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Stranger in a Strange Land

Posted on November 10, 2009

Today I left the Cotswolds at 6:12AM and headed for Heathrow where I caught the 11AM BA flight to Boston for work. I worked until my laptop died, which was really okay since I cracked the screen last week trying to put it on the docking station, which meant I was forced to read and write everything in windows resized to the left half of the screen over which a Rorschach ink blot resembling a leaf was swiftly developing. The right hand side had long ago been lost to a series of 1970s-TV-channel-that’s-lost-its-reception lines. I drank a bloody mary and ate my chicken tikka masala and dug the biscuit bottom crust out of a tub of white chocolate mousse decorated with a ribbon of rust coloured raspberry sauce. I watched an episode of Thirty Rock and wondered if I should be concerned that the television characters I relate to most are Liz Lemon and Larry David. I read the first fifty pages of Julie and Julia and wondered if the fact that I liked it and had liked Eat, Pray, Love and my sister had gotten annoyed by both of the whinging authors meant that I was an intellectually inadequate being. I pissed off other passengers by spending too much time in the lavatory so I could tug at my forehead under fluorescent lights and ponder if botox would do anything for my sagging eyelids. I gave a dirty look to the man in the seat next to me when he burped chicken tikka masala even though he was asleep or pretending to be so didn’t get the chance to experience my silent wrath. I wrote the first part of this blog and there was still 01:52 remaining on the flight clock on the video screen on the seat in front of me…

And when I finally got to Boston I did what all American exiles do when they land in the states: I went to the mall.

Recession? What recession, I ask you?

My god, the mall was packed to the gills, swarming, heaving, writhing with humanity. I headed to Hollister first where I was doing some Christmas shopping on behalf of a colleague whose son very badly wanted a very specific puffy vest type contraption. I had never been in a Hollister. It’s like a J. Crew converted into a nightclub. The music was too loud, the help were 12 and didn’t know shit because they were too busy hitting on each other, and it took about .38 seconds to realize I was not the target demographic. But it didn’t make me feel old; quite the contrary it made me glad to be middle aged.

I must have been a bit jet lagged because I next got the idea to eat dinner in The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant on which a resident-in-America version of myself would have—did in fact—heaped scorn. But somehow flipping through the menu while I waited in line nothing sounded better in the world to me than a BBQ chicken salad, ranch dressing being an odd sort of comfort food for the ex-pat returning home (and let’s face it, downright sophisticated compared to Salad Cream). After a few more minutes of waiting I was told it would take at least 30 minutes for a table. Not being able to face the prospect of further wandering in the mall holding an illuminated 1980’s style drug dealer pager, I recovered my British sensibility: I left the hollow mirth of The Cheesecake Factory halls, checked in to the hotel and ordered room service.

Random

(Random Thoughts on the) Class of ’89

Posted on November 10, 2009

In July I celebrated my twentieth high school reunion with about eighty other classmates in a non-descript hotel ballroom on Fort Myers Beach. Twenty years earlier my friends and I had celebrated our high school graduation with a “beach week” at the Pink Porpoise a mile or so up the road. We were there when the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred, and I remember watching the events unfold on the poky television in the sand encrusted, pine-paneled lounge of our rented cottage. The news was in stark contrast to the vodka and Kool Aid (aka Pink Ladies) soaked days that had preceded it and would follow it; Tiananmen Square was disturbing but failed to dampen the festivities of the remainder of our week. It was perhaps a timely lesson about the degree of apathy and detachment required to be an adult in this world, where any genuine absorption of the constant stream of global atrocities is likely to render one mortally depressed. (Whether that depression is over the atrocities or the apathy in the face of them, I still haven’t figured out.)

Five months later the world was marked by happier news: the Berlin Wall had fallen. Today’s papers are celebrating the 20th anniversary with headlines about the Class of ’89, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, who walked from East Berlin into West that first night. The fall of the Berlin Wall has a personal resonance for me. I spent several weeks in Berlin the summer after seventh grade, visiting my father who was then a Pan Am pilot based there. During that summer I became mildly obsessed with the wall, particularly the Checkpoint Charlie museum with its displays chronicling escape stories — both failed and successful — in hidden compartments of cars, across the river, and over the wall on a James Bond-esque high wire. I remember the day we took a US military bus tour of East Berlin, mostly that we were barely allowed out of the bus and the predominance of grey, as if crossing the city border was crossing degrees of latitude into a drabber, colder place. I visited Berlin again two years after the wall fell, during a semester abroad. I have a framed snapshot of myself from that trip, standing astride two graffiti covered remnants of the wall in an ill-advised pea soup green mock-turtleneck sweater and faded black jeans, looking like I’ve just walked out of the East Berlin of the 1980s.

Two years after I visited a reunited Berlin, I first stepped foot into Tiananmen Square to visit Mao’s mausoleum. I had read about the atrocities Mao committed against his own people, but somehow the mausoleum seemed like a circus attraction and therefore devoid of any reverence. (I had even brought along my copy of Wild Swans, which chronicles life under Mao, to Beijing to see if the hotel would confiscate it. They did.) While I was waiting in the long line to get into the mausoleum I bought a souvenir from a street vendor, a plastic, battery-operated Buddha, about six inches high and spray painted gold. When you rocked Buddha like an overgrown Weeble on his round base, he laughed. I gave the Buddha to my friend Suzanna, who subsequently reported his cackle had provided a disturbing soundtrack to the Northridge earthquake that rocked her house the following January.

Cotswolds

A Quiet Weekend in the Country

Posted on November 9, 2009

Saturday we went to the hardware superstore in Cheltenham where we picked out kitchen cabinets for our new London shoebox and “flame” winter violas for the hanging baskets at Drovers Cottage. On our way home we stopped in to the Wheatsheaf where our local bon vivant, M., was hosting the opening of his new food-themed exhibit, including a print of his personal gastronomic map of Britain. There husband met Giles, owner of the animal crematorium at Fosse Cross, the last stop for beloved local equine pets. Giles told the story of how an Irishman tried to buy the horsetails for use in his rocking horse business. Giles declined, explaining the owners of the horses expected every last bit of them to end up in the urn, although I rather like the idea of a tail being used on a rocking horse as a tribute to a cherished pet.

We acknowledged Remembrance Sunday by attending the local church service. Two plaques commemorating the dead of our town from WWI and WWII are mounted on the wall to the right as you enter the sanctuary. Above them hangs a vintage British Legion flag, and below, a wreath of paper poppies was laid by two elderly gentlemen wearing medals on their lapels.

Afterwards, Jacques, our resident Frenchman (something I highly recommend for every community) approached husband to discuss the upcoming Court Leet seating plan for which Jacques is responsible like some kind of unlikely bride. The all-male Court Leet dinner has been held annually since the thirteenth century in our Cotswold town, and husband is flattered to have been invited back this year. While we talked Jacques bemoaned the very un-French habit the men have of buying a bottle of wine which is jealously guarded at each man’s place, unshared with others, and sometimes swigged straight from the bottle. I suspect it’s a habit that might date back as far as the Leet itself.

Random

Blog Guilt

Posted on November 6, 2009

It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve posted anything on this blog. I was feeling guilty about it, but then I remembered that in the past two weeks I’ve:

  • Flown to Boston then Helsinki for meetings, with a jet lagged 24-hour stopover back in the UK between trips for something masquerading as a weekend. All I remember of it before I was back at Heathrow was an enjoyable Sunday roast at the pub, which was a good move because it meant I didn’t have to eat the curried reindeer penis (only guessing) meatballs Finnair served for dinner on my flight that night.
  • Sold a flat in London and bought and moved into another one on the same day thanks to sheer force of will and endless, occasionally bullying phone calls to solicitors and realtors and mortgage companies. The moving part was done with the sole aid of two guys—one of whom was stoned and smelly yet somehow likable—and their Sanford and Son-esque van-like and certainly unroadworthy vehicle.
  • Braved the streets of central London in a Prius and the price of valet parking at the Swissotel (in fairness I expensed that, but trust me it was still shocking) to attend a meeting in London, before two more days of meetings in an overheated Hampshire country house hotel, then back to London for an evening of fiddles and champagne for charity at the Dorchester.

With all these hotels one could be forgiven for thinking I make my living as call girl. While the truth is far less interesting, my job—and the fact that I’m actually enjoying it—is the main reason why life has gotten so hectic lately, and the main reason why I’ve been neglecting the blog. (The decision to move flats in London was just because husband and I court unnecessary chaos like a heroin addiction.) This is an alarming pattern in my life: as my engagement with the paying work I do increases, my creative life free falls in inverse proportion and vice-versa. During my last job in Los Angeles, the one where I endured working for a hair-gelled Texan named Chad, I somehow found time to complete a part-time professional cooking course. Work was a dead zone but thanks to the cooking, this was one of the most creatively fulfilling periods of my life. (One, I hasten to add, that has not stuck. I was reminded of this last Friday when in the midst of packing up the flat husband shook a plastic funnel in my face, exasperated over my refusal to part with any of my kitchen paraphernalia that was acquired during that “cooking phase,” and shouted, “Get real, you don’t cook anymore!”) And so I despair a bit. My new found job satisfaction may mean I blog a little less. But at least I’ve written this blog. And I kept the funnel.

England Random

Meet My Wardrobe

Posted on October 23, 2009

I have made concessions in my embrace of my newly adopted country. I will call a closet a wardrobe, for example. And yet eager as I am to assimilate, there are some things my other home country just does better, namely closets. The closet is a temple in America. Whole companies have been built around organizing them. They’re feted in films (witness Carrie in Sex and the City). You can WALK INTO THEM.

England on the other hand still seems to think of the closet as optional. Real estate is distinctly void of their presence. Industry professionals inform me it’s done to make places look bigger, but nobody is being fooled here. Suckers we the general public may be, but at least give us credit for realizing we’re going to need to take up some space in the bedroom to hang up our clothes. It is a quirk of British culture as baffling as the prevalence of the front loading washer, the very design of which makes it impossible to toss in that stray sock you dropped on your way to do laundry once the cycle has begun, lest you flood your house. Pressing the start button on a British washing machine is like sealing the space shuttle.

Alas I digress from the disgrace that is closet-less Britain, a situation that over the years has caused me considerable duress. I recall in particular a melodramatic evening spent traversing a rainy and traffic and expletive-riddled corridor of London’s North Circular road to get to a second branch of Ikea before it closed so that we could secure the right doors for two newly purchased wardrobes since having the frames and the doors in stock in the same store was apparently just too much for Ikea’s inventory management system. As a result I now suffer from Ikea-induced post-traumatic stress disorder that can be triggered at the drop of a stubby, bowling-alley style pencil.

You can therefore imagine my delight at the completion of a custom commissioned floor to ceiling wardrobe in Drover’s Cottage just last week. The fantastic carpenter who also made our front door and mantel piece, Gerald, is the man responsible for my joy. He lavished upon her the care and attention required to make her fit snuggly in the wonky angles of the bedroom floor. He measured and cut and sealed and painted her Victorian paneled doors, then adorned them with two substantial, shiny brass knobs. And what lovely doors they are, closing with a satisfying thunk. To me this is a wardrobe as magical as the The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe wardrobe — finally a resting place in England for all my clothes and shoes and power cords and wrapping paper and books husband won’t let me keep by the bed. It is mine, all mine except for a little bit in the corner where I let him hang his kilt.

Cotswolds Random

Falling Off Your Platforms

Posted on October 18, 2009

The Cotswolds continues to deliver up the fabulous. To be fair, the man I have in mind is a resident of Jersey over visiting friends of ours for a long weekend, which is how we came to make his acquaintance at a dinner party last night. Adrian is a hairstylist with more than a passing resemblance to David Byrne—lanky, NBA-height, and a deliberate dresser (last night’s ensemble featured a plaid shirt of earth tones accessorised with a woolen waistcoat, chunky silver bracelet, matching cuff links, and collar pin). I knew the dinner party was going to be a success early on when he responded to my question of how he ended up in Jersey with a story that covered his first job in London styling wigs for Barbara Windsor, moving on to being David Bowie’s Chelsea neighbor, and culminating in a fateful evening in 1973 at Sombrero’s nightclub in Ken High Street (where he used to dance with Jerry Hall and Barbara Hulanicki of Biba) when he fell off his platforms and ended up in St. George’s hospital on New Year’s Eve, after which he decided his love affair with London was over and headed for the Channel Islands. He has lived there happily ever since with a pointer and a pussy for company. Somehow my own retreat to the rural life seems the most loathsome bourgeois, vanilla, pedestrian odyssey ever, except for the part where I get to meet the Adrians of the world.

Cotswolds

Man Creche

Posted on October 5, 2009

…Or the latest reason I love my town.
This sign appeared in the window of the wine bar last week:

Ladies are you tired of trying to entertain the man in your life?
Do you need some free time without him getting in the way?
The answer’s easy: The Man Creche
 
Simply drop the little rascal off with us. Here he can play with friends in a secure and encouraging environment until you are ready to collect him.
We’ll keep him warm and fed and, don’t worry, he won’t go thirsty.
Random

Speaking in Tongues

Posted on October 2, 2009

Went to Germany last weekend to visit my sister, which is how I ended up at dinner with an analyst from the Department of Defense, another from the State Department, and three Scullies. Scully is my term for a female FBI agent, not theirs, but I thought I’d join in the spirit of their lingo heavy conversation. Never mind we were eating at a Greek restaurant in Stuttgart—ordering was a breeze compared to trying to follow the dinner table conversation. First there was “bu” this and “bu” that, as in the first syllable of Buick, which I had to have explained to me as shorthand for the bureau. Then there were IAs and IRs and lots of ASACS. (I gleaned that anything that starts with an “I” stands for intelligence but an ASAC remains a testicular sounding mystery.) Did I mention CDC and ACDC? Both refer to some kind of counsel, the latter surely being the coolest title a lawyer can ever expect to have. I spend half my corporate life trying to keep track of an ever evolving onslaught of special projects and programs and roadmaps with names like Bolt and Tango or meaningless three-letter acronyms (yesterday I was informed by my colleagues in a call that no less than three projects were running under the acronym of DCS so could I please spell it out). In short, I was pretty sure my current monolith of an employer had swept the category of code name proliferation. Imagine my surprise at discovering that the federal government crushes the private sector. The disappointing thing was that all this code was facilitating the same kind of banter you’d find at any old corporate campus water cooler: all about re-orgs and unfair promotions—how did that guy get the post in Barbados? — and pain in the ass audit and compliance requirements. Admittedly when the bitching turned to bosses the State Department employee sounded a little more glamorous. He reports good reviews of Hilary—a vast improvement over Condie and Madeleine and perhaps on par with an old favorite, Colin.

Books England

The Lie

Posted on September 29, 2009

The Wheatsheaf Inn book club took a field trip to London last Thursday to attend Book Slam, self-described as London’s best literary night club. We went to see William Boyd read, having recently finished his novel, Any Human Heart. Mr. Boyd, or Lord William of Boyd as our emcee referred to him, delivered both the gripping first chapter of his new novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms, and a humorous short story about a man whose life is defined by kleptomania of varying degrees.

The other literary guest of the evening was poet Don Paterson, with whom I was unfamiliar. I have a hard enough time trying to read poetry so I held out little hope for absorbing verse read aloud to a crowded, Chenin Blanc soaked room. But almost a week later it’s one of Paterson’s poems, The Lie, that has stuck with me — not exact words but his image of the lie, a boy of three or four, shackled in some hidden room in his house, grotesque from his years of confinement. A large glass and a half into my own Chenin Blanc submersion and influenced by Paterson’s repeated apologies for reading poems about divorce and death, I interpreted The Lie as being about his own divorce. The boy to whom he tends so faithfully and yet from whom he has remained detached for “thirteen years or more” is any one of the number of small lies in our relationships, lies that somehow culminate in that one big lie, that everything is just fine.

Husband and I have a different approach to our marriage, although I’m not sure it’s any better than the lie. We are, if anything, too honest, holding nothing back, particularly when we fight which is often. Bickering is our lingua franca, escalating more often than I’d like into full-blown, no holds barred, verbal WWF matches in which there are no failures to acknowledge that which the other perceives as lacking: sex, mental health, something to say to each other at the dinner table. Our lie is free, hopped up on sugar, and tearing around the house wailing like a banshee.

Random

Apply Within

Posted on September 24, 2009

A disclaimer: this post has nothing to do with being American or British or in the Cotswolds. Thus you, dear reader, will suffer none of my usual far fetched and occasionally tortured attempts to make the link between what’s going on in my life and the title of this blog. Despite the global economic downturn I have been in the lucky position over the past few months of trying to hire people. The open positions are in Helsinki, Berlin, and Boston, and they have attracted a range of applicants as diverse as those three cities. While I have yet to find the perfect person for any of the posts, it’s been a sometimes entertaining and sometimes exasperating experience reading the hundreds of cover letters and resumes received so far. As most of them applicants present at best tenuous evidence of the required skills and experience, I have no reason to interview them. This is a shame as I am utterly fascinated by a handful and would like nothing more than to sit down and have a chat.With some it’s their earnestness and backgrounds that make me sympathetic. One applicant was a recent immigrant from Turkey to the UK. He had a decent job in IT in Istanbul but had been working as a waiter at Pizza Express since moving to London. My heart bled over the discrimination and frustration I imagined he had experienced, but even if he was right for the job I don’t have one to offer in the UK. Another applicant, Ehsan, wrote in his cover letter that he was “…from Shiraz, the 4th biggest city of Iran.” He went on to say, “Your Company is one of the best choices for me to continue my engineering life and build my career life on it, which has always been my dream.” All of which may be true were I looking to hire a mechanical engineer with a background in metal processing, Ehsan’s specialty. I would, however, love to talk with him about his views on the recent Iranian elections.Then there are the slight nutters, the ones who tell you way too much about their personal lives, like “Without only one exception in Middle Summer Festival 1996, I have never passed out to alcohol nor having alcohol problems!” which is the least crazy thing mentioned in this particular candidate’s cover letter. My favorite is Isabella, who has applied twice, explaining in her most recent cover letter that she “…decided to take a break from London and spend a few weeks in Europe. I feel that this was not enough time but the fact is that I had to embrace a new lifestyle,” thereby managing to be somehow overly familiar and cryptic all at the same time. Isabella, I reach. A few weeks in Europe is never enough time and although I don’t want to hire you, I bet you’d have some interesting stories to share over cocktails.