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Horses for Heroes

Posted on February 7, 2010

This weekend I received an email inviting me to invest in a share of a race horse syndicate. The days when I would have found this odd are behind me. The Cotswolds are, after all, horse country and their signature horse racing event, The Cheltenham Festival, is only a month away. What was different about this invite is that it was for a charitable cause, specifically Help for Heroes, which provides assistance to injured soldiers. For every £5,000 share bought, £1,000 is donated to the charity.

Were it not for the fact that husband and I recently siphoned all our spare cash into another investment, I would have been tempted. A week or so ago we became official owners of a single share of a London musical. It took some last minute coaxing to get husband to take the plunge, but, with the help of dismal interest rates on savings accounts, I managed to convince him that greasepaint and footlights were as legitimate as a six-month CD. I, on the other hand, required no persuasion. I was raised on a steady diet of West End musicals, from Kismet to The King and I. I tap danced my way through my eleventh year to the accompaniment of the original cast recording of 42nd Street and, if challenged, am fairly certain could still sing the lyrics to Cats and Annie from beginning to end. I even liked Starlight Express.

I don’t really expect to get much back from our West End investment. I’m in it for the vicarious thrill and figure it can’t be much worse than the stock market or property in recent years. But should our musical ship come in, I’ll make sure to donate something to Help for Heroes. In the meantime, should you be in the market for a race horse for a good cause, you can buy your share here: http://www.kimbaileyracing.com/help_for_heroes_partnership.html.

Random

Cabin Fever Chronicle

Posted on January 8, 2010

Tuesday
Left work at 2pm at urging of husband who reported heavy snow at home. He’s a bit of a drama queen so I was skeptical until a colleague showed me the live camera feed from my exit off the M5. It appeared husband’s reports of eminent disaster were, for once, not greatly exaggerated. A journey that normally takes me an hour lasted four thanks to jack-knifed trucks, detours and several pauses to consider if I, like the tens of other drivers who littered the sides (and sometimes main thoroughfares) of the roads, should resign myself to spending the night in my car. In the end I abandoned the Prius on a turn-out on All Alone and walked down the last impassable hill to our cottage.

Relaxed in front of the fire by watching first day in the house of Celebrity Big Brother. Normal cast of washed up actors and singers, topless models in search of a career change, and current and former lovers of the famous and infamous. For once there’s a bonafide star too. What’s Vinnie Jones doing on CBB?

Wednesday
Snowed in so worked from home. Snow plough came through but it snowed as fast as he could plough. Left house once on foot to pick up provisions from the local store where there were lines out the door populated by stranded locals stockpiling milk and bread. Still reveling in the novelty of the winter wonderland that is our village like only a former Angeleno could. Husband is less enchanted. He’s been home sick all week with a cough that sounds like he’s trying to expel his kidneys through his mouth. When he’s not coughing he’s moaning about moving back to California where they don’t have weather like this. Tried not to feel annoyed in the midst of all this snowy loveliness.

Thursday
Still snowed in. Going on three weeks of being together twenty-four hours a day with husband thanks to the preceding two weeks of Christmas holidays, only this week there is no indulgence in wine and food to distract us. We couldn’t even pretend we were going to keep the stock new year’s resolution to exercise more as it was impossible to get to the gym by car and exercising outside was too treacherous. I’ve become an inert object. The most movement I can manage is to loll around on the floor in front of the wood burning stove in some half-hearted approximations of yoga stretches.

Husband seems to be addicted to me, only it’s a weird sort of addiction where the object of his desire offers not the pleasure of the crack pipe or whiskey bottle or Twinkie box but only exasperation and annoyance. During a one hour separation when I retreat to the bedroom for a conference call away from his kidney-ejecting cough, I receive three emails from him: an Outlook invite to—weather allowing—buy a shower head at the DIY shop in Cheltenham on Saturday, an update that our remodeling project in London is going very poorly, and a final email informing me he is not coming back from California when he goes for a business trip later this month. I accept the DIY store invite and return my attention to the call.

CBB has become my only reason for living. Who knew Heidi Fleiss was so likable, a sort of hibernating field mouse with botoxed lips who only wakes up to call Stephen Baldwin a dork? And Stephen is, at best, a dork. He’s one of those recovering addicts who’s shunted all his pent up addictive energy into another obsession, in his case fundamental Christianity. And yet even without his four gram a day habit he’s still the kind of narcissistic, finger jabbing the air, overly emphatic windbag that any sober person who has been around coked up people will immediately recognize. The only difference between then and now for Mr. Baldwin is likely to be the content. Now he talks about the Bible, then — if my own experience in L.A. is anything to go by — he would have been talking about his brilliant idea for a screenplay.

Take this opportunity to remind husband that the grass isn’t all greener in L.A. Cringe-inducing Stephen Baldwin types—many of whom are drinking coffee and reading scripts at the Coffee Bean on Main Street as I type—are as much a part of the SoCal landscape as clear, sunny skies with highs in the seventies.

Friday
Husband has given me his cold. I am also convinced I have an ear infection and fight my way to the doctor’s office to demand antibiotics, during which I notice the once lovely snow is now desecrated with marigold puddles of dog pee. Patient, cashmere draped woman doctor shines a light in my ear and reveals that the shooting pains in my face are due to a build up of ear wax. In short order I am discussing the merits of olive oil versus sodium bicarbonate ear drops with the chemist. How long until it’s hemorrhoid and denture cream? Thank god it’s Friday night which means a double bill of CBB.

Random

Oops

Posted on December 20, 2009

Friday morning I was greeted by the newly repaired church bells as I walked out to my car to drive to work. The air was crisp and clear, stirred only by tiny snowflakes in floaty descent. As I drove up the hill out of town, a small buck crossed the road in front of me. Watching him glide across the open fields, I thought smugly what a terrific blog entry this whole glorious morning was going to make. I was stirred from my reverie several moments later by the bleating of my phone indicating a text message. I pulled over to find it was from husband, thanking me for remembering his birthday before I left for work.

Oops.

So I did what any reasonable person in my position would do: I lied, texting back that I simply hadn’t wanted to wake him. I even added some vaguely exasperated language (“Geesh!”) over his implication that I had forgotten. Where then was his card he asked in reply, and I knew there was no way out. I was busted and I paid for it in several further colorful exchanges of emails and texts, all of which had in common the phrase “self-centered, pathetic cow.” In my defense, I had taken him to Hamburg two weekends before as a birthday treat, but the truth was I had become a little work obsessive in the last week and had lost track of the actual day. I apologized unreservedly for the slip up and thanked my lucky stars that he had the Fat Boy annual Christmas lunch to attend that day to distract him from my misdeed.

Unlike me, the fat boys had not forgotten his birthday. They even produced a homemade chocolate cake at the end of the meal. As if that wasn’t enough to make me look bad, one of the fat boys proceeded to flambé the thing using only a hip flask of brandy, the open fire, and a ladle seemingly produced from his pocket. (He was an old Etonian. Go figure.) I arrived at the wine bar later in the evening to find the remnants of the Fat Boy lunch, including husband, mercifully softened by the day’s intake of drink. I was chided for my lapse, but by and large I appeared to be forgiven. Still, the birthday card I belatedly bought remains unopened where I left it on the kitchen ledge Friday night. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still there on his next birthday.

Random

A Christmas Story

Posted on December 17, 2009

When my sister and I were little girls my father brought us a Christmas present that has become the stuff of family lore. It was an Olde English Sheep Dog named Greta, purchased from the pet department at Harrods and transported back to us in Florida in the cockpit of a Pan Am 747 where my father was serving as the engineer. What is remarkable about this gift is neither the dog nor how it was dispatched to us, but just how uncharacteristically spontaneous and joyful a portrait it paints of the man both capable of conjuring up this plan and pulling it off (obviously in days of laxer airport security): a man purportedly my father. Greta was a good pet, but we keep the story alive in my family mostly because we want to know this man.

As long as I can remember, my father’s main hobby has been watching the stock ticker tape roll by on CNN. Occasionally as children we were introduced to other pilots, many of them ex-Navy like my father. These men had a penchant for Corvettes, speed boats, and second wives. They seemed like another species. Despite having chosen a job that allowed him to travel the world, my father’s interest in the cities he was visiting – Karachi, Delhi, Paris, Beirut! – never seemed to extend much beyond a (admittedly self-reported) glass of milk in the hotel bar. During the period when he was hitting a lot of Middle Eastern routes my mother got a few rugs and my sister and I got some bootleg tapes of U2 and Huey Lewis and the News, but I suspect this was more the result of a sympathetic stewardess than my father’s own initiative.

Greta was never really a dog made for south Florida. She got fleas, her hair fell out, and when it thundered, as it often does on a summer afternoon in Florida, she hid under a side table next to the couch. When I was about twelve or thirteen the time came for Greta, long crippled by arthritis, to be put to sleep. My mother had taken my sister and me to our grandparents’ house in California for a few weeks of summer vacation, leaving my father alone in Florida to do the deed. He was distraught when he called us after having put her down. I took the phone at the desk nook built into my grandparents’ kitchen and, after listening briefly to his teary retelling of the afternoon’s events — intended to assure me the dog went peacefully and was in a better place — I began to sing the Meow Mix song, a popular advertisement for cat food in the 1980’s. I had moved on. I wanted a cat and would torment my parents with the Meow Mix song from then until the time Cleopatra, a bitchy one and a half year old Siamese cat I found through an ad in the Fort Myers News Press, was purchased for me for $20 from a couple who mysteriously didn’t want her anymore. It was, upon reflection, not a good lesson for an adolescent to learn about what you do when someone old and sick dies (replace it) or you don’t like someone anymore (sell it).

I like to think I made it up to my father when I gave him my dog a few years ago when we moved from Los Angeles to England. I say gave when I really mean insisted he take her. It shouldn’t have been a hard sell. After all, my father had loved having a dog and it was ridiculous that it had taken him twenty years to get another one. He had taken up no new hobbies since retiring unless you count the Internet, which he uses daily to log on to his Charles Schwab discount brokerage account. (The hint provided by the fact that his house abuts an eighteen hole golf course has not been taken.) Now he spends all his time cooking the dog bacon then taking her out for urgent walks because she can’t really digest human food. These days when I call it’s all about the dog: the lizard she chased through the patio screen, what she ate, defecated, bit. There’s still no sign of a globe-trotting bon vivant who buys his children live Christmas presents from Harrods and sneaks them back across the Atlantic in the cockpit of a plane. It’s just a man and his dog.

Random

A Pilgrim’s Regress

Posted on December 3, 2009

To make it to my Thanksgiving table, a pilgrim need not have left Plymouth. In fact, he would have needed to head 167 miles in the opposite direction to Gloucestershire. Good thing my Thanksgiving was held on the Saturday after the holiday, giving said pilgrim an extra two days to make it. British employers are so uncooperative when it comes to celebrating American holidays on time.

Schedules were not the only challenge to my feast. Certain key ingredients proved illusive, namely the cornmeal and buttermilk called for in my corn muffin recipe. I knew I had a recipe for making buttermilk stashed in a notebook somewhere in the cupboard—a relic from my more active cooking days in Los Angeles—but I only discovered polenta was a legitimate substitute for cornmeal during some post-Thanksgiving Googling. When I found that box of Bisquick hidden away in a corner of the grocery store it seemed like a sign. I figured I could transform the recipe for scones on the side of the box into the American version of a biscuit by leaving out the sugar. Then I could pass off the result as a legitimate traditional Thanksgiving offering to my unsuspecting British guests. It was sticky work, but with the help of half the bag of powdered ingredients to flour my hands and the counter, I pulled it off with no one the wiser that biscuits were best served with sausage before 10AM.

There were a few other cheats along the way. I roasted an enormous turkey breast instead of the whole bird. I bought the pecan pie, a pecan tart really but who was going to notice? It was absurdly expensive, the pain of which was somewhat mitigated by the pronouncement of one guest that it was the best pie he had ever eaten. But when it came to the sweet potatoes, there was no room for compromise. Despite my hunch that the preparation wouldn’t suit the British palate, mine were encrusted with the requisite blanket of grilled white sugary goop, having painstakingly separated two bags of white marshmallows from their pink sisters earlier in the day. The pink ones tasted pretty much the same as the white, but the site of pale pink on the orange sweet potatoes looked just too sixties psychedelic puke for the autumnal tones of the Thanksgiving table. While my guests—doppelganger couple and R+R—seemed genuinely pleased to be trying an authentic American dish, nobody went back for seconds on this one. Of course leftovers are the best part of Thanksgiving, so I counted myself lucky to be able to enjoy my turkey quesadilla with a side of sweet potatoes and a chaser of pink marshmallow straight from the bag.

Random

Stranger in a Strange Land

Posted on November 10, 2009

Today I left the Cotswolds at 6:12AM and headed for Heathrow where I caught the 11AM BA flight to Boston for work. I worked until my laptop died, which was really okay since I cracked the screen last week trying to put it on the docking station, which meant I was forced to read and write everything in windows resized to the left half of the screen over which a Rorschach ink blot resembling a leaf was swiftly developing. The right hand side had long ago been lost to a series of 1970s-TV-channel-that’s-lost-its-reception lines. I drank a bloody mary and ate my chicken tikka masala and dug the biscuit bottom crust out of a tub of white chocolate mousse decorated with a ribbon of rust coloured raspberry sauce. I watched an episode of Thirty Rock and wondered if I should be concerned that the television characters I relate to most are Liz Lemon and Larry David. I read the first fifty pages of Julie and Julia and wondered if the fact that I liked it and had liked Eat, Pray, Love and my sister had gotten annoyed by both of the whinging authors meant that I was an intellectually inadequate being. I pissed off other passengers by spending too much time in the lavatory so I could tug at my forehead under fluorescent lights and ponder if botox would do anything for my sagging eyelids. I gave a dirty look to the man in the seat next to me when he burped chicken tikka masala even though he was asleep or pretending to be so didn’t get the chance to experience my silent wrath. I wrote the first part of this blog and there was still 01:52 remaining on the flight clock on the video screen on the seat in front of me…

And when I finally got to Boston I did what all American exiles do when they land in the states: I went to the mall.

Recession? What recession, I ask you?

My god, the mall was packed to the gills, swarming, heaving, writhing with humanity. I headed to Hollister first where I was doing some Christmas shopping on behalf of a colleague whose son very badly wanted a very specific puffy vest type contraption. I had never been in a Hollister. It’s like a J. Crew converted into a nightclub. The music was too loud, the help were 12 and didn’t know shit because they were too busy hitting on each other, and it took about .38 seconds to realize I was not the target demographic. But it didn’t make me feel old; quite the contrary it made me glad to be middle aged.

I must have been a bit jet lagged because I next got the idea to eat dinner in The Cheesecake Factory, a restaurant on which a resident-in-America version of myself would have—did in fact—heaped scorn. But somehow flipping through the menu while I waited in line nothing sounded better in the world to me than a BBQ chicken salad, ranch dressing being an odd sort of comfort food for the ex-pat returning home (and let’s face it, downright sophisticated compared to Salad Cream). After a few more minutes of waiting I was told it would take at least 30 minutes for a table. Not being able to face the prospect of further wandering in the mall holding an illuminated 1980’s style drug dealer pager, I recovered my British sensibility: I left the hollow mirth of The Cheesecake Factory halls, checked in to the hotel and ordered room service.

Random

(Random Thoughts on the) Class of ’89

Posted on November 10, 2009

In July I celebrated my twentieth high school reunion with about eighty other classmates in a non-descript hotel ballroom on Fort Myers Beach. Twenty years earlier my friends and I had celebrated our high school graduation with a “beach week” at the Pink Porpoise a mile or so up the road. We were there when the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred, and I remember watching the events unfold on the poky television in the sand encrusted, pine-paneled lounge of our rented cottage. The news was in stark contrast to the vodka and Kool Aid (aka Pink Ladies) soaked days that had preceded it and would follow it; Tiananmen Square was disturbing but failed to dampen the festivities of the remainder of our week. It was perhaps a timely lesson about the degree of apathy and detachment required to be an adult in this world, where any genuine absorption of the constant stream of global atrocities is likely to render one mortally depressed. (Whether that depression is over the atrocities or the apathy in the face of them, I still haven’t figured out.)

Five months later the world was marked by happier news: the Berlin Wall had fallen. Today’s papers are celebrating the 20th anniversary with headlines about the Class of ’89, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, who walked from East Berlin into West that first night. The fall of the Berlin Wall has a personal resonance for me. I spent several weeks in Berlin the summer after seventh grade, visiting my father who was then a Pan Am pilot based there. During that summer I became mildly obsessed with the wall, particularly the Checkpoint Charlie museum with its displays chronicling escape stories — both failed and successful — in hidden compartments of cars, across the river, and over the wall on a James Bond-esque high wire. I remember the day we took a US military bus tour of East Berlin, mostly that we were barely allowed out of the bus and the predominance of grey, as if crossing the city border was crossing degrees of latitude into a drabber, colder place. I visited Berlin again two years after the wall fell, during a semester abroad. I have a framed snapshot of myself from that trip, standing astride two graffiti covered remnants of the wall in an ill-advised pea soup green mock-turtleneck sweater and faded black jeans, looking like I’ve just walked out of the East Berlin of the 1980s.

Two years after I visited a reunited Berlin, I first stepped foot into Tiananmen Square to visit Mao’s mausoleum. I had read about the atrocities Mao committed against his own people, but somehow the mausoleum seemed like a circus attraction and therefore devoid of any reverence. (I had even brought along my copy of Wild Swans, which chronicles life under Mao, to Beijing to see if the hotel would confiscate it. They did.) While I was waiting in the long line to get into the mausoleum I bought a souvenir from a street vendor, a plastic, battery-operated Buddha, about six inches high and spray painted gold. When you rocked Buddha like an overgrown Weeble on his round base, he laughed. I gave the Buddha to my friend Suzanna, who subsequently reported his cackle had provided a disturbing soundtrack to the Northridge earthquake that rocked her house the following January.

Random

Blog Guilt

Posted on November 6, 2009

It’s been almost two weeks since I’ve posted anything on this blog. I was feeling guilty about it, but then I remembered that in the past two weeks I’ve:

  • Flown to Boston then Helsinki for meetings, with a jet lagged 24-hour stopover back in the UK between trips for something masquerading as a weekend. All I remember of it before I was back at Heathrow was an enjoyable Sunday roast at the pub, which was a good move because it meant I didn’t have to eat the curried reindeer penis (only guessing) meatballs Finnair served for dinner on my flight that night.
  • Sold a flat in London and bought and moved into another one on the same day thanks to sheer force of will and endless, occasionally bullying phone calls to solicitors and realtors and mortgage companies. The moving part was done with the sole aid of two guys—one of whom was stoned and smelly yet somehow likable—and their Sanford and Son-esque van-like and certainly unroadworthy vehicle.
  • Braved the streets of central London in a Prius and the price of valet parking at the Swissotel (in fairness I expensed that, but trust me it was still shocking) to attend a meeting in London, before two more days of meetings in an overheated Hampshire country house hotel, then back to London for an evening of fiddles and champagne for charity at the Dorchester.

With all these hotels one could be forgiven for thinking I make my living as call girl. While the truth is far less interesting, my job—and the fact that I’m actually enjoying it—is the main reason why life has gotten so hectic lately, and the main reason why I’ve been neglecting the blog. (The decision to move flats in London was just because husband and I court unnecessary chaos like a heroin addiction.) This is an alarming pattern in my life: as my engagement with the paying work I do increases, my creative life free falls in inverse proportion and vice-versa. During my last job in Los Angeles, the one where I endured working for a hair-gelled Texan named Chad, I somehow found time to complete a part-time professional cooking course. Work was a dead zone but thanks to the cooking, this was one of the most creatively fulfilling periods of my life. (One, I hasten to add, that has not stuck. I was reminded of this last Friday when in the midst of packing up the flat husband shook a plastic funnel in my face, exasperated over my refusal to part with any of my kitchen paraphernalia that was acquired during that “cooking phase,” and shouted, “Get real, you don’t cook anymore!”) And so I despair a bit. My new found job satisfaction may mean I blog a little less. But at least I’ve written this blog. And I kept the funnel.

England Random

Meet My Wardrobe

Posted on October 23, 2009

I have made concessions in my embrace of my newly adopted country. I will call a closet a wardrobe, for example. And yet eager as I am to assimilate, there are some things my other home country just does better, namely closets. The closet is a temple in America. Whole companies have been built around organizing them. They’re feted in films (witness Carrie in Sex and the City). You can WALK INTO THEM.

England on the other hand still seems to think of the closet as optional. Real estate is distinctly void of their presence. Industry professionals inform me it’s done to make places look bigger, but nobody is being fooled here. Suckers we the general public may be, but at least give us credit for realizing we’re going to need to take up some space in the bedroom to hang up our clothes. It is a quirk of British culture as baffling as the prevalence of the front loading washer, the very design of which makes it impossible to toss in that stray sock you dropped on your way to do laundry once the cycle has begun, lest you flood your house. Pressing the start button on a British washing machine is like sealing the space shuttle.

Alas I digress from the disgrace that is closet-less Britain, a situation that over the years has caused me considerable duress. I recall in particular a melodramatic evening spent traversing a rainy and traffic and expletive-riddled corridor of London’s North Circular road to get to a second branch of Ikea before it closed so that we could secure the right doors for two newly purchased wardrobes since having the frames and the doors in stock in the same store was apparently just too much for Ikea’s inventory management system. As a result I now suffer from Ikea-induced post-traumatic stress disorder that can be triggered at the drop of a stubby, bowling-alley style pencil.

You can therefore imagine my delight at the completion of a custom commissioned floor to ceiling wardrobe in Drover’s Cottage just last week. The fantastic carpenter who also made our front door and mantel piece, Gerald, is the man responsible for my joy. He lavished upon her the care and attention required to make her fit snuggly in the wonky angles of the bedroom floor. He measured and cut and sealed and painted her Victorian paneled doors, then adorned them with two substantial, shiny brass knobs. And what lovely doors they are, closing with a satisfying thunk. To me this is a wardrobe as magical as the The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe wardrobe — finally a resting place in England for all my clothes and shoes and power cords and wrapping paper and books husband won’t let me keep by the bed. It is mine, all mine except for a little bit in the corner where I let him hang his kilt.

Cotswolds Random

Falling Off Your Platforms

Posted on October 18, 2009

The Cotswolds continues to deliver up the fabulous. To be fair, the man I have in mind is a resident of Jersey over visiting friends of ours for a long weekend, which is how we came to make his acquaintance at a dinner party last night. Adrian is a hairstylist with more than a passing resemblance to David Byrne—lanky, NBA-height, and a deliberate dresser (last night’s ensemble featured a plaid shirt of earth tones accessorised with a woolen waistcoat, chunky silver bracelet, matching cuff links, and collar pin). I knew the dinner party was going to be a success early on when he responded to my question of how he ended up in Jersey with a story that covered his first job in London styling wigs for Barbara Windsor, moving on to being David Bowie’s Chelsea neighbor, and culminating in a fateful evening in 1973 at Sombrero’s nightclub in Ken High Street (where he used to dance with Jerry Hall and Barbara Hulanicki of Biba) when he fell off his platforms and ended up in St. George’s hospital on New Year’s Eve, after which he decided his love affair with London was over and headed for the Channel Islands. He has lived there happily ever since with a pointer and a pussy for company. Somehow my own retreat to the rural life seems the most loathsome bourgeois, vanilla, pedestrian odyssey ever, except for the part where I get to meet the Adrians of the world.