Goodbye, summer. Voice from the past still rings true

Deep in the middle of unpacking, I came across two yellowed pages of newsprint, kept since the summer of 1981.  It's a column I wrote during the cherub programme, a summer school run at Northwestern University for kids between their junior and senior years of high school.  The Medill journalism programme director, George Harmon, chose to read this aloud at our closing ceremonies.

It was one of the proudest moments of my youth.  Which is why, no doubt, I've kept these pages through all the moves of the past thirty years.  Here's the column:

August.

One more month of real warmth in the midwestern sun.  One more month of fests and celebration.  One more month 'til school.  Looking around, I'm thinking I ought to prepare myself for some tearful goodbyes.

Free time.  Sleep until noon and party to the wee hours of the morning.  Soap operas.  Game shows.  Love Boat reruns.  Hours of purposeless talk on the telephone.  Sitting still just to feel the air conditioning rush over hot skin.  Hopping in the car to go for a country drive.  Shopping.

Vacations.  The ocean.  The mountains.  Anywhere far enough away from home to make it different.  The excitement of exploring a strange city.  The peace of dawn in a beach town.  Disneyland.  Suitcases.  Airplanes, busses, cars and feet.  Packing to go home.  Tears.

The sights.  People watching,  Caravans of kids on bicycles.  A few million different shades of green.  Flowers.  Roller skates in the park.  Convertibles.  The ice cream man, watermelon and a barbecue pit.  Lawn mowers, car washers and sun bathers.

The preparation.  Back to school sales.  New notebooks, unsharpened pencils, pens that still have caps. New clothes.  Coats tumble out of storage, shorts tumble in.  Hello sweaters, dusk before dinner and homework.

Feet are dragging.  Brakes are screeching.  None help stop August's mad rush towards September.  The older the month, the faster the speed.  

Pick up your feet.  Don't try to stop the race, just settle back and enjoy the ride.

Pausing from house move madness, it's time for Macbeth

A week later than planned, I got my lovely evening of communal entertainment on the grass.  Not the Olympic closing ceremonies, nor the Blur concert, but a six-man production of Macbeth on a basic stage set up on the lawns of The Vyne.  It was magnificent.

I’ve never enjoyed Macbeth more.  Part of this, I confess, is that we were watching a tightly edited version that came in at exactly two hours.  All the famous bits remained, but much detail and back story had been trimmed to keep things moving.  After all, as one of the actors said to us afterwards, most scholars now think the plays are so long, and have so much repetition, because the original audiences wandered in and out.  Shakespeare couldn’t have imagined an audience sitting in rapt silence, giving complete attention.  When that’s what you’ve got, why not trim the play for a more straightforward delivery?  The result, in this case, was a fast-paced drama with the feel of a modern action thriller.  No time to get bored and, more importantly, not enough time for the effects of sitting on the ground to seep into your bones.

Although, if you have to sit on the ground, this is a damned fine place to do it.  The Vyne is our local National Trust property, just two miles from our new place.  (For an earlier post about the house, click here.)  Its Tudor, red brick heart is graced with a classical portico of white stone, the first ever put on a private home in England.  This formal façade looks out over the North Lawn, which stretches down to the river, and beyond that, pasture and woodland.  The actors built their stage … a simple wooden platform with a castle tower as a backdrop … at the bottom of the lawn, just before the river.  It was a gorgeous setting, although the actors’ concentration was challenged by two flocks of wild geese landing with a chorus of honks, and various other waterfowl chattering in the twilight. 

Birds or not, we certainly had no problem with sound.  Though we arrived late, we discovered that the first third of the lawn was reserved for people who only had blankets.  (Further back, lawn chairs and folding tables proliferated.)  Thus we ended up 10 feet from the stage, able to hear every word and see every expression.

This rough and ready style is probably a lot closer to the way these plays were originally performed.  (Except for the aforementioned editing, of course.)  Outside of places like The Globe, Elizabethan and Jacobean companies often set up in courtyards of coaching inns, or great halls of noble homes.  A small band of men played all the parts, including the female ones.  They made no attempt to be convincingly female, besides the dresses.  But, let’s face it, if a man’s going to have an easy time with any of Shakespeare’s women, it’s going to be with Lady Macbeth.  We all know who wore the breeches in that relationship.

The acting style was a bit over-the-top, at times excessively dramatic.  But, like the stage and the setting, it added a flavour of authenticity.  When you’re belting it out to people at the back of the lawn, it’s all about big voices and big movements.  We probably noticed it more because we were the equivalent of the groundlings, a stone’s throw from the action.

Groundlings stretched on tartan with a picnic hamper full of Marks and Spencer goodies and bottles of Australian chardonnay.  There, I suspect, a rather vast improvement on our theatre-going forebears.

When it was all over, our multi-functional acting troupe switched hose and doublet for shorts and tee shirts and disassembled their own stage, while chatting to us about their interpretation.  We had been impressed, then we were charmed.  No question about it, we’ve discovered another “must” for the summer social diary.

At last, it's ours. Roots sink deep with the marital home.

At 10:30 yesterday, we got the call.  Monies had transferred, legal papers were all official.  Without leaving our desks, we had become homeowners.

It wasn't so much joy as contentment that washed over me.

I am a nest builder.  This was obvious even as a young woman when, forced by sorority house tradition to move rooms every quarter, I'd need to make sure my new room was completely decorated before move day ended.  Moving in with my boyfriend was one of the happiest, and most monumental, decisions of my life.  In the two years that have followed I've revelled in a wonderful relationship.  But I have hated living in temporary, rented accommodation.  Unable to put things on the wall, no point in decorating, no sense cultivating the garden.  A whole home life lived in temporary expectation, like a plant confined, root bound, to a pot, when it really should be in the ground.

And now, home.  Not just any home.  The marital home.  Chosen carefully, with every expectation of establishing ourselves there until the downsizing of our advanced years.  A home big enough to fit all our stuff.  A blank canvas with magnificent decorative possibilities.  A walled garden with enough room to challenge me, but not so much space as to make me a slave to horticulture.

Unexpectedly, a modern home.  For all my determination to end up in a picturesque village property, reality won out.  I've learned my lesson from the constant worries and maintenance of the 200-year-old cottage I lived in when I met Piers.  I've had enough of old world charm, and am rushing headlong towards the delights of high-tech insulation, windows that tip in for cleaning and every room pre-wired for television and ethernet.

In the value-for-money stakes, there was no contest.  We're getting more square footage, for less money, than any comparable property we viewed.  The floor plan is beautifully designed, with lovely touches like glass in the doors between rooms, to allow you to contain the heat while letting light flow through, or the granite kitchen counters with the power strip that pops out of a hidden hatch on the island.  It spreads over three stories; one of the spare bedrooms provides a roomy "man cave" for Piers. And for me, an office over the garage, so home working becomes a bit more formal and it's easier to separate the job from life.

The garden is surrounded by high brick walls in the same pale yellow as the house.  Just a swathe of grass now, I'll spend all winter sketching plans for what it might become.  Around the patio and the front of the house are beds ready for planting.  And plant, I have already done.

Pot bound roots isn't just an analogy for me.  I have a platoon of pots I've carried with me from Thames Cottage, nursing them in anticipation of a real garden.  In they went this afternoon.  Released from captivity, allowed to sink roots deep.  (If they can get through the thick clay I've discovered forms the basis of my land. I have a lot of soil improvement to do.)  One plant was more important than all the others.  A medium-sized hosta, light green leaves.  An unexceptional plant to look at.  But my own family roots are bound up in it.

My grandfather grew the ancestor of this plant in his garden in Bellerive Acres, a neighbourhood in suburban St. Louis, in the '50s.  When they sold that family home, my mother dug up sprigs of the host to take to their retirement house, and to plant at our place.  For 40 years, that hosta lined the walk to our front door.  When I left the house for the last time, I scattered some of my mother's ashes in her garden, then I dug up a sprig of that hosta, wrapped it carefully, put it in my luggage and brought it back to England.  I've been nursing it in a pot ever since, waiting for today.

And now, spade in hand, I'm digging in my soil, in my garden, planting my ancestral hosta, outside my house, shared with my husband.  At last, I am truly home.

Blur, The Specials and my Olympic let down. A lesson in the danger of assumption.

I never claimed to be cool.

Since this blog's inception five and a half years ago, I've written 13 opera reviews, more than 20 reports on exhibits at major museums, done a couple of entries a year on theatre and taken you to a hefty number of Michelin starred restaurants.  In all that time there's been just one popular music concert.  (Springsteen in St. Louis.)  It's never been my thing.  When I love a band, I have difficulty justifying the expense and hassle of tickets to see a performance that rarely sounds as good as a CD on your home sound system.  And if you don't love someone, then what would be the point?

Little did I know that starting point would put me on a collision course to have a deeply disappointing end to my Olympic experience.  More than most people ... I should have stayed home.

As an employee of sponsor BT, I'd managed to snag tickets to the closing concert in Hyde Park, taking place in parallel to the closing ceremonies.  We'd had a one-day window before tickets went on sale to the general public.  I was in a hurry, I didn't do any research, I just purchased.

Several bands were on the agenda.  New Order.  Fab.  Knew them from university days.  The Specials.  Never heard of 'em.  Blur.  No clue what they sang, but knew they were big in the '90s and very aware of one of their members, Alex James, who makes gourmet cheese and hosts "The A to Z of classical music" on classic FM.  But this was billed as an Olympic closing ceremony event.  So I made the assumption that this would be some huge, communal watching of the closing ceremonies taking place across town.  Since it was in Hyde Park, in the best tradition of country house "last night of the proms" concerts, we'd spread picnic blankets on the grass, eat lovely food, drink wine and be entertained.  I assumed the bands were warm up acts to the communal viewing, a few songs each before we got down to the business of the big show from the Olympic Park.

I had precisely 10 minutes in which I lived this fantasy.  The big screens were tuned to the BBC.  We all cheered when Prince Harry arrived.  100,000 voices around me joined in the national anthem.    Then Madness came on with Our House, and everyone started singing along.  Fabulous.  Although I wished everyone would sit down.  And then ... off went the BBC and on came Blur.  I was furious.  And disappointed.  But I'm not stupid.  By that point, I'd figured that's what was coming.

I'd started to clue in when we entered the park around 6.  New Order was playing.  Stuff I recognised.  Lovely.  But it wasn't a scene of gracious picnic blankets.  There wasn't even any grass.  A huge area had been covered with wood chips because of the traffic.  Turns out BT London Live had been hosting bands here for two weeks.  Most people were standing up.  It was hot.  And dusty.  And it all looked a lot more like those music festivals I see on TV, those ones where I wonder why any idiot would subject themselves to the physical discomfort and crowds.  Certainly not like any event on the grounds of the local National Trust pile.  Still, we managed to spread a blanket and a couple of people went off in search of drinks.  The queues were 45 minutes long.  Yes, you weren't allowed to bring liquids into the park for security reasons, yet getting any liquid was an endurance test.  My mood was souring.

Then The Specials came on.  They sounded a bit like UB40, but more discordant, jarring and generally irritating.  Hillary, who IS cool, explained that they were a ground breaking forerunner to the aforementioned more popular, but less critically regarded, reggae crossover band.  Now, to be fair to the performers, a live outdoor concert is not the place to hear music for the first time.  The sound is bad and the environment is uncomfortable.  But I didn't hear anything that was making me consider an iTunes download.  Halfway through their set, I wondered how soon I could leave without the people I was with thinking I was a complete nerd.

The answer was five songs through the Blur set.  Unpleasant music + thirst + tiredness + the inability to sit down = I don't care if everyone thinks I'm an old woman, I'm out of here.  I walked to the tube grateful, at least, that I was getting out ahead of the crowd, but really irritated ... at myself ... that I'd wasted the money and the time on something I could have predicted I'd hate, had I done my research properly.  And feeling particularly sour that my lovely Olympic buzz had been killed by this last night disappointment.

Fortunately, my husband (who'd come down with a cold and thus avoided the whole adventure) had taped the closing ceremonies for me, which I've been watching while writing this.  Not a patch on the opening ceremonies, but plenty of music I liked and recognised.  Eric Idle and the roller skating nuns, frankly, was so magnificent as to eclipse any other disappointment.  And I was happy to note that I had much of the night's running order on my iPod, including the youngest and newest of the bands.  (One Direction's You Don't Know Your Beautiful.)

So I may not be cool, but I'm not the grumpy old woman the Blur concert made me feel.  Right?

Summer turns up just in time for the Olympic sailing

My Olympic sailing tickets were the ones that excited me most.  Despite the wettest spring and summer on record, I had a dream.  Seaside.  Sun.  Sails.  It would be just like the Caribbean, but a day trip from Basingstoke.

Unlikely, but that's pretty much the way it turned out.

Sailing may not be the best spectator sport (it is often hard to tell what's going on), but it wins the general atmosphere prize.  Start with pure, natural beauty.  The little beach town of Weymouth sits on a bay sheltered by the peninsula of Portland to the south.  White cliffs topped by emerald green gazing land stretch to the east.  A stretch of public gardens called The Nothe, built around a Victorian fort, served as the viewing grandstand.  While you could see the races from many points on the coast this bit had been fenced, secured, wired with jumbo screens and sound and provided with lots of amenities.  That's what spectators got for their £55 tickets.  That ... and the fact that the race course was directly in front of you.

Sun and warmth is no good for sailing without wind, of course, and we got lucky there.  It was the finals of the women's Elliot 6m.  (Basically, small yachts, crewed by teams of three, in head-to-head competition rather than sailing in a big group.)  A stiff breeze blowing inland made for what commentators called the trickiest sailing of the tournament.  For spectators, that meant thrills and spills like one boat literally stealing the wind out of another's sails, the Australian captain getting pitched into the water and the spinnakers, emblazoned with national flags, showily full as the boats headed towards us on the straightaway before the finish.  We watched the Finns beat the Russians for the Bronze before the Australians lost to the Spaniards in the gold medal round.

Though rebranded from yachting to sailing in the past decade to make it more egalitarian, there's no denying this is at the posh end of the Olympic spectrum.  At the top of the Nothe Gardens stood a purpose-built bar, decked out like yachting watering holes the world over, serving up jugs of Pimm's and bottles of chilled white wine as fast as the boats were zipping across the water below.  The food stands also went upscale.  You could choose from spit-roast porchetta on ciabatta, chicken and chorizo wraps or organic beef burgers.

Amusing.  And a relief from the usual big event junk food.  (An even bigger relief that we weren't forced to endure global sponsor McDonald's high fat fiesta.)  But it does emphasise one unfortunate fact of these Olympics.  There may be some heart warming stories about athletes from the wrong side of the tracks, and I've heard stories about getting school children from poor schools to experience the excitement.  But what I've witnessed after three events, most obviously at the sailing, is a resolutely upper middle class experience.  Which is no surprise.  The only way to get tickets was online, with a Visa card.  While tickets came in a range of prices, the £50 to £100 range wasn't unusual.  Add in transport.   Around £30 a head for us to get up to London for events ... though your ticket did come with a London transport pass once you got inside the M25 ... and £50 each for us to get down to Weymouth.  And then there's the food and drink while you're there.  Add in a souvenir programme for £10 and a tee shirt.  The most basic is £18 but you can get that at Sainsbury's; most of the nice shirts were £30.  You get the idea.  This was not an outing for the cash strapped.

I'll let the organising committee wring their hands over that one.  Back on the lawn at The Nothe, I was soaking up the sun, revelling in the atmosphere and thinking that a day out at the seaside doesn't get much better than this.  Hard to believe that today, it all comes to a close.  Years of anticipation and it was all over in a flash.  I'm so glad I got to take part.  Especially in the sunny bit.

London, be proud. You're doing one hell of a job.

As mentioned in the last post, this is one of the most cynical cities in the world.  It's part of the English character to be negative, cutting and skeptical.  It's the obverse to that famous sense of humour; the dark side is necessary to bring out the light.

The national character laid the groundworks for the Olympics.  For years, the chatter went like this:  Anyone who was smart would leave the country, we were wasting ridiculous sums of money, the public transport system would collapse, a shame Paris wasn't saddled with this hassle, etc, etc.  Meanwhile, a silent majority was buying up all available tickets and stocking up on union flags.  Now, the games are here, they're magnificently organised, we're winning lots, and the proud-to-be-British movement that started swelling with the Queen's jubilee is reaching a sustained, red, white and blue climax.

We managed to snag tickets for two events this past weekend, beach volleyball on Friday night and fencing on Saturday.

Beach volleyball is taking place in a temporary arena set on Horseguards Parade, a military parade grounds tucked between the neoclassical offices of Whitehall and and the green, urban lung of St. James' Park.  From our seats we got a breathtaking panorama of the London skyline.  There was Big Ben (for you pedants, that's officially the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, as Ben is the bell itself) and the back windows of Downing Street.  There the London Eye, there the Shard, there a part of the facade of St. Paul's, and over our shoulder Lord Nelson on his column in Trafalgar Square, with a union jack on his hat and a gold Olympic torch for a cockade.

Yes, the Olympic Park is lovely, but for me one of the highlights of these games is seeing how the planners have worked the historic, magnificent fabric of our first city into the events.  Swimming in the Hyde Park Serpentine, cycling up Jane Austen's Box Hill and ending at Henry VIII's Hampton Court, archery at Lord's Cricket Grounds and the magnificent equestrian arena incorporated into the splendour of the Palace at Greenwich.  Nobody can doubt we're showing off the place to best advantage.

We're also running with a strange, uncharacteristic combination of German-like efficiency and American-style cheerfulness.  Even the most clueless couldn't get lost with the army of uniformed volunteers keeping things on track.  Paths from public transportation to the venues are clearly marked and cleared of traffic, security queues are efficient and move quickly, London transport has obviously laid on more trains.  We left the fencing at Excel centre as several other events let out.  Tens of thousands of people heading for the train at once.  I was expecting pandemonium.  Instead, volunteers were ready to organise orderly queues, which weren't really needed since the trains were coming one after the other.  Change at Canning Town ... train for Waterloo already there.  From leaving our seats to arriving at Waterloo:  20 minutes.  Nothing short of miraculous.  Across all this efficiency, place an overlay of carnival spirit.  Everyone's in a good mood.  The percentage of children in town has skyrocketed, but they all seem to be behaving.  Most people are draped in national flags or wearing goofy hats.  London's usual melange of languages is even more diverse.  The sun's even shining.
There's only one place I've ever been that feels like this, and most English will cringe when I say it.  It's Disneyworld on the Thames.

Of course, in theory, this is all about sport.  So what is going to an Olympic game actually like?  Radically different from any sporting match I've ever attended.

In the audience are a small percentage of people who are actually passionate about the sport.  But the majority aren't bothered; they just wanted the once-in-a-lifetime experience of being here.  Tickets need to be purchased long before you have any idea of who's playing.

Thus, the organisers put on a show that's as much about entertainment as sport.  For both sports, once we cleared security we were in a holding area with food, drink, shopping and activities.  At the volleyball, a sand sculptor dazzled.  At fencing, kids could suit up to have a go with the foils.  Beach volleyball features a swimwear-clad dance troupe and a throbbing '80s-heavy soundtrack for the breaks.  The stadium announcer doubles as cheerleader, starting Mexican waves, getting people on their feet for set points and generally whipping the crowd up to the frenzy this sport likes.  The fencing stage is white strips trimmed with coloured lights in an otherwise darkened arena.  Very Star Wars.  The pre-show entertainment here features a military band whose tunes include the soundtrack to Pirates of the Caribbean and a ballet troupe choreographed to Pulp's Common People.  Helpfully, the pre-show at both venues also included video on the basics of the game, and at fencing you could even buy an earpiece to listen to fight commentary.  Essential because, unlike beach volleyball, this sport demands silence during the action.

Get past all the flash, of course, and you're watching some amazing athletes.  Even if you're not an expert on the sport at hand, it's impossible not to admire the fitness and be amazed by the moves.  On the sand, we watched the American women defeat the Swiss to reach the semi finals.  In the next match, a scrappy Italian men's team kept us on the edge of our seats as they kept saving seemingly impossible shots to bring down the reigning gold medalists (also American).  Over at the Excel centre, the Americans took on the Russians for the bronze in the women's epee team finals, and won, followed by the Chinese versus the Koreans for gold.  (Gold to China.)  The grace, speed and menace of this sport makes it a spectator winner.  Though we enjoyed the volleyball, we thought the circus atmosphere ultimately detracted from the sport, while at fencing we were more able to focus on the skill on display.

Next Saturday:  sailing.  I can't wait.