Obituary

American English has died aged two hundred and forty years in a flurry of post-modern menu items culminating in an overdose of deep fried cheesecake.

Born in the flames of the finest writing in the English language to appear outside of a religious work, the American tradition had many fine guardians from Twain to Steinbeck, exporting grand new words and even grander ideas to the world. After a long struggle with marketeering, the relentless onslaught of verbisation, the steady loss of vowels, the US finally lost its power of speech. Hollywood visuals failed to fill the gap and after mocking the fall of the American Dream in the Walking Dead with its English lead facing the dumbstruck hordes, American English finally laid its head to its final rest.

Balance

I enjoy travelling in the US. It has its disappointments but then that's true of every nation. While I was watching someone tuck into a deep fried cheesecake, I tried to recall some of the things that make me smile about this great lunking galoot of a country.

Curiously, the things that come to mind often come with outragrous missunderstandings about food. We booked a hotel outside of Juneau, Alaska with a folksy name which turned out to be a hit with patrician older men travelling with their attractive young neices. In the restaurant there, I ordered salmon and sent it back because it was white, causing hilarity and uproar among the diners, most of whom had come a long way to eat the local king salmon as it started running. On a trip to Florida I went for a quick Mexican lunch with the team I was visiting and I ended up with seven plates. My inner 'eat it all up' parent was horrified. On the same trip, my host drove us fifty miles to a cuban restaurant where I had something with plantain which I very nearly described as awesome. Nearly. I once had two wonderful meals in the same week in Oakland. The first was after driving around looking for something vegetarian for my travelling companion. Her brilliant instincts found us a tiny Lebanese place where we ate falafel surrounded by the local Indian Bridge Society's annual outing. At the end of the same week, we visited a Thai restaurant where I ordered a simple fish dish. The waitress panicked, trying to explain that it was white fish, poached without fries, or chilli, or a sweet potato filled with caramel and marshmallows. I said that sounded wonderful after a week of wings and burgers, and I was right, it was. In between I had a clam chowder on Fisherman's Wharf which I managed to spread over myself like a four year old. But hey, in San Francisco if you feel you need to wear your food, not one single person would ever be so uncool as to even mention it.

Back in Oakland, we had a morning ritual of visiting churches, the bigger the better, as part of some spiritual quest or other of my companion's. The cathedral in Santa Cruz was a gorgeous confection in latin cream against a perfect, Californian blue sky, but the most awesome revelation of all was the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Oakland itself, set high on a hillside, Oakland spread below with the sun bleaching all of its horrors and San Francisco cross the bay behind, Alcatraz, Golden Gate and all, sumptuous in the brilliant morning. If anyone tells you that all American cities are soul-less, unplanned and utilitarian, they have somewhat missed the point, they can also be glorious. Washington DC is another grand city, but it's grandeur never quite looses its cellophane wrapping of faux and reminds me somewhat of a themepark built of limestone and marble, complete with gilded political roller coasters. That doesn't make it any less grand and  the Persians were almost certainly exactly as sniffy about the Acropolis.

If I'm on a long trip, I often declare myself vegetarian for health reasons and, in these enlightened times there are places in the US where vegetarian food is entirely legal. In some tolerant corners of California you may even find a competent vegetarian chef. As you go south, things become trickier. It's often easier to have a rational argument about gun control with a random redneck than to convince a waitress that a chicken is an animal. Worse still, try starting an argument about bacon bits. It's true that bacon bits are almost entirely free of actual pig solid matter, but they almost certainly are smothered in bacon fat of some derivation. Of course almost every restaurant in the US will customise any order. This is because every dish contains everything and so almost everyone wants something pulled. Just don't order a simple cheese and ham sandwich with no salad or extras with a queue behind you, because they may not appreciate the wait while the terrified server consults the manual about how to serve that. You may even be arrested. "Just cheese and ham, sir? On wholemeal?"

Something else which I find endearing are the folks running mom and pop outfits out in the woods. I go to a lot of those and the cheese and ham sandwich problem has a different flavour. They hear an English accent and ask if American cheddar is OK in a hushed voice and here is something I don't understand. Why is it so hard for a big chain to deal with someone who doesn't want salad on a sandwich when all of these mom and pop places are connected by a psychic network. I swear I bought lunch three days running in rural North Carolina and two years later the owner of an identical establishment in coastal Maryland recognised me and knew my order.

That takes me to Sitka, Alaska. This was twenty years ago and a certain chain of sandwich shops hadn't made it to the UK. Lady Snoutingdingle and I stood at the counter of what we now like to call Subnormal and ordered subs. By the end of the order the poor baffled teenager behind the counter was on the point of tears. 'Just salad' wasn't in his vocabulary. Someone behind us had to rescue us 'she wants lettuce, tomato, no pickles, no cheese, not bacon-bits, no dressing, no oil.' The next day, we went to the bookshop across the street which had a coffee shop in the back. That was before that caught on in the UK too. Books. Maps. Coffee. I'm surprised we ever left. On that same trip we tried to find wholemeal bread in a supermarket. The shelf-stacker had heard of it, which was a start, and took us to a tiny bottom shelf in a mile-long bread aisle. They made us put that in a brown paper bag before we left, or the cops might take an interest.

The Last Sleeping Tree

There is one tree in the Night Planted Orchard which we have not yet been able to wake.

It will have taken four years to rennovate the hedges. Last year we pulled out stems fourteen feet long and turned them into rustic fences. Even then it took five huge bonfires to clear all the waste. That completed the western side of the orchard just before the birds called time on our marathon hedging efforts. That allowed so much more light into the orchard that we had a bumper crop in a year when most of the trees are supposed to be dormant. This year I cut the eastern side back, at least as far as the scrubby wood next door will allow. The shape and height is restored all around the orchard. In the section of the garden left to wildlife and wild flowers, I left a taller run but even the very furthest reaches, where the garden ends at a deep ditch and the fen begins, are now back to proper hedge height and trim. Now that the overgrowth is pushed right back, new growth can hold its own in the gaps. We'll take advantage of the delay from this late cold to lay some hedges in those gaps, perhaps plant some more damsons and sloes. Finally, in the autumn, we'll tidy up.

There are two objectives to renovating the hedges. One is to restore a fine set of country hedges to good health after years of neglect. The other is to bring more light to the orchard. During the process I discovered among the thick tree-like stems, a run of thinner, tamer wood. I took this back to its natural height. At the end of the day, walking back through the orchard, I looked back and saw that this old gap in the hedge aligned perfectly with a long gap between the willows at the fen's edge. In the morning, I discovered that this south-easterly gap floods the orchard with early morning light. Perhaps I would have started with that stretch if I'd known. Perhaps the light will melt the frost in the orchard and that might be a problem in itself - I've always tried to let the frost leave of its own free will - or perhaps, just perhaps, it might extend the light on the one tree that we have not been able to wake in the last five years. We think it may be a nectarine or a peach but whatever it is, it's too sad to set blossom with its pretty toes cold and damp all year.

Perhaps a regular morning sip at the light will cheer it up. We'll see.

The Twisted Sporran

"You'll love this place." He said.

Across the street was a bar, yet another chain-experience with one of those differences that isn't really a difference at all but a lowest possible cost differentiator. In this case the cost saving was mostly in the waitresses uniforms. Imagine a Texan steakhouse where the waitresses wear stetsons to add authenticity to a bog standard American steak - admittedly delicious - or a mexican place with big-sombrero'd waitresses. This one was a girly-bar branded by breeding Scottish and Irish design cliches and hoping that no-one would notice the dissonance. The women wore kilts with hems designed to be within a millimetre of being crudely short and - I can see the big reveal in the pitch in my mind - the hem ain't straight. Their plaid tops were precision engineered to constrain heaving decolletage, even if there wasn't any decolletage to heave. The marketeers had turned the women to cartoons, killing any sense of the saucy, or sexy, or erotic. It didn't help that the place was huge and empty and the ladies were bored. They looked cold too, and their exposed skin was grey-white or bruised olive. Their expressions were similarly bored or icy which I personally prefered to the explosive fake smiles which crushed their eyes until they threatened to explode in a sparkly, perky, cheeky, zombie way. I ordered a margarita, raising a provocative 'ooooo' when I chose salt not sugar for the rim. Maybe I stumbled across some kind of code. Sometimes you look into someone's eyes and find someone screaming to get out. This was one of those places. The clothes are even designed to look half-stripped without the wear and tear.

Motel

I've added a new section focused on sound, rather than light. Here is a link to the first entry.