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Did I Mention…

Posted on November 14, 2010

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…

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Get a Cluj

Posted on November 4, 2010

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.

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DDB, 1949-2010

Posted on October 30, 2010

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.

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Scandal

Posted on October 26, 2010

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.

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Suzie’s

Posted on October 22, 2010

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.

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Jewish Family Envy

Posted on October 17, 2010

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.

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One of Those Calls

Posted on October 14, 2010

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.

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The Yorkshire Muse

Posted on October 10, 2010

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.

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Letters to the Editor

Posted on September 19, 2010

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…