Arrivederci London

Tomorrow, after nineteen years abroad, twelve of them in London, we are going back home. We are excited about a new beginning and being physically close to our families and good friends, but endings are bittersweet. You look around at everything you took for granted and wonder if it is the last time you will ever see this or that, him or her.

Our years in London have been mostly enjoyable, but it has not been an easy relationship for me (see "A Foggy Decade," March 10, 2010). I know I will look back on our time here with fondness, though. We have been extraordinarily lucky to have lived in this vibrant city for so long.

Every day now people ask me, "What will you miss about London?" I should say I will miss the fabulous museums, venerable galleries, and access to wonderful theater. That's true, but they are not the first things that come to mind. These things do, one for every year, in no particular order:

1.  Black cabs and drivers who know where they are going.

2.  Being able to walk everywhere on streets full of imposing buildings in a city steeped in history. We haven't owned a car for 12 years.
     
3.  Marylebone High Street, which has everything you need on it.

4.   Frequent visits from our friend Simon via Eurostar from Brussels.
   
5.  Alyson, Jami, Justin and Marcy.
    
6.  British pageantry.

7.  Wonderful architecture and beautiful parks, especially Regent's Park. 

8.  Easy access to other European countries.
   
9.  Everyman Cinema on Baker Street. How many cinemas serve cappuccino, fresh cakes and wine as well as popcorn and Coca Cola in small glass bottles?

     
10. Waitrose grocery stores, the food hall at Marks and Spencer's on Oxford Street, and Boots pharmacy.

       

11. Hatchards and Daunt book stores.

12. Orange cake at the Orangerie on the grounds of Kensington Palace.

I have not had a great love affair with London or the UK, it's true. I have that with Italy, and I'm a one-country woman (though I've had a few flings with some cities). 

But London and I have had some good times together. My feelings about it are best summed up with the lyrics from a Emmylou Harris song: "No, it's not love, but it's not bad."

Down the Chimney

It is olive-harvesting time in Tuscany, so we arrived at our place yesterday to observe the pickers and the pressing of new oil.  We like to come here at this time of year. The foliage is red and gold, the days are crisp, and the are nights cold, perfect for building a fire in the camino (chimney).

Anticipating that cozy picture, we began to prepare the hearth. We have learned the hard way to make sure the canna fumaria (flue) is open before lighting the kindling. Haven't we all experienced the moment, as smoke begins to form layers in the room and are eyes start to sting, when we realize the flue is still closed?

This flue usually opens easily by releasing a chain attached to the wall. We pulled. Nothing happened. We tugged. No movement. We jiggled the chain. Nada. I said if we worked on it we could surely coax the thing to open. Then we noticed a small pile of dirt at the back of the hearth. Were our eyes playing tricks or was that pile of dirt moving?

I've posted before about the learning curve of city people like us having to deal with creatures encountered in the country (wild boars, snakes). We are used to the occasional sound of pine martens on the tile roof at night, when it seems like a roomful of furniture is being  moved above our heads. We recognize pheasants strolling along the road. I used to scream upon sight of a tiny bat outside in the twilight hours, but once assured they were not vampires, I now barely notice them.  We were not prepared, however, for what we discovered in the hearth.

NOTE:  If you are squeamish you should skip over the next part.

Our eyes were not playing tricks. The little collection of dirt was teeming with tiny white larvae.  You could call them larvae if want to shield yourself from the truth, but I think they were, dare I say it aloud? Maggots. The larvae of flies.  John was stoic. I screamed. Then gagged.

We shoveled them into a heavy plastic bag, sealed it and took it outside. Then we sprayed the hearth and sealed it off. I sent an emergency text to Ivo, our savior who looks after the property.

If anyone tells you that Italian workers are unreliable about showing up or repairing things, let us talk to them. Ivo arrived bright and early this morning with a team of workers who are coincidentally constructing a new fence for us. All of their energies were focused, however, on the stuck chimney flue and why there had been live larvae in our hearth.

Since we had not built a fire in the hearth for one year, they surmised that a dead bird may have been trapped in the chimney. Thus the larvae. They also thought there might be a nest on top of the flue.  They did not find any dead animals, but they did find a nest as big as a briefcase. Calabroni (hornets). Huge ones.

They sprayed it with insecticide and then used the flexible chimney equivalent of a roto-rooter that pushed the nest down the chimney. Fortunately, the hearth was well-sealed in plastic because in releasing the nest, they also released hundreds of gassed hornets, all trying to get out. We watched in horrified fascination. Eventually they all died.

The workers cleaned up the mess and went back to building the fence.

We built a fire and speculated that if we had persisted in our efforts to open the flue last night, we might   not have lived to tell the story. We learned that if one hornet is attacked, it emits a chemical that signals to all the others in the nest to attack. While we might have survived the bite of a few hornets, the swarms that would have descended on us might have been too much to survive.

We're looking it as just another chapter in our never-ending country education.

The Pasta Dilemma

The person who started the Farmer's Markets in London was a young American woman, Nina Planck. She is also a friend of ours who now lives in New York City with her cheesemonger husband (Murray's Cheese), and three children.

Several years ago, as a single woman working for the American ambassador to Great Britain, Nina, a farmer's daughter, was appalled by the quality of produce she found in London supermarkets. Ever pro-active, she got together with local farmers and put together the thriving and extremely popular Farmer's Markets that are dotted around London on weekends.

Our local market in Marylebone is packed on Sunday mornings with shoppers looking for fresh eggs, pork, chicken, vegetables, jams, plants, flowers, pies, cakes, cheese, butter. We try to get there early or things sell out.

Nina's philosophy on food is to eat locally, know the source of your food, and eat things in season. She is a passionate believer in eating traditional foods like beef, butter and eggs, cheese, and raw milk. Her two meticulously researched and well-reviewed books, Real Food and Real Food for Mother and Baby, explain why those foods are good for us while debunking the myths surrounding them. We actually need fats, she writes, as long as they are the right kinds of fat.

We met Nina seventeen years ago when she arrived on our doorstep in Vienna, a visit arranged by a mutual friend. At that time she was a vegetarian and consumed large quantities of homemade bread (I was on a bread making kick). She ran every morning and was a pleasant guest in what was then a houseful of guests.  She describes herself as overweight during that period but I can assure you she was not.

Vegetarianism didn't work for her. She says she felt moody, out-of-sorts, and was often ill. That was the beginning of her search for healthier eating. Now, all these years later, and as an avowed meat and dairy eater, she is a lean, fit, lovely woman with energy that makes me sleepy to write about.

So where am I going with this?  Nina is not a fan of carbs. As in baguettes. As in warm, fragrant homemade loaves. As in crispy French fries and creamy mashed potatoes. As in, dare I say it, the world's most popular food, the ultimate comfort dish, the delectable and versatile pasta.

Though Nina does not push her ideas for eating on her friends, I once gave her then year old son Julian a piece of wholewheat bread to chew on. Out of my sight (or thought she was), Nina snatched it from him and threw it out.

I am mindful of Nina's guidelines for real food, but pasta is off her table and we live a part of the year in Italy. No matter where we are,  pasta is my default answer to "what's for dinner?" Nina's three kids have their own ideas about what they want to eat now, so I asked if she ever fed them pasta, the perennial kids favorite. Did she eat it herself? Had she grown up eating it?

She answered, "I never eat the stuff, but ate plenty as a child and feed my children plenty. They also get brown rice. My mother made lots, always white as I recall (red sauce, and mac and cheese, and tuna in white sauce!), though she was a whole wheat fiend for bread, cookies, etc. I believe she stopped making pasta completely when we left.

"Young children need not merely fat and protein but plenty of carbs so they don't spend all their energy just to move around and stay warm; the carbs spare the protein and fat for growth and development.

"Good bread serves a similar purpose in our house (e.g., morning toast and 'dessert' after meals).

"As for whole wheat pasta, it is now so much better than it was that I make it 8/10 times; white is now a treat." 

We are not children and probably don't need as many carbs, but if whole wheat pasta is better for us, there is a middle ground solution to the pasta dilemma. Serve whole wheat when it works with the sauce, and save the white for things like fettucine alfredo, lasagna, spaghetti carbonara, linguine alle vongole, fettucine al limone.

No matter how I serve it, I like to remind myself of Sophia Loren's line, "All you see I owe to spaghetti."

A Snake in the Pool

In my previous post, "Wild Boars Don't Jump," (8/15/12), I mentioned that having a place in the Tuscan countryside forces us to become familiar with creatures not on our radar screen as city dwellers. Boars, which ruined our grass on an almost nightly basis, are now kept out by a fence. Our lawn looks better, but that has consequences. The countryside has snakes. Boars eat snakes. If boars are kept out, a snake or two can slither in.

I'm guessing many of you reacted to the last sentence the way any sane person would: a muffled scream, a serious shudder, and an involuntary lifting of your feet. Me too.

We have had our home here for sixteen years, and have been visiting friends nearby for much longer than that, but we have never personally encountered a snake until this year.

I was sitting on the terrace swing, thinking deep summer thoughts like, should I paint my toenails a more vibrant, Italian color?, when Alyssa came screaming up the hill,

"Mom! Mom! There's a snake in the pool!"

I was cool under stress. "Just catch it in the skimmer net and toss it as far as you can down the hill."

She bravely did so. The problem dealt with, we both lost our superficial calm and began to imagine what might have happened. Okay, we aren't talking about a King Cobra here, but you get the picture. She described it as nine inches long, black with yellow markings, and a round head. We googled it. A harmless grass snake. But still.

Ivo, a Tuscan country man who works our property, confirmed our findings. The snake's round head was a clue to its benign nature. However, if we encountered one with an angular head, it was la vipera (a viper), whose bite was poisonous. He nonchalantly added that if bitten, we should tie off the area and go to the pronto soccorso (emergency room).  He drew us pictures of the two types of snake heads.

Seeing the looks of horror on our city faces, he explained that snakes are a part of the countryside and they do not attack. They are more afraid of us than we are of them. They are only dangerous when startled. He said we were in the middle of what was called a "Caligula" heat wave, and there had been no rain for six weeks, which had probably dried up snake water sources. 

After that, we carefully scanned the pool before jumping in. 

The heat wave continued with no sign of rain. Late in August John and I found a small dead snake on the parched ground. It had an angular head. We had been aware of a few human snakes wriggling through John's professional life for a few months and somehow the fate of that poisonous snake seemed like an appealing metaphor.

Wild Boars Don't Jump

We are city people so it seems strange to be writing about boar habits. When you are lucky enough to have a place in the Tuscan countryside, however, you have to learn about them. Bear with me for a brief boar lesson. I will try not to bore

you.

Wild boars, part of the pig family, are plentiful in this part of the world. In the fall, when hunting season begins, their numbers fall dramatically as the cacciatore (hunters) shoot them and take them home for dinner. Cinghiale (wild boar) is historically an important part of the Tuscan diet and remains so today. It shows up as sausage, salami, ragu sauce. How does it taste? Like pork, but gamier.

For several years we had a boar problem at our place. Never seen during the day, they used to invade our property at night. On occasion we thought we heard boar snorts outside our window. If accused of snoring, we had an alibi: "It wasn't me. It must have been a boar."

These creatures are geniuses at sniffing out food sources, and they dig ferociously for roots, tearing up the grass in the process. Ivo, who works the property, was tearing out his hair with frustration as he seeded and re-seeded the lawn. We had been opposed to a fence, but we finally relented. It was either that or lose Ivo.

He constructed a fence of almost-invisible wire around all the places a boar might enter. I asked him why he didn't bring it further up the hill, to include a ledge. "Cinghiali non saltare" (boars don't jump), he explained.

We have encountered a boar on a few occasions, always at night, and thankfully while in a car. It is dangerous to be between a mother boar and her offspring, so we were nervous when we saw a baby boar wandering on the dirt track leading to our place. Fortunately, it moved off the road before the mother could ram our Fiat Panda.

On another evening, as we drove down the winding road to the local village, a boar the size of a cow leapt in front of the car and appeared to JUMP up the hill on the other side of the road. Our daughter Alyssa called it the Famous Tuscan Jumping Boar. You haven't heard of it?

We haven't seen it since, but sometimes at night we think we hear a boar snort close to the house, inside the fence. 

Or maybe it is just someone snoring inside the house.

Meeting the Queen

It's the Queen's Jubilee, a festive commemoration of Elizabeth II's sixty years on the Throne. Celebrations will take place all year, but they officially begin this weekend. 

Union Jack flags are festooned across the streets, and shop windows are full of "best of Britain" products. Previously unseen portraits of the Queen are now on display. On the BBC, Prince Charles narrates unearthed home movies showing a warm young mother tickling him as an infant and encouraging him to walk. He reveals a vivid memory of his mother getting used to the weight of the coronation crown by wearing it around the Palace, even while "visiting us in the bath." 

Street parties are taking place all over the country. The Queen's face appears on cookie tins, mugs, plates, tea towels, napkins, even in the icing on cupcakes.

We have met the Queen twice and I thought you might like to hear about those times.

The first meeting took place around 1989, when we were in London for a NATO meeting. John, who is nonchalant about such things, casually mentioned that we, along with many others at the meeting, were invited to meet the Queen at a reception at Buckingham Palace. I was super-excited. You have to know that I once thought she would be my mother-in-law (see post A Foggy Decade, March 10, 2010), and like many Americans, I was enthralled with the whole Queen thing.

Our group arrived in a special bus that took us through the main gates of Buckingham Palace to the  entrance. We were led up a scarlet-carpeted marble staircase and down a corridor to the Queen's Gallery, a long room with walls covered in art masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, among others. 

Drinks were lined up neatly on high tables with little cards in front indicating what each was: white wine, gin and tonic, etc. I recall miniature sausage rolls and potato chips. 

Once a group like ours is assembled, members of the Royal Family enter through doors at each end of the long gallery. At least two royals work the room from end to end, crossing each other in the middle. 

The Queen's sister, Princess Margaret, entered first and was eventually led to our little group. She was wearing a deep red dress, with a large ruby and diamond brooch. She smoked, using a cigarette holder. She held a tumbler of what looked like whiskey in the other hand. I remember thinking her skin looked waxen. I also remember she wore open-toed shoes and stockings with reinforced toes.

An equerry is assigned to find out the names of people before introducing them. She was introduced to John, to whom she said in her high-pitched, posh voice, with a hint of flirtation, "But you are too tall! Will you please sit down!"

She was introduced to another member of our group, a Brit, to whom she asked, "And where are you from?"  "Warrington," he answered. "How unfortunate," she replied, deadpan. 

Forever afterwards we referred to our friend as "Martin the unfortunate."

Another Margaret memory: when she finished her drink, she simply held it to the side and let go, confident that it would be caught, and replaced, by her equerry.

We made our way down to the other end of the gallery where the Queen entered. Prince Philip was with her, though we had no encounter with him. One of the nice things about being married to a tall man is he gets noticed. Sure enough, the Queen's equerry approached John and asked his name and affiliation before leading the Queen in his direction. 

She wore a dark blue silk dress with a large sapphire and diamond brooch. Her soft complexion was flawless, and her eyes a startlingly pretty blue. John's height makes it easy for people to think of something to say. She said, "Well, I guess  you can see everything from up there!." He agreed that he could.

She smiled and moved on. Her eyes fell fleetingly on me and she smiled again, but I was not tall enough for an introduction.

We saw her a second time when she and Prince Philip visited the United States in 1991. We were invited, along with a cast of hundreds, to a garden party at the home of the British ambassador.  There were no introductions that time, but we saw her make her way through the guests, looking fresh and pretty. She must have a knack for making everyone think she is smiling directly at them because I am sure she smiled at me.

What I remember best about the garden party was chatting with the charming  Senator, now Vice-President, Joe Biden, near the pastry table. I told him I recognized B.B. King sitting over near the tree.

"Who is B.B. King?" he asked.

"He's one of the biggest blues guitarists around," I said.

Ever the politician, he replied, "Let's go say hello to him."

As we approached, Senator Biden enthusiastically thrust out his hand to B.B. and said, "You know, everyone here came to see the Queen, but I came to see the King!"

That, folks, is how it's done.

Bad Mothers?

TIME magazine's recent cover depicts a woman breast-feeding her three year old son, along with the challenging question, "Are You Mom Enough?" I didn't bother to read it. If mothers want to continue breastfeeding their kids until kindergarten, that's their business. 

A problem arises when women who don't wish to breastfeed that long, or at all, are judged as lesser mothers. It's the superiority thing that gets me. After the birth of her first child, supermodel Gisele Bundchen said breastfeeding for the first six months should be mandated by law. 

Did she consider the women who would like to do it but cannot for reasons of health, including severe mastitis, or medication? What about the women who would walk through fire for their infants but just don't like breastfeeding for whatever reason? 

Does that make them all bad mothers?

Women should nurture in whatever way they feel is best for their child and stop judging the ones who don't do it their way. Mothers have enough to worry about without adding peer, or societal, pressure to the mix.

Let's take, for example, the subject of my last post, The French Way (April 12, 2012), in which I discussed the bestseller French Children Don't Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman. The book caused non-French mothers everywhere to fret about what they were doing wrong. Are French children really so perfect? I decided to go to an impeccable source: my half-French cousin, Elizabeth.

Parisians Elizabeth and her brother Bernard have six little kids between them, so they are well-acquainted with the nursery and kindergarten sets. I asked her what she thought of the book. "It strikes me as a pile of dog merde," she said, borrowing from another subject in my last post.

"Of course they won't keep quiet in restaurants because they're kids! Do they all sleep through the night at two months? Mine gave me six hours at that age, or I think they did (I'm a heavy sleeper), but I know some, including my goddaughter and nephew, who didn't sleep through the night until they were toddlers."

Did she know French children who never threw food?

"Well, I always did it myself, and it was French friends who taught me. I have fond memories of the 'test du camembert,' where you take it out of its wrapping, throw it up to the ceiling, and if it sticks just for a little beat before it falls back down, it's perfect. If it falls straight back, it's still not quite ripe, and if it sticks for any length of time, it's overdone."

Now that's a French method worth considering.