Filed under: butters, cultural conundrums, going out, London places, present, work
I spent last night printing consecutive frames from Google Maps UK and worrying about what I’m going to wear to Wimbledon. Google Maps UK is my aid in getting me from place to place, and this morning I had to get from One Place to Another to Another. I’ve been to Another on a number of occasions, but infrequently by car, and never managing the vehicle myself. Today, it happens that I am behind the wheel because Butters needs an operation, and to get her to and from the Veterinarian’s office, I need wheels – private wheels because Butters is liable to pee or puke or worse. After dropping Butters for her appointment, I had work-related appointments of my own. The print-out slices of my journey lay on the passenger seat; I had superfluously marked my way with a red pen over Google’s blue path. The superfluous act with my red pen was intended not so much for reference but rather an attempt to etch the journey into my mind’s eye so that I wouldn’t find myself freaking out on the M3.
Have I missed my junction?
Last night, after printing and tracing and trying to etch into my brain this morning’s journey , I turned to my wardrobe, vastly expanded thanks to my visit to the USofA and the convenient exchange rate. Later this week I will be going to a corporate event where the agenda includes strawberries and cream and tennis whites and champagne or Pimms or both. A wise guy at work had me thinking I needed to wear a hat; thus the undue concern with my wardrobe. This morning I had a ‘doh’ moment followed by a confirmation email that cleared it all up.
Watch Wimbledon much on TV? Have you noticed the dress code?
Smart casual.
I love that designation.
No hat required.
Phew.
PS- If you are concerned, Butters is recuperating with a morphine doused patch and a little doggie cast.
At the north end of town we stop at a flat, square, adobe structure – the typical architecture of these parts – where a sign by the road reads, “The Bean”. There must be a tag line (I don’t remember it) that indicates that The Bean refers to the coffee variety of bean because I know it is this place where I want to stop on our way out of town – to hopefully get a fix of fancy coffee before hitting the open road.
The in-laws and I leave the Mista waiting in the car. If there are lattes, I will get him a skinny. If not, I will use my best judgement. I pull open the wooden-frame, screen door. It bounces shut on its springs behind us. We’re in luck. The menu above the counter displays a gourmet coffee choice of drinks. Even soya milk and rice milk and various sizes — all at gourmet coffee prices. The interior is authentic, hippy, rustic, bordering on dirty. The girls behind the counter slowly dish out the ground coffee and begin to heat the milk.
The mother-in-law mutters, “They really take their time.”
The in-laws are relatively patient people for folks who have spent most of their adult lives in New York City; but the pace of life here is even slower for people of such patience. I, on the other hand, like it. I realise that for as impatient as I am in some respects, I am infinitely patient in others. But this isn’t about me.
This is about how different the place where I am now* is from where the place where I generally am** — starting with the pace. The domesticated wild west is now a place where old hippies, young artists, and native American Indians — Hopis, Navajos, Comanches, and all sorts of permutations — of all sorts of ages, saunter over to their pick up trucks and crawl down main street at a turtle’s pace.
London is like a game of double-dutch. You have to examine the pace and prepare yourself to jump in, keep up, avoid tripping-up and getting tangled-up in the jump rope.
*Northern New Mexico
**The Smoke, my beloved.
My brother drove to the stadium, which is on the northeast side of town away from the shaded neighbourhoods, front patios, and green lawns. Where the prairie is closer than the mountains and the absence of water in the air is immediately obvious. (In other neighbourhoods sprinklers shoot mist into the air in addition to watering the grass).
He had a VIP pass, which entitled us to park in the gravel covered rectangle nearest the stadium. Even there, where people weren’t just people but were Very Important Peoples, the time-honoured tradition of eating and drinking out of the back of the family car was embraced. To my mind, tailgating (the tradition of eating and drinking from the back of the family car) is an activity reserved for the masses (as opposed to Very Important Peoples). There’s just nothing high-brow about unfolding folding chairs, sitting down in a parking lot, drinking beer, and eating coldcuts and potato chips from the back of your car. Yet, even in the VIP parking section, football/soccer enthusiasts practiced tailgaiting with the same hearty enthusiasm as those non-English speakers way out in parking lot Z. The USA is a democracy indeed!
I’ve never been inside Craven Cottage – that quaint, other-era football stadium on the North bank of the Thames, yet I guessed the Dick Sporting Good’s Park was about the same size of Fulham’s playground. Of the 20,000 seats, maybe a quarter were full. My brother insisted that this game was not representative: evening games are much better attended.
Is it because it’s more acceptable to drink beer in the parking lot in the evening?
As the game got underway, the enormity of David Beckham’s greed-driven mistake to join the LA Galaxy dawned on me.
Observataion 1: If the LA Galaxy is in the same league as these two (which indeed it is), then Beckham is a full grown man playing at the nursery. Don’t get me wrong: I am not an ardent fan of David Beckham. He is good to look at, but as a footballer, he’s never been the God that his salary would indicate. From my point of view, he’s been a slightly above average footballer in a world class league. To imagine him playing with the likes of those on the pitch at Dick’s Sporting Goods Park made me very, very sad for Becks.
I worried that the Mista would lose patience with the second rate display of the game that he loves. But, the Mista took it in stride and used the opportunity to disect the performance. He used the Socratic method to further my education.
“So, what do you think?”
“It looks like a high school game.”
“Why?”
“It’s very slow?”
“Yes and why?”
I lost patience with the Mista’s questioning before he lost patience with the lack of talent on the pitch.
“Just tell me already.”
Observation 2: “Lack of control. They can’t pass with any kind of confidence, and when they do get the ball, they don’t have the control to keep it.”
It was true. The Mista encapsulated the game in just a couple of short sentences within a few short minutes of the game.
Is this why it’s called soccer and not football? It’s another game entirely.
Observation 3: The spectators didn’t know much about football / soccer at all. The questions that I heard asked were the basic of the basic. Off-sides is a very, very basic concept. I had to explain the 4 minute stoppage time to my neighbour. He thought soccer games only lasted 90 minutes. “Why are they still playing?”
This ignorance about some basic points of the game leads me to a generalisation about Americans. For as much as I can make fun of Americans, be embarrassed by them, cringe at the sound of my own accent, I must give them/us credit where credit is due. Americans give things a shot. They try things. Here they are not knowing the first thing about this game they’re watching, yet they’ve gone out, built a stadium, funded a team and are hoping against hope that the game takes off. I like that.
In the end, the Rapids beat FC Dallas, 2-1.
Dallas trying to be Barcelona. That’s a laugh.
PS. This post has taken me by surprise. Writing about football? In America?
It’s 04:09 local time. I have snuck away from the unconscious embrace of the sleeping Mista on this, the morning of our anniversary. I have jet lag. I am wide awake and thinking about the size of the salads we had during our layover at O’Hare.
I’ve said it before at least one time: Everything’s bigger in America*.
Reminders of this indisputable fact started immediately into our journey.
Two Americans shared the Dot-to-Dot mini-bus service with us from SW London to Heathrow. A super-sized mother and daughter combo. I’m not talking plump or chunky or overweight. I’m also not talking from the perspective of a super-skinny or super-fit judger of weight. I, on occasion (ie frequently) eat too much, drink too much, enjoy my chocolate and pints with a bowl of chips too much. I’ve got some extra luggage myself. These two, however, were sadly-frighteningly fat. The fat-lady-in-the-circus kind of fat. If the mother was the star of the show, then the daughter was the understudy. At 10 years old (or thereabouts), the understudy already wobbled rather than walked due to the extraneous folds of plumpness that hung down from her gut, I imagined, covering her privates.
You I feel sorry for the child. You I think she has no shot at being a healthy size. You I don’t realise this until you I sit down to write about it: you have judged that mother.
How could she do that to her little girl?
I don’t want to admit to myself that I am a passer of judgement. Just look at my use of the second person, a subtle way to indicate it’s not just me; it’s something we all would do in the same situation. This exonerates me, but it doesn’t. Because in this case, it was just me there (well, also the Mista, but he has no qualms about passing judgement.)
In O’Hare, when the waitress brought our salads, I baulked; the Mista muttered, ‘Holy shit.’
I judged that the amount of spinach looking up at me from my salad plate was about as much as an entire bag from my weekly shopping; a bag generally split three ways.
Our salads were another reminder: (almost) everything in the US of A is bigger.
The Mista and I know this. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does. The abstraction in our heads of supermegabigsized things doesn’t seem to prepare us for the reality.
Walking into Super Target nearly killed us. (Day 1: 9 thru 14 already ticked off the list.)
Today the camera comes out to bear witness.
*And been corrected: that not everything is bigger.
Friday morning I left my house at 7:00. I wore my standard gym kit: light-weight gray running trousers with the unmistakeable Adidas stripes up the side, a gray sweatshirt, two jogging bras (you can never do enough to make sure the ladies stay in their place), and trainers. I had my everyday work bag with laptop, camera, wallet, pen/pencil case, notebook, and other miscellaneous shit hanging from my left shoulder; my backpack with work clothes, hairbrush, shampoo & conditioner, and a padlock was strapped on my back. A tennis racket swung off my right shoulder. I locked the door, walked out my front gate, and closed it behind me.
Yes, ‘closed it’ … do you hear that, Mista? Despite what you think, I do normally close the gate behind me! It’s time you apportioned blame on true culprit (the mail man) goddamnit.
Before I had even walked the 6 meters or so to the corner kerb, I noticed it: the “mystery stench” that enveloped the capital on Friday morning.
For a moment I was back in Yeehaw, USA where the smell of the annual rodeo permeates normal life for 3 weeks out of the year. The smell of the rodeo is also the smell of a dog food factory in winter, which Yeehaw, USA also had. Friday’s Big Smoke stench was the odour of a rodeo or a dog food factory. According to the free London rag (pictured), Friday’s stench was thanks to the French*.
I couldn’t help but laugh triumphantly inside. Something petty and childish in me enjoys the Anglo-French squabbling. A bit of ‘misery likes company’ I suppose: The Americans, (“Fuck Yeah!”) aren’t the only ones who inspire disdain.
*In a quick rereading of the article, I see my bias. The French aren’t the only ones singled out. The Belgians are also mentionned. In my mind, they are a footnote. In my mind, the English blame the French. Fuck yea!
I recently read somewhere – where, I don’t remember – a one sentence encapsulation of Big Brother. I do remember that the somewhere I don’t remember was a UK-centric somewhere because the Big Brother assessment was perfectly apt for UK Big Brother. It was, however, not applicable to its US sibling. UK Big Brother has degenerated into an opportunity to showcase freakshows and surreptitious wanking (mildly plagiarised from the somewhere I don’t remember). Americans don’t have the British appetite for forcing a seemingly diverse group of characters under one roof. Americans especially don’t tolerate displays of a sexual nature. Masturbation is too inflammatory a subject to be aired on mainstream TV. This is what I deem to be a weakness in the American psyche: parochial prudishness.
This weakness, however, has saved the American version of Big Brother from the same degeneration as it’s British counterpart.
The Mista and I have never really watched UK Big Brother. We’ve seen an episode here or there. I recognised Sandy from Series 3 (?) in St. Christopher’s Place a few years back. He was the one who woke up every morning and walked around the swimming pool for exercise. Other than that, we’ve not really gotten engaged. Over the past few years as the contestants have gotten ‘more diverse’ we have been more alienated from the show. Those people, the contestants, don’t seem real. They seem like actors. Even if they are real (and not acting), the do not represent real diversity because they’re all over-the-top caricatures of aberrations.
The US audience would screw up their lips in distaste (or possibly be inclined to kick the asses of those freaks). No, about as weird as the US contestants can get is to be not-too-campy (or not-too-butch) homosexual.
The US Big Brother is all about strategy, games, backstabbing and alliances. This aligns to the impression a British friend of mine has about Americans. She sees us at the park and comments, “Americans like to play games. You’ve always got a ball or a stick or if not you make up some sort of game.” This tendency permeates US Big Brother — or at least permeated the series we saw about 3 or 4 years back. We loved it, and were disappointed when it was never re-aired.
Then, this year, out of nowhere, the British TV People decided it might again be time for US Big Brother!
This momentous occasion happened to coincide with the upgrade in technology in our home.
The Mista, who is generally not very gadgety, broke his mould by buying a mysterious box that he plugged into the wall. This box is called the Slingbox. (I always call it Slingblade. Billy Bob would be chuffed). Slingbox lets us watch our TV on our computers — whether we’re in the comfort of our bed, or at the pub, or in another city, far far way. Technology is a baffling and wondrous thing.
Slingbox enabled the Mista and I to watch US Big Brother from the comfort of our bed (using our laptop).
Whilst the US version hasn’t degenerated in the same way as the the UK version, it is still not as good as we remember. Maybe it’s not that it’s not as good, but it’s just far more annoying. Those accents had us writhing in discomfort. American Big Brother doesn’t go in for diversity — it goes for loud, flat, nasal, annoying accents.
I don’t think we’ll be watching again.
On the subject of Bad TV, we’re both very glad (as I’m sure Mr. Trousers is as well) that the writers in Hollywood went on strike. The resulting gap in the current series of Lost is a welcome reprieve to our idiot box addiction.
Filed under: 2005, cultural conundrums, mista, problems, stream of consciousness
Before I had met Bobby Charles I would not have thought George Hounslow could have existed. I would have chalked him up to the over-active imagination of a fiction writer. Over 35 years of exposure to the rougher gender hadn’t prepared me for the unabashed misogynistic, sensualist that lived in Bobby Charles.
I like to think I know men – that I knew a thing or two about men even before I met Bobby Charles. I think I did. Bobby Charles was an outlier.
The Mista says I’m a guys’ girl. I like being a guys’ girl. I like drinking pints and not worrying (so much) about plucking my eyebrows and painting my nails. I attribute this way of my being to having grown up under the influence of two older brothers. I trailed after them, watching all the naughty things they did*. Although their boyish misconduct wrought me with ambivalence – I was equally indignant and envious of their misbehaviour – it was conduct that grew familiar. As we grew up, and the nature of my brothers’ naughtiness changed, I learned to be wary of every man’s ‘inner dirty dog’.
They all want to get into your pants.
The topic here is not feminism. I’m not going to get into whether it’s a bad thing for men to want to get into your (women’s) pants. Or investigate the whys and why nots women should or shouldn’t want to get into men’s trousers. I have no interest in exploring the societal double-standard, a subject, which frankly, I find hackneyed.
The topic here is an extraordinary man, a man who is described in the book that I’m reading, a man who I wouldn’t have believed existed except that I met him and had to work with him in the square mile protected by Griffins.
The topic here is trouble; the topic is Bobby Charles, a man, I suspect, who is trouble for any woman with whom he ‘gets involved’.
*Like sending lizards ‘into space’ by taping them to bottle rockets or setting booby traps for speeding cars (in the form of fishing line strung across the road) or TPing** the house of the neighbours who were chosen to be ‘the enemy’ for some reason or another.
**Toilet Papering: an act of ‘soft vandalism’ in that no permanent damage is caused, but there is often a hell of a mess to clean up.
Filed under: 2005, cultural conundrums, observations London, Odd, stream of consciousness
I’m reading a book.
It happens to be the very same book that the woman who stood next to me on the tube in the rush-to-get-home-hour was reading. She had the look of a cliche: mousey, librarian, prim, proper, bookish. I imagined she lived alone. Or with a cat. Or maybe with a same-sex flatmate. Certainly a flatmate would wear on her nerves. She (our mouse) would pine for the peace and quiet in which she could pamper her brain with books, books and more books! Even the most considerate of flatmates would cramp her style, I imagine. Unless, her flatmate is a sister spirit! Birds of a feather who twitter over Ideas and who rarely drink, but when they do they get drunk on a glass of wine.
I was imagining a sad life for the not-quite-dour, but certainly-serious-faced young woman next to me on the tube. I noticed she was reading a thickish book. Then, I noticed it was the same one I was reading. She had probably bought it on the same 3 for 2 sale at Waterstone’s that I had, though the orange, circular sale sticker had been removed.
I had just finished reading the following passage when I noticed the girl was reading my book:
George’s approach to women was clumsy, over-humble, and he might even stammer. (But his stammer always sounded as if he were doing it on purpose.) Meanwhile his deep-set brown eyes would be fixed on the women with an almost bullying intentness. And yet his manner would remain humble, apologetic. Women got flustered or angry, or laughed nervously. He was a sensualist of course. I mean, a real sensualist, not a man who played the role of one, as so many do, for one reason or another. He was a man who really, very much, needed women. {…} When George looked at a woman he was imagining her as she would be when he had fucked her into insensibility. And he was afraid it would show in his eyes. I did not understand this then, I did not understand why I got confused when he looked at me. But I’ve met a few men like him since, all with the same clumsy impatient humility, and with the same hidden arrogant power.1
The girl was much further along in the book than I. She had already read this passage.
What did she think of George?
I wondered if he (or the prospect of him) excited her? Or scared her? Or did she doubt his very existence? I wondered, because I thought she must doubt George.
A girl like her wouldn’t accept that a man like George is true.
I wondered because it struck me that there was a time that I would have doubted George too. Now I know better.
1 Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. p.126.
“It must be convenient living next to the shop. They can hold onto packages delivered when you’re not home – I mean, supposing you get on. Do you get on?”
My relationship with the speaker is new enough that I hesitate with my honesty.
Who are you kidding, big mouth? When have you ever held back from such an obvious opportunity to bitch?
“Well, on the face of it we get on; but, truthfully, I can’t stand that lady. She’s such a . . . . “
“Snot!”
“bitch!”
“Yes!”
My relationship with the speaker has just grown stronger! There is nothing like a common dislike to bring two people together.
I elaborate on my dislike for my neighbour, the ass-faced, high-end-retro-furniture-shop-owner with proper examples – just to prove I’m not mean-spirited or petty. I explain how the Mista cunningly tracked the scat that was frequently found on our stoop to the arse-faced neighbour’s pesky dog.
“Oh, that dog’s horrible!” my new-found friend explains. Turns out that new-found friend has got stories of her own about my neighbour and the little dog with the loud bark and the tendency to shit on our doorstep.
I explain about the gate and how it was a gambit to keep the pooh at bay.
I explain how we secretly hope Butters will bite onto pooping-on-our-doorstep-dog’s scruff and shake the little fucker until he’s too scared to bark or poop.
New-found friend and I commiserate in the shocking inconsiderateness of bad neighbours.
I explain how, despite the gate, little dog poop still occasionally makes an appearance.
“You know, the postman sometimes leaves the gate open so the dog will find his way in from time to time.”
The next morning, the Mista and I lie in bed awake despite the early hour. We hear the squeak of our opening gate. Normally, this sound heralds the rubbish collectors or the post man or the girl who lives upstairs.
It’s not rubbish collection day. It’s not the hour for post to be delivered, and the girl who lives upstairs is out of town. We scratch our heads. We peek out the blinds. We see the ass-face waiting for her dog to do his business!
“Get off the bus, mate! Get off the bus!”
Not a hint of the English aggro-ness that’s demonstrated more often at the hour of drink (and even more frequently associated with a football match).
I was surprised the Frenchman hadn’t gotten off the bus prior to the well-meaning prompting; almost pleading.
10 minutes earlier the morning-commute-hour bus had been making typical progress through the Smoke. I was upstairs, cocooned in my walkman, and, like a twat, with my laptop open to a draft PowerPoint that I was meant to have finished the night before, but hadn’t done, thanks to some questionable priorities.
I had plenty of time: an hour until my presentation; a ½ hour to reach my destination.
The bus stopped, as it would, at a bus stop.
The lights of the bus went out, as they would when the driver wishes to communicate discouraging news to erstwhile commuters: “This bus isn’t going any further.”
Why?
I picked my twatty-looking self up, descended the bus stairs with open laptop in hand (loathe to turn the damn thing off. I have work to do! Very important work to do! And it takes an age to resurrect my laptop from any kind of off/resting mode). There in the hull of the bus, I joined the other commuters who had yet to decide upon a course of action.
Stay put and hope this situation gets resolved quickly or hop off to catch the next one going my way?
I stayed in limbo and watched the denouement of the situation that had resulted in the stalled journey.
“You are a stupid, stupid man. Why eez eet that I must pay agin?”
The glass partition between the bus driver and the angry Frenchman muted the response.
“I ‘ave paid. I ‘ave paid. You are too lazy to do your job eproperly.”
No technical difficulties, no mechanical snafus. The morning’s momentum was stymied by a dispute between 2 men, each with the power to inconvenience a bus load of passengers with trajectories, goals and aspirations of their own for the day.
“Get off the bus mate! Just get off the bus!”
I wanted to applaud. We’d all been thinking it. I smiled into my scarf.
Bless you.
But the Frenchman didn’t take the cue. He didn’t get off the bus, not just then.
He waited until the other in-limbo passengers (myself included) jumped out to jump onto the next bus, visible in the distance. He followed us onto the new bus, where the altercation continued, but this time between the Frenchman and other commuters who just couldn’t swallow his gaul.
The episode made me think: what would have been the proper course of action? If the Frenchman had indeed paid and was perfectly within his rights to board the bus, should he have bowed to the majority and gotten off the bus just to be polite? Should he have stood his ground, claimed his right?
