The Food of London

Introduction

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Food is a big deal to me. When I’m not cooking or eating food, I’m either working to make money to buy it, or riding my bike to burn it off. Not surprisingly, many of my friends are also foodies, and some have asked how I liked the food in London during my recent vacation there. To those who haven’t asked my opinion, well, here it is anyway.

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I will point out up front, though, that I’m not going to pretend I could give an overall account of how good English food is, or try to compare it to what we eat in the Bay Area. In London I was a clueless tourist with no idea where to go, and judging English food by the random restaurants I blindly stumbled into would be no more fair than judging San Francisco food by the humdrum fare you get along Fisherman’s Wharf.

Bacon
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For some reason, the members of my bike club (http://www.eastbayveloclub.com/) are inordinately fond of bacon. Numerous group e-mail threads have been devoted to bacon-related topics, and I’ve even enjoyed a taste of a bacon chocolate bar courtesy of a teammate. There has even been talk of bacon icons on our jerseys or socks for next year. And when I mentioned I was going to London, there was much chatter about bacon butties and the merits of English bacon over American. So I’ll get right to the bacon here.

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Here’s a picture of English store-bought bacon before and after I cooked it:

As you can see, their bacon is much, much leaner than what we have here. In fact, it looked more like a pork cutlet than bacon. You can also see how much of it was left after cooking; that amount of American bacon would have largely disappeared into liquid fat. And the taste? Delicious. Salty and briny like bacon should be, and though obviously less fatty, still satisfyingly decadent.

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Of course, there is more than one kind of bacon in England. This snack bar sandwich had their “streaky bacon.”

This bacon was more like American, but its pairing with arugula on this simple sandwich was a nice touch. (Over there arugula is called “rocket.”)

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Bacon makes a guest appearance later in this post, and if we back up and consider pork in general, stay tuned because the very best thing I ate in London involves the almighty pig. If you love pork but you’re in a rush, and/or have an MTV attention span, skip ahead to the “highlights” section.

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Local specialties

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We never did try a bacon butty during our trip, but we did make an effort to try some of the more famous English culinary offerings. Baked beans on toast didn’t figure in because we breakfasted at the house, and never felt like making this. As much as I love starch, I don’t get the dual-starch thing (e.g., potato calzones). So, the very first thing we ate in London was fish & chips:

I really like the format here of a single giant piece of fish. It was crispy and greasy in the best possible way and I enjoyed it. Note the side of “mushy peas,” which we frequently saw paired with fish & chips. Mushy peas: what a strange name. “Mushy” seems pejorative rather than merely descriptive, like if they’d said “gross peas.” (Speaking of unflattering terms, during the trip I frequently announced to the kids that for dinner we were having “greasy bloaters” or “cabbage and potato sog,” both phrases from the brilliant kids’ book How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen, which I think should be required reading for all children and their adults.)

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So, you’re wondering, how were those mushy peas? Our panel of tasters declared them disgusting. But mixed with a little malt vinegar, salt, and some crème fraîche we stole from another entrée, they were actually quite tasty. I should also point out that the pub we ate fish & chips at has been around for about two hundred years old, with some very groovy ambiance.

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Another local specialty we wanted to have in the UK was a proper high tea. This we did at the Orangery restaurant in Kensington Gardens. Being a little confused, we described this outing to the kids as “taking tea at the palace.” (I see no harm in letting them continue to think of it that way.) We waited over forty-five minutes for a table, but the experience was very grand indeed:

The little sandwiches were tasty, and the scone was better than any I’d had before. Another item I have saved for my “highlights” section below.

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Alexa says this was one of her favorite memories from the trip. I'm glad, because this little snack cost about $80, and I could have put every single food item in my mouth at the same time and still had room for tea. Of course, it’s not like I worked hard to find a high-value venue for our high tea experience.

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It would have seemed silly and frankly irresponsible to spend two weeks in London without having bangers & mash, so I did: I love the contrast between comically ornate American menu descriptions (e.g. “served with a turnip, radicchio, and bruised parsnip salsify”) and the barebones English term “brown sauce.” No, they’re not telling us exactly what’s in it, nor even what animal(s) it derives from. Thus, this may have been my only exposure to the infamous English beef during the trip. (Note that I’m not uniquely suspicious of English beef; I generally eat only grass fed beef in the U.S., preferably local.) Anyway, the bangers & mash were quite nice, especially the mash.

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World cuisine

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When at home in California, we don’t focus on American food (and what would that be, exactly, anyway? Dennison’s chili? Ball Park franks? Or Native American fare like, uh, corn and acorns and Thanksgiving food? Or would it be New York or Chicago style pizza?). So in London, we eagerly tried out English renditions of other countries’ foods. At an Italian place, I had this risotto:

It tasted about how it looks: like a pile of rice with some ham and peas in it. There was no magic there—the dish was nothing more than the sum of its parts, and the Earth didn’t move for me. Truth be told, I’m seldom impressed with risotto; it’s so often an insipid, gloppy mess. But I had it at the California Culinary Academy when I took a cooking class there, and it was fantastic. I don’t remember exactly how we made it (I was fairly absorbed in babysitting the Bolognese ragu at the time), but I remember the chef/instructor, a real Italian and rather stout, tossing pat after pat of butter into it, long after the amount in the recipe was exceeded. I asked him what he was doing and why, and his response—the subtlest shrug you could imagine—tacitly told me, “Shut up—you know nothing.”
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This fettuccine alla carbonara at another Italian restaurant was a fair bit better:

The bacon involved was great stuff, and the pasta itself was perfectly cooked. Eight more servings just like this one would have made it perfect for me (look how much plate is showing).

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We had a goal of eating a lot of Indian food in London, but (not knowing where to go) we ended up trying only two restaurants. Both of them were good. Here is the samosa appetizer I ordered at the better of the places:

I’m not actually a big fan of samosas and don’t often order them, because they have that dual-starch thing going (pastry plus potato). But I just had a, uh, gut feeling it would be good here, and I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, the best samosa I’ve ever had, and decked out with other hearty, groovy stuff.

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And here is the thali that Erin ordered:

She loved it. By the time I tried it, I was pretty sated from eating much of my kids’ food and my own, and my mouth was already on fire from my noodles, so I wasn’t particularly receptive to its charms. As for those noodles, I’ll get to them later in the “Kids’ menu” section of this post.

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One night we had American food. As I said before, I’m generally not sure what American food even is, but in this case we were notified right off the bat this was bona-fide American:

There’s a frozen pizza brand in the Netherlands called “Big American,” and I had to laugh it its conception of what “American” pizza is like. The “California,” for example, has corn and tuna on it. US Pizza has some charming “lost in translation” menu offerings as well:

I was relieved to see that “EAGLES PREY” was topped with relatively humdrum toppings rather than the rodents, birds, and carrion the name suggested. And the name “WILD CAT FEAST” startled me as well. Meanwhile, I love that the “FAVOURITE” and the “CLASSIC” have exactly the same toppings. I’ll also point out that their “SEAFOOD ULTIMO” is the first pairing of tuna, prawns, and BBQ sauce I have ever seen.

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Here is the pizza itself:

It was exactly as good as it looks, and actually pretty authentic. (I had them hold the corn—local color be damned, I won’t eat corn on pizza. That would be almost as bad as whole wheat crust.) Of course the US Pizza didn’t rival my favorite pizzas in the US (see http://www.albertnet.us/2009/03/little-star-vs-big-zachs.html), but as far as run-of-the-mill pizza-delivery places it was just fine (and a fair bit better than Domino’s, except for the Domino’s we ate at in France back in ’03, which totally rocked, vindicating me somewhat for having bought it at all). Full disclosure: I like almost all pizza, even bad pizza, even (usually) frozen pizza.

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Things we didn’t eat

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The main thing we didn’t eat was Mexican food, because it’s almost impossible to find it over there. We’d been prepared for this; before leaving the US I ate Mexican for almost every meal, just as a pearl diver takes a huge breath of air before going underwater.

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In fact, one of our last pre-trip meals was at Mario’s La Fiesta, my favorite Berkeley place. Early in our meal there I realized that at the very next table were seated Mario himself and his wife Rosalinda, having their dinner! A framed photo of them above our table showed them on the day the restaurant opened, in 1959. They’ve held up well, as has their restaurant. We chatted with them, and they described to us how several American expatriate families have a tradition of heading straight to La Fiesta when they come back to the US for a visit. (My brother Geoff, who lives in the Netherlands, always makes La Fiesta a primary destination when he visits.) Mario told how, very recently, one expatriate couple, hearing of La Fiesta’s move from its original Telegraph Ave location, shifted their vacation schedule by a week so they could have one more meal in the original location. (Of course fifty years in business isn’t that long by London standards, but I’ve been eating at La Fiesta for roughly half my life.)

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I missed Mexican food terribly in London; twice I dreamed about it as I slept. One of these dreams featured two different kinds of chile rellenos. Waking up and realizing I couldn’t even find the raw materials to make my own pseudo-Mexican food, I was despondent. How can the English (among other Europeans) live like this? It’s barbaric. If these countries were ruled by evil tyrants who forbade Mexican food that would be one thing, but the fact that there’s apparently little demand there for this glorious cuisine just boggles my mind.

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Okay, enough griping. So, what else didn’t we eat in London? Well, we took a good look at the paella a street vendor was selling on Portobello Road. (The Portobello Road outing was another literary pilgrimage, based on the short story “The Portobello Road” by Muriel Spark. This story contains what may be the greatest sentence in all of literature: “He looked as if he would murder me, and he did.” It’s something of a ghost story.) Anyway, the idea of unrefrigerated shellfish and other unknowns frightened us away from the paella:

We also declined to sample the “doners” at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that we passed every day on the way home from the underground:

I guess “doner” is just too close to “donor.” Shouldn’t the English be similarly bothered by this similarity? Like the manager of this place goes around to other restaurants saying, “I’m running a shoestring operation, do you have any meat you could donate?” And there's a suggestion of "organ donor" lurking in there as well. Beyond that, the food looked kind of gnarly in the picture, and of the very fact of the pictures I consider a liability.
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We also didn’t eat this:

I’m no stranger to lard (my favorite Mexican restaurant in Boulder has t-shirts that say “Praise the Lard”), but lard in a cake? Or are they describing what the cake will do to you? I think a restaurant could be a bit more discreet.

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This problem of suggestive naming also scared us away from an appetizer offered by US Pizza: It’s a pity—the description was actually somewhat enticing—but I just can’t eat anything that calls itself pregnant.

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We didn’t eat much vegetarian food in London. (A friend of mine has commented, “It’s like all of England is on Atkins.’”) I’m not saying we looked particularly hard for vegetarian food (why would we?), but it’s apparently not that common to begin with. We did see a vegetarian offering at the (remarkably elegant) dining hall at one of the Oxford colleges:

Look at the second item from the top: “Mushroom in oats & salsa dip.” What the hell? Is this somebody’s idea of punishing vegetarians for being vegetarians? Wacky. (I’ve racked my brain for an explanation. I thought maybe it was “mushroom in goats,” as in goat cheeses, but there’s just plain no “g” there.)

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A final thing we didn’t eat: most of a loaf of bread that inexplicably became a science project the day after we bought it:

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Kids’ menus

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We were pleasantly surprised by the near-ubiquity and quality of the kids’ menus at London restaurants. I won’t say they were particularly cheap (£5-6, or about $8-10), but they usually came with a dessert and a side vegetable. They were always generously apportioned (which I appreciate, being the family “closer,” who makes sure every plate is clean by the end of the meal). Best of all, these kids’ menus offered sophisticated foods, not just the cop-out grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, or hot dog to which so many American kids’ menus are limited.

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Check out the quality of this kids’ entrée, grilled salmon with vegetables:

And though this next lunch gets middling scores for style points, presentation, and balance (it violates my dual-starch rule), it was fricking huge, and good. The stuff in that bowl hiding under a crust of cheese is macaroni and cheese, and we all loved it. The mashed potatoes were from scratch and perfect. The corn was, well, corn.

This dessert, custard with banana slices, was far too large for a single child. This isn’t a problem in my family, where there as a Parental Dessert Tariff of 25% per parent. The great thing about parenting is that you can create a true dictatorship. Individual rebellions are easy to crush, and kids just aren’t organized enough to challenge the status quo. In fact, perhaps the most British thing about our kids is their blind acceptance of our Parental Tariff. Whereas the founders of the USA rebelled against the whole British taxation-without-representation thing, our kids would always cheerfully slide their desserts over to be taxed, as though this were a simple fact of life. Thus a “free” dessert for them is a free dessert for us, and nobody falls into a sugar coma afterward.

At the especially groovy Indian place, Alexa got to have her own Thali, just like Erin. Look at how stoked she is:

Lindsay opted for the chicken noodles, which sounds like something really basic, like what we got out of a can in our own youth, but what she got really had some flair:

My own chicken and noodles plate looked almost exactly like this one, though it was spicier—too much so, actually. And it was only slightly larger than Linsday’s. I had her hold a box of crayons in the frame of this photo so I’d remember this was the kids’ version of this dish. You’d never know looking at it, huh?

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A note on the crayons, by the way: remember how in the ‘80s it seemed as though every restaurant in America had a salad bar? Almost like it was a law? Well, in the aughts you’d be hard pressed to find a restaurant without crayons and coloring sheets. Waiters have learned not to expect kids to share, so each kid gets his or her own box. The diversion is welcome, of course, unless you believe the parenting books that warn against destroying your child’s creativity by teaching her that “art” means staying within the lines somebody else has created. Meanwhile, the crayons invariably get left behind and thrown out since all kids everywhere have bazillions of crayons at home already. Years down the road we can expect a worldwide wax shortage and Technicolor landfills.

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Okay, back to the food. The real pièce de résistance of the UK kids’ menu was the “Big Mussels ‘n’ Chips” that Alexa ordered at our last restaurant meal of the trip, in a posh restaurant in Bath. I was not just surprised to see mussels on the menu (what American kid would ever order them?) but frankly a bit hesitant to let Alexa have them. For one thing, no less bold a diner than the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain warns against mussels, on illness-avoidance grounds (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/aug/12/features.weekend1). Besides, I wasn’t sure Alexa would even like them. But she was adamant, and here they are:

Alexa admitted later that she had been a bit leery of her first mussel (“it seemed gooey and jiggly on my fork”) and had to close her eyes before putting it in her mouth. But once she tasted it, she loved it right away, and on the basis of her yummy noises Lindsay became envious and begged for some mussels of her own. Here is the result:

Once she’d tasted mussels, Lindsay lost interest in her salmon. Things got a little dicey there—it was a good thing Alexa’s serving was so generous.

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Weirdness

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Dining out in London was occasionally a little weird. In one case it wasn’t the food but the service that was weird. At the really good Indian place, there was a little comment card, and Erin decided to fill it out. Now, I think we generally assume these comments are anonymous, but to our surprise the manager came out, plucked the card off the table, and questioned us about it. “Why only ‘very good’ in the service category?” he asked. Erin pointed out that my entrée came ten minutes later than everybody else’s. The manager acknowledged this, but still seemed a little hurt. Erin continued, “C’mon, I gave you almost all ‘excellents,’ I have to ding you on something.” He continued to go through the card. It was a pleasant enough dialogue, but what if we’d bagged on the place? The only comment card I’ve ever filled out was at an Arby’s in Boulder near my junior high school about twenty-five years ago. Being a snotty teenager, I rated the ketchup quality “poor” and undor “Arby’s Sauce” I wrote in “ketchup.” What would the Arby’s manager have said?

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Okay, back to food. I ordered the linguine alla vongole at an upscale restaurant (the place in Bath that served the mussels), hoping for the best. I make this dish at home, albeit with canned clams, and it’s pretty hard to screw up. (I used to enjoy it at I Fratelli, which was Erin and my favorite Italian Restaurant in San Francisco back when we lived there. On my deathbed I’ll still be regretting not eating there more often; it’s gone now—actually, it moved and hideously mutated and still exists in evil-twin form as Tre Fratelli in Ghirardelli Square and it’s awful). Anyway, here is the linguine alla vongole I was served in Bath: The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s really small. Probably fewer calories than in Lindsay’s plate. And I don’t need to point out that the pasta is like Noodle Roni. Why would they cut the noodles for me? It’s insanity! What isn’t evident from the photo is that at least half of those clam shells were empty. WTF!?

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Also not visible is how totally over-spicy this dish was. I’m no pansy—I like my salsa good and hot—but clams have a subtle flavor. Why drown it out? Okay, maybe you think I’m just a whiner and all these complaints are nit-picky. Fine—but bear with me, because here’s where the entrée gets really weird: every third or fourth bite had tiny shards of what must have been broken clam shell in them. Each time my teeth crunched on these rock-hard shards I would wince, cringe, wither inside and then (as the English motto goes) “keep calm and carry on.” After all, my kids were enjoying themselves.

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But what of Erin? Was she enjoying herself? Probably, but her own entrée wasn’t helping. She had ordered the plaice:

Now, some people might be put off by the mere sight of this fish. Not only is the head attached, but it looks like the fish equivalent of a slashed tire. That said, Erin and I are adventurous eaters, and I think Erin was still enthusiastic as she set about eating it. To say this is a flatfish is an understatement—it was practically two-dimensional. The fish opened up like a manila folder and all that was inside was bones. Hundreds of them, and virtually no flesh whatsoever. You could get more calories from the crumbs between your sofa cushions. It was a joke. She was done “eating” it within about sixty seconds. In all my years of dining out I’ve never seen anything like it. Again, I didn’t complain. We had a train to catch, and the salmon and mussels were great.

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Highlights

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As you’ve doubtless gathered, we had some really great food during out trip. Here I’ll share with you the “best of’ items—a little food porn, if you will. Baked goods were invariably delicious. At a very basic snack bar at Kew Gardens, we shared this simple pound cake:

It’s a good thing we divvied it up ahead of time, because otherwise we might have ended up in quite a fracas. It was really, really good. I think they added heroin or something. But better yet was this Belgian chocolate cake we had with our high tea at Kensington:

This was unbelievably good, I mean eyes-rolling-back-in-your-head good. The cake was more dense, more moist, richer and better-tasting than cake ever gets to be. And that stuff next to it? Clotted cream, baby. It’s like what regular whipped cream might be like if you could freebase it. As for entrées, we particularly liked this leg of lamb: The leg of lamb technically belonged to Erin, but it was so rich I got to eat a fair bit of it, including the marrow from the bone. It’s pretty hard to screw up a leg of lamb, but this place did an especially good job. It was the kind of food that makes you (or at least makes me) whimper with pleasure. But the very best thing I ate in London was this pork belly:

This was the first pork belly I’d ever had the opportunity to eat. Why is that? How come the pork belly has become the quintessential example of a tradable commodity, and yet you never see them on menus or at the butcher shop? What do Americans do with all their pork bellies?

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My God, this thing was exquisite. I won’t lie to you, it wasn’t lean whatsoever, but neither was it just a big pile of fat. It had the best characteristics of a pork cutlet and of bacon. It was like The Other Dark Meat. The skin was on it, all crackly and chewy. I was reminded of what my friend Mark said about a plate of pasta alla Bolognese: “This is so good it’s making me angry.”

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This pork belly … where had it been all my life? (A quick look at chowhound.com yielded only two recommendations, though I sensed a kindred spirit in the seemingly almost desperate person who started the thread: “What are your favorite restaurants to get pork belly in the city? I don’t care how it’s cooked. I don’t care if its in a salad, sandwich, app, main, or even dessert.”) The side dish this pork belly was served with was good, too: roasted potatoes and slices of apple in a light curry. Brilliant.

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Dang, thinking back on that meal has made it almost impossible for me to think. So, I think I’ll call this post done, and go fix myself a snack. Cheers!

London – Part Three

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Introduction

This post probably shouldn’t actually be called “London – Part Three” because it’s about our first venture beyond London. We traveled fifty miles from London and took a walking tour of two destinations in the borough of Oxford: the Cotswolds and Oxford University. [Note: this post is rated PG-13 for drug references and mild strong language.]



London Walks

We took the underground to Paddington Station and met up with a tour guide from London Walks, which is a walking tour company Erin had found on the Internet when planning our vacation. The idea of London Walks is this: you show up at a train station, give the tour guide a bunch of cash, and then (along with a bunch of other tourists) follow him around for a day. He takes care of all the transportation logistics (including discounted train tickets), shows you the best places, and gives witty lectures about them in a charming English accent.

This is much better than the alternative, which would be to pore over train schedules, take a train to the Oxford station, and then either do an endless death march toward the Cotswolds, wherever they are, and never get there, or rent a car and drive around lost, on the wrong side of the road, until you crash it into a tree. Even if we made it to the Cotswolds somehow, we wouldn’t know where to go or what to do, and our kids would start crying.

The downside of being in a tour group is that all humans are trained since birth to despise the idea of tour groups. In our minds, tourists are all fat and gauche, wearing “I’M WITH STUPID” or “Property of Alcatraz XXL” t-shirts and visiting wax museums and eating at restaurants that are usually “a place for ribs.” For tourists to gather together in a group only intensifies the stigma by bringing the cruise ship ethos to land.

Thus, if you actually join a tour group you have to either a) follow along ironically, silently condemning everybody around you and blaming some other person for your mandated participation in this disgraceful menagerie, or b) suck it up and admit that this really makes sense and better preserves your dignity than sitting by the side of the road crying about your ruined rental car, or fighting all day with your family about logistics. After five or ten seconds of deliberation, I decided to earnestly embrace the tour group concept, and I can now heartily recommend London Walks to anybody. (If you have teenage kids, who would die of shame if they willingly participated in such a thing, you might suggest that if anybody tries to tease them about it they can lie and say they dropped acid beforehand.)

The Cotswolds

What are the Cotswolds? Well, it’s a region of the UK near Oxford. (I’ll bet you never would have put that together.) “Cotswold” comes from the word “cot” meaning sheep and “wold” meaning rolling hill. This region used to be home to what was arguably the quintessential sustainable industry: sheep were raised here, their wool sheared, and the wool made into cloth using river-powered spinning wheels. For many years this industry made the region very important, and it thrived, and it had all kinds of train routes through it.

Then the industrial revolution came around, and coal-fired operations in urban centers lured the textile business away, and the sheep raising business followed it, and the industry dried up. About this time the railway was nationalized, and the routes into this region were all dismantled. I know this sounds like the kind of thing that only Americans would do, but remember, the English industrial revolution predated the existence of the U.S. That said, I’m sure that the bastards that ruined everything here were the same ones that subsequently left for the New World and founded our great nation.



Shed no tears for the Cotswolds, though, because as you can see, the area—being both gorgeous and close to London—is seeing something of a renaissance as rich Londoners buy up old cottages, fix them up, and come here on weekends for little getaways. This gentrification will is bound to spawn wonderful cinematic opportunities for Americans, along the lines of the weekend getaway scene in “Bridges Jones’s Diary,” that will positively sizzle on the silver screen. (Sibilance in this blog is brought to you by Dolby Laboratories, whose technologies can help out with the hissing sound should you read that last sentence aloud.)

To get to the Cotswolds, we took a coach. This is a whole lot better than saying “bus,” or (God forbid) “tour bus.” A chartered coach is a bit of a miracle, actually; you get on, sit around for awhile gazing blankly out the window, and then a miracle occurs and suddenly you’ve arrived at a place that you didn’t even know until now was your destination. As somebody who still takes wrong turns during the bike rides I’ve done for fifteen years, I really appreciated the simplicity. The downside is, I can’t provide a meaningless description of exactly where we went. Suffice to say, we walked around gorgeous places in the Cotswolds.

The Lovell manor house

Perhaps the highlight of our Cotswold walk was the manor house in the tiny village of Minster Lovell. Before I explain about the house, I feel a need to comment on the unfortunate reality of harmless English phrases sullied by American misuse. If you’re like me, the first thing you think of when you hear “manor house” is the low-end Safeway house brand of turkey you see around Thanksgiving. The Manor House turkey is usually alarmingly cheap, like twenty-five cents a pound, or even free sometimes if you spend more than $50 at the store (which is almost impossible not to do these days). This seems backwards: shouldn’t they be gouging us on this, since the Thanksgiving turkey is the centerpiece of the entire meal? And what awful animal husbandry practices did they undertake to get the price down this low?

Meanwhile, some British proper nouns strike me as more subtly maligned by the common American practice of contriving Old World place names to appropriate their impressive aura; for example, the underground station here called “Earl’s Court” makes me think of a trailer park on the outskirts of some down-and-out American town, while the station name “St. John’s Wood” sounds to me like a gated community in some California suburb.

Anyway, the manor house we looked at here, though in ruins now, is very impressive, as you can see. It was built in the 15th century by the Lovell family, who in addition to (obviously) being very wealthy were in good with the crown. This wasn’t always such a good thing in those days, though; the Lovells got into really hot water when the throne was overthrown (I propose a new “word, “overthrone,” to encapsulate both concepts, though it’s admittedly a little late for this) and had their property confiscated. (I think it was when Oliver Cromwell lead a revolution against King Charles I, but it’s been a few days since our tour and I can’t remember for sure and am too lazy to do any research.)

The house was eventually passed on to another rich family, who I think lived in it for a few generations, then passed it on another rich family, who did a bunch of renovations but never actually lived there. Their plans went awry due to a tragedy at a wedding there. The bride got involved in a game of hide and seek and was never found. Months passed, and she never turned up, and kidnapping was suspected, and finally the widower gave up. Understandably, he no longer wished to live in the house, and moved out. The moving crew, hoisting a large lead-lined box used for storing food, noticed that it seemed oddly heavy. Sure enough, they found the corpse of the bride in there; apparently she’d decided to hide there, and the lid fell on her head and knocked her out, and she suffocated. (Lindsay hated this story.)

The name of this village, Minster Lovell, gets its name from the little church very near to the ruins of the manor house. Here it is. This church is in fine shape, and services are still conducted here.

Other village attractions

Here’s a little three-bedroom cottage that was restored and sold recently, for the very reasonable price of £700,000 (about $1.14 million).



Everything in this village seems especially pretty and charming, even this bird:

It’s not a chicken. I can’t remember the name. It’s actually more closely related to a penguin. Okay, I made that up. If you know what this is called, post a comment or e-mail me (feedback@albertnet.us).

Here is the little family in front of a little cottage with a thatched roof. These roofs are made of straw, or (if you pay a little extra) reeds. Until recently, when a fire-retardant chemical coating was introduced, these roofs were a big fire risk so you couldn’t get homeowner’s insurance. Meanwhile, they are incredibly expensive to maintain; replacements are done one half of the roof at a time, because it takes six men two months just to do a half. I think the cost was like £15,000 (about $24,000) for the half-roof. So why would you have one? First, they look great, don’t they? Second, they really do work. Third, they last like forty to fifty years. Finally, due to zoning regulations you’re not allowed to get rid of a thatched roof if the house had one when you bought it.

Burford

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We had lunch in the nearby village of Burford. This is a great word. Say it a few times. Try to sound British: “BUUUUH-fuuuuud.” (I have no idea if this is a proper British pronunciation; perhaps you should try it on an English friend and see how hard he laughs.) I dreaded the prospect of rolling up in our coach to a restaurant with a giant parking lot specifically designed for tour buses, but in fact Burford is very pretty and authentic and quaint, if (inevitably) a bit touristy. We parked in a cul-de-sac and people walked to the restaurant of their choice. (This would never work in America, where we’re too fat to walk and too disorganized to make it back to the bus at the appointed time.)

Having no idea where to go in Burford, we ate at the restaurant recommended by our tour guide, Huffkins. It was a cute place … so cute, in fact, that I was wary of it. Though established in 1890, it was so polished I wondered if it were a chain. Checking the back of the glossy menu, I was reassured to learn that there are only two Huffkins locations, quite close to one another. I read the menu’s fairly predictable combination of life story, philosophy, and mission statement (“we enjoy preparing freshly made food using our wonderful local Cotswold suppliers,” etc.), and then was shocked to come across this disclaimer:


I love the English. If such a statement were ever to make it onto a menu in America, which of course it never would, some employee would sue for seditious libel and/or emotional trauma, and the place would be driven into bankruptcy, and some new law would be written prohibiting any such slander in the future and the big hotel college in Las Vegas would use the case as a cautionary tale and eventually all restaurant managers would all be castrated as a matter of course.

Oxford

During our drive back to the Oxford for our campus tour, our guide talked a bit about the University. This interested me a lot, because I’ve for years I’ve associated Oxford University with a general sense of having let my mom down. During my teen years she often mentioned that she’d like me to be an “Oxford road scholar.” I had always pictured this as a young intellectual guy hitchhiking on some area highway, his backpack full of books. I had a vague sense that he wasn’t allowed to attend classes, but could sort of hang out in the area and do the assignments, sort of like a correspondence course. This didn’t seem that attractive to me, and (being less than resourceful), I never even investigated the matter. Eventually I became aware that it was “Rhodes Scholar,” and that they were looking for the likes of Bill Clinton, not just some directionless kid with decent grades. Still, I felt like I never even tried.

Thus, I was heartened on this trip to learn that the notion of me attending Oxford was far more doomed than my mom or I had even imagined. The undergraduate program is mainly built around the school system in England. If you’re a high school student and want to go to Oxford, you apply before you even take any general college entrance exams. The university then checks in with your current school, whose staff predicts how well you’ll do on the exams. If their prediction is lofty enough, Oxford has you in for an interview. If that goes well, you’re in, unless you end up botching the entrance exam. It’s a weird system, and its validity has been debated for decades.

As we drove through the town, I saw something remarkable out the window of the coach: a vintage Ford Country Squire parked in front of a very fancy hotel.

I really want to know what this car was doing there. What is it even doing in this country, when the government will pay you £2,000 (over $3,000) to trash a ten-year-old Toyota? And how did the guy get such a sweet parking spot, right out front? Fortunately, I’m of the generation that is resigned to the fact that Google cannot answer all our questions, that I’m not just a few keystrokes away from the solution to this strange riddle. I will just ponder the matter in vain, probably indefinitely.

Speaking of strange, and getting back to my original thread (you in the back there, wake up your neighbor), Oxford seems like an odd school in general. It was established in the 12th century as a way to educate devout Catholics. They learned Latin and Greek (to better understand ancient scripture) and then French, because the French duke William the Conqueror (also called, I kid you not, William the Bastard) became king and required all laws to be written in French. It was a very Catholic place until Henry VIII created the Church of England, at which point the University changed literally overnight into an Anglican institution.

Now, you’d think these presumably pious young men would behave themselves, but the University had all kinds of problems with its students raising hell in the town and being generally drunk and disorderly. Thus, Oxford created all these smaller colleges (today there are around forty) so that their tutors could keep an eye on them. Originally these were just living arrangements, with the tutor onsite like a den mother, but then they started teaching classes there as well, and now a student’s individual college is where he spends most of his time, though the year-end exams are given by the University.

Okay, enough blathering on. Here are some photos. This first one shows the Sheldonian Theatre, where they have the ceremonies in which students matriculate (i.e., are formally admitted to the university—to me, this is one of those stalagmite/stalactite words and I had to look it up) and graduate. It’s also used as a theater and for lectures and certain conferences. Also in the picture is our tour guide, Richard, whose red hat is pretty much the only thing that prevented my family, several times, from losing contact with the group.

This next photo is the Radcliffe Camera, which is a building, not a camera. (The word “camera,” as I’m sure any Oxford student could tell you, is from a Latin word for “room” or “chamber.”) Oxford students call this the “Rad Cam” for short, as if this makes them cool or something—as if they’re not complete eggheads. At UC Santa Barbara, there was a park that we all called Dog Shit Park, because it was. Nobody even knew the real name. That, my Oxford friends, is cool. Now, get back to your studies and stop wasting your time on this highly non-educational blog.

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This next photo is of where Bill Clinton lived when he was an Oxford Rhodes Scholar. In fact, our tour guide informed us that this very building is where Clinton famously did not inhale. I can picture him in there, puffing on a fat spliff just to cleanse his palette, and then blowing out the smoke without it ever touching his lungs, so that he could study later, and be President one day.

There are gobs of gargoyles in Oxford, and I can see why: it’s the only place in England where we’ve been rained on so far. And in these gargoyles we once again see that irrepressible British humor asserting itself: as serious and stately as this university is, they couldn’t resist making gargoyles in the image of various Oxford dons. This one looks a lot like my first Latin instructor.

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Each college has its own chapel, and they’re very impressive. It’s hard to photograph stained glass windows; I did my best. Speaking of which, here’s another anecdote from our tour guide. During the English Civil War, Oxford supported the sitting king, Charles I, with the University serving as his home base. When this regime lost out, the new leader, Oliver Cromwell, punished Oxford for its loyalty to Charles by smashing out a whole bunch of its precious stained glass windows. Cromwell went on to become Chancellor of the University.

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Oxford is famous for its “dreaming spires.” I’m not exactly sure what this phrase means, but it doesn’t take an Oxford grad to know that spires are best viewed from above. Early in the tour our guide pointed out a great vantage point for photos, atop a tower in the Saint Mary the Virgin Church, which is this (look for the observation deck railing above the clock):

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When the official walking tour was over, we had forty minutes or so to wander on our own before being guided to the train station. While Erin and the kids checked out a bookstore, I headed over to the church to climb the tower. Here’s a closer view of the church.

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After paying a small fee, I headed up the tower. It’s funny: in two and a half years at UC Berkeley, I never did the climb up Sather Tower (aka the Campanile), but in one afternoon in Oxford I got around to doing this.

The view really is good. The observation deck winds around three of the faces of the tower so you can look out in three directions. I will let the reader decide for himself which are the dreaming spires in these photos. For that matter, you can work out for yourself what buildings are shown here, as I really have no idea.

Whether or not I report on any more of our London outings, watch for my report on English food. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.