Twas the Night before Christmas.....

....and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for the local population that were...well...panic buying.

You see I can see the local supermarket from my living room window as a sit on the floor, wrapping presents, listening to Classic FM and sipping coffee (I am a woman, so naturally I multitask). I can see the people of Balham piled into their cars (ranging from the small city cars to the huge range-rover that is so favoured by some well-off people in South London) desperately queuing to get into Waitrose. It is mayhem. People honking, turning their cars into strange angles, yelling at each other and even on occasion driving up on to the pavement out of frustrated desperation. God knows what kind of battle will be going on inside!

Let's imagine that shall we? Brussel Sprouts are flying through the air, mince pies are being crushed under foot, a woman is clutching a slice of Stilton and weeping with relief and two mothers with toddlers on their hips are arm-wrestling for the last tub of brandy butter.

Ridiculous! I hear you say? Not so! I have actually seen two old ladies fight over the last tub of brandy butter in Marks and Spencer a couple of years ago. What is ironic about this situation is that brandy butter is extraordinarily easy to make. It is basically brandy, butter and sugar. I remember when I was at university, making it myself and then, without a care for the dangers of heart disease, eating it straight out of the tub for several hours each day.

I also have first hand knowledge of what it is like to work in food retail during Christmas. For around a year, I worked at a delicatessen serving cheese and slicing salami. When Christmas came, we would open early in the morning and customers would be lined up in a queue to get in, that would stretch down the whole street. When the doors opened there would be a mad rush for Stilton and Cheddar cheese. And invariably we would run out of food as the day wore on. 'What?!' one woman once shrieked at me, 'There is no more Cropwell Stilton?! But what shall I serve on Boxing Day?! Our Christmas will be ruined!' 

Of course no one's Christmas is ruined, even if they don't have the gloriously yummy Stilton to eat on Boxing Day, just perhaps lighter in calories. 

As I write this, the horn honking outside has reached a crescendo at the appearance of a large John Lewis delivery van stuck on the street. Yes, the Christmas traffic has reached crisis point. The driver revs his engines and honks his horn impatiently, like his display of motoring frustration will make any difference to the Christmas-food-obsessed shoppers who have backed up the traffic for a mile in either direction. My husband is laughing so hard at all the honking (schadenfreude), that he has actually ended up knocking his knee on the coffee table in our living room. 'Merry Bloody Christmas!' yells an irate man out of his car window. Tensions are bubbling over and tempers are high. After all, those Pigs in Blankets aren't going to cook themselves!

And the most strange thing is that I know in around 4 hours time the area is going to be deathly silent, the roads will be empty and when my husband and I sleepily stumble to Midnight Mass at 11.30pm, the only people out will be a few drunk revelers and some church-goers. The people of Balham will be snug in their houses, watching TV, trying to get their kids to go to sleep, putting out a snack for Santa or tucked up in bed - all of them with a fridge full of food.

So without trying to sound trite, let's remember what Christmas is all about. Yes, in part it is about stuffing your face with food and unwrapping presents, but it is also about giving gifts to others and spending some quality time with those people who put up with you when no one else will. ie. your family. And...it is also about the celebration of the birth of a little baby and the joy of his parents. Now if that is not worth celebrating, I don't know what is!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Just when I think I have seen it all...

Along comes dogs. Dogs who can drive. And the crazy humans teaching them. Click on the link below to see our canine friends in mini coopers driving around like they had evolved to do it...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20614593

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Especially to my family in the US!
I am currently wondering if I can celebrate Thanksgiving as an Anglo-American without....a turkey! Or any form of roasted fowl. I have some cold pizza in the fridge which might make a good meal if re-heated in the microwave, but somehow I don't think it will be keeping in with the usual family tradition.
My husband and I just got back from Japan last night after a 13 hour flight and we are currently suffering from a 10 hour-time-difference jetlag, so roasting meat is not a high priority. About 10 hours ago, my bed looked so good and sleep came so easily, but at around 4am this morning, our eyes snapped open and I was the most alert I had ever been for the middle night ever! I could have recited poetry on command, done some serious mental maths and written an 3,000 word essay before the sun had even risen - I was that awake.

So we went to Japan, for 3 weeks....and I am not kidding...I seriously feel as if my whole outlook on life has completely changed. But, before I start writing about the most awesome trip...ever...let me recap on what exactly Thanksgiving has been to me the last 30 years.

I grew up in London, the child of American parents. We weren't actual citizens of the UK until I was much older, so for all intensive purposes we were pretty American for my early years. We celebrated Halloween more than anyone else at my school. When I was little, people didn't 'trick or treat' much in the UK, so my mum would dress up with me in our flat and basically just give me sweets and carve pumpkins and then try to scare my dad when he came home from work. It was great fun. I loved roasting the pumpkin seeds in the oven and sucking all the salt off them later.
And of course, we celebrated Independence Day (4th July) and Thanksgiving each year. Thanksgiving was always a big deal. My mum would buy a huge turkey, our cat would go crazy over the smell of cooking bird for around 4 hours and we always ended the meal with a pumpkin pie. I loved every minute of it and always gorged myself on turkey, gravy, caramalised onions, cranberry sauce, corn bread and wild rice pilaf. My dad would teach me how to draw a turkey by tracing around my hand on paper and we sometimes even made pilgrim hats and Native American Indian headbands complete with fringed bright coloured paper feathers. Of course, this is all before I had any idea about the human rights abuses the Native American Indians suffered at the hands of the pilgrim settlers, but hey! It was my time of innocence.
We often used to invite our close British family friends to Thanksgiving and sometimes there were as many as 12 or 15 people in our small flat. We pushed tables together and all sat squeezed in on mis-matched chairs. I loved sitting at the table and watching everyone eat and talk loudly. It was nice to have so many people in our lives and to watch them all enjoy themselves while eating a huge meal that my parents and I had spent hours preparing was, heart-warming.

And of course being British as well as American means I get to have a big British Christmas as well! Throughout my childhood, my mum used to cook strange things for Christmas as less than a month before she had been roasting turkey for Thanksgiving and so wanted to eat other dishes for Christmas day, but after a few years we developed a tradition of going to visit some family friends (who were English) for Christmas Day and Boxing Day. We would engage in a never-ending orgy of eating and drinking traditional British seasonal food. Which led to me probably being the only American child to develop a taste for Christmas pudding and brandy butter. So you could say that I got the best of both culinary worlds.

Then I grew up and experienced the awkward joy that is the 'Work Christmas Party.' In fact this year I have a ridiculous number of Christmas parties to attend at my workplace (due to the fact that my students are also organising events). I believe the total number is 10 parties/dinners. I will be well and truly sick of turkey and bacon-wrapped-cocktail-sausages by Christmas Day. Plus there is, of course, all the Christmas family events as well. Due to the complicated nature of my family on my husband's side, I will be attending 3 separate Christmas family gatherings, possibly even 4. But hey, I am fan of celebrations and this year I attended my first Hanukkah lunch and I would probably even celebrate Diwali if someone invited me to! Just maybe go easy on the turkey.

As the years have gone by I have begun travelling on the path to starting my own family. I married an Englishman and we incorporated him and his mother (also English) into our American Thanksgiving festivities. My parents, after living in the UK for more than 20 years, are now very Anglicised and take great pleasure in celebrating British holidays and cultural events. The last few Thanksgivings we have had have been smaller and I had the disconcertingly melancholy feeling of leaving my parents' house at the end of Thanksgiving. I have in the passing years grown up and become another guest. Instead of waving goodbye to friends at the end of the day, I now kiss my parents and leave to go to my own home with husband. So in fact, we seem less American now than when we moved to London all those years ago and I have had to adjust my identity from American to British, child to adult and daughter to wife.

However, this will be nothing compared to the adjustment I will have to make come January 2013, when I will have to transform from turkey-eating-party-goer to dieting-hard-working-exercise-freak. How else will I lose all those pounds I gained from eating so much turkey!
Ah well...

The Last Rose of 2012

I snapped this Rose last weekend. I think it is probably the last one of this year. Winter is coming!

It's a TV Jim, but not as we know it....

What big TVs looked like the last time I had one...

So I recently purchased a new laptop and collected it on a Friday about two weeks ago at the Tottenham Court Road branch of PC World. I originally bought the computer online and after a few calls to customer services and a long walk in the rain to several different stores, I finally managed to pick it up. After that long-winded and traumatic experience, I did not actually turn the computer on until last weekend. It has been sometime since I bought a laptop and I was very surprised as to how advanced these pieces of machinery have become.

After years of using the same laptop that has faithfully served me well, I needed to buy a new one. This is, of course, because my old computer has got so slow, that it is quicker to write in this blog with a pen and paper than type online. Some technophobes would say this would be no bad thing, but after waiting so long for a document to open, I often just give up and go make a cup of tea instead. Yep, I was ready to join the technological revolution and get some up-to-date hardware. Also, my husband wanted a new computer and his patience is even shorter than mine, so we bought the laptop TOGETHER.

This big joint financial purchase is like a precursor to having children (except with less forgoing of sleep, nappies and responsibility). I reckon that if we can buy a computer together and keep our bonsai tree alive, then we can graduate to a pet and then maybe be trusted enough to care for a mini-human. The jury is still out on our bonsai tree. I am not sure it likes us that much, as it droops a lot and sheds brown leaves all over our coffee table no matter how much I water it.

So, off we popped to our nearest computer store: PC World in Brixton. As soon as we entered the store, I felt uneasy for a number of reasons. First of all, without being rude about Brixton (I do love the area), the PC World in the area feels like one of those stores where you could buy a piece of electronics technology and then be robbed immediately after walking out the door with it in your arms. Don’t get me wrong, Brixton is no way near as dangerous as it used to be and it is a seriously funky and interesting place. It has a lot of great restaurants and a really cool cinema. But…it doesn't always feel so safe. Maybe I feel this way about the area, because, when we have come to the corner of Cold Harbour Lane outside the KFC restaurant, we have routinely been offered drugs.
‘Want some E? Some Charlie? Skunk?’ they ask my husband, as if he needs an illegal substance just to be able to cope with being seen with a woman as strangely dressed as me (bright coloured tights, long tangled mess of hair). Sometimes they use names for drugs that I have never even heard before. I’m not real up to date on my contemporary illegal drug lingo, what with me being someone who only really takes paracetamol when I have a headache and drinks the occasional rum and coke in a pub. Caffeine is my strongest drug of choice. The streets around the PC World store, however are free from obvious signs of drug dealing but are also poorly lit, so you have to carry your new and expensive purchase across an expanse of dark concrete parking lot. Basically, it is prime real estate for muggers.

Then there is the fact that half the stuff in the store is exactly the kind of items that juvenile, bored, frustrated and opportunistic youths were looting during the London riots about a year ago. I am not totally unsympathetic to the plight of these youths. Being young, unemployed and de-motivated in an expensive city like London during a recession has gotta suck. But none-the-less, when my husband walked into the store and exclaimed excitedly, ‘Oh my god! Look at the size of those televisions!’....All I could think was: People bothered to steal these things during the riots?! They risked getting criminal records for 32 inch plasma screen TVs! It is just a screen for god's sake! You could look out of the window for much less hassle and money!
I guess the TVs probably did not mean that much to the looters, it might have just been the idea of stealing something or taking an item that was a symbolic statement of affluence. A pair of designer shoes would probably have done just as well.

Of course I am not sure that PC World in Brixton was actually looted in the London riots last summer. It just has that sad atmosphere of a palace of treasures surrounded by city dwellers who can never gain entry to it's gilded doors. I honestly wondered how many of the giant TV screens the store has sold to the neighboring population. Brixton, like a lot of areas of London, is filled with many poor people, gaggles of students sharing houses, young professionals with flatmates, middle-class families and a few sort-of rich people. I wonder how many of them have giant plasma TVs? Brixton lately has become more trendy and gentrified, but that does not always translate into extra cash available for expensive electronics. Also, how many people have enough space on their walls for these home cinema screens?

What I was sure of, while standing in the store, was how much TVs have changed since I have owned one. Yes, that is right, I do not own a TV. I last owned one right after university when I was 21. Even then, my flatmates and I never paid the UK TV licence and so we couldn't watch live TV and only used the unit to watch DVDs (usually scifi movies or period drama series). When I lived with my close uni friends (Rosa, Bella and Dee - the names have been changed to protect the innocent!), we had one badly functioning TV that only played VCR videos. We only had one video tape: Lord of The Rings, The Two Towers. The TV sat in the kitchen and we used to turn the film on while cooking dinner and eating breakfast or even while having a break between writing essays on Greek mythology (we studied Classics at Uni). We must have watched the movie about a 100 times. I can practically recite all of Frodo's dialogue from my daily dose of Elvish drama. I have of course watched TV at my parents' house and I currently watch films on DVD on my ancient laptop, but never had I seen such big TVs in a store before. I have obviously fallen behind the times when it comes to technological advances in TV viewing. They even come in 3D now! I felt a bit like a Victorian looking at a series of brilliant new washing machines while still clutching my trusty washboard and old mangle.

My husband excitedly exclaimed, 'They are so big! Some of them are the size of a dining table! You could eat off this one!' He eventually grew tired of ogling them and we soon graduated to not-caring, 'Pff! What a waste of money.' He scoffed. 'You'd have more fun going to the cinema.' (which is now almost as expensive and also comes in 3D ironically)
Off we trotted to the laptop section. After getting lost in the 'Speaker' section and the 'Digital Camera' aisle and then passing the 'High Performance Laser Printer' shelf, I began to feel a little overwhelmed. There were so many gadgets all around us and only the newest and best technology on sale. I began to feel that familiar feeling that all retailers love shoppers to feel. They wait in the stores, looking out for that moment, when you experience shopper's anxiety. Basically shopper's anxiety is when you are confronted with so much materialistic choice that you feel as if you should own it all. In fact you feel obliged to own it all. You think you might be missing out if you don't own it all. We needed all this stuff in PC World. To survive in today's technologically modern world we need to have a laser printer and some HD speakers with 3D screens and surround seismologic sound that also comes with your own personal robot who bakes eggs while whistling Christmas carols and heating your bathwater (okay, so I invented that last gadget to illustrate my point). All the electronics items lining the shelves were being marketed as if they were essential items that we must have. It was extremely important that we own iPhones, earphones, speakers, a TV, iPads, Galaxy tablets, external hard drives, bluetooth headsets and something called a smartpen and gaming mouse.

Except none of the above looked like they were built to last. If I buy a toaster, I want it to last a good 10 years (I need to have my bread crispy, my friends!) or more. I don't see the point of upgrading every couple of years. I feel the same about my laptop. I don't want to constantly to be having to buy the latest technology. I want these items to be built to be used over years of time. It would save me money and definitely be more environmentally friendly. Of course, I know that computer manufacturers probably don't care about this and PC World just want my money. But I also don't like feeling that I need all these gadgets to survive modern life. Sure, I don't want to go back to the washboard and mangle (I like my washing machine) and I am not a technophobe, but there is no need for gadgets to be instigated into every area of our lives. We should be able to mix our own cake batter with a bowl and wooden spoon instead of one of those posh electric cake mixers that I see advertised in cook books all the time. Put some pumping arm-action and effort into that cake for god's sake!

I guess I am just in favour of being choosy. Some things I do the old fashioned way, others I use technology for. I wrote this blog post on paper first in a pretty little notepad while lying on a blow up mattress at my parents' flat. Technology allows me to distribute my thoughts to a wider audience. Otherwise, each and every one of you would be getting an individual blog post in a letter from me delivered by Royal Mail. So while my husband and I use our new laptop, do let me know if you'd like an old fashioned hand-written letter, I'm getting out my feather quill pen!

Oh, and since starting this post, our bonsai tree is looking a lot worse for wear and may actually have died. I guess a pet is off the cards then.....

Dreaming of sunnier days....

The winter weather has me dreaming of my holiday in Florence four months ago....

Facebook trying to connect to us without a computer...

So the above video is an ad for Facebook. Not that Facebook needs to be advertised since most people have heard of the social networking site already. There are those people who are on Facebook and there are those who aren't. And so far I think each individual in those two camps are probably fine with their 'status' as a user or non-user.

So who is this advert for?! Shareholders? Is it trying to raise the profile of the company so more people will invest in it? Or is it trying to improve the reputation of Facebook? It is as if the above advert is saying: See! Facebook is not a website where people spy on their friends, it is not a place where your privacy is routinely violated or where minor acquaintances project their deeply private inner-most thoughts on to your news feed. Nope, Facebook is like a chair. A bridge. It brings us together. Reminds us we are not alone in the universe. 

Sorry if I sound too sarcastic or hypocritical. I like Facebook. I have a profile on Facebook. I surf Facebook several times a week. I connect with friends and family who live on the other side of the world through Facebook. I post jokes and funny messages and sometimes I even express my frustration with, say, public transport or the IT system at work. BUT...I am aware of what it is. It is not real life. Seeing my friends' profile on Facebook is no substitute for seeing them in the flesh. Or even receiving a letter from them in the post.

My Facebook feed is mostly made up of news from different arts organisations, Time Out London updates and funny photos posted by George Takei (famous as being Sulu from Star Trek and more recently as a gay rights campaigner in California). I use Facebook as a way to find out what to do in London on the weekend or to email my friends who constantly lose their phones.

So when I see a video like this, I think...well...there are so many other ways to connect. Everyone in this advert is connecting without the use of Facebook and they all seem to be having a great time doing it (except for the one crying woman standing in her kitchen!?). Why use Facebook if you do have a spare chair for a friend to sit down on? Or a bridge to climb over, or a sunset to look at, or a plane to fly in? This ad just serves to emphasise how much more exciting real life is than anything that you can find on a computer.

Now on that note, stop reading this blog! And go for a walk outside!