It’s probably been proven – or just listed as one of
Murphy’s Laws – that the best way to ensure that one is compelled to do
something is to declare categorically that one will not do it. Somehow I
failed to realize that, having flow in to Heathrow, I would have to either
spend a great deal of money to change my port of departure or else fly out of Heathrow. So I found myself
for the second time this month lugging my trans-Atlantic suitcase through the underground,
thankfully sans cold this time, but blessed with a
semi-torrential rain that thoroughly drenched me and my case while running from train to
tube to train again.
The plan was to land in the U.S. on Friday morning in time to be whisked to
a wedding rehearsal, then the actual wedding on Saturday, a hurried packing and
disposal of gifts on Sunday, and be whisked back to the Airport by lunchtime in
order to land in Norwich around breakfast, to hopefully spend the day acquiring
groceries and working through the week’s assignments in time for workshop on
Tuesday. Everyone I’ve mentioned the trip to goes a little goggle-eyed at the
timetable, but I get so keyed up over flying I haven’t really considered the
thing in its entirety. My job is to get through customs, stay upright, sober,
and dry-eyed through the ceremony, change out the contents of my suitcase as
quickly as possible – in retrospect, leaving all of my warm clothes behind with
the intention of bringing them over on this trip was a trifle misguided – and
get to the airport once again with my baggage of appropriate weight and,
hopefully, containing nothing exceptionally illegal. Though I look forward to the day that I can no longer fly and am therefor set free to write an essay on things I've not had impounded from my checked luggage, but that's for another time...
And now a word about food.
We generally think of presents as showy things: jewelry,
clothes, exotic or expensive or big things, at the very least impressive things, but the best presents
seem to be the smallest. The exotic seems to be available anywhere, but the mundane is not, or not affordably at least. Wine gums. Crunchy bars. Polos. The Swedish
cider Kate and I grew addicted to while we lived in Reading. Stick-on Soles. Marmite.
Marmite. More Marmite. A massive tin of ghee that will hopefully be let through
customs because it’s the closets thing to butter my little sister can eat and
at home it’s too expensive. 99p tubes of henna paste, also for my sister,
because she can’t eat candy.
While I was here for undergrad my entire house, gathered
around the kitchen table for dinner or just to drink, would wax poetic about
the junk food of home. Kraft dinner. In–n–Out burgers. Real Mexican food. Root
Beer. Bad Chinese thick with cornstarch and swimming in MSG. Oreos. Strawberry
Twizzlers. The last I craved so badly I actually e-mailed the company, after
failing to find a way to mail order the candy, asking if they distributed to the
UK, if they might one day distribute to the UK, if they would perhaps consider
dropping a ton or so of Twizzlers – not Red Vines, the two taste nothing alike
– on 153 Whiteknights as an act of mercy to a poor student. They never got back
to me.
Going home only lengthened the list of treats to miss. We whined about the
lack of cider, or cider that didn’t taste like apple juice, water, piss,
vinegar. No more pasties. No more coke or candy made with real sugar. No more English
candy, full stop. Ribena. Digestives. Toasted brie and bacon sandwiches smothered in
cranberry sauce bought in a train station halfway between Reading and some
soon-to-be-explored town. Real bacon. Tea so strong it formed a scum on the surface of the
cup. Lychee juice. Nine different types of cream, and goat’s milk
whenever I wanted it. Being able to afford Halal lamb, fresh fish, and French
cheeses on a student’s budget. In the year and a half that it took me to get
back to England, I would frequently dream about chocolate-covered flapjacks
from the BP near the University and bottles upon bottles of fizzing, sweet
elderflower and lime cider.
Sometime in the first months after we’d landed, when
everything was still a little strange, a little off-center, David offered to
make me breakfast. It might have been three in the afternoon, or three in the
morning - and frequently was, as there’s something about undergrad that makes
everyone an insomniac and scrambled eggs especially appealing. Regardless of
time of day, he always made me breakfast, because in the Venn diagram of life,
“things Sara can eat” and “things a 19 year old male will have in his house”
have a very small overlap, at the time containing almost exclusively the value
“omelets.” And omelets, to me, are exclusively a breakfast and especially a
Sunday occurrence.
The first one had rosemary, and marjoram, and garlic in the
egg, and in the middle Stilton and mushroom and onion. And corn.
We - my house of American students - had noticed the tendency before: corn on pizza, and in
the sandwiches at the BP, and on offer to be put into pretty much anything you
wanted, and we all thought it was pretty weird. But you never complain about
the contents of a free omelet, especially a free omelet that is being made for
you while you sit like a princess on the counter, dripping on the omelet maker’s kitchen floor
because it is pissing down outside, interrupting his work because his house is
halfway between the train station and your house and you’re just too wet and
tired and miserable to go a step farther.
Omelet makers tend to have a maternal
streak, so coming to them soaked and tired and mentioning that you haven’t
eaten all day should get you satisfactorily clucked over, wrapped in a blanket
while your socks dry on the radiator, and sat down somewhere warm.
I don’t say it because it was free: Stilton-mushroom-sweetcorn omelet is tasty. And at the time it was one of the weirdest things I’d
eaten - this being the week after I’d roasted a lamb’s brain whole in our communal
oven and dragged Kate to the local Japanese joint to keep me company while I sucked down sea
urchin ovaries raw. It was a cultural difference. We came from the U.S., land
of corn syrup and cornstarch and corn derivative in pretty much everything, but
we couldn’t warm to the idea of fresh corn on pizza.
The afternoon before I flew back for the wedding, in between plowing away at “Heart of
Darkness” for the seventh time and reading my workshop pieces, I nipped out for
a sandwich. A salami sandwich because salami must have crack in it, with all
the salad they had on offer because I’d been lax recently about getting my five
a day. Halfway through, a kernel of sweet corn tumbled out onto my skirt, and I
remembered that first omelet. At some point in the time since, corn on everything had stopped being odd. It had been obtrusively sweet, slightly crunchy, that first time.
This time, I hadn’t even registered its presence on the salad bar.
When thrust into a new environment, sometimes the only comfort to be had is knowing that, sooner or later, it will all be familiar.
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