Photo by Owen Bjørnstad

The leadup to the trip had already been strange. The Dowager Mrs. Los Angeles, of whom I was extremely fond, had suffered a long and difficult deathbed, which had finally ended the previous January, when the icy North Dakota ground is too hard even to think of digging graves; when it at last came time to return her to her family plot, we had discovered that it is illegal in America to carry personal cremains on a plane, and it had become my task to send the ashes to the mortuary by the unlikely means of the parcel post. “What’s in this parcel?” the woman at the UPS had asked. “My mother-in-law,” I had replied and, because the situation was so bizarre, we had both found ourselves sobbing with laughter. When I got home, I had sobbed again, this time with grief.

Now, Agnes Olson Los Angeles was safely in the ground, having been blessed on her way by a Lutheran pastor who could not have been kinder or more gentle, and it turned out that the weekend when we were in Lakota was that of the annual turkey barbecue, the day when the entire town descends on City Park to feast on spit-roast turkeys, barbecued corn, and other delights.

Well, this was perfect timing, I thought. Agnes had talked so often and so fondly of her home town, and here her former neighbors would be out in force and available to talk to. What stories we could tell them of Agnes in her Los Angeles days, I thought, what memories of her youth we could coax them to share in return.

As soon as I had swallowed my own meal, I approached a table of folk of a likely-looking age.

“What a pretty town you have,” I said. “I’m traveling from Los Angeles and I think it’s beautiful.”

They stopped eating and looked up at me with brows furrowed in mild puzzlement.

“I’ve come with my husband and sister-in-law to bury their mother, Agnes Olson,” I explained. “She grew up here, then married Gerry from the farm, and they left for California around 1941.”

They continued to observe me thoughtfully, as one studies an exhibit of uncertain purpose in a museum specializing in primitive farming implements.

“Yah?” said one of the more gregarious after a moment.

“We’ve driven past the house she grew up in, and it doesn’t seem to have changed much,” I offered.

“Yah,” agreed Ms. Conviviality, her expression deepening from perplexity to outright bewilderment.

This was not going as I had expected.

“She went to the local high school,” I attempted. “And so did Gerry.”

“Yah,” confirmed Ms. Conviviality, shooting at her companions a sidelong glance of befuddlement.

“Do you,” I floundered desperately “… do you … remember … either of them?”

There was a pause as they all eyed each other in mutual mystification.

“Yah,” corroborated Ms. Conviviality, then. The others continued to study me for a while, and then, slowly, returned to their meal.

Broken, I trailed back to Mr. Los Angeles and his sister to describe the encounter to them.

“Welcome to the Midwest,” they said.

Back in Europe they didn’t really tell us about Midwesterners. The Americans we saw on the screen there were excitable and emotional: they were either speaking lines that had been scripted for them in movies or appearing on television talk shows to promote the movie they were appearing in – they were upbeat and enthusiastic and we used to laugh at them for describing everything and everyone as “wunnerful.” When I arrived in Los Angeles, I found to my delight that Angelenos really are like that anyway, and so – although they tend to use longer words – are New Yorkers. I had grown to think of Americans as people who wore their hearts on their sleeves.

Not in the Midwest, they aren’t. Midwesterners, I was to learn when at last I visited, guard their words and their emotions with the jealousy of a mother her newborn child. They live hard lives out in the Midwest, lives of blizzards in winter and tornadoes in summer, of farming accidents and failures of crops, and mile upon mile of prairie separating one town from another: they eat plain food and wear plain clothes, and if they yearn for some experience so inessential as attending a play or a concert, they must drive, sometimes for half a day, into the nearest city to do so. Midwesterners are good and honorable people; but they simply do not have the energy to squander on fripperies, either practical or – as I discovered at the turkey barbecue – conversational.

When I had met Mr. Los Angeles, he had told me, proudly, that his family were Midwesterners. What he had not made plain was that his family were the sort of Midwesterners who had … well … left the Midwest. Who had sat down one day in Lakota, North Dakota, where the ground is stubborn and the crops are unpredictable and the temperature dances at freezing point or below for five months out of the twelve, had figured out that there is a different place to live right here on this very globe where life is easier, and had taken themselves off to live there.

It was true that when they had arrived in Los Angeles, they had brought with them many of their Midwestern ways. They were thrifty and unpretentious and would none of them, man or woman, consider leaving the house without a full set of household tools in case of emergencies: Mr. Los Angeles still talks with pride of our first trip to London, where our hosts’ teenaged son had broken a wooden curtain rail high up in their tall Georgian house on a quiet Saturday night, which Mr. Los Angeles was swiftly able to whip out the pair of vice grips which he had packed in his luggage in order to repair on the spot. “Fixed it!” he boomed triumphantly to the fascinated circle of witnesses who had gathered, bemused, to watch. To this day, he thinks that this story reflects abnormality on them, not on him.

The family were also fiercely Lutheran in faith, and, although the Dowager stepped gallantly to the plate to accept my own slippery Papist background (truth to tell, I suspect that by the time I entered her wayward son’s domestic life, my lack of an extra head alone would have had her turning cartwheels to seal the deal), her real feelings would out themselves sometimes nevertheless. “I never thought I’d see my son married there,” she whispered faintly when we announced we were to be married at the Sacred Heart chapel of Loyola Marymount Jesuit University. I once took her to visit a Catholic artist friend who specialized in religious art: the Dowager tiptoed past the paintings of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena with ever-widening eyes of panic and ever-ashening complexion of alarm; when she at last reached that apogee of Rome-driven monstrosity the Virgin Mary her own immaculately conceived self, she was overcome and retired discreetly to the bathroom, where she found immediate relief to discover the walls decorated in the impeccably respectable Old Testament theme of Noah’s Ark: she positively skipped out, rosy-cheeked and smiling, and the two women were firm friends from then on.

Practicality, Lutheranism, and please let’s tiptoe quietly past my father-in-law’s beloved Ole and Lena jokes, and all, you would never now confuse the Midwestern Los Angeles family I married into with the Midwesterners who have stayed there. Whether California has changed the Los Angeles family or whether it was personal qualities of their own that drew them to California, I couldn’t say; but certainly, after nearly a century of living in the Los Angeles sunshine, they are one hundred and eighty degrees different from the North Dakotans they left behind: they are lighter in bearing, sunnier in outlook, more open in manner; they tell stories – oh, how the Los Angeles family loves to tell stories – they even make jokes.

It turns out that even their vocabulary has changed. We once had a visit from a young Norwegian relative, a charming, if earnest, young man with his nation’s stick-straight blond hair, with whom we spent an immensely pleasurable first afternoon talking family, Norway, and, inevitably in the Los Angeles family, household tools.

“That was delightful,” said the Dowager to him as the occasion ended. “Well, I guess we’ll see you mañana.”

The youth blinked in confusion. “But I thought we were meeting tomorrow,” he said.

As confused as he, the Dowager blinked back. “That’s what I said,” she said. “Mañana.”

It seemed the staunch little Lutheran lady had not realized to what an extent the language of the dreaded Los Angeles Catholics had infiltrated her own.

“Hello, Keri,” I greeted her, not especially remarkably, as I unrolled my exercise mat at the truly appalling hour of five to eight in the morning.

Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

“You know,” she said, “there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh?” I said politely, hoping that the topic would not be complicated: aside from inventing fresh terms of invective to hurl at our trainer, my brain really doesn’t kick into useful gear much before 11.00.

“You see, I used to be a hairdresser,” she began.

“Oh,” I said, my heart beginning to sink ever so slightly.

“So I know something about hair,” she explained.

“I suppose you would,” I agreed, not liking the look of where this was going at all.

“And believe it or not,” she said, “I used to have difficult hair myself. It was dry and frizzy and I just couldn’t do anything with it.”

I had not until then had cause to examine Keri’s hair. But now that I did, I saw that it was relentlessly yellow and ramrod straight, with each strand falling to alarmed attention like soldiers called to parade by a particularly aggressive Sergeant Major. As hairstyles go, it would not have been my personal choice; but then my general policy on other people’s hair, unless it is actually standing up and blowing poison darts at me, is to live and let live.

“It was plain old ugly,” she said. She nodded at me confidently. “Well,” she added. “I don’t have to tell you about that, do I?”

With my exercise mat barely on the floor, I found myself struggling for a response. I am aware that my opinion here might be a niche one, but I actually quite like my hair. It’s true that it never looks particularly tidy; but then, neither do I. It’s true that it will insist on standing up where it should be lying down, and sticking out where it should be waving smoothly; but as an unruly woman myself, I can’t help but admire its independence of spirit. More to the point, it’s my hair, the hair that has surrounded my face ever since I have had a face to surround; and I tend to suppose that most people would assume that if I didn’t like it the way it is, I’d have found a way, here in this city where every second person is a celebrity wannabe and every third person their beautician, to have changed it.

“Then I found this product that works wonders,” she said. “You really need to know about it, it’s called Gleem, that’s with two ‘e’s, OK?, you can find it in the beauty supply store, you apply it after you’ve shampooed, and ...”

“Thank you, Keri,” I said, politely. And, feeling we had satisfactorily exhausted the topic, “This is a tough class isn’t it? Did you feel as sore as I did yesterd…”

“… it works right away,” she continued. “It’s really amazing, especially for difficult hair like yours. It ...”

“Thank you, Keri,” I repeated, my pleasant tone beginning to fray just a little at the edges.

“... adds all the moisture you’re lacking,” said Keri, “ and it smoothes out that ugly disgusting frizz: believe me, it really makes a ...”

I do not come to my exercise class in order to engage in arguments; but I was beginning to feel that a firm hand was starting to be called for here.

“You know, Keri,” I said. “I really don’t like being given advice about my hair unless I’ve asked for it.”

“ ... difference,” said Keri. “It’s so important with difficult hair to use the right product, and particularly in your case ...”

It was time, I felt, to employ transparency.

“Actually, Keri,” I said, “ I’m finding this conversation quite offensive.”

There was a pause while Keri blinked a little in surprise.

“You see, I’m just telling you this to help you,” she explained, then. “Because, as I said, I do know about hair. And if you find the right product, even the very worst hair … ”

“You know, Keri,” I said, maintaining, I thought, a frankly impressive civility of tone, “I cannot believe that I am having to spell out to you that I am finding this conversation offensive.”

There was another pause as Keri pondered the scale of my folly.

“OK,” she shrugged, then, cheerfully, as we all prepared to assume the cat and cow.

Except that it wasn’t OK. You must never, ever tell my trainer this, but my morning exercise class is my happy place. It is where I go to work out my body while making silly jokes with people who make me laugh, to return virtuously exerted and luxuriate in a refreshing shower and a chocolate-covered peanut butter cup (you might want not to tell my trainer about the peanut butter cup, either). It is not – as, on reflection, few places are – where I go to receive unsolicited advice on how I can improve my hair.

“I need to talk to you, Keri,” I said, falling into discreet step with her in the parking lot after the class. “I have to tell you that what you said to me before class really didn’t make me feel good. I come here to feel better, but after what you said, I’m now thinking that people are looking at my hair and thinking it’s ugly, and that hurts my feelings.”

Keri stopped dead, and turned her magisterially coiffed head to look directly into my eyes.

“You know,” she said, “this happens to me all the time. People are always telling me how I can do better.”

Ah, I thought, so she, too, know how it felt.

“Well, there you are,” I said.

“And do you know something?” she continued then. “I love it!”

There was a soft thud as my jaw hit the asphalt.

“Wow,” was the sole response I could access after I had retrieved it.

Keri preened just a little.

“I do,” she assured me. “Really, I love it. Because that’s how I learn things – by listening to other people. It’s really helpful to me.”

I could think of no further comment to improve on my original

“Wow,” I repeated.

Keri nodded, impressively.

“You’d be amazed,” she said, “at the things I’ve learned from what other people tell me. I think of it all as feedback, and it really helps me to grow.”

It was becoming apparent that what we had here was a failure to communicate.

“You see,” I explained, “I don’t mean Wow as in Wow. I mean Wow, as in, I’ve just told you that ... and you’re not even going to ... and I feel … and you say … Wow.”

It was becoming further apparent that the communicational deficiency lay on both sides of the conversation.

“I listen to what other people tell me,” Keri repeated, patiently. “I learn from it, and I grow from it. It’s a really useful tool.”

I at last located my vocal chords.

“Well, maybe that works for you,” I said. “But it doesn’t work for a lot of people, and it doesn’t work for me. And I have to tell you that I found what you said to me about my hair offensive and hurtful.”

It was a sunny California summer morning; nevertheless, ice shards arose to engulf our small corner of the parking lot as Keri at last processed this latest piece of feedback.

She did not, it appeared, intend to learn from it.

“Right,” she snapped, furious with my ill manners. “OK. Got it.”

She turned on her heel, slammed herself into her car and gunned the engine. As she reversed, she leaned her gleaming-haired head out of the window.

“You need to broaden your mind!” she shouted at me before roaring off Oceanwards, never to be seen at the class again.

I have apologized to our trainer for costing him a client, but he didn’t seem to mind too much.

Photo by Dan DeAlmeida on Unsplash

Well, me, for one. I don’t like hamburgers, which, once consumed, sink instantly to the pit of my stomach, there to squat like a leaden toad and ruminate, darkly, on unforgiven slights and unforgotten wrongs. If I’m going to eat chicken, I’d rather have had it roasted in the oven, please, with a squeeze of lemon and a great deal of garlic. I don’t like chasing half a red pepper clear across my compostable bamboo plate in an ever more frenzied attempt to spear its shinily impregnable skin with the virtuously inoffensive tines of my compostable wood fork. And I particularly don’t like perching that same compostable bamboo plate precariously on top of my knee and attempting to digest my food while around me some other people are eating and some other people aren’t, and some are walking this way past and some are walking that way past, and my befuddled lower intestine is wondering confusedly if it really is still in our friend Mike’s back yard or has somehow transported itself instead to Grand Central Station during rush hour. If I’m going to eat with my friends – which, to be clear, is something I very much like to do as I’m very fond of eating and pretty fond of my friends, too – I like a dinner party.

For some reason, Angelenos don’t give dinner parties. They like any other sort of party just fine. Show them a birthday and they’ll have whipped out the grill faster than you can say many happy returns. Mention a televised event – the Oscars, a baseball playoff, a back-to-back Monkees marathon – and the table will be groaning with wittily themed canapés before Micky has slid down the spiral staircase. But the idea of gathering just a few people to sit around a table together in order to eat the same meal together, is one that seems to have been wafted from their collective DNAs at birth and blown with the dust in the Santa Ana winds to the ocean and beyond.

Which is a source of disappointment to me, because I’ve always liked a dinner party. In London when I was young, all young women and many young men learned to give them almost as a rite of passage, and looking back now on the time and effort we used to put into them then, I can only conclude that we either had a couple of extra hours in the day to kill, or were all stark raving bonkers.

Everything was made from scratch, and nothing was simple to make. Impossibly fiddly little items called stuffed mushrooms were a favorite starter – you spent an eternity and a day chopping mushroom stems into teeny-tiny little pieces with onions and garlic and various herbs which you then sauteed in butter and mixed with cheese which you had also grated, then laboriously stuffed the mixture into the mushrooms’ caps and put them into the oven to bake, they took all afternoon to prepare and were wolfed down in seconds, but it never occurred to us not to make them because that was what we all made. Home-made chicken liver pâté took less time to cook but was hell on a plate, so to speak, to clean up after; and my friend Patti would serve globe artichokes, bursting with plump leaves, a whole one for each guest, which would arrive all at the same time, hot and steaming from the tiny kitchen of her tiny flat, and even she can’t remember what on earth she would have cooked them in.

The nature of the main course would depend on your budget. Chicken was a staple, browned in olive oil, braised in red wine, adorned with sliced mushrooms, chopped bacon, peeled pearl onions, crushed garlic, squeezed-in tomato paste, melted butter and flour, and a hey nonny no as the cook slid silently to the floor in exhaustion; “spag bog,” as we used alluringly to call spaghetti Bolognese, was popular too, it being the height of sophistication to check the pasta for doneness by throwing a strand at the wall to see if it stuck – it was years before it occurred to any of us to fish a piece out to taste it instead, and when I now picture my former haunts, I sometimes wonder, a little sentimentally, whether the kitchens have residual pasta pieces clinging starchily to their walls to this day. Once, I was once entertained by an impossibly hip husband and wife couple, anthropologists, no less, and in their thrillingly cosmopolitan thirties, who gave me a dish of bananas wrapped in bacon and baked in cheese sauce, which tasted very much nicer than it sounds. Sometimes I would even make a cassoulet.

Desserts were an alcoholic’s Paradise. Kirsch rained like summer showers on everything from chocolate mousse to ever more elaborate concoctions of fruit salads; there were prunes in Armagnac, cherries in brandy, bananas au rhum (the extra “h” was non-negotiable), and a Scottish flatmate had a recipe that seemed to consist simply of whisky, whipped cream and more whisky, with maybe a solitary raspberry on top if she were feeling elaborate. How we managed to wash the dishes afterwards is a matter I now find in equal parts impressive and inexplicable.

All these years later, I’m still giving dinner parties, and my Los Angeles friends, although still slightly bemused by the eccentricity of this activity, do seem to enjoy them; the menu, however, is as very different animal from those of youthful yore. A starter will be a big bowl of chips and a selection of the delicious dips you can buy at the Farmers Market, the spread usually rounded out by the sour cream and dried onion soup mix without which Mr. Los Angeles insists, firmly if a trifle mysteriously, that a party is not worthy of its name. The main course will be a lazily simmered casserole, with a lentil option for the non-meat eaters and copious use of the various vegetables and salads that are on permanent offer in the Eden that is Southern California. Dessert will be more of same – fresh fruit and/or a pie purchased at that same Farmers Market, or, if I’m feeling inspired, I might pick a couple of lemons from our tree and stir the juice into a bowl of heavy cream and sugar to make a posset that sits in the refrigerator for a few hours and emerges tasting like what angels eat on Sundays. People seem to like it as much as they did in the labor-intensive days, and I’m not too tired to enjoy it either.

The soul of a dinner party is never just about the food anyway. There is an alchemy that arises when six or eight people are sitting around a dinner table eating and talking together. Themes will announce themselves, epigrams be invented, and running jokes take fire that will flame with brilliant hilarity for just that one evening and one evening alone; secrets will be confessed, life stories disclosed, personalities will blossom, sometimes even romances will bloom. It is the communality of it all that provides the magic, the shared food, the shared table, the shared room, the shared humanity.

Even when dinner parties are bad – and, oh, trust me, some of them are – they have each their own unique personality. One of the most memorable I ever attended was given by an unremittingly earnest acquaintance who wore a cravat and was obsessed with European politics of the mid twentieth century, a fascination he was unshakably convinced I shared, because one of my brothers was for a time a Member of the European Parliament. (I don’t). Over the veal goulash, the talk led to a discussion of the policies of Imre Nagy (1896-1958), onetime leader of the Hungarian People’s Republic; and, because most of the people my host hung out with were the sort of people who – and God bless them for it – were interested in this sort of thing, grew quite animated. My host, who was a kind-hearted man, at last noticed my own lost expression, and gallantly leaned over to include me in the fun.

“I always find it interesting,” he murmured to me waggishly, “how people will forget that Nagy was a Titoist.”

He nodded, and sat back, the better to savor his own bon mot.

It is not a comment I have ever forgotten or ever will forget. And I submit that it is not one you would ever have heard at a barbecue.

Photo by Toni Pomar on Unsplash

“What do you want to do while you’re here?” I asked them on the first evening of their stay.

“The thing we most want to do,” they said, “is go to Disneyland.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said, because it’s a fun trip for those who like it, and very Los Angeles, and, dearly as I love spending a week entertaining my English friends, I am also not entirely horrified by the prospect of having a day to myself along the way. “Which day do you plan to go?”

“Which day are you free?” they said.

“I think I’ll let you guys do that one on your own,” I said. There are two sorts of people living in Los Angeles, those who love The Happiest Place on Earth and those who do not; and, intending not a shred of disrespect to those in the former camp, I happen personally to fall squarely into the latter. “It’s a straight shot down the freeway to get to, and Mr. Los Angeles can tell you the best things to do while you’re there.”

“Oh, we couldn’t go without you,” they said. “That would be rude.”

“It wouldn’t be rude at all,” I said. “You want to go and I don’t. You have your own car and each other, so go for it.”

“It would be rude,” they said, firmly, and that was that.

The next morning we had breakfast on the patio.

“What do you want to do today?” I said.

The husband looked at the wife and winked, which in a certain sort of Englishman is a sign that he is about to say something which might, or then again, given the curious nature of the English male’s sense of humor, just as easily might not, be a joke.

“What we really want to do,” he said, “is go to Disneyland. We were really looking forward to going to Disneyland.”

I love my friends, I enjoy their company and wish them nothing but good things; but as a conversational thread this was beginning to grow just the smallest bit weary.

“You can go there very easily,” I said. “You have a car, it’s very simple to get to, you can spend as much time there as you want to, and when you come back here afterwards, I’ll have dinner waiting for you.”

“I think a good hostess would go with us,” said the husband. He sat back, sipped at the juice that his hostess had squeezed from her best friend’s oranges, contemplated the remains of the eggs that his hostess had lightly scrambled to order, the bread that his hostess had brought back from the local bakery and toasted, and the strawberries and cantaloupe melon that his hostess had procured at the Farmers Market, and winked at his wife again to show that he might – or on the other hand might not – be only joking. “I think if we had a hostess worthy of the name,” he expanded, “she’d understand that we can’t go without her because we are good guests and don’t want to be rude.”

“But, you see, I wouldn’t think it rude,” I said. “If you went without me, I wouldn’t mind in the least. I’d be happy,” I added, striving not to betray too unseemly a level of enthusiasm at the notion, “to know you were out there enjoying yourselves.”

But the husband was on a roll.

“I think if we had a good hostess,” he said, “she’d come with us so that we could all go together. We’re only in Los Angeles this once, and Disneyland’s the thing we want most of all to see. I think a caring hostess would respect that and find the time go there with us.”

I’ve known the husband since he and I were 18 years old.

“Then call me the hostess with the leastest,” I said. “What do you want to do that doesn’t involve my going to Disneyland?”

In the end we had an action-packed and enjoyable week together. We went to Hollywood. We went to the beach. We went to the big Wednesday Farmers Market in Santa Monica and bought flowers and tomatoes and fresh peaches. We went to Beverly Hills and gawped at the prices in the stores and at the plastic surgery on the streets. We met up with a friend at a movie studio and saw The Rock eating a salad in the commissary. One day we drove down the coast to San Diego and had lunch in the hotel where Some Like It Hot was filmed.

“Thank you,” said the wife when I bade them good-bye at the end of their visit. “That was a lot of fun and we had a really lovely time.”

The husband winked again, as he had, reliably, each and every morning and each and every evening of their entire trip. “Except for not seeing Disneyland,” he noted, as he had noted – probably, although not absolutely certainly only jokingly – on each and every such occasion. “We’d been so much looking forward to seeing Disneyland, and now I suppose we never will. If only we’d had a hostess who cared about us enough to want to make us happy, she’d have let us go there.”

“You could have gone to Disneyland,” I said. “Any day you wanted.”

The husband sighed just a little and shook his head.

“But we couldn’t have gone without you,” he explained, patiently. “It would have been rude.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all persons born on the North American continent must be in severe want of good breeding.

Photo by Steve Payne on Unsplash

This thought struck Elizabeth Darcy of Pemberley, Derbyshire, as she sat in her parlor awaiting a visit from Mrs. Josephine Bhaer, formerly March, of Concord, Massachusetts. Mrs. Bhaer was a literary lady of some repute in her native America, who was touring Europe and staying for a time with a neighboring family of the Darcys, the Chumleighs. Elizabeth was not a great reader, least of all of books which emanated from the former Colonies; but her husband, Mr. Darcy, who was hoping to sell to Mr. Chumleigh a prize pig, had during the course of their negotiations learned from his neighbor of the lady’s presence in the country, and had further understood from Mr. Chumleigh that the spirits of his eminent guest were of so unremitting a level of exuberance that her hosts would gladly sacrifice the honor of her company for a few hours; and so, out of a mixture of good fellowship and hopes to advance the sale, had issued an invitation for Mrs. Bhaer to spend a day at Pemberley. Elizabeth was to receive the visitor alone, Mr. Darcy having in the meantime been called to London on unexpected business, a circumstance which a less devoted wife might suppose to have been unusually convenient in its timing; but Elizabeth, beginning to reflect on this, reminded herself quickly that she was no ordinary spouse, but mistress of Pemberley, and that, along with the privileges of her position, it was incumbent upon her to extend the warmth of her welcome to all visitors to that great house, no matter how savage their manners might prove to be. And besides, Mr. Darcy was dearly eager to sell that pig.

Mrs. Bhaer was appointed to arrive at ten of the clock; at one minute past the hour, Elizabeth’s attention was caught by voices in the hall, that of the footman Jenkins alternating with an accent that was unmistakably Colonial. Elizabeth raised her eyebrows in astonishment. Surely Mrs. Bhaer could not be conversing with a servant as if he were her equal?

“A capital suggestion!” she heard then from the hall. “Humbugs it shall be, a pound of the finest for young Tommy Bangs’ birthday. Bless the boy, he will spoil his stomach with candy for all he pretends to study medicine. No, don’t trouble yourself, I shall see myself in.”

The door of the parlor was thrust open, and in strode Mrs. Bhaer, smiling broadly, and with her hand stretched energetically out in what Elizabeth could only suppose to be the American custom of greeting.

“Mrs. Darcy!” cried Elizabeth’s guest, seizing Elizabeth’s own hand and shaking it with some vigor. “What a trump of a fellow is Robert Jenkins! Here was I in a terrible pother about my friend Tommy’s birthday gift, and with the one word – humbug, Mrs. Darcy, Robert assures me there is nothing finer than a Derbyshire humbug – he has cleared my troubles completely.”

Elizabeth stood transfixed by her visitor’s ease of manner.

“What a regularly splendid room!” declared Mrs. Bhaer, inspecting the parlor freely. “And what jolly fellows above the fireplace!” Without awaiting an invitation, she turned her attention to a portrait of Mrs. Darcy’s two sons, Fitzwilliam and George, which had been painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and which Elizabeth had always considered to show the west wing of the house in a most pleasing aspect. “Are they yours?” she asked, pointing to the boys.

Elizabeth agreed that they were.

“Jolly fellows!” repeated Mrs. Bhaer. Then turning to survey the length of the room, “And what a capital house this must be for high jinks!”

“I do not believe,” said Elizabeth after a moment, “that I am familiar with …”

“High jinks!” said Mrs. Bhaer. “When they play at pirates or brigands or wild animals in the jungle, and cause as much clatter as they please. When my boys were small, we had high jinks each Saturday, and it sorted them out for the whole week. The dear lads, it did my heart good to see them overturning the furniture and sliding down the stair banisters, howling and racketing and making a regular uproar.”

Elizabeth began to feel a headache coming on.

“Such delightful countryside you live in,” continued Mrs. Bhaer, now moving to the window. “And what famous times you must have with all the other splendid women living nearby. It must do you heaps of good to be able to visit with the Miss Brontës.”

The Miss Brontës were the daughters of a country clergyman in the next county. The Darcys were not on visiting terms with any of the families who lived in their parish.

“I do not believe,” began Elizabeth, “that it would be proper …”

“Charlotte is a dear!” cried Mrs. Bhaer warmly, taking a tea cup from the tray and flourishing it with such energy that Mrs. Darcy began to fear for the Axminster carpet. “The middle sister is a queer prickly creature, I grant you, and I cannot forgive her Catherine Earnshaw for marrying that doltish Edgar Linton when she could have married Heathcliff. Can you imagine, Mrs. Darcy, anything more shameful than marrying a man merely because he owns a fine house and grounds? But take the three sisters together and they are altogether jolly. Oh, Mrs. Darcy, do let us make a trip to meet them for I know we would have such revels.”

Elizabeth, unobtrusively removing the tea service from Mrs. Bhaer’s further reach, could only hope that she had misheard.

“And we must ask Mrs. Shelley to be of the party,” continued Mrs. Bhaer. “My Teddy declares that her tale of Victor Frankenstein’s monster gave him the best nightmares he had had since the night he had broken into the strawberry patch. It’s a prime story, far better than any that I ever wrote – not,” she added quickly, “that I ever wrote anything of that nature, oh, dear me, no, I would think shame to do so. But if I had … oh, Mrs. Darcy, if I had …”

She stopped and appeared lost in a reverie.

“Perhaps some seed cake …?” offered Elizabeth.

“Then it is settled!” cried Mrs. Bhaer. “You and I and Mrs. Shelley shall travel together to visit the Miss Brontës at Haworth. What richness! Oh, if only Mrs. Shelley’s mother were still with us, I should not have a wish in the world better than to meet her.”

Elizabeth hardly dared inquire who Mrs. Shelley’s mother might be.

“Mrs. Wollstonecraft!’ announced Mrs. Bhaer solemnly, drawing up her height and placing her hand reverently upon her breast. “Surely you have read her Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman. Mrs. Darcy, I go nowhere without it.” She bent to produce from her reticule an object that gave the appearance of having once been a book, although so battered about was it, that its exact provenance was uncertain. “I read from it every day, and I always find something there that does me good.” She cracked open the book: a page fluttered to the floor but she appeared not to have observed it.

“’Men in their youth,’” read Mrs. Bhaer, “’are prepared for professions, and marriage is not considered as the grand feature in their lives; whilst women, on the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties. It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights of ambition, that engross their attention: to rise in the world, they must marry advantageously. How many women thus waste life away, the prey of discontent, who might have practiced as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their head?’”

Despite herself, Elizabeth found her attention attracted.

“Is Mrs. Wollstonecraft then suggesting,” she asked, “that, given sufficient education and opportunity, women’s abilities in life might prove to be equal to men’s?”

“It’s only the men who tell us they aren’t,” replied Mrs. Bhaer. “Come sit by me and let us read on. But … who is this I see behind the sofa?”

From behind the chaise longue arose Elizabeth’s daughter, Jane, who had concealed herself there earlier in the morning in the hope of catching a glimpse of the great author for girls.

“My dear Jane!” exclaimed Elizabeth, mortified. Jane was a headstrong girl, who early on had caused some disquiet to her parents by proving herself indelicate enough to master her pothooks more speedily than had either of her brothers: Elizabeth was now observing with concern the warmth of the girl’s affection for her bookish Aunt Mary. “Mrs. Bhaer, I cannot sufficiently apologize for …”

“The more the merrier!” cried Mrs. Bhaer. “Sit with us, Jane, and let us all three learn together.”

In London at that moment, Mr. Darcy was seated in his club preparing to address a large plate of bacon and grilled kidneys. He felt a sudden twinge of unease in the pit of his stomach, which he attributed to indigestion.

Photo by Rick Lobs on Unsplash

Every July, I travel to Concord, Massachusetts, to the wonderful and magical Louisa May Alcott museum, Orchard House – check it out here,

https://louisamayalcott.org/

– to take part in the Summer Conversational Series, quite possibly my favorite week in the whole year, when a bunch of Louisa May Alcott nerds get together to talk Alcotts, books, women’s history, and anything else of that genre that strikes our fancy.

The year, my speech is on the substantial number of women who cut their hair and signed up to fight as soldiers in the War, and I’ve been having the time of my life finding out about them, discovering stories funny (the recruit who tried to put on her pants over her head, anyone?), poignant, and, above all, stirring, because these women were a doughty crew.

I’ve gathered a lot of good stuff to talk about, but it does need to be organized, so that’s what I’ve been doing this week. If anyone wants to hear the talk, either virtually or in person, it’s happening on July 14 at 10.00 a.m. American Eastern Time, and you can buy tickets here

https://louisamayalcott.org/summer-adult-ed-series

Normal service will resume on Monday evening California time on July 13, by which time the speech had darned well better be ready, and meanwhile, as a nod to the mighty Louisa, I’m about to re-print a post from last year that features my own childhood heroine, the irrepressible Jo March

…

Photo by Luka Savcic on Unsplash

But lately, my non-American friends are starting to ask it of me in a very different tone. What’s it like to live in Trump’s America? What’s it like to live under the regime of a person who is not only mentally questionable and casually corrupt, but also openly, indeed gleefully, cruel? What’s it like to go from day to day feeling – in a pithy analogy that Mr. Los Angeles is given to quote – as if you’re tied to a chair and watching a toddler play with a loaded pistol?

So, for the average left-leaning liberal in sunny, let-it-all-hang-out Southern California, what is it like? Well, for those of us who have been so far lucky enough not to have had our entire lives torn apart, it’s in many ways not so very different from how it was eighteen months ago. We still wake up in the morning and go to work and come home and eat meals and pay bills and celebrate birthdays. But, yes, there are changes too, and some of them have crept in so gradually that, in the fine amphibian tradition of Kermit the Frog on the stovetop, we have more or less stopped noticing them.

We now, for instance, find it altogether unremarkable that the leader of our nation expresses himself in rambling bile-filled diatribes during the day and stays up for much of the night on his social media platform posting ever more outrageous fantasies about himself and ever more jaw-dropping lies about his opponents. When his staff insist, ever more loudly and in the face of ever more compelling evidence to the contrary, that no, no, really, he’s perfectly competent and doing what is best for the American people, we simply shrug. We accept without question that for most of this year we have been engaged in a war that no one asked for, no one can agree what is about, and no one seems entirely certain whether is still going on or not. In normal times, all of this would be the stuff of Alice in Wonderland as filtered through Franz Kafka. But for us by now, the abnormal has become so normal that we no longer have the capacity to be surprised by it.

There are other changes that affect us more practically. Our grocery bills have risen and our fuel costs have rocketed: we think hard before we take a car trip, and pour a stiff gin and tonic before we even consider pricing plane tickets. When we go to public spaces, we see fewer tourists than we used, and our overseas friends and family are flatly refusing to visit us. On our televisions, our funniest and most-loved talk show host has had his entire show canceled because he made jokes – jokes, for heaven’s sake – that offended the government. We find ourselves crying when we see footage of the Obamas, and sometimes ask each other, “Did you think there’d ever come a day when we’d miss Doubleya?” When we open our emails, we are flooded with messages from political and social campaigners begging us, each more urgently than the last, to sign this petition, fill out that survey, donate money here, read about this, listen to that.

And it is this last that signals the most consequential change of all. Because above and far beyond the surreal reportage of today’s news and the hypothetical threat of tomorrow’s, we are also facing real and immediate darkness; we must now live hourly with the knowledge that, as safe as we might individually happen to be – and I am fully aware that, as a reasonably solvent heterosexual Caucasian Californian, I am so far so infinitely much safer than are so many others – very bad things indeed are being done right now to other people all around us.

We know that men in masks are dragging our neighbors from the street and sentencing them to detention in sub-human conditions, and that there is nothing that we can, or the law is apparently prepared to, do to stop them. We know that, in many parts of our country, women are being denied essential treatments by doctors who know full well what they are doing but have been pressured by the authorities into doing it anyway. We know that the LGBTQ rights which so many of us had fought so hard for and been so proud to have won, are now under serious threat from a band of people who call themselves Christian without, apparently, having ever troubled to listen to the message of the man whose name they have co-opted. We know that this is not an America any of us had chosen to live in, or can feel anything approaching comfortable with living in. And yet here we are living in it.

The comparisons with Nazi Germany are inevitable, and I’m sure I am not alone in waking up most mornings remembering Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous lines, “First they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I am not a Socialist….” What I had never before realized when reading those lines was just how echoingly empty it can feel to “speak out” to those in power when those in power simply do not care to listen. Because Mr. Los Angeles and I and so many other people have been speaking out, vociferously, in large ways and in small. We sign petitions. We march in protests. We send every penny that we can afford to the places where we feel it will do as much good as it can. I have joined a collective of immigrant activists called All-American Story –

All-American Story

All-American Story celebrates the beauty, strength, & wisdom of ALL Americans and our shared humanity by sharing our stories.

– dedicated to collecting, recording, and publishing the true stories and other works of American immigrants from all over the globe as a gentle counter to the false narratives we are being fed by the xenophobes in power (check the stories out, here on the Substack blog of the same name, we have some good stuff). Meanwhile, Mr. Los Angeles’ Old Glory lapel pin, the one with the heroic family backstory that I am forbidden to reveal and that he has worn every day with pride and joy for so many years, is currently turned, pointedly, upside down. We could none of us look at ourselves or at each other if we didn’t do this. Has anything changed because we do it? Well, so far not a lot that is obvious, and it’s sometimes tempting to think that nothing has changed at all.

And yet, and yet. Along the way, there are starting to be shifts – small, sometimes barely visible, but shifts nevertheless – in the people as a whole. Yes, brawny young men with tattoos, and honey blonde and heartless “Christian” matrons will continue to espouse the views of these monsters. But others are changing. I don’t know many Trumpers personally, our circles just don’t cross. But a friend reports that her hairdresser, who commutes thirty miles each way from the Valley, has changed allegiance after the hike in gas prices. Another adds that her accountant has declared it was the killing by ICE of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis last January that was the last straw for him. (We could complain that it was the killing of one white person that affected him after so many unremarked on of Black and brown; but Renée was a person too, and at least he has been affected). At the top, there are rumblings of discord between Republican members of the Senate; there is evidence of serious concern about the upcoming midterms in November; and, in a rare piece of solidly good news, Florida’s infamous detention center “Alligator Alcatraz” is set to close down this summer. Maybe, just maybe, the ship is beginning to turn; maybe, just maybe, the voice of the people is beginning to be heard at last.

I once visited a friend in Chicago at the tail end of a long, brutal winter.

“It’s lovely to see you,” I said as we strolled down Diversey Parkway in a break between howling gales. “And you know I love Chicago. But, lord, doesn’t it look grim with no leaves on the trees and no color in the sky?”

My friend stopped dead beneath a tree and pointed triumphantly to the ground around it, where, if you bent very close and squinted very hard, you could make out tiny points of green struggling to surface from the ice-hard soil.

“Look,” she urged me. “Crocuses!”

As our nation approaches its 250^th birthday, I pray for crocuses to bloom in America soon.

Photo by Marcel Strauß on Unsplash

As I did so, a car drew up beside me and began to hover hopefully. I shook my head with an apologetic shrug in the universal parked car sign language of, “Sorry, I’m not leaving yet,” and continued into my seat. The car continued to wait. Well, it could wait, I thought, until it figured it out for itself, and turned my mind to my texts.

Soon, I began to hear the honking of a horn, at first polite, and then impatient. For a while, I attempted to ignore it. There is a particular etiquette to parking in automobile-choked Los Angeles. At the Farmers Market on Sundays, where parking in the lumber yard lot next door is free but stalls limited in number, we regard it as only considerate to vacate our space as soon as we have loaded in our fruits and flowers; but here on the public street, I had officially paid the city of Santa Monica $2.50 of money earned by the honest sweat of my brow for two hours of parking time, of which there remained 43 minutes left to me, and which I regarded it my full civic right to enjoy. If the other car didn’t understand that, I thought, it was the problem of the other car.

The honking continued, and I turned to look more closely at the waiting vehicle. It was big and expensive, gleaming white and shiny new, occupied, I guessed, by a sleek business executive endowed with a fat bank account and a battalion of minions back in his nineteenth floor office to scurry to do his bidding. I, however, was not his minion and had business of my own to attend to.

The honking went on. And on. And on.

At last I had had enough. I arranged my features into their most aggressive scowl, climbed out of my car, slammed the door, and went to confront the noise polluter.

Peering up at me through the window of the big white car was a little old lady directly from a fairy tale. A silver halo of fuzzy hair framed an innocent small wrinkled face from which enormous blue eyes blinked innocently; the delicate hands on the steering wheel were as fragile as aspen leaves. My aggression quickly faded as my heart began to melt.

“I’m not the one who’s honking, dear,” she whispered sweetly. “That’s the car behind me.”

I looked past her. There was indeed another car on the street, a smaller and more battered black car in which a harried-looking middle-aged man had paused his honking in a silent howl of frustration. Which, on closer inspection, it occurred to me that he had every reason to feel, since the little old lady’s very large car was occupying the whole of the narrow street, rendering it impassable.

“I think he wants to get past you,” I said kindly.

“I know he does, dear,” she said. And twinkled merrily at me. “But you see, I’m waiting for you to leave.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m not leaving for a while.”

Her twinkle faded slightly as her brow furrowed in confusion.

“Not leaving?” she repeated uncertainly.

“I’m afraid not,” I told her. “I have some texts to send first.”

“Texts?” Her brow furrowed further, and my heart turned further to goo: it was a very long time since I had been required to explain technology to someone less savvy in it than myself.

“You know texts?” I said. “Messages people write on their phones? Some people have been sending them to me, and I have to write back to them before I can leave.”

“Oh,” she said thoughtfully, and momentarily looked pensive. Then her face cleared.

“That’s all right, dear,” she said then. “I can wait.”

Except that she couldn’t really.

“You know, I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I said. “You’re blocking the guy behind you and he sounds like he really wants to get through.”

The little old lady smiled, showing regular small teeth as pretty as pearls.

“I’m fine, dear,” she reassured me. She gestured her little ringed hand towards the car radio from which floated the soothing strains of Debussy’s Clair de Lune. “I’m always happy when I have my music.”

“But the person behind you,” I began. Then noticed that behind the black car was a blue car and behind the blue car was a beige. “The people behind you,” I corrected myself. “None of them can get past you, you see, because you’re holding them all up.”

The old lady twinkled again.

“Oh, I think they can wait, dear, don’t you?” she said. “People these days are in too much of a hurry, don’t you think?”

She sat back contentedly in her seat, and my heart began to unmelt.

“There’s usually more parking on the next block,” I suggested.

She shook her pretty little silver head.

“That’s too far for me to walk, dear,” she said. “I have a hospital appointment just around the corner, you see.” She twinkled up at me, encouragingly. “Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong me with at all, but my son will insist I have check-ups. He does take wonderful care of me, dear boy.”

I was familiar with the hospital she was about to visit: its parking lot was small and crowded, but, like most hospitals in the area, it offered a valet parking service.

“The hospital does valet parking,” I said.

The little old lady tinkled merrily,

“Oh, heavens no, dear,” she chuckled. “I’m not going to spend my money on silly old valet parking!”

I do not claim to be an expert on personal wealth assessment; but even I could see that the rocks that glittered from her pretty little ears could have bought and sold both me and all three car drivers behind her several times over before we’d any of us sat down to our separate Trader Joe’s Very Berry granola breakfasts.

The little old lady leaned forward confidentially through her window.

“Besides,” she added, “I never feel I can quite trust those valet parkers with my car, if you know what I mean. You never know where they’ve come from.” Tenderly, she leaned down her hand to caress the car’s shining white exterior. “Isn’t it pretty?” she said. “My son gave it to me for my birthday, just this very month. Would you believe I turned 85? I still feel like a girl!”

As the beige car joined its honks to those of the blue car and the black car, I began to wonder if when the little old lady had been small, anyone had ever thought to spank her on her dear little bottom.

The little old lady sat back again in her seat and nodded at me.

“Don’t you worry about me, dear,” she said. “I’ll just sit and listen to my music and wait for you. I’m fine if I have my music, you see.”

The man in the battered black car was now gazing at me with an expression of open pleading.

“I might be quite a long time,” I said. “I have these texts to deal with.”

“I can wait, dear,” she said. “I have my music, and I’m really not in a rush.” She dimpled again, roguishly. “Doctors always tell you to arrive on time, but my Doctor D. has a little soft spot for me, so he won’t mind too much if I’m late. And now that you know I’m waiting, I’m sure you’ll be able to hurry up with sending your textbooks, won’t you?”

The man in the black car lifted meaty hands from his steering wheel and clasped them towards me in entreaty. It was time, clearly, to impose some discipline.

I turned to the little old lady, folded my arms, and spoke slowly and clearly.

“I am not,” I said, “going to hurry with my texts.”

At last I had caught her attention.

“Not?” she echoed doubtfully, her voice quavering just a little in surprise.

“Not,” I corroborated. “They are concerning a particularly serious matter, and I intend to give them the full attention that is their due.”

And having given appropriate weight to the question of whether I planned to meet Candy and Vanessa that afternoon at the coffee place at 3.00 or at the chocolate place at 3.30, I decided to leave no further margin for misinterpretation.

“And after I’ve finished with the texts,” I continued, “I’m going to get out of my car and put more money into the meter. And after that, I’m going to go away and have lunch.”

“Lunch?” the little old lady managed after a moment. I had a feeling that lunch in her world was not a hurried event.

“Lunch,” I confirmed. And lest there remain any confusion, “Appetizer. Main course. Dessert. And coffee afterwards.”

Now, I had hurt the little old lady’s feelings. Her silver curls shivered as she stared up at me piteously. Her pretty little lower lip trembled, and moisture glimmered behind the azure of her enormous eyes. With one searingly reproachful look, she closed her window, shifted her big, expensive white car into drive, and led her dear little self safely away from the stonehearted harpy in the dusty blue Prius.

I was pretty popular with the cars behind her, though.

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.