Amber (Well, Greenish) Waves of Grain

In the end, it was the most painfree trip we'd taken during our year abroad. No Heathrow Terminal 5 luggage roulette, like with Rome. No cattle-call RyanAir boarding hell, like with Dublin. No last-minute snag with the dog's crate, like when we'd moved to England in the first place. To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing became Oxford like our leaving of it.

We'd been fretting over our luggage--two checked cases each, stuffed to bursting, weighed with a borrowed scale--but each was under the limit. If you were standing near the British Air baggage check-in yesterday morning and saw a family of four high-fiving each other after each suit case was hefted onto the scale, that was us. The flight was a bit bumpy but BA provides a nice U.S. re-entry service: just watch "Semi-Pro" and "The Simpsons" on the little video screen and you're re-acclimated to the States.

Our driver was waiting for us at Dulles. I don't think I'll ever get over the thrill of seeing my name in Magic-Marker on a clipboard. "Why yes, I'm John Kelly." Then to BA cargo where, after 14 hours in his crate, Charlie the dog was set free, no worse for wear. He seemed to take special pleasure in that first long pee on American soil.

We climbed back into the van and proceeded to...wait in a traffic jam. That's when I truly knew we were back in Washington, a place where any trip can take anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours. But I wasn't in any hurry. It was costing me the same no matter how long the ride. And I felt no sympathy for the driver, who said he had to pick up another customer in Gaithersburg at 4 p.m. Let's see, our plane was scheduled to land at 1:30, we had to clear Customs and pick up a dog, then drive around the Beltway to Silver Spring? And he thought he could get to Gaithersburg by 4? The fool!

In the end, we arrived home at 3:59 and I wished the driver luck with his ion propulsion-drive system.

After 10 months on Osberton Road our Amurican house seemed huge. Huge but welcoming. Our tenants, Gordon and Leslie, had left it in just as good shape as we'd left our Oxford house. The only glitch was that the lawn service we'd contacted hadn't mowed since Gordon and Leslie moved out a month ago. The front yard was a wonderful ocean of grass, like something from the prairie.


I don't even know where to start with cutting it. I think I may need a scythe. Or some sheep.

Friday Grab Bag: Gone to the Dogs Edition

That's a photo of Charlie about to be put to sleep.

Don't worry. He was destined to wake up again. He needed some surgery--a little lump had grown on one leg; he had an odd bump on his lip--that required general anesthesia and the practiced flick of a scalpel.

Poor Charlie. And poor us. You never budget for 400 pounds' worth of dog surgery. You pay it, of course, but afterwards it's hard not to think: Who knew that I had $800 at my disposal? Maybe I could have bought that handsome suit, those nice shoes, that antique clock or original artwork. But by then the money's gone, spent on veterinarian labor and canine narcotics.

Charlie is a real trouper, so he came through just fine. He was a bit ditsy after the surgery. We don't have a car and while we'd walked the 25 minutes to the vet's we weren't going to make him walk home. That meant taking the bus, but when My Lovely Wife was walking to the bus stop, Charlie kept trying to pull away from her, jump over brick walls and, seemingly, get back to the vet's. I wondered if, Rush Limbaugh-like, he was already addicted to painkillers. But Ruth hustled him aboard the 7A toward Kidlington and got him home. He looked like he'd gone 10 rounds with Mike Tyson:


That was on Wednesday and today's the first day Charlie seems like his old, frisky self. The doctor thinks the growths she excised are non-cancerous and non-malignant. The only way to tell for sure is to have them biopsied, another $200. We decided not to. It's not that we don't love Charlie--we took him all the way to England, after all--just that if he does need the big guns of animal medicine brought to bear, we'll have to think hard about what to do, especially while we're living in the land of the $2 pound. (The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley recently had to ponder similar questions involving his dachshund Reggie.)

We may change our mind. The vet's kept the growths in formalin and if Charlie gets lumpy again, she can take a look.

Sharia Don't Like It...
I didn't know what to think when I first heard yesterday that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had said the adoption of Muslim sharia law in Britain was inevitable. Was he sounding a Daily Mailesque warning, as in "Unless Britain takes the necessary steps, sharia will become the law of the land"? Or was he advocating the adoption of sharia law?

Apparently it's the latter rather than the former. There's the expected outcry this morning. One can't help thinking, "What was he thinking?" The Guardian has a succinct editorial that paws through Williams's thinking before slapping it down. Never has the separation of church and state seemed like a better idea.

On an unrelated note, this is one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's eyebrows.
They are an impressive sight, bushy thatches of hair that swoop back, giving him a permanent look of surprise. There are those in my family who wish he would prune them back. But I like them. Only a certain sort of English intellectual has eyebrows like that. In fact, I wonder if it's a genetic trait that has been "selected for," as Darwin might say. Like the mane of the African lion or the white shoulders of a silverback gorilla, the bushy English gentleman's eyebrow is the result of years of evolution.

BritNews RoundUp
It pains me to report that there wasn't much silly stuff in the papers here this week. I blame Super Tuesday. Fleet Street has been covering the presidential campaigns with an exhausting regularity and I think that all the space that this week would have been devoted to errant footballers, wacky pets or pneumatic starlets was spent on Clinton, Obama, Huckabee and McCain. (And doesn't that sound like a scary law firm?)

Still, one tries. The Guardian reported that Prince William is considering doing a brief stint as a journalist, "to prepare for public life--and ultimately the throne." (The story was immediately denied by the palace.)

I somehow missed this story from December about a 19-year-old girl who thought that the tattoo on her stomach was her boyfriend's nickname "Roo," "until she showed it off in a Chinese takeaway and found out it actually spelled 'supermarket.'" The story raised several questions in my mind: What sort of nickname is "Roo"? And under exactly what circumstances is one cajoled into lifting one's shirt in a Chinese takeaway?

The Daily Mail reports that Cornish 51-year-old Alan January was not picked up by the local bus because he was waving incorrectly. I feel sorry for the fellow. The proper British bus-wave is something we've had to learn. But I wonder if that really explains why the bus--"the last-but-two" of the night--passed him by:


Perhaps the driver didn't pick him up on that lonely Cornish road because he looks like a homicidal maniac.

This story wasn't in the British papers but it's worth reading nonetheless: The U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency is inspecting and confiscating travelers' laptops, cellphones and MP3 players at airports. They're writing down passwords and copying files. "The U.S. government has argued in a pending court case that its authority to protect the country's border extends to looking at information stored in electronic devices such as laptops without any suspicion of a crime," writes The Post's Ellen Nakashima. All I can say is: Jesus Christ, what next? Vulcan mind meld?

Gargoyle of the Week
After last week's confession about grotesques I felt I should offer a bona fide gargoyle this week. So here he is:


He's on the tower of the church at St. Peter's College on New Inn Hall Street.

Have a great weekend and thanks for reading.

Paper Trail

As previously described, I start every morning here in Oxford by walking to the news agents. This accomplishes two things: The dog gets a walk and I buy the papers, always the Oxford Mail and usually the Guardian.

There must be a word to describe the posters that British news agents put outside every day, the ones that highlight the big story from that day's paper. (Street sheet? Paper poster? Perhaps an English newspaper vet could enlighten us.) These usually advertise a tabloid paper, the main story boiled down to a precipitate of eye-catching--and hopefully change purse-emptying--prose. Like a good tabloid headline, the ideal poster catchline pushes all the right buttons, whether they be fear, greed, joy, sex, or some combination thereof.

I spotted a good example this morning:


"Grieving," "tragedy"--the perfect combination of pain and pathos. Even better, though, was the poster on the other side of the sign:


I dare you to resist buying the Oxford Mail after seeing that line, just to find out what exactly a "volatile man" is. (Isn't that a Neil Diamond song? "I'll be what I am/ Volatile Man....")

The story is here. I suppose in a less enlightened era the poster would have read: "Crazy Man on the Loose."

In case you're wondering what I do with my dog, Charlie, while I'm inside buying the newspaper, this is what I do:


I lash Charlie to the bike rack as if he was a 10-speed Raleigh. He drops the tennis ball he's been carrying, since he knows as soon as I come out I'm going to give him a little doggie treat. Then we walk home, he reads the paper and I curl up for a nap. Or is it the other way around?

Friday Grab Bag

It was cold yesterday. I know that's hardly news in England in December, but it was a particular kind of cold, a noteworthy cold, one I'm happy to have experienced. It was chilly in Prague, of course--finger-numbingly so--but it was a boring, dry cold. The cold that we walked into after leaving Gatwick was a foggy, icy cold. Yesterday it gripped Oxford, coating everything in a scrim of ice crystals. Visibility was a few hundred yards and trees and buildings in the distance looked like indistinct phantasms.

It was a day to stay inside, but I got a lift from a neighbor to University Parks so we could each walk our dogs, his a greyhound named Becks, mine a goofy black Lab named Charlie. I'm glad I did, since it was an otherworldly kind of weather, a sentient weather that frosted everything it touched, like a painter applying frigid highlights.

Today we're back to unremarkable temperatures and humidity. And no prospects of a white Christmas.

BritNews RoundUp
The Mirror goes in search of Britain's biggest Grinch then tries to reform him. But Bill Shail, a retired wages clerk from the Southampton docks, is having none of it. "Blow Christmas," he says. "Wharra load of silly old b******s." But surely he likes mistletoe? "I'd rather hang it from my pants so people can kiss my a***," Bill says. God bless us everyone!

Damn the Daily Mail. It seems to have given its women's breasts editor the week off. Luckily, the Mail is among the tabloids that are fixated with celebrity skin care so I can offer this riveting story about Kate Moss's pimples. I love the way they circle her pimples then enlarge them. I feel like I'm looking at aerial photos of Soviet missiles deployed in Cuba. Shouldn't the president blockade Kate Moss to keep her from eating unhealthy foods?

I know this is the BritNews RoundUp, but I'm making an exception for our next story, which comes from America. I'm afraid it may not have been covered adequately in The Washington Post and I wouldn't want you to miss it. A surgeon in Arizona was suspended after taking a photo of a patient's penis during a medical procedure. According to the BBC Web site, "The patient is a strip club owner, Sean Dubowik, whose penis is...." Whose penis is what? Well, you'll just have to click to find out.

In other penis-related news, an English driving instructor has been sentenced to 18 months in jail for putting a carrot in his trousers and pretending it was his turgid member: "The court heard how [Stephen] Cooney put the 12-inch carrot down his trousers and told a pupil in her 40s that a perfectly executed maneuver was so good it had given him an erection."

Gargoyle of the Week


This fellow helps shed water from St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague. But what I really wanted to show you was:

Dog Poop Bag Dispenser of the Week


These nifty little dispensers dot the streets of Prague. Oddly, the dog in the drawing looks like he's filled with shame at what is a natural, healthy process. (My older daughter says it looks as if he's pooping in a golf hole.) The bag itself is made of paper, which is kind of gross. But each bag does come with a little cardboard scoop. And it features an illustration of a different dog, one who doesn't suffer from an anal fixation. It's a far-sighted pooch sitting on a toilet, reading the paper while wearing slippers:


Of course, if a dog really could do that, we wouldn't need the poop bags.

Have a great weekend.

Greetings from Glastonbury

I'm sitting in the parking lot of of Glastonbury Abbey in southwest England. We've just come down from Glastonbury Tor, a huge hill topped by a 15th century monastery (above). The monks are long gone, of course, but it's a two-pound bus ride from town to the base of the hill, and then a strenuous climb to the summit. The sun was burning off the clouds as we arrived and below was the English countryside, pastures cross-crossed with hedgerows.

We were without Internet yesterday, while staying in the tiny village of Dinder, a collection of stone houses outside of Wells. We were at a B&B called Middle Farm. It turned out the owners, Francis and Liz, used to live in Oxford, on the same street we now live on. Small country; small world.

Have I mentioned we have the dog with us? Charlie's cramped our style a bit but it's broadened his mind. He'd never ridden on a bus before. Or seen a cow. Or climbed a tor and entered a 15th-century monastery. I think it had a profound effect on him. Here he is surveying the landscape below and contemplating his own mortality. Or he could just looking for a place to poop:

We have thousands of years of British history to learn about today, and what is my family doing? They're off shopping. Between the supposedly New Age powers of the tor and the rock festival that's held here every year, Glastonbury has a collection of funky shops that they couldn't resist. Ah, here they come now.

We're off to Tintagel, supposed home of King Arthur. Charlie is dying to see it.