A Brief Pause Ensues

. . . so sleepy . . .

If Only I Could Have Skipped the Morning

Delayed jet lag arrived in Bedfordshire with me last night but didn't really sink its teeth in until the alarm went off at 5:30 this morning.

Work days usually start early in the movie business, but this one found me hot, sweaty and bleary in a new hotel room (which is devoting itself to righting the karmic imbalance caused by my plainly too-nice accomodations in London).

Activating the air conditioning last night required a multi-step process on a tiny controller in a dim hallway, and I had apparently managed to turn on the heat instead. A sodium floodlight mounted squarely over my window (why?) meant opening the drapes for a breeze was out, so I sweltered through 4 or 5 hours' broken sleep before dragging myself into the shower stall at dawn, where I stood blinking at the wall above for a long, stupid while, trying to work out how to make water come out of it. Finally, the absence of actual plumbing impressed itself upon me and and I stumbled instead to the sink, where I remembered I'd left my toothbrush in London.

This is not how I prefer to meet 120 new co-workers, but I piled into the crew bus anyway -- only later, in the downpour, realizing I'd forgotten my raincoat. Also that my laptop had not charged because I'd failed to flick the switches that turn on each individual electrical outlet in England.

People who know electricity tell me England boasts markedly safer electrical conventions. I say what is the point in eschewing, for instance, bathroom outlets when it only means you have to buy 20 feet of extension cord to drag the blowdryer into the bathroom where you can still throw it into the bathtub if you're so inclined, only now you die poorer by the price of one extension cord? You can't defeat human nature; it is human nature to dry your hair where you can see it, and that's that.

Bedford is famous for its swans, which I am given to understand all belong to the queen. Why she wants them I don't know, but I guess it's not to shoot them because there are any number of them floating on this pretty and unpronounceable river that runs by our hotel.

And there is a statue out front dedicated to the local men who fought in "The South African Campaign" at the turn of the century. There's an odd inscription that says something like, "War Declared 1899. Peace Inferred 1902." I swear this is true. Or trueish -- it's the best I can manage today.

Ugly American Takes the Tube

I saw this ad in the underground today: "Marmite Crisps. You'll love them or you'll hate them."

This is an example of what feels so wrong about England: Phlegmatic advertising. It is something you just don't see in America. Advertisers don't say, "Coke! You might be ambivalent!" Or "Southwest Airlines -- some people like this sort of thing."

Americans like to be presented with boldness, brashness, exuberant, irrational confidence. American advertisers speak exclusively in excited mode. Yes, occasionally, there are products -- foreign products like, say, Altoids -- whose ambiguous come-ons feel novel to us. And while we may embrace the product, we impute to its maker suspicious qualities: They are coy, sly, probably dirty. It's the Puritan in us.

Now, Russia, for instance, takes a different tack. In Russia everything is named prescriptively. Products and signs translate like this: Chocolate for Children; Juice for Health; Eat Fast. This is uncomfortable in the other direction -- it goes against an American's independent grain to have our purchases be instructional. We would simply never buy a thing that told us we had to, whether we had to or not. I vividly recall standing in front of a Moscow grocery shelf that was issuing orders at me in this silent fashion and wanting to yell, Mind your own goddamn business, you Huns! I'll use it to shine my shoes if I feel like it!

This was a sane response to my mind, authoritarianism begging resistance in all forms.

England, though . . . English subways say things like "Mind the gap" instead of "Watch your step!" What kind of milquetoast would pay attention to such a thing, we wonder? "Mind the gap," indeed. The only red-blooded response is a pitying sneer. Really? 'Mind the gap'? Perhaps I would if I were 4!

What's with all the diffidence? Really, they virtually begged for the Revolution. No self-respecting person could be ruled by a nation so suicidally prone to deference.

Weights and Measurements

I am 14 pounds lighter today than yesterday. Yesterday I stepped on the scale and it said 172 pounds -- extremely depressing since last time I stepped on the scale at home it said 164, which was bad enough. Was madly wondering if gravity is different because we're further north or something when I noticed the scale is calibrated in kilos and there was no 100. I weigh 72 kilos or 158 pounds -- much better. "Good," though, will involve either a diet or a gravity change. (Am weighing a move to Finland. Never heard of a fat Finn.)

The conversion wasn't difficult because I have this new iPhone (insert choir of angels here) and among its million applications is one that converts practically anything to practically anything else instantly. Also found one that translates English to French and then says the phrase for you in computerese -- like Hal 9000 with uvular r's. Very satisfying. So then I bought a flashlight and a dictionary and the New York Times crossword puzzle downloaded daily, and the whole spree cost $9.97. I didn't think I would like my iPhone (angels redux). I was hideously, giddily wrong.

I used my nifty converter to figure the U.S. cost of the steak and glass of wine I had splurged on from room service night before last: $76. So on Friday I ordered a chicken caesar salad and ice water: $32.

Tonight I went to McDonald's.

However, I made up for it by shopping, having unaccountably failed to bring a raincoat to England of all places. Today it rained, so today I shopped -- damply. Got a little blue trench on sale and discovered something very gratifying: In England they still fold new clothes before they bag them.

Was at Macy's last week picking up a few things for the trip and found myself grinding my teeth watching them take a respectable amount of my annual clothing budget, ball it up and stuff it in plastic like so many lettuce heads. Made a rather grandiose show of removing the things, folding them myself and reinserting them in the bag. I thought this would make a point, or at least an impression; all the woman at the counter did was look at me with blankly bovine patience.

Macy's used to be a nice place to shop; now it is Sears without the lawnmowers.

No Wine for You

This is the view from my table at Starbucks. I tried to have a table at a pub around the corner but it was entirely full of men. Nothing against men, but there were only men. They all had beers. There was no sport on the television -- there was no television. They had no excuse for being gathered in a Hunnish horde like that. I was far too visible, so repaired to Starbucks for tea instead of wine.

The church across the street in the background is All Souls, which looks older than anything in America. Probably older than the dirt in America. There are many such places, labeled with improbable "since" dates: The Royal Geographical Society, the Society of Medicine -- lots of societies. All standing where they are before America was a twinkle in a Calvinist's eye.

Traffic is crazy here. On the road are only white lines -- no yellow to suggest where one way starts and another stops. Somehow they know, the English, but I don't. Nearly got run over twice today because I jaywalked Californianly off a curb, blithely looking left when cars were approaching from the right. Saved both times by a savvy stills photographer who had tea with me. Saw this man in the elevator (closet-sized in typical European fashion -- hard to miss a fellow passenger) and intuited he might be a photographer I'd been told to look for -- friend of a friend. I said, "Steve?" He was quite surprised. Wonder if he was wearing something that gave me a subconscious clue? He didn't have the vest-of-a-million-pockets that stills guys wear to work, and no visible light meters depended from him. Still, he had the look of a photographer. I suppose I owe him some kind of fealty for saving my life -- wonder if he'd take a dog instead? I did buy him a macchiato and maybe that suffices.

Arrived at Heathrow yesterday and it is by far the largest airport I've ever seen. So large that, arriving at 10 on a weekday morning, I appeared to have landed in, say, Memphis at 3 a.m. I didn't pass 10 people in the quarter mile I traversed to Customs. Immigration took 2 minutes. As I told my husband, I'd recently seen the English movie "28 Days Later" and marveled at how they'd gotten London to look so empty. I now conclude they shot the entire thing at Heathrow at midday. Ridiculously, ludicrously large.

Tried to take the tube back to my hotel today after taxiing over to an actor's apartment in Kensington, but could only stand like a rube with my silly, colored money in hand, gawking at the subway map and realizing that, while I knew where I was from the signs, I had no idea where I was going, or even in which direction. It is impossible to keep your bearings while driving in London. Everything is roundabouts and one-way streets, and traffic snakes around in fits and starts like a conga line at a wedding reception. Never do you travel more than three blocks in a straight line. It would be a boggling experience for even my Eagle Scout husband, who couldn't plot by the sun because there isn't any.

Mary Poppins Country

This is the view out my hotel window. Mary Poppins could fly here. It could rain. It could and does get cloudy and cool in July. It is 35 degrees cooler than the San Fernando Valley today. I have not brought enough long-sleeved shirts.

I Never Used to Like Pink

This is my sitting area and workspace. I love this space, too. It is pink and everything is neat in it. Plus I don't have to make it neat. Someone has already chosen appropriate art and cunningly not-quite matched the furniture. There are no crayon marks. There are no nasty black patches where dogs have brushed repeatedly against the walls. On the downside, there are also no dogs. On the upside . . . there are no dogs. I am awful person.