Kevin

My uncle Kevin was a great many things to a great many people.  He was a husband, a father, a grandfather, a brother, an uncle, a cousin.  He was a chef, a baker, a businessman.  He was a writer, an artist, a musician.  He was a mentor and a teacher.  He was a Jeep owner and a weight lifter and a collector of old things.  He was a friend.

One of my earliest memories of Kevin is when I was 5 or 6, and I desperately wanted a toy telephone from the Rea and Derek drug store. I'd pestered everyone in the family to buy it for me, and Kevin said, “We'll see."  Now, as an adult, I have come to understand that "we'll see" really means "not likely" and I never did get that toy telephone.  But I am still grateful to Kevin for letting me down gently.  I think that's one of the things we all loved about Kevin - he was kind-hearted, even to pesky little kids.

Kevin was a thinker and a philosopher.  Earlier this year, he wrote on Facebook that "Intelligence, wealth, social standing, political affiliation - none of these define human worth."  But although he could be a serious man, he didn't take himself too seriously.  Once in a local restaurant where he was the chef and I waited tables, I lifted the lid on a dish from the kitchen to find an enormous fish head with a cigarette in its mouth and a sign asking "Got a light?"

Kevin made people feel special.  So many people commented online and in person that he made them welcome when they stopped in the bakery, and that his laugh could light up a room.  That he was a vital part of the area, and that he brightened the town with his presence.  That he was a backbone of the community.  And that feeling was mutual: Kevin said not long ago that while the bakery had given him and his family many things, the most important of these were the people who came through the door.

Kevin had a creative soul.  In high school said that "Everyone has to find art for himself, in any medium imagineable."  And so he created things - in just about every medium imagineable - in photographs of old cabins, in a stained glass window in his bedroom at his parents house, in a novel about working in kitchens, in magazine articles about local farmers and museums.  In a canvas that he used to clean his brushes and then later sold to his brother as a piece of abstract art, for an undisclosed sum.  And of course, he worked prolifically and proficiently in everyone's favourite medium, food, constantly experimenting and honing his skills, learning new techniques and inventing new edibles - peasant bread, and a cross between a ciabatta and a brioche. His bagels, which he resisted making at first as being too hard to get right, were truly the best I've had anywhere, ever.

Kevin was a mentor and a teacher.  Through the courses he taught at local trade and night schools, through his instructions to the people (including me) who worked with him in kitchens all over the Poconos, and to those who dropped by the back room of the Daily Bread, he opened countless minds to the joy of creating something greater than the sum of its parts - a fragrant pot of cassoulet warming a grey winter's afternoon, or a loaf of sourdough bringing a fragmented and distracted family back together at mealtimes. There is a beautiful photo of Kevin teaching his great-nephew Liam to form a loaf from a lump of dough which I think exemplifies this about him. 

He taught me a lot about cooking when I worked for him, and when the power went out and we peeled baby carrots by candlelight and cooked prime rib on a gas grill, he taught me about problem solving and about the value of honouring your commitments despite the circumstances.  Even as an adult, I'm struck by the number of recipes and techniques that he shared with me in our emails over the years, although because his recipes were industrial-sized, I learned that the quantities had to be adjusted slightly: 2 quarts of corn syrup and a gallon of Franks hot sauce cover a LOT of wings.

Kevin had vision - he saw the beauty in things that others didn’t; in rusty tubas and sea shells and mustard pumps and a Ouija board.  He preferred vinyl albums over digital CDs. He saw both the sentimental and functional value in a 90 year old Hobart mixer salvaged from the smouldering wreckage of the Pine Knob Inn, the first kitchen that he’d called his own.  He collected the things that he found beautiful or useful or both, and he cared for them and curated them in his unique way that created a feeling of warmth and a sense of place, of home.

Kevin dreamed big.  In 1979 he saw a cozy little dress shop with beautiful mullioned windows on route 390 and knew that it _wanted_ to be bakery; in fact he and Traci took to calling it "the bakery" even when it was just a derelict building. And he had the will to execute on his dreams; with hard work and sacrifice, he and Traci made that building into a bakery.  And they stuck with that dream, together, through fortune’s ups and downs; and together they made that bakery into something more than a building; they built it into an institution that made people in the community feel that they were home, whether they stopped in or not.  They made it place that gave people not just croissants and cream puffs, but joy.

While we may separately label Kevin based on what he was to each of us individually - father, husband, writer, baker - and he really was all of those things, ultimately those individual things don't really measure his worth, because he wasn’t a baker or an artist or even a father or a husband. He was Kevin.  He was human.  He was neither any less nor any more flawed and self-doubting than the rest of us. And like all of us, he was greater than the sum of his parts.

So, if those labels don’t define his worth, what DOES?  Maybe human worth is measured by how much we love, and by how much we are loved. And we loved Kevin: for showing compassion.  For being kind-hearted.  For helping us to grow.  For being unafraid to see and think and believe and behave differently from others.  For dreaming big and for realizing some of those dreams.  For loving us.

We may define him according to the roles we knew him in, but we must measure his human worth - anyone’s worth - in love’s currency.  And on that basis, Kevin’s worth truly is immeasurable.

Beauty

I've been on holiday this week in Ocean City, New Jersey with Michele's family.  Her parents have been hiring a holiday house in OC for the past 15 years, and it's been wonderful to watch our kids reunite with their cousins each year, and to see them all growing up.  The eldest will be off to university next year, no idea where that time went.  The long sandy days on the beach, and the simmering nights on the boardwalk will surely be things they remember about their grandparents in years to come.

In recent years, I've taken to getting up early - around 5, but sometimes earlier - to stretch, walk on the beach, maybe take a dip before anyone else is in.  These solitary moments give me time to reflect, clear my head, and appreciate the beauty around me.  I've clogged my Instagram feed with an assortment of clouds, flowers, sand, and birds - basically anything that at least at the time makes me feel positive and happy.

One thing I am really finding difficult to see the beauty in, though, is the horseshoe crab.

I mean really, this has got to be among the ugliest creatures alive.  It's not even a crab; it's a relative of the spider.  Its anatomy has been largely unchanged over that past half a billion years. It's got 9 eyes and blue blood.  Its shell has a set of pointed spines that resemble two rows of teeth.  Its tail looks as if it could put a hole in your foot the size of a nickle.  If one is looking for evidence that life on earth was seeded by aliens, one could do worse than to consider this horror, (along with pretty much anything that finds its way into your camper van in Australia).

It's a protected species here in New Jersey, not for its own intrinsic value, but because some other endangered species feeds on its eggs. Now that's a second class citizen if ever there was one.

And yet, these repulsive creatures are gentle, giving things.  They don't sting or bite.  They exist mainly as a food source for other animals.  Their blood produces an agent that is used to ensure that bacteria hasn't contaminated intravenous drugs during production.  Without it, turtles and birds would go hungry on their migratory journeys, and pharmaceuticals would kill people.

So it seems that you really can't judge a book by its cover, or the value of a creature by its appearance.  Consider that the next time you encounter something repulsive.

Moments

We have a collection of watches that, over the years, have stopped working. Some were inexpensive and a few weren’t, but they all stopped for the same reason: their batteries ran out. Power failure will get us all in the end.  I brought them to a watch repair shop up on the Strand that seems to have been there since the days of George V; now they’re all alive and ticking.

Their sudden transplantation from just before whatever moment they almost saw, straight into July 31 2019, 3:45 pm, made me think of this blog and the last moment I touched it, back in 2013.

Some of the words that were transplanted across that gap seem strange to me.  They're someone else’s stories, written in someone else’s words.  I honestly don’t remember who it was that showed me their third nipple, nor when, nor where.  But others seemed just as familiar to me today as they did in those moments when I wrote them.

So that got me wondering: if we could preserve a moment - a child’s birth, a first kiss, any moment of pure joy whatever its origin - would we recognise it when we looked back on it in later years? Would it feel just as it did when we first experienced it, or would it seem unfamiliar, like someone else's memory?

I went for a curry with my friend Richard tonight, to a restaurant near Canary Wharf where we used to work. I realized that I’ve been visiting the Tale of India since my first trip to London in 1999. It’s changed some over the years - a bit of new paint, an updated menu about 8 years ago - but some of the same people have been there all along. They always remember me and greet me as a regular, even though I haven’t worked in the Wharf since before my last post here, and although I now only visit maybe once or twice a year.  Every time I go, though, it’s like I never left. I'm part of its story, and it's part of mine.

If we could preserve a moment forever, leave it untouched and ready to be examined on demand, should we?  Wouldn't that distance it from us, make it strange and unrecognizable?  And would we preserve only the good ones?  What about the awful ones - don't they bear revisiting and examination too, as a catalyst for growth?  Maybe our moments - whether of sublime joy or of abject despair or anything in between - shouldn’t be preserved at all.  Maybe we should carry them around with us instead, not as baggage, but as an integral part of ourselves; each one an atom that, when taken together, make us who we are.  

Maybe it’s from all those joyful, painful moments that we’re really constructed, and maybe it's only by consciously embracing them, by integrating them rather than keeping them as separate things, that we can experience them continuously.

Ellipses

For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, I find myself adding ellipses (...) in many of my emails. Now, you might think that I'd be a bit more fastidious in my use of punctuation, considering that I'm the guy who surreptitiously rubs out incorrectly used apostrophes on pub chalkboards, but I just seem to keep misusing, or at least overusing the damned things.

What fascinates me is that I'm not even sure what I mean by them. Take, for example, a mail that I sent to my friend Richard tonight. I hadn't seen Richard in a while, and at the end of the mail, I wrote "good to see you..." Why did I do that?

To be honest, apart from implying that the thought preceeding them (it?) will be continued at some undefined point, I'm not even sure what the correct use of an ellipsis is supposed to be. Nor am I certain of the correct form to use. Them? It?

I guess my intent in using them is to show that I may have more to say, and although I haven't said it, I reserve the right to do so whenever the mood strikes me. Actually, that's probably overstating it. I really think that it's sheet laziness on my part. By inserting an ellipsis in a relatively short email, I'm effectively saying that I've more to say, but the reader can fill in the blanks for himself.

That's a pretty good cop out...

Night Train to Rome

I have always been a train geek. While the other kids in Cresco (the odd name of my home town is attributed to an unknown 19th century typesetter whose misspelling in a railway timetable altered forever the course of history for the town of Fresco, Pennsylvania) played football or shot holes in road signs, I sat under the ruined roof of the disused railway station and imagined great steam trains rumbling in to my little town, impatient engines belching steam and smoke while tourists from New York and Philadelphia streamed from the carriages and into the resort cabs.

When Steamtown, USA moved its collection of historical trains from Bellows Falls, Vermont to Scranton and the town honoured their arrival with that most American monument - a shopping mall - I trespassed in the trainyard at night, clambering through ancient Pullmans and onto rusty tankers like some middle class teenaged hobo.  As an adult, it was mostly the joy of travelling by train that made my three hour commutes from Downingtown to New York bearable.

So when my friend Clive informed me that he and a friend were going Interrailing in February, I was jealous. The idea of travelling around Europe by train, bumping and clanking through the meadows and mountains of the Continent was so appealing that I got to thinking - why not do the same? After all, the kids are just about old enough to make long stretches of inactivity bearable, the rail network in Europe is reasonably well-run, if not entirely profitable, and there are many places I'd lik to see.

Clive suggested that I let the kids plan the trip. Caroline's keen, but Michael shows little interest apart from swiping around the rail map on the iPad. We spent a good part of last weekend working out an itinerary (Caroline's been an active participant throughout, although I must admit that I've done most of the deciding).

Our general plan is to take the Eurostar to Paris on the Thursday before Easter and an overnight train from Paris to Rome.  We'll spend Easter weekend in Rome (and hopefully meet up with our friends the Becks who are sailing their yacht Moxie around the world - if they can ever tear themselves away from the sun-drenched Mediterranean) and then dawdle our way for two weeks along the coast, heading in the general direction of Spain.  We'll stop at a few places along the way (Cinque Terre for sure, maybe Nice).  Our only real obligation is to get to Barcelona in time to catch another overnight train back to Paris and from there back to London, school and work.

I'm unreasonably excited about this trip.  My commutes (by train, of course) these days are spent reading travel books about Provence and the Ligurian Coast, and squinting at endless columns of 6 point Times New Roman in the European Rail Timetable.  I'll let you know how it all works out.

Details

I was in a pub last week with a bunch of guys, some I'd known for ages and others whom I'd just met. One of the just-mets showed us his third nipple. Just like that.

At the risk of offending all bearers of superfluous nipples, i think that little show defines the term 'too much information', at least from someone I'd known for only a few hours. I generally like to get to know a person a bit before I go showing them my body parts, extraneous or otherwise.

Don't get me wrong - I wasn't offended or disgusted by this. Well, maybe vaguely disgusted. The issue for me was that I'd have preferred to have had a choice in the matter. Generally such a choice would involve having the opportunity to decide whether I like a person enough to want to spend more time with them - to at least have a foundation of a relationship before I have dirty laundry or spare nipples thrust full in my face.

I realize this probably sounds shallow, and maybe it is. We're told that we should accept (or not) people for who they are, warts or extra nipples and all. I agree with this. But I like to start slow. I will happily sit for hours and talk with you about a painful childhood or a difficult divorce, but before we get to that, I'd like to know a bit about how you think, how you see the world, whether we have something in common. Otherwise you're just dumping your shit on me and I'm not so interested, thanks very much.

I wonder, though, am I unusual in this regard? Do 'normal' people share every detail of their lives and bodies with everyone they meet? Has the relentless progression of social networking caused a permanent northward shift in the 'normal' level of sharing?

I have some 'friends' on Facebook that I rather wish I hadn't. If you use Facebook, you probably have some, too. They're the ones you accepted friend requests from without thinking, back in the early days, when you were trying to get the numbers up. The people you knew a long time ago, the people who share every detail of their life with no attempt to make these details interesting, humorous, or even particularly relevant.

Why do I not take the same liberty and tell these people to keep their details to themselves? I suppose I'm sort of lazy, for one thing. Moreover, though, I won't do that for the same reason that I didn't tell the guy with the extra nipple that he'd shared too much, too soon. Because I'm polite. Too polite, really, something I must change, I think.

So if someday, you find this post and realize, "Hey, I'm not connected to him on Facebook anymore," let me say that I'm sorry. Sorry that I didn't have it in me to tell you personally that I'm just not that interested in your weekly visits to the grocery store, your endless whining about being tired, or your griping about your family.

OK, 'unfriending' people from one's youth not really much of a step, but it's a step. "But wait," you say, "if you cut out everyone who slings more detail at you than you really care for, will there be anyone left?" Yes. Because if I genuinely like you, if I've gotten to know you and you me, no amount of detail is too much - bring it on.

See you on the other side.

Resolution

I've resolved to write more in 2013. I don't know what 'more' means in this context, since I've written almost nothing in the past 18 months, so the bar's set pretty low.

I also don't have a specific notion of what constitutes 'writing'. There's this blog, certainly, languishing in a corner since last year. It will receive some attention; but there are also three stories that I'd started work on, one as long ago as 2010. Maybe 2013 is the year those will see daylight.

The trouble, you see, is that I have both a very short attention span and a low tolerance for mediocrity, at least in my own work. Combined, these two traits make it nearly impossible to finish a first draft of anything longer than a paragraph, since a first draft is by definition rough and imperfect. The numerous typos and grammatical errors I make when I get in full flow drive me nuts, but correcting them while I write distracts me from the act of writing. I can't write longhand either - I don't think the same way with a pen in my hand as I do in front of a keyboard.

Another challenge is that I don't always have something to write about. Like today, for example. The only subject I have to write about today is how I'm going to do more writing. How interesting is that? Not particularly, not even for me, and if I'm not interested, it's a good bet that no one else will be, either.

A third - or fourth, I've lost track - difficulty is finding the time to write. Given my short attention span, writing for me is an all-consuming avtivity. My thoughts are increasingly slippery and when I lose my grip on one, it swims away quickly, lost forever in a flow - or more accurately, a trickle - of other less interesting thoughts. I can't tell you the number of Really Good Ideas that have escaped over the years by blending in with others. Writing, like fishing, requires all of the patience and attention I can gather. I don't catch many fish, because the requirements for doing so are at odds both with my own predisposition for distractedness and with the rhythms of a young family. The kids just don't seem to get that I need to be left alone when I'm writing, and to tell the truth, as grumpy as I get when they interrupt me ("Dad? Dad? Daddy? Daddaddaddaddad!" "What?" "Hi!"), I can't bring myself to tell them to get lost. Writing is, after all, a wholly discretionary activity. It doesn't feed us or clothe us, and I'd really rather spend time with them than do just about anything else. Besides, let's face it, they're going to have to support me when I'm old so I'd better be nice to them now before I forget who they are.

Finally, there's the thorny issue of subject matter sensitivity. There are topics I'd like to write about, topics that would make for funny reading, but I can't because it would be impossible to sufficiently disguise the people involved. They would instantly recognize themselves in the material, and that would be bad for everyone. (If you're wondering right now whether you're one of these people, you've made my point for me.)

Maybe I should revise my resolution: I'll write more when I have an inoffensive subject, when I have enough time, and when the ideas leap like spawning salmon into the jaws of a cleverly-placed bear. In other words, I'll write in 2013 about as often as I wrote in 2012.

Soap Bubble

It was the bra that hit me hardest.

I've always known that my children would grow up; that, apparently, is the one consistency among children. And of course family and friends with older kids have always helpfully advised me to enjoy the children being children because, like that big sale down at the Honda dealer, "when it's gone, it's gone".  I suppose I'd never really taken this advice entirely to heart - no matter how final the sale is, you know there'll be another - but I looked over my shoulder the other day and saw my own youth smiling and waving back at me in the distance.  Now my daughter is outpacing hers.  Incrementally, yes, but perceptibly.

In my mind, Caroline's still a toddler in the sunshine, squishy-cute, blowing bubbles and catching them again. But in real life, she's a preteen.  Her limbs have lost their childish bandiness and she really needs a daily shower.  She has a social life from which I'm excluded, and a private life inside her head that I can only guess at.  I've thought I'd adjusted to these changes well, but they've been so gradual as to be entirely unnoticeable day to day or even week to week, so the adjustment was easy.

When I left for work yesterday she didn't own a bra.  When I came home last night, she did.  And that suddenly, while I was commuting or eating lunch or composing another email, she's gone and changed.

Even now, when she laughs, she's the messy-haired toddler who's caught a bubble - it quivers, soapy and spectral in the sun. And then it's gone.

The Fuckit List

Apologies for the title, there are only so many words that rhyme with 'bucket'.

With Michele and the kids back in the US for the summer, I am, with the exception of a few weeks in August when I will join them for the annual sunburning and sand eating event at the beach in New Jersey, knocking around London on my own.

This annual familial summer migration has in previous years afforded me the opportunity to do touristy things, to go hiking in Scotland and to spend time with various friends in various pubs.  This summer, though, I intend to use the time to tackle a somewhat fluid list of chores, errands and pastimes which I've been either too busy or too lazy to undertake with the family around - the list of things whose undertaking I have, throughout the year, momentarily considered before concluding, "anh, fuckit."  The list consists of mundane things like cleaning the black gunk out of the washer, learning to play tennis, writing a novel.  That sort of stuff.

Today I spent most of the morning getting my iPhone to sync entirely with one computer, rather than partially with two and, as I would be in technology hell anyway, decided that today would be a good day to organize my applications on the phone into folders so I can find them a bit easier.  I currently have to scroll through 8 or 9 pages of applications to find the one I want.  Occasionally I discover an application that I'd forgotten I bought, neglected and gathering electronic dust in a remote corner of the phone.

Unfortunately, the mechanism Apple provides for moving icons around involves a great deal of dragging while the software helpfully arranges all the other icons around the one you're moving.  Placing an icon in a particular spot relative to others is about as easy as arranging a school of live fish in size order.

After an hour of trying to drop icons into folders that skittered away like cockroaches as I approached them, I'd finally gotten everything organized the way I wanted it.  And then the software crashed.

Anh, fuckit.

Loose Linguistics

I've written before about how English vocabulary is so specific in some regards and so vague in others, and reading a BBC account this morning of an attack on a young Lithuanian couple which lasted several hours in which the man was beaten and the woman was raped multiple times by the attackers, I was struck by both the vagueness and the incongruity of the reporter's choice of words in recounting the timeframe (I'm paraphrasing a bit since I can't find the article now, but the below is accurate on the salient points):

'Police believe that the attack began in the early morning and was concluded by tea-time.'

"By tea-time."  Seriously.  That's what it said.

I recently came across a blog post titled "Why is Language Vague?" which refers to an academic paper of the same title and which briefly explores the subject from an economic point of view.  The writer posits that people generally choose to use vague language rather than being forced into indefinite vocabulary due to a lack of language to sufficiently describe the desired concept.

So I wonder why was it that the reporter covering the attack chose to use what seems to me a vague colloquialism ("tea-time") when other more specific phrases are available and would arguably have been better suited to the business of factual reporting.  A few possibilities present themselves.

First, I am forced to admit the possibility that, as a native speaker of American rather than British English, I may lack the cultural context which would allow a native British speaker to interpret "tea-time" in the way the reporter intended, namely as a reasonably specific time of day.  I am well aware of the folly of relying on Wikipedia as a primary source for research material, but I think it's useful in this specific instance to show whether there is broad agreement as to what "tea-time" means.  From the guilt of cultural ignorance, the Tea (Meal) entry pretty well exonerates me.  According to the wisdom of the mobs, "tea-time" can be anywhere from 2pm to 7pm.  Or thereabouts.  So even if the precise time of the conclusion of the attack wasn't known to the reporter, a slightly less vague phrase like "early afternoon" or "early evening" would have served to better frame the time.

A second possibility is that the reporter was simply lazy.  I don't think the BBC is in the habit of employing inept journalists, although a number of BBC reporters staged a walkout yesterday so it is entirely possible that this reporter was, shall we say, not on the varsity squad.  It's also possible that this particular reporter lacked experience in crime reporting.  He may, for example, normally be assigned to the culture desk, where a phrase like "tea-time" might reasonably be applied without attracting much scrutiny.

A third and, I think somewhat more interesting possibility arises when we challenge the assumption that the reporter's interests are directly in line with the readers.  Broadly, we assume that a reporter investigates and provides facts to consumers who accept them as such, but we frequently adjust this assumption depending on the perceived reliability of the publication. In other words, most of us would be less inclined to accept as factual a story about, say, an invasion by extraterrestrials if that story were reported in the Sun than if the same story were printed in the New York Times.  The story in this case was reported by the BBC, generally considered to be a reliable news source, so we can assume that the writer wasn't fabricating his facts, but it is plausible that he chose the phrase "tea-time" deliberately to influence our interpretation of the story.

I know nothing about the political or personal motivations of this particular reporter, so let's consider this possibility of misaligned interests theoretically.  What could a hypothetical reporter hope to convey by the use of an incongruous and vague phrase (such as "tea-time") in a factual article about a violent episode?  It may be that the reporter wants to impart to the piece a certain levity if he wants us not to take the news too seriously.  Perhaps he is a xenophobe (the victims were Eastern European immigrants, an oft-reviled category here), or he may be a misogynist.  Maybe he doesn't quite believe the couple's story and wants to send the reader a wink and a tap of his nose.  Or maybe he's having a go at the police who are investigating the report, intending to give us the sense that the officers on the case may not exactly present the finest examples of investigatory prowess.

There may be other possibilities, but I think the point is made.  If someone uses vague language it may be a mismatch of context between the sender and receiver, or intellectual sloppiness on the part of the sender; but it may also be intentional and strategic, allowing the sender to transmit a specific message encapsulated in non-specific words.  In this instance, though, I'm forced to conclude, as the author of "Why is Language Vague?" did in his abstract: "I don't know."

Now I'm going to go do something else.

My Recount of the trip to The Tower of London

By Michael Conroy

I went to the Tower of London with my class. I got there by a boring and smelly coach. It smelled like gum. I got sick when we were getting off the coach. I got sick again. I got sick four times in the same sick bag. Mrs. Marsh helped me.

First, I walked past a bakery that was called “Fish and Chips.” Next, I went into the Tower of London. Then I saw the Crown Jewels. The crown looked shiny. Then I saw some short movies in the Tower of London. Only one was about Queen Elizabeth. The next movie was about soldiers in red suits and black hats with one black gun in their hand. After that I went into one of the rooms. The room had Henry VIII’s knight clothes in it. They were golden. Then I ate lunch. Well I tried to do it in a building but we got caught so we had to go out of the room and sit next to a tree. I kept on sliding off of the bench. After lunch I went to the loo. It smelt like wee. Then I went to a workshop called “Fire, Fire, Fire.” It was about the Tower of London. Samuel Pepys looked out the window and saw the fire. He went back to sleep and gave no orders to the people. Then somebody woke him up and then she told him that nine buildings burnt down. Six people died in the fire of London. I saved a snack from lunch then ate it up whilst I was doing the “Fire, Fire, Fire” workshop. Finally, I went home. Whilst I was on the coach I ate an apple and I had a sick bag. When I ate the apple I didn’t get sick. Then I got off the coach. Then I waited for a little while next to the gate. I saw a ladybird in the green net. I tried to get it out but its head fell off. Then I waited for a little longer. Then I saw my mom. Then I walked home.

My favourite part was when I did the workshop because people did some acting and it was funny.

The End of the World as we know it, and I feel fine. Well, sort of.

So the world didn't end yesterday, in case you failed to notice.

Very glad of this, I am - I didn't even get to clean out the fridge; and I'm also not terribly surprised that we're all still here.  Part of me, though, couldn't help thinking that there was a calculable probability that the guy might have been right.  Not because I think some old codger in America with a bible and a calculator has any sort of inside access to the End of the World project plan, but because the possibility always exists, no matter how small, that some sort of catastrophic event will befall the planet.  6pm on 21st May 2011 is as good a time as any for that to happen.  Just ask the dinosaurs.

Of course, there's also a calculable probability that while reading this, you will dissolve and rematerialize on the other side of the room.  Just because the probability of a thing happening is non-zero doesn't actually make it probable.

Equally, though, a non-zero probability is, well, a non-zero probability, and so the mind wanders off to consider the possibility.  I had lunch with my friend Phil the other day.  Talking with Phil is like improvisational acting - the only rule is that we must follow the discussion down whatever rathole it may happen to go.  I took advantage of a lull in the conversation caused by Phil having taken a rather large mouthful of bacon, and posed the question of whether he felt that we had the skills to survive in the event of a total societal breakdown.

By 'skills' I was referring to the hard skills required to procure food - spear fishing and bear wrestling, that sort of thing - but Phil took the question in another direction and talked about his friend, 'Bob' (I don't actually remember the friend's name, so we'll call him Bob).  Bob head-butted a guy at a family party because the guy took a swing at him, and then calmly returned to his beer while the guy bled through the nose outside.  Bob would survive in the post-asteroid-impact world, not because he knows how to trap and strangle a wild turkey, but because he doesn't hesitate to consider the possible consequences of his actions, nor does he dwell on their outcome afterward.  To put this in moral terms, Bob lacks a conscience.

Now, Bob may well feel badly about hitting the guy, may have thought later about the possibility that the guy had more friends at the party than Bob, may even have realized that he might have diffused the situation by applying a bit of diplomacy, but in the moment, when it really counted, Bob didn't think, he acted.  When society breaks down, those who act decisively and unhesitatingly will win out.  After the asteroid, or whatever, my money's on Bob.

Or rather, it would be, except I'll be dead, because I'm a thinker.  I can't help it - I was raised that way.  I am well-socialized.  I usually think about what could happen if I take a particular action.  I've often come to regret those occasions when I have taken action either in ignorance of, or in willful disregard for the consequences. You might think that as a result, I'd have learned not to act without due consideration, but 'due consideration' is a moving goalpost.  How much analysis and consideration is enough?  Would one more piece of data make the decision completely different?  At some point you have to act, or you get stuck in the analysis phase forever.

So how do we teach our children to behave responsibly and considerately toward others without becoming victims of those who have not learned similar consideration?

Michael was crying at the playground the other day.  A little kid had punched him.  This was not the first time Michael had been injured by someone else's child's behavior.  I sat Michael down on a bench and talked to him about it.  I told Michael that if someone hits him, he could hit them back, or at least give the other kid a good hard shove.  Michael shook his head tearfully. "I don't want to."  "Why not?" I asked.  "Because god doesn't want us to fight."

This is, and has always been, my problem with religious rhetoric.  Not defending yourself because 'god doesn't want you to fight' is obviously an impractical position, but it's difficult to dispute because it's dogmatic - either you believe that fighting is wrong and you don't fight at all, or you are forced to accept that fighting is always right, which clearly isn't the case either.  Dogma is simple.  It's black or white, never grey.  Life is complicated.  It's almost never black or white, almost always grey.  Dogma and life are, therefore, incompatible.  Perhaps I don't understand morality well enough, but it seems to me that a rigid moralism might be useful as a behavioral framework, but not terribly so in practice.  I think one should learn morality first, but then learn to adapt it to the situation.

I guess the next challenge is to teach Michael how to adapt his anti-fighting stance to fit the circumstances. Hopefully I'll get around to this before the next time the world ends.

Futurechurch

This one isn't likely to make me many friends.  Let me start by saying that I have no specific disdain for religion or religiosity.  Life's hard, and I think people should be free to take their comfort from whatever source they can find it.  That said, I do not personally subscribe to any particular religious belief or practice.  I'm not an atheist, but I'm not a theist either.  This post isn't about religion per se, though I'm sure that some who read it will make it so.

My grandmother's recently embarked on a crusade to save her church.  The dioscese wants to close several small churches in the area and build a new one centrally.  Ostensibly, the rationale is that a) it's an old building and will cost more and more to maintain as it ages while at the same time, b) the population is dwindling, providing less and less revenue to maintain it, and c) the number of priests available to run is is shrinking.  I also suspect (because I'm a jaded, cynical person) that they've had an offer from some greasy developer to buy the land to build a strip mall or a bank or something else equally unnecessary that shall soon become another vacant blight on the Poconos, but of course I have no proof of this.

The arguments makes economic sense to me, and despite my fond memories of the place - when I was small I would pretend that a friendly shark named Mr. Onkers lived in the stream that ran down the hill next to the church; I'd sit on a cool rock in the shade in the sticky summer morning and have long chats with him while my grandmother said the Rosary - I find the logic for closure difficult to refute.

In any case, Grandmama's asked me to do some research on old churches in London, her thinking being to refute at least the 'because it's old' part of the argument. Fortunately, you can't swing a dead cat in this town without hitting several venerable old piles, so the effort hasn't exactly taxed me.  With the kids in school and Michele out for the morning, I've had a bit of time to think about the question of the the future of churches - not of religion itself, but the physical plant used to deliver it. 

Now, I haven't been to church in years, and my experience is limited to the Roman Catholic rituals, so I may not be in the best position to talk about this, but I will anyway.  It seems to me that in this increasingly disconnected world of ours, any delivery method for anything which requires people to actually BE somewhere at a specific time to do something that they aren't absolutely compelled to do is destined for obsolescence.  I might still have to go to the DMV on their ridiculous bureaucratic schedule to get my license photo taken, but I can buy my groceries and do my banking on my own schedule.

As a parallel, I work from home a bit. I could work from home a lot more because my company encourages it. WFH has actually allowed my firm to shed some expensive real estate, plus most people who work from home will work during the time they would normally spent commuting, so the company not only saves money on space, but gets more of my time for free. I'm also more productive, at least with some of the more cerebral activities which don't require me to interact presonally with others, because there are fewer distractions than at the office. I don't work from home more mainly because I don't have a comfortable chair, but also because I like to get out of the house and see people.

It strikes me that maybe the same might be true of worship. It seems to me that, in the same way that my job can be delivered to my house, there are now better ways to support people's need for spirituality than to require them to turn up, showered and shaved and wearing uncomfortable clothes on a Sunday morning to spend an hour daydreaming about golf or tennis or the poolboy and then rush out and try to run each other over in the car park in their haste to get away. Why not deliver worship online?  Why not allow people to worship at their convenience, from the comfort of their home?  Why not make people with religious expertise and teaching available from a central location over the phone or via the Internet? 

I guess one argument (apart from the obvious heretical nature of this idea) would be that going to a physical church at a certain time provides an opportunity for people to interact with each other and to support each other's faith; an agrument which, I must admit, has a certain resonance - the same disconnectedness that allows me to skip the two hour scrum on the tube and be done with work in time to eat dinner with the kids cuts the other way too.  Staying inside alienates me from my neighbors, makes me socially reticent and robs me of the opportunity for broadening my experience. 
 
But couldn't churches - the buildings - then, address this issue by providing a much-needed forum for human interaction, rather than necessarily a place for worship?  In this model, churches wouldn't need as many physical buildings, and those needn't be designed as impractically as they are now - with their enormous open spaces that are costly to build, costly to heat and cool and costly to maintain.  Churches could be multipurpose spaces, or even shared spaces in existing community centers or offices.  They would be more intimate venues, allow people to interact and support each other rather than merely being mass recipients of a one-way message.
 
For my grandmother, this model wouldn't work.  She has her way of worshiping, and that's fine, and I'll help her in whatever way I can.  But I wonder how the model will change to suit the times.  I wonder if churches will evolve?

I Can't Believe it's Butter!

As a kid, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Not that I wanted to be a girl, necessarily, but I was captivated by the idea of living in a log cabin in the Great North Woods.  On my way to the bus stop in the dead of winter, I fancied that I was crunching my way to the milking barn through the new-fallen snow, the blue-black sky pricked with an incomprehensible number of tiny white stars, the cold air turning to ice in my nostrils and the winter sun just beginning to exhale a faint pink dawn onto the eastern horizon.  So when my mate Clive sent me a recipe for making homemade butter, I was overcome with that same pioneering spirit and couldn't resist the temptation to try my hand at churning my own.

I've always been a huge fan of butter.  Conversely, I find the idea of butter substitutes - margarine, for example - abhorrent.  Clive sent me this link because he's been both shocked and repulsed by the quantity of butter I put on my toast at breakfast.  This is why I will very likely die an early but mercifully quick death.

The recipe and the process for making butter are both surprisingly simple - a quantity of crème fraiche whipped in the mixer, followed by a relatively straightforward rinse to remove the buttermilk.  The recipe suggests that three minutes or so should be sufficient to produce butter.  Three minutes being roughly the length of my children's attention span, along with the limited number of ingredients (one), suggested to me that this would be an interesting kitchen project for the children to be involved in.  They are forever crowding around me while I'm cooking, trying to help and causing me no end of irritation.  Here was the perfect opportunity to show them something fascinating - turning a sour liquid into a sweet solid - while indulging their desire to help.  When I told them about the idea, they were falling over themselves to get stuck in.

As it turns out, the estimate of three minutes was somewhat optimistic.  After about twelve minutes of watching the whip go round and round with little productive activity in the bowl, the children drift away to find something more interesting to look at, like lint.  Even my enthusiasm for homemade butter is flagging when the mixture, which had taken on a whipped cream consistency early on and pretty much stayed that way, began to thicken more.  I leaned in to get a closer look when, without warning, the contents separate and the thin buttermilk spatters out of the bowl.  By 'spatter', I mean that it hurled itself around the kitchen in a violent monsoon of watery, sour milk.  The liquid came out of the bowl so hard that it stung my face, like fine saltwater spray off the bow of a speedboat.

Next follows the rinsing process.  This involves mashing ice water into the butter to wash away the remaining buttermilk, which is sour and makes the butter taste a lot like lemon cream frosting.  Now, I happen to like lemon cream frosting, but I don't imagine it will taste very good on my steak, which is where I intend to put my homemade butter later this afternoon.  Mmm.  Butter on steak.  Eat your heart out, Homer Simpson.

The rinse must be performed five of six times to get rid of all the buttermilk, and, as you might expect, the butter becomes harder with each successive dip in the icy water.  By the time the water comes out clear indicating that the buttermilk is gone, my hand and forearm feel as if I've raked all the leaves in Central Park, but it's butter!  Actual, real, honest to goodness butter, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder would have made.  Well, except that I used a Kitchenaid instead of a butter churn and bought my crème fraiche at the Tesco gas station down the street, but other than that, it's absolutely the same thing.

The children are unimpressed.  That's the trouble with kids these days.  No pioneering spirit.

Things I will not miss about the UK

1. Rude drivers - although drivers here tend to be somewhat more courteous towards each other than they do in the US, they are anything but friendly towards pedestrians. Despite much governmental huffing and puffing about increasing the number of walkers and cyclists, the fact remains that crossing any road here requires a combination of savvy, speed and stupidity. Even halfway across the road I've had drivers turn directly in front of me like I'm not there.

2. Myopic street crossing design - in the US, a traffic light changes from green to amber to warn drivers that the light is about to turn red. In the US, this warning generally means 'go like hell'. In the UK, the light changes from red to flashing red and amber to inform drivers that the light is about to change. It generally also means 'go like hell'. The unfortunate thing is that at many intersections, the green crossing sign is lit until exactly the moment that the lights change to flashing red and amber. I can't tell you the number of times I've nearly been run down because when the red/amber combo started flashing I still had one foot on the sidewalk, making me fair game.

3. Foxes and their excrement - the foxes themselves aren't so bad, though they do chew up anything that we leave in the garden. It's their poo - slimy, smelly, everywhere - that really gets me.

4. Chavs - I've heard that 'chav' stands for 'council housed and violent'. I don't know whether this is the origin of the term, but it's accurate enough. There's a certain look about this type of person - something about the condition of their skin and hair, their clothes maybe, that makes these types stand out. Oh, yeah, maybe it's the pit bull that seems to accompany them everywhere. What is it about these people that compels them to buy dogs that look like Mike Tyson after a heavy night?

5. Ageing thugs - one of the oddest things I had to get used to here was the elderly thug. Men in their sixties back home don't generally instill any sort of fear, but here that same quality of skin and hair clings to the chav through his whole life well into old age. Frightening.

6. Pebbledash - a mixture of gravel and concrete, this awful treatment is applied to the exterior of many otherwise lovely homes. It's cheap and hides, as my grandfather used to say, a multitude of sins. It also looks, in color and texture, exactly like vomit.

7. Clouds - it doesn't actually rain that much here, it just usually looks like it's about to. It IS cloudy here. A LOT. That gets old pretty quickly.

8. Short winter days - on the winter solstice, the sun rises after 8am and sets before 4pm. This makes it hard to get out of bed in the morning.

9. Rubbish - there's always trash blowing around in the streets and on the sidewalks.

10. Vomit - we have a lot of bars and nightclubs in town, so I often have to maneuver the kids around a fresh pile of pebbledash on the sidewalk on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Yuck.

11. Driving on the other side - still haven't quite gotten used to this.

12. Brutalist architecture - nothing says 'post-War cheap and nasty' like sootstained poured concrete.

13. Health and safety - EU health and safety laws are among the strictest on the planet. If I had a dime for the number of times I heard that 'we used to be able to do that, but can't any more because of health and safety'...

14. VAT - like sales tax, only much, much higher.

15. Smelly commuters - I realize that sometimes people just can't help smelling. But first thing on a February morning? It's not like they've been sweating on the train for an hour yet.

16. Pushy commuters - The daily bump and grind to get on and off the trains got old quickly. I'm a big guy, I'm not really sure what makes people think they're going to be able to shove me out of the way.

17. The cycling menace - I'm sure that most people who cycle are mindful of traffic laws, pedestrians, etc., but I've had more than one near miss with a Spandex-clad cyclist wearing one of those idiotic aerodynamic helmets. Generally he's run a red light so that he can ride the wrong way down a one way street or he is riding on the sidewalk. I've considered carrying a heavy stick to shove into the spokes of his back wheel.

Things I Miss About America

You've probably noticed that my enthusiasm for moving back to the US is not entirely unbridled.  There are many, many things that I will miss about this place, and I'll share these.  But there are also things that I miss about the US.  To start my series of posts about the joys and pains of moving back, here is a list of the Things I Miss About America.

1. People I love - I won't list them all, you know who you are.

2. Space - although it has its tradeoffs for convenience, America has a lot more open space than London. Of course, whether you have access to it depends entirely on where you live.

3. A good steak - beef here tends to be stringy and fatty. I may have given up too soon and simply not found a good outlet, but I do miss the feel of a nice solid sirloin between my teeth.

4. Sandy beaches - the Jersey shore (the real place, not the show), is absolutely one of the gems of the Northeast, despite being inundated with marauding seagulls and tourist tat, and in spite of actually being located in New Jersey, the Essex of America. (Credit to Stephen Fry for that apt comparison).

5. Oscar Meyer bacon - we used to be able to get this here, but I think we were the only ones buying it so the economics didn't work for Morrison's.  I've grown accustomed to the local equivalent - streaky bacon - but it's hardly the same thing, is it?

6. Dryers - you'd think that in a climate a cool and damp as this, necessity would have mothered an advance or two in the technology of clothes drying, but you'd be wrong. A clothes rack placed near a radiator is still the best - indeed the only - way to get your clothes dry, winter OR summer.

7. 24 hour drug stores - I once tried to find something for Michael's fever on a Sunday morning. It's a good thing it wasn't a serious illness.

8. Air conditioning that works - maybe it's because we really only need A/C about one week per year here, but buildings that are air conditioned might as well not be during that week. It's also worth pointing out that air conditioned public transport, while slowly making inroads here has been perfected in New York, where a couple of cow carcasses on the 1 and 9 train could have been the setting for Rocky's meat locker punch-up scene in .

9. A long drive in the country - America has something like 150,000 miles of roads. Many of these are shady and pleasant and green and are a beautiful way to spend an afternoon, the tarmac ribbon unfolding over gently rolling hills and winding below the ancient arching boughs.  There's a reason America is so in love with the automobile: she's lovable.

10. Roadside diners - chrome and cigarette-scarred Formica, ancient Germanic waitresses, greasy food, milkshakes, bikers on crank. What's not to love?

11. Good French fries - thin, crispy, a little greasy. The market here sells frozen 'American Style Chips'. Like the streaky bacon, they're just not the same thing.

12. Decent pizza - Don Pepe's in Penn Station in New York is, hands down, the best pizza on the planet. There is no Don Pepe's here. Pizza here is almost without exception flaccid, doughy and light on sauce and cheese.

13. Window screens - Seriously, guys, it's not that complicated. A roll of wire mesh, a wooden frame, a few tacks.  I could show you.

14.  Ice - I'm not sure why the concept of using frozen water to make things cold is so alien to people here, but you'd think it was an exotic notion.  It may be a small thing, but it's a useful one.

15.  July 4th - I generally don't go in much for patriotism, but I do love a good flag-waving parade and a marching band.  The 'Star Spangled Banner' makes my eyes wet - even as I write this, the screen is getting blurry.  Silly, really.  Sniff.

16.  Autumn - this past Fall here was probably the best yet, but it doesn't hold a candle to the fine weather, the honeyed sunshine and the brilliant foliage we enjoyed back in the US.

17. TiVo - we have DVRs here, yes, but they're just pants.

18. A decent postal service - every time I mail a letter I wonder whether it will arrive at its destination, and when.  In February 2011, the kids received a pair of Halloween cards from Michele's parents.  From 2009.  I sometimes get past due notices from the utility company several weeks before I get the bills themselves.  The Victorians apparently had such high quality mail service in London that the socialite set relied on it rather than messengers to deliver communications between themselves in a timely fashion.  I'm not sure what's happened since then, but it's not pretty.

19. Customer service - with the exception of every shop I've been to in the King of Prussia mall, a riduculous temple of vulgar comsumerism and poor taste, most people who sell things in America have at least some concept of customer service.  Not so here.  Napoleon called this a nation of shopkeepers, but he apparently never actually went to a shop here.

20. High quality dentistry - the joke about British dentists isn't a joke, they're shockingly bad.  We actually pay to use the dentist back in the US because they're so awful here.  Michele tried, with my insurance, to make a cleaning appointment for the kids, a semiannual routine in America, but was told that they're too young.

21. Non-roaming data - I've learned that my beloved iPhone is of only slightly more use than a rock when it's without data.  I've also learned that roaming data is obscenely expensive.  I cannot comprehend why, when the mobile carrier in Malaga has the same name as the one I bought the phone from in London, do I pay £8/megabyte for data.  Yes, Spain's another country, but it's about as far from London as Chicago is from Philadelphia and Verizon seems to manage just fine in both American cities.

There may well be other things that I miss and will be glad to get back to - this list started out considerably shorter, and I've been adding to it through the weekend - but these are the biggest ones that come to mind.  Up next, I think, a list of Things I Won't Miss About the UK.

Moving Again - With Children

It's been a while, yes. 

For those of you who check this page regularly, I'm sorry that I haven't been more disciplined about posting.  And for those of you who are easily disappointed, I'm even sorrier for what you're about to read.  But let's face it - you're an adult and it's not my job to keep you from being disappointed.  So I'll say here, now, it's official, insofar as anything in the banking industry is ever official - we're moving back to the US.

This may change, and our children (whom, I would add, it IS my job to try to protect from a certain amount of avoidable disappointment, or at least from life's endless buffet of pain and prosternation) are unaware of this impending move.  So please don't talk about it in front of them.  I will also add now that I am not entirely pleased about this move.  Our secret, yes?

By way of explanation, and just because I feel like it, let us consider some widely held misconceptions about my adoptive country, this place that I love:

1. "Taxes are higher".  This may be true.  In the UK, we have a very simple tax system.  There are 9 deductions (mostly applicable to those are either blind or who were born before 1935) and 4 tax rates (source).  While these rates may be slightly higher than thay are in the US, the taxes here are fair and do not lend themselves to cheating.  The government does not offer a direct incentive to own a home or to bear large numbers of offspring who may later take up the cause of consumerist consumption.  I filed my UK taxes in less time than it took the kids to pick up their Legos.  I owed 50p.  Compare this to the £600 I pay annually to have my US taxes compiled neatly into a stack of 30 or so A4 sheets to be sent to the local embassy.

2.  "Nationalized healthcare is shambolic".  This may also be true. To avoid using the UK National Health System, I pay £1888.80 per year for private health insurance.  Even taken as a direct comparison this compares favorably with the $8000 or so that I paid annually for health coverage in the US; but to this, I must add that my coverage in the US was, in a word, shite.  Even with Blue Cross I not only forked over a $30 copay for every office visit, but I also footed 20% of every medical bill.  Here, I pay, um, NOTHING.  I had £250 worth of bloodwork recently.  I paid NOTHING.  I had an MRI done of my head and spine, the bill for which came to £1600.  If you are the sort of dullard who learns only through repetition - perhaps you are a hockey fan - I shall reiterate: I paid NOTHING.  Had these tests been carried out in the US I'd have been out about $350 (assuming an oversimplified unit to unit currency conversion).  OK, so you might say that this is not a valid comparison - private health insurance does not adequately represent the general experience in a nationalized system.  And to you, dear detractor, I say in the nicest way, 'Bollocks, You Ignorant Tosser'.  Several years ago, Michael had not one, but two injuries requiring professional medical attention, and we took him to the local NHS hospital.  On both occasions, he was treated quickly and efficiently and with a degree of kindness and compassion that I've not seen in any US medical facility.  I'll reiterate - we paid NOTHING.  I'll be the first to admit that two data points may not be representative of an entire system, but, and I'll be perfectly forthright with you here, I don't really give a shit, let alone two of them, about whether my experience represents the entire system.  I only present my personal experience of it.

3.  "It rains a lot".  This is a completely unfounded assertion. Philadelphia received, over the course of more than 100 years, 70% more annual rainfall than London (source).  I rarely carry an umbrella in London, and although I can't say that I don't ever get wet, I get less wet here walking the 20 minutes or so to and from the train than I ever did while hatlessly navigating interminable suburban American carparks.  It's also worth adding here that while London does have a somewhat lower average temperature - 50 degrees F versus Philadelphia's comparatively balmy 54 degrees - the temperature here falls within a 24 degree band while Philadelphia's fluctuates by 44 degrees on average.  Put differently, the summers here may be cool, but the winters are warm.  Yes, I enjoy the change of seasons, but while I don't even own a heavy coat, there's a good chance that you're wearing yours now if you live in the Northeast US.

4.  "The transport system breaks down."  Yeah, that one's probably true.  On the other hand, London transport does actually GO to most of the places I need to get to.  Even now, after several drinks, I can think of no fewer than eight ways to get to work from where I live.  Some are more useful than others, but they all get me where I need to go, and the diversity of routes means that I have a fair few alternates when one is broken.  By way of comparison, let's say that I wanted to get from Downingtown (where we lived before moving here) to West Conshohocken (where I worked before moving here) using only public transport. The website of SEPTA, the regional Transport Authority, offers the following helpful instructions: "Dear customer, nearby to the given address stations could not be found. Perhaps timetable data of local transport associations is missing. We hope for your understanding."  OK, so public transport's out, let's drive.  If I were driving between the same points in the US, there were at most four different routes, one involving a dirt road skirting a Chester County cow pasture, and even that one was prone to backups.  I can find my way anywhere in London given a postcode.  It might take me a bit longer and I might be jostled on a crowded platform or sweat through my clean shirt, but goddammit, I'll probably get there and if I don't, I can always pour myself into a cab.  Oh, and by the way I pay £123 a month for this service.  Again, this compares favorably to the monthly cost of a car - payment, interest, maintenance and fuel.

5.  "There are no good restaurants".  Again, patently false.  Tonight, we ate at a Korean BBQ that opened around the corner from us.  A Google search for "London and Restaurant" yields 701,000 results.  A similar search for "Philadelphia and Restaurant" returns a comparatively lean 115,000 hits, despite Philadelphia's recent eatery renaissance.  One need but scratch the vacuous surface of Philadelphia's restaurant listings to find a Stephen Starr establishment at one's corner, occupying a previously vacant lot or a former Bolshevik diner.  Of course one can't compare these results directly, but the sheer magnitude of the difference in the numbers tells its own story. 

London is not without its faults.  The frequent altercations, both large and small, that I manage to get myself into at bus stops, tube stations and on the pavement outside my office are certainly examples of why this is not Utopia.  Sometimes the restuarants are not fabulous, the lights are not terribly bright, the schools not all that good.  But on balance, this city is where I live, it's where I feel comfortable, it's where I belong.  Though my life here may be short of middling, I love it anyway.

And now, it's time to leave this, all beauty and conflict, behind.  The Buddhists say that the path to happiness lies in letting go - of people, of places, of things.  I may only aspire to such greatness, or even to littleness.  I can't even let go of my morning commute without a struggle.

Wanderlust

I don't think I've travelled nearly enough.  I say this because of an advertisement I saw on the tube today on the way to work.  The ad was for STA TRAVEL (or STAT RAVEL, I couldn't really be sure as I broke my glasses some time ago and have either been too lazy or vain to have them fixed).  I don't really remember much about the ad, but the tagline was "Before you turn 35".  As a 40 year old, I found this frightening and disturbing and vaguely offensive.

I can just imagine the meeting of the STA Travel marketing department where they came up with that one - a couple of pimply twenty-somethings in baggy pants and baseball caps guzzling Coke and kicking ideas around.

"Yo, Tyler, how about 'Go before you're dead.'"

"Shu'up, Taylor, thas sum sick shit.  Or, or, or 'Before you turn 35'"

"LOL.  Yo mama's 35, beeyatch!"

Seriously, what's that supposed to mean?  I'm pretty well travelled for an American, but there are still plenty of places I haven't been to, even in America.  I pointed out to Caroline the other day that in her Brownies group there is a girl named Savannah and another named Georgia.  She stared at me blankly until I explained that Savannah is a city in Georgia.  She asked me what it's like but I have no idea.  I've never been to Savannah, though I have been to Hilton Head just a few miles north, and I remember the stench of the Savannah paper mills like the devil's own flatulence wafting up the coastline.  I hear it's lovely if the wind is right, though, so I'll put Savannah on the list, right along with all the others.

I don't like to brag (OK, yes I do) but I've got 144 cities in 11 countries tagged on my Facebook 'Tripadvisor Cities I've Visited' app.  Fact is, though, that's not enough.  I wonder if it will EVER be enough.  I'm not sure what drives this need to travel, to see new places and experience new things.  It's been a few months since I've been away and I'm getting itchy again.  I have a friend who's got three or four hundred cities tagged and he's still travelling.  It never gets old.

So the idea that you have to get your travelling in before you're 35?  Well, as a forty year old with a need to GO, I can say with some certainty that that's just bollocks.

Conversational French

We recently hosted some friends who are French.  The youngest child, Romeo, an adorable three year old with floppy brown hair and big eyes, speaks no English.

After a few drinks, I, like most people, come to believe that I am smarter, funnier and better looking than I actually am.  Ahh, the magic of alcohol.  Too bad it doesn't make my French any better.  The conversation between Romeo and I is recounted below, translated into English for those of you who either don't speak French or who aren't drunk right now.

"Sir," Romeo asks, his hair flopping down over his left eye.  "May I play with this yellow car?"  He calls me 'monsieur'. He calls Michael 'boy' and Caroline is 'girl'. I think it's very cute.
"Yes, of course," I reply in flawless French.  I am now his best friend, having both given him permission to play with the yellow car and demonstrated that I speak his language.  He is, poor child, completely unaware that I have exhausted the entire linguistic reserve of two years of high school French.  I speak French in the way that a parrot speaks English - I repeat it, it sounds about right, and the words are sometimes marginally appropriate to the situation, but as often as not, I have no idea what I'm saying.

Some time later I am in the kitchen preparing dinner for the children, believing that I am a better cook than I actually am, when Romeo toddles down the hallway with both the yellow and the red cars in hand.  The red and yellow cars require that you shake them vigorously and let them loose on the floor. While ridiculous to watch, if performed properly, this shaking will produce revving engine and screeching tire noises that are most satisfactory, especially to a small child.

"Monsieur, how does this car go?"  His question is a bit of a challenge for me, but after a half a beat, I parse out the words for 'car' and 'go' and deduce his meaning.

"Relieve-her you," I reply.  The French words for relief and shake are similar enough to confuse me.  He stares at me blankly, but I hardly notice; I'm too busy trying to recall more French.  "You relieve her and then put him under the stairs."

His bewilderment deepens.  "I don't understand," he replies.  It must be so difficult to be so young.

"Listen me," I command.  I shake the yellow car and place it on the carpet.  It races away, its engine roaring, and he shrieks with unbridled delight.  He fetches the car and brings it back to me, holding it aloft so that I may shake it again.  "No, you," I tell him.  "Relieve!" I instruct emphatically, demonstrating with my hand.  I have to get back to my boiling pasta, now frothing over, the starchy water hissing and popping evilly on the hot burner.

He shakes the car a few times and lets it go, but it only moves a few inches.  He is crestfallen.  "Monsieur, encore, s'il vous plaît?"  he requests, a quiver in his voice.  I shake the car and send it tearing down the hall, and he is happy once more.

There follows here a lengthy passage in his three-year-old French that is far better than mine and which I cannot possibly comprehend.  It sounds like a question and it ends with please, so I assume he wants me to do the car thing again.  I shake the car and let it go but his eyes well with tiny Gallic tears.  Apparently I have misinterpreted his intentions. "No, no don't rain!" I implore, but he is howling and crying for his mère.  "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" his mother asks him, shepherding him into the front room as I return to my cooking.

A few minutes later, he's back, holding aloft two of Michael's small toy dinosaurs.  "Monsieur, are these elephants?"  I of course have no idea what he's asking so I smile and nod politely, the way you do when you've had a bit to drink and your dinner's beginning to weld itself to the stove top.  "They don't look like elephants," he continues.  "Elephants are grey and they have looong trunks.  They are not elephants, I think.  Have you ever seen an elephant?"

I am completely out of my depth.  I think he's asking what kind of dinosaurs they are, but of course I don't know, and I admit as much.  He seems puzzled that I am uncertain as to whether I've ever seen an elephant, but he lets it pass.  "What are you cooking?"

"Stegosaurus, maybe?" I think he's still asking about the dinosaurs.  He looks horrified and runs away. 

He eats very little at dinner.  When his mother presses him to finish his pasta, he protests violently in French and runs away.  He does this a lot, it seems.  I ask if everything is all right, but his mother shakes her head.  "He has the, ah, the ideas crazy," she replies carefully in English.  "He say the pasta is a dinosaur."

I can't imagine where he got that idea.

The Last Time

I have to admit, I'm a little intrigued by the dead birds.  And the dead fish.  And all the other animals that seem to have decided to pack it in this week.  They, the people who name such things, have dubbed it the aflockalypse.  Is this really the beginning of the end of the world?  Hmm.  Probably not.  I really believe that the Mayans ended the calendar on 12-12-2012 because it had to end _sometime_ and they got tired of chiseling the dates into the stones.

But it does make you wonder.

There's actually a pretty thin line separating me from the naked guy with the crazy hair wearing a sandwich board proclaiming 'The End Is Nigh'.  I exist in a permanent state of impermanence.  I expect that whatever is there now soon will be un-there'd.  Yes, it's a somewhat taxing and depressing way to live, but the good news is that I'm rarely surprised when things DO end.  But that's just the big stuff.  What about the little things?

I was at a friend's house recently when he announced that he had to give his little girl a bath.  Bathing the kids was a routine that I both loved and despised.  Some days it was just a mundane chore; others, it was a welcome respite from the cares and worries of the adult world - you know, the one where you can't splash around.

I invented a tub game called squirty telephone when we first moved to London.  The children, having left families and friends and cherished toys back in the US, were miserable.  On the first or second night, while giving them a bath in the Savoy's commodious tub, to distract them from the misery brought on by having moved a quarter of the way across the world to a rainy, grey city where everyone seemed to be in a terrible hurry and the food was lousy, I hit on the idea of pretending that the hand shower was a telephone.  Making a ringing noise, I put it to my ear and turned on the water, and squirty telephone was born.  For the next two years I had to soak my head every time I gave them a bath.  We finally moved into a house that has no hand shower and they soon gave up baths.

I honestly can't remember the last time I gave them a bath.  It just stopped without warning.  I suppose I thought I would be bathing them indefinitely.  As much as it was a pain in the ass sometimes, I miss it.

The children have stopped waving to me from the front window.  I don't know when, or why, they just have.  I don't remember the last time they did, precisely because I didn't KNOW it was the last time.  If I had, I'd have made a special effort to remember it.

A facile philosophy would suggest that you should live your life as if every day is your last.  That's just not possible, I think.  Life does, in fact, get mundane.  Routine.  Even boring at times.  You take things for granted.  You assume that your children will always be children.  That your friends will always be around.  That the things and the people that you love will always be in your life.

And then, swiftly and without any warning at all, they are gone.

When was the last time you gave your kid a bath?