Lots has been happening lately.  I’ve been on journeys.  I’ve started to re-write the book (I can hear those sighs from afar…).  My family has come from thousands of miles away to visit me.  But today is all about food, because I’m participating in World Blog Surf Day, and like many other expat bloggers all over the interweb, I’m going to take a few minutes (and a few words) to consider something vitally important, on both a physical and a cultural level.

Ten years ago I visited Britain for the first time.  My parents and I toured the country for two weeks in a blue Ford Focus; I sat in the backseat listening to a Cranberries CD over and over again and writing stories in a green spiral-bound notebook.  We came from California, where friends brought us eggs freshly laid from their free-range chickens, or lettuce from their organic vegetable farm; I picked my own oranges and watched my grandparents crack macadamia nuts with a machine in the garage.  And we’d heard jokes, every one of them, the gist of which was: Haha!  The English can’t cook!

But the funny thing was, there we were, and we weren’t having a hard time finding a good meal anywhere.  We ate the best Indian cuisine we’d ever tasted; we had Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese.  And pasties!  Cornish pasties!  After a long hike along the coast a pastry full of hot meat and creamy potatoes is exactly what you want, especially when it’s just started to rain with such force that the parking lot has flooded and turned the stairwells into waterfalls.  We had bread and cheese, glorious cheese; and ate more chocolate, I don’t know why, than seemed humanly possible.

Ten years later, and here I am again in England, living here.  The English are no longer the focus of quite so many food-based jokes; we’ve learned better, it seems.  But what I like best, and what’s most interesting, I suppose, is the European approach to eating.  Here’s what I mean: you can stretch a meal out.  And there’s no better day to do this than on Sunday.  The Sunday Roast is the classic way of doing this, and it doesn’t get more English than this: a hunk of meat (beef, pork, chicken, or lamb), potatoes roast in goose fat (or butter), vegetables (maybe some cabbage, carrots, parsnips, leeks), all slathered in gravy.

The thing that’s nice is not so much the hearty sustenance (though I’ve no objection to it!), but that it’s more of an event than a meal.  A Sunday lunch (or dinner) is a social engagement of a very special nature; casual, gentle, slow-paced.

How to Have a Successful Sunday Lunch

1. Plan ahead; but not too far ahead.  Mention to your friends on Friday or Saturday that you’re thinking of doing lunch, and would they like to come?  But don’t buy any of the ingredients until Sunday morning.  Planning is over-rated, but also, you’ll get fresher stuff.  Go to the butcher, not the supermarket, if you can.
2. Don’t start cooking until your friends start to arrive; that would be silly (remember: planning is over-rated).  They’ll be late anyway, which means you have the morning free to do with it what you will.
3. By this time, everyone will be starving.  Serve some crisps and a few drinks.  Commence the cooking!
4. Forget a crucial ingredient; take a stroll to the corner shop and hope they’ve got what you need.
5. Several hours later, the food will be ready, and boy will you be ready for it.  But to wash down all that meat and grease, wine!  Lots of wine!
6. Remember halfway through the meal about pudding.  Something quick–a fresh fruit crumble is always nice–that you can involve your guests with.  Have them get their hands dirty making the crumble while you nip to the shop to get cream.
7. Continue with the wine-drinking.  For maximum effect, do not do anything even remotely productive for the rest of the day.
8. (Tailor these instructions to suit your needs.)

And now, without further ado, I send you off to your next food-based destination: Nurinkhairi.  Happy surfing!

❧

So I know no one wants to hear about my illness, but the fact is, it’s the most significant thing that’s happened in my life over the last few days and I can’t help it if it colours my perspective.  More importantly, I have eaten, since Monday, a bowl of cereal, a tiny tub of yoghurt, two bowls of plain pasta, a bag of lightly salted crisps, and several slices of toast (sometimes with butter, sometimes without), so you’ll have to forgive me if I seem to be fixated on the trite, but I want to bring up a few things today, in no particular order:

1) First, let’s discuss men who wear sweatbands (I mean the ones that go round your wrists, not the ones round your head, though that would be weird on a whole different level) whilst doing something ordinary and untaxing–say, walking down the street eating a pack of crisps.  Wearing a perfectly respectable shirt and jeans.  And flip flops.  Not trainers, but flip flops.  (Did you ever see anyone play sport in flip-flops and look anything but silly?  Come to think of it, did you ever see anyone play sport in flip-flops period?) Because I just don’t understand this one.  Maybe in the 1980s this was cool (it made you look preppy, sporty, ready-f0r-anything?), but in 2009, it just makes it look like you’re either a) suffering from worryingly overactive sweat glands, in which case why is that crisp Jack Wills polo so miraculously dry? or b) strangely concerned with dripping sweat into your crisps or indeed, c) both.  So I guess what I’m trying to say is, boys, get a grip: either on a tennis racket, in which case, please feel free to wear wristbands to your hearts’ content, because Roger Federer does, and it seems to work for him; or on reality.  You look silly.

2) Shops.  Let’s talk about shops for a moment.  I don’t mean the high-street, high-fashion variety, or the second-hand charity kind, or anything in-between.  I mean, I sometimes don’t know where to go when I need to get something very basic, like, say, Vogue (just this once, don’t ask the inevitable “need?” question–remember, I’m ill).  Not either of the two corner shops within a stone’s throw of our house, certainly–though I can go to either if I need the basic ingredients for a meal, and one or the other if I’m short on newspapers or booze.  Not the Co-Op down the road, either, apparently (I stuck my head far into the magazine rack to check, but all they had was Cosmopolitan and about a billion tabloids, so I bought the Cosmo and spent a furious half hour on the couch wondering how the editors get away with it all and, if they really know all the secrets to success, happiness, self-confidence and a sizzling sex-life, why anyone bothers to buy the magazine anymore–shouldn’t we all be out fucking and shopping?).  I struck gold at the newsagent across the street from the Co-Op, unsurprisingly, but here’s the thing that gets me: the newstand seems to carry just as much food, and as many household odds-and-ends, as the Co-Op.

I always thought that newsagents, like newsstands, were temples to the printed page, where glossy magazines and dozens of newspapers in dozens of different languages stood proudly on display, while cigarettes and the occasional bit or bob hid behind the counter, but this is obviously and vastly untrue.  There’s even one on the Cowley Road with a post office and, allegedly, a dry-cleaning service.  I’m just not sure that in the US, there’s a comparable complexity of shops.  Sometimes I want to pop into Boots, which I’ve had a hard time learning is not, despite appearances, synonymous with CVS, to buy something I think I should be able to get there–a magazine, a house-cleaning product, laundry detergent–only to be whisked by the crowds past baby clothes, expensive perfumes, women standing idly at designer perfume counters, seven aisles that encourage you to shampoo-condition-colour-moisturize-stylize your hair, and a thousand other things I didn’t know I could use to improve my appearance.

3) On a similar note…when I’m sick, there are two things that I crave invariably: lots of love and attention, and an infusion of brand-name artifical American goop.  The former has been bestowed well and kindly upon me by the Man, who has been nothing short of angelic these last few days; but the later has proven far trickier to get hold of.  Specifically, I want Gatorade, I want PowerBars, and I want saltine crackers.  The first and the last I can more or less find replacements for, but there is not, I don’t think, in all of England, a single PowerBar.  Ordinarily, fake food shot up with vitamins, made chewy and artifically flavourful, wrapped up in shiny plastic, would not particularly appeal to me, and I certainly wouldn’t mourn its absence in a country which has given me so many other good unwholesome foodstuffs, like Jaffa Cakes and Curly Wurlys (they do know how to name things here).  But PowerBars are like comfort food for times of physical woe, and when I’m sick I get particularly irrational about this.  Obviously.

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Didn’t start very encouragingly. Boxed red wine in the station (“it’s like being with a rugby team,” the Man kept saying). An impromptu train switch at Reading. The night already folding in on us. I’d been at work, then caught in a downpour, then at home, then late, then not late (a kindly friend had lied about the train time so I wouldn’t miss it). It was suddenly cold again; what happened to the almost-summer of last week? Another world. I needed gloves. And maybe socks. On the tube a toddler bounced between his mother and his father, every shift on the tracks a new hazard. Many stops later (or maybe not so many; I forgot to keep track), a part of London unidentifiable to me. We walked against the wind. Fulham. You hear so much about Fulham, but until last night it was just another London name.

Past a nursing home. Everything looked suburban. Not expensive but empty, tired, devoid of spirit. Around a corner, a sudden pub. We ate round a long table. Potted shrimp, scotch eggs, salmon, terrine, soft bread. Mashed potatoes, curly kale, slabs of bleeding beef. The Man looked especially happy. “Are you happy?” I said, looking over the top of my red wine glass. “Meat,” he grinned, reminding me of my dad’s 50th birthday (picture: a barbecue pit by the beach, some friends, and nothing to eat but pounds and pounds of tri-tip, which my mother had bought thinking it was the manly food to get). I even got past my fear of meat that hasn’t been cooked so well it looks black and enjoyed the tenderness (a little).

We sat on couches after. Shared an espresso, the Man and I, with a sugar cube. Back on the tube. We all shared no-hot-food-on-the-bus-back-to-Oxford horror stories (there are many). We were on the bus back before midnight. All so civilized. At St. Clements we alighted. As always I felt cold. I had to pee. I’d fallen asleep on the coach and my neck felt bent the wrong way. At home, relief, the sighs after a long night, but also a bewildered and delighted sense that neither of us had once considered screaming in frustration, this time.

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We’ve become these people that, like, act almost kind of cool, and adult, and stuff. We lounge around with our Macs, in our slightly hip outfits (him: Croc sneakers–though please don’t picture these, because his are actually really, surprisingly groovy plus he bought them from a man on the street for the price of two pints–khakis, and a Banana Republic jumper; me: black skinny jeans (yes, I finally caved), slightly ethnic scarf, long cardigan (according to the Observer magazine, cardigans are “in”)–actually, the image almost disgusts me. We cook breakfast, have friends over for casual lunches. I sit under a duvet drinking lots of tea and eating clementines (and I’m not the only one) while he catches the second half of the Spurs v Portsmouth game. When he comes home we watch a few episodes of 30 Rock and order a curry.

“You’re not eating the nob of your sausage?” he says when I remove the end of my lamb and place it back in the container.
“No,” I say. “I got bored with it.”
He picks it up, eats it. I’m chewing and gesturing wildly, like I have something really important to say.
“You’re going to make a joke about the nob of my sausage,” he says. I swallow.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I am.”

(Maybe not so adult.)

❧

I think I’ve been dropped into the middle of a circus. We’re making turkey pie. Without a bottom, because it’s hard to make a pie “without a soggy bottom, and we don’t want soggy bottoms.”

This is after my very first English Christmas. We went to church in the morning, which is not something I regularly (or, frankly, ever) do (the Man opted to stay at home and help cook the Christmas lunch). The church was a beautiful English village church, wood-beams, stone walls, but inside, it had been carpeted, which made it feel too soft and comfortable; too much like the modern establishments of my own youth.

A pair of boys handed us a bright leaflet with carols to sing. Scattered amongst the traditional songs were photographs of smiling children from disadvantaged backgrounds in the Middle East. The children were all called things Mohammad or Mehmet or Moshe and in spite of having families from Islamic or Jewish backgrounds every single one was holding a cross, or decorating a Christmas tree, or pointing at a picture-book bible.

The other leaflet, a green folded paper, let us know when we were meant to say things like, “Glory be to God,” and, “Jesus is the truth, allelulia!” Midway through the service a woman stood up to distribute gifts to a few children in the audience, each time asking the child, “and what have you done for me today?” and each time receiving the rueful mumbled response: “Nothing.”

And she would say back, “Nothing, exactly. You’ve done nothing for me, but I’m giving you this gift anyway. So this is a token of my love.” Like most good religious messages, it turned out to be a metaphor: God loves us, the woman was saying, even though we’ve done nothing to deserve it.

“Oh yeah,” said the Man when I returned home, feeling I’d been suitably guilted for the day. “That’s standard C of E. That’s not really considered religious.”
“Have we really done nothing to deserve God’s love?” I said, forgetting, in my religiously-coloured guilt, that I’m not even sure what I believe about God. “And how on earth is that not religious?”

As it turns out the English have just as curious a relationship with religion as the Americans. As far as I can tell, the Church of England is not so much a Church-with-a-capital-c as an establishment with some tenuous and primarily historical links to some tenuous and primarily historical religious beliefs. But it’s pervasive. If you go to a church wedding in England every single member of the audience will know not only the words to all the hymns but, more impressively, will know when to stretch certain words that don’t look like they should be stretched, or when to take a very long pause that isn’t written into the music, or when to forgo breath because everything needs to be squeezed into one beat. They all know this because regardless of whether their education was public or private, they grew up singing these songs in school.

You couldn’t, on the other hand, logically sing a song with the words,

Remember, Christ, our Saviour
Was born on Christmas day
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray

in any American public school and not risk an uprising of mothers quoting the constitution. We have that famous so-called separation between church and state, you see; but actually, the English are the ones with the real separation. God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman (or any other carol) isn’t seen, as the Man so aptly pointed out, as religious–just as traditional. If half the audience on Christmas morning had stood up and pronounced themselves Jews, or Athiests, I don’t think anyone would have blinked–or thought it odd that they were sitting in on a Christian ceremony.

Our relationship with religion in the states, however, is just as bizarre. We claim to have severed the tie between religion and governance, but elect our leaders based on their religious ideals and affiliations (any political pundit will tell you that if you want to be president, you need to seem to have a good Christian family, regardless of how religious you are). We inspire an actual fear in our children that saying the words “Christ our saviour” means that we believe in something that might be objectionable to someone else, but one of our nation’s most impressive artistic legacies, gospel singing, is a form of worship. What we forget, I suppose, is that we founded our country based on having the freedom to worship any way we wish, not on creating a secular society.

***

But regardless of the religiosity, or secularism, of English society, this was Christmas as I have never seen it before. For the first time ever, I set out snacks for Santa before going to bed (a glass of port, a glass of milk, two mince pies, two carrots–”why the milk?” I wanted to know; “in case Santa wants a choice,” the Man informed me). The next day at breakfast we opened our stockings; after church we spent hours (no, I am not exaggerating) opening gifts, adhering to strict rituals of present-distribution. We commented on missing the Queen’s speech. We took a very lenghty nap after a very heavy lunch. We played cards and sipped gin and tonics. We ate crackers and fruit and cheese for supper. We went for a starlit walk, our noses numb from cold.

Today I sit on the sofa in the lounge, South Pacific on the TV in the background. I hear a woman singing: “And they say I’m naive to believe anything from a person in pants…”

And because we are adults, but still not very adult, the Man and I giggle.

So yes, I missed my family this Christmas, and even the incongruous California warmth (when I was a child it angered me that Christmas came every year so hot and sunny); but here we are, and we’re very, very happy, and we’re together, which, as I told the Man when he suggested that Christmas was ruined because he had a cold (only a man would say that) is the most important thing of all.

“Here,” the Man has just said to me. “Taste the beer-and-cheese sauce I’ve just made,” and waved a spoon at me. I think it’s time for me to rejoin the circus.

❧