real estate and also some fun

Sir Edward Elgar, if you please

So we’re inno­cent­ly view­ing flats on Fri­day, in the rain that the BBC weath­er peo­ple var­i­ous­ly describe as a down­pour, a del­uge, or mere­ly a soak­ing. I love it when the weath­er guy says earnest­ly, “The rain should stop around lunchtime, leav­ing us with a gen­tle driz­zle.” I don’t think Amer­i­cans, as a gen­er­al rule, con­sid­er that it has stopped rain­ing if it is still driz­zling. How­ev­er. My point is, our real estate search was sort of ham­pered by driz­zle, or what­ev­er you call it, because it was less appeal­ing just to wan­der through the neigh­bor­hood. We looked in Not­ting Hill, and what might be more prop­er­ly called Hol­land Park, and saw one pos­si­ble flat, except that there was a nasty leak, drip­ping from the ceil­ing into a saucepan. And guess what the estate agent (“real­tor” to us Yanks) said? “Oh, after this bit of rain today it will stop. And it won’t rain any­more.” Well, that engen­ders con­fi­dence in her hon­esty! It’s only Eng­land: of course it won’t rain anymore.

Then anoth­er much nicer flat, whose own­er opened the door with the encour­ag­ing words, “Wel­come to the House of Lur­gy.” True to her word, the flat was inhab­it­ed by two dar­ling lit­tle girls cough­ing and sneez­ing and gen­er­al­ly being ill. We vowed not to touch any­thing and to wash our hands imme­di­ate­ly upon leav­ing. A very nice mod­ern do-up of essen­tial­ly two floors of a Vic­to­ri­an house. Per­fect­ly nice, with a gar­den, and Avery could have more room in her room. This is begin­ning to be essen­tial as she, her hun­dreds of books, her pony gear, are threat­en­ing to burst the seams of her cur­rent space. This flat was a real possibility. 

From there, we went to Hyde Park Vil­lage, a hop and skip from the sta­ble, which is a bonus. There we saw an extreme­ly nice, if bor­ing, small house. It had been done up to appeal to expats, and so was neu­tral through­out, which is dull but would be livened up by our things, so it appealed to me. And, dear read­ers: a sep­a­rate DRY­ER! This means that I could actu­al­ly dry more then one bed­sheet at a time, a true lux­u­ry. And a real-sized freez­er. I have found that even from my days of liv­ing in France in 1982, the Euro­pean dis­dain for ice has increased. There­fore, one can­not find ice trays in stores, and ice­mak­ers in freez­ers do not exist, plus the freez­ers are too small to acco­mo­date a bag of ice, which in any case is extreme­ly hard to find. What is it about Amer­i­cans and ice! But I love ice, and this freez­er had room to store it. A strange thing to love about a house, but there you go.

Home to lunch and a head spin­ning with real estate. John’s mom had game­ly gone along to all the flats, squeez­ing in and out of Emmy with aplomb. She hap­pi­ly entered into all John’s obses­sive dis­cus­sions on the top­ic of where to live, while I served my fan­cy tuna sal­ad. Because John and his mom liked it so much, I shall share (the recipe, not the sal­ad, because Blog­ger does not run to food across the wires):

Fan­cy Tuna Sal­ad
(serves 4)

First of all, keep this impor­tant cul­tur­al rule in mind: if you order “tuna sal­ad” in Eng­land, that’s what you’ll get. Tuna. With sal­ad. If you want what Amer­i­cans think of as tuna sal­ad, you must order “tuna may­on­naise.” That being said…

1 jar or 2 cans, yel­low­tail tuna steaks in olive oil (you can use the ordi­nary flake tuna, and I often have, but if you can find real­ly fan­cy tuna, it’s just a cou­ple of pounds more and will real­ly improve the result)
1/2 can (200 grams) chick peas
zest and juice of 1 lemon
1 small red onion, minced
2 stalks cel­ery, coarse­ly chopped
1/3 cup may­on­naise
4 leaves but­ter let­tuce (also called Boston, or here, “round lettuce”)

Sep­a­rate the tuna steaks into nice bite-size chunks, and add all oth­er ingre­di­ent, mix with­out com­plete­ly shred­ding the tuna. Eat piled onto let­tuce leaves.

*************

So that was Fri­day. On Sat­ur­day we dropped Avery off at Sophi­a’s house for an after­noon of the­atre! Oh, I almost for­got to tell you about an amaz­ing musi­cal evening John’s mom and I went to, at the Grosvenor Chapel in South Aud­ley Street. Actu­al­ly it was our nasty, greedy land­lords’ one gen­er­ous ges­ture, invit­ing us to this con­cert, where­upon they raised the rent 18%. Oh well, carp­ing does no one any favors. The point is, if you ever get a chance to hear Eng­lish Sin­fo­nia, you must go! They are a group of per­haps 8 women (and one chap, play­ing the bass!) on vio­lin and vio­la, and they pro­duced, in that gor­geous can­dlelit church, the most mag­i­cal sounds you can imag­ine. I don’t hear very much live music, and it seemed com­plete­ly impos­si­ble that human bod­ies in front of me could sim­ply lift up their instru­ments and become… a con­cert! Just gor­geous. Most­ly Han­del, and some Vival­di, but then a fel­low called Edward Elgar, whose music remind­ed me of my child­hood exper­i­ments with Debussy under the watch­ful ear (can an ear watch? what­ev­er) of my piano-tal­ent­ed moth­er. His piece was called “Ser­e­nade for Strings,” and the instruc­tions were “alle­gro piacev­ole,” which to my non-flu­ent Ital­ian vocab­u­lary sounds like… “fast enough to please a vole”? Sure­ly not. Any­way, it was just gor­geous. I wish Avery had gone, because she has just begun vio­lin lessons (what a ter­ri­ble thing to learn just at the very begin­ning!) and would have been inspired.

We picked Avery up at Sophi­a’s house, with her father Claus open­ing the door to us in the driz­zly dark, warm cosy Eng­lish light (and Diva the black lab!) spilling out the door onto the check­ered tiles. How beau­ti­ful. He wel­come us in for a warm­ing glass of cham­pagne, and then the girls and Susan came bar­rel­ing back in from their the­atre adven­ture, full of inco­her­ent (well, Susan was­n’t) sto­ries about the opera they had seen, “Chin­cha-Chan­cha Cooroo, or the Weaver’s Wed­ding.” Adri­ana’s par­ents came to col­lect her as well, and we all sat around gos­sip­ing about the hol­i­days, the iniq­ui­ties of the French teacher, recipes for trea­cle cookies!

And now I must run get sand­wich ingre­di­ents for the tea par­ty we’re hav­ing this after­noon. Sophi­a’s fam­i­ly will come over after the school Christ­mas con­cert, which promis­es to be one of those thou­sand-tis­sue events. I’ll let you know how it goes. Suf­fice right now to say: Avery will be play­ing the violin…