

In our first week in Berlin we have discovered many of the wonders of the city. There is the impaled UFO of a television tower in Alexanderplatz, the classical buildings of the museum quarter, the majestic Brandenburg Gate, the glass dome of the Bundestag, and the Central Park-like expanse of the Tiergarten, not to mention the basement food hall of the Galeries Lafayette (a surprise find by husband). But the thing I've been most fascinated by is much more local, inside our apartment as a matter of fact: our shower.

Like the television tower, our shower manages to look retro and futuristic at the same time. It could easily pass for a prop on Star Trek, especially when the miniature recessed ceiling lights are on (also convenient for use as a bathroom night light). Inside there are three knobs that seem to control from which direction the water shoots at you. My favorite is a combination of the removable shower head and ankle-height jets. Husband prefers the overhead experience, which is a bit too waterboardy for me. There are also two digital control panels with fourteen buttons each, most of which I am too scared to press despite the illustrations attempting to communicate what each is for. My favorite shows an adult stick figure standing next to a child. Bathing with your child is undoubtedly very continental, but the American prude in me refers to this as the pedophile setting. While we're on disturbing subjects I'll mention the coiled up length of blue rubber hose. The accompanying illustrated warning looks like Loony Tunes' language for speed: horizontal lines with a poof at the end that appear as the Roadrunner leaves Wile E. Coyote in the dust.

Husband did figure out what to press to make the jets undulate up and down your body in succession -- an unsettling but not unpleasant experience -- but so far neither of us have figured out how to work the high tap that pours into a shallow u-shaped shelf. There's a bench underneath where apparently you sit until the shelf is filled and then tips over your head. Never mind exploring Berlin, there's something to look forward to without leaving the house.

Wanting to Want to Go

2011-01-30T18:27:00.012Z

I had envisioned spending January posting wistful entries about the Cotswolds before my attention turns to Berlin on these pages, but I haven't posted anything in over a month. This is partly because it doesn't really feel like we are leaving and so I am not in the frame of mind to wax lyrical. We are, after all, moving into a furnished apartment in Berlin, and our cottage will remain largely intact except for our clothes.

The main reason for my lapse is that it has been an unpleasant few weeks. Not that I haven't written about unpleasant things before -- sickness, death, and fighting come to mind -- but until now there hasn't been enough distance from the drama for me to construct anything palatable enough for publishing. Husband is not happy about moving to Berlin, no matter how much contextualizing and box ticking and meeting of assorted terms and conditions is done. And a lot of box ticking has been done: beautiful flat, beautiful car, walking distance commute, and at least monthly return visits to the Cotswolds to name a few. He wants to want to go; the problem is he doesn't want to go.

What he really wants is what isn't on offer right now: to move back to Los Angeles. We are, in fact, in agreement on the merits of Los Angeles, which boil down to sun, the Pacific, Mexican food and Peet's coffee. But I have now made enough moves initiated either entirely or partially in search of greener grass for husband -- including London and the Cotswolds -- to know there is limited mileage in relocation as an elixir for happiness. As husband himself has been known to say, wherever you go, there you are.

But the truth is as much as husband doesn't want to go, I do. And so tomorrow night we will go, as planned, to Berlin. Under the circumstances it won't be easy, but then again, what is?

Christmas Letter 2010: I am a Jelly Donut

2010-12-23T16:52:00.001Z

When Kennedy gave his famous speech declaring, "Ich bin ein Berliner," some pesky linguists claimed he had mistakenly called himself a jelly donut. It turns out his grammar was correct since President Kennedy was speaking figuratively rather than literally. It also turns out that either interpretation now applies to me. After a couple of sunless months and a week of German food-- flammenkuchen, wiener schnitzel, kartoffelpuffer, spaetzle, rotwein, weißwein, glühwein-- my flesh now bears a striking resemblance to a powdered sugar-covered, Mr. Donut raspberry-filled. I've also decided, largely on the basis of a pastrami sandwich (step aside, Canter's), to accept a job in Berlin in the new year.

If only the decision was that easy. The truth is that husband and I flip-flopped as many times as John Kerry during our four-day "decision visit" to Berlin. There was, of course, trepidation about turning husband into a trailing spouse, which I recently learned is the official diplomatic term for those in his situation. It also didn't help that there was so much snow on the ground that my lingering impression of the city is of an upturned cola slurpee. But it did help that we found a great neighborhood with a great apartment in former East Berlin, five minutes away from the office and the purveyor of that pastrami sandwich. And so, shortly into the new year, the strapline for this blog will get an additional clause: "One woman's journey from burritos and margaritas to tea and scones" will become "One woman's journey from burritos and margaritas to tea and scones to bratwurst and bier."

Our year has ended with a bang after eleven months of mostly blips. Perhaps the most important thing in the year was what didn't happen at all: any further recurrence of the neurological symptoms I experienced last year that put me at risk for multiple sclerosis. The only thing related to multiple sclerosis that did happen this year was our London to Paris charity bike ride which so many of you graciously supported and for which we are grateful. We also made a return visit to France in the autumn to cycle through Provence, which husband now refers to as the broke-down seventies holiday thanks to the general state of modernity of the hotels we patronized. But the important things -- wine and food -- were good. Back at home we enjoyed showing off the Cotswolds to friends and family on a couple of weekends. We will miss it but we plan to visit once a month, and we hope to welcome you in both places.

Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you!

Drag for the Under-Eights

2010-12-13T16:09:00.002Z

After more than five years in England, I was pretty sure I had exhausted the repertoire of traditional British experiences. I've attended the grand sporting triumvirate of Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon. I've wanged-the-wellie at a village fête. I've even eaten haggis to celebrate a Scottish poet I've never read. But until last Saturday night, I had never attended a panto.

British pantomime is a Christmas theatrical tradition that seems to follow the format of fairytale -- Cinderella in our case -- with a twist. The purpose of these twists, like the walk-on role of the gorilla, seem to be entirely to encourage audience participation; the form is to shout "it's behind you," when said gorilla appears. You can also sing along to the updated musical numbers. We had a lot of Take That, but the best was the rendition of Adam and the Ants' Prince Charming. Then there is Buttons, the narrator/bumbling suitor of Cinders, who encourages participation from the moms, dads, and kids in attendance. Apparently Buttons wasn't expecting our group of six, childless adults in the second row. I decided to help out the dads, who seemed the quietest of the constituencies.

Then of course there was the drag. The ugly stepsisters were expected. What wasn't expected was that Prince Charming and his page would be played by women, which meant the central romance of the story was girl-on-girl. Suddenly the origins of stereotypical British sexual confusion became clear; this is, after all, the entertainment Britons are weaned on. I did seem to be the only one in the audience shocked by it though. The under-eights squealed with delight throughout.

Shanghai Blues

2010-12-11T10:20:00.004Z

Welcome to ShangHai

Evaded affection

Pieces of pieces of the Heart

Thank you

Very Much

And so read the bag in which the hand-tailored clothes smelling of Chinese food and cigarettes was delivered to me on the last night of my visit to Shanghai. It's a cheap shot to poke fun at translations, but I really like this one. It's poetic, an off-kilter haiku.

My week in Shanghai started with a shopping trip on which I ordered the above mentioned clothes (which, smell aside, turned out beautifully). Shortly after touching down at Pudong airport, our personal shopper, Francine of East of the Sun, collected us from the hotel and took us on a whirlwind tour of cloth markets, pearl vendors, silk-binders, and cashmere boutiques in the French concession, with a welcome stop for a street snack of savory, glutinous rice-filled dumplings.

The rest of the week was work-dominated, but there were other highlights like the Chinese banquet on our second night. After about ten dishes of varying degrees of identifiability (including tofu, something that looked like a stingray and was delicious, and meat of some kind with red chilies), the pièce de résistance arrived: hairy crab. I am a fairly adventurous eater, but on the advice of the more adventurous woman sitting next to me, I simply admired rather than indulged in the seasonal delicacy. I did, however, enjoy the red bean curd-filled dessert dumpling that looked and felt exactly like a silicon breast for a doll, right down to the crowning red dot.

My final highlight of the trip was discovering a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in the ground floor of the office building of Thomson-Reuters, where we went for a presentation. They don't even have those in London. And yes, I can confirm that a Coffee Bean latte tastes exactly the same in Shanghai as it does on Main Street in Santa Monica.

More tea, vicar?

2010-11-28T15:51:00.005Z

Today we went to church in GP after an unintended hiatus of some months. The new vicar was there, of whom we had heard much about earlier in the year in anticipation of her September arrival to the benefice. By her gender alone she would make a departure from the beloved previous vicar, the aptly named Godfrey. But based on those early descriptions I was also expecting a whirling dervish with a shock of flame-coloured curls. It turns out she is a modest forty-something with only a hint of ginger in her wavy bob. She was still feeling her way around her new congregation, and we weren't making things easy on her. When she started the service by asking Dorothy to light the first candle of Advent, Dorothy duly informed her we usually didn't light the candle until we started singing the first hymn. Wisely, the vicar agreed to this change of plan.

That first hymn got off to a shaky start. Our normal organist wasn't there, and the doddering old gent who was sitting in for him attacked it double time. As we struggled to keep up with the melody and get the odd breath in, Dorothy sauntered up to attend to her Advent candle lighting duties. Just as the vicar was getting her rhythm in the second Bible reading, the organist interjected with a sharp musical note. It was unclear if he thought she was done, was just trying to add some emphasis to the last verse, or had fallen asleep and struck his head on the keys. This musical Tourettes continued, puncturing the prayers of intercession and the sermon as well. To make matters worse, the rest of the morning's hymns were unfamiliar, leaving the diminutive congregation guessing at which "of" had three vowels versus one and whether or not you were supposed to repeat the fifth line of each verse three times -- the kind of nuance in hymns that depends on the collective memory of the congregation. Despite all this the vicar soldiered on, dispatching an efficient Holy Communion and greeting us all with a smile on our way out. We haven't broken her yet, but give Dorothy some time.

In Residence

2010-11-21T11:59:00.005Z

Big week in England. First the Queen went on Facebook, then her grandson went and announced his engagement. And in my little corner of this green and pleasant land, the big news is that husband has officially moved in with me.

This is, I acknowledge, the norm for most married couples. But for the past two years I've been full-time in the Cotswolds while husband has spent a few nights a week in our miniature London flat to accommodate his working life. And let's just say I've cherished those few nights a week of me time, indulging in a secret life of reading novels, watching trash television, and eating toast for dinner. Husband was never too fond of this arrangement despite my repeated attempts to defend it. One of my favorite lines was pointing out that this was exactly the same arrangement that David Double-Barrelled and his girlfriend had and how well it worked for them. Then DDB went and committed suicide last month which, needless to say, made that argument seem less convincing. Anyway, now that husband's working life is demanding less London time and the London rental market has sky-rocketed, it made sense to consolidate and move in together.

Our tenant moved into the London flat on Saturday, so we had a last hurrah in the city earlier in the week. Our tour of the neighborhood's greatest hits included a couple of glasses of prosecco at Negozio Classica, still managed by the lovely, sweater-vested Giuseppe; a stop-in at the Cow, where middle-age is doing nothing to dissuade the local hipsters from thinking they are still hip; and concluded at Crazy Homies, the only decent Mexican restaurant in England. It was the kind of night that made me feel warm and fuzzy about London. The next morning as I was getting into the car to drive back to the Cotswolds, I peeled a sodden, dusky pink business card advertising Posh Escort service off the windshield. I can't help thinking that perhaps this is the more appropriate abiding image of London.

Did I Mention...

2010-11-14T07:47:00.006Z

Yesterday afternoon we stopped into the wine bar for a postprandial glass or three. Henry the shepherd (of the lambing and Worcestershire livestock market field trips documented in this blog) was also there. In the course of casual conversation he let slip he will be appearing in an episode of the reality show about Liz Hurley's life on her farm. (Ms. Hurley has a farm about ten miles south of where we live.) Not only that, he has in fact done multiple shepherding duties for Ms. Hurley over recent years.

"How could you not mention this to me before, Henry?" I nearly shouted at him.

The more genteel amongst our group were busy guffawing over the fact that Liz refers to her four hundred-acre farm as an estate (which apparently requires, at a minimum, cottages). I was already off planning a screening party for Henry's upcoming appearance and posting that I know Liz Hurley's shepherd on Facebook, both of which are decent enough reasons why he's never mentioned this to me before.

P.S. The Romanian dream is dead. Two years was the deal breaker in the end. New dreams of Berlin or the U.S. brewing...

Get a Cluj

2010-11-04T22:49:00.007Z

On Monday I got a call from my boss's boss. He asked me to take a deep breath, which is not the kind of thing you want to hear when your company just announced lay-offs the week before. So I took a deep breath and listened as he told me my "name had come up" to run the office in Cluj and asked if I would be interested.

It took a few beats to register that I had just been asked to move to Romania, which he kindly clarified as an option not a mandate. My first reaction was to tell him I didn't think that would work for husband and me, but I also said I would think about it. That night I called husband, who was in London. He was unimpressed and informed me if I moved to Romania I would be moving there by myself. His reaction was predictable enough. He had, after all, been hoping for a corporate transfer to California, a far cry from the "-nia" now on the table.

Somehow, though, I couldn't shake the idea of moving to the land of Nadia Comaneci and Dracula, and the next morning I composed an email to husband telling him I thought we should at least consider the merits of the offer. I enumerated those as a more southerly latitude, the opportunity for him to become a kept man and spend a year indulging his creativity, maybe by making a documentary, and the fact that I already had the title for the book I was going to write, Getting a Cluj: Letters from Transylvania. Whatever I said worked, and husband soon started emailing me lists of demands for when I spoke to my boss's boss later that day -- we both agreed the assignment would have to be limited to a year. Husband also told our friend R. about our potential move, who responded by tagging us in pictures of Romania on Facebook that looked like stills from Borat (see above shot of Black Sea bathing beauties on Romania's version of Muscle Beach). By the end of the day husband was referring to himself as "Count" and had decided that his documentary would be a daily video diary in which he morphs into Bram Stoker's Dracula one crushed velvet jacket, top hat, and long fingernail at a time.

Unfortunately, I had also had another call with my boss's boss by the end of the day, who informed me the assignment was for two years. Again I told him I would think about it, which husband and I did that evening over a bottle of red, this being a bottle-of-wine kind of discussion if ever there was one. Despite our best efforts to convince ourselves otherwise, we concluded our curiosity had a one-year limit. And so on Wednesday I sent my boss's boss a polite email explaining that two years was out of the question, but noting that I thought we could make it work for a year along with the standard drivel about my "confidence in my ability to make an impact" in that time frame.

I expected a prompt reply thanking me for considering it, reiterating the necessity of a two-year commitment, and closing the matter. Instead, more than twenty-four hours later, I've gotten no response. Could he possibly be considering my twelve-month proposal? For the moment, the dream of living in the land of Nadia Comaneci and Dracula lives on.

DDB, 1949-2010

2010-10-30T16:46:00.004+01:00

Yesterday we went to David Double-Barrelled's memorial service. There were more than five-hundred people and a eulogy whose highlights included an anecdote about when DDB learned to ski in France wearing a Harris tweed blazer and plus fours (his real sporting love was shooting). This was the picture on the back cover of the order of service, and it sums him up so well: the juxtaposition of top hat and pint, face erupted into the smoky, full-throttled laugh I can still hear now. DDB, RIP.

Scandal

2010-10-26T07:29:00.008+01:00

Husband has not been invited to this year's Court Leet, the men-of-the-village-only dinner that's been going on continuously since the thirteenth century that he was so proud to have been invited to for the last two years. He thought P. was just winding him up when he asked him if he had received his invitation yet, but it turns out the invites really have gone out and one has not come through our door. He is more upset about this than he'd like to admit and has come up with several conspiracy theories by way of explanation, including the fact that we hang out all the time with our gay weekender friends, R&R -- if this is really the case I tell him he should be proud to be excluded -- and that he made the faux pas of wearing jeans to last year's event. In a fight over the weekend I tell him it's because he has developed a reputation for being loud and obnoxious and everybody in the village can hear him screaming and yelling at me. Despite my assertion I feel bad he's been excluded, like the mother of the only kid in the class not invited to the birthday party.

I too have my own exclusion worries. On Thursday my company announced they were laying off 12% of my division, not totally unexpected. I tell myself I am not in the bottom performing 12% and other rationalizations meant to reassure, but on Saturday night I wake up at 1AM and can't go back to sleep for the stress. Read Rachel Johnson's hilarious book about her first year as editor of The Lady to calm myself back down. All she was asked to do was lower the average age of readers from 78 to 40-something and double circulation in the middle of a recession to prevent the magazine from going under, which helps put my job stress into perspective.

Suzie's

2010-10-22T18:50:00.004+01:00

Today I did something I've been meaning to do for a very long time: I stopped for breakfast on my way to work at Suzie's, a roadside trailer with a bright red awning parked on a turnout near Seven Springs. Suzie's is not of the gourmet food truck ilk that I've read has swept Los Angeles, but rather a standard British burger van. You can order pretty much any combination of the basic elements of a traditional British fry up, and it's delivered in a bap (bun), which is good for absorbing the brown sauce and grease. I chose egg and tomato with a cup of tea. While Suzie cooked she chatted with another woman customer about the three chaps in plus fours leaning against their Land Rover and eating bacon butties. (Despite the fact that shooting clothes are a familiar sight this time of year, seeing them still reminds me of golfers from the 1920s.) They had apparently committed the serious offense of paying for their breakfast with large bills.

"What do you expect from someone who pays £43 to shoot a bird out of the sky," Suzie remarked.

I checked my wallet and breathed a sigh of relief to see a £10 note, which didn't seem too egregious for about £4 worth of breakfast. When she handed over my bap I opened it to find mushroom and tomato instead of egg and tomato. I hesitated for a moment before asking her to add an egg -- I didn't want to annoy her like the shooting party had. She did insist I had asked for mushroom and tomato, which she claimed to remember because she thought it was strange, but she was cracking the egg at the same time as defending herself so I figured she wasn't too mad. Then she asked me where I was from and what I thought about the British weather, so I knew I was OK in Suzie's book. And it turns out mushroom, egg, and tomato makes a good bap, good enough for Suzie's to become a weekly tradition.

Jewish Family Envy

2010-10-17T10:23:00.005+01:00

Last week my parents went to Stanley Freeman's 70th birthday party. Stanley is the father of one my best childhood friends, and she was in attendance along with her gynecologist and dentist brothers, and all three of their spouses. There were also four grandchildren and, for good measure, the dentist brother used the occasion to announce his wife was pregnant. On our weekly call my parents went on and on about the filet mignon and the speeches the kids gave and how funny Stanley's wife, Rivanne, was with her five martinis, but I'm pretty sure all that progeny made quite an impression too.

My parents have a long tradition of Jewish family envy. I know it's a stereotype, but the truth is all the Jewish families we know are big and close and successful. It makes quite a contrast to our own family's grandchild-lessness and waspish trademark lack of warmth and intimacy. It's not that we don't like each other, it's just that we're not very touchy feely about it. I, for one, am quite happy with our familial arrangement and have no desire to be "friends" with my parents. And frankly, none of us can really be bothered. While the weight of responsibility for the family being grandchild free rests squarely on my shoulders, my parents aren't going out of their way either. Despite the fact that I've lived in England for five years, they haven't found the energy to pay a visit.

The last time my parents admired a Jewish family this much was when my cousin married into one. The wedding was an extravagant affair at a ski resort in Utah, culminating in a Sunday champagne brunch thrown by the groom's grandparents. At breakfast the bride's family took a backseat as the groom's family toasted each other with lavish compliments highlighting their multi-generational successes. My parents were suitably impressed.

The happy couple were divorced within a year, and while I take no pleasure in the breakup of my cousin's marriage, I do view it as a cautionary tale for my parents. For now, the closest my family is going to get to being Jewish is a bowl of matzo ball soup at Canter's Deli.

One of Those Calls

2010-10-14T16:00:00.007+01:00

The first one of those calls I remember was when I was about thirteen. It came in the middle of the night, and I'm not sure if it was the phone or my mother's scream that woke me up. M., the son of family friends, had been killed in a car wreck. The next one of those calls came through to me on the ladies' dresses checkout desk at Burdines department store. I was working there over the summer after my sophomore year in college, saving up money for a fall semester abroad. It was my friend D., calling to tell me our friend A. had been murdered. Then there was the call on Monday night. I didn't answer the phone when it rang because I was washing dishes. When I was done I checked the phone and saw there was a message from S. I figured she was calling about our planned upcoming weekend visit and called her back without listening to the message first, which is why it was even more of a shock when she told me that DDB was dead, shot himself on Friday.

I've written about DDB on this blog before, most recently about his instruction in making dry and extra dry martinis. He was one of the characters from English central casting -- posh, mustachioed, and seeming to belong to a bygone empire era even though he was too young (sixty-ish) for that to be possible -- that we met at the Boylestone village pub. He drank too much, but I never thought much about it because he never seemed drunk. Rather he seemed perpetually charming, always armed with a story like the one about the time he took a business trip to Texas and got such a kick out of the way the locals pronounced "Hereford" (as in cattle).

I was only an acquaintance of DDB's and I have no idea why he committed suicide; as far as I know there was no concern amongst those closest to him, no note of explanation. The only conclusion I have is the obvious one -- these were the actions of a man in despair. And I feel a little bit ashamed at how I fell for his charismatic public front hook, line, and sinker. It was such a perfect fit with my romanticized version of the English countryside that I had no motivation to see anything deeper in him.

Wednesday morning I watched as the first of the Chilean miners was rescued live on the morning news. It made me a little teary and before I knew it I was heaving full blown sobs for DDB.

I'll miss him, and his yellow socks.

The Yorkshire Muse

2010-10-10T07:45:00.008+01:00

I spent the first week of October at the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre, the poet's former West Yorkshire home that has been converted to a writers' retreat. I went to work on fashioning a manuscript from the raw material of this blog, something I started a year and a half ago out of boredom when I got sick and had to spend a few weeks in bed. I feel spoiled for leaving one rural idyll to go to another to write, but the Yorkshire moors have the advantage of being distraction free. There was no television, no Internet, and no husband.

Of course I still found my distractions, mostly welcome, in the form of the disarming number of literary and artistic links packed into a twenty mile radius of the tiny village of Heptonstall where I was staying. I started with a visit to the Bronte parsonage in the village of Haworth, ten miles to the north. That feeling I had read Wuthering Heights because I could summon the names Cathy and Heathcliff and place them in the moors turned out to be the same phenomenon that makes you think you've seen It's a Wonderful Life just because it's playing in the background or you flick by it a million times every December. But the fact that I had never read anything by the Bronte sisters didn't detract from my enjoyment of the small museum, the beautifully restored parsonage that was their former home. My favorite was the sitting room with the table around which the sisters apparently circled endlessly while writing their books. In the upstairs bedroom directly above this room an artist had installed the sound of footsteps coming up through the chimney breast.

Nearer to my home for the week was the village of Hebden Bridge, packed with independent bookstores, coffee shops, small galleries and shops selling fairtrade organic cotton. It was confusing, as if a slice of Seattle retail had been airdropped into West Yorkshire. Up the hill in Heptonstall, Sylvia Plath is buried in the church cemetery. I found out she was buried there ahead of time and made the effort to read The Bell Jar. Somehow I had escaped it in my scant two university literature courses, although I seem to recall my feminist studies friend, Jenny, was a big fan. I became a fan on page one, as soon as I read the phrase "fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway." I did not, however, feel moved to leave a pen in the plastic jar on her grave as some other fans had. (I have felt strange about visiting the graves of the famous ever since that time when I was 19 and visited Jim Morrison's grave in Paris, littered with dropouts and half-empty liquor bottles. Pens, on balance, are less depressing.)

I wasn't safe from distractions even when I was in the house. I felt ashamed that I'd never actually read any Ted Hughes and I was staying in his former house, especially when some of my fellow writers confessed that was the main reason they had come. To compensate I plucked a copy of Birthday Letters from the library where I did most my writing and read it when I needed a break.

I ended the week with a visit to Salt Mills, a former mill that now houses a large David Hockney collection only a few miles from where the artist was born and raised. It is not as slick as the Tate Modern but shares that same comforting feeling of a saved former industrial building. Inside there is a happy marriage of art and commerce, including an airy cafe. It was the perfect place to end my week with the muses of Yorkshire.

Letters to the Editor

2010-09-19T10:06:00.004+01:00

My father is fond of writing letters to his congressman. He is also in the Tea Party. He is one of those kind of retired people, the kind with just a little bit too much money, bitterness, and time on their hands. In other words, nothing like me.

Or is he? Lately I have noticed my predilection for writing letters, not to my congressman or MP but to newspapers and magazines. I am embarrassed to admit that I can count six semi-recent occasions on which I have taken the time to submit my thoughts, compliments, or complaints to various editors and columnists. How this has happened when I have trouble finding time to get cash, buy milk, and do the laundry is a mystery to me. For my efforts I have been variously published, graciously replied to, and ignored. I like to think that I am part of the reason that Small Talk, the author interview in the Weekend FT, has returned (although it's just as likely it was simply on an August hiatus), or that one day the columnist from the same paper, Mrs. Moneypenny, may just read this blog and, bowled over by its superiority, hand over her column to me. In other words, I am slightly delusional. Just like someone else I know...

Good Morning, Cirencester

2010-09-19T08:55:00.007+01:00

It's a shame husband wants to move back to Los Angeles because I've just located one of the key missing features of life there, at least for me. The Vietnamese have arrived in Cirencester, our nearby market town, and they bring with them not bánh mì or pho but reasonably priced pedicures in the aptly named Hollywood Nail. Even the salon is reminiscent of the Santa Monica Fifth Street venue I was addicted to for the five years before we moved to England. It has pale pink textured wallpaper, chairs that look like they were purchased at Office Depot, speakers the size of a ghetto blaster spewing out easy listening pop, well thumbed trashy magazines, and the noxious scent of nail polish remover.

Back in the nineties when I got my first raise at my first grown up job, my first splurge was a regular pedicure. The nail salon was on the corner of my street, right across from the laundromat I still had to use because I didn't yet own a washing machine (confused priorities?). In my defense, flip flops are a plausible year-round shoe choice in Los Angeles so a pedicure had some practical relevance. With each move around SoCal, I always located my local nail salon with the same urgency that I identified the local grocery store and dry cleaner. They were always Vietnamese run, the Vietnamese having cornered the L.A. mani/pedi market like the Cambodians had with the donut market.

When I moved to England the weather negated the strict requirement for having year-round presentable feet, but the habit was formed and for the past five years I have been on a quest for the reasonably priced, utilitarian, yet thoroughly enjoyable pedicure of my Los Angeles years. Unfortunately a pedicure in the UK remains largely a splurge in which ladies indulge before a holiday to Dubai, and it comes at holiday prices. Lately I had taken to being shunted into a stuffy back room -- purportedly a beauty room -- in the Bristol Harvey Nicks because at least they give you a glass of pink champagne to accompany your £45 pedicure. Still I longed for the no-frills pleasure of the SoCal version.

Imagine then my delight at finding Hollywood Nail where the vaguely art deco looking desk consoles are manned by a task force of Vietnamese women and men, one who wears a Michael Jackson style surgical face mask and a giant diamond stud in his ear. This turned to disappointment as I was greeted in my undulating faux-leather massage chair by a young Welsh woman, the only British employee in the place, who took an extraordinary amount of time filing my toenails. Mid-way through she was dispatched to manicure a man and replaced by a young Vietnamese woman who loofah-ed my feet and painted my toenails with alarming and thrilling speed and accuracy. To celebrate I chose a color reminiscent of Chanel's Vamp, the it color of the era when I first started getting regular pedicures.

A Week in Provence Part 3: Aups - Tourtour - LA?

2010-09-10T08:49:00.009+01:00

Day four and I was grateful for the distraction of a day of cycling. It was a steady but pleasant ascent for the first hour. In La Bréguière we stopped at a small outdoor café for coffee. Across the street several games of pétanque were underway in the square in front of the mairie. The only other table was occupied by a group of four, one of them wearing a windbreaker from the Saint-Maximin pétanque club. On the table was a torn baguette and an open can of some dubious looking pâté. The leader of the pack -- trim, cropped white hair and beard, shirt unbuttoned to the navel -- was opening their second bottle of rosé, undeterred by the fact that it was 10:30AM on a Sunday.

"How French is he?" I whispered to husband.

I wanted to be charmed. I wanted us both to be charmed. But living in a small village as I do, I knew enough to know that if you lived in La Bréguière, this boisterous Gaul would quickly become a bore. I paid for our café crème at the bar beneath the watchful gaze of a mounted boar head wearing sunglasses, and we headed off to cross the scrub forest Domaniale De Pélenc. It was only 10km, but it was hot and dull and undulating. The market town of Aups was a welcome sight, and after a quick walk around the streets behind the market square we sat down in the shade of Auberge de la Tour. Pizza, postcards, and a pichet of rosé later, we headed out for the final push to Tourtour.

This was some of the nicest riding of the trip, hugging mountains to the left and, to the right, views across the Var of olive groves and villas. After about 10km, we started the final ascent through the winding main street of Tourtour, past its square and a few kilometers further to the Auberge St Pierre. The hotel is set into a hillside with a stone terraced pool and its own herd of bell wearing goats. There was also a tennis court, jacuzzi, and sauna, which, along with the village of Tourtour, were just enough to keep us busy for the two nights we were there.

The last day of cycling was both the longest and the easiest. We stopped in Entrecasteaux for coffee and quiche aux poireaux from the boulangerie, but otherwise focused on getting back to Le Thoronet. That night there was a wild storm. Thunder rolled through the hills and lightning floodlit the room. It was a perfect metaphor for an epiphany, but I had already had mine. When you start vacationing in places that remind you of home, maybe it's time to go back.

A Week in Provence Part 2: Battle of the Farmers Markets

2010-09-10T08:23:00.008+01:00

On our third day we freewheeled into Barjols for a visit to the market. I had read about the markets in the south of France in books by Elizabeth David, the English equivalent of Julia Child. And in Los Angeles, a chef acquaintance of mine used to talk about how these markets were the only ones she had ever been to that were better than the Santa Monica farmers markets. I had expectations.

The market was in a small square off the main road (where I spotted the woman in the photo reading). It was petite, just four stands. There was a handsome man selling handsome melons from Fox-Amphoux and another with stacks of gleaming eggplants, red peppers, and perfectly imperfect blush coloured tomatoes. Opposite was a stand specializing in goats cheese, each crotin hand decorated with either golden raisins, fresh herbs, or pink and black peppercorns. And finally there was the elderly lady tending her long table of almond biscuits in shades of pastel that matched the houses and shutters. The market was small but perfectly formed, and yet all I could think of was how the Santa Monica farmers markets spilled out for blocks, dwarfing this. And you could get chilaquiles. Husband was rubbing off on me.

I spent the afternoon by the pool finishing a mystery novel set in Marseilles, the kind of thing you are supposed to do on vacation. Husband lasted about an hour poolside before he retired to our stuffy room to text R&R with tips about their imminent vacation to -- where else? -- California.

A Week in Provence Part 1: Where Not to Take a Husband Homesick for California

2010-09-09T21:08:00.020+01:00

I first read Peter Mayle's rural idyll classic, A Year in Provence, in 1993. Last year, twenty years after it was first published, I read it again. The tales of languorous life in rural, sun dappled France had lost none of their appeal despite the fact that I now live in my very own rural idyll. This coupled with the fact that husband has put a two year deadline on moving back to California steeled my resolve to visit the region, and I've just returned from A Week in Provence.

The adventure did not start well. After landing in Nice we had a three hour wait for our train northwest into the Var. It was enough time for a seaside lunch in a posh restaurant had one been prepared and made such a reservation. One had not. We ate rubbery mozzarella panninis and nursed pastis in a smelly cafe with a view of an overpass while husband waxed lyrical about Los Angeles. It was the ocean front approach to Nice airport that did it. Even I saw the resemblance to flying into LAX.

Once in Les Arc the perpetually smiling Belgian, Ludmilla, met us at the station to drive us the remainder of the way to Le Thoronet, where our bicycles, dinner, and a night's rest awaited us. All were in order but the steak -- rare despite husband's request for bien cuit -- and the good night's rest -- blame smokey sheets and a barking dog. Buoyed by a triple carbo whammy breakfast of tartine, croissant, and pain au chocolat, we pedalled out of Le Thoronet and made it to our first winery, Domaine Sainte Croix La Manuelle, by 10:30AM the next day. The ride thus far had been indecipherable from say, Topanga Canyon, and now we were in a tasting room as modern and customer friendly as any in Napa. We were humored by a Frenchman with excellent English (if you clicked on the link, he's the tall one in the back) who explained the difference between Crémant and their sparkling wine technique while upselling me on a jar of lavender honey.

We left our purchases for Ludmilla to collect -- one of the perqs of being on a supported ride -- and continued on the vineyard lined road to Carcès and on to Cotignac. Here amongst the plane trees on the main street we selected a table at the nicest looking of the plentiful cafés and restaurants, La Table de la Fontaine. I was worried for a moment we had chosen style over substance, hoodwinked by the wrought iron chairs, red patterned tablecloths and broad, cream coloured umbrellas, but the escargot Provencal put my mind to rest. Inside each of the eight miniature egg cups was a snail resting on a bed of tomato concasse surrounded by a moat of garlic butter and topped by a pillow of toasted crouton. Heaven. And they cooked husband's filet de bouef bien cuit.

As we earned our lunch on the steep climb out of Cotignac, husband's thoughts turned back to California. And it was more than a little like the Hollywood hills with all those Spanish tiled roof tops below us. As we rode on to Pontevès, the resemblance to southern California only grew. There were the same pink oleanders as those that line my grandmother's driveway in San Bernardino, the scent of pine, the scrub clinging to rocky, terracotta-coloured soil. Even the houses behind our hotel looked like a miniature version of the terraced streets of Silverlake. In the center of town there was a departure with a medieval tangle of houses accessible only by pedestrian alleys, each with their door open and a beaded curtain for privacy. We wound our way to the ruins of the feudal château, backlit with rose gold light, and took in the 360 view of the mountains. Husband was back in California, granted a California of one hundred years ago. He sunk into a homesick slump eased not even by the evening's daube Provencal.

I am big!

2010-08-30T08:32:00.009+01:00

Last night our resident rock superstar played a gig at the pub in the next village over. Sure, his heyday may have been the seventies and eighties, but there's no denying this was a major coup for the pub -- roughly the equivalent of Phil Collins playing at your parents' anniversary party in your backyard -- and a major social event. A major social event that, I hasten to add, I did not attend. I didn't even know about it until doppelganger couple mentioned it in passing a couple of weeks ago by way of making an excuse for a far less glamorous invitation I had extended to them. At that point all the tickets were long gone and my fate as one of the excluded was sealed.

I thought I had gotten over it, but yesterday morning while chatting with J., one half of doppelganger couple, I was reminded of what I was missing. And just like that my frail ego flared up into a bonfire of vanity over the gall of the local community not to ensure my attendance at the soiree of the summer. How very dare they. J. tried to downplay it, complaining they had paid £40 each to stand in what was likely to be rain that night, but I was having none of it. The only thing to do was to sulk and then plan a fabulous evening of my own. For this I enlisted husband and R&R, all of whom had also been snubbed, and booked the cinema at our local country house hotel to be preceded by a meal at the village pub -- the one where our resident rock superstar was not playing.

For husband our humbler evening could not have turned out better. As we sat down at our table, he clocked none other than his third favorite film director in the world eating dinner a few tables over. It would be gauche of me to mention this man's name, but keep in mind husband is a film buff and his first and second favorite film directors are Mike Leigh and Ridley Scott, so calling this man third favorite is hardly a slight. (Some might even say he is bigger than the man who was singing at that other pub.) In the end husband was too embarrassed to ask the director for a photograph, but he was not too embarrassed to ask the waiter if the director was a local. It turns out he is, and is a regular in the pub on Sunday evenings. I think I know where we'll be eating supper most Sundays this autumn.

My own redemption for the evening came later when we watched the film. It was Sunset Boulevard, which I had somehow never managed to see and was all the better for being shown on a big screen. Norma Desmond's delusions of grandeur were as big as my own, and early in the film she summed up my feelings about the evening perfectly. To paraphrase, "I am big! It's the Cotswolds that got small!"

Escape from London

2010-08-30T07:45:00.007+01:00

The Boylestone Show and its giant vegetables came and went without us on Saturday. I wrote about my unforgivably blasé attitude in my last blog, but that wasn't the only obstacle to our attendance. It turns out our longstanding hosts and pillars of the Boylestone community, B&R, abandoned their own village show and are currently cruising the Med. We were lucky, however, to be able to spend our Saturday afternoon in the company of B&R's daughter-in-law, T., and grandson, J. They are friends from Los Angeles and were over to launch J's boarding school career at Repton. It is a bold move for a 15 year old from Malibu to willingly launch himself into Britain's public school system, and we celebrated with pizzas in south London.

It takes a lot to get husband to abandon the Cotswolds and drive into London on a Saturday, but seeing T&J was a worthy reason. In the process we proved that getting to south London from anywhere -- even other parts of south London as friends who joined us from Greenwich proved when they hit roadworks -- is painful. It took us three hours to navigate our way to Streatham from the Cotswolds, impeded on both they way in and the way out by traffic for the Chelsea match. (Don't ask me why we went through Chelsea to get to Streatham from the Cotswolds. I blame the sat nav.)

In any case, we had anticipated as much effort and decided to make the most out of being in London by spending the night at the flat. We booked a film at the Electric for the evening and planned a jog around Kensington Gardens followed by brunch at Raoul's on Sunday morning. Despite the Chelsea traffic, we made it to Portobello Road on time for the movie. It wasn't until the film finished and we were wandering around the darkened streets that we realized our miscalculation. Most of Ledbury Road and Westbourne Grove were boarded up. Notting Hill was a ghost town, its residents all in exile in preparation for the annual Carnival that would take over the neighborhood on Sunday and Monday. We headed into Bayswater for some noodles and replanned the weekend. By 7:30AM the next morning our escape from London was underway as we bombed along the Harrow Road just ahead of the police putting up barriers behind us.

Familiarity Breeds...

2010-08-12T14:55:00.007+01:00

In this case, familiarity is breeding a lack of blogging. It has now been two and a half years since we bought our Cotswold cottage, which equates to three winters, two springs, two summers, and two autumns worth of material about flora and fauna, fetes, shows, harvests, hunts, the wine bar, the pub, the church, and the characters that populate these colourful landscapes. The problem now is that I am losing my ability to observe. Today I drove past a sign advertising an upcoming Plough Championship in Mesey Hampton -- an event that in the past would have been immediately committed to the diary -- without even slowing down. I realized I know two women in real life, not a historical novel, named Georgina and have not had need to comment on it. And worst of all husband and I are not planning on attending this year's August bank holiday Boylestone Show. It is the mother of all village shows, the birthplace of our rural idyll dream complete with tea and cakes, homemade wine, and giant leeks. But this year we are off on holiday to Provence a few days after the show, and, well, quite frankly I can't be bothered to make the trip. Clearly I am a woman who needs to get her priorities in order.

How to Avoid Embarrassment and Be a First Class Guest

2010-07-25T09:42:00.010+01:00

Saturday husband and I attended the CLA (Country Land and Business Association) Game Fair. That's game as in pheasant and grouse, not Scrabble and Monopoly. And yes, I knew that before I attended. I even offered to drive R&R, who invited us, but they deemed arriving at the game fair in a Toyota Prius unacceptable.

"We'll take the E-class," R number one sniffed.

We also took their Norfolk terrier, Teddy, terriers being de rigueur at this sort of thing. There was in fact an awful lot of activity dedicated to dogs, including dog shows and hunting hounds and vets and people hawking pet insurance. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The game fair bills itself as "the world's original, biggest and greatest country sports exhibition and showcase for rural life." The website FAQ includes questions on whether the public can bring their dogs, their guns, and their helicopters when visiting, and the answer to all three is yes. Held on the grounds of Ragley Hall, a stately home in Warwickshire, the show amounts to a mass outdoor mall dedicated to all things associated with the British countryside, with a heavy emphasis on guns and fishing but with plenty of room for falconry, teak tiki huts for outdoor dining on the grounds of one's own home, Airstream trailers (a rare American incursion), hog roast stands, and every piece of clothing imaginable rendered in tweed. To shop all day amongst this splendour costs £21 per person, which, judging from the crowds, didn't seem to be much of a deterrent. As R number one observed, "What recession?"
We started our tour of the fair with a sharpener at the Pimms and Champagne tent, followed by a photo op milking a plastic cow and a hog roast and cider lunch. We then headed for Gunmakers' Row where I was immediately taken with a ladies' sporting ensemble of raspberry velvet waistcoat with pale blue silk cravat and plus fours. It was enough to make me give away all my personal details to Shooting Gazette ("Driven Shooting's Finest Journal") for a chance to win £1,000 worth of shooting clothes. The nice gentleman also gave me a copy of the July issue, which features articles such as "10 Steps to being the perfect gun - How to avoid embarrassment and be a first class guest" and "Confused by cartridges? The questions you never dared ask." It is sure to make some amusing bathtub reading.
R number two, the only shooter amongst our group, accompanied me into the Holland and Holland tent, which looked like something in which you might take gin based cocktails while on a luxury safari. As we browsed he explained in hushed tones that guns here are sold in pairs so your loader -- the shooting equivalent of a caddy -- can be readying one while you are shooting the other. Prices can reach £100,000 per gun. Luckily, I was more interested in a fetching silk scarf with knotted fringe ends and a pattern of forest creatures reminiscent of French tapestry.
"Don't hesitate," a cravated man said to me in Italian-accented English. "They're going fast."
The hard sell took me by surprise, and instead of the scarf I opted for buying a round of ice cream cones for the group, which we ate in the British Food Village while admiring the local human wildlife. Even though it was the middle of summer, the look for women under thirty was knee high brown boots, a skin-tight tweed mini skirt, a tailored long sleeved shirt in pink or stripes -- the kind I might wear with a suit -- and a mane of long straight hair. The options for men seemed more varied, and my favorite was the lederhosen-evoking velvet bermuda shorts sported by a fellow customer in the Holland and Holland enclosure. He had both the height and the uber posh accent to carry off the look.
We ended the day with husband and R number two taking in a round of target practice, the evidence of which now hangs on our fridge. Worn out from our big day, Teddy and I both fell asleep in the car on the way home.

Forget Me

2010-07-24T09:51:00.001+01:00

Friday afternoon our office manager walked onto my floor carrying a huge, hand-tied bouquet of flowers. It was the birthday of the woman who sits outside my office and we both thought the flowers were for her. It was neither my birthday nor my anniversary and so I was as surprised as she was to learn they were for me. I double checked the card to ensure there was no mistake. My name was on the outside, and inside the inscription started with "poopie doopie," a clear indicator they were from husband. The card went on to read "thank you for being so understanding."

The flowers were my reward for a week of enduring husband's latest fit of hypochondria, which in recent years has doted on various and assorted ailments including, memorably, colon cancer and AIDS. This time around husband had convinced himself he had diabetes. The speculation was less unreasonable than previous occasions given he had been asked to take a second blood test after a first one came back with high glucose levels. This coupled with the fact that his father had adult onset diabetes had convinced husband a diagnosis was inevitable, and he spent the week mining the Internet for other evidence to satisfy this conclusion. When the second test came back normal on Thursday afternoon, there was great relief. I was pleased husband didn't have diabetes, but just as happy not to have to endure the nightly sessions reviewing his latest findings on WebMD.

The only other time husband sent me flowers at the office was in the very early days of our dating career. He had cancelled a rollerblading date at short notice and sent a bouquet by way of apology the following Monday. The card carried the message "Forget me." The secretary and I had a good laugh at the melodrama of this instruction and then I did as I was told. Several days later husband called me, expressing exasperation that I had not yet telephoned him to thank him for the flowers. I explained I was just doing as he had asked and recounted the message. It turns out the clerk had transcribed the card incorrectly, and the greeting was supposed to have read "Forgive me." The rest, as they say, is history.

Cows in the Sky

2010-07-23T19:48:00.003+01:00

This morning on my commute along the M5, I witnessed a herd of black and white cows crossing an overpass. It was the second time in a week I had seen them, which confirmed I either was or was not crazy -- I'm still not quite sure which. They lumbered along with heads hung, no doubt embodying the true feelings of many a commuter beneath them. The sight was as unexpected as looking up to see Magritte's bowler hatted men drifting up through the clouds, and my instinct was to reach for my mobile phone to snap a picture. I thought better of attempting to photograph something while driving 75mph, but as you can see from this picture somebody else did not (oh the wonder of Google image search).

Stranded at the Drive In

2010-07-12T07:47:00.005+01:00

Saturday night we celebrated the Fourth of July in the Cotswolds. There's a lot of flexibility with dates for celebrating American holidays in England, so nobody seemed to mind we were a week late in honouring the independence of the rebel former colony. Some of the Brits even made an effort to get into the spirit of things. S. from the wine bar dressed in red, white, and blue and arrived with American wines, an Oregonian red and a Californian orange muscat for dessert. R. put on his best imitation of an American male, sporting khakis, an Izod, a baseball hat and sneakers. The man purse sort of threw off the look, but I appreciated the effort. L. arrived with a bouquet of the first of the season's sweet peas from her garden and half a dozen eggs from her chickens. It wasn't particularly American, but it was one of the nicer hostess gifts I have received.

I also did my best to create an authentic American ambiance. There was American flag bunting and a leather bound copy of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, provided courtesy of my father and his recent retirement sport of volunteering with the Tea Party. I filled the birdbath with ice, bottles of Bud and cans of Jack and Coke, a display that caused much amusement but remained largely untouched. There was potato salad, coleslaw, homemade guacamole, and burned hamburgers. I looked for hot dogs in the supermarket but the closest I could find were the kind of sausages Americans consider a breakfast item. (Those taste great in a hot dog bun too.) Oscar Mayer may have let me down, but Betty Crocker and Ben and Jerry were on hand to make dessert easier.

Husband did his part, transforming the back garden into a drive-in theater. There was no room for real cars but I did manage some blown up pictures of 1950s classics. When the light started to fade we indulged in the ultimate Americana, a screening of Grease. Even the Brits sang along.

We Tell Ourselves Stories

2010-07-03T08:48:00.013+01:00

Last night in the bathtub I read an article by Oliver Sacks about a man with lesions on his brain who developed alexia, the inability to recognize written language. It got me thinking about my very own lesions, and in turn MS, and in turn a man I met on the second night of the London to Paris charity bike ride. He and his friend joined husband and me over dinner at the hotel. He was wearing an orange T-shirt sporting the cheery star-spangled logo of the the MS Society, the charity I was also supporting, and when we got to talking I quickly learned that he suffers from MS. We exchanged disease synopses, much like you might exchange your reflections on a recent trip to Tuscany if you met someone and found out he or she had also just been there, had stayed in the very same villa as you as a matter of fact. (In this part of Tuscany there are wheelchairs and neurologists.)

I asked him about the time between the recurrence of his symptoms, a key factor in the diagnosis of MS. Once he gave me the answer I wanted – that his symptoms were so close together his doctor couldn’t tell them apart – I didn’t want to hear anymore. I had heard what I needed, which was that his experience with symptom recurrence was different than mine and, by extension, this meant I wasn’t going to develop MS. But he wanted, even needed, to tell me more. It was like he was performing a duty of care in dispensing his expertise on the disease to me, the potential new recruit. And so he told me more. More about the best doctors in the U.S., where he lived when he was diagnosed, and London. More about the need for a holistic approach to treatment. More about what an asshole banker he had been before he got the diagnosis, and how MS had made him a better husband and father.

I understand better than anyone that disease compels you to craft a narrative to rationalize it, and becoming a better man was the main arc of his story. And yet it was a story that made me uneasy the more I sat and listened, picking over my beef stew and pomme frites. It should have made me feel better. It was not my story after all. I was not, as far as I knew, an asshole, and was definitely not a banker or parent. And yet these facts establishing our separateness brought me none of the lazy comfort I'd allowed myself earlier when I differentiated this man's fate from my own based on the rate of his symptom recurrence.

That night I wrote on my blog that I found the man with MS narcissistic and unlikeable, which of course in retrospect was unfair. Husband had surprised me that night by questioning my assessment of the man’s behavior since we usually agree on this sort of thing. He suggested my reaction was more about my discomfort with confronting MS than the man's arrogance. And pain me as it might to say it, husband was right.

Bright Lights, Big City

2010-07-02T00:22:00.008+01:00

Yesterday afternoon I made good on my commitment to book a vacation somewhere new, and in September husband and I will ride bikes around Provence for a week. It is neither exotic nor adventurous -- to a middle class Brit it might be the American equivalent of a visit to Napa -- but I have read all those Peter Mayle books and it's one of those places I would regret not having seen if we move back to the states. It turns out there was a much cheaper alternative to making me feel a little less staid and stuck. All it took was a trip to London and an £8 admission ticket to Book Slam, where I got to spend a few hours in spitting distance of a disgusting amount of talent and creativity, enough to leave me basking in its reflected glory.

It was a chore convincing husband to stay in London on a Thursday night, traditionally reserved for his weekly exodus from the city, but Zadie Smith was reading and I prevailed. Ms. Smith would have been quite enough talent for one evening. Preceding her, however, was the lovely singer songwriter Obenewa who looked exactly like a black version of my friend Samantha, also a singer songwriter. Obenewa's mother was sitting in front of husband and seemed pleased at his whooping for her talented daughter. She even helped him spell Obenewa's name when husband posted a photo of her on Facebook. Next up was Akala, a young MC accompanied only by a pianist, which made me think why hasn't anyone else thought of that? He was 26 and charmingly self-possessed, and half way through his first number a woman in the audience wailed a marriage proposal at him from across the room, giving voice to what I suspect much of the femaled dominated audience (single men of London take note) was thinking.

And then there was Ms. Smith, reading an essay from her new book about her father and British comedy and death and her brother. I was glad it featured Basil Fawlty and Monty Python, which made it feel custom tailored for husband. I had been worried he'd be bored out of his mind at this kind of thing, even though by the time Zadie Smith got up to read he had long been won over. Book Slam had him at Obenewa. Ms. Smith's brother, the former rapper turned stand-up Doc Brown, closed the show with a full-length routine. We thought about leaving before he started because we were hungry and I assumed he would be, well, not very good. I mean surely he was only there because he was Zadie Smith's brother. I was fully prepared to cringe, and I did for all the right reasons when he told the story of how he couldn't take himself seriously as a rapper anymore after he sucked snot out of his baby girl's nose because she didn't know how to blow it yet. That and a rap song about how he wished David Attenborough -- the British equivalent of Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom -- was his grandfather were enough to convince me there is just way too much talent in the family Smith.

Remembrance of Things Past

2010-06-25T16:10:00.010+01:00

Turns out Proust was an apt choice for my "lite" summer reading. Last weekend's break in the Lake District was filled with nostalgic musings brought on by the fact that the hotel we have stayed in every year for the past five years has changed hands since our last visit.

On the surface the new owners have made improvements. Paint and soft furnishings have been changed from florals to tasteful neutrals, tongue and cheek taxidermy graces walls and mantel pieces, and vintage accessories of the riding boot and croquet set variety are strategically dotted in corners of rooms. In other words, it now looks like every other country house hotel in England. The menu, previously of the home cooking variety by a lady named Viv, now has the same scallop with pancetta and pea puree type repertoire found in every gastropub in England (not that my scallops with pancetta and pea puree were unenjoyable). Jam served at breakfast comes in shallow porcelain ramekins instead of the foil topped plastic packets of Silver Shred I once paid homage to on this blog. And all these changes are reflected in the average age of the clientele, which used to hover around seventy even when you included husband and me. In a hotel of fifteen rooms I counted only one elderly couple, she sporting the reliable female OAP attire of ped socks in wedge sandals, he nodding off on the couch in the lounge after their 7pm supper.

Husband and I made good sport of lamenting all the so called improvements, the edge of which was taken off by the amazing (that's an average day to you in L.A.) weather and the splendid isolation of the place, features that a lick of sage green paint and a stuffed owl in a glass box don't change. Still, I've noticed in our middle age we are getting more and more sensitive to changes in places we hold dear. Earlier in the month in Paris we spent the best part of an hour venting our disgust over the appearance of a Lacoste shop on the site of a former crumbling down patisserie in the Marais. It wasn't even a good patisserie -- I once had a very mediocre lemon tart there -- and yet there was something unmistakably violating about the appearance of the shiny new global retail brand in its place.

All this longing for the way things used to be makes me feel old and boring. We've become the kind of people who like the memory-fuelled idea of a place more than the place itself, and, even worse, are prone to wheeze on about it. The only remedy I can think of is rather palatable as far as medicine goes: time to book a vacation to a place we've never been before. Then we can complain the whole time about new things.

Summer Reading

2010-06-15T20:33:00.013+01:00

The New Yorker summer fiction issue arrived this week, which got me thinking about summer reading. In my California days, summer reading meant something along the lines of reading The Da Vinci Code by a hotel pool while sipping on an over-priced piña colada at 11AM without guilt. In other words, summer reading was a blissful reprieve from standards, both literary and moral, observed in other seasons.

Summer reading this year has meant something altogether different. Here in England it is the run up to the longest day of the year, and we have been enjoying daylight until nearly 10PM for weeks. On those mid-week nights when husband is in London and I am in the Cotswolds on my own, I retire to bed by 9:30PM for a benign menage a trois with my French companions, Marcel and his precocious, mommy- obsessed protagonist of In Search of Lost Time, to enjoy some day lit summer reading. In reading Proust I am not abandoning my customary June relaxation of standards but rather making good on an old -- 2009 -- new year's resolution to finally read the fabled author. (The truth is I wanted to read Alain de Boton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, but I didn't feel entitled to do so without having attempted Proust first.) The novel is slow going, dense stuff but not without its rewards. There was the madeleine incident early on and, later in Combray, I recognized the compulsion to capture a place -- the landscape and seasons and walking through them -- that I feel about the Cotswolds.

Husband and I will be in the Lake District this weekend for the longest day of the year, enjoying an early celebration of our ninth anniversary. The hotel in Elterwater is a converted country house with the most perfect lounge for reading, complete with comfortable chairs, a panoramic view of the lake and surrounding fells, and a kettle and biscuits. (Even husband, who finds movie watching to be a far superior form of leisure to reading -- in which he only indulges via The Economist and Hollywood biographies -- can read for hours in this lounge.) I may even indulge myself and pack the Alain de Boton, never mind the fact that I'm not even half-way through the Proust.

London to Paris sur une Bicyclette Day 4: Beauvais to le Tour Eiffel

2010-05-31T06:56:00.012+01:00

At breakfast on day 4 I noticed that husband and I seemed to be the only couple on the trip. Well, at least the only couple that started the ride that way. The other cyclists seemed to be girlfriends united by a cause -- like the Help for Heroes ladies who had sons and husbands in Afghanistan -- or a group of men united by their local pub, the beer from which played a pivotal role in encouraging them to think cycling 300 miles would be a laugh.

Within the first 10 miles of today's ride I realized why couples were so scarce. We were powering up a long incline when husband announced for no apparent reason that he was not going on the f***ing motorway that was running perpendicular to us. Seeing as our route had not yet been on any motorways and the organizer's insurance premiums almost certainly couldn't withstand such a decision, husband's proclamation struck me as nothing more than another moan in what had been a laundry list of complaints over the past 3 days. Thus far I had thought myself rather restrained in dealing with this sort of behavior. Husband would complain, I would grunt some sort of acknowledgment and then let it drop. But this time, what with the sore knees and the aching quads and no end to this hill in sight, I let rip. "Shut up. SHUT UP," I howled as I hunched over my bike with renewed vigor. There was no more speaking between then and the water stop at mile 23.

Despite the tension, the cycling over the first 30 miles of the day was some of the most rewarding of the trip. The roads were busier than the previous day which precluded riding side by side, and thus conversation (which given our early spat, suited just fine). With the exception of two lengthy inclines the terrain was straight and flat. The combined effect was that I was focused and alert and able to settle into a rhythm. No thinking, just doing.

Closer to Paris it was stop and start as we rode in along the Seine through the industrial northwest of the city, inching towards our Finish line at the Eiffel Tower. Our planned victory lap up the Champs Elysees was nixed by the gendarmerie -- it's a good thing I enjoyed my Tour de France moment earlier in the week in Calais -- and so we found ourselves sharing the Eiffel Tower with a swarm of rambunctious Perpignan rugby fans who were in town for the French championship. They were amped up, dressed in their team colours of red and yellow and drinking out of bottles or cups or Davy Crockett style flasks that they tried to squirt in our mouths in some sort of drunken show of solidarity. It looked like Paris had been overrun by a convention of Ronald McDonalds gone bad. We had our obligatory picture snapped in front of the Eiffel Tower and headed for the hotel.

The end of the adventure had been surprisingly unsentimental, flat even. I felt no need to lift my bike over my head in a victory gesture or hug or high five anyone as many of the others in the group did. My lack of emotion bothered me, and for the next few days in Paris I thought about why this was so. The prerequisites for tugging at the heartstrings had all been in place on this adventure: tales of tragedy, triumph over adversity, endorphins, and the city of romance for goodness sake! But in the end this experience was a visceral one for me, not a sentimental one. The value had been in the doing, and I had done what I set out to do. Many others could and would and will and do ride their bikes from London to Paris. And for four days at the end of May, I did too.

London to Paris sur une Bicyclette Day 3: Abbeville to Beauvais

2010-05-28T23:17:00.005+01:00

Today's ride is the most scenic of the trip, with terrain that resembles the Cotswolds without the dry stone walls. Their absence makes me realize how much that stone defines the aesthetic of the Cotswolds, manifest in the churches and cottages and, of course, walls. After three days of eating and riding together, our fellow cyclists are starting to become as much a part of our landscape as those dry stone walls are of the Cotswolds. Not yet knowing everyone's name, we've taken to privately calling them by their defining, sometimes annoying -- everything seems annoying when you are going uphill on your third straight day of distance cycling -- characteristic. I've already introduced smoking man and sweatpants-tucked-into-his-tube socks man, but they have now been joined by a cast of characters including:

Foghorn Leghorn, a twenty-something gung ho gal with a plum coloured bob and a booming voice she uses to indicate that she's very pleased with herself.

Australian Man Eater, Foghorn Leghorn's buddy on this trip who's clearly on the prowl. I presume the squeaking bed springs coming from next door in the early morning hours of Day 4 mean she was successful.

The "Merely-a-Paper-Cut-Gals," a trio of posh fifty-something birds who are shockingly athletic. My nickname for them hails from the French and Saunders sketch where the duo play a pair of country toffs who constantly sustain dramatic injuries and insist with quintessential English stiff upper lipness that it's "merely a paper cut."

The Sports Bores, a group of twenty-something uber athletic men who we only see in the morning and evening because they're always miles ahead of us. They favor achingly tight red lycra and wear their men-from-the-future sports sunglasses with their civilian clothes in the evenings.

The Doofus, a ginger haired boy who's joined Foghorn and Man Eater's clique, and keeps falling over on his bike.

The Doo-lolly, a blond haired, Rubenesque gal who likes to zoom past you on the downhill then suddenly stop her bike in front of you on the uphill so she can get off and walk.

By the time we arrive at our motorway adjacent lodgings, we've created back stories for most of the group. We continue this form of recreation over a pichet of the motel's house rosé. (Being France, it's quite decent wine relative to what you would expect to find at your average British or American Motel 6. Do they even sell wine at Motel 6?). And just to prove we're not horrible people we share our pichet with Foghorn's table.

London to Paris sur une Bicyclette Day 2: Calais to Abbeville

2010-05-27T21:55:00.006+01:00

Day 2 and I use every piece of advice, from trite euphemism to true wisdom, to get me through the 78 hilly miles. There's Larry, my L.A. yoga teacher and former zen priest telling me "so what," when I complain my feet fall asleep during zazen (and, as it happens, when cycling excessive distances). Richard, the ex-Navy Seal/zen priest in training/workout instructor/and, more recently, cable television host of a program about the weapons of war for which he gave himself the nickname Mack, is also there. He's shouting "not dead, can't quit," at me just like he did when I was doing push ups at 6:30am in the Santa Monica zendo. My colleague Ian is also on hand, nodding approvingly as I wash down my sixth Nurofen of the day with a dose of neat black currant cordial. Ian had advised me painkillers and a slow and steady pace would be my best friends for this bike ride, and so far he's been right on both counts. The cordial and jelly babies are also reliable acquaintances.

The terrain today is punishing and scenic, and seems to be populated solely by lazy, white French cows who sleep in the meadows like dogs in the shade. The villages we ride through are ghost towns, with broke down mini-chateaus and those concrete bungalows with brightly painted shutters the French seem to favor. Later there are American scale stretches of agricultural land, so vast they make the Cotswolds seem like it's engaged in boutique farming. Despite all the greenery it somehow feels desolate in these parts.

Over dinner at our hotel we are joined by a man and his friend who are riding for the same charity, the MS Society, that I am. We get to talking and I learn that he suffers from MS and was previously in a wheel chair. His story should be inspirational, but the more he talks the more I dislike him. I find him narcissistic and feel guilty about it, despite reminding myself that disease doesn't discriminate when it comes to the likability of its victims. When we are back in our hotel room, I ask husband if he had the same reaction and am surprised when he tells me he liked the guy. Husband suggests my reaction might be more about my discomfort with confronting MS rather than the man's arrogance. I decide to sleep on it.

London to Paris sur une Bicyclette Day 1: Crystal Palace to the White Cliffs of Dover

2010-05-26T22:11:00.007+01:00

An inauspicious start to the day when our mini cab driver arrives at our flat early, aborting my attempt to make coffee, then drops us at the wrong end of Crystal Palace park, leaving us roaming for 30 minutes looking for the starting line. Lose luggage tag and woman-from-the-future special bicycling sunglasses (later retrieved in the parking lot) in the process. When we finally do arrive at the check-in point I suggest to support staff they invest in some signage for future events in a tone verging on shouting. None of them gets hooked, which is a good sign: clearly they are well versed in dealing with drama queens, a skill that will come in handy over the next few days.

The whole thing reminds me of the time husband ran the Napa Valley marathon and we drove 26 miles from our hotel in Calistoga at 6am wondering why there was so much traffic going in the opposite direction so early in the morning. When we arrived in Napa we learned we were at the Finish line, so we stormed back up the highway to Calistoga arriving just as they were disassembling the Start line bunting. Support staff telephoned ahead to their colleagues to keep the first water stop open, and husband ran off into the morning mist like Forest Gump. He was so freaked out he finished in his fastest time ever, just over four hours.

Our late start doesn't inspire such speed on the first day of our cycle ride. 90 miles later we arrive in Dover in the bottom 3 of our group of 70-odd, not counting the handful of people who got a lift in the van. The other laggard is someone I will come to know as smoking man thanks to his habit of lighting up at the top of hills. He and a rotund chap who wears his sweatpants tucked into his tube socks will become my frequent companions at the back of the pack on day 2.

90 minutes later we arrive by ferry in Calais and convoy the 1o or some unwelcome additional miles to the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of town. Young men with long hair and earrings step out from bars with names like Le Crypte, whistling at us and inviting us for a drink in accented English. This is the closest I will come to knowing what it feels like to ride through a French town on the Tour de France, so I savour the moment.

Scenes from a Morning Bike Ride

2010-05-18T18:15:00.010+01:00

Morning in Coln Rogers

...and Ablington

Seven Signs of May

2010-05-15T18:43:00.012+01:00

It is mid-May and although the sun is refusing to acknowledge this, other elements of nature and man are playing along. On today's bike ride, the last big training ride before the London to Paris charity venture, I catalogued these seven signs of May in the Cotswolds:

1. Horse chestnut petals floating in the birdbath.
2. French's yellow mustard smears of rapeseed across the hillside landscape.
3. Cow parsley lining the lanes, innocuous but for the carpet of nettles at its base.
4. A gypsy encampment along a grassy verge, complete with painted wagon, solar panels, tinny sounding radio at full blast, lethargic dog, and bell-bottomed Cob horses grazing in a makeshift, roped off pasture.
5. Kamikaze insects, chartreuse pellets with translucent wings, turning my arms and legs into a human bug screen.
6. The arrival of the Italian tourists at Daylesford, wearing white jeans and "H" buckle Hermès belts and highlighted tips in their hair, and making the lunchtime viewing at the café as spectacular as the surrounding countryside -- from which the Italians will stay safely ensconced in this pristine, retail-enabled, meta-Cotswolds. I can hardly blame them.
7. Swags of wisteria draped across stone cottages like bunting for a fête. It's so picturesque I feel suspicious, like my senses have duped me into admiring a Thomas Kingkade painting.

The Houseguest and the Happy Ending

2010-05-03T10:15:00.007+01:00

This bank holiday weekend we hosted husband's brother who, on the heels of the breakup of his long term romance, was in need of some country R&R. Several hours into his visit he lost his mobile phone while out on a ramble with husband. We scoured the presumed area where it was dropped before giving up and heading for the pub. Even securing the phone number of the lady working behind the wine bar failed to dispel the gloom of the lost mobile phone that enveloped him that evening.

The next morning while our house guest was taking a shower I noticed he had left his bath towel in the bedroom. I shouted through the bathroom door that I had left it over the stair railing for him, only for him to shout back that he had brought his own towel. Unsure whether to be insulted by this, I went back downstairs to make coffee. A few minutes later I heard the whir of a blowdryer and realized our houseguest had also brought his own small appliances with him. Distracted by trying to remember if I had ever met another man who blow dried his hair, I forgot about being insulted by the towel incident. I recalled that our house guest had arrived yesterday with only a compact black satchel, which at the time struck me as fastidious. No wonder this very prepared man was so disturbed by losing his mobile phone. I suspect the fact that he was capable of losing his phone was as disturbing to him as the loss of the phone itself.

After breakfast we set out to retrace the steps of the previous day's ramble in a last ditch attempt to locate the phone. It was a beautiful day and the route was through the Chedworth wood, now lined with bluebells, so hardly a hassle. At the top of the woods husband rang the lost phone one last time and, to his surprise, someone answered. A local man had picked it up the day before while out walking his dog. He had also put it on his own charger at home in case the owner called it and made several calls to people in the recently dialled list in an attempt to find the owner. We had assured our houseguest that if someone local found the phone this was likely to be the outcome. Needless to say it was a rather different result than our London-based houseguest expected. In ten minutes we were at the house of the man who had found the phone, thanking him for his kindness and for providing our houseguest with a much needed happy ending.

The Lady Daydreams

2010-05-03T09:10:00.007+01:00

So I finally picked up a copy of The Lady, A Journal for Gentlewomen, which I blogged about back in January. I was grocery shopping and, being short of bathtub reading, susceptible to such impulse purchases. It contained some entertaining light reading, including a dissection of the seven tribes of incomers to the countryside. (After some consideration husband and I both concluded we were closest to the description proffered for the group of incomers called The Realists; we certainly weren't The Hassled Parents or The Bling Brigade, although I am guilty of wearing "witty Wellingtons" à la the Cath Kidston Weekenders.)

The Lady also came in handy in aiding the escapist fantasies I am prone to have when work starts to get too stressful. This class of fantasy tends to involve quitting my job to become a chef or a wedding planner or to take over the local post office and add on a tea shop selling tasteful tat. My last few weeks in my real life office have included several crises, a volcano ash cloud stranded manager (without whom I had to handle the crises alone), a launch in India, and a narrowly averted business trip to Beijing this week on impossibly short notice. In short, I was primed for escapist fantasy when I starting skimming the classified pages of The Lady and found this advertisement under the cryptically named section, Situations & Appointments:

Opportunity for semi-retired couple: Part-time housekeeper/lady's companion and gardener/handyperson required. Excellent accommodation in detached, two-bedroom cottage; own garden, parking, rural views to sea. Terms and conditions negotiable. Near Whitby in North York Moors National Park.Visions of Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins and the tragic romance of Remains of the Day flashed through my head providing just enough escapist fantasy to propel me through the remains of this week.

Cycling the Hollywold Hills

2010-04-18T10:22:00.029+01:00

Before I moved to England I lived in Los Angeles for ten years. Despite my residence in the capital city of celebrity, I rarely encountered one. In fact, I can think of only three times when I did, and one of those happened before I even lived there. I was thirteen and visiting my grandmother, which always involved a lunch outing to Canter's Deli on Fairfax Avenue. On this occasion our elderly and insistent waitress pointed out Whoopi Goldberg at the deli counter and ushered me over to ask for her autograph, which Ms. Goldberg obligingly provided. Later, when I actually lived in L.A., I worked at Capitol Records for a few years. One day Bonnie Raitt was wandering around our floor with her hair in rollers before a video shoot. I didn't see her though; I was out to lunch at the time of her reported appearance. My penchant for going out to lunch was rewarded when I later saw Quentin Tarantino in a booth at Birds, a chicken restaurant near the Capitol Tower.

Five years ago I moved to London from Los Angeles and then, three years later, to the Cotswolds. I went rural for the same reason I imagine many people in their thirties and forties leave London: that intangible oft described as quality of life. The last thing I expected to find amongst the honey-colored stone and rolling hills was a profusion of celebrity, but in the past two years I've had more star sightings than during my decade in Hollywood. I chalk this up to two factors. One is the pervasive car culture in L.A. Given the proportion of time most people spend in their cars there, it's amazing you ever meet anyone in the flesh. The other is that neither my budget nor social stature in California supported frequenting the haunts where celebrities like to spend their time when they are not in their cars, Quentin Tarantino's taste for budget chicken restaurants aside.

In the Cotswolds there is a distinct absence of establishments with velvet ropes and twenty dollar cocktails. No bouncer in a headset is going to ask you if you are "on the list," although I do know somebody who managed to get banned from our local wine bar due to non-payment of his tab and the general indiscretion of being, in the words of the proprietor, an ass. The point is that the celebrities here have to mingle with the regular folk because pubs and inns and the odd wine bar are the only places to go if you want to have a drink out.

The other notable change in my lifestyle in the Cotswolds versus Los Angeles is that my preferred method of transportation is, weather allowing, my bicycle. There are endless country roads where you are more likely to come across a tractor than a car, and travelling them by bike puts you in touch with the landscape -- the patterns of the hills and valleys, the flora and fauna -- in an up close, visceral way inaccessible by car. It also happens that most of my Cotswold celebrity encounters have happened on cycling outings. And so in the spirit of the Hollywood star map I offer up the Hollywold map, two intermediate, all-day (thirty to forty mile) cycling routes with celebrity spotting potential. Even if you don't bump into someone famous, you're sure to encounter the real stars of this place: chocolate box cottages and stately manor homes, all in quintessential Cotswold stone; a cast list of snowdrops, daffodils, rapeseed, May blossom, elderflower, and blackberries in roughly seasonal order of appearance; and of course the sheep, cows, odd pheasant, race horse farms, and, if you're lucky, a Gloucester Old Spot pig or two.

Route 1
Northleach - Daylesford loop
http://www.getamap.ordnancesurveyleisure.co.uk/?key=u6JE9qec8dNZil119UKoHQ2

Both rides start in Northleach, a market town near the center of the Cotswolds whose local inn has fed and watered several music superstars. Recently spotted: a member of the Rolling Stones.

1. Head out of Northleach on Farmington Road, just northeast of the market square. The ride starts with two climbs in rapid succession before you freewheel through Farmington and into Sherborne.

2. Past the Sherborne Social Club, take a left following the sign for the National Trust Water Meadows parking lot. It's up another hill before you hit a stretch of semi- desolate plateau with sweeping views of the valleys to either side. On the left you can look down over some of the most famous Cotswold villages, Bourton-on-the-Water, and farther west, the Slaughters.

3. Take the first road on your right (if you get to Clapton, you've gone too far). Head down the steep hill, taking care along this weather damaged stretch of road. Follow the road into Great Rissington, then up past the Lamb Inn. At the next junction go left, past the airfield into Upper Rissington.

4. Church Westcote, reportedly Kate Winslet's neck of the woods, is just to the east, but avoid the busy A road and, at the top of Upper Rissington, jog left then right towards Icomb. Follow the signs to Bledington then Kingham where you can make a pit stop at the Kingham Plough. You may not bump into Blur bassist Alex James here, but you can do the next best thing and eat his goat's cheese. Better yet, take the left fork out of Kingham and in a short while you'll be at the Daylesford Organic retail complex.

5. Daylesford has outposts around London, including Notting Hill, Pimlico and Harvey Nichols, but this is the mother ship, boasting a spa, yoga studio, garden and kitchen boutiques, butcher and food store/cafe. It's no wonder celebs feel at home here; even the vegetable displays look set designed. During my last few lunches in the cafe I spotted a member of resurgent British boy (now middle aged man) band, Take That, on an outing with his kids and a British actor best known, according to Wikipedia, for playing "assertive bureaucrats or villains." Should you wish for more bucolic company, pick up some goodies from the deli and enjoy a picnic on the estate.

6. Leave Daylesford and retrace your route through Kingham. Instead of heading right to Bledington, head left for Foscot, where you will fork left for Milton under Wychwood. Fork left again off the High Street then take your second right, crossing the A424 and heading into Taynton, then Great Barrington and right into Windrush. Follow the road into Sherborne where you'll recognize your turn off from the morning by the National Trust Water Meadows sign post. Continue straight, taking the second left where this time you'll see National Trust signs for Ewe Pen parking. It's uphill to the A40 where you should take care crossing.

7. Once over the A40 you'll cycle past another National Trust property, Lodge Park, which was used for deer coursing, gambling, and drinking in the 17th century. In other words it was a rural version of Vegas which the celebrities of the day may have enjoyed. Take your first right towards Eastington, which leads you back into Northleach.

Route 2
Northleach - Eastleach - Barnsley loop (a.k.a. The Supermodel Circuit)
http://www.getamap.ordnancesurveyleisure.co.uk/?key=qAlarUYnQbjDwAItzxj8Ig2

1. As with the first route, leave Northleach via the Farmington Road and continue through Farmington into Sherborne. Instead of turning left at the sign for the Water Meadows parking lot, continue on into Windrush then little Barrington, all the way into Burford, about ten miles in total. There are many options for refreshment on and around the handsome Burford high street, but you may wish to wait for the more secluded pub in Eastington, seven miles away.

2. After you've had your fill of Burford, head out the same way you came in, on Sheep Street, and take your first left on to Tanner's Lane. Head up the hill to the A40, where you jog right along a pavement before crossing with care at the next left.

3. Follow the road through Westwell all the way to Eastleach where, just to the left as you enter the village, the Victoria Inn is perched on a hill. The star offering on the menu is pork from the nearby Eastleach Downs farm, but the first time I went to this pub I had a star sighting of another type: Kate Moss made an appearance, wearing wellies and a mud splotched cardigan. As she drove off in her vintage Roller, she tooted the horn and gave a wave to the bemused patrons sitting at the picnic tables on the front lawn.

4. Leave Eastleach the way you came in, then head left briefly before turning right for Hatherop and then on to Coln St. Aldwyns. From here you could go right into Bibury, site of Bibury Court, a fine Jacobean mansion converted into a hotel, as well as the oft photographed series of cottages known as Arlington Row. Alternatively go left out of Coln St. Aldwyns towards Quenington, taking the first right onto the Welsh Way before you hit the center of Quenington. This takes you all the way into Barnsley along a less busy road than the B4425, which you'll have to brave if you choose to get to Barnsley via Bibury.

5. Barnsley's most famous resident is yet another supermodel/actress, Liz Hurley. I've never seen her there, but I have enjoyed the fine gardens at Barnsley House, which are open to the public for a small admission charge. Barnsley House also owns the Village Pub across the street, a good place to stop for refreshment before the last leg of the journey back to Northleach.

6. Leaving Barnsley House or the Village Pub, take the second right off the B4425 and follow it all the way back, through Coln Rogers, Coln St Dennis, and into Northleach.

The Details
The Wheatsheaf Inn
West End
Northleach
Gloucestershire GL5 3EZ
01451 860244
http://www.cotswoldswheatsheaf.com/

Kingham Plough
The Green
Kingham
Chipping Norton
Oxfordshire OX7 6YD01608 658 327
http://www.thekinghamplough.co.uk/

Daylesford Organic
Daylesford
Gloucestershire GL56 OYG
01608 731 700
http://www.daylesfordorganic.com/scat/daylesfordfarmshop

Lodge Park
Aldsworth
Nr Cheltenham
Gloucestershire GL54 3PP
01451 844130 (Lodge Park)
01451 844257 (Estate office)
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-lodgeparksherborneestate

The Victoria Inn
Eastleach
Nr Cirencester
Gloucestershire GL7 3NQ
01367 850277
http://www.arkells.com/pubs_more2.php?id=663

Bibury Court
Bibury
Gloucestershire GL7 5NT
01285 740324
http://www.biburycourt.co.uk/

Barnsley House/The Village Pub
Barnsley
Cirencester GL7 5EET
01285 740 000
http://www.barnsleyhouse.com/
http://www.thevillagepub.co.uk/

Stranger than Fiction

2010-04-15T23:48:00.005+01:00

Would you believe me if I told you:
1. UK airspace is shut down due to a cloud of Icelandic volcanic ash?
2. The UK's Transport Minister is named Lord Adonis?
3. The UK held its first ever televised Prime Ministerial debates tonite?
4. A Welsh political party running in the upcoming general election is called Plaid?

What a queer little country I live in...

Blue 57

2010-04-08T21:34:00.006+01:00

Lord and Lady Glebe, the lambs whose birth we witnessed a couple weekends ago, are now known as the gender appropriate Glebe sisters or the prosaic Blue 57. The latter sounds like I'm trying to sink your Battleship, but it's just a reference to the spray painted number that now graces theirs and their mother's sides so the shepherds can make sure they stay together in the pasture. Henry has managed to swing a trade with his boss so the Blue 57 trio join his flock and husband stays that much closer to realizing his dream of lamb chop liberation for the Glebe sisters.

We learned all this last night when we bumped into Henry at the local inn. There, over cider and red wine, a cunning plan was hatched to realize our dream of a pet sheep syndicate of which the Glebe sisters will be the inaugural members. We've identified a regular at the wine bar who has a few unused acres just out of town. It's a perfect plan if we can convince the land owner, who I just happen to know is partial to the Ox House white...

Second Life

2010-04-02T08:32:00.004+01:00

A post from last year gets a staid second life on the FT website as A circular walk with views of Snowshill Manor.

Lambing Part Deux

2010-03-31T07:03:00.010+01:00

Last weekend Henry made good on his invitation to visit his farm during lambing. About six hundred of the farm's seven hundred sheep had already given birth, and he must have figured husband and I could inflict minimal damage. So on Sunday afternoon husband, one half of R&R, and I made our way up to the farm near Stow-on-the-Wold. Heeding Henry's advice, R. and I were dressed in sensible jeans and sweatshirts. Husband, on the other hand, had found it unnecessary to change out of the tweed blazer and cravat he had worn to church; wellies were his sole sartorial concession.

Not long after we arrived, R. spotted a ewe that was about to give birth. I won't describe here how we could tell she was about to give birth. Let's just say it involves some telltale signs visible from the rear and that unlike Alice, the shepherdess on duty with Henry, I couldn't sit around slurping an instant pot noodle while I watched said signs expand, contract and leak. Waiting for this ewe to give birth was like waiting for a watched pot to boil, so we strolled around the individual pens that had been setup for ewes and their new babies on the other side of the barn. One pen looked like a dismantled kids playhouse with daisies painted on the side and a heat lamp hanging overhead. Inside, five lambs were regularly reassembling themselves from huddle to snoozing heap. These five were too small to make it on their own when they were born, so they were now being hand reared as pets. This included feeding them what looked like orange Gatorade through a syringe while the no nonsense Alice held them upright by their front legs. The cutest was a girl called Jeff with a black face and black legs. She was already so domesticated she cuddled like a kitten.

Back in the lambing pens the expectant ewes were looking fed up. There was a lot of panting and pawing going on. I've never been in the same room with a woman in labor, but I've seen some on TV screaming and cursing out their impregnator and it was hard not to anthropomorphize these ewes when the looks of disgust in their eyes was so similar. Soon R. had spotted another ewe who had started to give birth -- ewe number one was still holding out -- and within five minutes a tiny, gooey lamb had plopped out on the straw. Mom was immediately upright, licking and preening, and the other ewes gave her space. Within five more minutes the lamb was taking her first steps, just in time for mom to go down again and pop out the twin, another girl, which took even less time than the first.

At this point husband had already named both the babies, Lord and Lady Glebe (don't ask me why most the female lambs in this story ended up with male names), and was asking to buy them at well over market prices. He even offered to go into Stow-on-the-Wold to get cash out of the ATM. He didn't want to take them home to our pebble courtyard, just to buy them a life as replacement stock rather than heading to the abattoir in as soon as twelve weeks. I was trying to be more sensible and embrace the "know where your food comes from" ethic so suggested we should buy them to eat. We could, I wanted to think, have a bit of a feast and know that our food was reared and killed ethically. But the truth is I don't think any of us, except Alice of course, could have eaten Lord and Lady Glebe after we spent a few more minutes watching them come to life like one of those sponge toys that metamorphoses from a cubic centimeter to an animal when you sprinkle it with water.

In the next few days Lord and Lady G. will get a number spray painted on their side, the same as their mother to make sure they all end up together when they are put out to pasture. Henry promised to make note of their numbers and keep an eye on them. He says there is a good chance they'll end up as replacement breeding stock anyway -- their mother gave birth to twins which means they have hearty breeding genes. I'd like to believe that's true, but husband is taking no chances. He sent Henry another text today to see if he could still make the deal.

Supermodel Sunday

2010-03-27T18:34:00.005Z

I have finally gotten serious about training for our upcoming London to Paris charity bicycle ride. I think it was seeing that thermometer on my fundraising web page exceed 100% that made me realize in 3 months I really am going to have ride 95 miles then get up and do most of it again the next day. And the next day. And the one after that.

So on a recent Saturday morning, helped out by an appearance from the sun, husband and I roused ourselves for a 25 mile expedition down through the Coln Valley. The next day we got up and did most of the distance again, but this time heading north into Farmington and Sherborne and nearly Burford before we looped back. It was on this second day where we were rewarded with the kind of serendipity that cycling affords and that gives me hope for what small pleasures might accompany an awful lot of saddle soreness come May.

First, we saw a sign for the rural cinema which was showing a film we both want to see on an upcoming Saturday night at the Windrush Village Hall. The sign asked viewers to bring a cushion and a log for the fire, the kind of thing that two years into our rural adventure I still find endearing. Then we stumbled on a full English breakfast service in progress (and every second Sunday of the month) at the local social club. Despite having already eaten breakfast, we stopped in so husband could replenish himself with just a wee plate of hash browns, fried bread, beans, mushrooms, and fried eggs. I had a cup of tea and, feeling pious from my 25 miles the previous day, a slice of fried bread.

The next weekend serendipity turned surreal when, in the midst of a pub lunch break from our training ride (we take the eating as seriously as the cycling), Kate Moss and her entourage decamped to the picnic table behind ours. Their hips were accessorized with either cardies sporting a stylized assortment of mud splotches or boho babies and, on their feet, the inevitable Hunter wellies (never mind it was a perfect, sunny day). They were a self-conscious crew who seemed to find reasons to say "Kate" aloud often. It wasn't necessary as most of the pub had already clocked the celebrity arrival and, for those who hadn't, Kate honked her horn and waved out the rolled down window of her vintage Roller when she left 30 minutes later.

On today's training ride there were no celebrity sightings. But there were daffodil sightings and what seemed to me more uphill than down. With the onset of spring the palette of those hills has brightened into plusher greens and browns flecked through with the orange of our Cotswold stone, ploughed up and strewn about like rubble in the fields. Despite the climbs, I think I still have enough energy left to stay awake during tonite's outing to the rural cinema at the Windrush Village Hall.

End of an Era

2010-03-25T08:28:00.006Z

Wednesday night was R.'s last regular gig behind the wine bar. He's been in love for about a year now, and he's finally packing his bags and heading for Shropshire to move in with his lady love. It's been fun to watch a sixty-nine year old grin like a schoolboy each time he talks about his girlfriend, who is an old flame reignited. Still, I am sad to see him go.

R. has been around since the start of our Cotswoldian epic, and fifteen or twenty years before that at the wine bar. I think of him as our Cotswolds welcome wagon, introducing us to many of our now friends for the first time in his assumed role as host of the town cocktail party, which is how the wine bar feels on its best evenings. He can be a prickly character if he doesn't like you, but, luckily for husband and me, he has fond memories of working in America and seemed glad to have an American around with whom he could reminisce and talk politics (even if those politics were a million miles away from mine). He's also ruddy faced, a bit deaf, stubborn, opinionated and very generous. I can't count the number of times he's treated us to a glass of wine despite our protests. Oh, and he loves the devilled kidneys at the Wheatsheaf.

I've blogged about him before, like how he refused to learn to operate the fancy cappuccino machine when it was first installed at the wine bar, insisting that "the girls" do that. More than a year later he has now mastered the steaming, spurting chrome beast and is rather proud of his barista skills. I'll miss his coffees and his banter and most of all him, although he is promising to make guest appearances behind the bar now and then.

Edna & the Steakhouse

2010-03-16T10:17:00.004Z

Today the Cotswolds starts its transformation into little Ireland with the first race in the Cheltenham festival, the week long horse racing event that brings in punters and trainers alike from across the Irish sea. The wine bar, as usual, will show the races on TV and provide an in-house bookie so the locals don't have to brave the racecourse crowds thirteen miles down the road. But this year I will have to phone in my bet on Denman as I have traded in my bar stool for a seat on a flight to JFK. (Thing I love about my Cotswold town #389: being able to phone in a bet to my local wine bar.) In New York I can expect to find a week of confinement in the stale walls of a Time Square hotel conference room, to be followed by two consecutive evenings of steakhouse dinners where the most St Patrick's Day merriment I can hope for is some green lager to wash down my boiled corn beef and cabbage special.

I find the fact that my company is choosing to hold this meeting in NYC and forcing me to attend work dinners in locations chosen by a secretary catering for the tastes of my predominantly forty-something male colleagues downright cruel (to think of all that New Yorker "Table for Two" reading gone to waste). I don't mind so much when these meetings are held in the Boston suburbs where my expectations for free time are set no higher than an outing to the mall in the Hyundai rental car followed by a turkey melt from Marriott room service. But New York? I have old friends to catch up with, Tim Burton exhibits to line up for, and all of Central Park willing me to get lost in it jogging as is my tradition each time I visit.

Thankfully I have managed to eke out one opportunity for frivolity in the Big Apple, which presents itself tonite not long after I land. An old friend from Los Angeles (who once visited us in the Cotsies, as he calls it) who now lives in New York has, trading on his newfound local television celebritydom I like to think, scored tickets to a preview of Dame Edna's new Broadway show. I am hopeful that this will be followed by a late dinner and drinks anywhere that's not a steakhouse.

Lambing

2010-03-13T16:58:00.005Z

I still haven't made it to lambing at Henry's farm, although it's an offer I'll be pursuing tonite when we see him to celebrate his birthday. As it happens, I didn't need to know a real life shepherd to have a front row seat for lambing. BBC Two has been running a Lambing Live series from a farm in Wales for the past few weeks in prime time. It was so popular last Tuesday it killed its competition, University Challenge and Master Chef. I like to think the whole idea of prime time animal husbandry is one of the many examples of British quirkiness, but maybe not. I remember reading last year in the New Yorker that raising chickens is reaching new heights in popularity in the US, so maybe it's only a matter of time before stateside viewers are watching hens lay their eggs after American Idol.

After our horrible winter, lambing is being joined by some other early indicators that spring is nigh. Evenings are noticeably lengthening. The snow drops have been out for weeks, and today on a bike ride I noticed patches of green shoots promising daffodils everywhere. The sun even made an appearance, although wearing bike shorts was a bit optimistic on my part.

This Little Piggy Went to Market

2010-02-21T20:26:00.011Z

I’ve known what the name of this post was going to be ever since I got the word I was going to market, specifically the Worcester sale of 200 store cattle, 1 stud bull, and 800 store sheep, plus calves and weanlings. (No pigs, I know, but I still couldn’t resist.) Husband was invited to tag along with former gamekeeper and current shepherd, Henry, some weeks ago. I was very jealous, having developed quite a thing for country auctions – admittedly of the marmalade and homemade wine variety -- in the past few years. Granted I had no real use for livestock given our back garden is courtyard sized and covered in pebbles, but still I wanted to go.

So a few days before the market I persuaded husband to ask Henry if I could come along. Henry responded by text: "Yeh corse she can come as long as she keeps out of the way and says nothing! Tell her not to nod, wink or twitch while they are selling!" It didn’t take long to figure out why my invitation came with such a warning. In the first auction of the day the bidding for a pen of sheep seemed to be done solely by either a widening of the eyes or a pocket encased finger wag. But this most recent event in my continuing education in rural ways started long before the bidding began.

First we had to decide what to wear. Husband and I were both very excited about the prospect of our authentic rural outing and on the morning of we discussed our outfits like no outfit I had discussed since readying myself for a Friday night at Skatetown USA circa 1983. Husband settled on his checked shirt, a red tie, and grey sweater vest with jeans and wellies. I donned my suede elbowed turtleneck sweater, jeans, Chelsea boots, and a flat cap. I decided bringing a purse just wasn’t the thing to do at a livestock auction so I carried my things in the pocket of my very appropriate, moth-eaten Burberry wax coat. Luckily said pocket was designed to hold a game bird so it had no problem with my mobile phone and wallet, which is the closest thing to a pheasant it’s ever likely to see.

At 8:30am we arrived, as instructed, at a farm just outside Stow-on-the-Wold. It’s only nine or ten miles north of our Cotswold town, but it’s higher up and as such, has its own micro climate that still included the snow that had melted off in the valley villages weeks ago. Henry texted that he was still busy loading up the lambs he was taking to market, so we had a poke around while we waited. There were some kennels and a roaming herd of chickens, including a handsome hen of marbled black and white who seemed distressed by my attempts to take a picture of her with my phone. The Gloucester Old Spot, annoyed by how difficult it was for her hooves to gain a foothold on the frozen mud of her plot, was very amenable to the distraction of some wannabe country folks eager to pat her snout. She was so cute I thought about swearing off pork. That lasted as long as it took to drive to the market and discover there was a café and enough time for a bacon buttie and cup of tea before the auction began.

Before breakfast we had watched as the lambs from Henry’s farm and others were unloaded into sheltered pens. Once the unloading was done, an elaborate sorting process began to get sheep of similar shapes and sizes grouped together for sale. It looked like chaos, with pens opening and closing at seemingly random intervals and a man in a blue jumpsuit making a noise somewhere between a whistle and a hiss while waving his arms like he was directing a 747 onto the taxiway. I tried to stay out of the way while Henry got into the pens and helped herd errant sheep. I figured husband and I had already embarrassed him enough by having our picture taken dipping our boots in the buckets of antiseptic by every door.

When the auction bell rang at 10:30am we headed outside and joined the sea of flat caps. The auctioneer, a youngish better looking version of Prince Harry dressed in a checked shirt, tie, and white lab coat, stepped up on the concrete wall that ran the length of the pens and started the bidding. When the first lot went for £42, I was shocked at how cheap sheep were and felt an irrational itch to bid. Then Henry explained that was the price per sheep, not the entire pen. As we walked from pen to pen following the auctioneer, Henry also explained the difference between a Texel and a Suffolk Cross and why his farm opts for an unhandsome French breed called Charolais: small heads and big bodies means easy lambing and good meat. He also answered a thousand and one other questions we had that were no doubt the farming equivalent of a six year old asking his father why the sky is blue. In addition to husband asking Henry if his outfit was alright ("Your flat cap is too new" was the reply), these questions included what store lambs and store cattle means, which is that these animals were being sold off to continue to be raised on other farms rather than destined straight for the abattoir. In the end this would be their fate, but somehow knowing this wasn’t imminent made the proceedings jollier.

After the sheep were sold, we all headed into a sort of miniature amphitheater for the cattle auction. There were plywood step bleachers, but most people stood on the cold dirt floor facing a half moon shaped pen and the auctioneer, a different, older man this time, in a booth behind. The star of the show was the stud bull, a Pingauzer named Elgany John Jack. From the program notes I know his mother’s name was Our Wilma and his father, Edenbrook Cassius. Sadly, our stud bull never knew his father as Our Wilma was serviced by Edenbrook Cassius via the medium of Imported Austrian Semen. Perhaps it was rage over his absentee father that made it sound like King Kong rattling the bars of his cage when Elgany John Jack stepped onto the weighing pen scales. But when this ginger colored beast entered the viewing arena I couldn’t help thinking he had a touch of Liberace about him. It was the combination of his mop of curls poised on his head like a too small toupee, the golden ring through his nose, and the way his hooves made him walk like he was wearing a pair of Manolos. In the end he went for substantially more than a pair of Manolos.

We ended the morning with an instant coffee in the café. There, seated with a few other shepherds, talked turned to lambing which starts in March at Henry’s farm. I learned that snow is not of much concern during lambing but rain is, that you rarely need to assist a ewe in giving birth (despite what I had seen on all those episodes of All Creatures Great and Small), and that the whole thing lasts the better part of two weeks. That’s good because it means I’ll be back from my vacation in Florida in time to take part in this next installment of my rural education.

The Elusive Devilled Egg

2010-02-13T17:47:00.030Z

Last night I watched an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's the one where Larry holds the elevator for a woman who then proceeds to unconsciously body block the corridor and beat him into the doctor's office where they both have appointments. The woman signs in first and, as a result, gets seen first by the doctor even though Larry's appointment time was earlier than hers. Outraged, Larry then tries to enroll the entire office staff and waiting room in the gross injustice of it all. And today at lunch at the farm shop I had my very own Larry-esque experience.

I've written about the farm shop before -- it was a revelation when we found it because it specializes in vegetarian lunches. That's an unusual gastronomic gambit in this pie and sausage and chips and mash part of the world, but one that has found an audience in that rare Cotswold breed of eco-friendly yuppies slinging free-range cotton wearing toddlers from their hips and at least two people who miss California.

One of the highlights of the farm shop veggie lunch is that it comes with an array of salads. But lately we've noticed that if we don't get there early enough in the lunch service the salads start to dwindle. So instead of lentils vinaigrette, roasted beets and bulgar with your courgette lasagna, you might be pawned off with some greens tarted up with a dash of shredded carrot. Today when we arrived I was heartened to see that generous portions of all salads remained on display in the orange Le Creuset dishes that line the counter where you order and pay. And I was delighted to see the day's salad selections included devilled eggs, one of my favorites. (Yes, I really am sad enough to get excited over a devilled egg. I promise you when it is an egg from a chicken on the farm where you are eating it is worth getting excited about.)

Husband insisted on starting with a small bowl of spinach and potato soup. I hesitated, not because spinach and potato soup sounded bad, but because I suspected that would mean the salads would start running out while we dawdled over an appetizer. I examined the display of salads again. I may have even counted the devilled eggs. And then I reached way down in the depths of my dignity and self-restraint and ordered us two bowls of spinach soup to be followed by the curried chick pea stew with herbed polenta for husband and a beetroot and goat cheese tart for me.

Next we had to find ourselves a table, a task made all the more challenging by a large shopping cart planted in the middle of the dining area. The cafe is connected to a shop that sells produce from the farm plus the standard upscale, we-fancy-ourselves-green assortment of Fair Trade, Ecover cleaning products (or "dish soap without suds" as husband calls it), and imported Indian print tablecloths. (Lest you think I am mocking such eco-consumers, which I am, I'll 'fess up now to having purchased from all of these product categories at one time or another.) Of course there are no new shopping bags on offer, so the contents of this shopping cart were lying loose in the cart or stuffed in second hand plastic bags or old cardboard boxes. The overall effect was to make its owners -- who were in the midst of enjoying plates of stuffed peppers -- look homeless, an image further perpetuated by the woman's holey woolen socks encased in cork sandals. It took a double take to realize the holes were on purpose, an inexplicable variation on fingerless gloves.

We had just managed to wedge ourselves into a table behind the trust fund hobo trolley when the spinach soup arrived. It was tepid so we sent it back to get warmed up. I tried to distract myself with The Secret Agent column in the FT, but I just felt self-conscious holding my pink paper what with all the Soil Association and mother earth anarchist genre publications littered about. And inside I was starting to fret about what I imagined to be the rapidly dwindling supply of devilled eggs. The spinach soup came back hot, almost vindictively so. More time passed while we waited for the soup to cool down, but when it did it was good enough to occupy me until our entrees arrived with, sure enough, no devilled eggs.

"Are you out of devilled eggs?" I asked the waitress even though the answer was as self-evident as the dismay on my face.

"Oh yeah, sorry," she replied flatly and walked away.

At that moment I felt a sense of violation that I knew Larry David would understand. There was, after all, an undeniable injustice about the fact that I had ordered and paid for my entree well before any of those people who actually got to eat my devilled eggs had done the same. Surely my payment should have put a hold on a devilled egg? But no, the sacred and implicit devilled egg reservation contract had been broken between the farm shop and me. I avoided an outburst this time -- after all there were all those free-range cotton wearing toddlers about that I didn't want to upset -- but next time I think I will be taking my devilled egg with me when I order.

Horses for Heroes

2010-02-07T21:21:00.013Z

This weekend I received an email inviting me to invest in a share of a race horse syndicate. The days when I would have found this odd are behind me. The Cotswolds are, after all, horse country and their signature horse racing event, The Cheltenham Festival, is only a month away. What was different about this invite is that it was for a charitable cause, specifically Help for Heroes, which provides assistance to injured soldiers. For every £5,000 share bought, £1,000 is donated to the charity.

Were it not for the fact that husband and I recently siphoned all our spare cash into another investment, I would have been tempted. A week or so ago we became official owners of a single share of a London musical. It took some last minute coaxing to get husband to take the plunge, but, with the help of dismal interest rates on savings accounts, I managed to convince him that greasepaint and footlights were as legitimate as a six-month CD. I, on the other hand, required no persuasion. I was raised on a steady diet of West End musicals, from Kismet to The King and I. I tap danced my way through my eleventh year to the accompaniment of the original cast recording of 42nd Street and, if challenged, am fairly certain could still sing the lyrics to Cats and Annie from beginning to end. I even liked Starlight Express.

I don't really expect to get much back from our West End investment. I'm in it for the vicarious thrill and figure it can't be much worse than the stock market or property in recent years. But should our musical ship come in, I'll make sure to donate something to Help for Heroes. In the meantime, should you be in the market for a race horse for a good cause, you can buy your share here: http://www.kimbaileyracing.com/help_for_heroes_partnership.html.

Gone to California in my Mind

2010-02-05T22:06:00.003Z

It may just be down to the fact that we are having the worst winter the UK has seen for thirty years, but I think it could be time to start making a plan to move back to Los Angeles. It's an idea husband has been dropping into conversation on and off for at least six months now. I've been resistant, not least because I'm liking my job at the moment. But a few weeks ago, something shifted. I've noticed that I've started making mental lists of things I want to do before I leave. There's the Trouble House and the Kilkenny, pubs I drive by most days but have never made the time to stop in to. And I need to eat at the Plough at Kingham so I can taste Alex James' goat cheese. In London there's the Soanes museum and that Eritrean restaurant on the Harrow Road I've been meaning to try. Will I make it to the longest running show in the world, The Mousetrap, before it closes? What about the Louisana museum in Copenhagen and the new Magritte one in Brussels, not to mention Stockholm and a return cycling trip to Alsace? All of a sudden it seems like there is so much to do, and that doesn't even include finding a job in California or any of the two thousand other practicalities associated with hopping the Atlantic.

Worst of all I feel like some kind of fraud. I've spent close to two years blogging about the charms of rural Britain and yet, faced with a little snow, I'm ready to turncoat on the market square wine bar and settle into a booth at Gilbert's on Pico with a carafe of margaritas. Despite the fact that there's a red passport snuggled up to the blue one in my sock drawer, I guess at heart I'm still an American in the Cotswolds.

The Printed Page

2010-01-23T16:55:00.006Z

My Kindle conversion is incomplete. I'm still trudging through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (my choice of verb reflects the writing more than the digital experience), but I only made it through two Saturdays of downloading the Weekend FT before returning to the pink printed page. Dividing up the sections with husband for consumption over lunch at the farm shop only works in analog form. And I proved to myself today that the allure of paper still extends to books when I wondered into a second hand book shop in Cheltenham to kill time while husband shopped for Blu-Rays.

I was drawn in by the well curated shelf facing the sidewalk, tempting me with Ian McEwan and Jonathan Safran Foer and Patrick Gale. In the end I sprang for the 1949 Gloucestershire edition of The Little Guides. How could I not? I was taken in by the back cover which informed me that The Little Guides were banned from publication in 1940 for reasons of national security. And that was before I noticed that the tattered cover features a print of our Cotswold town, captured from the vantage point of the hill behind our house looking down over our curved lane and the clock tower side of the church. I know the vista well -- there's a bench at the top of the hill today that makes it a good spot to sit and gaze. Apart from the missing primary school, little has changed in the last sixty years. Even the text still applies. The description of our town starts with, "...a good place with good stone buildings dating from medieval times to early 19th cent. The later buildings are not so happy," as if prescient of the 1980s developments that would eventually bookend the town.

Attached to the back cover is a fold out map in perfect condition save for one tear at the seam. Here one major change to the Cotswolds is marked out by black squares, indicating railway stations in nearby Cirencester and Chedworth and Withington that are long gone. One day books may go the way of the railroads courtesy of Amazon and Google and Apple, but for now I'm still capable of being smitten with the printed page.

Consumption Cottage

2010-01-16T17:03:00.005Z

While I feel fine in all other respects, I have developed husband's kidney ejecting cough and spent the better part of the week annoying my co-workers with it. My own father seemed utterly exasperated by the racket, and he was on the other end of a phone a few thousand miles and an ocean away. I've grown bored of catering to the cough, so a glass or two of pink prosecco at the wine bar with R&R last night seemed a good idea. Afterwards we lured them to our cottage to watch CBB eviction night in the recently renovated loft, which has distressingly become known as the man cave. (With its exposed stone gable walls and light pouring in from the roof window, I had once imagined it as a cosy reading and writing room. One gable is now dominated by a fifty-four inch telly and ever since the Blu-Ray player arrived at Christmas, I've stopped fighting the inevitable.)

Within half an hour of Davina, a previously healthy R. was hacking away too. Now Drovers Cottage on College Row is known as Consumption Cottage on Consumption Row, and I have acquired the Dickensian moniker of Consumption Lil. I am afraid the labels might stick, providing yet more ammunition for husband in his campaign to return to California.

Hey Lady

2010-01-13T22:50:00.009Z

My new year's resolution last year was to read something by Proust. I really wanted to read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life but somehow that didn't see like a very legitimate thing to do without having read anything by Proust first. A year later the red spine of volume one of In Search of Lost Time is still staring back at me from my bedside table, nestled between Any Human Heart and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Unlike those book club mandated tomes, the pages of ISOLT remain unsullied by my nub nailed fingers.

So this year I made another new year's resolution, one that would enable me to keep last year's, albeit behind schedule. I'd let my subscription to the New Yorker expire in February and reallocate NYer reading time to ISOLT. It seemed like a good plan until this morning when Rachel Johnson, sister of the slightly mad Boris the mayor of London, appeared on BBC Breakfast to talk about the magazine she is now editing, The Lady.

Now why didn't anybody tell me about The Lady? It's taken me years to unravel so many of the mysteries of proper British life, things like marmite, the difference between hunting and shooting, and what a gilet is and how you pronounce it. And yet all along -- 125 years to be exact -- there has been a magazine to guide me in the ways of British ladyship. According to the news anchor its reputation of late has been the best place to advertise if you are in search of a nanny, but Ms. Johnson has livened up the old dowager. It even has literary and Cotswoldian links, having been established by the grandfather of the Mitford sisters. Coming up on my one year anniversary of becoming a Brit I feel I am practically a lady anyway. I can't think of a better way to celebrate than subscribing....to yet another weekly.

Cabin Fever Chronicle

2010-01-08T18:51:00.006Z

Tuesday
Left work at 2pm at urging of husband who reported heavy snow at home. He's a bit of a drama queen so I was skeptical until a colleague showed me the live camera feed from my exit off the M5. It appeared husband's reports of eminent disaster were, for once, not greatly exaggerated. A journey that normally takes me an hour lasted four thanks to jack-knifed trucks, detours and several pauses to consider if I, like the tens of other drivers who littered the sides (and sometimes main thoroughfares) of the roads, should resign myself to spending the night in my car. In the end I abandoned the Prius on a turn-out on All Alone and walked down the last impassable hill to our cottage.

Relaxed in front of the fire by watching first day in the house of Celebrity Big Brother. Normal cast of washed up actors and singers, topless models in search of a career change, and current and former lovers of the famous and infamous. For once there's a bonafide star too. What's Vinnie Jones doing on CBB?

Wednesday
Snowed in so worked from home. Snow plough came through but it snowed as fast as he could plough. Left house once on foot to pick up provisions from the local store where there were lines out the door populated by stranded locals stockpiling milk and bread. Still reveling in the novelty of the winter wonderland that is our village like only a former Angeleno could. Husband is less enchanted. He's been home sick all week with a cough that sounds like he's trying to expel his kidneys through his mouth. When he's not coughing he's moaning about moving back to California where they don't have weather like this. Tried not to feel annoyed in the midst of all this snowy loveliness.

Thursday
Still snowed in. Going on three weeks of being together twenty-four hours a day with husband thanks to the preceding two weeks of Christmas holidays, only this week there is no indulgence in wine and food to distract us. We couldn't even pretend we were going to keep the stock new year's resolution to exercise more as it was impossible to get to the gym by car and exercising outside was too treacherous. I've become an inert object. The most movement I can manage is to loll around on the floor in front of the wood burning stove in some half-hearted approximations of yoga stretches.

Husband seems to be addicted to me, only it's a weird sort of addiction where the object of his desire offers not the pleasure of the crack pipe or whiskey bottle or Twinkie box but only exasperation and annoyance. During a one hour separation when I retreat to the bedroom for a conference call away from his kidney ejecting cough, I receive three emails from him: an Outlook invite to -- weather allowing -- buy a shower head at the DIY shop in Cheltenham on Saturday, an update that our remodelling project in London is going very poorly, and a final email informing me he is not coming back from California when he goes for a business trip later this month. I accept the DIY store invite and return my attention to the call.

CBB has become my only reason for living. Who knew Heidi Fleiss was so likable, a sort of hibernating field mouse with botoxed lips who only wakes up to call Stephen Baldwin a dork? And Stephen is, at best, a dork. He's one of those recovering addicts who's shunted all his pent up addictive energy into another obsession, in his case fundamental Christianity. And yet even without his four gram a day habit he's still the kind of narcissistic, finger jabbing the air, overly emphatic windbag that any sober person who has been around coked up people will immediately recognize. The only difference between then and now for Mr. Baldwin is likely to be the content. Now he talks about the Bible, then -- if my own experience in L.A. is anything to go by -- he would have been talking about his brilliant idea for a screenplay.

Take this opportunity to remind husband that the grass isn't all greener in L.A. Cringe-inducing Stephen Baldwin types -- many of whom are drinking coffee and reading scripts at the Coffee Bean on Main Street as I type -- are as much a part of the SoCal landscape as clear, sunny skies with highs in the seventies.

Friday
Husband has given me his cold. I am also convinced I have an ear infection and fight my way to the doctor's office to demand antibiotics, during which I notice the once lovely snow is now desecrated with marigold puddles of dog pee. Patient, cashmere draped woman doctor shines a light in my ear and reveals that the shooting pains in my face are due to a build up of ear wax. In short order I am discussing the merits of olive oil versus sodium bicarbonate ear drops with the chemist. How long until it's hemorrhoid and denture cream? Thank god it's Friday night which means a double bill of CBB.