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.
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.
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.
Took the day off to get highlights and a cut in London today. I may have embraced rural life, but I’m not quite ready to entrust my locks to the ladies at Vuolo, the one room beauty parlor over the Chinese takeaway in our Cotswold town. On my way back from the salon in Covent Garden, I spotted a sign for Anthropologie on Regent Street. The store is still under construction but it looks like the pseudo-vintage haven will be with us in time for the holiday shopping season. Now if the UK would only get Taco Bell and Target (oh, and the sun), I might never need to go back to the states.
Moi! I am back from Helsinki having unlocked the secrets of the sauna. First, the saunas are, mercifully, segregated by gender. Second, the sauna is optional. In fact, the two other Finnish women attending my meeting suggested we just drink a beer while the men roasted themselves, which we did while watching the sunset over the sea. They promised next time I return we’ll drive up to Lapland for the weekend where they’ll take me to a wood burning—this electric stuff is a sorry substitute for the real thing.
I did a little better at creating an authentic experience when it came to food, although things did not get off to a very promising start. For my first meal I tried to sample cabbage rolls—which sounded suitably traditional—but the office canteen had run out. This left me with something called the American pork sandwich, which turned out to be a pork stir-fry in a bun served with coleslaw and pickles and not as bad as it sounds. Things got better over dinner at the Finnish Restaurant (a name that says it all about the forthright style of Finns), a rustic wood paneled grotto in downtown Helsinki with a menu full of elk and reindeer and schnapps. I started out with an unadventurous Finnish goats cheese salad, but my colleague did share a piece of bear salami from his Finnish take on a charcuterie plate. This was followed by pike perch and beetroot rosti, the first of much beetroot over the trip, washed down by lingonberry schnapps. My Finnish colleagues promise to take me to Zetor, otherwise known as the Tractor Bar, for more schnapps and traditional food next time I visit. I looked at Zetor’s menu on their website and found the following example of Finnish sensibility, as good a reason to return to Finland as a wood burning sauna in Lapland:
Zetor presents: Gone with the broth
(G) EUR 9.50 / EUR 14.90
The movie of the night is the romantic
Gone with the Broth. The events
of this Poscar-winning movie take
place in a bowl where the budding
love of potatoes and onions is tragically
transmuted by a rainbow trout
that cuts in. The blend wouldn’t be
perfect without the mysterious white
wine that creates more of a mix-up.
Directed by Creamy Soup.
It’s official: summer is over and Christmas will be here in what will feel like three days from now. I know this neither because rust and gold are already sneaking into the Cotwolds foliage (they are) nor because my black turtleneck sweater is in regular wardrobe rotation (it is), but because today I made my first Christmas present purchases. I spent a ludicrous sum on two exquisite, leather-bound notebooks at the Smythson of Bond Street outlet in Heathrow’s Terminal 3, the kind of impulse purchase I can only justify as a gift even when it is VAT-free. The shop assistant spent so much time tying navy blue, grosgrain bows on the various layers of packaging (which no doubt account for a considerable portion of the ludicrous sum) that I almost missed my flight to Helsinki.
It may have been I was subconsciously trying to miss the flight. When the business trip was first suggested a couple weeks ago, I was excited having never been to Finland. Then an Outlook invitation showed up in my inbox requesting my presence for a sauna following the meeting. There are few things I can think of that I would like to do less than see my mostly male work colleagues in a state of semi-undress, a sentiment I am sure they reciprocate. The prospect has been lingering in my psyche like a bad smell for the past week, surfacing occasionally with ill-timed arrivals of mental images of my sweaty, beet-faced co-workers sporting only a thin, white towel.
And should I steel myself and adopt the when in Rome attitude, just what exactly is the etiquette for a sauna? Bathing suit, towel only, is it really mixed gender à la the Ally McBeal bathrooms? As I ponder the smorgasbord of opportunities to embarrass myself, I suddenly feel like a very, very uptight American. The only way through this is going to be with humor, and I resolve to adopt that most admirable characteristic of my fellow Brits: the ability to take the piss out of oneself.
Since taking up residence in the Cotswolds one of the things I’ve observed about the local species of Toff is that they do not engage in anything an Angeleno would recognize as cardio exercise. They drink and smoke in copious amounts and, like a Parisian woman, stay infuriatingly thin. No Toff would be caught dead in lycra or running shoes, their idea of sporting clothes extending only to jodhpurs or plus fours in a nice, understated tweed.
I know all this because as a frequent wearer of lycra and running shoes on weekends, sometimes even in the polite company of the wine bar where I might stop in to fuel up with a morning coffee before a jog, I appear to be the source of much mirth. Such was the case on Saturday morning when Boot (all male Toffs of a certain age have a schoolboy nickname that is totally inappropriate for their current age and standing) took time out from selecting half a case of wine to mock my apparel. I am fairly certain it is all in good fun as he finished his roasting with an invitation for drinks that evening. Husband and I accepted, with a promise to bathe and remove any trace of lycra or Asics before our arrival.
The Boylestone Annual Show has been a constant in my life since moving to England, so I suppose it’s only natural that this year’s, my fifth, felt like a milestone in my Great British adventure and put me in a reflective mood. Boylestone is, after all, where the seed for the Cotswold chapter germinated. It started as a rural escape from that annual summer calamity, the Notting Hill Carnival, that invaded our London neighborhood. In those Derbyshire hills husband and I developed our taste for the kind of deep sleep only possible between cold sheets in a lone farmhouse under silent starry skies, daytime vistas of green speckled with white sheep, and country pubs filled with eccentrics from British central casting. No wonder we felt at home when we first stumbled upon our local wine bar, a Cotswold incarnation of Boylestone’s Rose and Crown, way back when we used to rent a cottage in G.P. for the weekends.
It went unspoken, but when we first bought our Cotswold cottage husband and I both thought we were somehow buying our way into a less complicated, healthier, more certain way of life. Isn’t that what the rural dream is all about? (We should have just asked a farmer who surely would have warned us about the whims of Mother Nature.) Never mind we were both still working in London, merely sampling the country life on weekends. On the surface at least some things changed. Tweed and waterproof clothing took on an increased significance in our wardrobes. Vocabularies expanded to include a language of dogs and foxes and horses and guns and tweed clothing for doing things with dogs and foxes and horses and guns, a language that was once as impenetrable to me as my high school Latin book.
But even when I left my London job and started living here more or less full-time, rural life refused to play by the rural dream rules. The most notable example of this lack of karmic cooperation was when my nervous system decided to attack itself back in March, starting the flirtation with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Even in the diagnosis stage, MS is a mysterious disease offering little in the way of explanation of its origin or prognosis. The process has been like engaging with a Zen koan, a medical imperative to embrace the Buddhist principle of living in the present and make friends with not knowing.
But even with a health scare encouraging me, I haven’t managed to embrace the slower way of life that was part of the rural promise. This became obvious to me a few weeks ago when, sitting in my boss’s boss’s boss’s office in a suburb of Boston I found myself telling him that I was “in a good place in my life” to take on more work. My awkward confessional was in response to a series of roundabout questions he had posed, a white American male’s politically correct way of asking a woman in her middling thirties if she had young children or was planning on announcing a pregnancy anytime soon. My response came without hesitation, which also proved to me I’d reached a milestone in my perception about the prospect of developing MS. I would be in denial to believe I was any less at risk having now cleared five months without symptoms, but I am relieved to find that the threat no longer hovers about my psyche exerting undue influence. My boss’s boss’s boss was thinking of kids not chronic disease, and I was clearly thinking of neither. I answered like I never managed to answer a koan, without a second thought.
Life in the country hasn’t done much to simplify husband’s existence either. He is still commuting between London and bliss, and the availability of bliss has only thrown the inhumanity of London life into sharp relief, an opinion which has recently found expression in his formation of a London is a Toilet Facebook group. Alas long walks in the woods may be palliative, but they are no cure for depression. As Horace wrote in Epistles, I, xi (courtesy of Harry Eyre’s Slow Lane column), “Those who cross seas change only the weather, not their state of mind.” (If only I had paid attention in those high school Latin classes…) Having crossed one sea to get here in the first place, husband is starting to suspect he is part of the problem — in his words, “everywhere I go, there I am.”
In Boylestone this year I found that, like my life, things had changed but somehow stayed the same. The show was joyfully familiar—mammoth leeks, tea and cakes in the village hall, Derek’s effective auctioneering techniques (sitting on one knee in front of the bidder and begging, “C’mon ladee, c’mon” to get another pound for that jar of lemon curd). But at the pub I learned that Dick, the father-in-law of the Rose and Crown landlady and enthusiastic domino playing regular who once taught me a joke about a Yorkshire butcher, died earlier this year. The better part of eight hundred people including the local hunt in full regalia turned up for his funeral, filling not just the village church but its lawn too. Of course life has gone on, as I was reminded when Peter, another Rose and Crown regular, told me about the pub’s runner bean contest we had missed the weekend before. Prizes were awarded for the longest and crookedest beans and cheating was gleefully rampant, ranging from grocery store bought entrants to, my favorite, a French import flown in the night before.
Saturday we made our way to Derbyshire to attend our fifth consecutive Boylestone Annual Show in which the village of Boylestone, pop. 123, exhibits its finest examples of giant leeks, home-brewed wine, marmalade, beetroot chutney, Victoria sponge, and such. There are first, second, and third place winners, plus a cup winner for each division, and any goods not removed from the hall by 4:45pm are auctioned off to raise money for the church and village hall. But before we got to any of that we made our way to the Rose and Crown for some mid-day refreshment.
The sky was blue which meant the smokers were out on the front lawn en masse. I was delighted to find one of my favorite regulars, David Double-Barrelled, among them. Imagine Prince Charles if he was mustachioed, always wore yellow socks, and had a shadow of alcohol-induced rosacea spreading across his face like errant ivy. DDB was drinking a pint of Pedigree from the crystal mug stored behind the bar for him, and before long he was regaling me with tales of his youthful years in NYC in the late sixties and early seventies.
Now I am accustomed to learning all sorts of useful things in the course of such country pub conversation, particularly that which occurs in the Rose and Crown. Typically the miscellany is of the how-to-make-elderflower-wine or shoot-a-game-bird variety, that is to say distinctly rural. But on this occasion DDB shared with me a rather cosmopolitan lesson from his time in Manhattan: instructions for making a dry martini, courtesy of Bill the bartender at the old Oak Bar at The Plaza. If you ordered a dry martini at the Oak, Bill would fill a glass with gin and finish it with a mere wave of the cap from a bottle of vermouth. If, however, you ordered an extra dry martini, he would fill your glass with gin then call the bartender at the Waldorf Astoria and have him whisper “vermouth” as he held the receiver of the phone over the top of your glass.
On Saturday the fanciest drink on offer at the Rose and Crown was probably a gin and tonic, but one day I hope to make my way to The Plaza and have occasion to ask the bartender to make that call.
When I was twenty-two I sat the Foreign Service exam. I was living in Singapore at the time and my head was filled with images of the diplomatic life, culminating in an ambassadorship. My expectations were in check — while ambassador to France or Italy would be nice, I’d accept being addressed as your excellency in a third world country. Unfortunately it was not to be. I passed the aptitude portions of the exam but failed the personality test, apparently lacking the fundamental building blocks of diplomacy.
Since assuming the mantle of dual American and British citizen earlier this year I have found a way to fulfill my dormant ambassadorial ambitions. I now regularly indulge in self-appointed responsibility for defending those aspects of either British or American life that require defending to the respective other side of the pond. I am equally willing to serve as the ambassador of tepid but real beer and cricket as I am of (the majesty of) Target, Taco Bell, customer service, and ice, without which one could not know the pleasures of iced tea. There are, of course, quirks perpetrated by both of my home nations that merit no defense: baked beans for breakfast and Sarah Palin spring to mind. In such cases I invoke a sort of diplomatic immunity which looks a lot like only claiming to be a citizen of the non-offending country.
Of late it appears the UK’s National Health Service (the NHS) requires my ambassadorial services in America. In the past few weeks the insults to this fair institution bandied about on U.S. cable news have infiltrated the British airwaves and inflamed the UK populace. It’s not that the NHS is without fault. It’s more akin to someone criticising your family, as in you’re allowed to speak ill of your own but that doesn’t make it kosher for someone outside the clan to do the same. (Especially when that someone rebelled more than two hundred years ago thereby severing all family ties.)
My personal experience with the NHS over the past four years has been good, even great. What sticks with me most is how my local NHS surgery got me in on the same day earlier this year when I noticed my speech was slurred (and there was no alcohol involved). The NHS GP progressed my treatment rapidly to specialists — who were admittedly paid for by my private health insurance –who got me diagnosed and treated within days. Yes, private health insurance is still widespread in the UK amongst employees of mid to large sized companies despite the existence of the NHS. Private and public care co-exist and, in my experience, cooperate quite nicely in the UK, a situation that currently seems unfathomable to many in the US. But lest you discount my arguments as the preserve of the coddled, privately insured, I offer as evidence my Uncle-in-law Alan, who survived open heart surgery at the hands of the NHS last year and has the pig heart valve to prove it. He can be found in a small village off the Morecambe Bay riding his bike along the canal path or drinking a pint at The Royal on any given day.
Of course the whole defense of the NHS is largely irrelevant in the context of the Obama administration’s current health care proposal. It does not legislate a nationalised health care service at all but rather different mechanisms that are attempting to reach the same end: universal access to health care for citizens. I note with no little shame that America is the only rich country in the world not to have embraced this principle. But my interest is not just in national pride for both of my home countries. It is distinctly personal. Should fate be cruel and decide to cash in the option on chronic illness it took out on my behalf earlier this year, my ability to return to America to live without impoverishing my family will be dependent on the passage of at least one part of the current proposal, that which prevents insurance companies from failing to cover pre-existing conditions. And fond as I am of ice and Taco Bell, returning to America is an option I’d like to keep open.