Went to Germany last weekend to visit my sister, which is how I ended up at dinner with an analyst from the Department of Defense, another from the State Department, and three Scullies. Scully is my term for a female FBI agent, not theirs, but I thought I’d join in the spirit of their lingo heavy conversation. Never mind we were eating at a Greek restaurant in Stuttgart—ordering was a breeze compared to trying to follow the dinner table conversation. First there was “bu” this and “bu” that, as in the first syllable of Buick, which I had to have explained to me as shorthand for the bureau. Then there were IAs and IRs and lots of ASACS. (I gleaned that anything that starts with an “I” stands for intelligence but an ASAC remains a testicular sounding mystery.) Did I mention CDC and ACDC? Both refer to some kind of counsel, the latter surely being the coolest title a lawyer can ever expect to have. I spend half my corporate life trying to keep track of an ever evolving onslaught of special projects and programs and roadmaps with names like Bolt and Tango or meaningless three-letter acronyms (yesterday I was informed by my colleagues in a call that no less than three projects were running under the acronym of DCS so could I please spell it out). In short, I was pretty sure my current monolith of an employer had swept the category of code name proliferation. Imagine my surprise at discovering that the federal government crushes the private sector. The disappointing thing was that all this code was facilitating the same kind of banter you’d find at any old corporate campus water cooler: all about re-orgs and unfair promotions—how did that guy get the post in Barbados? — and pain in the ass audit and compliance requirements. Admittedly when the bitching turned to bosses the State Department employee sounded a little more glamorous. He reports good reviews of Hilary—a vast improvement over Condie and Madeleine and perhaps on par with an old favorite, Colin.
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A disclaimer: this post has nothing to do with being American or British or in the Cotswolds. Thus you, dear reader, will suffer none of my usual far fetched and occasionally tortured attempts to make the link between what’s going on in my life and the title of this blog. Despite the global economic downturn I have been in the lucky position over the past few months of trying to hire people. The open positions are in Helsinki, Berlin, and Boston, and they have attracted a range of applicants as diverse as those three cities. While I have yet to find the perfect person for any of the posts, it’s been a sometimes entertaining and sometimes exasperating experience reading the hundreds of cover letters and resumes received so far. As most of them applicants present at best tenuous evidence of the required skills and experience, I have no reason to interview them. This is a shame as I am utterly fascinated by a handful and would like nothing more than to sit down and have a chat.With some it’s their earnestness and backgrounds that make me sympathetic. One applicant was a recent immigrant from Turkey to the UK. He had a decent job in IT in Istanbul but had been working as a waiter at Pizza Express since moving to London. My heart bled over the discrimination and frustration I imagined he had experienced, but even if he was right for the job I don’t have one to offer in the UK. Another applicant, Ehsan, wrote in his cover letter that he was “…from Shiraz, the 4th biggest city of Iran.” He went on to say, “Your Company is one of the best choices for me to continue my engineering life and build my career life on it, which has always been my dream.” All of which may be true were I looking to hire a mechanical engineer with a background in metal processing, Ehsan’s specialty. I would, however, love to talk with him about his views on the recent Iranian elections.Then there are the slight nutters, the ones who tell you way too much about their personal lives, like “Without only one exception in Middle Summer Festival 1996, I have never passed out to alcohol nor having alcohol problems!” which is the least crazy thing mentioned in this particular candidate’s cover letter. My favorite is Isabella, who has applied twice, explaining in her most recent cover letter that she “…decided to take a break from London and spend a few weeks in Europe. I feel that this was not enough time but the fact is that I had to embrace a new lifestyle,” thereby managing to be somehow overly familiar and cryptic all at the same time. Isabella, I reach. A few weeks in Europe is never enough time and although I don’t want to hire you, I bet you’d have some interesting stories to share over cocktails.
My family has been coming to Canters Deli on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles as long as I can remember, which is at least part of the reason why I am so irritated that my mother has just asked the waiter for a cup of matzo. How can she not know after thirty-plus years that matzo ball soup (at Canters at least) only comes by the bowl and not by the cup? And why is she asking the waiter for a cup of matzo, leaving out the “ball soup” part? Does she want a cup of unleavened crackers? My ninety-year old grandmother sits oblivious at the other end of our horseshoe-shaped, baby shit brown vinyl booth. Her head is suspended above the table at a forty-five degree angle, like a wrecking ball swinging from a crane, as she clutches half a corned beef on rye in both hands. A frosted coral mouth swoops in to take a bite, the red ragged edges of the meat protruding lasciviously from between the crusts while a small fly nests in her silvery helmet of hair. I am too transfixed by the scene of savagery—of old age, our food chain, of all of human history—even to swat it away.
But I cannot hold my mother’s obliviousness to matzo ball soup ordering etiquette accountable for my crotchety and pondering mood. I blame it on the cumulative contents of the vacation thus far, a pseudo vacation really, which started a week ago when we arrived in Florida to attend my twentieth high school reunion. On our first morning we brunched with my old childhood friend, A., at News Cafe on South Beach. Over eggs we talked of disease—my MS scare and her mother’s lymphoma. In matter of fact terms she explained that her mother is managing her disease but at the same time it is likely this is what she will die from. After breakfast we headed west for the reunion in Fort Myers. From within the air conditioned confines of her husband’s Mercedes (used, as she pointed out for what seemed like no particular reason), she updated us on the financial meltdown that is dominating her immediate family’s life. The story lasted the length of Alligator Alley and was littered with the usual suspects: commercial real estate market collapse, foreclosures, lawsuits, soured friendships, pondering when to pull a child out of private school. She talked about leaving Miami and starting over in Greenville, S.C. (where they’re “all just sitting around drinking a beer on the front porch”), dropping the word bankruptcy into the conversation as if she were breaking in a new pair of shoes by wearing them around the house. Throughout she was detached and impressively philosophical. It might be “the best thing that ever happened to our family” she mused before adding the admirable dose of self-flagellation: “We were very materialistic.”
A. and I have always had a kind of low-level, background competitiveness lingering in our relationship. We attended the the same high school and university. At both she outshone me in popularity (cheerleader, homecoming court) which I liked to think I made up for by marginally edging her out academically. But years ago A. had won hands down in the traditional success stakes: a stay at home mom with three kids and a wildly successful businessman of a husband. Last year she posted a picture of her ridiculously attractive and stylish family on Facebook and I joked with her to take down the ad from the Ralph Lauren catalog and stop pretending it was her family. I am relieved that my sub-conscious had the dignity not to feel a shred of victory over her current plight. My psyche somehow needed this better, richer version of me and without her I felt a little bit lost.
The reunion wasn’t all glum news. I reminisced with one of my oldest pals, J., about how in third grade we used to fight over who got Scott Baio and who got Jimmy McNichol in our imaginary boyfriend playdates in our imaginary hot tub. I had a snatched catchup with S., one of the few black girls in our high school class, just before we sat down for our Hawaiian-themed buffet dinner. She had been tall and athletic looking back in high school and still was. I had enough time to find out she was living in Atlanta, a teacher of some sort, in graduate school, and dating a long haul truck driver. I wish I would’ve talked to her more. I reconnected with P., whose older sister used to regale us on sleepovers by demonstrating her ability to open a beer bottle between her ample breasts. Back then P., like me, favoured an Aqua Net encrusted set of bouffant bangs, and we spent many Friday nights perfecting them with the curling iron before heading out in her red Honda CRX.After the reunion we flew to Los Angeles, where in addition to the matzo ball soup incident, I was subjected to twice daily nervous breakdowns by husband on the topic of why we ever left this sunny paradise. In between he checked his BlackBerry and muttered conspiracy theories about what was happening in his absence from work. I tried to ignore him and focus on the intense joy I experienced in our daily Mexican pilgrimages to Gilberts El Indio or Holy Guacamole, but the truth is I was starting to wonder why we ever left L.A. too. And herein lies the lesson: vacationing in your past is a dangerous game at which I had excelled. In ten days I managed to wedge in the entire psychological landscape of my childhood plus a good dose of mortality, which explains how I came to observe the whole sordid spectre of human history in that fly sitting on my grandmother’s head in a booth of a Jewish deli. I resolve to spend next year’s summer vacation firmly in the present, preferably someplace without BlackBerry connectivity.
Last year I went to the ballet at the Royal Opera House. My seat was in a box just off stage left, from where I could peer directly down into the orchestra pit. I don’t remember much about the ballet (La Sylphide I think), but I do remember looking down at the conductor and thinking with some sadness that I am probably too old to ever be able to do that. By which I meant, at thirty-six, it was unrealistic to think I could ever become an orchestra conductor. Not that I ever aspired to be an orchestra conductor, or a musician of any sort. I terminated my music career at will upon graduating from the eighth grade (everyone knows high school marching band is for losers), having scaled the heights of third chair flute in the Fort Myers Middle School band. But in that moment at the opera house I sensed the realm of all of life’s possibility slipping away just a little bit as I came to grips with the middleness of both my age and achievements in corporate management. It would almost be tragic if it wasn’t so narcissistic.
Of course I blame my parents for this obscene level of self-belief and sense of control over my own destiny that allowed me to think well into my thirties I might be capable of one day usurping Sir Simon Rattle if I just tried hard enough. They have always thought I am smarter than I am. (My father still thinks if I would have taken my SATs again I could have breached the Ivy wall instead of settling for my respectable yet second tier university). I suppose this life philosophy has served me well despite the inherent dose of denial. But it also explains why I am having so much trouble coping with a factoid my neurologist let slip on my recent visit.
It turns out those three sessions of intensive steroid treatments I did back in March only treated my symptoms: the brain swelling which subsequently caused me difficulty in speaking. They did nothing to address the underlying cause, a series of lesions on my brain. In fact the aftermath of these lesions will always be with me. Should I ever have want or need for another brain scan, I will first need to be shot full of dye so the doctor can tell any new lesions from the old ones.
None of this squares with my core belief system of you are generally in control of your life, even if I no longer quite believe I have enough years left to learn how to conduct a philharmonic. Surely there must be something I can do to rid myself of these lesions, some combination of oily fish and pomegranates and yoga if no miracle drug is yet available as my neurologist claims to be the case.
And so in the absence of any answers from science I have turned to the transformative power of language. Lesions are for lepers or people with venereal disease. They simply will not do. Therefore, I have decided I have les ions, which I like to pronounce lā-ē-uh, with a trademark French grunt on the last syllable. It still sounds vaguely scientific yet at the same time foreign and alluring. And best of all it makes me feel, just for a moment, like I am in control.
Near the exit at the Waitrose supermarket in Cirencester there are three tall perspex boxes with piggy bank style slots on top. When you checkout, the cashier gives you a charity token, a green plastic “coin” you can deposit in the perspex box for your charity of choice. Waitrose then makes charitable donations proportionate to the number of green disks in each box. The charities are rotated on a regular basis, but recently one of the boxes was designated for a local MS center. I am not ashamed to say that I got in the habit of lingering by the perspex boxes on my way out to observe what my fellow shoppers deemed to be worthy causes. Imagine my disgust at the number of people who thought that the town needed a better playground or that disabled kids might benefit from horse riding lessons. I thought about making an impassioned plea for tokens for the local MS center, but thought better of it. I’d hate for my outburst to get me banned from the store. This is the only place in a fifty-mile radius that sells Skinny Cow Triple Chocolate ice cream bars.
The truth is that getting up close and personal with a health issue will make you act in an extremely self-interested way. (Just look at Michael J. Fox. I don’t ever remember him talking about Parkinson’s disease when he was on Family Ties.) Which explains why I’ve just requested an information pack online for the London to Paris charity bike ride for the MS Trust in May 2010. Well, that and I’ve been catching up with old friends ahead of some upcoming high school and college reunions and am alarmed by the number of triathlete, yoga teaching overachievers who apparently haven’t gotten the memo that we’re pushing forty and officially letting ourselves go. Start saving your green plastic tokens now. You’ll need them when I come asking for sponsorship next year.
I went to see my neurologist yesterday for my three-month follow up. I am still not used to saying I have a neurologist. It’s like when you first get married and it feels wildly foreign to refer out loud to your “husband.” But the strangeness comes with a hint of pride. I would rather have a neurologist than, say, a proctologist or a chiropodist. It somehow feels more glamorous, more high brow, more befitting of me. The corporeal mutiny of age inches forward—an extra chin here, an autoimmune attack there—but that one vestige of youth, my vanity, remains.
My check up was more of a check in. In fact, my neurologist would make a great shrink. He has mastered the therapist’s technique whereby the patient poses a burning question and the therapist manages to get the patient to answer it for herself through a deft combination of silence and answering a question with another question. The burning question of the appointment was what to do next: nothing or scan again. The latter option means I would be actively searching for evidence of new “activity” in the brain despite a lack of symptoms (the doctor dismissed the lazy arm that cause me a spasm of panic earlier in the month within the first two minutes of our appointment; it’s not a MS symptom). If the scan reveals symptom-free activity it is enough to get you an MS diagnosis, which is the trigger to start on meds. American doctors are generally pro-medicine of all kinds, so odds are if I was in the US a doctor would advocate a scan. Brits on the other hand opt for the wait and see approach at this stage. And in this matter I’ve decided to side with the country of which I’ve most recently become a citizen. I shall stick my head in the sand and enjoy the symptom-free life I’m experiencing now for as long as it lasts, hopefully for the next sixty years or so.
I pretty much knew this was my decision before I walked into the doctor’s office, but that didn’t stop me from subjecting him to a thirty minute interrogation. I was desperate for my symptom-free three months to mean something of statistical significance about reducing my chances of developing MS. It doesn’t. It means what it means which is that I’ve gone three months without any symptoms. And that is a good thing in and of itself. And that’s all. I was hoping there would at least be some sort of ceremony to present me with my “three months symptom-free” Alcoholics Anonymous style token, something I could carry around in my pocket and finger inconspicuously when I was feeling insecure. Something to hold onto.
The one bit of new information I did glean from my questioning was that more instances of MS occur the farther away from the equator you go in either direction. My neurologist slipped it into a response to a question I had about treatment in the US versus the UK, citing “the equator effect” in explanation for why he couldn’t give me an accurate answer.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean,” I asked, concerned that this man in front of me was actually a quack witch doctor masquerading as a neurologist. This would not be good for my frail ego — which as I’ve mentioned is dependent on having a neurologist—nevermind my health. Next he’s going to tell me cats can suck the air out of babies’ mouths. But instead he went on to explain the epidemiological phenomenon of MS and the equator, which I later confirmed on the Internet (a validation process which I am sure sends shudders up the spine of every doctor in the land). Unfortunately the relationship is not causal, which means I won’t be changing the name of this blog to An American in Quito anytime soon.
The compelling inaugural read of the Wheatsheaf Inn book club was Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country. Early on the narrator, Sam Marsdyke, tells us about the attempted rape allegation that prematurely ended his school career. In his version it was a mutually reciprocated teenage dalliance interrupted by a teacher with unfortunate timing. I believed him. Then, a few pages later, Sam dropkicks a chicken for no particular reason and the doubts set in. Sam’s descent into the realm of the unreliable narrator continues unabated from there.
Over the weekend husband had occasion to tell the story of his own “chicken dropkick” moment with a much more personal unreliable narrator, his mother, who suffered from undiagnosed schizophrenia for many years of husband’s childhood. When he was ten years old he decided to reverse engineer a record player and, in the process of disassembling the transformer, gave himself a nasty electric shock. The experience disturbed him and over the next few days he became convinced he had developed a lump in his chest caused by the shock. After a few more days he decided to confide his worries in his mother. He told her the whole story, then she asked him what he thought the lump could be.
“I think it might be cancer,” whispered husband.
His mother paused and thought this over before answering.
“Could be, son,” she replied. “Could be.”
Lately I too have been struggling with the reliability of some personal narration in my life. For the last few days my right arm has felt weak. I notice it most when I’m driving and want to drape it on the arm rest or lay it in my lap in an imaginary sling position to get relief. I’m worried it’s an MS-related symptom, but husband is convinced it’s nothing. He tells me I’m just getting old and feeling creaky is to be expected. The problem is he’s understandably invested in me not exhibiting MS symptoms, having no desire to ponder a future in which he gets to play nursemaid to someone with a chronic illness. The part of me that knows positive thinking matters in situations like these welcomes his optimism. But another part of me knows he’s a fundamentally unreliable narrator on this particular subject.
He has, however, made one very accurate observation of late. Ever since this whole health debacle started, my brain has gone into overdrive making me highly sensitive to any physical anomalies no matter how slight. No cramp, tinge or tingle goes unnoticed. It’s as if 24/7 surveillance has been installed in my central nervous system. The fundamental question, though, is how reliable is the person my brain has put on duty to monitor the surveillance? Is it an Agent Scully type in charge, smart and grounded even in the face of an alien attack on my neurons? I’d be happy if P.I. Precious Ramotswe was on the case, wise and warm and down to earth seeming somehow appropriate for the task at hand. But maybe my cerebellum has gone and hired an overzealous mall cop for the task and now he’s stirring up “symptoms” to justify his own inflated sense of self-importance.
Of course I am hopeful my brain has just made a poor hiring decision and my lazy right arm is all down to mall cop’s overactive imagination. After all, there’s no need for the warmth and wisdom of the Lady’s No.1 Detective if there’s nothing wrong. I’ll find out soon enough because my follow up appointment with the neurologist is booked for the end of the month. Until then I’m keeping my inner mall cop away from the phone.
This morning I awoke to find my bedroom window framing the demise of coal size blobs of moss as they plunged to the ground. It was a violent change from the normal tree with field tableau. For a moment I thought these were the world’s first suicidal plants, then I realized it was a black bird violently shifting them from the places on the roof slates where they had nested all winter. It is officially spring, and I guess it is time for these blobs to make a nest for someone else.
I have spent a lot of time looking out this bedroom window over the last week as I’ve been laid recuperating from the after-effects of the steroid treatment, which was in some ways more debilitating (if less scary) than the symptoms. It is, thankfully, a rather nice view at which I could look more or less gaze indefinitely. The twelve window panes, whose frames are badly in need of a paint job, look out over a high stone wall and a large and handsome stone house behind us, a tree towering four stories to the left, and behind, St. George’s field which slopes up into a horizon of green, tree-lined hills. I’ve been to see the neurologist yesterday who seemed as pleased at my progress as he was stoic and scary when he first saw me a week before and broke the news. He’s prescribed one more week of looking out the window, then it’s a cautiously optimistic game of wait and see.
I have always had a big head, literally. If a hat label says “one size fits all,” I don’t even bother trying it on. I need “large” at a minimum, preferably “extra-large.” Over the years there have been both great millinery victories — my fuchsia, feathered Royal Ascot extravaganza — and disasters, as when my favorite Kangol white safari-style summer hat strayed into the clothes dryer and forever out of my wardrobe. But last week my brain decided to take the “big head” issue to new heights by engaging in what my neurologist terms “a clinically isolated incident of inflammation.”
I don’t mean to make light of my medical condition, but I hope that by demonstrating my good humor you’ll be more likely to forgive me the vanity I demonstrated upon hearing that my immediate course of treatment for an inflamed brain would be three consecutive days of intravenous steroid treatments.
“Are there are any side effects?” I asked the doctor, by which of course I meant would the steroids make me puffy. I am currently doing puffy just fine without any extra assistance.
As it turns out the steroids are an anti-inflammatory and therefore no puffiness involved. I can vouch for that now, having finished day three yesterday. The only side effects seem to be that I am fatigued and incapable of staying on my feet for more than an hour without becoming very tetchy. Which gives me time to blog.
The whole “incident” started a week ago last Saturday. Husband and I were out for a bike ride when I commented that I felt like I had marbles in my mouth. This continued over the weekend. I was finding it increasingly hard to talk, which is not without irony since I am well known for being a motor-mouth interrupter amongst both friends and colleagues. I felt like a drunk person trying really hard to sound sober or someone coming off Novocaine trying to form words convincingly. By lunch hour on Monday I knew something was wrong.
I knew something was wrong even though nobody else seemed to notice. I only vaguely sounded like I was slurring to my own husband. When I asked two co-workers with whom I share an office if I sounded funny they laughed and said only because I was American. Then one asked if I had been drinking and laughed some more. Trusting my instincts got me into treatment within a week of first recognizing something was wrong. And so concludes the public service announcement portion of this post.
Last week then devolved into a series of rapid progression, process of elimination medical appointments. Tuesday afternoon the GP put me through a drill not dissimilar to that of a drunk driver before handing me off to an ear, nose and throat specialist on Wednesday. After a camera up my nose to look at my vocal chords and more drunk driving tests, I was dispatched swiftly to “the donut,” or MRI scanning machine and given an appointment with the neurologist for the following Monday night. On Thursday the ENT called me during a break in the operating theater to assure me there were “no tumors or anything like that,” but to also let me know he had gotten me in with the head of neurology at 6pm on Friday. No tumors good, prioritised Friday night neurologist appointment bad.
The neurologist had me tell the whole story of my symptoms and did yet another round of drunk driver tests before he spilled the beans on my scan. I knew there were some beans to spill because he waited for me to put on my shoe before he’d start. Then out came the “clinically isolated incident” bit. The bad news was that multiple incidents constitute a diagnosis of MS. I had to ask if multiple meant two, as in if this happens one more time. It does.
I usually call people by their first initial in this blog since I am generally either poking fun at them or commenting on their prolific drinking habits. However, I feel obliged to give a shout out to my neurologist, Dr. Fuller, who refused to allow husband and I to get carried away with what might happen and instead kept us focused on the immediate steroid treatment. Dr. Fuller is tall enough to look like a retired pro basketball player and calm, gentle, and patient enough for me to wish just a little bit he was my dad. He even made a special trip to see me on Saturday at the hospital when I was getting my first treatment.
The hospital is a private one in Gloucester, a town I last visited in February for my citizenship ceremony. I am glad to be getting my treatment out here rather than in London. For one, husband can drive me and park easily. There is neither the hassle or the expense of taking a cab, just rather pleasant green space on the twenty mile drive between our cottage and the hospital. The hospital itself is more well maintained Travel Lodge than institutional. For the three days of my treatment I had the same private room overlooking a courtyard. There was a flat screen TV, a nondescript Impressionist framed print, and wood effect laminate flooring. The nurse wrote a note so the janitor didn’t throw my newspapers and magazine away. Each day a waiter brought a pot of tea. The doctor who poked me with needles every day was a Romanian named Elian who practised his English idioms on me. I didn’t mind because it distracted me from the vials of blood he was filling from my arm, except for the time on day three he tried to make a joke about having to take more blood but I didn’t get it was a joke.
The nice thing about the post-treatment fatigue is that I don’t have any interest in investigating websites on MS or Lupus (husband rifled through my chart to look at the second round of blood tests that had been ordered and blurted out Lupus, doing nothing to relieve my anxiety). I am surprised by my willingness to sit in the not knowing this week and attempt to recuperate, considering I am normally a control freak. I figure there will be plenty of time for obsessive medical investigation. Right now I’m more about Gilmore Girl reruns.
On Tuesday we returned home from a birthday celebration trip to Barcelona. For what might be the last time, I accepted a landing card from the British Airways purser, supplied my name, address, profession, and place of birth, then got in the non-EU passport holders line at Heathrow Terminal 1. Husband schlepped alongside even though he holds a British passport and that line was, as usual, much shorter.
Avoiding this landing card/long line routine is the original reason I applied for my British citizenship. That and the fact that British citizenship would make me eligible to work in Europe (Paris specifically, because in my fantasy life that doesn’t mean I need to speak French). It’s been months since I parted with the £600, lengthy application, and stack of old utility bills required to apply for citizenship. I hadn’t thought much about what becoming a British citizen actually meant until this week when the ceremony in which I swear my allegiance to HRM the Queen takes place. Now the doubts have set in. Have I earned the right to be a loyal subject in this fair land? Is being too lazy to fill out a landing card or wait in line at immigration control a worthy cause? It hardly inspires comparison to Ellis Island.
To make matters more confusing, America is on the up. Sure, the economy is in the pits but so is the UK’s. Obama is starting to restore the country’s reputation, the dollar is up, and the pound is down. I’m not renouncing my American citizenship to become a Brit, but even going “dual” feels a bit like betrayal. It’s like I got separated and now I’m getting remarried without getting divorced…which makes me a crazy Mormon bigamist. I told you I was confused.
In an effort to sort things out, I sat down and made a list of why I deserve to be a British citizen in addition to remaining a proud if not exactly flag waving American.
1. I am proficient in British. Specifically, I am totally au fait with the nouns: boot and bin tumble from my lips on a regular basis. Adjectives are a bit of a stretch. Bloody still doesn’t sound right coming out, but I did ask someone if he was cross the other night without so much as a pause. Verbs are fewer in general. Most are some variation of hooking up –to shag, to pull, to cop off– and in my eighth year of marriage I have little use for such vocabulary. I have been known to fancy something, as in “I fancy an Indian tonite,” by which I mean a curry dinner not shagging an Indian man.
2. I have made a genuine effort to fit in. My lean Los Angeles limbs have morphed to a pie-filled pear shape. My perfectly aligned teeth used to practically taunt “my dentistry is better than yours,” but now, with increased tea consumption, have mellowed to a less ostentatious gleam.
3. I am addicted to “The Archers,” an agricultural soap opera and Radio 4 institution. Imagine if “The Guiding Light” never made the leap to television and was set on a farm. Recent dialogue in an episode featuring a lambing scene included: “This one’s cervix isn’t dilated. Where’s the lubricant?”
What’s most remarkable about this last one is that I used to hate “The Archers,” whose chirpy opening diddy seemed to start up every time I turned on the radio on a long car journey. Now I love it, perhaps coaxed into its grip by a regular car commute and country life. But reasons don’t matter. My change of heart is the equivalent of developing a taste for Marmite, certain proof I am worthy of calling myself a Brit.