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Defeat Looks Like Joe Biden

Posted on October 4, 2008

It’s an interesting thing watching the debates from abroad because I am seeing them a day or two later than when they took place. I’ve already heard the press coverage, which in the UK decreed the vice-presidential debate a draw, neither harming nor helping either campaign. There was the admission that Palin had held her own in contrast to the snippet of her unraveling in the Katie Couric interview which was also widely shown on British news outlets. I am beginning to think what we saw of that in the UK was as edited as the snippet of the Queen storming off during an Annie Lebovitz photo session last year, which cost a BBC producer his job.

For my money, defeat looks like Joe Biden, that is if I could get him to look at me. He spent the whole debate making eye contact with Gwen the moderator, which seems like a waste since I’m pretty sure his ticket already has the black, female vote sewn up. It didn’t help that he smiled like the joker whenever Palin delivered a blow or referred to himself in the third person ala Bob Dole.

But it didn’t really matter what Biden did because I wasn’t paying attention to him anyway. The debate was like watching a Destiny’s Child video and Sarah Palin was Beyonce. I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she winked, hokumed, and “you-guys”-ed her way through the questions.

I admit I have formed a minor obsession with Palin, and after a bit of soul searching I think I’ve figured out why. She is another embodiment of Amber the homecoming queen, student body president, and cheerleader. Watching her I regress twenty years, simultaneously seduced by and jealous of the most popular girl at school. Nobody is paying attention as I wave my straight A’s in the air; they’re all watching Amber do the splits.

As in high school I am lacking the maturity to resist the petty swipe. And so I invite Ms. Palin to make use of her newly acquired passport to come see for herself what a healthcare system “controlled by the feds” really looks like. I think she’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Uncategorized

A Charitable Affair

Posted on October 3, 2008

So far husband is still employed, smoking only tobacco, and staying away from high school cheerleaders. (I’m not even sure if they have the latter in the UK.) He is instead doing the respectable country gent version of pulling a ‘Kevin Spacey in American Beauty.’ This consists of drinking beer in a barn with other men and two strippers imported from the big city likes of Birmingham. It’s all for the sake of a cancer charity so how can I say no? And it leaves me free to jeer with abandon at Sarah Palin when Channel 4 broadcasts a recorded version of last night’s debate.

I’m sure the men in the barn wouldn’t mind a striptease from Sarah. As pointed out elsewhere, her up do and glasses lend themselves to the clichéd image of the librarian/teacher/insert safe woman career here, unfurling her hair and whipping off the glasses to reveal the sexpot within. Sarah is welcome for a bit of Cotswold burlesque anytime. I’d just prefer she stay away from The White House.

Random

What’s in a Name?

Posted on September 29, 2008

Amber. It sounds like a mean cheerleader. And wedding and motorcross sport event planning sounds exactly like the kind of job Amber the mean cheerleader would have when she grows up. That or an aggressive realtor in the model of Annette Benning’s character in American Beauty.

The real life Amber who taught my wedding planning course in Bath this weekend looked the part of a former cheerleader. Slim with blond hair and blue eyes, she also would have been the homecoming queen and student body president. She is the cheerleader you couldn’t help but love, nothing like the mean Heather or obnoxious Tiffany types.

As if to reinforce the high school paradigm, there was one man in my class of ten women, and he looked exactly like Rod Whited, captain of the mighty Green Wave football team. Then he opened his mouth to speak and all of a sudden Rod Whited had a Yarmouth accent, shattering my trip down memory lane. All the better, there was a mood board and some craft glue calling my name.

Sixteen classroom hours later I am the holder of a diploma from an accredited professional wedding and events planner institution. I’ve also become some kind of cliched nightmare of an aspiring small businesswoman. Today at work I toggled back and forth to a surreptitious Word document where I was constructing nauseating prose in the third person for my website profile (Bob Dole says…). Tonite I procured every possible variation of my company domain name, then spent the rest of the evening fiddling with the Vista Print free business card online editor. I’m now the one in danger of becoming the Annette Benning character in American Beauty, albeit a bit fatter. I won’t worry until husband quits his job and starts lifting weights, smoking pot and chasing a high school cheerleader.

Random

Wedding Planning School

Posted on September 25, 2008

Having discounted my plan to top the proprietress of The Cotswold Ice Cream Company and assume her identity as a far too risky and frankly not very nice way to attain the rural entrepreneurial dream, I have signed up for wedding planning school in Bath this weekend.

Yes, I am still employed in my proper London job, but husband and I have been harboring the secret, embarrassing dream of starting The Cotswold Wedding Company. Being an obsessive compulsive project manager at my core, I will gantt chart brides’ rural wedding dreams into reality while husband films it all for the happy couples to enjoy for years to come.

I’ve just received an email informing me that my tutor for the weekend will be international wedding & motorsport event planner Amber Hunter. I am a little afraid of women named Amber (and motorsports for that matter). Whatever happens to my entrepreneurial dreams, I suspect Amber and her motorsport anecdotes will be good for a few blog posts.

Books Cotswolds Random

Redemption Looks Like Tom Cruise

Posted on September 24, 2008

Last weekend the pheasants appeared en masse in the Cotswolds, the humble brown hens and their queenie male companions tarted up like Louis XIV out for a country stroll. They have invaded the sheep fields, pecking and skittering about the flocks. The first time I saw a pheasant last year I was enamoured. The delight faded after the third or fourth time husband was forced to slam on the brakes to avert a panic-stricken pair who decided to run out in front of the car. They are stupid birds, and I pity the sheep.

The pheasants were the most idyllic thing about last weekend. It was tits up* from the start, which was marked by an aborted attempt to get out of town on Thursday night that ended with an argument at a West London gas station. We made it out on Friday in time to attend a long planned dinner party where I drank too much. Attempts to exorcise the hangover on Saturday with painkillers and fresh air failed where dinner at a Mexican chain restaurant in Cheltenham succeeded. The pleasure of the latter was promptly undone by going to see Mama Mia!.

Oh, Meryl.

The film produced an allergic reaction in me, triggered I suspect by Pierce Brosnan singing. The upside was that my sneezing drowned out the sound of husband’s blame for the film selection all the way home.

Sunday started full of promise with a trip to a charitable country house car boot sale (aka a flea market). It was planned for the grounds of Lord Vestey’s estate, Stowell Park, but was moved to a disused airfield in the next village over due to flooding. It’s been dry for a good week so I am cynical about the motives. I think Lord Vestey thought better of having the masses invade his estate, who were indeed a different crowd than the plant loving elderly crew from the previous open gardens day at Stowell Park.

Lord Vestey had hinted at royalty in attendance in the promotional interview I had read in this month’s Cotswold Life magazine. Instead we got Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (think cable show interior designer if you’re American) and donations to a silent auction from HRH Princess Michael of Kent. She proffered a purple velvet bag of potpourri and a set of miniature wooden Christmas figurines, both of which looked just about worthy of a shelf in Oxfam. Honestly, she’s letting the royals down. Charlie is going to have to open another organic food porn store in the area (have I mentioned the newish Highgrove shop in Tetbury?) to make up for it. I had to go sit down in the shade with a half pint of 7.7% Old Rosie cider just to get over the disappointment.

Sunday descended into nothingness with husband bitter, complaining, and getting on my nerves—a pheasant to my sheep. On cue, the alarm failed to go off Monday morning and when we did get back to London there was no hot water thanks to some fault with the boiler.

Things only got better last night when we went to see Ben Stiller’s flick, Tropic Thunder. Tom Cruise as Les Grossman showing off his best dance moves since Risky Business was alone worth the price of admission.

*Speaking of “tits up,” I recommend Annie Proulx’s new book. One of the stories, “Tits Up in a Ditch” was published in the New Yorker earlier this year and, like Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, the book is worth the purchase price for it alone.

Cycling England

London Love Lost

Posted on September 18, 2008

This morning was crisp and sunny, the start of a perfect autumn day. That and the fact I was running late motivated me to ride my bike to work, something I’ve done far too infrequently of late. Implausible as it may sound, I can make it in faster on a bike that on a bus. The other advantage of a bike is I can’t use my BlackBerry.

As I was riding along Kensington Palace Gardens, a grand private street (but public to cyclists) housing many of the world’s embassies to the UK, I was feeling a bit of affection for London that I haven’t felt for a long time. For once, the superiority of the countryside wasn’t readily apparent. I even thought I’d blog about how much I liked London today.

Then I turned onto Kensington High Street, the busy thoroughfare at the bottom of embassy row. Police were everywhere, and, whoa, that’s a helicopter parked in the middle of the road. People were gawking and holding up mobile phones to photograph or video the scene. We were close to a tube and a terrorist attack crossed my mind, but the emergency vehicles were more fire brigade than bomb squad. Despite riding my bike I was still late, so I moved on.

Once at work my colleague explained the ruckus: a cyclist had been knocked off of his or her bike by a double-decker bus. The air ambulance was called and apparently an emergency leg amputation had to be performed. Suddenly my feeling of virtuousness about riding my bike to work seemed naive and misplaced. My London love evaporated as quickly as it had appeared.

Cotswolds Cycling

Post Mistress Envy

Posted on September 15, 2008

Nothing has come of the talk of an Indian Summer, but it was dry on Saturday so husband and I set off on a favorite bike route. Like many of our “healthy” activities, this involves several stops for refreshments, the first of which is a pot of coffee at the post office in the village of G.P. The post office closures that caused outrage up and down Britain when announced in the spring have finally caught up with postmistress Chris. Her service has been scaled back to twice a week and she is trying to compensate with an increased emphasis on the shop. She’s even become an agent of a rural dry cleaner.

While we were drinking our coffee an older local lady came in and introduced her also mature friend to Chris. This friend had become something of a local hero for putting up a fight that saved her own village post office. Tall and stick-straight, she had an unruly yet regal shock of white hair. She was dressed in sensible country attire of the corduroy and v-neck jumper variety that’s not particularly age or gender specific. She was also quite hard of hearing and greeted congratulations from Chris with a harsh “what?” as if it was Chris at fault for not speaking up. I could imagine why local officials backed down from her. I too wanted to congratulate her, having been enamoured with the concept of the post mistress ever since I watched the BBC production of Lark Rise to Candleford over the winter. It follows 19th century life in two rural villages in nearby Oxfordshire with a feisty postmistress, Dorcas, as protagonist. It’s a British version of Little House on the Prairie and I can’t wait for the second series.

After G.P., it’s a short but hilly ride to the next village over, which happens to have a good pub. There I rediscovered the culinary delight that is a pickled egg nestled in a bed of ready salted crisps as we surfed the weekend papers. This combination of vinegar and salt / soft and crisp achieves the same balance of flavour as the breakfast food that previously inspired me to poetic ends in this blog: fried bread and marmalade (which I proudly compared, in verse, to fruit compote and foie gras terrine).

One more steep hill and across a ridge before we ate our packed lunch of coronation chicken sandwiches in the tourist village of Lower Slaughter. There I also hit Christmas gift gold. Yes, I know it’s only September but one has to take advantage of these things when one comes across them. So as not to completely give the surprise away I will just say it involves naked British farmers and a charitable cause.

The last leg is the hardest. First it’s down through Bourton-on-the-Water, which has excellent public toilets but other than that is notable only for more teeming hordes of tourists. Then it’s up for a long time. There’s a nice bench on the ridge to catch your breath before the hills start to roll again. The Cotswolds Ice Cream Company (see Saturday’s blog) is conveniently placed at the end of the route for motivation.

Cotswolds

Murder, She Blogged

Posted on September 13, 2008

I want to kill someone. My target is the proprietress of Cotswold Ice Cream. I shall then assume her dreamy identity, creating and pedalling fair-trade dairy products from her hilltop farm.

I was inspired by a recent article in the New Yorker about Frédéric Boudin, a Frenchman and professional impostor. His biggest con was getting the Spanish authorities to believe he, at the age of 23, was a missing child from Texas who had been kidnapped by a European porn ring. The American authorities flew him to Texas where he was reunited with the family of the missing teenager. He lived with them for nearly five months before being exposed by a local private eye. The story is extraordinary and true, and I’ll put my money on a Hollywood studio having a version on the big screen by next summer.

My cunning plan to achieve the ideal rural life is of course flawed. Bourdin spent six years in a Texas jail, and he didn’t even kill anyone. Should any local law enforcement be reading this, you can relax. For now I will content myself with a tub of Cotswold Ice Cream’s passion fruit and mango madness.

Cotswolds Random

Protestant Guilt

Posted on September 11, 2008

Since I mentioned Protestant guilt in a recent post, I thought I’d expand on the theme. Both husband and I have it, a legacy from mothers who regularly dragged us to Sunday school. It generally takes the form of “we don’t deserve this,” and the intensity varies depending on the volume of wine consumed and number of telephone customer service reps I’ve lost my temper with that particular week. It’s a more vanilla type of guilt than the sex/mother anxiety and acting out I’ve observed in my lapsed Catholic friends (and Fellini). How typically Protestant.

I try to tell myself mitigating things like our cottage is the size of a shed on the estate of a truly rich Cotswoldian. It doesn’t really work. Nor is there any solace in the £50 contribution to charity that’s automatically deducted from each of my paychecks. In fact, I’m embarrassed to write down the number because it’s so low. There’s just no getting away from the fact that we own three properties (the third is our LA rental), are middle class and overfed.

I can’t justify why a second home or any number of the other excessive things I do—£16 hair conditioner and eating out five times a week to name a few—are ok in a world as fucked as ours, but then again two Zen masters could never really satisfactorily explain to me why “everything is exactly as it should be.” In the past year I’ve just accepted that I like the sound of church bells and birds, witnessing the seasons, and that being in the country seems to have some chemical effect for the better on husband’s depression. On a good day, I even try to be grateful.

Cotswolds

Cotswold Cult Explained – The Court Leet

Posted on September 10, 2008

Today as I was wedged underneath a London conference room table unplugging my laptop, a man popped his head in to ask if I knew where so and so was. With my ass still in the air I called out that I did not know so and so, but this man seemed to know me. He enquired if by chance I had been in a butcher shop in our Cotswold town over the weekend clad in lots of lycra and a bicycle helmet. I had. What are the chances of being caught in two compromising situations in one week by the same person?

It turns out I am not the only employee of my company to have discovered the charms of our lovely little Cotswold town. T. has lived there for 16 years, commuting into London every day. We exchanged lots of gushing about our town, things like the joy of walking out your front door to pick blackberries for a cobbler. Then he started telling me about an annual town dinner called “The Leet,” and it clicked that this was what G. was describing to us the wine bar a few weeks prior.

My vision of a Cotswold cult was wide of the mark, but this is a case where truth is better than fiction. It’s the kind of thing that an American eats up about living in England. Even husband was charmed by the revelation.

The annual Court Leet dates back to 1227 when King Henry III granted our town a charter entitling it to a weekly market. The town’s men have an unbroken record of meeting for the Leet annually since the charter was granted to elect honorary officials to oversee the market. Their duties include making the rounds of the local pubs and reporting on the quality of the brews. The Leet is a sort of democratic state of the union, only about important things like beer. Children get in on the action too, roaming the streets banging tin cans. When they knock at your door you are supposed to ask them who the new High Bailiff is and give them a coin for their can, a capitalist version of Halloween.

An invitation is a tricky thing, fraught with sensitivities. Some men who have been resident for years have yet to receive one. If G. pulls it off for husband it will be a coup. I’m not banking on it as G. is prone to bluster, but, for the blog’s sake, I hope it comes through.