bearing blog

If there is a pattern in my years of maintaining most of the 2008 weight loss, it is a succession of stories:  In Which I Try Something New For A While To See How It Works.

"Works" is pretty mild here.   I haven't done the slow creep of weight gain (I'm heavier now than before my last pregnancy because I didn't drop back down quite as far, but am stable).  So none of these things seem to have mattered in terms of keeping the weight off.  It's staying off, it seems. 

What I'm looking for is, I guess:   Does this new thing (intermittent fasting, rule-based eating, No-S, whatever) make it feel easy?   Does it make prudent-yet-pleasurable dining second nature and reinforce good habits?  Does it get me out of an unhealthy headspace of obsession?  Does it keep me from being terrified of re-gaining weight?  

Here's the story of my Something New for right now.

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One of my goals, going into the couple of weeks my family spent in France this past September, was to spend several hours in bookstores.  Because there's no substitute to being able to browse through stacks of physical books, and I don't get to do that very often in my second language(s).

I had literary items on my to-do list, both fiction and nonfiction.  But I also had a couple of, shall we say, lifestyle-related items to tick off.  What I really hoped to find would be a practical book about feeding families, by French and for French families:  about keeping the traditions of the family meal, the leisurely, conversational, multi-course family meal, while under the pressures of dual-income families (or single-parent families), busy school and sports schedules, and all the distractions that tug at individuals and pull them apart. 

I especially hoped to find realistic and practical meal plans:  daily menus that reflected the courses that French families put before their children on the dinner table.  

I know that there is a tradition of entrée, plat, dessert–where "dessert" is often fruit, cheese, or both—and where the entrée is likely to be a vegetable first-course.  

I know that you can take an American square meal and, theoretically, untangle it so that (for example) the vegetable side dish comes out first, the fruit or a dairy product is pushed back to last, and what's left (meat and complex carbohydrates) becomes the plat, or main course.  

But I wondered how this looks in real life.  And I wondered if any enterprising French author had taken it on herself to explain to bewildered French millennials exactly how to perform this fundamental familial magic, à la Adulting.  I wanted to see meal plans for a whole week that would tell me, for example:

    WEDNESDAY DINNER

• Entrée:  Grated carrots in lemon and olive oil dressing
• Plat:  Grilled chicken with herbed rice and sautéed mushrooms
• Dessert:  Wedge of Camembert
• White Burgundy, or Belgian bière blanche

…. and so forth, all set up to make it easy to use up leftovers.  All set up to give many examples to show how to feed both children and adults with a balanced and pleasant meal, made of excellent ingredients, simply prepared and served in tidy little courses.

Sadly, I could not find such a thing in the shelves of childrearing, education, or cookbooks.  It seems that the French, even millennials, are not yet so disconnected from their roots that they need people to tell them how to eat dinner.

But I did find something very like it, somewhere else, by accident.

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I was browsing through a spinning rack of French self-help mini-books, because I am fascinated by the existence and format of self-help books and was curious about whether French ones were different from American ones. 

Stop being a workaholic!

Learn to meditate!

Get organized! 

As you might expect, a number of these were faddish exercise or diet books:  yoga, juicing, etc.   When I came upon a generic, non-faddish-looking one (Mon cahier minceur, or "My slimness workbook"–the French don't mince words and call their goal "health" or "weight loss"), I picked it up and opened it to a page.

And!  It was full of meal plans, very like the ones I was wishing for (only, for the benefit of those pursuing the elusive minceur of the title, the plans suggested quantities in grams).

So I bought it, of course. 

• It was a cheap little paperback, and the meal plans looked like normal, non-faddish, non-fat-free, whole-foods stuff, on the principle of Reasonable Or Reduced Quantities of Good Things.
• Furthermore, they were simple and modular—very unlike your average "Drop 7 pounds in our 7 days of meal plans" American magazine article, which pretends that you will put together a vegetable frittata for Tuesday morning breakfast and whole-grain waffles on Wednesday.  (Fun for a few days, but hard to sustain in the long term.) 
• The suggested gram-quantities are different for different people (I took the little quiz and wound up in the second-lowest-quantity bracket).   This is a weigh-some-of-your-food plan but not a count-your-calories plan.
• There are three weeks of "regime" menus, to be repeated as long as necessary, followed by two weeks of "stabilization" menus, to be repeated for as many weeks as one was on the "regime."  The "stabilization" menus have larger quantities, meant to ease the person into maintenance.
• Finally, they have a slight but unmistakable French accent.  Breakfast is present but unimportant, almost a careless throwaway half-meal; there's cheese and yogurt and crème fraîche everywhere, and also bread with butter (though a scantier smear of butter than I would like); dinner comes apart nicely into courses; and there are strict warnings against the dangers of eating between meals.  

I decided to follow it as much as I could, for as long as it was enjoyable, as my post-vacation Austerity Measures.

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Today's Tuesday, so here's a sample Tuesday menu.  The gram-quantities for you might be different than those for me, by the way. 

Breakfast:

• Tea or coffee
• 50 g of seven-grain bread (pain aux céréales)
• 20 g of cheese

Lunch (imagine this as a large salad with the yogurt for dessert):

• Crudités (example:  carrots, celery, grated cabbage).  Unlimited.
• 1 teaspoon of oil to make the vinaigrette [understood:  mix with as much vinegar, salt, pepper, mustard, etc., as you like]
• 2 slices of cooked ham 
• 150 g of cooked green peas, flageolets, or lentils
• 1 plain yogurt [this means 125 g, and it's not nonfat, but French "demi-écremé," which is executed better than our low-fat yogurt.  I just eat whole-milk yogurt and enjoy it.]

Dinner:

• Green salad seasoned without oil; e.g., make a vinaigrette with 1/2 tsp mustard + pepper + 2 tsp. vinegar + 2 tsp milk + lemon juice
• 100 g of roast beef
• Gratin dauphinois made with 175 g potatoes sliced and layered with 15 g grated emmenthal and 30 g crème fraîche mixed with 50 ml milk, baked 1 hour at 350° F
• 1 fruit

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This is pretty representative.   

• Plain vegetables are always unlimited. 
• Fruits aren't weighed, but the number is set: half a grapefruit, one apple, two kiwis.   
• Added fats, such as butter, oil, mayonnaise, and cream, are present at most meals in restrained amounts. 
• Breakfasts are always complex carb (bread, sometimes buttered, or cereal) plus dairy (cheese, milk, or yogurt).   
• Lunches and dinners are quite square:  a serving of meat or fish, a serving of complex carbs, usually both vegetables and fruit, and nearly always a serving of dairy.
• There is one very simple recipe given as part of one meal each day, such as the gratin dauphinois that accompanies Tuesday's dinner.   

And let's take a look at that dinner, shall we?  Here's how I would render it into a family meal:

• First course:  Big green salad (full of things the children like, including red bell peppers and cucumber, with cold roast beef strips on top, and croutons for the rest of the family, and their favorite bottled dressing for the children; but for me, an oil-free dressing with lots of strong dijon mustard)
• Second course: That lovely potato gratin, which finished baking while you had your salad.  And if your family would prefer it with cheddar cheese, do it that way.  You could add extra cheese to people's servings, too.  
• Cut fruit — I would put it on the table at the same time as the second course, and people could decide whether to have it together or separately.

Obviously, you could serve a plainer salad first and then put a beef roast next to the gratin; but I don't really like roasting beef, so I'd put deli meat in the salad.  YMMV.

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I've been surprised how much I don't miss my Egg For Breakfast (eggs have been moved to lunch, where they are just as pleasant).    It helps that I have replaced it, often, with buttered toast, which is one of my very favorite things.

One of the best parts of all this:  lunches that end with 20 g of good cheese.  I had forgotten how good a creamy blue cheese can be as a course to end a meal.  I would absolutely eat Stilton for dessert, any day of the week.

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To my surprise, the whole plan seems to work very well for me.  At least by the measures of suppressing panic and obsession, enjoying my food, and supporting good habits. I'm a little sheepish that I'm having such a good experience with what is basically an unusually-well-put-together "magazine plan."

That's not to say that everything I've eaten in the past few weeks is by the book.  I've demolished a few piles of chips and guacamole here and there while getting together with friends—but one of the things I want out of daily moderation and simplicity is that it leaves room for feasting.

Next post:  escaping from the Only One Number trap.

I don't know if you can believe it or not, but next month it will be the ninth anniversary of my six-month push to a 40-pound weight loss which took me down to a weight 52 pounds lower than my highest nonpregnant weight.

Since then I've had two babies and — mostly — maintained it.  I say "mostly" because 

• after a few months at that weight, I decided that too many people were asking me if I'd been ill, and deliberately re-gained about 6 pounds, at which point the concerned questions stopped.
• after my most recent pregnancy, not quite all of that came back off, and I stabilized at a weight that was, let's see, ten pounds heavier than that.  

And that's more or less where I've been for the last two years or so, with some seasonal and vacation-related fluctuations.  I did manage to get within three pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight at one point, but it proved difficult to maintain and I went up to the ten-pounds-higher one.

Still in the "normal" range, though!    And  that's why I feel like I can keep saying I maintained the weight loss.  I maintained most of it and am pretty stable.  As in, for the last two years I have not been working particularly hard, and my weight has not changed much at all, apart from some seasonal-type fluctuations.

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Let's just label as "seasonal-type" the few extra pounds I took back with me from my five weeks in the French Alps, the Italian Riviera, and London. 

I knew it was coming.  I had spent the last few weeks drinking a lot of pints of bitter and glasses of good red wine, and eating a good deal of cheese, pasta, and meat pies.  Somewhere in there I made a deal with myself that I would stop worrying about it, enjoy myself thoroughly, and implement Austerity Measures as soon as I returned.

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Austerity Measures seemed like a better name to me than a lot of the other trendy ones burbling around these days, like Clean Eating (with which I have a word association problem) or Whole 30 (why exactly thirty?)  or, uh, I don't know… Dump Dinners?  Can we get rid of the phrase Dump Dinners?   Just for the hell of it?

Anyway, having come so recently from France, I decided on some decidedly French Austerity Measures before I got home. 

British Austerity Measures are not nearly as pleasant.  Trust me, when you are in London, you want abandon, not austerity.  You want three pints a day and plenty of meat pies.  The same goes for Italy.   You want pizza and pesto and gelato (and more gelato) and lots of wine.  

But actually, French-style Austerity Measures aren't too bad.  I will elaborate in upcoming posts.

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I also want to write a little bit about:

• the trap of Only One Number, and my recent goal to generate other interesting numbers to distract me from it;
• long-term (first medium, and then very long-term) thinking;
• my ever-present concern (since about 2010) that in writing about weight control at all, I'm contributing to a culture of body shaming, making an idol out of Looking Not Fat, and putting myself in a not-so-good headspace;
• and the surprising situation I'm in, of thinking about my physical self in a future that, likely will have no more babies in it.

Be patient with me, it'll probably take me a month to get all four or five or so of these posts out there.  But:  that's November, my goal-weight anniversary month, and I can't help but be thinking about it a lot.  So I guess I might as well take you along.

 Continuing from the last post and the one before that.

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Assassins d'avant by Élisa Vix

This one is another roman policier.

One of the nice things about reading to improve one's language is that you don't really have to read things that are very literary.  Popular works, for the sake of their popularity, can be instructive all by themselves.  Not that this isn't going to be literary; I don't know whether it is or not.  But I don't need it to be.  I just need it to be interesting enough to keep the pages turning.

The back-of-the-book summary:

Manuel Ferreira is a cop.  When a young woman asks to interview him about the ranks of the police, he's charmed at first.  But when she pulls out a photograph taken twenty-five years ago, the worst of memories rise up to the surface.

Adèle Lemeur is no journalist, but a medical researcher.   Her mother was Marie Moineau, the fifth-grade teacher killed in front of her classroom of students, including Manuel himself—who never forgot that terrible scene, and maybe became a cop to exorcise it.  

She wants to know why her mother died, and Manuel is the only one who can help her find his former classmates, the witnesses to the crime.  He says yes:  because he wants to see her again, because of his unhappiness, because of his love for the one woman he has no right to love.

In a novel as incisive as it is mysterious, Elisa Vix drives her heroine on the trail of a truth that lies in wait to snare her.  Twenty-five years are not enough to repair the wounds and the lies.  And what if Adèle has been sheltered from these things for her own good?  And what if there is no such thing as a family without something to hide?  Adèle will go farther than she ever imagined.

 So, there you go, pretty standard French detective novel.  Maybe a little psychological thriller throw in for good measure.

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Le Chemin de Mère Adèle Garnier by Gianmario Pica

First things first:  I did not buy this book.  It was handed to me for free by Sister Thomasina of the Tyburn Nuns when we visited the shrine.

 But it wound up in my hands (in England), and I will probably crack it open at some point, so I may as well mention it.  

Mother Adèle was, of course, the foundress of the congregation, and her cause for canonization has recently been opened; she has formally received the title "Servant of God" as of, oh, about a year ago.  This book came out in 2013.  Some Googling reveals a few details which the Catholic press found interesting, namely that the foundress is said to have witnessed multiple Eucharistic miracles.  But Sister Thomasina hadn't mentioned that to me, stressing instead Mother Adèle's personal holiness and the great gift that is the Martyrs' Shrine.

 Here's the brief biography of Mother Adèle on the Tyburn website.  I am interested to know more about this woman and her work.

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L'Équation du Nenuphar:  Les Plaisirs de la Science, by Albert Jacquard

Waterlilies again!  

I stood in the bookstore for a long time with several books by this author in my hand.  I was looking for nonfiction essays, and I couldn't decide which of his books to buy. 

My eye had lit upon his name as I scanned the "essais" section, because I noticed right away that he appeared to have published books essays on at least two distinct topics:  general science and philosophy.  The philosophy book was entitled, Petite philosophie à l'usage des non-philosophes, that is, "Little philosophy for non-philosophers."  That interested me, because I am not a trained or certified philosopher, but I do my share of philosophizing. 

The science book purported to be the sort of thing to demonstrate the beauty and pleasure of science to people who (unlike me) are not trained scientists.  So in one sense, the other book was for me, and this book was not for me.  But on the other hand, there is the potential to enounter the pleasure of science in French.  That would be new.  And I like the idea of reading philosophy by scientists, and of studying and performing science with the eye and mind of philosophy — which is what's necessary to know science's place in the scheme of things. 

So I immediately knew I wanted to get one of this guy's books and see what he had to say.  It was just a matter of whether to get one, both, or neither.  In the end I put down the philosophy book and promised myself I could order it later if the science book made me think I wanted more.

Jacquard, who died in 2013, seems to have been quite the polymath:  double baccalaureates in math and philosophy, master's degree in factory engineering from the École Polytechnique, civil servant, additional studies in population genetics and an appointment at the WHO as well as at several universities.  He has written numerous works of professional and popular science as well as works of politics and philosophy.  I'm interested to meet this author:  it may well be that we will have points of difference in our politics, but in any case I should enjoy some of the work I'll have to do to hear him out.

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A Stack of Magazines

Not much to explain here!  Most of these are cooking magazines, and one is sort of a French equivalent of Scientific American.  I set reminders on my calendar to dole them out to myself at the rate of one every two months. 

I do have a couple of other things, namely a couple of cookbooks, but I'll bring those up if and when I ever make some food with them.  As I got some interest from these, I will probably attack Et ils eurent beaucoup d'enfants first.  I hope to report back with at least a few pages read.

When I was about to come home from our family Europe trip three years ago, I listed some practices I wanted to bring back with me, so that our vacation would leave me permanently changed, if only by a little bit.

And then there's the food. Since I have been here I have made a new vow at every meal, it seems. When I get home I am going to find a supplier of tiny sour French pickles and I will never again eat a ham sandwich without them. I will buy the beer at Surdyk's which is attached to the city's best cheese shop and I will find out if they sell Abondance and Tomme de Savoie, and I will make salads with fine ribbons of white, soft-rinded cheeses and twists of proscuitto. I will throw out all the bottled salad dressings and make only pungent mustard vinaigrettes and luscious cream dressings with herbs. I will buy a crêpe pan and an electric fondue pot, or at least a correctly-sized enameled cast iron saucepan that will hold the heat. I will buy the expensive butter, maybe not for the whole sticks that are melted to go into waffles, but at least to spread on my sandwiches. I will make pan sauces again with cream and wine.

I know better than to think, even for a minute, that I have time to do much of the fancy sort of French cooking. But surely I have time to make my quick meals more civilized? With the good kind of canned tuna that is packed in olive oil? With better cheeses on my salad? With tiny, ice-cold glasses of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice?

I did take up some of those practices, and a few others, like starting family meals with "first course" when I can manage it.

Will I take up any new ones this time around?

I have some thoughts.

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Food is always the first thing I think about, because you encounter it three times a day. I wish I could get greengages or Charentais melons, but they are a rarity. Anything more feasible?

Well, I was reminded how much I like sparkling water with meals, and a couple of the kids learned they like it for the first time. I'm not sure if it's realistic to think we'll grace our table with fizzy water; it would be a pain to lug one more liquid home from the store. But it's something maybe to have more often. One of my cousins swears by a Sodastream, just for making her water bubbly. I'm a little worried that this would lead our family down a direction I don't want to go. On the other hand, you can make tonic water with one, too. I suppose I could just buy bottles for a while and see what happened.

I have a new interest in Ligurian red wine: tart, a bit frizzante, pale so that it nearly looks like rosé. I guess I will look for some.

I learned to make proper fondue savoyarde, and I think I would like to try it again at home; that is, if I can find the right cheeses and wine. The wine might be tricky, since I don't think much of it is exported; but perhaps I can find something close to the right balance.

Another thing I learned: to make tuna sandwiches by mixing good tuna only with good mayonnaise, and spreading it on soft, not-at-all-crusty bread, with lettuce and tomato (maybe capers), and slicing the egg instead of mixing it in. The results are a bit more swanky and luxurious than my prior default tuna sandwich method, which involved diced onion and celery, lots of dill pickle relish, and sometimes a baguette.

(I will go on making tuna melts the old way, I think, though, with English muffins and sharp cheddar cheese. Those are pretty hard to beat.)

On the English side of sandwiches, I have decided to find a nice spicy chutney or two and squirrel them away in the fridge to have on buttered bread with more sharp cheddar cheese. And for drink: I was reminded of the superiority of Samuel Smith's beers. Some of these, I am sure I can find at home in Minneapolis: Taddy Porter, oatmeal stout, a bottled bitter. Maybe (I hope) the chocolate stout. "They're what, seven dollars a bottle?!" protested Mark, but I wouldn't drink them every day. Just some of the days, and I would share. Who knows, if I look high and low I might even find the apricot beer.

Furthermore, I have seen the light: puff pastry has great utility as a carbohydrate delivery method, and I am resolved to learn how to make sausage rolls and meat pies.

Also cheese-and-onion spread.

Maybe mushy peas.

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I don't know if I have any non-food sorts of things to take up. But I find myself wishing that we went away more often, maybe just for a weekend, to do things that are interesting or relaxing not so far away from home. I don't know how realistic that is. It seems easier to do one big trip than to find the time for multiple small ones; and many weekends are taken up by Scout trips, school planning, and necessary household tasks. But I would like to make it work, if it could work.

Who knows what you are capable of as a family if you don't try?

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We put the kids to work setting the apartment back to rights. Obviously we don’t have to clean it thoroughly or anything, but there is a certain amount of tidying up that (a) seems to be common courtesy and (b) is required if you want to find all your belongings in the corners.

At the end we had time for a little relaxation, or at least to keep the smaller ones occupied while the rest of us finished up. Mark needed to repair a curtain rod that the 3yo had pulled down a couple of days prior.

I shot a selfie in my traveling clothes.

And a couple more of the apartment: the view from the kitchen window of the lovely blue sky:

And stepped out on the balcony into the perfect autumn day, and looked down at Bloomsbury Square:

A van was coming to transfer us and our luggage to Heathrow. On our way back from the pub the other night, Mark and I had walked around the block that contained our apartment’s little pedestrian street, looking for a good place to wait for it. We found a sign that marked a spot as Loading Zone Only, just around the corner and across one street, and that didn’t specify who was allowed to load. So the teen boys worked to transfer the seven big suitcases and the backpacks and the car seats into a pile on the curb, one watching over the pile while the other went back and forth fetching bags.

I gathered up the three smaller children, with the carrier and my tote crammed full of things I needed to take with me on the plane. I dropped my apartment keys on the little side table, the one with the selfie mirror, and went out the door and let it shut and lock behind me.

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The four of spent the waiting-for-the-van time in the tot lot at Bloomsbury Square Gardens.

Then I got the text from Mark:

We got in the van, and after a ten-minute standstill because of construction traffic around Bloomsbury Square, were off. I watched the neighborhoods slip away: Soho, Marylebone, Hyde Park, Acton, Ealing.

Heathrow.

We grabbed lunch in the airport at Leon, a Mediterranean-ish chain restaurant. My last English meal was thus a fish finger wrap.

And a bottle of sparkling water. I am going to miss Sparkling Water Available Wherever Still Water Is Sold.

And to the plane.

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The three-hour hop to Reykjavik on IcelandAir was uneventful, except for a slight mixup in ticket-reading that had us rushing off the plane to make an impossibly short connection that turned out to actually be more than an hour.

At takeoff for our six-hour flight to Minneapolis, despite the lollipops and sips of water I had at the ready, the 3yo appeared to be having Ear Problems. He shrieked, squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head “no,” and cried that he had a headache. And then, quite suddenly, he stopped crying, panted a bit with his eyes half closed, and fell asleep.

It was maybe five or six p.m. in the time zone we’d come from, which is not a crazy time for him to be having a nap, so I let him. He slept for a few hours, then woke up cranky and refusing to eat the bag of crackers in his complementary IcelandAir kids’ meal.

We went to and from the bathroom a couple of times. And then, with two hours left in the flight, he threw up all over himself and his carseat.

I was relatively prepared! I had two changes of clothes for him and a lot of baby wipes. Mark switched seats with the 11yo to sit next to me and get help from the flight attendants, and we got him cleaned up, the seat cleaned up, a plastic bag for him to sit on so the damp seat wouldn’t be uncomfortable, and all the soiled clothes packed away in waterproof bags, and a pile of paper towels at the ready in case he got sick again.

Then he threw up again, mostly but not entirely on the pile of paper towels that I thrust under his chin. More help from the flight attendants. I was glad for Mark talking to them, accepting towels and plastic bags, so I could attend entirely to my sad, sick, and uncomfortable little boy.

How much easier a sudden crisis can be when another person frees you up to deal with the crisis by talking to the people who are trying to help, so you don’t have to waste any energy turning back and forth, adopting alternate positions of Crisis Management and Oh Gosh Thank You.

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The third vomit was nothing left but bile, but I caught it in a plastic garbage bag that was ready on his lap for the rest of the trip. The 3yo said he felt better, and volunteered to walk on his own carrying his backpack. Through the customs line, until they took pity on us and invited us to the head of the line, he stumbled forward a few steps and then lay down on his backpack until we had to urge him forward again.

Really sick and not just airsick? Hard to say. We’d been up for twenty hours and this was not all that different from his behavior in the UK customs line a couple of weeks ago, when he was entirely well.

I texted a vomit warning to H., but she was unfazed. “We’ll risk it,” she texted back. And when the two cabs we hired made it to our street, our house was already lit and full of friends.

I carried the sleeping 3yo straight up to bed, changed my clothes, and washed my hands really well before coming down to company.

And food!

Fish tacos!

GUACAMOLE.

Even a birthday cake.

And milk, eggs, fruit, and English muffins for the morning.

I ate, and the kids reconnected, and we chatted, and I settled into my chair with a glass of red wine from a box, and was happy to be home. And just as we started to flag, they packed up, said “Bye! See you Monday!” and went home, leaving us fed and ready for bed.

The pile of held mail on the counter can wait, the suitcases can wait, the laundry can wait (even the 3yo’s backpack), for one night’s sleep to the sound of the ticking of the ceiling fan in my own bedroom.

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Thursday was my birthday. It was also, sadly, our packing day, with no outings planned because we expected a tube strike that in the end never materialized.

I had planned to spend two or three hours shopping for gifts to take home, within walking distance of the flat. But Mark managed, unexpectedly, to get a slot for each of the teen boys to go driving at Mercedes World outside of London. So instead my shopping slot was moved to the afternoon, and he took the bus with the boys.

Before he left I took myself out for a Full English Breakfast. At the last minute I switched my order to the vegetarian version:

The little frittata is spinach and feta. It was nice, and more what I wanted than two kinds of meat wojld ve.

I bought lunch things for the younger children and myself, and went back in time for Mark and the boys to leave. A little packing happened—and then I got a migraine! I took my medication, but had to nap for the next few hours. So it is just as well that Mark and the boys got their chance.

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After they returned, pleased and with new Mercedes lanyards for their gym IDs or whatever, I supervised some more packing; and then around five o’clock I went out myself. I walked through Covent Garden, listening to the patter of street magicians, inhaling the aromas of food from the restaurants, looking in windows. I walked into a shop that sold Scottish wool scarves, I walked into a shop that sold kitchen gadgets, a shop that sold tea things, each time looked around, but kept on walking. I really didn’t have enough time to look and think and to find things I wanted, and Covent Garden seemed to be a bit pricey.

I set a new course for Seven Dials. Here and there shops were closing. Some had closed at five, and nearly all the boutiques would be closed by seven. Looking in windows. Nothing drew me.

I saw a sign for a vintage-clothing store. Well, you never know what you’ll find in one of these, and here I am in London, so I walked in. Men’s clothes on the left, women’s on the right. Dresses, mainly crepe floral. A pine-green cotton sweater dress with patch pockets, briefly considered. Then I went over to rifle through the small coat rack.

Hmm. Real leather? Check the tag. Lining, acetate, outer, leather. Hmm.

Sixty pounds? For a leather duster that fits me perfectly, in a color I like? Yes, please! Happy birthday to me!

And then it was time to get dinner, and that was the end of my shopping trip. And that is why I didn’t buy any presents in London.

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Our 17yo had gone out by himself to see the UK opening of the new Bladerunner movie, so the rest of us would be having our last-night-out dinner without him. At first I was disappointed that we would miss him, and it seemed wrong that there should be only six of us (although admittedly that would make it easier to get a table).

Then I reflected that I was getting a glimpse of the not-too-far-off future when he would be gone for most all family dinners. I decided that today would be the first evening that I would begin learning about, and looking towards, that new dynamic that is coming, the dynamic where our second oldest is the oldest who is with us at the table. It will be a good dynamic, too, and it stands for good things. And—just like that—while I was still disappointed to miss him, it did not seem wrong anymore, but completely okay and right.

“There are six of us,” I said to the waiter in the upstairs dining room of the Nag’s Head.

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We had a pub dinner for our last night. Mark and I started with pints of stout and IPA. I think he will be glad, if nothing else, to get home and drink some craft beer with noticeable hops.

The 7- and 11yo ordered lemonade that turned out to be fizzy, and two starters to split as their entree: a chicken basket (popcorn chicken, grilled barbecue wings, and fried wings) and a plate of battered onion rings.

The 13yo ordered sparkling water, and baked meat lasagna that came in an individual casserole, with a green salad.

Mark and the 3yo split a fish and chips platter, with mushy peas on the side.

And I ordered a glorious meat pie on a mound of mashed potatoes, with broccoli and carrots and a lovely gravy, and a glass of red Tempranillo wine because by then my Guinness was gone.

Austerity measures may be called for when I get home, but not on my birthday in London.

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Still reading? Thanks for coming along with me.

All that is left now is the trip home. And maybe a renewed blogging habit? We shall see.

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Once on the boat it was a relaxing and interesting ride for everyone. The 3yo, on my lap, was very pleased to be sitting in the front corner of the ferry, where he had an excellent view of a looped rope being tossed and tightened to secure the boat to the pier each time it stopped.

By the time we got to Greenwich, it was well lunchtime. We looked in a couple of restaurants in the village, but decided that we were likely to pay about the same, and more efficiently, by eating at the museum café. So straight to the National Maritime Museum we went.

The approach has a long trough of running water coming from each side and meeting at drains in the middle. It would be a good place to sail a paper boat. The children threw autumn leaves in it to amuse the 3yo.

Museum cafés don’t seem to cost significantly more than regular restaurants here in London, especially if you factor in a small tip. The cafeteria format makes it easy for the littlest verbal children to choose what they want. There are often tables large enough to accommodate our entire family. They are located right where we want to be. And the food has been reliably good.

This one had cold sandwiches and salads, paninis that could be heated on request, and a small hot bar with a child’s plate, two plates of the day, and soup. Also, as at the Tower of London, you could put together a child’s box lunch out of a small sandwich, a bag of chips, a juice box, and two cold sides like gelatin dessert or grapes.

Three kids got the £5 hot child’s plate of breaded chicken, fries, and English baked beans. Two teen boys got fat individually-baked casseroles of beautifully browned macaroni and cheese. I got a cold veggie wrap filled with greens, crunchy pickled carrots, and some kind of red-pepper-and-hummus-like spread, plus tomahto soup. And Mark got a plate of hot salt beef brisket with potatoes gratin (not the cheese kind, the buttery baked kind) and chunks of roasted carrots.

I am going to miss the universal availability of bottled sparkling water. Everywhere there is bottled water, there is sparkling water for the same price as still.

Satisfied, we went to see the Maritime Museum. Prince Frederick’s barge:

A turning paddle wheel:

There are two children’s areas in the museum, but unfortunately the one with a big play structure was closed. This “children’s gallery” was just about as good, though. It contained fun activities but also items exhibited here in their own right, like real cannons and cannonballs and rigging equipment. Our three younger kids were in their element, but the teens enjoyed it too.

There’s a ballistics simulator with a cannon you can raise with a crank or turn on a turntable to shoot at a faraway island. If you are 13 and not 3 you can learn from your error and correct the trajectory until you win the game. If you are 3 you can turn a big wheel and make it go “boom.”

Extraction from the children’s area finally accomplished, we managed to see some other exhibits before moving on. The Nelson exhibit was cooler than I had expected. My favorite part was an interactive screen that showed the ship movements in the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Trafalgar. I am fond of military history and strategy, even though I have nevr had the time to dig into it as much as I would like, and I appreciated being able to step the ship movements forward and backward in time while zooming and rotating the map. Something like that makes it so much easier to see how command decisions interact with the geography and with each other. It is really far better than reading.

Maybe it’s actually the geography that interests me. The landforms and waterways we can still see today, and how people moved in them once upon a time. How we have changed the landscape and what the consequences will be. Geography and humans together. Battles are just a very rapid and intense kind of chapter in that same story.

But the technology is part of it too. So battles, writ large, are a story of goals and motivations and planning and strengths versus constraints, costs and benefits. If you forget about the pain and suffering (and the simulator does; but examples of that are in the next case over) it’s an engineering problem, or a game. Which way to think about it when? Should it always be both? One or the other? Or neither?

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Through some windows in the Maritime Museum you can see a wide swath of green grass, now littered with leaves from the trees that dot it, criscrossed with walking paths, and sweeping up a high hill. Speaking of battle geography, and having just come from the castle-studded Aosta Valley not long ago it would be entirely unsurprising to my untrained eyes if the top of the hill were crowned by a fortress to watch over the flow of the Thames. But of course the sight of the base of that grassy hill thrills me not because of its military value, but because it is the site of the Observatory.

It is a rather long climb up the hill. Once you are up there it is obvious why the observatory is there. It is the tallest thing around.

The children all had to take selfies at the Prime Meridian.

Then we explored the Observatory itself. Many of the instruments are still in place, including the one that was used to fix the meridian.

We had a moment of sympathy for poor Halley, who had one of the loveliest monuments in Westminster (placed on the occasion of one of the comet transits) but whose meridian, marked at Greenwich by a strip of metal on a wall, didn’t win the day. But perhaps we should have more sympathy for the pavement-layers, because the marked meridian is inaccurate too, thanks to imperfections in the plumb-line method given variations in gravity. The GPS-measured prime meridian is about 100 meters away, and as of this writing, still unmarked.

There’s a working equatorial telescope (the kind that you can set to compensate for the rotation of the earth so you can take a good photograph of stars). In the winter it’s possible to come and look through it on special astronomy nights.

We could have stayed for the next show, perhaps, but Mark had other plans. The Cutty Sark! The tea clipper has been lovingly restored, and its interior is a museum unto itself. With some of the best-designed museum displays, for pure ability to transmit information, that I have seen yet.

London museums have been top-notch in this regard, by the way. Just in the skill with which they display both quantitative and qualitative information. It’s all very smartly done.

The Cutty Sark is absolutely worth a go. I liked it far more than I expected I would. Partly because of the ship itself, partly because of the excellent displays. Also because they had very, very good displays and activities for young children in every part of the ship, not just in a dedicated children’s gallery. Both my little boys were engaged the whole time. A motorized bench you could sit on to feel the “rocking of the ship;” a game of stacking little weighted cubes, boxes of tea, in the hold without tipping the toy ship mounted on a bearing.

There was another excellent simulator here, of steering a ship from Sydney to London while taking advantage of the trade winds. What I liked about this one was that your display consisted of a world tradewinds map, a closeup of your
ship with arrows showing the trade winds in the immediate vicinity, and a compass. No big picture, no GPS dot on the map showing where you are. You have to pay attention and keep track.

Top deck. Part of it was roped off; jumpsuited men and women with badges labeled “Professional Rigger” were working behind the curtain.

Officer’s saloon. Note the drink holders that swing freely from the ceiling on either side of the light fixture

Pantry

Mark spent a lot of time admiring the mechanism that converted rotation of the wheel into rotations of the rudder. I was chasing the 3yo at the time and missed most of the explanation from the docent in the cap.

But that was okay, because it gave us something more to talk about over pints of Extra Stout and Double Four Lager and Organic Apricot Fruit Beer after dinner, and a walk along the Strand.

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We are down to the last few days, and on the last day there’s a Tube strike planned, so we must focus.

I made the three big kids get up at nine and leave at ten, because the sisters at Tyburn Convent offer a tour of their shrine daily at 10:30.

Outside Marble Arch tube station we discovered something cool: outdoor ping pong tables! The last players had left the ball on the surface, tented under two paddles so it wouldn’t roll away: two more paddles were in slots under the table.

Sadly, we had to move on so as not to be late.

“Now I want you to know that as you’re looking around down here, please feel free to take pictures. As many as you want! I know some feel they aren’t supposed to, in a holy place. But our work is for everyone, and the more people know about it, the better.”

So I did take pictures.

This is their altar, topped by small replica of the Triple Tree:

Sister Thomasina had a way of telling that started down a path, went down a trail, backed up to the main narrative, then started again down another trail. She began by explaining the long history of hangings at Tyburn. “East was the sea,” she said, “so when people approached London from the countryside they came from the west, and there was a little river here, the Tyburn. And you know, they wanted the criminals to be hanging there when visitors came from the west, so that is why the executions were here. And—listen—” She held up a finger and we heard a low rumble grow, tremble the floor, and die off. “That’s the train, from the Underground. Well, we’re downstream of the Triple Tree, and you know, the river once flowed under here, it forked. So we say that the blood of the martyrs flowed under our feet.”

She described hanging and drawing and quartering in detail, and she had a very different demeanor from the Yeoman Warder who gave our Tower tour; he played it for laughs. She was not somber, though; there was a certain cheerfulness in her telling of the story. She explained the size of the gallows, big enough to drive two carts side by side under each crossbeam, big enough to hang eight people on each, twenty-four in all.

“These reliquaries on the walls,” she said. “On this side”—she gestured—”these relics were spirited away to France during the persecution, and they’ve been brought back here. And these on this side went to Spain, and they’re back thanks to the Spanish Embassy.”

Sister Thomasina invited us through the gate into the kitchen garden, in a tiny courtyard. “Here is where we grow our herbs, and the salad things,” she said. “We have room to try some new things now and then. Here, we are trying to grow an avocado tree. Don’t know if it will bear fruit but it is worth a try.”

In one corner of the garden was a raised stone sepulchre. “That’s our foundress,” said Sister. There was a little kneeler in front of the tomb, and above it a mural of the resurrected Christ. Right next to the kneeler was a large glassed-in bulletin board in which were posted printed emails. I leaned over; they were clearly petitions submitted to the Sisters via a website combox of some sort. All were crisp with relatively recent dates. I suspect that if you send them an email and ask for a prayer, your prayer will be posted here, next to the little kneeler.

She gathered us around and handed us a little card with a prayer printed on it. “A prayer for the canonization of our foundress,” she said. “Why don’t you come around here and let’s all say it together right now.”

So we did, and then headed back through the door, passing more posted petitions.

The crucifix on the wall we passed bears a tag that reads: Pray for those who died around this crucifix at Ypres in the 1914-1918 war and for their chaplain. R. I. P.

Before we left, Sister said to us, still unflappably cheerful: “If you have anything that is worrying you or burdening you, leave it here at Tyburn. Our prayers are for everyone here. Prayer is our work. Leave it here at Tyburn. And,” she added with a wider grin, “if your burden isn’t lifted, you may take that to mean that we can use some help! And pray for us, then.”

On our way past Marble Arch we found the stone marking Tyburn where she had said it would be, flanked by three little oaks that had been recently planted to make a new Triple Tree.

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We walked down to the Bond Street station, past Selfridge’s (which would be a better shopping destination than Harrods).

I had promised my daughter some sushi. We found a chain called Wasabi in the mall. Very nice: you can pick individually wrapped pieces of nigiri, maki, onigiri, and other things to make a bento box, or grab a preassembled combo to go. Also there are hot noodles and rice bowls. Once again, London fast food wins the category.

Then we took the tube to Westminster Abbey. Which had once been Benedictine, like Tyburn. But of course is quite different now.

I came back to find Mark working:

I snapped a photo of a sign I had passed many times over the past few weeks, and been pleased by:

After a quick gobble of dinner, I set out with four children to the Cambridge Theatre in Seven Dials. We had tickets to Matilda: The Musical.

I haven’t time for a proper review, so I’ll just say that we all loved it, with the possible exception of the 7yo for whom it was a bit too intense and dark. I think he was okay in the end, though. Although I love Roald Dahl (even, or especially, his stories not written for children), I never have read the book Matilda nor seen the movie from a few years ago. I only had a vague idea of the plot. So it was unspoiled for me, and I enjoyed it greatly. There seem to be a few places in the story that are paced irregularly, the mark of an imperfect adaptation. But the music is wonderful, and there was the extra delight of a passel of very talented children. Matilda herself was played wonderfully dryly by Savannah Read, a tiny girl with long red hair and expressive body language. The set design and lighting is brilliant. A lovely evening out with the kids.

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This one had plenty of interesting objects as well as technical demonstrations (how is plywood made? why can it be formed into so many shapes? why does it make such good chairs?). With the right glues, it can be waterproof; it’s light, formable, and strong; we saw boats, car parts, suitcases, a bookbinding (the Shackleton exhibition brought a printing press to Antarctica and printed books using their plywood packing crates as hardbacks). Disposable lightweight airplane gas tanks:

Eames (yes, he of the sleekly curved and modern molded plywood chair) apparently did his war work making sleekly curved and modern molded plywood leg splints:

Having finished that, we picked galleries that both of us were interested in (so I probably saw something quite different than I would have had I gone alone. We stuck to the rooms labeled “Techniques and Materials,” and started with the enormous collection of cast iron and wrought iron.

I appreciated the building itself very much. It lacked the maze of cubical white rooms that’s so common, and is made instead of courts and wide, high halls, many of them visible from above by means of galleries on the upper floors. They display many large pieces that way. The smaller galleries that run alongside often contain explanatory material or smaller pieces that are related to the massive works in the middle. It is very grand and lovely.

We spent two hours there. Sadly, the temporary exhibit of Pink Floyd artifacts was sold out when we tried to buy tickets.

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The day itself was relatively pretty, and I suggested for the afternoon we take the three smaller children to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens. We would have lunch there from the food stand, and then stay and play. The promise of food brought the teen boys too, but once we got to the gardens they decided they’d rather explore. So I gave them money and off they went.

The two little boys, on seeing the playground, refused to eat until they had been allowed in to play.

I fed the 11yo first (chicken nuggets for her; caprese panini for me) while Mark went in with them, then came in and gave him a chance to go eat (stone-baked Parma ham and rocket pizza). My daughter volunteered to run around playing with the 3yo, and my 7yo was already making friends, so I felt free to walk around and explore the place myself.

The playground is entirely fenced in, with one entrance by the food stand (it has one counter inside and one counter outside, and there are picnic tables on either side of the gate). To get in, you push a panel and, if you are an adult accompanying children under 12, a guardian buzzes you in. You must also be buzzed in to leave. So, while technically parents are supposed to supervise their children, once inside the playground children can run freely through numerous outdoor “rooms.”

The playground has a Peter Pan theme. The pirate ship is glorious, with smaller rowboats on the side, some stable, some mounted on springs so they can be made to rock hard left and right. The Lost Boys’ house is a clearing encircled by a wooden fort, with slides and log bridges:

The lagoon looks like it might be a fountain in the summer, and even now there are fountains that send water in when children work them. Tantalizing shapes and objects are embedded in the concrete to look like prints in the sand: the mark of a rope, planks washed ashore, rocks arranged in the form of a crocodile. Plus shells and other small treasures.

Read the final paragraph on the explanatory board: “It is now recognized that risk taking is an important element of play and physical development.

Bravo! I guess the Queen is just not all that worried about being sued if a child breaks her arm. Take another look at that pirate ship:

While we were there, a girl of about seven climbed the ropes to the topmost horizontal crossbar and worked her way out to the end. She clearly knew what she was doing. It was a joy to watch.

After a while, the teen boys came back, having explored the vast grounds of Kensington Gardens and then gone to Tesco for the £3 lunch special.

My 13yo son was SO pained that he was technically too much grown to play in this playground. I could see his eyes sparkling when they lit on the pirate ship.

We let him go in as “accompaniment” to the 3yo, with a careful admonition not to get in the way of younger children. And bought more food (the 3yo polished off nearly all of a New York Style Hot Dog with mustard, and ice cream novelties were had). And stayed still longer.

I think maybe we were there about two and a half hours? And it was one of the more fun playground afternoons I have had.

I don’t know why American playgrounds have not adopted the very, very sensible European practice of putting a fence around playgrounds and having only one exit. Even if you don’t have a guardian buzzing kids in and out, this makes it so much easier to safely supervise multiple kids: park yourself where you can see the exit, and you can watch in peace. Unless you have the sort of child who will climb the fence against strict instructions (and I know some of us do, true, but for most a fence can be a hard boundary), a one-exit fence is the kind of safety precaution that allows for more freedom and independent risk-taking for the children inside it.

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Mark and the 17yo walked to get carryout from Nando’s for dinner: piles of wings and fries, and some salad and corn on the cob.

“One of the things that’s great about British food,” says my 17yo, “is that you never have to worry, when you look at a menu, about whether you should get medium spicy, hot, or extra hot. Wings, vindaloo, whatever. Just order the hottest level always. You never have to worry that it will be too hot. Hottest is generally just right here.”

So far, this has turned out to be correct.

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After dinner, Mark and I headed out with our tickets for Young Frankenstein at the Garrick Theatre, a building which was financed by W. S. Gilbert.

This show is a retooling of Mel Brooks’ original Broadway production, clearly an attempt to do something similar to what he managed with The Producers. It got mixed reviews in NY and has been tightened up from three hours to two. The monster is played here by the same actor who played him on Broadway.

Poster outside the theatre:

Theatre selfie:

About the show itself: The audience around us appeared to eat it up, but I have to wonder what proportion of Brits are the sort of people who have seen the Mel Brooks movie often enough to quote it from start to finish. Because when you’re steeped in the movie, like we are, it is a standard that no adaptation can live up to. Every departure from it, however necessary for the stage, is a step down.

It’s also a good deal bawdier than the film. “What knockers!”/”Thank you, doctor” is positively understated compared to the new Brooks-authored musical numbers. You know how people say that Brooks could never make Blazing Saddles today? He couldn’t put these musical numbers on the big screen, I think. They’re not obscene, and they’re not unfunny, but they’re also not inoffensive and may cross lines that
would make too many people uncomfortable. One song plays physical domestic abuse for laughs, for example. And some of it just works a little too hard, expecting bawdiness to stand in for actual humor. There were a couple moments where I cringed a little for the actors.

Still: The six cast members were all talented, with good strong voices. Igor’s physical comedy was very effective. Inga’s role called for an impressive display of both gymnastics and yodeling. The actors in the roles of Frau Blucher, Hermit/Kemp, and Monster inhabited the demeanor of the movie characters pretty well. The fiancé wasn’t really anything like Madeline Kahn (more rich bimbo) but her demeanor was funny in its own way. And the sheer impossibility of filling the shoes of Gene Wilder had me rooting for the American-accented star, who was game for the challenge and, I think, did a fine job.

The ensemble sounded good. The dancing could have been a little more tightly executed, but I have high standards and maybe they were going for a rougher look. There were a few new one-liners tossed in that worked very well. All in all, I did have fun. But I am glad I didn’t spend money on a ticket—though they were not unreasonably priced, both together cost us less than £100—for either teenage boy.

And if I was looking for an ordinary London experience, I thought, as we exited the theater onto Charing Cross still alive with light from the windows of pubs, and walked past the line of black cabs there to be hailed from the curb, I had certainly had one.

We stopped at a pub on the way home for one quick pint (Fuller’s HSB for me, Red Fox for Mark), long enough to agree that the Sam Smith’s are much superior, and walked back through Covent Garden, the bricks gleaming in the streetlight, the streets still relatively crowded at 10:30 p.m. on a Monday.

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