This is the second year in a row I’m missing the Jeffrey birthday festivities – oh no!
Jeffrey has been a dear and true friend through all manner of disorder and hilarity, and I miss him. He is adorable, sweet, sarcastic, and sings opera in the shower (not to mention on the professional stage).
He is also one of the few people who would ever dare bite me. What more could you ask for in a friend?
Happy birthday wishes to him!
I went to the Cambridge Student Union, location of many historic debates (like Should women be granted the vote?) to watch the election returns with an unruly mob of drunken undergrads, Americans, and the occasional intellectual.
My little crew mainly consisted of mad scientists but Jean showed up after midnight with his friend, a German academic with tattoos – shocking! The boys dragged at our shirts and we both revealed too much decorated skin, a very unusual experience in that context.
I had an entertaining hours-long discussion with an economist ranging across matters political and fiscal and dietary (he has a gluten allergy).
Cambridge is in many ways an awful place to live, but the scene at the Union (including a drinks queue of at least a hundred people respectfully jostling for position in that special way that Brits do) sums up everything that is good about the city.
Several strangers, upon hearing my accent, thanked me for voting – a delightful addition to any evening, but especially nice given the harsh way my obvious American-ness has been regarded by many people over the years in this town.
Though I was not happy to be cornered by a television news crew.
Yes, I look theatrical, but really, I do not give good soundbite. When asked by a chipper blonde person why everyone was so excited I replied in typically testy fashion I have no idea, and find the phenomenon annoying.
She blinked and tried to extract a better quote but I was unyielding, admitting only to an interest in the gubernatorial race in my home state.
I doubt my comments made the edit for the evening news this time around, but plaintively ask once again, why me? Every freaking thing I’ve done since age ten ends with a camera in my face and I do not seek the attention.
Jean laughed hysterically and disputed my complaint so I thumped him in the chest, but we held hands and enjoyed the absolutely bizarre spectacle as the votes were tallied.
I didn’t think it could or would happen, right up to the moment I watched the acceptance speech.
I’m still cynical, and predict massive disappointments ahead, but – how amazing.
Today I’m celebrating the election results by eating a grilled cheese sandwich with ketchup and pickles (or as they call them here, ‘cocktail gherkins’) and pondering big questions like Does this mean I can move back home now?
The answer is, obviously, no. Or at least, not yet.
It will take more than one rousing speech to fix the systemic problems that forced the decision to move to a country with socialized medicine.
Though I feel a lot more optimistic about incremental and small reforms than I have since, oh, the Carter administration. When I was so young I used to play with an Amy Peanut doll.
Tonight on my doorstep (or whatever they call it on a boat):
Fun fair, fireworks, twenty-five thousand people, and a massive bonfire. Too exciting for words!
This holiday is pretty gosh darn interesting given the historic and symbolic framework: religious recusants, confessions extracted under torture, a bloody and public execution, and centuries of yearly celebrations including the symbolic torching of people of faith.
Of course, schools no longer teach the whole poem. So here you go:
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up King and Parliament.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!
A couple of weeks ago my son had to have two teeth extracted because they stubbornly refused to go, no matter how often wiggled.
He had resisted for months, but after the procedure conducted in the kind and cheerful environs of an NHS dentist, he walked away and marveled That wasn’t hard at all!
This was in reference to the last time, when he was assaulted, face bashed into a brick wall, at age six. During the course of a supposedly normal day at the happy hippie alternative school in Seattle.
That day, the handsomely compensated stateside dentist held him down with brutal and callous force as the boy screamed and writhed against the injustice. Three ruined teeth were yanked out.
This afternoon he poked at one of his other teeth and it came away cleanly without professional or thuggish intervention…. hurray!
We went over to the farm store to pick up supper and they asked who we hope will win. We replied in unison Obama!
Ten years ago I didn’t even know how to chop garlic, nor did I care to try. My explicit domestic policies included the refrain I do not cook, or clean, or care. When challenged by a family member I would frown and reply I’m not your housekeeper – I already have a job!
In my mid-twenties Polly predicted I would have an epiphany and be a master chef by age forty, but I always scoffed. Stella later spent a good number of years trying to teach me, supplying tempting treats and training and cookbooks, but again – I never made much progress.
I loved our champagne breakfasts on the beach, but had no inherent capacity to learn how to recreate the experience.
This makes sense since I lacked a sense of smell; food made almost no impression… because I couldn’t taste it.
Right around the time my olfactory capacities were restored I moved to the International District of Seattle, had money for the first time in my adult life. I discovered sushi, the burrito bus, pho, Vietnamese delis, all the wonders of the culinary world that had formerly been beyond imagining.
One year later I moved to a very odd corner of England, where the food lives up to all the bad stereotypes you have ever encountered in the media.
It is true that I have had excellent meals in London, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Bristol. Heck, I’ve even had good food in Margate and Cromer. I recently visited an awesome outdoor market in Norwich – there are high quality options for food in all sorts of unexpected places.
Cambridge is just the city where I live and shop, and thus the place I feel the pleasures and perils of both most keenly. The fact that this particular city fails so spectacularly cannot easily be explained – even my bougie or decadent friends are uneasy when pressed to name a restaurant that is truly worth spending the money on.
This is good in the sense that we all save a lot of money, and inevitably throw more dinner parties.
However. It isn’t just hard to find good salsa; it is nearly impossible to find the constituent elements to make it. Ditto nearly all the staple ingredients I was accustomed to, even in the bland years of greens and tofu.
I’m lucky enough to have the money to scamper off to Rome or Paris or Barcelona (flying to another city is literally cheaper than dinner at the only good local restaurant) when I start to crave the simple delicious foods that Europe offers. Those adventures have been great fun.
But during the course of an average day, I have had to start from scratch, learning not just basic cooking techniques but also conquering major barriers like, you know, the metric system. Four years and four months into this experiment, I still can’t tell you the difference between a gram or kilogram, and I have no idea why some foods are weighed while others are measured, yet I have persevered.
Thanksgiving was of course the main challenge, and Stella came one year to help, Marisa another. Then I was on my own, and somehow managed to pull it off, right down to bribing farmers to scour the countryside for a bird and a pumpkin.
Then I extrapolated that to baking chickens, and making stock, and even soup – loathed all these decades – then tortillas, and onward!
Last night without any particular effort I made a four course dinner featuring a reasonably authentic chili con carne Byron swore was the best meal ever served in England!
I’m sure the compliment was excessive, but it is a dish otherwise not available in any legitimate form on this quadrant of the green island. I’m not bragging – I am, instead, surprised. My mother can assure you that I could barely make toast and certainly didn’t even knew how to cook an egg when I left home.
Of course I still stand by the premise that I am not a servant and will only cook for my own idiosyncratic pleasures, regardless of any other factors.
The fact that I learned how without paying all that much attention is baffling.
Five years ago I was in the hospital with acute cholecystitis and cholelithiasis exacerbated by existing abdominal adhesions.
In other words, my gallbladder was strangled and killed by scar tissue as the delayed result of a massive gangrenous infection (you know, the one that technically killed me). The ensuing secondary drama was fairly, um, serious. Though it seemed easy-peasy compared to previous invasive procedures. I had anesthesia, at least!
When I woke up the surgeon reported that what should have been a diseased or distressed organ had in fact been reduced to black sludge.
Hurray for five years without continuing complications! Hurray for five years without surgeries (if you ignore the biopsy regimen, shh)!
Though I haven’t been able to drink coffee since.
I definitely miss it.
One of the best features of Cambridge is the farm store, and today they celebrated their second anniversary.
I popped over to eat cake, buy yummy fruit and veg, and wish them well.
These kids are easily some of my favorite people in all of the UK, and contribute to my day in countless practical ways!
I tried to watch the thirty minute political advertisement but only lasted ten minutes or so before I started to exclaim things like which motherfucking assholes thought NAFTA was a good plan, huh? HUH?
Byron said Walk away from the tv, Bee! Just walk away!
I replied It isn’t tv, it is youtube!
The Democratic candidate certainly gets credit for, well, not being in office back then. But I find it infuriating that the Democrats are using anti-globalization rhetoric to win the race. Just sayin’.
Of course I am also such a wingnut I haven’t been able to watch any appreciable amount of television since the Oklahoma City bombing, so I took the advice and stomped off, still muttering.
I voted weeks ago so there is not much reason for me to pay attention until election night, but my take on what I watched is summed up with Well, duh.
Reform is around the corner, but it will be a tepid centrist variety. This is nice (I’m a bureaucrat by temperament and training) but hardly revolutionary or even surprising. My only real hope is for core changes in the health care industry (like, for instance, disconnecting it from the concept of profit), but those childish dreams died long ago.
I’m actually much more thrilled by super tasty Washington ballot items like assisted suicide, extending the lightrail, earthquake-proofing the Pike Place Market, and a furiously tight gubernatorial race.
October of 1996 found me languishing on my side in a hospital bed that had been my home for five weeks, following five whole months on medically mandated home bedrest.
That particular afternoon featured a massive hemorrhage, then an emergency abdominal surgery performed without sufficient anesthesia. The objective was to save my life, and maybe another.
I passed out but eyewitness accounts attest to the lavish loss of blood, splattered across all attending medical staff, bystanders, the floor.
When I woke up I was surprised to find the infant snatched from my belly had also survived – gasping for breath, born too soon, encumbered with too many names because it was all way too much to cope with – but still, alive.
When I took him home from the hospital he was twenty-two inches long and weighed five pounds.
Now that sad little waif of a baby is nearly my height, an autonomous brilliant person just as likely to put on a puppet show as launch conversations about Descartes.
The last week has been a nonstop celebration in honor of the boy, including sushi dinners, tickets for plays and a circus, a trip to London to see the King’s Privy Wardrobe, with random detours for The 39 Steps and Ripley’s, cake, laughter, love.
I’m not allowed to post current photographs but here he is in a younger incarnation – Barcelona 2006:
The news from the states has been remarkably dismal, and as a consequence I’ve lately been afflicted with Appropriate Timely Emotions.
To the extent that if you were at the Arts Picturehouse last night you could have spied me sitting in the middle of a crowd of strangers crying.
That kind of thing never happens.
Back to regular programming: tomorrow I’m off to London to wallow in decadent debauchery, and really, that is the best possible option for distraction, no matter how backwards the solution sounds.
Even reclusive, suspicious, obsessive people like me need a break sometimes.
Plus, my idea of decadence often involves, aside from the mandatory drunken literary salon thing, wholesome excursions to English Heritage monuments.
I’ve pretty much forgotten not only the experiences described but also the text of Lessons in Taxidermy. One of the only bits I remember clearly is the fact that, in real life and the book, nearly all of our vast network of friends and family abandoned us in the midst of my medical problems.
People are prone to grief fatigue; it happens. Particularly when you are confronted with someone like me, who remains dismally sick for years and decades, the attrition rate of support is predictable.
Last month I heard that someone back home had entered hospice, and I sat in the market square crying as I wrote a letter thanking her for being a nice person and good friend.
This woman was singular in remaining a stalwart friend through the crisis, to the extent that she donated her annual leave so my mother could spend at least a few precious days in the hospital with me. She conscientiously, persistently showed up, sent flowers, invited us for dinner, took my mother to lunch and tried to make her laugh. She even responded to my teen pregnancy with a gentle, sweet benevolence and interest rather than the much more common horror and scorn.
This was a byproduct of her religious faith but she did not proselytize – she just acted in a decent, plain way to take care of people who needed tending.
Yesterday I received a reply to my letter in her careful penmanship, and could not bring myself to open the envelope. Hours later my mother sent email reporting that our old friend passed away.
I’m thinking about her husband and son, and wish that I could somehow do more.