The Baby and I were talking about my father, her grandfather, whom she barely knows. I was trying to remember when she had last seen him, but she was very clear.

The last time I was there, she said emphatically, was when you went to the CIA by accident.

Right. I had almost forgotten that.

I had taken the two younger children, my son the Actor (then about 15) and the Baby (10), on holiday to the USA. Among other places, we went to my father’s house in northern Virginia, partly to visit with him, and partly so I could show these British children some of their American heritage.

One morning I borrowed my father’s car just to drive it as far as the underground – I guess it was about 20 minutes. I wanted to take the kids into Washington DC.

About five minutes down the road I remembered I did not have my driver’s license with me (in England you are not required to carry it when you drive, and because it is large and doesn’t easily fit into a wallet, I usually don’t).

Oh, don’t be silly, Mother, said the Actor. You are not going to get stopped!

A few minutes later I remembered I hadn’t brought the map either, but once again my son took charge. Not a problem, he said, I’ve memorised the directions.

So we carried on. I spent the day dragging the kids to every monument and memorial in the Capital. It was post 9/11. Visits to the White House were suspended and trips up the Washington Monument had to be pre-booked, but otherwise we saw and did pretty much everything a good tourist is meant to do: we trooped up the steps of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, wandered in the then fairly new sculpture garden at the Roosevelt Memorial, and walked sombrely past the names of the Vietnam dead (which I found deeply moving, and no doubt the children found dull, but they humoured me).

At the end of the day we rode the train back to Virginia and the Actor directed me as we picked up the car and headed toward my father’s house. We were nearly there when the Actor told me to take the next right.

Here? I asked.

I think so, he hesitated, and I turned. The sign, invisible from the main road, said, CIA. Authorized Personnel Only Past This Point.

Oops, said the Actor.

I looked around in a panic. The road was designed with a thick hedge of trees and bushes entirely separating the lane heading towards the CIA from the lane heading away. There were no turns to the right or left and no way to go back.

I had no choice except to carry on and eventually stop in front of a speaker on a post rather like the ones where you order at drive thrus. Only I didn’t think they would be selling me a latte. We were still a long way, I guessed, from any building.

A stern voice asked me to state my business with the CIA.

I said I didn’t have any business. I had taken a wrong turn and just wanted to get back on the main road.

The voice ordered me to continue forward into a parking area, stop in front of the chain link fence and follow the instructions of the officer.

I said, Please can’t I just turn around?

The voice bellowed, Follow the instructions of the officer!

I pulled in and parked.  Through the rear view window I saw a man in combat uniform sporting a machine gun almost as tall as he was saunter towards the car. I rolled down the window and waited for the inevitable question.

Can I see your driver’s license?

I explained that I came from England where it was not necessary to carry the license.

Okay, he said, Can I see your passport then?

I regretted that I did not have my passport with me.

He strolled around to the back of the car and examined the number plate. As he did so the Baby asked, in a whisper, What does the CIA do?

Without hesitation my son answered, They kill people.

The officer returned and said, in some exasperation, Well, can I see some kind of picture ID, please?

I said I thought I must have something… I shuffled wildly through my wallet and in a moment produced the only one with my photograph on it.

Reader, I handed the officer my Bodleian Library card.

A look of real sadness came over his face as he turned it from front to back. Ma’am, he said, I’m trying to help you here.

Well, anyway, things went from bad to worse and the officer pointed out I wasn’t giving him much to go on when I couldn’t find either the registration or insurance documents in the glove compartment. Nevertheless, he finally let us go after running the number plates to see if the address I gave him matched. You’ve got a couple of kids in the car, he said, by way of explanation, but I think it was the Bodley ID.

Back home, my father found the story hilarious. The turn towards his house is right after the CIA turn and it seems it wasn’t the first time that mistake had been made. His new house cleaner had also gone to the CIA by accident, only because she was Hispanic and driving an old beat up car, the disembodied voice directed her to pull into a spot where swords came out of the ground, surrounding the car and creating a cage. She was scared out of her wits. My father laughed until he cried as over and over he threw up his arms to demonstrate just how the swords had come up.

I guess, compared with your average encounter with the CIA, we came off pretty well.

The Baby and I spent a couple of days with Lawyer Sis, about two hours’ drive south, before Baby was due to join her beloved cousin, Buggy, Lawyer Sis’s middle child, in LA.

On the first evening we had barbeque on the deck. Lawyer Sis and Brother in Law are on a low carb diet, but they cheerfully provided everything required for anyone who still believed in sampling the major food groups. We all ate on paper plates.

After dinner we made popcorn in the microwave, climbed into the SUV and went to one of the last drive-ins left in the state. I hadn’t been to a drive-in movie for thirty years, and definitely not since they’ve abandoned those speakers on poles in favour of tuning in your radio. It was a lot warmer with the windows rolled up. The movie was dumb, but at a drive-in I guess the movie isn’t really the point.

The next morning Brother in Law put on a suit and went to work, while my sister, in her pajamas, fielded emails and phone calls from the office while entertaining me and coordinating her kids’ arrangements.

Late morning she drove me to the near-by holiday town where our brother bought an investment property a few years ago and has since then been in litigation with the former owners and the realtor. We got back around noon to find the Baby had just got up and was casually eating cereal out of a paper bowl. I had assumed the paper of the previous night was in honour of deck dining, but Baby, who makes herself at home here, knew it was the house norm.

In the afternoon we rode a ferry, bought a hostess gift for the Baby’s upcoming visit, reclaimed my youngest niece from her Greek grandmother, and smuggled my little dog under my sweatshirt into the ferry passenger cabin on the return ride, because it was way too cold to follow regulations and sit with him outside. Fellow travellers who spotted my subterfuge only smiled.

Home again, and very tired, we ate cold cuts off paper plates and cancelled the bowling alley we’d booked, though my energetic sister was keen to introduce me to “cosmic bowling”. I think that’s bowling with music and moving lights, but no doubt I’ll find out eventually.

Instead we turned on the Olympics, and as I watched the first American tele I have seen in many years, I was struck by the prescription drug ads. We have nothing like that in the UK and I wondered how British GPs would respond to the repeated suggestion “ask your doctor”. I was quite taken with the drug that stops you needing the loo when you’re on an outing and thought even Her Majesty could use that one (I once heard that royal protocol dictates she has to be within a hundred yards of one at all times). Alas the side effects, which apparently they are required to mention (they start speaking very fast at that point), make it sound not really worth it: among others, dry mouth, headache, stomach cramps, liver damage.

It turned out to be pretty much the same with all the drugs they were recommending. As soon as one looked like it would just fix me up there were threats of heart palpitations, strokes and dizzy spells, not to mention the assaults on my poor liver, already well dosed with red wine. Since they announced that women shouldn’t take the drug for reducing prostates I guess they are required to list all possible contraindications too.

Meanwhile the Lawyer Sis and Buggy’s father exchanged breezy emails about Baby’s travel arrangements.

Now I know it is not polite to make fun of someone who has invited your sixteen year old daughter to be a houseguest for a whole week, but I’m making an exception, not just because his name is St John (pronounced, quite correctly, Sin Jin – and trust one of us to find the only guy this side of Jane Eyre called that), but because he denied his child until the Lawyer Sis slapped a paternity suit on him. (And when I tell you that in divorcing the father of her first child she got him excommunicated for good measure, you probably won’t be messing with her.)

Baby thought St John’s (Sin Jin’s) email about her upcoming visit was very funny:

Our place is an old Spanish house built up in the hills with a great view. It’s hot in Los Angeles and we have palm trees everywhere, so you’ll get to wear sunglasses and a cute dress when we head out to explore Hollywood. Don’t have sunglasses or a cute dress? Save your pennies and we’ll take you shopping. Vicki knows all the best places, whether you like the latest thing or really old grungy stuff. You’ll live like a rock star for a week! Well, maybe like a back-up singer anyway.

The next day we were up early to dodge the Saturday traffic. In the ferry line my sister and my daughter applied their make up. I felt a little underdressed next to them and fumbled in my bag to see if I had remembered the lip coloured, almost invisible, lipstick I sometimes wear. Nope. As usual I had forgotten it.

By the time we got to the airport Baby had all her gels, blushes, lotions and creams packed into a clear plastic bag, her British passport stowed and her American one ready to display for a picture ID and a note of her booking reference for her e ticket. Once again I was impressed with the poise and maturity of a child only just sixteen who travels all by herself so easily across oceans and continents.

We left her in the security line. She was in LA, almost a thousand miles south, long before her aunt and I, fighting Seattle traffic, were home.

Two Athabascan Natives from Minto, in the interior of Alaska, were driving along the Manley Road when they came upon a couple of bull moose.  Now moose are not in season, and anyway, it is illegal to shoot from the road, but the Mintoites killed the moose anyway.

They had guns with them, but they didn’t have knives, so they couldn’t butcher the animals.  Leaving their kill by the side of the road, they took a little detour to the General Store in Manley (where half the fun is getting there) for some refreshment before returning to Minto for knives.

Now the store, which used to be owned by one of the Survivalists (my mother’s husband), isn’t supposed to sell alcohol to people from Minto, because Minto is dry.  Only the current owner claims he doesn’t know who’s from Minto and who’s not, and, what with not much passing traffic now gas costs $6 a gallon up there, a sale is a sale.  He sold the Mintoites whatever they wanted.

While the moose shooters were getting smashed and looking for their knives, some of the Manley Natives called the Fish and Game troopers to report the illegal shooting.  Fish and Game told the Manleyites that they were too busy to deal with it, so it was okay for them to go ahead and salvage what meat they could.

Unlike the Mintoites, the Manleyites had knives.  They hauled the moose back home, right around the corner from my folks, and began working on the carcasses.

After some time, the shooters came back with knives and reinforcements from Minto and demanded their kill.  They claimed they needed it for a Potlatch Dinner (not to be confused with a Potluck Supper), which apparently trumps Fish and Game laws.  There was a stand off, each group claiming the moose for their own, and for a while it looked bad.

Luckily there was an Elder from Minto present who said to the Manley people, You have done a lot of work.  You keep what you have already cut up, and we will take the uncut meat.

Thus it was settled, though there are still a lot of angry people, some of them well fed.

Despite trying all day and into the evening on the Fourth to get one of the hippies, drunks or Democrats to come back and fetch me so I could join them on the Extremely Small Island, I failed.  There was nothing for it but to go to the other party.  The invitation said 6:30 and by then it was half past seven.

I cut flowers from the garden and made a sweet bunch of poppies, snap dragons, toad flax, delphiniums and peonies (everything is late this year), threw together my salad contribution and grabbed a bottle of wine.

The party was at a beach house with a panoramic view across the water – so wide that the hostess (who just about knew who I was after I told her my name) told me that this time of year they could see the sunrise on the right edge of the horizon and the sunset on the left.  Alas, she seemed unimpressed with my posy wrapped at the stem in wet paper towels and cling film.  I guess hers was more an exotic hothouse plants from the florist sort of world.

I added my bottle to the shared table (where, unpromisingly, it was one of two) and poured myself a large glass. (I was right in predicting it would be the only glass I would get.) Passing a table laden with salads, chips (crisps), and rows of red white and blue cupcakes topped with mini American flags, I tentatively wandered over to the tail end of the barbeque.

As he deposited a hotdog on my paper plate the cook said, pointedly, “So glad you could come,” and I realised at once that he must be the host and that he was quite sure I had crashed his party.

I ate my hot dog and chatted a little to the few people I knew or recognised, including Dancing Man whom I had spotted from an internet dating site (where I occasionally lurk but never have the nerve to post a profile myself).  I didn’t let on that I knew he was Dancing Man.

Most people had eaten and, for something to do, I helped clean up. Then, beginning to feel sorry for myself, I sat alone and watched the sun set.  Across the water firework displays were getting going, and from the next door house, hidden by a bank of trees, there was an occasional bang.  The several dozens of guests at this party pulled up their chairs to the water’s edge and waited.

After a very, very long time two young men rowed out to a barge loaded with fireworks and lit a fuse.  Loudspeakers began to play The Star Spangled Banner and the first rockets went up.

There’s nothing like being abroad for thirty years to bring out patriotism.  It has been at least a couple of decades since I was in the US on the Fourth of July and the anthem with the rockets thrilled me.  But I am afraid my enjoyment of the show ended there.  The music became increasingly loud and the lyrics increasingly aggressive and unpleasant until there was one that seemed to be saying we would put a bullet in your butt courtesy of the red, white and blue.

On the way home I caught the tail end of a much better display on the other side of the island.  I went to bed feeling sullied and fell asleep to the sounds of distant bangs as my fellow Americans celebrated on into the night.

In England I used to annoy my neighbours by hanging an American flag out the window, but for the first time in forever I am actually in the US.

I’d forgotten what a deal patriotism is here.  Presidential candidates are fighting over who is the more patriotic, the radio is playing Sousa marches and flags are flying from lawns all over the place.  In England on the Queen’s birthday we get a verse of God Save the Queen just before the 8 o’clock news and there are a few discreet Union Jacks on government buildings and pretentious hotels looking to attract foreigners.  It isn’t a public holiday, nor are the other two possibilities, St George’s Day (for England at least) or Guy Fawkes Day.

I haven’t yet got definite plans for my day of patriotism.  The crowd I usually hang out with, the drunks, hippies and Democrats have all decamped to another island only accessible by boat.  I stayed home, partly because of the cat, but mainly because I thought I could rent out my bed-no-breakfast that I am doing for some extra cash over the summer.  (I didn’t.)

Meanwhile the well-behaved, grown up, hip replacement gang have invited me to a sober potluck on the beach.  I don’t know any of them, really, but it was kind of them to ask.

Either way there I shall be sure to do my patriotic duty to eat barbequed hot dogs and to ooh and ahh at fireworks.

My housesitter opens the post and emails me about anything I need to know. In one of his occasional updates he mentioned that Her Majesty’s Revenue Collectors were “a bit unhappy” about the National Insurance I owed them, and would I like him to forward the letter?

Since I don’t owe them any money I wasn’t too worried. A few weeks later I guess he thought I really ought to see the letter so he scanned it and sent it to me.

My British email provider decided it was junk. Well, of course.  It was bound to be fake; Her Majesty’s Revenue Collectors would never use such intemperate language. The letter was headed “Warning of legal proceedings”.

When I finally retrieved it during an occasional trawl of the junk folder more than a month had passed since the date of the letter. I did think my housesitter might have given me clearer warning, but it was my own fault — I ought to know by now that “a bit unhappy” is strong stuff.

I telephoned the number they offered, in friendly British way, in case I knew any reason why they shouldn’t begin legal proceedings, or if I needed “help or advice”. It’s one of the things I like about the Brits. They never really expect you to be competent about your tax affairs.

A man with a beautiful Edinburgh accent answered the phone. After a few moments discussion he said, “Ah, now there’s where you went wrong Miss – “ and then he pronounced my name so beautifully that I wanted to work out how to change the spelling so it could always sound like that. Meanwhile he twiddled with his computer a bit and said it was all fixed. So it seems I will not be helping the police with their inquiries or detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

I wasn’t expecting the Scottish accent, though. The tax office is on Tyneside, near where my ex husband’s family comes from and where I expected to hear a version of Geordie, the local accent.  This accent is still distinctive, although many of the dialect words are vanishing, except among the elderly. When their father’s uncle talks my kids just smile and nod. I’ve heard them tell Americans emphatically, “There is no way you could understand our Uncle Bob.”

For Yanks who don’t know Geordie, here’s a recording from the British Library archive. This man is a generation or two younger than Uncle Bob and speaks much more slowly and clearly, but I bet even so you have to concentrate.

Yesterday the All England Club at Wimbledon was taking a hard line, but by this morning the policy of hiring marksmen to shoot pigeons above the courts was abandoned.

I spent much of tonight with G who was angry because the Firefighter Builder wasn’t home and hadn’t called her (a fair cop in my book).  Her house is on my walk from work and I stopped by to say hello.  When her husband hadn’t answered his cell phone a few times I said I would go with her to check out where he might be.

So we got in her car with my small dog and her forty pound puppy and a large senile mutt she’s kind of inherited.  We cruised by a few usual haunts while she got it into her head that she saw his pickup truck where it shouldn’t have been.  Back at my house she made calls to friends, and friends of friends, and husbands of friends, and husbands of friends of friends, and friends of husbands of friends, to ask them to drive their own trucks by where any husband’s truck shouldn’t be, to see if her husband’s truck was there. 

After a while the guys stopped returning her calls. And her husband definitely wasn’t responding, even to my one pound sterling a minute United Kingdom cell phone that I obligingly lent her because it was a particularly good disguise.

G suspected that the Firefighter Builder was at the house of a woman who sleeps with married men and wants sympathy from other married men when she feels neglected. G didn’t believe her husband was in the first group, but was furious at the possibility he might be in the second. Also, besides being an adulterer the woman used to be a department store decorator and now her home looks exactly like a three bedroom Neiman Marcus.

G’s other complaint was that even if he wasn’t at Neiman Marcus with the Adulterer, at the very least the Firefighter Builder preferred drinking beer to doing the family taxes which had been her suggested activity for the evening.

Just as I was about to throw G out, her husband and a friend (male — not the Adulterer) showed up here. I didn’t wait for explanations and pretty unceremoniously told all three of them, plus the puppy and the senile mutt, that it was time to go home. G had drunk most of a bottle of wine, and the puppy and the senile dog had eaten all of Eloise’s cat food, and meanwhile I really, really wanted to get into the bath and read Trollope.

But I should not exaggerate the drama of the evening. How unlike the home life of our own dear queen was one perspicacious late Victorian’s response to seeing the play Antony and Cleopatra. And I would like to confirm that not once this whole evening was anyone bitten by an asp.

The sun came out while I was considering a blog post on the route the Survivalists had taken to Alaska, so I thought I would have a break and do a bit of gardening. When I tried to go back in for a late lunch I found the door locked.

I remembered, unhappily, that the night before I had had one of my British attacks. In Britain one closes windows and locks doors at bedtime. Once, on a hot summer night many years ago in Oxford, I didn’t close the window and someone crept in and stole all my husband’s jackets. At first I refused to believe it. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said to my husband, who seemed to be accusing me, “who would want your jackets?” Apparently not even the thief did, because the jackets were afterwards discovered in a nearby alley.

A year or two later we bought a house in rural Oxfordshire next to the combined post office and village shop. Two weeks after we moved in I stood idly watching out my kitchen window as three men entered the shop. In just a few minutes they came out, jumped into their car and drove away. When the car went around the bend faster than I thought appropriate I memorized the number plate. A moment later the postmaster appeared in his doorway, blood dripping from his forehead. I went round to see if he was all right, and when the police arrived I explained that, although I hadn’t actually realized what had happened until the robbers were gone, I had noted the car number.

The policemen were somewhat puzzled by this. They said, “Why would you do that?”

I said, “I’m a very irritable person, and I take down people’s numbers all the time.”

The next day the headline in the Oxford Times was “Have-a-go-hero foils armed robbers”. When the postmaster called his dog instead of handing over the cash the would be robbers hit him on the head with their air gun and fled. The article mentioned that information from a “sharp-eyed villager” had led police to the abandoned getaway car. Although the baddies were never caught, the shopkeepers got invited to a celebration in London of brave postmasters and mistresses and were awarded a medal.

Meanwhile I was repeatedly assured that such a thing had never before happened in the village.

About a year later a man knocked on my door, said he understood that I had done the Post Office a service a while back and with my permission he would like to come for me in a week’s time so that the Royal Mail could express its gratitude.

On the appointed afternoon a large Rover car arrived at my house. The driver wore a hat and there was a clean piece of blue paper on the floor so that I didn’t have to put my feet anywhere other feet had been. I was driven ten miles to the Swindon Sorting Office where I was given a tour and a nice cup of tea with two bourbon cream biscuits (that’s a British cookie containing neither bourbon nor cream) and a cheque for £30, before I was chauffeured back home. I always meant to buy a letter opener with that money.

Like my village, this island is mostly a pretty peaceful place. A “crime wave” was reported some years ago, but it turned out a lot of teenagers were stealing their parents’ stash. And then there was the night a group of young men came over from the mainland and broke into five or six houses and loaded up their car. Unfortunately they missed the last ferry back, fell asleep waiting for the first one, and were arrested at dawn.

Nevertheless, locking the door seemed a sensible, British thing to do, although I am assured no one else on the Island ever bothers. How was I to know that these Yankee door knobs were made so that even while locked you can get out, but it stays locked so you can’t get in again? Far as I know we don’t have this sort of treacherous device in the UK.

When I found I couldn’t get in the front door I went unhappily around the back, where my memory that I had diligently locked that door too was confirmed. I checked the windows – all also locked.

I went into the former garage, now my mother’s studio (unlocked), and poked about for a spare key. I found several spare keys to the studio.

Because I had only popped out to pull some dandelion weeds I had no phone or money or car keys, and only slip-on gardening shoes. I know few people here and no one’s number. I doubted there was a locksmith on the Island or that anyone else would have a key to my mother’s house, but every other man I had met so far was a builder or a firefighter or both. Surely either could fix this.

Fluffy had no collar or lead (leash) so I shut him in the fenced back garden, got on my bike, and rode around to one of my mother’s best friends, G, a woman about my age, whose husband, 17 years her junior, is of the both sort.

There was no sign of G, but not only was her house unlocked, the door was ajar. I went inside, shouted to see if anyone was home, and looked around for pen and paper. Not finding either I saw G’s handbag on the table, and, after a moment’s hesitation, riffled through it. Wallet, but no pen. It occurred to me that mine would be a very compromising position if G or her Firefighter Builder husband should come in.

In a pile of post there was an open letter, official looking, about some structural building work, but it was the only full size sheet of paper I could find. In the living room I discovered a blunt pencil, and reasoning that 1) they wouldn’t fail to notice a note written on the back of this document and 2) as I was only writing in pencil it couldn’t do any serious harm, I left a message.

I wrote, for good measure: “Cold, hungry and homeless,” and then bicycled home, back to gardening. The studio holds one of the three refrigerators here, well stocked with Diet Coke, and in the rental apartment (also unlocked) I found some old mixed nuts left by the last occupants. Nor was I really cold in my gardening tee shirt, as long as I kept digging and raking. But homeless, except for the rental, sans computer and current book, was looking possible. It was late afternoon on a Friday and I was banking a lot on G and her Firefighter Buider.

I hadn’t put my watch on before I went out and there didn’t seem to be a clock in either the studio or the apartment. As I gardened I tried to guess what time it must be, and how long before G got off work.

Early evening G pulled into the drive and a tall woman wearing a black straw cowboy hat got out with her. The tall woman had long black hair with grey streaks at the temple, a strikingly white face and heavily pencilled red lips. She looked like a western Cruella de Vil and introduced herself as a former model and current makeup artist, fourth generation Island resident.

G said her husband had called her with my message. “Didn’t that document look important to her?” he asked. “The engineering report to be filed with the county?”

The three of us surveyed the house. G remembered that a window, reachable only by scurrying up one side of the roof used to be left open for the cat Abelard. We could just see it from below, and it was clearly closed now, Abelard having been dead for some years and Eloise not able to jump higher than a bed. But there was a chance it might not be locked. Cruella didn’t volunteer to climb, and G and I were both too short to reach the bottom of the roof from the ladder we had. At last G declared that her husband was my only hope.

The Firefighter arrived, fetched a longer ladder, lifted himself onto the roof, made his way to the top, removed the screen, opened the window and climbed in, as we cheered below.

Later, in the Island diner, Cruella grabbed my chin, plucked off my glasses, and turned my head side to side. “You have wonderful bones,” she said, “I’d love to do your make up.”

I bought G’s dinner (the Firefighter having gone home). Just before they parted G and Cruella exchanged prescription drugs in the car. Cruella advanced G some valium and in return G gave her something more interesting. “These are for dogs, though,” G said tentatively.

“No problem,” said Cruella.

And that, sports fans, is why there was no blog post on Friday.

I woke up feeling hard done by because it is a Bank Holiday in the UK. I had already missed the traditional Oxford May Morning celebrations, when Magdalen choir sings from the College tower and there is dancing in the streets, and now I was missing my day off.

This was not entirely reasonable, since every day for a fortnight has been a day off for me, but today that is about to end. I have a “job”. I have put it in inverted commas (that’s quotes to Yanks) because it is possible that it is only a rumour – I don’t have a job title, job description, contract, or anything else in writing; no one has asked for my social security number and none of my employers is likely to be around when I report to the office later today.

I did think I might find out a little more about their projects at a community meeting planned for last Saturday, which I risked my life getting to, on account of bicycling on the wrong side of the road. Sig.ra La Kitchenette, a board member of the local non profit that has “hired” me, was meant to give a slide show about their work. Seven people stood in the car park (parking lot) for half an hour, but Sig.ra did not arrive. There was no meeting and I am none the wiser, yet.