Vacation, Up North
I am finally, finally here, after some weeks of being either away or too tired to write - last week (from the 15th to the 20th) I was in Scotland with my husband. We stayed, as usual, at his mom's, who lives in a town about 45 minutes by bus outside of Glasgow; we arrived by train, got a taxi right outside the station and were mutually upset that it cost £26 to get to her house from there. He at least took the freeway (sorry, motorway) to get there so it didn't take long, but that still seemed like an awful lot...
And so we arrived on Saturday afternoon, tired (the train left Euston at 10:30 but we had been up since at least 8, probably 7, on a day we usually sleep in) and my back was not helped by the seating, which had me nearly fixed in place, with no way to adjust the chair at all. Next time we will know better about this as it was our first time going up to Scotland by train...as I said, we were tired and what was on tv but a particularly gruesome show, Midsomer Murders. This one was actually scary, though in truth I don't know if it was the sexually neurotic religious fanatic with an old school sword or the oily politician who made me more uneasy. I couldn't tell if it was bad on purpose or just haplessly bad, but I kept wishing I was able to change the channel, but at M's mom's house the station is ITV all day, without exception. And so the politician was nicked, as they say here, and one over-acting character after another was killed. Thus began our vacation...
It was like this almost the whole time - a nice breakfast, Jeremy Kyle yelling at someone with a neck tattoo to grow up (Jeremy Kyle is like Jerry Springer, kinda, though I have yet to see anyone throw a chair on his show), and lots of concerned/mildly apprehensive/smiley faces on morning-round-up chatshows on either side. I even saw enough of Loose Women to determine that, in case I had any doubts about it, I'm an American, not British; if asked I would still not have anything much to say on how much trouble shopping is, or whether Page Three girls should continue to exist. Shopping is trouble if you make it troubling, in my opinion; and there are far worse things now than those girls (who will no doubt disappear of their own accord anyway)...
M's mom is from Italy and always says that I am Italian because I enjoy Italian food so much, and indeed have enjoyed it since I have been able to feed myself, around the age of 2 or so. This is nice, but M's mom also would feed us this or that and insist that it was good for us (one morning substituting eggs and bacon with All-Bran with yogurt covered-flakes, leading to near exhaustion on my part later that day - it wasn't even a big bowl of the stuff) so many times I wondered if she was trying to convert us to her diet altogether. Moms are like that, I guess, but she kept saying this and that was good for us, so much, that I began to rebel, inwardly, esp. since my own mom was never that insistent on the benefits of, oh, wild rocket pesto. (That's because it didn't exist when I was a kid; indeed I went through the 70s and 80s with no knowledge of pesto at all.) It was as if someone has recruited M's mom to be on the wild rocket pesto street team, without our knowlege; she mentioned it three times to M on the phone just the other day, and yes you have to go to the dreaded ASDA to get it...she was the same way at the time about the cereal, and while we ate a lot of store-bought non-frozen pizza on our stay, not to mention ice cream, she told us not to eat pastry - and used olive oil, not butter, for our eggs each morning. Now, I am not going to complain about anything anyone gives me to eat unless it leaves me in the bathroom quietly or not-so-quietly moaning, on all fours, but for someone to tell me repeatedly that something was either bad or good in an absolute way (there is no arguing or reasoning with M's mom; and from what I could tell, she still doesn't understand M had a mini-stroke in January, and thus can't drink alcohol) and that is that. That our bed was so hard I had to take painkillers in order to sleep on it at all was something I never mentioned to her, as she most likely wouldn't have understood...
A few other notes: Glasgow's charity shops - at least those in the downtown section and Hillhead - yielded nothing, save for me finding Kathleen Edwards' first album Failer at the Oxfam Music shop. M's mom went with us, which was okay, I guess, though it severely limited where we could go, and for how long. And would you like someone to keep asking you if you'd found something yet in a charity shop? Or any shop, for that matter? My brain simply seizes up at this question, proving that I am more delicate than I generally think I am. I found no cookbooks anywhere (but then I think right now I have more than enough). The subway in Glasgow is small and circular and reasonably priced (unlike the bus service in Lanarkshire, which is just as expensive as London now, for what could be called worse service - for one thing, they only take exact change, giving us Londoners one more thing to worry about - and for another, the 255 at least isn't a double decker, so if there's a crying baby/mom pretending she doesn't notice baby's crying combo there truly is no escape). Glasgow is getting to be more like London on the street - less courtesy, more of a feeling that the pedestrians are all wrapped up in their own worlds and only vaguely deign to notice that you are there. The areas that are run-down look worse, the roads on our way all need to be repaved, and on our way back I told M that in Toronto if a street really needed work they would just shut the whole thing down and do it, fix it before it got worse. And they would be up at 6:30 am out there doing it too, because in Toronto the future can't happen soon enough. There's also a civic strength in Toronto that seems to be lacking in Glasgow; at least in the parts I saw, at least. Gallowgate and Parkhead have been in the dumps for years, and they are far worse than the scruffy parts of Parkdale, for instance.
Leaving was as awkward as our arriving; packing, repacking (to her commendation M's mom tends to give us food for the trip as well as food to eat once we get home that she makes herself) and so on. It rained heavily all day, trapping us in ITV's perpetual glare of oddness (I haven't even mentioned Alan Titchmarsh, The Chase or Red Or Black?) until the taxi showed up. Our tickets were Motherwell station returns, and the taxi driver told us he couldn't take us right up to the station, as roadworks - longstanding roadworks by his clock - prevented him from doing so. We got our bags and under my umbrella managed, slowly, to get to the station and to the platform and to the platform's waiting area without catching a cold. I think. The station is something of a dump (sorry, Motherwell, but putting fancy paving downtown just means you have fancy paving, no more, no less) and as we were at the next stop outside of Glasgow we got seats easily, and finally escaped the rain somewhere around Carlisle. I remained baffled by the whole experience - the inability or unwillingness or what have you for anyone, any person, to change and grow and learn. I do not know what the cause is, but the effects are everywhere, while those in power seem to bumble about like the detectives on that show, seemingly unbothered by most of it, as if the whole thing has been decided by the Big Guy Upstairs and that, simply, is that.
We have nearly been back for a week, M still on his annual leave. We have both been sleeping a lot, to say the least.
And so we arrived on Saturday afternoon, tired (the train left Euston at 10:30 but we had been up since at least 8, probably 7, on a day we usually sleep in) and my back was not helped by the seating, which had me nearly fixed in place, with no way to adjust the chair at all. Next time we will know better about this as it was our first time going up to Scotland by train...as I said, we were tired and what was on tv but a particularly gruesome show, Midsomer Murders. This one was actually scary, though in truth I don't know if it was the sexually neurotic religious fanatic with an old school sword or the oily politician who made me more uneasy. I couldn't tell if it was bad on purpose or just haplessly bad, but I kept wishing I was able to change the channel, but at M's mom's house the station is ITV all day, without exception. And so the politician was nicked, as they say here, and one over-acting character after another was killed. Thus began our vacation...
It was like this almost the whole time - a nice breakfast, Jeremy Kyle yelling at someone with a neck tattoo to grow up (Jeremy Kyle is like Jerry Springer, kinda, though I have yet to see anyone throw a chair on his show), and lots of concerned/mildly apprehensive/smiley faces on morning-round-up chatshows on either side. I even saw enough of Loose Women to determine that, in case I had any doubts about it, I'm an American, not British; if asked I would still not have anything much to say on how much trouble shopping is, or whether Page Three girls should continue to exist. Shopping is trouble if you make it troubling, in my opinion; and there are far worse things now than those girls (who will no doubt disappear of their own accord anyway)...
M's mom is from Italy and always says that I am Italian because I enjoy Italian food so much, and indeed have enjoyed it since I have been able to feed myself, around the age of 2 or so. This is nice, but M's mom also would feed us this or that and insist that it was good for us (one morning substituting eggs and bacon with All-Bran with yogurt covered-flakes, leading to near exhaustion on my part later that day - it wasn't even a big bowl of the stuff) so many times I wondered if she was trying to convert us to her diet altogether. Moms are like that, I guess, but she kept saying this and that was good for us, so much, that I began to rebel, inwardly, esp. since my own mom was never that insistent on the benefits of, oh, wild rocket pesto. (That's because it didn't exist when I was a kid; indeed I went through the 70s and 80s with no knowledge of pesto at all.) It was as if someone has recruited M's mom to be on the wild rocket pesto street team, without our knowlege; she mentioned it three times to M on the phone just the other day, and yes you have to go to the dreaded ASDA to get it...she was the same way at the time about the cereal, and while we ate a lot of store-bought non-frozen pizza on our stay, not to mention ice cream, she told us not to eat pastry - and used olive oil, not butter, for our eggs each morning. Now, I am not going to complain about anything anyone gives me to eat unless it leaves me in the bathroom quietly or not-so-quietly moaning, on all fours, but for someone to tell me repeatedly that something was either bad or good in an absolute way (there is no arguing or reasoning with M's mom; and from what I could tell, she still doesn't understand M had a mini-stroke in January, and thus can't drink alcohol) and that is that. That our bed was so hard I had to take painkillers in order to sleep on it at all was something I never mentioned to her, as she most likely wouldn't have understood...
A few other notes: Glasgow's charity shops - at least those in the downtown section and Hillhead - yielded nothing, save for me finding Kathleen Edwards' first album Failer at the Oxfam Music shop. M's mom went with us, which was okay, I guess, though it severely limited where we could go, and for how long. And would you like someone to keep asking you if you'd found something yet in a charity shop? Or any shop, for that matter? My brain simply seizes up at this question, proving that I am more delicate than I generally think I am. I found no cookbooks anywhere (but then I think right now I have more than enough). The subway in Glasgow is small and circular and reasonably priced (unlike the bus service in Lanarkshire, which is just as expensive as London now, for what could be called worse service - for one thing, they only take exact change, giving us Londoners one more thing to worry about - and for another, the 255 at least isn't a double decker, so if there's a crying baby/mom pretending she doesn't notice baby's crying combo there truly is no escape). Glasgow is getting to be more like London on the street - less courtesy, more of a feeling that the pedestrians are all wrapped up in their own worlds and only vaguely deign to notice that you are there. The areas that are run-down look worse, the roads on our way all need to be repaved, and on our way back I told M that in Toronto if a street really needed work they would just shut the whole thing down and do it, fix it before it got worse. And they would be up at 6:30 am out there doing it too, because in Toronto the future can't happen soon enough. There's also a civic strength in Toronto that seems to be lacking in Glasgow; at least in the parts I saw, at least. Gallowgate and Parkhead have been in the dumps for years, and they are far worse than the scruffy parts of Parkdale, for instance.
Leaving was as awkward as our arriving; packing, repacking (to her commendation M's mom tends to give us food for the trip as well as food to eat once we get home that she makes herself) and so on. It rained heavily all day, trapping us in ITV's perpetual glare of oddness (I haven't even mentioned Alan Titchmarsh, The Chase or Red Or Black?) until the taxi showed up. Our tickets were Motherwell station returns, and the taxi driver told us he couldn't take us right up to the station, as roadworks - longstanding roadworks by his clock - prevented him from doing so. We got our bags and under my umbrella managed, slowly, to get to the station and to the platform and to the platform's waiting area without catching a cold. I think. The station is something of a dump (sorry, Motherwell, but putting fancy paving downtown just means you have fancy paving, no more, no less) and as we were at the next stop outside of Glasgow we got seats easily, and finally escaped the rain somewhere around Carlisle. I remained baffled by the whole experience - the inability or unwillingness or what have you for anyone, any person, to change and grow and learn. I do not know what the cause is, but the effects are everywhere, while those in power seem to bumble about like the detectives on that show, seemingly unbothered by most of it, as if the whole thing has been decided by the Big Guy Upstairs and that, simply, is that.
We have nearly been back for a week, M still on his annual leave. We have both been sleeping a lot, to say the least.