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Books

Kindling in the Cotswolds

Posted on December 31, 2009

This Christmas like—I’d be willing to wager—thousands of other thirty- and forty-something women I received my first bonafide toy in years: a Kindle. But before I’d even charged the battery on it I was up to Benita’s Frites in another gift, a paperback edition of Jonathan Gold’s alphabetical guide to Los Angeles restaurants, Counter Intelligence. I first read about Jonathan Gold earlier this year in a profile of him in The New Yorker. He wrote restaurant reviews in the LA Weekly for many years, but somehow in my intermittent reading of that periodical during my decade in Los Angeles—largely while waiting at the car wash on Pico and 26th and the front counter of Peet’s on Main Street—I never came across him. Given that I’ve lived in England for going on five years now, one might think my sister’s timing of this gift a bit off. To the contrary, I find it perhaps even more compelling now than I would have if I still lived in L.A. I’m not sure what’s at work here, but it must be the same logic that explains why I flip straight to Table for Two, the mini restaurant review in the opening pages of The New Yorker, despite the fact that I, like much of the New Yorker subscribing population, have visited New York City a grand total of two times in the last decade.

Back to the Kindle. I finally got around to charging the thing up and, at the risk of sounding like a consumer electronics blog, my first impressions are all good. For starters, they’ve emulated Apple and kept the printed instructions to a minimum. This caused me brief concern as I couldn’t find any reference to why the thing came with an American plug (I used the USB instead of hunting around for my adapter) or if I had to do to something special to register it for use outside the U.S. Eventually I threw caution to the wind and just followed the prompts to buy a book. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, my current book club read, downloaded in mere minutes from the front bedroom of the cottage which means Amazon has performed a minor miracle with their Whispernet service in the UK. (Mobile phone reception in our cottage is limited to practically leaning out the back window of our kitchen and, in our town, precise longitudinal coordinates in the market square. Start venturing down West End to the Wheatsheaf and you’re quickly in no bar territory, no pun intended.)

I started reading on it yesterday while enduring the lengthy process of getting highlights. I highly recommend this over mind numbing banter with your hair colorist unless of course your hair colorist is my talented friend Debi at the Jim Wayne salon in Beverly Hills who can entertain you with stories about her porn star clients. But my hair colorist was the twenty-something Mia of a Covent Garden salon, and once I had told her I was going out for dinner on New Year’s Eve and she told me she was going to Brighton with my hair stylist, Summer, and another girl from the salon, we had largely exhausted our conversational repertoire. She left me to my Kindle and I tipped her handsomely for it. In general it was a pleasant reading experience, although the page transitions are ever so slightly clunky and I already long for a color version. But now I am sounding like some kind of geek. I might as well seal my reputation and admit I am truly pathetically looking forward to showing it off at my first book club meeting of 2010.

Christmas Letters

Christmas Letter 2009

Posted on December 21, 2009

The defining personal event of this year happened in March when I got sick. Physically speaking neither the symptoms nor the treatment were very dramatic. I slurred my speech so subtly that even my coworkers and family had trouble detecting it, was treated with a high dose of intravenous steroids for three days running, then spent two weeks in bed sleeping, reading and writing. The recovery was even, dare I say it, enjoyable during those moments when I wasn’t thinking about the looming implications of the whole thing. But there were implications, namely if I had a second spate of neurological symptoms like these I would be diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. It is a disease that lacks both an explanation and a prognosis, more of a name for a collection of symptoms than the promise of cause, calamity, or cure that the word “disease” implies.

The three months between my recovery and my follow-up appointment with the neurologist were spent adjusting to this new reality of living in the not knowing. (Of course all of life is living in the not knowing, it’s just that most of mine I’ve been lucky enough to maintain the delusion of “knowing” afforded by the luck of birth, relatively stable employment and relationships, and material comfort.) Husband and I both thought and spoke of the “what if” daily. I monitored every physiological tick with the vigilance of a sniper, and husband still doesn’t let a confused consonant or dropped syllable slip by without asking, half-joking, if I have MS. The follow-up appointment finally came and, despite the fact that this three-month symptom-free milestone was of no statistical significance for my chances of developing MS, I felt liberated from obsessing about the possibility.

It was during those preceding months that I had the brilliant idea that husband and I should do a four day bicycle ride from London to Paris next May to raise money for MS charities. It was an act borne of that time when I needed to exert some control, when nothing else was bending to my will. But the truth is now that I’ve been healthy for nearly nine months I don’t want anything to do with MS, even (maybe especially) charity. Undoubtedly those of you who have been within earshot or blogshot of me in the past year feel the same way. However, I have decided to do the ride; it will be character building, no? And I am fat, which can only be helped by a little cold weather training for an endurance event. And it’s a convenient excuse for a trip to Paris, where I can undo all that training by consuming my body weight in confit de canard and vin blanc within hours of arrival.

The MS scare was the low point of the year but there have also been ups, notably husband’s reaction to the whole thing. By his own admission he is a high strung nancy-boy at the best of times, and yet during the crisis he became possessed by an unfamiliar demon of rationality and support. I was also granted dual citizenship of this fair country, which came with the invaluable right to get in the shortest customs line at Heathrow. And I was promoted, putting me back in the realm of the music business I thought I had left behind for good last year (third time’s a charm, no?). Husband survived the launch of the latest entertainment extravaganza, coming to a theatre near you in 2010. He did this notably without killing anyone in his workplace — with only the help of the occasional prescription neuro-enhancer and the bent ears of both his long suffering wife and his plump Irish shrink. And just because we like to create stress we decided to sell our flat in London and buy another one — a fixer upper to ensure the stress keeps on coming — closing on both in the same week that I had to be in three different countries for work. Finally, there was my personal moment of zen 2009, Levi Johnston’s Vanity Fair interview about life with the Palins.

I end with a request that this holiday season you give to our charitable endeavors with the same level of fervor with which husband and I have recently courted chaos in our lives: reckless abandon is welcome and, for once, you’re guaranteed to feel good the next morning. Every penny / pence / eurocent of your donations will go to the charities as husband and I will cover the costs to support our trip. Just think how guilty you’ll feel if my brain decides to attack itself again. Low blow? Yes, but remember it’s all for charity!

To sponsor me click here.

With much gratitude I wish you a merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and a happy, healthy new year!

Random

Oops

Posted on December 20, 2009

Friday morning I was greeted by the newly repaired church bells as I walked out to my car to drive to work. The air was crisp and clear, stirred only by tiny snowflakes in floaty descent. As I drove up the hill out of town, a small buck crossed the road in front of me. Watching him glide across the open fields, I thought smugly what a terrific blog entry this whole glorious morning was going to make. I was stirred from my reverie several moments later by the bleating of my phone indicating a text message. I pulled over to find it was from husband, thanking me for remembering his birthday before I left for work.

Oops.

So I did what any reasonable person in my position would do: I lied, texting back that I simply hadn’t wanted to wake him. I even added some vaguely exasperated language (“Geesh!”) over his implication that I had forgotten. Where then was his card he asked in reply, and I knew there was no way out. I was busted and I paid for it in several further colorful exchanges of emails and texts, all of which had in common the phrase “self-centered, pathetic cow.” In my defense, I had taken him to Hamburg two weekends before as a birthday treat, but the truth was I had become a little work obsessive in the last week and had lost track of the actual day. I apologized unreservedly for the slip up and thanked my lucky stars that he had the Fat Boy annual Christmas lunch to attend that day to distract him from my misdeed.

Unlike me, the fat boys had not forgotten his birthday. They even produced a homemade chocolate cake at the end of the meal. As if that wasn’t enough to make me look bad, one of the fat boys proceeded to flambé the thing using only a hip flask of brandy, the open fire, and a ladle seemingly produced from his pocket. (He was an old Etonian. Go figure.) I arrived at the wine bar later in the evening to find the remnants of the Fat Boy lunch, including husband, mercifully softened by the day’s intake of drink. I was chided for my lapse, but by and large I appeared to be forgiven. Still, the birthday card I belatedly bought remains unopened where I left it on the kitchen ledge Friday night. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still there on his next birthday.

Random

A Christmas Story

Posted on December 17, 2009

When my sister and I were little girls my father brought us a Christmas present that has become the stuff of family lore. It was an Olde English Sheep Dog named Greta, purchased from the pet department at Harrods and transported back to us in Florida in the cockpit of a Pan Am 747 where my father was serving as the engineer. What is remarkable about this gift is neither the dog nor how it was dispatched to us, but just how uncharacteristically spontaneous and joyful a portrait it paints of the man both capable of conjuring up this plan and pulling it off (obviously in days of laxer airport security): a man purportedly my father. Greta was a good pet, but we keep the story alive in my family mostly because we want to know this man.

As long as I can remember, my father’s main hobby has been watching the stock ticker tape roll by on CNN. Occasionally as children we were introduced to other pilots, many of them ex-Navy like my father. These men had a penchant for Corvettes, speed boats, and second wives. They seemed like another species. Despite having chosen a job that allowed him to travel the world, my father’s interest in the cities he was visiting – Karachi, Delhi, Paris, Beirut! – never seemed to extend much beyond a (admittedly self-reported) glass of milk in the hotel bar. During the period when he was hitting a lot of Middle Eastern routes my mother got a few rugs and my sister and I got some bootleg tapes of U2 and Huey Lewis and the News, but I suspect this was more the result of a sympathetic stewardess than my father’s own initiative.

Greta was never really a dog made for south Florida. She got fleas, her hair fell out, and when it thundered, as it often does on a summer afternoon in Florida, she hid under a side table next to the couch. When I was about twelve or thirteen the time came for Greta, long crippled by arthritis, to be put to sleep. My mother had taken my sister and me to our grandparents’ house in California for a few weeks of summer vacation, leaving my father alone in Florida to do the deed. He was distraught when he called us after having put her down. I took the phone at the desk nook built into my grandparents’ kitchen and, after listening briefly to his teary retelling of the afternoon’s events — intended to assure me the dog went peacefully and was in a better place — I began to sing the Meow Mix song, a popular advertisement for cat food in the 1980’s. I had moved on. I wanted a cat and would torment my parents with the Meow Mix song from then until the time Cleopatra, a bitchy one and a half year old Siamese cat I found through an ad in the Fort Myers News Press, was purchased for me for $20 from a couple who mysteriously didn’t want her anymore. It was, upon reflection, not a good lesson for an adolescent to learn about what you do when someone old and sick dies (replace it) or you don’t like someone anymore (sell it).

I like to think I made it up to my father when I gave him my dog a few years ago when we moved from Los Angeles to England. I say gave when I really mean insisted he take her. It shouldn’t have been a hard sell. After all, my father had loved having a dog and it was ridiculous that it had taken him twenty years to get another one. He had taken up no new hobbies since retiring unless you count the Internet, which he uses daily to log on to his Charles Schwab discount brokerage account. (The hint provided by the fact that his house abuts an eighteen hole golf course has not been taken.) Now he spends all his time cooking the dog bacon then taking her out for urgent walks because she can’t really digest human food. These days when I call it’s all about the dog: the lizard she chased through the patio screen, what she ate, defecated, bit. There’s still no sign of a globe-trotting bon vivant who buys his children live Christmas presents from Harrods and sneaks them back across the Atlantic in the cockpit of a plane. It’s just a man and his dog.

Cotswolds

Falling Apart

Posted on December 12, 2009

Our Cotswold town appears to be falling to bits, and just before Christmas! It’s almost as bad as when the Chinese takeaway shut down for six weeks back in February. It all started about a month ago when the town sign—a lovely oval, hand-painted affair detailing scenes from the town—disappeared from its perch on the edge of the market square. Weeks ago we were assured by the town artist that it was just away for repairs, but it has yet to materialize again. Then, a week ago the bells stopped ringing. I’d go as far as to say the church bells are the most distinguishing feature of the town. They ring all throughout the day and night, marking the hour and sometimes the quarter hour too. Every new resident has a story of how it took them some time to get used to sleeping through the night with the bells banging on, but it invariably ends with a profession of fondness for said bells. Tuesday night the bells starting clanging like they would for a wedding or christening, and I thought we were back in business. But they stopped after an hour or so and haven’t been heard from again, so the mystery of the bells continues. Tonite we go for Christmas drinks at Glebe House. It’s right next to the vicarage so I expect the vicar will be there. He has some explaining to do.

Europe

Return to Hamburg

Posted on December 10, 2009

We kicked off the Christmas season last weekend with what is threatening to become our annual visit to Hamburg. After checking into our Japanese hotel, the Nippon, we were at loose ends before dinner so decided to look around a nearby grocery store. Visiting a grocery store, I thought, is a great way to learn about a culture. And I was validated as we admired the long wall of glass jars holding vibrantly coloured, endless variations of sauerkraut and pickled things. Husband spent a lot of time looking at the salad bar, which reminded him of California what with its bowls of vegetables unadorned with mayonnaise-based dressing unlike the British equivalent. He was so impressed he decided to get a little bowl which he ate as we walked the aisles, an action which seemed to cause consternation among the ruddy faced matrons who were manning the place.

The mayo may not have been in the salad, but it was on the shelves in toothpaste tube packages, one of my favorite continental quirks. I seriously considered taking home a handful for stocking stuffers before my concern that they would exceed the carry-on liquid limit stopped me (lucky for all of you on my Christmas list). Next we turned our attention to the deli counter, topped with a dizzying assortment of cheese samples. Husband and I indulged in several varieties before we realized the wildly gesticulating ruddy faced matron was talking to us, pointing out a well hidden jar of toothpicks intended for use in tasting the samples. Husband smiled and shrugged, responding with an “English” by way of explanation before he speared a smoked Gouda. It seemed we were not so popular at the grocery store, and that was before we tried to pay for our sparkling water and empty salad container with a debit card and were informed of the ten euro minimum, which meant we had to hold up the entire line while we went and found some other things to buy. I suppose in the end the culture exchange of the grocery store went both ways, with the matrons learning as much about the gluttonous, unsanitary “English” as we learned about the Germans.

Saturday morning we got down to the serious German business of Christmas at the main market outside the Rathaus. The Christkindel Cafe & Bar hut was our starting point. There, a helpful, green velvet cloaked young man steered us away from our opening gambit of eierpunsch (creamy eggnog) to heidel beer (hot blueberry wine). Husband got his with a shot of rum, and we enjoyed our first drink to the sounds of a trio of south Asian Santas on accordion, sax, and clarinet. Next up was some nourishment in the form of potato pancakes, mine with sour cream and apple sauce, husband’s with a heady remoulade and streaky bacon. To cut the richness, I enjoyed a traditional glühwein while husband doubled down with the eierpunsch he had foregone in the last round. Our switchback tour of the bar huts yielded the new, vaguely-redolent-of-cat-piss-yet-surprisingly-tasty white glühwein and somewhere along the way we split a bratwurst. There was a deviation to an Alpine theme for a raclette and a welcome glass of almost chilled Beaujolais tasting spirit (at this juncture, I was pointing not asking). We finished with a hot raspberry wine to help brace ourselves against the wind and drizzle we faced on our hotel-lent bike ride home. There the Nippon greeted us with the welcome contrast of tatami mats and low, hard-bedded austerity.

Random

A Pilgrim’s Regress

Posted on December 3, 2009

To make it to my Thanksgiving table, a pilgrim need not have left Plymouth. In fact, he would have needed to head 167 miles in the opposite direction to Gloucestershire. Good thing my Thanksgiving was held on the Saturday after the holiday, giving said pilgrim an extra two days to make it. British employers are so uncooperative when it comes to celebrating American holidays on time.

Schedules were not the only challenge to my feast. Certain key ingredients proved illusive, namely the cornmeal and buttermilk called for in my corn muffin recipe. I knew I had a recipe for making buttermilk stashed in a notebook somewhere in the cupboard—a relic from my more active cooking days in Los Angeles—but I only discovered polenta was a legitimate substitute for cornmeal during some post-Thanksgiving Googling. When I found that box of Bisquick hidden away in a corner of the grocery store it seemed like a sign. I figured I could transform the recipe for scones on the side of the box into the American version of a biscuit by leaving out the sugar. Then I could pass off the result as a legitimate traditional Thanksgiving offering to my unsuspecting British guests. It was sticky work, but with the help of half the bag of powdered ingredients to flour my hands and the counter, I pulled it off with no one the wiser that biscuits were best served with sausage before 10AM.

There were a few other cheats along the way. I roasted an enormous turkey breast instead of the whole bird. I bought the pecan pie, a pecan tart really but who was going to notice? It was absurdly expensive, the pain of which was somewhat mitigated by the pronouncement of one guest that it was the best pie he had ever eaten. But when it came to the sweet potatoes, there was no room for compromise. Despite my hunch that the preparation wouldn’t suit the British palate, mine were encrusted with the requisite blanket of grilled white sugary goop, having painstakingly separated two bags of white marshmallows from their pink sisters earlier in the day. The pink ones tasted pretty much the same as the white, but the site of pale pink on the orange sweet potatoes looked just too sixties psychedelic puke for the autumnal tones of the Thanksgiving table. While my guests—doppelganger couple and R+R—seemed genuinely pleased to be trying an authentic American dish, nobody went back for seconds on this one. Of course leftovers are the best part of Thanksgiving, so I counted myself lucky to be able to enjoy my turkey quesadilla with a side of sweet potatoes and a chaser of pink marshmallow straight from the bag.

England

Take Your Beauty Where You Find It

Posted on November 23, 2009

It’s easy to find beauty in the Cotswolds, even in November when the countryside offers up a half-hearted reprisal of spring before the winter sets in. Trees flame up with golden foliage standing in for the oil of rapeseed yellows of May, while the fields that were ploughed under in September now sport a green stubble. But last week I stumbled upon two more unlikely but nonetheless beautiful scenes.

The first was while I was driving on the M25, London’s orbital road about which it’s difficult to say anything pleasant at all. Bored of the deliberate cantankerousness of John Humphrys interviewing politicians on the Today program, I switched off Radio 4 just in time to spot what appeared to be a giant, multi-colored amusement park ride just off the motorway. It turned out to be a lot for cherry pickers, but there was something so striking about the towering height of the machines and their assorted candy colors that they would have looked equally as in place in the Turbine Hall of the Tate as on the edge of the M25.

The second was at 8:30am last Saturday morning when husband and I went to pick up my car in Soho after our Priscilla evening the night before. Early on a weekend morning Soho is almost village-like, barring the occasional but reliable sounds of a jack hammer or car alarm. We stopped into the equally reliable Bar Italia for coffee, where the Formica and neon and lipstick red Gaggia haven’t changed since the middle of the twentieth century when they were first installed. The Christmas decorations were out in the form of pannetone boxes entwined with lights strung from the ceiling. The November morning was mild enough to sit outside, where we were joined by a table of four what can only be described as blokes from the London fire brigade. Next to them sat two slight, twenty-something men discussing the merits of skinny jeans versus boy leggings over their morning coffee.

Cotswolds

Happy Birthday Dorothy!

Posted on November 23, 2009

Sunday we celebrated the ninetieth birthday of Dorothy Watson, owner of the village bakery and matriarch of St. Michael’s in Guiting Power, a title for which she has some competition given the regular church congregation consists of about six other little old ladies. She had indicated in her birthday party invitation (cover of which is pictured) that she hoped her guests would join her at church before the celebratory luncheon, and her request was heeded. The church was fuller than I had ever seen it before, including the harvest and Christmas carol services. Much to the amusement of the crowd, Dorothy heckled her grandson for failing to partake in communion, jokingly calling him a heathen. Thinking out loud in church is a specialty of Dorothy’s, often directed at the vicar and part of the reason I find it so enjoyable.

Afterwards we adjourned to the village hall for champagne and cocktail sausages, fishcakes, cold roast beef, swiss roll and banoffee pie. Dorothy’s grandson made a speech and Dorothy heckled him again. She was toasted by her friends in the Women’s Institute and by her daughter, who barely made it through her salute before bursting into tears. Dorothy looked radiant throughout in her bright red dress, working the crowd and enjoying her day. May we all be so lucky at ninety.

England

FAB-u-LUSSS!

Posted on November 21, 2009

We spent a rare Friday night in London last night to see Priscilla, the musical based on the film Priscilla Queen of the Desert, with R and R, aka the only gays in the village (although strictly speaking that isn’t true, I still like to call them that). I am still buzzing from the experience, breaking into the occasional disco classic as I read the paper and soak in the bath. It was just the thing to cheer you up after a dreadful week, one that say started with waking up at 3:30am on Monday morning and not being able to fall back asleep despite the fact you had to get out of bed at 5:30am to drive into London for a day of meetings with your new boss, followed by an 8:45am shouting match in which you are forced to threaten divorce in order to get your spouse to lend you his flat keys since he has given your set away to the plumber and is now inexplicably refusing to part with his, which in turn necessitates that you have to pay an extra non-expensable £15 to park in one of only two garages in Soho because it is supposedly ‘closed’ for construction unless you agree to have your car washed, all so you can be marginally on time. Let’s just say the week continued as it had started and a big gay— in both senses of the word—musical was just the thing to salvage it. It was like going to the best disco ever on Halloween in West Hollywood (only you could sit without feeling conspicuous). My favorite costume hands down was the literal take on Who Left the Cake Out in the Rain—a giant cupcake with illuminated candle hat covered by a transparent umbrella streaming tinsel. The tickets were comps from husband’s work, proving he is useful for something if not keys. He reported that bar takings at Priscilla are setting records, a trend with which we happily aligned.