A birthday, at home and abroad

I always felt bad for the kids who had birthdays in July.  Nobody was around.  Maybe they were at camp, but it wasn’t the same.  It wasn’t getting up early, having your favorite breakfast, lunch and dinner.  It wasn’t a birthday party with your friends and your presents and your cake.

It’s made even tougher when you have a birthday in a new school, new city and new country.  Your parents are still there, but so are your sisters and there’s the Facebook notes, but most of the birthday wishes come much later in the day, when everyone gets home from school and logs on, and you’re getting ready for bed.

It can’t be the same.  At home we have traditions, there’s Beni-Hana.

So we do our best, Mommy let’s them have cupcakes for breakfast, but in the new house we can’t find any candles.  There are presents, but we expect fewer people at school know it’s his birthday.

But then everything is new for this birthday and sometimes new is better.  There are still presents and the big singing wake up.  And for some reason all the kids at school know it’s your birthday because Facebook told them.  And then we take an hour tube ride to Fulham Broadway to go see our new home football team play, Chelsea.  And instead of traffic to FedEx Field we laugh at the people trying to pile into an overcrowded/heated train.

And the stadium is like Fenway or Wrigley, right in the middle of a neighborhood.  And instead of Beni-Hana we have burgers and fries as we walk with the throngs to our seats.  And our team scores and we jump up and can feel the stadium ride and shudder with glee.  And after the win we run to the store and buy jerseys and scarves and balls and mugs.  We have a team.

And at the end of the night we tell Mommy all about our experiences, the stadium, the crazy German opponents with their flags and their chants, the tube ride, the store, the food, the pitch.  And he tells us what a great day it was as he gets into bed with his 300 Facebook messages.

Parents always lament how much older the kids are getting.  But we have done this since he was 6 months old (I can’t believe how big he’s getting, I can’t believe he’s walking, I can’t believe he’s in grade school, middle school, high school).

And he soldiers on with a big smile, because no matter what, when you see your birth date on the calendar, or in the paper or you write it at the top of a pop quiz, you know, in your heart, that it’s still your day.

Rude Britannia? Not Here

The main London attraction for me is not the pubs or the tube or the Abbey, but the people.  There is something about their charm, wit, the language they use, the appreciation of good humor (not mine).   When I lived here 24 years ago I was a college mutt, so the charm I remember was nothing more than the young Pizza Hut waitress who served me my first legal beer.  

So I took notice of the John F. Burns piece in the New York Times entitled “Rude Britannia” lamenting the “eroded sensibilities and courtesies, the coarsening of life in the public sphere and the rough-tongued disdain that seemed to have seeped into our streets… and the abandonment of standards that touched even great national institutions like Parliament and Scotland Yard.”

Burns spent most of his adult life in the US before recently moving back to the UK.

He goes on to discuss the Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal as he sidles up to Labour leader Ed Miliband who suggests the scandal is a “symptom of a wholesale corruption of values in Britain’s public and private life.”

Burns’ list of lamentations includes policemen behaving badly, high salaries for soccer players, coarse language on the BBC, and a “beer culture” that has made public drunkenness a scourge.

With this article in my back pocket I arrived in London just days after the riots and I just don’t see it.  Like the great television shows that criss cross the Atlantic, these social maladies that he sees as so dire are like re-runs of the Office.  Not as good as the original.  The things that trouble him have been in the US for years and here in London they seem less so, less dangerous, less rude, less coarse, less bad.

The people of London that I  encounter, whether at the Pub, the Post Office, the Marks & Spencer, the barber, the Pret, the Costa Coffee, the Tube, the ticket booth, the guitar player in the Tube, the security guard, the cabbie.  They are as I remember.  The charm is there, but it’s bolstered by a sincere interest in trying to help.  They apologize for their slow technology, long delays and broken pieces, but the personal side is anything but broken.  It’s their best export. 

I Saw Them Queue for Rabbit Stew

Lunch is my big meal of the day during the week.  In Rockville I had such well known establishments as the Cheesecake Factory, Timpanos and PF Changs to choose from.  London has introduced me to a city-wide feast of lunching opportunities, and I have vowed to explore as much as possible every non-rainy day.

Last week I dined with a group at “the city’s best fish and chips place,” the locals rave.  Also a well known fact about the Happy Days fish and chippery, is it's the place where Jack the Ripper dropped his final victim.  It’s in the Eastern part of the city, a little more ethnic, in the literal and figurative shadow of the larger financial buildings.  They never caught the Ripper, in fact they question whether he existed or not and credit the string of WhiteChapel killings as a media-perpetrated event.

Today was Borough Market, a mad house of soups and ethnic dishes, fish and venison and yes rabbit.  Although I have seen the Brits now Queue up for everything whether the Post Office or the bus, today  indeed I did see them Queue for rabbit stew.  And while this sounds like the start of a demented Dr Seuss poem, they lined up for this and other delicacies.  This caught my eye because the dead rabbits were hung next to the food and people were taking photos as if they hunted them down themselves.

I had Syrian Falafel, Israeli salad with the Monmouth Coffee, the stuff that really drew me to the place.  All of this takes place just under the London Bridge, the oldest bridge connecting both parts of London and that sits just outside our office window.