Second Day of New Habits

It’s 11:30 of a Wednesday morning, and I have parked my tail in a chair to write.  I got off to a slower start this morning because two new groups moved into this vacation rental last night and tied up the kitchen and upstairs bathroom this morning.

I realize I could have started this exercise sitting akimbo in our room, but that’s not my “assigned” space, and overcoming the lure of my destroyer sailors’ website and the military humor and more website is hard enough without coupling it to being close enough to my wife to readily, easily, pleasantly converse.  So I waited till breakfast was done, the dishes were washed, and the kitchen was clear.  Those conditions have been met, and here sit I, alone in splendor.  

The sky is what I’m starting to think of as BSS . . . British Standard Sky . . . more cloud than clear.  The trains seem to be on time; at least they keep reflecting light through the glass doors.  The breeze has dropped, and it’s sixty-three degrees American - I mean Fahrenheit - outside.  Lord knows the weather inside.  While I am wearing a pair of khaki shorts, I am also swathed in my “What if the Hokey-Pokey is really what it’s about?” sweatshirt and the Lincoln green cap Kathryn knitted for me.  Knitted or crocheted?  I’ll have to ask her again.  Anyway she did it with her needles on yarn we bought in Coimbra, Portugal, last month.  (She knitted it.)

Why is it necessary for the United States to cling so steadfastly, read that as: “bull-headedly” to non-metric measurement systems?  The rest of the world has managed to get at least that much figured out.  Yes; I memorized the equation for converting back and forth from Fahrenheit to Celsius, but, really, to what purpose?  I keep trying to internalize the different systems, and it just seems pointless.  It’s hot, or it’s not.  It’s cold, or it’s not. The rest is a matter of degree (pun intended).  The main reason I want to have an idea of the weather is so I’ll know whether to wear long pants or shorts.

I don’t know that it matters what the thermometer reads.  When I walk London the weather changes when I’m in -sol- or -sombra-, whether I’m in the wind or in the lee of a building, whether I’m walking the banks of the Thames or the streets somewhere else in town.  I see people in tee shirts and shorts competing for sidewalk (excuse me, “footpath”) space with people dressed like Admiral Peary at the North Pole.  

And as for how people dress, gawd, just spin the lottery wheel, especially with women’s fashions.  Short skirts, long skirts; baggy, spray-painted on; immaculately tailored, threadbare and raggedy.  This raggedy blue jean thing constantly amazes me.  My mother spent approximated forty-seven percent of her waking life sewing and ironing patches on the blown-out knees of my brother’s and my blue jeans.  There were times when I felt like an armored knight with two layers of iron-on patch inside and three out on my knees.  Those iron-on patches were most often four- or six-inch squares and basted down around the edges to keep us from peeling them up while we were sitting at our school desks.  

The men dress as differently to my unintentionally-isolationist eye.  There are suits cut like the British Invasion suits the Beatles brought over in the ‘70s, Sergeant Pepper-inspired double-breasted blazers, tee shirts and not-quite-as-raggedy jeans, boiler suits (mostly on mechanical tradesmen).  And the ethnic attire is eye-opening.

A couple of days ago I fell in with a young man in a caftan and skull-fitting shashia (I looked it up) to ask for directions.  As we walked together toward my destination I asked him about his attire; he told me he was a Muslim, that his attire was a religious thing for him, though the collar was of the Omani style, not the Saudi.  I was not really clear which he preferred because one or the other irritated his neck.  I have seen the swirling robes of North African states, the wonderful wax-dyed ensembles of Central Africa and of the Caribbean.  I have seen fezzes (I had to look that plural up, too), turbans, porkpie hats, ball caps, and motorcycle helmets. 

It’s almost like you could take those spinning-square-stacked costumed blocks from the 1950s and turn them to come up with what you want to wear or to see.  It will come up.  I wonder how much of the costumery and hair color rage has been spurred by Effie Trinket in “The Hunger Games” films.

Noon approaches, and Kathryn and I are both getting hungry.  I’m going to take a timed break at twelve-fifteen to make lunch.  I will sit me down again after that to finish my assigned homework.  It’s one-thirty.  Kathryn and I have gotten into the habit of the European lunch.  What’s the point of getting in a hurry?  Calm down.

We’ve started cooking and eating differently since we’ve left the States.  Bolting meals doesn’t make for a satisfying experience.  Taking time to talk with the person across the table does.  Spanish and Portuguese portions are smaller, and even so, I’m discovering that if I walk like a draft horse and cover miles instead of yards, I don’t need to satisfy my appetites with larger quantities of food.  Often and often we would take enough of a serving back to our rooms for a second or evening meal.  

Here in London my experience is being served with larger portions.  And, by and large, I’ll clear my plate, partly because I was a member of the Clean Plate Club when I was a kid, and partly because the noise level, the excitement level, of the places I stop are elevated, and I think I’m storing food for impending emergency flight.  Does that make sense?

At any rate, I sat back down at 1:30.  That breaks down, because I checked from curiosity, to thirty minutes to prepare the meal from scratch with a side of conversation, and forty-five minutes of enjoying the flavors we’d created as well as the conversation we’d generated.

Because we are restricted to a single shelf in the refrigerator for cool storage and two shelves under the built-in ovens for dry storage, we shop now for half a week instead of the full seven days.  The only can in there is a tin of Portuguese sardines.  There is a five-pound (by weight) bag of small potatoes, a pound of penne pasta, boxes of tea, a jar of decaf coffee, two bananas, a pair of oranges, and a brace of pears.  There is also a bag of “palmiers” (“butterfly pastries” back in the States) and an unopened package of English muffins.  “Crumpets” look, feel, and taste like half-English-muffins.  They’re just as wonderful with butter and honey or butter and orange marmalade or just with marmalade or apricot jam.  

Now that I’m articulating this, it’s easier to overeat here than in Spain or Portugal or France.  The flavors there satisfy (we’ll talk about fish and chips in a minute) more fully, somehow, than those here.  Today’s lunch at home, for example was a slice of what is packaged as bacon.  That “bacon,” when I saw it in the market, looked like a single pork chop, and I figured, “OK; we’ll just share that; it’ll be plenty of meat.”  Then I read the label and discovered it was six slices of meat.  Again, “OK; I’ll just fry it up like regular bacon.”  It didn’t work out that way.  The largest skillet (teflon) our host has in the kitchen will readily accept two slices without crowding, so I put in two slices on some butter because we had more than we wanted to put in the fridge, and I cooked them at a lower, slower temperature.  Before those were in the skillet I had chopped a half dozen of the small potatoes and quartered a medium carrot and put them on the boil on the back burner.  Kathryn was assembling a green salad.  The bacon slices came straight from the skillet to each plate.  I drained the potatoes and carrots and set them beside the bacon, artfully arranging the carrots alongside.  The butter from the bacon went over the potatoes and carrots.  Everything went to the table.

Maybe forty, fifty years ago I folded cloth napkins; I really don’t remember.  Well, since we have to provide our own paper towels here, we got out the serious linen-cotton napkins Kathryn bought in Portugal for embroidery work and put them on the table.  I mentioned folding in the first sentence here.  I went to the internet and followed the instructions for “bishop’s mitre” folding.  That looked really nice.  Especially with the water in clear stems.

Now we have a white kitchen with light gray floors, daylight, white walls, white table and chairs, white napkins, white plates and clear glasses with water.  Presented in all that is the red-brown of the ham, the ivory of the potatoes and orange of the carrots, and the glorious rich green of the lettuce flanked by the brushed chrome of the cutlery.  It was a meal to delight the senses.  Taste, certainly, smell, of course.  The clink of the cutlery agains the crockery. The brush of  cotton.  The low murmur of calm conversation like bees around their country farm hive.

We finished with half a palmier each, and it was enough.

You can’t get that at a Mickey-D’s drive-through.  Not even at a sit-down.  It’s not a function of television advertising campaigns.  

So now I’m sitting here as the light waxes and wanes counter to the cloud coverage, munching a bunch of green seedless grapes (in a shallow white bowl), and hammering these keys.  The time disappears till I check my watch.  It sits, red-stained bamboo on the white table and chides me when I glance at it.  So I focus on this page.

And I think.  

Yesterday I put here that I love to share new things with people.  While I am enjoying sharing this with whoever has the will to read it, I primarily am writing for myself, articulating my thoughts, pinning my ideas to a more concrete tablet than synapses.

I think I would really like to organize specialty tours of this Island and of the Continent.  They are each so different from what we see in the States, yet the people and the passions are so much the same.

Why do I think I can operate tours?  Of adults, not kids this time.  I organized summer road trip camps hauling a dozen kids at a time from Dallas to Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of the Dakotas to Cape Canaveral in Florida, by way of the Confederate Gulf shores.  They’re not called that, but that’s what they are.  I took kids to see air shows and aviation museums and gem-studded caverns and canoed rivers and lakes and camped places where we packed up in the middle of the rainy night and moved to higher ground - where we looked in the morning to see our original campsite under four feet of water.  

I want to shepherd adults now and not have to type up a logbook page to print out and send home in a notebook at the end of the session.  Those original camps were in the days before the internet.  Now everybody can keep their own logbooks if they wish.  It will probably be their  facebook pages.

Quilters are amazing and creative people.  The shops they haunt and prowl are filled with color and texture and other smiling people.  They support each other’s process as they agonize over pattern and color matches and which thread goes better with a particular fabric.  They’re fun.  Knitters, crocheters, weavers, spinners are much the same, but with a differently-tuned eye.  Many of them start with the fleece, heck, a lot of them start with the sheep.  Or the alpaca, or the goat, or the rabbit, even.  Both disciplines have practitioners who dye their own fabric or wool.  These (mostly) women are fierce in their tracking-down of the right mordant to set the specific dye to get the particular hue or tint.  And they share their skills.  And they study each other’s teachings as intensely as a cardiac surgeon.  Don’t you ever think they don’t.  And they laugh.  Lord, how they laugh, and enjoy each other’s just being there.

And readers.  There are more readers than there are books, I think.  There are more readers than writers.  And they read about everything under the sun.  And they read across the genres.  They’ll read mystery novels and history tomes and books on spacecraft design just to see if the detective got his clue right.  What they know is immense.  When they are through with a book or a series or an author, they don’t have a patchwork quilt to show for their labors, but they      -do- have a neural net more tightly knotted than a New England fisherman’s herring net.

These are the people I want to bring over here to “see new worlds; to boldly go . . . “

Anyway.

I’m pushing back from the table.  I’ve done my two hours today.  I’m starting to tire, actually, and I want to save space for tomorrow.  Besides, there’ the other half of that palmier tightly rewrapped back in the counter.

Tomorrow I’m chasing Agatha Christie and Patrick O’Brian through Town.  And I’m walking Shakespeare’s Southwark on an organized, guided tour.  

Because Life is Rich and Full and Good.