Nearly spring…

Signs of the times:

• The crocuses are peaking out of the ground in all sorts of glorious colors. (I’m relying on Becca here that these are, in fact, crocuses.  I’m hopeless with flowers beyond roses and tulips.)
• The sun now rises before 7:00 in the morning.
• More importantly, the sun was visible all day the past two days.
• Most importantly, the neighborhood children have begun chalking up the sidewalk.

(Sorry about the lack of blogging recently.  Aside from an awesome visit from friends from Boston, we’ve just been going about our normal lives without anything terribly remarkable happening.  But don’t worry – we’re off to Belgium this weekend and should return with plenty of material to write about.  The last time I was in Belgium I had three waffles, three beers, and three servings of chocolate in about five hours.  The mythical triple Belgian trifecta.  I hope to replicate it this weekend, albeit over a longer period of time.)

English Football

Have I said enough great things about Denmark on this blog? I think not. Here's one more thing that's awesome about the home of Hamlet: breakfast. Here's a Danish breakfast that Danny and I tried to recreate at home:

This was inspired by the discovery that we could buy traditional Danish 100% rye bread (rugbrød) at the farmers market. I can really only speak for breakfast as it existed at my host family's house, so that may not be completely universal, but I like to think that all Danes sit down to a breakfast as complete as we did in Jyllinge. I guess that first I should specify that the version that Danny and I created was more of a mix of breakfast and lunch. What's more typical is that breakfast would involve some plain white rolls, with many options for toppings: solid cheese, cream cheese, 2 kinds of jam, butter, and Danny's favorite, thin chocolate wafers. On weekends breakfast was expanded to include yogurt and soft-boiled eggs. Weekend lunch would be rugbrød with cheeses, many kinds of herring, hard boiled egg slices, and liver paste. Danny and I threw in poached eggs because we just can't get enough of them. Importantly, it was in Denmark that I learned that putting jam on top of a slice of mild cheese is delicious. Seriously. Try it.


But right, back to English football. In some ways, I can't believe it's taken us until February to write about football, but actually this makes sense for several reasons. In Europe, football is a winter sport, so the season didn't start until some time after we'd been here. Then for most of the early winter we were totally preoccupied with The Ashes, and we weren't paying attention to the football (on a related note, the cricket world cup starts Feb 19th!). Then our first foray into going to a football match - an England vs. Montenegro Euro cup qualifier match at Wembley - was perhaps one of the most boring soccer matches you could have asked for. It was a 0-0 draw. Seriously. Do you know the population of Montenegro? Less than 700,000. You'd think that England could have at least gotten one goal in, you know? Anyway, English fans booed the team at the end of the game because they had played so badly, and honestly, they deserved it.

This experience left me assuming that the old days of English soccer hooliganism were completely over, and that lack of crowd-control and mugs of beer had been replaced with calm, serious fans and mugs of tea. And while I was happy there were no riots or broken beer bottles or destruction of stadium property (seriously, click on the link above - it used to be bad), I was a little disappointed by the lack of passion from the fans. But it turns out we just hadn't been to the right game yet.

On Sunday we took advantage of a friend-of-a-friend connection to get cheap tickets to a Queens Park Rangers game. In order for this to make sense, let me take a minute to explain the workings of the English football league. According to wikipedia, there are about 7,000 clubs that are technically members of the league. Let's just pause on that number for a minute. That is a huge number. Not all of these clubs are professional, of course, but the defining characteristic of the football league is that it is completely fluid. As in, if your team plays really well one season, you get bumped up to a higher division the next season. And vice versa. So theoretically, some local team of guys who play football in their spare time could become amazing and one day be playing against Arsenal. Theoretically.

The highest division is the one you hear about - the Premier league, which contains well-known teams such as Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal. There are always 20 teams in the league, which is sometimes also called the premiership. The second highest division is called the Championship (not to be confused with the champions league, which is a Euro-wide competition between the best club teams from each country). Below the championship are League One and League Two, which, confusingly, are actually the 3rd and 4th levels, but whatever. At the end of every season there is a well-regulated method of moving teams up and down between divisions. And sadly, it looks as if our localest team, Barnet, will be moving down out of league two after this season, currently being in 24th place out of 24.

Alright, all that was just background, so that me saying that Queens Park Rangers (QPR) are currently in 1st place in the championship and will likely be moving up to the premier league next season will mean something to you. Between this fact, and the fact that Sunday's rival Nottingham Forest were not far behind at 4th place, the atmosphere at the stadium was great. The stadium was packed - topping out at over 17,000 fans. We happened to be sitting very close to the Nottingham fan section which led to some amazing heckling. Well, I don't really want to call it heckling, because it was much more that that. Each fan base has a full arsenal of songs and chants that went on for the entire game practically non-stop (many of which are the same, just with their team name thrown in), and their comments are quite pointed.

I could talk about intra-England prejudices for quite a while (and don't even get us started on intra-Scottish factions, which neatly break down along Catholic-Protestant divide), but for the purposes of this game, it's enough to know that to Londoners, anyone from north of Cambridge is a rural country idiot or a grimy former miner who's living on benefits, neither of whom ever learned to speak proper English. And to anyone from the North, Southerners are posh elitist snobs who stupidly pronounce R's as W's. (Note: the Southwest doesn't fit into these categories, and people there talk like the Irish. but I digress). Of course these are huge generalizations and there are many people who like and respect their Northern/Southern compatriots, but for the purposes of the QPR match, Nottingham fans were referred to as a bunch of "sheep shagging c**ts". And as for what the Nottingham fans were calling the QPR side, I couldn't understand it at all; you know how funny those country folk talk.

QPR and Notts drew 1-1, though with Notts playing with only 10 men for the last 60 minutes of the game, QPR really should have won it. We'll see about that promotion...

Taking Advantage

Random photo today:


Cake. You know you want it. And this one is almost healthy, made with lots of apples and olive oil. Though that's before you smear on the butter and cream cheese frosting, which is delicious. Luckily many other foodies have posted the recipe before me, saving me the trouble. You can find it here, just scroll about a third of the way down. My icing is a different color because I used dark sugar.

As some of you may know, Danny and I have now booked our tickets back to the states. May 18th is our departure/return date, which means we can now start counting down our days in London. This means we're trying to fit in as much as possible before we go - from local restaurants to travels across the EU. The past few days we've been doing some fun neighborhood stuff. I'm sorry if this post is a bit mundane, but hopefully it gives you a taste of what it's like to live in Dartmouth Park!

Thursday: The Star. We've mentioned this local pub many times, but on Thursday we did something especially fun, which was to bring our awesome travel backgammon set, on loan from my parents, with us to the bar. The Star has something that many good English pubs have: a real fireplace, and comfy couches around that fireplace. Why don't more American bars have fireplaces? And why aren't any of them quiet enough that you could sit and play a board game? We sat with our pints and absorbed the warmth from the dying embers, and although I quickly went up by 4 points, we ended the night even-stevens. Though I'm still up by 5 points overall.

Friday: A few months ago we happened to walk by an Italian restaurant up Highgate Hill from us (about a 10 minute walk) that featured pizza by the meter. Well then. We both had a productive week, so we decided to reward ourselves with pizza at Fabrizio's. The food was good (an appetizer plate of various fried things, and 1/2 metre of thin-crust pizza), but the most endearing thing about the place was the intimacy of it. The restaurant is small; there's just one waiter and one woman who's sole job seemed to be to grind fresh pepper and grate fresh parmesan onto your food, plus Fabrizio the chef, and everyone is Italian. Fabrizio brings out some of the food himself, and he clearly gets a kick out of chatting with the patrons. Earlier in the night he had mentioned to us that the fried rice balls we were eating were a specialty from Rome, which is where he is from. So of course later on in the evening Danny told him that he had lived in Rome for 3 months, and Fabrizio looked very pleased. 30 seconds later he came back to our table with a sly look and asked which Rome football team Danny liked. uh oh. Danny stated that he didn't have much preference, but that he had once been to a Lazio game. Right answer! Fabrizio got really excited and proceeded to congratulate Danny on having good taste in football teams and to give the waiter, who was apparently a Roma fan, and hard time. It was pretty amazing.

Saturday: This Saturday started out like every other Saturday when we are in London - a short run, a cup of tea, then a trip to the farmers market. The rest of the daylight hours were spent going to two other neighborhood pubs (The Dartmouth Arm and the Lord Palmerson) to watch sport. First was the Manchester United vs. Manchester City soccer game. As I recently learned, these matches between local rivals are referred to as "derbys", and with Man U and Man City close to the top of the league, this was going to be a big game. As the linked article states, Rooney's winning goal (Man U won 2-1) was absolutely brilliant. He may be the baldingest man in the Premiere League, but don't say he's lost his touch. After the football was England vs. Italy in the rugby 6 Nations. With a 59-13 victory for England, this game was perhaps less thrilling, but it was still fun to watch. And by the way, Chris Ashton, who scored 4 tries for England, was born in 1987. oof. On an unrelated note, know what else I like about English pubs? People bring their kids to them to watch sport. It's cute.

Not wanting to feel to cramped by NW5, we ended this day with an evening at the Tate Modern. Neither of us are huge fans of modern art, but the Tate is kind of a big deal, so we felt we should give it a chance. There were some pieces I liked, but there were also moments where I found myself thinking "Do you think someone should tell the curator that the painting they have labeled as 'Unfinished Painting' is really just a mirror?" And things like that. Added bonus of the evening was walking back across the Millennium Bridge towards an illuminated St. Paul's Cathedral. Beautiful.


Sunday was more football! We went with our friend Leanna to see the Queens Park Rangers vs. Nottingham Forest, which is a Championship game (2nd tier teams). This was an experience worthy of it's own blog post, so I think I'm going to leave it at that. And now, I'm off to have a slice of leftover pizza for breakfast...

They break the Sabbath, I relax and refresh myself

Polo, as you may have heard, is something of an upper-class pursuit.  A sport that requires multiple horses for each player over the course of a single match isn’t something that little kids can pick up on the street.  It’s not an accident that Ralph Lauren’s aspirational clothing brand co-opts the image of a polo player and magnifies it beyond of all semblance of proportion.

It’s polo’s association with the wealthy and the famous that led to one of the more engaging exchanges of letters that I’ve come across in the archives.  Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband, is something of a polo fanatic.  Well, I have a feeling he doesn’t play much these days, seeing as he’s now almost 90 years old.  But in his youth, it seems as if there was no better way to spend a Sunday than playing polo.

Therein lies the problem (and how His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh is likely to end up in a PhD dissertation on postwar Christianity).  Back in the 1950s, sabbatarian groups like the Lord’s Day Observance Society didn’t take kindly to anyone playing sports on Sundays.  The Lord’s Day was for churchgoing (twice, if possible), prayer, and quiet time spent with the family.  In the eyes of the LDOS, virtually everything else was a sin against God and destined to bring about national ruin (seriously – here’s what they said about a 1966 bill that would have allowed theatres to open on Sundays: “the Bill […], if passed, […] will result in a further departure of our Nation from Almighty God, His Word and Commandments, with both ill effects upon the spiritual and moral life of the nation and the certain removal of the Divine Blessing from us as a people.”

So you can imagine why the Lord’s Day Observance Society wasn’t too happy about Prince Philip playing polo on Sundays, especially with hundreds of paying spectators there to watch him (and the other seven players).  For a period in the mid-1950s, the LDOS was writing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, every year, pressing for Fisher to do something about 1) Philip’s Sunday polo playing and 2) the Queen’s presence at said polo matches.  Reading this correspondence, it’s pretty clear that Fisher wanted nothing to do with this dispute.  He didn’t have much sympathy for what he saw as sabbatarian fanaticism, and he definitely didn’t want to piss off Prince Philip or the Queen.  But in 1955, prompted by the Free Church of Scotland going public with its criticism of Philip’s Sunday polo-playing, Fisher delicately raised the issue with Philip.  While being careful to avoid personal criticism of Philip’s Sunday activities, Fisher warned that Sunday polo by a member of the Royal Family might provide ammunition for “all who are now constantly seeking to invade the domesticity of Sunday rest and recreations, and who when the time comes will press very hard for legislation to remove all restrictions upon the full secularisation and commercialisation of Sunday”.

Philip’s response to Fisher, unfailingly polite, began by agreeing with Fisher on the sanctity of Sunday, the importance of churchgoing, and the undesirability of any paid labor being done on the Sabbath.  This included professional sports on Sundays: “I would resist at all costs any suggestion of professional Sunday football.  I would go further.  I would ask all organisers of charity cricket or football matches on Sunday not to ask any professional to play in them.”  He went on to suggest that any recreation that involved “killing” (hunting, fishing, and the like) should be avoided on Sundays.

And yet, in spite of this apparent sympathy for a certain degree of sabbatarian rigor, Philip wasn’t at all ready to give up his Sunday polo.  As an amateur sportsman, his participation in Sunday polo would not violate his stricture against payment for activities performed on Sundays.  Nor was it his fault that spectators were interested in watching the game and willing to pay to do so.  “As far as I am concerned I would not mind playing behind a screen without anyone looking on but unfortunately the club which organises the game cannot afford to do this.  It encourages people to pay to come and watch in order to reduce to some extent the expense of the game.”

These “expense of the game,” it seems, was in large part paying the wages of the grooms, timekeepers, and bus-drivers that made the game possible and easier for spectators to watch.  Philip deemed these “paid services” “unfortunate,” but ultimately worth the while, since he needed physical activity on Sundays to “relax and refresh” himself from the hard mental work of the rest of the week.  “It so happens that I like playing polo.”

So there you have it.  Wage-earning on Sundays?  Bad.  Unless, of course, it enables someone else to relax, enjoy themselves, and re-charge the batteries for the next week, especially when that someone is married to the Queen.

Little things that made my day awesome

1) A newly-installed washer and dryer in the flat.

2). Caramelized garlic.