Inspiration Lacking Thereof

It has been nearly eight months since I last blogged.  I suppose, that is quite a long time in the world of blogging.

One would think a move from Singapore to New York would create fertile ground for interesting ideas, content and stories to share.  It hasn't.

I think this has happened, in part, because we seem to be back to the normal world.  Singapore with all its weird wonderful idiosyncrasies provided ample fodder for fun, anecdotes and yes with a shamed face, lots of mockery.

The US is just normal.  Or rather where we are living is just rather normal, nice, pedestrian and dare I say ... boring.  

You might have guessed that we are not living in the bright lights big city of Manhattan, so for those of you excited to stay with us to have access to the Big Apple, be warned, we live in the woods 40 miles outside of Manhattan.  

The only bright lights where we live are the lighthouse bulb bright drive way lights on everyone's property to stop them crashing into their own houses at night. 

That said, you are all extremely welcome to stay.  Well, actually, only half of you. (See divisiveness is brilliant.  I see why politicians do it, as now half of you are wondering... "is that cow talking about me?").  

I am also writing now because Christmas is coming up and I always write a Christmas blog to wish you all merriment and a wonderful healthy hearty time with family and friends.

This year, we will have family with us for Christmas and will not have to run away from the heat, our ipad app log fire and our 3 ft fake tree.  

I also thought this is the time to wish everyone a Happy New Year but I don't think I can write that without you noticing the sarcasm dripping off my font.

It has been a doozie hasn't it... 2016? I don't want to bang on over the state of the world because there is endless banging on about that every second of every day.  

Instead, I thought you might enjoy hearing how, with this miserable funk hanging over me due to the 24 hour news cycle beating me up on loop, I have managed to turn an exciting new adventure for us in America, into poop.

Example 1
It is an hour on the train into Manhattan which is a bore, but as one steps out of Grand Central station into the hub bub of the city it is instantly energizing. And at Christmas it is especially wonderful.  The lights, the noise, the homelessness, the garbage, the music, the buildings, the drunks, all makes me love Manhattan and takes me back to my many happy years as a young Dick Whit seeking my fortune in London.


The only problem with New York is the grid system.  

Everyone warbles on about how the grid system is the easiest system to negotiate.  This is like those people who say bats have sonar.  I cannot tell you how many times I have had bats fly into my face. That whole sonar echo location thing is just something made up by conspiracy theorists.  

Secondly, it doesn't matter if I have my New York guide book and my google maps out on my phone.  I can come out of the same exit of Grand Central every time and stand there for ten minutes before screaming out loud "which goddamn way is east".  

Please note that even though I mentioned a guide book and phone GPS I am not a tourist.  I am one of those travelling snobs that would never call myself a tourist.  

Tourists get in the way, lacerate strangers with their selfie sticks, amble and stop suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk.  I am not one of these people.  I am a traveller, so I do none of these things, but admittedly in New York, I do all of these things, because I don't know which way is east!  

I think a good start for overcoming this problem is admitting to yourself that east does not mean right and west isn't left and it does matter where you are standing when attempting to navigate. 

I also believe if you have grown up or worked in a big city you have free licence to go to anybody else's big city and abuse tourists for getting in the way.  It is a big city understanding between big city people. So on a recent trip to Manhattan to meet an old friend, I had great fun parroting her as she cursed all the tourists queuing round the blocks of places we wanted to go to.  What fun. 

God, I really hate people.

Example 2
As I mentioned we live in the woods and when I say the woods, I mean the woods.  We do live in a wonderful friendly neighbourhood and there are two small towns about a 15 minute drive away in each direction.  There are no pavements or sidewalks and we regularly have rabbits, deer, coyotes and velociraptors strolling through our garden.

I love the countryside.  It is clean aired, refreshing and pretty but unlike our old days in Guildford where we had the benefit of the countryside on our doorstep, it was also a short walk into a fantastic town with great shops, restaurants, bars, theatre and a cinema.  So if you fancied a bit of sophisticated urban posing, it was only a few minutes away and it was delightful.

We don't have that here and everything is a car ride away so I decided I should embrace my new life and attempt a daily stroll.  This was particularly important after I found out shortly before we left Singapore that I had put on 11kg in weight, shrunk an inch and had raised cholesterol.  Just what every girl wants to hear.  They might as well have given me a lollipop and a sticker saying middle aged with an arrow pointing downwards, labelled "death".

Anyway, I decided to dig a free fit bit out and attempt to do my 10,000 steps a day by walking up and down our road which is hilly. You get the 10,000 steps in and have an asthma attack, which I believe is a sign the cholesterol and arterial tube fat is breaking up.  Can't breathe and want to faint.  Cholesterol is dissolving.  All good.  

However, while this is all rather swell for my health, due to the fact we live in the woods, walking has become somewhat of a hazard.  Unlike my children who absolutely love road kill and are clearly putting in the foundations to become serial killers in later life, I am less keen.  

I am petrified of road kill and dead animals haunt me.  My daily walk has become a minefield of squashed squirrels, dead mice, decapitated bunnies, run over raccoons and just recently half a deer leg that appeared in front of our house and a few days ago moved across the road to someone else's house.  I have no idea how this happened but given it is a leg, I assume it walked there.  

I am now too scared to leave my home. So my walking days in the fresh biting cold air are over and I am just going to walk up and down my stairs at home and carry laundry up one pair of pants at a time to maximise my opportunity for exercise.

Example 3
Work is very quiet.  The company I worked for briefly in Singapore, where I signed my contract and then two weeks later handed in my resignation due to the job offer in the US, were incredibly kind to ask me to continue working for them from here.  This was an absolute gift.  Having spoken to friends who have moved to the US in the last few years, they are all struggling with boredom due to lack of work opportunities.  So I grabbed this job with absolute glee.  

I am doing freelance work so it is ad hoc and as a result can be infrequent.  I had a month of work to keep me busy after we arrived but recently it has quietened down to, well, nothing so I am bored and of course scared due to the high proportion of animal deaths by my house.

So, I have had to find other methods to entertain myself other than walking underwear up and down two flights of stairs one at a time.

The Autumn here was nothing short of stunning but even though all the leaves have fallen to the ground, it is actually far easier to spot the myriad of amazing wild birds endemic to the US that are quite frankly, beautiful.  Chickadee's, woodpeckers, nuthatches & finches. Glorious!

You may scoff, but believe me, you will eventually all have mismatched chairs, a fan heater and a blanket over your laps, like a scene from UP! with binoculars on the chair arm, so you can watch wildlife in your gardens and the neighbours undressing. Don't get above yourselves!

Anyway, in my bird watching glee I thought we should get a bird feeder.  I never realised how relaxing it is watching birds. What joy one can acquire from the simple things.

But of course, no smooth sailing for me.  Much in the way that my daily constitutional was mired by roadkill I have a new enemy in my midst.  

I suppose I am always at war with some animal, irrespective of where I live.  Slugs and foxes in the UK, geckos in Singapore and now in New York, squirrels.  

I do not want squirrels eating the food I have put out for the birds.  Those greedy rodents have spent all of autumn burying their nuts around the garden and are now attempting to build on their obesity by stealing seeds not meant for them.

I am on a continued battle with the squirrels who scare the birds away and ingeniously contort their bodies to pretty much empty out a bird feeder of food in less than a day.  

I refused to be beaten, so I drove to the shops and bought two squirrel resistant bird feeders and you cannot imagine my joy as I watch those bozos try time and time again to get inside it to no avail.  

I did consider scraping the dead racoon off the road and hanging it from our tree to encourage a hawk to fly in and perhaps take the squirrels off too.  I think that might be going too far as the squirrels are cute and I am really enjoying watching them fail repeatedly, moreso because they are cute.  

I liken this experience to seeing someone very beautiful fall over in the street.  I revel in this schandenfreude.  Stupid good looking people coasting through life because they are pretty.  They should fall over all the time.

Back to the squirrels.  Don't be mad with me.  These squirrels are the size of cats.  They do not need any more feeding unless we plan to eat them for Christmas.

Example 4
We don't have any holidays booked. This fact is giving me the skitters.  

We are trying to save our pennies so we can take full advantage of travelling around this continent. I cut my fringe at the weekend because I didn't want to waste money on a hairdresser, (although that backfired because now I need to buy a hat to hide my hair),  Eleanor has toeless socks as her toes have broken through the material because they are too small and Arthur is wearing age 4 trousers even though he is 7 and a half. We look like a bunch of tramps.  I am glad our landlord never met us before we moved into their house.

I think I understand now why Americans do not travel very much.  It has nothing to do with the fact that their country is so big why go anywhere else.  It is because their country is so big you cannot afford to go anywhere in America.  

Furthermore, the seasons which I desperately longed for and missed while we were in Singapore mean there are actually less places to go to in America because it is too damn cold for 9 months of the year. 

A bit of research highlighted that some of the west coast national parks are in fact amazing in February and April.  You don't have the blistering heat or the millions of tourists (yuck!) getting in the way.

I looked into flights to Phoenix which puts us in Grand Canyon territory and the best option I found for both, the Grand Canyon or Yosemite National Park was around the $4,000 mark with two stops en route, making the journey around 21 hours.  

After much screeching about how much I hate America because I could fly to Italy in less time and for less money I was reliably informed by my hubby that I was thick as, because flying from New York to the West Coast is probably the same distance as flying from New York to Rome and jet fuel costs the same.  Still, I object to paying that much dosh when you are travelling within your own country.


I think the only way forward is to embrace the extreme winters on the east coast and do something fun, albeit cold. 

There are lots of skiing opportunities in this area, a few, only a two hour drive from where we live, which is great.  

The kids are going to take a couple of lessons just after Christmas to see how they take to it, Rob is going to go skiing on his own as he has no friends and I am debating whether I should have a few lessons too, given I have only skied once 15 years ago.  

It was brilliant fun, although I was absolutely petrified.  I can also proudly say that I didn't fall over once on the slopes because I saved that humiliation for landing in a messy heap off the button lifts every single time I used them.  I also threw myself off the chair lift as it got to its highest point before rounding the corner to head back down.  Don't ask how I managed it.  Let's just say I am talented at such things.

So that is our life in America to date.  

As we move forward into 2017 my resolutions are to avoid the news as much as possible.  I can't even watch the endless stream of suffering coming out of Syria anymore.  I think all our hearts break daily as we watch these poor people's plight and know there is little we can do unless we can quickly train at Black Briar and take Putin, Assad and Iran out, Jason Bourne style.  Although, it is fair to say the list of monsters across the globe is much longer than just that triumvirate of hell.

I will continue to significantly reduce our waste and plastic usage, continue to watch The West Wing to delude myself into how government should be run, continue to watch The Crown and thank heavens I am not the English Queen.  I know she has nice horses and stuff but that job really sucks.

And lastly continue to watch Planet Earth II and take solace that there is still great beauty, majesty, wonder and true magic in the world, entirely where humans aren't, but it is still there and I will never tire of seeing David Attenborough in a hot air balloon.  Those images will always remind me that perhaps there is still hope.

Merry Christmas everybody and let's hope that 2017 isn't the crappy suck fest of 2016.  Good luck to us all!

Roots Chapter IV

Roots

I am not overly fond of big hotels and generally like little guesthouses which have a homely feel or lots of character.  Other than that we are quite happy sleeping in old factories or prisons. Cheap and cheerful with bundles of charm. 

Before we had the kids we used our trusty Rough Guide and Lonely Planet to get us everywhere we went.  The books seem to have evolved for those young free things in the 90s who are now shackled and burdened with children, mortgages and irritable bowel syndrome in the noughties.  They are still my go to travel guide as they always deliver up a few little gems and remind you to get off the beaten track when you can.

Some of our favourite accommodation were these small guesthouses with three to five rooms.  They were homely and welcoming and made you feel like you were staying with friends.  One particular treat was a tiny little cottage in Kandy up in the forests away from the lunacy that is the traffic in that city.

Here we were welcomed by a lovely gentleman called Thomas who had the most sticking out ears I have ever seen in my life.  He was wonderful and both he and his colleague made absolutely incredible curry.  He welcomed us in, abused us for not eating enough, never asked me where I was from and then abused us some more for not eating enough.  It was like home.

Anyway, there is a particular smell about those places that connects me so powerfully to Sri Lanka, even after all these years.  It is a combination of mothballs, jasmine, the gorgeous clean smell of sandalwood soap and the toilet.  I know that sounds odd but even the smell in the bathroom after you have flushed is familiar to me.  This has nothing to do with my prawn explosion in 1988.  It is clearly something in the way the sewers works.  I don’t know.  It is just a smell that takes me back.   

Before we left I popped to a chemist and bought a block of sandalwood soap for $1.  It is already sitting in my soap dish at home and making the entire bathroom smell like Sri Lanka.  Unfortunately we don’t have the jasmine and sewer smell as well but I do have some mothballs so I have nearly recreated the environment from this holiday and those from my childhood.

It does seem to be the little things that connect you to places you thought were irrelevant to you due to distance and circumstances and the influence of your parents.  Neither of my parents had any pull to Sri Lanka.  Other than her brothers my Mother had no interest in the place and my Father wasn’t remotely bothered whether he went there ever again. 

He felt his real home was the UK and yet being a sentimental old duffer, my Dad kept hold of many things from his life in Sri Lanka before he left as a young man.   

Following his death, while arranging all his affairs and paperwork we opened an old leather briefcase that he had kept since his time in Sri Lanka.  Inside it was a treasure of items from photographs, stubs, tickets, letters that he had squirreled away and that we had never been allowed to see.  

One particularly striking photo was of my Mum.  It was a black and white portrait and she had two thick plaits in her hair.  

On our travels around Sri Lanka as the little girls spill out from school they all sported the same two thick plaits and looked adorable.  

I told my Mum about this observation and happily said, that nothing has changed in the 70 years since she was a little girl having her picture taken in her two thick plaits after school.  

She replied that she was 19 years old in that picture.  

Yet, as I pointed out in response, she still did her hair like a 10 year old.  It was all a bit Judy Garland trying to convince people she was 10 in the Wizard of Oz by wearing plaits when she was actually 48.

Amongst all his mountains of paperwork I found random papers from Sri Lanka.  Like his sarongs, my Dad liked his paper, thin and transparent but there was another type of paper that was thicker, coloured and had a very distinct smell of leather, mothballs, sandalwood and the 1940s.

I had forgotten all about this until we went to Kandy to watch a cultural performance.  It was terrible.  The performance that is.  Our tickets however were made out of the same paper I found in my Dad’s old leather satchel.  It felt the same and it smelled the same and as soon as I held it in my hand I once again felt a strong connection with this island.

In this world full of immigrants, me the child of two, I have up until recently always felt I needed a sense of place and home, somewhere I am totally connected. That place has always been the UK.  It was where I was born, grew up, studied, worked, married and had my children.  It was always the home of my parents.  More British than Sri Lankan due to their upbringing and one of the last few generations educated under the last vestiges of colonialism.  They did not feel they belonged in Sri Lanka.  England was home.

And yet, since leaving the UK, I feel an increasing disconnect.  If I had a choice as to where I would want to live out the rest of my life it would always be the UK but I would come back feeling the need to start life anew.  I feel no connection with Singapore other than my little family resides here and yet after this trip to Sri Lanka I feel an increased pull to that teardrop in the Indian Ocean.  Maybe I need to give up a little of the UK to allow Sri Lanka in.  After this last trip, it is not a difficult thing to do. 

 

Irrespective of where I am or where I go, my roots are there.  It is the birthplace of my parents, it is a hundred photographs in our albums from the 1930s to the 1950s, it is the smell of sandalwood, leather briefcases and thick green paper.  It is the backdrop to the young lives of my Mum and Dad.  It ties me to family and friends and the memories of loved ones departed.  

I had hoped this holiday would help my son understand why he has flat enormous knees and huge feet and his lower legs are the size of chopsticks.  It didn’t.   

In 27 years, like the rest of the world, young Sri Lankan men have become handsome, taller and burlier.  Gone are the days of the small, skinny young lad with his creepy moustache and too short trousers whom I used to laugh at with my cousins, while being all superior and looking cool wearing my banana clip, batik poncho and sporting a similar moustache.  

Arthur’s legs, I guess are just from another time and when he looks at the old photos of my Dad standing in front of his house in Colombo in his white school uniform in the late 1930s, with his big flat knees and his huge feet and chicken legs, he will know that half of his roots lie in Sri Lanka too.

Dedicated to Uncle Thamby. 

A kind and gentle soul and the tallest member of my Mothers’ family because he used to hang upside down by his feet like a bat in order to not be cursed with the short DNA afflicting everybody else.

He was right.  Gravity did overcome genetics in this instance.

I am glad we saw you before you had to go.

You will be missed.

Roots Chapter III Little Britain & Curiosity Killed the Man Who Asked that Question One Too Many Times

Little Britain

I don’t want to turn this into a travel blog as you can get a guide book for that. Besides my blog provides no travel information whatsoever.   

We will swiftly move on from people irritating me in Sigiriya with yoga and at the beach in Mirissa with yoga, oh and sarongs, and skip through Kandy which was fantastic and pick up our story in the Hill Country of Sri Lanka. 

This part of the country was incredible.  We stayed at a converted tea factory which is half hotel and half museum and received a fascinating education into the processing of tea.  

We got to pluck our own tea at the small plantation owned by the hotel, see it processed, packaged and then given to us as a small parcel when we departed. It was one of the highlights of our trip.  

The hotel was incredible.  I am rather fond of kooky hotels and with the exception of sleeping in a converted prison, this was one of the best and most unusual places we have ever stayed. 

 

While in the region, we did visit a working tea factory where their produce is processed and packed for export.  We wandered out into the sea of tea leaf bushes and watched the women, young to ancient plucking tea at an incredible rate.  They work from 8am to 6pm and pluck around 16-18kg a day.  That is about how much weight I have put on in the last two years so I can completely appreciate how heavy those baskets must be for them.  They get paid around 625 Sri Lankan rupees which works out to around 3 quid for a days work.  It is back breaking.  We went tea plucking for forty minutes and collectively had barely enough to fill a cereal bowl.  

I felt desperately sorry for these ladies and the hard, heavy lifting they did all day.  Their fingers were rough and calloused and their skin blackened by hours in the harsh sun. “Iyo, what happened to you, you use to be so pretty, you got so dark”.

On our last night in Nuwara Eliya, our last stop in the Hill Country, we had a nice Sri Lankan curry for dinner and sat in the hotel bar by the log fire, as it gets quite cold in the evenings.  We drank tea and watched the T20 cricket and said to each other.  I don’t think we have ever been more English than we are being at this very moment. 

  

From Nuwara Eliya we caught a train to another little town on the eastern edge of the hill country called Ella.  Highlighted as one of the finest rail journeys in the world we were so excited about this stretch of the holiday as the views were supposed to be absolutely breathtaking.

Instead, it poured with rain for the entire journey, it got dark early and we didn’t see anything.   

You should go.

Curiosity Killed The Man Who Asked That Question One Too Many Times

Our holiday was going absolutely perfectly.  We couldn’t fault it apart from the rubbish train ride but we blamed the weather for that.  After all we were in the Hill Country and being terribly British, so yes, it was the weather, cats and dogs and so forth.

However, I was growing grizzly.  Once again, I was the subject of much interest.  This time, I was asked straight off by total strangers, “where are you from?” I always answered, the UK, I was born there, but my parents are originally from Sri Lanka.  The response to this was invariably,  “aaaaaaahhhhhh". That's it.

Now, on this trip, I had no weird hairdo as that was cleverly hidden under my dorky Tilley hat.  None of my clothes were transparent and I was clean shaven so no moustache to speak of therefore why on earth was I getting hounded about my origins.   

I think I preferred the staring instead of the interrogation, as now I am older and more grumpy  I will go in for a staring contest with the best of them, whereas when I was 12, I would quickly avert my eyes shyly out of embarrassment.  Now, I will glass yer, pub brawl style.

I know people were just being friendly and curious but given we covered so much ground on this trip, when you are asked the same question 4-5 times every day for 16 days it does become very wearing. 

I was also frequently asked whether I speak Sinhalese, so like a performing monkey I would rattle off the few words I know, some might even have been Tamil, I can’t tell the difference:  Mother, Father, Little Brother, Grandmother, Little Sister, Small Girl, Big Sister, Small Boy, Bum, How Are You?, Can I Have A Shower?, Hiccup And I Went to Galle, Hiccup Stayed There And I Came Back (Sinhalese rhyme for getting rid of hiccups which you say in one breath), What’s the matter?  Fart.   

The final straw conversation went like this:

Chap: Where are you from?

Coconut: Me, we are from the UK?

Chap:  Oh.  Where are you originally from?

Coconut: The UK (I was only being pernickety on day 15 because I was fed up by this stage)

Chap:  Oh.  It is just you look Asian.

Coconut:  (In my head: DURRRGGGGGHHHH!).  Well, yes, of course.  I have a dusky hue my good man, as my parents were born in Sri Lanka

Chap: Aaaaaahhhhhhhh.  I thought as much

Coconut:  (In my head.  Congratulations Sherlock.  Cracked it).

I was so desperate to find a fellow “checkerboard” chick to ask if she had suffered the same fate as me, but no luck. 

My hubby in fact told me off for being snippy with the gentleman in the shop on day 15 but appreciated I was getting a little tired of the same questioning.  I now have some sympathy for Hollywood actors who have to do those endless press junkets.  That said, I am not paid 20 million dollars to answer the same questions over and over again, so I take that back.  In fact, the only way I can stop anyone asking me the same questions is to buy something in their shop for 20 million dollars. 

Rob said that if and when we ever make it back to Sri Lanka he will brown / black up for me.  I suggested he just does his face but doesn’t do his neck, arms and legs.  Thought it would be quite funny and might shift attention to him over me.  

Although, knowing my luck, I will still get asked all the same questions and added to that will get grilled as to why my husband has a skin disorder.

Next Time: Chapter IV Roots