I had an actual father, too, and by many standards he was a good one. He was solidly married to my mother, he kept mostly moderate habits, and as the sole breadwinner for a family of seven, he worked tirelessly and with more than adequate success. He told me often and firmly that he was a “marvelous father,” and I am sure that by his lights, he undoubtedly was.

But he was also a man’s man to his bone, who saw no reason either why he should attempt to mask his preference for his four sons over his daughter, or, curiously, why he might expect that daughter’s feelings towards him to be colored by this. My father provided for me when I was a child, and when I was an adult occasionally said things that made me laugh; but he never made me feel particularly loved. Uncle Tony did.

The Reverend Joseph Anthony Barrett S.J, my mother’s eldest brother, stood 6’3” tall, and boasted a booming aristocratic voice and a commanding presence. He wore his spirituality proudly, and took his priestly duties with full seriousness – there are bad priests, yes, but there are good priests too, and he was one of them; but he also loved the world. He loved wine, and history, and good books, and word puzzles, and arithmetic, and astronomy, and gadgetry, and off-color jokes (he told me some ripe ones, and my male cousins report he told them even riper), and, most of all, telling stories.

Oh, lord, Uncle Tony loved to tell stories. He spent most of his life traveling between Farm Street, the British Jesuit mother church in London, and a range of locations in Rome, and had stories to tell from all of them. He told stories from Ancient Rome. He told stories from Tudor London. He told stories from his childhood. He told stories from the priesthood. He told stories that friends had told him from who knows where. At one point in his career, his superior, the Provincial, whom he had somehow offended (my mother’s family were blessed with many qualities, but tact was not among them), decided to punish him by sending him away for a spell from fashionable Farm Street to rainswept downmarket northern Manchester to be chaplain of the infamously bleak Strangeways Prison: to the surprise of both men – and I imagine the fury of the Provincial – Uncle Tony had the time of his life there, and came back with some of his best stories of all.

When Uncle Tony would visit our ragtag family branch in Palmers Green, it was an occasion. He would arrive at the door, rosy-cheeked with having been twittered over all morning by the nuns at the local convent, greet my mother with a kiss and my father, with whom he was very good friends, with a resounding bellow of “Hello, Broth-ah!” and we would all pile into the family car to be taken, exotically, to lunch at the Curzon restaurant on Green Lanes, where Uncle Tony would order the food in Italian from the waitresses. On one occasion, there was gooseberry tart on the menu. “Order it in Italian,” we asked Tony. He consulted with the waitress and they both shook their heads. “They don’t have gooseberries in Italy,” he told us. This was the first inkling I had had of a world so different from North London that gooseberries didn’t exist there, even in theory.

Uncle Tony liked me. He would ask me which books I was reading, and tell me stories of Roman restaurants where I imagined women in jewel-colored dresses wearing lipstick and smoking cigarettes. Once, after watching me struggle with cutting my chicken at the Curzon, he demanded we two ditch the car ride home so that we could walk past the butcher’s window where he could educate me in fowl anatomy. Used as I was to being ignored by the men in my family’s circle, I for years found this avuncular attention confusing, even a little alarming. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me that it was, in fact, really rather nice.

When I was an adult, I began to visit Uncle Tony in Rome. His Italian was fluent, but I hadn’t realized, I at first thought, how pronounced his English accent was. “I-o son-o Padre Barrett,” he would introduce himself delightedly to puzzled strangers on the banks of the Tiber, and to their further befuddlement proudly including his niece in the introduction, “e cuest-ah è mi-ah nipot-ah.” It was only when I met him again in London that I remembered that, when ordering food in Italian restaurants there, his accent became worthy of Petrarch.

One of my brothers swears he once accompanied him to a trattoria in Soho, where they were waited on by an olive-skinned and Botticelli beautiful young man whom Tony addressed in a mellifluous speech in which the terms Roma and bottiglia di vino featured prominently, only to have the youth reply in broad and apologetic Cockney that, “I’m sorry, Farver, I don’t speak Italian.”

Bad Italian accent or good, his company was fabulous. And he drew towards him an array of other colorful characters – American heiresses, Italian politicians, retired Colonels, Sixties drop-outs, scholars, artists, and prison workers – and loved nothing better than including his beloved nipota in their midst. Time after time in Rome, my feeble suggestions that I might visit, for instance, the Sistine Chapel were brushed aside with a breezy, “You don’t want to do that, sweetie, it’s full of bloody too-rists. Come and have lunch with the contessa instead.” To this day I haven’t seen the Sistine Chapel. But I’ve had some remarkable lunches.

Before Mr. Los Angeles and I got married, I took him to Rome to meet Uncle Tony. Tony was polite but wary: he liked most Americans, he enjoyed their directness and humor, but this one was planning to marry his nipota, and the stakes were high. One morning, when he was leading us through the Centro Storico, expounding on the use of concrete in the Pantheon, he noticed Mr. Los Angeles, who is a talented amateur photographer, busily capturing a nun eating ice cream.

“Are you still taking bloody photographs?” he called across the ancient cobblestones. “You look like some bloody American too-rist.”

Mr. Los Angeles beamed upon him a sunny Californian smile.

“Well, Tony,” he explained genially. “I am a bloody American tourist.”

There was a pause while respect dawned gradually in Uncle Tony’s eyes.

“Ah,” he said then. “Right. Carry on.”

Uncle Tony loved me; but he also loved my father, and it saddened him deeply when we two became estranged. Being a man of his generation, he naturally took my father’s part, and wrote me a number of letters reminding me to honor my father and my mother, and quoting Christ’s injunction that if someone strike me on one cheek, I should turn the other. I think even he realized that this last was not what you’d call a ringing endorsement of a caring parent, and when I wrote back that after turning and turning again, I could surely be forgiven for at last walking out of the room, he (mostly) dropped the argument. It was the closest we two ever came to falling out.

The last time I visited Uncle Tony was for his ninetieth birthday celebration in Rome. This was an affair several days long of cousins and friends and lunches and dinners and a large and riotous party, at the end of which he made a speech culminating in a lengthy joke whose punchline was “hemorrhoids for the h’aristocracy.” (You probably had to be there). Mr. Los Angeles captured the session on his handheld computer, with which Tony was fascinated, and he remarked, wistfully, that, had he been younger when computers came along, he would have very much enjoyed learning to use them: I can just see him now, slamming the latest model exultantly onto the kitchen table. “I say! Look at this!”

The very last time I said good-bye to him, we were standing outside the sacristy of the Chiesa del Gesù, the Italian Jesuits’ mother church that over the years had become, along with the Irish pub across the street and the Ristorante Abruzzi ten minutes’ stroll away, his personal fiefdom. The previous night, we had had, once again, the inevitable discussion about my father, and had come, once again, to the inevitable consent to agree to disagree. Now, he looked down at me from his tall, familiar height, lifted his chin across the church towards Mr. Los Angeles, busy examining the carpentry work on one of the confessional boxes, and cleared his throat.

“You happy, sweetie?” he said.

This was not a question it had ever occurred to my father to ask.

“Yes, Uncle,” I said. “I’m very happy.”

“Good,” he said. And that was that.

He died a couple of years later, of what he ruefully described as “a bad case of anno domini.” He spent his last few weeks in a nursing hospital in Rome, being cared for by nuns, who allowed him to have wine in his room, with which he entertained the series of visitors who came to pay final court.

“Are you frightened?” one of them asked him.

“No,” he replied thoughtfully. “I’m curious.”

One morning, he woke up, and said to the nun who was tending to him, “Io parto oggi” – I’m going away today.

“È Dio che decide, non Lei,” the nun told him. That’s God’s decision, not yours.

They were in the middle of debating this when he died, having had, for the last time, the last word. It was March 19, the feast of St. Joseph: not only his name saint, but the patron saint of a happy death

.Photo by Owen Bjørnstad

His funeral was in the Gesù, and a splendid occasion it was, with multiple priests on the altar and eulogies in both Italian and English: I attended with a group of cousins and we were made much of, being i nipoti, the representatives of the family which had given Padre Barrett to the world and to Rome. After the ceremony, the long, long coffin – Uncle Tony had never shrunk physically with age – was driven to a mausoleum in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city, where it was placed in a crypt: this was apparently a mark of honor, although I didn’t like leaving him there, it seemed far too cold and lonely for my sociable uncle. But he himself would remind me that what is in the crypt is only a shell: the important part of Joseph Anthony Barrett is off somewhere else now, I hope having his curiosity satisfied.

The next day, I went back to the Gesù, and for the first time in all the countless other times I had visited, was struck by how darned big it was. And it is massive – 75 meters long and 35 meters wide, abundant with high altar and side chapels, lavishly decorated with gold leaf and bronze, tall marble pillars, and soaring frescoed ceilings. The guide books now tell me it is one of the most impressive Baroque edifices in all of Rome.

It had just seemed so much smaller with Uncle Tony in it.

Photo by Marisela Leon on Unsplash

For those who do not know, diner lingo is a slang employed by wait staff in some of the more basic restaurants in the city, created originally for the waiters to entertain themselves while transmitting to each other order after order of mostly the same food. Eccentric and semi-humorous names have been given to regular dishes: some of them self-explanatory, such as “bad breath” for onion, or “wreck ‘em” for scrambled eggs; some of them faintly Biblical, such as “Adam and Eve on a raft” for two poached eggs on toast, or “Eve with a lid” for apple pie; an occasional few are mildly punning; and another will sometimes appear – “drown the kids” for boiled eggs, anyone? – that will be such as to make you wonder exactly what was going on in its creator’s brain.

It is a tradition that stretches back to the bustling days of the nineteenth century, when the city of New York was busy about inventing itself, and I, for one, find it thoroughly charming that, among the wave after wave of newcomers to the city earning their daily crust in the diners that still provide the backbone for its work force – dreamers of dreams arriving from Europe, from South America, from Asia, from Africa – all have embraced this odd offshoot of the English language as their own and allowed it to continue. It’s true that you can no longer find diner lingo in every single diner in New York; but it’s there if you want to hunt it out, and that morning, I was congratulating myself for having run it to ground.

“I would like a mushroom omelet,” I told the server: while a healthy breakfast dish, it is nevertheless a relatively newfangled creation and one for which there exists no slang equivalent. And, having suitably addressed my nutritional needs, I went on to treat myself to a juicy excuse to hear the lingo. “With rye toast, please.”

“Sure,” said the server, who was a thoroughly charming young man. He raised his voice to call across the room to his buddy at the griddle.

“Una omelet de champiñones y una tostada blanca!” he shouted.

Which latter part was not by measure of either menu item or slang idiom at all what I had had in mind.

“Not tostada blanca,” I corrected him politely. “Rye toast.”

He turned back to smile patiently at the ignorant gringa.

“Is what you said,” he reassured me kindly. “Tostada blanca. It means white toast.”

“I know it does,” I said. “But you see, I don’t want white toast. I want rye toast.”

The server’s smile became a trifle puzzled.

“White toast,” he agreed. “Tostada blanca. I just order it for you from my friend there.”

“But I want rye toast,” I said.

Subtly, the server’s expression shifted from the puzzled to the mildly concerned, and his eyes shifted just a little: a thinner-skinned woman might have wondered whether he were scanning the room for the whereabouts of my caring companion.

“Tostada blanca,” he repeated. And, yet again, because he was a young man who wanted nothing but the best for me, “That means white toast in Spanish.”

“But …” I began, and then stopped as the source of the disconnect became clear to me.

For all the years I have lived in America, for all the Thanksgivings and Fourth of Julys I have celebrated, for all the high school graduations I have attended, for all the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I have consumed, for all the “have a nice days” I have bid my fellow Americans, I have never yet been able to master the sound of the American “r”. This is particularly frustrating as I actually have some success with it in other languages: French people have praised my authentically guttural Gallic version, and I can roll the Spanish edition with all the verve of a Rita (“I like to be in Amai-rica”) Moreno. But to this day, the American “r” eludes me. During my brief incarnation as an actor (it’s a long story), I was cast in the mercifully minuscule role of Lydia Lubey, downhome Midwestern American next-door neighbor, in a production of All My Sons, in which character I was required to deliver the line, “Frank, the toaster’s broken”: I do believe that I required as much coaching for that one line as the rest of the cast did for Miller’s entire tragic masterpiece, and even so, I heard someone comment at the first night party that, “the British girl did fine, all things considered.”

Experience has taught me that the only way I can have my American “r” accepted for what it is, is by the effective, if less than dignified, process of channeling my inner Tony the Tiger, the genial cartoon commercial face of Frosted Flakes breakfast cereal (“They’re GR-R-REAT!”). Without wishing to be too precious, I can’t honestly claim that pretending to be an oversized cartoon jungle cat in a TV commercial for sugar-crusted corn flakes would be my preferred method of presenting myself to the good people of Manhattan; but these were desperate times. Drawing on the acting skills I had acquired all those years ago, I cast my ego to the winds, thought orange and black stripes and a big cartoon grin, and summoned to my sense memory a large bowl of cereal flakes, glistening with sugar in the morning sunshine. I sat up straight in my chair, and opened my mouth.

“I want rrrrrrye toast!” I cried tigerishly.

“Oh.” The server’s face cleared as comprehension dawned on him. He nodded once, and turned back to his buddy. “No tostada blanca,” he shouted. And, launching to my delight without a pause into impeccable diner lingo, “Gimme whiskey down!”

My earlier studies of the Method had paid off. I sat back in my chair, sipped contentedly at the reliably revolting coffee that is the hallmark of any self-respecting New York diner, and squinted through the window at the throng of sodden New Yorkers scurrying through the rain to avoid the muddy puddles thrown up by the passing buses. It was going to be a good morning.

Who was alive and is dead.”

A cricket ball is a potentially lethal weapon. It has a core of cork covered with tightly wound string encased in a cover of leather the menacing color of oxblood and reinforced with a sturdy raised seam. It weighs a powerful five and a half to five and three-quarters ounces, and if it hits you in the wrong place, you can be seriously injured or even – as, reputedly, in the case of King George II’s son, Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-1751), referenced in the satiric verse above – killed. You do not, to sum up, mess with a cricket ball

.Photo by Craig Hughes on Unsplash

And yet it is one of the many anomalies of English life that it is the particular timbre of the thwack that is produced by the densely packed leather of the cricket ball striking the lightweight willow wood of the cricket bat – the hymned “sound of leather on willow” – that evokes all that is gentlest and best of an English summer.

Cricket, like many of the finest of English traditions, is proudly ridiculous. Its rules, even by those who understand them, are all but impossible to explain; its matches can take up to five days to play and still sometimes end in a draw; it has fielding positions with names like Fine Leg and Silly Mid-Off; and should the famously parched English climate dare at any point to squeeze a drop of moisture from the heavens, there will be an amazed cry of “Rain stops play!” as batsmen, bowlers, and fielders will make their incredulous way to the pavilion to fortify themselves with beer and sandwiches while they consult the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern Method (yes, it is a thing) to calculate how many runs they would have scored had the weather co-operated. As earlier advertised in these pages, I personally loathe most sports; but I actually quite like cricket.

Cricket, in my preposterously male-heavy family, filled my childhood summer days as football my winter; but, oh, it was so much quieter than football and, oh, so blessedly less intense. Games would drift through the hours as the clouds drifted across the blue summer sky; there were long periods of reflection while new batsmen ambled from the pavilion to the pitch, wickets tumbled and were re-erected, and in the background hummed the sweet honeybee buzz of the famously long-winded cricket commentators passing the time of day by shooting breezes as gentle as the Zephyr. Years before The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the young television writer Douglas Adams once entertained himself mightily by having Doctor Who’s Tardis land briefly in the middle of a cricket match, solely for the purpose of showing the two commentators discuss it with placid interest (“my word, this really is extraordinary”) and thoughtfully ponder the chances of an historical antecedent, before the machine took off again (“well, that wasn’t too bad, was it?”) into galaxies unknown. I have always considered that that short scene – barely two and a half minutes long, airily unencumbered by character development or plot, and jubilantly dotty – was in itself the very essence of the spirit of cricket.

The men in my family took the game greatly more seriously than did I. Endless hours from June to August were spent with the majority of the family barricaded in the living room, the curtains closed with Fort Knox-worthy precision against any chink of sunlight that might intrude to reflect off the television screen, as two-inch tall black and white figures with names like “Fiery” Fred Trueman and “Lord” Ted Dexter (who was posher than Fiery Fred, was married to a former model, and appeared with her in the television adverts for Noilly Prat, God, the glamour) bowled and batted and googlied and leg before wicketed while brothers and cousins and uncles would cheer and groan and curse and cheer again and outside the lovely sunshine slipped away to dusk.

It wouldn’t have been my own choice for spending a summer day; but then, it being summer and not winter, I had other opportunities available to me. I could go swimming with a friend; I could take my pocket money to Winchmore Hill, where there was a second-hand bookshop on the Green and an old-fashioned sweetshop on the way that sold delectables like humbugs and pear drops from glass jars and when they had less than a couple of ounces left in any one of the jars would tip the residue into a spare jar, which disgorged “penny bags” of thrilling unpredictability; or I could simply slide around the corner to the library, come back, and plump myself and my borrowed booty into the hammock under the apple tree, and read and read until my eyes dazzled and my mind distended to bursting point at the stories I was devouring in the dappled summer shade of the tree.

And that was another thing I liked about cricket: it meant it was summer, the brief but beautiful English summer, when the sun shone benignly and the birds sang early in the morning and the daylight stretched luxuriously late into the evening, when there were strawberries and cream for tea and ham and salad for supper, when I could at last liberate my itching legs from the terrible scratchy tights that had encased them all winter long, and at school we swapped our navy blue gym slips for cotton dresses the color of the sky that made the blue-eyed girls’ eyes even bluer, until we even stopped going to school at all and started on the six weeks of heaven that was the summer holiday.

But of all the good parts of cricket, the very best and most delightful of all, was that when my brothers weren’t watching it on the television, they were out at Lord’s or the Oval, watching it in person. And since cricket matches, unlike the niggardly ninety minutes long soccer matches, stretched the whole day through, it meant I had the house to myself for hour upon blissful hour. What was not to love?

As for the cricket ball that reputedly killed Frederick, Prince of Wales, back in 1751? Well, had Prince Frederick lived, it would have been he, not his son George, who would have inherited the throne of England when King George II died in 1760. And since Frederick apparently had a considerably greater interest in and skill for politics than did his science nerd, madness-approaching son King George III, it is not entirely impossible that when the American colonists started to act up in the 1770s, King Frederick might even have found a way to thwart the rebellion and keep America as part of the British Empire.

A rousing hip hip hoorah, then, and a hearty chorus of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” for the sound of leather on willow.

As she spoke, I felt each single hackle on my body arise, stand tall, and vibrate in fury.

Photo by Anastasiya Badun on Unsplash

“Do not ever,” I directed her, “use that word in my presence. Ever.”

“Why not?” said Candy.

“Don’t ask her,” said my English friend Vanessa. “She’ll tell you.”

“Tell me what?” said Candy. “I’ve never had a problem with acupressure. Did something bad happen to you with it?”

“I told you,” I reminded her. “Not to use that word in my presence.”

“Don’t ask her why,” sad Vanessa. “Really. Just don’t.”

“Well, if something bad happened to you,” said Candy, “I’d want to know.”

“Oh, God,” said Vanessa. “She’s going to tell you.”

“That word,” I said.

“What word?’ said Candy. “Acupressure?”

“Oh, God,” said Vanessa.

“That word,” I said.

“Has anyone tried the new coffee shop on Lincoln?” said Vanessa. “The latte is good but they don’t have oat milk, which I’d think would cost them some custom these days.”

“That word,” I said, “is a flat-out insult to the Latin language.”

My Latin teacher at school had had the almost too perfect Latin teacher’s name of Miss Winthorpe. She was a small woman, with permed white hair and an icily condescending smile: her parents, unlike the immigrant forebears of most of the pupils at St. Angela’s Convent grammar school, North London, had been not only English but voluntary converts to Catholicism instead of former babies who had once been shoved indignantly into the baptismal font: she had received her degree from Oxford, went when she was sick, not to the National Health doctor, but to the private Catholic hospital near where Paul McCartney lived, and never, ever, ever split an infinitive. She thought, with some justification, that this made her posher than the rest of us. She also thought, erroneously, that it made her better, and rendered it several shades clearer than crystal that she had expected life to have led her somewhere markedly more uplifting than to spend her days reciting amo, amas, amat to a ragtag bunch of working class girls in Wood Green, London N22. Miss Winthorpe, in short, was a stuck-up old bitch.

But she did teach us Latin – maybe not as much as she might have if it had ever occurred to her to be kind to us, but she did teach us some. And one of the words she taught us was acus, or needle. It was reflected in both Latin and English, she said, not only as a sewing implement but as a mark of precision: it showed up in the English language in words like accurate and acuity, and for the ancient Romans, the equivalent of the blunt English carpenters’ expression, “you’ve hit the nail on the head,” had been the notably more elegant rem acu tetigisti – “you’ve touched the matter with a needle.”

Acupuncture, therefore – the ancient Chinese practice of pushing thin needles into specific parts of the body to stimulate energy points and thus relieve pain – makes perfect sense to me, both etymologically and medically. It is a practice that goes back for at least 4,000 years, and some say even longer; and, while I don’t pretend to understand the science that lies behind it, I have no question that it does work. I’ve undergone it myself and found its effects pleasing, if, on my own unromantically robust body, subtle; I have had friends whose systems are more finely tuned than my peasant own, who have experienced effects that have ranged from the dramatic to, in at least one case, the near-miraculous. As medical practices go, I have nothing but respect for it.

Nor do I have even the ghost of an argument against the idea of applying thumbs instead of needles to those same body parts in order to stimulate those same, or presumably very similar, energy points. Energy is energy, after all, no matter how it’s sourced, and I very much like a thumb: as digits go, it’s solid, hardworking and unpretentious; it’s useful in preventing my wine glass from slipping through my fingers; it even occasionally allows me to indulge my fantasy that it is I, not the cat, who have first dibs on the most comfortable armchair. So if some kind person wants to apply their own thumbs to making me feel better, then I say an enthusiastic yes, please. Dig those opposable digits into my pulse points; burrow them in between my toes; drive them deep into the back of my skull, and the harder you press, the happier I will be.

But when I examine the word that is currently used to describe this most agreeable practice, then my entire world view is thrown into chaos. Because, while the second part of the original “acupuncture” has been appropriately replaced with “pressure,” the “acu” part remains exactly the same, invoking needles where there are none, and altogether ignoring the honest thumbs that are actually doing the work. And if we begin to confuse thumbs with needles at this stage of our evolution, then we have to ask ourselves quite seriously where it will all end. Will we start to refer to a clumsy person as being “all needles?” Will we take to including emojis in our texts showing hypodermic syringes pointing up for approval or down for lack of? Will Mick ‘n’ Keef come together for a glorious last hurrah to re-record that shamefully steam-inducing paean to male arrogance Under My Hatpin? The ramifications could be catastrophic, and it will be squarely the fault of the person who had the depravity to launch upon an unsuspecting society the excrescence of a word known as acupressure. And when I consider that person, I wish for nothing more than a cloud of plague-bearing, bloodsucking, many-fanged harpies to descend on them and bear them away, shrieking, to burn in hell’s hottest oven for all eternity.

“I told you not to ask,” said Vanessa.

“Well, see,” said Candy, who is a sweet soul and likes to see the sunny side of life, “I think that’s very interesting that you know that, I just wish I knew Latin too. Did you learn it at school? I always think that would have been so cool.”

“Do you, now?” I said. “Well, let me tell you about my Latin teacher.”

“Oh, God,” said Vanessa.

“I am,” I agreed

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

“I have driven many people from Britain in my car,” he announced. “And I always ask to them the same question, which is this. Why is there in Britain such an importance on the society class you are in?”

Now that, I thought, was a very good question.

“Now that,” I said, “is a very g…”

“I ask to them,” he said, “but they will never answer because it is something you do not want to discuss.”

He was on the money there, too: British people hate talking about class.

“It’s quite a probl …” I said.

“But it is something you should discuss,” he said. “because it is something that is wrong. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I absolutely did and was in full agreement.

“I absolutely d …” I said.

“You have three people,” he said. “One, two, three. In my country they are all equal, but in Britain they are not. One is a lord and he lives in a castle and everyone he admires him. And one is a businessman and he lives in a big house and everyone he treats him well enough. And one is a digger of ditches and he lives in a small shack and everyone he spits on him. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

To be fair to the people of Britain, I haven’t seen too many actual gobs of saliva being launched in the way of the working class there lately. But he certainly had a point.

“You certainly have a p …” I said.

“Why is one person more important than the other?” he said. “One person here, one person there, they all do their job, they all pay their taxes, they are all equal, and that is the end of it. That is the way it is in my country, and that is the way it should be everywhere. But it is not the way it is in Britain and it stays that way it is there because you do not want to discuss it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

“I couldn’t ag …” I said.

“Now,” he said, “if the person who is digging the ditches does not pay his taxes, then he should go to prison because he has done something that is wrong.”

I personally would have pegged the businessman for the more obvious suspect for tax avoidance, but I saluted the general idea.

“That’s absolutely tr …” I said.

“But why do you continue to spit on him on the way?” he said. “He has done wrong, he is paying the price. That is fine, and it should be enough. You do not need to spit on him too. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

For the record, I have never knowingly spat on any person, whether I caught them en route to prison or to Buckingham Palace. But there was no disputing his argument.

“I certainly d…” I said.

“But no,” he said. “You spit on him when he is in prison, and you spit on him when he is coming out of prison. And even when he has paid his price and he is out digging the ditches again, you are still spitting, and he himself, he is no longer the guy who digs the ditches, he is the guy who digs the ditches who was once in prison who everyone spits on. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I was beginning to hope that the unfortunate reformed offender had at least invested in a sturdy handkerchief to mop his face.

“I …” I said.

“And meanwhile the lord, he is in his castle with his lady and they are having a fine time,” he said. “And the businessman, he is in his big house with his wife and they are having a good enough time too. And the guy who digs the ditches, he does not even have a wife anymore because his wife, she has said to him, ‘Why were you in prison and why can you not buy me fancy clothes and jewels like the businessman buys for his wife?’ and she has left him and he is on his own. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

There comes a point where it becomes necessary for one woman to stand up for her hypothetical other.

“Women are not all …” I said.

“And he will stay on his own,” he said. “Because no woman will marry a guy whose wife has already left him and who has no money and who was once in prison and who everyone spits on.”

It was true, I thought, that life could be unfair.

“Life can be unf …” I said.

“And he will get more poor,” he said. “And he will die still alone while the lord and the businessman, they will get more rich and their wives they will stay with them until they kick them out for the younger models.”

Sad to say, he was very possibly right.

“You’re very poss …” I said.

“And that is the doing of your British society class,” he said. “And it will never change, and do you know why it will never change? I will tell you why it will never change. It will never change because you will never discuss it.”

It occurred to me then that the art of discussion was an underestimated one.

“The way I see it …” I said.

“You cannot have discussion until you learn to listen,” he said. “But the guy who digs the ditches, he is at the bottom of the heap. There is the top of the heap and there is the middle of the heap and there is the bottom of the heap. And no one will ever listen to the guy who is at the bottom of the heap. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Oh, boy, did I understand what he was saying.

“And this is why it will never change,” he said. “Because one person will not listen to another. Well. Here is your house.”

So it was, I noted gratefully.

He nodded at me, with grave benevolence

“We have had discussion today,” he congratulated me. “We have not always seen eye to eye but I have learned about your country and you have learned about mine, and maybe we have opened up each other’s minds a little. And that is why discussion it is good for us all. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I do,” I said.

He was really quite a nice man.

This was not in the least degree the fault of the journalists. They were delightful people, as the majority of my ragtag colleagues are, friendly, funny, and with stories to tell they could sell by the yard. My problem was that the company into which I had, by an involved set of circumstances, fallen was exclusively British, and, as far as they were aware, so was I. So their conversation, inevitably, revolved around Britain: British politicians, British TV shows, British in-jokes and cultural references which sailed as far above my Southern Californian head as the high clouds float over Dover Castle.

Photo by Documerica on Unsplash

My own keen journalist’s nose for a story had already ferreted out the information that when British people get together, they might reasonably be expected to talk about matters British: however, when I meet a group of them these days, it is usually when they are visiting America or I Britain, in a setting in which I have already been identified as someone who lives in Los Angeles; and, while I obviously don’t expect them to tailor their entire conversation exclusively towards me, there is nevertheless an awareness – even occasionally some interest – that my current frame of reference is different from theirs.

All that these people knew about me was that I wrote for a British magazine, and my stubbornly British vowel sounds give no clue that I might live anywhere much west of Shepherd’s Bush. To them, I was simply someone who talked with the same accent that they did, but had remarkably little to say in it: someone who was, at best, extraordinarily dull company, and, not entirely implausibly, also suffering from a brain damaged by extreme and relentless drug use. Had anybody ventured to ask me a question about myself, I could have maybe had the chance to explain my situation. But since to the average Brit, asking a personal question is somewhat on the level of disgorging the contents of one’s breakfast over the Royal Crown Derby bone china at afternoon tea, the only way I could realistically have broken my silence would have been to leap onto a tabletop and shout, “Hear ye, Hear ye, I live in California and have no idea of half of what you’re all talking about.” So I stayed quiet.

Which left the other option, of talking to French people. In usual circumstances, I very much enjoy talking French, and, while far from fluent, can generally make myself understood for an entertaining enough conversation. My family were good friends with the tough-minded order of Breton nuns who taught me at school – I was even named after one of them, Mozzair Mairy Gabriel, who met my pregnant mother one day outside Palmers Green train station and ordered her, if ze bébé were a leetle gerrl, to name her after the Archangel Gabriel, and when Mozzair Mairy Gabriel said “sautez,” one sautait – I’ve heard French spoken around me since childhood, and am usually relaxed and happy to join in. Usually.

The Cannes Film Festival, however, showcases, not only films from all nations, but also French bureaucracy. Tickets to screenings require a degree in astrophysics to secure, and invariably, for my hopelessly disorganized self, involve standing in the wrong line, wearing the wrong color badge, and being shouted at by one or another ferociously stern Frenchman to turn around and go là bas, là haut, à gauche, à l’autre porte, up to la claire fontaine, across le pont d’Avignon and often stopping off to pick up la plume de ma tante along the way. It is exhausting simply to decipher – let alone feel inclined to seek out more conversation on top of. So I kept quiet there, too, and as the days passed, began to feel the waves of loneliness lapping ever more insistently at the shore of my own personal ever more desert island.

On the Sunday morning, I found myself at a loose end in Festival terms, and walking past a church and seeing Mass about to start, I decided to slide in and attend. As soon as I entered, I felt my shoulders begin to relax. I’ve been being prayed over by Frenchwomen since, very possibly, before I was born, and know au nom du Père et du Fils as well as I know how to make the sign that goes with it; although these days far from a regular church attendant (sorry, Grandma), I also know what Mass is about, when to stand and when to kneel, what is happening in it now, and what is about to happen two prayers down the line; after a while, the comprehension dawned on me that, for the first time since I had arrived at the Festival, and being now neither shouted at in French nor talked over in British, I actually understood what was going on. It was really quite refreshing.

And it was to get better. It turned out that this Mass was not just any old Mass, but the most tender and touching form of Mass that you could ever hope to stumble upon in the church year. It was the children’s First Communion Mass.

To say that Catholic children are excited about making their First Communion is akin to suggesting there might be the occasional hole in Blackburn, Lancashire. The Catholic Church teaches that during Mass, each Communion wafer is quite literally transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. This is admittedly an unusual sort of assertion, that adults may argue for as long into the night as they choose: for children, however, it is simply another new piece of information, and a thrillingly magical and mysterious one to set against the other facts that are presenting themselves, like the eight times table and the inexplicable spelling of Wednesday.

First communions are a big deal: they happen en masse, at a specified Mass during the early summer of the school year the children turn 7, and for the weeks leading up to it, the children’s lives are given over to its preparation. They attend special lessons dedicated, not only to the meaning of the sacrament, but also, in this excitingly grown-up and responsible new spiritual world they are about to enter, to the technique of receiving it: how to file out of the pew in an orderly line to approach the altar, how to take the small round wafer in the hand or directly onto the tongue in an appropriately reverent fashion, how to slide it past the palate and swallow without biting on it (a practice session will have been involved with unconsecrated wafers brought dramatically in from the church itself), how to return to the pew and immediately kneel down to say prayers of thanksgiving for the miracle in which they have just partaken. The anticipation is intense.

The day itself is one of glorious celebration. The boys will wear new suits, the girls, white dresses with wreaths of flowers in their hair over which their mothers have been agitating for weeks. Relatives will descend to make a fuss of the communicant and the communicant alone (this a first and incontrovertibly last experience in my own family of endless cousins), and there will be presents galore – sometimes, even, too many: I was given a white-covered prayer book by my grandmother and one similar but not identical by my godmother, which provoked hours of agonized choice every Sunday morning thereafter because we all went to the same church, and what if one of them noticed me using the other’s gift instead of her own? There’s a jubilant procession to the specially reserved front pews of the church, and a big celebratory breakfast – featuring orange juice, no less – afterwards. It’s not quite a wedding day: but for a 7-year-old, it’s not so far behind, either.

For the adults in the congregation, to see forty or so 7-year-olds, all dressed in their angelic finery, first tiptoe nervously to the altar, and then bounce back to their pew, bursting with the sheer magic of what they have just done, their eyes triumphantly seeking out their families to confirm the heady reality of it all, is a sight against which some hearts might manage to remain proof, but I would estimate not many, and certainly not mine. It was drama that by far outshone anything I had seen on the film screen all week long; and best of all, I understood every single element of it. I was overcome with joy: stick a white dress on me and a prayer book in my hands, and you’d have been hard put to tell me from the First Communicants.

After the Final Blessing, I floated from the church, made a quick pit stop at le tabac to buy a replacement package of paper tissues, and took the bus into town to meet the Brits for lunch.

“What did you do this morning?” one of them asked me.

“Well!” I began, and then stopped. Although the famed British upper lip has softened considerably from that sported by previous generations, it is still not precisely what you’d call tremulous; and the British approval rating for disclosure of church attendance is below even that for personal questions.

“I went for a walk,” I said at last. It seemed simplest.

Photo by Zoe Richardson on Unsplash

It arrived in my in-box from an upscale local florist which I have used several times because they really do deliver the most fabulous blooms. It informs me that the reason why I should buy flowers for Mother’s Day this Sunday from them rather than from anyone else is because, they announce triumphantly, their flowers enjoy the superior benefits of having been – and I quote – “Grown by Mothers, Designed by Mothers.”

The women who tend their flower farms, they explain helpfully, are “most of them mothers themselves,” and by virtue of that, it seems, know better than anyone else when a flower is ready to be cut and when it needs a day more to reach its peak. And adds helpfully, in case I had not already fully recognized the source of their flower-pickers’ exceptional skills, “This is what we mean when we say Mother to Mother.”

As someone who suffers the ongoing sorrow of infertility myself, I am well accustomed to receiving implicit insults from society. I am hardened to being told that we non-parents “haven’t really grown up until you have your own little person to take care of.” That we lack the “superpowers that only a Mom is required to develop.” That no one “really knows what love is” before they have a child. And if I hear one more woman muse tenderly that motherhood has “opened a door in my heart that I never even knew was there,” I will personally produce a padlock that I will affix to the door of her smug maternal mouth.

This is the first time I have been told that my failure to reproduce has affected my ability to pick bloody flowers.

Everyone has their sorrows in life; and for Mr. Los Angeles and me, a major one is our childlessness. We knew going in that it was a possibility: I was over 40 when we married, and when we very quickly got pregnant, we were beside ourselves with joy. But we lost that baby, and later on another one, and in between went through what felt like centuries of hell: of hopes raised and dashed, of raging hormones and drugs that wreaked havoc on both of our emotions – I remember standing over Mr. Los Angeles at 2.00 in the morning screaming furiously that “This is not me! This is the drugs!” while the poor man begged to be allowed to sleep – of sitting in doctor’s waiting room after doctor’s waiting room while glowingly pregnant women accompanied by raucously healthy toddlers were excitedly welcomed into the office, only to have the nurse’s tone fall to glum resignation when my name was called. (“Why are you looking so down?” one nurse had the temerity to ask me. “Because I’m here for fertility treatment,” I explained, which appeared to offend her further). At last, we had no option but to accept what my own mother would have called God’s plan: that we were to remain childless.

Truth to tell, I have never fully come to terms with this. I don’t sit in a darkened room weeping from morning till night: I enjoy my life a great deal, and have in it a great number of people of all ages for whom I care deeply. But there is always a little pain in my heart too that I know will never go away; always a missing feeling that there should have been more in Mr. Los Angeles’ and my life than just the two of us; always a sad awareness that, coming as we do from a genetic inheritance that on both sides flourishes with fertility, the only family of which he and I have been capable will end with us and us alone.

I do not suppose for a second that I am the only person in the world to know disappointment, and it is not my intention to burden others with my own. But neither is it something I feel the need to keep secret; and what strikes me, when the topic does arise in a conversation, is the frankly quite strange reactions of some women who have been luckier than I have.

“Do you have children?” is a natural women’s conversation opener, and in the majority of cases, a safe one: most women who want children do have them, after all. Many non-mothers are what they cheerfully describe as child-free, which is certainly a valid personal choice, and, as many of them would point out, very possibly more responsible for the future of the planet, too. But for those of us for whom the truthful answer is, “We wanted to, but we couldn’t,” I wouldn’t have thought it too complicated for the questioner to offer a plain “I’m sorry,” to which I could then agree that life doesn’t always turn out the way we had hoped, and we could all move on to a different topic.

And so, to be fair, most conversations do proceed. However, there are also a surprising number of mothers for whom a simple response to my statement appears beyond even their superpowers. Some will smile consolingly under panicked eyes and mumble, “It’s not all roses, you know,” while surreptitiously scanning the room for their own precious tykes lest they should have been infected by my terrible condition and snatched into the void. Some will look waggish and quip hilariously that “You can have mine if you want,” which is a line they – although, curiously, not I – apparently find both original and very witty indeed. Some will evince a sudden and intense interest in the content of the canapés, the design of the curtains, the whereabouts of the cockatoo, anything not to acknowledge the unspeakable piece of excrescence I have inexplicably chosen to spew onto the thitherto immaculate floor of the conversation.

The most extreme of these reactions came, strangely, from a multi-awards winning Australian film actress I once interviewed while she was glowing and great with her third healthy pregnancy. I asked her – it seemed to me unremarkably enough, since her condition was blazingly obvious and she is famously happily married – how the pregnancy was going, expecting her to say something along the lines that at least with the third you know what to expect, I could tick that interview box, and we could progress to discussing her new film.

Instead – and to my astonishment, because it’s not usual interview protocol for the subject to ask questions of the interviewer – she abruptly asked, “Do you have children?”

Caught unawares, I gave my honest answer, which was, “Sadly, no.”

The acclaimed thespian – who, lest we forget, had asked the question freely and of her own volition – turned every shade of lobster known to the sea and physically gaped like a goldfish for several moments while she grappled with the unimaginable horror that was my daily existence.

(For the record, not all actors are like this. Anne Hathaway, now the happy mother of two, who, God bless her, has spoken with generous candor about her earlier fertility struggles, once gave me a crisp and professional interview on the topic, at the end of which she immediately threw her arms around me in a hug and said, simply, “I’m sorry for your pain.” That’s class.)

The truth is that my brave and unsung community of childless women needs neither your pity nor your embarrassment: what we could use is some plain old human recognition. No, we haven’t been through labor; we haven’t spend sleepless nights nursing teething babies; we haven’t fretted into the early hours about the behavior of teenagers. That’s the experience of mothers, and of course it goes without saying that they deserve a day to be spoiled.

But I would submit that a lot of us less lucky ones do a pretty darned good job on the sidelines, too, as aunts, as godmothers, as friends, as mentors: we do it without celebration – if there’s an official Godmother’s Day, I have yet to hear about it – and we do it smilingly, in the face of a heartache at which people who have successfully become parents can never even guess, that lasts the year around, that is particularly piercing around Mother’s Day, and that society as a whole simply refuses to acknowledge. I think we’re a pretty impressive bunch.

Some of us even know how to pick flowers.

Photo by Omkar Jadhav on Unsplash

It was not until we had actually drawn into the museum’s parking lot and Mr. Los Angeles had shut off the engine preparatory to exiting the car that the reason at last occurred to me.

“You do realize,” I said, “that taking me here is sort of like taking Stevie Wonder to the Metropolitan Museum of Art?”

Mr. Los Angeles looked at me for a moment in puzzlement. Then his brow cleared.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. He replaced the key in the ignition, started the engine again and back we drove down the hill and into Cannes.

Welcome to anosmia, the disability so overlooked that even a sufferer will forget she has it.

I was born with what appears to be about five per cent of a sense of smell. That is, I think I was born that way: my mother used to tell a story from my baby days about a visiting neighbor child cracking a large wooden clothespin down on my newborn skull, which she seemed to think had not much effect, although I’ve sometimes since wondered; but we’ll never know now, and whatever the cause or lack of it, this is how I have been since before I can remember.

I am familiar enough with the general idea of smells to be aware that they exist. I can even identify those of coffee and lemons, although probably not from very far away; I can recognize the sweet warmth of entering a bakery; and when I walk down the street, I can very faintly sense different waves in the air as I pass certain plants, although I could no more tell one from the other than describe the surface of Jupiter. The rest is simply a blank canvas. If it were my vision, you’d call me legally blind.

Strangely, my taste buds appear to work just fine. People tell me, in tones ranging from the suspicious to the outright accusatory, that this is physically impossible; all I can say is that here I am, and that enough people have commented enthusiastically enough on my cooking that I must conclude that I know which taste goes with which. If this makes me an aberration of nature, it’s a deviation which I accept with gratitude.

It was some years before I realized quite how sensorily deprived I was. I was a hopelessly impractical little girl, and when I was small I somewhat assumed that smelling was one of the many things I would get the hang of one of these days but had not yet, like tying my shoelaces or eating an orange without covering myself in juice (truth to tell, I’m still working on the second). When it became apparent that this was something I was not going to be growing into, I decided it must be a rare and special talent, that a few people really had and others only pretended to have, just as sturdy ginger-haired Sheila Cassidy, who was met at the school gates each afternoon by a sturdy ginger-haired woman who kissed her fondly and led her away, would maintain unblinkingly that her mother was an Indian princess.

I was about 13 and being scolded in the school lavatory when it fully dawned on me that I was different. The lavatory had cubicles that backed, not onto a wall, but onto a long window with a deep sill, and my friend Kate and I had discovered that, if we went into adjoining cubicles, stood on the toilet seats and leaned our elbows on the window sill, we could enjoy the superior experience of having a conversation, not in the classroom or on the playground, but, thrillingly, behind the lavatories instead.

One day, when we were about this uplifting pursuit, we were discovered by a teacher.

The teacher was young, and more sympathetic than many.

“Of all the places you could choose to be,” she said, tones of honest bafflement mixing with her reproof, “I can’t think of a nastier or smellier one than this.”

I don’t know what it was in those particular words; but for the first time, they communicated to me that the ability to smell was neither an exceptional skill nor a self-aggrandizing fantasy, but a very basic human capability that most people had, and I had not. That I was – albeit in a manageable and almost unnoticeable way – disabled.

For years, I hid my condition. I was an eccentric teenager, which already did not go down well in 1960s London, where girls were expected not to draw attention to themselves: I was afraid that if I were to round out the cocktail of incessant poetry quoting, terminal clumsiness, and a swooning crush on Bonnie Prince Charlie with a disability no one had even heard of, I would be chased out of the pack altogether. So I pretended. I nodded knowingly whenever the conversation turned to the olfactory, and quickly perfected the art, should someone wonder what particular smell was in the air, of wrinkling my nose, adopting whichever level of expression of delight or disgust seemed appropriate, and remarking in mild puzzlement, and by the way, without a word of a lie, “Do you know, I don’t know!”

The act worked. Granted, there was the occasional wobble. There was the time I rushed rapturously to bury my nose in flowers which turned out to be made of silk; the time I arrived for dinner at the house of a rather stern woman I didn’t know at all well and offered my usual dinner guest greeting of “Mmm, something smells good,” to be told in some surprise that she hadn’t started cooking yet. But nobody really noticed. People don’t notice very much about other people anyway; and the idea that I might be bothering to dissemble about something so unremarkable as the smell of roses or roasting chicken was so bizarre that it apparently never even entered anybody’s head.

As I grew older and more confident, I began gradually to confess my disability. To my relief, this caused the reverse of drama. Nobody demanded I carry a bell to warn the innocent of my monstrous approach; nobody issued me with a scarlet F for Freak to wear on my clothing. Nobody – as had been my secret fear – clapped her brow with a triumphant cry of “Aha! That explains it!” It appears, in fact, to be so thoroughly boring a piece of information about me that friends will time and again forget it and thrust flowers or perfume or soap into the dead space beneath my nostrils with the cheerful exhortation to “smell this! … oh, but you can’t, can you? Never mind.”

Do I mind not having a sense of smell? To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure. My dear friend Jo Fairley, one of Britain’s leading authorities on perfume, co-founder of On The Scent Media, and multiple winner of something celestially fragrant-sounding called the Jasmine Award (yes, I know, and she hangs out with me anyway, which is impressive of her) will occasionally suggest I try nasal exercises which she says will improve my nose’s function, but for some reason I have never done so: probably because I did try quite hard when I was younger, it never worked then, and I don’t want to be disappointed again now. Mine is the only world I have ever known; and if it would be richer with all five senses involved instead of just the four, well, it’s still plenty rich enough for me as it is.

It’s true that it has required a few adaptations. There are always some trusted people I rely on to tell me if I should start to smell bad – for the record, I wash as often as most and more than many, but anyone can step into or brush against something unsavory, and if I were to do that I would have no way of knowing. I am obviously more at risk than others for a variety of household disasters – I still feel a little sick when I think of the cozy winter afternoon when I set a slow-cooking casserole into the oven, and a couple of hours later was standing at the stove top and literally reaching for the matches to begin cooking the vegetables when Mr. Los Angeles burst through the door, knocked the matches from my hand, and flung open the oven door to release the gas which had been collecting there. But it’s not something I dwell on. Even people with five senses have near misses from time to time.

It’s lonely, though, being anosmic. I don’t know anyone else who suffers from it, and I rarely read about it, either: it’s not a dramatic disability, after all, and there’s really not a lot of colorful conversation to be mined from it. We had a brief moment in the sun when Covid caused temporary loss of smell in some sufferers; but time passed, and life and medicine moved on, and now we’re back hiding in the shadows again. Call me Mrs. Cellophane.

A couple of years ago, Mr. Los Angeles and I did what many Californians have done, and converted our bedraggled and too-thirsty front lawn into a more water-wise collection of waving grasses, sages, and lavenders. I chose the plants for it, and both I and the many passers-by who stop to compliment it think it looks beautiful. To my surprise and delight, and by the purest of happy coincidence, I appear to have accidentally chosen plants that smell beautiful too.

It makes me feel very good when people tell me I have made a yard that looks pretty. But when they tell me I have made a yard that smells sweet, well, that makes me feel like the cat’s pajamas.

Photo by Victoria Sherwood

I am a relative newcomer to America, just three years into my immigrant journey. The novelty of being in this new and wonderful country, with its unique peculiarities and perks, hasn’t worn off. I love that the Stars & Stripes are flown uncontroversially from homes, businesses, cars and boats. I’m enjoying the charitable vibes of a small New England town, with the volunteer fire department, food bank, regular blood drives and seasonal get-togethers, from Christmas tree lighting to debating the local school budget. I am also fond of the full service gas station.

Where I’m from, you pump your own “petrol,” pay twice as much for it, and enjoy no pleasantries in the way of conversation, unless you encounter someone particularly charming at the cash register.

So, on one of my early encounters with the full service gas station, I was delighted to be met by a smiling young chap who enthusiastically greeted me, asked me what grade of gas I preferred, and went ahead to top up my car for me.

Now, I don’t normally order extras at our local full service station, but on this occasion, I happened to need a small replenishment of engine coolant, the level of which had dropped a little too close to the reservoir’s “minimum” line for comfort. So, as it was on offer (and having never before had the luxury of someone topping it up for me), I asked the gentleman for a splash of coolant for whatever price he deemed appropriate – nothing fancy, I added, just the house’s choice of fluorescent water/glycol mix. It made a nice change from my life in Blighty, where topping up the coolant myself involved digging around the garage for the gallon container I may or may not still have, and then inevitably spilling a lot of it because I had misplaced the funnel.

“No problem!” he said, as he returned my credit card, and the gasoline started flowing. We proceeded to embark on routine small talk, as you do, and with which I’m now very familiar. More often than not, along with weather-related remarks, I am asked some combination of the following: “So you’re from England?” “What soccer team do you support?” “What do you think of Harry and Meghan?” “Do you like living in the USA?”. All fairly routine. If you’re interested, my answers to the above are, “Yes;” “None, but my family likes Arsenal;” “It’s a shame they left but they seem happy;” and, “Yes, very much so.”

Then, the gentleman asked, “How long have you been driving for?”

This puzzled me. I consider myself a decent driver. I’ve driven all sorts of cars, manual, automatic, left-hand drive and right-hand drive, long wheel-base and short, in a variety of countries, some safer than others. No accidents to my name. My car isn’t scratched, the tires certainly had no chunks missing from the sides. I wondered if this chap thought he’d seen me drive into the forecourt erratically, too fast, or without signaling?

“Well,” I replied, “about 15 years, actually. I’m pretty experienced, and have adjusted to US roads pretty quickly.”

The gentleman laughed at me, then explained: “Today. How long have you been driving for today? I need to know if your engine is hot or cold before I open the coolant tank.”

Well, that made more sense. It’s not all small talk after all.

Photo by Gaurav Dhwaj Khadka on Unsplash

Had I been a different person, I would not have needed to call the Help Desk for this, because I could have applied to Mr. Los Angeles instead. Mr. Los Angeles happens to be a professional computer guru, able to fix the most intransigent of computer malfunctions with just one stab of his preternaturally skilled keyboard finger. There is in Los Angeles a not insubstantial community of friends, and neighbors, and friends of neighbors, and neighbors of friends, who have in their homes small shrines to Mr. Los Angeles and his computer genius. However, I am not a different person, I am Mr. Los Angeles’ wife; and as anyone married to a computer guru knows full well, seeking help from their computer guru spouse is more or less tantamount to putting their divorce lawyer on speed dial.

“Not a problem,” said the young man. “It’s very simple, in fact. You just click on the binky, then drag down the trinky, and then choose glinky.”

The level of ignorance of Mr. Los Angeles’ wife where technology is concerned is verging on the monumental: I am the reverse of proud of this, but on the whole find it more productive to acknowledge it than to try to hide it.

“I don’t understand what you just said,” I said.

So he repeated it, more slowly.

“I said,” he said. “You click on the binky. And then you drag down the trinky. And after you’ve done that, you choose glinky.”

“I know you said that,” I said. “I did hear you say it. But the problem is, I don’t know what any of those three words means.”

The young man refrained from sighing: he was a polite young man.

“OK,” he said. “We’ll take it from the top, shall we? First you click on the binky. Then after you’ve done that, you drag down the trinky. And after you’ve gone to the trinky, you scroll past the zinky and choose glinky.”

“You said that last time,” I said. “And I would be delighted to use a binky or a trinky or even an iwantadrinky if I had the faintest idea what they were. But, as I have explained to you, I don’t.”

The young man still did not sigh; but he did take a deep breath. Across the telephone line I could hear him begin to wish he had not given up smoking the week before.

“We can do this,” he said. “We’ll work through it together. You’re sitting in front of your computer, right?”

Since I, too, attempt to exhibit politeness, I refrained from pointing out that there would be not a great deal of point in our having this conversation if I were not.

“Right,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “And you have your form open in front of you, right?”

I further restrained myself from observing that the precise reason why I had called him was to seek help with navigating that same form.

“Right,” I said.

“And you’re looking at Page 1,” he said. “Right?”

“Wrong,” I said. “I’m looking at Page 2. As I told you, Page 1 is where I want to be, but I’m calling you because I can’t figure out how to get back there.”

“Right,” he said. “Now we’re getting somewhere, right? You’re not on Page 1, you’re on Page 2, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “This is good to know. You’re not on Page 1, you’re on Page 2. I’m calling up Page 2, so we can do this thing together. You’re on Page 2, too, right?”

I was beginning to wish I’d taken up smoking myself.

“Right,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “Now what you need to do now is go to the binky.”

I could, on the other hand, silently pound my desk and make shot-in-the-back faces in the mirror.

“If you would just tell me what the binky is,” I said, “then all of this would be very much easier.”

“Right,” he said. “We can do this,” he said. He thought for a moment. “It’s the binky,” he said then.

“So you have told me,” I reminded him. “But I still don’t know what that is.”

“The binky,” said the young man, “is the part that leads you to the trinky.”

“Those words mean nothing to me,” I said. “Would you please explain it to me in words that I can understand?”

“OK,” said the young man. He was a very polite young man. “We can do this,” he said. “That’s why I’m here to help.’

He cracked his knuckles just a little.

“You’re sitting in front of your computer,” he said. “Right?” he said.

“Right,” I said, because I still was.

“Right,” he said. “And you have your application form open at Page 1, right?”

Big girls, I had early been instructed, do not cry.

“Page 2,” I said. “I’m still stuck on Page 2, which is the reason why I called you to help me get back to Page 1.”

“Right,” he said. “I’m on Page 2, too. We’re both on Page 2 now. And what I want you to do on Page 2, is go to the very top of your screen and look at the row of icons there.”

Well now, here was a word I recognized.

“Icons!” I cried triumphantly. I knew what an icon was. I even once attended a webinar on iconography, given by my exercise buddy Rachel, who is an art historian.

“Can you find the icons?” he said. “They’re that row of, like, little pictures running across the top of your screen?”

“Icons,” I confirmed. You can’t put much in the way of icons across someone who shares an exercise class with an art historian.

“Icons!” he agreed. “OK! And you’re looking at the icons right now, right?”

Slowly, across the dark horizon, there began to show the faintest line of rosy pink.

“I am indeed,” I affirmed.

“There’s probably one that looks like a plug,” he said. “And one that looks like a file folder and one that looks like a notebook, and such.”

“Those would be icons,” I confirmed.

“They are icons!” he exulted. “All right!”

The line grew broader, and in the treetops the birds began to sing.

“All right!” I cried, heady with the dawning of the brand new day.

“OK!” he rejoiced. “I knew we could do it if we worked together! From here on, it’s Easy Street! All that you have to do now is go to the icon that looks like a spalinky!”

In the silent darkness of the reinstated night, I was struck with a sudden idea.

“I’ve just thought of something,” I said.

Across the line came the faintest flicker of the young man’s eyes darting nervously.

“What?” he said.

“If I close the form without having hit ‘save,’” I said, “all the information I’ve entered will be lost, right?”

The young man examined for a moment the hypothesis of a person who had reached Page 2 of the form without having hit “save.”

“Right,” he at last allowed cautiously.

“And that means all the information in there?” I said. “Including the mistake I made on Page 1? Gone, vanished, kaput, right?”

The young man could not now suppress a small sigh, albeit a polite one.

“Right,” he could not but agree.

“So if I haven’t hit ‘save’ yet and don’t hit ‘save’ now, but just close the form as it is, I can log out, log in again, start over from the beginning, and fill out Page 1 correctly, right?”

There was a soft rustle as the young man rummaged fruitlessly in his desk drawer for just one errant cigarette he might possibly, blessedly, have overlooked.

“I guess you could try it and see,” he conceded.

“Then that’s what I’ll do,” I said.

So I did. And, what do you know, I could. And, what do you know, I did.

“Thank you for your help!” I said.

“You’re very welcome,” said the young man at the Help Desk.

He was a particularly polite young man.

Photo by Nicholas Bartos on Unsplash

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I would tenderly inquire of my beloved.

Mr. Los Angeles would beam at me in delight.

“Sure!” he would reply.

“Then bloody well fix it yourself!” I would snarl furiously and storm out of the room, leaving the turtle doves silenced and Mr. Los Angeles scratching his head in manly confusion.

It was Mr. Los Angeles who, after a few rounds of such an exchange, at last summoned me from my sulking chair.

“I’ve figured out what’s been happening here,” he said. “In Britain, if you offer another adult a cup of coffee, they’ll say ‘Yes, please.’ Here in America, it’s only little kids who say that, adults say ‘Sure.’ I’m not going to start saying ‘Yes, please,’ because I’m not a little kid. But it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the offer, because I always do.”

The turtle doves resumed their song and all was once again right in the Los Angeles kitchen.

There is a perception in some quarters that British people are by nature more courteous than are Americans. This is, to put it politely, hogwash. Obviously, there are polite people and impolite people in both cultures; but the British cultural tic of uttering the words “please” and “thank you” at times when Americans don’t, has somehow translated itself into the notion that British people are more polite in the grand scheme of things, which is by no means necessarily the case.

This stereotype might be colored by the fact that Americans are, on the whole, more direct than the British. If the American sitting next to you at a dinner party wants to know what you do for a living, they will ask you. If the Brit is curious about the same thing, they will ask whether you’ve traveled far to be there; to which you will reply that it wasn’t a great distance, but that the traffic had slowed the journey somewhat; which the Brit will counter by remarking that if the traffic is bad at this time of the evening, it’s even worse during rush hour; to which you will respond that, luckily for you, you’re usually able to avoid the rush hour because you work from home; to which the Brit will return that since Covid, there have been many more employers who are willing to let their employees do this; with which you will agree that so you have heard but, as it happens, it doesn’t affect you personally because you’re self-employed; at which the Brit will muse that there are a number of interesting ways to be self-employed, in both the artistic and the commercial fields; by the time you’ve been shepherded into volunteering your exact job description, the evening is drawing to a close and you’ve infuriatingly missed the piece of gossip that drew such scandalized gasps at the other end of the table and that everyone now refuses to repeat.

Is it politeness to subject your companion to such time and effort when a direct question would have uncovered the same information in seconds flat? Judging by the typical British response to such an inquiry of an offended intake of breath, followed by the icily stilettoed preface of “Well! Since you ask …” the Brits seem to think so.

Of course, genuine politeness consists of neither more nor less than making the other person feel at ease, an art in the exact opposite of which few people are more skilled than the occasional Brit who has put their mind to it; unfortunately, this seems particularly prevalent where it concerns the continuing British obsession of their class system. I was once telephoned at my home by a British photographer with whom I had been commissioned to work on a magazine article. I was out when he called and so he left a message with my youngest brother, who was visiting me at the time, and who, for reasons best known to my youngest brother, was choosing to present himself to society as a loveable cockney sparrer of a diamond geezer. After Bert the Sweep had transmitted the message to me, I called the photographer and introduced myself as his new colleague, to whose brother he had spoken earlier that afternoon.

“Well, now,” was the man’s greeting to me. “You’ve come up in the world, haven’t you?”

I cannot imagine any American’s even being capable of forming such a conclusion based on a few words spoken by a stranger over the telephone; let alone thinking it acceptable to speak it aloud. To my shame, I failed to repress the retort that it was my brother, not I, who had gone to Eton, a description which I imagine might have somewhat surprised the teaching staff of Finchley Catholic High School, London N12; but the photographer treated me with noticeably increased respect from then on, for which he should have been even more ashamed of himself.

My late and sainted mother, the granddaughter of a dirt-poor Irish immigrant on one side and a Liverpool policeman on the other, had the nerve to be something of a snob herself – her father had made some money, now long scattered to the winds, and as a girl she had attended the sort of upper-class convent where, she used to joke ruefully, she had been taught little but how to address a bishop and how to eat ice cream with a fork. She had also been taught that the only socially acceptable way to add salt to one’s food was to pour a heap onto the side of the plate and dip each individual forkful into it, in contrast to the hopelessly déclassée habit of her state-educated husband and children of sprinkling it over the top of the whole dish.

My mother often disapproved of the social habits of her husband and children; in fact, she disapproved of the social habits of most people she knew, with the shining exception of her adored eldest brother, my Uncle Tony, who had been educated at Ampleforth (posh), gone on to become a Jesuit (impressively posh), and now divided his time between Farm Street church in Mayfair (dead posh) and the Collegio Internazionale del Gesù in Rome (all but lost in the lofty mists of high altitude Catholic Poshtopia.) Uncle Tony, in my mother’s eyes, was The Business.

One day Uncle Tony, pith helmet tucked under his arm and phrase book of North Londonese clasped helpfully to hand, made his way to the wilds of Palmers Green to dine with us. When my mother passed him his plate of food, he tasted it, nodded approvingly, then picked up the salt shaker with his large and aristocratic hand and sprinkled the salt on top.

We children were transfixed. Our gazes flew from our posh uncle, who hung out with Honourables in London and contesse in Rome, to our formerly posh mother, who now went shopping at Sainsbury’s every day but Sunday. The expression on my mother’s face was a veritable Jackson Pollock of shock.

Uncle Tony was not a man to mince his words.

“What?” he boomed dismissively. “You don’t hold with that Victorian nonsense of putting the salt on the side of the plate, do you? Nonsense!”

It was possibly the sole occasion during my childhood on which I saw my mother deprived of speech.

Sad to say, my mother had died some years before Mr. Los Angeles appeared in my life. Try as I might, I can’t picture the two as boon companions; but he and Uncle Tony became very good friends indeed.

As our parents were given to warn us gravely, all the neighbors knew we were Catholic (this a safe enough assumption on a corner that was regularly roused from its Sunday morning slumber by my mother’s fortissimo aria of “Oh, Our Lady and St. Joseph and all the Saints in bloody Heaven, help me find my bloody mantilla and get me to bloody, bloody Mass!”) and with that came the solemn duty for us children to comport ourselves at all times with a superhuman level of excellence, with the express end that our neighbors would think to themselves, “Hmm, those Donnelly children are well-behaved, I’d better examine this Catholic church of theirs,” and thus be converted to the One True Faith and in time admitted into a decent Catholic Heaven instead of languishing in Limbo with the other unfortunate unbaptized

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

The object of this mission would have come as something of a surprise to the family who lived next door to us, who were squeaky clean of habit, faithful of worship at the local Methodist church, and one might have supposed to have had their spiritual needs amply fulfilled; but apparently Methodism did not make the cut for salvation with our own all-powerful and ever-merciful Deity, and any exhibition of childhood misbehavior at the Donnelly end of Broomfield Avenue would be met with a sad parental shake of the head and the sorrowful observation that “I see you like to keep Heaven empty, don’t you?” Happy times.

The time when we were most conscious of being Catholic was Holy Week, the week that leads up to Easter. It was kicked off by Palm Sunday Mass, a service notable in the liturgical year in that its Gospel reading, usually a short passage recounting a parable or a passing miracle, relates the entire story of Christ’s passion, beginning with his triumphal entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week – hence the name, for the palm branches that were waved by his followers – and ending with his death by crucifixion at the end of it. For committed Christian adults, this is a sobering story and one essential to their faith. For us children, painful to report, it was simply a long one. A very long one indeed, and one that, for me, carried with it yet an additional stress, since a teacher at school had confidently informed me that, if I were able to stand without fidgeting for its entire length, then at the end of it, God would reward me by releasing a suffering soul of His choice from Purgatory and into Heaven. If I failed the test, however, that same poor suffering soul would remain in the cleansing flame until his full sentence had been served, undergoing who knew what manner of agonizing torments for who knew how many centuries more, and all because on Palm Sunday morning at St. Monica’s church, Gabrielle Donnelly had failed not to scratch her nose. Happy times, indeed.

The week grew increasingly doleful as the days passed – which was particularly unfortunate for those attempting to celebrate a birthday in late March, glumly greeted by exhortations of “Happy birthday (don’t forget it’s Holy Week)” – until we reached the supreme and sublime pinnacle of Catholic gloom that is Good Friday.

Good Friday for our family meant Stations of the Cross. Stations of the Cross is a particularly lugubrious church service during which the priest will process slowly around the series of fourteen images that line every Catholic church wall depicting the different stages of Christ’s execution, stopping at each one for a prayer, a meditation, and a faintly accusatory description of the precise nature of the torture undergone by the Son of God at that particular point in the proceedings.

To outsiders, this might seem a strange story to recount in such detail to children; but by the time we had reached church-going age, we had been told it so often and so matter-of-factly that it had simply slid in there along with all the other curious things that happened in the New Testament, such as the virgin birth, which we did not begin to understand but knew to be a big deal, and the changing of water into wine, which also caused a stir although it would have been more interesting had it instead featured fizzy orangeade, and so, at least for me, was not one fraction as frightening as the cautionary tale of Little Suck-a-Thumb, who sucked his thumbs and had them cut off, a horror which haunted my dreams for years.

These days, I quite enjoy Stations of the Cross: it includes the swooningly dolorous hymn Stabat Mater, and for a quiet hour provides respite from the increasingly daunting challenge of seeking out the positive in 21^st century life. Back then, however, the details of the service barely registered in my brain at all: I was far too preoccupied in trying to figure out where to put my knees.

While the priest moves around the church during Stations of the Cross, the congregation will follow him from their pews, standing with him as he moves from station to station, and kneeling with him when he kneels to pray, along the way rotating their bodies the entire 360 degrees of the church’s perimeter. The conundrum of how to kneel on the church kneeler while parallel with the church bench is one that befuddles me to this day.

After Stations had run its course, we would take ourselves home to face the Good Friday fast and meat-abstention. The Catholic interpretation of “fast” is what some might describe as a loose one: a little oddly, fasting Catholics are allowed regularly to interrupt their self-deprivation with the activity that can only be described as eating. They are permitted a reasonable but not excessive breakfast; a “collation” – generally agreed to be somewhere between a snack and a meal – in the middle of the day; and a reasonable but not excessive dinner at the end of it. In my younger and less greedy days, I once told my father that that was how I intended to eat on Good Friday anyway; this drove him into such an apoplexy of anger that I could only kick myself for not having thought of it earlier.

My father took his Good Friday fasting very seriously indeed. He would weigh a breakfast of two boiled eggs against three slices of buttered toast with the intensity of St. Thomas Aquinas examining a pin head for angelic dance prints; he would trap the unwary in unexpected corners of the house with furrowed brow of concern and earnest inquiry of whether the addition of a slice of tomato to his lunchtime cheese sandwich would tip it from a collation into a meal. He would even refuse dessert at dinner, yes, even when there was apple pie. “It wouldn’t feel right,” he would say, while we would draw in our breath in collective awe. When my father refused apple pie it was serious matter indeed.

My mother’s fasting style was other. A woman never widely known for the length of her emotional fuse, she would sit through Stations with eyes devoutly downcast, only to become mortally offended afterwards by some unmannerly fellow-worshiper who had insulted her on her way to the family car. They might, for instance, have said, “You’re looking well today, Mrs. Donnelly,” suggesting that her appearance did not merit acclaim on every day. They might have said, “How is your sister, Mrs. Donnelly?” communicating that her sister was more important in their eyes than was she. On a good day they might simply have said, “Hello, Mrs. Donnelly.”

Whatever had been said to her, it would have sent my mother’s sturdy and horse-healthy body into a spin of nervous prostration worthy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She would sit glowering through the journey home beneath a pitch black cloud of bitterness; once there, she would storm into the kitchen, declaring ringingly that “I’m too ill to fast!”, and set about fixing herself an invalid’s plate heaped high with bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes, bread fried in the bacon grease, and a side of toast and jam, which she would demolish at the kitchen table, her grey-blue eyes as icy cold as the winter Atlantic, her every mouthful an accusation against the world in general and whichever of her children in particular were foolish enough to catch her attention.

We children, hungry and irritable from the long Lenten ban on sweets, would roam the rain-bound house – it always rained on Good Friday – attempting to dodge my mother’s ire and my father’s dietetic dilemmas alike, and inevitably falling into squabbles with each other, which as inevitably drew down upon us a speech that began with “If this is how people knew the Donnelly children behave on Good Friday …” and culminated in vast and vacant acres stretching across Heaven’s wide prairies as far as the eye could see, all of which might have been occupied by our neighbors if only we had behaved better.

The only good thing about Good Friday was that it would end at last, and that the next day would be Easter Saturday; and at noon on Easter Saturday – Hosanna! – the Lenten sacrifice ended, and the Donnelly children could eat sweets again.

And for those happy minutes while the Donnelly children munched our thitherto forbidden chocolate bars, we were released from worry about the souls of even the Presbyterians three doors down.

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

I have been demonstrating in public in one way or another ever since I was a teenager. My first such outing was when my school friend Lucy persuaded me to join her in a day-long sponsored fast on Trafalgar Square to raise awareness and money to help fight the famine in Africa. My parents, an exceptionally witty couple, gave themselves some considerable entertainment at the notion of their daughter’s forgoing food for more than two hours at a stretch; and I now wonder myself just what the fine people of London made of my rotund and ruddy-cheeked self’s thrusting a collection tin into their faces with the smug declaration that “I’m fasting” – as one man gallantly observed, “it might do you some good” – but I did it, and, while hardly claiming to have since braved rack and rope with the valor of the martyrs of old, have continued, when possible, to raise my voice wherever I have seen the need.

When I was at college, marching was woven into student life. We marched to protest injustice. We marched to protest hunger. We marched, it seemed almost weekly, to protest Margaret Thatcher, then Education Secretary, whom we called Thatcher the Milk-Snatcher since she had abolished the program providing free milk for children in state-funded primary schools, and who now, having herself benefited materially from state-aided further education and seeing no compelling reason to pay the favor forward to the next generation, was forever trying to slash our grants. At least once we protested the Vietnam War by marching around the Royal Holloway College campus – 135 acres of wooded parkland set just outside the bucolic village of Englefield Green in deepest verdant Surrey, a statement which must have struck terror to the heart of the American government. But the war did end, however, so who knows but that they were paying attention after all?

In my busy early adulthood, my time – and, seen now through the possibly rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia, any urgent necessity – for protests had shrunk, but I did turn out when I saw fit. I marched for women’s rights. I marched for gay rights. I marched with friends. I marched with friends I hoped would become more than friends. I declined to march with my father to protest the release of The Life of Brian, on the grounds that I had seen the film and found it not offensive at all, but very funny: a refusal which, in my particular family, was itself roughly the protest equivalent of setting myself on fire while throwing myself in front of a horse while chained to the government’s railings.

In America, I did not protest for many years. I was there on a foreign journalist’s visa, which allowed me to live and pursue my career there on the very reasonable proviso that by confining myself to foreign outlets I not take work from an American journalist while I was doing so. It did not, however, allow me to vote; and the idea of protesting a government I had not helped to choose seemed somewhat like walking into another person’s house and criticizing their furniture. So I stayed quiet.

Then I met and married Mr. Los Angeles, and became, first a green card holder, and then a citizen. After so many years as a guest – albeit a most warmly welcomed and hospitably entertained one – in the home of other people, I now had a home of my own. And it was a home, I discovered, that I cared desperately to protect.

This coming Saturday, people across the nation will be taking part in the No Kings protest. The mandate, on this protest as it was on the last, is to protest peacefully and with good humor. We are also encouraged – partly as a protective device, and partly as a comment on the ridiculousness of those against whom we are protesting – to dress for the event in inflatable animal costumes. For much of the country, this is merely a suggestion; for a city of hams such as Los Angeles, it is a clarion call to extravaganza.

The last No King’s Day saw Santa Monica’s Palisades Park transformed into Alice in Wonderland after the Cheshire Cat had handed her some pretty darned good mushrooms. We had people dressed as frogs, as unicorns, as pandas, as zebras, as Darth Vader, as Dorothy from Kansas, as Smokey the Bear, as Bozo the Clown. We had people dressed as butterflies with signs that read, “This is the only Orange Monarch we want.” We had small children with signs that read “Stamp Out Ice.” We had battle-scarred older women with signs that read, “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this (fill in your obscenity of choice).” We had flamboyant gay couples with signs that read, “A Pair of Queens beats a King.” We had a sober-looking thirty-something man with a sign that read, “You know it’s BAD when a straight white guy makes a sign.”

At one point, one of our local Westside heroes, the late and sorely lamented film director Rob Reiner, unofficially known as the Mayor of Hollywood, stood up to make a calm and dignified speech about the need to fight for our continued democracy. When he was halfway through it, a heckler interrupted him. The crowd tensed, and the police in the area, until then laid back and smiling along with the protesters, began to sit up and take notice. “Let him speak,” said Rob, then. “He has the right to his opinion, too.” We all relaxed, knowing that with the Mayor in charge, everything would all be all right – as indeed it was. We had no idea then that two months later, both the Mayor and his wife would be dead.

The horror of Rob and Michele Reiner’s death was buried in the future that day. There was only laughter and dancing and friends greeting old buddies and strangers making new friends while the sun shone and music filled the air and below us, the Pacific Ocean glittered like a jewel beside Pacific Coast Highway, as, together, we pledged to fight with all our might to maintain the America we know and still love.

There will be the same spirit abroad this Saturday; we will make sure there will. We none of us want to be protesting; we wish with all our hearts that we didn’t feel the need to do so. But since we apparently do, we’re making damn sure that we will exercise our right to do it wearing frog costumes.

Photo by Tom and Julie Trainor

One evening we drove to the Valley to consult a man we had heard of called Eric. Eric was slightly built and balding with a mild manner and a clipped New Zealand accent: he led us into the crystal-bedizened living room of his modest ranch-style house, and disappeared further into its interior, he said, “to prepare.” A few minutes later he returned, sporting an immense medallion and a booming baritone voice, announcing himself to be Babob from the lost kingdom of Atlantis, given instructions by the High King to escort us to the bar at the corner of his street where we were to join him in downing unspecified quantities of “the potion you call te-quila.”

Eric was harmless, if unhinged: we fled, giggling, to the car, and drove, still laughing, back to the Westside, with an anecdote for the more easily amused of our acquaintance for a week, and a standing joke for ourselves in perpetuity. I had also acquired something that would prove to be of infinitely greater value, which was a telephone number.

In among the crystals on Eric-soon-to-be-Babob’s coffee table was a book called How To Be Irish in Southern California. I had never seen it before nor have I found a trace of it since: it was a slim volume, since the Southern Californian Irish population is not massively large, and contained lists of local Irish fleadhanna and festivals, shops where you could buy Claddagh rings and Wolfe Tones CDs, and more of the same. One item that had particularly caught my attention was a list of the all of two Irish language instructors in Los Angeles, one of whom, a man called Patrick Burke, apparently lived close to me in Santa Monica.

The next day I telephoned the number given in the book, to be greeted by a mellifluous voice with a majestic Celtic intonation.

“I understand you give Gaelic lessons,” I said.

“’Tis not Gaelic,” the voice on the telephone corrected me sternly. “’Tis the Irish language.”

“Oh,” I said. “Isn’t that called Gaelic?”

“In the Irish language,” the voice allowed, “’tis an Gaeilge. But in English, ‘tis the Irish language.”

I never did learn how Patrick came to be included in the book on Eric’s coffee table because he seemed somewhat surprised to be asked for lessons, especially since, as he noted disapprovingly, “they’ve changed the spelling” (the Irish alphabet had been updated from the old-fashioned cló Gaelach to Roman type some thirty years before). But he cautiously agreed to give it a try. And so a light entered my life that still shines on it, if only in memory, to this day.

Patrick was a widower who lived in an airy apartment filled with books and paintings on San Vicente Blvd: he was a tall, stately man with a shock of silver hair, eyes like sapphires, and long, elegantly ringed hands which he would lay gracefully one over the other across his substantial stomach as he sprinkled our lessons with fairy dust plucked from his seemingly bottomless supply of songs, poems and stories. He was born shortly before the Easter Rising, and grew up in the remote town of Gort, in Galway, where entertainment, he told me, was simple, and in the winter, the scéaltóir, or storyteller, would travel the area, accepting lodgings for the night in exchange for an evening of stories. Patrick was something of a scéaltóir himself: he would weave spellbinding tales of his time in Ireland and in Indi-ah, where he had dined with princes and once been attacked by a pan-thah, and once, when sitting with Mr. Los Angeles and me over a pre-dinner drink in the bar of the English pub, embarked on a tale of his India days so engrossing that the couple sitting next to us, who had openly abandoned their own conversation in favor of ours, were aghast when our table was called. “But you can’t go!” they cried. “We want to know what happened!”

Patrick was a teacher by trade: he had spent some years as a schoolmaster at St. Monica’s High School, and now was mostly retired, occasionally teaching a poetry class for senior adults at Santa Monica College. His poetry declamations were famous: he had once spotted a display of daffodils at the Santa Monica Farmers Market, and stopped to recite Wordsworth’s poem, by the end of which a crowd had gathered, and the stall holders presented him with a bunch of the same flowers as an accolade.

For years I would go to Patrick’s apartment on Friday mornings for my lesson. Aside from a smattering of Old Norse at college, Irish was the first language I had studied that was not Latin-based, and for me, it required a radical re-think of what was a noun, what a verb, and what an adjective. I did not, for instance, stand or sit, I was in my standingness or my sittingness; I was not hungry or sad, there was hunger or sorrow on me; I did not know a thing, there was – or more often, was not – knowledge at me. And these prepositions mattered. When I would leave Patrick’s apartment he would bid me farewell with slán leat – health be with you – to which the correct return would be slán agat – health be at you – which time and again I would forget and parrot slán leat back at him, until he at last burst out in exasperation, “Do you not get it? You’re going away so I say health go with you, but I’m staying here, so you say health stay at me.” Irish is a tough, tough language to learn. But when it comes together – as at last it did, just a little, even for me – the song it sings is hypnotic.

Patrick was never an effusive man – a wry side comment was more his style of communication – but very occasionally he would let slip that he kinda sorta liked me. Once, when I was inscribing a book to him, he asked me to make it out do mo chara Pádraig – to my friend Patrick – and then shook his head and amended, “No, do mo chara dílis Pádraig” – to my dear friend Patrick. My heart turned somersaults of joy.

He came to our wedding, where he broke out some impressively nifty moves on the dance floor: during the reception, he chatted with Sylvia, who later revealed to me that when he had taught her at St. Monica’s, she had known him, not as Mr. Burke, but as Brother Thomas. “Sylvia says she remembers you from St. Monica’s,” I told him the next time I saw him. “Ah, so,” he replied benignly, and that was it. It appeared that this was one story with which the scéaltóir did not intend to regale us.

I was not able to say good-bye to Patrick. I telephoned him one day to arrange our regular Good Friday outing to Stations of the Cross at St. Monica’s church, where we would both lament the substitution of contemporary music for the mournful traditional Stabat Mater – “Björk!” he once snorted disgustedly, although whether his indignation had been aroused by Björk’s singing style or by her lack of Catholic credentials remained unclear – but he never called back; we did not have close friends in common, but I made some more calls and at last learned that a few weeks before he had suffered a stroke and died. He was well into his eighties and had lived a full life, but I was sad not to have seen him one more time, and even sadder to have missed his funeral: it would have been a good one.

My Irish is now so rusty it all but shrieks when it hears me coming. I do try to keep it up on Duolingo, although Duolingo requires me to repeat that the boy drinks the milk over and over until I am tempted to pour the bainne down the pesky little buachaill’s throat until it chokes him; and it never, ever folds one hand over the other to serenade me with a snatch of Seán Ó’Duibhir a Ghleanna. But I keep going, in memory of Patrick, and also of those of my family who spoke the language daily until they were forced to stop: it seems the least I can do to honor him and them.

A Phádraig, a chara dílis, I’ll raise a glass to you on St. Patrick’s Day. I’ll also raise a glass to Babob from Atlantis via Auckland, New Zealand, to thank him for the extraordinary gift he gave me without even knowing it, and to hope that, wherever he is and whatever earthly form he is currently taking, he has found someone he cares for to drink the potion they call te-quila with him.

“I can help you!” she assured me, fervently and unasked, shooting with fevered eye from behind a display of hazelnut cranberry crackers. “You want cheese, you’ve come to the right place! We have cheeses here that’ll knock your socks off! We have big cheeses! We have small cheeses! We have French cheeses from France, we have goat cheeses from goats! You cannot name a cheese we do not have! Go ahead and try – name your cheese and I guarantee you we will have it! And that’s a guarantee!”

Photo by VIRUL on Unsplash

“What I’m looking for,” I explained, I would have thought unremarkably enough, after the wind had at last settled in my hair, “is a piece of English cheddar.”

The young woman’s head swiveled in delight.

“You want a sharp cheddar cheese!” she cried. “Sharp cheddar cheese, I’ll show you sharp cheddar cheese! We have a cheddar cheese so sharp it’ll bite you right back! Right back, I tell you! Come with me and I’ll show you sharp cheddar cheese!”

In fact, I was not looking for a sharp cheese. A good English cheddar, while certainly flavorful, is not particularly sharp at all: it’s mellow and deliciously nutty with a firm texture and a pleasing pale yellow color. It used to be difficult to find a good cheddar in American cheese stores, but these days, with improved transportation techniques, many companies are importing them with some success; and if you can find a piece of good English cheddar in peak condition, it is a treat worthy of the gods.

My new friend was glaring at me in some irritation.

“What are you waiting for?” she demanded. “I need to show you my cheese! You want sharp cheddar, I tell you, this one is so sharp it’ll bite you right back!”

Obediently, I followed her to a section of refrigerator in a corner, in which lay a perspiring rectangle of what looked like a portion of foot severed from a newly-discovered corpse, encased in plastic that proudly announced its provenance to be the fair American state of Vermont.

“Now that,” cried the assistant in triumph, “is a traditional cheddar cheese!”

Now, I will be polite up to a point, but there does come a time when facts must be served.

“You see,” I felt impelled to point out, “actually, it’s not.”

There was a pause while the assistant absorbed this

“It is, you know,” she said, then.

“It might be a cheddar,” I allowed. “But what I’m looking for is an English cheddar. And that’s not it.”

Unlike champagne or Parmigiano Reggiano, cheddar cheese has no Protected Designation of Origin, and thus can theoretically be made anywhere. But it is well documented that the most authentic form of English cheddar cheese – and to my personal palate the tastiest – is made from the milk of cows in the West Country of England, the nearer the better to the little town of Cheddar in Somerset, where it is matured in the caves of the adjoining Cheddar Gorge.

The assistant’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

“Ma’am,” she said. “I assure you that this is the sharpest cheddar that you will find anywhere. It’s from Vermont, and once you try it, it’ll bite you back, I tell you.” She nodded, firmly, at the amputated foot portion. “Bite you,” she repeated lest there was a danger I had misunderstood her until now. “Right. Back.”

“I’m sure it’s a sharp cheddar cheese,” I agreed. “But what I’m looking for is a piece of English cheddar cheese. Which actually isn’t particularly sharp at all, but more full and, well, cheddary.”

The assistant puffed her cheeks in frustration.

“Ma’am,” she affirmed. “This is the sharpest English cheddar we have. It’s from Vermont! It’ll bite you right back!”

It’s not that I have anything against Vermont cheeses per se. They have excellent animal livestock in Vermont and, the specimen currently in front of me apart, there are fine cheeses to be made from their milk. But, since Vermont is generally agreed be in America, as opposed to, for instance, England, not even the finest of Vermont cheeses can be accurately described as an English cheese.

“I believe you wholeheartedly,” I told her. “But as you’ve just said, this cheddar cheese is from Vermont; and as I’ve just said, the sort of cheese I’m looking for is English cheddar. From England.”

The assistant’s brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “I’m not getting what you’re telling me.”

I decided to take it from the top.

“This cheddar,” I said, speaking slowly and gently, pointing to the amputated foot portion with clarity and without hint of blame, “was made in America. I’m looking for a cheddar that was made in England.”

The assistant pondered and at last her brow cleared as it all became plain to her.

“Oh!” she cried. “You mean you want a Lye-ster cheddar! Why didn’t you say so?”

Now, the county of Leicestershire is a particularly pretty one. Set in the verdant center of England’s pleasant land, it offers the visitor grassy lanes, thatched cottages, and, poignantly, the home of poor little Lady Jane Grey, the teenaged political pawn who reigned as Queen for precisely nine days in 1553 before being deposed and beheaded for treason; in the grounds of her now-ruined house, the oak trees to this day are cropped at the top in her memory.

What Leicestershire does not offer is the Cheddar Gorge, which lies somewhat 150 miles to its southwest; and the cheese it produces, while quite delicious when topped with a spoonful of mango chutney and served on an oatcake, is reddish-orange in color, crumbly in texture, and in taste could hardly be more different from cheddar cheese if you marked it with chalk.

It is also pronounced Lester.

“It’s pronounced Lester,” I said.

The assistant rolled her eyes just a little.

“Lye-ster,” she corrected me, wearily.

It is a long-established English hobby to argue about the pronunciation of words. Some people, for instance, call the lightly sweetened tea biscuit a scone and others a sconn. Some people lie awake at nights worrying, should they chance to run into Queen Camilla on the 44 bus to Battersea, whether they should address her as Ma’am or Mah’m. Apparently, to refer to a portion of one’s home as a “room” instead of a “r’m” is a dead giveaway of a less than exalted social origin; and I have a friend who comes over all Lady Bracknell should one prove oneself so plebeian as to propose meeting him outside London’s Charring Cross station in place of the more aristocratically announced Chairing Cross.

There is only one way to pronounce Leicester.

“Actually,” I said, “it really is Lester.”

The assistant sighed and shook her head.

“Here we go again!” she said. “I get this from both sides. Half of English people say Lester, and the other half say Lye-ster.”

There are around 58.6 million people currently living in England. Of them, and their parents, and their great-great-grandparents all the way back to the Domesday Book, not a solitary one has ever said Lye-ster.

But the assistant was on a roll.

“And both sides,” she continued, beginning to gnaw on the inside of her cheek, “are just so sure that they’re the ones who are right and the others are the ones who are wrong. And there’s no talking to either of them because their minds are already made up.”

I remained bereft of a response.

The assistant turned on me a brow dark with foreboding.

“And you guys need to figure a way to settle it,” she warned me sternly. “Because you can’t go on arguing about things like this, it’s how wars get started.”

She thought, and her eyes widened.

“Wars,” she repeated. “Wars, OK? And I don’t think you want a war, do you, just over how you say Lye-ster? Start killing each other over how you guys pronounce a name? That would be crazy, even for you Brits.”

She spun around, and took a few calming breaths in the direction of the fig jam. Then turned back, revivified.

“We can do this!” she cried. “We’ll find you a cheese that will knock your socks off, I guarantee! Now, if you don’t want a sharp cheddar and you don’t want a Lye-ster cheddar, the next cheddar we could try would be …”

In the corner of the case, I spotted a portion of blessedly neutral Swiss Gruyère, blamelessly wrapped, and clearly marked as to weight and price.

“Do you know something?” I said. “I think I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll get this instead.”

Slowly and delicately, I picked it up and backed away towards the cash register, careful to do nothing to startle or offend.

Photo by Alex Simpson on Unsplash

And Mr. Los Angeles did indeed go to Europe later that year. However, he didn’t quite manage to get to either Norway or Amsterdam, neither of which fine places either of us has visited even yet. Instead, he spent the first week of his much-anticipated European adventure sitting in various living rooms in North London being inspected by members of his future in-law family ranging from the mildly batty to the barking mad. Somewhat to my relief, he decided to go through with the wedding nevertheless.

We did get to France, though, and we did manage eat a great deal of cheese, and also to visit the Chartreuse distillery, where we were shown around by attendants wearing chartreuse-colored suits, which I privately thought was brave of them, and after that we decided to drive down to Italy to visit my Uncle Tony in Rome. Under the Alps we drove like a subterranean Hannibal and at last arrived in Florence, after dark and in a rainstorm of Biblical proportions. The next morning, we strolled through the rain-washed city, spent some time investigating the Casa di Dante, and then walked down towards the river and past the Museo del Bargello.

“Do you want to go in?” I asked Mr. Los Angeles.

Mr. Los Angeles looked across the street to the Museo. There was a special exhibition that month, and a line of people stretched from the door and clear around the corner of the block.

“I’m not that interested in museums,” he replied.

Now, I am in many ways a perfectly delightful person, but not even my staunchest champions would claim that my observational powers were acute. Heady with love and Italy, I failed to notice the line of people snaking from the door of the art gallery, and simply heard Mr. Los Angeles telling me that he did not care for museums. This was newly into our relationship, and we were still learning about each other. On that trip, I had already learned that Mr. Los Angeles was undaunted by my family (impressive); that he insisted on doing all the driving (yes, please); that he insisted on having music while he was driving (not my own first choice, but he was the one driving, after all); that he did not care for smoked salmon (there went my fantasies of gourmet romantic breakfasts); and that, while he was not in the regular habit of crashing cars, he was nevertheless capable of doing so (don’t ask). To this file I now added that Mr. Los Angeles was uninterested in museums; and if this registered as a slightly surprising prejudice for a man who so loved history, well, he was also a Norwegian who disliked smoked salmon, so go figure.

Evidence to refute my theory presented itself immediately. Having by-passed the Bargello, we made our way to the Uffizi Gallery and both spent a couple of happy hours there. The next day we drove up the hill to Vinci and the Museo Leonardiano, where after an hour I decided had seen enough so took off to wander around the town, while the museum-averse Mr. Los Angeles remained, absorbed, until lunchtime. After we left Florence, we drove to Orvieto and made a beeline for the Etruscan Museum where a similar situation played out. And so on to Rome, which is itself a museum spread over seven hills, where Mr. Los Angeles was both visibly and audibly in his element. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the woman with whom he proposed to spend the rest of his life, he remained uninterested in museums. He had told me so himself.

Back in Los Angeles, our normal life resumed. At the weekends, Mr. Los Angeles would often suggest we spend an afternoon at LACMA or the Natural History Museum; when we made trips out of town, a visit to the local museum was de rigueur, during which we would continue the agreement at which we had arrived in Vinci, that I would enjoy it until I had had enough and Mr. Los Angeles would stay until he had examined every single exhibit exhaustively and with boundless fascination. But Mr. Los Angeles had declared to me quite specifically, one bright October morning on the Via del Proconsolo, that he was uninterested in museums, and so it must be true.

Looking back now, it seems extraordinary that it never once occurred to me to question Mr. Los Angeles’ supposed museum indifference. But we see what we see and we hear what we hear; and if any one of us has nailed their colors to a particular belief – whether it be a religious faith, a political allegiance, or simply an opinion about a partner’s taste in sightseeing – then all the evidence of our own eyes and ears can come battering at our mind’s front door and it won’t make a darned bit of difference because what we’ve decided to think is what we’ve decided to think. And Mr. Los Angeles is what his mother would describe delicately as an unusual man; and compared with some of the Baroque painted ceilings that adorn his mental processes, the question of why he would continue to spend time in spaces that purportedly bored him was as but a tiny trinket box in the entire Palace of Versailles.

Time passed. Mr. Los Angeles and I graduated from giddy lovers to newlyweds to regular married couple. We fought, we made up, we went to work, we went to dinner, we got sick, we got better. A couple of years after the first European trip, we were invited to a friend’s birthday party in London, and decided to pay a visit there of several days’ duration. I would spend much of that time making myself nauseatingly adorable to the various editors who commissioned work from me; Mr. Los Angeles, having by now served his time with my family, would be free to explore the city.

“What are you going to do with yourself while I’m busy?” I asked him. “It’s a pity you’re not interested in museums because London has some really good ones.”

Mr. Los Angeles looked at me in a way you just might call kinda funny.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“You don’t like museums,” I reminded him. “You told me so yourself, in Florence.”

Mr. Los Angeles shook his head as if to dislodge something that had landed unexpectedly in his brain.

“Where have you been,” he asked in honest befuddlement, “for all the time we’ve known each other?”

I wish Mr. Los Angeles would go to our nation’s capital and start asking similar questions of certain people there.

I must amend that. I am not so much one chicken, as the entire cast and crew of Chicken Run, down to the lighting cameraman’s pesky kid cousin whom they’d agreed to hire as a temporary runner to keep him out of trouble until school re-opened.

Photo by Alex Padurariu on Unsplash

I come by my cowardice the old-fashioned way. I grew up in post-World War II London where adults, heady with the end of wartime rationing, rained candy and cookies on children like the bombs that had fallen in the Blitz, and the resulting dental cavities were addressed by drills the size of jackhammers that for years bore directly and agonizingly into our unanaesthetized teeth, and who were we to complain? Our parents had fought The War, after all, and what could compare with that?

When I was in my early teens, our family dentist produced a needle resembling a bicycle pump, which he would shoot brutally into our gums, but which at least numbed the pain for the subsequent procedure. A few years later, he was replaced by a younger practitioner to whom it had remarkably occurred to insert the needle in a way which wouldn’t hurt in the first place, and who further endeared himself to me by shouting at my brother and making him cry. (Score). But by then the damage was done, and my transition into fowlhood complete. Throw some Henhouse Reserve into the corner of my coop and I’ll lay you a nice speckled egg for your tea.

When I first came to America, young and broke, I was able to avoid dentists for several years on the shamefully convenient grounds that I could not afford them. But at last pain overcame frugality, and even fear.

“Dental care in Britain is free, isn’t it?” said the dentist I consulted, inspecting the inside of my mouth with horrified fascination.

“It is,” I affirmed.

The silence that followed reverberated clear across his clinic, surged over the freeway, and landed in the deepest canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, where they say that on a clear day, you can sometimes hear it still.

Two years and more money than I care to recall later, I could rejoice in a newly acceptable smile and a firm agreement that stands to this day, that where the dental profession and I are concerned, we will all be a great deal happier if I prepare for any but the most basic procedure with a prescription for Valium.

To be clear, I take Valium only and exclusively when I have to go to the dentist. I take an Uber to the clinic and back, and when I return I sit on the patio and read Dorothy Parker until the effect of the drug has worn off. I do not then go scavenging through the neighborhood trash cans looking for half-filled heroin needles; I do not wake up the next morning, trembling violently, to face polka-dotted zebras and purple peacocks springing from the bathroom mirror. I simply take the pill when I need it, and then go about my life.

Recently my current dentist, a lankily mild-mannered soul I’ll call Dr. Toothbrush, broke to me the glum but hardly unexpected news that the bombardments of sugar that had torpedoed my youth had at last declared their victory and that he would be required to replace a couple of my front teeth with a bridge.

This is by no means as bad as it might once have been: even the temporary bridge works just fine and at first looked more than reasonable too. However, over the weeks while I waited for my permanent, its appearance had gradually shifted from a unremarkable creamy white to a color that could only be described as green. It was an attractive shade of green, mind you, the vibrant emerald of moss after a healthy rain shower, and if you were to see it adorning the whitewashed wall of a cottage swept by the salt sea breeze, you might even find it somewhat pleasing. As part of the smile I preferred to exhibit to the world, not so much so.

“Can Dr. Toothbrush do anything about this before the permanent arrives?” I asked the nice nurse, Mary, over the telephone.

“He can,” said Mary. “But he’d probably have to take the temporary out to do it.”

“I’ll need a Valium for that, won’t I?” I said.

Mary has been with me through many an appointment.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “You will so need a Valium for that.”

Except that the prescription for the Valium never arrived at the pharmacy. And when I telephoned the office to check up on it, I was answered, not by Mary, but by a new nurse, whom I had never met before.

“Dr. Toothbrush doesn’t want to prescribe you Valium,” she said. “He doesn’t think it’s necessary for this procedure.”

This was something of a surprise to me: I have been consulting Dr. Toothbrush for some years, and he is well aware of my pusillanimity.

“It might not be necessary for most people,” I said. “But I’m an unusually nervous patient and Dr. Toothbrush always recommends that I take it.”

But it appeared that the new nurse was not merely a new nurse, but a whole new sheriff come to clean up Dodge City.

“Dr. Toothbrush has decided people take too much Valium,” she said. “And for this procedure, he thinks it would be unnecessary.”

Dr. Toothbrush has been known to go pale when I walk into his office with my pupils at their normal size.

“Can I talk to Dr. Toothbrush?” I said.

The new sheriff sighed.

“He’s with a patient,” she said. “But I can go and ask him again.”

She pressed hold and for the next several moments I could hear her polishing her badge and humming Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling as she perused the Wanted posters. At last, she returned to me.

“Dr. Toothbrush says a Valium would be unnecessary for this procedure,” she said.

And that was that.

On the appointed day I presented myself at Dr. Toothbrush’s office.

“You want me to clean your temporary?” he said.

“I want to know how you’d go about cleaning my temporary,” I said.

He told me. A drill would be involved.

“I’d need a Valium for that,” I said.

At the sound of the V word, Dr. Toothbrush’s eyes widened in alarm, and he looked nervously over his shoulder towards the nurses’ station.

“You don’t need a Valium,” he said loudly, carefully angling his voice towards the new sheriff’s desk. “People take too much Valium. This is a very simple procedure.”

“But it’s not simple for me,” I said. “It’s never simple for me.”

“That’s only because you get so nervous,” he said.

“That’s why I want to take a Valium,” I said.

Dr. Toothbrush’s expression escalated from alarm to ill-concealed terror as he once again looked to the nurses’ station.

“A Valium,” he declared ringingly, “is not necessary for this procedure.”

“Maybe not for most people,” I said. “But you and I both know that I have a special condition, and if we’re going to do this, I’m really going to need something for my nerves.”

Dr. Toothbrush was now ashen with anxiety. He turned back towards me and lowered his voice.

“We don’t have to do it at all,” he said. “It’s only two or three weeks till the permanent will be ready.”

“My teeth are green,” I said.

A vein had begun to twitch in Dr. Toothbrush’s forehead.

“They’re not very green,” he said. “Not if you don’t smile too much.”

Dr. Toothbrush is a kind-hearted man and under normal circumstances, I would have felt sorry for him. But by now I had had enough.

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “I’m a responsible adult, and all I want is to go into the world with normal-colored teeth and for both you and me not to have to visit hell to get there. I have a couple of business meetings and a birthday party to attend this week, and I think I have the right to want to look acceptable for those. And if you really believe …”

“Hold on there,” said Dr. Toothbrush. He was still pale but something in his eyes had shifted. “Did you just say you have an event coming up?”

Truth to tell, I’d only thrown in the birthday party for good measure. It was for Mr. Los Angeles’ BFF Pete, a rocket scientist from Wisconsin who has a map of Middle Earth hanging in his living room, and is married to a lovely woman called Misty, who is part of a trio that sings Old Icelandic folk songs. We four would be meeting at the local Mexican dive, where tongue-scorching salsa and toe-curling jokes would flow free, Misty and I would revisit the charms of Viggo Mortensen, Pete and Mr. Los Angeles would compare the finer points of Plan 9 From Outer Space, and the chances of anyone’s even noticing my teeth were roughly on a par with those of Gandalf’s taking up square dancing. Although we all planned to enjoy the occasion immensely, it was unlikely to have the organizers of the Met Gala spending sleepless nights mulling the competition. But in the dictionary definition of the word event, it incontrovertibly qualified as an occurrence that would be taking place. I even had it written in my diary.

I drew myself up in my chair and summoned all of the hauteur I could muster in squinting down the pug of my London Irish nose.

“I have,” I announced icily, “an event to attend.”

Dr. Toothbrush exhaled. Color was returning to his face, and he was standing straighter.

“Well,” he informed the new sheriff’s desk. “If you have an event to attend, we need to get you looking your best, don’t we?”

He stood taller still and raised his voice.

“And if a Valium is what it will take,” he cried, “then in this particular case, I see no alternative but to prescribe you one.”

He closed the door to his examination room, and leaned forward confidentially.

“I’ll even prescribe you two,” he whispered.

Safe behind the closed door, we both snickered quietly into our fists.

He hooted in derision.

Photo by omid armin on Unsplash

“You’ve been living here too long,” he told me. “You’ve gone to the dark side. It isn’t skedule, it’s shedule. Shedule.”

“They say skedule here,” I said.

“Well, they’re wrong,” he said.

He paused to ponder.

“Wrong,” he explained, then, helpfully. “That’s one of the troubles with Americans. They don’t know how to speak the King’s English.”

“I think they want to speak American English,” I said. “I think that might have been a reason why they became Americans in the first place.”

“Well, they were idiots,” he clarified. “And talking of idiots, why the bloody hell is everyone here so bloody friendly all the time? They don’t have to be, and it’s really irritating.”

“They don’t mean anything bad by it,” I suggested. “It’s just the way they are. Probably something about the California sunshine.”

“Sunshine!” he snorted, angling his pallid British complexion to a more favorable position to catch a dollop of Vitamin D. “I went into a shop this morning and a chap popped up behind the counter, grinning all over his face, and said, ‘Hi! How are you today?’ Today! He didn’t know me from Adam, I nearly clocked him.”

“Well, different cultures have different ways of expressing themselves,” I said. “And this is the way they do it here.”

“But it’s so hypocritical!” he said. “That chap didn’t give a damn how I am today any more than he cared how I was yesterday. I could have been dying of pneumonic plague for all he was interested.”

“I think he’d have cared if you had pneumonic plague,” I said. “I understand it’s quite contagious.”

“And there you go again!” he said. “Being literal, just like an American. I was making a joke, didn’t you get it?”

He took a gulp of his tea, and shook his head in despair.

“Pigswill,” he identified. “I’ve been here four days and not been able to find a decent cup of tea yet.”

“They don’t drink much tea in Los Angeles,” I said. “The coffee in this place is very nice though.”

“If I’d wanted coffee,” he said, “I’d have gone somewhere sensible like Italy. I’d have thought in somewhere as silly as Los Angeles, at least I could get a proper cup of tea.”

“If you really want a cup of English tea,” I said, “there’s an English pub in Santa Monica. They might be just a touch friendly for your taste, but you could certainly get a good cup of tea, and I’m pretty sure they’d say shedule instead of skedule, too, and maybe even throw in a snarl if you asked them nicely.”

He snorted in disgust.

“Why would I want to go to an English pub here?” he said. “I didn’t come here to sit in a fake English pub when I can go to a real pub back at home. I came here to learn about Los Angeles, but it’s such a silly place, isn’t it? All this sun shining in the middle of winter, and people walking around grinning like fools and saying hello to you when they don’t even know you, and talking about the sidewalk when they mean the pavement and the trunk of the car when they mean the bonnet and on and on.”

He stirred at his spurned tea, and shook his head again.

“And do you know what the worst of it is?” he said.

Oh, boy, howdy, does any American right now know what the worst of it is.

“We’re doing what we can to fight it,” I said. “There’s a demonstration on Saturday if you want to come?”

“I don’t want to go to a Los Angeles demonstration!” he said. “What, with strangers smiling at me and people hugging me and everyone ordering me to have a nice day whether I want to or not? I don’t think so. That wasn’t what I was talking about at all.”

“Then what were you talking about?” I said.

He took a bite of his chocolate cherry Danish and frowned.

“The banknotes,” he said.

Yes, I was a little surprised by this, too.

“They’re all the same color!” he accused. “It’s ridiculous. In sensible places like Europe, they have different colors for different values, you can tell them apart as soon as you look at them, and then you can organize them in your wallet and pull out what you need when you need it. Over here, they all look the same, so you can’t keep them in order, and then you have to look at the numbers to know what you’re dealing with. It’s really irritating. Doesn’t it bother you?”

I had had enough.

“It’s a constant source of sorrow,” I told him. “When I wake up on a February morning, and even with all the terrible stuff that’s happening, the sky is still blue and the sun is shining and the jasmine is blooming and the Farmers Market is bursting with oranges and lemons, and I don’t know whether to be happy about that or worried about everything else, the very first thought that goes through my head is, ‘Oh, no. How will I face another day with banknotes that are all the same color?’”

He sat back in satisfaction.

“You see,” he agreed triumphantly. “It’s all wrong, isn’t it?”

“It certainly is,” I confirmed.

I am not a great wearer of adornments. (“Minimalist” is the description I’d choose; if another person were to prefer frumpy, they might just not find themselves without company). I will wear a simple necklace when Mr. Los Angeles and I go out, mostly because he likes it and he is the one who has to look at me after all; I also have an engraved silver cuff bracelet of my mother’s that I break out on extremely fancy occasions; but my youthful ear piercings grew over years ago, and the only brooch I have worn in decades is an Irish flag pin for St. Patrick’s Day. I do wear a wristwatch, because since my idly drifting writer’s life very rarely requires me to be anywhere very much at all at any time very much at all, I am therefore the very much more fanatically obsessed with checking the hour of the day at any hour it falls. And I also wear two rings: my wedding band on my left hand, and on my right another gold band inset with tiny diamonds, which Mr. Los Angeles gave me early in our marriage.

When I was first required to ditch the rings I was prepared, even somewhat tickled, to do so. I felt girlish, mildly naughty. Who was this woman, I asked myself silently, sashaying down the street with her fingers bare of signs of commitment, her hands scrubbed clean of history? Unbotoxed and proudly carrying the spread of her middle years, she was visibly of an age to have stories to tell: what strange dramas could her past therefore hold that she had made so momentous a choice as not to display a hint of them? There was a mystery here, I thought. I quite intrigued myself.

As the novelty wore off, however, the titillation began to pall. A wedding ring is not an enormous piece of metal: the napkin-holder sized piece on Mr. Los Angeles’ impressively mighty hand weighs barely 6.2 grams, while that on even my own large peasant paw slips in at just 2.4. But it is an appendage that I usually wear so regularly and so unthinkingly that it has become almost a part of my body itself; and, although I am not usually conscious of it when I am wearing it, I found that I became acutely aware when I was not.

Reaching fruitlessly to the finger indentations where my rings usually sat, I began to realize how many times during the day I thought of Mr. Los Angeles, whether to tell him of something that had happened, or make a plan for something that was about to happen, or simply to share a silly joke; and how accustomed I had become in those times to sensing those two tiny weights of gold on my fingers, and how bare and lonely my hands felt now that they were no longer there. Although it was summer, they began to feel really quite cold.

It would not have occurred to any of the married women in my family to remove their wedding rings. When I was a child, I once asked my mother whether she ever took hers off: we were at a family gathering, she was sitting with a couple of my aunts who all looked at each and laughed in the knowing way that women do, and I knew that something was being communicated that was powerful in a way I could not yet understand. My grandmother had been left a widow in her forties: when she lay dying in her eighties and her fingers had grown so thin that the nuns at the hospice had removed her rings for safety, she looked down at her hands, this fearsome matriarch who for decades had ruled with a rod of iron her family, the parish priest, and several hapless bank managers, who had been married for twenty years and widowed for forty, and said, simply and forlornly, “Without my wedding ring, I don’t know who I am.”

The strangest point of my own ringless experience was the evening when Mr. Los Angeles and I decided to try a new restaurant for a romantic dinner. The space was small and flatteringly lit; a candle flickered on the table between us. We ate, we flirted, we laughed; we exchanged memories, revived private jokes. Mr. Los Angeles reached his manly hand to cover mine; I reached my free hand to cover his. It was only when my bare finger brushed his ringed that it occurred to me: he was visibly a married man, but, to the outside observer, I would appear to be single.

It is not, I must make clear, that an eager throng was crowding to watch us: Mr. Los Angeles and I are neither famous nor even particularly interesting to look at, and there was no reason to suppose that even one curious soul might be lurking in the shadow of the fiddle-leaf fig tree with furrowed brow of fascination to study our encounter and ponder its meaning; but if there were, I suddenly thought, and they chanced to look at our hands, what on earth would they make of us? Might they think that Mr. Los Angeles was the sort of person who would cheat on his wife? Might they think that I was the sort of person who would be party to cheating on Mr. Los Angeles’ wife? Where was Mr. Los Angeles’ wife this evening, anyway? I do not usually pay much attention to what opinions even real human strangers might form of my private life, let alone hypothetical lurkers in the shadow of the fiddle-leaf fig; but on that occasion, I found, it bothered me quite considerably.

It is, when you consider it, a thoroughly bizarre thing to get married. To select just the one person out of all the millions of people in the world, and say, “I choose you, and you alone, to spend the rest of my life with; I promise to be kind and faithful to you for all of it, no matter how long it will last or what it may throw at us or how it may change us; and when, out of all the millions of other people in the world, you make the same promise to me, I still think you sane enough that I believe you.”

Strange, yes; but couples have been marrying each other almost since time began, and since not much long after have been marking their commitment by exchanging rings. It was the ancient Romans who chose to place them on the third finger of the left hand, in the belief that that finger contained a vein, the vena amoris, that flowed directly to the heart: although that particular anatomical theory has now gone the way of the toga, the custom, along with the aqueduct and much of the modern legal system, remains. Not everyone today chooses to wear their partner’s ring; but for those who do, it transmits a clear and unmistakable message, not only to the world, but to the wearer too. It is a reminder that you are no longer a single person but part of a pair: that, wherever you go and whatever you do, there is another person somewhere who shares your life, who has your back, who is your pal.

Mr. Los Angeles and I do not have a picture-perfect union. There are times when we disagree; there are times when we want to strangle each other; there are times when we each look at the other and think, “What on earth was I thinking?” But we wear each other’s ring through the good times and the bad; we never (well, except for the time one of us had an allergic reaction, and the time another removed his to wash his hands in a gas station and forgot to replace it, and have you any idea how the price of gold has shot up over the years?) even consider not doing so.

I still don’t know what made my allergy go away. But I was awfully pleased when it did.

Photo by Paolo Aldrighetti on Unsplash

“That,” said the testosterone-heavy Angeleno, jerking his head towards a small, dark bar as we bowled down Pico Blvd to the cinema at the Westside Pavilion, “is where me and my buddies go on Super Bowl Sunday.”

“That’s nice,” I agreed glumly, supposing that it would indeed be the sort of place where a testosterone-heavy sort of man would go with his buddies for his sports fix.

“It only has one television,” he said. “And we sit as far away from it as possible.”

I blinked, absorbing this.

“I don’t care for sports,” he explained.

I hitched my skirt up a little and arranged my legs at an attractive angle.

“Tell me all your hopes and dreams,” I cooed throatily.

Until then, I had never known it was an option for a man to be not a sports fan: experience had led me to believe that an obsession with people doing things with balls was an inextricable part of the gender, like shaving, and saying, “Can I help you with the housework?” in a house equally occupied by two of you. All of the many men in my family were sports buffs; so until then had been most of my boyfriends, male platonic friends, work friends, and even some of their wives and girlfriends too. Sport was already an art form in England, and when I arrived in America I learned that it was also a social occasion: events like the Super Bowl were celebrated with lavish parties, where families and friends, married couples, batches of singletons, workmates, churchmates, and neighbors would gather together to eat, drink, rejoice and commiserate, and throw themselves heart, soul, and passion into their shared enjoyment of the game.

When I was new to this country, I had nowhere to go on the days of the big games: single, and in those days short on friends, I would sit my solitary self down in my back yard, and listen to the comradely cries of joy, despair and ardent team loyalty echoing from other houses clear down the street; I would turn my ear towards the reverberating silence ringing in my own empty yard; my soul would rise in my chest, and I would cry silently, from the bottom of my heart, “Thank God it’s not happening here!”

To say that I am not a fan of sports myself is akin to commenting that Quasimodo struggled occasionally with his posture. I say this with no pleasure, because I see so many people deriving such joy from it in so many different ways; but if there is even one sport that will speak to me personally, I have yet to find it. Tennis gives me a headache; ice skating makes me feel cold; swimming makes me feel cold and wet; basketball makes me want to kill myself; volleyball makes me want to kill someone else. Do not get me started on golf.

It was unfortunate for my childhood, therefore, that the Universe decided it would be a really, really good joke to place me in a household of sports fanatics. My father and brothers were heartily manly men who rarely met a sport they didn’t like; but for them, the one sport that ruled them all was the melee of muddy ankle-scufflings known bafflingly to its fans as The Beautiful Game, which is English football.

Football, in the already dreary winter months, ruled my childhood home with an iron hand encased in a wet woolen glove. The matches happened on Saturdays, and each week leading up to them would be dominated by speculation about players whose very names spoke rainy afternoons: what form Bobby Charlton would exhibit, how Nobby Stiles’ leg injury was coming along, what Matt Busby had up his sleeve for Albert Scanlon and what Sam Leitch would have to say about it afterwards; the bulk of Saturday was spent sequestered in hermetic concealment from the outside world lest any stray syllable might trickle in to reveal the result of the match when it happened, and the horrible fate thus befall of the suspense being ruined when Match of the Day screened the pre-recorded action later in the evening. My father and brothers loved all of this. It is difficult for me to locate the words to express the depths of my own loathing.

All the girls I knew growing up didn’t hate football: some even, mysteriously, appeared to enjoy it. In my North London grammar school, emotions ran high between the followers of Tottenham Hotspurs (the Spurs), the team my own family followed, and those of Arsenal (the Gunners), who were our bitter enemies, and so bone-deep does the North London tribal rivalry run in even my blood that when Spike Lee once asked me during an interview, charmingly and even mildly flirtatiously, whether I were an Arsenal supporter, his thitherto soft-spoken and respectful interviewer astonished us both by snarling ferociously that those were “fighting words;” but ask me to name a single Spurs player, from those days or these, and I hope you’ve brought a sandwich because you’re looking at a long wait. I had a friend at university who was so devoted a Shakespeare buff that she appeared even to have enjoyed Coriolanus, who tried for three years to convince me that an afternoon’s struggle between Leeds United and Chelsea carried the same level of dramatic tension as did the duel between Macbeth and Macduff; but call me a particularly backward branch dragged in from Birnam Wood, because all I could see on her field of high histrionics was a very great deal of mud.

When I first came to America, I decided, along with various other experiments in personal reinvention, to try to see if my new American self could learn to enjoy these new American sports. I went to a baseball game, where I teared up pleasurably at the National Anthem, and ate a hot dog, and then some peanuts. So far, so good, I thought, my hopes rising a little: maybe I had at last discovered the sport that would win my heart. And then the actual game started. It did not win my heart. It also lasted considerably longer than it had promised it would, the mosquitos were out in force, and it’s surprising how many hot dogs and peanuts you can eat if you have nothing else to do, and, once you have eaten them, how particularly terrible you will feel for a very long time afterwards.

“Come and watch an American football game,” said a group of new Los Angeles friends. “We’ll sit with you in front of the television, and explain everything that’s happening as it happens.” So I did and they did. They very kindly and patiently explained everything very clearly indeed, and I put my mind to concentrating very hard indeed, and at last began to feel that I was gaining a grasp on the proceedings. It was really not so complicated after all, I decided, once you had established that a field goal was a good thing but a touchdown a better, and after a while I even began to feel sufficiently confident to start cheering for the team. I quite liked cheering for the team, I found, and continued to do so quite lustily. It was only halfway through the game and inches away from the ending of several these kind and patient new friendships that I noticed that for most of the afternoon I had been cheering for the Cowboys while everyone else had been cheering for the Rams.

When Mr. Los Angeles arrived in my life, I could not believe my good luck. Sports had just never done it for him, he said, he didn’t know why. He had tried out for the football team in high school, he said, out of curiosity to see what all the fuss was about, but had broken his arm at practice, and out of further curiosity to find out how long he could delay seeking medical help (this is a very Mr. Los Angeles story) had summoned the power of his far from unimpressive intellect to “tell the pain to go away,” which it obediently did for several days until at last his mother dragged him by the ear to the family doctor, who promptly sat down the teenage – and at the time squeaky-clean of personal habit – Mr. Los Angeles for a Marathon Man-style interrogation into his presumed drug use. Mr. Los Angeles has never much cared for sports since.

As for me, I’ve learned to accept my status as sports Philistine, here in Los Angeles as back in London, and to live with it. This Super Bowl Sunday I’ll be sitting quietly in my own back yard, just as I did when I first arrived in America, and – while I am delighted that Super Bowl parties are available for people who do enjoy them – I shall still be keeping a firm distance from any action that might be taking place, and still continuing to relish the peace of non-participation. But this year, as for the last thirty years, I shall have a fellow non-sports lover to enjoy missing the fun with.

Win-win, I’d call it.