Modernity in Spain

I wouldn’t have guessed that you would hear that phrase at our dining room table. This is partly because we don’t eat at our dining room table, so you're pretty unlikely to hear anything there. We sit on the sofa in front of the tv. One of us (usually me) says “this is really bad, isn’t it? We should sit at the table and talk to each other instead of watching rubbish tv.” The other agrees, and we both tuck into our meal. It’s kind of like saying grace.

A couple of Fridays ago, however, we did sit at our table and the phrase Modernity in Spain was uttered. Not by me. But it was uttered at our table. Yes, I thought you’d be impressed.

It was like this. Somebody had suggested to me, if you want to find friends, the best thing to do is to try getting to know new arrivals. They will be in need of friends. People who’ve lived here for ages aren’t. This seemed like good advice. So when Husband mentioned that a new person had pitched up at work, and that she and her husband were living very near us, I said “invite them round”. I didn’t say “invite them round with no notice at the children’s bedtime on a day when the children are particularly hyper, the place is a tip, there’s no food in the house and not even a bottle of wine”. What I did say, knowing that the other husband was Spanish and called Manuel, was “we’ll have to be careful not to make any Manuel jokes”. Husband said “I already have, but he didn’t mind. He knows about Fawlty Towers, and he’s not from Barcelona”. So that was OK then.

You know, actually, it is a very sneaky strategy to have no food in the house (although the no wine bit isn't so clever). This means that instead of having to expend effort thinking about, shopping for, and cooking dinner, you can simply say to your guests “we’ve got no food in the house, let’s get a take-away”. This is much easier. Even the children’s bedtime thing can have it’s advantages – the guests go and get the take-away on your behalf. And the bottle of wine.

So there we were, children in bed, wine in glasses, take-away served. They were very good company. They even made nice comments about the take-away. I thought that was very polite.

I really liked them. And you know, once in a while, it's nice to have Modernity in Spain discussed at your table, rather than whose turn it is first on the playstation after dinner. We’ll have to have them round again. Trouble is, I can’t invite them, because then I’ll have to bother to cook. You can’t pull that no food in the house trick twice. Meanwhile, I must get one of those clever Blogger tracker tools sorted out, because it would be fun to know just how many people have googled Modernity in Spain and ended up with Domesticity in the Midwest instead.

More about Burgers

Another reason for enjoying a Burger Bash is that it involves one of my favourite words. Burger. That’s right. Burger. You see, for the English amongst us (ie me and Husband), the word has 2 vowel sounds and 2 consonants. Bur-ger. But for the Americans amongst us (ie everyone else), the word has 2 consonants and a huge amount of rrrrr-ing. Brrrrrr-grrrrrr. Now in Scotland, it is altogether different. The word there has 4 vowel sounds and 4 consonants. Bu-rra-gu-rra. You see how impoverished we English are in this department. No amount of thatched cottages or winding leafy country lanes is going to make up for our sad deficiency on the R front. I have an English accent, and when it comes down to it, no-one is ever going to admire me for my Rs.

This is a subject close to my heart, by reason of the fact that my surname contains a silent R. Silent when I lived unsuspectingly in England. It didn’t remain so when I got to Scotland, and now, emboldened by a few years of causing me awkward introductions, it is jolly well not going to go back to submissive silence again. Suppose my surname is Burns (it isn’t, by the way). In Scotland I became Burrans. Now in the US, I am Brrrns. The trouble is, I still call myself Buuhns. You see the problem. When I have to give my name, it always involves the following conversation:

“Buuhns”.

“Brrrns?”

“Yes, that’s right. Buuhns.”

I have learnt to get round this problem by spelling out my name: “Buuhns, B-U-R-N-S” with a bit of rolling on the R (ahrrr) to help clarify. It is, however, all a bit of a disappointment. You see, on marrying, I exchanged an unusual maiden name for a much easier surname. Not only did I whizz up the alphabet, but for a few England-inhabiting years, I no longer had to spell out my name, pronounce my name, repeat my name. So it is rather annoying to return to all that.

However, notwithstanding my personal complications, I must say I do like all these extra Rs. One of the finest evenings I had in Scotland was when the book group I belonged to (nay, was a founder member of) discussed “Gurral with a Purral Earring”. This was already one of my favourite novels, but I think the sheer pleasure of listening to those lilting voices with their rolling Rs, pushed it even higher up the list.

There is one word that I prefer even to burger, and that is murder. True, it is less easy to weave into a conversation, but its great advantage is this: once you have got it into play, you are only one short step away from getting your speaker to say the word murderer. Now that really is fun. Here in the US, I’ve found that if you can target someone who is chewing gum before they start, you can leave them muted for the rest of the day, the fronts of their top teeth glued to the inside of their bottom lip. Fun, but perhaps not very sprrrting behaviour.

Burger Bash

This has been a busy week-end at the neighborhood pool. On Friday night, there was a Burger Bash, which we attended. On Saturday, there was a Midnight Swim, which would have involved either organising a babysitter or dealing with very tired children for the rest of the week-end. Neither seemed worth the effort, so we passed on that one. Then tonight, there was a Jazz Evening planned, but it's been cancelled this afternoon, or postponed at any rate, "due to unforeseen circumstances".

The Burger Bash was fun. It involved burgers, hot dogs, baked beans, salads, a big range of desserts, and swimming. Very pleasant. Life always looks up at the neighborhood pool. Sitting on a lounger under a sun-shade, burger in hand, happy children cavorting in the water, I watched the Stars and Stripes fluttering gently in the breeze above me and thought "well, I wouldn't be doing this in Scotland. Not if I valued my extremities."

I haven't been persuaded into purchasing a two-piece swimsuit, but I have bought a squaw dress. I'm not sure if I should call it a squaw dress. I haven't worked out the pc issues and vocabulary relating to Native Americans, except that I know I'm meant to call a buffalo a bison. So maybe I shouldn't say squaw dress, but I don't know what else to call it. It’s a shift dress, black with big, striking, blue and purple flowers, and tassels round the bottom. I feel it is a bit short for someone of my advanced years, but Midwesterners are very casual, so I can probably get away with it (and my legs are better than my midriff). It is suitably 60's for the pool scene. I also feel a bit more respectable wandering home through the neighborhood with a squaw dress over my swimsuit, than with a towel wrapped insecurely round my waist. I like it, and anyway, it was on the reduced rail at Wal-Mart.

I think my friend Fran would be pleased with me. She says she doesn't mind me quoting her in my blog, so long as I don't call her 21-yo (actually, she isn't, but you get the idea). In fact, Fran put her finger on something rather important (must be all that leafing through the Boden catalogue that gives you super-accurate fingers). I told her I was thinking I should acquire some hippy 60's gear for the pool, and she emailed back "Go you! Join the film set. Life's too short to observe from the wings." This is, I think, the very heart of the ex-pat condition. Can I ever truly be part of the action? And do I want to be? It certainly feels rather safer to be on the film crew side of the camera, but I think Fran is right. It's more fun to be an extra. Specially if you get a great costume like a squaw dress.

A sad day

I seem to be obsessed, blog-wise, with the wildlife in my back yard. I don't quite know why this is. I suppose school holidays and summer do tend to push you out into the back yard, and there's not all that much that is interesting to write about inside the house. There are rooms, and they are filled with our furniture.

I thought the back yard was coming good on the wildlife front. Fireflies good, mosquitoes bad. Glorious red trumpet vine good, odd-looking fungus bad. I think I'd started seeing it in terms of a scorecard. Fireflies good - fifteen love. Mosquitoes bad - fifteen all. Trumpet vine good - thirty fifteen. Fungus bad - thirty all. You get the idea. I had a feeling that I was winning, or at least getting the upper hand.

I asked someone round to help me learn about the plants, and she came yesterday, gave me loads of helpful information and left me some gardening books to borrow. She told me where to buy a large long-sleeved smock-like garment (a smock, in fact) impregnated with insect repellent, which I can keep by the back door and put on whenever I go outside. I got all excited about the potential of the place. I was planning a triumphant blog entry (perhaps with pictures) about our lovely back yard. I was going to tell you my clever anti-mosquito strategies, the beautiful birds, the squirrels (including Poor-tail, the one who is easily identifiable by his half-missing appendage), and the crowning glory, our little tame rabbit. How lovely to have a tame rabbit in the garden (see how at this point I lapse from the back yard into the garden again). How surprising, given that our predecessors had two cats. He looked like a wild rabbit, but we live right in the middle of the city - where had he come from? He was tame enough that he would not move away until you approached very near. It was easy to get within 4 feet of him. I had set the children the project of trying to get him to eat a leaf from their hands by the end of the summer. We had put out carrots and celery and a bowl of water. I loved that rabbit. He had become our rabbit.

You know where this is going. It was 6-yo who found him. "The rabbit has died. At least I think it's dead. It's got a purple eye." He was right. It was dead, and it did have a purple eye. No other signs of cause of death. Flies already closing in. The children are remarkably philosophical. They are sure that they WOULD have managed to get him eating out of their hands by the end of the summer (although on the evidence of the amount of time and patience they had for the task, I silently doubt it). They agree with me that he died probably as a result of eating something poisonous, that he didn't die a horrible death, just had a poorly tummy and went to sleep, and that it was nice that he had come right up to the house to die - he must have wanted to be near us. I used to opportunity to reiterate the rule about not putting anything from the garden in your mouth (3-yo is a worry on this front, at that age where it is funny to do naughty things, or be about to do them, she has been deliberately putting leaves in her mouth and coming to show me - I don't think she'll be doing that any more. Sorry, rabbit, but I couldn't help using you as a cautionary tale).

I was telling yesterday's gardening friend how I had been surprised by how hostile (a word I apologised for in advance of using) the environment here is, and how that seemed to make such a difference to daily life. I had never truly appreciated how very gentle a country Britain is, in terms of climate and countryside. She understood, and then put it very eloquently: "Here, we do have to try harder and take more steps in order to live happily alongside nature". I know in the grand scheme of things, the death of one rabbit doesn't amount to much. He did, however, make our home here feel a bit friendlier, a bit softer round the edges, a bit less hostile (there, I've said it).

Today it definitely feels like Advantage Back Yard.

Shopping

Here are three things I like about supermarket shopping here:

1) you can push your child around in a big plastic car-like contraption which is fixed to the front of the trolley (which I remember to call a cart), and it is big enough to fit 3-yo and 6-yo in together. It's a bit hard to manoeuvre, but the happy children are worth the trouble. You can weave up and down the aisles, which are twice as wide as UK supermarkets, saying "you're not steering very well", and make them practise parking neatly in front of the Cheerios. I am anticipating receiving comments saying "we have those car-trolleys in my local Tesco", but they didn't have them in my local Co-op in Scotland, nor in the Morrison's which was 10 miles away (one less reason to ...), so they are new to me.

2) you can buy cactus leaves in the fruit and veg section. This makes me feel I am living an exotic abroad existence. It is one of my ambitions to find out how to cook them.

3) when you read the cooking instructions on packets, it gives alternative cooking temperatures and times for high altitude. This doesn't apply to me, but gives me another shot of that exotic abroad feeling.

An experiment in empathy

In my last entry, I talked about the way we build up day-to-day knowledge over the years. How knowledge is mixed in with experience, and beaten into shape by frequent use. How as a newcomer to a situation, we can get an off-the-shelf knowledge product, but how that just isn't an equivalent.

I wondered if this would feel the same to an American woman arriving in the UK. So I tried an experiment. Try it with me, if you will.

Imagine you have moved to some rural corner of England, and you have nettles in the wild space at the bottom of the garden. Your child tries to pick one and gets stung. You ring a friend, and she says "oh nettle rash, don't worry about that. Just get a dock leaf and rub the juice on, or, um, I think it's bicarbonate of soda that's meant to help, or is that for wasp stings? I can never remember. Anyway, don't worry, it'll go in a few hours."

These Brits, you are thinking to yourself at this point, they're so vague. And dock leaves? What is this? The Dark Ages?

So you google "nettles", and you find an entry in Wikipedia where you get a picture of a limb covered in a rash. See it there on the right hand side? Not very pretty. Then you go to NHS Direct which you think will be fairly authoritative. As you read the article on nettle rash, you very quickly start learning about acute urticaria, chronic urticaria, and within a paragraph or two, you are into angioedema, which can cause swelling of the lining of the mouth, the windpipe and, in men, the genitals. Click down to the “treatment” section, and you see it mentions nothing about dock leaves (which you’re kind of relieved about, as this would only confirm your darkest anxieties about the NHS), but you find it talks about steroids, their side-effects, and emergency hospital treatment if breathing becomes severely affected. See what I mean. You’ve gone from a small patch of itchy hives to emergency hospital treatment in a few minutes, and you’re adrift.

You might also remember having heard about nettle tea. You want to understand as much as you can about this obsession with tea which is such a part of the British life, so while you're on the subject, you have a go at googling that. Why on earth would anyone risk stings, hives, swelling of the genitals and possibly emergency hospital treatment for a cup of tea, when you can buy several different brands at the supermarket? Your search doesn't bring much enlightenment. One of the first Google results for nettle tea tells you that "nettle tea [isn't] better than regular black tea, it's just different".

Not better, just different.

.

Bugs

Apologies to those of you who are squeamish about creepy-crawlies, but I am returning to the theme. They have been a feature of the past week or two. The fireflies were a high point; it's been downhill all the way since.

First off, I have discovered that I am sensitive to mosquito bites. Everyone seems to have an allergy these days, so I think I could say this is my one. I’ve had mosquito bites before which become the size of a 50p piece and a bit puffy, but we’re talking different league here. The mosquito here asks “do you want me to supersize that?” as he bites, and my body, without my permission, says “oh yes please”. The bite becomes the size of a beer mat, and then it starts changing shape and moving in a rather intriguing way. Up an arm, round the side of a leg, morphing into less tidy shapes as it spreads over the contours of muscle and joint. It’s red and hot and swollen and angry. The only saving grace is that it isn’t particularly itchy (although if I confess that, I will obviously receive less sympathy), and I am relieved that they’re not spider bites. The first bite had me worried, especially when a very friendly and helpful pharmacist used words like "venomous", and told me to look out for evidence of tracking up a blood vessel. But I have now caught a mozzy in action, which is useful diagnostic work on the one hand, but on the other, not a very cheering prospect for the summer. There are sprays for yourself and for your back yard, and you can eat lots of garlic, but the bottom line is cold compresses and anti-histamine tablets which give me a sort of brain fog for about 3 days per bite. The alternative is never setting foot outside my house, car, or destination, which isn’t very appealing, although it would give me a real flavor of life as an average Midwesterner – ouch, did I say that?

Next,10-yo has been doing a Young Scientist's Camp each morning this week. This involved exploring in woods and ditches. Good childhood stuff. He came home and said "you've got to do a tick check on me". Once I'd finished wearying patient Husband with jokes about putting any ticks I might find in boxes, and whether they'd be ticks or checks once in the box, I realised I didn't know what I was looking for in any case. I have people I can ring up and ask these things, so I did that. Then I looked up the information on the internet. This is always a mistake. in just a few minutes, you can go from hearing that ticks are really nothing much to worry about, to knowing that they can carry Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. You can see what a Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever rash looks like. You can learn that most cases respond to antibiotics, but that 3% don't.

This is one of the difficult things about living abroad. You don't build up knowledge gently over many years. You have to get it brutally all at once. You don't have the backdrop of years of plucking ticks out of scalps, and of your mother plucking ticks out of yours, to give you a reasonable perspective in which to put the very occasional horror story. You can't download that kind of knowledge from the computer. Human memory files work in a rather more cumulative way. I'm not sure you can rely on finding short cuts.

So you can see why I am fed up with the bugs here. I'll have to make sure I go and watch my friends the fireflies again this evening to redress the balance a little.

Rhyming pang

My 6-yo was being assessed at school. The assessor said she was puzzled. He can read, but he couldn't make rhymes. Being able to make rhymes is normally a pre-requisite skill for reading (if I understood her correctly). He had taken ages to come up with basic rhyming words, and had sometimes suggested incorrect ones (although she had been suitably impressed when he had produced "earthquake" as a rhyme for "take"). I wondered if this was something to do with him processing her accent, as I was pretty sure he could do rhyming easy-peasy. So I tried him out on a few at home, and as I expected, he was able to come up quickly with 2 or 3 rhyming words for each word I suggested.

So I tried the same experiment on myself. I speak French (rustily). I tried naming a French word and then thinking of a rhyme. It is very difficult. Very difficult indeed. My conclusion is that rhyming in a language or accent other than your mother tongue or accent is difficult. Perhaps it's because in your tender years you didn't learn all those nursery rhymes and have your mother talk rhyming baby gibberish to you, carving out the necessary trails in the brain to make rhyming an almost instinctive skill.

Of course assessors don't get everything right. She told me "I told 6-yo that my family had come from Scotland as I thought he'd find that interesting". He told me "Everyone else got to watch a movie, but I had to go and do extra work for this lady because she is from Scotland and I am from Scotland. It wasn't fair. ".

Fireflies in the back yard

Oooh, another bonus. No-one told me we'd have fireflies in the back yard.

So far, I've found the wildlife rather hostile. There are spiders with bites that can turn nasty (and even fatal, but don't tell my mother that bit). These are called fiddlebacks after the outline of a violin that you can see on them, or brown recluse. The one we saw marching across our basement floor wasn't very reclusive, though. Probably ailing or dying, according to the pest control man who came round to spray the house (oh so tempting to say "Hello Spiderman" when I opened the door to him).

Then there are fluttery moths, large numbers of woodlice (I've never seen so many, but at least they have the decency to stay hidden under stones and bricks and any toy left outside overnight), mosquitoes (lots, apparently, as the summer wears on), ants (many, many), chiggers (which bite your ankles, mine more than most, but you can effectively stop the bites itching with clear nail polish, I'm told), and termites (we know we don't have those, at the moment, as you have your house inspected for them when you buy it).

So it was with great joy that I witnessed the fireflies. I have never seen a firefly before, but have always imagined they would be charming and curious. And indeed they are. They are truly lovely. They are little blobs of yellowy-green light that switch on, float around, and switch off. It is like having magic in your back yard.

Husaband and I agreed that all we needed was a couple of garden chairs and a bottle of wine, and we could have spent some happy time sitting in the warm evening breeze watching the fireflies. Sadly, Husband is off wine as on antibiotics, and we have no garden furniture, although it has been on our agenda (I'm talking two attempted and aborted shopping trips with bored children). But it's very good to know that the fireflies are there. I'm so pleased to have met them, and I'm going to enjoy getting to know them better.

The Neighborhood Pool

When we were house-hunting, everyone advised us how nice it was to have a neighborhood pool. I didn't really believe them. We were house-hunting in the snow, and it is always hard to imagine what a different season brings, even if you know first hand, let alone if you don't. We're not a very swimmy family, I thought. We're too fair-skinned to stay out too long in the blazing sun, pool or no pool. We'd go for the odd quick dip, but we wouldn't hang out.

We did, however, end up buying a house in a neighborhood with a pool. They were right. It is a very life-enhancing thing. We have become a swimmy family. I am nagged daily until we go. We stay for hours. I have bought UV-protection swimwear, lots of sunscreen and have learnt to be less paranoid. I am a convert to the neighborhood pool. It is a lot of fun.

There are times since I've been here, and I'm sure this is a common experience, when I feel I am in a film. So much of American culture is familiar to us Brits through film and television, that when you experience it for real, it feels strangely fictional. Do Americans feel like they've walked into "Notting Hill" when they visit London, I wonder? Anwyay, the neighborhood pool is very much that being-in-a-film experience. Marvellously, it's like being in a film about the 60's. It starts with the architecture. The building is long and low, and has decorative features, squares and stripes, which tie it to its age. There is a pale blue telephone on the wall in the entrance, which must be the original.The pool is that shade of turquoise that all good pools used to be, before they went pastel. It's not a rectangle, but that shape that you learn the name of at school and then forget since you never have need of the word. Except now. Like a rectangle, but with the two long side slanting inwards instead of being parallel, and the top end shorter than the bottom. Trapezoid? Rhomboid? (And while we're on the subject, whatever happened to the word "oblong"? I used to love that word, but "rectangle" has won the day, and you never hear good old oblong any more.)

I digress. Back to the not-rectangular neighborhood pool. There are chairs and loungers made of soft plastic strips, so you can't stand on them as your feet will go through (although if you are a child, you'll have a jolly good try). There is the radio played over loudspeakers, lots of golden oldies. There are two lifeguards sitting on chairs at the top of ladders (two, mind, for a smallish pool: this is very reassuring for mothers of not-very-strong swimmers). The lifeguards blow a whistle if you try running by the side of the pool, or any other naughty behaviour. There is a hatch where you can buy sugar and artificial colouring combined in various forms: solid, liquid, fizzy or frozen. There are lots of children diving for rings, or playing water basketball. There are parents. There are teenagers in small groups, either awkwardly self-conscious or self-consciously confident, depending on which side of that particular line they exist. The teenagers enhance the 60s feel, as their swimwear is all turquoise and brown circles, or lollipop pink polka dots. Bikinis combining halter neck tops with little hipster shorts are the thing. One of my English friends has kindly advised me that Boden deliver such things to the US. Thank you, Fran, but get real. I've had three babies. I am making my own small contribution to the 60's theme by wearing some odd, slightly winged, sunglasses. I thought I'd lost them in the move, and was looking forward to getting new ones, some of those clever ones that go dark when you're outside and clear when you're inside, but sadly, I've found my old odd ones, so am having to work on justifying a new pair to myself before I can do that.

Anyway, this misses the point. I don't need to look the part, because it is me who is watching the film. I am someone who has inadvertently wandered onto the set and am watching the action. I don't have to be part of it. The odd glasses are just a nod in its direction.

So there we are. The neighborhood pool. The perceptive amongst you, and the pedants, will have noticed that I have not been consistent in my use of American and English spelling. Neighborhood, but colouring and behaviour. Let me reassure you. There is a logic in it, which goes like this: I'm sticking with my English spelling, but the neighborhood pool has to be the neighborhood pool. There's no such thing as a neighbourhood pool. They just don't exist. And maybe that's why I am getting so fond of the neighborhood pool. It's an extra. It's something we couldn't have enjoyed in Scotland. Not wrong or different, but a bonus!

A bird, a beer and a birthday

There are three moments which have pulled at my home-heartstrings in the past few days. The first was when a seagull, a single bird, flew over our neighborhood pool. It must have been very lost. We are 650 miles from the nearest sea if you head south, over 1,300 if you head east (as my thoughts do).

The second happened when I was browsing the blogosphere. I came across a reference to the Poltimore Arms. This is a small pub in a remote location on Exmoor. It is a very pleasant spot. I haven't been there for at least 10 years, so I couldn't exactly say it was a part of my everyday pre-Midwest life, (unlike seagulls, which were). In fact, I never thought about it. But I am thinking about it now, and it is a long, long way away.

The third moment came when I was standing in Dillons (the Waitrose of supermarkets here, and very nice) choosing a birthday card for my younger brother's 40th birthday. There is something wrong about sending a 40th birthday card half a world away to your younger brother. Not wrong, just different? No. I'm sorry. This one is wrong, just wrong.

Li'l words

3-yo is doing interesting things to process the different accent.

She goes once a week to a Mom's Day Out (we don't really have these in the UK, but you can imagine what it is). She came back saying "li'l" instead of "little", and clearly rather pleased with herself, dropping it into the conversation rather as you or I would a word like "mellifluous" or "plethora". Then with impeccable logic, she applied the rule (ie, slide over a t/d in the middle of the word) to "playdough" and now calls it "play-oh" - in spite of my best efforts to persuade her otherwise.

In a similar way, she has learnt to sound the "r" at the end of words such as car, beaker, bigger, but has also added it onto other words like sofa, pizza,
Mama (sofrr, pizzrr, Mumrr). Fascinating.

I don't mind being Mumrr, and it is better than Mom, although in all honesty I think I did prefer Mummy.