Home Is Where The Heart Is

[Click here for Part I]

My sister’s bathroom does not have an overhead shower, thus I had to “shower” by kneeling in the bathtub and rinsing with a hand-held nozzle. It was a lot like trying to fill a bucket with a teaspoon and gave my sister ample material to inform everybody that it took me “three hours to get ready!” As I’ve said a hundred times, I don’t know where she gets the tendency for such gross exaggeration. Another thing about my sister is that she likes to chat a bit. Which is to say that were there an Olympic category for non-stop talking, my sister would be the proud winner of numerous gold medals. More than once I had to entreat her to TAKE A BREATH!

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[Pretty much the only time my sister stops talking is when she’s texting . . . trust me, she even talks in her sleep!]

There is nobody quite like your big sister to bring your ego to a crashing tumble. For example, upon seeing me without a shred of make-up: “Oh my god, you’re a spitting image of Mum!” Granted, our mother is, and always has been, beautiful, but . . . she’s now 71-years old.

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[Our Mum in Cornwall {think: King Arthur and Camelot}
circa 1970-something. Why, yes, those legs do run in the family!]

Regarding how I look in my reading glasses: “Oh, you look so smart . . . like a … like a … secretary!” Should I mention that I dropped out of law university? At the bank: “This is my SISTER!!! … She’s a foreigner though.” ~sigh~

I finally met my nephews and niece in person and was thrilled to discover shared familial traits. I did find myself having a hard time trying to understand my niece’s accent as she verges on a Cockney tone. My sister, on the other hand, having been formerly married for many years to a Northerner, speaks with a weird blend of Northern and Southern English accents. My own accent, while still distinctly English, carries slight overtones of California and Texas. My nephews and parents, like me, all speak with a relatively accent-less “normal” English accent. In other words, I can understand them quite clearly. My oldest nephew, Ryan’s partner [or as we used to say, “girlfriend”], Cat, is from Wales and she has a lovely lilting accent. I actually found myself code shifting* a lot when talking to my sister and/or niece!

[*British people can to some degree temporarily ’swing’ their accent {and particularly their vocabulary} towards a more neutral form of “standard” English at will, to reduce difficulty where very different accents are involved, or when speaking to foreigners. This phenomenon is known in linguistics as code shifting.]

One night Ryan and Cat had us over for Fish Pie — which, typical to British meals, is not a pie at all. Rather, it consists of a mixture of codfish, prawns, and mashed potatoes . . . and I cannot begin to describe how much I regretted having taken my sister to lunch in town during which we shovelled down Jacket Potatoes, because the Fish Pie was absolutely delicious and I didn’t have near enough room left in my stomach to make a pig of myself!

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While we did normal family things such as play cards and eat Fish & Chips, it was all very new to me, having been away for such a long time. I found myself delighting in the simplest things such as shopping in a supermarket – despite that the other shoppers had no sense of direction whatsoever and I was highly amused by the lack of streamlined smoothness that I generally encounter in American supermarkets. Throughout my visit, I was introduced to a stream of my sister’s friends, most of whom I would probably not recognise again if I had their photo in hand.

My sister was bound and determined to tour me around every square inch of the town in which she lives [Colchester, Essex]. It is, indeed, a beautiful little town, with both a modern section that includes the ubiquitous fast food restaurants – Digression Alert: I have never seen such ridiculously long queues for fast food in my entire life; apparently the term “fast” food takes on a different meaning in the UK – and chain stores, and also sections of historical quaintness. It was quite amusing to walk through a tiny lane with equally tiny shops selling jewellery and artwork only to stumble across a kinky clothing shop. My mind had a hard time wrapping itself around the contrast!

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Another thing that blew my mind is the narrowness of the streets. Cars have to park halfway onto the pavement and there is simply not enough room for cars going in opposite directions to pass one another without one of the vehicles tucking neatly and nimbly into a space between the parked cars. It was both scary and fascinating to witness how smoothly this was accomplished.

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My sister’s best friend, Andy, took us to lunch one day at a charming rustic restaurant named Milsoms. The two of them have been friends for something like 25 years! I can certainly see why, as Andy is polished, charming, and a perfect gentleman. Lynne and I did our best to flirtatiously break his composure, but he held fast.

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One weekend night, we girls dressed for a night of dancing at Lynne’s social club in Stoke by Nayland. Having not been out dancing in Houston for roughly six weeks, I am embarrassed to admit that I was actually winded after a couple of songs. However, I gamely stayed on the dance floor for several more. I turned out to be quite the hit amongst the old fogeys, which, I might mention wasn’t that difficult. It also led to my being introduced to another slew of Lynne’s friends, whose names I almost immediately forgot, and a couple of slow dances with a very handsome 60-year old English gentleman who broke my heart when he announced that having just met my sister he intended to marry her. Story of my life. Lynne was all a-glow and proud as punch at my alleged dancing skills. She insisted that everybody in the place was impressed and were all asking who I was. Granted, several of the men asked to be introduced to me — probably as an excuse to talk to her. She said she’d never seen moves like that . . . that’s a, uh, compliment, right?

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On another evening we joined one of my sister’s many admirers for a drink at a nearby pub. By “nearby” I mean that it was only about a 45-minute drive. Pretty much everything we did involved a 45-minute drive. Probably because of all the nipping in and out of parked cars and spinning around roundabouts. Our barmaid was named Nicola and she was quite delightful. She even provided us with a dictionary so I could prove my point that “see-saw” does, in fact, have a hyphen even if you don’t use it when playing Scrabble at the pub. Fortunately, nobody objected to my singing along to Amy Winehouse as an attempted diversion during the Scrabble game. One would think that as a writer I would not need such diversionary tactics, but you try spelling something brilliant with three “i’s”!! The pub had quite an interesting name; at least to my juvenile sense of humour:

Moving right along, here are some thumbnails of random shots from around Colchester:

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The battery in my faithful Timex watch died during my third day in England. It was as though Time itself wanted to stand still . . .

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To Be Continued . . .

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 8:08 am and is filed under Humour, Reflective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.