Ye Olde Global Crisis

I’m sorry to contribute to what has already been a year of disappointing news but I’ve decided to blog again. If history is any guide, this should be a short-lived experiment so you can at least take solace in that.

Looking back, this original blog set out to answer — by eating, somehow — the lofty question of whether it is possible to come home again. As I am writing this from a pub in London, I guess that the answer is no. Or rather, not really. Or even better, why bother?

Now don’t worry. This will not become an expatriate blog. Somebody else said it first (James Baldwin? David Sedaris?), but to be an expatriate one must first be a patriot, which I am grateful that my upbringing and education never permitted me. “Expatriate” also expresses a kind of diminished affection: that I had enough and somewhere snapped, and in my privilege, instead of say torching a mail truck, moved to a place where (a la Big Bill Broonzy) “the climate suits my clothes.”

Just as an aside, the climate here does not suit my clothes at all. The climate here is awful.

It might surprise you to learn that my affection for my homeland is undiminished — not America of course whose dissolution cannot come soon enough, but those cities and pockets of California for which I have affinity, especially my true home in Northern California where the mighty redwoods meet the sea, and even the red-tailed hawks sell acid.

All I wanted was to find the same old disfunction with a slightly different inflection: where the crackpots are unarmed, where disappointment is nothing to be ashamed of, and where the country is too wet to burn.

As I write, I’m watching an icy rainstorm outside from a pub in Aldgate where I am the only customer. The pub is effectively out of beer, covered in advertisements for a fish-finger sandwich on white bread with ketchup, is playing Queen on blaring repeat, and feels more like a soviet veterinary pharmacy than any kind of hospitality business. It is so offensive, in such a different way than I am used to, that I am having a wonderful time. I feel — in my special occasion type of misery — that I am in Disneyland.

I’ve come to London with my girlfriend, Jill, to have a European adventure (normal for a 35-year old), stress-test our relationship, and see precisely how far we could bury our heads in the sand with each other's help. We’re also undertaking a literary project: collaborating on an erotic novel that we’re both hoping will make us millions and cement our international reputation as both literary powerhouses and sex experts.

Other than meals — which get longer and more elaborate and increasingly blur together — and the porn-writing, it’s hard to say what exactly I’ve been doing to fill my days. We volunteer most weekends to get out the vote in the United States, a poor salve against the guilt of leaving, but important.

In the name of research I’ve been reading so-called erotica by some very obnoxious white people: Henry Miller, DH Lawrence, and I’m sure eventually but mercifully not yet, Anais Nin.

I’ve been walking a lot: miles everyday, to get my bearings and explore, but to also offset the effects of the unsustainable amount I’ve been eating and drinking. I walk without any sort of destination: in my head, not walking to anywhere but away from (and as fast as I can) the yawning maw of an early grave.

Also, the leadership here is — please note the typical British understatement — lacking. So every day we are warned that LOCKDOWN IS IMMINENT and that pubs and restaurants might CLOSE TOMORROW*. Very difficult to do the healthy and affordable thing and stay home and cook chicken breasts when every meal feels like your last chance to eat a daily special or drink wine by the glass.

On one afternoon at Noble Rot, a wine bar I really love and that we walk to at least once a week for lunch, I ate an entire partridge (hoping the whole time I’d have to spit some shot onto my plate with an extremely English “plink!” but no luck) and a basket-worth of eels on toast and a sticky pudding.

Here, a professional food writer should probably elaborate (how was it made? What did it taste like?). But this one can’t really remember the details, except that (as a child assures their parents on the eve of their divorce) I loved them both equally and very much.

I do vividly remember the bread and butter which approached an ideal in the category: Breads and Butters with capital “B”s. Warm, crispy in the right places, chewy in all the others, focaccia that, like Cleopatra, dribbles golden olive oil when you squeeze it. If their ovens would accommodate it, I would like Noble Rot to bake my coffin from their focaccia bread. Too much?

A quick aside: they toast things so fucking well in this country. And the bacon. I love American bacon in its variety and smokiness. And the best of American bacon really can’t be beat — yes I see you Bentons. But in terms of everyday ubiquitous bacon, the UK just blows us out of the water. I know it is an entirely different cut and style here (belly vs loin, smoke vs salt etc) but I just can’t get over the meatiness of the bacon here. It’s really a breakfast for dinner for breakfast bacon, and I love it.

Bacon memories part one of a series: for the first two weeks here in quarantine, in a cluttered little house in East Dulwich watching Brits shop for vacation properties on television (in Spain or the South of France, or exotic Orlando Florida) I effectively lived on delivery bacon sandwiches with a side of black pudding. I would spread the black pudding on the buttered bread, and cover the whole thing in brown sauce. Piggy perfection.

As hard as it is to explain, those bacon sandwiches really meant something to me. I’m sure they will become a kind of touchstone, a comforting food memory when I am old and demented. Like how some nursing home patients listen to Debussy and remember their wives, I will drink pig’s blood and remember British daytime television.

I’ve also been awed by British desserts — Great British Bake-off, you cannot tell a lie — and am for the first time in my life developing a sweet tooth. But more on that in later posts as don’t want to blow my whole trifle too early, which is something they say here all the time.

As is the local custom, I drink with every meal, and with every course of the meal, and before meals and in between them. Over a few weeks, I’ve stretched my stomach to accommodate imperial pints and lunch-desserts.

I really have been walking a whole lot.

There is of course a plague on. And I can attest that the populations on both sides of the Atlantic are equally depressed and terrified and unmoored. If my waking life is approaching some depraved ideal, my sleeping self is tormented by nightmares. No idea why, as everything, everywhere is going so swimmingly.

I’ve never dreamed like this before, every night and into the morning beset by screaming tortured animals, children blinded and bleeding from their eye-bandages peeling the flesh from my sides. I wake up multiple times a night gasping or crying or flailing against Jill. My waking hours have taken on a weird kind of edgy twilight cast, as I expect danger everywhere (though never when it is actually bearing down on me in the form of London’s silent and ubiquitous bicyclists).

I snap at my girlfriend, swear at the kitchen appliances and yell at the television. The blood my brain so desperately needs to keep a grip on reality is constantly being diverted to help digest the whole beasts I can’t seem to keep from swallowing.

I’m actually very happy, joyful even, and extremely lucky of course — and never forget it. (The only people I know for sure read this are my parents so let me say that again: I am fine.) While I can’t get myself to do any real work, my brain at least feels fertile. I’m finding a lot of real comfort in my current delusions: mainly that my daily walks ameliorate the damage of all my other lifestyle choices, and that everything, everywhere will eventually be fine.

All of which is to say, it’s nice to be back and thanks for reading. I’m not sure what this will evolve into but expect passionately held opinions on sandwiches and culture in general — how English men wear women’s trousers for example.

Pip pip,

Charley

*As I was revising this they did in fact announce a lockdown, most likely through Christmas. I’m not sure what that means for this blog... maybe a pivot to rage cooking, or perhaps something more drastic. A “fuck it” wholesale move to Sicily? A kind of “Eat Pray Love” thing where the “Pray” is also “Eat” and “Love”, as it should always, comes first?