Year: 2009

Strikes, snowstorms, perpetual passport drama, and reading news of a bungled bombing = trip cancelled.

Free first class tickets…. squandered!

Oh well; at least this city is beautiful.

I finally have a bank account.

Huh. The process only took five and a half years.

How did I manage this stunning feat? It would be best not to share details, for fear that someone reading these words is warned off by my immigration woes. Suffice to say that my copious documentation of identity, assets, and fiscal stability were not enough.

I have sufficient funds, letters of reference, and a valid residency permit, but I am self-employed and my address is a boat – albeit one registered to and lawfully moored in council jurisdiction for which I pay council tax – so hey! It was a cash-only existence for me oh these many years.

Sheer bloody minded persistence did the trick in the end, but I promise, if I had known this would be such a huge problem, I might have just stayed home.

But anyway, with my shiny new account I: sent invoices for three years of freelance work, filed and paid taxes in six states and two nations, subscribed to all my favorite magazines, bought a Tate membership, and splashed out on my first ever pair of high heels.

Grownup? Ladylike? Or just foolhardy? Hmmm…

Continuing in grownup mode: I’ll be selling my boat later this spring. Of interest mostly to those who already have mooring sorted.

I’m definitely back on the grid.

I hope all this adult behavior abates in the new year.

I gave and received excellence in abundance…. while Santa decided it’s all about stilts and show tunes.

Highlight of the holiday? A Ukulele orchestra.

After the usual feasting I celebrated this festive yule by acting as midwife to a brand new server. I named him Oswald.

I was away to London for literary debauchery; now I am back in Cambridge to attend a bookstore bankruptcy sale.

Helpful hint: if you wish to purchase  Lessons in Taxidermy at the Borders closing sale, it has been filed under “cookery.”

Poor little book – misunderstood by the publishers (who largely want it to be “inspirational” when it is in fact “subversive”), shelved incorrectly by the stores (generally under “parenting” or “disease” or “sports and fishing” instead of, um, anywhere accurate), distressing to those who appear in the pages (or who have since formed an emotional attachment to me “the person” as opposed to “the character”).

Though librarians like it, and that is the highest possible compliment.

It is snowing! Hurray!

Except…. I was denied a Santa visit for the first time in my whole life!! My (now) teenagers flatly refused.

At this rate I’m going to have to borrow some children.

I consoled myself by watching bunnies frolic through sparkling white fields.

Ana’s first choice of London adventures? We bought flowers and slogged through the crowds at Westminster Abbey to offer a tribute to Aphra Behn.

The stone is inscribed Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be / Defence enough against Mortality – and it is directly on the path to the toilets.

Uncaring tourists kicked the bouquets aside just seconds after we put them on the grave, and we scuttled away shrieking with laughter.

Further perambulations took us through Covent Garden on a search for tights, the Shoreditch vintage stores questing for the perfect hat, dinner on Brick Lane with Alessandro and Yuka here on a short visit to ponder relocation.

The hunt for Oscar yielded no prescribed results, though Ana did find a charming young banker at the Commercial Tavern, and we towed him along to Jaguar Shoes for drinks and chatter.

Ana had difficulty tracking the fact that London closes early, but we still managed to make the end of Daniel’s birthday party – once again, the best of times spent with the dearest of people:

It is no secret that I am thoroughly sick of this city; the question is, what keeps me here?

Now that my kid has dropped out of school, the answer has become: nothing whatsoever.

However, certain persuasive external forces are tempting me to stay. Or should I say bribing? Whichever. The offer this week is a secret, and incredibly desirable.

I resist because, dear reader, what is ever truly free?

While we ponder these existential concerns a much more entertaining event has happened – Ana Erotica is here!

Last time it was all about her search for Bad Boys and Lumberjacks. This time? We’re on the hunt for someone named Oscar.

England, you are on notice.

I am not ashamed to admit the delight I feel hanging out with people who punctuate all sentences with AWESOME.

James has lately found love & all that good stuff in, of all places, Ohio. Why do so many people from my youth end up in that state? FYI: I will never visit. Though I do miss James, at least!

We were the best and closest of friends throughout our grim years in the Pacific Northwest, sharing everything including a shotgun shack in Olympia, before taking off for (in his case) Tokyo by way of Chicago (and in mine) England, and scattered destinations in between. During the traveling years we corresponded nearly every day, and for awhile he lived as an ascete in my Portland basement.

His newfound happiness has translated to a marked lack of communication – but I don’t mind, because I love him quite sincerely and it is tremendously thrilling to know that he has found the life he wants to live.

Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, he is supremely talented. You should definitely buy his book.

Today, like every day in the United Kingdom, I am thankful to live in a country where standard medical care is free, always.

Yes, there are wait lists – rationing – and excellence is variable depending on your postcode. But the basics are all in place; nobody wants for an asthma inhaler, or refrains from seeking emergency care. Everyone can in fact receive treatment for all manner of chronic conditions, including a liberal sprinkling of drugs I personally would consider experimental or pointless.

The system is incentivized, but in a civilized fashion: as a survivor of a particular kind of cancer I’m not allowed to pay for drugs because they really really really really want me to take the stuff that keeps me alive and moderately well. The murky central organizing committee apparently reckons ‘free’ is a good price to pay for compliance.

Now that I have the permanent right to live in the UK I am safe, but I’ve been watching the move toward reform in the states with great interest. Not because I want to go home (though I sort of do) or because I am fundamentally uninsurable in a pure capitalist model (though I am) but mainly because my friends and family are impacted by current policies. I’m worried about my parents right now, and about what my kids might do in the future. You know, that whole ‘family as a fundamental building block of society’ rhetoric.

Of course I was sufficiently indoctrinated in the bullshit bootstrap ethos to feel that I ought to work hard for my money and benefits; but my instinct was that no amount of work could protect me.

The first Americans in my family only arrived there about eighty years before I left, and I can assure you my ancestors were primarily economic immigrants. They didn’t leave their homelands seeking adventure, or to flee war. They wanted food and land and opportunities for their children to be something better than working class.

I’m the result, one of the first in the stateside family to permanently move more than six miles from the pioneer homestead, go to college, succeed by the standards of the community I was born in. And I did exactly what they wanted without losing sight of what they sacrificed – though the family is not especially impressed by any of my escapades.

My great-grandma lived to one hundred; she knew and disliked me, and met my daughter. But she probably never imagined her decades of dodging deportation would directly influence me to choose a new life in Europe. Not exactly a popular destination if you consult the huddled masses and etc.

I’m sort of with her on the bewilderment, but for a different reason: health insurance. Complicated? Oh, yes.

Right now I am sitting around thinking about questions I am not equipped to answer, and the reason is simple. I don’t recognize myself in this scenario. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, everything that has happened, even the fact that I am standing in a kitchen in Cambridge England cooking pumpkin pie, I am still a poor kid from a peninsula west of Seattle.

I lack a sense of entitlement to the extent that I do not even feel comfortable typing up my problems, let alone talking about the intricate and interesting bits about moving to a new country.

Basically I feel like an impostor. Though all the evidence indicates this is my real life. Some of you have even met me!

Happy Thanksgiving.

There are two cliched observations about money that I never understood growing up poor:

1. Having enough to survive is crucial, and enough to play is important. More? Not just irrelevant to happiness, but actively destructive, because…
2. More money = more trouble. Tupak probably said it best as far as relationship woes, but beyond that, all those celebrities having absurd accounting problems? I get it now.

Fifteen years ago I took a vow that I would work only for integrity of the experience, not for material rewards, regardless of consequence. There were a few skint years (none of us care much for eggs, milk, or vegan mush after surviving on WIC and punk house hospitality) but overall the experiment was strangely lucrative.

Because I fundamentally do not care about getting rich, I have avoided all of the social traps associated with chasing money. Put me in any environment, be that an ‘important’ dinner or BBC live broadcast, and I will say exactly what I wish. I have nobody to impress, nothing to lose, nothing to gain.

Of course my purity is easy to sustain, since my job is random and theatrical. The audience expects the writer to misbehave, and I deliver, then make them cry. This does not pay vast sums, but it does pay (as my grandma would say) regular.

Avoiding the obvious and standard traps implied by matrimony and career but protecting the children and my own health required brutal, creative, and destructive effort. Observers might even say the emotional cost was too high – but I did it, and here I am.

How extraordinary and alarming; I ended up where I wanted to be all along. If you had asked me at age ten, this is the future I was dreaming about.

The only real penalty of autonomy? I am perpetually homesick, and there is no cure.

Today I’m making a feast while missing my mother, Marisa, Stella & Al, the forests and water.

Orphan Thanksgiving was cancelled for the first time in, what, a decade? Mainly because I could not face cooking for a crowd of fifty or more people who do not understand the tradition.

Still, I will be cooking for a smaller group, on a different date, at a secret location. Shh.

The main problem this year is the fact that cranberries and pumpkin are scarce to nonexistent. Some kind of crop famine? I have no idea. So it was away to London to look for a solution!

While there I also went on some typewriter recon (or recce if you insist) in the murky lanes of Middlesex.