Unlucky washing

Sarah has informed me that people are asking where my next blog entry is. Ok then, here it is. One has to remember that I live in France, and nothing ever happens. Nothing. Not a thing. I shall simply tell you about recent events so you get the picture.
It has been a time of unlucky washing, the delivery of a chicken dispatcher, some icicles on the shower head and, most importantly, the sending off of forms so that Sarah and I can get the whole fiancé visa thing started. Blimey! A lot happens in France.
The small French town of Couhe appears, at first glance, to be closed. Actually, it looks like that after a second glance too. The first time I saw it, my immediate reaction was that it was entirely brown. The walls, shop fronts, street, trees, sky. All of it brown. This area (the department of Vienne) is mostly agricultural, which is one possible reason for the overwhelming brown nature of the place. Couhe looks like it’s been recently ploughed.
The more investigative of visitors will, however, discover a beautiful river, an ancient Abby, a medieval market hall, the world’s most technologically advanced dentist, an absurdly friendly post-office and a doctor who gives single-figure blood pressures.
Three kilometers outside Couhe you will find me in an old farmhouse, doodling away the days and wrestling with the complexities of every-day life. One day soon, Sarah will be making her first visit! Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that everything looks closed.
So last week I made a rash decision to do some laundry. It had been snowing a bit, but not enough to stop me from walking to the washing machine. Perhaps I should explain. While normal washing machines live inside people’s houses, this one is hidden in a ramshackle outbuilding. To get to it I have to navigate my way past a variety of farmyard animals, all of them convinced that I want to feed them. I don’t know why this is.
I got to the washing machine unmolested and put my clothes inside, set it to the “dark things that won’t make everything blue” setting and set off with my dogs for a hike through the woods. That was a success. The washing wasn’t. On my return I discovered that for some reason it had remained on the same setting, and my clothes, which should have been finished, were still in hot water and turning everything blue. I twiddled the knob to no avail and slurped the clothes out into a bag and took them back to the house to drain a bit.
The next day was like Spring at last. The sun was out and the sky was blue. I decided to hang the washing on the line. The washing line is, you will not be surprised to discover, nowhere near the house. It’s somewhere near a barn. There’s an old plough, some rabbit hutches from the days when rabbits were farmed for eating, some ancient logs for firewood and an even more ancient tractor. The washing line is made of string. As I pegged the last of the wet clothing to the line the string broke and the washing landed among the accumulated piles of guano and sheep droppings that litter the fields. Bugger. I tied it up and took the dogs off to town.
Taking the dogs to town is a fairly new adventure. They were born under my bed in Greece and for two years there were six of them roaming round the house. They were a pack. The local hobby in the village of San Stefanos is dog-poisoning, so I didn’t let them very far out of my sight. I’d only walk them in places where Greeks hardly ever went, and in the summer I would walk all six of them on leads. Other dogs would come to play with them and then wander off to do their own thing. Sometimes I thought it cruel that I wouldn’t let my dogs go play with the others on the beach but, looking back on it, all of those dogs are dead now and mine survived. I’m rather proud of that. I found homes for three of them in Germany and one in the UK, and I have two with me. So the practical upshot of this fear of paraquat is…they aren’t town dogs. They understand the concept of trees, but not shops. Something I need to solve, so I’ve started taking them to town. I left them in the car as I went to the post office.
The post-office in Couhe is absurdly friendly. I don’t know what people are saying, but they seem to be saying it in an absurdly friendly manner. They say hello when they come in, and they say goodbye when they go out. I thought at first that everyone must know each other, but that isn’t it. It’s just how they do things. I think it’s wonderful. If I went into a post office in England and said hello to everyone, people would back away, nervously. Not so in Couhe.
The weather wasn’t quite as warm as the greeting one gets in the post-office, and on my return it was snowing on my unlucky washing.
A couple of days ago I was woken early by a small French man with a package for the lady who owns the house. She lives in the other half of this vast old building and she is the one responsible for the collection of farmyard animals. She will soon be responsible for slightly fewer farmyard animals because when I gave her the package she informed me that it was a “Chicken dispatcher.” I’m not sure what a chicken dispatcher is, but I fear it involves a chicken that starts out alive, and ends up not quite so alive, heading, one might say, for that great chicken dish in the sky. I had a chicken dish in the sky on my last Air France flight to Philadelphia, and it wasn’t bad. If anyone is interested in the exact nature of this gadget I shall find out, but, to be honest, I don’t like to get too involved in the minutiae of eating animals. I tend to look after them, rather than dispatch them. Last year I fed some lambs from bottles. A few months later people were coming out of the barn with them in plastic bags. At Christmas she served a variety of foul at the dinner table and I foolishly asked if I knew any of them. I did. I developed a passion for roast potatoes.
A few days ago I tried to have a shower but no water came out. Being a genius with plumbing I instantly worked out what the problem was. There were icicles hanging from the shower head. A shoe removed them and the shower was working again. My unlucky washing, entirely blue and covered in evidence of chickens, was stiff as a board.
I woke up in the night with dyslexia. There were daunting forms to fill in for the fiancé visa application and I only had one set to work with. The more I tried not to make mistakes, the more likely it would seem. Can anyone tell me my ex-wife’s birthday? I haven’t given this any consideration since 1989 and I‘m not sure how seriously I took it then. The dyslexia came with the dates. British people write dates differently to Americans. For me, 9/11 is the 9th of November. The forms require dates in the American format and trying to override 46 years of training is difficult. Every time I had to write a date I became nauseous. The wild stab in the dark that was my ex-wife’s birthday, mixed with the emetic effect of back-to-front dates, probably has her down as 103 years old. The forms are a welter of dates. On reaching the end, sweating yet triumphant, I signed with a flourish and dated them with a…shit! I was about to put my usual 9/3/05. One can’t write dates back to front with a flourish. It isn’t possible. Slowly and with great care, I dated the forms to suggest they hadn’t been filled in 6 months after they were posted.
This morning I went to Couhe to find a photocopier for my divorce documents. One photocopy was all that stood between me and sending this fearful pile of spurious information to Sarah. I had the photo of my right ear (they specify the right ear, as I suspect the left ear is easy to forge), and a letter to say that I want to marry Sarah and that this isn’t just me wanting long-term access to the delights of Atlantic City. I had all 4 copies of the forms with the back-to-front dates and the original divorce documents. All I needed was a photocopier.
There is, you will be please to hear, a magnificent photocopier in the supermarket in Couhe. I walked in to find a small French woman standing by it looking unhappy. She engaged me in conversation for some time. Longer than one would expect. I don’t know what the French is for “the photocopier isn’t working”, but I guessed that somewhere in her monologue, she said it. I left.
I went into the car insurance place where I happen to know that Jean Charles speaks enough English to tell me where there’s another photocopier. He wasn’t there. I went to the travel agent where I bought my first ticket to Philadelphia, but it was closed. I went to the tobacconist where the man says “Thank you and good bye.” It was worth trying. His wife was serving and she doesn’t ever say “Thank you and goodbye.” I considered the doctor’s surgery, but when I went there to ask him to investigate some pains I was having in my chest he informed me that I had a blood pressure of 37. A single figure blood pressure isn’t something you want when you’re already worried. I wanted two numbers. 120 over 80 would have been nice. Thirty-seven isn’t a blood pressure. It’s an age at which people stop counting birthdays. I then found the tourist information office. I claimed to be a tourist who just happened to need a photocopy of his divorce documents and the smallest adult human being I have ever seen greeted me from under his desk. His stature was only matched by his inability to speak English, which I thought was yet another handicap for a man in a tourist information office. “Photocopy”, I said in fluent French. He pointed in fluent French to a shop across the road.
The shop across the road not only had a fully functioning photocopier, but also was manned by a man with very large feet. I know this because he took my documents, photocopied them, charged me 25 cents and promptly stood on my divorce papers, leaving a perfect imprint of his boot. There are so many customs I simply don’t understand.

The forms are in the post. Your turn Sarah! Good luck love.

Born to be Mild

I spoke to Sarah today and I wondered seriously if I should continue with this blog thing. She said I should. I wasn’t so sure. It’s not the blog per se, I don’t think. I do feel a bit strange writing things for other people to read. It’s more the fact that I’m smack bang in the middle of that SLUMP that gets me after getting back here. Maybe you’d noticed. Catherine’s comment about me not wanting this to be an overt and public display of my love for Sarah…ha! She’s right of course. The very next post was an overt and public display of my love for Sarah. But it takes me a while to get over leaving her. It takes me a while to get back to being a hermit after being with Sarah and her family, with Charlie and Cecily. After meeting the many people whom I now regard as my friends. After feeling alive and happy.

So I thought I’d stop being so lame and post something. Ten minutes ago I was off to my bed, but I decided that the day should end on a positive note. I’ll post something light hearted and at the moment, the only way to do that is to grab something I wrote a while ago. It’s cheating. I don’t care. Sarah did say I could write about anything! I’ve grabbed something that contains England (where I come from), Greece (where I lived for 4 years), and France (where I live now). It’s sort of relevant. Sort of.

When I left England, all the people I work for said they would still send me work in Greece. As a way of helping to remind them of my existence, I wrote a journal and sent them instalments. As the work piled in, I kept writing but stopped sending it. I wrote as a cathartic exercise. I wrote it to make me laugh.

One summer I developed a fever and was unable to walk. I simply fell down and became delirious. After four days I was taken to Corfu hospital and there I stayed for a week. When I got back to my house I still couldn’t walk. I also had a huge work project that I simply couldn’t face. I became afraid of the computer and tried to pretend it wasn’t there. Eventually I couldn’t help but notice it, so I nervously turned it on, telling myself that I would get back to work. I simply sat and stared at the blank screen, frozen. As a gentle introduction back into the world of the computer I decided to write about how awful Corfu hospital was. I wrote about 20,000 words and then was able to get back to work. I can send this extract and get up tomorrow knowing that today ended on a positive note and that tomorrow will be better. I might even have something to write about!

By the way, this part was after one of those strange moments when writing takes you in unexpected directions. An account of Corfu hospital became a plan to become a new breed of travel writer. One who never goes anywhere, never talks to anyone, and simply makes things up. I think there’s a market…

***

I thought I might go out again, but decided against it. I still have a nagging feeling that the village folk will shout, “there he is!” and I’ll be lurching through the streets of San Stefanos like the Elephant Man, looking for some place to hide. A bar full of pale limping spotty people would be perfect, but I don’t know any.
I’ve just got out of a Greek hospital, you see. It seemed the place to go as I’d contracted a rare tropical disease and I live in Greece. Unfortunately, the breadth of people’s minds seems to be proportional to the size of the community they live in, which is probably why Universities are housed in large towns. Suddenly, a jab from a pointy tree, a nasty little bug called Ricketsia and a week of being prodded by Greek doctors has dropped me right to the bottom of the social list.
I’ve got to find a way of changing my life, and despite my complete lack of credentials, travel writing is going to be it. I don’t fancy going anywhere, I don’t like talking to nutters and I have no interest in interesting little side streets, but I can find a way round this, I’m sure.
I have decided, in a positive moment, that I do have one very important quality that could make me into a successful travel writer. It’s a bit vague and tenuous so bare with me because I’m clutching at straws.
Michael Palin doesn’t look at all adventurous, and neither do I.
There. That’s it. What do you think?
This spurs me on and I think I’m on to something. Too many antibiotics perhaps, or maybe I’m riding on a tide of optimism now that I’ve been wearing shoes for several hours.
And Simon was the least adventurous looking person you’ve ever met, but he was a surprise.
Simon was, and possibly still is, a slight human being with a fine sense of humour and a cold. He looked like he belonged in carpet slippers. A good dose of complan and amoxycillin wouldn’t have done him any harm. I met him on a very small boat.
Hang on, lets get into the swing of this travel-writing business and give more information than ‘a very small boat’. I met him on a 26-foot sailing boat that belonged to my friend Keith. I didn’t actually measure it, so I may be Norwich Catheldraling on the whole boat length thing, but it wasn’t a big boat by any means. It slept three people. Four if someone was daft enough to contemplate sleeping in the ‘V’ shaped space near the pointy end.
Actually, Keith wasn’t even really a friend, more an acquaintance. A friend of Sue and Andy’s really. One day, whilst having Sunday lunch at Sue and Andy’s house, the story emerged that Keith had returned from Shoreham yacht club - a small yet active club in Sussex, England - to invite them onto his boat. The elders of Shoreham yacht club had decided that its members should talk their land-lubbing friends into experiencing the delights of the sea. Sue agreed, despite a hatred of boats but an even greater desperation to look glamorous. Andy agreed because he didn’t want to look like a land-lubber, despite that information being printed in big letters close to the top of his C.V. Keith had wondered if I would like to go, so in a rare moment of devil-may care stupidity, I said yes.
The very next weekend we met Keith in Shoreham, a few miles west of Brighton, and saw for the first time the vessel that was to drive the very sea into our veins.
A fine boat with a beautiful French name. Cinque.
Actually, I can’t remember what the name of the boat was, but we need detail in this, even if I have to make it up (as my hero Spike Milligan said when he claimed that the car he was trying to sell had been blessed by the Pope – it’s a lie, but a damn good one).
The waters of the river Arun took us out of Shoreham harbour. Within fifteen minutes we hit the high seas and spliced the main brace or whatever nautical things Keith did. Sue went green; Andy kept disappearing below because it was too windy on deck to light his roll-ups. I loved it. I truly loved it. Our hair was pushed out sideways and went stiff in the salt wind. Our cheeks were ruddy. Our knuckles were as white as the foam that fizzed around the sides of the boat.
We went past Brighton and I have never seen it looking so impressive. From the road, Brighton is a mess of traffic and traffic lights, corner shops and road works, second-hand furniture and blinking amusements. From the sea it is a majestic town. The Georgian houses that sweep up from the sea look no different to the etched prints you see on pub walls, of a town once patronized by Royalty and rightly so. Brighton is at it’s best from a place where it’s too far to swim to safety.
When we got back to Shoreham, Keith swabbed his poop and dug the weevils out of his gangplank. Andy said how much he’d enjoyed it, the way that people say how much they’ve enjoyed a meal that they’ve hardly touched, and Sue looked like she’d been raped by a gorilla.
I said I’d enjoyed it, and strangely enough, I had.
So a month or two later, when Keith asked Andy and I if we wanted to go with him from Shoreham to Fecamp in France, I agreed. Andy was busy.
It was to be a long weekend and the crew consisted of Keith, the only man on board who knew which end of a boat goes at the front, me, a man who’s nautical knowledge was gained almost entirely from having read Treasure Island, and two people from Keith’s place of work who he didn’t know, and who didn’t know each other. I don’t think they’d even read Treasure Island.
In short, we were all strangers who were about to be trapped in a confined space out of sight of land. Tim looked a bit athletic, in a short and stocky way. Simon was slight, with a cold, and looked out from behind his eucalyptus-smelling hankie with a sort of confused amusement.
Off we set, the wind on our larboard tack and some nervous bonding with sea-shanties.
My lasting impression of that trip was how small that boat got when the comforting sight of England had gone and the comforting sight of France hadn’t arrived yet. The only view was water. It’s incredible how scary that is.
It took thirteen hours to sail over to Fecamp and it was dark when we arrived, so we moored up in the harbour and hit the town. We were four brave and adventurous men, fresh from a battle with the raging sea and keen to down a pint or twenty, then rum and boiling lead and broken glass. Oh yes. We were men’s men who could tackle anything the mighty ocean could throw at us.
So we looked in one bar and didn’t quite like the look of it so we walked on. The next bar we went past looked a bit suspect too. We came to one place that had a stripper in it, so we hung about for a minute or so outside, giggled, and moved on.
We didn’t need that sort of tourist nonsense. We needed a sea-shantie place. A place where men who had battled with the raging elements nodded to each other in mutual respect and never mentioned their shark bites or the bit of mast that was embedded in their leg.
We ended up buying a can of beer each from a little shop, a stupid French beef-burger that fell apart, and some chips. We had this meal walking along the road to the harbour.
The next day I went exploring. There are cliffs in Fecamp and I have a gene that prevents me from ignoring high places if there’s any possible chance of getting up them. I don’t know what the others did.
It’s curious how things go. Not long before the floating death that was a 26-foot long boat in mid-channel, I had been down to Kent and visited Dover Castle. I grew up in Folkestone, a mere 7 miles from Dover, and the castle is buried deep in my psyche. Or rather, it’s the best place that’s only 7 miles from Folkestone, and the bus fare was cheap.
We went on a school trip to see Dover Castle when school trips took you 7 miles away to see an old building, rather than taking you skiing in Vermont for 4 weeks. It’s a fine castle and well worth visiting if you find yourself lost in Dover and standing next to it.
All along the cliffs between Folkestone and Dover there are bunkers from the war. Pill-boxes we called them as kids - and that may even be their official name. Concrete structures where men would once again defend our country from invasion. As a small boy I found them frightening, haunted places. So I was fascinated to discover wartime bunkers on the cliffs overlooking Fecamp. Bunkers built by the other team. Bunkers designed to anti-bunk our bunkers. I went into them, crawled over them, snooped around. They were better than ours. The Nazis had perfected tidy bunkers. They even look clean today, and well cared for. Perhaps the French don’t want to upset German tourists who would be upset by brambly bunkers.
I stayed there longer than the appeal of concrete would suggest. I was fascinated by the fact that my whole childhood had been punctuated by visiting these concrete curios and now, for the first time, I was at the other end of the pitch, so to speak. Germans would have sat in these places singing little songs to cheer themselves up “Ve haff better bunkers than Tommy…Our bunkers are tidier too…And because ve are Germanic and organized…we’ve even brought crosswords to do…”
Travel writers need to be interested in things. Even concrete things.
On the way back to England, Keith and I sat chatting as he steered. The others were asleep. I said that it was good how we’d all got on, and that it was good that Simon, who didn’t seem to be the adventurous type and did seem the most ill-at ease on the water, had decided to come on such a trip.
“He’s a bit more adventurous than he looks”, Keith said.
“In what way?”
“He’s not long back from a solo wander around Vietnam for 3 months.”
“What?”
“Yes, and he said that in his whole time there, he never once met anyone called Charlie.”

A little latitude

“A degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles, or 69.04 statute miles. A minute of latitude is equal to one nautical mile, or 6076 feet; thus, a second of latitude (6076 divided by 60) is 101 feet, 3 inches.”

On June 30th, 1921, an Englishman named Alfred Watkins had a sudden vision that has been known ever since as the “The Old Straight Track.” In a blinding moment of inspiration he saw neolithic Britain as a criss-cross of straight lines, marked out on the landscape by standing stones, sites of pagan worship, ancient monuments and the like. He called them ley lines. People have agued that ancient Britons didn’t have the ability to mark out such perfect lines over such vast distances. Others say it’s pure mathematical chance. Others believe that ley lines are the lines of power that gave Druids an ability to fly. They honestly believe that ley lines contain some form of mystical power. I don’t know. But something has just puzzled me, and being half scientist, half artist and half very bad at mathematics, I thought I’d explore what I’ve just found out.

This is inspired by the comment from Elise; that Ari felt he was in the wrong place. It is inspired by the fact that I have put a new photo of Sarah on my desktop and once again I am overwhelmed that someone with whom I fell in love through her words – her character – turned out to be so singularly beautiful. She is an ocean away and it cannot be through sheer mathematical chance that we found each other. Some force was at work that brought us together, as it seems to bring all true love together. The vine in my engine. A celestial alignment. A mistake of latitude and longitude that initially placed us so far apart and set up this romantic obstacle course. A mistake that needed to be put right. Ari spoke of builders who were building a house the wrong way round. Perhaps the celestial builders had the plans wrong when I was born 3600 miles away from the person I was supposed to be with. Somehow it had to be put right.

We both went through our share of confusion in the years leading up to that serendipitous email. Then all the confusion was gone. It was magical. There were lines of force at work. Dava Sobel wrote the book “Longitude.” I’m going to write about latitude.

The snow in Philadelphia on this latest trip puzzled me. I’m not a climatologist and I tend to work on the idea that the further south you go, the warmer it gets. It works that way in Europe. People fly south for a suntan and north to try out experimental thermal clothing. It’s simple. Philadelphia is a lot further south than Poitiers in France, and therefore it should be warmer. Philadelphia is about the same degree of latitude as Corfu, and in Corfu it only snows about once every 40 years. Amazing but true. One winter a puddle froze outside the small supermarket in Arillas and there was a collection of Greeks standing round it. Some were prodding it with sticks. Others stood back in case it was dangerous. I imagined a newspaper headline, “Puddle freezes, five dead.” Philadelphia, however, gets more snow than you can shake a stick at. In New York it was a battle to maintain even a respectable core body temperature. Corfu does, however, get very wet and windy in the winter. The wind blows off the snowy mountains of Albania and straight up an Englishman’s trouser legs.

There was a cruel draft exploring my trouser legs when that first serendipitous email arrived. It had been three months or so since Sarah had first emailed me. I no longer have the email, but I remember it fairly well. It went along the lines of, “Can I have drawing number 43 please.” The big Cecil B. DeMille moment obviously hadn’t yet arrived, but still, I was very excited to get an email from those United States. We continued in a highly professional manner for several months, apart from in one very simple, touching, and extraordinary way. She would call me Pete. I have worked for a million Editors over the years and they all call me Peter. My friends and family call me Pete. I would smile every time she wrote it. A few emails into our professional relationship a slightly bigger window into the personality of this Editor from afar emerged. She threatened to throw her fax machine out of the window. I like this girl, I thought. I’m not attracted to everyone who threatens to destroy office equipment; it was just that she was so professional in her dealings with me and yet the force of her character would burst through. One word in a business email would make me smile. There was someone very human on the other side of this screen.

The mountains of Albania become relentless around late November. The wind climbs high over the snowy peaks and rushes unencumbered across the Ionian Sea, through the badly fitting French doors of a small house in the Corfu village of San Stefanos and deep into the bones of any Englishman foolish enough to be sitting at a computer. In the winter the village contains about 50 people. In the summer it caters for several thousand, so 50 people get lost among all those holiday apartments. I would go for months without much contact with the rest of the world. My record was 17 days without seeing another human being, even from a distance. I would walk the dogs every day, but I still managed to go 17 days without seeing anyone. By Christmas, I would become hopelessly miserable. The airport is closed for the winter and it takes a lot of money or dedication to get off the island and go see your loved ones in England. I would sit it out. That Christmas, some three or four months after Sarah had asked for drawing number 43, I was at a very low ebb. I was cold and lonely and, looking back on it now, in a laughably bad way. Where were all the Christmas cards? Where were the cheery Christmas phone calls? Where, for that matter, were all the people? And then came the moment that changed a life from one that was lost and lonely and confused, into one that is happy and full and completely right. An email came through. An email Christmas card. A personal email Christmas card from Sarah that she sent to all her friends. She had included me in the list. Me. A man on a Greek Island who was sitting in the cold and crying out for something, and there it was. I don’t think any greeting has ever lifted the spirits of another human being in the same way.

I wrote back and thanked her of course, but couldn’t really tell her that she had just saved me from drowning. I was supposed to be exuding an air of professionalism. I wrote back and thanked her. She wrote back to me. We started the most important correspondence of my life. We were considerate of each other and I came to respect her as I have respected no other person. I fell in love with who she is.

I have written a lot about Corfu over the years and it’s almost all derogatory. People have often asked me why I moved there if it’s so bad. I don’t actually know, but I discovered something today that appeals to my sense of the scientific, the romantic, and the unusual. I am beginning to wonder if Druids could fly along the power lines that are Alfred Watkins’ Old Straight Tracks. I wonder whether lines of force do exist. I wonder if Devine Intervention works in strangely pragmatic ways. I went through life in a confused and basically unhappy state. I didn’t know what was the cause of the unhappiness, but it was there and it wouldn’t go away. I moved to Corfu and it was there that I discovered the answer to all my questions. Sarah. Sarah answered everything for me. She was an ocean away, but closer than anyone I had ever known. Today, while trying to work out why it never snows in Corfu and doesn’t seem to stop snowing in Philadelphia, I looked up the latitude of both places. Philadelphia is 39 degrees, 53 minutes. My house on Corfu was 39 degrees, 47 minutes. As far as north south goes, we were only 6 nautical miles apart. The gods of displaced peoples picked me up from the bottom right hand corner of England and plonked me on a line that circles the globe and goes smack bang through the home of the most beautiful, courageous, kind and loving woman it is possible to meet.

Could the Druids fly along their magical ley lines? I don’t know, but I’ve certainly flown along mine.

Back where I don't belong

Before I catch up on recent events, I’d like to send out my thoughts and love to Sarah’s family. It’s a sad time for them. I am going to write this entry in my semi-sensible way, but I need to send my condolences first. My thoughts are with you.

I abandoned Catholicism at the age of six months. This was a big decision for one so young, but I’ve stuck to it religiously. Now, however, I feel like I’m in a confessional. “Forgive me Father, it’s been a week since my last blog entry…”

I’d like to thank everyone who commented on my one and only submission. I think the later comments were actually written by my old English bank manager, who was very pleasant but gently persistent. “When,” he would wonder, “would I be making another deposit?” Here’s another deposit and from now on I shall keep my account in the black. I used to say that to my bank manager, but this time I mean it. I’m back in France and have little else to do but write and dream of being back with Sarah again. As always, I had a perfect, perfect time. I met again the people who have become my family and my friends. I was immersed in the world of art. I was shown how good life can be. I was loved. I was welcomed. I was force-fed. I was almost sent to Singapore.

I do have a very good reason for not writing. I was doing other things. I was doing things that were exciting and wonderful in a way that writing isn’t. I was, however, giving this blog thing some thought. I sat on Sarah’s porch and did some thinking. I am determined not to turn this into an overt public display of my love for Sarah. I share that with her. I write her emails and you can’t see them. So what then? I tend to look at life from two paces to the left. It’s funnier that way. I wondered if people would be interested in what I see as an Englishman in America. Clichés came to mind (everything is bigger isn’t it), but one should avoid clichés like the plague. And then something happened. Two women rode past on a tandem. They were holding a conversation that could be heard from two time zones away. The woman in front shouted, “I was told she needs more emotional support.” I laughed as only an Englishman in America would laugh, and decided that I’ll just write about the minutiae of what goes on around me. I don’t need to write clichés. I don’t need to describe how big everything is.

Aren’t American menus big! One thing highlighted by the Human Genome Project is that English people lack the gene necessary for understanding big menus. I have discovered that choosing what to eat in an American diner is rather like being given a copy of War and Peace and, five minutes later, being asked to choose your favourite sentence. It can’t be done. I am therefore much indebted to Ruby’s diner in Ardmore for providing fish and chips with Alaskan halibut. It enabled me to make a choice before we got to the point where someone holds a mirror to my face to see if I’m still alive. That’s always a bit embarrassing. If there are any Alaskan halibut reading this, I’m sorry and this isn’t personal, but you are surprisingly edible. English fish and chip shops don’t really go in for Alaskan halibut in a big way. Not at all, in fact. Doesn’t travel broaden your horizons?

The diner in Rockaway, New York, has a menu that makes War and Peace look like Tolstoy wasn’t really trying. It’s not so much a menu, as a fully comprehensive list of things human beings eat. A copy should have been sent with Voyager, though I doubt if the thing would have got off the ground. The waitress was very pleasant and actually seemed serious when she asked if we were ready to order. In a blind panic I chose something half way down page 458. Even the “French fries” came in several varieties and she laughed when I asked for normal ones. I don’t know why she laughed. Perhaps the alternative to normal French fries is abnormal French fries.

It isn’t just the size of American menus that astounds me; it’s the diversity of choice. In Brooklyn I went with Steve on a world tour. We started in a supermarket run by Incas. We then bought cakes in a Russian cake shop/video store. The videos were in Russian. There were Russian people in there. It was a little bit like Russia, but with cakes. Then we went to pick up pizza that was cooked by people who looked Chinese. On the way back we talked about Israel. If I were in possession of a GPS gadget, it would have exploded.

So far I’ve been sent on a relentless tour of Chinese food, Thai food, Japanese food, Italian food, American food. I can’t even eat fish and chips without the fish coming from Alaska. And the chips are French fries.

So I guess what an Englishman sees in America is choice, diversity, and the occasional cyclist discussing the need for greater emotional support. There was also the non-flying car, the poisonous toothpaste and the 25 instant friends that forced themselves upon me while, in a moment of madness, I decided to get my hair cut. There was the shop that contained no mice. There was the advert for a school that proudly announced that it had been “Educating Underachievers since 1962”. You may get these things in depth.

Meanwhile, here I am back in France. On Sunday at 19:20 I caught a plane to Charles De Gaul airport in Paris, but there was still time to go to one more diner. A farewell feast at Deny’s. This time the menu didn’t daunt me because there were far more important things afoot. I was going again. In my strange Professor Steven Hawking Space-Time-Continuum warpy universe, it seems that I leave more often than I arrive. I was at this diner to say goodbye, not to practice my speed-reading or decision-making skills. I was going back to France. A place where the food is cooked by me, and the choices are “dull” or “poisonous”.

Or was I going back to France? The girl at the check-in desk was very nice, but had a strange determination to send me to Singapore. She thought I was going there. Her computer thought I was going there. After my gastronomic world tour, even I thought I might be going there. Sarah was with me and we were polite but firm. Paris would be better. She went away with a hammer and came back to say that ok, I could go to Paris.

So here I am, in France, half way down on the left hand side.

My next entries will be more light-hearted, but my heart is not light. For a few days I need to come to terms with the fact that I am not where I want to be. It’s good to see my dogs again, but that’s it. I am eating a Kit-Kat that has a little panel on the back where a message says “To Pete, From Sarah.” CastAway is playing on the DVD and Tom Hanks has just apologised to a basketball. My dog Tyson is talking to the gas fire. My dog Pansy is on the bed. I’m typing. I’m sad. It takes me about two weeks to adjust to being back here, and I’ve only been back for 40 hours. For two weeks I stomp about and rage that this is simply not right. I shouldn’t be here. When I first moved to France, all I could see was how much better it is than living in Greece. Now all I see is how much worse is it than being where Sarah is. I think France is a wonderful country, but Sarah is home, and I want to be there.

Valentine's Day Massacre

Of the few people I confidently expect to read this thing, three of them already know I’m going to write it. They know because they were present when I made the rash pronouncement, “If I win $20, I’m going to start a blog.” I thought I was on pretty safe ground. I was wrong.

The Old Pine Community Center in Lombard Street, Philadelphia, is an uninspiring building with a flat red brick frontage and a gymnasium/basketball ball court at the back. I tend to avoid places of sporting endeavor, but this night was different. I think I was comforted by the healthy accumulation of people outside smoking. Besides, I said I would go. How often does one get to witness a Valentine’s dance held in a gymnasium? In America?

By the way, I’m English. Remember that. It’ll explain a lot.

I don’t want to say too much about the dance. From the number of people who turned up, I suspect that it’s supposed to be secret, but there were a few notable points. There was free coffee. The DJ was a very long way away. The music was as melodic as a masonry drill. I got to see my beloved dancing. Best of all was a small middle-aged man who did everything with admirable enthusiasm. He introduced himself from across a gloomy table while eating pizza. “She likes you.” he said. “You can tell by the way she’s looking at you.” Sarah tried to explain that we are engaged, but like some imp, he was gone. Before the dust had settled on his mozzarella, however, he was back into the gymnasium with an entrance technique that can only be described as delusional. He ran in (no, really), did a little jump, looked around as though he were exactly what the party desperately needed, and then danced with his arms out like a smaller version of Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music. I think he even twirled. Then he was gone again. “That was weird.” Charlie said.

Charlie explained that these dances vary in their degree of excitement. During one particularly memorable event he was so impressed that he went to photograph gravestones. In the dark. Admittedly, neither Charlie nor I would ever be seen running into a room and twirling like Julie Andrews, no matter how successful an event, but I think on this occasion we were all in agreement. It wasn’t very good. Ten people, two basketball hoops and a masonry drill isn’t going to be very good, no matter how free the coffee. So, as the evening wore on, the needle on the what-shall-we-do-instead-ometer swung past the “photographing-gravestones-in-the-dark” setting and tipped into “let’s-go-to-Atlantic-City”. With the speed and determination of a small pizza-eating Julie Andrews, we were gone.

What I need to impress upon you is that I grew up in the bottom right hand corner of England; a place where no one ever says, “Let’s go to Atlantic City” and means it. So while in America I tend to go round with a child-like sense of bewilderment. I’m sure people here think I’m basically harmless, but not too bright. My jaw falls open and gives me a dropped-on-the-head-as-a-baby look. I entered Atlantic City with my jaw open.

How does one describe Atlantic City? It’s on the coast and seems to be where all the electricity goes when no one else is using it. The term “less is more” was obviously viewed with great suspicion by the town planners, who designed the place to be seen from Pluto. Very tall buildings full of light bulbs. The gaps between the light bulbs are filled with highly reflective surfaces and more light bulbs. We went to Caesars (avoiding “Cleopatra’s Garden of Slots”, as we weren’t there to study the classics, we were there to win obscene amounts of cash) and walked into the casino with a degree of confidence that bordered on the foolhardy. It was at this point that I made my pronouncement that I’d start a blog if I won $20. I was on safe ground. Seriously, what are the chances of walking out of a casino with $20 more than when you went in?

I sat at a slot machine and fed it money like it was a starving child. It turned out to be an ungrateful starving child. It took $10 and didn’t even say thank you. I discovered that other slot machines were of a similar disposition. There were occasional wins of 2 or 5 credits, but basically, it was a game of how long you could last before your $10 was gone. I started to wonder why this place functioned 24/7 and why people kept coming back. I just knew there were people behind one-way mirrors pointing at me and laughing. “It’s the Englishman who was dropped on his head!” Still. At least I wouldn’t have to start a blog.

I took my 6th $10 bill and put it in a machine that had also been dropped on its head as a baby. In a moment of rare altruism, the win indicator suddenly went berserk. It span up past 2, 5, 10, 20 and kept on going. It was still going as I had visions of buying a small private island. It finally stopped on 500. FIVE HUNDRED. I had won $125. I had made $60 profit. I was walking out of there a winner!

I was starting a blog.

Things like this seem to happen in America. Or because of America. I live in France (half way down on the left if you fancy coming to visit), in an ancient farmhouse. There are chickens and the occasional sheep. I don’t speak French. I don’t have tv. Monks have a better social life. But I am here in America for two weeks to be with the only woman I have ever truly loved. To be with the only woman I’ve ever wanted to marry. She found me when I was living in a small chicken-riddled house on a Greek island, and a life that was all wrong and devoid of direction suddenly had meaning and purpose. It was Divine Intervention. She thinks so too. Divine Intervention. Being English however, I tend to mishear almost everything she says and I thought she said it was the vine in my engine. I’ve realized that anything is possible. Finding love on the other side of an ocean. Walking out of Atlantic City with more money that you went in with.

Anything is possible. Even me starting a blog.