Living in London

After the clouds and dark days of earlier December, the last two days have dawned clear and cold, and left all of London feeling a bit manic I think. We went on a long walk today though Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park where it seemed most people were smiling and laughing, out for a Sunday stroll and dressed in their Christmas best. Many children received either scooters or roller blades from Santa and they were all in the park trying them out.

It occurs to me that this type of weather, and resulting behavior, may have afflicted Dickens when he wrote A Christmas Carol -- Scrooge, the cranky, penny-pinching miser, felt so much better when a clear and sunny Christmas Day dawned, that he reformed. Or maybe he had just gotten an iPod and could finally listen to his own playlist as he walked! In either case, we send out our best wishes for a Happy New Year to all our friends and family.

"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!"

Check out this site for great information on how much Dickens influenced the modern idea of Christmas.

Today we were up early (relatively speaking) and headed to the Borough Market near the Southwark Cathedral to pick up our Christmas snacks - cheese from local and Spanish dairies, fabulous local bread and meat pies, clementine oranges (they call them satsuma here), dried berries, and, because this won’t be enough calories, a beautiful buche de noel for dessert.

It is a blustery Christmas eve day, and we are hoping a little snow blows down from the Artic to complete our first Christmas in London (bookmakers are putting the odds at 9 to 4 that we will not see snow in this southeast corner of the country).

We are now snuggled in, waiting for Santa and are toasting this holiday season with a glass of Hollick wine.

We have done our best today to get into the London version of holiday spirit. Beginning on the capitalist front (plenty of opportunities to participate on this level) we shopped up and down Marylebone High, New Bond, and Regent Streets, marveling at all the stuff and all the high prices.

The shopping concluded at the new Apple store (no shortage of products or of buyers) where Linda finally succumbed to the pressure to become a pod person. (It’s a mini, silver, and it has a little stocking of its own.)

After a brief rest at home we ventured back out to the Royal Albert Hall to enjoy Carols by Candlelight. We even sang along to a few carols. (The Little Town of Bethlehem has the same words but a completely different tune here!)

Because Royal Albert Hall is only a few blocks from our flat, we are able to walk home from Royal Albert Hall, and en route we stopped at the beautiful Milestone Hotel for a glass of champagne.

Today is December 21, the Winter Solstice. That means that today is the day of the year that the sun is farthest south.

More importantly, it means that today is the shortest day of the year. This morning the sun rose in London at 8:05 AM. It will set at 3:55 PM for a total of 7 hours and 50 minutes of sunlight. Of course, I use the word "sunlight" here in a theoretical sense, since the sun has been obscured by clouds all day.

At least for the next six months the days will be getting longer. The future is so bright . . .

(Thanks to Jim Wilson for the picture of nearby Stonehenge, where the solstice is celebrated with a passion.)

[Update: for our friends in Alaska, we sympathise with your darkness. I heard Esther mention on the Whole Wheat Radio audio magazine on Monday that on the winter solstice the sun was going to rise at 10:25 AM and set at 3:30 PM. Wow. That is only only 5 hours of daylight. I will never again complain about our 7 and 50 minutes of daylight again.]

After several weeks of travel we are back in London, and happy to be here. Sure California was 65 and sunny every day, and our home there is spacious and comfortable. Sure we miss our family there (not to mention our friends whom we were unable to see). Sure our dollar was actually worth something there. But hey, as our friend David Campbell would say, "did we mention that we are in LONDON?"

We restocked our inventories of things from America that we need for winter. We brought bottles of lotion for dry skin induced by the cold weather. We brought coats from places where our dollar actually allowed us to purchase nice ones and we brought boots to keep our toes warm. We brought yarn to knit some fabulous scarves (contrary to what most Americans would believe, the knitting stores here are nothing compared to those in California where knitting is a full blown craze).

We are ready for a white Christmas London. Lay it on us.

You don’t realize what you have learned, and how you have changed, in a number of subtle ways, until you come back to the place you started. We have been in London about five months now, and have returned for a week to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Noticeable immediately:

• Over-the-top friendliness: Every person with whom you make eye contact on public transportation (yes we do have a little of that here) smiles. Not a tight little grimace smile, but a big, happy, generous smile. At least half a dozen complete strangers have started conversations with me. The store clerks act like they are so pleased to see me. It’s a bit scary. My mother-in-law asked if Americans seem "needy" and I have to say "yes."
• Teeth size and color: My god they are all so enormous and white. Is all this smiling friendliness, or just showing off the dental work? This goes hand-in-hand with the note above, but it really has to be called out on its own because these teeth are just stunning.
• Christmas décor: There are hardly any Christmas decorations, even around Union Square. Some of the smaller areas, like Berkeley’s Elmwood district, have nice, understated decorations in the stores, but I haven’t seen anything that comes remotely close to London's celebration of Christmas. It’s warm here, around 15 Celsius, so maybe people just can’t get into the season.
• Driving, driving, driving: It’s endless. We need two cars and have put more than 600 miles on them in five days. (We really feel the lack of any physical exercise whatsoever.) The cars on the road are all huge and spotlessly clean. As a further homage to time spent in car, the "vanity plates" are numerous. More friendliness I guess.
• Sunshine! You actually need sunglasses here (for the sun, not just the smiles).
• Pedestrians: People in the street have the right of way here, and they know it.

We took another step in our commitment to living in the UK: I sold my car today.

I originally listed the car on Craig's List but was too sceptical about potential fraud. Back in college, when I sold the first car I ever owned, the buyer wrote me a bum check that bounced. When selling the BMW I was nervous about accepting a large check from a Craig's List buyer.

Hence, I decided to sell the car to a dealer. I got a little less money but I know that the check is good.

Good bye, my steel blue baby. The BMW was an awesome car to drive. I definitely see another bimmer in my future. The 5 series are looking quite nice these days.

We got hammered with a ton of spam recently by some online poker sites. There were more than 1,000 comments inserted into our posts.

I deleted all the junk and set up some safeguards to protect against future spam attacks. Of course, the risk is that we ended up blocking legitimate comments. If you ever find yourself blocked from entering a comment send me an email and I will resolve the problem.

Will we ever win this battle of wasted time and bandwidth against these

I am having a heck of a time figuring out the way people write phone numbers in this country. In the US every phone number is 10 digits with a 3 digit area code, a 3 digit prefix and a four digit number. So a number in the US looks like xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Not so in the UK. First of all, the UK has the preceding 0 if you are dialling from within the UK but that is not used when dialling from outside the country. Hence our phone number in London is 0208 xxx-xxx when dialled locally but 44 209 xxx xxxx when dialled from outside the UK. This is very confusing for Americans.

However, that is not the worst of it. What I can't figure out is how many digits there should be in a standard phone number and how digits should be arranged. For example, here are some actual phone numbers taken from customer service sites around the web:

The thing to notice here is that the numbers range from 9 - 11 digits and they are arranged rather willy nilly. Sometimes the digits are grouped 4-3-4, other times it is 4-2-2-2 or 5-6, or 3-4-4. There does not seem to be any rhyme nor reason as to how the individual digits are grouped.

If anyone can shed any light on these number patterns I would be most appreciative.