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England

Twist Tryst

Posted on January 17, 2009

Last week I stole away to London for a tryst with my boyfriend, Jeremy Clarkson. Our date was for the opening night of a new production of Oliver! at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and Jezza, as his intimates call him, had brought along his wife and a coterie of adolescent children whom he has presumably fathered. That’s ok, I had brought along husband too. In fact, husband knows all about my boyfriend and is just fine with it, a sure sign we are well on our way to being authentic Europeans. Husband was actually with me on my first date with Jezza some months ago, at Rico coffee shop on Westbourne Grove where we all happened to be breakfasting outside on a fine autumn day. I’ll never forget the hilarious moment when the Westminster Council bin men drove by in the garbage truck and shouted out at Jezza, “Oiy, Clarkson, wanna test drive this?”

Jezza gets a lot of this kind of thing being the star of BBC1’s popular television show, Top Gear, which is ostensibly an automotive review program. But Jezza and his co-hosts spend most their primetime hour time doing things like attempting to race homemade amphibious vehicles across the English Channel and interviewing celebrities who’ve done timed laps on the show’s racetrack. Simon Cowell holds the top spot having edged out Gordon Ramsay — both also coincidentally boyfriends of mine. I guess that’s why I like the show, what with all my boyfriends showing up on it all the time. I mean I’m certainly not a car person. I’m in the process of getting a company car right now and my main interest is colour and whether or not heated seats are an option. Jezza would snort with derision if he knew I’ve settled on a Prius, so we’ll keep that our little secret. On top of being twelve years my senior — safely out of the Catherine Zeta Jones ick range, I’m sure you’ll agree — Jezza is a bit of a right wing, global warming denying kind of guy, as he makes perfectly clear in his weekly Times columns. I guess opposites attract. There’s no denying the frisson of sexual tension as I brushed against his coat lapels during interval drinks, Champers for him, Sancerre for me.

Lucky for his wife and kids, Jezza wasn’t the only celebrity vying for my attention at Oliver! Terry Wogan, the Johnny Carson of the UK was there, as was Anthony Andrews, he of the iconic role of Sebastian Flyte in the best television miniseries ever, Brideshead Revisted. Rowan Atkinson was onstage playing Mr. Bean playing Fagan, alongside Jodie Prenger who won a reality television series last year to secure her role as Nancy. It was a bit of a British luvvie-fest, and I surprised both husband and myself with my powers of celebrity recognition and sheer starstruck delight. In my quest to become a British citizen I’ve already proven via the “Life in the UK” civics-light test that I know the patron saint of Wales (David) and that a person from the Tyneside is called a Geordie, but this is the truest measure yet that I’m ready to take my oath to the Queen. To think just a few short years ago Patsy Kensit and Michael Winner went unnoticed as they stood behind me in line at Tavola in Notting Hill.

Books Cotswolds

Rescue

Posted on January 10, 2009

My first week on the new job is in the bag. People complain about long commutes, but my drive time was one of the highlights of the week despite the frozen conditions. I’ve established a set of landmarks for my journey that go like this: The Royal Agricultural College or RAG, known as the Oxbridge for farmers; The Veg Shed, a farm shop on the estate of Prince Charles’ country house, Highgrove; then a series of villages with names that make me smile: Little Badminton, Petty France (I looked for but did not find Gracious Switzerland or Important Italy), and Old Sodbury, which I like to think is populated wholly by old sods; finally the motorway and the bright lights, big city of Bristol.

After the snow melted this week there was a true frost, transforming my commute into a bit of Narnia. The entire landscape looked like it had been flash frozen then sugar dipped. It was something I’d never seen before having grown up in Florida where frost refers to that one night a year when farmers worry the orange crop might be lost. But upon encountering this new found beauty I admit my first association wasn’t with fairytales, but rather the Russian Winterland wedding Joan Rivers threw for her daughter Melissa at the Plaza Hotel some years ago. Why my brain can produce this data from an ancient episode of Entertainment Tonight at the slightest provocation but not the location of my keys is one of life’s little mysteries.

Another such mystery is what exactly “Process Portal Framework” means. This was the subject of one of no fewer than twenty-eight PowerPoints I was given on Monday morning as an “induction pack” for my new job. By the time I got to the Process Portal Framework sometime on Friday afternoon I was pretty sure I hadn’t landed my dream job. It’s a good enough job, a well paying, middle management job in an interesting industry where I’ll get good experience I can use to parlay into yet another one of these kind of jobs. Which I realize may be very depressing sounding depending on just what kind of person you are but, for whatever it says about me, I feel just fine about it.

I cannot say I felt the same about seeing Katie Price next to Annie Proulx in the Fiction Ps at Waterstone’s today. I went in to buy a calendar (despite BlackBerry enabled Outlook syncing, husband and I are still dependent on a paper version to manage our new found active country social life attending bingo and fetes and such), but I have no self-control in bookshops and was soon browsing the shelves.

Katie Price is a glamour model (Britspeak for topless tabloid model) turned reality television star who has a commercially successful series of ghostwritten children’s books, adult novels, and no less than three autobiographies. Think of an industrious Pamela Anderson. She was most recently in the news for renewing her vows after a whopping three years of marriage to a man she met on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. I saw her in the fake tanned flesh two years ago when she was eating lunch in the same room as me at Royal Ascot, our collective presence perhaps revealing something about the social decline of this once venerated event. And there was Katie today, three volumes exactly, snuggled up to a single hardback of Annie Proulx’s latest book of short stories, Fine Just The Way It Is. Now Annie Proulx is one of my favourite authors, and this was an indignity I couldn’t tolerate. Even though I’ve already read it, I bought Annie just to rescue her from the slight. Of course I can afford to dispense such biblio-thropic acts of justice precisely because of my well-paying not so dreamy job, which in its own small way is a good enough sign that there’s some kind of order in this world.

Cotswolds

Living the Dream

Posted on January 6, 2009

So I’m back in England, living the full-time rural dream. I started my new job on Monday, which means I spend a lot of time in the car commuting now. Most of the ride I’m like James Herriot driving through picture postcard country lanes to that zippy music of the opening credits of “All Creatures Great and Small.” Only my car is a little more air-tight, which is handy since it was 24 degrees yesterday. It’s so cold I have crafted a special outfit for evenings around our drafty cottage (note to self: learn to build a fire). It consists of my black imitation Ugg boots, pale pink Chinese silk pajama pants, crusty oatmeal jumper with protruding long sleeve orange t-shirt, topped with a glen plaid LL Bean bathrobe. I look like a hobo who’s stolen a Russian dancer costume from a cut-rate production of The Nutcracker. It’s probably good for our marriage that husband isn’t going to be here much during the week.

Back to the commute. This morning I was getting a bit bored with Radio 4, England’s NPR, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and give Lenny’s Christmas gift, Laura Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession a spin. Now I know it’s not nice to speak ill of a lady who died of cancer, but Laura has not dated well. It reminded me of The Carpenters on amphetamines, all full of exhortations to “get happy!” or “come on down to the stoned soul picnic,” which is apparently replete with moonshine and sassafras. Plus a generous dollop of flutes and tambourines. I took Lenny’s advice and skipped the bonus tracks.

California Random

The Thing About Lenny

Posted on December 30, 2008

Today was my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party. It was held in an anteroom of the Arrowhead Country Club whose decor, prime rib menu, and bartender, Manny, had not changed since I was last there roughly thirty years ago for my grandmother’s retirement party. There were thirty-three family members and friends in attendance, most of whom were elderly women who had outlived their husbands. The handful of men included a neighbor who is rich from selling Italian tractor parts, my father, and my great uncle and his two sons, one of whom is the notorious Lenny.

Lenny came half an hour late, which would have offended most grandmothers on the occasion of their ninetieth birthday but he had already done that when he displayed the same margin of tardiness at my grandfather’s funeral five years ago. When he did arrive today he was at least bearing belated Christmas gifts. As with last year it was a CD, this time of Laura Nyro. And as with last year’s Neil Young which came with a burned copy on which he had re-edited the track order to “improve” it, this one also came with very specific instructions to ignore the bonus tracks.

“It was called the Thirteenth Confession for a reason,” he informed me.

Like Neil Young and T.C. Boyle, Laura Nyro is in Lenny’s canon of artists on whom he is forever pontificating. I tuned out somewhere between Lenny missing Laura Nyro’s Woodstock performance because he had to work in a steel mill to pay his way through college and the declaration by an “authentic rasta man” that his son was the chosen one in the family and had recently reeled off an epic poem comparable to Blake in twenty minutes. To be fair to this son, he has forever been in the shadow of his Ivy League student body president/McKinsey Consulting/Gates Foundation/Harvard Business School sister, so it was strangely sweet if slightly deluded to hear his father championing him. (Come to think of it, our entire family is in his sister’s shadow.)

As we said our goodbyes, Lenny separately directed both my sister and me not to “look for homogeneity” and to “expect variegation” in our new Laura Nyro CDs. In the country club parking lot my sister, an FBI agent in another state, told me how Lenny had left several frantic messages for her earlier this year. When she called him back he reported that his girlfriend had lost her wallet. My sister informed him there was nothing much she could do, omitting to clarify for him that most FBI agents are busy with other stuff like, umm, trying to prevent another 9/11. Instead she calmly directed him to a website which walks you through the steps you need to take, esoteric things like call the police and cancel your credit cards. I’d like to expect variegation in next year’s annual visit with Lenny, but somehow I am expecting homogeneity. Maybe Neil Young or Laura Nyro with their voices edited out and Lenny’s in their place, droning on.

Random

Routines for Sunny Climes

Posted on December 23, 2008

Day three and things have fallen into a vacation rhythm of sorts. In the morning we jog around my parents’ neighborhood which consists of a Russian doll-like series of gated communities with names like Mystic Ridge and Heron Glen within the larger security guard manned compound called Pelican Landing. It’s like Checkpoint Charlie with palm trees and landscaping to rival the royal parks. The Colony is the ultimate lockdown sub-community within Pelican Landing. It has it’s own separate golf course, country club and security guards, who recently turned my mother back as she attempted to breech the perimeter on her beach cruiser bicycle.

After jogging we head to Bonita Beach for a couple hours of sun therapy using the aging and NRA bumper sticker adorned Toyota Avalon my father has lent us for the week. Having forgotten my bathing suit in London, I wear a twenty year-old faded purple and neon pink paisley bikini. Through the dual miracle of American residential storage space and worn out elastic, I found this high school relic in the upstairs’ bathroom drawer at my parents’ and it still fits. Lying on the beach listening to the radio from Doc’s Beach House blare out “Send Her My Love,” “The Time of My Life,” and a synthesizer version of “Deck the Halls,” it feels like nothing has really changed from my high school days other than some extra bulges and extra money manifesting in the form of our double chaise lounge rented for fifteen dollars and ninety cents.

With all this beach time I am working my way through my airplane reading material much faster than anticipated. The New Yorker fiction issue has been consumed cover to cover bar The Financial Page, and by tomorrow I’ll be done with my novel. Even my mother’s Bon Apetit, thanks to which I am now familiar with the eating habits of Ryan Seacrest, has been picked clean. I’ll soon be left with nothing but the enemy, silent contemplation set to the lapping tide of the Gulf of Mexico or, worse, forced into actual conversation with husband.

Like a toddler who prefers the bubble wrap to the fancy toy that came in it, Taco Bell and Target are two of the small pleasures of returning to the states. Lunch at Taco Bell—cheap and Mexican, both rare in England—happens before or after the beach depending on how early a start we got, then the afternoon is spent on what husband calls a “spot of retail therapy.” It’s ok when this phrase is used in a lifestyle magazine but somehow wrong when it falls from his lips. At Target we routinely have to perform interventions with one and other to prevent regrettable choices. Today I had to have a large black leather-like tote with lots of shiny hardware and a sticky zipper pried from my hands in the check out line by husband. I had entered a delusional state brought on by the prices, even at these exchange rates, and had convinced myself the purse was a Birkin Bag-esque steal. But there was no stopping husband from purchasing the half size too small Chukka boots that do actually resemble the pair in the gentleman’s clothier in Cirencester.

After retail it’s dinner with my parents at a chain restaurant in one of the infinite new strip malls. My parents only eat at two restaurants, Bone Fish Grill or Carraba’s, maybe P.F. Chang’s China Bistro if they are feeling zany. The strength of the boundaries to this culinary repertoire became clear when, on night two, my parents offered to take husband out to dinner for a belated birthday meal. Husband suggested a nice hotel by the water or maybe one of the outdoor restaurants in downtown Naples. We knew from the balking that followed that the invitation was really only good for one of the chain restaurants. We were at Carraba’s in time for happy hour two-for-one Pinot Grigio. My father knows all the wait staff by name, including our server, Tiffany, from whom he not so secretly ordered a sundae with a candle. The delivery was accompanied, inevitably, by the entire wait staff singing Happy Wishes to You in Italian to husband.

I’ve given up on any post-dinner, communal family television watching. The first night I attempted this with an E! True Hollywood Story on Oprah. My parents expressed a bizarrely vehement disdain for Oprah, their chief complaint seeming to be a suspicion she doesn’t read all the books in her book club. I suspect there’s some Obama related mistrust lurking there too, and I decided if we couldn’t agree on Oprah (I mean my God, who doesn’t like Oprah??) there was really no use trying with anything else.

England

Will Elgin Lose His Marbles?

Posted on December 20, 2008

Yesterday I finally made it to the British Museum. To be frank it wasn’t something I really wanted to do. I just needed more to show for my last two weeks of gardening leave than the double digit hours I’ve so far logged watching the Snooker World Championships and reruns of The Gilmore Girls. Gardening leave is a delightful British concept in which you “work” out your remaining notice period from the comfort of your own home. Being part of the European Union, there are long notice periods — mine was three months.

So now, after three and half years of living in London, in the eleventh hour of my residence I finally visited the British Museum. Having no particular agenda, I decided to hit the “Don’t Miss!” section listed on the museum map. After a failed attempt to find the King of Ife, I made it to the Rosetta stone, then the Assyrian Lion Hunt reliefs. I stopped to admire the swaying, headless nymphs in the reconstruction of the Nereid Monument, which in my dusty, adolescent memories I had mistaken for the Elgin Marbles. The latter were in the next room, in the middle of which was a stand holding pamphlets that address the controversy of ownership over these Parthenon sculptures. The pamphlet is in the form of an FAQ including answers to questions like “What has the Greek Government asked for?” (A: to have them back, please) and “What is the British Museum’s position?” (A: waffle, waffle, “…maximum public benefit,” more waffle).

Standing there reading the pamphlet, it occurred to me what a trivializing name the Elgin Marbles is for this group of nearly 2,500 year old Parthenon sculptures. I thought of the man at the wine bar the other night who told me he owned Farmington, as if the village was some kind of shiny bauble, and I could just picture it: a group of guffawing 19th century lords sitting around talking about that eccentric old chap, Elgin, and his marble trifles, picked up while he was British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

Controversy aside, there’s no doubt the Parthenon sculptures are well looked after by the British Museum. I was reminded of this later walking through the Egyptian mummy rooms (it seems most of the contents of the British Museum are something other than British), which are a stark contrast to those in the humid and dusty and charming Cairo Museum I visited last year. There in the room showing off the treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamen were scribbled notes tacked inside the display cases to explain when a particular piece was on loan. With that kind of filing system would anybody notice if a piece here or there went astray?

On my way out of the British Museum I stopped in the book shop where a hieroglyph edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit caught my eye. It reminded me of the old saying “two countries separated by the same language.” Slowly I am learning the tongue of my adopted land, the “Elgin Marbles” decoded after a year of study at that unlikely Rosetta stone, our Cotswold wine bar.

Cotswolds

Fat Tuesday

Posted on December 17, 2008

Last night we made an unexpected visit to the Cotswolds. Husband couldn’t find his passport and, since we’re flying out to the States on Saturday, decided it was worth driving out to see if it was at the cottage. It was, and so we happily retired to the wine bar for a quick glass before the dinner he bribed me with to get me to drive out with him.

It was a mellow night, welcome after last Friday’s conclusion to the Fat Boy lunch. R. the barman was on duty having long since been relegated to Tuesday nights from his previous post on Fridays. R. has been a constant in our Cotswold life. He was our original welcome wagon, and we spent many quiet Friday nights last year perched at the old bar talking with him before we got a Chinese takeaway and drove up to the rented cottage in G.P. He has a thick head of greying dark hair, a pink face, and smiling eyes. When he’s working he wears an apron over a checkered shirt, when not a leather waistcoat and a flat cap. Once I saw him across the lawn of a posh hotel party wearing a cravat. He calls himself a Zionist, is a Catholic Anglican, and his favourite book is Gordon Is a Moron. It was good to catch up with him and watch him break all the house rules, including serving “a pound’s worth” pours and letting the lovely labs, Fing and Inch, wander around off their leashes.

M. was there briefly, looking much more stable on his feet and much less red in the face than when I left him on Friday evening. E. also made a brief appearance — all the people who work in the wine bar seem to drink there too — long enough to update us on the success of her bird plucking business and to find out she’s disposing of all the feathers in a big hole at the bottom of her new boyfriend’s, a.k.a. Boy Racer, field. (I don’t know why I need to know things like whether sheep sleep indoors or what she does with all the feathers, but I do). R. had a brace of pheasants hanging on the coat rack, ready for her to take away. And G. was there, a permanent background presence nursing his customary two glasses of red.

There were a few new people as is always the case even after a year of evenings in the wine bar. I met the charming wife of twenty years of one of the Fat Boys, which was something of a relief since the majority of people around here seem to be divorced. A man came in to order a case of wine and stopped for a glass. Within five minutes I knew his ex-wife was a Roosevelt, a result of the potent combination of the Oxonian effect and the license to be gauche to which I’m entitled by nationality. The former refers to the phenomenon in which someone who went to Oxford will tell you they went to Oxford within the first eleven seconds of your conversation with them, which I’ve found extends to all kinds of things besides Oxford (like being related to Roosevelt by marriage, even if said marriage is now defunct). Of course the Oxonian effect helps make the wine bar the wine bar, and without it things would undoubtedly be less fun.

Cotswolds

Fat Boys

Posted on December 14, 2008

Friday was the Fat Boys lunch, an event husband had been invited to by M. and for which I had been enlisted as a chauffeur. Husband was titillated by his inclusion and spent the morning weighing his clothing options aloud like a teenage girl anguishing over her prom dress. Coral coloured cashmere sweater vest or tweed blazer? Was his sheepskin coat too “urban”?

The arrangement was to meet at the wine bar at noon. At 12:30PM husband was just wrapping up a call so I was dispatched to the wine bar on my own to stall for him. I used the time to enquire about the etymology of the lunch’s name since the attendees, while not in danger of anorexia, were neither overtly fat nor boys. A., a local writer who resembled Paul Bunyan in his leather waistcoat, attempted to explain as he poured me half a glass of champagne (I was the driver after all). The account was delivered in an authoritative and confident voice that tricked me into believing it was a coherent response, a common characteristic of the posh spoken. There was something about Oxford and self-employment and a loose association with the arts, but it took some prodding before I was finally able to work out that the most important qualification was that you didn’t have to go back to the office afterward. As A. commented in a moment of unusual lucidity, “I’ve always thought if you don’t have it done by Friday lunchtime, you’re unlikely to get it done by the end of the day anyway.”

Overall the explanation had a bit of machismo, chest beating pride on behalf of the assembled guests, who included a magazine editor, the publisher of a local newspaper, writers, and a former military man turned vintner. Husband in fact is in the employ of someone else who might reasonably expect to be able to reach him on Friday afternoon, but seemed to qualify on the basis of his employer’s association with the the-uh-tah and possibly because I drive a station wagon which M. suspected he could persuade me to chauffeur. But all these men shared at least the illusion of being in charge of their own destiny for this particular afternoon, and they were going to spend it drinking copious amounts.

Husband materialised (having chosen coral cashmere) and, after a case of wine was loaded into the trunk of the car, we were off. The brief journey to the pub was no cause for a respite in gossip. A story about how the ex-wife of one of the Fat Boys had a lover in common with Princess Di (presumably the reason she is now an ex) was my reward before depositing my charges at the door of the pub.

The call to retrieve them came five hours later. When I arrived they were on whiskey and cognac and there was no sign of the case of wine. One suede loafered man was wondering around with a half empty bottle of port, and the ex-army officer turned winemaker was telling me how he was shocked to learn over lunch that I stripped my way through college to pay the bills. After an aborted attempt to find someone from Suffolk presumed to still be in the pub, I managed to herd them into my car and back to the wine bar where the man from Suffolk had already made his way.

The scene that followed was much as you might expect after a dozen men have spent five hours drinking champagne, beer, red wine, port and whiskey. M. kept falling into a coat rack. His ex-wife did not look amused, and was not her same warm, friendly self towards me. I imagined she was rather horrified husband seemed to have fallen in with this crew and assumed our marriage was headed for the same eventual destiny as her own. Husband mistook a request for his last name from a fellow fat boy attendee as some kind of insult, then insisted his response was meant to be “a joke.” The man from Suffolk kept telling me his life was a mess — just back after ten years in Japan, freshly divorced and with two kids — all of which seemed incongruent since he reminded me of the gay, lecherous Uncle Monty from Withnail and I from the moment I first saw him.

It seemed best to dissociate myself from the fat boys, so I mingled. The most amusing of my new acquaintances was a portly man of about sixty who was a good six inches shorter than me with thick, black-rimmed glasses on a cord, horrible teeth, and a very posh accent. When I asked him what he did he said, “My dear, I own Farmington,” which is the village up the hill from us. Twice he told me I had a very red nose, which is true, and twice that he’d just as soon comment on my body as my nose but he couldn’t see it underneath my coat. Despite his behaviour which I suppose could be construed as piggish, I found him entertaining and was half tempted to drop the coat and strike a pose. All the better that I didn’t seeing that his wife was losing her patience at his refusal to leave the wine bar and go to dinner. His defense was that he wasn’t leaving with a bloody half bottle of wine left. She barked orders at him like he was a naughty dog, which I suspect was deserved, and finally he made his exit. Husband had apparently had his fill of being a man in charge of his own destiny and offered no resistance when I told him it was time to go, using the age old lure of sausage, chips and curry from the Chinese takeaway across the square.

England

Journey Home

Posted on December 11, 2008

Next week is my last as an official resident of London, and nostalgia set in on my morning jog. Since my gardening leave started, I’ve taken to running husband into work as far as the Park Lane crossing where the animals in war memorial is. Then I turn back and head for the Serpentine before crossing into Kensington Gardens. It’s a route we’ve run a hundred times, every weekend before we started spending them in the country. Somewhere around the duck pond, slick with the morning’s swan shit and presided over by the alabaster Queen Victoria at the far west end, I started to get misty and take in the detail.

I cut through the Kensington Palace grounds along the sunken garden, then up and out across Bayswater Road to St Petersburgh Place. Here is my favourite row of brick houses, each with a round window in the front door. It’s left on Moscow Road, past the Greek Orthodox cathedral of St. Sophia where we once heard music and plates being broken from the basement windows. The next right takes me along a block of arched upper floors with wrought iron balconies, briefly transforming Hereford Road into a an architectural doily. Then it’s a cut over a block to the west to go up Chepstow Road, which always reminds me of New Orleans with it’s tin balcony roofs and wrought iron filigree pillars. The building that houses the basement flat we once lived in has been reconverted to a family house, the brick red front door now replaced with a Tiffany’s box blue one.

On cue my ipod, on shuffle, started playing a Shostakovich piece made for a film noir chase scene as I rounded the corner into the northern, less salubrious reaches of Notting Hill. It was past the two continuous city blocks of satellite dish studded Brunel Estate flats, under the Westway, and over the non-sequitur Candy Land bridge of sky blue and gold painted ironwork before the chirpy, lazy “A Sleepin’ Bee” sung by Cassandra Wilson ushered me back to my home for now.

Europe

Hamburg

Posted on December 7, 2008

Liverpudlian is what they call the residents of husband’s hometown. It’s a pleasing word to say, what with its five syllables and internal alliteration, not to mention the hint of the whimsical that comes with sounding like Lilliputian. It’s hard to think of a better thing to be called. Unless of course you are from Hamburg, which makes you a Hamburger.

We’ve just returned from a weekend trip there, our only one away from Drovers Cottage this year other than our farewell trip to Paris in the spring. It was husband’s birthday present. Like any good port city it’s known for it’s red light district, but husband swears he picked it out of nostalgia for the business trips he took here often during our first year in London (which could be one and the same thing) and, at this time of year, the Christmas markets for which Germany is famous.

We visited several, but my favorite was the one in front of that overblown gothic marvel that is the Rathaus. It had four rows of stalls, the central aisle of which had a toy electric train running overhead, serving all manner of strudel and roasted chestnuts and pfaffen-something or other. Several bars kept the crowds well-supplied with gluhwein, despite which there was not a hint of the aggression or binge drinking I would expect in a similar environment in London. We drank gluhwein and rum grog and apfel punsch mit calvados. Having had a Dutch grandmother we grandchildren called Oma, I was practically obligated to sample Oma’s Einchpunsch, which turned out to be a potent eggnog. We ate well too – potato pancakes and lox, bratwurst, a raclette. It was more Christmasey than Christmas, which is just as well seeing as we’ll be spending it amongst palm trees with my parents in Florida.