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Cotswolds England

Royal Wedding Red Carpet

Posted on April 30, 2011

All the Cotswolds, even this folly, was decked out yesterday for the royal wedding.  Well, that’s not totally true.  Despite my earlier assertion that the ladies of the Cotswolds would be wearing their finest hats for the viewing at the wine bar, I was the only one (unless you count L.’s floppy straw number and a couple of men in baseball caps).  In fact attendance was rather sparse when husband and I first arrived at 9:30AM.  In a classic Toff display of the middle-finger-to-the-world attitude, A., one of the scariest dames of the neighboring villages, hadn’t even bothered to put in her dentures.  I guess she didn’t really need them for the coffee with a snifter side car of something or other she was drinking.  She did, however, seem amused by my small-pink-bird-just-exploded-on-my-head hat, quipping with a front-toothless smile that there was still time to make it to the Abbey.  Vera, the eight-year old pug who had the bar stool next to me, also seemed to like my hat.  Or at least my croissant.

By the time I was on to my first Bellini of the morning the place had started to fill up.  This provided me with an audience for my running red carpet commentary on the guests, something the BBC broadcast was too dignified to provide.  It went something like this:

  • Pippa the sister should have never been allowed to wear white.  If it wasn’t for her spray tan she may have stolen the show.
  • Eugenie and Beatrice did steal the show, but not in a good way.  In an ugly stepsisters in a Cinderella panto kind of way.
  • The Queen looked radiant in yellow.  Not a hint of Big Bird despite my initial fears when I first glimpsed her in her car on the way to the Abbey.
  • Advice to Harry: stand up straight.
  • Advice to Wills: shave it off.
  • Advice to SamCam (PM’s wife): next time wear a hat.
  • I shouldn’t have liked Miriam González Durántez’s (Deputy PM’s wife) Cruella de Vil get up but I did.  It takes guts to wear a floral turban to the Abbey.  Very Sunset Boulevard.

and finally,

  • Best hat goes to Zara Phillips for her silvery-black tilted UFO.

Congratulations, William and Catherine!

England

All About the Swag

Posted on April 26, 2011

I admit it.  That was me who cleaned out WH Smith’s stock of Royal Wedding Commemorative Stickers in Heathrow Terminal 5 last Friday.  I mean what’s not to love about Royal Wedding Commemorative Stickers? They’re almost as good as the pope bottle opener and Virgin Mary travel shampoo bottles I bought in Vatican City. (Or were those holy water bottles?  I forget.)

Commemorative stickers aside, I was surprised at how thin on the ground Royal Wedding merchandise was at Heathrow. Other than the stickers all I saw was a very funny My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding spoof book in which Kate and Williams’ heads were super-imposed on a Big Fat Gypsy Wedding party (if you haven’t seen the documentary that inspired this, get a taste here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2XuqGS1fm8) and a tin of Walker’s shortbread with that overused engagement photo on it (you know, the one that Kate’s eyebrow groomer should be fired over). The London Olympics people already managed to get a whole frickin’ shop open in Terminal 5, and their event isn’t even until next year. And their logo looks like it was designed by a cat.

Luckily, Tim the cashier at WH Smith informed me that all the really good merch doesn’t surface until after the actual event. Everyone is waiting for the money shot of the wedding dress (hopefully accessorised with subtly arched brows). Thanks for the tip, Tim. I’m not even mad you forgot to give me half off my buy-one-get-one-half-off books.

Cotswolds England

Royal Wedding Fever

Posted on April 16, 2011

I was nine years old when Prince Charles married Diana, and I still remember getting up early in the morning to watch the grainy broadcast in the family room of my suburban Southwest Florida home. I was glued to the television. I wanted to be Diana—not because she got to marry Charles but because she got to wear those acres of cream puff silk—or at the very least one of her bridesmaids, who I thought were the luckiest girls in the world. And now that their son, William, is getting married I am just as engrossed.

For one thing I now have a personal, if very tenuous, connection to the royal couple. It was at a wedding in the very church of our very Cotswold village where the couple appeared together in public for the first time in months last October. In the universe of royal watchers, this was a highly significant event and fueled speculation (correctly as it turns out) that the announcement of their engagement was imminent.

My own preparations for the royal wedding are well under way.  To start with, I will be leaving a business meeting in San Francisco a few hours early in order to make the 6:55PM flight that will get me back to the UK on time. (If anybody asks, I’m prepared to defend my decision with an explanation that, as a UK passport holder, I am virtually obligated to be present in the green and pleasant land to witness the big event.) I will be taking the day off so that we can watch the wedding from the wine bar, which will be hosting a prosecco and bunting studded big-screen viewing. The ladies of the surrounding villages have already agreed to arrive in hats, and my own, a hot pink number that last had an outing at Royal Ascot some years ago, will soon be retrieved from its pentagonal box in the far reaches of the wardrobe. I plan to pair it with my Target-Lily-Pulitzer-knock-off sundress and a pair of vintage pink crystal strawberry-shaped clip on earrings. I’m sure I’ll still be basking in the afterglow when I drink my coffee out of my Kate and William commemorative mug the next morning.

Cotswolds England

Drag for the Under-Eights

Posted on December 13, 2010

After more than five years in England, I was pretty sure I had exhausted the repertoire of traditional British experiences. I’ve attended the grand sporting triumvirate of Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon. I’ve wanged-the-wellie at a village fête. I’ve even eaten haggis to celebrate a Scottish poet I’ve never read. But until last Saturday night, I had never attended a panto.

British pantomime is a Christmas theatrical tradition that seems to follow the format of fairytale — Cinderella in our case — with a twist. The purpose of these twists, like the walk-on role of the gorilla, seem to be entirely to encourage audience participation; the form is to shout “it’s behind you,” when said gorilla appears. You can also sing along to the updated musical numbers. We had a lot of Take That, but the best was the rendition of Adam and the Ants’ Prince Charming. Then there is Buttons, the narrator/bumbling suitor of Cinders, who encourages participation from the moms, dads, and kids in attendance. Apparently Buttons wasn’t expecting our group of six, childless adults in the second row. I decided to help out the dads, who seemed the quietest of the constituencies.

Then of course there was the drag. The ugly stepsisters were expected. What wasn’t expected was that Prince Charming and his page would be played by women, which meant the central romance of the story was girl-on-girl. Suddenly the origins of stereotypical British sexual confusion became clear; this is, after all, the entertainment Britons are weaned on. I did seem to be the only one in the audience shocked by it though. The under-eights squealed with delight throughout.

England

Escape from London

Posted on August 30, 2010

The Boylestone Show and its giant vegetables came and went without us on Saturday. I wrote about my unforgivably blasé attitude in my last blog, but that wasn’t the only obstacle to our attendance. It turns out our longstanding hosts and pillars of the Boylestone community, B&R, abandoned their own village show and are currently cruising the Med. We were lucky, however, to be able to spend our Saturday afternoon in the company of B&R’s daughter-in-law, T., and grandson, J. They are friends from Los Angeles and were over to launch J’s boarding school career at Repton. It is a bold move for a 15 year old from Malibu to willingly launch himself into Britain’s public school system, and we celebrated with pizzas in south London.

It takes a lot to get husband to abandon the Cotswolds and drive into London on a Saturday, but seeing T&J was a worthy reason. In the process we proved that getting to south London from anywhere—even other parts of south London as friends who joined us from Greenwich proved when they hit roadworks—is painful. It took us three hours to navigate our way to Streatham from the Cotswolds, impeded on both they way in and the way out by traffic for the Chelsea match. (Don’t ask me why we went through Chelsea to get to Streatham from the Cotswolds. I blame the sat nav.)

In any case, we had anticipated as much effort and decided to make the most out of being in London by spending the night at the flat. We booked a film at the Electric for the evening and planned a jog around Kensington Gardens followed by brunch at Raoul’s on Sunday morning. Despite the Chelsea traffic, we made it to Portobello Road on time for the movie. It wasn’t until the film finished and we were wandering around the darkened streets that we realized our miscalculation. Most of Ledbury Road and Westbourne Grove were boarded up. Notting Hill was a ghost town, its residents all in exile in preparation for the annual Carnival that would take over the neighborhood on Sunday and Monday. We headed into Bayswater for some noodles and replanned the weekend. By 7:30AM the next morning our escape from London was underway as we bombed along the Harrow Road just ahead of the police putting up barriers behind us.

England

Cows in the Sky

Posted on July 23, 2010

This morning on my commute along the M5, I witnessed a herd of black and white cows crossing an overpass. It was the second time in a week I had seen them, which confirmed I either was or was not crazy—I’m still not quite sure which. They lumbered along with heads hung, embodying the feelings of many a commuter beneath them. The sight was as unexpected as looking up to see Magritte’s bowler-hatted men drifting up through the clouds, and my instinct was to reach for my mobile phone to snap a picture. I thought better of attempting to photograph something while driving 75mph, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Books England

Bright Lights, Big City

Posted on July 1, 2010

Yesterday afternoon I made good on my commitment to book a vacation somewhere new, and in September husband and I will ride bikes around Provence for a week. It is neither exotic nor adventurous —to a middle class Brit it might be the American equivalent of a visit to Napa —but I have read all those Peter Mayle books and it’s one of those places I would regret not having seen if we move back to the states. It turns out there was a much cheaper alternative to making me feel a little less staid and stuck. All it took was a trip to London and an £8 admission ticket to Book Slam, where I got to spend a few hours in spitting distance of a disgusting amount of talent and creativity, enough to leave me basking in its reflected glory.

It was a chore convincing husband to stay in London on a Thursday night, traditionally reserved for his weekly exodus from the city, but Zadie Smith was reading and I prevailed. Ms. Smith would have been quite enough talent for one evening. Preceding her, however, was the lovely singer songwriter Obenewa who looked exactly like a black version of my friend Samantha, also a singer songwriter. Obenewa’s mother was sitting in front of husband and seemed pleased at his whooping for her talented daughter. She even helped him spell Obenewa’s name when husband posted a photo of her on Facebook. Next up was Akala, a young MC accompanied only by a pianist, which made me think why hasn’t anyone else thought of that? He was 26 and charmingly self-possessed, and half way through his first number a woman in the audience wailed a marriage proposal at him from across the room, giving voice to what I suspect much of the femaled dominated audience (single men of London take note) was thinking.

And then there was Ms. Smith, reading an essay from her new book about her father and British comedy and death and her brother. I was glad it featured Basil Fawlty and Monty Python, which made it feel custom tailored for husband. I had been worried he’d be bored out of his mind at this kind of thing, even though by the time Zadie Smith got up to read he had long been won over. Book Slam had him at Obenewa. Ms. Smith’s brother, the former rapper turned stand-up Doc Brown, closed the show with a full-length routine. We thought about leaving before he started because we were hungry and I assumed he would be, well, not very good. I mean surely he was only there because he was Zadie Smith’s brother. I was fully prepared to cringe, and I did for all the right reasons when he told the story of how he couldn’t take himself seriously as a rapper anymore after he sucked snot out of his baby girl’s nose because she didn’t know how to blow it yet. That and a rap song about how he wished David Attenborough — the British equivalent of Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom — was his grandfather were enough to convince me there is just way too much talent in the family Smith.

Books England Europe

Remembrance of Things Past

Posted on June 25, 2010

Turns out Proust was an apt choice for my “lite” summer reading. Last weekend’s break in the Lake District was filled with nostalgic musings brought on by the fact that the hotel we have stayed in every year for the past five years has changed hands since our last visit.

On the surface the new owners have made improvements. Paint and soft furnishings have been changed from florals to tasteful neutrals, tongue and cheek taxidermy graces walls and mantel pieces, and vintage accessories of the riding boot and croquet set variety are strategically dotted in corners of rooms. In other words, it now looks like every other country house hotel in England. The menu, previously of the home cooking variety by a lady named Viv, now has the same scallop with pancetta and pea puree type repertoire found in every gastropub in England (not that my scallops with pancetta and pea puree were unenjoyable). Jam served at breakfast comes in shallow porcelain ramekins instead of the foil topped plastic packets of Silver Shred I once paid homage to on this blog. And all these changes are reflected in the average age of the clientele, which used to hover around seventy even when you included husband and me. In a hotel of fifteen rooms I counted only one elderly couple, she sporting the reliable female OAP attire of ped socks in wedge sandals, he nodding off on the couch in the lounge after their 7pm supper.

Husband and I made good sport of lamenting all the so called improvements, the edge of which was taken off by the amazing (that’s an average day to you in L.A.) weather and the splendid isolation of the place, features that a lick of sage green paint and a stuffed owl in a glass box don’t change. Still, I’ve noticed in our middle age we are getting more and more sensitive to changes in places we hold dear. Earlier in the month in Paris we spent the best part of an hour venting our disgust over the appearance of a Lacoste shop on the site of a former crumbling down patisserie in the Marais. It wasn’t even a good patisserie—I once had a very mediocre lemon tart there—and yet there was something unmistakably violating about the appearance of the shiny new global retail brand in its place.

All this longing for the way things used to be makes me feel old and boring. We’ve become the kind of people who like the memory-fueled idea of a place more than the place itself, and, even worse, are prone to wheeze on about it. The only remedy I can think of is rather palatable as far as medicine goes: time to book a vacation to a place we’ve never been before. Then we can complain the whole time about new things.

Books England

Summer Reading

Posted on June 15, 2010

The New Yorker summer fiction issue arrived this week, which got me thinking about summer reading. In my California days, summer reading meant something along the lines of reading The Da Vinci Code by a hotel pool while sipping on an over-priced piña colada at 11AM without guilt. In other words, summer reading was a blissful reprieve from standards, both literary and moral, observed in other seasons.

Summer reading this year has meant something altogether different. Here in England it is the run up to the longest day of the year, and we have been enjoying daylight until nearly 10PM for weeks. On those mid-week nights when husband is in London and I am in the Cotswolds on my own, I retire to bed by 9:30PM for a benign menage a trois with my French companions, Marcel and his precocious, mommy- obsessed protagonist of In Search of Lost Time, to enjoy some day lit summer reading. In reading Proust I am not abandoning my customary June relaxation of standards but rather making good on an old—2009—new year’s resolution to finally read the fabled author. (The truth is I wanted to read Alain de Boton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life, but I didn’t feel entitled to do so without having attempted Proust first.) The novel is slow going, dense stuff but not without its rewards. There was the madeleine incident early on and, later in Combray, I recognized the compulsion to capture a place — the landscape and seasons and walking through them—that I feel about the Cotswolds.

Husband and I will be in the Lake District this weekend for the longest day of the year, enjoying an early celebration of our ninth anniversary. The hotel in Elterwater is a converted country house with the most perfect lounge for reading, complete with comfortable chairs, a panoramic view of the lake and surrounding fells, and a kettle and biscuits. (Even husband, who finds movie watching to be a far superior form of leisure to reading—in which he only indulges via The Economist and Hollywood biographies—can read for hours in this lounge.) I may even indulge myself and pack the Alain de Boton, never mind the fact that I’m not even half-way through the Proust.

Cycling England Europe

London to Paris sur une Bicyclette Day 4: Beauvais to le Tour Eiffel

Posted on May 31, 2010

At breakfast on day 4 I noticed that husband and I seemed to be the only couple on the trip. Well, at least the only couple that started the ride that way. The other cyclists seemed to be girlfriends united by a cause—like the Help for Heroes ladies who had sons and husbands in Afghanistan—or a group of men united by their local pub, the beer from which played a pivotal role in encouraging them to think cycling 300 miles would be a laugh.

Within the first 10 miles of today’s ride I realized why couples were so scarce. We were powering up a long incline when husband announced for no apparent reason that he was not going on the f***ing motorway that was running perpendicular to us. Seeing as our route had not yet been on any motorways and the organizer’s insurance premiums almost certainly couldn’t withstand such a decision, husband’s proclamation struck me as nothing more than another moan in what had been a laundry list of complaints over the past 3 days. Thus far I had thought myself rather restrained in dealing with this sort of behavior. Husband would complain, I would grunt some sort of acknowledgment and then let it drop. But this time, what with the sore knees and the aching quads and no end to this hill in sight, I let rip. “Shut up. SHUT UP,” I howled as I hunched over my bike with renewed vigor. There was no more speaking between then and the water stop at mile 23.

Despite the tension, the cycling over the first 30 miles of the day was some of the most rewarding of the trip. The roads were busier than the previous day which precluded riding side by side, and thus conversation (which given our early spat, suited just fine). With the exception of two lengthy inclines the terrain was straight and flat. The combined effect was that I was focused and alert and able to settle into a rhythm. No thinking, just doing.

Closer to Paris it was stop and start as we rode in along the Seine through the industrial northwest of the city, inching towards our Finish line at the Eiffel Tower. Our planned victory lap up the Champs Elysees was nixed by the gendarmerie—it’s a good thing I enjoyed my Tour de France moment earlier in the week in Calais—and so we found ourselves sharing the Eiffel Tower with a swarm of rambunctious Perpignan rugby fans who were in town for the French championship. They were amped up, dressed in their team colours of red and yellow and drinking out of bottles or cups or Davy Crockett style flasks that they tried to squirt in our mouths in some sort of drunken show of solidarity. It looked like Paris had been overrun by a convention of Ronald McDonalds gone bad. We had our obligatory picture snapped in front of the Eiffel Tower and headed for the hotel.

The end of the adventure had been surprisingly unsentimental, flat even. I felt no need to lift my bike over my head in a victory gesture or hug or high five anyone as many of the others in the group did. My lack of emotion bothered me, and for the next few days in Paris I thought about why this was so. The prerequisites for tugging at the heartstrings had all been in place on this adventure: tales of tragedy, triumph over adversity, endorphins, and the city of romance for goodness sake! But in the end this experience was a visceral one for me, not a sentimental one. The value had been in the doing, and I had done what I set out to do. Many others could and would and will and do ride their bikes from London to Paris. And for four days at the end of May, I did too.