Ghost Rider in the Traffic Jam

A busy few weeks: Moved into a rental house, started a job, got a new car, worked at a trade show in London, and caught a cold.

We bought a car just before I started working, so for my first week's commute to work, I had to drive a rental, specifically a Kia Picanto. With a robust 1.1-litre engine, she really set the motorway on fire with her 60 mph of pure putt-putt.

Not that I could go the 70 mph speed limit, what with the traffic. I should say here that the commute isn't nearly as bad as I feared, but my first night coming home, there was an accident that closed the motorway just after my exit. It took me an hour and 45 minutes to get home; it usually takes somewhere around an hour -- maybe 10 minutes either side. One guy at work who lives not far from me said that one time he left work at 5:00 and got home at 10:30. I'm thinking I need to put together an M25 survival kit: pull-tab cans of beans, cereal bars, a blanket, water, an emergency pee container. Other ideas are welcome.

My new car is a Toyta Yaris diesel automatic. Now that I have an automatic, I'm very happy that all I have to think about is where I am on the road. Driving on the left is the easy part. The hard part? The roads are narrower, there's no such thing as a straight line, and there's a roundabout, like, every 100 feet. (No, not really, but on any given trip you can pretty much count on hearing "drive .8 miles then enter roundabout" coming out of the GPS speaker several times.)

After much consideration, I've named the new car 'Ghost Rider'. While not a motorcycle, I still hold out hope that the Yaris will one day have the ability to "travel between interdimensional realms and along any surface".

Ghost Rider and The Tangerine Dream.

Time Enough

I always got a chuckle out of what seemed like the national 'aversion to convenience' of the English. Things like mixing your own windscreen washer fluid from concentrate, instead of picking it up in a big jug in which it's already mixed. Or being able to buy ibuprofen only in packets of 16 instead of 150-pill bottles, or finding ways to dry your laundry on a rainy day when the clothesline isn't an option.

Look at toilet paper. In the States, we would buy it in packs of 48 rolls -- sometimes two at a time -- and keep the extra on a shelf in our basement. This was very convenient; we never ran out of toilet paper. At our local Waitrose, the largest package contains nine rolls. This is probably a good thing, since we have no basement, and our garage and third bedroom are currently filled with all of the stuff we brought with us and have no room for in a house that's half the size of what we had in Massachusetts. We need to become better at planning for our toilet paper needs.

In another example, drying laundry on a line should be done whenever possible. In my world that means on sunny days, or perhaps overcast and breezy. But this is England, where winters are cold, dark, and wet -- perfect for using a clothes dryer. The problem: they require space, and in a house where under-counter kitchen appliances consist of separate refrigerator and freezer, and a washing machine, there's no room. We have a condenser dryer, which is keeping our boxes of books company in the third bedroom. But even where people have dryers, the cost of electricity can make them expensive to run.

Things take time: mixing the fluid, making another trip to the store, hanging laundry, setting up and using the drying rack. It's worth reminding ourselves that for many reasons time is not, in fact, money. Nor does it free up cupboard space to stock up on food, water, and medicines in case of blizzard, epidemic, or zombies outside your door.

London's Motorway

The Tangerine Dream

It's going to be mine now, the orange Skoda Fabia we call The Tangerine Dream. Starting in a few weeks, I'll be using it to commute to my new job.

I thought my first job here might have me commuting by public transport to Central London. Now, in place of commentary on the state of the National Rail and sketches of colorful characters who ride the train, my commuting stories will be about the traffic jams encountered between Junctions 10 and 16 on the M25 to Uxbridge. I'll try to make it seem interesting.

The M25 is the 117-mile London orbital road known around here as 'the world's biggest car park'. In length, it's sort of the Capital Beltway half as much again, or Route 128 times two. For traffic jams, it may be times ten. A couple of weeks ago, traffic was backed up for 28 miles and parts of the road were closed for 24 hours. I've read that sitting in traffic on the M25 inspired Chris Rea to write 'The Road to Hell':

On your journey 'cross the wilderness
From the desert to the well
You have strayed upon the motorway to Hell

I think it's probably a metaphor.

Some of London Is Burning

Thanks to all of our stateside friends who have inquired about our well-being in light of the riots in the UK. We are about 30 miles out of London, in the country, and so haven't seen any of it.

I was thinking it's probably a good thing I haven't found that perfect job in London yet. Then again, this morning I was speaking with a friend who works in London and she has gone into work every day this week without a problem. Yesterday they were told to leave early, and that's when she got angry. Not so much for herself as for all of the people whose lives have been disrupted and livelihoods ruined.

I haven't been here very long, and so I won't start delivering my opinion based on my five weeks of being a permanent resident temporarily living in a West Sussex hamlet. Maybe when we move closer to London at the end of the month, I'll start to be able to form an articulate sentence about the culture.

I will offer one piece of advice to my American friends and family: Don't read only the US press. Don't follow only Fox, or only Salon, or only anything. Here are some links to UK news sites:

www.bbc.co.uk/news
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

The Ties That Bind

I've written before about discarding those things which no longer have any meaning to us, if they ever truly did. But before we left the States, we also let go of things that we used, things we loved, things we would have kept if we only felt we could. Things like: 

• Our cars, especially our Mazda MX-5 (Miata). Two-year-old 'Red Sonja' replaced the 1997 model John bought used just a month after we started dating. That's 13 years of top-down driving along winding country roads in New England. In theory, we could have shipped it, but fortunately there are plenty of MX-5s in the UK, and the roads are narrower and twistier (or 'naggery', as one pub denizen described them).
  

  

  With 'Red Sonja'

  
• Our living room set. Almost as young as Red Sonja, and just about as big. We feared our America-sized furniture wouldn't fit into England-sized doors or living rooms. This fear was confirmed when friends told us they had to remove a window to get their American couch into their English house.
• Several hundred books. Maybe we would have reread them all, if we won the lottery and quit our jobs and spent our days reading. As it was, our shelves had become sort of monuments to books we've read. There will be no room in our house for monuments.

Those of our belongings we did ship made it through UK customs this week and are now in temporary storage. Just a few short weeks and we'll all be reunited at the house we will be renting. As we unpack, maybe we'll think, "Why did we keep this?" Or, "We have no room for this".

And then we'll start letting go all over again.