On Landing.

It’s hard, in some ways, not to make these blog entries sound something like the narrative parts of “The Wonder Years”. It’s not supposed to be an online diary; it’s supposed to look at US culture through my eyes. But, given the fact that there are still eleven-and-a-half days till I actually go there, the best I can do until then is to walk you through my memories and expectations, plus the mind-numbing lunacy which is moving halfway around the world.

At the moment I’m waiting for a quote for shipping all my stuff. And when I say “shipping” I use the term advisedly. It’s probably going on a boat, on the sea. Probably through Panama. It might arrive with some exciting breed of spider tucked in between the Terry Pratchett books and some photos of Durham. That might be quite cool. Actually, given the fact that Stacey’s hometown was where they shot the film Arachnophobia this might not be the healthiest train of thought. Either way, my stuff is going in cardboard boxes, on a boat, halfway round the world, and it’s expensive, although not as expensive (or as ruinous to the planet) as flying it all there. Exactly how expensive remains to be seen.

It looks like it’s going to be around £800. I had thought £600, but that was when shipping companies were telling me sweet little lies, and before there were revolutions in oil-producing countries, shoving the cost of jet fuel, well, sky-high. Speaking of which, if anyone on the British side of the Atlantic feels like REALLY moaning about petrol prices (because let’s face it, it’s either moan about that or the weather, and it’s sunny at the moment) have a look at this. Prices are true as of April 26th; $1=£0.60 . Sickening, isn’t it? Never mind.

Unleaded Fuel Prices	$/gallon	=	£/litre
San Luis Obispo, CA	$4.17	=	£0.56p
Whickham, Tyne & Wear	$10.58	=	£1.41

But anyway, I’m waiting for an exact quote from various freight companies. There’s only so far you can string that subject out for, and packing is dull, so I tend to daydream. What, for example, am I looking forward to in the first week after I land? There’s the obvious task of renewing old acquaintances, but it’s not a very cultural subject. So, moving on…

Breakfast at the Hacienda Hotel

It’s not an overwhelmingly glamorous affair, breakfast in a relatively modest hotel in El Segundo, a relatively modest part of metropolitan L.A., next to Los Angeles International Airport. It’s not Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Claridge’s or Harry’s Bar. But breakfast at the Hacienda promises the world. On a day when you have breakfast at the Hacienda, you feel anything could be accomplished. Their menu is here. I would gladly have it in a frame on the wall. The reason you feel able to accomplish anything after breakfast might be that a Hacienda breakfast contains an appreciable fraction of the calories required to lift the space shuttle into orbit. In Britain, a hash brown is a perfectly respectable little thing, the size and shape of a deck of cards cut in half corner-to-corner. At the Hacienda, they are golden discs six inches across. They take your jet-lag on and they make it cry. You get two.

 

Highway One

If California State Route One was a person, it’d be Harry Connick, Jr. Oh, so he can play the piano? Just a little, or really well? Ok, phenomenally well. That’s fine, but you say he can sing too? Sure. He can carry a tune? No, he’s got a voice like melted chocolate. And he composes and directs. Writes songs? No, wins Emmies and holds US Patents.

Well, fine, so the guy’s a musician, that’s his job, it’s what he’s good at- wait, what? He’s an actor too? Oh, for crying out loud. Anything I’ve heard of? Memphis Belle, Independence Day and Will and Grace. I see. All this success must mean his personal life’s hell, right? Misery and disaster? Or is he, by any chance, just throwing this out there, married to a Victoria’s Secret model with whom he has three children? Yeah, ok. Well, at least he’s got the good grace to be an ugly bugger, eh? No? Just thought I’d ask.

Highway One is the automotive equivalent. It follows the coast from Orange County to Leggett, 180 miles  North of San Francisco; 655 miles in total. It passes through Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, Santa Monica, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Pismo, Morro Bay (see left) before heading towards Big Sur (Yes, as in The Kooks’ song, see right) crossing Bixby Bridge (Yes, as in the Death Cab For Cutie song). That’s just the first 300 miles of it. I’ll be where I’m going about 50 miles before the bridge, having seen some of the most beautiful coastline in America by doing so, but having missed out on some of the most beautiful coastline in America by stopping halfway.

 

 

Seeing Pelicans

They really are the most fantastic of birds. You will hear me rant about them out of all proportion to their achievement. They just make me laugh. They fly impossibly slowly; you imagine that anything that big, flying at such low speeds, must simply drop out of the air out of sheer embarrassment. They can also dive in the most incredible manner. After gaining height and selecting a target, they pivot on one wing and roll the other over. They plunge into the water from a height of sixty feet or so, breaking the water like gannets. But the gannet is an undeniably beautiful bird, with a pointed bill and kohl-like markings round the eyes, somehow reminiscent of the early jet-powered RAF bombers of the 1950s, all sleek lines and anti-flash white. The pelican looks like a toddler’s drawing of a pigeon. It’s like something out of the Flintstones. They are inherently comical-looking. I saw one land on the railing of the pier at Avila. Slowness of flight is one thing, but grace and control are quite different matters and its momentum nearly took it beak-first into the sink used by fishermen to clean fish caught on the pier. It flapped its wings and hopped from one foot to the other, and by some miracle of balance, completely at the bottom of whatever scale Olga Korbut was at the top of, it stayed upright. I can’t help feeling though, that however comical they look, the pelicans have it all their own way, so the joke must be on us. I love them to bits and I’m determined to get some really good shots of pelicans soon.

 

SLO Farmers’ Market

I am a big fan of the Farmers’ Market movement in the UK, which has exploded over the past decade or so. It has made available high quality, ethically farmed produce available to British consumers at prices which, while not low, are worthwhile and cut out the middle man. For example take the good folks at Broom House Farm in  Witton Gilbert, near Durham. Some of their prime Aberdeen Angus is pictured to the right here, moments before being turned into  steak and ale pie. They also produce Saddleback pork and wonderful lamb and mutton. The meat is phenomenal; it practically cooks itself. I met them at the monthly Farmers’ Market in Durham and have never begrudged a penny I’ve ever spent either there or up at the farm shop itself. The Farmers’ Market has been good for everyone; British consumers, British agriculture, and the market towns where they are held.

The events themselves, however, are somewhat…quaint. Check flannel shirts, flat caps seem to predominate. No matter where you are in the country, everyone behind a stall seems to have a Yorkshire accent. There is the faint feel of Country Life and Horse and Hound. If one stands very still, one can almost hear the Archers theme tune playing, as if by a heavenly orchestra. One is suddenly in a land of Agas and Hunter wellies. Incidentally, I’m not entirely sure whether the pictures of lithe young women showing more than a bit of thigh while wearing rubber boots is either supposed to be ironic or represents a little-suspected but not-entirely-surprising outpost of the underground fetish movement of this sceptred isle….

Anyway, as J.B. Priestley, a fellow northern city boy, put it, it’s sometimes hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins. Two redoubtable and praiseworthy institutions, neither of which I belong to, nor would I wish to. I don’t feel excluded by the people at farmers’ markets in the UK, but I don’t feel like I’m part of their club, and I don’t feel as if I’m missing out.

Predictably, in California they do things differently. In the county seat of San Luis Obispo, Farmers’ Market is a weekly social event. Restaurants from the town erect huge, broad stands. Large areas of Higuera Street are turned into open-air kitchens, where fast-working me and women see to it that skewers are grilled, pizzas are baked, ribs are roasted, tacos are made, gyros are turned, churros are fried and shwarmas are shwarmed. The air is filled with the smell of sizzling meat, spices and charcoal. There are recruitment drives; Democrats, Republicans and various charities seeking donations and membership subscriptions. Naturally, there are market stalls, selling fresh flowers and fruit, vegetables and bunches of herbs the size of footballs.  This is a flavour of what’s going on there tomorrow, at the various street intersections along Higuera:

NIPOMO STREET -- Kappa Alpha PSI - musical petting zoo [really??? What, like, bunnies with banjos?]
BROAD STREET -- Cal Poly Women's Programs - SAFER Event [for more, see here]
GARDEN STREET -- United Cerebral Palsy - Life Without Limits event
CHORRO STREET -- Loren Radis - local singer songwriter [pretty good: see here]

The market has a facebook page. It’s an amazing way to be made to feel part of the town. And you can eat yourself sick for $6.

 

And there you have it. Lots to look forward to. I’ve just booked my stuff to be shipped on Thursday 5th with Anglo-Pacific. Better get back to the packing.

It rhymes with “mucus”….

 

Cayucos, California will be my new home as of two weeks’ time.

I consider myself extremely fortunate for many reasons, but moving to Cayucos surely counts among them. It’s the town in the background of the photo behind this text. It nestles at the north end of Estero Bay, roughly halfway between L.A. and San Francisco. The pushpin on the map shows where, but only roughly. You could be dropped at a location covered by the pushpin on that map and still have a two-day walk to Cayucos.

Actually, it’s not the world’s best map. You have to appreciate that the distance between Cayucos and L.A. is the same as the distance from London to York. That cartoon drawing pin is probably about half the size of Wales. Well, probably not, but probably about thirteen-seventeenths the size of Rutland. Bigger than your average drawing pin, anyway.

Here (right) is a more useful scale map. Here you can see Cayucos in the top-left, at the north end of the bay, playing book-end to the slightly larger town of Morro Bay further south. Actually, Morro Bay has four times the number of inhabitants of Cayucos. The considerably larger university town of San Luis Obispo is off to the east. Even by the standards of small-town California, Cayucos is a fairly small place.

The town website calls it the ‘Last of the California beach towns’. Obviously this isn’t literally true. It’s at the other end of the beach from Morro Bay, for a start. But Cayucos, more than perhaps anywhere else, has retained the style and character of a real American small town.

Bill Bryson once went looking for “Amalgam, USA”- the perfect small town of the films of his youth. This was in the 1987 and 1988, following the death of the author’s father and, in his view, Reagan’s America compared poorly to Eisenhower’s. Bryson had yet to mellow into the cuddly, professorial uncle of his later books, and while his jokes were funny he was nothing if not acerbic in his criticism. He never did find anywhere resembling Amalgam, where

“Bing Crosby would be the priest, Jimmy Stewart the mayor, Fred MacMurray the high-school principal, Henry Fonda a Quaker farmer. Walter Brennan would run the gas station, a boyish Mickey Rooney would deliver groceries, and somewhere at an open window Deanna Durbin would sing. And in the background, always, would be the kid on abike and those two smartly striding men.”

                                  -The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson

But I always feel that he’d have been slightly less disappointed if he’d spent any time in Cayucos. It’s a town of 2,000 people; there’s next to nothing there. A few shops and restaurants. But the charm seems to seep up from the cracks between the paving stones and makes the whole world look better. The town was founded by Captain James Cass, a Bristolian by birth, who came to California via New England in 1867. His house, reputedly haunted, is now a rather classy-looking restaurant. If Bryson shifted his gaze a decade later into the twentieth century, and looked for somewhere where the protagonists in the Beach Boys’ songs might get around, possibly looking meet a California girl who’s had her driving privileges revoked, then he’d do worse than to take a stroll along the beach at Cayucos.

This place has an almost mythical quality in my imagination. Or rather, my memory. The sand is pale and almost powder fine. Just walking along it makes the soles of the feet perfectly smooth. Occasionally a bit on the black and sticky side too; natural tar, seeping from the sea bed in pleasantly mineral-smelling lumps, is washed ashore, melts in the sun and clags to the feet of walkers who may or may not care.  I do know that it’s the most remarkable public beach to simply walk along and watch wildlife from. The pelicans treat it as their own and I believe I had been there four or five times before the dolphins failed to put in an appearance.

The place absolutely oozes quirk from every pore. Having decided today, for example, that taking a crappy, half-plastic ukulele halfway around the world is not an efficient use of space on an oceangoing freighter, that I shall be able to replace it at Alternate Tunings Ukuleles? Oh, on closer inspection it seems they only do lessons and re-stringing now. Never mind- I can console myself by indulging in a bit of retail therapy at Bugga Boo Clothing, a shop selling "Tie dye baby clothing specializing in onesies and tees for ages newborn to 2 years old." Who knew?? 

And so we’ve managed to find a place to rent there. When I say "we", I do mean, of course, that Stacey was the one who did the hard work of finding the place, sorting out the lease and moving all the furniture down over a period of weeks. It’s a fair assumption that any time someone achieves something in concrete terms, it’s going to have been Stace rather than me. It’s small, but there’s just the two of us and the cat. There is an antique marble worktop whose stand needs painting. The grass needs cutting and the garden needs a bit of attention generally. There are shelves which need putting up, but I think Stace might just have saved them for me to do as a sop to my masculine pride after she shifted all the furniture.

I can’t think of a better place for two people who’ve been apart for far too long to settle down. I defy you to look back down the pier here and tell me I’m wrong.

CARE Package

This year, on March 1st, I was emailed by my Texan friend, the incomparably wonderful Mary Stewart:

“Hey buddy!  It's the second half of your birthday!  Well, actually, in England your birthday may already be over. But it's still your birthday in America!!  You really gotta stretch that shit out.”

I had the dubious good luck to be born on February 29th one year. Dubious, I suppose, because on the one hand I’d rather have been born than not. On the other hand it leads to a fair bit of hesitancy among my friends who are never quite sure, in non-Leap Years, when they should be dishing out the cards, sending the congratulatory texts and making the obligatory divide-my-age-by-four jokes. To be honest, it’s nice that they remember full stop; I feel it’d be rather churlish to quibble in these circumstances. I know other leap children who celebrate on 1st March, but I stay loyal to the month of my birth, and go for February 28th.

And due to the unpredictable nature of transatlantic postal services, I managed, as Mary had suggested, to stretch shit out without even trying, because the hefty parcel Stacey had sent didn’t arrive until yesterday, Thursday, 2nd March. Now, the packing being well and truly under way, Stacey hadn’t wanted to send me anything too bulky. I’ve been trying to get rid of books since September last year. In addition to selling books online I took around 120 or so to Oxfam and about the same to an auctioneer. Actually, credit where it’s due, my Dad helped out a lot with the actual taking of the actual books. The practical help I’ve had from my  parents has been invaluable. My point is (did I have one? Oh yes…) that since September I have been a net exporter of books, which is (and I say this through gritted teeth) a Good Thing.

So the bulky gift package which arrived was not packed with books, as it might  have been in days gone by, but  with stuff which you just can’t get very easily on Tyneside, but which abound in America. It was, like the CARE packages of old, sent halfway across the world to comfort and sustain the starving of Europe. Stacey, in other words, is like a one-woman mini Marshall Plan (see right for nice juxtaposition of 1940s Marshall Plan poster with unflattering maritime photo of fiancée, culminating in moderately clever extension of the “ship” metaphor.)

So, what is it that we are short of, here in the Old World? Wondrous things!

1) Beef Jerky Cure: If you don’t know what beef jerky is, I pity you mightily. The definition doesn’t do it justice. In theory, it’s spiced, air-dried strips of beef. In real life it is the very essence of saliva-invoking, savoury beefiness. It’s what ambitious young beef calves tell their careers advisers they want to become. And it’s achievable at home, if you have the time and the inclination. You get a couple of kilos of brisket and some packets of stuff. One packet contains the chemical salts you need to cure the beef, another contains spices. You slice the beef into strips, marinate it for a day or so in the cure, and then dry it on a very low heat in a fan oven for hours on end. I swear, it takes immense self-control to make the stuff last as long as it took to make. Great for long walks, low in fat, high in protein. But that’s not why we eat it. We eat it because it makes us feel like cavemen, without us having to dig a pit and chase a dangerously dangerous hairy elephant into it.

2) Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix: It might come as something of a surprise to British readers that the idea of serving  Chili con Carne (or, as we like to spell it, Chilli con Carne) with rice is a somewhat unusual one in the US. It’s not unheard of to do so, but other accompaniments are more usual. Corn (tortilla) chips are usual, or you might just as often as not get chili served on its own. However, if you want to push the boat out in taste terms you could do a lot worse than cornbread. It’s a kind of bread, made from corn. It’s sweet and has a lightness which is hard to reconcile with its depth of flavour. It looks about as likely to stand up to soaking up chili as a slice of Madeira cake, but somehow it manages. And the best way to go about getting fresh, hot cornbread is to use Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix. American packet mixes are far superior to ones you get in the UK, for some reason. I don’t know if it’s because in the UK packet mixes are seen by snobby cooks (and I will include my past self in this category) to be cheating, and so food manufacturers have perhaps avoided paying them too much attention. I now take the view that if it tastes good, it’s alright. Getting sniffy about it doesn’t make sense. For example, you might, if you wanted, make some home-made ketchup one day. But I defy you to do it every time you needed a bottle, forever; you wouldn’t dream of looking down your nose at someone who bought Heinz, would you? They’d look at you as if you’d taken leave of your wits, and rightly so. So why draw the line at ketchup? Are we going to make our own pasta, churn our own butter, bake our own beans and mill our own mustard seeds? No, I didn’t think so. Not every week, at least. If it tastes good enough, it’s authentic enough. The Americans have known this for a long time, which is why when Deirdre (my future mother-in-law) gave me some Ghirardelli brownies, I came as close as is polite to calling her a liar when she told me they had been out of a packet. She had to take the box out of the cupboard and show me the bags of powder. This Jiffy mix is along the same lines. It’s in the oven in 30 seconds, and it’s magnificent. Amaizing. Ahem.

3)- Take Five Bars: Okay, it’s a calorie bomb. But it’s a calorie bomb which contains peanut butter, caramel, chocolate and pretzels: try arguing with that. Take Five bars are made by Hershey’s, who also make Reese’s peanut butter cups. The salty-sweet phenomenon is a thing which is understood better in the United States than perhaps anywhere else: who else puts bacon with their pancakes and syrup? I tell you this: if people were really serious about bringing the Great Satan to its knees, they’d forget trying to pinch Russian warheads or hide bombs in their shoes. I’m fairly sure that if they had a real go at the peanut butter industry, American civilisation would be lost to the world within a week. THAT, my friends, is when you need Jack Bauer.

 

4) Ranch dressing: Santa Barbara County is the next county down the coast from San Luis Obispo. There, in the 1950s, two guys who worked at a resort known as the Hidden Valley Ranch. They invented a salad dressing, bottled it and sold it for a fortune. It’s tangy and creamy and savoury. It’s what “Cool Original” Doritos are flavoured with- they’re called “Cool Ranch” in America. It’s great on reheated spicy pizza for breakfast. At that point Stacey took my hands in hers, and gently and calmly explained that if I ever do that again, she’s leaving me. The implication was that how exactly I would be left might well be “mutilated with an axe on the kitchen floor”, but she never said it out loud. I could tell by the way she was controlling her temper, though. Still, she trusted me enough to send me some packets of dressing mix. Thank you, darling!

There was some other stuff too, but I know when I’ve outstayed my welcome. I shall leave you, then, with:

5) Palm tree bottle opener: I wanted a bottle opener, the one I had was broken and hadn’t worked that well when it was in one piece. When I first went to America, we drove from LA to Cambria up Highway 1, the Pacific coast road. Southern California is about as different-looking from North-East England as it’s reasonable to expect in the English-speaking world. Stace laughed at how much I loved palm trees. Palm trees will grow in practically any temperate or tropical climate, and they do. There is one species which is native to Switzerland, and a few examples grow outdoors in the Faroe Islands. There are palm trees at the end of my street. But they don’t belong there. They know it, and so does everyone else. They’re ugly and stunted; pathetic interlopers living a lie. Those people could have a perfectly respectable Rowan or Silver Birch in their gardens, but they’ve got poxy bloody palm trees. As if they’re expecting coconuts or something. It’s not a bloody Bounty advert, it’s Gateshead. It’s sad. But if those poor sods are the Tracy Emins of the palm tree world, then those that I then beheld in LA were the Elle Macphersons. They were outrageously tall, for any urban tree, and they were so…palm tree-y! They were beautiful, and I couldn’t get over it. So, when Stacey managed to secure us a little house to rent in Cayucos, the town in the background shot on this blog, she made sure one of the first things she told me was that there are beautiful palm trees visible from the windows. And I have a bottle opener to match. Thank you, love.

Little bits of paper

I should have been married for about four days now. This is, alas, not the case.

A couple of months ago, Stace and I agreed that patience was the order of the day, and that we should not panic about not having heard about my visa interview, which every applicant for a K-1 visa (that is, a Fiancé Visa) has to undergo at a United States consulate- in my case, the impressively scary-looking Embassy in Grosvenor Square, in London. I was expecting, as had happened to a friend’s sister a few years ago, to suddenly receive an appointment, have a medical, be interviewed and leave the same day all visa’d up.

“If it gets to Christmas and we still haven’t heard, I’ll call them.” I said. Now, I hear you say, this demonstrates a distressing level of complacency, not to say indifference,  vis-a-vis the visa process. This, I hear you protest, is your future. Regard this Davis, you say, and say she isn’t the woman you want to marry! You must proceed without delay, surely!

Now, I quite understand your strength of feeling; indeed, I share it. I agree entirely. But what you must understand is that the ONLY way to contact the Visa Section of the embassy is to phone them, at a special rate of £1.20 per minute, and needless to say, nobody at the other end of the phone is in any rush. It once cost me £10 for them to tell me they had received my documents. The feeling of agony, as time runs through the pinch in the hourglass at an alarming rate, and Skype forecasts dire consequences should one’s credit expire, is akin to that felt whilst trying to pass a chilli-coated porcupine through one’s lower intestine. So, I counselled caution. Stacey argued against, and we settled on me phoning them on the 20th of December. I did so.

“Yeah, actually the procedures have changed. You now have to book your medical before we’ll give you an interview. Yeah, that changed about six weeks ago. No, we didn’t tell you, no. That’d be meeting you halfway, and more typical of a system which treated you like a human being. That procedure was changed too, yeah. Yeah, a while back now, yeah. You too, sir. Bye.” click……

I was furious. We were waiting day after day for news. I could have beaten Usain Bolt over the distance from the car to the letters on the doormat after work. And all this time we could have been getting something sorted out, arranging the medical, booking train tickets, arranging time off work, getting ahead of the curve, but we hadn’t been, because they had changed the rules halfway through the game? I was not happy.

I arranged a medical appointment and booked train tickets. Three days later I got an email from the embassy, advising me it was time for me to book my medical so they could move things along a bit. I find that one disadvantage of electronic media is that in situations like this, an email doesn’t scrumple well. It takes the edge off the dramatic gesture if you have to print the offending document out first.

The clinic I had to arrange my appointment with is the only one in the UK the American embassy uses to carry out its medical checks. Nice little earner, I thought to myself. I arrived in London; I sat and ate the finest burger I have ever beheld at a nearby burger joint apparently staffed entirely by pleasantly flamboyant Americans. I went and filled in a medical history, and heard all sorts of horror stories from other people waiting. Now, this whole process has been a monumental pain in the neck. It has been accompanied by a wailing and an aching of balls. But it hasn’t been horrific. It has been boring and frustrating, occasionally demeaning, patronising and intrusive. And it has kept me away from Stace for far too long. But it has never been truly terrifying, and yet there were people here telling me stories about having been married in the US for four years and then denied re-entry into the States and being separated from her husband for another year until they sorted something out. Or someone who was continually hassled flying in and out of the US despite his documentation being in order; detained at Immigration for hours on end.

What the tellers of these stories had in common was their blasé familiarity with USCIS (US Customs and Immigration Service) procedures, and an incongruous tendency to have done something fairly dumb as regards their US immigration status. For instance, Married-In-The-US-And-Then-Denied-Re-entry Girl was trying to stay in the US based on the fact she was married to a US citizen. However, she had originally entered America on a student visa, not with the intention of staying there. The horror stories were all being told by people who had blatantly not read the manual. My advice, should you want it, is when dealing with USCIS be absolutely open and honest, volunteer information if it will help and remember that doing something the long way round is probably the quickest way of getting it done. Thoroughness is a supreme virtue. I was poked, prodded, bled, had chest x-rays taken, was inoculated against Tetanus, Measles, Mumps and Rubella, charged £260 for my sins, and pushed off into the loving custody of my dear friends Helen and Corin™ who were putting me up for the weekend. Relieved to have it over with, and in excellent company, I spent one of the best weekends I can remember peeling veg and making chutney, eating fantastic cheese, drinking cider and rum and looking through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter. It was a truly restorative experience, and I came back north with my soul intact, and generally feeling the love.

 

And so, one day in January, I received a letter which I’m sure was subtly designed to screw with my head. It came in an envelope with a window through which could be read my name and address, as per usual. The back of the envelope was stamped United States Official Business. The subtle mind screw starts with them getting your name right on the address, but not in the letter. Deliberately, too:

“Dear POTTS; RICHARD JAMES” it opens, despite having been perfectly correct in the address, when they called me Richard Potts. It was printed in Courier New, as well, which I feel is an overly dramatic touch. Never mind. From that point on, it gets worse.It referred to me throughout the rest of the letter as “this case”. Rather than by name, I mean. Never mind. I had an appointment.

At 8.30 on the appointed day I queued up in front of two ladies in Grosvenor Square. The square is beautiful. Even the incongruously modern Embassy has a certain charm. It is overbearing and a bit too much, but in a comforting, American way. There are statues of FDR, looking extremely patrician and dignified, and of Eisenhower, looking frankly rather rumpled. But he had been up all night liberating Europe, so we’ll let him off. The ladies checked my letter, and asked me to stand in the next queue, in front of a masked security guard. He was accompanied by two policemen. They were the ones with the machine guns. After waiting in his queue, he sent me to queue inside the big glass kiosk. There was a police van parked outside- painted pillar box red- with tinted windows. The kiosk was like airport security. Bag on the conveyor belt, belt and keys and wallet in the box.

You aren’t allowed any electronic devices in the embassy. None. no phone, no iPod, no laptop. Not even car keys with a radio central locking device. You have to leave them elsewhere; they suggest a local pharmacy with whom they have an agreement. I knew in advance, so had come prepared. There is a sign on the door to the kiosk which I have recreated below. It’s easy to mock up because I’ve never seen one like it, and it sticks in the mind:

So, apparently, you can’t take your bomb in with you either. You must have to leave it at the local pharmacy too. I was made to leave the security kiosk because they found a prohibited item in my rucksack. Hardly the most dignified moment in my career, emptying a rucksack on the pavement in Grosvenor Square, to find a dud AA battery, and throw it in the bin next to the massively conspicuous police surveillance van. I rejoined the queue by the masked security guard, passed through the kiosk, went into the embassy and was given a number, and was asked to join the queue in the visa hall.

This queue wasn’t a line; it was like an airport departure lounge surrounded by 25 service windows. A number is called once every 20 seconds or so which requires the person with that number to go to a window. You can’t, therefore, settle down to read because you have to pay attention to the numbers. After an hour and a half of sitting in Kafka’s local branch of Argos, your brain has turned to slurry.

At this point, a woman whom I thought acted rather aggressively for someone in the role of a minor clerk with the same decision-making powers as a mosquito in a typhoon, asked me to pay for the visa, and to let her see various documents. My birth certificate. My police certificate. Where was my German police certificate? I didn’t have one? Why not? Did you brush your teeth this morning? Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

I explained my reasons for not having a German police certificate. Although I had lived in Germany, I’d never spent more than 11 months there. We had debated whether or not I needed to apply, and I thought that on this basis, I’d save the time, money and hassle and not apply to the Germans for a police check. This is an example of the long way round being quicker. She was not impressed. She voiced her lack of impressedness. She went tut, and made me feel ashamed and angry and patronised. I did not feel lucky.

I felt bloody awful. It had taken us MONTHS to get this appointment. Months of work; hundreds of dollars, hundreds more pounds. Time off work. Medical records. Injections, X-Rays, petitions, phone calls, photographs. Filling in forms and printing out correspondence. And then the bloody water torture of checking the post every single day. And here I was, sitting, looking at I didn’t know how much shit, because I thought it would have been easier. What was actually at stake here? Who knew? The interview? Another month of waiting? Were our wedding plans in danger? Was my future marriage at stake? I had no idea, and no way of finding out. I couldn’t phone anyone, as my phone was elsewhere in London. I couldn’t do a damn thing except wait and listen to the numbers being called. For another hour and a half of dread, fused with painful boredom. I was very grateful for not having drunk any caffeine that morning. By the end of those 90 minutes I was half a cup of weak coffee away from standing up and hurling my chair across the room. Which would have been bad.

And then, into our lives, came a man who I believe was called Gary. He was a friendly, dapper, middle-aged man, who looked the way I imagine Stace’s grandpa probably looked about 25 years ago. He was a scholar and a gentleman. He was the first actual American I’d met all day, and he was understanding and helpful. After a short- very short- interview, he told me that today was not my day for getting a visa. He needed the German police check, and told me how I could get my hands on one. I have since applied for it; it’s very simple. He told me that when I’ve got it, they’ll send a courier to pick it up, along with my passport, and they’d continue the processing from there. He didn’t want to see any of my files, emails or photographs. He wished me a nice day, and I left more or less empty handed, but not without hope.

And so here we are; all we need are a German police certificate (or, as they call it, a Testimony of Good Conduct- I do love the Germans’ way with words), and a K-1 Visa. We’re two little pieces of paper away.

 

Technorati Tags: K-1 Visa,Guerilla Burgers,US Embassy,Visa interview,Visa medical,Knightsbridge Doctors,German police certificate.

The waiting game.

Estragon: Let's go.
Vladimir: We can't.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.
Estragon: (despairingly). Ah!

-Waiting for Godot

 

Davis: Let's go.
Pottsy: We can't.
Davis: Why not?
Pottsy: We're waiting for the bloody Embassy..
Davis: (despairingly). Ah!

-Probably not Waiting for Godot

 

We wait. It’s what we do. And I tell you what: tick followed tock followed tick followed tock followed tick.

Any day now, a letter from the US embassy stipulating date and time of interview will drop through my letter box. It didn’t today. It didn’t last Monday either, although I had the strongest sense of preja vu that it would.  But it didn’t. So we go through the motions of working, and getting rid of stuff, and never being sure, and talking on MSN and having dates via webcam.

And it’s fine. But frustrating. There is a seemingly indefinite list of things to save up for. Visa, plane tickets, freight, medical examination (to prove I’m not carrying TB or HIV, or any of those other nasty acronyms), wedding rings, Christmas, and on and on and so on…

It’s making life take place somewhere between Melville, Beckett, Kafka and Bridget Jones, all of which came neatly together a couple of weeks ago. At 5:45am my alarm goes off, so I can chat to Stacey for an hour before work. Now usually, she does most of the talking and I confine myself to yeses, noes, LOLs, brbs and emoticons because, well, it’s still bloody night time.

But the morning in question, the old grey matter was somewhat shocked into what passes for alertness at a time of the morning when one could comfortably convince oneself that it’s still yesterday, when a litany of alarming MSN messages from the Dearly Beloved carried somewhat perturbatory news.

We’d fucked it up, royally. Oh boy. Wake up. Wake the fuck up. The paperwork is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You have not only dropped a bollock, but you have dropped an extremely rare 15th-Century lacquered Ming bollock with mother-of-pearl inlays, which was one of the only known remaining pair of lacquered Ming bollocks outside China. And it had just gone ka-ching on the floor.

In all the hurry-up-and-wait which is the visa application process, we had sent all the embassy forms off in August, but had failed to attach my personal documents. Police certificate, Birth certificate and so on. The reason we hadn’t heard was because we’d been put to the bottom of the pile, having forgotten to attach the documentation. We were sure we’d been right not to include this at the time. And now we were equally sure that this had been the equivalent to putting on boxing gloves before handling a precious, extremely rare 15th-Century lacquered Ming bollock with mother-of-pearl inlays.

It all boiled down to Form DS-156K (as distinct from for DS-156). I knew I hadn’t sent my documents. But looking at my copy of DS-156K it specifically stated that we had to attach them to it. We had held off sending them. We may or may not have enclosed the DS-156K without the personal papers. We weren’t sure. We weren’t even sure which-if either- of these courses of action had been correct. I had to phone the embassy and ask whether we’d been right to wait or not.

A very tense day followed, as I waited to get home from work so I could pay £1.20 a minute for the privilege of speaking to Shaq, a Scotsman with an Arabic name working for the American Embassy in London. He could tell me, at least  (for the princely total sum of nine pounds) that I was NOT supposed to attach the documents. So far, so good. But he could not say whether or not the DS-156K had been in the envelope with forms DS-156, DS-157, DS-230 and DS-2001. This was crucial. If we’d withheld it in order to send it with the birth certificate and so on, our application would be held up and our petition might expire, leaving me this side of the Atlantic for another 9-12 months and having to pay for another petition. Shaq gave me a code to put on an email to the consular office, so I could make a proper enquiry. I sent a newly filled-in DS-156K to the embassy by special delivery (£5 for one sheet of A4- thank you, Royal Mail)

Two days later, the reply appeared:

Thank you for your email correspondence.

According to our records, the Immigrant Visa Unit received all of the necessary forms in your case yesterday. You will be notified of your interview appointment date and time shortly.

Sincerely,

Consular Information Unit
U.S. Embassy, London

So, at the price of £14 total and three days of feeling as sick as a dog, the message from the US embassy is this: Everybody, be cool.

And so we wait.

Davismania!

Stace has graced England with her presence once again. We have had an awesome time. Truly fantastic. We were, sadly, forced to operate within the constraints of what was possible. We had a list of what we wanted to do while she was here, and this list was about three weeks long. We had 11 days.

We did the important stuff:

 

1. Going to see Newcastle thrash the living crap out of Aston Villa, and getting on the telly in the process. At 45-6 seconds, the blonde with the blue-star t-shirt in the front row is Stace, and the idiot to her right is me- dishonourable mentions go to Stephen and Claire to my right, disgraced, cheering for Newcastle United. Credit where it’s due- Claire survived another assassination attempt to go to the match she bought the tickets for. I’ll get you next time, Graham, next tiiiiiiiiime……..
   
   
   
   
2. Going to Durham, and reminding ourselves what good people our friends are. Naomi and Jen were as sweet and supportive as ever, and Dave and Ella took time out to travel from different parts of the country. Not only was it great to see people for the sake of seeing them, which is always great, but the extra effort they put in was touching.
   
   
3. Visiting York. I am increasingly jealous that I have no personal connection to this wonderful city. I’ve never lived there, I didn’t study there; none of my family is from York. It would be nice to say any of these things. The pubs in York range from the dreary to the phenomenal. With the benefit of a bit of first hand research (nothing is too much for you guys) we can recommend The Black Swan, The Old White Swan, and if you’re cygnophobic and happen to enjoy a bloody good burger, The Lendal Cellars.
   
   
   
4. Going on a proper date. To quote the wise and lovely Kristina Rimpley, who knows what it means to do the long-distance, long-term thing: “People say, like ‘You’ve got Skype’. I’m like, BITE ME!”. Yes, the internet makes maintaining a long-distance relationship easier. It might not have been possible, once upon a time, to sustain a relationship as well as we have. MSN and Skype are better than phone and letters and emails. I honestly don’t know how far we’d have made it without modern technology. It might have failed horribly. It might not. I don’t want to think about it. But if you think the internet has made this easy, really, really, bite me. It’s not easy. A lot of the time it’s not even normal. Sitting together watching a film doesn’t happen. Getting a hug doesn’t happen. Having a beer together doesn’t happen, because when it’s teatime here it’s breakfast time there, and people look at you funny when you’ve got a bowl of cornflakes in one hand and a bottle of lager in the other. So the opportunity to get dressed up and hold hands is frankly mind-blowing. The Blue Coyote played host to our first night out together in six months. The South African waiter there can recommend some first-rate reposado tequilas, like Partida Reposado. We didn’t get to go dancing. Maybe next time.
   

And we did lots of other things too, which I won’t bore you with. It was just nice. we did soppy romantic stuff and social stuff and civilised stuff and geeky stuff. I handed in my paperwork for the visa. It’s a matter of obtaining some documents and waiting for an appointment for an interview now. The amazing thing is that next time I see her, we will be together, more or less, forever.

Soul for Sale

Things are getting serious. Not that I didn’t expect them to. But it’s my books. “Books” says Lord Peter Wimsey, “Are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.”

The more books a person surrounds themselves with, of course, the more detailed fossil record of their earlier stages of development is. It was a strangely forensic process. I identified approximately 130 books which could easily be sold online and about the same number which will more than likely have to go to a charity shop as I’d make a loss selling and posting them.

I have promised myself that I will try and retain all my German books, all my Terry Pratchett 1st editions, the majority of my cookbooks, and anything which was antique or irreplaceable. Apart from that, nothing is sacred any more. I’ve sold Harry Potter CDs, Patrick O’ Brien books and sword-and-sourcery novels. I’ve sold history books from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to D-Day. I’ve sold V for Vendetta, Phonetics and Phonology and Dead until Dark.

Let me know if there’s anything you want that I might have. I have a massive amount of cookery books which I doubt I’ll be able to take 100% of, a large range of military history books, most of the Lord Peter Wimsey books and a disgusting amount of trashy spy fiction.

Welcome!

One of the many changes which moving to America is going to bring is the opportunity to write again. I will have lots to say and less time to do it in. The blog is the way forward, I feel.

In around 6 months’ time I expect to make my home in the New World and I intend to have celebrated my wedding to Stacey within 12 .

This blog will provide a means by which I can share some of that experience with you all. For those of you who remember Münchener Freiheit this will be a return to more-or-less familiar territory. But this medium means that the variety of what I can share with you can be considerably broadened. Expect photographs, links, recipes and general garbage in addition to what I hope will eventually be fairly regular pieces on life as a Briton in the USA.

Obviously, I’m not there yet. My life in England, such as it is, continues. So welcome to the embryonic phase of Going Coastal, an English take on the Special Relationship, the American Dream, motherhood and apple pie. Until I leave I will be blogging on, well, anything I like really. It’s going to be largely American-flavoured, I guess. You are my trial readership for now; it’ll properly go live when I can dangle my toes in the Pacific. Obviously not with my laptop on my knee; that’d just be asking for trouble.

I encourage you all to comment on the articles, too.

Pottsy.