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Cotswolds

Stranded at the Drive In

Posted on July 12, 2010

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.

Random

We Tell Ourselves Stories

Posted on July 3, 2010

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.

Books England

Bright Lights, Big City

Posted on July 1, 2010

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.

Books England Europe

Remembrance of Things Past

Posted on June 25, 2010

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-fueled 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.

Books England

Summer Reading

Posted on June 15, 2010

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.

Cycling England Europe

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

Posted on May 31, 2010

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.

Cycling England Europe

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

Posted on May 28, 2010

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.

Cycling England Europe

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

Posted on May 27, 2010

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.

Cycling England Europe

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

Posted on May 26, 2010

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.