Waiting Waiting Waiting...

Another day and no visa-post. This shouldn't surprise me. On Friday I succumbed to the make-as-much-money-out-of-the-visa-suckers-as-possible system and paid out the extortionate £1.20 per minute charge to call the US embassy (or rather, a call centre in Glasgow representing the US embassy) and they informed me that while I have qualified for an interview (which must mean I'm HIV / TB free, which is good to know), I wont hear for another 2 to 4 weeks when that interview is. But, like a half starved pigeon that gets fed sporadically, I check constantly just in case.

The waiting is wearing thin. It was never supposed to have lasted this long. Originally, I came back to England (in 2007) with the plan that Jeremy would join me within 6 months. Visas and jobs and life got in the way and, well, that didn’t happen. Then we got engaged in February this year and I made over-optimistic plans to move over within 6 months, and errrr that didn’t work out either. Now I’m not making plans (I’m a big fat liar). I have surrendered to the 'Great We’ll See’ (bollocks I have) and am sitting on my hands and waiting for the visa-gods to anoint me (I’m jumping up and down and waving my hands around trying to get their attention).

It’s driving me insane.

I am not a patient person. Stubborn? Yes. Patient? No. Which makes for an interesting combination. Waiting becomes not an act of passive patience but one of persistent stubborn endurance. I rant and I rail and I stamp my feet like Veruca Salt on the inside, all the while maintaining a look of benign calm on the outside (well, a lot of the time…I have been known to stamp my feet in frustration, but normally only in front of Jeremy and my family).

At times it’s had the feeling of waiting in the rain for a bus, when you know it might be quicker to walk but you’ve waited too long to give up because the bus might be right around the corner. Although that’s not the best analogy because walking isn’t really an option – sitting down and crying is about the only option I can see and that’s not particularly constructive. Anyway, the bus is around the corner. I can see it (by standing in the middle of oncoming traffic and peeking around the corner). It’s sat there, with its driver, watching me in the rain and having a sneaky fag (Cigarette! That means Cigarette!) whilst obstinately waiting until it’s exactly the right time to move the 5 foot to the bus stop and open up the doors and take all my money.

I’m slightly concerned that by the time the bus doors open I’ll have gone completely loopy. The pressure is mounting. As usual, I’ve overestimated my mouth capacity and bitten off more than I can chew. The living out of suitcases and wedding planning and emigration and job searching and goodbyes and homelessness and missing Jeremy and hair-care are all mounting up and I wouldn’t be surprised if steam started coming out of my ears.

The problem is there’s no solution other than to suck it up and wait and hope that at the end of it all my mental faculties will still be intact. Oh and tell Jeremy every 5 minutes how fed up I am of waiting. That helps a little.

Leaving (part 3): My Sister

Yesterday my sister came to town. Not to visit me you understand - she had a Camp America (organisation which recruits hapless English young-adults and ships them off to the states to be camp counsellors, supervising American youths for a summer...aka my worst nightmare) Reunion and needed to kill time before meeting up with her real friends. But regardless of being an afterthought to her weekend's plans, I was happy to see her.

I was five and a half when Jess was born. She came as a bit of a shock (to me, I'm pretty sure my parents planned her) - my quiet world was interrupted by this screaming mass of curly attitude - I had to move out of my newly-flowery-papered bedroom (my mum swears she told me I was choosing the paper for the new baby - I do not recall this) to accommodate the wailing monster and I decided the only remedy to this new noisy presence was to ignore it.

Only Jess isn't particularly easy to ignore.

We're not particularly similar, Jess and I. Apart from the curls, (any argument between the two of us is referred to as curly warfare by my friends) we couldn't be more different. While I intently read book after book as a child, with near religious zeal (my mum once hid my books because she was worried I wasn't playing enough. I found them), Jess was busy causing havoc and demanding the world's attention. Even now, everything she does / says is done at warp speed and the rest of us are left out of breath just trying to follow the conversation / her progress across the room.

So I wouldn't say she's mellowed with age. But our relationship has changed. While curly warfare certainly still takes place, we have grown to value and respect each other. I've given up ignoring her presence in my life and come to welcome it. The older sister reflex has kicked in and I feel a strangely fierce sense of protectiveness over her.

There is an element of irony here. Growing up, Jess was the confident one - on French family holidays, when mum and dad asked us to go get the bread (in my memory we went running off unsupervised into town and came back laden with loaves. I'm guessing I've edited this memory somewhat because this doesn't sound like a my-mum thing to permit), it was Jess who would march without fear into the boulangerie and request 'pain-au-chocolat' while I looked awkwardly at my ten-year-old feet in fear that someone would realise I couldn't actually speak french fluently.

Unsurprisingly, Jess was far cooler than me in school. Thankfully I left the year she started or she would only have further highlighted my cool-deficiency. She learnt to drive as soon as she turned 17 (I, if you recall, am still summoning the courage to book lessons) and is now studying a degree that will actually qualify her for an actual profession - none of your fluffy English Lit / International Relations crap for Jess. My little sister is far better equipped to tackle life than I will ever be, and yet I want to wrap her up in cotton wool and keep the big bad world away from her.

But, as she reminded me yesterday, I'm buggering off to America. And while my powers of protectiveness aren't particularly strong in the UK, at least I can check in on her, buy her lunch and quiz her on the various marauding men interested in her. From January I'll be limited to phone interrogations, and neither of us is particularly good on the phone.

Then I remember an episode in yesterday's visit which should serve as a reminder to me of her capable-ness and my ineptitude.

We'd stopped into the Tate Modern to check out the Turbine Hall and do a whistle stop tour of Surrealism. The current installation in the turbine hall is a great big black box, which visitors can walk into and experience something 'personal and collective, putting considerable trust in the organisation' and other such rubbish. Jess and I entered the darkness, clutching each other's arm and our handbags, for fear of art-loving pick-pockets. Giggling we stumbled through, gaining confidence as our eyes adjusted, walking into the gloom until... I smacked my face right into the back wall, while Jess laughed her head off.

Jess of course, like any other thinking person, had had her hand in front of her face as she walked, so stopped before slamming into the wall. Jess was sensible and prepared. I however was not.

Thinking about it, I don't think I need to worry about Jess at all. While she runs rather than walks through life, at least she's doing so with her hand out in front of her. I do however think she should maybe be worrying about me. If we were to think of the big black box as a life-metaphor, I've gone walking into the unknown and ended up with a sore forehead. Hmmmm. Let's hope this isn't an omen.

Talking to hairdressers

I had my hair cut today. Not that anyone will notice - it has pretty much looked exactly the same since I was 15. Apart from the time I decided to attempt cutting it myself (I know that's what you do aged 2, I did it when I was 22) and even then it looked the same when it was curly - you only saw the damage when I straightened it.

With my upcoming nuptials, the only concession I'm making to the traditional bridal-preparation-regimen is getting my hair cut regularly to ensure its bouncy happy healthiness. I've ditched the straighteners, forbidden myself from going near it with scissors, and promised the Goddess of Weddings to get it cut on a regular basis.

I hate having my hair cut.

I hate having to verbalise what I want, having someone see quite how split-ended my hair is, having to look at myself in the mirror for an hour. But most of all I HATE SMALL TALK. I'm crap at it. I find it so difficult answering the prescription hair-dresser questions, because all the while I'm thinking in my head 'this is boring, why would she ever want to know this?'. However I have discovered the fail-safe, keep-banal-conversation-ticking-over-for-an-entire-haircut conversation topic: yup, you've guessed it, getting married and moving to America.

It's like a hairdresser charm - you can literally hear them breathe a sigh of relief as they realise the conversation is all set for the rest of the hair-cut. And while I may tire of recounting where we met / got engaged / are getting married and how I'm feeling about moving countries etc etc, it's a darn sight better than having to think of what to say about my next holiday (I'm moving countries - I don't get to plan holidays) or my plans for the weekend (sleeping doesn't feel cool enough to tell a hairdresser).

I'm wondering what I'll talk about when all this is over - not only to hairdressers but to all fleeting small-talk-necessitating acquaintances. But then I remember. I'll be in America, with an accent - the ultimate small-talk-tool that immediately distinguishes me as somebody where infinite why/what/how questions can be asked. I'm not too sure how I feel about being immediately singled out by my accent for the rest of time, but being able to have a hairdresser-worthy-topic should help ease the blow. And maybe it'll mean I have healthy happy hair for once.

The Day of Food...

...Is tomorrow.

Of course Americans know it as "Thanksgiving", but since the original thanks-givers were doing so having deserted with disdain my beloved land, I'm boycotting the name and re-christening it The Day of Food (TDoF).

I'm a big fan of TDoF, if you skirt over its traitorous provenance. It is exactly what it says on the (rechristened) tin: THE Day of Food. All people do all day is eat. And they spend about a week preparing to eat. Everyone together eating - no presents or trees or other distractions - just family and food. And it's a pretty ecumenical Day at that - while the original apostates were Christian, nowadays anyone can get in on the act - all they have to do is like food, family and be nice and appreciative for a day.

So I think we English should reclaim TDof (since its originators, treasonous though they were, were English after all). In fact I think we have more entitlement to this particular day than Americans.

Here's why:

1. Our commitment to Roast Dinner. We've even given it its own dedicated weekday - and all across the country, 100,000s of people cook it religiously every Sunday. So you see, we have experience in cooking such things.

2. Our lack of Sweet Potato pie. I actually like sweet potato pie. As a dessert. That much sugar and marshmallows does not belong with gravy. Sweet potato pie with gravy is the equivalent of eating ummm any dessert with gravy. In fact, I think the fact that Americans do this is reason enough to transfer Thanksgiving TDoF rights over to the UK.

3. The Roast Potato. The best ever way to cook potatoes and you don't even know what I'm talking about. Find out and maybe we can negotiate.

4. I just remembered the existence of chicken salad (for the English people reading this, it's not chicken-with-salad, it's chicken all mushed up with mayonnaise like tuna-mayo. Nasty.) I know you don't have this for TDoF, but its mere conception is sufficient to eliminate all rights to all things for all time.

OK I've only got 4 reasons, poor effort I know, but I still really like Thanksgiving (TDoF isn't really working for me - I'll just conveniently forget that the Treasonous Ones came up with the name). I've celebrated it every year for the past 7 years now (with and without Americans present), and that takes effort because we don't get the day off work so it means coming home after a full day and cooking Thanksgiving dinner (I tend to skip the turkey tho - I prefer chicken). I've hosted Thanksgivings for upwards of 30 people and over the years I've converted 10s of Englanders to the day. I am a Thanksgiving pioneer and deserve much acclaim.

So I think you Americans should let me keep it. I'll let you celebrate it too, provided you accept it wouldn't be here if it wasn't for England driving out the pilgrims in the first place.

Language Etiquette 101

Today, after I'd told him how much I missed him, how much I love him, how I can't wait to move countries for him and be his wife, Jeremy called me cute. CUTE! The cheek of it.

I'm guessing there's a wealth of Americans out there bemused at my outrage and wondering what 'cheek' is.

Well I'll tell you.

Cute is outrageous because over here it is what you call baby rabbits, kittens - everything diminutive and juvenile. It trivialises, belittles and essentially makes me feel like a child with dimples (got that Jeremy? Cute is out of the Love vocab). Basically, if anyone calls me cute when in my wedding dress they run the risk of getting punched in the face.

Cheek is what Jeremy had to call me cute. That's the best explanation I've got. Sorry.

So I thought I'd take this opportunity to communicate a few more words / phrases that translate badly. Think of it as damage limitation so at the wedding all the guests don't start offending each other.


"What's up?" OK so we are fairly familiar with this customary greeting. Primarily because of the highly irritating Budweiser advert of the 90s where frogs imitated frat boys (just realised in some post-posting hyperlink searching that the frog one was a different irritating ad, and actually it was frat boys imitating frat boys). And yet when asked the question 'what's up?' most English people (note I'm not saying British here. We do not call ourselves British.) will give a look of bewilderment. It denotes something should be up. And before we compute that it's just Americans asking us how we are, we first think 'am I being asked if there's something wrong?' and then, when do we catch up and answer the inevitable "nothing (is up)", there's a sense of anti-climax, as if we should be able to have something be up and yet there is nothing of note. In England, instead, we say 'Alright?', which I'll accept is equally puzzling for Americans, but at least the end answer is 'yes thanks' and so ends on a polite affirmative.

"Sure" Now this one drives my mum (mUm) crazy. When asked 'would you like a cup of tea?' or 'can I get you a crumpet', or other such offers of food / assistance, Americans (Jeremy) often reply 'sure'. This is not acceptable. In fact, you're likely to cause serious and long lasting offence. Why? Because we British (I'm pretty sure the Welsh, Irish and Scottish are with me on this one) are a polite species and have had it drilled into us from an early age that when offered something, 'yes' is followed by 'thank you'. 'Sure' is a) bad grammar and b) rude.

"Biscuit" I feel the need to educate Americans and English alike on this one. Mainly because if English people were unfortunate enough to order Tea and Biscuits in the states, they'd be met with a nasty surprise. Biscuits in 'American', are basically bread-rolls. I find this staggering. Even the word 'biscuit' is onomatopoeically bound to be crunchy, and yet you Americans think of them as soft dough balls to be eaten with gravy. If you ever came face to face with a chocolate digestive you'd be ashamed of yourselves. Biscuits are actually essentially cookies, except for when they're not cookies, because we also have differing definitions of what constitutes a 'cookie'. I know I'm not explaining this particularly well. But basically you need to stop calling biscuits biscuits and start calling them lumps-of-bread. OK?

"Jumper" This is NOT, not matter what my future mother-in-law tells me, a dress worn by school-girls, it is a sweater - apart from when said sweater is made from the sort of fabric they make hoodies out of, then the sweater is a sweater. Got it? Good.

"College" / "School" Without going into the English school system at length, suffice to say that college and school are not synonymous with university. They are completely different stages in a person's education and if you ask an English person where they went to school, you'll get the same look of confusion as for 'what's up?' before they remember hearing it used differently on Friends once and catch up.

I hope this irons out some problems. These are the words that trouble me most of all - I'm not going near pronunciation, because, well, we're right, you're wrong and that's all there is to it.

Misanthropy and Hope

Today, like a snail or a tortoise or ummm a hermit crab, or any other creature that carries its home with them, I lifted my bags and my trusty laptop and went on my way (only far less gracefully...yes, you heard me, I'm less graceful than a snail). My end goal was a borrowed bedroom in Kent (I'm currently typing this in a princess bed, having ousted my friend's 3 year old from her room), but first I had to go via work.

Getting to work from Sian and Marc's is usually a breeze. I roll out of couch, hop across the river and I'm there before you can say skinny-vanilla-latte. This morning however the world and its weather was against me. The wind threatened to throw me off Tower Bridge, I nearly got stabbed by more than one ridiculously enormous I'm-a-smug-sod-and-therefore-can-take-up-the-entire-pavement umbrella and the puddles left tide marks on my new boots.

It was grim, but at least everybody around me had the courtesy to look equally miserable. Everything was grey and correctly adhering to pathetic fallacy (although I don't know if it's real pathetic fallacy when you're miserable because of the weather and then the weather mirrors your misery?), and then I saw her. A merry optimist that had no business being in London at rush hour, with an umbrella that read 'Rain Makes the World Grow'. Ugh. I grabbed her umbrella and started bashing her over the head with it. Well, in my head I did anyway.

So it was with such thoughts of peace and goodwill that I finally waded into work.

Two coffees and an onion bagel in and my misanthropy was fading. The world always looks better with an onion bagel. A friend sent me a link to the BBC Personality Test which, being something of a wannabe psycho-analyst, I happily completed. In retrospect I'm not entirely certain it's not a government sponsored spying tool since it asks questions such as 'how much alcohol do you drink' and 'how many sexual partners have you had'? But either way I disregarded any Big Brother misgivings and filled it out like the rest of the sheep.

The test results give you a percentage of various personality traits and tell you (if you didn't already know) how satisfied you are with your life, what your life goals are and other useless-if-you-know-yourself bits of information. Having said that, my scores actually came as quite a surprise - especially when you consider that I nearly assaulted someone with an umbrella this morning for being a bit too positive - it turns out I'm officially (according to the BBC, and we all know you can trust the BBC) pretty happy. Apparently I have 94% Life Satisfaction, scored 82.5% Health and Wellbeing and I prioritise relationships (ok that wasn't surprising - I'm moving countries for one afterall).

While it surprised me on the basis of my exaggerated anger at miss rain-is-food this morning, I realised that when I cut through the crap - when I look past trudging through London in the rain, sleeping on couches and living out of suitcases, not being able to speak to Jeremy properly and stressing about visa post - there's actually a pretty calm, pretty happy Hannah inside.

That's not to say the outer crustiness of Hannah is going to become a little-miss-perky-pants any time soon (rain sucks, whether it makes the world grow or not), but it's good to know that there's an inner smile in there somewhere.

The World According to Americans

Somewhere out there there’s a woman who thinks her email address is my email address. She must do, because I’ve received flight confirmations, parent-teacher evening requests and random people contacting her because their pastor recommended her as a one fine lady. We shall call her Holly (largely because that’s her name).

Through receiving her emails, I actually know quite a lot about this woman. Other than her being one fine lady, I know she has a son called Noah; that she has a piano which gets tuned by a man called Bob; that she travelled to Chicago with 2 family members on the 24th April; that she is very involved in her church and that her husband is the president of a local Christian college. I also know her phone number, her frequent flyer number, which Tiger pack her son is in (I’m assuming it’s like scouts, otherwise it all sounds a little jungle-book) and I have a sneaking suspicion that the number 8 doesn’t work on her computer. I actually think I probably have enough information to steal her identity. Not that I know how to go about that, but were I the sort…

If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m a Nice person. At least, I’m able to suppress the Nasty most of the time and let the Nice triumph, even if it is through gritted teeth and glares when waiting for tourists to finish taking photos of themselves in the middle of the pavement (trans. Sidewalk). So not only have I not stolen her identity, I’ve also been replying to all of these misguided emails, telling the sender that I am not Holly. Until recently I didn’t know her actual email otherwise I could have signposted them, or at least emailed her and let her know that the reason she’s never heard from all these people is that she doesn’t know her email address.

A couple of the people I’ve replied to have replied back. Some apologising, some checking I’m 100% sure I don’t have a son called Noah, and one actually letting me know Holly’s real email address (my email address but with the number 8 at the end) . In one of these exchanges the woman replying to me asked me, oh so naively, if I lived in Clearwater Florida too.

I’ve done some research. Clearwater Florida has a population of around 100,000. I don’t think this woman really has much of a handle on how the internet works. Never mind that the USA has a population of 304,059,724 so the chances of me being in the 100,000 strong population of Clearwater are pretty damn small, there’s a whole world out there in which a quarter of its population speak English. I chuckled to myself and thought what an adorable example of Americans living up to their stereotype it is.

I know it is a stereotype, and in all likelihood this poor woman is fairly new to cyberspace, but the fact is the majority of Americans do have a pretty sketchy appreciation of geography. I’m not saying they all think that Australia is Iran but I have taken to just saying I’m from London to avoid the blank stares that mention of any other city brings.

(I should probably say here that Jeremy is a major exception to the rule. One of his favourite games is for me to name a country and him to tell me what the capital is. He’s pretty good. )

Another endearing America trait is their ability to be entirely un-phased by distance. This comes from living in the third largest country in the world. Contrast that with living in the UK, which can fit into the US 40 times over and you’ve got some very different ideas on how many miles equal ‘far’.

It doesn’t help that England’s roads basically originated from sheep paths and are therefore the windiest, narrowest, slowest roads known to (wo)man, so getting places takes a long time. My to-be mother-in-law once asked me if she could do London, Cornwall and the Lake District in one weekend. Technically she could, but she’d spend about 2 hours not in the car.

With Jeremy and I, our different nationalities (and therefore relative-distance-appreciation), make for interesting navigating at times. That and I’m pretty lazy and don’t like walking long distances. He generally resorts to lies and trickery. Jeremy has a habit of telling me how far places are according to his GPS watch (he also likes to tell me how fast we’re going when on trains / planes and likes to ask me every 2 minutes how far I think we’ve walked to highlight my poor grasp of all things measurement-ish). In Spain last month it took me quite a few hours of walking towards locations allegedly close by for me to realise that this is as-the-crow-flies and I am not a crow. In America though, this navigational system works ok because they’re basically all crows. Or at least their roads go in straight lines rather than respecting the rights of hedgerows.

Mock it as I may, I quite like the American vision of the world (ignoring the dangerous implications of isolationism of course). Mostly because it makes the Atlantic seem a heck of a lot smaller and the issue of my family being 3000 miles away a minor inconvenience.