London Calling

Now get this
London calling, yes, I was there, too
An' you know what they said? Well, some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
And after all this, won't you give me a smile?
London Calling
I never felt so much a' like, a' like, a' like...

The Clash, London Calling 1979

We went to London for Thanksgiving to meet Jeanne, who flew in from Florida, and to celebrate with Steph & Andy and Luke's five cousins -- all new citizens of the U.K.

"Lucky," Luke said, bemoaning his own misfortune. He was born in London and descends from a number of Brits, including my grandfather, Fred Burgess, but that's not going to help him on the citizenship front. London's calling, but he'll have to find his own path back one day. [Photo note: Despite Natty's protests, Jeanne and I took pictures of him in his school uniform.]

I went out one night with Paddie and our friend Simon to a Thai restaurant in Chelsea. At the end of dinner, I checked in with Jeff. They were still at Steph's, so I decided to walk back along Fulham Road.

I thought about my first trip to London, summer of 1983, when a college friend, Lisa B., and I were making our way to Poznan, Poland as part of a program at UF. We flew to London via People Express (I loved that airline), spent a few days visiting friends (one we barely knew, the other we'd just met), and then took a long train across Europe to Poland. We were on a very tight budget.

Our London friends introduced us to the Camden Palace, a hard-driving new-new nightclub where the beat ricocheted off the walls right along with the punk rockers. After a few hours I realized I hadn't seen Lisa B. for a while. She was outside crying. "I couldn't find Jesus in there," she said. Neither could I, but I hadn't been looking.

Twenty, twenty, twenty four hours to go

I wanna be sedated

Nothin' to do,

No where to go

I wanna be sedated

Ramones, I Wanna be Sedated, 1978

Later, in the early '90s, during the CME days, we'd go to a club, The Limelight, in an old church in Soho with the TV people from MGM, Warner Bros. etc. Back then, Jeff and I went to the theatre and had dinner at almost midnight, jostling for a place with the other late-nighters filling the city streets.

On this trip the only club we visited was where Josh plays rugby on Sunday mornings. And instead of the Camden Palace, we talked about the Crystal Palace where Ben's been invited to try out for a place on the football team.

We did dance and sing..- with Stephanie and Quentin at his music class one morning.

Let's dance

Put on your red shoes and dance the blues

Let's dance

To the song they're playin' on the radio

David Bowie, Let's Dance, 1983

We tromped around the theatre district in search of fun and found it...at Funland, of course. Who knew there's a multi-level facility right on Picadilly Circus with bowling alleys, pool tables and arcade games to boot? We even heard the Clash... at the 02 arena, speakers blaring, lights flashing, as Andy Murray and Rafa Nadal entered the court to play one of the best matches of the season, maybe of their careers --London calling, reverberating through the dome.

I walked through Chelsea that night and across much of Fulham. I'm not one to wallow in nostalgia, but a panorama of London past, complete with soundtrack, accompanied me along the dark street. Finally, in the distance I saw Jeff and Luke, heading back to the apartment we'd rented for the week. They didn't see me at first, and I watched them, happy, that in a moment, I'd return to my present.

If we took a holiday

Took some time to celebrate

Just one day out of life

It would be, it would be so nice

Madonna, Celebrate, 1983

The rest of the week went by in a rush of seeing friends, old and new, spending time with family, enjoying Thanksgiving together again, and this time with a turkey as well as the Thanksgiving Fish.

As for Luke, he'll find a way back to London. There's a part of him already there.

You can't return to a place you never left.

Deep in the heart

Deep in the heart of this place

Deep in the heart

Deep in the heart of this place

U2, Deep in the Heart, 1987

Not the 6th

When we lived in Paris, we lived on the Left Bank in the 6th arrondisement. Paris divides into 20 different sections, arrondisements, and we fell in love with ours. When we're back in Paris, we make our pilgrimage to the street where we lived. Of course, we had to take Charlie this summer.

We used to know an Englishman with a passion for a jazz club in Chelsea called the 606. In his mind, no food was as good, no club as exciting. He often muttered after tasting a bite of food or looking around a place, "It's not the 6." Jeff and I have, only half-mockingly adapted this phrase in comparing other places to our former abode.

A couple of weeks ago, we were in Paris and we didn't visit the 6th. We didn't even step foot on our preferred Left Bank. We'll correct this anomaly when we're back in December with JL, DR & GRLs....but it made me realize that we no longer own any part of Paris. [We never actually "owned" our apartment, but it surely belonged to us for a time.]

This is sad, but it gives us freedom to explore other parts of the city, something we didn't do as often as we might have done when we lived there. After all, they're not the 6th.

On our recent trip, we spent a fair amount of time in the 11th & 12th arrondisements. The Place de la Bastille, the grand square that's actually a noisy, chaotic traffic circle, is part of both districts. As the name suggests, this was the site of the prison fortress that protestors stormed in their violent search for firepower at the start of the French Revolution. Today a tall monument commemorating a later revolution, the July Revolution of 1830, presides over the occasional rallies and demonstrations and continuous barrage of traffic.

The bubble-wrapped, determinedly modern opera house, developed by President Mitterand to bring classical music to the masses, hulks behind the July Column.

Despite the noble intentions, the Place exudes something seedy along with the exhaust. (Definitely not the 6th.)

That didn't stop Luke and Roy from enjoying a tattered strip of carnival and arcade games all decked out for Christmas. Or the locals and tourists who swarm the Marche de la Bastille that occupies the Blvd. Richard Lenoir every Sunday.

Luke's photos capture the color and vibrancy of the market better than my words could.

Blvd. Richard Lenoir is built over the Canal St. Martin, a waterway forged through the city in the early 1800s, on order of Napoleon Bonaparte, to bring water to the masses. [Maslow would appreciate the shift in priorities for the masses from water to opera.] The canal totals 4.5 km in length, 2 km of which runs underground. You can take a boat ride down the canal that includes a plunge into the tunnel under the Place and the marche. We opted to walk along the wide, tree-lined boulevards built over the canal with Louise & Phil and girls who came to join us for the weekend.

Our route took us through a large swath of the 11th, past parks and playgrounds, until we reached the locks of the canal where we watched a boat emerge and rise up from the pressure and energy of the water rushing into the confined area.

Across the way in the 12th arrondisement, we witnessed a sensational rise of another kind at

the quarterfinals of an ATP tennis tournament. First we watched Roger Federer coolly dispatch his opponent, but the real show began when Paris' own Gael Monfils took the stage to battle Andy Murray. The crowd banged steel drums, chanted and even performed an awkward rendition of The Wave to show support for Monfils who responded with leaps, twirls, dynamic, and incidentally winning, tennis. His posse, a group of young men and women dressed for the club scene, led the charge. [Lucky Luke happened to be in the right place for autographs from both players.]

Roger Federer is already a tennis legend, but the tennis world has discovered an emerging superstar in Monfils. And we've discovered an entirely new Paris. Not the 6th, but that's not all bad.

Ode to Olive Oil

"I spent hours this weekend picking olives in my garden," my friend Michelle remarked the other day. She and her husband have a beautiful house on a hill overlooking Grasse, complete with the ubiquitous olive trees that populate this region.

(Note the ladder propped against one of the trees.)

November marks the start of olive season, so why not harvest your olives to make your own olive oil? Michelle proudly displayed her buckets of black and green olives mixed together. All olives start out green and turn black as they ripen but apparently you don't have to separate them for the purpose of making olive oil.

We met at Moulin de la Brague, the third largest olive mill in France, where the same family has been extracting oil from olives for over 150 years.

One of the mill workers weighed Michelle's olives, and then, to our surprise, threw them into a communal bin with lots of other olives.

Posted signs warned that inferior or damaged olives will not be accepted, but we didn't need to worry.

Michelle's olives passed the test, even if her outlay was a bit small by local standards. The olive growers milling about the moulin waiting for their lots to be weighed, their olives to be squashed, or their payments to be processed, had typically brought a few crates of olives.

While the olives were being washed, crushed (along with their pits), mixed and pressed, we wandered around looking at the old and new machinery and learning about the process of making olive oil -- an ancient art dating back thousands of years.

Homer called it "liquid gold" and the early Egyptians credited their goddess, Isis, with teaching them how to cultivate olive oil. Greek mythology claims that Athena won the city of Athens after bestowing an olive tree on the city's residents -- a gift deemed more worthy than those offered by Poseidon.

I was grateful to receive a gift of my own that day. Michelle's first efforts at olive harvesting resulted in four slim bottles of freshly pressed oil. And being a wonderful friend, she rewarded me with one of the bottles.

On my way home from Opio, I stopped at our favorite boulangerie for a fresh baguette, and at the Oasis des Fruits for tomatoes and avacados. Et voila! Lunch is served.

"Freshest I've ever tasted," Jeff effused between bites.

There's something about the taste of good olive oil that inspires us all. But instead of penning my own ode to olive oil, I'll share part of that written by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda (no relation to the Czech writer, although Pablo did choose his pen name, Neruda, to honor Jan).

Ode to Olive Oil

In
The dry
Olive Groves
Where
Alone
The blue sky with cicadas
And the hard earth
Exist
There
The prodigy
The perfect
Capsules
Of the olives
Filling
With their constellations, the foliage
Then later,
The bowls,
The miracle,
The olive oil.