BT or not BT, encore

Our BT phone line suddenly stopped working. When Holly called about this, she was promised that a technician would come to look at the line in four days. Hours later, the line was working again. In fact, it was ringing every couple of hours to tell me there was a voice message. The message was a BT operator calling to say that BT had taken a report that our phone wasn't working and they were looking into the problem. But until the phone started working, how was I to get the message?

This operator had a lovely Scottish accent, and I played the message three times to hear again how she said “phone.” There's a vowel sound that I can't reproduce, rather like the vowel Canadians have in the word “out.” I used to walk down the street in Toronto trying to say it. “Out and about.” I'm not bad at languages, but there are some sounds that refuse to come out of my mouth.

As for my silence over the last few days, I've had a bout of intestinal distress which left me severely cramped for one day and then exhausted for days afterward. There wasn't much to blog about except for the color of the ceiling I stared at or the programs I listened to on BBC four. (If you're going to be sick in bed, though, do it in Canada or Britain. The radio programming of the CBC and BBC is much better than anything on offer in the U.S.)

Travel anywhere results in swallowing new varieties of microbiology, and relatively innocuous bugs can make you sick if they're new to you. Or so goes the theory. Americans expect to get sick with “Montezuma's Revenge” when they travel to Mexico and drink tap water. But what spirit wants to wreak vengeance upon foreigners in Britain? I blame Boudicca. I am recovering from a bout of “Queen Boudicca's Revenge.”

I am behind on my story writing, behind on my novel chapters, and only barely caught up now with my teaching. Next week, I travel to Germany. I won't be posting much here for a couple weeks.

Wind Shaking the Barley on Kilburn High Road

Our cultural events for this week were a film, "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," and an historical walking tour of the nearby Kilburn High Road.

"The Wind That Shakes the Barley" is an excellent historical drama set during Ireland's struggle for independence. We saw it at the Tricycle Cinema, a theatre that was founded by Emma Thompson, who tapped her Hollywood colleagues for donations and raised the millions necessary to again provide a cinema to the Kilburn area, which had once been home to Europe's largest movie theatre (about which more later).

Good heart-breaking drama often leaves me feeling wrung out, and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" certainly had that effect. But as I told Holly, I have some built-in protection against the emotional impact of films. I'm a storyteller myself, after all. As I watch, I'm always thinking, "What's the worst thing that could happen next?" Since, sure enough, that's what will happen, I'm ready for it. I don't fall into the trap of thinking, "Oh, no! Surely he won't do what I fear he's about to do, will he?" Of course he will. That's how this whole story-making business is done.

The poet Marvin Bell recounts finding a very old how-to-write-fiction book. At the back of the book, there was a multiple choice test. Given a story situation, the reader who has studied the book is asked to choose the answer that best represents what should happen next in the story. "The gimmick was easy to spot," Bell says. "The correct answer was always the cruelest one."

"The Wind That Shakes the Barley" makes cruel storytelling choices aplenty. It's also a very good cinematic history lesson. It left me really angry at the British Empire. At the end, if there had been any 1920's British Imperialists in the lobby of the theatre, I might have punched one of them in the nose. I guess it's a good thing for me and for them that they're all dead now. Serves them right, too.

========

Our free walking tour, led by Silver Cane Tours, began at the Kilburn tube station (which could be called the Kilburn el station, since the trains through this area run on elevated tracks rather than underground). Kilburn High Road is an ancient Roman road. During the middle ages, pilgrims on their way to St. Albans would have to pass through a section of the road where dense forest allowed cutthroats to hide among the trees and waylay travelers. To get through this bad neighborhood --- Shoot Up Hill --- the pilgrims would stay at the priory, Kilburn Abbey, until their numbers were great enough that they could safely dare Shoot Up Hill.

Across from the Kilburn station on the brickwork supporting the elevated track is a mural depicting, among other things, H. G. Wells and his crashed time machine in Kilburn. The mural is a product of the Signal Project, an effort by a collective of grafitti artists who, as our guide said, pursue with religious intensity the goal of having grafitti art recognized and valued. Another figure in the mural is the "Mother of Invention," pushing a pram. I'll have to go back and take some more time to look at this work.

Some of the other things we saw on the walking tour:

The Black Lion pub, with a listed interior. (The U.S. equivalent would be "having an interior that is in the national register of historic places.")

Crook Undertakers, a very old family-owned business and the origin of the expression, "I'm feeling Crook."*

*Actually, no. This was our guide, Simon, having a bit of fun. But Holly and I, as ignorant yanks, didn't know enough about the claim to be the least suspicious of it. Fortunately for us, Simon did not attempt to sell us shares in the Tower Bridge.

At the Tricycle Theatre's Kilburn High Road entrance, there is a mechanized sculpture with a glass window. If you put fifty pence into the slot, the curtain behind the window opens to reveal a city skyline, the facade of the theatre, and little cars passing by on the street. Lights come on in the miniature city.

The Tricycle's live theatre occupies a special niche. They perform other kinds of shows, but they have a tradition of developing performances that dramatize official inquiries. A dramatization of a Guantanamo Bay inquiry is a recent production that has since gone on the road.

Further south on Kilburn High Road is the State Cinema. It opened in 1937 and could seat 4,000. There was a grand front entrance for the upper classes and a side entrance for the plebes. An enormous chandelier modeled on the chandelier at Buckingham Palace decorates the foyer of one of these entrances. Guess which one.

The interior of the State Cinema is still gorgeous, with elaborate ceilings in relief painted light and dark blue, white, black, and gold. But there are no movies shown there any longer. The State is a bingo parlour now, with slot machines in the foyer. Gambling brings in enough revenue to keep the building beautifully maintained.

"We think of London as a one-river city," said our guide, "but actually it is a city of twenty-three rivers." We went to have a look at the number three river of London, the Westborn. Well, it was more of a listen than a look. We stood over a manhole cover where we could hear that, yes, it sounded like there was a river down there. The Westborn feeds the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park, but like many of London's rivers, it runs most of its course under the streets now. No wonder the Thames is the only London river anyone thinks of.

We saw The Animals War Memorial Dispensary with a bronze relief dedicated to the animals sacrificed in the Great War. The guide noted that there is another Great War memorial to animals depicting a dog, a horse, and a mule and bearing the inscription, "They Had No Choice." That might be a fitting inscription over the graves of conscripted human war dead, too, but for some reason that particular motto has never been chosen for honoring people.

Next to the Animals Memorial is a tin chapel that is fitted inside and out like a naval vessel. It is unlovely, but not unloved. The priest who skippers her is applying for protection as a listed historic building, and I suppose that if the alternative is yet another news agent or fast food outlet, the tin shack with port holes on the doors might was well remain.

Our last stop was the site of Kilburn Abbey, where we saw a flint-and-mortar wall with a marker identifying it as "Kilburn Abbey 1134." The guide noted that the construction materials were of the sort that the Normans liked for church building, but he wasn't sure that the wall was genuine. He said it might be "1940's cheese." A bit further on, though, there was a pile of cut stone rubble that the guide thought was more likely to have been part of the Abbey.

A stretch of the winding country lane that leads to the Abbey from the far side of Kilburn High Road is still called Abbey Road. Yes, that Abbey Road.

Odds and Ends

At the Queen's Park Day celebration, the nice volunteers at the recycling booth gave us a sticker for our mail slot: NO JUNK MAIL. It's to discourage the people who come around slipping circulars and business cards and other printed matter through mail slots all over the city, and it you don't accept the paper to begin with, it's less that you have to recycle. Except that I've decided that I like my London junk mail, at least for now.

Thanks to junk mail, Holly discovered a nearby delicatessen that she likes. We received an Open Morning invitation to see an independent prep school which I might like to investigate just to see what it's like. Through the mail slot we get Grove, a free monthly magazine devoted to our section of London, and a second free magazine from the Brent Council telling us about local services and special events. (A public celebration of Diwali in October, and two weeks later, Eid-Ul-Fitr to celebrate the end of Ramadan.) If we ever want to order Indian food for delivery, we have many menus to choose from.

The most common delivery through the mail slot, though, is business cards for car services. The business is distinguished from taxi service in that car services are not allowed to drive the streets searching for fares. The have to be called on the phone, and they want to be very sure that no man, woman, or child in London is without a copy of their business card. We get a car service card through the mail slot about every other day, representing eight different companies so far.

For now, we won't put up a sticker saying NO JUNK MAIL, but I'd like to find one that says NO CARS.

From Philip Lees in Crete: “I hope you've learned how to pronounce Cherwell, Cholmondeley, Featherstonehaugh and Beaulieu. Otherwise, they may cut off your

electricity.” I’m sure Philip made all of those place names up.

Finally, only my friend Philip is threatening to cut off our electricity, but the TV Licensing authority is threatening prosecution. We received an OFFICIAL WARNING in the mail today. We’re again strongly advised to give in and pay our TV license, and we are cautioned as follows: “Officers from our Enforcement Division catch 57,287 people every year.” The precision of that number, the number caught EVERY year, indicates that once the officers have nabbed the 57,287^th television scofflaw for 2006, they stay in their TV Licensing barracks to play darts and wait for January 2007. One shudders to think of all the viewers who get away with watching television for free at the end of each year, confident that the enforcement quota has been used up.

BT – Here We Go Again, and Proper English Dogs

Holly finally reached someone at British Telecom who did not lose the connection with her, did not promise to call back and then fail to do so, did not say only that they were looking into the problem with our connection. No, this woman gathered all of Holly's information, opened the appropriate records in the computer and told Holly, “I don't see an action order for this account.”

“Do you mean to say,” said Holly, “that of all the people I have called and spoken to, none of them actually made a record that we had a problem with our line?”

“I must be honest with you. That is entirely possible.”

So one full week after our phone was supposed to be turned on, we finally found a competent person at BT who could make a record of our technical problem and order that it be fixed. The next day, a technician came and repaired our line. We have a working phone.

All's well that ends well. If only that were the end of it.

You may recall the woman at BT to whom Holly spoke earlier who said, “We're bad, but we're not that bad”? The issue in question would be whether we would be billed for phone service that we had not actually received. Holly called BT to confirm that their billing would reflect service that had started on the 19th.

“But our records,” said the woman in billing, “say that service started on the 11th.”

“No,” Holly said. “That's when service was supposed to start.”

“You can negotiate with the billing department for a service-fault adjustment.”

“No. Service did not start until the 19th. I will not pay a bill for service that I did not receive.”

“Hold on.” When the woman returned, she said, “You didn't call to report a problem until the 18th.”

“It is true that I did call on the 18th. I also called on the 12th, on the 14th, and twice on the 15th. On the 18th, I happened to reach someone competent for the first time.”

At last the BT representative relented and, without us having to negotiate some “compromise” settlement, our billing will begin on the 19th, when we heard a dial tone for the first time.

As Holly was having this conversation, she was remembering the meter reader for British Gas who had come to read our neighbors' meters. Holly asked him about using our new pay-as-you-go token card to add money to our meter. He advised her to let the meter run down to zero and only then use the new card. And what about British Gas's promise to refund the money that was already on the meter? He laughed that off. “No, no," he warned. "Don't let them be pushing you!”

So Holly wasn't about to be pushed into an “adjustment” from BT, either.

==============

Having the phone is progress, but it seems we are still far from having our Internet connection. I have found two different benches that are suitable for work, each within the range of a different unencrypted WiFi connection. One of these is in a dog park. Well, it would be a dog park in the U.S. Here, it's just a park that happens to be suitable for dogs, a park with a big grassy expanse.

The result is that I am seeing a lot of the neighborhood dogs and their owners, and what I am seeing amazes me. Every dog is trained. When the dogs come into the park, their owners generally put them through their paces of obeying hand signals to go out, lie down, come back, stand left, go around, sit, stand right, and so forth. Only after this reminder of who is in charge are the dogs given leave to run off on their own.

As I say, I have been sitting at a bench. If I were on a bench in the western or rural U.S., I would expect most of the dogs that were taking their free roam to sniff at my legs. Dogs, in my experience, don't respect my personal space. Their owners do, but the owners' expression of this respect is to apologize for their dogs, or to scold the dogs as if the dogs could understand what they were saying. “Now leave that man alone!”

In hours and hours of sitting at this London bench, I have had dozens of dogs pass within a few feet of me. A few males have paused to mark the far end of the bench. But not one has sniffed my trouser leg or shoe. Not one had paid me the least bit of attention.

Above, I limited my assessment of dog behavior to the western U.S. because what I am observing may be partly a matter of urban culture. People in cities have to manage their dogs well, if for no other reason than that a disobedient dog may not survive living among busy streets. I don't recall New York dogs greeting or sniffing human strangers, though I also don't remember having seen New York dogs unleashed.

But in much of the U.S., dog owners are the permissive friends of their pets, not their masters, not the alpha dog. What I'm seeing in the dog park here suggests that at least among the people who choose to exercise their pets in the park, everyone has done obedience training, which is as much about educating the owner for a lifetime of dog ownership as it is about training that one dog.

Perhaps the archetype of the American dog owner is a psychology professor I know. He is a man of a deservedly brilliant reputation in his field. Naturally, he knows all about motivation and the operant shaping of behavior. But when his dog was trying to eat off the table, how did he intervene?

“Oh, Prince,” he said, “I wish you wouldn't do that.”

BT or not BT

Further adventures in trying to get our telephone turned on. Holly called BT again and got a woman who, after doing some checking, found that she could not get any information about the status of our line or when it might be working. She told Holly that she would do some research and call Holly back. She took down Holly's mobile number. We hoped that she was, at last, someone who could tell us something.

We never heard from her again.

---------------------------

I have found a good place at last for checking the Internet without walking too far or sitting suspiciously in front of private homes. There is a bench on the grounds of the Catholic church at Wrentham Avenue and Chamberlayne Road, and there is an unsecured WiFi hub near enough for me to use that connection. So to whomever it is who owns that hub, thank you for letting me log on from this shady and comfortable seat. I don't know if your connection is open because you are a generous soul or just don't know about the hazards of unencrypted WiFi, but I hope it's the former and that no ill ever befalls you for your trust of urban nomads like me.

Registering to Not Vote

In Australia, voting is compulsory. If you don't vote, you can be jailed. I rather liked that idea until I spoke to some Australians about the effects of having lots of unimformed voters entering the booth in a bad mood because they are being made to do something they don't want to.

Perhaps a better thing to do is strongly encourage people to register. And I mean strongly.

Holly and I received a letter from the electoral authority. It was more polite than the letter from the television licensing people, but nearly as insistent. The letter informed us that there was no record of our voting status, and that previous letters had gone unanswered. (We never saw these.) If we did not fill out the enclosed registration form, we would continue to get letters, and if we did not eventually respond to those, someone would come in person to interview us.

I dutifully filled in the form, registering us as people who are not allowed to vote in Britain.

Just as impressive as this drive to get everyone registered is the list of qualifications for voting. Commonwealth citizens who are resident in Britain, even though they are not really British, are eligible to vote. If Holly and I were resident here as citizens of Canada, Nigeria, India, Jamaica, or any of the 49 other sovereign states in the Commonwealth, the form that I returned would have registered us to vote here in the next election.

And Brits do vote. We saw mention in the newspaper last night of 75% voter participation. In U.S. elections, that would be a staggering turnout of registered voters, and a large percentage of Americans who could vote don't even register.

Odds and Ends

Meanwhile, I have continued to access the Internet by wandering my neighborhood looking for unencrypted wireless hubs. They are easy to find, but I usually find myself sitting on the sidewalk. Yesterday I finally signed on with the Queen's Park Wireless Club. Starbucks has no electrical outlets that are convenient to their customers. I can sit at Starbucks and surf until my battery runs out, then walk to the library to recharge, then go back to Starbucks, by which time I'll be ready to order another drink, anyway.

Not ideal, but if I'd had an Internet connection at home from our first day there, I'd have doubtless spent too much time in the flat and not enough getting to know the neighborhood.

=================

We accomplish everything on foot, including grocery shopping. We bought a flowery rolling cart that we have named Vickie, in honor of our Queen's Park neighborhood. (The park was named during Victoria's reign.) Orange, white, and yellow, she really does look like a Vickie.

Rolling Vickie home does make it relatively easy to bring home a large purchase of food, but it's still a long walk to grocery stores of any size, and I find all this trekking wears me down, especially now when we have so many needs --- a completely empty larder to stock. What's more, we don't really have a routine yet that allows Holly to pick up a few things on the way home or me to have a regular shopping plan. Here's to settling down soon with a phone line that actually works, a broadband connection, and something like a schedule.

Finally, about BT. Holly called again from her office today and reached a friendly agent who said he'd be pleased to help. Then he put her on hold for two minutes. Then the line went dead.

Foxes and Other Vocalizing Animals

Our neighbors mentioned to us a few nights ago that the foxes that hunt in our back yards also vocalize when they are mating. “If you hear what sounds something like a baby being murdered, it's the foxes.”

However, some of what I've recently heard in the night wasn't foxes. It is a fact of city life that with people living close to one another, their privacy is compromised. Sound travels. I think that's as explicit as I care to be except to say that I heard loud vocalizations three times during the night, and only once do I think it could possibly have been foxes.

I bring this up at all, really, to reveal the sort of life that Holly and I have together. These incidents in the night resulted in the two of us having a breakfast conversation about the evolutionary significance of sexual vocalizations. We made distinctions between communicative and expressive speech acts, talked about the function of emotional expression as a mechanism for both intensifying the emotion and for informing the individual about what he or she is feeling. We used the word “teleological.”

We are, in short, science geeks.

Odd and Ends

Our British Telecom phone line was supposed to be turned on on September 11, but we still don't get a dial tone. Holly called BT from her office phone at the London Business School. “It seems there is a problem with the exchange,” said the woman she spoke to. “We'll get it sorted out.”

“I want to make sure,” Holly said, “that we won't start being billed for phone service until we actually have phone service.”

“We're bad,” said the BT agent, “but we're not that bad.”

========================

We have made appointments to be interviewed for our National Insurance Numbers. Unfortunately, the appointments we made conflict with travel plans, so we want to change our appointments. The local job centre where we are to have our interviews is impossible to call. At any time of day or night, the line is busy.

Holly called the central job centres office, where we made our initial appointment. They told her that while they could book initial appointments, they could not book changes. They looked for an alternative number for our job centre and found none. Holly asked them to try calling the local centre themselves. They tried, but could no more get through than we could. Finally, Holly tried e-mail.

“Thank you for your comment,” said the automated reply. It went on to say that one should not expect a reply, or even that the message would be read any time soon. For matters requiring a response, a phone call was advised.

“At least it's better than the old Soviet Union,” Holly said, remembering that Russian has no native word for “efficiency.”

The Falling Stones and Internet Theft

A cemetery nearby on Willesden Lane appears on the map as “Willesden Lane Cemetery,” but the sign on the gate calls it “Paddington Cemetery,” which is a little surprising since we're quite some distance from Paddington.

Whatever it's called, the cemetery has some interesting characteristics. While there are some large and elaborate markers are from the late Victorian era, most of the stones are modest and from the nineteen-thirties and later. The soil seems singularly unstable, and the ground around even recent burial sites shows cracks or ripples.

The result is that headstones and wooden markers in most of the cemetery are listing, leaning, or have toppled and broken. Markers that promise “We Will Never Forget” look very much forgotten. In a few cases, headstones of apparently unrelated people lean toward each other as if offering mutual support, or as if the graves had turned intimately toward one another.

The biggest, oldest tombs and stones lining the path to the chapel are still mostly upright, and the chapel is in good condition. But aside from these, the only other markers that stand straight are the markers for veterans of the Great War, all of them standing together near a common memorial statue. Dating from the teens and twenties, they look newer than markers that were placed decades later. I'm sure that the government or perhaps an organization of veterans maintains these.

I've never before seen the usage common on many markers: “Fell Asleep” is the euphemism for “Died.” I imagine this was a fashion (for most of the twentieth century) in England. I don't know if I've ever seen it in the U.S.

I'm glad that the veterans' markers are respected and maintained, but I'm glad to see others going to ruin so swiftly. There is something strangely comforting about seeing the earth turn itself over so energetically in a cemetery. Markers carved only seventy years ago are already weathered into illegibility. Promises to “Never Forget” have been left by people who are themselves on the way to being forgotten. Why is this reassuring? I suppose because it reminds me that life is for the living, and that I can do worse with my time than lying on the cemetery grass to watch clouds cross the sky.

Holly observed that this English cemetery makes for quite a contrast from Japanese graves. Whether the austere angles of Bhuddist stones or the more natural shapes of Shinto, markers in Japan show signs of having been very recently tended and decorated, even if they are very old. Perhaps especially if they are very old. But ancestor veneration isn't a part of English culture.

As for Internet theft...

My one-week, twenty-pound subscription to Sip and Serve expired today, and I can't afford to keep connecting at that rate. I haven't been able to contact anyone in the Queen's Park Wireless Club since I met them during Queen's Park Day, so I set out to see if I could find one of their sites just by walking around the neighborhood.

I did find an unsecured hub only a dozen or so houses away from our flat. On the sidewalk, I leaned against the garden wall of a house and logged on. A man left a nearby house on his bicycle, returned an hour later and said, “You're here for the day, then?”

“For the hour, anyway,” I said. “I'm using a wireless connection, but I don't know where it's coming from.”

“I have an idea,” he said. He pointed up and down the sidewalk and smiled. “This is a lay line.” (For those who haven't encountered the term, a lay line is a metaphysical connection route along the earth. A line on the spiritual power grid.)

My battery gave out, and I went home. Once I had recharged, I set up in a shady spot at the kerb. (These English spellings are infectious.) Actually, my feet were in the gutter as I taught my MFA students. Feet in the gutter, mind on poetry. I was being the very definition of a writer.

A man came out of one of the houses. He wanted to know if I was all right.

“I'm fine, thank you. I'm using someone's wireless connection. I don't know whose.”

“Probably mine then.”

“It's unsecured, then?”

“Yes it is. Would you like some tea?”

“That would be lovely.”

“I'll bring you a chair.”

And that was how I met one of my neighbors. After I logged off, I brought the chair back to his front door, and we chatted in his kitchen for a few minutes before he had to walk to the school to collect his children.

We talked about my London project --- this blog and the writing I hope to get from it --- and he observed, as I have heard others observe, that London is a vast village more than a big city. It feels that way to me, too, when people I haven't met, people from whom I am stealing an Internet signal, offer me a cup of tea and a comfy chair.

Odds and Ends

British Telecom has started charging us for our phone line, but it doesn't seem to work yet. Based on this and some other reservations, we canceled the order for BT broadband. When Holly called a competitor (a phone and Internet company that, unlike BT, answered their phone...and with a real person, no less!) the helpful man at the Phone Co-op said to her, “Do I detect an accent?” Holly told him, “You do. I'm from America.” “I'm afraid you'll find that efficiency is in shorter supply here,” he said.

Mirror-World Moments and Funny Money

I'm getting used to looking right first when I cross a street. I'm beginning to develop a better sense of where traffic might come from. But I still experience some moments of strangeness, such as today when I saw the driver of a car looking out his side window with a bored expression as he drove, never even glancing at where he was going. Naturally, he wasn't the driver. He was a bored front-seat passenger, sitting where I expect to the the driver. And it happens almost every day as I cross streets and look at the car to see if the driver is going to stop for a pedestrian in the crosswalk or not. I look to the wrong side of the car to make eye contact with the driver. For driver's who politely stop for me, I wave my thanks half the time to their passenger.

It's interesting that I seldom had this problem in Japan, where the driver again sits on the right. I think the difference is that in Japan I had reminders at every moment that I was in a foreign land. Here, where they speak my language (more or less) I begin to feel that I'm in familiar territory.

I've already complained here and elsewhere about earning dollars and spending pounds, but there's more to the situation than an unfavorable exchange rate for the dollar. Just as I am accustomed to looking for the driver on the left side of vehicles, I am used to thinking of prices in terms of certain whole units. To see 5.95 on the restaurant menu of a modest restaurant seems quite reasonable when I'd expect to see a similar dish for 6.95 at home. The overall higher prices in London combined with the weak dollar end up making me feel, when I have a hundred pounds in my pocket, very much the way I'd feel with a hundred dollars in my pocket at home. I've dealt with different currencies in a dozen or more countries, but since a pound in London buys about what a dollar would in Eugene, it's easy to lose track of the reality that taking the hundred pounds from an ATM drew down my checking account by one-hundred and ninety dollars and change.

Also, although I've been in Britain before, visits here were always part of travel to other countries in Europe to that the coinage of the United Kingdom often mixed in my pockets with Austrian schillings, Czech crowns, French francs, and eventually euro cents. This time, I've dealt with British coins long enough to really learn the denominations and get a sense of how sensible they are. Before, the relative sizes of huge two-pence coins and tiny five-pence coins, big ten-pence coins and small twenty-pence ones threw me. But one night, emptying my pockets and stacking the coins by denomination, the system of shapes, sizes, and metals became so wonderfully clear that I feel a bit foolish now for having had to search handfuls of change with such puzzlement before.

On Holly's dresser are a few American coins. I can't say they look strange to me. I've known these coins all my life, and getting used to British ones is not enough to make nickels, dimes, and quarters seem alien. But I was struck by how worthless they are. When coins held value because of their metal content, you could spend a florin or a drachma or a shekel wherever you took it. But the coins of fiat currencies are based on faith and the willingness to accept them. Generally you can't exchange coins (unlike paper money) outside of the country that uses them, so fiat-money coins turn into disks of metal, and won't be money again until they are repatriated.

Odds and Ends

One of the betting parlours in the neighborhood is called "Ladbrokes." I think it's comfortingly honest of them to use a name that has "broke" in it.

On the package of Ginger Nut biscuits: "Does not contain nuts."

A fun and silly radio programme on the BBC, "Just a Minute," had celebrity contestants trying to complete an extemporaneous speech on a surprise topic without repeating themselves, digressing, or pausing. Wit is celebrated on British radio. There is almost no wit on American radio. I wonder if that means we don't value verbal cleverness. Or don't trust it. (Certainly we don't value articulate speech in our politicians. Maybe we are afraid that we can't trust people who are witty. America is still is in some ways still in love with the Jacksonian ideal of the commonest of common men being, in some way, our ideal.)

Alluring lingerie goes by the name of "French wear."

I keep meaning to write about the Willesden Lane Cemetery, but once again, that will have to wait for another entry.

Must-Sees and Tube Snogging

On 9 September I went to a session of the T Party, a group that meets once a month in a London pub to critique fiction --- mostly SF and fantasy. It feels to me like the culture of SF and fantasy is very similar everywhere, and I felt very at home in this group almost immediately.

We had only one story to critique, and thus plenty of remaining time to just chat. Eventually the discussion turned to what sorts of things I ought to do with myself while living in London. Among the suggestions:

Small museums and collections. The Wallace Collection. Somerset House.

Just once, as it's so expensive, have the roast beef at Simpson's on the Strand. Simpson's has great English breakfast, too. Similarly, spring once for high tea at the Ritz.

Garlic & Shots. This goth hangout has a menu emphasizing garlic and a bar emphasizing shots.

For an odd night out, Intrepid Fox. For an odder night out, Ben Crouch.

Denni, the East German ex-pat in the group, suggested that I take advantage of the London sports bets culture to bet on something weird. Odds are laid, for instance, on the outcome of reality shows.

Brick Lane for Indian and Bangladeshi restaurants (although there are perhaps eight of these within a five-minute walk of our flat as it is). The Brick Lane Festival. Brick Lane used to be a Jewish quarter and is now south Asian.

Near London Bridge, Barrow Market for fresh food.

Go up in the London Eye. It's not just for tourists. Londoners love it, too.

All the standard museums.

For something odd, the shell temple at Margate. Discovered when someone fell into it by accident, the shell temple is either an authentic pagan temple or a 17th century folly, but no one seems to know which. (Comment by Holly when I told her of this: “Surely someone can tell.”)

Martin is willing to tutor me some on the intricacies of football, rugby, and cricket.

Outside of London, Windsor is worth seeing.

For November 5, there are many places for viewing fireworks, but Lewes near Brighton, again outside of London, is special for its “secret societies” that build hate figures for the bonfires. There we will likely see images of Guy Fawkes, the Pope, Tony Blair...maybe even George Bush if we're lucky. From the sound of it, these secret societies are a bit like the Mardi Gras crewes in New Orleans.

Before this discussion at the T Party, I'd heard from our upstairs neighbors, Chris and Claire, that there is a wonderful Victorian monument with inscriptions dedicated to individuals who died trying to do heroic things, such as saving a drowning child.

I feel like I'm filling my plate nicely with ideas of things to experience. And of the free evening papers, so far my favorite is The London Paper which has two features that I especially like. One is “In the Know” with tips about special things to see or do, like this one:

“Abney Park Cemetery: One of the weirdest, spookiest yet strangely romantic places you'll visit in London. It stopped being used as a cemetery in the Seventies and is now a nature reserve. The graves are all collapsing, overgrown, and higgledy-piggledy, and the chapel in the centre is a ruin. When you walk in off Stamfor Hill, it feels as if you've entered a Tim Burton film. It's usually deserted and you can't hear anything except birds. High Street, Stoke Newington, N16 5TU.”

Another feature is “3 Things to Do Tonight.” And a recent entry: “The first Tuesday of each month is candle-lit late night opening at this beautiful museum. The house of the 19th century architect Sir John Soane, it houses the treasures he picked up on his travels --- including an Egyptian sarcophagus --- as well as masterpieces by Hogarth. 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2. Free.”

So far in this entry, I'm reporting a lot about things I haven't done yet. Something I did do was come home on the underground. I walked from the T Party meeting to the Temple station with Gary and Peter. As we entered the station, I stopped to ask them if they were sure I was going the right way. I knew that parts of the Circle and District lines were closed for the weekend, and that it mattered which direction of Circle I caught. I think my puzzlement gave them the impression that I was gormless about the subway system, so they were solicitous about taking me in hand and making sure I got where I was going. Again, a reminder that I find Londoners on the whole very courteous and helpful.

On my Bakerloo car, directly across from me sat a couple in their twenties who could not get enough of each other, at that stage where they probably haven't slept together, or at least not more than once or twice. She was sort of draped across him, and they nuzzled each other. He licked her. Long, open-mouth kisses. They were in that mix of self-consciousness and oblivion that comes with being hopelessly infatuated and sexually aroused, aware that people were watching and probably disapproving, but for the moment not caring because they were elevated above the concerns of ordinary mortals.

While this was happening, two women of about twenty got on, wearing the low-slung pants that can be --- and were --- so unflattering. It's hard to say why this look doesn't work sometimes, but in this case it seemed to me that the low cut of their pants left them looking strangely shapeless. Besides these pants, they wore layers of shirt, vest, and jacket. One of them eased herself stiffly into her seat. The other sat down quickly and gave a little yelp of pain. “Oh, God,” she said. “I hope I haven't started it bleeding again!” Their navels weren't visible, but it wasn't hard to guess what they'd just had done. “How long does it take to heal?” “Depends. Up to six weeks.” “Six weeks! No!”

They talked about how they would look. “I'm going to put a diamond in mine to show what a bad girl I am.” “You should do that. And hair extensions.” They made further suggestions to demonstrate that they were being intentionally over the top. Hair extensions would really be too much.

The couple who were snogging disengaged sufficiently to stand up and leave the train.

“Oh my God,” said one of the newly-pierced. “Yes, that's where I'd bring my date. On the tube!”

“Imagine doing that on the tube! Who does that?”

“At least he was nicely dressed. I want a guy to dress well. Not like some of them. Some guys, I want to say to them, 'You want to go out with this looking like that?”

Odds and Ends

I'm sure I'm getting slang wrong and misspelling place names left and right. For slang, I can understand what's being said, but I haven't yet tuned in sufficiently to how it is being said. I need to hear a lot more London dialog to accurately reproduce it. And for place names, the subtlest differences in my American ear and English pronunciations mean that I don't easily make the leap from what I think I'm hearing as the name of a pub --- the Wheat Chief --- to the obviously more reasonable reality --- the Wheat Sheaf.

On Saturday, Holly and I attended Queen's Park Day. In the park were giant inflatable clown slides, kiddie carnival rides, donkey rides, music from the bandstand, a temporary stage with a magic show, and all manner of food vendors, local artists, psychic healers, tarot readers, vendors of flea-market oddments, and service organizations.

Holly and I joined the Queen's Park Residents Association. I logged on wirelessly from the tent of the Queen's Park Wireless Club and their Community Wireless Broadband Network. Thanks to Rob and other members of the group, I was able to check my e-mail and teach my MFA students eight time zones away. www.queenspark.me.uk

I wish I had met these guys before I bought wireless connect time from Sip & Surf for twenty pounds a week. They would have charged just ten for a month of connection. I'd also rather have done my Internet service through them instead of BT, both to save money and to support a local connectivity effort. Sometimes we learn about these things too late, but I may see if I can cancel some or all of my work order with BT and get more reasonably priced service that doesn't require a one-year contract...especially as I'll only be here another eleven months.

Welcome to Britain. Now Shape Up!

It took us a few days to find the mail that had arrived ahead of us, letters that other residents in our building had set aside to await us. Two of the letters contained threats.

One of these letters was from our local council. Here in the U. K., your council tax is more or less equivalent to property taxes in the U. S., with a major difference being that the property owner pays the tax in the U. S. (and charges rents sufficient to cover this expense), whereas here, the residents themselves are responsible for the tax. And the council was letting us know that as we hadn’t registered with them within 21 days of signing our lease, we were eligible for a fifty-pound fine.

The second threatening letter was from the television licensing authority. In Britain, you must pay for the privilege of watching television even if the only stations you view are those that are transmitted over the airwaves. This letter began, in red letters: “YOU ARE ADVISED TO CALL THE PROSECUTION PREVENTION LINE ON THE NUMBER ABOVE.”

It continued: “You still have not bought a TV Licence for this address. If you are using TV receiving equipment to watch or record TV programme services, you are committing a criminal offence. Your details have now been passed to the Enforcement Officer responsible for NW10, who is authorised to visit your property and take a prosecution statement from you, should evidence be found that you are watching TV without a valid licence.”

We’re instructed to call the Prosecution Prevention Line immediately to forestall action being taken against us, or to call a different number to inform the authority that we are not using TV receiving equipment at our address.

“Note: If you have already been visited by an Enforcement Officer prior to receiving this notice, you may no longer be able to avoid prosecution by purchasing a TV Licence.”

Holly called the authority to inform them that we did not have and would not be getting a television. She reports that she first had to get through phone-tree hell. Then the phone rang and rang. No one ever answered it.

We told Lynette about this, and she said that she’d been trying for years to tell the TV authority in Portsmouth that she doesn’t have a television there. They also do not answer their phone. Once when she did get through, the person at the other end promised that she was making a note that Lynette did not have a TV. However, the letters threatening prosecution continued as before. Lynette’s advice is to ignore the threats. Apparently, compliance with the licence requirement is spotty even among those who do own television sets, and enforcement doesn’t seem to go beyond the threatening red ink.

Meanwhile, we’ve been trying to reach our Council, but we get varying stories about where they are located and how we should go about contacting them, and their letter to us, in spite of its threats, is less than informative.

We have appointments to receive our National Insurance numbers in order to access health services. The case workers will see us in October, more than a month from now. I’ve been assured by a nice man at the Inland Revenue office that if I am hit by a bus before I have a National Insurance number, I’m entitled to treatment as a U.K. resident whether I have a number or not.

And when I say “nice man at Inland Revenue,” I mean it. I am unsure of my tax status, since I’m a legal resident but have no U.K.-sourced income. When I called Inland Revenue, the man answering the call was courteous and went out of his way to offer paths to answering my questions. I’ll have to call a Status Inspector to get a Liability Decision about what I do or don’t owe the government of Britain, but short of being able to answer that question, this guy was thinking of other problems and concerns I might have and giving me web sites to investigate. He seemed almost reluctant to hang up. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” That kind of eagerness to help is, er, atypical among officers of the Internal Revenue Service.

Odds and Ends

Without broadband installed at home yet, I'm still relying on public Internet. This week, instead of a dedicated, hard-wired Internet business, I'm camping out at Carre Nero on Kilburn High Road. I've been here for an hour today, and so far the languages I've heard have been Czech (two men), Polish (the baristas), Brazilian Portuguese (three energetic, voluble men) and English in a variety of accents.

And speaking of accents, one of the pleasures of Britain is that sometimes the combinations of accent and ethnicity take me by surprise. I'm well accustomed to south Asians who speak with English accents. But one of our waiters at an Indian restaurant two nights ago had a wonderful Scottish accent. Well, of course there are Indian immigrants in Scotland. I just hadn't encountered the combination before, and it made me smile.

Electrical Mysteries of London

I remember a story of Somali refugees who were found hungry, their children dehydrated, in the American motel where they had been dropped by an aid service. The case worker assigned to them had not appeared to explain to them how things worked. They had a debit card and could have walked to a store, but they didn't understand what the card was or how things worked for getting food in America.

I feel a bit that way when it comes to getting electricity in London.

Before I get into that, let me say that we like our flat and our Queen's Park neighborhood quite a lot. The neighborhood is diverse. We're within walking distance of two shopping districts, one of which is very working class, featuring urban convenience groceries, Internet cafes, and a Laundromat --- urban immigrant businesses. The other that is just half a notch up, with restaurants, pubs, and a Starbuck's. We're close to a mosque and to a centre (like that spelling? I'm catching on!) for inter-faith activities. Our three local constables out walking the beat together last night were two men and a woman, and one of the men was a Sikh. The ethnic/racial mix is broadly diverse.

So we're happy, to a very large extent. But there have been some things we just haven't been able to figure out on our own. In the kitchen, a sign on the boiler instructs us to read the owner's manual before attempting to operate. There is, of course, no owner's manual.

Our gas and electric are on a "token" system. Rather than coin-like tokens, we use an electronic card for gas and an electronic key in another case. The system is supposed to work like this: to heat and light our flat, we take the appropriate token devices to the neighborhood news agent --- a convenience store or news stand in the U.S. --- and hand over cash. The news agent uses a device to load the token with electronic credits. We go home, put the token into the meter, and press buttons to load credit onto the meter.

With the gas token, the operation is straightforward. I inserted a loaded card into the meter, pressed the top of two buttons, and saw first the amount of credit on the card and then the addition of that sum to the credit in the meter. Great!

The electric is another matter. First, the meter is situated about nine feet from the ground. If I stand on a chair, I can reach the key slot and buttons, but I can read only the top third of the LED display. The two buttons do not work in exactly the same way as the gas card. Every time I press the white button, I see an amount displayed in pounds and pence...I think. I can't see the decimal point. I think that when I withdraw the key after entering the amount, I am adding that amount to the meter, but I'm not sure. The blue button cycles through a variety of displays, but I can't tell what sort of units are being displayed, and even the amounts are a guess based on seeing the top of the figures.

We lost power once yesterday, and I managed to get some more credit into the meter although I'm not confident that I know what I did.

The property agent had no information to give us about the property, though he was at least apologetic. The landlord's "manager" had never been to the place and was utterly useless for telling us how the electric worked.

We hoped to get all of this sorted out when our landlord and his "technical" man came by last night. Under Mr. Bastami's direction, Mr. Josef broke the non-functioning lock that kept us from opening the back door, pried open windows that had been painted shut, hooked up the washing machine, explained the operation of the boiler, and readied the steam heat radiators for use. Then we all went together to the electric meter.

Both Mr. Bastami and Mr. Josef know how the meter and key work together in principle. But as for which button does what, and the steps for operation, and how to check how much charge you have on either the key or the meter, it's as much a mystery to them as it is to us. And no one, standing on the available chair, can really make sense of the meter.

Our electrical adventure took a further turn after the departure of our landlord when the fuse blew for the ceiling lights. The flat has been remodeled, and I suspect that the halogen ceiling lamps put a strain on their five-amp circuit when very many of them are on. This will encourage us to turn off lights and acquire at least a couple of lamps that plug into the wall. At the moment, when the ceiling lights go, the only light we can turn on is the hood light over the kitchen range.

We walked to one of the little neighborhood stores to buy candles and a lighter, and we went to bed early. Today we are on the train to Petersfield to meet up with Holly's step-mother, Lynette, and shop for a few more essentials.

Odds and Ends

I feel a bit out of sorts for not having written or spent more than a couple of hours devoted to my teaching this week. Classes started Monday, as we were showing the Morikawas how to do things in our Eugene home. (We left detailed written instructions. Every landlord should be so helpful!) Now, not yet a week later, we're still attending to unpacking and equipping the flat, but even in the midst of lingering chaos, I want to get some stories, chapters, and commentary to my students written. Every time I've been in London in the past, I have been on vacation. But I'm certainly not on vacation now, and I'm restless to be back on track.

At my step-mother-in-law's house in Hawkley, she introduced us to the shandy, a mix of ale and ginger beer. Quite good, and with so little alcohol that I risked it even though I'm not supposed to be drinking alcohol.

Lynette served courgettes with lunch, and I'm reminded that this is a good word for gardeners in America to know. Zucchini vines are always abundantly productive, and eventually your neighbors start to refuse offers of zucchini. But you might say to them, "How would you like some courgettes from my garden?" They might say yes. Of course, this is likely to work only once. It's like offering aubergines to a child who hates eggplant.

The drive to Lynette's house from Petersfield to Hawkley is on those marvelous English roads that are wide enough for only one car and usually have hedges on either side, or sometimes even run through green tunnels of hedge that rise on either side and meet overhead. You zip along with limited visibility and just expect that if you meet oncoming traffic, you'll both stop in time and someone will back up to a position where it's possible to give way. Tree-covered hill slopes that Lynette explained are actually escarpments with open country on top. The trees, or the groves, grow in a special way and are called "hangers." I'm not yet sure what Lynette means by this, but we'll return on a day of drier weather and I'll have first-hand experience.

Lynette speaking about her mother: "Of course, you couldn't put the central heat on before the last day of September. If October started out warm, she'd decide that the heat couldn't come on until the first of November. You'd have mold growing on the ceiling, but never mind! No heat until November! Well, at least that way she always managed to pay her bills."

Lynette's rundown of English papers: "The Times used to be good, but now it's owned by Murdoch and it's gone tabloid. The Independent is truly independent. The Telegraph is a bit liberal, but very good for the sections on Saturdays. Really, the paper to read if you want to be up on international news is The Guardian. They're left, but thorough. They're left, but they'll give both sides."

Lynette about her dog, Badger, as he digs in to his dinner: "He's a real trencherman, isn't he?" Where does this come from?

On the train from Petersfield, the announcement of nearby towns you could connect to from one stop all sounded like made up places to me. I mean, come on. Haslemere? Actually, that one’s plausible. The most absurd ones didn’t stick to my memory, they were so implausible.

In Petersfield, I showed our blown fuse at an electric shop. "Oh, they haven't made them like that for years," the clerk said. "No, you can't buy a replacement, but I can sell you the wire to rebuild that one yourself."

Finally, on our gas and electric adventures, Holly called our gas and electric provider from Lynette's house. She was shunted among six different customer service representatives. In short, we're going to be sent a new gas card and new key, with instructions. Then we are to run our meters down to just a couple of pounds, then phone to have the technician come round to reset our meters for our card and key. Yeah, that'll go off smoothly. Holly's final assessment of British Gas call center employees: "Their incentive scheme apparently rewards them for answering calls, but not for helping people."

The Broken Tube and the Kindness of Strangers

There is a saying --- I think it's Finnish or Icelandic, which probably means it's neither --- "Keen is the eye of the visitor." So I'm seeing more of London right now than I will once I've settled in more.

One of the things I'm seeing is an underground system that's always under some strain. From my previous trips to London, I remember seeing the whiteboards set up at various stations announcing the closure of one line or another, but I think I was actually inconvenienced only once. Yesterday, though, tube troubles were a theme of my day. The other chief theme was the kindness of strangers.

I managed to get a few hours of sleep on the plane, and woke up to blue skies and a city gleaming in the early orange light. "That's a good reason to book this schedule," said our seat mate. "That view of London in the morning."

We left two of our bags at the Excess Baggage office and set off with three bags apiece to get the keys to our flat. I had a small wheeled bag full of books, my biggest bag --- a little over thirty kilos --- and my laptop case strapped to the big bag. Holly carried her backpack and two rolling suitcases. We weren't just burdened. We were exhausted. We'd been giving up sleep in favor of hours devoted to putting our things into storage, cleaning the house, and packing. On the plane, Holly hadn't slept at all.

We planned to ride the Piccadilly line to Green Park and from there take the Jubilee to the property manager's office. A few stops short of Green Park, the train driver announced that an unattended bag had been left in the Green Park station. The station had been evacuated and was closed to trains until the security issue was resolved. As Holly opened the tube map to figure out an alternate route, I suggested that we just ride the Bakerloo to Queen's Park. She could leave me at the flat to wait with the bags, and she could go unburdened to get the keys.

I will pause here to note that the Toronto subway system makes excellent use of escalators or lifts, which are an excellent help to riders who are infirm or are lugging thirty kilo bags across the city. In London, riders with thirty-kilo bags are left to struggle on their own, or to rely upon the kindness of Londoners. Fortunately, the kindness of Londoners is in abundant supply. As I started up a long stairway in the Piccadilly Circus station, alternately moving the sixteen- and thirty-kilo bags one step at a time, a young man behind me said, "Need a hand with that, mate?" He took the lower end of the heavier bag, and we fairly ran up the steps with it. Cheers, mate! The same thing happened at the Queen's Park station when we arrived there. I struggled. A stranger stopped to help carry the heavier bag.

A walk through Queen’s Park left me sitting alone on the front steps of the flat, surrounded by luggage, watching a team of tree surgeons remove a tree from a neighbors yard. As they finished up, one of these young men nodded to me. "Throw you out, did she?"

"Not that I don't deserve it," I told him.

When Holly returned, it was finally her chance to get some rest. I set out at noon to retrieve the two remaining bags. I expected the journey to take a while. The Heathrow trains run only to Hatton Cross because of construction, and free bus service provides the final link to the airport. This slows things down, but to a reasonable degree. On the way back, however, the train from Hatton Cross halted before Boston Manor, proceeded very slowly out of that station, then stopped again. And stayed stopped. Then proceeded to the next station, then stopped. Slow progress to one more station. Then the driver announced that there was a problem with a train in the Acton Town station. That problem would soon be resolved, but further up the line, there were signal problems at Holborn. The Piccadilly line was to be closed, and trains already running would go only as far as Hyde Park, under severe delays. We were strongly advised to transfer to the District line.

I was again hauling heavy bags. Twenty and thirty kilos. The burden of the intelligentsia: When we pare our household down to the bare minimum, the bare minimum includes a lot of books --- books that I am teaching from, books for researching my novel, books for Holly's research and teaching. And Holly's copy of the latest Harry Potter.

The transfer to the district line was easier than I feared. I just had to wheel my bags across the platform. But at Earl's Court, transferring to the northern branch of the district line, pulling the heavier bag into the train proved too great a strain for the handle. It broke.

My transfer at Paddington involved a lot of walking. The corridors in that station are narrow, and there are barriers that act like median barriers on the highway, keeping the pedestrian flow to one side. With two suitcases behind me, I was like a wide load on a mountain road. There was no getting around me, and I was slow. Thanks to the broken handle, I had to stoop a little to roll the heavier bag, and the bag hit my heels with every short step. Whenever there was a break in the barrier, I paused like a good truck driver to let the faster traffic zip by, except that the rush-hour flow was steady. Every time I started up again, I was blocking someone. Blessedly, I reached the end of this passage to find...escalators!

At Queen's Park, I faced stairs again. A man with a Chinese accent said, "I am helping you," as he took hold of the heavier bag.

From Queen's Park station, I started my slow trek with the ow! bigger bag ouch! hitting my ow! right heel with damn! every step. Half a block to a side street. Up a long residential street. Half a block to the park entrance. Through the park gate. A young woman talking to a boy on a bicycle looked my way. She picked up her skateboard and said, "Can I help you?"

Janine is Australian, a nanny, and a paragon of helpfulness. "Well, what's going to cost me but five minutes of my time?" she said. She walked the lighter suitcase across the park for me, as her young charge followed us with the skateboard and bicycle. When she discovered that she had actually left me with the more difficult burden, she offered to swap. I resisted, then relented. Janine and Sam brought me all the way to my front gate. It was six o'clock. It had taken exactly six hours to collect two suitcases.

A cab would have been horrendously expensive. Right now, especially since I am earning weak dollars and spending strong pounds, I have more time than money. But I might have to re-do that calculus. Or I might take (duh) the train service from Heathrow to Paddington station. I opted for the subway only because it was more familiar and I already had my Oyster card.

Odds and Ends

As I write down the prices of things, I realize that I don't know how to write the symbol for pounds. An L with a line through it? Two lines?

Every time I have been to London before, I have been a hazard to myself at pedestrian crossings. Even when I remember to look both ways, I'm confused by where turning traffic might be coming from. I don't recognize a car that wants to turn into the lane where I am about to step. For once I will be in London long enough to re-train by brain about where to look for traffic. Meanwhile, I am very crosswalk compliant. Londoners may be crossing against the light, but I'm not going to step into the street until the green walking man lights up.

This traffic problem gives me added appreciation for Tom Morikawa's driving feat day-before-yesterday. Tom is renting our house in Eugene while we are here, and with that comes the use of our car. It has been fourteen years since Tom has driven a manual transmission. Like the Brits, the Japanese drive on the left. So when I took Tom out for some driving practice, he was re-learning how to drive a manual transmission, getting instruction on how to do so in a foreign language, driving on the "wrong" side of the road...all while being jet-lagged.

Sitting across from me on the Heathrow train were a man my age and his two daughters. They looked European but were speaking a language I could not place at all. One of the girls played music on her cell phone, song after song that sounded like Arab pop, but wasn't in Arabic. So they were Muslims, probably.

Finally I asked and offered my guess. "Bosnian?" (But I'd expect to recognize a few words in Bosnian.)

"Albanian," the older daughter told me.

Ah. My guess was at least in the right part of the map, but as far as linguistic lineage goes, well, I have no idea what other languages Albanian is related to.

Finally, two observations from packing up our household for storage. Observation one is that we own too much stuff. I've been trying for years to trim my possessions, but even so, there is just too much. We took carloads of things to donate to Goodwill. We filled our trash and recycling bins, and I drove one trunkful of things to the dump. But we still own too much of the sort of thing that might come in handy one day, or books that I might eventually have a use for, or extra shoelaces acquired at an excellent price. Here in London, we have the opposite: nothing in the kitchen yet beyond the installed appliances and an empty bottle for drinking water from the tap. No sheets for the bed. No pillows. No towels. Everything to build up from scratch. As much as we need things, packing up our worldly wealth in Eugene makes me reluctant to buy here. I did buy a cat litter pan today. It is European sized. We hope our American cats will adjust to the European standard of smaller sizes. (I have known cats who reasoned, "All of my feet are in the litter box, therefore it is safe to empty my bladder." This logic did not always prove to be reliable.)

The other observation is about travel I have made for meeting people in my field. I come home from conferences with my pockets full of business cards, but I also come home to writing deadlines, so the cards are set aside somewhere, and I may not see them again until I am excavating my office for a move or because the mess has finally become intolerable. By then, I have forgotten what I talked about with these people, or I just don't have the time to follow up. I'm beginning to think that travel I undertake for business may not do much as much good as would staying home and writing an extra chapter or story in that time. Kris Rusch and Dean Smith don't like taking time from their writing for publicity. The best publicity for their writing, they like to say, is more writing. I'm beginning to come around to seeing things this way myself.