Continental Breakfast

Continental Breakfast

I have recently been bitten by the travel bug.  Om a whim (or, as some would say, because I've taken leave of my senses), I decided to take the family to Switzerland for the week.  I remember now why travelling with children is, if not an outright bad idea, at least a less sane one than travelling as a couple or with friends.  Children need to sleep. They need to eat regularly. They are not adventurous eaters. Their idea of a good time does not involve a leisurely lunch in a cafe with a nice bottle of Swiss wine (you didn't know there was such a thing, did you?).  Michael is perpetually fidgeting and upsetting the glassware. Caroline won't eat croissants.  There is nowhere to obtain a proper brekkie, even on Sunday. The children bicker. Constantly.  Travelling with them, at least in a city, is an expensive, often unpleasant undertaking.

I say expensive, but actually 'exorbitant' would be more accurate here.  I paid £25 for a panini, a croissant, an espresso and two glasses of milk today. London is pricey. Geneva is ludicrous.   

On the upside, my French is getting better. I only screwed up once today that i know of anyway, ordering pineapple sorbet (ananas) instead of the banana ice cream (banan) that Michele wanted. Ah, well, say lah vee.

We leave the city tomorrow to drive to Yvoire, on the French side of Lake Geneva. We're meant to be staying in a 12th century castle. I booked online. The site was in French.  There's a fair chance we'll be staying in a 1970's shed, but we'll see.        

Penultimate Day

I have often wondered why our language is so precice in some respects and so loose in others.  Why do we have a word meaning 'second to last' while our words for emotions: love, sadness, pain, are abstract and subject to individual interpretation. We often qualify these words with references to experience to help the reader understand them: for example, 'pain like losing a best friend' as distinguished from 'pain like a broken leg'. But this seems an imperfect solution: there are people whom I miss, but I've never broken my leg.

English is an acquisitive and flexible language. Its complicated, seemingly lawless pronunciation and grammar stems from the fact that it borrows heavily from many other older languages, each with their own rules of syntax and pronunciation. But its complexity is its strength. It's the reason Cormac McCarthy can use the word 'nightsoil' to describe the sludge oozing from the end of a pipe. The word may not have a specific meaning to the reader, but no one reading it would think anything pleasant looking or sweet smelling was coming from that pipe.

I had occasion to think about pain yesterday. Michael, King of the Bumper Cars, woke with a stiff neck. As he lay in my arms, writhing in agony, I wished for a good word, universally understood, that Michael could use to describe the pain. Is it muscular? Skeletal? Nerve damage?

He's much better today, and maybe that's why our words for emotions and pain are so imprecise: these things pass, fading into recollections of situations and people, rather than recall of the physical pain or the emotion associated with them. Thank god, else life would quickly become unbearably painful indeed.

My New Favourite Drink

Fill a glass with ice.  No, REALLY fill it.  Now, crush up a couple of basil leaves with your fingers and put them in the glass with the ice.  Add 1 part vodka and 2 parts lemonade and shake.  

You might not think basil in a drink would be very good; I assure you, it is. Refreshing like a mojito, but about a third of the effort.

Thanks to someone kind enough to maintain an open wireless access point, I am blogging, not from the beach, exactly, but from the beach house, anyway.

One of the benefits of being nearly 40 is that you grow to not really care. About the greying hair on your chest, about being more than stylishly overweight, about snoozing under the umbrella instead of frolicking in the water. The water, by the way is shocking and cold, but you get used to it. What choice is there, really?

The kids are having a wonderful time, and I love watching them enjoy themselves and each other so much. Michael falling off the boogie board while pretending to surf, Caroline with sand making her bathing suit bottoms droopy, in this, one of her last beautifully un-self conscious summers.

I have come back to the house to make lunch, since I don't like to eat at the beach, so just a short one for now.

One Day

I dislike endings, always have.  The end of a good book can put me in a funk for days.  Last night, I finished David Nicholls' One Day.  I enjoyed it so much that I read all the way through it in, well, one day.  It's Bridget Jones meets Anita Shreve and The Time Traveller's Wife.  OK, maybe I go in for the chick lit a bit too much, but it's clever-funny, it's bittersweet and it's plausible.  All good qualities, all qualities that I look for in a book.  The trouble is, now I'm in a funk.  I feel like I knew these people, the characters in this book.  They made me laugh like good mates down the pub on a warm Sunday afternoon, but they left abruptly, while I was in the toilet.

The other problem, of course, is what to read next.  I've got a week at the Shore coming up, and my book on oil politics and greed in the 21st century (The Squeeze, I recommend it as a way of answering the perennial question about why fuel prices are so high and why they sometimes swing wildly), while interesting and really well researched and written, seems a bit heavy to read on the beach.  Having read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I could read the next installment in the Millenium series, The Girl Who Dropped Her Ice Cream Cone, or whatever it's called, but I'm not sure that's good beach material either as it requires paying attention.  I can't tolerate Dan Brown's writing, his dialog is trite, his characters are two dimensional and lack any discernible, consistent motivation, his prose is awkward.  I used to enjoy Tom Clancy, but he got to be rubbish too after the fourth or fifth book.  Michele's reading the Twilight series, but we don't have the first book with us, and besides, I'm not really sure I could actually read a teen vampire book without, at some point, thinking, "Seriously, Paul.  What the hell are you doing?"

I need something easy to read, with a good plot and a bit of humour, with characters I can identify with.  Maybe I'll reread One Day.

Beanz on Toast

It is Thursday and I have a small hangover.

Today is the first day of my vacation - I'm heading back to the US this afternoon for a week and a bit of reuniting with family and, hopefully, with some friends too.

Admittedly, in Michele's absence, I have not been looking after the house as I should.  The mail is piling up, the tomato plants are nearly dead, the taxes remain undone.  I haven't been home much these past few weeks, so, desperate for something to fill the void in my belly and quiet the hammering in my head, I was dismayed to find almost nothing edible in the fridge.  As I'll be away for a while, and as today's rubbish collection day, I thought it would be a good idea to clean out the fridge before I go.  It was not.  If you've never scooped  rotten tuna salad out of a tupperware container after a heavy night, don't; or if you must, at least don't do it before breakfast.

The fridge finally clean and the sink filled with plastic containers, bits of furry green mould still clinging to their sides, I confronted the next problem of the day - what to eat for breakfast.  Since there was really nothing left after my cleaning binge (the top of the lettuce looked fine, but the black sludge in the bag suggested otherwise, and anyway, lettuce for breakfast isn't really my thing).  Eyes watering, still gagging occasionally, I turned to the cabinet.  And there, amid the packets of DeCecco fettuccine and the tins of anchovies left over from a dinner experiment gone horribly wrong, was a can of the best breakfast food on the planet: Heinz Beanz.

A uniquely British culinary experience, Beanz on toast is simple, healthy (well, if you don't slather the toast with great gobs of full fat butter as I do), tasty, and easily the best cure for a hangover short of a sauna and a full day's sleep.  Salvation!  Choirs of angels sang while a heavenly light shone down upon my cupboard.

I am now packed for my trip (everything fit into my backpack, with plenty of room to spare) and am waiting for an appropriate time to catch the tube out to the airport.  I have recently acquired Gold status on Virgin Atlantic (my favourite airline), so I will be availing myself of the Virgin lounge in Heathrow.  There are airline lounges and there are Airline Lounges.  Virgin's is most definitely in the latter category.  The free spa, with massages and haircuts, the tasty food, the chill-out music, the billiard table.  The great long bar with an impressive number of vodka bottles.  I am also hopeful that I will be bumped up from economy to upper, or at least premium.  Surely there aren't that many elite status customers flying on a Thursday afternoon?  We'll see.

I head back at stupid o'clock on the morning of the 14th, but if you're in the Poconos this weekend or the Jersey Shore Monday through Friday next week, drop me a line.  I hope I get to see you.