Auslanders: Coming Home to The Germ

Coming back through the Chunnel felt like we were heading home.

Which was weird, because we weren’t heading for home, we were heading for Germany and we had only been in Germany five days before we left.

I guess there is nothing more likely to make you feel at home in a new setting than spending a few weeks eating lukewarm ham sandwiches in hotel rooms every night in front of British game shows and scrounging living space off kindly intentioned relatives.

Don’t get me wrong, the relatives couldn’t have been any more accommodating. Well, they could have given us spending money, I suppose, but that would make me feel guilty considering that they were already sharing their food, showers and toilets with us and dealing patiently with the unwavering intensity of our children as they demanded another round of treasure hunt. This is nothing to be taken lightly. If you commit to a game of treasure hunt, you will need to set aside at least one hour and prepare an exhaustive list of treasures to be found. Then you will need to make a map of the area where those treasures can be found and then you will have to hide those treasures in key places on that map and it makes me tired just writing about it.

At the end of two weeks living on the other side of the road, highballing back through that funky little France/Belgium/Holland/Germany corner that you can do in three hours gave us all a strangely homey feeling.

This made no sense.

Germany was filled with foreigners, most of whom speak German.

We were Canadians, English speakers. And we were leaving England, the Home of English.

Looking back, I have to wonder if it didn’t come down to a simple hunger for more downtime.

There are sixty million people in England, a country roughly the size of a decent corn field back home, and at any given time it seems that the bulk of those sixty million are all driving on the same stretch of the motorway and lining up to enter the same buildings at the exact same moment.

Like at Harrod’s.

We went to Harrod’s on a Saturday, thinking we would wander through this inextricably famed shopping centre and show the kids the impressive food selection, which, however impressive, may not be that interesting to children it turns out.

It also turned out that every other physically mobile human being in London had come up with the same idea that same morning and we had blundered into a pulsating nightmare of retail extravagance during some kind of special sale weekend.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the actuality of a Harrod’s sale weekend, but I can tell you that trying to walk through the store during this particular sale weekend made me feel like one of those salmon trying jump up the falls, secretly praying for grizzlies to catch me before I go insane.

It was ridiculous how many people struggled desperately to reach one end of that store only to immediately turn around and rush back to the first end, turn back again and start the process anew. It was like a zombie movie on fast forward.

Did anybody have even the slightest intention of buying anything during all those grim lengths?

I did see a guy with a pale yellow LaCoste shirt who looked like the main bad guy on Revenge of the Nerds (that’s Ted McGinley, if you wonder) carrying way too many shopping bags and sneering into his cell phone, clearly explaining to some other equally wealthy prat how horrid it was to have this rabble (that would be us) sully the rarefied shopping atmosphere he would normally have enjoyed on any average day of spending two hundred pounds on a pair of socks.

The rest of the people I saw appeared to be there largely to take part in a lot of energetic and anonymous rubbing together of sweaty bits as they fought their way upstream.

It was like this throughout much of England, and after fourteen days of such an intense immersion into hot people on people contact, I was ready to get back to our little patchwork of German communities and enjoy a communal living area larger than one English hotel room. As much as I love my kids, I was looking very much forward to not bunking down in the same cell with them every night. There’s only so much nose breathing one man can endure at 3:00 am.

Unfortunately, my dream of coming back home to restful sleep was not to be borne out by reality.

We had been traveling through England during the hottest ever July, the hottest ever week, the hottest ever day in recorded history, and the hottest ever hotel room in recorded holidays. This was borne out for me after reading this headline on the front page of a Portsmouth newspaper: “Melting Road Traps Pedestrians.”

They’re probably still there.

I was certain that, back in the Germ, it would be radically different. We had been told that a hot summer like they’d been having was short term, a complete fluke, an irrepeatable blip in German weather patterns never to be seen again.

We got home to a tandoor oven.

Remember, German houses are made of thick concrete, and when they get hot, it’s not just the air we’re talking about. The walls and the floor generate powerful convection currents that, however effective for cooking chicken tikka, are not conducive to supporting human life. Not mine, anyway.

Even my clothes began to suffer. I am pretty sure I brought my hooded sweatshirt over here, but I can’t find it anywhere. The only explanation for its absence is spontaneous combustion.

Those first few nights back in Meerbusch saw us driven into the basement for respite.

All of us.

In the same room.

Again.

Trying to sleep.

Nose breathing.

During the day, we just sat wherever there was shade, torpid, arms and legs splayed out to minimize skin on skin contact, like a family of lizards.

Strangely enough, however, I was happy to jump on the bike for my daily exercise no matter how hot it was. It was novel enough riding around in this new environment that I didn’t really notice that I was being slowly roasted alive.

We live in a portion of Meerbusch called Strump.

Everyone in Strump is tiny and blue and wears a white hat. We live in peaceful harmony with each other even though there is only one woman and we suffer under the fearsome tyranny of the evil Gargamel, our fiendish overlord.

I realize that only a very small number of readers will realize that I was gamely attempting to generate comedy just now, and I suppose there will be a certain portion of people who will call their local MPs and officially register their outrage that good Canadian citizens are being terrorized in Germany by a fiendish overlord and forced into some kind of sick wife sharing arrangement. And then they will wonder why we are blue…

But it is a bad sign when you are attempting to generate comedy.

It is a worse sign when only a small number of people recognize that’s what you are doing.

I would say that low numbers of audience members recognizing one’s comedy is a pretty convincing indication that you are not, in fact generating comedy. Comedy exists only in the presence of other people’s recognition of it, and without that recognition, comedy like the sad clown in a black velvet painting behind the wet bar in somebody’s 70s basement.

It just makes you feel uncomfortable.

So if you are not generating comedy, and yet that is what you are trying to do, what are you generating?

I suspect it is something on that thin line between boredom and nausea.

Now I guess I have to do two things:

1. Admit that I am that sad clown, generator of obscure non-comedy about Smurfs and
2. Explain that the Smurfs were called Stroumphs in the language of the country where they were invented. Was it in Germany or France? Holland? I can’t answer that because I have never actually watched the Stroumphs. It is almost amazing that I was able to tell you as much as I have about them. In any case, Stroumphs = Strump and it was all I could do at the time.

Another of the Meerbusch villages is called Osterath. Remember, when pronouncing Osterath, you pretend that there is no “h” on the end of the word.

If you pronounce it with that “h” you will be marked as an Auslander. Which is not good unless you want to wear the Funny Hat and have used batteries thrown at you.

Why do they bother to put that “h” on the end of Osterath if they have no intention of making use of it, anyway?

I suppose a German might ask me the same thing about the “h” in “white” or “whale” or “what” but the thing is I don’t like those “h’s” any better than the one in Osterath. I also don’t like writing “h’s.” Too much punctuation all in one place.

Osterath is a prettier town than Strump in many ways, with a very European looking cobbled brick road area in the centre of the town, many more shops and the added attraction of two stores that you could recognize from a distance as being grocery stores.

This may not sound like a big deal, but considering most of the other stores around here, it is fricking incredible.

On an average drive through any given one of these villages, it is in no way obvious to me what kind of shops are lined up along the road unless the proprietors place their products out in full view on the sidewalk. It is hard to tell if some of them are shops at all.

There is one store on the main street in Osterath that has bikes on the right side of the shop, flowers and trinkets on the left, and if you are brave enough to go into the back, you will find luggage and women’s clothing in one room and a hidden basement that has hardware and two men cutting keys or fixing things.

There is no sign out front, and nobody in the building would even meet my eye. I wonder now if it was a store at all. Perhaps I was wandering through somebody’s apartment. There is no way to know.

My favourite store around here is in Krefeld, a small city to the north that is only fifteen or twenty minutes on the bike path.

This store is a huge, popular chain store that could be described as the German equivalent of Walmart. Which means that it is way better than Walmart, and if you don’t believe me about that, ask a German. That German might point out to you that Walmart was driven out of this country on a rail and you could find huge empty buildings on the outskirts of many towns with ghostly stains where the Walmart signs had been removed, taken down and mined for their raw materials.

The German chain store is called Real and it is unbelievable.

The first time we walked in, we just stood there, paralyzed by the selection.

Real isn’t so much a store as an aircraft hanger of common household objects up for sale.

We walked around for an hour and half amidst the shoes, clothes, backpacks and so on before I noticed that we were in the small antechamber attached to the front of the main body of the store, where the groceries were.

I pointed towards the horizon. “This way! If we start now, we can make it before nightfall!”

We began our ascent for groceries on the northern face of the magazine racks, but on the twelfth day, after eating our sled dogs, we were forced to turn back.

Shopping at Real makes you wish not only that you were rich, but that you had a dump truck instead of a grocery cart. This store doesn’t have the hideous industrial banality of Costco, or the low rent taint of Walmart, but makes me think of an older style Loblaws if it had a giant, mutated Woolworths growing parasitically inside it.

It is the kind of grocery store where you go in with a plain old list of staple food products for an average week and come out with a five pound bag of work socks, fur topped women’s boots, a pleather jacket, a mountain bike, three hundred Euros worth of groceries that weren’t on your list, and somebody else’s kids sitting in your cart wailing in German.

There is no way to nip into that store. There is no nipping.

Part of that nip-free environment is a personal problem. One that I will freely admit.

I love grocery stores.

Whenever we travel to a new town, city or country, I can’t wait to run into the nearest grocery store and browse the aisles. It might be some kind of primeval hunting instinct that isn’t being met by my daily modern existence, but it is undeniable.

On that first Real expedition, I had goosebumps as we strolled past racks of unfamiliar foods and brand names.

I felt faint in the cereal aisle as I fingered the bags of exotic mueslis.

I was overcome with tears in the dairy section as my frugality crashed into a headlong full body hug with my lust for milk fat. Bags of mozzarella cheese were 49 cents, a liter of milk 55 cents, a brick of Gouda jung 1.49, even Brie for the same price. And then I noticed something that sent shock waves reverberating through my body with an intensity that has not yet subsided these many months later.

There is a company here called Bauer that has an extensive line of yogurts with an enormous variety of flavours and textures. You can buy pumpkin yogurt at Hallowe’en, blood orange yogurt, raspberry muesli yogurt, kiwi yogurt, potato leek yogurt, beef and bacon yogurt and there, on the bottom shelf, hidden behind everything else I found half a flat of something I could only have dreamed about: Strawberry Chocolate yogurt.

Bauer Strawberry Chocolate yogurt may just be the single greatest dairy product of all time.

As of this writing, I have had hundreds, perhaps thousands of containers of this yogurt.

The smell of this yogurt alone is enough to heal the sick and bring peace to the Middle East, if they would only stop fighting long enough to sniff it.

Real is filled with such things.

There are foods here that North Americans could never have imagined, delicious pastes and unguents and cuts and slices and tender bits brined with the juices of freshly picked whatnots, all laid out for the lusting.

How can we be expected to live without them when I leave?

Curry ketchup.

Curry cashews.

Hot lion mustard.

Chocolate Muesli.

Chocolate Wheatabix.

Chocolate Bran Flakes.

Chocolate Chocolate.

I haven’t even tried to describe the bread.

Because I can’t. You will just have to come over here and try it for yourself.

And that’s why Germany was already home when I came through that Chunnel that day.

They say that home is where the heart is, but I say that is a damn lie.

Any fool can tell you that your heart makes a lot of stupid choices. Your heart is an idiot and will leave you curled up crying in a fetal ball on the front yard of some miserable, undeserving woman’s apartment.

But your stomach will never do you wrong.

Auslanders: U.K. Dokey Part 3 - Good Value

One of the biggest problems I have experienced in England, aside from Advanced Sticker Shock, Peanut Butter Withdrawal or Stage Three Chocolate Milk Pangs, is something I have come to call I Am Bloody Sick and Tired of Gift Shops.

Even my daughter, the kind of normal kid who loudly advocates for useless trinkets designed to be appealing to crows and little girls began to loudly complain whenever we climbed a mountain or emerged from the depths of some remote cavern only to find ourselves trapped in some labyrinthine gift shop.

“Can’t they just leave us alone? What do they want from us!”

This was coming from a girl who argued that it was imperative that she jam twelve stuffed cats into her very limited amount of luggage. Even if that meant she had to wear the same pair of pants for a year.

The answer to her question two paragraphs ago is “No.” They can’t leave us alone.

They can’t and they won’t.

Not ever. 

England is rife with gift shops. Lousy with them. Infected, infested and tits full of them. And that includes gift shoppes.

It becomes blatantly apparent that you are in a maniacally over gift shopped when you find a gift shop in a gift shop. A gift shop gift shop, selling little kids books about the history of the gift shop, figurines of the cashier, tea towels with poorly reproduced drawings of the front door, all of it. It’s just sad. There was a Japanese bus tour stopped there too.

Eventually somebody is going to have to figure out that there can be only so many gifts that people need. There are only so many gift giving opportunities. Think about it: Families are shrinking. Old relatives are dying off. Young people are growing up who aren’t into collecting unusable miniature spoons like they used to, unless they also happen to be 1980s coke dealers.  

Especially egregious is having to pay admission to the gift shoppe. It’s simply gone too far.

But I will stop.

I am not going to continue to complain about how much everything costs over there, as we all know it’s beyond outrageous.

We all know that petrol is twice the price of the exact same fuel across the Channel, a small cup of coffee is 9.50 Canadian and that’s all fine. I don’t care about that. Largely because I don’t drink coffee, but even if I did, I love England, and after only five days in Germany, it is amazing how thrilling it was to see signs that verge on the comprehensible.

East Wapping? Well, I was pretty sure I’d never been wapped, but I did know what East meant. 

It was at Tesco on our first morning in England when I realized how quickly we had become starved for the sight of our native tongue.

Nisa and I were giddy as schoolgirls in springtime, racing through the superstore, grabbing up packets of this and that, reading the contents out loud and laughing through our tears.

I can see how much fiber is in this cereal!

This is mushroom soup!

Gum!

Looking back, I realize that we were pathetic and setting bad examples for our children.

Sure kids, we will take you to Germany and tell you how exciting an opportunity it is for you to learn a new language and culture, but as soon as we get to England, we’re going to fall all over ourselves like belly-rubbed pups at the sight of Walker’s crisps.

“Oooh, Cheese and Onion! Sweet Thai Chili! Roast Chicken!”

Exultations of great joy. Tears of relief. People steering their carts well around us, shielding their own children’s eyes.

No, I am not going to complain about prices, and I am not going to make us look like fools because we had grown nostalgic for English after only five days. That is partially because I already did, and partially because what I would far rather do is prove to you that England is indeed worth paying the big bucks.

I want to reveal to you a few of the things that money can’t really buy, the little this and that’s we took away from our holiday that didn’t have price tags.

And then I will put price tags on them.

1. Accents - $500

In my homeland, people from Toronto sound pretty much like people from Vancouver. Except for a few obvious exceptions like insular populations of immigrants, hard core East Coasters, Quebecois and Huron County rednecks, people all over Canada sound pretty much the same.

England, however, which is the size of the underdeveloped calf muscle on Ontario’s left leg, is completely the opposite. It is not uncommon that people in Village A can have accents that sound nothing like people in Village B, and those villages are ninety meters apart.

What I like about that is that everyone in England sounds like they are in a movie, which then makes me feel like I am as well.

In reality, nobody actually talks like the Pikey in Snatch. Once Guy Ritchie said “cut,” Brad Pitt sounded just like every other guy named Brad that any of us grew up with.

Saying that makes me wonder if England isn’t exactly the same. I’m not saying that everyone is like Brad Pitt, because I can count on one hand the number of Fight Club style abs I saw in my two weeks, I’m saying that I am willing to bet you that five seconds after the last highway bus of New Jersey tourists pulls out of the Warwick Castle parking lot, the attendants drop the who accent thing and sound just like us.

“Hard work, eh?”

“Jeez, ya.”

It’s all public relations. But I suppose that, as long as they intend to keep up with the masquerade, I intend to take full advantage of it. In a country where everyone sounds like a character from a Monty Python routine, it is hard not to be constantly entertained.

It is a good thing for me that I have seen so many Python sketches so many times, because I have learned to copy a lot of these accents, and here is a trick that you should try if you are good at copying them also.

Whenever you’re in a store and you have to talk to someone, use four or five different accents in the same sentence. Mix up the Newcastle with the Kentish, the Liverpudlian with the Cornish. Hell, toss in an Irish word here or there, a Scottish “aye” at the end. You have to see the looks on people’s faces.

“Where are you from?” they ask in amazement. “I can’t place your accent.”

“Well of course I’m Canadian,” and I would said that like I was Canadien - French style.

They nod like that makes perfect sense, because they have no idea what Canada really is, except that it has something to do with Britain. Which takes us to-

2. British People - $1500 (running total – $2000)

You can take that same game and play it with information also.

After you say you are Canadian, say that whatever the weather is like is way less than it is in Canada.

If it’s hot, and a Brit says, “Hot, isn’t it,” you say, “Hot? No way. In Canada this time of year it’s hot enough that you can fry on egg on your own face. Which I have done and it was delicious, however painful.”

That Brit will believe you, or at least pretend to, because they are mostly too polite to call you a damned liar.

I have tested the ingrained politeness of these people a great deal, and it is almost impossible for them to stop doing it. It’s like they were trained to be nice by a big man with a rolled up newspaper. The more you hurt them, the politer they are.

We were at a pub with some unnamed family members for a meal celebrating our last night of staying with them. I might suggest to you that it was most likely they who were doing the celebrating due to our imminent departure. We probably would have stayed longer because they kept feeding us. Regardless, the food at the pub was much less than mediocre. In fact, it wouldn’t be too much exaggeration to say that it was approaching vile.

The chips (remember, that’s French fries in back home English) looked cooked, but were still mostly frozen in the middle, whereas my mushroom burger had only a few select pieces that hadn’t been grilled to charcoal. My wife’s steak was flavourless and as rubbery as a pretend steak chew toy, the tiny salad was just this side of slimy and there was a severed big toe circling around in my ice water. And it had a mean ingrown.

Nobody else had anything better, and there was much grumbling about how things had really gone downhill in this particular pub since the parrots were stolen. Don’t ask. Two seconds after this scathing comment, the waitress approached and asked how everything was.

I sucked in the breath I would need to inform this young woman that the stuff on our plates (it was certainly not food) was most likely foul enough to kill at least one of us when suddenly our host whirled around like she’d been caught stealing

“Lovely!”

My mouth flapped open, but nothing came out.

I would have been less surprised if she had asked the waitress how much the cook would pay us if we actually dared to put any of this stuff into our mouths, but it wouldn’t have sounded right after one of our party had just said, “Lovely” with such a huge, phony smile.

The waitress walked away, somehow managing to cover her shock at the outrageous lie to which she had been witness.

I wheeled on our hostess.

“You just told us how disappointed you were with everything! What were you doing telling her it was lovely? This meal is a crime against the word edible! We should be sending this back with a biohazard sticker on it.”

She just dithered, unable to articulate what had just happened.

I could articulate it.

In fact, I will.

She couldn’t stop herself from being polite, no matter what it cost her in money, dignity, mental health or stomach upset because she has been schooled since birth to suck it up, tamp it down and smile no matter what.

I hope she enjoyed her gristly sheet of “ham”.

If you are wondering what this meal cost, the bill came to ninety pounds, and I couldn’t help but wonder if we might have been better off piling our money in the centre of the table, lighting it on fire and eating each other’s socks. It might have been a better use of ketchup and would have caused no significant damage to the quality of that evening’s meal.

3. More British People - $1500 (running total $3500)

Everywhere you go, you see the same few people.

They’re like the extras in the background on a TV movie of the week. Somebody keeps waving them through every setup to add texture and make the shot look more realistic.

I can describe them, and you will think I am stereotyping, but I’m not, even though I am. Of course, these people I am about to describe weren’t the only people I saw, not by a long shot, but no matter where we were, they were there. Lots of them. Just like little paper people you cut out all at once and string across the board in Sunday school.

He was five foot six or seven, with a mostly shaved head, a tank top or t-shirt with a football team logo, that shirt frequently off. The five or six homemade tattoos in sloppy, faded blue were set off perfectly by his deep red, sunburned back. He swaggered Popeye style, tottering around on skinny white legs, squinting in the sun, teeth bared with a grimace, revealing exactly which ones were missing. He smelled like an old pub and looked like 1980s news footage of violence at the World Cup.

She looked to me like what you see in the U.K. 50’s Slang Dictionary if you looked up “bird.” The haircut hadn’t been stylish since Dallas was cancelled. Smoking had carved years into her face that you could count like rings in a cut down tree, craggy lines in the hard, leathered sun damage. There was a huge expanse of cleavage, deep, cavernous UV spackled cleavage, and the breasts inside it stuck out almost far enough to overshadow the belly. Almost. Luckily she had an outfit on such that you couldn’t miss any of it, all accentuated by the tottering needed for her to balance on those heels. Her tattoos were a little more colourful, I should point out, and looked almost like they might not have been done in prison.

Watching these two walk around under their own power was kind of like watching Roger Rabbit the first time. You spend some of the movie laughing, some getting caught up in the story, and some of the time you just shake her head in amazement at how they got those cartoon characters in with the live action people so seamlessly.

They almost looked real.

4. Carvery - $40 (running total $3540)

You’re traveling all the time, living out of a car and a cheap hotel chain. How are you going to eat?

Constant Tesco runs that leave you worried about the status of the ice in your cooler? Load up on junk food and say the hell with nutrients? More fish and chips?

The answer is yes to all of them, but eventually you will find that you are somehow still hungry even though you just ate three bags of crisps and a Double Decker bar.

What are you going to do when your body is desperate for real, actual food? What about vegetables?

I tell you to find yourself a carvery.

In Canada we might call it a buffet, or perhaps a smorgasbord, or maybe eating at your Grandma’s house (if your Grandma lived in a pub), but in England the place to go when you want to eat hot and a lot is to a place that advertises a carvery.

We had our first one in Castleford.

After a day of hiking up and down (the first half of the day up, the second half down), we had built up the kind of hunger that makes your kids whine, your wife angry and leaves you thinking about eating them all and fixing every problem at once.

Wandering through the lovely village for a place to eat, and feeling the fierce heat of my wife’s raging hunger on the back of my neck, I wanted something immediately, yet was willing to hold out for something really good.

On the main corner in this touristy village, there was a little restaurant attached to a typical pub with a sign out that read “Carvery at 6:00”.

We burst through the door and took the nearest table. I didn’t know exactly what the sign was advertising, but I was pretty sure that a decent percentage of the stuff that one could carve was going to be good eating.

While we sat there drooling helplessly, the waitresses loaded up the buffet table with a turkey, a cow, a pig, a tray of perfectly roasted potatoes, a tub of stuffing, Yorkshire puddings and a bucket of gravy.

On another table they filled a couple of pails with broccoli, spinach, leeks, carrots, boiled potatoes, green beans, and more.

Tears came to my eyes unbidden as I watched those little British girls file past, biceps straining against the weight of all that food.

At six o’clock the proprietor came out, took his place behind the blistering serving table, and began the elaborate carving ritual. It was obvious that he wasn’t just about tearing the meat off in as efficient a way as possible. He was very methodical. It was excruciating to watch, but I suppose that the name carvery isn’t just a name.

If you go in there thinking that the carverer is going to hop out of the kitchen, rip off a couple slabs of meat and pile it all over your plate because there is a big line up of growling, ravenous hikers lined up at the steam table, you are sorely mistaken.

The carverer is going to slowly work his knife into the perfectly roasted flesh of the animal of his choice on the correct angle, against the grain, cross slicing uniform cuts on the bias in a most meticulous fashion and then he will very slowly arrange those cuts of lovingly sliced meat onto your plate in a very specific manner.

This has two purposes that I can see.

One, it makes you hungry enough to eat the back of the head of the guy in front of you, and two, it makes you think twice before you go back into the line for your next run through that elaborate procedure in order to get your teeth into another serving of meat, which might thereupon save the proprietor a few quid.

The proprietor didn’t save any quid with me.

I ate as much food substance as I could physically contain within my skin without internal tearing, and sat like a toad in the intense heat, drinking tea (don’t ask me, I panicked when the waitress asked me what I wanted) and concentrating on digesting enough to be able to walk back to the car without blowing out a sidewall on the way.

I could continue with my list of great English experiences and the attendant values, and pretty soon you would have to agree that my list added up to way more than the amount of money anyone would need to spend to enjoy such a trip. But I’m not going to do that anymore, because I think that you will see all this as a sad psychological trick where I somehow try to justify to myself the expense of my own holiday.

And I am hurt by your assumption because that is simply not the case. I have gone through all of this for you, all for your benefit, like the loving, giving and warm-hearted daddy man that I am.

I don’t need to rationalize what I did or try to tally up my experiences to see if it was worth it, because I am already 126% sure that it was.

Mostly.

Auslanders: U.K. Dokey Part 2 - Castles

We paid the stomach churning admission to Leeds Castle of course, but I had no choice.

This was our children’s first castle.

After months of talking about all the amazing castles they would see on our journey, would you want to be the evil parent who says, “Sorry, you aren’t going to see this, your first castle because your happiness isn’t as important to me as forty British pounds.”?

So did I.

But I was with my wife, and she would not want to be that parent. At least, not until we went in.

Let me tell you easily excited visitors to England, your entry fee into Leeds castle grants you not only one full year of access to the castle should you be planning an immediate repeat of your current trip within that same year, but also includes the price of admission into the Dog Collar Museum!

I did not make that up.

We didn’t visit that particular museum.

I am certain that the very presence of the Dog Collar Museum is a clear sign that there is literally nothing left in the country of even the most infinitesimal historical value that has not already been installed in an existing museum somewhere else and that includes the Small Wooden Object of Indeterminate Origin Museum near Bolton and the Rough Stony Bit Found Near Some Old Stuff Museum on the outskirts of Wainscotting.

Things were to improve greatly as we traveled to The North.

You know about North, don’t you?

Imagine that even a country as tiny as England is somehow broken up into regions, and I will try to quickly sum those regions up:

First, there is The South, which includes the Home Counties just under London, then there is London which is the Center of the Universe, then, just outside of London there is a thing called the Watford Gap, a point at which there is no discernible gap of any sort, and then, over that non-gap there are signs that point to The North.

That North stuff includes pretty much the rest of England in a big singly named lump that has a huge stigma attached to it.

Sure, there’s a little bit of East (but that’s North East or South East) and a sliver of West, but in a country where you can drive from the West Coast to the East coast in an hour and a half in places, it doesn’t really count.

Therefore we are left with North and South and the odd reference to the Midlands, which being North of the Watford Gap means The Midlands are in The North as well.

So The North starts just minutes outside of London, which is actually well in the South and if you drive out of it, you will see signs that say just keep saying The North for hours and hours and you will never actually get there because you have in fact been there the whole time.

It’s kind of like Purgatory.

I might add that if you happen to look behind you when you are heading up the M1 into The North all the signs going the other way say The South.

We found a castle up there that was much more interesting that Leeds.

It is call Alnwick, which in the English way is pronounced nothing like it is spelled. They pronounce it Annick and its claim to fame is that a few scenes in the first Harry Potter movie were shot there. I won’t tell you which scenes, because you may choose to make pilgrimage to this fine castle and take for yourself the one hour “Which scenes from Harry Potter were shot here” tour.

We took that tour and saw that wall, the top bit of that tower and then the ramp that pointed down over into that area. Oh, and there was the front part of that open area.

It was fun for the rabid Potterite, but I would suggest to most visitors that they would be better off simply walking around the grounds on their own.

Much more interesting to me was Warkworth, which is truly fantastic and far enough off the main roads to be unheard of.

Warkworth is a ruin, but there are a lot of interiors open and intact, which are dark and deep and really impressive. It is the kind of place that you can scramble about with only those few other tourists lucky enough to stumble into the town, and it is also the kind of place where you can’t help running around pretending that you are an orc.

If they opened this castle up at night and allowed a handful of intense Dungeons and Dragons players to set up in there, it would be a gold mine. Bill Gates, buy this castle and make it so!

One of the best known castles and one of the most developed specifically for tourist enjoyment, is Warwick Castle, just north of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Visiting Warwick Castle is about a million times better than going to Shakespeare’s mother’s house, which is less fun even than reading Hamlet in class on a sunny day in May when you are seventeen.

This well tended castle has been redone to appeal to people who like showy events and highly costumed reenactments (ie Americans) along with their history.

There is an archery demonstration, a birds of prey demonstration, a 30 metre trebuchet firing, a haunted tower/fun house and an honestly impressive wax display in the redone castle interior. The designers went as far as they could with this wax display and have thoughtfully added smell generators so that the stables smell like a manmade facsimile of horse manure, the blacksmith’s shop like a chemically generated forge and so on. It also smells eerily like hundreds of tourists with limited understanding of deodorant jammed into a small wax museum in 37 degree heat.

Let me say that I would be the first person to announce a complete lack of interest in visiting a wax museum with effigies of famous persons. I don’t care how much it looks like Madonna, I don’t want to go in and see it. I wouldn’t likely want to go in and see it if they had captured the real Madonna and stuck her to the floor with duct tape either, for that matter.

But this wax museum is awesome.

There are actual humans mixed in with the wax figures, all set up in impossibly detailed configurations of daily life in a medieval castle and under those low light conditions, and taking into consideration the dizziness and confusion that comes with being subject to the body odor of hundreds of tourists, it weaves a convincing illusion.

My children were alternately repelled by the generated odors, bored by the intricately designed replications and terrified by the hideous wax figures that sometimes leaped up with swords.

Yes, Warwick is almost fun enough to be worth the shocking entrance fee.

The last castle I will mention is Conwy castle in Northern Wales, and if you are tired of hearing about the few castles I have briefly mentioned here, imagine how tired my kids got of being dragged through these and more by parents who like to *gasp* read all the plaques.

Conwy castle was my first castle back in The Day. It is set on the shore side of a beautiful walled town on an inlet, and from the high parapets, you have an amazing view of the whole walled town. Walking through this amazing fortress, imagining what it would have been like when it was built in the 1200s, is fantastic, and here is the kind of tip you won’t get from any of the other writers who write about my life in excruciating detail.

Just down the street from the castle, on the south side of the road, beside the oldest house in town, is a bakery that cannot be described in a way that does it any justice.

We popped on a whim, ignorant of what was in store or I would have ordered hundreds more. I had a steak, onion and mushroom pie that melted in my mouth and reduced me to tears. There has never been such gravy save for that gravy in the Platonic World of Perfect Forms. My wife got an obscenely tasty sausage roll, the crispiest, lightest pastry wrapped around a monstrous roll of peppery meat. The kids had donuts. I don’t particularly like donuts, but I can tell you these were the single greatest deep fried food products that I have ever eaten.

I am not exaggerating. I swear.

It is unbelievable how good these donuts were. The outside was formed into a crust somehow that was crunchy, yet lightly bready and chewy just inside that gentle crunch, moister than should be possible with modern baking science. Now imagine that donutious offering covered with high quality chocolate instead of the thin waxiness that subsitutes for chocolate glaze on most donuts.

You are going to say, “Oh, there he goes romanticizing and glorifying his life again,” but you are dead wrong, my friend. I demand that you go to the north of Wales and find that bakery and eat that food for yourself. You will break down and cry just like we did and just like I am doing right now as I think back and wish I was there. You will agree that it is simply not possible to imagine a bakery producing goods of such quality that you find yourself seriously considering crawling into the oven to be first to get your food.

And then you will thank me for telling you about it.

For which I say that you are welcome.

Auslanders: U.K. Dokey Part 1

My wife has a British passport. No, it’s not one of those black market ones Will Smith might get from a sarcastic guy in a wheelchair who has a lot of computers and hacks into the government computers to find out what’s really at Area 51. But that would be way cooler.

She got it the old-fashioned way – she inherited it. Her dad is British, for which it turns out we are muchly grateful, in spite of the accent that makes you think, “Excuse me, but haven’t you been living in Canada since 1961?”

Thanks to her British dad, it was a whole lot easier for us to come to the Germ. That’s what all the cool kids are calling it, by the way. The Germ. Saying the whole word is so last year. So I moved from the Can to the Germ, which, now that I see it written there, doesn’t sound as cool as I thought. It sounds like I should be washing my hands.

This U.K. Connection was put into play some time last spring when I went to the German consulate in Toronto with all my info, a bunch of naïve questions and a vague plan to move to Europe for a year. The stern, thin-lipped frau behind the plexiwindow couldn’t have looked less enthusiastic about my presence, and told me with a complete lack if interest as to whether I complied or had a fatal heart attack that I was to take a number and get in line.

The Line had at least forty people in it, all soaked with panic sweat, all holding screaming babies, and all of them looking like they were going to cry and/or soil themselves with fear when it was their turn to go to the wicket. Were these refugees from Canada? I mean, I knew things were bad when Harper won, but this bad?

I almost started crying myself when she told me to join this wailing group, and I spoke up maybe a little too loudly, “But didn’t the Wall come down? What about glasnost? What about Achtung Baby?”

She couldn’t even summon up the energy to be offended. “Only EU citizens are allowed (insert official government gobbletyfart here).”

Millseconds – the right synapse fires – “Wait a minute. My wife has a British passport. Isn’t that EU?”

The woman behind the plexiwindow suddenly blossomed into a loving smile, and sent me to a special door inside which there is no line up, no pile of howling Canadian infant refugees. There was a comfy desk chair and plenty of air con. I sat on the padded expanse and started timing how long it would take before somebody took my order for chocolate milk or offered vigorous shiatsu.

Nobody offered shiatsu, but I did find out that it is a lot easier to move to the Germ for a year if you are married to my wife. Since I am currently the only person in that lofty position, you will have to stay in the Can, thanks for playing.

However, one of the lesser known side-effects of being married to my wife is that, a few days after you move to the Germ, you will immediately pack your bags for a trip to jolly old England.

If you have been correctly reading your program notes, you will no doubt remember the initial backstory to this adventure, which found our dear Wife in the northern English city of York for one year of university, or uni, if you want to fit in with them. (There are a lot of cute little nicknames like uni. Chocky bicky, prezzies, vacay, Becks, Macca, scrummy, Madge - probably hundreds more that I blocked out after I left because it tears through my brain like a ripsaw to hear them.)

However, after having spent that year there, and having been to England several other times in her youth to visit her dad’s family, my wife began to romanticize England to a degree that not even the most tea drinking, cricket watching, Ruth Rendell fan could muster up.

She remembers an England that certainly doesn’t exist. One that glimmers with a holy nimbus of ancient glory. She smells a charcoal briquette and thinks fondly of her granny’s house, salivates when she reads the newspaper, unable to stop smelling fish and chips that aren’t there, dreams of eating Bournevilles all night, and yes, drinks afternoon tea with, you guessed it, chocky bicky.

Her glorification of this island would be worthy of my mockery if she hadn’t somehow infected me with some small sliver of it.

I might even have done it to myself.

You see, going to England was my first trip alone, my first time visiting a place that had a history older than the parking lot in front of it. And I do love history, love castles, medieval warfare, crop circles, British bands, Scotch eggs, Alan Moore graphic novels and the Rendlesham U.F.O sighting.

I’m not as bad as my wife, but I too have built England up into something more than just a cute little tourist trap that smells of skunky old beer and deep fried everything.

As you could imagine, being so close to the U.K. and having been giving complete control over Mark and Anja’s car (up to 20,000 kms or so), there was no question that we would be going over for a few weeks. It was just a question of how.

Anja said that the only way to go is to take the ferry from Rotterdam.

I told Anja I would rather sit a bathtub of my own wee overnight than ride on that overnight ferry. Okay, I didn’t tell her that, and I wouldn’t rather do that. It would be cold and stinky and make me sick after awhile. But so would the ferry.

I can’t think of a ferry ride on the North Sea without having vivid flashbacks of ships going down in brutal chop after U-boat attacks, even though I was never on one of them, so by rights, I shouldn’t be able to flash back to things I never did. But I do.

Maybe I watched too many episodes of The World At War at too young an age, but just thinking about ferries on the North Sea makes me hunker down and pray we get rescued. No, I don’t expect a U-boat attack and I know the ship won’t go down, but I also know that I get seasick watching the kids on a swing set. Just holding a ticket to the Tilt-A-Whirl for somebody else makes my stomach roll. There is no way that I would be able to handle God knows how many hours on a ferry without some kind of intense chemical intervention, and remember, I don’t even drink.

So, would we fly over on one of those cheap flights, rent a car, drive the snot out of it, drop it off and fly back, right?

No! We already had a car. Renting one would be like dumping your girlfriend to go out with her mom. Well, maybe not exactly like that, but you see what I mean. Redundancy. Innefficiency. Fiscal irresponsibility.

You know where this is going.

We were going to be taking the Chunnel. There is no other way across.

This would be a good place for me to Alt-Tab out of Word and hit Wikipedia for some choice background tidbits on this incredible engineering marvel. Like, did you know that the idea of an underground passage across the English Channel was first attempted in 1732 by Sir Reginald Mountebank, who had been quoted as saying, “I would rather sit in a bathtub of my own wee overnight than take the ferry.”

That clearly isn’t true, although I do seem to remember that a tunnel really was tried many times over the years. I have to admit that I didn’t Alt-Tab out, but only because I don’t trust that Wikipedia. Not since I found out my chupacabra pictures were fake.

And they looked so real.

If you want to go on the Chunnel, I recommend that you follow these simple steps to make it easier:

1. Buy a lottery ticket.
2. Win the lottery.
3. Book your ticket without feeling like you’ve been robbed.
4. Laugh at the prices that would have crushed your soul if you hadn’t won that lottery.

Foolishly, I forgot to do 1 and 2, and when my wife did 3, we found out that it was an even more ridiculous idea to book a Chunnel crossing on the first Monday after the 2006 World Cup Finals were over.

Apparently the Chunnel Booking Bosses are economics grads and all those drunken footie (cute nickname alert!) hooligans weaving back to England en masse reminds them of their first supply and demand lesson back in Ripping People Off 101.

We paid many hundreds of Canadian dollars to drive onto what looked exactly like a gutted Toronto subway train and ride for less than half an hour under the hopefully impermeable bedrock of the English Channel.

That heinously overpriced subway rides turned out to be a fitting harbinger to our holiday in England, or as we now call it, “How Can You People Actually Live Here With These Shocking Prices” Land?

I have never paid so many exhorbitant admissions to so many things. Not ever.

Sure, in Germany you have to give a scary old woman who follows you into the bathroom 30 Euro cents to take a leak, but in England we actually paid three pounds to look at a river. From a distance of seventy-five meters. You couldn’t go in it, couldn’t even dip your toe into the water. You could only walk down some steps, stand there on a tiny landing with a guard rail all around, and just look at it.

Before I go any further, let me pitch you on my idea.

Get rid of the government of the United Kingdom.

You can keep the Queen and all that. You can keep the House Of Lords and Parliament and Tony Blair, all of that can stay (well, maybe not Blair), but they will only be there for display purposes, like the animatronics in the Hall of Presidents. Because I suggest to you that England be folded into the Disney family of companies.

Don’t judge yet, let me finish.

Nothing will change, not much anyway, but for some key aspects that will make the tourists a lot happier, and therefore keep them coming through those turnstiles year after year, and stop them from complaining about the fees.

Like DisneyWorld, England desperately needs a single, pay one price, passport ticket.

Rather than have us all show up and trundle through the place, paying to see this rock or paying to see that picture of a rock, everyone can simply pay one set price at the airport and know in advance exactly what they’re getting.

And make it all-inclusive.

I don’t care if the admissions are tiered. In fact I think a scale of passport levels is a great idea. They could have a Boozehound’s Meat and Smokes Combo Plan on one end and the Stereotypical Historical Sites and Cheap Hotel Family Pass on the other.

This pricing strategy would go a long way towards stopping the inevitable problem that occurs when people from other lands go into stores or wickets for castles and go through that same dialogue that we experienced over and over again.

Scene:

In which an excited family just over the Chunnel sees signs for their children’s first castle and runs pell mell from the parking lot with excitement, faces aglow in the pale morning light, cheeks ruddy and eye alight, for they are in England, and they are ready for history to come alive!

Family- “Hi, we’d like a family pass to see Leed’s Castle.”

Admissions Attendant- “That will be forty-five pounds.”

Beat.

Family- “Excuse me?”

Admissions Attendant- “That will be forty-five pounds.”

Family- “In money?”

Maniacal laughter from the fiendish grandmother behind the wicket as family grits their teeth and struggles to mentally convert forty pounds into Canadian dollars.

Lots and lots of them.

Photo Essay: Experiments with Facial Hair

Faithful readers have already seen what happened to my head. I guess it was only my hair, not my actual head. That would have been far more disturbing, particularly in photos.

Those readers will also have astutely noted that I was in possession of quite the mess o’ face hairs in and around the mouthal area. This formation is known as the Van Dyke. I know this because of the ads that were in my early 70s comic books. Do you remember those ads? You could order X-Ray glasses, a fake nose, onion gum, a lot of great stuff that I never once ordered. A couple of the more intriguiing drawings amongst the many in those ads were the ones advertising the fake beards on offer. One was called the Van Dyke.

As a  boy, I swore that when I had saved up enough testosterone, I would use a small portion of it to grow a Van Dyke of my own. Part of this was because I thought the kool kat in the drawing was awesome and probably played the skins in a groovy jazz combo, and part of it was because I was a fan of the Dick Van Dyke show. The relationship between these two things is admittedly tenuous, but it was enough to work on me.

Thus, I grew a Van Dyke, and proudly I wore it around during the Christmas holidays, or Weinnacht as they call it here.

It was only a few weeks old, not  that bushy or scruffy.

There was a small problem alread noted with the increasing number of white hairs, but they were as yet outnumbered.

I was getting scared looks during visits to the Weinnachtmarkts, which was hugely rewarding. Thanks to my Man Hat, that Van Dyke and the deep, haunted circles under my buggy eyes that make me look insane, I was able to wander through the many German-clogged Christmas Markets we visited with no concerns about people inviting me over to their stand up tables for a hot mug of gluewein (spelling?) or deep friend everything. I was left alone.

The bad part was that this “left alone” thing began to bleed over into my married life.

One day my wife twitched as though startled, goggling at me like I had just magically appeared beside her. And had fangs.

“That beard makes you look old.”

“But I’m not” I said carefully. “I am only 41. So, lucky me, right?”

She narrowed her eyes and looked at me a long time.

She didn’t say anything else.

It didn’t help me look any younger having gobbets of applesauce stuck in my moustache. Or waving my cane when she walked across my lawn.

I was upset.

It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t ask to look like this.

It’s not like I was in the Human Being store trying on selfs and took this one so now you people are well within their rights to criticise my choices.

“What? You bought that face? Those limbs? And what’s with those goggle eyes? Come on! Didn’t you try them on first? They don’t even fit!”

I was going to have to shave.

It wouldn’t help my face any. In fact, it would probably hurt, because people would have to deal with so much more of it. It would be completely naked. Right out there for everybody to see.

But I would do it for my wife and I would do because I don’t want her to send me to a rest home. Not yet. At least not until I’ve had my hips done. Although, I would be able to get applesauce every day…

In any event, I have put together a selection of offensively anti-artistic photographs documenting my shave.

I am certain that many of you will shake your heads and curse these Internets that have allowed us to document such a thing, but you can’t have only the good stuff, or you wouldn’t know it was good.

Step 1. We could have lots of fun.

 Side note: The rest of my face may look old, but dang it if those lips don’t look a day over seventeen. 

Step 2: There’s so much we could do.

I was going for a kind of a Wolverine-meets-some-historic-Victorian-Canadian-Prime-Minister look here.  Kind of

Step 3: I can’t remember any more of the lyrics. Sorry, NKOTB fans.

What ever happened to the Village People, anyway?  

Step Four:

I call this one “The Clouseau.” 

Step Five: It’s only a moustache!

Step Six:  At this point I still hadn’t seen the back of my head. Remember that?

So, I was forced to go all the way to Step 7. I call this “The Shaved Ape.” This is the look I kept. But it won’t last long. My son refused to look at me for over an hour. He wore a towel over his head for protection.

I know what you’re thinking: why can’t they just get a graft off my back shoulders?

And damn you for thinking it.

Hugs and Kisses,

The Shaved Ape.

Auslanders: U.K. Dokey

My wife has a British passport. No, it’s not one of those black market ones Will Smith might get from a sarcastic guy in a wheelchair who has a lot of computers and hacks into the government to find out what’s really at Area 51. But that would be way cooler.

She got it the old-fashioned way – she inherited it. Her dad is British, for which we are muchly grateful.

 
Thanks to her British dad, it was a whole lot easier for us to come to the Germ. That’s what all the cool kids are calling it, by the way. The Germ. Saying the whole word is so last year. So I moved from the Can to the Germ, which, now that I see it written there, doesn’t sound as cool as I thought. It sounds like I should be washing my hands.   

When I went to the German consulate in Toronto with all my info and a bunch of naïve questions, the stern faced woman behind the plexiwindow couldn’t have looked less enthusiastic about me moving over for a year, and told me with an utter lack if interest in my response to take a number and get in line.

The line had forty people in it, all soaked with sweat, all holding screaming babies, and all of them looking like they were going to cry a lot when it was their turn to go to the wicket.

I almost started crying myself when she told me to join them, and I said maybe a little too loudly, “Didn’t you recently open the borders? Something about Glasnost?”

She couldn’t even summon up the energy to be offended. “Only EU citizens are allowed (insert official government gobbletyfart here).”

Millseconds – the right synapse fires – “Wait a minute. My wife has a British passport. Isn’t that EU?”

The woman behind the plexiwindow suddenly blossoms into a loving smile, and sends me to a special door inside which there is no line up. There’s a chair and air con. I sit on the padded expanse and wait to see how long it takes before somebody takes my order for chocolate milk or applies vigorous shiatsu.

Nobody offered shiatsu, but I did find out that it is a lot easier to move to the Germ for a year if you are married to my wife. Since I am currently the only person in that lofty position, you will have to stay in the Can, thanks for playing.

One of the lesser known side-effects of being married to my wife is that, a few days after you move to the Germ, you will immediately pack your bags for a trip to jolly old England.

If you have been correctly reading your program notes, you will no doubt remember the initial backstory to this adventure, which found our dear Wife in the northern English city of York for one year of university, or uni, if you want to fit in with them. (There are a lot of cute little nicknames like uni. Chocky bicky, prezzies, vacay, Becks, Macca, scrummy, Madge - probably hundreds more that I blocked out after I left because it tears through my brain like a ripsaw to hear them.)

However, after having spent that year there, and having been to England several other times in her youth to visit her dad’s family, my wife began to romanticize England to a degree that not even the most tea drinking, cricket watching, Ruth Rendell fan could muster up.

She remembers an England that certainly doesn’t exist. One that glimmers with a holy nimbus of ancient glory. She smells a charcoal briquette and thinks fondly of her granny’s house, salivates when she reads the newspaper, unable to stop smelling fish and chips that aren’t there, dreams of Bournevilles and Tesco all night, and yes, drinks afternoon tea with a bicky.

Her glorification of this island would be worthy of my mockery if she hadn’t somehow infected me with some small sliver of it.

I might even have done it to myself.

You see, going to England was my first trip alone, my first time visiting a place that had a history older than the parking lot in front of it. And I do love history, love castles, medieval warfare, crop circles, British bands, Scotch eggs, Alan Moore graphic novels and the Rendlesham U.F.O sighting.

I’m not as bad as my wife, but I too have built England up into something more than just a cute little tourist trap that smells of stale beer and deep fried everything.

As you could imagine, being so close to the U.K. and having been giving complete control over Mark and Anja’s car (up to 15,000 kms), there was no question that we would be going over for a few weeks. It was just a question of how.

Anja said that the only way to go is to take the ferry from Rotterdam.

I told Anja I would rather sit a bathtub of my own wee overnight than ride on that overnight ferry. Okay, I didn’t tell her that, and I wouldn’t rather do that. It would be cold and stinky and make me sick after awhile. But so would the ferry.

I can’t think of a ferry ride on the North Sea without having vivid flashbacks of ships going down in brutal chop after U-boat attacks, even though I was never on one of them, so by rights, I shouldn’t be able to flash back to things I never did. But I do.

Maybe I watched too many episodes of The World At War at too young an age, but just thinking about ferries on the North Sea makes me hunker down and pray we get rescued. No, I don’t expect a U-boat attack and I know the ship won’t go down, but I also know that I get seasick watching the kids on a swing set. Just holding a ticket to the Tilt-A-Whirl for somebody else makes my stomach roll. There is no way that I would be able to handle God knows how many hours on a ferry without some kind of intense chemical intervention, and remember, I don’t even drink.  

So, would we fly over on one of those cheap flights, rent a car, drive the snot out of it, drop it off and fly back, right?

No! We already had a car. Renting one would be like dumping your girlfriend to go out with her mom. Well, maybe not exactly like that, but you see what I mean.

You know where this is going.

We were going to be taking the Chunnel. There is no other way across.  

This would be a good place for me to Alt-Tab out of Word and hit Wikipedia for some choice background tidbits on this incredible engineering marvel. Like, did you know that the idea of an underground passage across the English Channel was first attempted in 1732 by Sir Reginald Mountebank, who had been quoted as saying, “I would rather sit in a bathtub of my own wee overnight than take the ferry.”

That clearly isn’t true, although I do seem to remember that a tunnel really was tried many times over the years. I have to admit that I didn’t Alt-Tab out, but only because I don’t trust that Wikipedia. Not since I found out my chupacabra pictures were fake.

And they looked so real.

If you want to go on the Chunnel, I recommend that you follow these simple steps to make it easier:

1. Buy a lottery ticket.
2. Win the lottery.
3. Book your ticket without feeling like you’ve been robbed.
4. Laugh at the prices that would have crushed your soul if you hadn’t won that lottery.

Foolishly, I forgot to do 1 and 2, and when my wife did 3, we found out that it was an even more ridiculous idea to book a Chunnel crossing on the first Monday after the 2006 World Cup Finals were over.

Apparently the Chunnel Booking Bosses are economics grads and all those drunken footie (cute nickname alert!) hooligans weaving back to England en masse reminds them of their first supply and demand lesson back in Ripping People Off 101.

We paid many hundreds of Canadian dollars to drive onto what looked exactly like a gutted Toronto subway train and ride for less than half an hour under the hopefully impermeable bedrock of the English Channel.

That heinously overpriced subway rides turned out to be a fitting harbinger to our holiday in England, or as we now call it, “How Can You People Actually Live Here With These Shocking Prices” Land?

I have never paid so many admissions to so many things. Not ever.

Sure, in Germany you have to give a scary old woman 30 Euro cents to take a leak, but in England we actually paid three pounds to look at a river. From a distance of seventy-five meters. You couldn’t go in it, not even dip your toe into the water. You could only walk down some steps, stand there on a tiny landing with a guard rail all around, and just look at it as if you were seeing the only one in England.

Before I go any further, let me pitch you on my bold new idea.

Get rid of the government of the United Kingdom.

You can keep the Queen and all that. You can keep the House Of Lords and Parliament and Tony Blair, all of that can stay, but they will only be there for display purposes, like the animatronics in the Hall of Presidents. Because I suggest to you that England be folded into the Disney family of companies.

Don’t judge yet, let me finish.

Nothing will change, not much anyway, but for some key aspects that will make the tourists a lot happier, and therefore keep them coming through those turnstiles year after year.

Like DisneyWorld, England desperately needs a single, pay one price, passport ticket.

Rather than have us all show up and trundle through the place, paying to see this rock or paying to see that picture of a rock, everyone can simply pay one set price at the airport and know in advance exactly what they’re getting.

And make it all-inclusive.

I don’t care if it’s tiered. In fact I think a scale of passport levels is a great idea. They could have a Heavy Drinkers/Meat and Smokes Combo Plan on one end and the Typical Historical Sites and Cheap Hotel Family Pass on the other.

This pricing strategy would go a long way towards stopping the inevitable problem that occurs when people from other lands go into stores or wickets for castles and go through that same dialogue over and over again.

“Hi, we’d like a family pass to see Leed’s Castle.”

“That will be forty-five pounds.”

Beat.

“Excuse me?”

“That will be forty-five pounds.”

“Pounds of what, because it’s not possible you could be talking about a monetary admission to this unwhelming castle.”

Zero percent laughter from the grandmother behind the wicket as we grit our teeth and mentally convert pounds into Canadian dollars.

Lots and lots and lots of them.

 It was only the beginning.

Yes, that was a long break.

Ok, I’m sorry.

For a number of days, there were no posts.

No tales of life in Deutschland.

No overly detailed reminiscences about my unsettling childhood.

No minutely detailed observations of aspects of life that nobody else notices or even really cares about.

No me.

For many of you, I imagine not having any me for a few weeks would be a nice break. Although, thinking about this makes me realize that if you wanted a break from me, you wouldn’t bother coming to my blog in the first place. And, if you are in fact reading this current document, you are one of those few wonderful human beings who don’t want a break from me at all. Presumably you are the kind of wonderful human being who wants more me. Lots of lots of Prime 100% Grade A Canadian Me.

Here is my gift to you.

Me.

Those of you who have clicked in for a look around may well wonder what the heck.

Where was I during those few missing weeks of Christmas holiday?

I would like to tell you that I was abducted by aliens, or perhaps German supermodels AND aliens, but I won’t.

I will instead tell you that my sister and her family came for a visit and that I was far too distracted to sit down and concentrate. Part of that distraction came from having the hot breath of prepubescent boys on the back of my neck as they skulked around behind me, hoping to see me play World of Warcraft.

I didn’t do much of that either. There just wasn’t time.

Having an unusual number of houseguests is a curious by-product of living here, and it makes me wonder:

Where the hell were all these people when we were at home?

I don’t mind cooking for guests and doing their dishes and entertaining them with sea shanties and tales of bold adventure, but I am going to have to draw the line at dressing and grooming. Sorry, Todd. You’re on your own in the bathtub.

My sister claims to have three children.

I can agree to a point.

Using conventional enumeration technologies, an objective observer would indeed come to the number three. However, using the Lobb Scale of Environmental Impact, the actual number of her children comes out to eight or nine, depending on how much candy is laying around the house.

But I’m not complaining about them.

And I’m not complaining about having guests all the time.

Not entirely.

It’s just something that takes some getting used to.

When you have disparate groups of people jammed into the same several hundred square foot environment for a sustained period of time, there is a kind of critical mass that is reached.

You have to make adjustments to your routines.

Your have to adjust your exercise bike riding times because you have to take people to Amsterdam or Oki Doki Land.

You can’t go to The Gerge (remember? The German Gym) because there’s a trip to Paris or supper in the Altstadt.

You can’t perform nude yoga on the cold purity of the ceramic tiled living room floor, because it makes the children cry.

You see?

All your Chi gets rerouted, and you find yourself out of your pattern, reeling with the changes to your normal existence.

And this happens every month or so.

I can give you a really good example of the bizarre effects of this kind of disruption to my Chi.

Recently, after a few weeks of growing a goatee (actually, it was a Van Dyke, but nobody remembers that name except me), I began to notice that, not only was my beard looking a bit shaggy, but the thin pasting of sparse growth on my middle-aged head was starting to get out of control.

It was time to cut my own hair.

I know that some of you will remember that, the last time I cut my own hair, I made some mistakes with the trim guide that fits onto the cutting surface. As a result, I ended with a bad patch that forced me to have a Mohawk for several hours.

This time, I was very careful.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to have some fun.

First I thought, “Hey! What would I look like if I was a monk?”Kind of pre comb-over.

Not so good. It was hard to tell what I had done.

So I clippered it down to the last part, the hardest part at the back, and there I stopped and wondering what it would be like if I started a mullet from this point.

It wasn’t dramatic enough to keep. If it had been longer, and if I’d had a NASCAR hat, maybe then, but not yet.

I stopped my work at this point to clean out the clippers and then started into the back of my head.

This area is hard for me because my eyes are on the front.

Basically, I can’t see anything that is happening behind me unless I turn, and due to the way that I turn, the back of my head is never there. It is somehow attached to the base of the turning radius or pivot point or something like that.

Suffice to say that, for about twenty minutes I tried to turn as quickly as I could and catch the back of my head still there, but it never was. It had moved away each time before my eyes could get there. Very frustrating.

I was forced to go ahead and clipper that section by feel alone.

After I clippered it up, I went downstairs and showed my wife and she agreed it was fine.

And then I turned around.

Her shriek was loud enough to hurt.

“What did you do!?”

“What? I cut my hair.”

“With what?”

I told her I used the clippers, just like every other time.

“Did you look at the back?”

“Why do you think it took me twenty minutes? I must have tried a hundred times. The back of my head is too fast. It gets away every time.”

She sent me back up with a hand mirror.

That’s when I realized that I had forgotten to put the trim guide back on. I had been using the clippers straight up. Marine style.

I would imagine that some of you will think that I am joking, that there is no way that I could screw up my haircut again after last time.

But I can prove to you that I wasn’t joking.

Nobody would do this on purpose.