Last days of school

St Aldates

Today was Olivia’s last day of school for the semester. Tomorrow is Ally’s last day. It’s a half-day so she and her posse are headed to someone’s house to hang out for the afternoon and say their goodbyes. It’s kind of sad around here. Reflection is setting in.

My cabbie in Penzance asked where we had traveled thus far and after I told him, he said, “You haven’t seen much of England then?” I suppose if travel is just the physical act, that statement could be true. But if travel extends beyond that narrow definition, then I think we have traveled much further in our heads than was physically possible in this period of time. I think we got down to the business of just living in England and that became the travel experience itself. It was hard to picture before we left Madison, how this trip would all take shape once we were here, but in the end, we were just ourselves living in England, a lot closer to Europe than Madison. But the kids slogged off to school all week, Chip went to the office, I grocery shopped, cleaned and washed. We were tired or had errands to run on the weekends, just like everybody else. We ran out of milk just like at home. And we became obsessed with all the same things we love at home.

So what stamps would we claim as our favorites if we were in charge of the rubber stampers at immigration? For me, I’d like a stamp for my new found basic grasp of recent English history, politics and a broader perspective of the American election and the banking crisis. Another stamp for having gone green, as I don’t use plastic bags anymore and I compost. Chip gets a stamp for going green also, riding his bike to work every day, a routine he would like to continue when he gets home (forecast for Madison, 10 inches of snow tonight by report...what’s that now, Chip?). The girls get multiple stamps for having sought out and appreciated English music, comedy, fashion and pop culture and managing to figure out the bogglingly different English school system. The girls also get stamps for new vocabulary, “mocks, form tutor, maths, trousers, nang, cheers and mingin” and for friends called Imogene, Poppy and Polly.

These invisible stamps are indelibly marked in the pages of who we are. We’re actually just a bunch of media obsessed American homebodies who managed to get out of the house in between all our television, music, school commitments and reading pleasures and well done to us for that.

Penzance and Land's End

Time is flying and I am panicking about what I've yet to do. Kids have been sick, and now it feels like I haven't been anywhere! I fled Monday for Penzance, where I was sure to see the ocean and hopefully trek to Land's End. The real one. Actually, a five hour train ride is about all I can do alone without entertainment (in the form of Chip or television). Too far to only go for the day but not so far that the umbilical cord can't stretch-perfect. All this time together the past five months has ruined being alone for me. So much concentrated time together has made me dependent on the kids in a way, the kids might characterize, that indicates my need to get a life. I'm going to have some trouble adjusting when we get home and they don't invite me out with their friends. I'm guessing they'll cut me loose faster than Madonna cut Guy that check for 50 million.



I didn't know, but do now, that the Gulf Stream clips Penzance in particular. It creates a tropical microclimate even in December. I stepped off the train to the port in Penzance. Palm trees, cool ocean breeze, blooming flowers...it was weird in the best way.






The Coast Guard kept a close eye on me during my stay. Below, the dawn view from my hotel room with the Coast Guard boat moored just offshore. The owners are wonderful people who let me leave today without paying because they don't accept credit cards and refused to take all my cash (embarrassingly short anyway). I was on the phone to Chip within minutes of their dropping me at the station (just the best people ever) to get him to put that check in the post this morning.




Yesterday, although it was cloudy, it was balmy for December, with temperatures in the fifties. I walked along the beach trail from Penzance to Marazion, the town next door. Suffice to say, Marazion's beaches are picturesque (a dog walker's paradise) and the town way deceptively farther than I thought. I was near dead when I arrived in Marazion, and desperate for a ride, any ride, back to Penzance. I saw an older woman near a bus sign--hallelujah. Twenty senior citizens and I bounced along the coast on the little green bus back to Penzance, shopping trolleys and one ancient husband flying into the aisle as the driver navigated the winding roads at break neck speed. What took well over an hour and a half to walk had a return trip on the bus of about six minutes. I think everyone but me was bound for the Tesco superstore.





I missed the bus to Land's End because it left from the wrong stall at the depot and I guess all the local people knew, but I didn't. After ten minutes, I suspected the worst. The bus supervisor was there, so I said to him, "Was that the bus to Land's End?" He checked his clipboard and said "yes, m' love." I said, "Well, he was in stall B instead of stall C so I didn't know it was the right bus. Hey, you still have tourists out here in December, you know?" He was embarrassed but had no solution for me except to point at the cab stand. I took the cab ride with a disarming Irish cabbie who showed me the sights and took perhaps more of my money than he should have, the naughty old geezer. "I'd like to show you Sennen Bay,if you'll let me." It was beautiful, but I didn't notice any attempt to turn off the meter for the little diversion. In the end, the view of Sennen Bay was worth any extra money he charged. The bus ride back was free (I didn't ask), so in the end I was a spiritual winner even if fleeced out of some of my cash. The cabbie tried to talk me out of our family trip to Ireland...likely because he was run out of Ireland on a rail for his grifting ways.

Land's End is just that. Breezy and green, the views were amazing and although absolutely everything was closed, including the restaurant (the hotel lobby evoked The Shining for me so I didn't stick around in there) I still managed to kill two hours taking pictures, eating a bowl of soup in the cafe and watching the sun set behind the clouds. Oh, and the fleece jackets are SO much better out there! They grow right on the hillside and you can pick as many as you like, in an assortment of colors, blazon, cornflower and chameleon, sizes XS-XXL.




Self portrait!

A river rescue

Oxford Canal

I didn't have my camera for this day and that's always the way, unless you're a photojournalist. I've been following the extraordinary events of my friend's blog, as she has witnessed two accidents and fire/rescue operations within four days. One rescue in the air and one on land. I add to that today, as I crossed the Thames, a water rescue by bystanders of a drowning person. A first for me in my 46 years.

Allison and I shopped all afternoon and she hopped the bus with her bus pass and all the bags as I made the short walk home on foot. I love crossing the river each day. It's always dynamic and radically changes day to day. The river right now is very swollen and the currents are challenging even for the resident swans and geese who maneuver constantly out of the currents just to stay close to the bridge. Hard work for the water birds this week. It was a pretty mild day today as winter goes, and I always check the river for pontoons and rowers as I cross. Generally, just to mutter to myself, "ya crazy sonsabitches..."

My friends, the tramps of Abingdon Road, are the only other daytime residents of the river banks this time of year where they can drink hassle free all day on the benches that line the path. They're a scrappy bunch of guys who mostly keep to themselves, drinking, pontificating in unintelligible garble and hugging. As per my usual routine, I cross the Folly Bridge and look downriver for my rowers and instead see a most extraordinary thing--a head bobbing in the middle of the river about two hundred yards away. Simultaneously, I see and hear two men who work on the pontoon boats below me running as I've never seen grown men run, the "man overboard" run I think, with orange life preservers up the dock stairs, across the bridge and down the tow path toward the drowning man. I then see with closer inspection there are many life preservers already in the water, floating far from the man whose head now appears to be bobbing under as much as over the water. He is smack dab in the middle of the Thames and swirling in the currents. Wait, now there are two heads. Someone's jumped in to save him.

Well, crap. I know CPR. I don't want to go, but this is England and it's possible I'm the only one who might initiate rescue breathing before putting on the kettle. When Olivia's foot was run over, they brought her a cup of tea. I better go down, I think to myself. I walk down the path and note now there is a THIRD man in the water swimming from the other side, quite athletically to the duo of rescuer and drowning man making their way slowly to shore. The rescuer reaches shore and he and another man drag the drowning man up onto the bank and begin pumping the man's belly very hard, probably breaking his ribs and injuring his spleen and liver, but I'm hoping also clearing the water from his airways. I'm still not at the scene but watching it all unfold. Someone from the opposite bank is yelling, "Breathe for him! Breathe for him!" Shut up, lady, I think. Easy for you to say, you're on the other side. I arrive. The athletic swimmer has made it across and is still standing in the water recovering from what was a fantastic but dangerous swim. Everyone's wet and I see that rescuer, rescuer's friend and drowning man are all very drunk. It's 40 degrees. I'm thinking hypothermia all around. They've turned drowning man on his side and he is definitely blue. I'm getting ready to announce my intentions of starting rescue breathing, as I'm simultaneously considering what blood tests I'll need (hepatitis and HIV surely, possibly malaria, leprosy...) once we've exchanged saliva and blood from my kiss of life....when I hear him groan.

PRAISE SWEET BABY JESUS! I do NOT have to put my mouth on his. I bend down, as the rescuers, including the pontoon boat guy, are starting to panic about what to do next. The drunk guy is screaming, "Stay with us, Woody. Don't leave us!" Can you believe it? Even tramps watch too much TV! I hear the sirens and they are close. I bend down and recap the situation for the rescuers, "Look, he's breathing. He's groaning and trying to talk so let's just keep him warm until help arrives." The rescuers call for jackets. I don't give mine. It's a little piece of nothing that would cover no part of this mountain of a man lying on the ground. This guy needs the electric warming blanket of an ICU but it's England and I'm sure they'll put on the kettle at the hospital. And so people offer up their jackets and although he's still blue, he's groaning and moving and that's fine with me.

The police have run the entire distance down the river path which is admirable and I note their fitness. I'm checking out the police? Focus, Julie.... We all start giving our stories briefly. Mine is that I don't think he was under water for very long, if at all but that I'm sure he's swallowed quite a bit during the rescue. I can't account for prior brain damage due to years of drinking at the river's edge, so it will be a challenging neurological assessment at the hospital. I don't think the water did him much harm today. His buddies bouncing on his abdomen is a different story and I hope he lives to tell about it.

I leave after admonishing the student who is not drunk and still standing sopping wet on the river bank, to get someplace warm before he becomes hypothermic. As I left, a mysterious smoking man in a Norwegian knit hat was telling the police, "He was pushed." Entrigue! Better get Inspector Lewis down here right away.

I got back out to the Abingdon Road just in time to flag down the ambulance for the police. I feel guilty for feeling relieved that I didn't have to suck face with the drunk drowning man.

As I said, Allison took the bus and I was supposedly right behind her on foot....twenty minutes later, I walk in. They thought I was still shopping.

The Business Lunch

Another scratch off for the “to-do” list--lunch in Jericho, home of the Oxford yuppie, with my number 1 blog fan. Chip and I scheduled a “business lunch” at Branca, a nouvelle Italian bistro on Walton Street. It’s a puzzle to me at this point how I continue blogging once this blog is no longer a travel/culture diary. Am I doomed to a life in nursing or can I try something new? My “hating taking care of sick people” thing is what a nurse recruiter might consider a bad fit for most health care settings. Nurse Ratched is a role model. Maybe I need to keep my finger on the pause button for a bit longer.



What better way to contemplate a fantasy alternative career than with a fantasy business lunch? Chip will confirm that I am completely out of touch with reality as regards the business world. Since my parents also worked in health care, my ideas about the business world are based largely in all I’ve carefully studied on television dramas like Dallas and Dynasty as well as the daytime soap opera, The Young and the Restless. As a business professor, Chip sees business as a complicated sociological matrix of industry, unions, technology and a dynamically changing workforce (I just made that up with words I’ve heard him use on the phone). For me, business is an office with a desk, computer and a phone and power lunches, business dinners, early morning planning sessions with coffee and pastries, and cocktail parties after work with “clients”. A parade of social gatherings with food. You are familiar with Darren Stevens and Mr. Tate on Bewitched? Then you have my vision.



I used to love meetings when I was a staff nurse. If they need a staff nurse at a meeting instead of at the bedside, it’s usually driven at an administrative level to introduce an “innovative new strategy of care” which implies cost saving measures for the hospital sure to lengthen hours, decrease staffing or cap a pay scale. They unlock your shock collar and let you leave the patient care area to go to a boardroom with a white erase board and and comfy chairs in an area of the hospital that doesn’t smell like poop, but more like flowers and leather. There I could sit for an hour without having to respond to the unrelenting universal needs of the suffering--sustenance, pain relief, oxygen, emotional support and elimination. Timed well, the inspired and experienced nurse could plan her day around coinciding unpleasant tasks, like weighing her obese patient with the bed scale or getting her post-surgical patient on the bedpan, with her meeting time.
“Right, I just put Mrs. Johnson on the bedpan, Sally. Can you check on her in about ten minutes? And grab a weight on Room 406 if you would? Thanks, you’re a peach.” I’m sure I never did that.



My power lunch started with an Island Breeze Punch or some such, a lovely drink of Campari, limoncello, cassis and lemon topped with Prosecco. We had a great luxurious two plus hour lunch as business people do, and left around 4pm. The restaurant was peaceful between the lunch and dinner crowds. We cycled home at dusk to children wondering why their unrelenting demands for tea had not yet been satisfied.



The Christmas decorations are up. Little house in Oxford is ready for Santa.

Like I said back in February 2007....I love a snow day

Madison snow day in years past

February 2007

I was up at the regular time this morning, got the girls off to school and sat down to check the Internet. I checked the weather around the U.S. cities where I and my nearest and dearest live and noted a remarkably well timed snowstorm in southeastern Wisconsin that might result in school closings. Snow days are few and far between in Madison but not unheard of especially in the past five years. I think the number of driving parents, the increase and diversity of the student population, the snow day once or twice a season is a realistic hope. The key to the Madison snow day is the city bus service. If the city buses can run safely, schools are open. But I suspect a more practical matter weighs heavily in these decisions--whether the teachers will be trapped at the end of the day with screaming parentless children one minute after contracted hours. Have you ever really looked at a teacher at 3pm? They've done their job admirably but it is time for their students to go home. That contract is binding baby, and if there is the slightest whiff of an army of teachers stuck at school with our kids past their working hours, I think things could get ugly fast. I am naturally suspicious and think the worst of people and organizations, which is why I think this.

In any case, any snow day for a friend is a snow day for me. (see above link to a post from over a year ago before my blogging had really taken root). The timing of this storm looked promising, with the bulk of the snow falling during the school day and peaking at 3pm. I hopped on the Channel3000 website and began streaming the live morning show which starts at 5am at home. I kept watch for my friends most of whom still lay in their warm beds, even emailing one teacher friend that I knew would be awake. She emailed back, dubious of her chances. I shared my theory about teachers being trapped with little monsters, and she thought I might have a point although she is one of those teachers who would gladly stay with the little monsters regardless of her contract. I told her to hang in there until 5:50am, an arbitrary time of my choosing. Sure enough as I was typing, she emailed back, NO SCHOOL. She called me minutes later, a teacher with a free day off in the middle of the week! That's like talking to a kid on Christmas morning! We had a good old chinwag about all sorts of fun topics and reveled together in her day off. Everyday for me is a day off, but her celebration is mine as well today. I stayed in my pajamas until 3pm, chatting on Skype with my dad and playing with my pictures on Snapfish.

I love snow days. They are like found money. Stay in your pajamas, don't do anything practical or organizational or useful, Madison. I am with you in spirit.

Another year, another daughter

Posh Spice

Her Italian high heels

A second family birthday in two weeks. This girl came quickly into the world with a pixie-ish face too whimsical to be a Madeline. And so she became Allison Amy. Blonde and blue eyed, reasoned and practical, stylish and sporty--always a genius although we didn't know it. Her nursery school teacher approached us about entering Ally into an early readers study as she'd been identified through a local university. Say what now? She's an early reader? In the shadow of her sister's "Letterman's amazing kid tricks" linguistic skills, Ally went along through her early years unbothered by intrusive, overpraising, highly scrutinizing parents. She's always been a Mama's girl. Took forever to wean her, she still wants to sit with me on planes and trains and up until recently, would set up residence on Chip's side of the bed, complete with stuff on the night stand whenever he went out of town overnight. She's got a face for nicknames. The Beaner, Allyboots shortened often to just Boots, and Chummy. Now she's just Ally to her friends. I can refer to her as Ally but to her face, she's Al or Allison. Sometimes still Boots.

She's a tenderhearted girl, but private about her feelings and determined to hide her vulnerability. It's in her actions that I see the tenderness. She'll always offer me an earbud on plane or train so I can share a song with her. She'll never exclude a friend out of spite or anger and she's got a teflon coating when it comes to girl drama. She loves animals and from age three has dabbled in vegetarianism which I expect to become full blown in college once there's a permanent salad bar option. She's rarely in trouble with us because for her, confrontation is not comfortable. She goes along with most things but digs in vigorously on a few others, which makes it harder to compel her to change anything. She doesn't lie. The brutality of truth as I try to keep up with the fashion trends. I find myself desperately seeking her approval....of my outfits. And that's where our family turns into American Idol. Olivia is Paula. She always finds a nice thing to say and has a hard time being critical, even when it's warranted. Chip is Ryan. He's just here to keep the show moving and change the subject if things get heated. And Ally is Simon. Just yesterday, and it pains her to even have to deal with my amateur attempts...."You have way too much goin' on there, Mom."

She's newly independent since August. Carrying key, wallet and bus pass, she rides the city buses and strides alone through town in the late afternoons wearing her iPod and stopping occasionally for milkshakes, school supplies or baguettes. Her wit has sharpened with the introduction to British telly, and her style has grown even more mature. High heels and skinny jeans...definitely new. There's sure to be some backsliding when we head home to the familiar, but she's returning to America as Ally Extra. Goodbye to Chummy. I'll miss her... but she did always kick and steal the covers.

The Les Mis experience

Ally's birthday request was to see a show in London and she chose Les Mis. For my part, although I've seen it once before, I started crying by the second song and stayed weepy until intermission. I pulled it together until Eponine took one for the Revolution. I could feel the giant drops hitting my blouse again. Occasionally, Chip would reach over and pat my knee because he figured I was crying. Generally, he was correct. It's tragic and epic and getting caught up in the story is part of the fun. Even the ensuing headache that comes with holding back the full blown sobs is almost worth it. It's just like the Steel Magnolias or the Brian's Song headache. I wish they had a little cigarette girl who came around at intermission and sold Advil.



After the show, we strolled Camdentown while waiting for our dinner companions. Excellent bargains, for the very young and hip of course.





A nod to my friend Nina. I can't take pictures of food like she does, but we went for pizza at Marine Ices in Chalk Farm. Sprinted to Paddington with three minutes to spare for the last train to Oxford. Tomorrow, we worship the birthday girl. Better get my rest.