Getting Loose

Violet

prepared a wonderful meal. Many different courses.   Beautiful terraced cottage.  A beautiful personality that just fills the room with light!

She also had a wonderful pudding for dessert, and finished off with a cheese plate of three wonderful cheeses. Oh, my, I hope I did not look too much like un porc!

Of course we finished with tea . . . that's hot tea to your Yanks.

Culinary Delights

There are some great restaurants in the Ealing area. 

Here are two at which we have eaten and enjoyed very much:

Papaya

Monty’s

RI

I’ve been a Rotarian for years. 

And I had the most gosh-awful, difficult time trying to figure out where the Rotary Club of Hanwell & Northfields  met in order to attend a make-up meeing.  As it turned out, Google was spot on.  But looking at the addresses of the houses on the street, the address was way off.  On top of that the door was locked and you had to swipe some card to get in.  I couldn’t believe it.

After that after having travelled all that way by the E2 bus and having had to walk an entire block! 

I had to wait for a chap in an electric wheel chair to get into the parking lot and ask him if he knew where the Rotary Club met. 

He pointed right to the building beside which I was standing!

I said, “How on earth do you get in if you are not a member?”

“You see that fence over there?  Go around that fence and there is another door and it is open.”

I could not believe it.  I thought these Rotarians really do not want any visitors.  Where are the signs?  How are you supposed to know this?  Do you have to be an “insider” to know your way around?

Believe me, the parallel was not lost on me as to what visitors face at so many churches!

Once I could run through the hoops, the Rotarians were a congenial lot.  The food appeared home cooked.  There was lots of it for 11£.

I remarked how it was strange to me that they met at night, for in the USA they predominantly meet at noon or some at breakfast, but that I could not think of one who met at night!

They told me they were primarily a social club; they were not trying to make business connections per se.  There were lots of inside jokes. 

I find I have to listen harder with some people to wade my way through their accent.  I find it too easy to tune it out as if I were in a foreign country where unless you are the person being addressed, you tend to let the chatter pass you by.

I had a banner to trade with them from my own club.

“Oh, yes.  Right.  Well you see, we don’t do the banner bit anymore.  But we will make a 5£ donation to the Rotary Foundation in your honour.”

I thought, “Hmmm.  Not bad.”

The speaker spoke of Dechenne's muscular dystrophy.  I had never heard of it.  1 in 3500 boys is born with it, and even fewer girls.  It was a sobering speech.

The meeting lasted almost 2 hours!  But it was very interesting.

Between 3 & 5 p.m.

We went to an afternoon tea.  It was everything I had ever thought it might be.  Ours started at 3:30 p.m.

Ken and Hazel took us to a 4 star hotel at Runnymede.   Now you Americans, without double clicking on the name, do you remember what happened there?

As you can see in the pic, we got hot tea, (well . . . Ken got coffee), sugar, milk, four kinds of finger sandwiches (the requisite cucumber, egg & cress, smoked salmon, and ham), jam, clotted cream, scones, fruit cake (but not like the American kind), strawberry tarts, etc.  There was so much, we just couldn’t eat it all.  But it was a proper English afternoon tea.  However, they admitted hardly anyone does this anymore.  Times have changed.

That happens to be a pic of Hazel.  Guess what she does?  She teaches IT in college to adults who think they might be hopelessly lost in ever being able to use a computer!

After having a wonderful time at this venue and even going outside to look at the Thames which flows just at the edge of this property, we motored around and went to the town of Windsor.  We drove by the castle, and it turned out that the queen was there, for her flag was flying.  I had to get back, though, for I had an impending meeting to attend at the Rotary.  I was so sorry to disappoint her Majesty’s request for an audience.

I can’t get over being in a land with so much history and tradition.  Here we think a building is old at 50 years.  Some of these buildings are hundreds of years old and in excellent repair.

 

O'Neill's

Well, there are different flavours of pubs.  You’ve got your English pubs, and you’ve got your Irish pubs as well.  Last Sunday after church, we went to an Irish pub.

I had a lamb steak pie with peas and colcannon.  Have you ever heard of that?  I hadn't either!  (Now, thou knowest, you can double click any word in my blog and get an immediate definition for it, so I did not put an external link on that word just so you could try it out!) 

The Mrs. had an Irish stew.  I washed mine down with apple cider, and she washed hers down with an Irish apple bubbly drink.  We were both satisfied.

Sorry about the fuzziness!

BABS

Dave and Marian were very generous to invite us over to their house for a supper.  Again, very English . . . but then what would you expect?  I am in England for crying out loud!

He's a Methodist, don't you know, and she's an Anglican, don't you see?  But they have a great marriage, and a generous heart.

The first course was carrot soup.  It tasted great, but I could have never identified it as carrot.  It was so yellow like there was a lot of butter or food coloring in it.  I kept asking if there were such things as yellow carrots.

"Well maybe there are . . .  but I've never seen one!"

"So you just blended those kind of carrots that grow In the ground and are orange when you pluck them up?"

"Why, that's the very ones."

"But this soup is so yellow.  Did you add some yellow squash to it?"

"Yellow squash?  Why not at all!"

"So it's just carrots, is it?"

"Isn't that what I just said?"

"Why, come to think of it, I believe you said the very thing!"

But it was great whatever it was.  And that was a huge hurdle for her to cross.  I tend to like only raw carrots.  I'm just not a fan of cooked carrots unless they are candied in some way.  And I don't mean just that thin gruel of a sugar glaze.  I mean candied like a think, browned barbecue sauce.

Dinner was great, their back yard was delightful and the gardening evident, but what was superb was BABS.

Now for those of you who do not know, I love barbershop quartet singing.  Not that I am in a group or anything, but I love the very close harmony.  I wish the church in the village could somehow manage to pull off a song once a month.

At any rate, Dave, who happens to be part of a barbershop society group, had this recording of the American group who had won a gold medal in BABS.  They were phenomenal to put it mildly. As I was listening to the introduction by the American chap, I started laughing. 

Dave wanted to know what was so funny. 

I said, "That bloke doesn't have an accent!"

"Doesn't have an accent?"  And then he could see what I meant.

A song that really focused the difference between American and English cultures' use of the language, was using a version of George & Ira Gershwin’s, “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.”

They highlighted the way we say and use different words and expressions—tomato; potato; loo, bathroom; queue, in line; diversion, detour; etc.  It was a lot of fun sitting with our British hosts and laughing about how differently we use our common language.

Takin' in the Pride

Well, Mytes, ‘ere’s where we ite our mid-afternoon meal at the Paddington an’ all.

 

I ‘ad a plite uv Oxford bangers an’ mash, and the Mrs. ite a rack o’ ribs. 

 

I washed mine down wiv a pint o’ cider, thou knowest, an' the Mrs. ‘ad a diet Coke.

 

We ite so much that we rolled to the Lancaster Tube stop.  It was qui' a sight if I sie so me-self.

Typical English

O my goodness . . . Peter and Kathleen have outdone themselves again. 

We were invited over this evening for a “typical” English meal—lamb stew, steamed broccoli, steamed peas, runner beans (phaseolus coccineus, but they look so much like snap beans—phaseolus vulgaris),
and apricot pudding (somewhat like a delicate apricot cobbler) with crème frais.  I found that I really liked the runner beans.  I think some people grow the plant for its red flower (never considering eating the accompanying pod), and they may be the same as the Oregon lima bean.  You could not get a better meal had you gone to a restaurant and paid 40£ a head!

Now Kathleen did fall off the wagon and served French wine along with some hard crusted uncut white bread with a soft interior with three cheeses—Brie, Stilton, and some other fromage blanc.  I took it all in and said, “C’est magnifique!”

We took a constitutional by walking home after 10 p.m.

Oxfordshire

Kathleen and Peter were very generous and took us motoring out to Oxfordshire.

Now let me explain to my American friends.  “Shire” was originally an old name for county.  So Oxfordshire (pronounced OX-ferd-sher) is Oxford County.  In a lot of ways, that area is like home for Peter who is in his 80’s.

On the way to Burford, we went through Oxford University.  It was amazing to see this campus.  It has to be one of the most prestigious universities in the entire world.  I’m not sure that I saw Christ Church (the college where John Wesley studied), but I might have and did not know it.

On our way to eat, we stopped at Huffkins
to have a spot o’ tea.  It was great.  High Street which this faces must have a 1:4 elevation rise!  The Mrs. And I walked around town, and they were having a bazaar in the basement of the Burford Methodist Church (Zoom out and it's to the right of the Gallery) there on High Street. 

We then stopped at the Church of St. James the Great (zoom in all the way to the point and double click on the church at the top of the picture)  across the river at Fulbrook.  This church has been in existence since the 1200’s.  Absolutely astonishing to me.  They finally decided to take out a few pews from the back of the nave, and use more flexible seating to have a social area in which to visit and for community use.  Since doing that, the church has had more people to come to it.

We had lunch at the Masons Arms at Fulbrook. 
It was a pub at which we ate a wonderful meal. 
(The insides were really much darker.  The camera inside of my telephone compensates for the lighting in a way over which I had no control).  I had Oxford sausages and for dessert I had Apricot pudding.  But it is not pudding as we think of in America.  It is much more akin to the style and substance of bread pudding, albeit there is no bread in Apricot pudding.  (Just like Yorkshire pudding is not pudding as we think of it in America, but a baked, stiff, puffy, wonderful delicacy that was eaten before the main course, filled with gravy so that guests and family members would not eat as much meat!)

From there we saw a lot of the country side.  I have a couple of pics from St. Edward’s at Stow on the Wold (that's the name of the town). 

You have to almost be rich to live in England.  Two of our dollars about equals one pound (£).  Some of the residences out in the country with their dry stack stone walls were breath taking.  It was like in one of these kinds of places that people like John Lennon or Madonna would be living I suppose.

A very moving day and we covered lots of sites.

Acton Hill

I went to the Good Companion group at the Acton Hill Church.  It was a group that met in the back of a sanctuary designed to seat 1,000 people. 
Quite an impressive structure with stone facing (though this is the old church just around the corner, but you get the idea).  They were cordial, meaning not all of them fell asleep as I described my call into ministry, and a little of how we have had to do things differently at Terrace in order to survive and grow.  And that attendance has grown by 12% in three years as a result.

 

Graham, their lay leader was so gracious to collect me at the manse and drop me off again.  On the way back, we got to talking about the common language that divides our two great nations, e.g.,  they have no trucks in England.  What they have instead are lorries.  And police officials are not called cops.  Perhaps coppers, but never cops.  Cop is an Americanism that probably comes from the meaning of nabbing someone.  We stand in line.  In Britain they queue.  In NYC they stand on line.

 

In Britain, the further north you go toward Scotland, the more difficult Londoners find their ability to understand the accents in northern England!

 

For supper we went to Maxim’s. 
We are fortunate that it is on the same block where we live right around the corner.  It is most likely one of the best 4-5 Chinese restaurants in all of London.