mak­ing sure I have a whole week to panic

So a week from tonight, I can hardly believe it, I will be far away in a lit­tle vil­lage in Devon all by myself, hav­ing spent my first day at my week-long writ­ing sem­i­nar. I must con­fess that except for one two-night trip to Los Ange­les when Avery was a baby, to try to find a pub­lished for my even­tual book, I have never left home! Can that be pos­si­ble? In nearly twelve years? I guess it can be pos­si­ble. Of course, John often leaves home, Avery reg­u­larly leaves home. But I? As close to NEVER as you can get except for NEVER.

I don’t think of myself as a con­trol­ling per­son, at least in terms of con­trol­ling OTHER peo­ple. But I like to have con­trol over myself! I never don’t know what I am going to have for din­ner, or what color my sheets are (they should be only white, in my opin­ion), who I’ll be spend­ing time with… all strangers! That part actu­ally sounds like fun. Leav­ing behind Avery and John, not so much fun.

But surely I need to do this: a week with other food writ­ers, being taught by pub­lished, famous food writ­ers… and I’m pack­ing up my com­fort nov­els about other peo­ple who have gone off on sem­i­nar retreats and adven­tures. Good­ness! A week with no mobile phone, no inter­net. It all promises to be an adven­ture of comic proportions.

Look at this lit­tle crea­ture! We spent Sun­day morn­ing at the fab­u­lous indoor swim­ming pool asso­ci­ated with Avery’s new school (with glass roof tiles that made me think of the Great Lon­don Expo­si­tions of the late 19th cen­tury!), learn­ing how to receive swim­mers on the rota sys­tem we’ve all signed up for. On the way home, this lit­tle guy emerged onto the pave­ment! “Save him, save him!” Avery cried, so we all tried to lure him onto a leaf to put him up in the grass above the side­walk. Finally John said, “Hey, there’s no rabies on this island,” so I scooped the lit­tle thing up in my hands and turned him out onto the grass. As we did so, a lit­tle boy and his dad walked by. “We just let him out of our house,” they laughed. Avery was in heaven.

So as not to appear cal­lous about the global eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion, I must utter the words “credit crunch,” “700 bil­lion dol­lar bailout,” and “global eco­nomic melt­down,” and take a drink of my cock­tail for each phrase, and then never utter the words again. What I’m wor­ried about, as my friends and I dis­cussed today, are wait­ers and wait­resses, clean­ing ladies, florists, and local shop­keep­ers, not Wall Street. So I did my share today: I left a good tip at lunch with my friend Dalia, I paid my fab­u­lous clean­ing lady for the week, sent flow­ers to my dear hus­band and bought an entire bone­less roast duck at the new Chi­nese gro­cery store, Ori­en­tal City, in Queensway. That, and tak­ing care of my fam­ily, is about all I can do in a world­wide mess of such pro­por­tions that Avery’s ques­tions at din­ner (“what’s wrong with hav­ing a mort­gage?” and “why does any­body in Eng­land care what hap­pens in New York?”) are really insur­mount­able. Even John is stymied. But what lux­ury we live in, not to be panicked.

And then there’s the elec­tion! I keep think­ing, “Why does any­one want an ‘ordi­nary per­son, some­one I can relate to, some­one like ME!’ to be pres­i­dent or vice pres­i­dent?” For heaven’s sake, the last per­son in the WORLD I want in the White House is some­one like me! An ordi­nary per­son? Not on your life! When it comes to peo­ple cut­ting my body open, or fly­ing the enor­mous air­plaine con­tain­ing me and my fam­ily, or run­ning the coun­try, I want EXTRA­OR­DI­NARY peo­ple! The very best, the smartest, dare I say it, the most ELITE peo­ple I can get. How does any­body want every­day peo­ple in charge of such mat­ters? Check­ing out my gro­ceries, my library books, sure. But run­ning the coun­try? No thanks. That’s scary.

Our neigh­bors here in Eng­land are sim­ply agog, and alter­nately com­pletely unsur­prised. “These Amer­i­cans are capa­ble of any­thing,” seems to be the gen­eral con­sen­sus, which is frus­trat­ing when we are liv­ing here try­ing to act like nor­mal peo­ple. It is increas­ingly hard to explain any­thing hap­pen­ing on our erst­while native shores!

Well. All I can do is to immerse myself in the rel­a­tive san­ity of my adopted land (which looks increas­ingly like my per­ma­nently adopted land, if cur­rent trends back “home” con­tinue). We spent Sun­day after­noon, after drop­ping Avery off for her after­noon of slave labor clean­ing tack and scoop­ing poop, at our friends’ Vin­cent and Peter’s loft eat­ing every sort of quiche you can imag­ine. How does Vin­cent just turn out these dishes seem­ingly effort­lessly? But he does. And there was our friend Boyd, from our Morocco adven­tures last year, and Mark, my art installer extra­or­di­naire. I love it when I can intro­duce peo­ple to peo­ple they like. We scared our­selves look­ing through pho­tog­ra­phy books in Vincent’s col­lec­tion, like the work of Loretta Lux, who struck me an a com­bi­na­tion of Diane Arbus, Sally Mann and… some­one else really creepy. Chil­dren dressed in impos­si­bly dated, per­fect cloth­ing, big heads, weird props. And then we repaired to three quiches: one with aspara­gus and fresh cherry toma­toes, one with caramelised onions, goats cheese and black olives, and one with lar­dons and Gruyere cheese. The most PER­FECT lunch. Salad, and then Peter’s home­made ice cream: gin­ger and honey, and hazel­nut. And con­ver­sa­tion? We talk for hours and hours while a bit of me sits back and feels intensely grate­ful for their friend­ship, for the sup­port I feel behind me, should I ever need it: the love of longterm friend­ships, peo­ple who really love you. Irreplaceable.

Thence through the gor­geous late-afternoon skies over Tower Bridge, talk­ing to John’s mom (“I think it’s very cool to be talk­ing to some­body who is cross­ing Tower Bridge!” she says glee­fully), past the Savoy, past the Houses of Par­lia­ment, through Trafal­gar Square… what a day.

This week I’m look­ing for­ward to a book sign­ing by Stephen Fry! A book about his expe­ri­ences in, of all places, Amer­ica. And then there’s the after­noon at a cer­tain Lon­don cathe­dral which shall go unnamed for rea­sons of pri­vacy (ha!) where the girls of Avery’s school will meet up with the boys of the brother school in an atmos­phere of unheard-of (at least in my life) splen­dor… And I must spend plenty of time wor­ry­ing about how my fam­ily will do with­out me, and I with­out them, next week. Wish me luck.