All Things Bright and British

Mary's graduation went swimmingly on Wednesday. It was not, unfortunately, in the London Guild Hall where it usually is, but rather in a somewhat dreary University of London student center. But there were lots of fun academic robes and maces, and everything was presided over by the Most Honorable 7th Marquess of Salisbury. Who, it later turned out, is a fairly annoying right-wing Tory in the House of Lords, but still, he's a Marquess, and we don't have those in the land of the free.

After the ceremony Mary's mother took us out for sushi, and then for dinner we drove with her father up to Essex for dinner and Morris dancing in a pub. We were met there by a crusty old English veterinarian Mary used to work for, and who was, I suspect, James Herriot incarnate.

And then, if things weren't English enough, there was a black tie graduation ball at Hatfield House. I was sort of expecting Hatfield House to be the local community center, but it turned out to be the home of aforementioned Marquess of Salisbury. And his home is a Tudor/Jacobean mansion, owned most notably by Henry the VIII. Queens Elizabeth and Mary grew up there, and supposedly Elizabeth was sitting underneath an oak tree in the courtyard when she found out that Mary had died, and she was now queen. The dinner and dancing were in the oldest part of the grounds, the original 15th century Great Hall. It felt a little odd to be doing the Macarena underneath the antlers of a deer shot by Henry VIII, but we Americans, we adapt.

Satiation

Courtesy of Mary's father, I tonight ate the following:

1. Wild Mushroom and Bergamot Soup

2. Roast Saddle of Wiltshire Rabbit with Foie Gras and Summer Truffle Risotto ("Game may contain lead shot.")

3. Chocolate Pudding with Spearmint and Pistachio Ice Cream

This all at Rules, supposedly the oldest private restaurant in London.

Barnet Bound

Very occasionally, the title of this blog makes sense. In a few hours I am off to the airport. Eleven very cramped hours after that, I'll be in Barnet for two weeks. Incidentally, I missed the exact date, but this summer marks the two year anniversary of this humble blog. I began it initially when I was in England for the summer of 2005, so that I didn't have to write the same repetitive little travelogue email to all of my friends and family.

Apologies to the many, many people I owe things to at the moment. They are coming.

Will somebody please come kill my cats so that they will stop playing in my suitcase? Thanks.

Beer on the Last Day

Last day in Barnet. Borrowing a friend's little car (a tiny little automatic Geo Metro complete with a choke) Mary, Molly and I drove around Hertfordshire doing a little pub hopping. We vaguely knew of a country pub we wanted to try, but not knowing where it was we just pointed the car North and resolved to see what we could find.

First stop was the Candlestick, which we ran into by accident outside of Essendon. It was a nice little building, but mostly empty, and the barman looked like he'd had a rough Saturday night. We were able to take our drinks--I had a pint of McMullen's AK Bitter--out into a garden where we could enjoy the rare sunshine.

From there, we noticed a sign pointing the way towards Wildhill, where the phantom pub was supposedly located. Sure enough, we ran straight into the Woodman. Unfortunately, it was closed during the afternoon, so we had to forge on ahead to the Five Horseshoes. I started out here with a Courage Directors Bitter. Growing hungry, we sat down and all three of us had beef and ale pies, washed down for me with Old Speckled Hen. The beer was good, but the pie was literally the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. But then Mary had to go and order a Corona, which completely destroyed the ambience of the photo above.

Tomorrow, Los Angeles bound!

St. Paul's and Beyond

I've managed, somehow, never to go to St. Paul's Cathedral in London. I've been to the Tower and Westminster Abbey zillions of times, but the third in the holy trinity of London tourism has always evaded me for some reason. So yesterday, I finally made it there.

I was a little underwhelmed. I hadn't realized how closely it mimics St. Peter's in Rome, right down to the baldacchino over the high altar. (quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Wren?) And of course, it can't really match up to St. Peter's in size or sense of majesty. In fact, I was quite struck by how unspiritual the whole affair seemed. It's ironic that Westminister, which as a Royal Peculiar is more officially nationalist than St. Paul's, feels much more religious. I don't think it is just the Gothic versus early neo-classical architecture, but I can't quite put my finger on what the difference is. At first I thought it was because the cathedral seemed oddly tatty. There wasn't a ton of interior detail, and what details there were seemed a bit rough. But then, I've been to some other cathedrals that also seemed plain inside, like the one in St. Albans, or even the cathedral in Cuernevaca, Mexico. Those cathedrals were once more ornate, but at some point in history had been ransacked (by Henry the XIII and leftists, respectively.) But I found their plain interiors rather beautiful, whereas for me St. Paul seemed oddly institutional, like the community room stuck on to the back of a Methodist church. Of course, Mary the Presybeterian looked at the altar and sniffed that there was an awful lot of gold. Guess it's all about perspective.

I do admit that there was a great view from the top, however. I had to swallow my claustrophobia a bit to make it up the 300 steps of a tiny, crowded spiral staircase, but it was quite lovely. The picture above is from the top, looking southwest towards the London Eye and Parliament beyond.

Afterwards we made a quick trip to the Tate Modern, to check out the infamous slides that are installed in the atrium. We each went down the short one, which had less of a line. Then it was off to the National Gallery, to check out the free exhibition "From Manet to Picasso." It's just a temporary exhibit to give a home to some of the famous impressionist and post-impressionist artworks from the permanent collection which are displaced by a touring show. It was nice to see some oldies but goodies of impressionism, but I wasn't very impressed with the curacy--I wish they had been more creative in their "redisplay." One treat was seeing a Hammershøi, an artist I didn't know of but who we quite liked.

Today: work!

Barneted

By the way...did I mention I'm in England right now? As is my typical fashion, I skipped out of town mere hours after finishing grading for the quarter. No jet lag to speak of this time; after five years of constant traveling like this, my body no longer has any problem with suddenly skipping ahead eight hours. I'm not sure if that is a good or a bad thing.

Saturday was spent at the antique markets in Notting Hill, indulging Mary's addiction to funky jewelry. Sunday we met a fellow expatriate Los Angeleno musicologist (it's a small but close-knit community) for drinks in Primrose Hill, before coming back to Barnet for baked ziti. Today, I think we are going to lounge around and go see The Good German, which is still in theaters over here.

So, in lieu of a substantive post, I'm going to fill out SoHo the Dog's survey.

1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.

To go with something recent, I liked the libretto for Dr. Atomic much more than John Adams's wishy-washy music.

2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.

I'm not a Gould person.

3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?

Charles Ives. I've actually somehow managed to avoid listening to The Sun Treader all these years, at least until last week when it was a bonus question on a final I proctored. Not so impressed.

4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.

See #2.

5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?

This isn't really an answer to the question, but I just want to state that despite the fact that Schubert apparently hated the instrument, the viola lines in everything he wrote are truly beautiful.

6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)

Hmm...I'm thinking...Harvey Milk set in Renaissance Florence. It could totally work.

7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.

When I was undergraduate, my university had a very strong world music performance program, and there was lots of great concerts by the resident gamelan ensemble. However, invariably, there would be a smattering of (always white men of a certain age) audience members who would show up wearing traditional Javanese tunics, and would sit cross-legged during the performance with beatific smiles on their faces. That was very unfortunate.

8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?

Patti Smith!

9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?

I have a soft spot for Sibelius.

10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?

If you've ever seen the film clip of Furtwangler conducting the Ninth, with Goebbels and a bunch of wounded war veterans in the audience and gigantic swastikas hanging over the stage, you'll find it quite easy not to listen to it ever again.

Sir Edward

Can I just say how cool it is that the twenty pound bill in the U.K. features a picture of Edward Elgar? I mean, it's not like the British have a proud tradition of classical music. And yet, they feature one of their few big names on a rather major piece of currency. It's hard to imagine a piece of U.S. currency featuring a twentieth-century artist! I'd like to see Aaron Copland's shiny bald head on the fifty dollar bill some day; who really feels the need to commemorate Ulysses Grant these days?

Tragedy on the A1001

The horse surveying adventures continue apace: we've been to Hickin, Harpenden, St. Albans, Sandridgebury, and my favorite name, Ickleford. The horse people run the gamut from friendly to quirky to rude. We went to a horse show in Tring to do some clipboard surveying, and I ended up giving advice on how to get into vet school to a fifteen-year-old Brit. We went to a stable in Thrall's End, run by an American couple, who had not only horses but a suite of professional offices such as dentists and the like; would you like a free toothbrush with your horse? One stable was on the grounds of vaguely sinister-sounding company called something like "Ovebra", but Google doesn't give me any info so either I mis-remember the name or it is an MI5 front.

However, the most pertinent event since my last post is that we had a car accident on Thursday. We are both perfectly fine. The car is less fine, but fixable. It went down like this: we were driving to a stable outside of St. Albans, and came to a roundabout off the A1001. Mary is a pro at these roundabouts, which, if you've never been to England, are the primary way the British route traffic, rather than streetlights. So we get to this roundabout, which Mary has driven through many times before. This circle actually does have traffic lights as well, which regulate your entry into the circle. We were waiting in the line of cars, and when our lane started to move, we cheerfully followed.

However, it turned out that actually the lights were turned off for roadwork, and we were actually in a yield situation--the cars in front of us had simply taken advantage of a gap in traffic. Mary was entering the circle, and I looked to the right and saw this gigantic lorry bearing down on us. It honked, Mary tried to get out of the way, but it rubbed against the front driver's side of our poor little Citroen. If Mary hadn't gotten out of the way as much as she did, it probably would have smashed straight into her door, so that is a little scary to think about. We were obviously at fault, but it was also obviously an ugly traffic pattern.

But, we're all fine. And the good news is that of course the lorry was completely unscathed, and the driver was very nice. Also nice was a road worker who got the car down to a pull out spot, and nicest of all was Mary's mechanic, who came out personally in the tow truck and was very soothing, even going out of his way to drop us off in Barnet. As best as I can tell, the damage didn't involve the engine--it just knocked out the front headlight, tore off part of the bumper, and pushed in the side of the car.

In the meantime, we have resumed our busy driving schedule using a roommate's car. No pain no gain!

The Story of Catlips

This past week the missus and I have been busy with her final year research project, a survey of horse owners and equine veterinarians in hopes of determining attitudes towards physiotherapy--that is, alternative treatments such as acupuncture, chiropracticy, equine massage, etc. Physiotherapy is not as popular in the U.K. as it probably should be, and so the idea is to find out if this is due to ignorance, miseducation, or veterinary malfeasance. The survey is limited to the county of Hertfordshire, and the distribution process involves us driving around to every single livery stable and equine veterinary practice in the phone book.

It's actually a lot of fun. Hertfordshire is an odd, liminal area. The county includes urbanized tendrils of London, stretching up into cities like Watford and Barnet, satellite cities like St. Albans, quaint villages on the border with Essex and Cambridgeshire, and lots of very rural farming and grazing land. (Historical trivia: the imaginary line between Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire counties dates back to the division of the Saxon kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex!) We have been spending about five hours a day in Mary's little Citroen, puttering about down tiny little country roads in search of horse. It is very nice to meet so many British people for a change, especially since British horse people tend to be a bit oddball.

Yesterday, we were trying to find a stable evocatively named "Catlips" in the area of Chorleywood, near the western edge of the county. (Historical trivia: Chorleywood was the center of British Quakerdom before they all emigrated to Pennsylvania.) We have our trusty A-Zed of Hertfordshire, which showed that the farm was in the middle of a big patch of green, completely roadless. There was one vague line that seemed to indicate a driveway, so we tried to find it. Exiting off the A1, we (and by "we", I mean Mary) proceeded down a series of smaller and smaller roads, until we were hurtling around on a path barely big enough for our own car, let alone the occasional oncoming traffic. We kept on not being able to find the turnoff, so we slowly circled around the green patch on the map. Finally, we saw a little dirt driveway that indeed bumbled its way into a meadow, and eventually lead to a farm.

The farm? A bunch of rickety old wooden buildings, an aggressive rooster pecking away at the ground, and a grassy area in which were parked at least twenty decomposing motorhomes, lying fallow and gradually being overtaken by the woods. If we were in the U.S., this sort of scenario would make city people such as us think scary things about banjos, but this being the U.K., we quite had no idea what to expect. We poked our heads into the house trying to find a person, and found ourselves in the middle of a crowd of people who were all pawing away at a gigantic pile of horse boots, saddles, leads, and whatnot. Turns out that there was an unofficial used horse gear shop being run out of this farm, and there were several families checking out the merchandise. Mary waded through the crowd to hand off the surveys, and I waited outside, where a middle-aged British man in wellies commiserated with me. "Like a sale at Harrod's, it is, with these women!" he remarked companionably, although his accent was so thick he might actually have been telling me to haul my American butt out of town before he got out the shotgun. I just smiled back.

Mary successfully handed off her surveys, however, so we trundled our way back to the A1 and civilization. We never found out what was up with the name "Catlips." The mind boggles.

Barnet Thus Far

Surgery Reports. Dissertation writing. Big Brother 7. Evil landlords. Heathrow is Hell. Suspicious customs agents. Lamb with a balsamic vinegar crust. Wagamama. Ye Olde Monken Holt. Guinness Extra Cold. New sheets. Irish soda bread. Rain. My Super-Ex Girlfriend. Sun. Pinot Grigio. Queen Mother Hospital for Animals. Whitby trip planning. Green beans. Unsucessful search for shoes. Boots. Starbucks. Little Red Citroën. Penelope the Rottweiler. Waitrose. Conversation.

Historicity

There a number of towns in England which have been kept meticulously "historic." I'm thinking, for example, of Stratford-upon-Avon, Windsor, Bourton-on-the-Water, and so on. There is a subtle formula that creates these towns: they can't be too large, because then the pressures of industrialization, need for housing, public transportation, etc., tend to have overriden any desire to maintain older buildings with consistency. But they also can't be too small, because it does take money to maintain all of that history. And of course, the most important part of the formula is tourism, which provides the money and energy to create systematic plans to retain the historic character of entire districts, rather than just individual buildings.

The thing is, of course, that all of these "historic" towns end up kind of looking the same. Stratford-upon-Avon looks a lot like Bourton-on-the-Water, which looks a lot like Windsor, which looks a lot like St. Albans. These towns are all in drastically different areas, and have very different histories, but they really do all blend together. I think it is because people, especially tourists but also the historic preservation industry, privilege certain historical architectural styles over others. We love timbered construction (what we call "Tudor" style in the U.S.), low ceilings, thatched roofs, wattle and daub walls, and so on. And so certain buildings get preserved, but not others--in the Cotswolds, for instance, there are lots of stories of people "renovating" Jacobean and Georgian structures by adding thatched roofs!

Anyways, I don't have any larger point here. Yesterday, Mary, Laura and I spent a very pleasant afternoon in St. Albans, which is only about ten minutes away from Barnet. It was the home of a famous abbey once upon a time, although post-Henry VIII all that remains now is a large gate. But there is also a funny little cathedral, and a really nice park that has some great Roman ruins. We had a leisurely lunch at Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, a very old pub that was once the pigeon house for the abbey. All day I'd had a hankering for British food, and I was pleased to be able get a Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding. Delicious!

St. George on a Stick

I arrived safely in London yesterday after a fairly hassle-free flight. Air New Zealand was nice enough. About the same level of service as BA, although they did have a nicer in-flight entertainment system. (As you might expect, the entire Lord of the Rings cycle was available fore viewing). On the way back from Heathrow we stopped for lunch at Wagamama (I would give anything for them to expand to the U.S.), and then had a pleasant evening relaxing around the house and the local pub.

Barnet is still more or less the same as ever. The one funny thing about London at the moment is that every pub, house, apartment, and car is flying the English flag at the moment--not the Union Jack, but the red and white cross that is specific to just England, rather than Great Britain. It is theoretically in celebration of the World Cup (not that England has much to celebrate at the moment), but it is a weird phenomenon, because flying the English flag has for a long time been associated with the BNP and various right-wing fascist movements in the U.K. There is a lot of talk in the papers of English citizens "reappropriating" the flag back from racist use, but I have to say, I'm not sure I like it. True, the flag now has less racist connotations than it once did. But at the same time, I have yet to see a non-white Brit flying the flag from his or her car, and I bet they are supporting the World Cup as much as everyone else. It's like the Confederate flag in the states--you can say it means whatever you want, but as a matter of how people receive it, there will always be resonances beyond your control. And even if the flag was purely harmless, flying flags from your car is such an....American way to celebrate things.

I've decided that Brazil is going to be my team for the World Cup this year. Both the U.S. and the U.K. are unworthy of my support, and Brazil has Kaka, who is pretty hot.

Driving Less Wrongly

I know that everyone is fascinated by my continued attempts to drive, so here is another update:

The big news is that last night I drove from Barnet all the way into central London, to the Euston train station just south of Camden. This was presaged by a less successful attempt to drive a friend to Heathrow Thursday morning. I got there fine--it was ridiculously early in the morning, so there was no traffic on the M25 and I could just cruise in fifth all the way there. I managed to pull up to the terminal fine and drop my friend off, but once there I got stuck. There were crowds of people surrounding me, and with the pressure I began to stall spectacularly. After trying for several long minutes, I finally gave up and Mary drove us home.

Last night, however, for various complicated reasons we had to return a rental car to Euston. It was fairly late at night so there wasn't tons of traffic, and I stalled two or three times, but more or less I made the drive successfully! It's about a thirty minute drive, with a variety of roundabouts, stop lights, tight busy streets, and one very steep hill through Highgate, so I am quite proud of myself.

Cotswolds Photos

I have uploaded a few photos of our weekend expedition to the Cotswolds.

Cotswolds

The three of us went on an impromptu little trip to the Cotswolds this weekend. Mary's boss at the most recent internship kept on going on how lovely they were, and how easy it was to get there and see the sights, so we finally gave in. We just drove up Saturday at noon, motored around seeing the cute little villages, spent the night in an inn, motored around a bit more in the morning, and then came back home.

Most of the towns in the area developed in the 12th and 13th century as markets to support the region's wool industry. Of the towns, Chipping Campden was by far the cutest and most well-preserved. Every single building in sight is made out of local limestone, which is a kind of brownish-yellow. Lots of buildings still have thatched roofs, and there is very little recent development. It's all very cute and adorable to the point of sickness.

We did have a very nice evening in Tetbury though. We stopped off there to have dinner (lamb, of course) at a pub called the Royal Oak, and while there began to look vaguely for a place to spend the night, although since London was only two hours away we could always have returned for the night if need be. That seemed to be the case, as everything was predictably all booked for the height of the summer tourist season. The pub owner, however, heard our plight, and made a phone call to some friend who managed a pub just a block up the street. It turned out that she had a spare room that she wasn't ordinarily letting, as it needed some repairs--perfect for us, especially at only thirty pounds for the night. We spent the rest of the evening enjoying the pub, which was a rather shabby, and very local, place in an sixteenth-century stone building. Once it was closing time, and we were full of beer and lamb, the three of us squeezed into a little room upstairs, and had a lovely night's sleep.

These next few days we're lucky to have two friends from college visiting--Ruth, who had been visiting her parents in the South of France this summer, and my former Cambridge roommate Sun, who is stopping off here for a day en route to Germany. A random convergence of people, but fun.

A Northern Breeze

Barnet usually smells fine. Today, however, the wind was blowing from the north, and all of a sudden, the whole area smells distinctively of...cow. Yes, definitely cow.

The Roof, the Roof, the Roof is on Fire

Remember the idyllic scene I posted earlier in the summer, where I lounged in our garden underneath drying laundry? Well, this picture is what that looks like now.

It's been hot and dry here all week, so much so that I watered the lawn this morning. As I was inside doing dishes, I suddenly smelled smoke, and noticed out the window that ash was falling down. I go outside, and lo and behold, there is a gigantic conflagration in our backyard. It seems (according to the fire brigade), that a neighbor's garden shed spontaneously combusted, which then lit off our shed, and two others in adjoining yards. While another neighbor and I wrestled with a water hose, the fire brigade took their sweet time getting to us--the flames were meanwhile as high as our house. They later told us that there was, believe it or not, a similar fire elsewhere in Barnet at the same time, so the crew that responded to us had to come from Finchley.

In the end, no real damage except to the garden sheds, the fence, and our next-door neighbor's prized birch trees. Guess I don't have to worry about maintaining the garden anymore!

Another photo here.

London

A series of explosions went off this morning in central London, in tube stations and on at least one bus. We are all fine here, although the tube stations affected are ones that we often use on a regular basis. I had vague plans this morning to try and go visit Windsor Castle by train; I'm glad I didn't.

Strangely, this is not the first terrorist bombing I have been present in London for. When my family was here for Christmas in 1983, my father took my then-newborn sister in a stroller to visit the Harrod's department store in Knightsbridge. Streams of people suddenly started pouring towards him, away from the store. It turned out that the IRA had just bombed Harrod's, killing five.

I initially thought that only a few people had died in the bombings this morning, but it now appears that many more have been killed. Scary stuff.

Changing of the Bands

We went to Buckingham Palace on Sunday to see the changing of the guard with my grandparents. I saw this once before, when I was about three years old and visiting my other grandparents, who lived in London at the time.

It's probably due to the time of year (July vs. December) but there were a LOT more people there--probably about 5,000 crammed in. Barricades were set up, police horses were patrolling the edges, the whole deal. We were supposed to meet my grandparents at the foot of the Victoria Memorial, but that was clearly not going to happen

The changing was a bizarre experience, however. It was announced by a military band coming tromping down the street playing a march. They went through the gates into the Palace courtyard, shuffled around a bit, and then stopped playing as the men in furry hats strutted around doing their thing. Then the band trotted over to the side, picked up some music stands and set them up in a semi-circle, and then proceeded to play a little concert. It was hilarious--they more or less played the same music that my high school wind ensemble used to (at more or less the same skill level, to be honest), highlighted by a spirited rendition of Billy Joel's "Piano Man."

It was a truly bizarre sight: thirty British soldiers dressed in their red coats and furry hats, standing stiffly at attention, participating in an ancient ceremony at the seat of the British monarchy, surrounded by all of the imperial monuments of the Victoria Memorial, playing..."Piano Man."

Weird country.

A Midsummer's Night Roadtrip

Drove up with the girls to Stratford-upon-Avon yesterday to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer's Night Dream. It was a pretty drive (especially with Mary doing the driving) up the M40 past Oxford and Blenheim Palace. It would be nice to do it again with time to linger at some of those places. Stratford-upon-Avon is a tourist trap, but a pretty one with lots of nice Tudor buildings. We unfortunately didn't have much time to tour around before the show. The RSC theater, I have to say, is perfectly dreadful. It was built in the 1920s, and was just awful: hot and sweaty, cramped, awkwardly laid out. From the outside it looks like a failed Robert Moses housing project. The audience has to wind its way through narrow hallways to reach their seats, which, if you are in the upper balcony as we were, were mere feet from the rafters. Apparently, the backstage is even worse, with the actors having to run outside round the back of the building to switch sides of the stage. Plans have been in the work for a new theater for ages, but with no result yet.

The production was great though. It was a mixture of rather modernist starkness (particulary in the Athenian context) and then busier, more fanciful sets for the fairy bits. The Athenians were dressed in contemporary clothes, and the fairies were all punked out in grunge garb. There was some slightly eerie puppet work--Titania's fairy attendents were a flock of plastic baby dolls held aloft by actors, and her boy page was a knee-high puppet being guided from behind. In general, it is a pleasure to watch some very well-trained Shakespearean actors do what they do best.

Beforehand we had a pleasant dinner with one of Mary's classmates and her mother, who live in Sheffield. One of the facts of my time here is that I never actually have much interaction with real live British people. Mary's close friends are Americans, and there aren't really many other opportunities to meet people. My main contact with them is dodging the endless stroller-wielding yuppies that plague the Barnet High Street. So it was actually really great to talk with two intelligent, non-stroller-wielding Brits.