“Coming Home, Coming Home, Tell the World…”

After 111 days away we are coming home.  Temporarily.  And so tomorrow night we will be sleeping in our own beds, driving down our street, seeing our dogs, celebrating a holiday in our home.  And the emotion is pure question mark.

It feels weird to say we’ve been away for four months, when it feels like four minutes. The time has sped up with the impending shift back to Eastern Time.  The calendar filled quickly and the mix of re-integrating plus the rush to complete year-end projects, resolutions and corporate duties has pushed time ahead.

You can see it in the children as they begin to act out, worrying about things that didn’t worry them before and at the first sign of conflict (play-date scheduling overlap, friends who are leaving town as we arrive) there are harrumphs of “I want to stay” or the growl of “I want to go back home.”

There are people to see and friends to embrace, but there is a balance. 

Do they really want to hear about the Christmas Hampers and Canary Wharf, Prince Edward and Paris, my commute and Copenhagen, Eurostar and Espresso, politeness and politics, Camden and Swiss Cottage?  Do they care about St. Pauls and St. John’s Wood, museums and movies, cabs and cars, buses and Brussels, Thanksgiving and Theatre, integration and immigration, pounds and dollars, working and walking, holidays and health scares, distance and getting lost in Dulwich, Facebook and friends, Rugby and relationships, schools and shuls, tubes and trains, of writing and whining of Pubs and Pantomines?

I realize that sometimes reading a blog is like watching a friends’ home movies or those “great” vacation pictures. 

One of the many worries before moving here was that London would lose its magic.  That once I knew the street names, the tube stops, the landmarks that it would become a jumble of people and places no different from home.  But it only grew in my mind and now holds a special place for the five of us.  I’m resistant to saying the experiences have been life changing, but engaging, eye-opening, exciting, intimidating and oh so rewarding. 

As one friend said, “You’ve turned back the clock” in that we once again have time with our children.  Time that we lost when they grew up and away.  And we know now more than ever that it’s fleeting, but the chance to grasp at it one more time is time travel.

Can’t wait until January.

Of Headlines & Hampers

Sometimes headlines whisper, sometimes they hint, lately they shout: “Weak Retail Sales” “Unemployment Remains High” “How to Save the London High Steet” “How Low Will the Euro Go?”

Sitting in the Gallery restaurant at Fortnum and Mason I watch the queues grow and grow until they bleed out of the 300 year-old store onto Piccadilly Street.  And I wonder if the headlines mislead?

Studying the menu the man next to me, with whom I’ve been forced to share a table due to overcrowding, is struggling between the Carpaccio of Sussex Red Beef with Golden Enoki Mushrooms and the hand carved Basque Ham with Wild Rocket and Pyrenees Goat Cheese.

Teeming with customers, the smell of candles and incense, the nutmeg blending with the vanilla, the wood floor polished, but creaky, and a soft version of “I Saw Grandma Kissing Santa Claus” brings a festivity for the holiday that penetrates my Jewish being.

I know that America is blamed for the commercialization of Christmas(s) but the Brits have taken it to a new level.  They forget about the Christ and focus on the Mas, as in Mass Market Consumerism, not Midnight Mass.

Christmas isn’t December 25^th, it’s the whole last three weeks of the year.  When they say have a good Christmas, and everybody does, it's like saying "enjoy everything after December 2^nd."  When you ask somebody what they are doing for Christmas their answer begins around Guy Fawkes day and hits everything from the holiday parties, to the client lunches, the shopping, the drinking, the late starts and early exits, the explanation of Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, who goes where/when and Why.  In a country where 12% regularly attend Church they certainly got religion when it comes to Christmas.

The big Christmas business at Fortnum and Mason is their famed Hampers.   They call it the “most travelled tuck box” in the world.  Coming in all sizes and filled with everything from cookies and jams to fruit cakes and puddings.  The line to buy and send the Hampers snakes around the store, past the ornaments, the properly dressed mannequins and out toward the ice cream parlour.   

These are not small investments, ranging from £50 to £5,000.  The embarrassingly low-end Hamper is meant, according to Fortnum, as the perfect “thank-you gift for a weekend host.”  The classic “huntsman basket” includes a “taste of Christmas” with a “miniature version of our classic Christmas Cake, Christmas Spiced Biscuits, Mulled Wine spices, a jar of our fine Raspberry Preserve and, of course, a helping of champagne.”

But the big boys play in a whole different pitch. 

The “Imperial Hamper” contains only the best:  “Darjeeling’s finest tea, a whole side of wild Scottish smoked salmon, white truffle oil, Beluga caviar, Foie Gras with Truffles, Fortnum’s Cognac Butter, Magnifici Florentines, an amphora of Orange Marmalade with Champagne, an enormous box of chocolates, a magnum each of Cristal 2002 and Dom Ruinart 1993 and a bottle of Dalmore 32-year-old whisky. As if that weren’t enough, this year we’ve included our new Jubilee Queen Elizabeth Christmas Pudding, which takes our King George Pudding as its base and adds macadamia nuts, port and double cream and a crown of glacé fruits, painted with gold leaf. Presented in a hamper made of English willow.”

So not only has Christmas become a train wreck of holiday slobbery (most offices are empty after lunch from the middle of December until January first), but they also have taken hostage of the Queen’s Jubilee to create “one-time only” Jubilee Hampers, Royal Sovereign Strawberry Preserve, Jubilee Musical Biscuit Tin, Jubilee Fudge and my favorite the Jubilee Lion and Plantagenets Mug.

When I ask Customer Service how the economy is affecting Christmas he says he’s never seen it so busy in his 10 years with the company.  However, he admits, business for the Imperial and other high-end Hampers is down because of the “corporates” but the consumer business, “they’re making it a very, merry Christmas for F&M.”

Coffee and Windows

I’m 12 years old and riding in the back of my mom’s car and we pass a huge Dunkin Donuts sign on Telegraph road and the sign reads, “World’s Best Coffee.”  My friend Harley and I crack up.  How can there be good and bad coffee?  At that point in my life, pre-Starbucks, coffee was something that came in Taster’s Choice crystals and measured out into a mug and topped with boiling water and a pink packet of fake sugar that everyone said gave you cancer.

Fast forward 20 years and coffee was a teeth staining, bad breath creating, stomach churning energy source for many, but not me.  But I wanted to be a coffee drinker.  I wanted to sit there with my mug in the morning, steam rising, looking out of my office window.

Like Kilgore in Apocalypse Now: I loved the smell of coffee in the morning, it smelled like victory.  But I never drank the stuff.  Until now.

Coffee in Europe, to me, tastes, looks, smells and feels different and I’m sure it’s in my head.  But I’ve become a serious espresso drinker, once in the morning and again at lunch.

A secondary point.  I am a believer in windows and sunlight and all that comes from it.  I believe in it even more now that we are in London and throughout the short days and long nights of winter people are downing Vitamin D pills like tic tacs.

Our first Washington office of Marketresearch.com was in a windowless building basement.  For the two years we were there we were unprofitable and struggled through the start up phase, cash crunches and funding troubles.  In year three we moved to a first floor, windowed office and the company turned.

There is a Nero Coffee Bar between the tube stop and my London office.  On my way in I stop for a single espresso served to me by a six foot tall Italian woman who spies me from the end of the line and barks, “Single Espresso, stay in.”

I drink it there.  I like my two sips of coffee at the bar surrounded by conversation.  I don’t know why, maybe because I want my espresso hot, maybe it’s the miniature ceramic cups with the tiny spoon that I like, or the way the brown sugar lays at the bottom like wet cement.

And so each morning I stop in, pay my pound fifty and sit by the front window over-looking Fenchurch Street.

And every day it changes.  There are businessmen hustling through the rain or cold or just because they are late to a meeting.  There are people in scarves and hats and tweed jackets and sometimes pretty women pass by in skirts and I watch the men catch an eye-full.  And I watch the thousands of stories in the faces of the people in the store:  The business meeting, the couple having a last conversation before work (they must be newlyweds), the college student struggling through a term paper, the unemployed middle aged man hoping that today will be the day.

Britain-Care (Part I)

It’s all about expectations.

If you fall running in Central Park you expect to go to an emergency room and get treated NOW.  And if it’s broken and you need surgery you want to get it done NOW, by a hand surgeon who has mended the fingers of Yo-Yo Ma.  And because it’s almost Christmas break you need to get the cast on and then off so you can make your flight and your trip and by the way I’m training for a half marathon so when can I run again?

Switch to London.  You’re running on the canal between Maida Vale and Notting Hill and you trip on uneven pavement.  You go to one hospital and get x-rays.  And then you wait.  And they transfer you to a new hospital.  But the tech systems are down so they can’t get the x-rays from the first hospital so you wait and get a second set of x-rays which is OK, because it’s better than the first.

Then they put a big cast all the way to your elbow because you have to see a specialist and he can’t see you until tomorrow.

And so tomorrow arrives but you don’t know whether to eat or not because you don’t know if you are getting surgery or not.  So you don’t eat and you meet in the morning with a 30-ish looking hand surgeon who goes by the name Mr. O’toole. 

So I ask him, sheepishly, “but you are a doctor.” 

“Yes, I went to university,” he replies.

“I realize that, but they call you Mister and your card says Mister, not Doctor, so you passed all the exams, right?”

He doesn’t understand the question.

The room is part office, part operating room.  He hasn’t heard of us or seen an x-ray, we could be coming there for an in-grown for all he knows.  Resting on his desk is a tall clear glass of yellow brown liquid (he claims it's tea) and we hand him our disc of x-rays and he says, “Oh yea, this needs surgery.”

He tells us a lot about what will go on in the “operating theatre” and you might want earphones because the drilling is loud and the pins in the finger, etc.

When Jill asks when she can run again the doctor says, “Well, unofficially, two weeks.  I mean, I am a runner too, but a doctor would say to wait a month.”

Umm???

Then the fun begins and he gives us a code, we then call the insurance company and they give us a code and then we call his secretary.  And he warns us, “It might ring for five or ten minutes, but she’ll pick up, eventually.  We're very busy.”

And she does and we give her our code and she tells us to come back in 3 hours for surgery.

Fingers crossed, at least the ones that aren’t broken.

“And so this is Christmas…”

In America there is atleast an acknowledgement of numerous December holidays, including Hanukah.  But here in London it is Christmas baby, and you can’t help but get in the spirit.

And so we trod off to see the lights on Oxford and Regent Street, we ice skate in Kensington, Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park and then we go to the Christmas Pantomime Show.  Because that is what Brits do. 

What is the Christmas Panto, you ask?  Don’t think Marcel Marceau, think fairy tales with cross dressing step sisters, old women singing Lady Gaga, a gay fellow named Buttons and lots of sight gags that make six year old’s laugh so hard that milk flows through their noses.

My wife got us all tickets for the Cinderella Panto.  As a side note, it just so happens that my wife is out of the country on the day of the show leaving me to explain to my children (11, 13, 15) why we are going to a theatre populated by people wearing big boy pull up diapers and celebrating their 6^th birthday party.

Here is how the Panto game is played:  The evil step-sisters are sleeping in a haunted room and every time they look for the ghost, they can’t find him.  But the ghost is standing right behind them and the crowd screams with vigor, “They’re behind you.”  Or another witty one includes the aforementioned Buttons who yells, “How ya doin?” to the crowd which in turn raises its hands and screams, “Top Bananas!”

The shows run from Late November through January and while not explicitly about Christmas, it is an integral part of the British holiday experience.  The show is not silent, as I expected, instead it is filled with song and silliness that makes the under 7 crowd squeal.  They are always based on traditional stories that the audience is supposed to know, some of the shows this year include:  Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and Jack and the Beanstalk.

There are modern twists to the story, including the fact that everyone calls the lead “Cinders” in this tale, and every year the stories are updated with topical jokes, some here included the Olympics, the press hacking scandal, unemployment and jokes about the dodgy neighborhood in which this particular theatre sat, called Hackney Empire.

The show peaks near the end when the horse, Clapton, saves the day by foiling the evil steps sisters (brothers) from stealing Cinders off in a hot air balloon. At which point the horse, (think horse from an elementary school play, not Warhorse), comes front and center to receive a medal and the entire crowd sings along to “Clip Clop Clapton, the Wonder Horse.”  Not once, not twice, but three times.

This was one of those Christmas traditions that we can say we’ve done, although as the winter solstice approaches next year, we may leave Clip Clop Clapton for the tourists.