Building a Mystery

It started as an idea for an unusual Christmas gift -- a playing-card caddy bought at the Princess Alice Hospice charity shop.

The decorations on the box looked like something John's mother would like, so I took it down from the shelf thinking it could be part of her Christmas gift, since she loves playing cards.

A few aspects of this purchase begged to be investigated:

1) I had hopes that the cards were vintage.The Missions to Seamen is is still around. Since 2000, it's been called The Missions to Seafarers. The name Britannia Airways was used from 1961 to 1995, so the cards date from then. No way of knowing yet if it's nearer to 1961 or 1995. But maybe, I thought, the next piece of the puzzle would give me a clue.

2) When I tipped the cards out of the box, I found this clipping:

Now I was on to something. Could this box have been owned by Laura Francatelli's nephew? Maybe he even received it from her estate. Was I holding an object that was within two degrees of separation from Titanic history?

The auction, which took place in 2007, also included a letter Laura wrote shortly after the disaster, and her affidavit from the subsequent legal inquiry. The life jacket was signed by people aboard that last lifeboat she shared with, among other people, Lady Duff-Gordon and Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon.

None of this, of course, proves that the box belonged to Laura's nephew. None of the sources I found mentioned the nephew's name, much less where he lived and if and when he died. No clue then, if the box may have been from his estate.

3) The bottom of the box has this tag affixed to it:

Do the numbers indicate the year it was made, or is it just the number of the box? What about the company Persian Crafts? Were they importers, located in the UK, or did the owner pick this up on his or her travels? Is the company still around? Google remains silent on the topic.

If anyone reading this has any ideas about this -- or any other part of this mystery -- please share.

Leave the Light On

From the first time I heard it, the song "Leave the Light On" by Chris Smither was one of those that breaks your heart a little every time you listen to it. You know, in a good way.

For me, the lyrics are about being caught up in our lives, in the midst of events large and small that we know are happening but that we forget to notice until they've passed. It reminds me of risks ventured, life gained.

The other day I was listening to the song after a few months of not playing it, and it didn't break my heart, not even a little. I started thinking about why.

Maybe because I am caught up in events large and small that I can't help but notice. A new job and a new house, new roads in a new country. Choosing what I will try to understand and leaving behind those things that aren't, for now, important enough to figure out.

Or maybe it's to do with the risk finally ventured, gain unknown.

I don't actually have an answer, and I think it may be one of those things that, for now, I'll put off understanding.

Waiting for George

Since I moved to England, many people jokingly ask, "So have you seen the queen?" I can now answer "yes" to that question. It's important to note that "seen" can be defined in a few ways. It could mean that I was invited to a reception where the queen was in attendance. It could mean that I was part of a crowd lining the streets to view the royal wave.

It was neither of those.

We recently hosted our first visitors from the U.S., which gave us a chance to visit London together for the first time since we moved here. While walking from Buckingham Palace to the Houses of Parliament, John noticed the blue lights of a police escort and said, "someone's coming around this corner." Behind two police motorcycles, and in front of another police car was a nondescript black auto that was not a Bentley. We glimpsed the profile of a woman wearing a yellow hat and dress and we said, "hey, that's the queen!" Then she was gone.

We hoped for a brush with royalty of a different kind later as we walked through Leicester Square. Spying a red carpet, and having heard that morning on the radio that George Clooney would be in town for the BFI film festival, I assumed the best. Seeing George Clooney after glimpsing the queen would make for a pretty good day. I approached a couple that waited with the gathering crowd -- still only two deep -- and asked, "Who's everyone waiting for?" They both shrugged, said "I don't know," and laughed.The next person I asked also didn't know.

Still, they waited.

We were encouraged by the fact that the marquee over the cinema showed that "Real Steel" was playing so maybe, we thought, it was Hugh Jackman. Finally we found someone who knew the person he was waiting for. Roughly 2.5 hours from then, Michael Fassbender was expected. And well, he certainly looks nice, but not worth standing on the pavement in the cold for more than two hours. For that matter, is George Clooney?

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.