the won­der­ful world of Arvon

But first, I’ve got to stop laugh­ing and report that it’s hap­pen­ing again: the bizarre and won­der­ful world of cus­tomer ser­vice in my adopted land. I just now rang up the Olympia Horse Show ticket office to book for the Christ­mas Show, hav­ing tried to buy tick­ets online and being told they were sold out for the Fri­day. Not feel­ing defeatist I thought, “Hang on, I bet a real per­son can help me here,” and it was the work of a moment to get an agent on the line. And then the fun began:

“May I help you?” (rather lack­adaisi­cal male voice)

“Yes, I’d like to buy three tick­ets for the Fri­day evening, and I’m being told online that it’s sold out, so I thought I’d check with a real per­son. Can you help?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll check for you… What’s the name on your order?”

“But I don’t have an order, that’s why I’m ring­ing you.”

“Right. I’ll check to see if there are any avail­able. Did you know what event you wanted?”

“YES! The Olympia Horse Show! Three tick­ets on the Fri­day night.”

“Yeah, there’s the first tier at 51 pounds, the sec­ond at 44…” (and so on)

“I’ll take the 51, please.”

“What day did you want that for?” (didn’t I say already?)

“The Fri­day, please.”

“And did you know how many tick­ets you wanted?” (hmmm…)

“Yes, please, three tickets.”

“That’s sold out, actu­ally, if you wanted the Friday.”

“Yes, I did. Are there tick­ets at any other price?”

“Did you know how many you wanted?”

Grrr! At this point I felt I had been thrust all unknow­ing onto the stage of an ama­teur pro­duc­tion of an Ionesco play.

The long and short of it is, Friday’s sold out full stop. I finally got tick­ets for Thurs­day, but I’m not at all sure they will turn out to be for the horse show. If I end up booked for the “Christ­mas Con­fer­ence for the Lac­tose Intol­er­ant and Vegan in the Lon­don Expat Com­mu­nity,” I will be not at all surprised.

Right, rant over. The point of my post today is sim­ply to wax lyri­cal over last week’s expe­ri­ence at the Arvon Foun­da­tion at Totleigh Bar­ton. To think that eight days ago I could not really have lisped the ten­der syl­la­bles of the place because I was com­pletely under­whelmed at the thought of going… and com­pletely over­whelmed at the thought of leav­ing home. The whole thing just goes to show that get­ting right away, and hav­ing the courage to leave all the whole of your life details in the hands of other care­fully cho­sen peo­ple, is a fan­tas­tic idea. Go, do.

Once I actu­ally left home, it turned out, I was fine. Just the phys­i­cal act of shut­ting the door behind me was ther­a­peu­tic, really. I felt the weight of the world drop from my shoul­ders! Isn’t that pathetic. I really must get out more. A lovely trip through the misty coun­try­side to arrive at Exeter St David’s train sta­tion and much covert scrutiny of my fel­low arrivees to try to deter­mine who might be a food writer. And won­der­ing where the promised taxi might pos­si­bly be, and gen­er­ally feel­ing extremely foot­loose and ran­dom, not at all my usual sense of being firmly planted in a sit­u­a­tion where all the pieces are in place for nor­mal life.

I caught the eye of a girl who struck me as hav­ing a suit­case full of recipes, so I approached and said, “Food writ­ing?” and she laughed and said, “Yes, I’m Louise.” The first friend, very promis­ing. A com­pletely jolly man with a per­fectly Eng­lish shock of blond hair approached and said, like a line in a play, “Food writ­ing?” We laughed. He was Char­lie, and quite firmly the sec­ond friend. More and more peo­ple gath­ered round, a very young chap called Adam and a reserved, qui­etly obser­vant man called Edward, an unas­sum­ingly friendly lady called Pauline… and there was the first taxi, so there was a rather gen­tle­manly skir­mish to allot the first pas­sen­gers since clearly we would need more than one conveyance.

Char­lie, Edward and I were left peace­fully behind to await the next taxi, and there was per­haps 25 sec­onds of hes­i­tance before we began the relent­less ban­ter that became what Avery has described as (hav­ing heard thou­sands of sto­ries by now) “The Kris­ten, Edward and Char­lie Show.” We could not talk fast enough. Edward’s chuck-it-all, I’m-bloody-addicted-to-cooking three-month stint at Bal­ly­maloe, a cook­ery school in County Cork, Ire­land, Charlie’s devo­tion as a PR man to the fate of a Scot­tish reg­i­ment. I don’t remem­ber if I con­tributed any­thing more intrigu­ing to the gen­eral may­hem than con­fess­ing a hatred of tofu, but in any case we made fast friends in an instant, and then real­ized that no taxi was in sight to take us to our des­ti­na­tion. Char­lie rang up the com­pany. “It’s bro­ken down you say, and you’re send­ing another? In 45 min­utes? And you think we should have a cup of tea and wait? Right…” He strode over to the taxi rank nearby and ges­tured thumbs-up to us, and we were off.

There fol­lowed an hour-ish of the most enter­tain­ing con­ver­sa­tion I can ever remem­ber. What did we talk about? Any­thing and every­thing, our words spilling over each other in reck­less silli­ness. I think a lot of our instant bond came from sheer relief: the unspo­ken fear we had all har­bored about our upcom­ing week, a jump into the unknown, an inescapable throw­ing together of strangers for an expe­ri­ence grounded in total iso­la­tion. What if there was no one of inter­est, I think we had all feared, what if every­one is a dire bore and one can’t get away? What if I’ve landed myself into a week of stilted con­ver­sa­tions about noth­ing, punc­tu­ated by mis­er­able, enforced togeth­er­ness at meal­times? This had, I think, been in all our minds, and our joy at find­ing fas­ci­nat­ing (well, I can speak only for my per­cep­tion of Edward and Char­lie), well-spoken peo­ple with intrigu­ing sto­ries to tell made us rather instantly the best of friends. “How bad can it be,” Char­lie mused, “if we at least have each other to talk to?” Lit­tle did we know, the only prob­lem over the com­ing week was going to be get­ting enough of the peo­ple around us. There was never a lack of con­ver­sa­tion, all week.

Our taxi dri­ver, sit­ting beside me, emerged from his silence to say, “We are about fif­teen min­utes away,” and I said, “What’s your name, any­way?” “I am Sedgkin, I am Turk­ish,” he said, “and I must ask you: are you all come­di­ans? Because this is the best taxi ride I have ever had.”

At one point, twist­ing around in my seat as I had to, to chat, I heard Char­lie say what I thought was, “Then I spent two years as Santa,” which struck me as amaz­ing. “Do you know David Sedaris?” I asked, instantly think­ing of his mind-bendingly hilar­i­ous sto­ries of his days as a Macy’s Christ­mas elf in New York. “You’ve got to lis­ten to it, with your expe­ri­ences!” I went on, although tak­ing in a bit the utter blank­ness on their faces. Typ­i­cal British peo­ple, I thought, think­ing Amer­i­cans rave on about the stu­pid­est things, I thought, feel­ing a sur­pris­ing hurt that my two new best friends didn’t under­stand my enthu­si­asm. Then it dawned on me. “WHAT did you say you spent two years doing?” And of course that was it. He spent two years at SAND­HURST, say that with a British accent. For God’s sake. If I could have crawled under the seat I would have. “You know, the place Prince William went,” Char­lie added help­fully, “pass­ing out and so on.” Pass­ing out: if I could have done that, I would have.

We arrived in gravel-spitting splen­dor and got out of the car, to be con­fronted with the most dra­matic of land­scapes and archi­tec­ture, as you see. Twi­light was com­ing on, there were sev­eral smok­ers in the group casu­ally light­ing up out­side what would turn out to be the kitchen win­dow, a chap roared up on a motor­cy­cle dressed in leather and I thought, “This could be very inter­est­ing.” A com­pletely unfa­mil­iar wave of glee came over me as it dawned on me that I was absolutely on my own, about to make what friends I would of these unknown peo­ple. I felt a part of me that had been sleep­ing wake up sud­denly: that per­son that a per­son is when stripped of all the cozy bits that make up one’s iden­tity: fam­ily, home, respon­si­bil­i­ties, rou­tine. Per­haps I’m alone in feel­ing so depen­dent on those cocoon­ing strands of iden­tity, I don’t know. I do think most peo­ple find it eas­ier to let go of them than I do. But I did.

I can tell you right now that the food, from Day One to Day Five (as we all uni­formly referred to the pas­sage of time!) was nearly uni­formly dia­bol­i­cally bad. Isn’t that ironic? Here we were, six­teen aspir­ing food writ­ers gripped with vary­ing degrees of obses­sion with what we eat, and… it was dire. We were faced with pre­cisely the same menu and store of ingre­di­ents as, say, a group of poets or sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers would be. Oven-baked Span­ish Risotto? I don’t even know where to start in my list of objec­tions to THAT notion. Where else do you bake some­thing? Risotto is Ital­ian, not Span­ish, and is NEVER baked, even in an oven. For heaven’s sake. Fried Tomato and Haloumi Stacks? That’s just WRONG.

I can also tell you that you may expect an instant ratcheting-up of your ten­dency to swear, should you embark on an Arvon week. I never swear, hon­estly. Who can, with an 11-year-old as one’s con­stant com­pan­ion? Well, I do now, or I did and now I’m hav­ing to rein in my appalling lan­guage in sit­u­a­tions like a missed shot on the ten­nis court or an impos­si­ble con­ver­sa­tion with a ticket agent on the tele­phone. For &^%$‘s sake.

We learned from Simon, our Arvon host, that part of the week’s activ­i­ties would be cook­ing together, in groups of four, each night for din­ner. At this, Edward, Char­lie and I fell over each other rac­ing to the sign-up sheet. “Spicy Roast Chicken With Spinach” seemed the least dire choice, although a bit laconic in its word­ing. Spinach how? Ah well, how bad could it be. And we’d have fun. We gath­ered up the only other Amer­i­can, a mys­te­ri­ous travel writer called Roger, for our four­some, the last night of the adven­ture. Lit­tle did we know what dra­mas would ensue in the kitchen, to the menu, to all our friend­ships, as the week progressed.

Another thing I can tell you is that spend­ing five days hav­ing one’s every WORD scru­ti­nized, ana­lyzed, described alter­nately as “rub­bish,” “riv­et­ing,” “just wrong,” “truth­ful but awk­ward,” etc., is one of the most life-changing expe­ri­ences a writer can have. Can you imag­ine? Sev­eral of us dis­cussed the phe­nom­e­non as the week went on. “Don’t you find your­self mea­sur­ing your words to a degree you never have before?” the youngest mem­ber of our group, Sam, asked ingen­u­ously one after­noon, as we sat keep­ing the smok­ers com­pany in the sun out­side the kitchen. “And not just in writ­ing,” I agreed, “even speak­ing has become some­thing I can’t do just nat­u­rally anymore!”

I’ll describe to you the sequence of our hours, and you can imag­ine how stun­ningly self-conscious, and inti­mately con­nected to one another it makes writ­ers, as the days go by. First thing in the morn­ing: a trek to the ancient barn adja­cent to the house, with soar­ing ceil­ings fit­ted with the most hideously inef­fi­cient heaters ever devised. We all arranged our­selves on the sev­eral sort of stage-set-like draped sofas around the perime­ter of the room (I kept imag­in­ing some­one from an Alan Ben­nett play to leap out from behind one). Our tutors, Tamasin Day-Lewis and Orlando Mur­rin, would bark at us to get in and get started. They set us an exer­cise to write about that instant, twenty min­utes’ time limit. Hold­ing up a lemon, Orlando said on our first real day of work, “Describe this object to an alien. Twenty min­utes.” Oh, no. But oh, yes. And twenty min­utes later, we each read out our pieces to the whole group, at that point rel­a­tive strangers, to the tutors’ (and even­tu­ally all our) rig­or­ously truth­ful response. Painful! Scary!

Then lunch together, mak­ing ten­ta­tive for­ays on that first day into friend­ship (although “The Kris­ten, Edward and Char­lie Show” was full-on even on Day Two of our adven­ture, so at least there was always some ban­ter, even ini­tially. Per­son­al­i­ties began to emerge: moth­erly and yet feisty Rosie, Roger the Spy (was he or wasn’t he? He could tell us but then he’d have to kill us), peace­ful Katie, ambi­tious and very young Adam, laconic but intense Jack the motorcycle-riding pro­fes­sional chef… how would I be described? An inter­est­ing question!

After lunch we had our indi­vid­ual tuto­ri­als with Tamasin and Orlando, and dear read­ers, I don’t know if I was really prac­ti­cal, really brave, or really stu­pid to sched­ule mine both on the first day. Prob­a­bly a bit of all three, really. My idea had been that I would get their responses and their crit­i­cism to the pieces I had sub­mit­ted right at the start, and then have the whole week to work on them. Well, per­haps. But what I didn’t bar­gain on was the gut-wrenching shock of pro­fes­sional, no-holds-barred feed­back (how I hate that word now) before I had prop­erly learned what my strengths and weak­nesses were. True, I had all week to work on what they said, but I also to my peril had all week to REMEM­BER what they said, in all its black-and-white drama. Fairly shat­ter­ing, I have to confess…

Then din­ner (enough said), then more reading-aloud in the big barn at night. Thank­fully, the atmos­phere at night was quite defin­i­tively admir­ing, enjoy­ing, sup­port­ing, as an anti­dote to the fiercely hon­est mood of the day­time read­ings. I don’t think any of us would have sur­vived oth­er­wise, quite sim­ply. You emerge from a week of this treat­ment com­pletely with­out fear of any­thing any­one will ever say again about your writ­ing, I assure you. But it’s a week of trial by most elo­quent fire.

Well, I must get back to actual liv­ing, as opposed to describ­ing liv­ing. What a bore that is, some­times, the reg­u­lar liv­ing. Because yes, I’m back in the real­ity of super­vis­ing Latin home­work, emp­ty­ing the dish­washer, remem­ber­ing people’s birth­days, fill­ing out school forms. But I’ll be back, because I really need to put some of this extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ence into words, if only for me…