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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.

Random

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.