Another day, another week....

So, heres the skinny.

I've been back in the country for a little over a week. Its cold, rainy and I have a cold already. Grrrrr.

Much worse than that, I have been without my baby. This is NOT GOOD! I spend most of my days thinking about her, and worrying about how much she has to do without me, and worrying that we wont be able to afford the wedding, and worrying and worrying and worrying.

Everything feels wrong. The pain in my recovering ankle has always been dull, but maybe with the damp weather it feels worse. The food I've had since I got back is fine except it just doesnt taste the same. Even the TV shows just dont entertain me as much. Everything is as I left it 7 weeks ago, but somehow slightly different.

I just miss her.

Anyway, I'm here to write a blog, not whimper on about how life is terrible.

I do however want to write an apology. I have a number of friends, good people whom I let down consistantly, I dont keep in touch, I ignore their requests, and dont return their phone calls. Its not because I dont want to. They are all very entertaining and great fun to hang out with, but as I get older I have noticed that this is the compromise we all make.

Friends... take up valuable time that we could be much better off spending watching soap operas, and keeping warm tucked up in bed. When we feel down and depressed we avoid our friends. When we feel poor, we avoid our expensive friends. Our friends may give us great memories, but they also give us hangovers, they also force us to get out of our comfies and make us whip round with the hoover in a mad flurry.

For me right now I have two things to focus on. Spend as much time with my baby on line as possible, and work. I have so little time I can freely give to my friends, whom I miss and whom I care about very much.

I really miss chewing the fat with my brother. We used to compete over almost everything, and discuss pointless rubbish like the astethic values of Tarantino's "Kill Bill" til the early morning. We once watched 30 hours of movies back to back, with help of a few friends, snacks, pizza and a hell of a lot of coffee.

I miss cooking strange new recipes with one friend, watching her face as I throw in handfuls of dried spices. I miss us having a meal and sitting down to watch a Vin Diesel or Russel Crowe, seeing her purr at the screen. Or another day we would pig out on chocolates and chat til 2am. With my unreliablility, however and her busyness its been months since we have done that.

I have another great friend whom I adore spending time with. When I was younger I used to pop round to see her and her fella. They would put up with me tinkering on their guitars, playing their music and asking silly questions like "Who is Bruce Springsteen anyway". Now I only ever get to see her on family occasions or very very rarely I stop and chat to her at the odd gig. Im so sorry.

Then theres my oldest friend who now lives in Bournemouth with his beautiful wife. Its not so far away, and yet I rarely even call. When they first moved away I used to go round and stay for the evening. We would hang out in the best Chinese restaurants eating 100 yr old eggs, and dim sum to die for. Then after a few bevvies it was back to the flat for an entire night of playing "rocky" on the X-box. Now I have to search around to remember his phone number.

My great school friend, another married lady now, who tries her very best to stay in touch with me. Offering me a coffee every now and then. We have spent a few New Years together, but I've never done enough to deserve your attention.

My favourite work colleague. Who endlessly asks me out for a drink. Im not a big drinker, you always knew this, but I wish I could spend more time just hanging out with you. I'm always saying I dont have the time or the money. I'm sorry buddy. I miss you.

My literary friend. Who throws ideas off his walls like a sparkler on a cold bonfire night. I know how busy we have both become, and how hard it is just to hang out anymore, and I'm sorry. And my ex-flat mate, who actually lives on his own at the moment. Do you think I would come round more often if we had two playstations set up? lol. I should spend more time pal. I'm so sorry I dont.

There are many many others who I could mention. There are many others that over the stretch of time I have simply lost. Perhaps we all do. Perhaps people really do drift apart like this.

I can only assume its my melancholic mood thats making me think these things, plus the recognition that next year I will move away. Perhaps not forever, but for long enough that things may never be the same again.

I have found that through the net, I have done better at keeping in touch with these lost amigo's. That in some small way I can tell them whats going on in my life, and maybe get a glance of what has happened in theirs, but know that you all mean so very much to me, and I really do miss you even if I dont have the time to say so in person.

The Majesty and the Misery

There have been some fabulous unforgettable moments that I have been lucky enough to enjoy over the last 6 weeks of pseudo-marital bliss. Moments that I found surprising, like the day we went to my lady’s friends house, and we, they and the kids played chickenfeet ‘til we couldn’t laugh or stay awake any longer, or the time we went flying kites and even my lady was surprised at how much fun it was keeping a 4 foot square piece of plastic in the air or the afternoon I stuffed myself silly eating a small mountain of frozen yoghurt with every topping imaginable cascading down its slopes with each spoonful.

There have been moments of such warmth the like of which I have never experienced before. Like introducing Roald Dahl to the skiddles, putting on silly voices as we read them “George’s Marvellous Medicine”, and “The Witches”, or watching the oldest skiddle have that moment of realisation when he finally saw, after 75 minutes of fighting with me, that if you carry that number down, long division really does work, or making my girl hold her chest with belly laughter, watching her tears stream down her beautiful cheeks as I tell her stories of what her evil cat did to me in the middle of the night. Or when I read the warm and touching comments from the lady whom I hope will soon be my mother-in-law.

There have been moments of total synchronicity too. Like when my girl and I told the 2J’s, at exactly the same time, that they could both wear dresses to the wedding if they really want to. Hearing the older boy moan his complaint for the next few minutes would have been great fun, but we were laughing so much at saying it at the same time that we couldn’t hear him. Or occasionally thinking and acting with perfect understanding, like suddenly singing to the same song on the radio, or ordering things without asking each other while out to dinner.

Every now and then, individually the skiddles would turn to us and say in a petulant and frustrated voice “I have the weirdest parents!”. Words which on its own would fill me with pride, being referred to as “parent”, but when said in reaction to us just being “in-love” made it all the more special.

Today was not a good day however, for so many reasons.

First and most obviously, the dream has ended. My six wonderful weeks are over and I had to say goodbye to the woman who has taken my heart. I know I will return and that I have to go home to organise myself and say a different set of goodbyes, but, stealing a line from a man much funnier than me, when you finally know who you want to spend the rest of your life with, you want that life to start right away.

I feel like I have been a balloon, and when I am near her I am blown up, stretching my heart to its fullest, but now she is not by my side. Now that I know I will not get to touch her hand or kiss her lips or smell her hair for so long, I feel like the balloon is empty, and the rubber has warped and gone wrinkly. I feel all wrong, out of shape and uncomfortable. I don’t feel like I will function right again until I am with her again. That’s all I am going to say about her. My feelings of loss are mine own, they are also unreasonable and in my more lucid moments I recognise that this has to happen. It doesn’t serve me to dwell on them, but it is useful to know that my mind was never where it should have been, and still isn’t.

This is probably why on my trip back from OKC to Heathrow I managed to get lost twice.

I can’t say very much about leaving Oklahoma, it was a little bit of a blur, I simply wasn’t thinking about it. I can tell you it was flat, but then most places look flat from above on high. I could tell you that the staff were polite, but I don’t remember a single word they said to me. I didn’t cry on that flight, I just went quiet, stoic and statuesque. It’s a form of shock I imagine.

I landed in Minnesota, the twin city, an hour or two later. I have never been to Minneapolis airport. Last time I came back via Cincinnati, I think, and the in flights were always through Atlanta, both of which seemed quite generic places, but Minnesota had some real character. If It were a real holiday I would have spent a few days there hiking through the woods looking for deer or bears to photograph.

Unlike the times previous however I got to leave the airport. Not out of choice, I should add. For some reason, as I left the flight from Oklahoma I felt I had to collect my luggage from the baggage claim place. After walking past security it dawned on me that they would probably just move my bags directly to the next plane, just like they have always done in the past. So I asked the very nice police lady with the very large hand gun who politely told me that I was right, I needed to check back in, but if I was trying to go back the way I came she would have to use the aforementioned device and floor me. After a swift retreat I found myself facing another security guard type person who told me I was allowed outside the airport for as long as my visa was good, if I didn’t mind missing the flight. With this newly garnished knowledge I ventured my first few steps into the metropolis of Minnesota, and with my second few steps I ventured back into the airport and to the safety of airport control.

A cup of coffee a dose of self-consternation later and I had resolved to pay more attention to what was going on around me and stop sonambulising myself through a coma.

Minnesota really was an interesting place to visit, and even though I was only there for a short amount of time, and only in its airport lounge, there was a sense of identity that you don’t see in other places. They were far more in touch with their spirit. Native Indian art and jewellery was everywhere, as were stuffed wolves and pictures of snow. Even cowboy hats and boots had their place, something you just don’t see in the much smaller OKC airport, but my real joy was taking off.

It’s not that big an airport having what appeared to be only one runway, but it was certainly nice to see the planes taxi in turn on the runways in such an orderly fashion, but the truth is that it was the clarity of the night lights that I enjoyed so much. The freeway lights causing regular areas of shadow and light reminded me of tiger snakes as far as the eye could see. Every block clearly defined and spaced out in such an organised grid pattern that would make mathematicians and town planners the world over turn pale with jealousy. The Vikings stadium and the baseball pitch next door so beautifully lit up. And The big river meandering through it all, with its brightly lit bridges creating focal points throughout the city.

I was stunned by its elegance, but as we flew higher and higher, the wispy clouds blurred most of the lights until they were like distant galaxies seen by the hubble telescope. This notion stayed in my head for the next 30 minutes as we drifted across the states passing small towns that looked in my wandering head like tiny constellations. A horse prancing, a bucket spilled, a field of mushrooms.

The hours dwindled, I flicked through some in flight movies, but even X-Men made me feel sad and Transformers got turned off within 5 minutes. I ended up watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and wondered when Matthew Mcconaughey will remove his misogynistic thumb out of his apparently sexy derriere and make a movie that doesnt involve him being an annoying playboy type to women who fawn over him all the time.

Eventually, we began to lose altitude and I looked out my window onto a bright and hot London. Its odd the things I never normally noticed before, that we dont appreciate. I looked down at a rich green patchwork of fields, not a straight line separating them. It was almost as if a five year old were told to draw them. And every field, road, house, garden and farm edged with the trees and bushes that so epitomise my country.

I watched as the landmarks of london came into view. The Thames Barrier, The Millenium Dome, The Ghurkin, The London Eye and Parliament. I watched Buck Palace pass underneath and for the first time perhaps I noticed just how many fields, greens, parks, play areas and commons it has. How you are never too far away from grass and always have a tree in view within a minute. I look in wonder at a very different sort of elegance. At a country that wasnt planned, but formed over centuries of struggle and debate, that was torn by class conflict, by unfair taxes, by crazy civil wars, by religious bickering and also by rain that cuts through our rolling hills and creates so many irrisistable natural boundaries.

And I realise that even on this, the saddest of all days when I say goodbye to the love of my life for a period of time too long to contemplate without invoking a panic attack, that my exhausted state allowed me to see things of elegance and beauty, things that describe the differences between our two countries so simply, things normally overlooked by me and many like me I am sure.

The world has a habit of throwing you curve-balls... and sometimes they are just the tonic you need to keep going a little longer.

Culture Shock and Double Cream

As some of you will know this trip to the US is very different to the last one. Wheras last time we were going out all the time spending the days in museums, art galleries and theatres, and the nights in good restaurants trying to teach the two skiddles which fork to use, this time the closest we have been to going out has been McDonalds.

It has been a good thing though, interesting and challenging. For my part with my girl in her new job leaving at 7am in the morning and coming home at 6pm at night, and the kids gone from 8 to 3, its meant that I had to get to grips with a very different Oklahoma. I have kept myself busy enough, or at least I did initially, trying to keep the place clean, and cook a variety of things, but I have noticed some "differences" which have not helped in my plight to become a domestic god.

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For a start, some of my world famous recipes, have not gone according to plan. In fact they have not gone according to plan so much, that now both the skiddles and my girl are a little... well i'd like to say worried but the truth is that they're more scared than worried. And whilst I accept that some of it has been my fault, most of it hasnt been. Say for example just the other day when I made a peach desert. I wanted to top it off with Evapourated Milk, a delicious, thick and sweet liquid, that goes nicely with a spongy cake type thing. Imagine my disappointment when the stuff that came out was much more like UHT (which they have never heard of over here). It was very hard to explain how it really does taste better in England! Luckily we had some "Whipped Cream"... Whipped cream over here comes pre-whipped in a margerine tub, for you to spoon out!

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The other day I was cooking some sticky lemon pork, which went well,

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but the spanish rice.... this is rice boiled in chicken stock and tomatoes didnt go so well. For  a start, I spent a good half an hour trying to figure out how to use the can opener, then the rice I used turned out to be quick cook rice, and so went very squidgy by the time I had finished with it. Then there was the spaghetti... now i know what youre thinking... how can you get spaghetti wrong, well two things happened. First the tin of tomatoes I had turned out to be tomatoes and chillis. Now, I am sure that skiddles the world over are fussy. I remember my mother fighting with me over fussiness when I was younger, and my girls skiddles are no different. They took to my "chilli" bolognaise like cats to water... it was not pretty. It didnt help that when I asked how much spaghetti to use, my girl, not realising it was a big pack, told me to use the lot, which then overfilled the pot, until they went all sticky and starchy!

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Then there was the spanish omelet (or tortilla) which I made with green beans (cos I didnt think the kids would like spinach), but apparently since I called it a tortilla, and so they expected a flat mexican pancake, and i gave them a thick eggy omelet, they objected to!

In fact the only thing that seems to have gone down okay is my salad dressing, and even that has a limited success. I have noticed that the kids have taken to "adding salt" to everything I cook now, not cos it needs salt but because that way they cant taste it, and they can turn to mommy and claim "its too salty, can I throw it out"!

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Now speaking of Mommy for a little moment... Mommy started off by backing me up. "you must try it", "Its all food", "children in Africa would love to eat this", but as the weeks went on, I noticed she started having "A full lunch with the boss"

So I have started to feel more and more deflated, and its not just in the cooking department either. Take for example the toilet cleaner, which comes as a powder that you leave in the toilet bowl for a while before flushing it. Except flushing it at the wrong time, or putting too much powder in the bowl (especially with such a high water mark on the loo) meant that the foam would flow over the lip of the toilet and may have covered the toilet floor and I may have had to spend a while cleaning it. erm.... but thats not all, even their floor cleaner proved to be too tricky. Instead of having a simple mop and bucket, which everyone and his grandma could deal with, they have a "swisher", a strange device that looks like a mop with a button push cleaning fluid ejector half way up the stick....  Now how was I supposed to know that you needed to put a sheet on the bottom of the thing.

Enough said.... There are things I could have done better, and there are things I have been plain unlucky with. All this is part of the culture shock you get when you come here for any amount of time. I was stunned the other day whilst watching the american version of who wants to be a millionaire that I couldnt get past the first three questions! How was I supposed to know the lyrics to some childrens song!

The truth is that the US might look a little like England, might feel a little like England, might even talk english, but it aint England! No double cream, no clotted cream, no sugar in chocolate (the chocolate here is horrid!), no hot tea, no back bacon, no mature cheddar, no branston pickle, no curry and no crusty bread.

Not that Im saying England is better, just different. And the US offers so much more..... pazazz.  It surprises you with its never ending supply of drinks, the swimming pools, basketball nets and tennis courts connected to each set of apartments, its free telephone lines in other countries when you get a new local contract.

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The US shows how the customer really can be king, it floods you with a million special offers and a billion freebies. Sometimes though its hard to look past the BOGOF's and the Open Days and see how you are being manipulated. Its hard to see that the cheap fuel given to you in one hand means a divisive and unethical manipulation of the international market on the other. Sometimes you feel like you are living in a fantasy, and you just cant imagine people living a different way. Its easy to "expect" things and after a while I have found myself questioning service instead of stoicly putting up with it like we do in the UK.

I can see why they often appear to us as brash and demanding. Its just what they expect over here, but wheras we suffer everything with a good dose of cynicism, they have none and blindly believe what is told to them. I was astonished to see that President Obamas speeches are used to advertise bad debt companies, can you imagine Gordon Brown appearing on a British Beef advert!

Their belief in the polarised one side or the other system is quite astonishing. Not just republican (tory) and democrat (labour), but Dallas Cowboys or Pitsburgh Steelers, No guns or you must have a gun or Jesus or the Devil. Everything is black or white and there is no voice for shades. And the language is so confused that you sepnd half your time trying to work out what you are supporting (or not). Pro-life or Pro-choice... which one believes in abortion? If someone talks of euthanasia, another person talks of death camps.

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Since I've been here I've heard arguments that Darwin caused World War II, that Gravity is gods way of keeping us on the planet and that the US of A have won every major war since the war of independance. Mostly told by nutters that have no place singing on street corners, and yet they do.

I have had a discussion with my future father-in-law that said that the americans saved "your butts" in Granada. If you dont know what happened in Granada, I advise you to look it up and see what the text books say. I had to aquiesce since I didnt know the subject, but I must have done enough, because a revised edition was handed to me the next time I spoke with him, and therin lies another great thing about the US.

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When they do realise, accept, appreciate they are wrong, they really do something about it. Service is incredible, in every regard, like when the kids ordered some drinks the other day and the waitress brought them over, but the kids started crying telling us they wanted a different drink. In England you would die of embarrassment and tell them to shut up. In england the waitress would huff and groan and charge you double. In the US the waitress told us no problem and came back two minutes later with the new order at no extra charge. Or the way that my girls steak was not cooked well enough for her so they asked her to remove the baked potato, so she had something to eat, whilst they cooked it up, and then they gave her ANOTHER baked potato with the newly cooked steak. This was not special attention, this was common practice.

I went to the school the kids are at again. I had gone several times last time I was here, and I had to pick something up here this time. The staff remembered my name, allowed me to sit in their office, offered me a tour and a drink. There is something incredible in that level of commitment. And believe me, its not just to me they offer it, its with everyone.

I hope that my life here doesnt make me forget my cynicism. Doesnt stop me questioning the facts I am told about the world. I hope I keep doubting everything, and looking for my own answers. More than that, I hope that I keep pushing my new family to see the rest of the world, to recognise what they consider as being normal or passable actually is incredibly good in any other country. I hope I can bring a little realism to their lives, as in my opinion everyone needs to know how they have it good wheras others have it bad just because they happened to be born in the wrong country.

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I have alwasy been greatful that my parents did that for me, that they forced me to eat things I didnt like as a child, forced me to sit through things I was bored at, and forced me to try speaking languages when it was much easier not to. I hope I can help do that because its a start to being a more understanding more sympathetic person. To appreciate that things are good here, in part because they are bad somewhere else, and that things covered overnight but not put in the fridge is what millions of people with no fridges do every single day, and perhaps we shouldnt worry so much about the germ that got away, and that maybe a few germs can make us stronger not weaker.

That wasting food/fuel/energy/plastics/boxes may not be a crime, but it is a sin, in that it is a crime of priviledge that both sides of the pond are guilty of.

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In the US at the moment they have adverts for "Swine flu packs" these include tissues, cold medicine, headache pills, muscle pain pills, face masks and hand cleaning gel. They are aimed at children, in fact such is the panic of swine flu that schools are regularly closing their doors for days at a time to stop the spread. We are talking about swine flu here. On the grand scale if things, swine flu is not a big killer, its not even killed as many people as measles did last year. According to statistics, your child is more likely to get run over going to school than they are from the swine flu they are very unlikely to get at school. And its that kind of manipulation that scares me. When you are swamped with it, then its hard to see the truth.

After all, how many in the UK were worried by asian flu, or the millenium bug. We all fall victim to this crazy manipulation caused by newspapers and media looking for sensationalist stories to catch the attention of a scared public. And I'm in the heart of it. Right here. I dont want to succumb to it, and  hope I never do significantly. Its that part of me that I worry about the most though. That part of me that forgets how ugly hard and real life can be elsewhere, when we have it so good, that even our homeless people have somewhere to ask for help if they are prepared to. I'm reminded of Alan, one of Dorchester's tattooed drunks that recently was given a home to live in. After years and years of choosing not to accept help he finally gave up, saying that his tramping days are over and thanks for the retirement present.

I'm thinking whilst it is good to see the old stallwart walking home every night, what people in Sierra Nevada or Pakistan would have thought of the choices he made. What the young innocent girls of the Surinam, raped by men who have aids because a witch doctor told them that was the only cure, would think of it. What Indian children of 8 years old would think of it as they climb up giant rubbish tips in search of some tin to sell. I wonder in fact how much money those same children would make over here in the US in one year climbing up the mountains of trash over here.

As a conclusion, and I'm sorry this is so long, I want to say that the US is a wonderful paradise of opportunity, where the best really is appreciated and demanded, but I just want to see a little piece of the other world. The world of poverty and hunger. When I was a child I saw Barry Norman on a kids tv show. The nations favourite film reviewer at the time said that to be a film reviewer, a good one, you had to watch an awful lot of BAD movies, to know a good one when you see it.

I think thats good advice for me now, and for everyone.