Tag: living in America

An Englishman Abroad Struggles With Sporting Conventions

It’s play-off and championship season in the National Football League and I am riveted by the mass of information on the TV screen.  There’s the score, the time, which quarter the game’s in, the number of yards needed and which down it is.  It’s a lot to take in but I remain baffled as to why the home team’s name comes second on the screen.

A lifetime in the UK has been based upon the immutable law that when a match is promoted and shown the home team’s name is first.  It makes sense because the game is at their stadium and it’s a reminder of home advantage.  It is very disorienting to have this turned on its head for no good reason.

The argument from American friends is that it is to reinforce the spoken version.  So it’s “the Steelers at the Patriots” and they seem equally bemused by my concern.  It’s common to American sports from basketball to baseball to hockey but it is as strange to a resident alien as some of the spelling. 

It might help if the American sports had proper knock-out cup competitions because it seems inconceivable that you would draw the away team out of the hat first.  But there was incredulity when I described a competition where pure chance might pit the might of Premier League Champions against the humblest of pub teams.  There is no equivalent here to the televisual genius of watching faded, mumbling players of yesteryear plucking swirling numbered balls blindly from a rotating device that has been borrowed from the local Bingo hall.

The ‘oooing’ and ‘aaaing’ and sharp intakes of breath as particularly juicy ties are drawn is a staple of being a fan of English football.  It’s matched by the camera in the clubhouse of some non-league upstarts looking to make an impression on the shins of an overpaid, over-tattooed and overrated Premier League star.  They may themselves be overweight, overworked and, er, over-tattooed but this is their moment in the sun.    

Everything about the FA Cup speaks to the principles of a working class game that has spawned decades of clichés. It’s eleven against eleven, a game of two halves and a pitch recently cleared of cow pats is a great leveller.   Nobody wants to play against Clogger United on a frosty, January night but it’s a reminder of the days when players caught the local bus to the stadium and drank a pint or four with the fans after the game (and sometimes before).     

It seems to me that the lack of decent cup competition is against the very spirit of the United States and I’d venture, without any genuine understanding, that it is likely to be unconstitutional.  This is supposed to be the land of opportunity where every child has the chance to become President and where Supreme Court Justices vehemently declare their love of beer.  Surely there has to be a space for the town of Gonzales, Louisiana, the ‘jambalaya capital of the world’, to form a team called the Gophers and take homefield advantage to give Bill Belichick’s all conquering New England Patriots a bloody nose.

When I raised the possibility it was suggested that the entire Gophers squad would be hospitalised in the first quarter by the superior physical qualities of the visiting supermen.  But anybody who saw Division 2 Sunderland beat the mighty Leeds United in the FA Cup Final, or savoured Southern League Herford’s win against the, then high-flying, Newcastle United, knows that dreams never die.  A ruptured spleen and complex fractures of every limb seem a small price to pay for a shot at glory.

It’s always good to have a theme so if I’m obliged to start a campaign my intention would be to invoke the spirit of the Rocky’s – Balboa and Marciano – and the formidable peak peaks of the Rockies – Elbert and Massive.  Warming to the task I’d eat Rocky Road ice cream (invented in California in 1929), wear Rocky boots (from Ohio since 1932) and sing Rocky Mountain Way by Joe Walsh (born in Kansas 1947) as my closer.

I put the whole fear of being beaten by part-timers down to another unfathomable thing about American sports – there is no promotion or relegation.  For a land which consistently harps on about winners being first and losers being nowhere this rather softens the blow of not being good enough.  No chance of going down or up, or facing ‘Nutter’ Smith in the backfield during a tricky cup match, means that the players can coast indefinitely.

The weakness of some of the groupings in the NFL’s structure of eight, four-team divisions grouped in two conferences has been recognised.  An example is the NFC East where the New England Patriots have topped the table 16 times in the last 18 years.  The advantage is that you get a week of rest and then homefield advantage against a ‘wild card’ team.

Talking of the Patriots reminds me of another strange thing about American football.  Each team gets to use their own balls when they are on offense (or attack in English parlance).  This led to the famous ‘deflategate’ scandal where the Patriots were accused of under-inflating their balls.  It was January 2015 and they were playing the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship game.

The referees seemed not to notice at the time which is not surprising because their ‘ruling on the field’ is overruled by video review with astonishing regularity. It may also be because they are dressed in replica Newcastle United shirts and throw yellow dusters around when they spot an infringement. It’s like watching the Toon Army take up Morris Dancing with Molly Maid Home Cleaning Services.

It’s difficult for me to get excited about the scandal because the thought of teams being able to change the ball just because they are in possession is bizarre.  But I do laugh at the thought of running a rugby game in the same way.  Imagine stopping some lumpen Welsh flanker with cauliflower ears and a broken nose, who has just turned over a ruck-ball by stomping all over the head of an English fly-half. 

Referee: “Sorry, old chap, but it’s your turn to attack now so you need to stop for a moment and play with your own ball.” Flanker: Makes unintelligible, sub-human noises due to fractured septum, mud up the nostrils, multiple concussions and an ill fitting gum-shield over teeth already needing complete reconstructive surgery. Referee: “Good man, tha……” before the rest of the conversation is lost as the unfortunate official being trampled by what the late Bill McLaren might have called, ‘twenty stone of the finest, Welsh livestock on the hoof’.

And with that I am immediately looking forward to the first day of the new six-nations championship on 1 February and the opportunity to indoctrinate friends here about the virtues of rugby.  Dark-arts in the scrum, pace and power set against speed and strength, and the ultimate in physical confrontations without padding.  There is nothing quite like it and I am hoping that the screen will show the home team first – just like it should be.   

AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD GOES BACK TO BLIGHTY

Visiting England after more than a year away is like putting shoes on after a year in flip-flops. In fact it really did mean putting on proper, all encasing shoes after months of fearlessly baring my toes to the world. I guess it’s how a four-year old feels when they are fitted with their first pair of school shoes.

I’d expected to be a somewhat changed person on my return but as the wonderful Rupert Brooke wrote, ‘If I should die, think only this of me That there’s some corner of a foreign field, that is forever England’. However far you stray from your beginnings some things are too deeply embedded to change. And at this time of year his words carry an even greater poignancy.

Travelling near Remembrance Sunday, I found myself buying a poppy a day – they seem to break with startling regularity – and being sorry to miss being in England to commemorate the 100th year of the Armistice. The two World Wars are written large in the heart of every child who grew up with parents in the Forces and I have stood quietly and respectfully on many sombre early November Sunday mornings. With age I have stood with increasing thanks – it remains the greatest gift and good fortune to have grown up in a period of relative peace and economic stability.

I have always been able to survive the first verse and refrain of the Last Post but there is something that happens after that which is too heart-breaking to endure. And Bunyan’s magnificent verse is a memorial to everyone I have known and loved – ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning. We will remember them. Permission to lose control of stiff upper lip, sir.

The trip was six whirlwind days with three cities, five hotels and multiple modes of travel. My arrival at Heathrow was marked by a cool, overcast English day – it was absolutely perfect. Keats’ ‘seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness’ are missing from California but the English late autumn was a reminder that seasons are built into my blood.

Needless to say the trains were terrible. How it is possible to take longer and to have more changes to get from Liverpool Street to Norwich than to go via Cambridge is a warping of the time-space continuum. Hawkwind’s long neglected song ‘Quark, Strangeness and Charm’ gets close to the experience with the line ‘All that, doesn’t not anti-matter now, we’ve found ourselves a black hole out in space.’

My own theory is that the London to Norwich line is part of a black-arts operation by CERN where the stranger particles from the Large Hadron Collider are diverted for investigation. Passengers are used as substitutes for Schrodinger’s Cat and so whether they existence or are comfortable is unknown (and certainly not cared about). Scientists run the railways as a cosmic experiment and while Einstein wanted trains travelling at the speed of light he is losing out to Lord Kelvin’s views that they should terminate like the heat death of the universe.

To make matters worse Planck’s Constant has been replaced by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to build the timetable. Higg’s Bosun is a grumpy ex-naval man who was the lucky mascot of the Irish Rover, the Flying Dutchman and the Titanic before deciding that he preferred to drive a train. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg summed it up when he used quantum mechanics as a metaphor for the railway system in saying, “There is now, in my opinion, no entirely satisfactory interpretation of quantum mechanics.”

Enough about the trains though because it is the people that make the difference. Some very amusing evenings of drinking and snooker and late-night burgers and Indian meals. And most of all conversations that would only make half-sense to an outsider because they are framed in the context of shared experiences, disagreements and understanding of each other’s values and views. It was great fun and I was humbled that so many people made an effort to meet up during their busy lives.

I also caught up with my older sister for the first time in eight years. It’s a good reminder that when your parents are no longer around there is usually nobody but family who remembers your earliest years. In our case it was a peripatetic first ten years full of different schools, a father disappearing to trouble spots at short notice and a reliance on a very small family unit.

It was a delight to be able to talk about our family, about the misunderstandings we have had with each other and reflect upon all the ways in which life might have been different. But as importantly to share the good things that happened in the period when connections were lost. People say that you can never make up for lost time but we had a pretty good go at it.

I’ve noticed that throughout this blog I have talked about England and when asked that is where I say I am from. For me the United Kingdom has always been a ‘community’ where the squabbles of Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and England have been largely suborned to a belief that there is strength in unity. Respecting and believing in each other’s right to a national identity within that house is as important as respecting and regarding a person’s individuality.

In that context the potential for a botched exit from the European Union to drive an irreversible wedge and create four countries is depressing. It would be a strange future if the territorial certainties, secure since the effective partition of the Republic of Ireland with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, were to change. But I guess that previous generations probably felt the same as the Empire disappeared in a flurry of declarations of independence.

It confirms that change is the only constant of the human condition and Remembrance Sunday was a timely reminder that there is much to be grateful for. After a week back in San Diego I particularly realise that I am fortunate to have roots and friends on both sides of the Atlantic. It is certainly something to think about as Thanksgiving approaches.

An Englishman Abroad In Cactus Alley

Tending your own patch of land is as much part of the English psyche as talking about the weather, queuing in an orderly fashion and having fifty ways of saying ‘sorry’. Ever since encountering the overgrown wilderness behind my first house I have been a keen gardener. Four distinct seasons provided the setting for a year of planning, tilling, planting and reaping.

The country’s love-affair with its gardens drove the song, English Country Garden, to number five the charts in 1962. It was based on an English-folk song, Country Gardens, which married the whimsy of Morris-dancing to the pagan, earth revering influence of the druids and spawned many parodies. It is from that background that I came to tend the semi-arid, almost season-less, badlands of San Diego.

Americans don’t really even have ‘gardens’ because they have yards. The word comes from the Anglo-Saxon “geard” (pronounced YAY-ard) and is a good reminder why prisons have yards while country houses have gardens. One word is Proto-Germanic with overtones of efficiency and sparseness while the other comes from the Gallo-Romance language of Picardy and Flanders.

In the new environment everything has to be placed and considered in the context of hours of sun or shade, lack of moisture and relative danger to humans and animals. Rocks, dirt and pebbles are home to relatively slow growing plants that have evolved to be as tough as their setting. It’s a harsh, alien, unforgiving and strangers need to beware.

I’d never been allergic to a plant until I tangled with the toxic sap of the Euphorbia tiruccalli, which goes by the common name of Fire Sticks. Waking up with a face that looked like I had gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson was an early sign that I’d always need to wear gloves in the garden. But that was only a precursor to my duel with the Cactaceae.

Euphorbia tiruccalli

It is no mistake that the family group name for the cactus has echoes of a Mediterranean-based crime family. They are tough, aggressive, impassive plants that never tell, never forgive and always take revenge. The biblical warning “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” (Acts 9.5 and Acts 26:14 of the King James Version of the Bible) could have been written to remind us of the challenge they bring.

Engaging with a cactus and not taking appropriate precautions is like inviting Hannibal Lecter to dinner in a private room. One of you enjoys the potential of sharp objects to inflict pain and misery while the other will end up on the receiving end of a miserable evening. Even the slightest brush against one of these beasts can bring several dozen tiny shards of agony.

But through the allergic reactions and hours of picking cactus spines from my arms the year has seen a pleasing sense of order emerge. The reshaping of the garden has allowed for Cactus Alley and Succulent Corner to become landmarks while individual plants have been able to thrive after being moved to better locations. And I have learnt lessons in caution after indiscriminate digging cut through carefully buried irrigation lines which led the arid earth to resemble the Somme for several days.

Cactus Alley – Jeffe, Bobby, The Succulent with No Name and  Sneaky Pete

Because I am unfamiliar with the names of the plants many of them have emerged with personal nicknames. We have the barrel cactuses Billy, Bobby and Betsy as well as the handsome and rapidly growing Jeffe. Sneaky Pete is aptly named as the prickly pear has tiny, needle-sharp bristles that embed themselves with just a touch. Gomez is as sharp, squat and evil-looking as any bandit from a spaghetti western.

In the open ground Fellaini is the bargain bin asparagus fern with a habit to match the Manchester Uniter and Belgium footballer or his alter-ego from The Simpson’s, Sideshow Bob. Alongside him Spike, the yucca, has moved to luxuriant growth in full sun after being a weedy and ailing specimen in the shade. These are plants with individual characters that are forged by their resilience and robustness.

I’ve introduced some flowering plants but have learnt to paint pictures in the garden with the varying pinks, greys and subtle variegations which seem the natural palette of the desert. From similar climes we have Australian visitor ‘kangaroo paws’ (Anigozanthos), Asteriscus maritimus from the Mediterranean, and Didiereaceae from Madagascar. It is a global garden that is united by the challenging combination of glaring sun and water and soil poverty.

As a United Nations of plants it co-exists in a climate that is under increasing stress and facing enormous challenges from progressively worsening climate conditions. Disproportionate application of resources allows traditional Western plants to grow but plants used to living more frugally demand their rights and can thrive without pampering. It’s a little like the economic lessons of the real world.

After living with the land for a year I have begun to understand the raw materials. The variation of temperature, daylight and precipitation are more subtle than the English seasons. The growth patterns of the plants move to a rhythm which is less easy to understand but which can result in moments of extraordinary flowering and unexpected beauty.

While I have dabbled with herbs, tomatoes and peppers this year I am hankering after developing a vegetable patch. There is little more satisfying than pulling a broad bean or a new potato from the earth and eating it a few minutes later. But the planning involves thinking about ways of conserving even more water over the winter season to support this ambition.

It’s been a steep learning curve but whether semi-desert or temperate the garden offers similar lessons and insights. Patience and perseverance, the determination of living things to survive and the belief in planting today however uncertain the future might be. It is captured nicely by American author, journalist, activist Michael Pollan who writes, “The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. ” (The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)

COUNTRIES SEPARATED BY A COMMON PINT?

Moving to San Diego seemed to be one of the easier calls in life. Trading in the English winter for Californian sun was no hardship. And I had successfully managed a move from Essex to Yorkshire, arguably the greatest cultural distance in England, when I was 23. But we are creatures of our environment and subtle changes are worthy of reflection.

San Diego is one of the great craft beer cities in the world and I have been converted from my standard lager to the local product. A lifelong love affair with Stella has become a series of one-night flings with Sticky Henderson, Perky Blonde and Deftones Phantom Bride. These are courtesy of the brewers Resident, Belching Beaver and Thorn Street – just three from the 100+ in San Diego County . But to my great shame I was so distracted by the weather and wearing flip-flops (of which more in a moment) that it took me three months to realise that a pint is not a pint. It’s not even close. People from the country of my birth know that this is one area where size is everything and will be glad to read that history and actuality are both on our side.

Since 1824 the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth have broadly standardised on the Imperial (feel your heart swell with pride at a word which gets less play by the day) pint equivalent to 568ml. In America the standard pint is 473ml – the uncharitable might even call it the ‘Puny’ pint. That’s because the Imperial (had to use that word again) pint is about 20% larger.

The downside is that what I had begun to consider an increasingly heroic drinking capacity was rather less impressive than I thought. However, craft beer often weighs in at a pretty hefty 6%+abv compared to Stella’s 5.2%. Like the shots to goals ratio of an erratic centre forward I have not quite worked out the right balance between volume and potency but look forward to continuing my education.

An offshoot of this discovery is the mild satisfaction of realising that US gallons are smaller than British gallons. So the price of petrol (or gas as I call it when I am trying to fit in) is not quite so extraordinarily low as we have all thought for years. But I am also told that California gas is expensive compared to Pennsylvania so visitors should choose their destination and filling stations wisely.

My second discovery has been that wearing flip-flops is not the work of the devil. Like most English boys from my era my feet have been encased safely in socks and shoe leather from my first pair of Start-Rite’s to my latest black lace-ups. The notion of bare feet in public anywhere but on holiday in some far-away place where the neighbours would never see has been largely unthinkable.

But there is something about constant sunshine and getting very hot feet that lured me into reversing years of tradition, training and toe-trapping. Shopping the Zappos app has become a little like finding Tinder for shoes as I swipe right for OluKai and Chaco and left for Loake’s. Inevitably, the increased exposure of my feet has led me even further down the path towards behaviour my father would have considered slightly troubling. I had a pedicure.

In my defence I was driven by a sense of anthropological enquiry after being told that the ratio of men to women made mani-pedi salons a dating hot spot. I had, after all, been responsible for the PR team that invented ‘love in the aisles’ to suggest that ASDA’s frozen food aisle was Cupid’s home. For those interested I can report that nail salons are as unlikely to light the fires of love as frozen cod fillets. But if baby soft, good-looking feet are a sign of evolutionary success it’s an hour well spent.

This probably gives the impression that my early months have been spent strolling around the neighbourhood visiting bars and obsessing about my toes. I write that as if it would be a bad thing, but it really isn’t given the quality and quantity of local beers and brew-houses. My current recommendations to visitors are The Bluefoot Bar in North Park (for a dive/sports bar), the Queenstown in Little Italy (Sunday brunch/people watching), and 10 Barrel Brewing in East Village (great balcony).

Sadly, the Bluefoot is a place of pilgrimage for Arsenal fans. Matters appeared to come to a head last week when there was a seven-hour stand-off as SWAT teams thought they had a homicide suspect holed up across the road from the bar. I know that the Carabao Cup result was distressing for the Gooner faithful but that seemed a bit extreme…

My third discovery came when crossing the road the other day. Firstly, I managed to look to my left first to check for traffic which is quite something after so many years of Tufty Fluffytail and the Green Cross Code adverts reminding me to look right. It always struck me as one of the stranger journeys for David Prowse to go from child-safety icon, the Green Cross Man, to progeny-maiming dark lord, Darth Vader. But it’s nice to have some perspective by learning that Prowse’s west-country lilt led to the rest of the cast nicknaming him Darth Farmer.

More important though was that I headed for the pavement (sidewalk!) that was IN THE SHADE. Sensibilities built up over years of vitamin D sapping winter weather and overcast summer days dictate that when there is sunshine an English person walks in it. There are days when crowds of people zig-zag their way down city streets to maximise exposure and worship the glowing, unfathomable orb in the sky – it’s like line dancing but from a cult that also invented Morris dancing.

We do it because we know that the sun might disappear any moment – behind a cloud or a building. More worryingly we know that its reappearance is not certain. Certainly not for days or even months. So we act like lizards, soaking up the warmth and the rays to see us through the lengthy periods of dark, cold and precipitation we know are heading our way.

Sunshine or shade. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the distance between the innocent, carefree time of the Green Cross man and the stygian depths of Darth Vader as he embraced the dark side. But that’s for another blog and a different time…in a galaxy far, far away.