Karen McCann's Blog

Can anecdotes cross borders?

2008-08-31T16:12:00.000+01:00

On a summer break in Dubrovnic I picked up at the airport the local ex-pat newspaper, The Dubrovnik Times, which ran to about 8 pages and had ads for the tourists as well as general articles by ex-pats such as one by a man from America who came for a holiday eight years ago and decided to stay. I am familiar with ex-pat living after spending some years living in Asia, and many of my travel destinations are determined by where a friend may have a posting, or a love affair with a local that never ended, or an English teaching job where the perks are worth more than the pay or conversely the pay is worth the pain of separation from family and friends. The ex-pat straddles two cultures – some pretty comfortably some not.

Ex-pats are often a jaded mob who hang out at foreigners’ bars to whinge about the locals; yet when they go back home they can only talk about their foreign experiences until they are avoided in their local as a bore. Soon enough they realize they can’t handle normal life in their native country and so they pack up and go back to their adopted country to resume their old place at the foreign bar, greet their cronies and give each other knowing looks when a newbie rolls up, a reflection of themselves long ago.

There are many flavours of ex-pat. There are the regular business travellers (who are honorary ex-pats); there are the diplomats and businessmen on postings and their spouses (upper class ex-pats); there are the ones who marry a local and can’t speak a word of the language (parasite ex-pats); there are the geeky more-native-than-the-natives types (gone troppo ex-pats); there are lots of ones on one or two year deals (only just ex-pats) and shady characters on the make (tax-dodge ex-pats). These guys (and they are usually guys) hang out in ex-pat bars the world over, talking complete crap to each other about what they understand or don’t understand about the country before trying to pick up a local girl.

At the same time the ex-pat bars are host to locals who like to hang out with the ex-pats, who are either curious about foreigners or more usually wanting to practice their English language skills. These girls (and they are usually girls) hang out in ex-pat bars the world over trying to comprehend the difficult pattern of conversation not covered in their usual English language text books while trying to either fend off or encourage the attention of the know-it-all ex-pats.

Almost all ex-pats will have a large part of their identity defined by being in that foreign culture and having to cope with the adjustments of living there. They try explaining to friends back home what it is like, about not having comforts they are used to and dealing with bureaucracy, taxes and service, cultural misunderstandings, language difficulties, climate and comfort differences, and so on, but no one understands – unless they are an ex-pat too.

Every traveller can appreciate the surface differences, such as funny looking money, alternative hygiene practices, differences in the cost of living and how some things are so much easier back home. However, it is the more nuanced aspects of different cultures that characterises the ex-pat experience above and beyond the travellers’. You don’t really know a country until you have worked in a foreign office, shopped locally, and most of all tried to crack a joke in a second tongue.

My friend Australian friend met her German husband in Bali at a swim-up bar in a hotel pool. After chalking up expensive phone bills she decided to visit him in Hamburg and that was that, she is now married and bringing up a half German half Australian little boy. She told me that her German language skills were quite rough when she first arrived. She had studied some German at school and even lived in Germany for a while on exchange, but it is a very different thing when you live and work there.

Moving there was the hardest thing she has ever done. The emotional strain of being far from her family was hard enough on its own, but she has had to set herself up financially and emotionally with a partner from a very different culture – she hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be just to fit in.

Her husband has a close circle of friends with a 20-year store house in-jokes and assumed knowledge between them. Her German was improving in leaps and bounds, but joking in a foreign language is a skill that takes years to develop.

English people like to say Germans have no sense of humour. Whilst it’s true that Germans are fond of a straight answer, keeping their word and firmly committing to a plan of action, they are also fond of beery conversation – much of it humorous.

My friend found that conversation between friends in Germany has a different pattern to conversations in Australia. Her husband says English language chat is like ping pong – the conversation leaping from one end of the table to another, everyone constantly interjecting, with jokes and put-downs, asking questions, diverting the topic, coming back to it again and so on.

In Germany, she says, at least in her husband’s circle of friends, it’s different. The participants as if by design seem to come to the table with ready-made stories to tell. The stories can be long or short, significant or trivial, on a personal or a topical event. The story might be a serious political story from the newspaper or more often about something that happened to them at the petrol station on their way to the BBQ.

When the person tells their story there is a neat set-up, complication and punch line. Anyone can interject to clarify a point, but it is not done to divert them from their story and it is expected that the speaker will reward the listeners with a rounded narrative so that on queue at the end they can laugh or be shocked or express disbelief. Her most terrifying time at the table is when the turn comes around to her, she can just about follow the fluent German tales in full flow, but she has not mastered the rhetorical skills necessary to take the floor.

I noticed in the Dubrovnik newspaper an article where two tourists – a German man from Freiberg and an English woman from Inverness – were. The questions asked how long were they staying in Dubrovnik (both for about a week), what did they enjoy (the fortified walls, the crystal clear water) what did they buy (the English woman not much, the German man said he bought beer) and so on.

The last question asked of them was if they had any stories to tell or unusual experiences in Dubrovnik. The Scottish woman said the first person she had met in Dubrovnik happened to be from Aberdeen! Imagine that! The German man said he had brought his dog on holidays with him and when he arrived there was another dog on the pier and it had scared him so much he had run into a shop, much to the amusement of the locals.

Reading these two little stories you know they are the ones the two tourists will tell friends, neighbours and work colleagues when they get back to their home towns. It comes back to me how the strangest thing about travelling is how much you take where you are from with you on the plane. And when you come back again, you automatically shape the exotic background around a tale that could be understood and appreciated by your audience. They could easily say when it is their turn, you know, something similar happened to me when I travelled abroad.

Don’t Mention the War (Still)

2008-08-31T00:25:00.002+01:00

Its summer and the British and the Germans are at war. The big guns are their respective tabloid newspapers. The opening salvos are puns on Huns in the Sun newspaper answered by pokes at British bums in the German paper Bild. The message is clear – the two nations are still at war, though today the battle ground is claiming the prime deck chair positions by the hotel pool.

It’s true; Basil Fawlty is alive and well and still unsuccessfully trying not to mentioning the war. It is truly astounding how often the subject of the second world war comes up in England, in the media, in conversation, or with physical reminders in the landscape, it could have been just a few years ago instead of over 50. As a recent immigrant it is impressed upon me how the trauma of the war is still keenly felt today.

In November every single presenter on British TV, and I do mean every single one, has a plastic poppy pinned to their lapel, it seems to be a rule that if you are on TV in a factual position (like a news presenter, or a politician, as opposed to a character in a drama who are allowed occasionally to get away with a naked lapel) then you must wear one or you will not be allowed on screen until December 1st.

With the war in Iraq there is renewed public respect for soldiers and the charity that supports them, but for most people wearing The Poppy means they are not forgetting long dead soldiers from long past wars. On the first of November people stick on their plastic poppy with a pride that borders on mania and those who do not sport one at all times feel ashamed and scuttle past the Poppy police at the entrance to the supermarket shaking their charity coin collectors menacingly at them.

It is curious to witness this behaviour – it is every every English person’s duty to wear The Poppy. Just as it is every Christian’s penance to carry the cross (perhaps embossed with diamonds on a chain around the neck). Both symbols say: We will remember Him/Them. Both are powerful symbols indeed.

In Manchester the IRA bomb that obliterated the central shopping district in the late 1990s should, you would think, warrant frequent mention, but it doesn’t. It transformed the city centre, and it could be argued did the city a lot of good as it is now a gleaming Mecca for shoppers who appreciate the large scale open spaces, connected walkways and shiny new buildings. This bomb was preceded by a warning and no loss of life resulted, so would seem that the impact of the bomb was economic rather than tragic in the long term. It could also be argued that it was a local event, Birmingham has its own IRA bomb, for example, not to mention those in Northern Ireland, so it had only a local impact, but the impact is not felt much today at all, it is not mentioned in conversation and there are no annual days of rememberance.

The London bombings of July 2005 although more recent has also had a diminished impact; the loss of life was devastating, and although the bombs specifically targeted the capital the whole country felt the shock keenly, but the feelings stirred by these acts of terrorism are very different to the collective reaction to World War 2. It is probably too early to judge the long term unsettling effects of the London bombs; it is far too raw and with the war in Iraq still going on, it is still an open sore. But despite how these bombs were only recent, and despite how they were on British soil, the bombs have not impacted on the British consciousness the way the world wars half a century ago have done.

Perhaps time is the key. Everyone has had time to think about World War 2, they have thought and thought and thought about it. The diggers of the Great War have all passed away, but many veterans of the Second War are still alive, some still remembering the effects of the first war as well as the second and able to tell their grandchildren about it and record their memoirs in the different forms of media. There are ample opportunities to investigate one aspect or another, including all the bits that were forgotten the first time around, the people who contributed in quieter days or the secrets that were only just allowed to come out after a 50 year ban. The second world war is at an almost ‘golden’ age in its assessment and importance to people’s everyday lives here, in a way I don’t think it is in Australia or America.

Germany, however, and Japan too are still very much thinking about the consequences of the war and dealing with it in their different ways. Japan has the old guard of revisionists and nationalists deeply influencing conservative politics, particularly with symbolic visits to the Yasakuni shrine. Japan is also still contending with the deep, deep wound of the atomic bomb, when so much of the world sees nuclear power as benign and nuclear weapons as something vaguely associated with the shrouded countries of Iran or North Korea. (Now that Russia and China have become economic powerhouses and now that the price of oil has gone through the roof the baby boomer anti-nuclear hippies of the world are like the rest of us more interested in energy and wealth than ideology.)

In Germany the topic of the war is carefully avoided with strangers. The emotions, memory and guilt are so complicated that casual reference is frowned upon; it is too difficult a subject to chat about with foreigners. The importance of the war and its impact is felt there physically, dramatically in the reconstruction of their cities out of rubble.

As ‘losers’, Japan and Germany the war led to long term introspection (though, curiously Italy is not really mentioned so much in English media, the axis is more of an axel when it comes to the popular imagination).

But England seems to have a similar obsession with the war even though they were ‘winners’. Britain seems to be hung up on it like Japan and Germany and in a different way to the other Allies. (Perhaps it has as big an impact in France where they had to deal with the fall out from occupation as well with the sorting of the reviled collaborators from the pride of the Resistance. Or perhaps they moved on and had a good meal and a bottle of wine. Not knowing French, I couldn’t judge.)

I know that here in Britain the war is mentioned often, sometimes casually, tauntingly to Germans and Italians in football games, on TV by comedians, or mumbled under breaths by the hotel pool. Other times it is considered in depth in countless books in countless ways. Sometimes the British are proud of their victory, sometimes they are deeply conflicted by it. There is a complication to the feelings it arouses that it doesn’t seem to have in the hearts and minds of America. America is tortured by Vietnam, not by World War 2.

Last year I read a biography of the Mitford Girls. I had never heard of them before I picked it up, but now I hear them mentioned all over the place, particularly one of the Mitford Girls – Unity – who was bizarrely enamoured with Hitler and recently rumoured to have carried his love child. This was aired on TV as a scandal, because imagine – Hitler’s child could be living here amongst us! The child would be middle-aged by now, but to the English the thought is delicious. Just imagine – Hitler’s child! It has the impact a holy visitation would have in the religious deep south of America (and yes, I know the analogy is sacrilegious). Hitler is a figure of fascination; he is almost mythic to the British, but not of course in a good way.

The English remember the rationing of the post-war period to this day, they feel some annoyance that the Americans lived such lives of abundance post war while they had bananas rationed for a decade. I was at a tennis club quiz the other week and one of the questions asked what was rationed until 1953 (I think that was it – I will surely be corrected if it is wrong!) and the answer was sweets – although most people at the quiz smacked their foreheads because they wrote bananas instead. The point being that rationing is a concept even the children at the quiz knew about.

Indeed, my boyfriend’s niece was in the school play entitled ‘Will Santa be shot down?’ I asked if it was a comedy, and she shook her head, ‘No!’ she said, ‘It is about World War Two and a little boy who was frightened Santa would be shot down by German airplane fire’. Which I thought was pretty heavy for a child’s Christmas play in 2007.

Every child born in a new century here knows about the bombing campaign of the World War 2 German fighters (just as presumably every German child knows about the Allies bombing their towns). Indeed the effects of the air raids can be seen even in my street today. The house we live in is not in keeping with its neighbours, it was built in the 1950s in contrast to the Edwardian semis opposite because a fat bomb landed right here sometime during the war. It is this palpable physical evidence that drives home the impact of the unforgotten war; it is was so much more immediate here than the experience of Australians or Americans (and I don’t think the Pearl Harbour or Darwin bombings really come close despite the American movie of the former).

World War Two meant an end of an era to the British – the end of Empire, the end of being the biggest of the major players on the world stage, it meant misery for many, suffering, it meant pride in overcoming the odds, and it was Britain’s finest hour - which does have a final ring about it.

Perhaps in a few years these sentiments will have changed irrevocably for Britain. The change was in the air with the 50 year anniversary of the war’s end, and the new millennium with new obsessions with new computers and terrorists to worry about. But more likely it won’t. The War is still with us and will be for a while longer yet.

My boyfriend, would happily argue for hours that it was WW1 that was the key war, not the second, saying it was the one that ended Empire, the one that saw the end of innocence when so many were slaughtered in the trenches, the one that set the agenda for both modern Europe and modern America. He also says that the origins of the war is complex and fascinating and that the second war that followed on its heels is just boring by comparison with its easy reduction to Us versus the nasty Nazis.

I would argue that it is this good versus evil comparison which makes the war so fresh in people’s minds, Hitler as the Devil on Earth is comprehensible in a way that the messy Vietnam War or the where-exactly-is-it Falklands War for the modern sensibility, not to mention the current Afganistan/Iraq debacle. For America WW2 was a defining moment when it became the leader of the western world, so Indiana Jones fights Nazis in the 1980s and a whole new generation of kids can cheer for the good guys in the movies they way they couldn’t in the scarier Vietnam films of the 70s. Those kids have grown up and have kids of their own who are all carefully learning about the world wars of half a century ago in history classes in school.

It is understandable why the Americans would want to Save Private Ryan again and again, but what about the British, didn’t the aftermath of the war when the baton passed to America mean that they had dropped their own? Post war it was pretty miserable here, so why does everyone want to remember it all the time? Was it in fact the last great hurrah of Empire? Or is there something in the British psyche which revels in the desperation, privation, exhaustion and broken pieces of the post war era? Britain hugely enjoyed the swinging sixties, but it was the 40s that people here remember with pride and nostalgia. The trauma has not healed, every November the Poppies are pinned to lapels and the wound ripped open again.

Sea change

2008-08-30T22:00:00.001+01:00

A sea-change in my own personal blogosphere will hopefully mean that there might be some more posts in the future.

I would like to polish up my writings and ramblings into entertaining and well-rounded blog posts, but the problem is that I never get around to all the editing required. I have blogs from last year sitting around clogging up my computer and my conscience. I devoted some time to knocking out a first draft, and then I never get around to it again until I am in the position where I have moved house and had a baby and not a peep is heard from me from months on end.

So, without more apology I am going to put up some blogs that are dated and unedited for the sake of posterity.

Sorry To Have Missed You

2008-02-26T00:16:00.002Z

I have been a bit slack with the blogging for a couple of months. I have been busy with Christmas and the new house and my dramatically changing body shape. The blogs have been brewing on all these topics, and this blog may well open the flood gates. So stay tuned.

Let me restart with the curious subject of how impressed I am with the post code system in the UK. The codes here mix digits and letters to clearly indicate your social-economic demographic through exact geographic positioning. The first half of the code tells the curious which county and then which town or suburb within it. This is great for snobs, insurance companies and real estate agents.

The second part of the code goes even further towards explicit disclosure; it picks out which precise street you live on and even which end of the street, sometimes which side. This is a bit startling. If someone knows your postcode it wouldn’t take much to stalk you or steal your identity. But, hey, the up side is that it is nifty for home services and deliveries.

Every delivery company asks you first your postcode and then the number of your house and then click, they have you locked in their sights. On websites you can enter your postcode and pick your house from a drop down list. My new cleaner asked for my postcode which she could pop into her car’s satnav. The postcode system was clearly anticipating the age of the database. I know I am easily impressed, but I marvel at the forethought.

In contrast my home town in Australia has four digits for a postcode used by all 45,000 plus people living there. Hong Kong is even more shocking, they have no postcodes at all. This used to cause problems for some international online shopping orders where they demanded a postcode in their forms and wouldn’t process the order until I put in zeros or x’s to satisfy them.

My hat is off to the HK post office. I have no idea how they can cope with a mail system for 6 million people without any codes, especially as they deal with mail addressed in handwritten in Chinese, English and Pilipino.

And yet it somehow works (well, at least I never had a problem). In fact, I once sent a postcard to a new Hong Kong friend from a hotel in Vietnam when I knew only her first name and that she worked in a distinctive tall building in Central district on Hong Kong Island. She has kept the card to this day, impressed as much as I was that it somehow got to her mailbox.

I don’t know how Hong Kong as a former British colony, and one that embraced British bureaucracy enthusiastically in so many quarters, failed to institute a postcode system. It is even more astounding that it works for them while over here with a deadly accurate system I have had no end of problems with my mail.

Christmas was a nightmare when it came to receiving parcels. I can readily appreciate that the postal system is overloaded at Christmas time, but nevertheless not one of my anticipated parcels arrived without some sort of protracted bother.

Some of this should be laid at my own door. I did get a bit overenthusiastic with my online shopping in the mistaken belief that it would save me from the hassle of real, physical shopping. I ordered bits and bobs from a half dozen different companies over the net, fretting the whole while about credit card security when the real problem was with delivery.

I prefer to start work late and end work late which suits my sleep/work pattern but does not seem to suit the postman at all. I never know whether to opt for parcels to be delivered to work where I will be most of the day or to the house where I drag out my breakfast until mid-morning. I have tried self-posting to both options and whichever way I go I always manage to miss the parcel and get one of those delightful Sorry We Missed You cards where the scribbled time can occasionally be deciphered so that I can ruefully note I was just ten minutes too late.

When I get those cards two days in a row it has me beating my head against the bricks because I know what will follow. First I first have to call one of those numbers where a recorded voice tells me to press three then one then some 10 digit code on the card which fails to compute meaning I get through to a human, usually on a different continent, who informs me I am about to take a demoralizing car trip to one of Manchester’s dreariest industrial parks to a depot to retrieve the parcel.

Ooh, I hate those cards; but much worse than getting the card is getting no card. This happened over Christmas where parcels sent by my mother 8 weeks previously had still not shown up by end of January. Despite the much admired postcode being clearly and legibly written on them in my Mum’s best school teacher writing, they still managed to get lost in the system.

The people in the system were very polite and were trying to be genuinely helpful. After speaking to the postman, the depot, and finally some help centre online, and thanks to the fact that Mum kept the receipt in Australia which preserved some precious 10 digit codes, the final two parcels were eventually located.

One had been held at a post office a couple of miles away, for some strange reason, instead of my local. That one was easily retrieved (helpfully they gave me the post office’s postcode so I could pop it into Google Maps and plot a satnav course to find it); but the other parcel took a bit more sleuthing.

The parcel was apparently signed for by someone called ‘F. Sidebottom’. I pondered this for a bit, did it mean ‘the front side bottom’? Did that mean they left it somewhere under a rock at the side or the bottom of a wheelie bin and given me a cryptic clue ala The Da Vinci Code?

I asked my boyfriend and he told me there was a local comedic character with an act where he insisted his name Frank Sidebottom was pronounced ‘Frank Sid-ee-bott-om’. He suggested someone somewhere must have signed for it with this joke name. Chances are I would never see the parcel again.

I was psyching myself up to start a door knocking / letter campaign to get to know the immediate neighbours when my email correspondent from the post office suggested I try Flat 4 next door.

That very night I buzzed Flat 4, and lo and behold the guy is in, he trips down the stairwell with my parcel and finally I had it in my little hot hands! I was so grateful that I decided not to berate the guy for having kept it for four long weeks without bothering to knock on my door to return it to me. But I guess he didn’t know I hadn’t received my Sorry To Have Missed You Card and what’s more he probably thought me rude for not showing proper gratitude. (Proper gratitude is very important here.)

Upon reflection, I could have called back around and thanked him for adding to my little store of local knowledge by introducing me to the legend of Frank Sidebottom, but instead I celebrated by opening my Christmas presents a month late.

It is pretty weird to open Christmas presents long after the tree has been put away again for another year and all the silliness has been processed and you wondered why you were so worked up about it all. Besides, there was something anti-climatic about opening presents when Mum had already told me what was inside, thinking they were lost in the ether of the great postal neverland.

Not that I want to sound ungrateful, it was just that the epic tracking of the parcel had eclipsed the contents. After everything was unwrapped I found inside the box a note from Mum telling me to expect more parcels for my birthday in February. Oh no, not more parcels! The merry-go-round starts again.

Bless the BBC box set!

2007-12-02T20:25:00.000Z

After discovering a seemingly inexhaustable supply in the local library we have been trawling through the back catalogue of BBC petticoat serials the last couple of weeks allowing me to catch up on all the worthy English novels of the accepted cannon that I will never read. I know, I know, I should have read Middlemarch, but when it is covered in a couple of entertaining hours on your TV on a winter's eve, really, it is hard to say no and reach for the paper tome instead.

Especially when they are such weighty tomes. I have known for along time that I will never attempt another Dickens after my one and only valiant attempt at 'The Pickwick Paper' (not the best choice) was derailed by other entertainment options too readily at hand. My Dad, a solicitor, has sailed many references over my head to 'Jaundice versus Jaundice', but now, after watching the BBC's excellent Bleak House I know I can give him a knowing wink without having had to balance the book on my knee for a month or two.

It is all down to a one-man revolution for me - Mr Andrew Davies. I have read somewhere online that personally he may be a tad arrogant or other such criticism, but ever since the watershed moment when I saw the 1995 Pride and Prejudice BBC adaptation, yes, the one with Colin Firth in the wet shirt, I have been a fan, even if I didn't know it at first.

The art of TV adaptation is curious - it is creative, but it is also slavish - the writer has to balance the essential themes and characters of the novel with the particular dictates of the medium. TV serials allow a greater allotment of time for the writer to include more of the characters and incidents that would have to be sidelined by a movie, but the ability to know what to keep and what to cut is a fine art. It is enlightening to read Austen's novel, then watch all of, is it 6 or 8 hours, of Davies' BBC version, and then watch the latest movie offering, the one with Kiera Knightley.

This is not an exercise that my boyfriend would ever, ever embark upon, it would probably be the most effective torture for him, more effective than having his bollocks bashed ala the latest James Bond film. But for me, as an unabashed Austen fan, well, OK, a little abashed, I found it illustrated the differences between adapting for film and for TV very nicely.

The book has so much detail, of course, being a book, but it also has the peculiarities of that particular era of the novel - loats more description than we can stomach these days with our airplane book tastes, far more introspection and moralising as well, and then a huge dose of pathetic fallacy, repetition and an extended denoument which has much to do with the fact that the original author and audience for the book had no TV, video games or internet to distract them from a decent lengthy book. The original book also didn't have much in the way of sex scenes, or even extended kissing scenes, the big climax in the book is, if I remember rightly more in the way of an ardent long look in the eyes with the couples' hands clasped. That's it.

So for electronic mediums for a modern audience this aspect has to be beefed up. I remember reading Mansfield Park in school (which was at the time deadly dull and only completed by reading a chapter and then rewarding myself with a dose of TV before the next session - eyes propped open with matchsticks). But in the film version the naughty daughter jumped into bed with the dashing rake of a neighbour and they were caught in flagrante by the shocked heroine, Fanny. Whilst in the book this fabled bit was described as "jumping over the ha-ha gate" a metaphor that sailed over my head when I was skimming it for exams. I was in the cinema when I saw the characters going at it, and I couldn't help myself from exclaiming aloud, Oh! The Ha-Ha gate!

Pride and Predudice doesn't have anything as juicy and censorious as the incident in Mansfield Park. It is a much fluffier work, one which the author herself thought was lacking in a bit of weight. But it is one that has touched the hearts of lots of romantic women who should probably know better, but can't help indulging in the wish-fullfillment pleasure anyway.

The treatment of P&P in the BBC adaptation is nevertheless sexed up by Davies' invention of the famous wet-shirt scene that poor Colin Firth will rue until the day he dies, even if he acknowledges that it also set up his entire career. There is no mention of his dip before he comes accross the heroine still dripping in the novel. But it was a stroke of genius - women swooned, they just loved it despite the ridiculousness of the incident - why would a lord decide after a long ride to swim in a murky pond when he could pop into his huge house nearby and fill one of a dozen baths for his ablutions? Because then we wouldn't get our delicously titillating moment. Davies knows just how to judge when to pop one in.

There are other moments just as delicious, an early ball scene where they dance verbally and physically is a masterclass in TV choreography, the 'accidental' meetings of the would-be lovers in the snooker room or on the grounds are also timed to perfection, as is the heart-melting moment in the drawing room when they know they are in love and look at each other lingeringly over the piano forte oblivious to the others in the room - ahh. Even the fight when he first proposes is a beautifully acted and directed scene of tension that allows me to shed buckets of guilty tears if I am alone to indulge myself.

But the Knightley film, that seemed to be so successful, just rocketed along, careering past and only just touching off plot points and omitting delightful comic moments because they had to. For the film it was only about the love story between the two protagonists, with no time for any comment on the class mores and mileu, nope, just get to the snog at the end. And then you can watch the alternative 'American' ending where we see Elizabeth and Darcy embarrassingly going over their courtship in icky detail in a gag-inducing scene where he says something about calling her Mrs Darcy forever.

That was not in the book. Neither was the extended kissing and the cakey candle-lit surroundings, it is a moment of fan fiction. Like Gone with the Wind part 2 or some spin-off Harry Potter fantasy where minor characters have dramatic gay sex in the Hogwarts staff room. Trust me, get the Davies version, pack off the boyfriend somewhere and settle down with a box of chockies and a hanky or three.

With Middlemarch Davies was not yet the star adapter and the budget was not quite there that they would enjoy after the success of 1995's P&P, but nevertheless the scope and drama of the book are very enjoyably realised. To see the full Davies treatment, however, go straight for Bleak House, the increase in directorial and editing pizzaz is remarkable and in no way detracts from the story - it makes great TV.

The most recent Davies' adaptation I have seen is Fanny Hill. This is an extraodinary choice because the original, in my opinion is unreadable. Obviously other people have managed it, but the relentless descriptions of male members as throbing rods of ivory and so on gets pretty tedious, pretty quickly. And in terms of depth of characterisation and thematic exploration it is one dimensional - a straightforward no applogies story of a girl from the country who beds her way to the top, thanks very much. Tom Jones is a far more enjoyable saucy rags to riches tale - and the best thing Kubrick ever did.

So not all of Davies' adaptation are equally brilliant, and not all of the BBC petticoat producitons that were made without Davies' input are worthless, most of them are definitely worth a look. I can highly recommend Tipping the Velvet adapted from a Sarah Waters' novel, it is more tightly written than Fingersmiths also by Waters but not adapted by Davies, but both are worth watching. I also enjoyedBBC versions of Dafoe's Moll Flanders and Trollope's The Way We Live Now, especially as I know full well that I will never get around to reading them unless I am struck down with a debilitation illness.

I missed out on the latest BBC offering here, Cranford, which has garnered some good reviews - but it is the case that if you miss the first Sunday, you have to miss all the others until you can get them out on a box set from the library. Bless the box set! How did they do it before DVDs? Imagine watching the brilliant I Claudius every Sunday for weeks and weeks, if you missed a week of that you would be lost. The only trouble with the box set is that it is hard not to go for that next episode even if it is 3am on a worknight, it is too easy to say go on, and click on to the next one.

It should be noted that our Mr Davies has not just done period adaptations. He also wrote various episodes for various TV series, as well as film scripts, inlcuding famously and probably lucratively the two Briget Jones' movies, but it is the TV mini-series where he excels. It doesn't even have to be period - his scathing and ironic political miniseries The House of Cards and To Play the King are also delights for the box set collection in the tradition of Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy.

I guess it is a reflection of my recent relaxation into domesticity that heralds my respect and enjoyment of these TV serials. And perhaps it is because it allows me to cheat my literary credentials as I acknowledge that my reading tastes are getting lighter instead of weightier as I get older. I still enjoy the odd trip to the movies, and I have not yet given up reading altogether, but as I am sitting there flicking between chanels looking for something to watch while eating tea, I am grateful to the BBC for providing me via the DVD player with reliable extended viewing pleasure that makes me feel as if I am getting more out of the box than a dose of reality TV, an education as well as entertainment. Bring on the BBC serials, it annoys the hell out of some people, but I am properly grateful.

Settling down in Britain

2007-11-18T21:30:00.001Z

From a life of whim and indolence (as my boyfriend would have it) I am now suddenly and dramatically interested in all things fence-picketed. My carefree single life has devolved into slightly ill-fitting domesticity. I remember in the over-baked days of my youth in Tamworth wondering whether I was headed one day for domestic bliss or slavery; pessimistically I believed it would be the latter and so spent many pleasant single years doing just as I pleased, wandering through Asia, contracting intestinal bugs and divesting myself of bulky possessions as I moved from one relationship to anther, one job to another, one country to another.

Now I am definitely ‘partnered’ I am as happy as can be, but the realities that others have faced for years, such as mortgages and parenthood have given me a rude slap in the face and made me thoroughly ashamed of my tardiness in the school of real life. I have been thrust into frantic catch-up study of adulthood and this blog of late has become a record of all my crammed homework. I beg your indulgence as I will now produce a short series on the terrors of home renovation that will be familiar to many but which has come to a shock to my sensitivities.

The importance of buying, renting and renovating homes in the UK can’t be underestimated. In Australia there were lots of home improvement TV shows and magazines, but the emphasis over here is much more on hardcore property development – i.e. not so much the Australian ‘my home is my castle’ philosophy, but more along the line of ‘chuck in your day job and strike it rich through property development’.

Even the home improvement shows here seem to have an emphasis on money making schemes. If a flat won’t sell – what do you have to do to impress the buyers? Can you make big bucks if you gamble and buy a dump from auction sight unseen? Even when the focus is on personal lifestyle choice, the programmes here more often follow the pattern of how to buy overseas than how to renovate what you’ve got.

Whether they are empty-nesters downsizing or people choosing between the countryside or moving to Spain, the emphasis seems to be about moving on, whereas in Australia it seemed to be much more about improving what you’ve got through extensive decking.

Recently, on UK ground level (not TV-land), prices of flats and houses have topped out, the listings at the real estate agents have stagnated, interest rates have skyrocketed and everyone has a skip parked outside rather than plans to sell up and move on. It is not reflected as much on TV, but it is endemic on my street and elsewhere in the neighbouring suburbs.

Lately, I have to admit that I have not been reading modern literature in translation or seeking out the latest work by of a worthy playwright or modern artist. Instead I have been checking out bedroom and bathroom showrooms and leafing through magazines and brochures I would normally only glance at in a waiting room. I am no different than so many others; I have officially joined the brigade of the house proud. This is because we are in the throes of a house renovation, with side and back double story extensions and a loft conversion. We are trying to turn a four-bedroom Edwardian semi-detached suburban home into… a four-bedroom semi-detached suburban home.

It is true! After doing everything possible to extend the available living space, we have ended up with exactly the same number of bedrooms as we started with! But they are all large bedrooms now, instead of two large, and two tiny rooms. And we have three bathrooms instead of one, and most importantly of all we have made a small kitchen into a very large kitchen/dining room with double doors leading out to the garden. So, it is not all in vain, but it is difficult, trying and expensive. And so I am now going to share my experiences with you. Read on.

The Edwardians

2007-11-18T21:29:00.004Z

The Edwardian period in Britain marked an incredible period of house-building that laid the foundations for how life is lived here today in many ways. The Edwardians, with better transportation and communications made the move out into the suburbs, leaving Victorian terrace houses in favour of semi-detached and detached homes on leafy streets in neighbourhoods, rather than villages or city squares, reflecting a shift towards the privacy of the single family unit that still exists today. This is despite divorce, childless couples and the influence of immigration with extended family models; enduringly, the Edwardian model of the family house overlays our own.

The Edwardians laid out the pattern of rooms that we still use today. What was important then were more than one reception room, decent sized bedrooms, a large kitchen and scullery, a pantry and wine cellar, a bathroom with separate WC, a coal cellar, and the ‘mod-cons’ of hot and cold water, perhaps newly installed electric lighting and even a telephone connection. The Edwardians also wanted a hedged or fenced off front yard which was decorative and not used, and a private back garden which was.

What is important today for the average family is fairly similar, with the scullery transformed into the laundry/utility room marking the rise of the appliance, and the coal cellar giving way to the garage, and the additional bathrooms will more likely have showers than bathtubs. The mod-cons today are similarly focused on energy and communications – our modern homes aspire to having cable or satellite TV, wireless broadband internet and the green credentials of double glazing, insulation, and possibly solar heating.

The Victorian fascination with moral and spiritual health, gave way to an Edwardian obsession with physical health and cleanliness, which has given way to a modern desire for global interconnection and carbon neutrality. The design of houses reflects social priorities; then as now we live our obsessions on our sleeves. Today we want wall-mounted TVs, a place to put our recycle bins and off-street parking.

It is interesting to know that 90% of Edwardians rented and that most houses were built ‘speculatively’, that is, they were built for landlords to rent out and the occupiers had little say in the design or the fitting of the houses. Today two-up, two-down cottages that would have been built for workers are being snapped up by upwardly mobile young professionals; it is a purchase on that rung of the property ladder located between the single person’s first flat and the family home in the best suburb we can afford.

Even if most people will change properties several times in their lives, usually at the most significant moments of their life, the purchase of a property is a always a heavy undertaking. As Alain de Botton noted in The Architecture of Happiness for most people a house is the most important and expensive thing they will buy in their life, so it is natural that we will tend to be conservative when making this important decision. Even new houses therefore tend to be built to look a lot like older ones. De Botton bemoans this tendency and declares that we must buck the trend and opt for more dramatic modern architecturally designed homes that suit our modern lifestyles.

The rest of us can be excused for ignoring his advice. It is fine for the wealthy and arty to go for the modern, but the rest of us could be working our whole lives to pay off a single building and so we don’t want it to be experimental; we want it to keep its value. So the housing market will always, to some extent look backwards, even as we want it to adapt to our changing modern lives.

The Edwardians looked backwards, not only to the Victorians but to the Georgians and even Tudor for design inspiration. They were magpies for taking nibbles of all sorts of design elements from neo-classical columns to Jacobean plaster ceilings, but they still developed a new direction for design.

Edwardian houses differed markedly from the Victorian in their emphasis on simpler design lines, with a much greater delight in natural light and a penchant for decoration. With the rise in disposable income, and a taste for journals which the newly literate and leisured middle-classes perused eagerly, the Edwardians went to town on fancy fireplaces, wallpaper, tiles, and furniture. It is the more permanent fixtures like stained glass, fireplaces, light fixtures and tiles that we are so desperate to preserve or replicate today. These ‘period features’ are renovator’s gold as we look backwards while we look forwards when trying do decorate our homes today.

A house is a home is a puzzle

2007-11-18T21:29:00.003Z

My long history of house tourisiting has not been an idle endeavour – I consider my trysts in other people’s houses not as pure voyeurism, but as essential research for my own much more humble house decorating endeavours. I have never been a lifestyle magazine reader (OK, except at the checkout); I much prefer to wander around a three dimensional space and really see what I think works and what doesn’t in other people’s houses in the flesh.

After toying with buying in an overblown housing market we decided like everyone else down the street to take what we’ve got, make it bigger and park a skip out front. The first step was planning permission which was a saga in itself culminating in tearful pleas to grumpy counsellors at the town hall, with eventual victory after much chagrin and delay.

Then the builders swarmed over the poor little house ripping it apart and putting it back together again and now we are nearing the time when maybe, just maybe we can think about moving in, in the not so distant future. But first we have to have something to sit on, wash in, sleep on and cook with. In other words the whole place has to be refurbished and populated with furnishings and fixtures and so far we have an empty and battered shell. And I have to take a crash course in home decoration to fix it. This would be heaven to some women, but it is simply frightening to me.

(I have to warn my loyal readers that this topic has been consuming my life of late, and if you can’t stand it, I can sympathise, and suggest you look away now. One day I will go back to talking about something else.)

I am not the homeliest of people; my decorating agenda to date has consisted of trying to accumulate as little furniture and knick-knacks as possible so that I didn’t have to cart them on to the next place. I look back with some regret at some of the fantastic places I have been around the world where I spent far too much time looking at architectural wonders and sampling exotic cuisine when I really should have been focused on shopping for home décor. I suddenly realise why brides had a trousseau, and I realise that in this department I am not a good catch. I blame my father for not providing the appropriate yams, chickens and cows for my dowry. I have to blame someone.

I have casually judged others by how they dress their house and I am now in paralysis on how to dress my own. Part of the problem is that I haven’t enough money, time or talent to do the job. I am bumbling along in the dark making decisions driven by the electrician, the plumber and the builder. Suddenly the oddest pieces of the jigsaw have already been laid – stud walls, TV points and positions for lights and switches are dictating the layout in the rooms before I have any actual pieces of furniture or any idea of even what look I am supposed to be achieving. Basically, I have no idea of how it is supposed to be done.

Vaguely, through the dust on the building site, I am trying to imagine myself living in this newly expurgated house (now that it has acquired walls again). And I am trying to get my head around this home decorating palaver. Because we have already decided on some aspects and not others, there is a revisionism which has to be inherent in the décor scheme. The kitchen has (very nearly) been decided and it is contemporary and light with all the mod-cons (we can’t afford). The rest of the house must fit around it, and everything else must be economical as we’ve spent most of the budget already.

The house, by the way, is Edwardian, or for the rest of us it is dated between the turn-of-the-20th-century and the start of WW1. I have since found out that in design terms the era was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, which looks to me like toned-down Art Nouveau. The house is not grand by any stretch of the imagination, and sadly many of the features of the house have long been stripped out of it and we have gutted the other half of it anyway. What we’ve ended up with is a house that is more or less, straight down the middle, one half modern and one half traditional.

I hope we can pull it off successfully, as the ultimate goal will be to marry the two so that it looks deliberate, even, dare I say it, stylish. That is, if I can figure out just where to start. I will never denigrate anyone who declares they are an interior designer. I wish I had the natural flair that comes to some women and some gay men. Time to pull my finger out and do some serious research.

Aga Do or Aga Don’t

2007-11-18T21:29:00.001Z

What is the English obsession with Agas all about? I had never heard of an Aga before I came here and now, thanks in no small part to being deeply involved with planning a kitchen (which we have resolutely decided will be modern and not have one of these damn Aga things in it anyway), but even before this induction into the world of kitchen design I was already blown away by the sheer cultural weight in England of the mighty Aga.

The Aga, to some English at least, represents an ideal of home. Not any kind of home, but a home that is solid, enduring, classic and beautiful. But for many, it is a benchmark of unattainable wealth because it would involve acquiring a) the expensive Aga itself and b) a kitchen big enough to put it in. Personally I think they are big, curious, blocky objects that dominate a kitchen but which owners seem to think are the bee’s knees.

What, I was desperate to know, is this fabled thing – the Aga? It is, to put no finer point on it, a cooker (or to use the term I am more familiar with, it’s a stove). Physically, it is an oven, usually with two or four doors and two enormous hotplates on top with chrome lids that swivel upright. It has a ceramic coating in traditional colours of racing green, deep burgundy, cream or black. But there are new models in any number of colours with new configuration options. They take oil or solid fuel (i.e. wood) and they take the best part of 24 hours to heat up so they are generally left on all the time.

It can safely be said that Aga lovers are evangelical about their darlings. In cold wintry England they are a dream: it can heat the hot water for the whole house and radiate warmth in the kitchen making it a clothes dryer, radiator, boiler and oven in one. The oven part is also fabled. It is built for Sunday roasts and Christmas dinner. It is a monolith. If you have one or want one in your kitchen it’s the thing which you must organize everything else around. It’s the beating heart of the traditional kitchen and, oh yes, it’s expensive.

After a little internet research I discovered that despite its cultural weight, the first Aga only dates from 1929 when a Swedish physicist named Aga blew himself up. (No I lie, his name was actually Dalén – Aga stands for Aktiebolaget Gas Accumulator, if you really must know.) Dr Dalén, blinded, was recuperating at home and observing his harried wife when he decided to invent a new type of cooker.

It’s truly amazing that the Aga has survived so long and become so beloved despite all the advances in cooking technology. Lately, I have become very well acquainted with the latest in kitchen cooking appliances. You can have gas or electric or the latest steam oven or a combination microwave that can do it all. And you can go in for a hob that uses the latest induction technology, or you can opt for a wok-burner, a BBQ grill, or a flat teppanyaki hotplate (which costs a fortune, by the way).

But your Aga doesn’t have these options. Nope. The Aga doesn’t even have a temperature gauge! In fact, it is not a good idea to use the two massive hotplates at all. When the lids are hinged back off the hotplates the oven looses too much heat, so they are not used much at all, especially because you can only regulate the heat on them by balancing pots or pans half off the plates. So Aga cooking tends to be all about the oven.

The owners of Agas love how well the ovens cook saying the food doesn’t dry out like it does in gas or electric ovens. However if you forget you have something in it you might pop the door open two days later to find burnt offerings because there is no way to smell when something is burning. But Aga lovers say that this is really an advantage because any old food is automatically burnt away so it is dead easy to clean them just by brushing it out.

All this leads me to believe that to own an Aga is a lifestyle choice, like vegetarianism or Scientology – you are choosing to leave the mainstream and while others will call you bananas, there is a small band of dedicated followers who are believers just like you. And they had to buy new Aga-proof pots as well.

Indeed there are Aga websites out there with Aga recipies and woeful stories about what a pain it is to service them every four months which requires turning the precious Aga off and not having heating or cooking facilities for a minimum of 48 hours (24 hours to cool down, 24 hours to heat up again.) These Aga lovers fear a warm summer, because it makes their kitchens unbearable. (So far as I’ve been in England I think they have not much to fear on this point).

But Agas are sufficiently popular to have entered into folklore. The Aga Saga is a genre of ‘chick lit’ fiction where middle class women leading comfortable middle class lives in medium to large country-styled houses have some sort of temporary problem which leads to much mahem, a little raunchy sex and a happy ending where the heroine is finally appreciated for her true worth and her Sunday roasts.

All this has not convinced me one iota – so the first problem on my list was easily solved – my kitchen is going to be contemporary and electric. When it comes to cooking I am not a romantic – I believe in reading the instructions on the back of the packet for weekday meals and calling catering for a party. If I get creative on the weekend and actually look at a cookbook it will be one of those 15-minute wonder types of recipes which assume you have never considered anything other than electric, thanks very much.

The focal point to it all

2007-11-18T21:28:00.001Z

The kitchen is just the start of it. The contemporary versus traditional debate has reared its head in other rooms as well. My boyfriend has become a dedicated fire-place spotter. This is his latest in a long line of instant obsessions thanks to our recent forays into the world of home décor. The lifestyle section of the Sunday newspaper magazine he used to whip over smartly, but now he lingers and admires a mantle here, a fireback there… It is a change from interest rates and sporting highlights for him and perhaps he’s secretly wondering if he has turned into a metrosexual. I assure him he is not because I can’t face all this decorating on my own; I have to keep his interest in it above the bottom line.

In the decorating books I have recently borrowed from the library there is a concept I have had to embrace whole heartedly and that is ‘the focal point’. A focal point is the most important feature in the room – the one that immediately attracts the eye when you walk in. Traditionally it is the fireplace, but in reality it is more often the TV. This has set up a bit of a battle in the décor world. Which one should reign supreme?

The purists would get rid of the TV or somehow disguise it. The tech heads say embrace modernity and build a temple to entertainment because that is what you want to do (you know you do!) The writers of design books say hey – do both, put the TV above the fireplace! Bingo! The paranoids say, but what about the fire danger? Will the TV overheat? It is a real battle ground.
The weirdest part of it is that no one here needs a fire these days because everyone has central heating. So we are left with these redundant fireplaces which we have to build our lounge room lives around because it is the ‘focal point’. This is a romantic view but it has an economic imperative – fireplaces add value. After all this work, some day one day, if you live long enough, you will have to sell and move on.

So, the fireplace dilemma (even before we think about the competing TV dilemma) is to decide what to do with your redundant fireplace – are you lucky enough to have the original fireplace and think that it is beautiful and in perfect nick? Or do you have a 1950s fireplace that looks in the words of a friend who saw it ‘funereal’? It really does look scary – tombstone grey with a design of inlaid vine, it is only missing the words ‘here lies a monument to past décor’.

The front room by contrast has a beautiful Edwardian understated fireplace that looks just fine (similar to the picture above). But upstairs the original fireplaces in there are very ordinary looking. We are keen to keep any original features, but these ones upstairs are nothing special to look at, but like the funereal one in the lounge, the dilemma becomes what do you put in their place?

The choice is threefold – you can eliminate it all together and make something else the ‘focal point’; you can transplant an original or reproduction period fireplace; or you can go contemporary and make a statement. (And I apologise if this is not riveting stuff, it is nevertheless what keeps me awake at night.)

The elimination option is very tempting: if it’s gone, it’s gone, no need to wonder whether to put in real or fake flames with realistic crackling sounds, or to put in glass chips or dried flowers or candles – it’s just gone. Whilst if you go for replacing it with a new fireplace (whether period or not) you are in for major expenditure because this focal point business is very expensive icing on cakes.

Fireplace stores wax lyrical about the importance of the Fireplace Focal Point (or FFP). They use phrases like ‘a passion for warmth’; ‘the perfect atmosphere’; ‘added value and desirability’; and how they ‘hearken back to a time when a crackling fire was the heart of the home’ – back to when they had no alternative fuel options. One fireplace store says people just love staring at flames – so don’t fight it.

But people love staring at TVs too. So, what to do? The tyranny of the ‘focal point’ is weighing on my mind! I can’t think putting a TV in a cabinet is a good idea in order to ‘downplay it’ so it doesn’t compete with the fireplace. I also think the TV under a two-way mirror over the fireplace is not a practical solution. For one thing it would be too high. For another, a two-way mirror? Where do you get one of them? Ask Austen Powers?

But I have to say I am a bit worried about the TV situation. My boyfriend has put TV sockets in every room and he was tempted to put them in the bathrooms too. This is one of those ‘boys toys’ urges that it does no good to resist. But I am worried about the 42” TV in the kitchen and the lounge room and the front room let alone the bedrooms because (whisper it quietly) I am a TV addict and I will never get anything done when the daemon box is so all-seeing in every room.

After saying all that, if I am honest with myself, I know I will in all certainty be spending time in the kitchen watching TV while I cook or at the table, and when I am in the lounge room I will be gazing at the TV more often than the fireplace. Impressions for visitors are one thing, and sure, I do want them to say, ‘wow, nice fireplace’, but in the end it will be our home and we have to enjoy inhabiting that space.

So, there will be a TV in the kitchen and it will no doubt be at least 42” and in the lounge there won’t be anything to obstruct the view of the TV from the sofa. I know we will have to deal with the fireplace focal point some how. The tyranny of the focal point cannot be denied.

House Tourist

2007-09-02T19:48:00.001+01:00

In England house hunting is a national sport; and it’s best to start from the armchair position. I have come on the scene at the peak of a ten-year boom where house prices have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled. My nose, lately, is all too often an inch from the window of a local estate agency, jostling with the other wannabes, sniffing at the photos of houses and flats beyond my reach.

Every week I splay out on my coffee table a new collection of glossy brochures for properties with too many digits after the pound sign. After diligent practice I am able to decipher the descriptions written in rosy agent-speak. For example, the phrase ‘in need of some modernisation’ means the electrical wiring is pre-war - and that's first world war; similarly the phrase ‘perfectly proportioned bedrooms’ means a double bed will only fit in the master bedroom if you stitch it together in situ, while the second bedroom can comfortably fit a baby’s cot – which of course is ‘perfect for families’.

I should stop here and admit straight up that I have taken the next step on from mere window shopping – I am a House Tourist. I started off looking around properties that I couldn’t quite afford, and moved on to looking at ones in the next price bracket, but soon enough I threw all sense of realistic finance out the window and now I trawl internet property sites late at night restricting my searches to houses one million pounds and above.

...

Some years ago I became a hotel tourist (as opposed to a tourist in a hotel). I can casually saunter into to 5-star hotel feeling like I have taken the presidential suite. I affect a haughty look directed towards the reception desk before perhaps deigning to have a word with the concierge about where one could partake of a bit of Tiffin so late in the afternoon.

A cup of tea in a gilded lobby may cost a tad more than a Starbucks Cappuccino Grande, but I just love the monogrammed china and the little biscuit they give you on the side; oh, and the obsequious backwards shuffle of hotel staff dressed in ridiculous livery just tickles me pink. If ever I am asked for my room number I simply dither for authenticity and then say, hmm, I think I will pay cash for this one. Of course Madam, they say, knowing very well that I am not a guest at all.

I don’t want to give the impression that I am out of control. I don’t strip nude and wander into the steam room muttering something Swedish (well, not as yet, I must get that phrase book). But I do enjoy the opportunity to use a well-appointed loo. The best ones have perfumes beside scented hand creams and little cotton towels you can toss into hand-woven baskets. The hotel loo experience is infinitely preferable to joining the all too common line of women with crossed arms (or crossed legs) snaking out from the shopping centre conveniences and it is the primary reason I became a hotel tourist in the first place.

Its a sad fact that once you have become addicted to 5-star tea and loo breaks it is difficult to go back. I now feel perfectly at home in any hotel of decent quality and I believe I am somewhat of a connoisseur in some cities of my frequent acquaintance.

...

Now, hotels are one thing, but private homes are a different kettle of fish. After some practice I feel I am now fully conversant with the unwritten rules of the house tourist game. I am mindful that people selling their house don’t want to have their time wasted, and that many of them are both extremely proud of their home as well as quite desperate to sell and move on, so they are not to be trifled with. I am never deliberately late, I always wipe my feet, I am polite to the extreme and I am careful to compliment without effusion.

The trained house tourist observes the correct etiquette when conversing with vendors. It is important to murmur positively about the generous size of a room or the ample light. Don’t be overeager as you are supposed to be cagey when you like a property.

It is also important to keep curiosity on a tight leash. It may be appropriate to ask why they are selling as they will have a prepared answer for this, but photos on the dresser should not be scrutinised too obviously, nor is there any need to peak in the bathroom cupboards, or ask blatantly what they do for a living. If you really must, these things you can ferret out discretely when they leave you alone to take your time before coming down.

With an agent you can be less delicate; they may even make a few sardonic comments themselves on the décor. Some agents require assertive handling; and indeed many will try to take the initiative. They might ask questions on whether you are looking to invest or are buying for yourself, and they will especially want to judge you by where you are living now. It is best to answer vaguely, a gauche slip up can give the game away, so be on your guard.

Agents can be annoying guides as they take every opportunity to put in a good word for the property even commenting that the box room is a real asset to the property or pointing at some mould and suggesting it is actually an unusual wall paper detail. In turn you are expected to delicately probe a bit by asking if there have been many viewings, how long it has been on the books, and, if there has already been an offer, whether it was below or above the asking price. Naturally all questions will be answered guardedly, but it is suspicious if you don’t ask.

...

I should give fair warning that this pastime should only be attempted by intrepid types as it can be both uplifting and depressing. It can give you concrete examples of decorating dos and don’ts; it can give you insight into other people’s lives and make you reflect upon your own; it can show you how the other half lives or it can make you glad you don’t live somewhere so sad. It’s a rollercoaster of status, style and identity comparison.

I recall looking around one house that was straight out of a magazine – wall to ceiling wine racks, fluffy rugs, huge designer globe lighting, walk in wardrobes and a spectacular art deco bathroom – it was a dream home. And the owners were only in their early 30s! They were both professionals, possibly lawyers, recently married, and they wanted to move on to somewhere where they could have horses. We were glad we parked the ten-year-old VW Golf some way up the road.

A real house hunter would try to block out the impression of an outlandish feature wall or dated kitchen units. It is important to separate the contents of the house from the physical structure when you know the present owners take all those interesting possessions with them. The serious buyer makes a concerted effort to ignore the tat to concentrate on room size, orientation and layout. But as a house tourist I am more interested in the software than the hardware.

One house I visited had a virginal harpsichord in the front room built from a kit ordered off the internet. Another had an African theme with zebra print rugs, wooden face masks, and a well-thumbed guidebook for every African country there is. An elderly couple in an enormous place occupied about 15% of the space; she spent her time in a tiny larder next to the kitchen pouring over cook books, while he was tucked away in the eaves tapping away on his computer. My visits afford me a fascinating window into such different lives.

...

People’s houses say so much. They can say this house revolves around two adored children, a boy and a girl, and now the family wishes to move because they need a bigger garden. Or it can say the kids have all grown up and moved out, and Mum and Dad are looking to down size and buy a place in Spain. However the houses that shout the loudest are the ones where a musty smell greets your nostrils, your eyes strain due to half the bulbs being blown, and the bath and toilet have plastic hand rails. These houses make you shiver from the ghosts.

At one dusty old house the agent pointed out the ‘Mezuzahs’ on the door frames. These are Jewish prayers encased in a small metal or wood case and nailed flush to the doorframes at shoulder height on an angle. Mezuzahs are blessings to God. I have since seen them in many houses in this area once noted for its sizable Jewish community, it has since diminished, many moving on, many more passing on.

I viewed a house which was occupied until recently by a single Jewish family for a hundred years. The last of the family to live there was a 97 year old man who occupied only on the ground floor and was legally blind. We were guided around the house by his nephew who had promised he would not put his uncle in a home before he died. You could imagine the old guy shuffling around guiding himself by the familiar walls.

The house was crammed with period features: enormous skirting boards, carved fireplaces, hand-blown light fixtures, ceiling roses, servant’s bells and dark tatty furnishings. The nephew said the tall windows still had blackout curtains from the war. He pointed out the pulley system for drying clothes over the fire and the mangle in the basement as well as a pre-refrigerator system for cooling perishables on a sand table.

It was a house full of history. The nephew told us it belonged to his grandmother, and how it used to be full of people at family gatherings in his youth, and now it is so big and empty and there was no one left to live in it. He said that his family had shrunk. The days of having six kids had long gone, they have one or two now.

I asked him about his unusual accent and he said cryptically that it was from all over; he pointedly avoided saying he was Mancunian-Jewish. When my boyfriend mentioned the Sufi house that was just behind the garden wall he remarked that he had no idea what Sufism was. When told it was a Muslim Mystic sect, he winked at us and said wryly that there were no Muslims around here.

Sadly, I couldn’t afford this house full of history, but I did enjoy looking around it, hearing about what went on and picturing it full of life. I pass it often on my route to work and it always draws my eye, it is an acquaintance. Some houses are like that. They are brimming with stories and with the sense of time passing. It won’t be long and there will be a sold sign on it and a new chapter will begin. I hope the new owners will treat it with respect.

...

England has been described as a nation of property developers and there are dozens of daytime TV programs on how to buy a dump, do it up and reap the rewards. Shocking things have been done in the name of development; period features ripped out, gardens cemented for car parking space, and bits added willy-nilly so that you just shake your head in consternation for what must have once been so grand.

Thankfully some houses have been done up sympathetically and some of my favourite house tourist experiences have been in houses like these. Big, old, detached houses in the best areas on the best streets with astronomical prices attached.

We had one vendor show us around one such lovely home. We were buzzed in through electric gates, told to come around to the back past the 4x4s, walk on over the decking into the open plan kitchen dining room that opened out through sheer glass concertina doors to view the garden. What a place for a party! You’re not joking, said the vendor, his friends come around unannounced and he can’t get them to go before dawn.

He made us a latte before giving the tour. Everything was done up to a high spec. The furnishings in the sitting rooms were of lush hotel quality. The rooms upstairs had mod-cons like a ceiling mounted flatscreen over the bed and a remote control so you could switch on the shower and adjust the water to the right temperature before you entered the ensuite.

The vendor’s personality was everywhere – he had a framed cheque for $54,000 from Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas; in another room he called the ‘Al Pacino guest room’, a large canvas print of Pacino in Scarface was mounted at the foot of the double bed. You couldn’t help liking the guy. He took us around the kid’s rooms upstairs, saying they had their own bathroom with spa; it was a long way from his own upbringing, where 6 people shared one bath. His kids didn’t know how lucky they were.

Back in his poker room he showed off how the piped music system worked – it could be isolated or consistent through the house or separated into zones. He pointed out the table had special poker lights on the ceiling and lovingly caressed the carved wood replica Hemingway stand up bar. He clearly loved this house, why was he leaving? The strain of doing up the house had caused his marriage to collapse. He had to sell now to settle the divorce.

...

I have been to so many houses now I can pinpoint the price to within 10K just by glancing at the map and the floor plan. But it has had an unfortunate side effect – I can no longer seriously look at anything in my real price range; I have been indelibly spoilt by looking around all those fabulous places. A pokey little semi-detached seems like a doll house and I have to be cut down to size to fit into it.

Real house hunting is all about compromise – something has to give between price, location, condition, size and potential. I look around my boyfriend’s house where I live, and I think actually its pretty nice, it’s comfortable, close to the bars, convenient to the office… perhaps its not a good idea to move after all – its so much better being a tourist.

...

Mrs Chung's

2007-06-24T20:41:00.001+01:00

I am living in Mrs Chung’s house. In every room the house sighs, it is overcome with an old-fashioned malady; the house is pining for its true mistress. Despite my continual efforts at deChungification, her ghost is everywhere, I can sense her. Mrs Chung’s essence is embedded in the décor: it is in the pink frosted glass light fixtures, in the textured wall paper, and the carpet that goes with the chairs that go with the curtains. I can see Mrs Chung out of the corner of my eye; she is dusting, plumping cushions, and feeling quite pleased.

...

It would have been the height of the 1980s, when Mrs Chung consulted an interior designer and commited herself to Country Pastel. She would have looked in magazines, she would have thought about it for years, she took mental notes every time she entered another woman’s home, and when she finally had her house all done up, top to bottom, it was just the way she wanted.

The lounge and dining room were made boldly ‘open-plan’ by cutting an arch into the intervening wall. The paint around the arch was ‘texturised’ by lathering thick white paint and while it was still wet the decorator’s fingers were squiggled up one side, then over, and down the other, creating undulating waves. The ceiling also has decadent levels of paint where the decorator dipped a rag, pressed it to the ceiling and revolved his wrist carefully to create the repeated effect of circular paint splodges. Mrs Chung approved.

Not to be out done, one side of the room has different textured wallpaper to the other. On the right there is a cross-hatched pattern in pink white and grey. The opposite wall echoes the same colours but in a pattern of orchids. Both sides use a raised stroke effect that feels like foam to the touch. I remember on daytime TV how puffy paint was a popular method of hand-decorating jeans for creative but bored housewives and gay teenage sons destined for the fashion industry. Ah, remember the 80s?

Every room is pastel pink except the bathroom which had an olive green three-piece suite; it was the one room that did not get the Mrs Chung treatment. Perhaps she ran out of money, perhaps it was next, but somehow it never got done. It must have irked her every time she sat down for a pee that her house was not complete. It was all that remained from the people before Mrs Chung, who favoured an orange, olive-green and brown décor that would have been right on in the 70s. Mrs Chung would have thought it horribly drab.

...

It is a common thing, particularly for women, to lament the previous owner’s taste in décor and enjoy stamping their own individuality on their ‘nest’. My boyfriend did not go through this rite of passage, as he was too busy with other things to bother. He was however very house-proud, this being his first home; so he was a full grown man pottering around in a pastel pink house not realising he had become Mrs Chung himself as he arranged fresh flowers for the table and adjusted the alignment of her ornaments as he passed.

I have lived with Mrs Chung for a year. I have cooked in her kitchen, opened her curtains and looked out on her roses. I don’t know what she looked like; although my boyfriend met her several times, she has no face for me. I know her only by her taste. My home, my most private space, has her living in it. In fact it is me who is living in her house, in her slowly fading monument, some 20 years after she achieved it all.

I have been told Mrs Chung was married, but Mr Chung doesn’t seem to have asserted his manly influence inside the house at all. Perhaps Mr Chung spent his time in the potting shed that used to be in the garden. My boyfriend doesn’t do anything practical, from knowing what is going on under the hood of the car, to cooking vegetables, to growing them; domestic DIY activity is mysterious to him. He got rid of the potting shed and the vegetable patch, so that where there was once a purpose to the path dissecting the rectangle of lawn in the backyard, it is now a path to nowhere. Mr Chung has similarly vanished.

Chung is an exotic family name and it is also very familiar to me as I have come to England after living some years in Hong Kong. But Mrs Chung, I am told, was white and judging by her taste, stolidly middle class. Even though Mr Chung was reputedly from the Caribbean there was nothing exotic in the house at all to reflect his origins. Mr Chung is invisible, but Mrs Chung is everywhere. My boyfriend said before he got rid of it that there use to be a little sign that declared, ‘The opinions of the husband of the house are not necessarily those of the management.’

...

‘Oops!’ I dropped another of Mrs Chung’s ornaments in a subversive phase of deChungification. The Chungs downsized from this small house, to an even smaller unit at a retirement village, so they had to leave many of her things behind. My boyfriend swears he took boxes full of her objects to a charity shop when he moved in. However, four or five glass bowls, some funereal vases, two miniature lamps with floral designs, and a ceramic bell – these ones for some reason he kept. ‘You should have seen the ones I took away!’ he giggled.

I confess when I first visited some 6 years ago I harboured some suspicions about my boyfriend’s sexuality. A friend who stayed here described his house as looking like a B&B. If I had not known his apartment in Japan which was all grey and utilitarian, I would have nothing to calm my girlfriend concerns. But now I know it was because he was infused with Mrs Chung, she has refused to let go.

I have made some progress of late; gone are the frilly pelmets over the downstairs curtains; a few more ornaments have bitten the dust; the floral curtains upstairs are three pairs down, one to go. It is an on-going campaign of attrition; the pink doily light shade in the bedroom was an early casualty, while I only got around to removing the gold framed botanical print of a rose the other day. The trouble is everything matches so well, that if you attack one thing, then the next one is forced into relief.

There is no alternative; there has to be complete revolution. Deep inside I know that if ever I do get to the end of it – the wall paper steamed off, carpets replaced, light fixtures changed, ceilings sanded back and repainted, everything made modern – then naturally it will be time to move on.

When it is finally finished the next woman in here will have to contend with the ghosts of my decisions. But somehow I think Mrs Chung’s spirit is the stronger, she is proving a stubborn mistress. Really, I should cut my losses to save my energy for the next place as I will never dislodge her from here. I am living in Mrs Chung’s house.

...

‘Feels Like Summer'

2007-06-01T00:53:00.000+01:00

It was the hottest April in 300 years and the locals didn’t know whether to be gleeful or worried, and so they settled on a compromise of guilty enjoyment. (Unless of course they went off to Spain for Easter in which case they felt cheated and wanted their money back.)

Weather to the British is something more than a combination of barometric pressures; it is a collective measurement of mood, where the seasons are depression, hope, happiness and anxiety. Back in April we entered the season of hope, traditionally associated with ambitious gardening and travel plans, and with picnics.

The weather had been for weeks unseasonably and relentlessly warm forcing a perceptible cultural shift – the locals began to anticipate good weather, to rely on it, and even to invest in outdoor furniture (one month and several hundred millimetres of rain later expectations of the weather are back to normal). It was under similar circumstances last summer that my boyfriend decided to teach his Aussie girlfriend the art of the picnic.

However, he was bluffing, he had never ever picnicked before, despite having passed through childhood. (He insists he was out working from age 4, and for this he believes he should be admired and pitied in equal measure.) With characteristic verve he had acquired the appropriate picnic equipage some years previously, in the form of a fully stocked wicker picnic suitcase complete with straps designed to attach to one’s open-top automobile (presumably).

He was longing to have his moment; he had added a tartan blanket and even stuck in a Frisbee (he was also deprived of Frisbee play in his David Copperfield childhood). And yet despite there being several warm days in those intervening years he had not yet managed his fabled picnic.

...

As in all Jane Austen novels at last the great day had arrived – he had tickets for Opera in the Park to be held on the grounds of a vast country house not far from the city (yes, tickets!). With glee he skipped off to Marks and Spencer’s and bought a pre-packaged salad, some cheese and biscuits, and four bottles of wine. After a few rounds of cultural confusion we worked out that an Esky was the same as a ‘cool box’ and he was delighted to find another strange object in his cupboards actually had a use.

It was only when we joined the long, long line to get in to the park that we realised this was no casual picnic affair. Officials on either side of us herded streams of people into VIP and plebeian queues, and no guesses which one we were in.

After half an hour the British reserve broke and people started talking to each other. Conversation started with a comment on the weather, as in ‘I don’t like the look of them clouds over there’, and progressed through complaint, ‘the queuing was just as bad last year, you’d think they’d’ve got it right this time round’, to end up with comments of admiration and envy, ‘Gosh, you’ve got a lot of equipment, no wonder you need a trolley!’

The boyfriend noticed how other people there had elevated the picnic to a fine art. The man with the trolley had four folding chairs, a table, lanterns, a stereo, and about half the kitchen. He was accompanied by two women who had enormous backpacks usually seen humped around Sumatra by 20-year olds except that theirs were bulging with farmer’s produce, ‘Organic,’ they told me.

By this stage the boyfriend had decided it was better to put the attractive but heavy wicker picnic basket down between queue movements, and, glancing back along the queue stretching over hill and dale he was starting to get the idea there would not be enough room to toss someone the cheese knife, let alone a Frisbee.

...

After a full hour and a half we entered the park grounds to be met with a sea of garden furniture. The locals seemed to have turned the humble picnic into an ironic art form.

Everywhere over the crowded hill there were men dressed in black tie. They were accompanied by women in ball gowns, who had plastic tiaras on their heads. Each party was seated formally at table, faces flushed red from wine drunk out of real glasses. On the table was serious dining crockery and cutlery, one table even had a butler (in shorts) and a lantern done up like a chandelier. The effort! The one-upmanship! The organisation! The Victorians who sent the servants on ahead to set up their picnics would have been proud.

The numbers alone would have overwhelmed their forebears; the scrap of lawn where we spread our humble tartan blanket was overlooked by tables on all sides preventing any view of the stage which was probably over a kilometre away. The only saving grace was we could find the blanket again when we came back from the Portaloo queues because we were the only ones on ground level.

And then, after weeks of sunshine, with the locals gnashing teeth about the state of their lawns and crying ‘drought!’ and ‘hosepipe ban!’, the heavens opened up and poured scorn on the butler in shorts, on the ladies in taffeta and on our pathetic blanket. Two seconds later in concert all around us we heard popping noises, as enormous golf umbrellas sprouted everywhere, as in a David Attenborough time-lapse sequence of fungi sprouting in the rainforest.

The locals were determined to enjoy themselves. I even heard one group singing rain-song medleys with ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain’ segueing into ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’, until the ‘Shhs!’ were too loud to ignore. I had entirely forgotten that there that somewhere far away they were playing opera.

...

At about 11pm a fireworks splutter from the other side of the ornamental lake was the signal that the seasoned ironic picnickers knew well – the race was on. Crockery and cutlery and butlers in shorts were put on trolleys and trundled away in great haste. We knew something was up, and bundled up our sodden blanket, put the mushy biscuits back in the Esky with the empties and made a made dash for it.

It took a full three hours to get out of the car park. The rain was bucketing down, the fluro-coated traffic wardens were splattered with mud and in foul moods. We didn’t talk much. It was after 1am before we got through the front door. The picnic basket went back in the cupboard, with the blanket, dirty cups and wet biscuits still inside.

That was a year ago. The Frisbee I am sure is fine, although it has yet to be given its maiden flight. We are too frightened to see what might have grown on the more organic elements in the basket. And all I know is that the boyfriend is cured of picnics, ironic or otherwise. Yes, now he wants to have a BBQ.

...

‘Rimy and Damp'

2007-05-12T20:17:00.001+01:00

I have been living in the UK for a year now. It takes a full cycle of seasons before I feel comfortably settled in a new country, and as I am well in to my second spring, the time has come to take stock of my new situation and set down my observations.

...

England is so effortlessly green. With my family and friends back home in Australia in the grips of a dispiriting drought it is extraordinary to look out the kitchen window each morning at all that greenness. But then it is so green because it is so bloody wet.

‘Manchester gets more rainfall than the Amazon!’ I read somewhere in the papers. Surely the Amazon can't be that wet... But they are prone to the odd bit of exaggeration here because the same paper quoted last August that the south of England is ‘drier than the Sudan’, from a politician who had obviously not gone to Khartoum for his last summer hols.

The English firmly believe they have extreme weather, and having lived through an impressive gale a few months back I am reluctant to counter their claims, but I think it is fair to say that the locals here have a great sensitivity to meteorology.

BBC TV’s weather ‘caster’ (as they are called, as if casting lots) stands in front of a screen at the beginning of their bulletin showing a shot of the skies above some spot in the UK with a pithy invocation of the weather. This is one of the things I am enjoying about England – they have a literary heritage that comes through even in graphical weather bites.

These few words are wondrous in their emotive brevity, ‘Rimy and Damp' it might say, or ‘Squally showers'. I love these little comments so much I think I will name my blog posts after them (unless the wind changes, of course).

...

First blog, finally.

2007-05-12T19:01:00.000+01:00

I am now committed to regular blogging, joining the ranks of all those people who have so much to say with so few people to listen to them...

First, my big news:

The book is out at last - Pre-Animate: The Guidebook for Independent Animators - and available on Amazon.co.uk . The book is attaining lofty levels in the Amazon sales ranking, I think it was in the 300,000s last time I checked. Oh well, with 1.5 million books on Amazon in the UK, I suppose it isn't such a bad effort. Keep buying the book!

I will keep this blog up to date with weekly or fortnightly ramblings, but if my erratic attempts at keeping diaries in the past have any bearing on this new medium, then it will be a few taps on the tomato sauce bottle, then a big splodge and just a few dribbles after that.

...