Saturdays in our house are a kind of homage to smug liberals everywhere.  The recent discovery of the East Oxford farmer’s market makes it worse.  It used to be Sundays, but the Observer just isn’t as good as the Saturday Guardian, and by lunchtime we’re sitting at the kitchen table reading columns out loud to each other while we eat our locally-grown vegetables and freshly baked bread.  It’s almost disgusting.  No; it is disgusting, but endearingly so, don’t you think?

One of my greatest Saturday pleasures is Tim Dowling, the front-of-magazine columnist who writes about…well, nothing, really, and writes it well.  These last few weeks his pieces have been rather lackluster , but I eat them up even so, and I always, always want to root for him, especially when he writes about googling himself (am I secretly hoping he might take the practice up again and find my blog?  Yes, maybe.  So what.) and discovers there are people out there who think he’s a twat. He is not, as far as I can tell, a twat.

And then, the other day, I had a revelation: part of the reason I’m so enamoured of Dowling (apart from envying his ability to turn the boring into the amusing) is that he’s American born.

I came to this revelation whilst watching the recent episode of Mock the Week with Tom Stade as a guest.  You need to know two things about this:

1. I had not previously heard of Tom Stade, and;
2. American accents and Canadian accents SOUND THE SAME TO ME*.  Maybe I should be more discerning, but I’m not.

So I heard Tom Stade speaking and I had this weird thought: aw, another American.  And every time he said something funny, I laughed louder than I did for Frankie Boyle and co., and every time he said something almost-funny-but-not-quite I laughed anyway, and then I realized that this is my own brand of patriotism, and I’m somewhat relieved to have found it.

My patriotism has been missing for awhile now.  I meet fellow Americans in bars and at dinner parties here, and sometimes they’ll say, but honestly, don’t you miss the US? And I’ll have to admit that what I miss most is not the beloved nation but my weird, lovable little family and the weird little ranch where I grew up.  They’ll name chain restaurants, routines and traditions, products you can’t get here, and I won’t feel that warm fuzzy feeling I probably should.

I thought I was weird.  But now I know: give me an American writer (/comedian/actor/radio host/etc) living (or at least performing) in the UK, and I’ll support him (or her) with the passion of a true patriot.

*Upon futher investigation, I learned that Tom Stade is Canadian, not American.  So before writing this post I double-checked that Dowling is, as I had always suspected, a fellow citizen.

❧

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!

❧

Two years ago today I arrived in Oxford.  I can still recapture the feeling in my breast—not the feeling upon arrival, but the feeling an hour after, walking from Jericho towards town.  I retraced the line that the taxi had taken, made my way towards Christ Church Meadow, where girls in summer dresses were sunbathing, and boys lay reading in the shade.  The first really glorious day of the season, I’d heard.  The sky certainly looked the part, all Mediterranean azure blue.  The feeling I had was what I can only describe as freedom: independent, and as yet unfettered by human ties, memory, history.  This day could have been my first on Earth, if I’d wanted it to be.  The girls in their sundresses specters; watching me, envying me as I envied them.  The tourists (and already I felt separate from them, I was separate in that moment from everyone, and also strangely open to them, connected through my separateness) taking photos, posing before the great stone face of Christ Church, lounging on the walkways, resting on benches.  A jogger or two, passing me by.  There I was: someone with no past and no future, no childhood, no family, no education, no knowledge, really.  And what happened after was not so much a reinvention as a distillation.
I made my way across the city; how imposing she was, how beautiful under the sunlight, how golden her stones and welcoming her gardens!  It was the first and only day in my life, perhaps, that I had not known what would happen: not known where I would be five minutes from now, even—for we cannot predict our movements in a new geography.  Now, I would not go back to that feeling willingly, but then, it was perfect, and with everything I did, everything I saw, I was building my own world.

We met, of course, at a pub; if you were going to write a story for yourself, whereby you came to Oxford and fell madly in love, would you choose any other meeting-place than an old tucked-away tavern, with low ceilings, strong cider?  Hidden from the street.  Only accessible by two alleyways.  There I turned to him and we spoke for the first time.  My coming to Oxford is synonymous with my falling in love.  No way to separate the two; and why would you want to?

The night was long, and full of shadows.  Past the Radcliffe Camera, viewed for the first time under a midnight sky.  The smell of books wafting up through the grates.  We wound up, he and I, at a dingy bar off the High Street, where we have never since been, where I kissed him, or he kissed me, and in that moment of kissing, the freedom was lost forever, but in its place something better, something stronger, grew.  No longer was I untied to this place, history-less, loveless, separate, alone.  It was me and I was it.  You cannot foresee something like that at the time, of course, but you can just begin to feel the edges of it.  You can think, as you wake in a strange bed the next morning, to another blue sky, another day full of golden-stoned structures, that something is happening that you are powerless to predict or prevent, but then you simply forget it, let it happen, because the way that he offers you his phone number on the envelope of an old electricity bill, the way that he kisses you just before you get on your first Oxford bus, take your first trip as someone who belongs here, dissolves all else.

To think in two years I have seen hundreds of Oxford days, each one of them taking me further away from that moment of arrival.  To think that we have shared hundreds of Oxford days.  That to mark this day, this anniversary, I take the day off work, we go to the pub at midday and share a drink.  We let the time slip away from us completely; have bacon sandwiches in the afternoon, repose in the lounge.  The day covered by bright grey clouds.  In the evening we get on a train; this is an ordinary day, an extraordinary one.

❧

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.

❧

For those of you interested in reading me warbling on about living in the UK, check out my expat interview…

❧