Living in London

Today we complete the last two “to do’s” for our time in London – turned off the utilities on the Hampstead flat, and now write our last post to the Living in London blog. We will keep this site up for a little while as we figure out how to turn the content into a coffee table book to remember our wonderful time here. After that, new adventures may result in a new blog – who knows?

Thanks to all our readers over the past two years! We wish you many exciting adventures wherever you live in the world.

Linda & Heather

London has very strict building codes designed to preserve the historic look of the city. For builders who want to tear down and rebuild out of date buildings, the challenges can be enormous.

This photo is of a building façade on Baker Street near the Baker Street Underground Station. It is an amazing sight to see only the façade and steeple of a building preserved while the entire supporting structure of the rest of the building has been removed. Eventually, a brand new building will be attached to the existing façade. Wow!

I have walked and ridden past this structure many times in the last few years. Today the light was good and I finally had a chance to take a decent picture.

Today we visited the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-East. This charming and serene garden-inside-a-church is wonderful. A church was originally built here in 1382. It was severely damaged in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Rather than being completely rebuilt, the damaged church was patched up between 1668 and 1671.

A steeple, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, was added 30 years later. This was unusual in that Wren designed it in the gothic style, to match the old church. It has a beautiful and unusual design, with a spire that is supported by four buttresses.  

Sir Christopher Wren always believed that the flying buttresses and four pillars that supported the steeple made it one of his strongest creations. The combination of beauty and strength in this gothic tower made it one of his personal favourites. Someone once hurried to tell Wren that a hurricane had injured all his steeples. 'Not St. Dunstan's,' he replied confidently." When German bombs destroyed the rest of the church in 1941, the steeple proved Wren correct. The bombed out site was turned into a public garden in the 1970s.

Samuel Pepys mentions the church in one of his diary entries in January 1663, “where a sermon, but I staid not, but went home . . .”

Today we drove up to Warrington so that Heather could turn in her laptop and say goodbye to the folks she has been working with for the past nine months. It was a rainy, overcast day so, except for the road spray from all the trucks, not a bad day for a long drive.

We had two delightful surprises en route. One was that our driving route took us along the north side of the Peaks District National Park. Wow, what a fantastic looking place, with lots of old stone fences and hedgerows stretching across beautiful rolling hills. We want to come back and take some rambles there.

The second surprise was the best fish and chips we have had since we arrived here 20 months ago. We have been to every “highly rated” fish and chips restaurant we could find and have been consistently disappointed by mushy fish and bad chips. Today we went to “Ye Old Mottram Chippie” on the way to Warrington — the proud owners of the Love Chips website. Its a little hole in the wall that closes at 2:00PM and reopens at 4:30. We arrived at 1:55, just in time to order lunch but only to discover that they have no tables. Naturally, we had take out wrapped in paper – I had cod and Heather had haddock – that we carried back to the car in the cold and rain, and then ate with little plastic forks.

What a delight! Crisp, not greasy, sweet firm fish ... Finally, some fish and chips that can make England proud! The owner of this shop is named Lez Brierley, and of course he has a secret-recipe batter.

We have spent the past week exploring New Jersey, getting acclimated, and learning about the next place we will call home. We bought cars, obtained mobile phones, got a post office box, opened a bank account, toured about six small cities, and generally had a very productive week with a minimum of frustration. Everything we tried was can-do. No paperwork, no bureaucracy. But the single best thing (so far) about New Jersey has got to be the fact that automobile owners are not allowed to pump gas ... yes, at every station there is an attendant and you don’t even need to get out of the car!

Now we are back in London for about ten days, during which time we must pack, move, and say goodbye to some of our favourite places in the city. Its hard to know what we will miss most about our life in London; we are already anticipating missing:

• Roundabouts, because they are vastly superior to the regular intersection in every way
• The Tube and trains running at all times, to all places because its great to have alternatives
• Single cream, because the American “half-n-half” cannot compare. And tea, oh my gosh, Americans have completely missed out on the tea thing
• The wondrous multitude of British accents because its so much fun guessing what part of the country people originate
• The British sense of reservedness because Americans really are intrusive with their friendliness
• British weather, because England has taught us that we want to live in four seasons again
• Real diversity of cultures because there is nothing like a ride on the tube — listening to a chorus of foreign tongues — to appreciate the absolute multitudes of people in the world
• The yellow light between red to green to "get ready" because well, it allows you to “get ready”
• Floor numbering that begins with the ground floor on the ground, and floor number one up one from that, because it makes sense
• The double decker buses, because we can say “front row, upper deck #10” and know exactly how that trips feels
• Full length doors on all toilet stalls, because privacy is a wonderful thing
• The fact that every filling station has little plastic gloves at the pump, because now I never get gasoline on my hands
• Wonderful heated towel racks in every bath or shower room, because really there is no greater luxury at any price than a warm towel

We spent the weekend in Rye, and Dungeness, at the suggestion of Desmond. It was a great place to visit – Rye is indeed very old, charming, and one-of-a-kind. We could almost hear the echos of the smugglers laughing off the dampness as we walked past several long-established pubs.

The beach by the power plant in Dungeness is otherworldly and mystic. Unfortunately for us it was pouring rain the entire weekend and very uncomfortable walking around either place. We loved the “tour” of Rye that took place at the Visitor’s Centre via a scale model of the city.

The most enchanting part of all however was the numerous drives we took down little one lane roads that bordered the local farms and pastures.  We had some good podcasts of English and Scottish folk music that were the perfect accompaniment to these drives.

Formerly a sea port, and virtually an island, Rye is now completely silted up and now sits two miles from the sea. St. Mary’s is the local parish church in Rye, and has the oldest operating clock in England. This clock is rumoured to be the source of the famous nursery rhyme:

Hickory dickory dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one
The mouse ran down
Hickory dickory dock

I flew a 727 today. We took off from Heathrow in the early afternoon and flew a nice gentle circuit around London before I brought her down in a rather “bouncy” landing dead centre on the runway.

The 727 is anything but nimble, and a humble servant to Newton’s first law. At about 86 tonnes, whatever direction she is headed in is the direction she's going, unless you apply continuous force to change her mind.

Okay, so I didn’t really leave the ground — but from inside the cockpit you would never know it. I spent about an hour and a half in a full-fledged flight simulator. This thing sat 10 feet off the ground on a half-dozen hydraulic pistons and was able to emulate the the full motion of the plane, complete with turbulence and a heck of a rough landing. It was quite an adrenalin rush.

I love to understand how things work, and spending more than an hour flying in the cockpit of a large aircraft satisfied a lifelong curiosity of what it is really like to fly a commercial aircraft. Let me just say that flying in three dimensions is much harder than driving in two.

Today’s word is shambolic. According to Answers.com it is an adjective, used chiefly as British slang, meaning disorderly or chaotic.

An example from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Now, nearly four months and three chief judges later, the court has actually sat for just 10 days, and those sittings have often descended into shambolic shouting matches between the defence and the bench, peppered with walk-outs. Last week, the defendants boycotted the court, which continued hearing the case without them before adjourning for 10 days. Such scenes have led some observers to label the trial a sham, warning that it may help make a martyr out of Saddam Hussein.

What a great word. Say it a few times and feel how it rolls around in your mouth.

It seems like it might also be used appropriately in discussing the US State of the Union but I could not find an references in US newspapers

We have had The Fat Duck on our list of must-visit destinations since April of last year when a reader of our blog pointed out that, if we like good food, we need to make the short trip outside London to Bray. A few days after posting this advice, the Fat Duck was voted the best restaurant in the world. Today we finally ate there.

The Fat Duck has been awarded three Michelin stars. To put this in perspective, consider this explanation, borrowed from the Wikipedia entry for the Michelin guide:

Stars are awarded sparingly; for instance, in the UK and Ireland 2004 guide, out of 5,500 entries, there are 98 with one star ("a very good restaurant in its category"), 11 with two stars ("excellent cooking, worth a detour"), and only 3 with three stars ("exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey").

Here is our review: (5 is the highest, most perfect score)

• The Guardian

With plans to make a big pot of Bulgarian Beef Stew this weekend, I set off to my local grocery store with a shopping list a mile long. Normally I would simply pick up a hand basket but this trip called for a trolley (aka shopping cart).

Although the American and UK versions of trolleys serve similar purposes, they are actually designed quite different. On the positive side, I was thrilled to find that all of the trolleys at Waitrose were equipped with a clipboard dashboard. Downright ingenious — even if I am too tall to read my list without bending over.

I wish I could say that the same ingenuity had been applied to the design of the wheel systems. For reasons that escape me, ALL of the wheels on UK trolleys are free to rotate (see picture—note sideways wheels). This is simply daft! When all of the wheels pivot, it makes the cart eminently harder to steer. It requires constant force to keep the cart heading in a forward direction and turning the corner at the end of the aisle feels like you are being flung at the end of a tether. Pulling the cart is out of the question, unless you are keen to bump the displays on both sides of the aisle.

On shopping carts in the US, only the front wheels pivot for steering while the back wheels are locked in the forward position. Pushing (or pulling) the cart requires a little energy in the forward direction and turning corners is a simple matter of twisting the cart to point in the new direction. How could such a good idea not make it across the pond?

Of course, the US carts are the size of a small SUV but that is a subject for another post . . .

This is our boiler. It provides our hot water as well as pumping warmth through the radiators to heat this drafty flat. The entire contraption is only 32 inches high and 25 inches wide, which is downright minature compared to the 50 gallon behemoth that we had in Oakland. The size difference is due to the fact our unit here is “tankless” versus the tanked variety we enjoyed in the US. (The New York Times has an insightful article on the raging debate between the tanks and the tankless.)

Regardless of the technical differences, we actually have no idea how the boiler really works. We have managed to figure out how to set the timers for both the hot water and the heat. We know its 5:00 am when the radiators begin gurgling as the hot water moves around. We also know that the whole thing just quits now and then. We learned this the first time through a very cold shower. The remedy is to reach behind the boiler for the hidden valve to replenish the water that occasionally boils off, leaving internal levels too low for the boiler to function properly.

The best thing about this system is that the “radiators” for all the bathrooms are simply heated towel racks. Nothing beats a toasty warm towel as you step out of a lukewarm shower.

The worst thing is that the boiler is temperamental, unpredictable, and the landlord opted out of installing a central thermostat when he built this palace. The heat is either on or off, with a valve at each radiator to control individual room heat. When the weather changes we make the rounds to adjust the valves again.

We dream of our digital and centrally-controlled heating system in the U.S.  I guess we should be grateful we are not shoveling coal for heat!