Happy Christmas

Thank God for technology. I'm so glad that I can buy all of my Christmas presents online through Amazon, download any music I like from iTunes, any time of day, and keep all of my friends up to date via Facebook every time my mood changes.

Unfortunately, all is not wine and roses. For example, it was via an automated system that British Airways informed us that our flight back to the US was cancelled for tomorrow. 'We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused' said the mail. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a pretty difficult time locating any degree of 'sincere' in an automated email. OK, I understand the need - BA (or anyone else) wouldn't be in business long if they didn't capitalize on the efficiencies afforded by automation, but a human had to actually author the text (or at least the boilerplate) for the mail. Did this unknown author really think that anyone would feel better if the mail included a 'sincere' apology? Hey, BA, here's an idea. If you want to 'sincerely' apologize, how about giving me a discount on my next flight? Or crediting my frequent flyer account (and Michele's and the kids' accounts, too) with 50,000 air miles. How's that for sincerity?

Anyway, we now have an extra day to prepare for our journey. This also means we have an extra day to feed the kids. There's a sort of famine mentality that sets in around here at Christmas time. Everyone knows the stores will only be open on an occasional and apparently random basis for the next week or so, so they clear absolutely everything out of the food stores in an effort to ensure that no one goes hungry between Christmas and New Year's. It's the British equivalent of the rush on food stores that happens every time The Weather Channel predicts another "Storm of the Century". This also means that, even if we CAN find an open shop on Boxing Day (that's tomorrow, the 26th), chances are we'll only find some leftover prunes and a fruitcake or two.

Speaking of fruitcake, this fine tradition in alive and well here, except that people here actually eat them, unlike in the US where everyone just passes the same fruitcake around to each other year after year (I've even known some to be handed down from generation to generation). They are also iced, with some sort of stiff white icing vaguely reminiscent of the layer of fat around a pork roast. Most unsettling.

There are a great many culinary traditions here which I can't fully appreciate or simply don't understand. Blood sausage. Runny eggs. Haggis. But the most wonderfully oddity by a furlong that I've yet come across has to be the stuffed goose. Mind you, there's nothing unusual about stuffing a goose per se; what's unusual is that they stuff the goose with a turkey. And they stuff the turkey with a duck, and the duck with a chicken, and the chicken with a game hen, or possibly a pigeon or some other smallish bird. The net result is sort of a Matryoshka doll of fowl. Apparently, the butchers can bone the things while keeping the carcass intact, thereby allowing for a pretty solidly packed and easily sliceable bird(s). I understand it's delicious, though I've yet to find a recipie for it, partly because I've no idea what it's called, and cookbooks tend to be indexed by such mundane terms as 'turkey' and 'chicken', and not by 'guinea fowl-stuffed-chicken-stuffed-duck-stuffed-turkey-stuffed-goose'.

Well, my Christmas cheer (such as it was) has now worn off, and so I bid you all a Merry Christmas, and to all a good night.

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

Despite having worked in the financial services industry for much of my career, I have a track record of bad investments. I pooh-poohed AOL in the early 90's, bought Starbase (SBAS) at $3.50 just before it dropped to like $0.00001 and thought the Google IPO at $180 was too expensive (the stock recently topped $400).

One notable exception to this pattern, however, was my Swivel Straight Christmas Tree Stand (As Seen On TV!). I don't think they even sell these anymore, but in 1996 when I first moved to Philadelphia, they were all the rage. It has a separate bucket into which the tree is placed and secured, then the bucket assembly is inserted into sort of a ball socket device, which you can turn and, well, swivel until the tree is straight.

This techology didn't come cheap. At $50, it probably cost more than my couch, but it avoided all of the Christmas tree hassle, the tree never fell over, and it lasted for years.

Last year, I allowed myself to be talked into a new-fangled tree stand with a single spike that inserts into a pre-drilled hole in the bottom of the tree. Great concept, except for three things: not every tree place drills holes, not every tree place that drills holes drills them straight, and no tree place in the UK has ever thought of drilling a hole. So this wonderful tree stand (which, by the way, fell over last year, depositing a gallon of sappy water on the carpet of our old family room) is utterly useless.

True to form, I also decided, for reasons still unclear to me, to sell my perfectly servicable Swivel Straight Christmas Tree Stand (As Seen On TV!) for something like $5 to a neighbor before we moved. So now we have no tree stand. Great strategy, Conroy.

Michele bought two strands of lights, one of which didn't work. On returning that one, she could only find sets for £15. I realize I complain a lot about how expensive things are here, but come on. $30 for 100 friggin' Christmas lights? They don't even play an annoying tune.

Speaking of expensive, we did a little shopping yesterday in Wimbledon Village. For those of you who've been here, Wimbledon Village is the nice end of Wimbledon. We live in the other end. We looked at some nice trees whilst there and nearly bought one before we found out it was £50. You do the math. That's one expensive tree. It ought to come with a manservant to water it for that price.

Ours was a bit cheaper. We bought it down the street at the guy who sells flowers on the corner when the mood strikes him. He was there when we moved in and we thought "How nice! We have a flower stall right down the street". Then he buggered off and we didn't see him again until about a month ago. Apparently the flower business allows him to take the summer off. Or maybe it's the Christmas tree business where he really makes his money.

I carried the tree from the corner. It was kind of funny, me carrying a tree down the road. I got a lot of looks from people, which is unusual, because it seems that no matter what you do here, no one will look at you. It's sort of an institutionalized ignorance.

So now, tree decorated, I am roasting a chicken while Michele writes out more Christmas cards. Next year, e-cards for everyone. Now that would have been a good investment.

Vienna

Phew. (In England, they pronounce the p and the h separately, so that it sounds a bit like pee-hew. Just another cultural oddity). November was a busy month. Between my trip to Key West, our pseudo-Thanksgiving dinner (which was great fun, although we may serve meatloaf next year), our trip to Vienna (more on this in a bit) and my trip to New York right off the back of that, I feel like I've spent most of the month in airports.

Speaking of airports, I must tell you all (well, both of you, anyway) about a great program I've been enrolled in for some time, but am now only just getting some use out of. With airport security being what it is these days (how long d'you think it'll be before we have to go thru the metal detector naked?) you have to be at the airport pretty damn early to make sure you catch your flight. As a result, you spend a lot of time savouring the unusual odors from the other passengers in The Waiting Area of Death. The is, unless you happen to be a member of Priority Pass, which gets you into a bunch of airline lounges for a nominal fee. This is the best thing since printed money as far as I'm concerned. Most of the lounges have a bar, or at least a bunch of snacks, comfortable seating, WiFi. One at Heathrow even has an upper deck from which you can see both runways and watch the planes take off and land - kind of interesting for grownups, but really fascinating for kids. If you travel on your own dime (and therefore don't have business class lounge access), it's definitely worth a look.

OK, so Vienna. The kids are actually becoming really good travelers. They know how to wait in line at checkin (a skill one can't avoid learning in Heathrow airport, possibly the worst organized institution on the planet), they don't mind the indignities of the security screening, and they have learned to make the best of airline sandwiches by combining the edible bits from each offering until they arrive, sticky-fingered, at the logical conclusion: tuna and sweetcorn with cheddar, ham and pickle.

What they do not know, however, is how to stay up past 8 or sleep in later than 6.

This, as you might imagine, requires something of an adjustment for a nightowl such as myself. Fortunately, I hit on the perfect strategy - put the kids to bed, and then go out again. Unfortunately, this approach has one drawback. You may have guessed it already. Yes, it means that someone has to stay with the kids. So it was I who found the little organic cafe with the best vegetable lasagne and the Italian waiter who's lived everywhere and moved to Austria for love (not for money, as he was quick to point out). And it was I who got to have Vienna's best Wiener Schnitzel at a place called Figl Muller. And it was I who got to go out at 2am to find a pharmacy. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We arrived on Friday afternoon and, after a quick stop at the hotel to check in, had a bit of a wander. The thing about traveling with kids is that they can only take in so many architecturally significant or aesthetically pleasing structures before they go into total meltdown, so we've learned to keep our sightseeing to a minimum and instead find the nearest playground. Vienna fortunately has at least two very nice ones which our children enjoyed immensely.

After ticking off a few more items on our list of European Playgrounds to Visit, we headed for what we specifically went to Vienna to see - the Christmas Markets. These are sprayed around the city like so much glittery graffitti. On our first night, we visited the largest and most famous, the Christkindlmarkt in front of the city hall (called, appropriately enough, the Rathaus). While mostly full of stalls selling kitschy junk, it was a lot of fun, in large part due to something called Gluh wien, which is some sort of mulled wine - just the thing for warming up on a chilly November night. I had bratwurst, the kids had frankfurters, we rode a little train, I spoke what little German I know. It was heavenly.

The kids in bed, Michele and I whispered in the dark until they fell asleep, at which point I ventured out in search of a real dinner. It was then that I discovered the cafe around the corner from the hotel, on a back street. I'm not terribly picky when it comes to food any more. If a place looks reasonably clean and serves beer, that's about all I really need. This one fit the bill, so in I went.

I may have mentioned that I don't speak German. Predictably, I also can't read it, so the menu was completely unintelligible. I know the words for beer ('biere', helpfully pronounced 'beer'), please ('bitte', which seems to be a versatile word, as people seemed to drop it frequently into conversation), thank you ('danke schoen' - everyone knows that from the Wanye Newton song), 'I don't speak German' ('Ich spreche kein Deutsche'), and 'Do you speak English' ('Sprechen-zie Englisch'?). But now you know pretty much all the German you need in Vienna, because the minute you open your mouth, they start speaking English. What a helpful place!

Roberto, the moved-for-love-not-money waiter I mentioned earlier was most helpful. He taught me another useful phrase, 'Noch eine, bitte', which means, loosely, 'barman, another of these please', especially when spoken in conjunction with an elaborate pantomime of drinking from a glass. I asked Roberto to order me the four course menu, which involved a red vegetable soup, (hearty and tasty), a salad with both greens and some sort of potato and vinegar mixture (also tasty), the aforementioned veggie lasagne (huge, tasty), and a dessert which for the life of me I can't remember. I took a second portion of veggie lasagne back to the hotel for Michele. All this, plus two beers came to just €25.00 (£17 or $32).

Next day, we took a tram ride around the city (we didn't intend to, it was just that I forgot the map back at the hotel, so we ended up going in a circle to see what there was to see). We ended up at another Christmas market, this one selling much nicer things and with far fewer people. Unfortunately, Michael, being three, insisted on touching everything, so it was kind of a miserable time for him.

After lunch (some sort of potato thing with onions and peppers fried in butter, I think) and some more gluh wein, we decided to give Michael a break from not being able to touch things and went to the nearby Natural History museum. Now this may not sound like fun, but the kids loved it, especially the hall of fish. They sat for about an hour drawing pictures of the funny looking fish they saw there.

Since the Rathaus was on the way back to the hotel, we decided to feed the kids there again, and this time, we actually went in to the Rathaus, where there were a bunch of activities for the kids. We selected baking. The kids had a ball - got covered in flour, covered in dough, and got to keep their paper hats.

After the kids were asleep, I had another nice tour of the city, ate the Wiener Schnitzel (it was a little dry, but tasty and big). Got back to the hotel about 11:30. At 2:30, Michael woke up shivering uncontrollably. Then he got a fever. I went off to find an all-night pharmacy. These are not as plentiful as they are in America. The all night drugstore is a bit like a speakeasy. You ring the bell, they open a small door, you tell them what you want, they go get it and pass it to you thru the little door. All very back alley, cloak and dagger stuff. Tell 'em John sent you.

Back at the hotel, Michael had thrown up and was very hot. It was neither a pleasant nor a restful night. Next day, we all sat in the room and watched German TV until it was time to go to the airport. Tom and Gerry is still just as funny in German.

There's still a lot of catching up to do. The trip to NY, the visit to my family in the Poconos, Caroline's birthday. But tomorrow's a big day - Michele and I have 4 hours to ourselves - so I'll go to bed now and save those for another time.

Auf Wiedersehen!

Orphan's Thanksgiving

I allowed some people from work to talk me into having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for them, and, since there's no point in cooking turkey for 4, we invited 10. While we had a lot of fun last night, there were a few snags.

First, there's the oven. Our oven makes the Black and Decker toaster oven that I used through college look rather grand. It's waaay too small to cook a real traditional 25lb turkey; I'd have had to hack off the legs and cut it into quarters to fit it. This actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise, though, because, at £75 ($150), that was the most expensive turkey I've ever encountered.

Next, there's the size of our house. Although everyone who came marvelled at how big our place is (and I guess it is, as compared to many homes in London), it is not the sort of place acustomed to hosting 12 adults and 4 children. Once again, we had to press into service the card table and folding chairs my grandmother gave us years ago (thanks, gran!), along with a small play table for the kids and one of the chairs from our patio set. Incredibly, not only did we fit the turkey into the oven, we fit all the guests into the kitchen, with seats.

With everyone around the table, though, and the wine glasses, there wasn't quite enough room for all the food, so we had to pass the platters around and then remove them once everyone had some. This system worked fairly well until someone wanted seconds, at which point, several people had to mobilize in order to let him out.

Thanksgiving is, hands down, my favorite holiday. There are no gloopy cards to send, no expensive gifts to buy. All you do is ruck up to somebody's table and eat. It's an entire holiday about conspicuous consumption and tryptophan. Oh, yes, and giving thanks.

My non-American friends were well impressed with the quantity of food laid out (a number of positive comments about the quality were also made). Several people brought vegetables, desserts and salad, all of which were fantastic and much appreciated.

But the real success of the evening were the guests. I think a good party is at least as much about having the right mix of people as about the food, the wine or the venue, and last night's crowd was first rate. I hope everyone had as good a time as I did (despite the extensive clean up).

The cranberry sauce was the hit of the evening, so here's the recipie (props to uncle Kevin for this one):

Red Onion Cranberry Sauce
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion, sliced
2 large shallots chopped finely
1 pack (14ounces) fresh cranberries
1 cup red wine
1 cup chicken stock (or turkey stock if you have it)
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1 cup sugar
salt and pepper

saute onion, cranberries and shallots in oil until most of the berries have cracked
Add remaining ingredients, reduce until thick and glossy.

This can be served hot or cold, and if there are leftovers, makes a great sauce for pork.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Back to Reality

I've just returned from a short stay in Key West, Florida. For those of you not familiar with Key West, it is an island, it has palm trees, and it is the southermost point in the continental US. There's a marker intended to identify the actual southernmost point; but, while my map reading skills may not be my greatest strength, I am somewhat skeptical of the marker's location being the actual southermost point, since even a casual read of a map of the island shows any number of other spots which are, well, more south.

No sense quibbling over a few hundred yards, though, the marker itself is largely symbolic. Symbolic of the sheer enormity of the political experiment that gave rise to one of the most powerful nations on the planet. Symbolic of man's triumphs against nature - it is situated near the origin of an underwater cable that was laid to Cuba across 90 miles of open water to Cuba in the late 1800's. Symbolic of man's eternal idiocy, as it seems to be a favorite site for both graffiti and public urination. Evidently, it's something of a rite of passage to relieve oneself while carving something profound into the marker, like "Bob + Shaniqua" or "OJ Simpson wasn't here".

Key West itself is surprisingly (well, to me anyway) not nearly as schlocky as one might expect of a popular tourist destination. This is not to say that it's entirely schlock-free: there is no shortage of ersatz-nautical-theme restaurants featuring such maritime staples as Cap'n Dave's Grilled Chicken Sandwich, and shops selling cuted-up t-shirts ("If you think I'm cute, you should see my mom/aunt/cousin/sister/babysitter/granny") - but there's an interesting mix of the sanitized and the real here that you don't get in a lot of other seaside communities. Beach bums sleep in beat up cars outside ornate Spanish villas. The eccentric and the insane share the streets with the beer-bellied and the Hawaiian-shirted. Men with arms like Popeye row into town for supplies from their boats anchored just far enough out that they can live for free, but not so far that they are completely isolated.

I went to attend the wedding (actually a renewal of wedding vows) of my oldest friend, Mike. I first met Mike in 7th grade, when we were gawky teenagers. Our concerns then were about whether we'd pass the math test and whether anyone would figure out that it really doesn't take 90 minutes to hook up a microphone for a school assembly (we learned early the benefit of arcane knowledge unshared). It's interesting to see how we, and the others that we know from that same era, have grown up without, I think, growing old. I certainly don't feel as old as I expected to now that I've sailed well north of 35. We still like our parties, but we manage our responsibilities, too.

I also met some really warm, interesting people - friends and family on both sides - who made the trip really enjoyable. Props to Tim and Jessica for hosting us so graciously on so many evenings (I know firsthand how trying that can be...), to Greg and Cris for admirably balancing the needs of the party with the needs of a baby, and to all the others in whose company my visit felt even shorter than it was. But thanks especially to Mike and Ali for giving us all a reason to get together in such a beautiful place to participate in such a wonderful event.

And now, back to the routine of daily life. Come on, retirement.

The Hype Cycle

The introduction of new technologies seems to follow a common trajectory, called the hype cycle. This cycle includes both over-inflated expectations and a realistic view of what the technology can actually do. I think this cycle applies equally to living in another country. We are now firmly in what one would call the trough of Disillusionment. It is at this point where all the newness of the experience has fallen away and we realize that, while dramatically different from our previous life, this new life is, well, just life after all.

It includes such mundane realities as paying taxes (40% income tax, 17.5% sales tax and property tax, even though we don't actually own any property, and NHS fees, even though we pay for private insurance so we can actually see a doctor). It includes commuting (50 minutes each way minimum, all of it in standing and in close proximity to irritants of all varieties - bad breath, body odor, cell phones (many now have a feature whereby the owner can play music through its speakers. What misanthrop thought this would be a good idea?), loud talkers, loud breathers and slumpers - those who think that my body is something they can safely lean against. It includes an endless cycle of baths, laundry, sandwiches, carrot sticks, cookies, markers, crayons, bits of paper. It includes gum on the sidewalks. It includes little eddies of leaflets, swirling on a current gritty air. It includes a great deal of strawberry jam.

London is noisy, dirty, chilly, damp, expensive, inconvenient and impersonal.

So why do we still love living here?

Ah, Paris

One of the plans we had when we moved here was to travel with the children and then write books for people travelling with children. There are very few of these available, and those that are don't seem to include the useful bits of advice that real parents of real aspiring globe-trotters need. They show pictures of smiling mums and dads beautifully coiffed with little Tyler and Taylor beaming up at them as if to say, "You guys are the best parents ever! We are SO going to support you in your old age!" They do not show travelling with children as it really is.

The do not show M&D trying to enjoy 30 seconds of peace in a park while T&T whinge about not being able to climb onto some piece of incomprehensible play equipment. They do not show T&T with chins, noses, sleeves and trousers coated in chocolate drool howling in a cafe over who got the last cookie. They do not show M&D trying desperately to get T&T to shut up and go back to sleep at 5am.

So here, having just returned this evening from our first family trip - a long weekend in Paris - are some hard-won pearls of wisdom.

1. Children need to eat. In fact, they need to do this with astonishing regularity, as often as three times a day. Much to our chagrin, wine and cheese is apparently not an acceptable substitute for a nutritious, well-balanced meal. Fortunately, crepes covered in bananas, chocolate sauce and whipped cream are, as are ice cream, sugar waffles, and just about anything sold from a stand near a carousel. This is doubly fortunate, since no Parisian restaurant worth frequenting will serve dinner before 7:00.

2. Children require entertainment. Again, we were surprised to learn that this does not include cabaret, architectural masterpieces or insane people. It does, however, include statuary, particularly the sort with no clothes. For example, in the Jardin des Tuilleries, Michael noticed that a particular statue was naked and crying. "Maybe he has to go wee wee really bad".

3. Children require sleep. This must also be provided with the sort of regularity that would warm the heart of any Swiss watchmaker, and must be offered in extremely large quantities. Normally, the children's sleep habits are not particularly onerous - they sleep, I do something else. But although we were in the City of Lights, they apparently don't turn them on during the day, so not being able to go out at night was a bit of a drag. A bottle of wine in the hotel room can do wonders to lift the spirits, though. Just remember to leave the glasses out of reach the next day.

4. A stroller is effectively ballast in Paris. Yes, it would have been nice to let Michael fall asleep in it rather than in my arms halfway up the Eiffel Tower, but you can't actually take a stroller up there anyway. So after dragging the damn thing on and off 4 trains, through two security checkpoints, around miles of subway tunnels (all of which seem to be at different depths, connected only by narrow stairways), and over at least 9 different sets of feet, it saw exactly 14 minutes of action, and all of it in London.

Michele and I first went to Paris in 1 B.C. (that's 1 year Before Children, or 2000 A.D. by the Gregorian calendar), and it was a completely different city then. The Paris of 8 years ago was one of fine restaurants, long strolls through shopping arcades, an afternoon nosing around a Monet exhibit at a back street museum. 3 hour dinners with a good stinky cheese after.

This year's Paris was one of playgrounds and toy boats, of carousels and piggy back rides. It was a Paris where our offspring climbed through the mouth of a bouncy castle dragon and slid out the other end. It was a Paris of joyful shouting on catching yet another glimpse of the Eiffel Tower around a corner or over a tree. It was a Paris of hanging upside down, sloth-like, from a plane tree.

I think I liked this year's Paris just as much. At least I got to catch up on my sleep.

Maddy

Madeline McCann. 4 years old, missing from her family's vacation villa in Portugal since May. This story has been impossible to miss here, as it's been front page news for 4 months, and recently took a surprising twist. But I'm getting ahead of myself. A few observations/random thoughts about this news item.

Firstly, much has been made of the fact the her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, both highly educated and comfortably well-off, would leave their children unattended while they had dinner with friends. People tend to see this and condemn the McCanns as irresponsible. I've even heard people imply that they had it coming.

What seems to be perpetually overlooked, though, is the fact that the resort at which they were staying is entirely geared toward the production of an environment in which parents can do exactly what the McCanns did. Having talked to people who've actually stayed in a Mark Warner resort, it's not uncommon for parents to leave their children unattended for long periods of time. Let's not condemn the parents for doing what many, many others have simply because we have the benefit of hindsight.

Second, and here's where it gets interesting, the McCanns have done a tremendous job of keeping the story alive, ostensibly in the hope that by doing so, someone will come forward and say that they've seen the girl and her abductor. In the last week or so, though, the Portugese police formally placed the McCanns under suspicion, and it's now up to ajudge to determine based on the current evidence whether formal charges should be brought against the parents.

While details of the evidence against them are sketchy and unreliable (there's a huge amount of speculatory "evidence" sprayed around various news outlets), from what I gather, a large quantity of Madeline's hair and some "bodily fluid" which was an 80% match for Madeline's DNA were found in the trunk of a rental car used by the McCanns some 25 days after Maddy's disappearance. Her parents accidentally killed her with an overdose of sleeping pills, hid the body, then disposed of it later, or so goes the theory.

Now, it may just be me, but I think this new evidence is just a bit hard to swallow. My issues with it are fairly simple. First, where, exactly, does one hide a body in a foreign country? And didn't the police thoroughly search the resort compound and surrounding areas immediately after the disappearance? OK, so maybe the McCanns initially hid the body somewhere else. But if the they were at dinner with friends, when would they have had time to get far enough away that that the body wouldn't be found and then get back without arousing curiosity from their dinner companions? And if the killing was accidental, as has been suggested, wouldn't they have been noticeably shaken during dinner?

OK, set that aside for the moment. Consider the evidence that's been found in the car. A "large amount" of hair? Come on. I just can't imagine that people who are clever enough to have stashed a body for 3 weeks while a massive manhunt and media frenzy raged around them would make the schoolboy mistake of not vacuuming out the car after they'd dumped the body. And just how would they have been able to elude the photographers, journalists and random strangers who've surrounded them for long enough to retrieve the body, move it and then bury it again. Aren't the chances pretty good that someone would have noticed that? Or did the McCanns kill the onlookers, too?

In fact, I'm not alone in thinking that the rental car evidence is a little dodgy. Dr. Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, was quoted as saying that a body which had been decomposing for 25 days would leave a large amount of putrefying matter behind unless it was tightly wrapped. It doesn't seem that a great deal of anything was found in the car. But, as Dr. Baden points out, if the body were so tightly wrapped, how did the hair get out?

Since everyone seems to be in mystery solving mode these days, I'll offer my two alternative theories:
- The Portugese police planted the evidence in the car because they're tired of looking like the Keystone Kops. I admit that this is pretty unlikely since the police would have had to obtain Maddie's hair and some sort of bodily fluid in order to put these into the car, but certainly, given that they had access to the villa, they could have obtained these fairly easily. I'm not fond of this theory, since it feels a bit too Hollywood for me.
- Maddy is alive, and her abductor planted the hair in the rental car to make it a) look like she's dead so as to reduce the intensity of the search and b) make it look like the McCanns did it. Win-win. This is also admittedly a bit of a stretch, since, just as it's unlikely that the McCanns could have exhumed, moved and reinterred the body unnoticed, it's equally improbable that anyone would be able to break into their rental car unnoticed, but I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility.

So maybe my theories aren't watertight, and I certainly don't have all the facts in my posession, but from what's been reported, it doesn't seem like the police have it quite right, either.

Either way, I hope I'm right, and that Madeline is found. The sad fact is, though, that children go missing all the time, from all parts of the world, and no one's looking for them. Maybe we should be.

Bad Habits

We've been toilet training Michael. He's pretty much done, and none too soon, as he starts nursery school next week. He's acquired an interesting habit along the way, though. In the early days, he was afraid to poop on the toilet, so, like any good parents, we incented him to do so. In his case, his favorite thing is Thomas the Tank Engine, so we gave him a little toy train. Every single time.

Clearly this wasn't a sustainable practice, since he's always been fairly regular and merchandising tie-ins are expensive. Predictably, this has created a sort of inverse Pavlovian response, as every time he moves his bowels he now expects to receive a toy train by way of compensation.

Apart from the strange looks we get from other patrons in the Gents' as he wails about 'wanting Annie' while we wash his hands, the Trains for Excrement Exchange Programme has had the desired effect in that he's now happy to have a poo nearly anywhere.

In fact, he's proudly deposited the contents of his lower digestive tract in some of the poshest toilets in all of Christendom: Buckingham Palace, The British Museum, Windsor Castle, the Tower of London, some Indian place at the Notting Hill Carnival, and the Island Gardens DLR station (this last, though you may not have heard of it, was quite an achievement, as we had to convince the station attendant to let us use the 'secure' toilet. Apparently, we don't look like the type of people to leave a bomb in his toilet. For the record, we didn't - we flushed.)

This has become something of a hobby with him - seeing on how many famous places he can leave his skid mark. Still, while somewhat inconvenient, this habit is fairly benign. Caroline, on the other hand, has several habits of which Michele and I feel obliged to divorce her as quickly as possible.

First, she cries when we drop her at school. This happens every day, and it's getting old, especially because the wailing starts when we leave the house and it's a 10 minute walk to school. She's fine once she gets there and starts playing with the other kids, but now one of the boys calls her 'the crying girl'. I hate little boys. I think they should all be rounded up and sent off to break large rocks with small hammers. Failing this delightfully Dickensian childcare approach, however, we'll have to figure out a way to stop her crying before the other kids figure out that she's an easy mark and start making her cry just for the hell of it. Because that's exactly what they'll do. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them to make her life miserable.

Second, she's a nose picker. OK, I know, we all are. Yes, you are, too, stop denying it. The real trouble is, she also eats it. Eww. I don't think I ever did that, so I figure she must get it from Michele. The frequency of this has decreased recently, so I assume she's either growing out of it or has gotten full, but I don't want her growing up like that girl we all knew in high school who got busted eating snot in the second grade and spent the remainder of her school years sitting in a corner obsessively picking lint from her sweater and drawing astonishingly realistic pictures of large knives slicing through various body parts. Come to think of it, getting away from one's early childhood history may be one of the benefits of moving around, as I doubt very much that booger snarfing goes on one's permanent record. Does it?

Finally, and perhaps most troubling, is the butt scratching. And I don't mean your run of the mill oh-dammit-I'm-gonna-have-to-change-my-undies-now sort of scratching, I mean full on, both hands down the back of the pants, subtle as a trainwreck sort.

It's not that I'm embarrassed of her behavior. Well, the crying is a little embarrassing because it makes me feel like a bad parent. But let's face it, not one of these things is self destructive, and they certainly don't hurt anyone else; so as far as I'm concerned, she can wail, pick and scratch to her heart's content if that's what makes her happy. The problem is that I know she'll be teased mercilessly for these things. Yes, I also know that if it's not one of these, the kids will find something - that's how kids are - but these behaviors are just too obvious, too juicy for even the most kind-hearted child to pass up.

On the other hand, maybe it's better for her to learn the cruel lesson now. To take a drubbing in her early years and be thereby fortified to face the challenges which will surely come in adolescence and beyond.

No, as rational as that may sound, I think our focus will have to be on breaking these habits. Too bad she doesn't like trains.

Tube Strike

"Woke up this morning, what did I see
A big black cloud hanging over me
I switched on the radio and nearly dropped dead
The news was so bad that I fell out of bed
There was a gas strike, oil strike, lorry strike, bread strike
Got to be a Superman to survive
Gas bills, rent bills, tax bills, phone bills
I'm such a wreck but I'm staying alive"
- The Kinks

I got my first taste of industrial action today when the union for Metronet, one of the companies that maintains the London Underground, went on strike. In actual fact, I wasn't really affected. I used the dire predictions of thousands left stranded in various parts of the city and having to subsist on day old curry and bits of rat as an excuse to slag off work early.

The strike is set to last 72 hours, with another 72 hour strike scheduled for Monday. While inconvenient, it's certainly not the end of the world. I'm fortunate enough to be able to work from home if I need to. The odd thing, though, is that neither I nor anyone I talk to seems to have the foggiest idea what the strike is about. Unlike in the States, when a strike is used to call attention to something the union wants, and where the striking union is highly verbose, if not entirely articulate, in its explanation of matters, this strike is entirely different. The union isn't saying anything. Not one word has been published about why there's a strike, what the union's hoping to accomplish, and what demands need to be met to avoid next week's strike. It appears that the union is simply striking because it can. Or because they really, really enjoy inconveniencing people.

If anyone can offer an alternative explanation, I'm all ears.

Home Alone

Well, not exactly, but all of our visitors have gone, so it feels as if the house is empty again. We spent 3 of the last 4 weeks entertaining relatives and, although it was great fun having everyone here, now it's back to reality.

I have work next week, and this will be my first full week in about a month. I'm not looking forward to it, even though I've been keeping up with my email, more or less, as I know there will be a pile of undealt-with stuff waiting for me. Caroline starts school again on Tuesday, and is none too happy about that. Michael starts school the week after and, while he's ambivalent about the whole thing, Michele's pretty excited to have time to herself every day, even if it's only two and a half hours.

We've also (finally) booked a European trip. We're going to Vienna for a long weekend in November for the Christmas Market. This is apparently a tradition that dates back either 300 (according to historians) or 700 (according to marketers) years, in which the streets around the Vienna City Hall (the Rathaus, which would be an appropriate name for any government building, really) are transformed into a pine-scented, ornament-selling, mulled-wine-drinking wonderland. We've no idea what to expect - this could be either a really great time or complete bollocks - but we're really excited about the prospect of going to Vienna. For the weekend. How cool is that?

We're also planning a long weekend in Stockholm in October. Somehow, Michele and I always manage to travel in the off season. We went to Paris in October, Rome in November, Nevis in the summer. Nearly all of my trips to London were between November and March, and New Hampshire in early October isn't as colorful as you might think. But so far, we've been really lucky with our travelling. We've never had a bad time anywhere we've been, the weather has generally been good (though Paris in late October is really rainy and windy, so much so that the Eiffel tower was closed), and the tourists have mostly gone home. Maybe we'll make a practice of this off-season travelling. I hear Iceland in February is, um, Icy.

Permanent Autumn

While the calendar officially indicates that it's still summer, that season has been and gone. By my reckoning, summer lasted precisely one day, Sunday, 5 August. On that date, the mercury topped out at 29C (85F). Since then, it's been cool and breezy, bit of rain, bit of sun.

Rather than lament the loss of summer, though, I have to say that the weather suits me just fine, thank you very much. I've never been a huge fan of the ridiculous temperatures we had in Philadelphia. When Michele was in the States at the end of July it was 103F; and that's just silly.

Don't get me wrong, I like to sit by a pool and drink cold beer as much as the next guy. The trouble is, you can't spend your entire summer doing that. At some point, you have to put some clothes on and, say, go to work or mow the lawn. So frankly, the perpetual autumn we seem to have here in old blighty is OK by me.

Maybe it's because my birthday is in October, maybe it's some latent memory of returning to school or maybe it's just because I'm weird, but leaden skies and early dusk carry a feeling of enormous potential.

So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and enjoy the short twilight.

More soon (we had visitors last week, and more coming next week, so it's been a little busy here...)

Spinach

I've decided. I really like to cook. Even if it's just for me. Tonight, as Michele and the kids are away, and I simply couldn't stare down another order of chicken tikka masala (though I do dearly love the stuff), I decided to see what could be made from the few items in the fridge which remain recognizable after my family's two week absence.

It's not that I can't be bothered food shopping. Perversely, I actually enjoy food shopping. I did most of the shopping when we lived in the States, at first because it was hard for Michele to get out with two kids, but then because I found a sort of euphoria in the melon-thumping, tomato squeezing ritual of a Saturday morning in Wegmans. Rather, there is almost nothing edible in our fridge because one cannot actually get in to a grocery store before 9 or after 7.

I made several false starts. Originally, I wanted to make spinach salad with hot bacon dressing. I even looked up a reciepe for the dressing on the train home. As I was getting the stuff out, I saw some eggs and decided to boil them and put them on the salad. Then, I thought it might be better to make an omlette, with sauteed spinach and tomato. Finally, I put away the eggs and made a nice spinach and tomato penne.

I offer you the receipe below, because, well, it's my blog and I can write whatever the hell I want. My dishes are more about ingredients than technique, because, while I love to shop, I hate to chop. I also don't really measure much, so the measurements in the receipe below are really just suggestions.

It's strange how the human mind works. Or mine, anyway. Much like the salad to omlette to pasta progression. I had a friend, Tim, whose mother used to have a sign in her kitchen that said 'when in doubt, add more wine'. Whenever I cook with wine (which is often, and I occasionally put some in the food, too), I think of this.

Tim was a good guy. He was a positive force in my adolescent life. He introduced me to public speaking. Because of this, I went through to three national speech tournaments in places as varied as Buffalo and Baltimore. WIthout his influence, I would not have seen New Orleans in its ante diluvian heyday. He also showed me how to work the antiquated lighting system in my high school auditorium. This arcane knowledge allowed me to skip almost as much class as I wanted because, after all, I was the only one who knew how to do it after he graduated. It was as a passenger in Tim's car (actually, his parent's station wagon) that I first broke the 100 mile per hour barrier, topping out at 108 on Route 940 in Mount Pocono. The rumble strips at the traffic light sounded like bumblebees on meth.

Tim, along with 258 others, was on board Pan Am flight 103 when it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, just before Christmas 1988. He was returning home from a semester in London.

And so it goes, to borrow a particularly appropriate Vonnegut phrase.


Empty the Fridge Spinach and Tomato Penne
. 1/2 pound spinach leaves, washed and dried
. about 8 strips of pancetta if you can get it, or thinly sliced bacon if you can't
. 2 ripe tomatoes
. olive oil (regular, not extra virgin, save that for bread or dressing)
. 1 shallot. Shallots are absolutely essential to keep around. They look nice, they smell nice and darn it, they taste good. Buy them in large quantities wherever you find them.
. 2 cloves of garlic
. 1 pound of penne pasta
. Any hard flavorful cheese* - pecorino, parmigiano, whatever.
. White wine
. Sea salt and fresh ground black pepper. You can use plain old salt and pepper, though I think the sea salt is less, er, salty, and fresh ground pepper just looks nicer and, when applied with a suitable flourish, makes it look like you know what you're doing.

Large pan with a tight fitting lid.

Chop the shallots and garlic finely
Cut the pancetta into biggish pieces
Core the tomatoes and cut them in half horizontally
Squeeze and shake out most of the pulp and seeds, don't worry if there's some left inside
Cut the tomatoes coarsely

While the pasta is cooking, cook the pancetta, uncovered, over low heat in enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Stir occasionally. When the pancetta is nicely brown (you don't want it too crispy), turn the heat up to medium high and add the shallots and garlic. Sautee these about a minute, don't let them brown, then pour about 1/2 cup of white wine around the edges of the pan.

Stir just to get the brown bits off the bottom, then turn the heat back to low, add the spinach, sprinkle salt generously over it, and cover. The spinach will cook down a lot, so don't worry if if seems like there's too much.

When the volume of the spinach has reduced a bit, add the tomatoes, then turn the spinach over and mix the bacon mixture and tomatoes in. Add some more salt and pepper if you like. Cover and simmer until the pasta is done.

Drain the pasta, return it to its pot, then stir the spinach again. Continue cooking the spinach until it has all wilted, then add it to the pasta and stir.

Top with grated cheese. I had mine with a really nice red, but that's entirely up to you.

*There is no mold that grows on cheese which will hurt you. If your cheese is moldy (and by cheese, I specifically exclude the kind that comes pre sliced and wrapped individually), just cut the mold off and eat it. The cheese, not the mold.

Day Out

"Where've you been?" you ask. I wish I could say that I've been doing something glamorous, like partying in Ibiza or hopping the train to Paris; but alas, I've been largely engaged in that necessary but thoroughly uninteresting activity known as work.

This week is different, though.

Michele's taken the kids and left me. Not permanently, but they've gone back to the States for a few weeks to visit. Apparently, Caroline's in ecstacy at seeing her cousin Ryan again. They're getting married, I hear. I suppose we'll have to break it to her at some point that they can't, in point of fact, be married. On the other hand, there were a lot of weddings between first cousins here in Merrie Olde England back in the day, I wonder if it's still legal.

So today I spent my first Saturday alone since I don't know when. Possibly the first one ever. I had big plans. Sleep until 10, no, 11. Brekkies at some cafe in town. Back by 1 for my nap. Lunch at a pub around 3. A little stroll through the air conditioned mall, dinner at a nice restaurant, some evening telly, bed by 9. In short, my day was going to be spent doing as little as humanly possible. I would breathe and eat, but anything beyond that would require serious consideration. So far, though, my plans haven't worked out - my day has been much more productive than I had intended. Must do something about that tomorrow.

Rather than sleep in I was wide awake at 6:30. Now why doesn't that happen during the week when I need to get up for work? Well, I'll be damned if I'm getting up at 6:30 on a Saturday when when there's no earthly reason to do so, so despite the brilliant sunshine streaming in around the curtains, I managed to force myself back to sleep until half past 7. Unfortunately, my body simply refused to sleep any more after that, so rather than risk bedsores I got up. Then, in some strange sort of brain seizure, I thought it would be a great idea to head up to Notting Hill for a nose around the Portobello Road market.

You may not know this about me, but inertia and I are normally locked in an epic battle. Maybe it's because I sit in an office all day, but I have to expend an enormous amount of mental energy to rouse myself to do much of anything. I find all sorts of excuses: I don't know how to get there. I don't know what it'll be like. It'll be full of tourists. It's too hot/cold/sunny/rainy/early/late. I'm hungry.

Today, though, I'm glad I bothered to get out of bed, because it really was a great day. The weather was beautiful for starters, and Notting Hill is a pleasant area full of flowers and trees and twisting cobblestone streets and the sort of grand old town homes that make you wish you had a morning suit and real money. Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts may have been the lead actors in the eponymous film (one of my favorites, despite the corny ending), but the real star of that movie was the area.

The market itself, while definitely not a good place to take kids (it's crowded and full of the kinds of fragile, priceless objects that our son seems to gravitate to), is easily walkable, with plenty of interesting things to admire and wonder about their purpose, if not actually to buy. There are lots of interesting shops as well, though as it was market day, there were stalls lining the road, thereby rendering the shops largely unnecessary. I'll go back another day to poke around the shops.

The market is a great place for people watching, too. I saw an old lady with pink hair and purple everything else (lips, nails, clothes, stockings, shoes). I saw a man walking with his dog on his shoulders. I saw a guy absolutely livid because someone had poured paint all over his car. Seriously. Gallons of it. This seemed too random to be random, so I wonder who he pissed off? Or maybe it was some kind of performance art piece. It's hard to tell sometimes.

After breakfast in a cafe (eggs on toast with a grilled tomAHtoe, not the full English breakfast), had another stroll to try to find the "town". Apparently, there isn't really one - Portobello Road is about as close as it comes. I did, however, walk up to the top of Notting Hill, which is an actual hill, although not a very big one.

Back down the other side and you hit a main road, Notting Hill Gate. This road is neither picturesque nor pedestrian friendly, so I aimed to get out of there as quickly as possible. But not before I was stopped by some German tourists who asked the way to Notting Hill. "The market or the actual hill?" I asked smugly. I'm so well travelled.

Having successfully directed my German friends to the market (which, much to their surprise, was not called the Notting Hill market), I set off in the general direction of Kensington Park. Kensington Park is the back garden of Kensington Palace, which is, or was, the home of Princess Diana. Kensington Park was also where J.M. Barrie, the guy who wrote the Peter Pan stories, spent much of his time. So naturally, there's a Peter Pan-themed playground dedicated to Princess Diana. Adults can't actually go in unless accompianied by a child, but judging from the map outside, it's HUGE.

Had a nice walk through Kensington Park, then sat in the sun and watched the pond for about an hour. Now normally even I wouldn't be inert for that long, but as I had had to pay for the use of the deck chair upon which I had perched my weary bottom, I felt obliged to get my money's worth. But I'm glad I did, because in so doing, I got to see a great cross-section of London life. The little Greek guy with the hairy pot belly, Groucho Marx eyebrows and unbuttoned shirt whose sole occupation seemed to be chatting up unattractive female tourists. The 18-month old on a leash. The little girl riding a bike by herself for the first time. The elderly couple supporting each other as they shuffled along the path. The mother admonishing her kids not to "stand in poo." That's sound advice, mom.

After such an extended period of inactivity, I was feeling a little peckish, so I headed down into South Kensington to find a pub and have some lunch. A word about pubs in London. Pubs are so important here that the Elephant and Castle tube stop is named for the local boozer, as there's neither elephant nor castle in the vicinity. Pubs are generally family friendly, but are somewhat spotty when it comes to food. In this regard, pubs are to London what Ruby Tuesday is to America. I have heard that there are pubs in the Parliament buildings, though I'm not sure this is true. I do know that pubs near the Houses have a special bell that's rung when there's an important vote going on. It's called the division bell, which is also the title of a Pink Floyd album. (I wonder if I could get some sort of grant for this blog as an educational resource).

Another fact about pubs: they are everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except in South Kensington, where, with a growing sense of urgency as the sky grew darker and I developed a desperate need for the toilet, I searched in vain for that beacon of hope, that bastion of civilization, the carved and gilded pub sign. Finally, frothing at the mouth and driven half mad with the simultaneous needs for a wee and some grub, I ducked into a betting parlor and asked someone for a decent pub. He graciously (though somewhat perplexedly) pointed out the one about 10 feet down the road. Maybe next time I'll wear my glasses.

Thus relieved at Ye Olde Zeitgeist Arms (or something like that), I ordered the steak pie with mash (-ed potatoes) and "mushy peas". Mushy peas are exactly what they sound like. They are peas, they are mushy. No mystery there. I also ordered the obligatory pint of ale. Many of my American friends labor under the impression that the Brits drink warm beer. This is not true. It's room temperature, which will feel cool unless either the room is hotter 98.6 or you're a lizard. And you CAN get cold beer, just don't order the ale.

It was at this point that the rain started; not like the rain we had yesterday, which was more waterfall than mere rain, but still heavy enough to make me glad to be inside a sturdy shelter that also happened to serve food and drink. Problem is, after gobbling up two weeks' worth of starch and washing it down with a beer, there's not much left to do in a pub. I suppose I could order another, but I was feeling a bit bloated after the heavy meal, and besides, who wants to drink alone? OK, who besides that guy with the watery eyes and the plaid jacket at the end of the bar?

Since the rain didn't show any sign of letting up, I reluctantly decided to make my way home. Waiting on the platform, a woman asked me how to get to Paddington station. Hmm. A bit more difficult than the "where's Notting Hill" question, but no problem for a stalwart local such as myself. Still flushed with my early success at providing good directions, I produced my pocket A-Z guide and deftly directed the young lady to Paddington via the least complicated route. Aren't I wonderful? And, apparently, quite British-looking.

It wasn't until I was on the train and had an opportunity to examine a tube map that was larger than a match head that I realized I'd given her the wrong directions. Evidently, apart from the ability to speak English, I'm wholly unqualified to give directions to anyone but German tourists. For all I know, the poor girl's still going round and round on the Circle Line thinking to herself that London must be an awfully big place and isn't it funny that so many stations have the same names. Fortunately, the tubes shut at midnight, so there's little chance she'll have to spend the rest of her life in this state. Next time someone asks me for directions, I'm going to yelp and skitter away.

One last story. On a crowded underground train, an obviously out-of-town family had had the abysmally poor judgement to sit with one of the many drunks who lend such character and charm to the tubes. And no, it wasn't me, thanks. The girl, perhaps 12, and the boy, maybe 8, looked both amused and horrified as they desperately tried to cover their noses against the odor wafting from the man.

Welcome to London, kids. Now go shower and find a pub.

Weather forecast

Crap.

Crap, crap, crap.

Crappity, crap.

Living with fear

I should mention something about the bombs. Last week, two car bombs were found in London, and a third at the Glasgow airport. All three were mercifully ineffective, though obviously they would have been more effective had they actually worked as intended. The phrase 'dodged a bullet' has some applicability here - next time we may not be so fortunate.

I'd like to be able to say that the threats aren't real, or that these incidents aren't cause for concern. They are real, and they are cause for concern. This is the decade of global terrorism, though some might rightly argue that this is simply the decade in which the United States America awoke to what has been going on for years.

Either way, let's not get our perspectives too far off. Are we entirely safe? No. But who is? Life is inherently unsafe. Random, intentional acts, while spectacular, are not especially prevalent outside certain parts of the world. We face danger every day from far more prevalent and mundane sources - train derailments, storms, drunk drivers, cholesterol. But these are somehow more abstract, less real, than bombings. No American has ever asked me whether I'm frightened by the increase in gun-related deaths in the UK. That's because few Americans know that there IS an increase in gun-related deaths in the UK. This isn't their fault, the story loses its newsworthiness once you get off the island.

So yes, bombings are real, they are alarming, and they are massively tragic when they succeed. But they are also infrequent and of limited impact. So for now, at least, I prefer to live with the fear, not in it.

Fourths and Fortnights

The cross-cultural experience just keeps getting better. Today, I found a legitimate purpose for a word that I never thought I'd use - fortnight. A fortnight is a two week period, so it's not terribly obscure. But honestly, when would you ever need a convenient term to describe that period of time? I haven't had a bath in a fortnight? As it happens, most tennis tournaments last a fortnight, so "Wimbledon Fortnight" is a perfect description for the famous tennis tournament by the same name (called "The Tennis" here).

We had a nice day today, though it didn't start off that way. I've had a chest cold for a few days, so I've been even less pleasant to be around than usual. It rained all day yesterday and I (and the kids) didn't leave the house. Why is it that our kids follow us from room to room where other people's children seem to skitter away the moment an adult comes in range? I should be grateful, I suppose, that our kids like us and want to play with us, but at 5 am? No, I would much rather you go entertain yourselves with, well, just about anything, than play with you, thanks very much.

So after a day of fending off requests to do anything but lie on the couch and feel sorry for myself, I was ready to get out. Only, despite the sunny start to the day, it rained in the morning. Grrr. I used to think that Londoners were obsessed about the weather. I remember being on conference calls with them and hearing them marvel at our stories of how hot/cold/snowy/rainy/dry/humid it happened to be that day. Now I understand. They need to experience the weather vicariously, as they have very little of their own. Well, they do, but it's exactly one type. Rain.

OK, I'm exagerrating a little. The afternoon cleared up nicely, and it's a glorious evening. But so what? I have to go to bed in a little while, and it's not like it'll be like this tomorrow anyway. I've noticed that it always seems to clear up here in the evening, and then cloud up in the morning.

On top of feeling lousy and sorry for myself, and guilty for having done nothing on Saturday byt blow my nose and yell at the kids, I started thinking about all the fun things that people back in the States will be doing this week. Going to parties. Cooking over smoky barbeques. Drinking beer in the sunshine. Mowing the lawn. Watching the flare of distant fireworks just over the horizon. Sweating. I never thought I'd say this, but I really miss the raucous sauna of a July night.

But I did have a good day in spite of myself. We had arranged to have lunch with Caroline's friend from school and her family. Afterwards, we spent most of the day together at a park. The kids had a ball, we got some fresh air, and we spent some time with nice people.

OK, I'm happy again. But what I wouldn't do for a charred hot dog and a beer in the sun...

Mexican't Night

I got this great idea today at the Borough Market. It's easy to get inspired by the mountains of beautiful produce from all corners of the world; there's something very Imperial about buying beans from Egypt and oranges from Spain. Anyway, my idea was to make guacamole and mojitos tonight. The ripe avocados, the fresh cilantro and mint, the gorgeous tomatos and green chillis, they were all there, all waiting for me to just put them together in the right amounts and make a wonderful meal. Maybe some Spanish ham (acorn-fed) to start, a little chorizo, a bit of cheese and a nice bottle of rioja would make the night complete.

That's often how it goes with me. I have a grand vision in mind, but lack the means to execute on that vision. I wanted to dig to China when I was a kid, but got sidetracked while looking for a shovel.

My guacamole, because I am too arrogant to follow a recipie, was more like avocado salsa. Don't get me wrong, it's tasty, but it ain't guac. And the mojitos (my Avalon friends will recall the many, many pitchers of mojitos which fortified us for those interminable Texas Hold 'Em Death Matches between Yingling and Michele), well, let's just say, club soda isn't sold at the Indian bodega around the corner, and Sprite isn't the ideal substitute.

The chorizo and cheese and, thanks to Michele's expidition to the wine shop down the street, the rioja, are a reality, though. Not sure this was the healthiest dinner, but it's certainly tasty...

The Queen's Handbag

Michele made an interesting observation the other day - the Queen always carries a handbag. What's IN it, I wonder?

Maybe she carries her lipstick and a small mirror, but wouldn't she have people to do that for her? Or maybe she keeps the phone numbers of a few minicab companies in there, just in case she stays at the curry house too long and misses her last train.

I'll bet she keeps her crown in there. She probably ducks off to the loo and puts it on when no one's looking and admires herself in the mirror. Maybe she practices the regal wave then, too.

I wonder if she keeps any money in her purse. If she does, do you think she looks at it and says "hey, that's me!"

Other likely items - a flask, a can of mace, her keys, a photo of her grandchildren, a couple of movie ticket stubs from Terminator 3, a stray hat pin or two, a matchbook from the White House with that cute Saudi prince's phone number, an old stick of gum, a breath mint, a Starbuck's card and the Hope diamond. Typical stuff, really.

Beer and curry

There are at least two national institutions in Great Britain: beer, of which there is a seemingly endless variety and curry, where what is lacking in variety is more than made up for in availability. Indian food is about as close to being the national cuisine as one can get, vying for affection against the traditional Sunday roast. In fact, I think there are now more curry houses in England than pubs. And the Indian joints are certainly open later.

Fortunately, the Brits have found a way around this pub vs. curry dichotemy by ingeniously combining the two. No, they don't serve Vindaloo at the pubs, at least not that I've seen, but rather, it has become something of a national habit to binge drink on Thursday night, and then go for a curry. No matter how many times repeat this Groundhog Day scenario, it never seems like a bad idea at the time. "Hmm. Now let me think. It's 11:00, I've had 6, no, wait, make that 8 pints, my last train is in 45 minutes, and the Indian place is in the opposite direction from the train station. I've got a 9:00 tomorrow, and it's at least an hour to get home. Yeah, what the hell, I'll just have a quick bite."

And the reason this always seems like a good idea is that there is just something about curry that makes it taste really, really good after a couple of beers. Now that I think about it, though, maybe it's really the other way round. Or maybe I just have no willpower. Whatever the reason, if I'm out past 9:30, it's a pretty safe bet that I'll be getting home at 1:30, onion stench oozing from every pore.

Now, this wouldn't be such a bad national addiction - after all, everybody needs a few vices - but for one thing. Curry and beer, especially mingled and taken in large doses, not only make one's clothes reek, but also really do a number on the digestive system. Add to this the facts that public transport in London is crowded and poorly ventilated, and that Londoners are some of the most self-absorbed people on the planet, and you've got an environment whose toxicity would make an Al Queda operative think "nah, that's just TOO harsh."

For those of you whose public transport experiences are limited to the comparitively palatial accommodation afforded by the New York MTA, allow me to enlighten you. The Tube (as the London Underground system is affectionately known) is just that - a tube. Where the interior walls and ceilings of the subway cars that we're used to in the States are square, more or less, the cars here are designed to fit as compactly as possible into those underground tubes, so the interiors are round. As a consequence, they are only about six and a half feet tall in the middle, and the sides slope down to about five and a half feet. Imagine standing inside a seventy foot long commuter jet and you've got the picture.

In addition, as I've mentioned many times, the Tubes are not air conditioned. I'm not sure why this is - air conditioning is not a new invention. I'm constantly reading about are all sorts of schemes to cool the Tube, most of which sound like they're straight out of "I Love Lucy". Pump cold air into the tunnels from the stations? Great for keeping the rats comfy, but without a way to get the air into the cars, not terribly effective. Or my favorite - install freezers under the seats, which will freeze blocks of ice while the train is above ground, then run fans to blow air over the ice and blow the cold air into the cars. Hey, Rube Goldberg, here's a thought, if you're gonna install freezers, why not just INSTALL FRIGGIN' AIR CONDITIONERS?

But until one of these harebrained ideas actually gets funding and works, we're stuck in tiny, crowded, diabolically stuffy cars. This is not such an issue when there's no one else in the car, but I did a quick calculation one day and estimated that there are at least 150 people in each one during rush hour. You literally cannot move, and although you can breathe, you probably don't want to.

Especially on Friday morning. Especially after beer and curry.

Soaked

I got caught in my first downpour today on the way home from the train station. I suppose this should have been not only forseeable, but avoidable. After all, the sky was the color of a nun's hat, there was a jacket in my bag and it was spitting as I left the station. But I thought I could make it home before the heavy stuff came down.

I was wrong.

I didn't stop to put on my jacket because I thought I'd only get wetter by the time I'd gotten it out and put it on. And I didn't have an umbrella because, well, I'm an idiot. Winter is apparently like this a lot, so there's that to look forward to.

Fortunately, there's wine and brie in the fridge, so all's well that ends well.

Always hungry

I am ALWAYS hungry here. We ate dinner about 2 hours ago, and I'm starving again already. And no, it wasn't Chinese food, either.

There are a variety of restaurants that deliver here. Actually, there's very little 'variety' in the selection, but there ARE a lot of them. Indian, Chinese, Thai and pizza seem to be the choices. There's some variance in each genre (Goan Indian versus, um, regular Indian, I guess), but those are pretty much the choices. So far, we've had at least one of each, which verying success.

Most of the food we've had delivered has ranged from 'not bad' to 'really pretty good', but we had just the worst Chinese the other night. OK, I probably should have known to steer clear of a place called 'McChina'. (Seriously. I couldn't make this stuff up). But I was taken in by a nice looking menu and promises of the 'freshest ingredients carefully prepared in traditional ways'.

Rubbish. It took nearly 2 hours to arrive, and, although it was hot, it was largely tasteless. I thres most of mine away. Offsetting this unpleasant experience, though, is a great pizza joint that serves interesting pizza (my fave is the gorgonzola and tomato), and it arrives pretty quickly. But get this - you can have them deliver beer! (Seriously. Did I mention I couldn't make this stuff up?)

So now we probably order out 1-2 times a week, and have sampled a variety of places in the area. Best of all: not a single one of them is Domino's.

Sausages and Shaving Cream

So that sausage I bought earlier at the French market? Not sure how it's supposed to be eaten. Got about a quarter of the way through when I realized that it might not actually be cooked. Hm. No instructions, either.

Took Caroline to her school fair today. Apparently, it's a common practice among the older children to have shaving cream wars at these things. There were roving bands of kids with squirt guns loaded with shaving cream. Interesting time. I helped win the tug of war. It was actually a lot of fun, and they also had beer, wine and Pimm's, which made my whole day!

I should explain Pimm's. It's a spirit, I've heard that it's gin-based, which I always associated with old people who smelled like mothballs. Turns out - surprise, surprise - it's really good, especially when mixed with Sprite and various bits of fruit like apples, oranges and cucumbers. OK, so cucumbers aren't technically a fruit, but they put them in anyway and boy, it's tasty! So all you US-bound party people, run out and get yourselves a bottle of Pimm's No. 1 Cup for your next party. It's tops.

Michele and I are going out, alone, for the first time since we arrived. Our sitter, who lives across the street, is coming to not only watch the kids, but put them to bed, too. Yikes! But we're looking forward to it. Hopefully I won't be doubled over in pain from eating the raw pork.

More Why

Despite the high prices and iffy weather, I am constantly finding great reasons to love it here; the French Market which came to Wimbledon this weekend being but one of the more recent.

A itinerant gustatorial carnival, the good folks who run the market apparently drive over from France bearing fresh food, soap and wine. At the moment, the kids and I are enjoying a perfect baguette (from my perspective it's perfect, anyway) and pain du chocolat, which is a sort of flaky pastry with large chuks of chocolate inside.

For later, I bought blue brie (I've never even heard of this), sausage coated in black pepper, and a bottle of wine.

Let you think me too cosmopolitan, though, I should admit that when I purchased the sausage, I dusted of my high school French and apparently ordered a dead pigeon. Fortunately, I remembered my manners and said 'por favor'.

Funny

It's funny the things you learn to live with, like the total absence of air conditioning on public transportation. But it's also funny the things you miss.

The new people moved into our house the other day. This is somewhat distressing for me because, silly as it sounds, I guess I felt like it was still ours and that we'd be going back to it at some point. Now I knew this wasn't the case, of course, particularly when the equity from the sale was deposited in our bank account, but still, knowing something and feeling it are two very different things. I miss the workbench I made when we moved in. It was one of my first projects, in that blissful time just after apartment living, when I was overly optimistic about how long it would take to build stuff.

Michele misses other things. We had our first visitor last week, our friend James. He very kindly brought us Goldfish crackers and Crystal Light lemonade. All the way from the States. Michele is still ecstatic, so are the kids.

There are other things you can't get here - paper napkins, refrigerated eggs. A decent cheesesteak. I guess we'll learn to live without those things. Maybe not the cheesesteak.

Sick day

Poor Michael's been unwell these past two days or so. Michele and Caroline went out to the London Borough market again yesterday morning while Mike and I waited for the satellite installation guy to show up. He was fine until about 9:30, when he started complaining that his stomach hurt (Michael, not the satellite guy). Then he just got quiet and wanted to lay on my lap. For any of you who know Michael, you know that he is NOT the type of kid to be quiet or lay down. Ever. But despite all the times I've wished he'd just sit still for One God Damn Minute, I do hate seeing him like this. His temp was 102 by midday so I gave him some Tylenol and let him sleep a bit. He's had a fever on and off since. He woke up a few times last night, once at 4:15 this morning.

I may have failed to mention the daylight hours here, so I'll do so now. It starts getting light at around 4:00am and stays light at night until nearly 10:00pm. Seriously. I do like that it's light so late, though it is somewhat disorienting when leaving the pub at 9:30 and it's still light.

I may have told you aleady that most shops are closed on Sunday and those that aren't open much later. I thought this was cute until today when I really needed some children's cough medicine for the boy. I wandered around the deserted town at 9:30, wondering if maybe a hydrogen bomb had gone off and somehow missed me.

Pharmacies are closed on weekends, food stores don't open until 11, convenience stalls don't sell children's cough medicine. It was during this solitary exploration of out sleepy little hamlet that it struck me that we a) don't have a family doctor, b) don't really have any way of finding one until we get new insurance information, c) don't have a National Health Insurance number, so we can't even go to an NHS doctor.

Uh oh. Looks like the honeymoon's over.

Fortunately, it turns out the children's Tylenol is also supposed to releive sore throats, so that combined with a large quantity of ice pops got Michael through the day. Who needs doctors when you have frozen sugary juice?

What's the difference?

A lot of people have asked me "how's the adjustment going," or, "have are you settling in?" These questions really invite only one answer - "very well, thanks", in much the same way that the classic "how are you doing?" is really not designed to elicit any answer more than "fine, you?".

But recently someone asked the question in a more open-ended way - "have you found anything really frustrating?" Hmm. Why yes, in fact, I have. The computer keyboard.

You see, I've been banging away on one keyboard or another for most of my life. I remember as a kid, dragging my mother's Olivetti Underwood manual typewriter up to my room to try to teach myself how to type. I figured if I typed the same letter over and over, I'd eventually learn. I didn't, though I did end up with a page full of A's for my effort.

Somewhere along the way, though, I did learn to touch type, though not very well. I have a hard time typing for long stretches, and sometimes my fingers just don't find the right keys and I still have to look down. (I've made about 15 mistakes in this paragraph so far). But I manage, or at least I did until I came here.

For starters, the @ and the " are reversed. So I'm forever Googling for @pubs in london@ and sending mail to drinkers"myfriends.com. As if that wasn't bad enough, the and \ keys, which I do use with some regularity in my profession, have been banished to the western frontiers of my keyboard, and reside in the same labor camp as the lower-class letters like Q and Z. This change was made, apparently, so that the Enter key could extend upwards. The result of this is that every time I mean to type a backslash, I end up hitting Enter. This is more than annoying, it's downright dangerous.

I'm not at all sure what happened to the curly braces ({}) or square brackets ([]), but that doesn't matter so much since I don't do a lot of programming any more. The pound sign (which is called a 'hash' sign here) is in a random spot, but the British pound sign (£) is in its place, so I guess that makes sense. The good old dollar sign is still above the 4, right where it belongs, though, so I take some comfort from that.

Apart from that, though, the adjustment isn't really too bad. Most of the other differences are just things to get used to. For example, it takes some getting used to stores closing at 7 on weeknights, and earlier on Sundays if they're open at all, and not being able to phone my bank at 2am on a Thursday is odd, though one might well ask why I don't have anything better to do at that time.

Many of you have also inquired about the time difference. If you're on the East Coast, we're 5 hours ahead. Except when we're not. You see, the US changed Daylight Savings Time to start 3 weeks earlier this year. This was the Bush administration's Big Idea to save energy. Seriously. Evidently no one bothered to figure out that if you shave an hour of daylight off the beginning of the day and tack it on to the end, people would have to turn on their lights in the morning instead of in the evening. Duh. Oh, and it cost something like a gazillion dollars for IT departments to fix. It was a mini Y2K, except no one spent two years planning for it. Who needs hydrogen cells when we've got Dubyah .

Anyway, for those three weeks in the Spring, the US is 4 hours behind the UK, until the UK switches to British Summer Time, and we're back to 5. If you're ever in doubt, www.timeanddate.com has a great timezone converter. The time difference isn't frustrating, exactly, but you really don't fully appreciate the magnitude of a 5 hour time difference until you're on the other side of it. People in the States don't start work until about 2pm my time, and then they expect that I'm going to be available until 5 or 6 pm Eastern (that's 10 or 11pm here, in case the math eludes you).

There's also the language difference. "Wait, what language difference" you ask. As well you might. I mean, we both speak English, right? Well, not exactly. English is slightly different here, just enough to make things a little complicated. There are the obvious differences, like loo for toilet and bum for butt, and other words that we think are funny. But then there are problematic differences, like when you need to use the loo, you ask for the toilet, not the restroom or the bathroom. After all, wou'd want to take a nap or a bath at work?

(note to grandma - you may want to skip to the next paragraph)
'Fanny' is a really obscene word here, while, oddly, 'fuck' is comparatively mild. When you come for a visit, don't bring a 'fanny pack', bring a 'bum bag' instead. Ass is arse, unless you're talking about a donkey (the animal type, not the investment banker type - they're arses). Busting someone's chops is 'taking the piss out of them', while taking a piss is 'having a slash'.

Some foods are different. Eggplants are aubergines, and zucchini is courgette. Or maybe I have it backward. I'm not a big fan of eggplant or zucchini, so not a big loss there. But what do you call London broil? Just broil? Children eat dinner early, and it's called children's tea. Which makes for some confusion for us Americans, since 'eat your tea, darling' sounds a little odd.

There are some expressions I just can't puzzle out and need someone to translate for me. 'Doing the messages' means grocery shopping. 'I'm not bothered' means I don't care one way or the other. 'Potty' means crazy, and I think there's a subtle distinction between 'quite good' and 'really good', though I don't know what it is yet.

Monetary denominations are somewhat confusing. The pound is divided into 100 pence. There are only £1 coins, no notes. For notes there are £5, 10, 20, 50 and 100. So far so good, right? But for coins, there are £1 and £2, and there are 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p and 50p. I'm not as fast at counting the change in my pocket as I should be, so I end up paying with a note, and just getting more change. By the end of the day, my pants are jangling around my ankles with the weight of all those coins.

These aren't annoyances, they're just trade-offs. They're things to get used to, and we will in time. But there are other things to get used to, too. It costs me just £105 a month to get to work and back. It would have cost me twice that in gas alone back in the States, not to mention car payments, maintenance and insurance. And then there's the travelling. Not that we've done much yet, but when people talk about going to the beach, they're talking about going to Greece to the beach or to the Canary Islands or to Sardinia. When they talk about going to the mountains, they mean the Swiss Alps. And when they talk about going to Octoberfest, they mean Munich. In October.

Yeah, I think the trade-offs are OK. Now if I could just find that damn backslash.

Moving Day

Leaving's hard. Fortunately, there's drink. Two of my oldest friends, Mike and John, came down from the Poconos on the last day of packing and took me to lunch, which is a euphemism for having a few beers in the sunshine. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon, and I almost forgot that I had a house full of men piling our stuff in the driveway.

I love getting together with these guys because, as any of you who've had friends in the 25year + range will appreciate, they know all your old stories. High school, college, early career. The trouble with these stories is that they are at beast meaningless and at worst, downright boring to anyone who wasn't there. So whenever we get together by ourselves, we have license to reminisce and laugh manically at things that would make our wives just roll their eyes and wander off to check on the kids.

John was the first of my friends to have children. You'd think he'd have warned us, but nooooo. All he did was talk about how great it is. After about the third month of not sleeping after Caroline was born, I called him up and said "what the hell?!?" "Oh, yeah," he said, "I left that part out." Thanks, John.

All is forgiven now, though, as the children finally do sleep through the night. Turns out John was the smartest among us, having them early and all. Now, as I'm trying to drag my mid-thirties body around after my three and five year olds, he's kicking back on the couch in the basement with a beer while his girls hang with their friends upstairs. It's clearly a young man's game, this. Thanks for the warning, John.

Mike, on the other hand, waited even longer to have kids. To be honest, I really never thought he'd settle down. I figured his life would just always be one long party. Kudos to his wife Ali for attempting and accomplishing the seemingly impossible. I clearly remember how shocked I was when he called me and said they were having a baby. It's so odd to see him in daddy mode now, because I still think of him as the same kid I met in 7th grade.

Everything changes, I guess.

Caroline

Caroline's settling in to the routine of going to school. I took her the other day, so I can say that it's a LOT different from school back home. For one thing, there's a lot of commotion in the morning - all the classes line up in the schoolyard. The kids have to put their lunchboxes in a certain place, then they line up to go into the classroom and have to put their bookbags, water bottles and gym (yes, GYM) bags in designated spots. Caroline's in the 'plum' group, so her stuff goes in the bins with the plums. Which sounds easy, except that the plums on the gym bag box look more like, well, I really don't know what. Burgundy colored eggs, I guess. Speaking of eggs, I keep forgetting to mention that they don't refrigerate eggs here. Really. Just one of the many small differences that seem to leap out at you when you live in a place.

Caroline's still a little shy at school, but she's made a bunch of friends. The other day she was quite pleased with herself when she told me that three girls were fighting over who would get to play with her. She's also started changing her pronunciation of a few things (tonight she said 'fahn' and 'dahnce') and using Briticisms like loo and bum. I'm sure she'll have an English accent by the end of the year. She has Michael saying loo and bum, too, which is kind of funny.

She and Michael have also started putting on shows for us, as shown here. This does NOT mean that they've stopped bickering over absolutely everything, just that they do occasionally play together, and it's actually pretty funny when they do. Michael, too, seems just a bit more grown up than he did before we left.

Caroline still says she misses Ryan and Kerri and the girls at school, and frequently asks why we had to move, which of course is a delicate question to answer since we didn't, in actual fact, HAVE to move. I've thought about telling her that mommy is wanted in three states, but that would require too much explanation. Hopefully she won't hate us when she's older. Not for this, anyway.

Michael's Birthday

As you may know, Michael's 3rd birthday was on the 22nd, so we had a Lightning McQueen cake for him (Lightning is the main character in the Disney movie Cars, for the uninitiated). As you can see, both Michaeland Caroline enjoyed it immensely. It was an odd cake - the frosting was hard, like some sort of edible plastic, but I have to say that it was actually kinda tasty. There's a sort of raspberry jam used to stick the frosting unibody to the cake, and the cake itself didn't have that sickly sweet box cake taste. It's no Daily Bread Bakeshop cake, but then we didn't have to pay duty on it. Oh, wait, yes we did - 17.5%...

Anyway, Michael had a great birthday, and thanks to all who sent him cards!

More Travelogue

Today, we went to the London Borough market. It's held every weekend near London Bridge. Don't worry, it showed no signs of imminent collapse. The market is really the embodiment everything we moved to London for - food, wine, interesting people. We bought far more than we can actually use, but it was great fun, prowling the stalls, talking to the vendors, noshing on the free samples. As you can see from the pictures, Michael and Caroline enjoyed the market, too.

Probably my favorite thing about the market today was buying wine. It was only £3 for a bottle, and that includes a £2 deposit. It may not be great, but for a quid, who cares?

We didn't see a quarter of what there was to see, but we wandered out and into the churchyard of Southwark Cathedral, where we sat on a bench and noshed on the sausage I'd just bought on impulse. Delish!

I needed a toilet, so I went for a wander while the kids chased pigeons at the cathedral. Along the way, I found a replica of Sir Francis Drake's ship. The kids LOVED it. They had me going up and down the steps, crawling through the gun deck (which is no more than about 5 feet high, and bashing my head on just about everything in sight. It was great fun as you can see from these...

Once we'd had enough of the sailor's life, we retired to the nearby Thameside pub for a very pubby lunch of fish and chips and mashy peas(with an ale for me). Unfortunately, we had to sit outside, much to the children's dismay, as it was a little breezy. Lunch wasn't exactly pleasant, what with the kids whingeing about being cold and alternately loving and hating the fish, but we made it through without anyone getting thrown overboard.

Despite the less than ideal lunch, it was still a great day. We really do like living here...