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My England diary: favorite things

Posted on May 11, 2019

Just back from two weeks in England, half in the Cotswolds and half in London. In the former, there were some disheartening changes to one of our favorite pubs in a neighboring village. The old snug bar has been dismantled, its fireplace-facing easy chairs displaced by a pack of dining tables that lend this fifteenth-century pub all the charm of a high street Pizza Express. Still, I wish anybody willing to take on a country pub well. If it was easy, they wouldn’t change hands and shape so often.

The Golden Fleece, Nelson Street, Stroud

Stroud

My disappointment was allayed when I was introduced to a pub, The Golden Fleece, in Stroud that seems to be getting everything right in balancing old and new. We only had time for a half pint, but I look forward to going back and whiling away an entire afternoon there, as our neighbor seemed to be doing with a pint and a paperback.

Instead, we cycled down the canal to check out the relatively newly renovated Stroud Brewery. It’s wildly different than the original, much larger and slicker, and our hearts initially dropped with the sense that another gem had been lost. Then we found a spot in a snug overlooking the vast beer-hall-style ground floor and, over the course of a few hours and a few pints of Alederflower Pale Ale, had a lovely time chatting with our fellow patrons. Vélo Bakery and Pizza is still onsite in the brewery and provided our excellent dinner.

London

In London, our standout meal was a lunch at the Persian restaurant, Berenjak, in Soho. We sat at the counter and watched the team of cooks work the tiny open kitchen, delivering dish after exquisite dish from the clay tanoor over, grill, shawarma spit, and fryer. We chose conservatively but were still rewarded: hummus with taftoon (sourdough seeded flatbread from the tanoor), an aubergine stew, and a fancy riff on a late night kabab, piled on a bed of fries and topped with a hand-tossed lettuce and onion salad, all washed down with a house lager and a Bibble pale ale.

After lunch, we walked over to Second Shelf Books, the jewel box of a bookstore selling first editions of books by women writers. There’s a profile of it here, and it’s a must-visit if you love book stores. I bought a first-edition of Carson McCullers Clock Without Hands after ogling a much more expensive copy of Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado. Like Berenjak, I’ll be back.

Carson McCullers Clock Without Hands
The spoils of my visit to The Second Shelf: A first-edition Carson McCullers


Books Britain England

My England Diary

Posted on October 21, 2018

Cheltenham Literature Festival

Listening to the radio on the drive to Heathrow after two weeks in England, host Richard Coles (current vicar, former pop-band member) mentions the “deep seams of embarrassment” that are core to the British psyche. His assertion is that tapping into these seams is the key to British stand-up comedy. It strikes a chord with me, too. This more than tea and scones, Shakespeare, cozy pubs or any other emblems of twee Britannia, is the root of my Anglophilia. I am, at heart, a congenitally embarrassed American.

Embarrassment has been a sort of leitmotif of my visit, which coincided with the annual Cheltenham Literature Festival. As with past years when I’ve been able to attend, one of the festival highlights was the event featuring four of the Man Booker Prize finalists (alas not the winner, Anna Burns). When Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room, stood at the lectern and started to read, she immediately interrupted herself to ask the person in the audience that sounded like they were slurping their drink through a straw to please stop. She did this with a sort of comic abrasiveness that elicited a laugh from the audience. No sooner had she started again than she interrupted herself once more to ask the offender to really, please stop. At this point someone near the front of the auditorium helpfully called out to Kushner that the noise distracting her was someone with breathing difficulties. I died inside for Kushner, wondering how she would handle the faux pas. In her shoes, I would have apologized profusely and immediately left the stage while self-flagellating with my belt or whatever object made itself available. Kushner instead gave a subtle, self-deprecating wince and immediately got back to her reading, which was dazzling and therefore effective on its own at moving the audience on from what had just happened.

After the event, all the authors shared a table for the book signing. Robin Robertson, author of The Long Take, a novel partially in verse that was one of the long shots for the prize, sat quietly with his hands folded, waiting for an autograph-seeking reader to materialize while his fellow nominees wielded their Sharpies with abandon. I was in line waiting for Kushner to sign a copy of her book, but such was my unsolicited self-consciousness on behalf of Robertson that I almost bought a copy of his book and asked him to sign it to alleviate my own discomfort—despite having enjoyed his reading the least of the four authors on stage. (Now I feel bad about saying I didn’t particularly enjoy it. To atone for this, I will add that it’s an epic novel about a World War II veteran set in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and you should definitely buy it if that sounds like your kind of thing.)

Me looking not at all embarrassed to be holding a book about poverty while eating in a gastropub.

 

In the end I bought four books over the course of the festival. In addition to Kushner’s The Mars Room, I also got Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari (his talk was the other highlight of my experience at the festival), Olivia Laing’s Crudo, and Sally Rooney’s Normal People (from the delightful The Suffolk Anthology bookstore). In the past I’ve feigned embarrassment on social media over my unbridled acquisition of books, but this is at least one area where I’ve managed to cure my own feelings of self-consciousness. My corporate job is fine as far as corporate jobs go, but the one unfettered joy its compensation brings me is the liberty to buy books whenever the mood strikes, which is often. It’s a pleasure to compensate authors—who pour years of their lives into this work—and stimulate my intellect, or simply decorate my shelves, with this sort of material indulgence. For this I offer no apology, feigned or otherwise.

***

After Cheltenham, we spent a couple nights in London, including one with an old if not particularly close friend of my husband’s. He and his family live in a home in North London that’s like the kind of home you see in a film like Notting Hill. He’s very hospitable—especially considering we see him approximately once every seven or eight years—and most striking, perhaps the least embarrassed British person I’ve ever met.

One way this manifests is in the almost-delightful-in-its-unselfconsciousness amount of namedropping he manages over the course of the ten or so hours we spend in his home. The next morning over coffee my husband and I tot up the list and come up with:

  1. Neil Kinnock, a former British politician who, apropos of nothing, our host informed us was the father of someone he and his family had recently vacationed with.
  2. The actor Damien Lewis’s brother, who is either a producer (like our host) or a director and whose profession I misstated as one of those at some point in the evening, only to be sternly corrected. Our host also gleefully explained how he and Mr. Lewis’s brother refer to Mr. Lewis as a cat’s arse because of the way he puckers his mouth. It is an image I can’t quite shake and am worried is going to affect my enjoyment in watching Billions.
  3. A British actor who plays a captain on Star Trek whose name I can’t remember, but is not Patrick Stewart, who I definitely would’ve remembered.
  4. Richard Curtis (screenwriter of Notting Hill, appropriately), his partner Emma Freud (great-granddaughter of Sigmund), and their daughter Scarlett, who coincidentally interviewed her father at an event I’d attended in Cheltenham the previous Saturday. Our hosts reliably inform us the Curtis clans runs herd over an entire village in Suffolk before thrusting a copy of the new Scarlett Curtis-curated anthology, Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies, at me and insisting I take it. The implication is that their connection to the Curtises has somehow resulted in them having a stash in a cupboard somewhere.
  5. Elton John, mentioned when I asked about a painting hanging in the hallway—a riff on a Penguin book cover—that I liked. Apparently the painter, Harland Miller, is “big with celebrities” like Sir Elton, but our host acquired this piece long before that was the case, natch.

If our host is reading this—which he’s almost certainly not—please don’t be mad, and please keep inviting us to stay at your house every seven or so years so you can regale us with throwaways about famous people. We shamelessly like it.

***

And now on a plane back to California, where I’m writing this. Early in the flight I was annoyed by a young woman speaking loudly. Assuming it was someone wearing headphones who didn’t realize they were talking at such a high volume, I was keen to catch their eye and give them the kind of disapproving look I’ve perfected for such occasions on shared transit. Then, in a flash, I remembered Kushner’s misstep in Cheltenham and wondered if the person speaking loudly may have an impairment. She did, which I discovered shortly into the flight when she was helped to the bathroom by her caregiver. I breathed a sigh of relief I hadn’t given her daggers earlier and said a silent thank you to Kushner for sparing me the mortification if I had.

Britain England

London in a single street

Posted on July 14, 2018

Golborne Road: a tale of two cities

 

London is hardly a one-street town, but sometimes it feels possible to experience the entire city on a single street. Such was my feeling about Golborne Road—a stretch of pavement that starts near the top of its more famous neighbor, Portobello Road, then runs a few blocks before it spits you out in a community garden along the Grand Union Canal—on a late spring visit earlier this year. We have a minuscule flat in Maida Hill, five minutes farther on the other side of the canal, that was unexpectedly free of tenants when we were there, and so we used it to stay overnight before heading home from Heathrow the next day.

My sharpest memory of this road from when we last lived in the neighborhood, almost a decade ago, was seeing David Cameron strolling with his small children during a weekend market. Back then—pre-Brexit disgrace—he was the opposition leader, and it was striking to see such a prominent politician without security out amongst us common folk. The street has gentrified considerably since, so much so that it perhaps no longer offers the backdrop for the sort of man-of-the-people positioning Cameron was likely after at the time. Still, much remains the same, including the tiny-yet-labyrinth Moroccan homewares shop, Fez. Inside we admired cheerfully painted, octagonal side tables, and I sprang for a straw summer bag decorated with a silver tassel and a snail-shaped spiral of sequins.

Other stalwarts of the street include the antiques shop, Les Couilles du Chien, which always reminds me of the Harry Enfield sketch, I Saw You Coming, featuring a shop that’s “basically a bunch of crap that I’ve rather tastefully displayed and a few smelly candles.” (Note: having never actually gone into Les Couilles du Chien, I have no reason to think the “crap” contained therein is anything less than the dog’s bollocks.)

We next turned our attention to two adjacent and new-to-us cafés, both with inviting pavement seating. At Snaps + Rye, we went off piste from the Danish menu and enjoyed a glass of rosé outside. This gave us an excellent vantage point from which to spot a table freeing up outside at Kipferl next door. We swooped in and ordered a carafe of Grüner Veltliner, which arrived on a silver tray with another carafe of water, in the same appealing manner as Viennese coffee service.

Scandie-Austrian on Golborne Road

From here, I watched people doing their shopping at two independent markets directly across the street. One of them, E. Price & Sons, had the most striking visage: on the left, a boarded up, graffiti-strewn incarnation of the exact same cheery, Union-Jack-festooned shop on the right. The only other difference was the description of the shop painted in cursive script underneath “E. Price & Sons.” On the old shop, it read “English & Foreign Fruiterers,” while the new sign had dropped the distinction entirely for the more generic “Fruiterers & Greengrocers.” It seems wholly appropriate on a street featuring Moroccan, Portuguese, Pakistani, Lebanese, Danish, Austrian, and Italian—to name the ones I remember—shops and restaurants, that the words “English” and “foreign” had been rendered superfluous. The notion works equally well for London as for this tiny street.

There are other things I liked about this side-by-side contrast of the old and new shops, not least of which is that there is a word in the English language that makes a retailer of fruit evoke a life of excitement akin to being one of the three musketeers. While “English & foreign” were summarily dismissed in the recommissioning of the sign, “fruiterer” was wisely retained. I also like how, in a world where we are relentlessly tasked—especially by our social-media-platform overlords—with reinventing ourselves, the reincarnation of the fruit shop seems to be giving us permission to say sometimes it’s OK to pack it all in and start from scratch. And it’s just fine to leave our past failures on display. I very much hope to find the dilapidated old shop in exactly the same state when I next visit. If you happen to be there before me and notice it’s been reinvented, please feel free not to tell me.

Dinner that evening was at the excellent Pizza East, at the Portobello-end of the street, then back over the railway bridge where we couldn’t resist stopping in for one last drink at Southam Street. What used to be a pub is now an ambitious-seeming multi-level bar and restaurant with a doorman wearing weather-inappropriate, ominous leather gloves. The wine was more inexpensive than the context implied. As we walked back towards the canal, we passed what appeared to be a very-fun-to-hate members-only club just in the shadow of the brutalist landmark, high-rise residences of Trellick Tower. This caused me to suddenly remember, and curse, a painter who had once dropped and smashed a beloved mug that was decorated with a drawing of Trellick. I was fairly drunk.

On our final morning we crossed the Harrow Road, then the pedestrian bridge over the canal, and headed back to Golborne for our last hour in London. At the Portuguese coffee shop Lisboa, we joined the queue of commuters for inexpensive, delicious black coffee. I mourned my dairy-free diet as I watched my husband consume not one but two custard tarts. (In my pre-vegan days, I particularly enjoyed the chicken croquettes, coxinhas, at Café O’Porto, another Portuguese café on the opposite side of the street.)  It was soon time for us to leave London, and even though the past twenty-four hours had been spent largely on a single street, I felt remarkably well-traveled.

England

The Grandest Race: England’s Grand National

Posted on April 4, 2014

As a makeshift Cotswoldian, my horse racing sympathies should naturally lie with that region’s biggest race of the year, the Cheltenham Gold Cup. But I’ve always been partial to the mayhem that is the Grand National, and not just because I’m married to a Liverpudlian. In honor of the race at Aintree tomorrow, I’m sharing an excerpt from my memoir, Americashire, that helps explain my kinship with it. For context, it takes place immediately after I have been treated for the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis and celebrates long shots of all kinds.

The UK is in love with horse racing, so much so that there are betting tips every day on BBC Radio 4’s flagship morning news program, Today, roughly the equivalent of NPR’s Morning Edition. Another regular segment on this show is Thought of the Day, in which a priest or rabbi or imam offers some spiritual insight in the form of a quickie sermon. That these two segments sit alongside each other without any trace of either irony or discomfort is perhaps the best illustration I can offer of the difference between America and the UK.My first outing following the treatment was to the wine bar to watch my favorite horse race of the year, The Grand National. Miles was working behind the bar, and his reliable reply to my inquiry of how he was—“marvelous now that you are here”—made me feel particularly good that day. He just happens to have a bookkeeper who is also a bookmaker, and so the small group that had assembled was able to call in some bets before the race started. (Between this and the wine, free-range eggs, and homemade marmalade on offer, this place was getting dangerously close to supplying all my needs in life.) I broke my cardinal rule of choosing my bets based on horse’s names I like, instead opting for two tips I read in the appropriately named “How to Spend It” supplement in the weekend Financial Times. This is how I came to have Snowy Morning and Butler’s Cabin to win.

At 4:20 PM, the race got underway in a manner befitting of the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of horse racing. There are no starting stalls in The Grand National. Instead the forty competing horses just rushed the starting line like a school of crazed fish. There were two false starts before the official let them get under way on the four-and-a-half-mile course.

The other distinctive feature of The Grand National is the fences, thirty of them to be exact. They look like giant hedgerows, taller than the horses, some with ditches and water features and names like The Chair and Becher’s Brook. Surviving the process of elimination—which is as much what winning this race is about as being fast—starts at the first jump when a handful of horses or their jockeys or both go down. This continues over every jump, and it is a dramatic, sometimes wrenching sight with horses lolling on their backs and jockeys in a protective, head-clutching fetal position as they try to avoid impact from other horses flying over the fences behind them. A handful of jockeyless horses still make their way around the course at any point in the race, oblivious to the fact that they’re disqualified and generally posing a hazard to everyone else. None of my horses won, but it was no small feat that all three finished. Only seventeen of the forty did.

The finish line was not the only milestone reached that afternoon. After three straight weeks of being patient and solemn and an emotional rock, D finally relaxed enough to start introducing some humor into my recent health scare. He joked with Miles about how it would go down in our small rural community if he left me now that I was a “disabled lady.” Miles replied it would depend on how fast and with whom I then took up, a scenario that, judging by D’s expression, he had failed to consider. Both Miles and Roddy had been a comfort since the whole MS scare had begun. Roddy had confided his own daughter had MS, somewhat demystifying the disease in the process, and Miles had sprung into action, tapping into his network to get advice on the best neurologists in the region. And now, right on cue, Miles was also ready with a bit of deadpan humor.

The joking was a relief to me. Ever since the possibility of MS surfaced, I had been concerned about the impact to D’s depression. But instead of sinking him into one, the experience had the opposite effect. He had been calm and devoted throughout. Although he was dealing with the same terrifying thoughts about the potential impact of this disease that I was, it was as if his subconscious wouldn’t allow him to melt down. We were part of a team, and two of us couldn’t be on the bench at the same time.

I was feeling great but cautious, having made the mistake of spending an hour that morning on WebMD reading up on MS after showing such exquisite restraint with Internet research earlier in my treatment. It was filled with depressing articles called things like “MS and Your Career” or “MS and Intimacy.” The thing that got me most about my prognosis was the uncertainty. Even if I was diagnosed, it didn’t offer much more insight into what happened next. The symptoms I could experience ranged from a little muscle spasticity or feeling like my foot is asleep to loss of bladder control, sudden paralysis, or blindness at intervals of anything from weeks to months to years between episodes. I must have been at that stage in confronting bad news where you try to find meaning in things, because the parallels to the Grand National seemed obvious. First there was the rapid-fire process of elimination that got me to my initial diagnosis: voice-box damage, stroke, and brain tumor knocked out in consecutive days like horses fallen at consecutive gates. And like MS, the odds mean little in The Grand National. The winner, Mon Mome, was one hundred to one, while another favorite, Hear the Echo, collapsed and died in the run in. I took comfort in Butler’s Cabin, one of my bets, who finished in seventh but collapsed shortly after crossing the finish line. He was quickly revived by a dose of oxygen, springing to his feet to the relieved cheers of the crowd.

Christmas Letters England

Letter from the Lake District: Christmas 2013

Posted on December 22, 2013
The Christmas lights on Regent Street in London

I’m writing this year’s Christmas letter in front of a crackling fire in the resident’s lounge of possibly the best pub in Britain, the Britannia Inn in Elterwater, Cumbria. Our trip to England has so far been an embarrassment of rural idyll riches, having started in the Cotswolds where, for the first two weeks, we requisitioned the flat of our dear friends (a.k.a., Rupert and Ralph) and finished out the remaining work weeks of the year. We’ve now embarked on the northern leg of our journey to spend Christmas and Boxing Day with husband’s family, starting with an interlude in the Lake District.

The Britannia Inn, Elterwater, where we nearly divorced while arguing over the answer to Maggie Smith’s Oscar winning film during the pub quiz

Between all the bucolic bliss, we managed to spend 2 nights at the Portobello Hotel in Notting Hill, which I highly recommend if you want to feel like you’re in a Richard Curtis film. The room featured a freestanding bath tub with a view of a private garden (yes, just like the one Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant broke into in that film). Breakfast in the sitting room consisted of the most beautiful heap of scrambled eggs sitting atop a piece of toast with the crusts trimmed off. It arrived, of course, beneath a silver dome. All this pampering didn’t come without its price, but seeing as we were celebrating husband’s 39th birthday for the tenth time, it seemed apropos.

Favorite breakfast ever. Certain it was made by Mary Poppins.

We also managed to indulge in a little shopping, spurred on by the discovery of the charming shop, Stumper & Fielding on the Portobello Road. On a stretch of London that’s been blighted by tat, Stumper & Fielding is a bastion of English sartorial standards, from Tootal scarves to Loakes brogues. Husband got so carried away he purchased a pair of booties of the latter make in a size too big, a fact he failed to notice until he had marched the length of Kengsington Gardens, Hyde Park and Mayfair to deposit ourselves at the Duke of York’s theater for an evening of Jeeves & Wooster (splendid, go see it if you’re in London). Blistered and bruised, he hobbled into Stumper & Fielding in the morning to find that, amazingly, for only a pittance to cover the re-soling, they were willing to exchange the shoes. What could I do but buy myself a velvet-collared Harris Tweed blazer to express my gratitude at their professionalism?

Husband, crippled by his new shoes, leans on his favorite shop

Here I will pause for a moment to acknowledge my self-consciousness at the outpouring of wonderful life-ness I have just directed you to read. I fear you may be finding this year’s Christmas letter devoid of the gleeful Schadenfreude you had hoped for, and I wish to provide comfort. You see, this is a Christmas round-up letter, which means I am practically legally obligated to only write about pleasant events. Rest assured that I, in fact, pay very good money to a very nice lady each week to divulge my life’s tribulations. I think we can all agree that’s the appropriate place for such strife.

I did toy briefly with the idea of telling you about my challenges earlier this year of finding an MS medication that didn’t involve a needle and feeling like I had the flu on a weekly basis. But then I was reminded of the dreaded part of my weekly telephone conversation with my mother in which she debriefs me on the maladies of people I last saw thirty years ago. Terribly dull stuff, so, suffice it to say, I have settled on a twice-daily pill that also happens to be used industrially to make foods taste sour. Its worst side effect is to occasionally give me ruddy cheeks. If it makes you feel better, you can also use the MS narrative to justify the indulgence described above—you know, ‘life’s short, live it while you have your health’ kind of stuff. But, let’s face it, we both know I was a skilled indulger before the arrival of that dratted disease.

You may also take some comfort in the fact that my first book, Americashire, failed to, ahem, crack any bestseller lists. Somehow, despite this, it was the highlight of my year: a fantastic education marked by some terrific moments. These include meeting my fellow inaugural She Writes Press authors at our joint event in Berkeley in May and collecting the Indie Reader Discovery Award for Travel Writing at Book Expo America in New York in June. Husband was a supportive presence at both, and a big hit with the literary ladies. I also have a debt of gratitude to all of you who so patiently put up with endless self-promoting tweets and Facebook posts. Some of you were even so kind as to buy the thing and write nice stuff on Amazon and Goodreads. Thank you. You can’t imagine how much your actions mean.

Me at Book Expo America, prouder than I have any right to be

Back in California there were highlights, too, including our BYO Zen sitting group, seeing husband’s two idols, Shatner and McCartney, on stage together in a benefit for the Los Angeles Shakespeare Center, and our discovery of Ojai, or, as we like to call it, the Cotswolds of California (which I wrote about here). And so, friends, I think this place of gratitude for the year is a good one from which to take my leave. A pint and a packet of Scampi Fries await me in the pub. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

England

Best of the British Isles: A Gift Giving Guide for Anglophiles

Posted on November 6, 2013

It’s November, which means (hurrah!) it’s socially acceptable to start talking about holiday shopping. If you’re in need of a gift for the Anglophile in your life—even if that’s you—look no further than my list of favorite things hailing from or inspired by the British Isles.

Riley’s Gastronomic Guide to the British Isles

For the Foodie

Riley’s Gastronomic Guide is a charming illustrated map of all things edible in the British Isles. How else is a self-respecting Anglophile supposed to know where to find Star Gazy Pie?

It may not have made Riley’s Gastronomic Guide, but Grasmere Gingerbread in the heart of the Lake District deserves a mention. The village is best known for Dove Cottage, William Wordsworth’s former home, but the gingerbread that’s been produced there since the mid-nineteenth century is equally poetic. Luckily they deliver overseas.

You’re going to need some tea to wash down all that gingerbread and, short of moving to the Cotswolds, a piece of china from Emma Bridgewater is the easiest way to invoke that feeling of English cottage cozy. Plus, this line of English pottery has managed to do the seemingly impossible in creating tasteful tat to commemorate royal events. Prince George mug, anyone?

For the Dandy

When we first moved to the Cotswolds, the Cirencester-based gentlemen’s clothier, Pakeman, Catto & Carter, was the destination of choice for my husband to suit up in the local garb (think corduroy, tweed, and the occasional velvet collar). Their selection of accessories includes pheasant cuff links, mother of pearl collar stays, and a flat cap made from their specially commissioned 150th anniversary tweed. I also love their selection of women’s pajamas.

Clothes and accessories in Liberty art fabric prints are another classic option. Shop a curated selection of Liberty clothes and accessories at J.Crew and avoid overseas shipping costs to the U.S.

For the Bibliophile

Just in time for Christmas are three new offerings from classic British franchises. Sebastian Faulks brings us the first new Jeeves and Wooster novel in forty years, which makes a perfect pairing with Liberty’s Jeeve’s Bowler Hat table lamp. William Boyd has penned a new installment of James Bond, Solo, set in 1969 in West Africa, and Helen Fielding gives us the next phase in the life and times of Bridget Jones, now 51 (!), in Mad About the Boy. And, if you’re looking to try something new, I humbly suggest my own Cotswoldian memoir, Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage.

England

Ode to Sunday Lunch

Posted on August 23, 2013

2014-10-1119.50.13-1
My love of travel and marriage to a Brit have meant that, at the age of 41, I have made a home in four countries outside the U.S. Throughout my life as an expat, food has always been my favorite portal to a culture: A country reveals itself in the way it breaks bread. In Singapore, citizens belied their buttoned-up reputation in the raucous aisles of the evening hawker stalls, where my favorite meal was nasi goreng, served up on a plastic plate and washed down with a large bottle of Tiger beer. In Berlin, pragmatic stereotypes prevailed, and I acquired a Teutonic appreciation for the importance of the first meal of the day, Frühstück. And in England, where I have lived the longest, I made a rookie error in assuming the tourist staple of high tea at a fancy hotel was the country’s quintessential meal, prim and proper as the Queen herself. It turns out that Sunday lunch, a far more languorous affair, holds that mantel. In the below excerpt from Americashire: A Field Guide to a Marriage, my memoir of life in the English Cotswolds, I recount one of my favorite experiences of this most British of meals…Read the rest over on Transitions Abroad, who were kind enough to post the excerpt.

England

Ask and You Shall Receive

Posted on October 11, 2011

All is redeemed at the Eltermere Inn. On our last morning I noticed the small print on the breakfast menu imploring me to enquire if I desired something not listed. And so it was that this golden treat arrived on my table.  (Still no foil packets of Robertson’s Silver Shred though.)

One of the things that will be hardest about going back to the States is giving up my laissez faire attitude towards food. I can hardly remember those pre-European days when a croissant was considered a treat rather than a staple, to say nothing of bread fried in lard (admittedly still considered a treat). I know before long I will be back in the land of skinny lattes and calories listed on menus. For now, pass the fried bread.

England

Elegy to Eltermere

Posted on October 9, 2011

We are back in the Lake District for a farewell visit, although husband has forbade me from using words like goodbye, last, farewell, and final in the run up to our November departure for Boston.  Call it what you will, but the the truth is I am busy soaking up my favorite experiences in England while it is still convenient, i.e., the Atlantic Ocean does not lie between them and me.

We are staying in the same hotel where we have stayed most years since before we even lived in England, the Eltermere Inn.  I wrote last year of its gentrification, which has continued unabated in the thirteen months since we were last here.  There is more glass-encased taxidermy and our favorite room has been collapsed into the room behind it to form a suite with, what else, a claw foot bathtub in the center of the rear room.  Shame there isn’t a hot water tank at the hotel large enough to supply two consecutive baths in it (guess who got the first bath?).  Never mind, I still had my Lakes breakfast featuring fried bread and marmalade to look forward to.  But no, as I found this morning the fried bread is gone from the menu, leaving me to nibble on a delicate eggs Florentine.

And so against all better judgement I offer up the ode to fried bread that this hotel’s breakfast first inspired me to put on this blog some years ago:

Fried Bread & Silver Shred

As a Yank I cannot abide
Beans in morning, even on the side
But when staying in the Lakes
Fried bread for breakfast I embrace

Transforms mere grain to food divine
Layering of fat and tart
‘Tis a culinary art
Echoed in things much esteemed:
Fruit compote and foie gras terinne

Golden toast and tangy ‘lade
Coin in which I’m gladly paid
For my labour up fell and crag
Richly fed I shall not lag