londonbaby.us

My “Why I Love London” series continues, at the pace of a turtle.

Maybe there is a city that values its parks more than London, but I’ve yet to visit it… Here, there are fields, commons, heaths, and parks — I’m not sure the distinction, but a heath is huge, I believe, a field, is small, a park is medium size, and I don’t really know what a common is. I also think it’s on the big side. Whatever they’re called, they make our parks — Brooklyn parks specifically — look run down and nasty.

My favorite park is not Regent’s Park or Hyde Park or Hampstead Heath… It’s Clissold, which to me is like a mini Central Park, minus the highway of roller bladers, bikers and runners. There’s a mini “zoo” with bunnies, billy goats, chickens, and deer. A small aviary with doves, parrots and cockateals. A butterfly tunnel. Gnarled, ancient trees. A steeple that peeks out from between them. A winding creek caked with flourescent green algae. An outdoor kids pool. A rose garden. A fountain where you can drink water above while your dog drinks from the basins below.

There are ponds filled with ducks and turtles sunning themselves on logs. And, like all the parks here, even small ones, there is a cafe that is open every day, where you can get a latte, tea, breakfast, or lunch. Do these people know how to kick it in the park or what?

Most neighborhood parks also have “1 O’Clock Clubs” for moms (and dads, though you rarely see the dads) of kids ages 0-5. They’re within a gated section of the park, with tables and chairs and toys set out and a small fieldhouse for kids activities. It’s all very nice and friendly, but slightly scary if you don’t know anyone. Only recently have I ventured inside the gate at Highbury Fields, another park we’re close to, and that’s because I’ve made a friend — a fellow expat named Kay. Twice now, we’ve managed to go together with her girl Etta and Maxine, who eat and sleep while we talk about what it will like to leave London (because she’s going too…)

Clissold has been great for Rufus of course. Every morning, Mike walks him in the park with a handful of women who all happen to have black dogs. At home they’re known as “The Ladies in the Park,” or simply “The Ladies,” and these women — Bea, Peggy (from left, above) and sometimes Rose — are what make the Clissold walk such an essential ritual for Mike.

Well, them and Rufus, who’s become best friends with their dogs, too. Together they do a trick every morning called “Dog on a Log,” where they jump on this log together (from left that’s Bella, Rufus, and Blue.) This is actually Rufus’s only trick.

What is truly great about Clissold is that we live about five minutes from it. Being the lazy one, I turned down a lot of “Let’s go to the park” invites from Mike and Rufus. (I do take Maxine out, I swear, but two trips in one day is pushing it for me. Bad mommy.) But now in our last days here I’m always game for a walk in Clissold.

ok, so I’ve already skipped a day. I thought of doing two reasons for loving london in one post to make up for it, but fug it.

CBeebies is basically the BBC for kids, and it is AWESOME. Now, it’s not like I stick Maxine in front of the tube all day, but for about an hour spread throughout the course of the day (she takes monster naps, this one!), i turn it on so we can watch things like (I kid you not) a pretty host with an amputated arm. You may have heard of her–Cerrie Burnell. She claims she would rather have been born blond than with two hands. I’m straying from the point. What I love about CBeebies is that it’s forcing British kids to watch Cerrie, and accept that she’s normal. Though I suspect they’re just wondering where her other hand is! I doubt they’re running from their homes screaming, as some have claimed… In fact I know at least one mom (mum) here whose toddlers haven’t noticed her missing appendage.

CBeebies also has a show on it featuring a blind man. Yes, it’s true, I saw it (!) today. He was singing and walking in the street and all of a sudden he pulled out his walking stick and began asking “Do I go right or left?” Kudos to CBeebies for embracing all mankind!

As if that wasn’t reason enough, they also employ hot (but probably gay) hosts — to keep the stay at home moms company I suspect. They have a show called “Big Cook Little Cook,” which is the cutest kids cooking show ever, and a bunch of Claymation cartoons, which I admire because it must take so long to crimp the clay in a slightly different position, for every single tiny take.

And they have a show called “In the Night Garden,” by the creator of Teletubbies (yes, that’s a British show–who knew?), that is even more surreal and psychedelic. Iggle Piggle, above, is one of its “stars,” and who can resist a name like Iggle Piggle? Try to get that out of your head now. Go on! Iggle Piggle!

I’m not sure what American kids shows are like (I mean, aside from Sesame Street, which is called Sesame Tree here, and features muppets with British accents!). But I suspect that it’s nothing as amazing as CBeebies. I highly recommend clicking thru, just to see all the great characters that appear in our living room every day. I will really, really miss these guys, even if they’re just background noise to me.

This one is kind of a boring reason to love London, but it needs to be said. The buses rule. I have never ever embraced public transportation like I have here, because it simply works. You don’t get a free transfer from the “tube” to the bus like you do in NY. But you do have plenty of room to bring your stroller (or “buggy”) on and off the bus, and, when you ride the top of double deckers, you feel like you’re getting a London bus tour for free!

Once, I left my wallet on a bus. It was the first time I had been out of the house alone since Maxine was born, and I rushed to the farmer’s market to pick up a chicken, and rushed home. It must have fallen out of the bag, and I didn’t realize it was gone till the next day. Luckily, when I called the station, they actually had it in the lost and found drawer. I had to ride 40 minutes on the 19 bus to the end of the line — Battersea Bridge, which is pronounced Battasea — with Judi and Maxine, who was between three and five weeks old. So it her first trip on a bus. We picked up my wallet, ate at a pizzeria — Pizza Express, a chain here — and I breastfed in public for the first time. Good times! No, really, it was a very frightening time, not knowing what I was doing. I much prefer the six months and up period. At least she’s talking a little now and I can read her like a kid’s book.

We are leaving London. It’s true. On July 15, we will either be home, or in Zurich (though home seems more likely), and I am already missing London. This is ironic, because until April 1, I actually didn’t like London. I was upset that we’d moved, both because I was pregnant at the time and knew no one here, and because my only hope for gainful and fulfilling employment was an email called Brooklyn Based. Then I had Maxine, and I became obsessed with her, but I still hated London…until last month. Something kicked in — the threat of leaving I’m sure — and I began to appreciate how good I (we) have it here. So, to make sure I really appreciate my final days here, and to make an effort to really document this place, I’m going to blog once a day until we leave about one thing I love here. Starting with Our Garden.

It is no coincidence that I really started digging London when we moved to Kelross Road. It’s just down the street from Highbury Park, where our old place was, and the difference is night and day. On Highbury, our ceiling leaked, the shower screamed (really, every time you turned it on, it made an awful sound), the toilet was only capable of a “half” flush (and every time you sat down on it, it would slide a little to the right with a thump), and the windows were so drafty, and the heat so messed up, the upstairs would be an oven by 3 am, a time no one wants to walk downstairs and turn off the heat. Also: to get inside you had to walk up four flights of stairs, not pretty with a newborn).

Here on Kelross, we live in the garden flat of a beautiful, brick Victorian townhouse, and have a gorgeous country-in-the-city garden all to ourselves. There is a swing with wisteria vines wrapped around it. A winding path that leads you past the swing to a laundry line where I sometimes hang sheets to dry, and imagine I’m in living in an age before modern appliances (which is not so far from reality, here), and planted throughout are a bunch of strange, beautiful flowers I’ve never seen before, like these blue puffballs. Someone told me their name, but until I hear it again, I’ll just call them puffballs.

They’re now waning, joining a long list of plants that have already bloomed: daffodils, black tulips, a cherry tree, lilacs, some gorgeous bright yelow bush. The only thing left right now are pink and blue columbines, buttercups, and a mass of weeds, which happen to have pretty blue flowers on them.

Most nights, Mike barbecues on a charcoal grill out back. This is mainly because the weather is warm, and he enjoys it, but also because our oven still doesn’t work–the sockets in the apartment aren’t capable of carrying enough power for the new electric oven, which was installed days after we moved in. I’m still waiting for the management co. to replace it with a gas “cooker.” Yet as annoying as it is to live without an oven, I’ve learned to cook many more things on the (gas) stovetop, and I’ve almost perfected roast potatoes on the grill.

So, long story short, I love our garden.

This message is one you often see around here, at least in the public transport spots and the post office.

Yesterday I saw a poster in the underground of a london transport employee’s blazer that read “Not Meant to Protect Thin Skins” and then something along the same lines of “Don’t abuse our staff, we’ll arrest you if you do.”

Despite all these warnings, I’ve never once seen someone yell/knife/smack/assault a station agent or the post office guy. It makes you think that this was either once a big problem, or they are trying to prevent it from ever happening. And it seem to be working. It’s too bad, because now I want to see someone verbally abuse the guys at post office. “I said Overnight Delivery asshole! Does it look like I want Second Day?”

Well, resolutions be damned. I think of a post, I think to myself, I’m going to write this really quick update to the site and then I don’t because I’m checking my stats on BB or watching Lost (I hate it but I can’t stop watching it!) or feeding Maxine… which has taken a turn for the best! She took a bottle Sunday, finally, and we’ve been giving her one every night since. She didn’t do it in time for us to see Grace Jones in concert — which was going to be our first date night since she was born (and apparently it was a fabulous show). But it wouldn’t have mattered, because our nanny crapped out on us anyway.

Finding one has been a comedy of errors. We originally had the best nanny in the world lined up, a modern-day Mary Poppins with a degree in Child Psych. Then when Jody and Jan were here we ran into her in the park and she lifted up her arm… which was in a cast. She’s having some kind of surgery done to a ligament in her thumb and is out of commission till March.

Next… we find Lorna, a Scottish woman who’s got a great way with Maxine, and sang her these great Scottish songs to get her to bottle feed (which she did, somewhat successfully). She came for 2 days, then Dagny came to town, so I said we didn’t need her, then the following week (last week) she called to say it wasn’t going to work out. She happened to split the care of a family with our own Mary Poppins mentioned above — small world — who then quit because of her hand, and now Lorna is going to watch that family full time.

So the search is back on for a woman to come 3 times a week for 3 hours at a stretch. Not much, but enough to get shit done. The hunt did lead us to one very interesting girl (who didn’t work out), but who did graffiti… with moss (look under Design, then Skin or Sporeborne). She and a friend took slabs of moss off gravestones at a nearby cemetery for WWI and WWII veterans and their families, and, with wheatpaste or something, affixed stenciled moss words to walls. This is how it looked when freshly applied…

and this is what we saw:

The cemetery is called Abney Park, and it’s filled with matter-of-fact descriptions of how these men lost their lives. Can you read this? It says he was killed by a bomb thrown from a zeppelin in 1915. Think he saw that coming?

That was one recent adventure. When Dagny came to town, we didn’t do a lot of sightseeing — which was fine by me, her and Maxine. Well, we did see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, which is a ridiculous, ostentatious ceremony that now includes a marching band playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” (wtf?!)  But for the most part we acted like we were roommates (there’s still a bed for you here Dag!). We hung around the apartment, set Dagny up on facebook (this was a contender for her profile pic, but you wouldn’tve been able to read the title of the book…),

and got Maxine a passport. Yes, a passport. I suppose the purpose is to protect against baby napping, not terrorism, but the fact that it’s good for five years is hilarious. She will look nothing like this then! And she can’t even sign her own passport! But it is cool that her birthplace is in the UK. And no, she doesn’t have dual citizenship… only we grant citizenship at birth (not sure of other countries that do the same in fact). And sadly, she will never be president unless we amend some important legal doc. There’s time yet.

So… life with Max has been great lately. She sleeps like a champ (last night, 8 pm - 5 am!!!) and she now takes a bottle and she is so cute it’s hard to stop looking at her. What more can I ask for? A little more ease in doing things around town with her would be nice, but that will take years I’m sure. We did find one great, cheap thing to do here — part of a new effort called “one new thing,” in which we attempt to do one new thing in London every weekend. We checked out the new Saatchi gallery, which is more like a museum. The current exhibit is group show of artists from the Middle East, and I had to breeze through it because Maxine was fussing. But some of the photos and installations were great…

like this one, called “Ghost” by a French-Algerian woman named Kader Attia. It’s supposed to be the separate room in a Mosque where Muslim women pray, and it’s very spooky, made entirely of tinfoil, and slightly reminiscent of a room full of steel Donald Judd boxes.

Outside the gallery, a gourmet food market is set up on Saturdays, and Mike found a Jamaican beef patty and I tried a meat pie finally (would you try something called a “meat pie”? I suppose “chicken pot pie” sounds equally weird but I’m familiar with those…) from a company called Pieminster that was excellent. The food here gets a bad rap. There’s plenty of gourmet treats, like the raw milk cheeses at La Fromagerie, the cheese shop we live five paces from. It’s the best in London, and we’ve been eating lots and lots of aged, stinky, triple cream, washed in beer, wine, rubbed with truffles, you name it cheeses…

Of course, as you may have read or seen in the news, London was hit with its biggest snowstorm in 18 years on Monday, and while Maxine may only have registered that her surroundings were more “white” than usual, it was crazy to see snow on the palm trees… yes, they have palms here, because it’s usually a very temperate place. Ah, climate change! The storm brought every kid and parent out of hiding and into the parks where they built way more snowmen than you’d see after a big snow in New York, where this stuff is old hat.

The snow was such an anomaly for Londoners, there was a segment on the BBC yesterday morning in which a traffic cop explained how to brush snow off a car. I told this to our dogwalker Mark, who laughed but agreed that some people needed the help — he saw a woman yesterday in a housecoat and slippers brushing snow off her car with a wooden spoon. (wait, that sounds like me!)

We’re expecting more tomorrow… it’s like preparation for our trip to New York next week, my first time flying with Maxine. I suspect she will handle it better than I think — and if not, I’ll just be that woman with the crying baby on the plane. Funny how it all comes around, like a boomerang.

Red Fox, Blue Socks, Maxine Talks from Maxine Didovic on Vimeo.

If only I could figure out how to edit using iMovie, I’d take the last 30 seconds out of this video. (In fact, when it gets to “What happens to the Red Fox?,” you can rest assured there’s nothing more to see.) But the beginning’s pretty hilarious!

In two parts, video proof that we still go out from time to time:

Maxine Gets Thai Part I from Maxine Didovic on Vimeo.

and Part II, with special guest appearances from Chloe, Gavin and Camilla:
Maxine Gets Thai Food Part II from Maxine Didovic on Vimeo.

Maybe it’s because I’m in London, but lately I’ve been jonesing for Abbey Road — specifically “You Never Give Me Your Money,” and the whole stream of songs it segues into… (really the whole album is just a stream of songs that blend into each other… Carry That Weight, Golden Slumbers, Polythene Pam, Mean Mr. Mustard, Sun King.) But I left the cd at home, and rather than buy a new copy, I just went to the library, where I also found the Brazilian band CSS, The Roots of Acid Jazz, Antonio Jobim, a Devendra Banhart album, and The Very Best of Cat Stevens (for Mike — he’s randomly on a Cat Stevens kick. Feel free to tease him about it).

How is this possible? Unlike Brooklyn, where you might find one copy of “The Sound of Music” soundtrack sitting on the CD rack at the Central Public Library, my local Islington branch has an incredible CD collection, which I am slowly burning, disc by disc. Problem is I always forget to take them back on time, and last time I forgot, I had to pay 20 pounds in late fees. Ouch. Anyway, I made a mix of the “songs you can hear at the Islington Library” here>>

The Goils

It could be that the Jersey Girls made me think of Abbey Road, since it was one of the staple albums that played like a loop as we drove around the suburbs (stoned) in Jody’s yellow Volvo. They came to town two weeks ago, to meet Maxine and just kick it for a week, something we haven’t done in god knows how long. We spent many of the nights indoors, watching 30 Rock on DVD (thanks Ann + Glenn!!!).

My mom made me hold these chopsticks.

But by day we did as much as one can with a newborn (you can see more pix here) — like go to Kew Gardens (note: not so fun in winter), see Shakespeare’s Globe Theater (guess what? it was rebuilt by an American), get dim sum and see the Annie Leibovitz exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery (it was organized by the Brooklyn Museum but I didn’t see it there). She blended personal photos with her public work, so you got to see, for instance, that the year she started taking pictures for Vogue, she learned that Susan Sontag — her partner, which I didn’t know — had just been diagnosed uterine cancer.

Photograph © Annie Leibovitz.

Maybe it wouldn’t be as poignant or as interesting to the onlooker if her partner wasn’t as famous as Sontag, but it was still novel to see someone’s private life playing out side by side with her public work. It felt very honest and confessional, and not in a self indulgent way. It informed her work. I loved it. And, after months of looking at images online as tools to illustrate emails, it felt great to get engrossed in “real life” photography I could stare at on a wall.

It also felt good to think about things other than… How can I get Maxine to bottle feed? (I now realize I didn’t attempt it earlier than 6 weeks because that’s the advice I got here, from midwives and lactation experts. Fuckers. If I was in NYC with all my Type-A mom friends I would have known to get it down when she was under 3 weeks…)

She’s doing great in all other aspects, though like sleep. The girl can sleep a good 4-5 hours a night now, and I’ve found a carrier that doesn’t kill my back like the Baby Bjorn, so it’s easier to take her out and about. Parents to be, Friends/Relatives of Parents to be, don’t buy the Bjorn. Get the Ergo Baby. It looks gay and all the people wearing it on their site look like Germans on holiday, but it feels great, like a good backpack that puts the bulk of the weight on your hips (no they didn’t pay me for this endorsement). Very smart. And I can see Maxine’s face, unlike the Bjorn which basically pointed her head down.

Ok, last thought, to bring this long-winded email back to its point. I also love Sunday Roasts at the pub. It’s like a Thanksgiving-type feast, heavy on the carbs and liberal on the gravy, with tons of vegetable sides, only all the pubs serve it every Sunday starting at noon. We’ve tried a few now, and have found three that are outstanding. The Compton Arms used to be our “local” — it’s a tiny, very authentic pub (ie., everyone knows each others’ names, they play football on the flat screen, and they serve fish and chips — which is like having buffalo wings on the menu at a real sports bar). But they don’t like families/screaming babies, so we’ve been trying pubs in the stroller-filled hood near us, Stoke Newington, and so far have loved The Three Crowns and the Londesborough, where we ate today. At each one you get a serious meat and potatoes meal, with plenty of fresh “veg” thrown in for 8 to 14 pounds. It’s very basic, and tastes good even when you’re not hungover. Or when your baby spits up all the milk you just fed her onto the floor, and a lesbian couple moves away from you because she’s crying and you can’t console her. (To their credit, one of them came to my aid and tried to help me clean up the mess, and even wipe off my shoulder, but at a certain point it just became to much for them and for me. So I left the pub early in a cab with Max while Mike paid the bill and walked Rufus home. But we went out dammit!!! And for awhile, Maxine was having fun, too.)