In the UK they don’t really understand the US version of Halloween, and for a long time politicians, the police and the church all regularly denounced it as a tradition that encouraged a combination of juvenile delinquency and devil worship.  At best it was described as an “unwelcome American import”.

Nevertheless, it is catching on, bit by bit, and in many neighbourhoods these days children go trick or treating.  Sometimes they are met with surprise and occasionally with anger, but usually sweeties are doled out and everyone is happy.  It doesn’t always work the way you expect, though.  At one doorstep my little daughter held out her bag and said sweetly, “Trick or treat!”

The man replied, “Oh, I should much prefer a treat, thank you!”  And then he reached into her bag, took out a sweet and thanked her again.

Even where Halloween is celebrated there is nothing like the American enthusiasm and energy for the holiday.  Pumpkins, once somewhat exotic (and still expensive), are now available in every supermarket (jack-o-lanterns used to be carved out of turnips). But on the whole, people do not erect tombstones in their front gardens or hang strings of skeleton lights or startle trick or treaters with dangling spiders.  Costumes are simple, and very repetitive: children dress as witches or devils or vampires.  No one goes as Michael Jackson, the Cat in the Hat, a pirate or a fairy princess. 

Grownups don’t answer the door in costume, and grownups don’t get invited to Halloween parties.

This was my first Halloween in the US for 30 years.  The Lawyer Sis and the Lawyer Brother-in-Law invited me to join their annual celebrations, always elaborate and coordinated.  Last year they went as Sarah Palin and a moose. 

My joining them meant, my sister insisted, that we had to come up with a costume idea for a threesome. 

And unfortunately, she added, she was useless with a sewing machine, so I would have to make the costumes for whatever threesome I decided on.  She would be in charge of props.

Here’s how we looked:

(The Duchess is the mouse on the right.  No one else was willing to wear the mouse undergarment constructed out of mattress pads, hung from the shoulders by blanket ribbon, to bulk out the suits…  Nevertheless I thought we looked pretty good – and I sewed the suits without a pattern, or rather I made my own pattern from pencil scrawls on taped together sections of the NY Times.  I thought the Lawyer Sis handled her prop brief well too.  The white canes adapted from sawn off Bo Peep crooks were inspired.)

We gathered at my brother-in-law’s brother’s house.  Since we lacked a Farmer’s Wife, his friend the Freudian Slip – who is in real life a bassoonist with the Seattle Opera – wielded the carving knife.

After mayhem we all went to Highway 99, a blues club in downtown Seattle where the brother-in-law’s brother had a gig (he’s a professional trumpet player).  I thought his girlfriend must be dressed as a groupie of some sort, or maybe a cocktail waitress, but she informed me that she was Marie Antoinette.

Osama Bin Laden – former principal trumpeter with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra – brought his own cocktail.

And the mice enjoyed a martini or two.

It was a lot of fun.  I’ve missed Halloween!

*******

Poor neglected blog!  For any readers I might still have I will try to do a series of catch up posts soon…

Huricane Bill has made his way over the Atlantic, and what is left of him is blowing the trees about in an ineffectual sort of way.  Bill’s rain is what the Brits like to call “wetting” rain.  I know what they mean: the effort feels half hearted, but it doesn’t half soak you.

I knew Bill was coming, so this morning I lugged up the tow path my two toilet cartridges – what the boaters call, “shit suitcases”.  I thought I’d do it early because I prefer to stay dry when I sluice my effluent.

The cartridges were surprisingly heavy, and their contents were all mine.  It amazes me how much waste a body makes in a week.  I have had no other home except Pangolin since last Tuesday. 

I am still having anxiety dreams about moving out of my house and waking at 3 am in a panic.  If I can wait just a little while, at 4 am I know the BBC World Service will give me lovely, familiar, soporific news to doze by, but I have learned that the radio is not my friend in every sleepless hour.

In my last nights at Hedges (my former home) I sometimes turned the radio on too early.  One night the program was interrupted mid sentence, and there followed, for twenty minutes or more, a series of clunks, dings and fog horn type noises.  Was no one else listening?  And no one at the station to intervene, apologise, and offer me “a little music” while they sorted it out?

There was no such intervention, and when I next heard a voice it was speaking a language I did not recognize, except intermittently when it shouted “Afghanistan!”  “Pakistan!”  “Taliban!”  The voice, whose unfamiliar syllables sounded to me angry and aggressive, continued for another fifteen minutes.

With insomniac logic I calculated that the whole point of the BBC World Service was that it was English, the Language of the Empire, the Common Language of the World, and more importantly, the Language I Understood, and which ought to be lulling me back to sleep. 

If the radio wasn’t speaking English, something must be badly wrong.  I began to be certain that terrorists had taken over – if I imagined World Service studios at all I imagined them remote and vulnerable.  The terrorists were now broadcasting to their brethren (and me).  How many more times were they going to say “Afghanistan”?

While I was wondering what to do next – surely I should call someone – I heard the words “BBC Swahili” and then English, and normal service, resumed.  Okay, fine.  But next time before the Swahili program comes on don’t break the tape first.  And maybe try throwing in a few comforting, international words, the sort that terrorists always eschew, like Disneyland, weekend, and Big Mac.

Meanwhile, no one on the towpath can get phone, tele or internet reception.  Leaves on the trees, apparently.  I can sometimes get connected if I wander around outside and point my screen hopefully at the sky.  So I need to brave Bill, and the wetting rain, to post this.

When I get back inside, I think I’ll read Mansfield Park.  I packed it near the top of one of my boxes, because I thought I might need it.  It’s a comfort text, with nice dry pages, reliably in English.

Just as soon as I find out where I have packed my knickers, I promise to describe the last hours at Hedges and my move to Pangolin.

Did I say? Pangolin is the name of my boat and Hedges is the name of my house, rented as of yesterday.  In the days when my ex husband and I were trying to run a business from home I thought the house – and hence the business – ought to have a more grown up address.  I knew there wasn’t a lot I could do about the lines “Buckland, near Faringdon” but I was sure I could at least get a house number. 

With some difficulty I found out who was responsible for numbering houses and I telephoned the local official.

“Sorry, love,” he said, “but we can’t give your house a number.” 

It was hard to argue with his reasoning.  “Unfortunately,” he explained, “all the numbers are used up on the other side of the road.”

Hedges is still numberless, but the Royal Mail (which briefly demanded to be called “Consignia”) now objects to “near Faringdon”.  These days we aren’t meant to use the old fashioned “near” in addresses.  Instead we are to write FARINGDON (or equivalent postal town), the “near” having given way to shouting.

It’s an official objection.  In practice, just as Consignia was abandoned after a few weeks of ridicule and the revelation of how much in brand consultancy fees it had cost to come up with the name, the Royal Mail is still pretty good at parsing obscure addresses.   I once got post delivered that was addressed: “White house near the shop, two big noisy dogs in the window, Buckland, Oxfordshire.”

I love the UK, and I am very partisan.  So I am particularly distraught over the Ashes.  Below is the latest. 

Read it, and parse it, and weep.  And don’t forget they make it all at once weird and silly and tragic entirely on purpose.  I am particularly fond of the part where Ricky Ponting (the Aussie captain) calls incorrectly at the toss, but that is because I know (and you might not) that toss is a naughty word.

England struggle in deciding Test

Fifth Ashes Test, The Oval, day one (close): England 307-8 v Australia    By Jamie Lillywhite Bell looked set for his ninth Test ton until his dismissal straight after tea England failed to build on a promising position in the deciding Ashes Test as Australia restricted the hosts to 307-8 after the first day at The Oval. They were 108-1 at lunch, with skipper Andrew Strauss making an assured fifty. He shared a century stand with Ian Bell who overcame a torrid start to top-score with 10 fours in a valiant 72. Andrew Flintoff, in his final Test, made only seven as five wickets tumbled after tea to a combination of poor shots and aggressive pace bowling. England, who need to win the Test to regain the Ashes, won the first battle of the day when Ricky Ponting called incorrectly at the toss and Strauss chose to have first use of what looked to be a perfect batting wicket. But an exceptionally dry surface started to show signs of wear after just a couple of overs, courtesy of Peter Siddle’s bustling footmarks, and by lunch repairs usually made much later in a Test match were being carried out by the ground staff. Occasional spinner Marcus North was finding extravagant turn and bounce, and with pieces of the pitch breaking up frequently, assessments of what constituted a good score began to change. BEN DIRS BLOG Too many of England’s batsmen were delicate racehorses, cantering a few yards before pulling up lame Ben Dirs After the out-of-sorts Alastair Cook rigidly prodded to second slip in the sixth over, Bell was given a formidable working over by Siddle, who reached speeds in excess of 93mph. Bell, who made a pair in the 2005 Ashes Test at The Oval and went into the match without a century in 31 previous innings at number three, had been moved up the order despite a poor display at Headingley where England were crushed by an innings and 80 runs. He might have been given out on nought after a Siddle bouncer brushed his wrist, but umpire Asad Rauf correctly gave him the benefit of the doubt, with several replays unable to determine whether contact with the glove was made. But the Warwickshire batsman showed admirable resolve and also weathered a prolonged series of short balls from left-armer Johnson, another to pass the 93mph mark, to compile his 21st Test fifty. The combative Siddle has a total of 10 wickets in the last three Ashes innings In the second over of the afternoon session, Strauss drove gloriously through the covers to the boundary to record the century partnership from 139 balls, the captain’s contribution 52. But three balls later he was gone, for 55, to a disappointingly tame nibble outside the off-stump, neatly caught low by Brad Haddin, although replays showed bowler Ben Hilfenhaus had over-stepped by several inches. The partnership was 102, the same number made by the entire England team in the first innings at Headingley. Australia used their four seamers for 46 overs before introducing a change of style, in the form of North’s part-time off-spin. Trott’s first run came after 12 balls, including a bizarre bouncer from North, and no doubt a few choice words of mental disintegration from the Australians aimed at the South-African born batsman.   606: DEBATE The way the pitch has crumbled and deteriorated has made 350 look a very decent score Red_Doc Paul Collingwood drove loosely to gully and the departure of Bell, who got an inside edge that left his off-stump out of the ground in the first over after tea, saw the scoring rate dip alarmingly. Although Matt Prior hit two stylish boundaries he was hopelessly deceived by Johnson’s slower ball, through his drive early and easily caught at cover. That brought in Flintoff to a wonderfully warm, stirring ovation, somewhere between a heavyweight title fight at Madison Square Gardens and The Last Night of the Proms. He opened his account with a boundary through gully off Johnson, but it was to be his only one and he edged a wide one in the left-arm paceman’s next over, to immense dejection from the crowd. Trott, having replaced Ravi Bopara in the side, showed signs of his prolific county form with some elegant strokes, but after a patient 41 he was brilliantly run out by Simon Katich, whose razor sharp collect and direct hit from short-leg saw the batsman out of his crease. England lost Graeme Swann in the final over but Stuart Broad was unbeaten on 26 at the other end and England must hope he will be to muster enough runs to help the bowlers apply pressure on the Australians. Scorecard

I am thinking of entering my house for the Turner Prize. 

In just 8 days my tenants move in.  Do you think it is time to start panicking?

Day after tomorrow I have movers coming. They have already shaken their heads at the sight of my stuff and sucked their lips and said it would be a lot cheaper if I packed myself and could I be sure my bed was fully disassembled before 8 am?

I want to have hired the kind of movers who will, without demure, pack up my breakfast and deliver a half eaten egg hours later at my new home.  

I don’t want the cold egg and I don’t have a new home.  But I also don’t want the alternative, which turns out to be examining every object I have accidentally acquired these 25 years and asking, Is it worthy enough to be moved?  Is it valuable enough to be stored? 

I worry that when the objects are gone I might forget to tell the stories, so like some capricious god I preserve a few and pitch away the rest.  Amongst the Saved are all the birthday cards from my elder son and the doll given to my elder daughter by a mad, middle-aged Japanese graduate student, former nun obsessed with Iris Murdoch’s husband.  I also preserve the crumpled school play programmes wherever I see the name of my younger son, all grown up and off to drama school, and a sweet, lumpy, spotted pig fashioned in clay by my Baby her first term at school.  I don’t think she is going to be a sculptor, but I expect she will forgive my semi-formed sentimentality, matching her pig.  It’s the thought that counts.

Meanwhile, books turn out to pose the greatest difficulty. I got rid of boxes and boxes of books (meaning I donated them to Oxfam) when I first put the house on the market in 2006, but it seems I have acquired more books since.  I ought to pitch them, but it’s so hard. I look at each book and think there is a possibility I might want to read that again.  Or I might want to give it another chance and read it a first time.  Or it’s a book no reasonable household should be without, just in case someone might want to put it in a footnote. 

And there are books that might actually be useful, like the London A-Z.  I need that a lot and often forget to take it with me, so I buy a new one.  I used to say that when I retired I would set up a used book store selling back editions of the London A-Z.  It would be a niche market. I’m a few years from retirement yet, but only found 8 copies today.  I thought there would be more.  Apparently I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Besides the A-Zs, there were 3 copies of The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins), probably not a best seller even in my retirement bookstore, and 4 copies of the same edition of The Aeneid, A New English Translation. 

I think my first book cull must have been incomplete.  I refuse to accept that I am accruing copies of the Aeneid, even in translation, at a rate of more than one per year.

So that brings me to today’s game.  Which books appear more than once on your shelves?  (optional: How many times?  Why?)  I am so disorganised that I am not even going to count books where I have merely two, but in better regulated households two is a quorum and eligible to play.

Now that I have finally rented (alas not sold) my house that I have lived in for more than 25 years, I am gradually moving my most portable stuff to Pangolin, the 62 feet long 6.5 feet wide narrowboat I bought not long after I put the house on the market. 

On Saturday I moved some cushions, a little oriental rug, two bags of wood and three candles to the boat.  It felt like progress, so I celebrated by hanging out at the Rock of Gibraltar and ordering a Greek salad.  The salad was small and expensive (£6.45) and the oil faintly rancid, but the pub is a five minute walk up the towpath, and I guess that makes it mine.

The next morning, as I stood on Pangolin’s stern deck drinking tea and checking my batteries, someone from a passing boat shouted that the one behind me had come adrift.  I looked up to see its bow floating across the canal.  Grabbing my shoes, I stepped outside and just about managed to reach the stern line as it drifted away.  I hung on and looked for help.

I couldn’t secure the line, because I couldn’t let go in order to fetch mooring pins or mallet or reinforcements or anything.  If I let go, the boat would be completely adrift.  The canal isn’t wide or deep, of course, but it is a nuisance to lose a boat, even so.  The canal is wet and cold and rats piss in the water.  You don’t jump in if you don’t have to.

The canal and the towpath suddenly seemed remarkably empty, but after a while a woman and child in a kayak – I think the boy must have been about 12 years old – paddled by. The mother asked if I needed help, and still hanging on to the rope of the drifting boat (which weighs about 17 tonnes), I admitted I did. 

The kayak mother hailed another passerby and suggested that if young Liam, who had now managed to board the drifting boat, could throw a rope, the passerby, a woman in her late 50s or early 60s, could catch the rope and guide the bow in while Liam manned the boat and I held the stern line.  The mother in the kayak would shove the boat and shout orders.  It sounded like a plan to me.

The passerby said our instructions were very unclear and she didn’t have time.  She needed to walk.  She shuffled grumpily up the tow path.

Nevertheless, the youngster on the drifting boat, his mother in a kayak and I on the tow path, eventually managed to get control of the heavy, drifting boat.  I secured the stern line first and then hammered in the mooring pin attached to the bow line that young Liam recovered from the canal.  Liam climbed back into the kayak and he and his mother continued on their journey.

An hour or so later I was all packed up and ready to return to the task of moving out of my house.  By chance, just as I was locking up Pangolin, the unhelpful passerby was returning from her walk. I told her that she ought to check out the story of the Good Samaritan.

I thought there was a good chance I was offering her useful information.  According to the morning’s religious reports, only 16% of the British public know that story.

Sometimes the Sunday news comes in handy.

That’s what my former mother-in-law used to say when my chilren were teething.  By the time we were married none of my ex husband’s family had their own teeth (except him), so I guess she knew what she was talking about.  Looking at my shiny, new, gummy babies, I was troubled by the inevitabilty.

But I know what she meant in a way, only I’m thinking about sofas rather than teeth.  Furniture is a trouble to get and a trouble to get rid of.  I confess I have never had a happy, adult relationship with an arm chair and now I am moving, I am once again oppressed by upholstery.

When I was a young bride, every time I thought I might acquire my own furniture my mother-in-law would find that she needed a new what the Brits call a “three piece suite”.  Since I was never really a grown-up in America I have little idea if such a thing exists there.  The British version is a sofa and two chairs all in the same fabric.

I was raised to believe that matching furniture was vulgar.  I was also raised to believe that waste was wicked.  Sadly, I worked out that the only thing that could trump vulgar was wicked. 

Before you could say Jack Robinson my in-laws arrived full of good cheer and second hand furniture.  (They also brought their own toilet paper.  I never quite understood this.  I think they were worried that their only son had married a foreign wife who might have exotic habits.) 

Each time, though, I chucked out one piece, despite the wicked waste.  A sofa and one matching chair was a misfortune.  A sofa and two matching chairs looked like carefulness.

Many years later I stood in a furniture showroom and wept. I was nearly 40 and had never bought my own sofa.

Some time around then, my husband and I acquired a flat in London.  I don’t think I can explain exactly how it happened that for several years it was empty except for a couple of foam mattresses on the floor.  I was – and am – terrified of driving in London and have never yet done it.  My husband drove, but he didn’t do furniture.  

When my mother came to visit one year we resolved we would somehow nevertheless manage to furnish the flat together.  We got the larger items (a sofa, yay! and a queen size bed) delivered, but the budget was tight and we realised we would have to move the smaller items ourselves, by bus.

One Saturday, my mother — then in her late sixties — and I walked the quarter of a mile from my house to the village bus stop with two ladder back chairs.  I had sent my elder son earlier with the other two chairs.  We would take the small dining table the next day.

The bus driver collected our money, and nodding at the chairs asked, What? Are you taking them on an outing?

In Oxford we changed buses for London. 

At London the station attendant looked really surprised when we stepped off with our chairs.  He said, It’s the strangest thing!  A guy this morning also got off the bus with two chairs!  Is there some kind of chair convention today?

Well, those chairs aren’t mine now and aren’t my responsibility, though when I recently visited the flat for the first time in nearly ten years (because, though it belongs to my Ex my daughter currently lives there) I saluted the chairs like old friends.

Meanwhile, and two sofas later, I finally have my own furniture to deal with.  I’m moving out, and I can’t keep this stuff.  In England I will only have a boat; in the US I have nowhere of my own at all, though I am still thinking a van is a good idea.  You can’t put a sofa on a van.

I fretted for a long time about getting rid of my hard and late won furniture: my dining table that seats 12 in a pinch where I served so many family meals, the solid maple kitchen table I bought with my book money, the sofa and two chairs that don’t match that I finally had when I was single again and all grown up.

Happily, my Ex is also about to move – he’s going into a new house and willing to take my furniture and keep it for me as long as I want.  I guess it might be forever, but I don’t quite have to say good bye. 

So not as much trouble to get rid of as I thought.  No novacaine required.

Because I am going to make a real hash of explaining the Ashes to Americans.

Today is the first day of the 2009 attempt of the Brits to regain the Ashes, and I don’t think we have begun all that well, although the BBC headline was “England Make Solid Start to Ashes”.  The score is 336 for 7 – apparently the Aussies took some late wickets.

If you are already confused, that’s because it is cricket: a sport where it takes five days to play the game (which often ends in a draw), where you play in sweaters though it is summer, and where part way through everyone breaks for tea and cucumber sandwiches.

We won the Ashes in 2005 after about 20 years, but next we lost them.  Because we only play in the summer, and we only play with Australia, and we play in alternating countries and our adversaries are in the opposite hemisphere  (have you got all that?) this is our first chance to win back.

I won’t explain the rules to you, because frankly I don’t know them, though I am charmed by the whole process, and especially the vocabulary.

There are Overs, and Maiden Overs and Wickets and Sticky Wickets and Leg Before Wickets, and Square Short Leg, Silly Mid Off, and the deeply sinister Third Man.   Also I swear all the umpires are called Dickie Bird, and they look up at the clouds and consult their light meters, and employ the Duckworth Lewis method in case of rain. 

The Brits invented the game, and taught it to the colonies, and these days, mostly the colonies beat us.

It wasn’t always so.  In 1882 England played Australia on English ground and unexpectedly lost.  (Remember that at that time Australia was still England’s penal colony – where we sent our criminals.)

The newspapers screamed that with this extraordinary loss, cricket was dead.  An obituary was published in the national news and the following year something (it isn’t clear what) was burned in a mock cremation in Australia – a ball, bail, stump or perhaps a lady’s veil – and an urn with the Ashes of Cricket was presented to the English team.

Since then we have competed with the Australians for the Ashes of cricket. It is one of the most important sporting events in the UK calendar, very like the American baseball world series – except it only happens every 18 – 30 month. 

It would be a long time to get the Ashes back, except it doesn’t matter.  We’ve declared the Ashes were a gift and the urn is too fragile to travel.  We always keep them, no matter who wins.  A bit like the Parthenon. The sun never sets and all that.  We’re not just a pretty face, you know. 

In this picture the Aussie captain holds a replica, as he is entitled to do, since they won, as usual, the last time around.  Never mind.  We’ve got the real thing, even if it is awfully small, and even when we lose (gloriously, of course). 

But it is funny how such a little thing can stop whole countries.

On Sundays the BBC makes a point of having vaguely religious “news” and last Sunday morning’s wake me up story was how most of the population (more than 75%) say they own a Bible and it is “meaningful” to them, and yet only a fraction of those surveyed could list all 10 commandments, mention a single fact about Abraham or could tell the story of Good Samaritan.  One man noted the amazing coincidence of Jesus being crucified on Good Friday.  Another young women, an art student shown a series of nativity scenes, complained of sexism: all the babies in the pictures were boys.

Because last weekend’s other news was mainly about Michael Jackson and the Glastonbury Festival (Bruce Springsteen was playing for the first time),  I began to think about cultural literacy.   Would my mother understand this news bulletin?  Would my children?

A long time ago I had a high school teacher who said he couldn’t teach American literature any more because the kids didn’t know scripture.  He made us read a lot more than we wanted.  Later, when I went to college and took an English degree there were only two non negotiable requirements: Shakespeare and the Bible.

It’s coming to the end of Wimbledon fortnight in the UK, and I guess because Wimbledon is so perfectly British, it always reminds me of the first years I lived in this country.  I have written before about my second Wimbledon, when I had my tiny, first son in my arms and he and I dozed together to the gentle thwap thwap of tennis balls, barely visible on a little black and white tele while a commentator with impossibly clipped vowels murmured, “Oh, I say! Good shot!”

Though the broadcasters clung to standards, not all the players did; that year, for the first time the men’s singles champion, the young John McEnroe, was not invited to join the All England Club, because of his ungentlemanly behaviour on court.  (These days he is a great favourite here, though he is still teased and asked to repeat, “You can not be serious!” – that being pretty much the worst of his shocking remarks.)

One year earlier I had spent my first summer in England.  My friends, fellow graduate students at Oxford University, were as engaged with Wimbledon as Brits ever are, but the real television draw in 1980 was something else, a drama repeat just before each day’s tennis broadcast .

A friend explained, Of course everyone is watching the repeats in case they can spot a clue to who shot JR.

I asked, Who is JR?

My friend’s jaw dropped, and then he declared I must be the only person in the UK – and probably in the English speaking world  – who could be quite so ignorant. 

Bjorn Borg won the men’s singles.  I got pregnant and I got married.  My British husband filled me in on Dallas.  When our son was born my husband assured me that American cultural imperialism – of which that show was but a small example – meant I needn’t fear to raise good Americans anywhere where television reception was guaranteed.

These days I forget who shot JR and just about recall who Absalom is (the survey didn’t ask about him; he’s my bonus for extra points).   I can tell you quite a lot about Abraham, and am reliable, I think, on all the parables.  But tonight, at least, I could only manage 9 commandments.  (If you want to play this game with me I’ll tell you which one I forgot and which I remembered last, if you’ll tell me yours – no googling. Or we could play a different game where we think about what would be the best 10 commandments for the 21st century.)

As for cultural literacy, it is hard to know what counts any more.  I’m pretty comfortable in my BBC radio world, but if I read the internet I realise I don’t know a damn thing (oops that’s a commandment) that anyone’s talking about.