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Random

Letter to Tina Fey

Posted on May 9, 2011

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.

Random

Free ‘n Easy

Posted on May 6, 2011

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.

Cotswolds England

Royal Wedding Red Carpet

Posted on April 30, 2011

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!

England

All About the Swag

Posted on April 26, 2011

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.

Cotswolds

Back in the Wolds

Posted on April 21, 2011

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 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!

Cotswolds England

Royal Wedding Fever

Posted on April 16, 2011

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.

Berlin

Gastronomic Infidelity

Posted on April 8, 2011

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/

Berlin

My Name is Not Roberta

Posted on March 27, 2011

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
+49 157 73346020 

Berlin Books

Life is Not a Petting Zoo

Posted on March 18, 2011

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.

Berlin

The Glass Jar

Posted on March 12, 2011

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.