Letter From America - Part 2

(Physically America, mentally still mid-Atlantic-ish)

Although I am settling in to the new culture and lifestyle, I find my thoughts still direct themselves towards certain parties left behind. Perhaps a transitional period.

Acclimatizations include constant mild nosebleeds resulting from the altitude. This creates copious amounts of peculiarly orange snot. Makes a change from black London smog-snot. There was the one exception of alarming day-glo yellow after my visit to the pool – they must have different ideas about pool-chemical recipes over here.

The day has a different rhythm here – going to bed much after 8.30 pm seems quite unnatural. I must admit that almost unawares, I find myself inhabiting a sickeningly wholesome lifestlye. I crave almost no coffee at all (those of you familiar with my usual habits may find this hard to swallow, but I assure you it is the case). Tea is more refreshing, although goes almost immediately cold, as water boils at 80 degrees at this altitude. There no room for microwave-tea snobbery here. Apparently the rules for baking are all different, and an altitude cookbook must be acquired if one is to have any hope of success.

As we drive between the two vast walls of snow that flank the roads, Alison tells me that this is the worst year in living memory for snow. It is a very bad season (clearly the Annabee-holiday-weather jinx continues to thrive). As I trudge through knee-high drifts in a car park, I try to imagine where all the rest of the snow (in a ‘proper’ season) is crammed in. Meanwhile everyone at home is plastering facebook walls with news of the preternatural amounts of the white stuff back in the UK. (But, of course.) In cafes and bars, in locker rooms, and on chairlifts, I overhear folksy murmerings: it's an El Nino year – the snow will fall in February; the Ullr-fest parade will bring the snow; we will have a storm tonight – did you see the moon on it’s back last evening? I looked at the moon – clearly framed in the cloudless sky – and saw only a lascivious grin.

I’ve done some skiing. Well – I’ve made my way to the bottom of a mountain on a pair of skis. A subtle distinction that would be not-so-subtle if you had the visaid. I find the lift queue quite a surreal experience, principally because of the music broadcast to the queuing masses – I’ve not done that many runs but, as far as I can ascertain, it’s on a permanent Aerosmith loop, with the odd interjection of Toto’s Africa.

It is apparently unprecedentedly warm for January. Nevertheless, I wimpily clad myself in unfeasable numbers of layers, the base of which comprises several depths of M & S thermals. When fully encased, I am so rotundly padded that I could hurl myself ski-less down a slope and merely zorb to the bottom. As I waddle along, local boarders (I am sure I saw him on the plane!) skoot past me in t-shirts.

Runs are colour-coded so you can pick one of a level appropriate to your skiing ability. I find one also gets a strong intuition from the name – I intend to avoid such runs as ‘High Anxiety’, ‘Shock’, and ‘Psychopath’. I did brave ‘Little Hairy’, perhaps aided by a US-to-Scottish translation issue (I thought it was called ‘Little Harry’). Some supposedly on-piste runs appear to me indistinguishable from cliffs (apparently primed for hurling oneself from). Perhaps I have not yet quite inhabitied the skier mentality. Today I was very smug to have achieved a blue/black, albeit unwittingly (I took a wrong turn). Ironically, the run was called 'Volunteer'.

I did two days of ski school last week – helpless adults follow brazen zig-zagging instructors like strings of ducklings. A technique is imparted, and then you try to implement it on a run. For example, after being told to concentrate my weight on the balls of my feet, I whispered from my racing crouch all the way down “balls, balls, balls...”. Not sure what the casual observer made of that.

The work is very varied, and there are many procedures for me to memorize and feel confident implementing at a moment’s notice. You really have to be ready for whatever you encounter, and that could be pretty much anything (including fatalities). My uniform and radio bestows authority upon me - a terrifying and burdonsome illusion I must maintain. In truth, I am currently more lost than the guests! This bluff (along with disguising my current woeful skiing ability) is proving to be quite stressful to uphold!

Highlights of my first day included skiing down a little boy who was out of his depth: moronic parents avoid paying for ski school then tip their unfortunate ill-taught progeny down blue runs unawares. I side-slipped next to him, carrying his skis for 500 yards, assuring him what a champ he was, until he was content to hurtle his merry little way to the bottom once more. I was also given what is termed ‘body snatching’ duty. This involves standing at the top of the Quicksilver chairlift, which serves only beginner runs. Every 10 seconds a new chair deposits six clueless bodies in a guddle of limbs and skis – this needs to be disentangled, individuals extracted, rendered upright and ski-clad, and removed from the vicinity before the pile is augmented by the ever-advancing subsequent chair. The hardest element of this task is that the process must be completed without sniggering, on pain on firing. Tricky.

On the Annabee-welfare front, Alison nags me just the right tactical amount about eating, so the nourishment stakes thus far: Annabee, 1; self-destructiveness, 0. Top marks in Annabee-husbandry. I am hoping to hit an equilibrium soon whereby I can separate my real life – or what should be my real life – from the stuffing I interpose to obfuscate and stall clarity and progress. I must be careful not to, in turn, sabotage this process by becoming absorbed in my skiing ability (or lack thereof) or job performance (it is, after all, a voluntary position). My goal must be to achieve and retain a concrete perception of what I am, and my current relative position, no matter the circumstances (studio drudgery, musical invisibility, skiing ineptitude...). Annabee GPS – a known and fixed point.

To be continued. Possibly. No promises.

Letter From America - Part 1

(Actually, more of a letter from Heathrow and mid-Atlantic)


Heathrow was some kind of Kafkaesque airport nightmare - despite staff thrusting palliative sandwiches at wan travellers, who had the appearance of having lost years in desolate stationary queues. Queues that appeared and disappeared amorphously before one's eyes, and for which no end (or, terrifyingly, beginning) could be found. Indeed, I myself fell under the spell and elected to join one. As nobody appeared to know which queue they were in, nor could the end of any specific queue be found, I grasped gratefully at the one end that appeared brig-o-doon-like in front of me. I was seduced by the admittedly random logic that any queue was better than the ice-cold state of belonging to none at all. Frankly, I am reluctant to recall anything further of this chapter of my journey.

Was pleased to get my seat of least-terror (aisle, over-wing). But no sooner had I blessed the absence of proximate screaming children, than I realized I was marooned amidst a host of rubbery American adolescents who insisted on conversing dude-to-dude over my head. Ah well.

300 ‘dudes’ later (just over 4.5 hours) (could this be measured in dudes-per-hour?) we had moved not an inch. We were in another queue, this time comprising planes. The weight of several hundred people occupying this queue-space appeared to be an insignificant factor. (Wondered if this observation could be usefully applied to models of federalism. Brain starting to depart from planet, even if plane not.) Our wings required de-icing. Apparently this would take 40 minutes and smell bad. 40 minutes after the arrival of the (rather cute, as it transpired) spray-bot, that is. Which didn’t happen for, as I mentioned, a significant period of time. Apparently, dude, they have millions of de-icing rigs at the airport in Alaska – it’s, like, skoosh, like a carwash, man, and that’s it. And thus a 9 hour flight became a 13 ½ hour one.

******

Already, merely from the vantage of mid-Atlantic, I was able to cock a rueful brow as I reflected on my real life (the one 38,000 below, and some way South East). Still wantonly not engaging with any of the things I would like to in life. It’s not as if I make a good-faith try, yet fail gallantly – this scenario would be a triumph next to my perpetual tortuous inertia. Does the solution to inaction lie all the way across the Atlantic, I wonder...

This last year has been, without a doubt the best year of my life. Albeit a turbulent one. I was plunged head-over-heels-over-head-over-heels into love, only to be denied thrice (well, technically, I proposed 4 times, but who’s counting?). The U.S. is my crowing cock - no further denial-invitations shall be forthcoming. He is the only other person I’ve encountered who truly understands the nature of anxiety: how it dissembles one’s life brick-by-brick, extinguishing all under its suffocating blanket. Yet it is responsible for forging the most beautiful , and unseverable, of connections between us.

The trials of love aside, this was also the year I embarked on my most ambitious project to date. I was so crap at being what others' expected. I hope I turn out to be rather more successful at being me. So: slowly I sand-off the socially-acceptable topcoat. Perhaps this will be the year we’ll get a peek at the grain.

And so it begins with my little US adventure.

To be continued...
(possibly. Should I find the impetus...)