Each time I go back to the UK, it takes me a while to get back into the spiritual groove I have been establishing since I moved here.
It’s tough, when you’re surrounded by a hundred Welshmen, spilling their pints of Stella over you, while drowning their sorrows at another Welsh rugby loss, to stay calm.
So when I come back, I have to re-group, as they say, and have to immerse myself back in the culture that seems such a far remove from home.
My bookshelves here are packed with self-help books of various sorts. My latest read was Eat, Pray, Love, a rather earnest quest by US journalist Elizabeth Gilbert to “find herself” in Italy, India and Indonesia.
It all sounded a bit energetic for me, and I specially wasn’t drawn to the India bit, where she rose every day at 3am to meditate.
Good grief: I’m hardly ever in bed by 3am.
I’m a bigger fan of Andrew Gottlieb’s take on it – Drink, Play, F@*k – although having no hash key on my Apple computer keyboard (as I have just discovered), I have had to insert a star where a hash should be. Life’s never easy, is it?
Outside my local grocery store, I picked up a magazine called Awareness, billed as “California’s premier bi-monthly holistic magazine”. It’s a rather unprepossessing publication – all muted colours and men who look like aliens on the cover – but I thought it might serve as a pick-me-up for my dilapidated spirit.
The cover provided information about forthcoming events, including a “Raw Spirit Festival” (rustic 100% proof Russian vodka, I wondered? Somehow, I doubted it). There was also an “Alchemy Conference”.
The only thing that would draw me to that would be if it were to alchemise into a Jimmy Choo "all shoes ten cents" sale before I got there.
Inside the magazine, there were even more treats – a tree-hugging day in Santa Monica, for instance. I’ve never quite got tree-hugging. Why would you hug a tree while there are still men in the world? And why is there not a Martini-Hugging Day?
People have told me that tree-hugging is a very rewarding experience – well, not people I hang out with, you understand, just people who don’t wash their hair much and prefer Glastonbury digs to a Marriott. Weird people.
The magazine is very big on angels (and disturbingly, I really do know people who claim to hang out with their angels), and there is even a website on which you can “Listen to Archangelic Messages”.
I don’t think that Christmas is the time to tune in, to be honest, a time when archangels have a habit of delivering messages along the lines of: “Lo, you will become pregnant without having sex and not be able to find a Marriott within walking distance.”
If you’re not keen on chatting to angels, guess what: you can “Get in touch with your personal gatekeeper”. Should you be as ignorant as I am on this, your gatekeeper is “The producer/director of the play your soul wrote before you came into this lifetime.”
Having just had possibly the worst year of my entire life, here’s a message, gatekeeper: you should have done a re-write of the middle act; it’s shit.
Despite some strange practices described within, Awareness is quite encouraging about money and does not rule out material riches going hand in hand with spiritual ones (just as well, the packet these people must be making on the back of the gullible and/or stupid).
Niurka, for instance, is a glamorous businesswoman and author of Supreme Influence; she offers techniques on how to become aligned with your true nature in order to increase prosperity and yet stay true to your spiritual self.
I am quite drawn to this you can have the penny and the bun philosophy, and Niurka has a strong background in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), of which I am already a strong advocate.
“Make a decision to go deep within yourself,” advises Niurka. “Focus on the essential nature of your being and everything around you will change.”
My bank balance, in particular, I hoped, although I suspect my damned gatekeeper wrote: “No money. Ever” into my script in his/her first draft.
I already meditate twice a day, but decided to up it a bit, in the hope of changing a few things.
When I first learned Transcendental Meditation, I found that it lowered my blood pressure and made me generally less anxious and depressed – well, apart from on the day when I went for my initiation ceremony, couldn’t find anywhere to buy the required handkerchief on Oxford Street, and nearly went under a double-decker bus in my rush to get there.
It’s a powerful tool, though. Within an hour of upping my 20 minutes to 40, I was in Sports Club LA spa, asking for more information about the Four Seasons Amex special massage offer.
“We’re not the Four Seasons,” explained the receptionist. “Yes, you are,” I insisted. “The Beverly Hills Hotel is, and you, the Beverly Wilshire, are part of the same group.”
“But we’re not the Beverly Wilshire,” she said.
Oh, no, you’re the gym. Silly me.
It’s all very well diving into your psyche in search of greater awareness, but nobody ever tells you that it can make you mad.
Barking mad, if you’re a tree-hugger.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Keeping A Welcome In The Welsh Beverly Hillsides 12/2/09
Hiraeth.
It’s a word I used on my Facebook page this week, saying that I was suffering from a rather severe bout of it. It is a Welsh word that, as far as I can gather, doesn’t have an English equivalent, and it means, quite simply, a deep longing for home.
It’s not a longing for your house or any specific individual, and the only way I can explain it is in terms of its being a longing for one’s homeland: the place where you left your heart.
No matter how far you travel and how much you enjoy every new experience and people that you meet, hiraeth is the rhythm of your innermost being, always reminding you of the place from which you came and gave you life.
There is also, in my case at least, the inevitability of its returning there.
It came upon me suddenly this week, and although I described my sudden feelings of isolation in terms of homesickness to my non-Welsh friends, I could say “hiraeth” to my countrymen and know that they would know exactly what I meant.
I love LA. I love the sun, the easier pace of life, the lower utility bills, the great service in bars, restaurants, and at the end of the phone. I love the fact that you can eat out at a really good restaurant without having to take out a second mortgage; and I love being able to go to the gym and eat healthily with such ease and without being considered a bit of a freak.
In contrast, there is very little I miss about the UK. Appalling train services, expensive gas, electric and phone, rudeness pretty much everywhere you turn – on a point by point chart, LA would win over the UK every time.
But then there is that little corner of a foreign field that is, to me, forever Wales, and I am as attached to it now as the day I came out of the womb at Glossop Maternity Home in Cardiff in 1958.
I know how lucky I am to be living in Beverly Hills, where the sun rises in my living room and sets in my office. I know that for many people, this would be the trip of a lifetime, and that even to see the Hollywood sign on the hills just once, let alone every day, would be one of life’s great joys.
And I know that I am blessed to have a job that enables me to travel and meet new people all the time, and that I have been equally blessed to have the good health that enables me to do that.
All of this I know in my head. But then there’s hiraeth. That aching, longing, tugging of the heart that, this week, has seen me sobbing uncontrollably to go home – to my family, my friends, my homeland. To where I belong.
I’ve been looking at the languages of other cultures to see if they contain a word that conveys the same sentiment.
Arabic has the word “ghurba”, which is a derivative of the word for stranger, and in the Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is explained as: "absence from the homeland: separation from one’s native country, banishment, exile; life or place away from home.” it is also often translated as “Diaspora”.
Like hiraeth, “ghurba” also carries with it an intense, melancholic feeling of longing, nostalgia, homesickness and separation: of, according to the Canadian newspaper columnist Ghada Al Atrash Janbey (thank you, yet again, Google), “a severe patriotic yearning for a place where one’s heart was not only living, but . . . to a place where one’s heart danced to the silence of a homeland’s soul.”
There is a word for it in Portuguese, too – saudade – and it expresses a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one loved but is now gone.
It also carries fatalist undertones and the repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return – or even, as one translation puts it: “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.”
Apparently, this state of mind has subsequently become pretty much part of the Portuguese way of life – a feeling of absence, something missing, and yet a desire for presence rather than absence – or, as they say in Portuguese, a strong desire to “matar as sauddasa” (literally, to kill the saudades).
I don’t know about you, but that kind of thinking isn’t going to put Lisbon top of my must-see holiday destinations next year.
My favourite word so far to describe my 6000 miles away from home hiraeth is the Dutch one, “weemoed”, which is apparently a “fuzzy form” of nostagia. Being Dutch, their definition means that we don’t have to guess for very long quite why it might be regarded as fuzzy, but I like the word.
The Fins have “kaiho” – a state of involuntary solitude, in which the subject feels incompleteness and yearns for something unobtainable or extremely difficult and tedious to attain (I tell you: my Welsh hiraeth buddies and I are a veritable choir of laughing policemen among this lot).
In Korean, “keurium” is the closest to saudade, and reflects a yearning for anything that has left a deep impression on the heart – a memory, place, person etc. The Japanese word for a longing of the heart is “natsukashii”. While in Armenian, the word “karot” describes the deep feeling of missing something or somebody.
Different words, same emotion, but to me there is something about just saying the Welsh word hiraeth that pulls at exactly the part of your body from which the longing comes.
It’s the part I feel when seeing my friends’ names on Facebook late at night, and the pictures of my close friends Mary and Liam's first grandchild.
It’s my Mum’s voice, 6000 miles away on the phone, telling me about Maddie the bichon frise’s latest crimes (breaking into my old bedroom and opening the M & S biscuits, an aunt’s Christmas present).
It’s knowing that there’s a rugby game being played just a couple of miles from my house, and my brother calling me from my home to tell me who was asking after me.
I want to know how Sioned and Gareth’s wedding plans are going.
I want to see Leisha who, for my birthday when I went back home, decorated my table with flowers, bought a cake with candles, and reduced me to tears with her thoughtfulness.
I want to know what Liz and Ronw are filming and share with them the hysterical laughter than never fails to leave me uplifted.
I want to go to the Robin Hood pub, chat to Dave, and hear Gwerfyl and Heulwen's latest adventures.
I want to see the Tuesday lunchtime rugby blokes in Llandaff's Butchers Arms, still reminiscing about the Lions tour 30 years ago.
Although "hiraeth" is a word not linked to specifics, all of these people are inherently linked to the home I love. And each brings extraordinary qualities and joys to a life that, even as I look to the sun setting on Beverly Hills, fills me with a longing I haven't felt in many years.
It’s a longing for the warmth of the Welsh, the humour and laughter (oh, God, how I miss the laughter here), Sunday roast in the Cameo Club, the wet leaves in autumn – yes, the rain. I never thought I’d say it: but I really miss the rain.
I miss being among people who "get" me. The rugby team were shit against Australia, but I don't care. I miss being Welsh.
Whatever you want to call it in any language, it’s a longing for home. Like most clichés, "Home is Where the Heart Is" didn’t earn its cliché status for nothing.
It’s a word I used on my Facebook page this week, saying that I was suffering from a rather severe bout of it. It is a Welsh word that, as far as I can gather, doesn’t have an English equivalent, and it means, quite simply, a deep longing for home.
It’s not a longing for your house or any specific individual, and the only way I can explain it is in terms of its being a longing for one’s homeland: the place where you left your heart.
No matter how far you travel and how much you enjoy every new experience and people that you meet, hiraeth is the rhythm of your innermost being, always reminding you of the place from which you came and gave you life.
There is also, in my case at least, the inevitability of its returning there.
It came upon me suddenly this week, and although I described my sudden feelings of isolation in terms of homesickness to my non-Welsh friends, I could say “hiraeth” to my countrymen and know that they would know exactly what I meant.
I love LA. I love the sun, the easier pace of life, the lower utility bills, the great service in bars, restaurants, and at the end of the phone. I love the fact that you can eat out at a really good restaurant without having to take out a second mortgage; and I love being able to go to the gym and eat healthily with such ease and without being considered a bit of a freak.
In contrast, there is very little I miss about the UK. Appalling train services, expensive gas, electric and phone, rudeness pretty much everywhere you turn – on a point by point chart, LA would win over the UK every time.
But then there is that little corner of a foreign field that is, to me, forever Wales, and I am as attached to it now as the day I came out of the womb at Glossop Maternity Home in Cardiff in 1958.
I know how lucky I am to be living in Beverly Hills, where the sun rises in my living room and sets in my office. I know that for many people, this would be the trip of a lifetime, and that even to see the Hollywood sign on the hills just once, let alone every day, would be one of life’s great joys.
And I know that I am blessed to have a job that enables me to travel and meet new people all the time, and that I have been equally blessed to have the good health that enables me to do that.
All of this I know in my head. But then there’s hiraeth. That aching, longing, tugging of the heart that, this week, has seen me sobbing uncontrollably to go home – to my family, my friends, my homeland. To where I belong.
I’ve been looking at the languages of other cultures to see if they contain a word that conveys the same sentiment.
Arabic has the word “ghurba”, which is a derivative of the word for stranger, and in the Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic is explained as: "absence from the homeland: separation from one’s native country, banishment, exile; life or place away from home.” it is also often translated as “Diaspora”.
Like hiraeth, “ghurba” also carries with it an intense, melancholic feeling of longing, nostalgia, homesickness and separation: of, according to the Canadian newspaper columnist Ghada Al Atrash Janbey (thank you, yet again, Google), “a severe patriotic yearning for a place where one’s heart was not only living, but . . . to a place where one’s heart danced to the silence of a homeland’s soul.”
There is a word for it in Portuguese, too – saudade – and it expresses a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one loved but is now gone.
It also carries fatalist undertones and the repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return – or even, as one translation puts it: “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.”
Apparently, this state of mind has subsequently become pretty much part of the Portuguese way of life – a feeling of absence, something missing, and yet a desire for presence rather than absence – or, as they say in Portuguese, a strong desire to “matar as sauddasa” (literally, to kill the saudades).
I don’t know about you, but that kind of thinking isn’t going to put Lisbon top of my must-see holiday destinations next year.
My favourite word so far to describe my 6000 miles away from home hiraeth is the Dutch one, “weemoed”, which is apparently a “fuzzy form” of nostagia. Being Dutch, their definition means that we don’t have to guess for very long quite why it might be regarded as fuzzy, but I like the word.
The Fins have “kaiho” – a state of involuntary solitude, in which the subject feels incompleteness and yearns for something unobtainable or extremely difficult and tedious to attain (I tell you: my Welsh hiraeth buddies and I are a veritable choir of laughing policemen among this lot).
In Korean, “keurium” is the closest to saudade, and reflects a yearning for anything that has left a deep impression on the heart – a memory, place, person etc. The Japanese word for a longing of the heart is “natsukashii”. While in Armenian, the word “karot” describes the deep feeling of missing something or somebody.
Different words, same emotion, but to me there is something about just saying the Welsh word hiraeth that pulls at exactly the part of your body from which the longing comes.
It’s the part I feel when seeing my friends’ names on Facebook late at night, and the pictures of my close friends Mary and Liam's first grandchild.
It’s my Mum’s voice, 6000 miles away on the phone, telling me about Maddie the bichon frise’s latest crimes (breaking into my old bedroom and opening the M & S biscuits, an aunt’s Christmas present).
It’s knowing that there’s a rugby game being played just a couple of miles from my house, and my brother calling me from my home to tell me who was asking after me.
I want to know how Sioned and Gareth’s wedding plans are going.
I want to see Leisha who, for my birthday when I went back home, decorated my table with flowers, bought a cake with candles, and reduced me to tears with her thoughtfulness.
I want to know what Liz and Ronw are filming and share with them the hysterical laughter than never fails to leave me uplifted.
I want to go to the Robin Hood pub, chat to Dave, and hear Gwerfyl and Heulwen's latest adventures.
I want to see the Tuesday lunchtime rugby blokes in Llandaff's Butchers Arms, still reminiscing about the Lions tour 30 years ago.
Although "hiraeth" is a word not linked to specifics, all of these people are inherently linked to the home I love. And each brings extraordinary qualities and joys to a life that, even as I look to the sun setting on Beverly Hills, fills me with a longing I haven't felt in many years.
It’s a longing for the warmth of the Welsh, the humour and laughter (oh, God, how I miss the laughter here), Sunday roast in the Cameo Club, the wet leaves in autumn – yes, the rain. I never thought I’d say it: but I really miss the rain.
I miss being among people who "get" me. The rugby team were shit against Australia, but I don't care. I miss being Welsh.
Whatever you want to call it in any language, it’s a longing for home. Like most clichés, "Home is Where the Heart Is" didn’t earn its cliché status for nothing.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Poem For McDonald's At Thanksgiving 11/23/09
Now the dads and mums
with fatty bums
and kids with zits
and endless shits
were just passing by
And the lazy cooks
who can’t read books
and can’t bake lean
and don’t like green
were just passing by
And the poor old tramps
with four legged scamps
on scruffy rope
and losing hope
were just passing by
And the money guys
with gleaming eyes
in disbelief
what passed for beef
were just passing by
And anyone with any sense
or even just a few more pence
or sense of smell
and taste as well
were just passing by
On the other side
with fatty bums
and kids with zits
and endless shits
were just passing by
And the lazy cooks
who can’t read books
and can’t bake lean
and don’t like green
were just passing by
And the poor old tramps
with four legged scamps
on scruffy rope
and losing hope
were just passing by
And the money guys
with gleaming eyes
in disbelief
what passed for beef
were just passing by
And anyone with any sense
or even just a few more pence
or sense of smell
and taste as well
were just passing by
On the other side
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Thanks at Thanksgiving 11/22/09
Independence Day, Darwin Day, Veterans Day, Columbus Day, Halloween – there is no person or event too big or too small that the Americans will not commemorate.
And on Thursday, it’s the real biggie - Thanksgiving.
It was in this very month last year that I came to LA for only the second time in my life and decided that I wanted to live here. I was enjoying my 50th birthday treat to myself and staying at the five-star Beverly Wilshire at the bottom of Rodeo Drive, the outside of which features in the film Pretty Woman (the interior was filmed on a set, as I disappointingly discovered).
I also discovered that Thanksgiving is no time to be alone in the US. The few people I knew had either gone away for the holiday or were entertaining family and, like Christmas, it seemed a time only for nearest and dearest.
So I decided to have my Thanksgiving dinner in the hotel, surrounded by families and couples too lazy to cook their own turkey. One problem: my dinner never arrived. I waited. And waited. But it never came. The hotel is my favourite in the world and they rarely get things wrong, but being the only person in America who didn’t get to nibble a bit of turkey on Thanksgiving was rather galling.
They made up for it by giving me a complimentary meal on my return in March this year, but by that time I was heavily into my new healthy lifestyle, and a leaf is no substitute for a juicy chunk of ugly animal.
This year, I’ve been invited to Santa Monica for my dinner, but don’t want to have to worry about transport, so have had to pass up the offer. The group Brits in LA have a dinner for waifs and strays at the Hudson club and restaurant; and the Beverly has its usual spectacular menu (or so I understand, according to the people who have had the privilege of tasting it).
I was considering all my options, when it suddenly hit me: Thanksgiving isn’t a big deal to me, but it must be to the many homeless in the city; and in the UK, there are so many organisations begging for volunteers to make Christmas just a little bit special for people less fortunate than themselves, it was probably the same for Thanksgiving in the States.
So I went online and, sure enough, discovered that Thanksgiving is a really dreadful time for the homeless. Of course, every single day is a bad one if you have no home, but there is something about festive occasions that reinforces the desperation with added poignancy.
So I decided to sign up to do volunteer work, serving food and beverages down on Skid Row.
It was a place I had heard about only in movies and on TV; in the musical Little Shop of Horrors, there is a song called Skid Row, which is a rather jolly little number that has me tapping my hands on the gym treadmill when I exercise to it. Yes, Skid Row was where I would spend Thanksgiving.
After all, the books I had been reading to further my emotional and spiritual “journey” as they are wont to call it here, kept emphasising the importance of being of service to others, and what better opportunity was I going to get than being precisely that, on one of the most special days of the year.
I went online and saw Ally McBeal/Brothers and Sisters star Calista Flockhart in an apron and brandishing a spoon at a dinner for the homeless last Thanksgiving; and the web was full of stories of other stars who did their bit for the downtrodden.
I was about to join them and started to make calls. But guess what . . . I couldn’t get in! Be a volunteer at Thanksgiving? You have to be bloody joking, was the general riposte. Join the bloody queue.
The queue to be a volunteer helping the homeless in LA at Thanksgiving turned out to be longer than the one of people in the queue for their dinner. In fact, I had even missed the boat for Christmas and was looking to next year’s Thanksgiving if I stood a snowball’s chance of doing my bit.
How far we have come since Mary, Joseph and Jesus couldn’t find any room at the inn? I was trying to be an innkeeper and they still wouldn’t let me in. How weird was that? Too many celebrities looking for a photo opportunity, I reckoned.
Is the volunteer list as long in the UK? I have no idea, but it warms the heart to know that there are so many people who will give up their time, rather than just open their wallets, to make their fellow beings’ lives more comfortable. And it made me want to get on that list and do something for real.
A homeless person isn’t just for Thanksgiving.
And on Thursday, it’s the real biggie - Thanksgiving.
It was in this very month last year that I came to LA for only the second time in my life and decided that I wanted to live here. I was enjoying my 50th birthday treat to myself and staying at the five-star Beverly Wilshire at the bottom of Rodeo Drive, the outside of which features in the film Pretty Woman (the interior was filmed on a set, as I disappointingly discovered).
I also discovered that Thanksgiving is no time to be alone in the US. The few people I knew had either gone away for the holiday or were entertaining family and, like Christmas, it seemed a time only for nearest and dearest.
So I decided to have my Thanksgiving dinner in the hotel, surrounded by families and couples too lazy to cook their own turkey. One problem: my dinner never arrived. I waited. And waited. But it never came. The hotel is my favourite in the world and they rarely get things wrong, but being the only person in America who didn’t get to nibble a bit of turkey on Thanksgiving was rather galling.
They made up for it by giving me a complimentary meal on my return in March this year, but by that time I was heavily into my new healthy lifestyle, and a leaf is no substitute for a juicy chunk of ugly animal.
This year, I’ve been invited to Santa Monica for my dinner, but don’t want to have to worry about transport, so have had to pass up the offer. The group Brits in LA have a dinner for waifs and strays at the Hudson club and restaurant; and the Beverly has its usual spectacular menu (or so I understand, according to the people who have had the privilege of tasting it).
I was considering all my options, when it suddenly hit me: Thanksgiving isn’t a big deal to me, but it must be to the many homeless in the city; and in the UK, there are so many organisations begging for volunteers to make Christmas just a little bit special for people less fortunate than themselves, it was probably the same for Thanksgiving in the States.
So I went online and, sure enough, discovered that Thanksgiving is a really dreadful time for the homeless. Of course, every single day is a bad one if you have no home, but there is something about festive occasions that reinforces the desperation with added poignancy.
So I decided to sign up to do volunteer work, serving food and beverages down on Skid Row.
It was a place I had heard about only in movies and on TV; in the musical Little Shop of Horrors, there is a song called Skid Row, which is a rather jolly little number that has me tapping my hands on the gym treadmill when I exercise to it. Yes, Skid Row was where I would spend Thanksgiving.
After all, the books I had been reading to further my emotional and spiritual “journey” as they are wont to call it here, kept emphasising the importance of being of service to others, and what better opportunity was I going to get than being precisely that, on one of the most special days of the year.
I went online and saw Ally McBeal/Brothers and Sisters star Calista Flockhart in an apron and brandishing a spoon at a dinner for the homeless last Thanksgiving; and the web was full of stories of other stars who did their bit for the downtrodden.
I was about to join them and started to make calls. But guess what . . . I couldn’t get in! Be a volunteer at Thanksgiving? You have to be bloody joking, was the general riposte. Join the bloody queue.
The queue to be a volunteer helping the homeless in LA at Thanksgiving turned out to be longer than the one of people in the queue for their dinner. In fact, I had even missed the boat for Christmas and was looking to next year’s Thanksgiving if I stood a snowball’s chance of doing my bit.
How far we have come since Mary, Joseph and Jesus couldn’t find any room at the inn? I was trying to be an innkeeper and they still wouldn’t let me in. How weird was that? Too many celebrities looking for a photo opportunity, I reckoned.
Is the volunteer list as long in the UK? I have no idea, but it warms the heart to know that there are so many people who will give up their time, rather than just open their wallets, to make their fellow beings’ lives more comfortable. And it made me want to get on that list and do something for real.
A homeless person isn’t just for Thanksgiving.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
BA - Bugger All Again 11/17/09
Air New Zealand came through spectacularly in giving me my upgrade as a reward for my having given up my favourite seat last month to La Toya Jackson.
British Airways, meanwhile, aren’t budging on the £3.60 for a flight I wasn’t able to take. Their view is that as I didn’t turn up at the check-in desk, they are not responsible for my not having taken the flight.
Never mind that I had to re-schedule an entire week’s worth of meetings and go to Paris on the Eurostar (hence my not “turning up” at their check-in desk), after they left my luggage in London when I flew to Toulouse; nor that in 19 months of correspondence, sending them everything they asked for three times, they never once said they would not refund the flight.
It is, I now learn, their policy not to (pity they hadn't thought to mention it 19 months ago), but guess what? In addition to my £3.60, they have credited me with thousands of Air Miles.
When I told them I would never be flying with them again, they said that if I did, I could have an upgrade. Fair play to the press office, they really have tried their best, but their hands are clearly tied, and something tells me that upgrade won’t be from Business to First, London/LA.
I have yet to talk to anyone who has a good word to say about BA at the moment. Rude onboard staff, dreadful food, lost luggage, general inefficiency.
Last month, a friend of mine turned up at Heathrow with her family to fly to LA, after checking in online. It transpired the computer hadn’t worked, and, 40 minutes before take-off, she was told the plane was then full and she couldn’t go on it. She had to wait another five hours to catch a Virgin flight.
Following the company’s recent merger with Iberia, BA’s Chief Executive Willie Walsh has just said that BA’s services are not going to be affected. Blimey. That can only be bad news for all of us.
Dealing with BA hasn’t been my only travel stress. The Atlantic haul that I have been doing quite regularly is starting to take its toll. Having just come back from visiting the UK and Paris, I am fairly wiped out after having my French mobile stolen on the Eurostar and then, I thought, my US/UK wallet, complete with every card, stolen from my hotel room.
I spent well over an hour in the police station, reporting every detail, and another hour cancelling various cards – only to remember that I had left it at home for fear of losing it.
Even buying a train ticket at Paddington brought stress, when an elderly couple admonished me for going to the First Class window to buy a First Class ticket, instead of standing in the long Standard ticket queue.
I had to shout at the guy to get his hands off me when he started grabbing my shoulder. When I told him to go away, he kept repeating: “Oh yes, I’m just a pathetic Englishman.” It saved me from having to say it, anyway.
Road rage and air rage have clearly extended to rail rage now in the UK, a country in which people seem to be more and more angry every time I return. The States has its problems, but the Californian sun really does seem to put people in better spirits for much of the time.
The only pleasure in UK travel is getting into a London black cab; they really are the most amiable taxi drivers in the world. The French don’t want to drive anywhere, the LA drivers can’t understand a word you say, even if they do want to take you, and in Wales you can never get a taxi of any sort if it’s raining – which is most of the time. There are some rotten apples in the black cab barrel, true, and some of the drivers’ views are a tad extreme, but they are courteous, knowledgeable, and, on the whole, pretty honest.
But it’s good to know I’m going to be car/train/plane free again for a few weeks, returning to my LA routine of white tea/gym/fresh fruit, after eating bread and cheese in a small French hotel room because the British pound is now about as appealing as a stale baguette.
Four euros for a cup of tea – that’s nearly £4 now. Next time I go, I’m taking a travel kettle and a box of PG Tips; actually, on second thoughts, I think I might just stay at home and look at the Eiffel Tower on the Internet.
Paris is still the most beautiful city on Earth, and it’s always good to go to the UK, too, and touch base with friends and family. I also loved doing another stint with the great people on ITV1’s Alan Titchmarsh Show – and this week I was able to say that I sang on the same show as Ronan Keating. Not in the same item, unfortunately, and my contribution was only one line from the Welsh national anthem, but it was still the same show.
I also enjoyed broadcasting again about I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! which has returned to ITV1 in its ninth series.
And with my last Air New Zealand flight from LA to London taking just a little over nine hours - and certainly the way my First Great Western journeys by rail are going - ANZ will soon be the fastest – and probably the cheapest – way to travel.
British Airways, meanwhile, aren’t budging on the £3.60 for a flight I wasn’t able to take. Their view is that as I didn’t turn up at the check-in desk, they are not responsible for my not having taken the flight.
Never mind that I had to re-schedule an entire week’s worth of meetings and go to Paris on the Eurostar (hence my not “turning up” at their check-in desk), after they left my luggage in London when I flew to Toulouse; nor that in 19 months of correspondence, sending them everything they asked for three times, they never once said they would not refund the flight.
It is, I now learn, their policy not to (pity they hadn't thought to mention it 19 months ago), but guess what? In addition to my £3.60, they have credited me with thousands of Air Miles.
When I told them I would never be flying with them again, they said that if I did, I could have an upgrade. Fair play to the press office, they really have tried their best, but their hands are clearly tied, and something tells me that upgrade won’t be from Business to First, London/LA.
I have yet to talk to anyone who has a good word to say about BA at the moment. Rude onboard staff, dreadful food, lost luggage, general inefficiency.
Last month, a friend of mine turned up at Heathrow with her family to fly to LA, after checking in online. It transpired the computer hadn’t worked, and, 40 minutes before take-off, she was told the plane was then full and she couldn’t go on it. She had to wait another five hours to catch a Virgin flight.
Following the company’s recent merger with Iberia, BA’s Chief Executive Willie Walsh has just said that BA’s services are not going to be affected. Blimey. That can only be bad news for all of us.
Dealing with BA hasn’t been my only travel stress. The Atlantic haul that I have been doing quite regularly is starting to take its toll. Having just come back from visiting the UK and Paris, I am fairly wiped out after having my French mobile stolen on the Eurostar and then, I thought, my US/UK wallet, complete with every card, stolen from my hotel room.
I spent well over an hour in the police station, reporting every detail, and another hour cancelling various cards – only to remember that I had left it at home for fear of losing it.
Even buying a train ticket at Paddington brought stress, when an elderly couple admonished me for going to the First Class window to buy a First Class ticket, instead of standing in the long Standard ticket queue.
I had to shout at the guy to get his hands off me when he started grabbing my shoulder. When I told him to go away, he kept repeating: “Oh yes, I’m just a pathetic Englishman.” It saved me from having to say it, anyway.
Road rage and air rage have clearly extended to rail rage now in the UK, a country in which people seem to be more and more angry every time I return. The States has its problems, but the Californian sun really does seem to put people in better spirits for much of the time.
The only pleasure in UK travel is getting into a London black cab; they really are the most amiable taxi drivers in the world. The French don’t want to drive anywhere, the LA drivers can’t understand a word you say, even if they do want to take you, and in Wales you can never get a taxi of any sort if it’s raining – which is most of the time. There are some rotten apples in the black cab barrel, true, and some of the drivers’ views are a tad extreme, but they are courteous, knowledgeable, and, on the whole, pretty honest.
But it’s good to know I’m going to be car/train/plane free again for a few weeks, returning to my LA routine of white tea/gym/fresh fruit, after eating bread and cheese in a small French hotel room because the British pound is now about as appealing as a stale baguette.
Four euros for a cup of tea – that’s nearly £4 now. Next time I go, I’m taking a travel kettle and a box of PG Tips; actually, on second thoughts, I think I might just stay at home and look at the Eiffel Tower on the Internet.
Paris is still the most beautiful city on Earth, and it’s always good to go to the UK, too, and touch base with friends and family. I also loved doing another stint with the great people on ITV1’s Alan Titchmarsh Show – and this week I was able to say that I sang on the same show as Ronan Keating. Not in the same item, unfortunately, and my contribution was only one line from the Welsh national anthem, but it was still the same show.
I also enjoyed broadcasting again about I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! which has returned to ITV1 in its ninth series.
And with my last Air New Zealand flight from LA to London taking just a little over nine hours - and certainly the way my First Great Western journeys by rail are going - ANZ will soon be the fastest – and probably the cheapest – way to travel.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
You Say Tomato, I Say What The Hell's That? 11/15/09
Will I ever taste a real tomato again?
Will I ever again taste a tomato that is distinguishable from a sprout?
These are some of the questions I find myself asking every week as I dive among the bruised supermarket pulp here and try, in vain, to find just one ripe, full, firm fruit that smells and tastes as a tomato should.
The smell that greets you in your greenhouse when those first tomato plants start to grow; the smell of summer when you pick the fruits for your first salad; the smell that comes upon you suddenly, after the fish, the freshly-baked bread and the mouldy cheese in a Paris market.
The smell that is unmistakably, gloriously, sweet, earthy and beckoningly, nothing but tomato.
Everyone warned me that Californian fruit and veg tastes of nothing, and they were right. And I never feel more homesick than on a Sunday morning, when I remember my weekend routine in Paris, where I lived for eight years before coming to LA: waking to the sun climbing between ancient rooftops, walking along the Seine to the Bastille, drinking coffee while listening to the debate in the philosophical café, and wandering the length of the market where sea salt, Indian spices, chicken cooking on a spit, wine and lettuce compete for attention.
And tomatoes. Yes, real tomatoes. Baby tomatoes. Plum tomatoes. Tomatoes on the vine. Tomatoes as big as pumpkins (okay: small pumpkins). Red, green, purple, yellow, white.
The only Sunday market in Beverly Hills features a few over-priced stalls next to the busy Santa Monica freeway, where you might as well buy a cabbage as a peach, for all the difference in taste.
So, last weekend, it was a joy to re-experience my old routine when I returned to the City of Light that is my favourite place on Earth.
Well, it is my favourite place on Earth for tomatoes, but, as I discovered this time round, there are ways in which California spoils you that make Europe, and in particular France, feel as if you have been sent to Coventry by entire nations – a bit like getting nul points in the Eurovision Song Contest.
When I lived in Paris, I was never someone who complained about the service, which I always found so much better than in the UK I felt blessed if a waiter so much as acknowledged me within the first ten minutes of sitting down. On Saturday afternoon, however, I left four restaurants after being seated and then ignored for well over ten minutes in each one.
I went to Orange to sort out a problem with my French phone, and despite speaking French throughout, could not have endured less communication than if I had tried to make a trunk call by holding an elephant to my ear.
The problem with France’s service industry is that wherever employees are on the ladder, they know that they are pretty much going to stay there; that’s why some restaurants have staff who have been there for decades.
In the States, the spirit of optimism that infects the nation makes service staff always feel as if they are en route to something bigger and better. That optimism might often be misplaced, but it is as if the whole country is in permanent audition mode, knowing that if they tread the boards just that little bit longer, they will hit the big time.
As a middle-aged woman who regularly dines alone, I am never made to feel like a second-class citizen in LA. I am not shunted off to a dark corner of the bar if I express a preference to sitting at a table, and the best staff also remember their customers, irrespective of how often those customers frequent the establishment.
Take Greg of the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge. Greg hasn’t seen me since last November, but still remembered that I had been there before. Greg is the happiest barman in the world and possibly the only one in LA who doesn’t want to be an actor.
The staff at the Beverly Wilshire, where I last stayed in March, continue to address me by my name and treat me as if I were a fully paid-up guest.
The British staff at the Taschen bookshop provide me with cups of PG Tips when I am out shopping, I feel practically related to the staff at the kitchen store Williams Sonoma and my Chinese foot masseuse (yes, I have one) at the Eden salon, and I join in with my fluent Italian in my favourite local restaurant Il Pastaio (Well: I can say “Excuse me, is there a bank in the vicinity?” but if it isn’t second on the left after the church, as the book says, I will be totally lost).
My heart leapt when I arrived in Paris on Friday, coming up the steps at St Germain des Pres Metro, and meeting the smell of the Nutella stall at the top.
When I woke to the sun shining above the Paris rooftops on Saturday, I felt again that this was where I belonged. Then it pissed down. And when it takes you two hours to get a damned mediocre crepe placed in front of you, it’s enough to set you off California Dreamin' again.
As for the tomatoes: heck, I’ll buy a tin.
Will I ever again taste a tomato that is distinguishable from a sprout?
These are some of the questions I find myself asking every week as I dive among the bruised supermarket pulp here and try, in vain, to find just one ripe, full, firm fruit that smells and tastes as a tomato should.
The smell that greets you in your greenhouse when those first tomato plants start to grow; the smell of summer when you pick the fruits for your first salad; the smell that comes upon you suddenly, after the fish, the freshly-baked bread and the mouldy cheese in a Paris market.
The smell that is unmistakably, gloriously, sweet, earthy and beckoningly, nothing but tomato.
Everyone warned me that Californian fruit and veg tastes of nothing, and they were right. And I never feel more homesick than on a Sunday morning, when I remember my weekend routine in Paris, where I lived for eight years before coming to LA: waking to the sun climbing between ancient rooftops, walking along the Seine to the Bastille, drinking coffee while listening to the debate in the philosophical café, and wandering the length of the market where sea salt, Indian spices, chicken cooking on a spit, wine and lettuce compete for attention.
And tomatoes. Yes, real tomatoes. Baby tomatoes. Plum tomatoes. Tomatoes on the vine. Tomatoes as big as pumpkins (okay: small pumpkins). Red, green, purple, yellow, white.
The only Sunday market in Beverly Hills features a few over-priced stalls next to the busy Santa Monica freeway, where you might as well buy a cabbage as a peach, for all the difference in taste.
So, last weekend, it was a joy to re-experience my old routine when I returned to the City of Light that is my favourite place on Earth.
Well, it is my favourite place on Earth for tomatoes, but, as I discovered this time round, there are ways in which California spoils you that make Europe, and in particular France, feel as if you have been sent to Coventry by entire nations – a bit like getting nul points in the Eurovision Song Contest.
When I lived in Paris, I was never someone who complained about the service, which I always found so much better than in the UK I felt blessed if a waiter so much as acknowledged me within the first ten minutes of sitting down. On Saturday afternoon, however, I left four restaurants after being seated and then ignored for well over ten minutes in each one.
I went to Orange to sort out a problem with my French phone, and despite speaking French throughout, could not have endured less communication than if I had tried to make a trunk call by holding an elephant to my ear.
The problem with France’s service industry is that wherever employees are on the ladder, they know that they are pretty much going to stay there; that’s why some restaurants have staff who have been there for decades.
In the States, the spirit of optimism that infects the nation makes service staff always feel as if they are en route to something bigger and better. That optimism might often be misplaced, but it is as if the whole country is in permanent audition mode, knowing that if they tread the boards just that little bit longer, they will hit the big time.
As a middle-aged woman who regularly dines alone, I am never made to feel like a second-class citizen in LA. I am not shunted off to a dark corner of the bar if I express a preference to sitting at a table, and the best staff also remember their customers, irrespective of how often those customers frequent the establishment.
Take Greg of the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge. Greg hasn’t seen me since last November, but still remembered that I had been there before. Greg is the happiest barman in the world and possibly the only one in LA who doesn’t want to be an actor.
The staff at the Beverly Wilshire, where I last stayed in March, continue to address me by my name and treat me as if I were a fully paid-up guest.
The British staff at the Taschen bookshop provide me with cups of PG Tips when I am out shopping, I feel practically related to the staff at the kitchen store Williams Sonoma and my Chinese foot masseuse (yes, I have one) at the Eden salon, and I join in with my fluent Italian in my favourite local restaurant Il Pastaio (Well: I can say “Excuse me, is there a bank in the vicinity?” but if it isn’t second on the left after the church, as the book says, I will be totally lost).
My heart leapt when I arrived in Paris on Friday, coming up the steps at St Germain des Pres Metro, and meeting the smell of the Nutella stall at the top.
When I woke to the sun shining above the Paris rooftops on Saturday, I felt again that this was where I belonged. Then it pissed down. And when it takes you two hours to get a damned mediocre crepe placed in front of you, it’s enough to set you off California Dreamin' again.
As for the tomatoes: heck, I’ll buy a tin.
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