Diamonds for the Queen

Amidst a double dip recession and with the Olympics a mere two months away, the entire city of London, in fact the whole country and the ones they own, will shut down for a long holiday weekend. Not a Memorial Day three-dayer, but a full-on four day, Friday-Tuesday weekend to celebrate a symbol as much as a woman, the Queen.

Is the Monarchy the story of a dysfunctional family, a cold Queen, a dunce Prince, a beautiful princess killed by a sinister plot.  The only thing I know for sure is, they LOVE their Queen. The Royal Family, the cost, the castles, the embarrassing anachronistic displays may put some people off, but this is their Queen, for many this was their parents' Queen and for most this is their children's Queen and she will be celebrated.

Imagine a figure in America that you'd put on Mount Rushmore.  Whose image might be printed on our money.  Whose birthday we celebrate with a National Holiday.  Now imagine if that person were still alive, walking the streets, making news and impacting the world.

The Queen is a part of England and this Queen in particular, who took the thrown at the young age of 25 and has been a centerpiece of the country since the 1950's.  No other public figure in the world has been around for anywhere near that length.  And even as a Royal, she is only the second to have a Diamond Jubilee, the last one being Queen Victoria during the time of Lincoln.

This week-end there will be Jubilee Parties (Our street is having a Block Fayre of Pimms and Pastries), there are television specials, concerts, horse races and everything British.  Sales of Pimms, bunting and Royal gnomes have gone through the roof, as stores reported selling 1000 miles of bunting and more than 200,000 teacakes.

The high point of the festivities is the Jubilee Pageant when more than 1000 boats will assemble and the Queen and Duke will travel in a Royal Barge down the Thames.  And then on to St. Pauls with a final carriage ride to Buckingham Palace where the Royal Family will appear on the Balcony.

One of the most famous photos of this well-traveled Queen was during her Silver Jubilee in 1977.  That celebration is being remembered with a 100 metre-wide photograph of the Queen and her family on the Buckingham Palace balcony.  (You can see the amazing set up online).  The family looks happy, smiling and waving, and altogether regal.

The picture includes a very young-looking Prince Charles who was just months away from a first meeting with a 16 year-old Diana Spencer.  In the photo Mark Phillips, the Queen's son in law at the time, seems to have just told a joke to his wife.  It would be another eight years before he fathered a child out of wedlock with a New Zealand art teacher.  And prominently displayed in the middle is Earl Mountbatten, an uncle of Prince Phillip, who took a strong interest in Prince Charles, affectionately calling him an "honorary grandson."  Within two years Mountbatten would be assassinated when the Irish Republican Army planted a bomb in his fishing boat.

The Queen is 86 and while it feels like she has been around forever, Churchill was still Prime Minister when her reign began, they know that her day will come.  And so they will celebrate everybody's favorite "granny," because they know their history, not their future.

Football Season Comes to a Close (Part II)

We came to this country huge fans of soccer leagues with names like Stoddert, not Barclays.  We leave believers.  I am a cliche:  The American who comes to Europe and falls in love with Soccer.


We are American sports fans.  We stay up all night to watch the Super Bowl.  We set our alarms at ungodly hours to watch our teams in playoff action.  ESPN.com is the first thing we check in the morning to get the previous day's game scores.


But now there are new words, terms and names that are part of our daily lexicon.  Words that previously had no meaning.  A foreign language:  Chelsea, Bayern, Stoppage, Didier Drogba, Mancini, Tevez and Torres.


"Today we don't cry."

Those were the words of the players from Chelsea, which won the Champions League.


The words were similar in tone when Manchester City won the Premier League.


In European soccer there are many ways to win and many ways to lose.  Chelsea won the Champions League this past weekend making them the champions of European soccer.  However, you only make it into the European Champions League if you are one of the top four teams from England.  Chelsea was only the sixth best team, but by wining they guaranteed themselves a spot next year.  However, the team in fourth place, Tottenham gets bounced.


And I haven't even started explaining the confusing stuff.


Soccer enriches and defines the life of Englishmen. With a big game pending, I knew I could walk down any street, find any pub, join any crowd and be in the thick of football pain and pleasure.

What I will remember about my first season are the people and how they react to this, their most cherished pastime.

Wherever we travelled we tried to see a game and the memories of those places are some of the strongest.  The old men crying in Rome as they sang a love song to their team.  The cheers that rang through Old Trafford as Man U closed in on a victory.  The red nosed men at Stamford Bridge. 

Their stadiums have great old names.  Not unlike Wrigley Field, though it is still named after a consumer product, it harkens back to another era:  Old Trafford, the Boleyn Ground, Craven Cottage, Stadium of Light and Anfield.

And the sports pages write of nothing else.  Although understanding what they mean requires a local to explain: 

"Second half goals by Cisse and Mackie either side of a Joey Barton red card, had given ten-man QPR a shock lead."


I can explain that.

My Wife and the Lord

We live at the outer edges of London and so the Tube stop is busy with people going down in the morning and coming up in the afternoon.  And so on a Thursday I was surprised to see the queue going the wrong way.


Even the escalators were both coming up, only stairs for those going down.

The universe was in reverse.  Usually this means a problem with the trains.  It wasnt the train, it was the first day of Cricket season and we are just down the street from the home of Cricket, Lord's Cricket Grounds.
A place where they started playing cricket about the time America was founded.


Getting to Lords was on my list of things to do one day and so I followed the crowd, scalped a ticket and found myself in the midst of England against the West Indies.


The crowd is proper, all carrying baskets, wearing ties and hats, sports coats and salmon-colored pants.  The Test match will last through Sunday.
I watched for an hour or so, walked the grounds, saw the school children emulating their favorite players, amazed that a sport with such wide appeal is so foreign to me that I couldn't really follow the scoring.  


After a visit to the gift shop I headed back to the tube.  When I got home that evening I told my wife where I'd spent the first part of my morning.  


There are a number of reactions she could have had: "Maybe you shouldn't be playing hookey," or "Maybe if you worked more..." or some other retort that I would make had she told me she spent the day on a shopping spree.


But instead she said, "Why don't you do that more often?"


"Why don't I go to more Cricket matches?"


"I hope this is something we bring back to the States with us," she said.


Me too.

The Beginning of the End

It starts with the invitation from a friend who asks us to a concert in September.  


Then the new issue of TimeOut Magazine arrives, advertising events that are too far in the future.  And we realize that soon the festivals and carnivals, events and every days will start happening in London, without us.  The things we looked forward to last year are still gonna happen next year, but it will be someone else’s Chocolate Festival at Borough Market, it will be their opening day of the Football season.

The final trips are being planned, the social engagements we’d been putting off get booked and the bucket list of items we needed to get done in London gets a re-write.

The real estate agent starts showing our house, we made an inventory of things we need to get rid of like the UK X-Box, the sheets that won’t fit on a bed at home, the trampoline in the back yard.  


There is un-opened roll of packing tape on the kitchen counter.


And the kids talk about their plans for a return visit.  And I wonder what it will be like when we come back.  Usually when you return to a vacation spot you want to do all your favorites:  That store you love, the restaurant you can't forget, the park that was so special.  But all the London things we'd come back for can’t be achieved in a day, recreated in a week or a month’s visit.  How do you replicate everyday living?

Two Seasons Come to a Close (Part I)

There is nothing like a child’s first love.  Not the one that breaks your heart once.  But the love that breaks your heart again and again your entire life.  In sports your first love is often the one that lasts.


He may not be able to get himself up on most school days without his mother and the promise of chocolate chip pancakes.  But he set his alarm and got himself out of bed at 2:30 in the morning for every hockey game the Washington Capitals played and watched until completion, whether that meant regulation or overtime, or double overtime, or triple.

All over England you can strike up conversation by asking which football club they follow.  And they always have one.  And when you ask why they answer that it was their father’s club.  Or their grandfather's or the place where their first house once stood.  “We’ve always been Arsenal fans,” they might say.  "My dad remembers the plane crash in 1958 and that's how he got stuck on United."

The previous evening my son went to bed with tears in his eyes after his team lost on a long day which ended well past 3:30 in the morning.  There was only pain in his heart.

The next afternoon we watched as the Manchester City fans wept in pain and then joy, the reverse for Manchester United.



The pain lasts and then fades and it's on to next season.


A few hours after the soccer season ended I was riding in a car with a Manchester United fan, whose team had been handed as heartbreaking a defeat as we’ve ever seen.  “Manchester City deserved it,” he said.  “I have to hand it to them.  They played the better football.”


That night I told my son I'd pick him up at eight o'clock the following evening.  


"Please don't say the word eight, dad.  It reminds me of Ovechkin and that the Caps lost."

A Good Stumble

"Not all those who wander are lost"  Tolkien


We don't stumble anymore, we search.


We don't look for old books in old book stores, we search online and find them and have them sent to our house.  I've been looking for a book about a guy who took his family to Paris and wrote about it.  I'd been to a few book stores, unable to find it.  Then a few weeks later I was in an old book shop I'd been seeking out.  I found the store, but alas they didn't have a copy.  They could order it, but I said "no thanks."  I still had an hour before my next meeting so I ambled across the road and found another book store, one I'd never heard of, and there in the travel section was one copy of the book.  Pure delight.


People have been writing about walking and exploring in London since Pepys.  In a city like London anything can be an adventure, or a chore, depending on your perspective.  Virginia Woolf wrote one of her great essays about her adventure to buy a lead pencil as she went "street sauntering" "street rambling" and "street haunting."


For me London is meant to be explored and all the difficulties of city life (the trains, the delays, the jostling, the dirt, the noise, the rain, the mess) is all part of the adventure.  An adventure that must take place on foot.  We have hoofed it from Abbey Gardens to Golders Green, Whitehall to Westminster, from Hampstead to Hampshire, Ealing to Edgeware, from London Bridge to Leadenhall and Lime Street.  No matter the sector of the city, if there are sidewalks we walk it to learn it, to know it, to stumble upon it.

I set out part of every week to walk London and find something.  And it rarely disappoints, finding the great new places which existed, always hiding in plain sight.

One my best stumbles is the English Restaurant.

The English Restaurant is my single favorite place in London.  I go in the morning, they have dairy free cake and tea and banged-up chairs, and knotty tables and funny young people making coffee and a steady stream of world weary walking through.

How I Stumbled:


-One day I went to see "Dickens in London" an exhibit at the Museum of London.  
-After the exhibit I looked through the gift shop finding a book called “Quiet London” which listed quiet places within the city, including libraries, gardens and coffee shops.
-The next week I followed the book to the Bishopsgate Institute Library.  A nice old creaky, dusty library, just North of Liverpool Street.  

-Afterward I walked down a side street until I bumped into Old Spitalfields Market, a Victorian market hall which is now filled with what can only be described as rows and rows of vendors selling bric-a-brac.
-Later as I walked back to the office I bumped into a restaurant called the Grenadier, which of course required me to stop and take a picture.  

-Next to the Grenadier I saw a coffee shop called the English Restaurant.  




As soon as I stepped foot in the place it grabbed me by the throat and pulled me in.  The people kept me there.  A constant stream of clever playfulness permeates this tiny space which to me is everything English.


It's run by a couple who keeps everything, quintessentially English.  The food is well-bragged about, though I've never had a meal.  "You've got to try the kippers with mustard butter for breakfast," they tell me, but I get the bagel and lox.  "Then come back for dinner the venison casserole and pan-friend Guinea fowl with steak and onion pudding is out of this world," and all I ask for is another slice of dairy-free cake.

English food and English service are legendarily bad.  They take pride in this.  However, in my English Restaurant I found only love for the customer and the food.  Food that will never pass these lips.

The Three Vs of Brighton

All of us are confined to a schedule, sometimes of our doing and sometimes not.  But there is a sense of strength, if that’s the right word, maybe it is freedom, that comes from being able to stand at a train station look up at the big board and know you can go anywhere the tracks will take you.   You have 24 hours and they are yours.

I chose Brighton.  Well, I really chose Liverpool, but the tracks were all messed up and a two hour ride was going to take me six.

Brighton did brighten my day, even in the cold and drizzle that has shrouded England for the past four weeks.

Brighton is one of those cities like Portland Maine or Seattle Washington that is heavy on the Three Vs:  Vinyl records, Vegan food and Vintage clothing.

A one hour, ten pound train from London takes you from the city to the seaside with stops throughout South London from Hassocks to Hayward's Heath, through Three Bridges, East Croyden, and Burgess Hill.  But Brighton has all the sights and smells of a beach.  Visually it looks like old-time Atlantic City with the Ferris wheel and the pier, the sound of gulls overhead and the smell of fish (and chips) all around. 

Brighton is on the south coast of Great Britain and like all things in this country has a long history going back to 1086.  It was a health resort kind of place even back in the day, then it went through some disrepair and is now back on the gentrification track with universities and high end stores.

But beyond the sea, the highlight is the visually magnificent Royal Pavilion.   And there are the North Laines, a shopping area like no other with bunches of zig zagging streets and hundreds of shops, none of which exist anywhere else on earth.  From records and turntables, vintage clothing and vintage cameras, from tattoos to typewriters, the streets, even on a rainy day are teeming with tourists and townies all looking for a bargain, a cup of tea and a piece of dairy/gluten free cake.