Rudders at Home

…but not for good.  I’m officially headed home for three weeks in September. The tickets are bought, and the real planning now begins.  Although, I am less than impressed, because, as we all know, this holiday to my hometown is shockingly not all about me. This is why I’m taking things into my own hands. As Paul and my father high tail it off to Canada, my mother and I will be headed out and about as well.

I plan on introducing my mother to the idea of sun loungers and drinks by the pool. And maybe we’ll see something like this as well:

I just need to make up my mind where we should go on this girls’ holiday.

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Lured by the thought of £8 shoes (!), I stopped in on the Next sale last Friday afternoon on my way home from work. Next is a clothing store which sells numerous clothing items for everyone in the family, but I’m most familiar with the work wear. For those at home, perhaps think JC Penney’s, but on a smaller scale and definitely focused more towards trends – Sorry Mom, but you wouldn’t find anything to wear at Next!

The Next sales are quite famous, in my book for being chaotic. They only do sales certain times of the year, and you’ll never find a sale rack, unless it’s sale time. At that point, the whole store is on sale – generally there won’t be any new stock during these times. Their plan is to get rid of as much as possible, and then bring in the new lines.

The idea of the sale is tempting. I mean, who doesn’t want to get a new suit or another item of clothing for half price? If it only were as easy at that! To give you some bit of an idea, I last went to a sale at Next when I lived in the Wimbledon area – three + years ago now. I did not have a good experience. It was the first time I had ever been truly pushed out of the way by a woman who wanted to root through a pile of clothing I was standing near. I stepped back and promptly ran into someone else who was trying to get through me to the rack in front of me. At that point, I decided I had had enough and swiftly left the store. Part of me thought maybe it was because I had never been a big city dweller before, but seeing subsequent Next sales even from a distance convinced me this wasn’t the case. Where I came from, you didn’t push and shove people out of the way – even when shopping the day after Christmas or Thanksgiving!

So, when my friend told me that the Next near our work wasn’t nearly as crazy as the sales get on Oxford Street, I was tempted. I can always use new work clothes and thought maybe I might find a new shirt, or even like her, lucky girl, new shoes. So, believing her blindly, I tried my luck.

Sadly, I really shouldn’t have bothered. It wasn’t as bad as the Wimbledon shop – no one was pushing, but it wasn’t great, either. It was the end of the day, and the place was a mess.  If you didn’t know better, you would have thought the store was closing and therefore having a clearance sale. There were clothes everywhere – on the floor, hanging off hangers, on top of racks and piled in places. Even if I knew what I was looking for, I would have had trouble spotting it. It was a bit of a mess, and rather overwhelming. Still optimistic (no one was fighting me for space!), I made my way to the back of the store to have a look at what shoes might be around.

I simply don’t know how my friend found her shoes. When I had a look, there were just piles and piles of shoes in absolutely no order, just thrown around on shelves. I didn’t even really see that there were pairs together. I had these visions of trying on one, and then crawling around on the floor hunting for the other pair – as if you were getting them out of a very crowded and messy closet. Having no desire to root around, I made my way quickly back out of the store and headed back down towards the train station.

The short of it is, the Next sale would be ok, but you need to get there before anyone else, and I think you also need to know what you want. And, in some instances, you have to be prepared to push back.

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Since my first year in the UK, I’ve stopped asking for care packages. I’ve given up on recreating my American home here exactly and have done my best to accept the fact that there are certain things I just won’t get here. For the most part, I can find suitable substitutes, and when a friend hears I’m at a loss of what might work, they are usually pretty good with suggestions.

But, as much as I think I may have adapted, sometimes you can’t beat a good old fashioned care package. I received one of those at the weekend. I don’t get them too often, but when I do, I’m very grateful. Everyone loves to receive mail, but there’s just something about receiving an actual package. Especially one filled with stuff from home! Just look at everything I got!

I think this was one of the best care packages ever, because not everything is shop bought. Clearly the chocolate chips and the cookie flipper you can barely see in the bottom left hand corner are from the store, but the rest is not. My mother sent along some moose meat sticks (a story I will have to elaborate on later), a sandwich holder which she made for me, as well as a striped plastic bag holder which was made for me as well. I can’t wait to try everything out!

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On the phone the other night, my mother suggested to me that I just might be homesick. I thought she might be right, so I decided to attack this in one of the best ways possible this weekend. Now, generally this includes planning a holiday and getting the heck out of Dodge for a while. However, because I haven’t got a holiday planned for me until September, I had to find another way around this problem.

So what did I do? I made myself a good home cooked meal, that’s what I did!

Yep, food. Besides travel, whinging to Paul, and having a good cry, food is one of the best ways to get myself over my homesick blues.

With the cleaning done on Saturday, I set myself up for a good kitchen session on Sunday. I made two old favorites and a brand new recipe. You may have read all about my gelato, so here I’ll tell you about the old favorites I had to have. Fried chicken and potato salad. Below you’ll see a picture of the fried chicken I made:

Now, doesn’t that look good? Okay, maybe not if you’re vegetarian, but it sure looks good to me! And it went down a treat with Paul as well.

The funny thing is I don’t remember really liking fried chicken and potato salad all that much when I lived at home. Now, I get really hungry for it and feel almost compelled to make it. I think maybe because fried chicken was something I had at least once a year growing up, and the potato salad I would eat numerous times throughout the summers at home. When I moved here, I know I went at least two years without either. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t start making it myself until last year, when I was in my own flat for a year. Either way, now my summer here doesn’t seem to be complete without it. It also really helps combat the homesickness bug that hits every now and then.

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Every time I’m meant to see Radiohead, it rains. I don’t mean a drizzle. I mean serious rain.

I was invited to a Radiohead concert a few years back and while we were driving to the concert, the heavens opened up. It didn’t look good. The sky was black. We were optimistic, though, when the rain broke as we arrived at the venue. We were out of the car and into the concert when we were hit by further torrential downpours and heavy thunder and lightning. The concert was an outdoor event, and was soon cancelled. I was disappointed not to see the band, but more to the point, that was the wettest I have ever been in public in my adult life. Even London rain hasn’t been so bad to me.

So, bring on Glasgow. When Paul surprised me with Radiohead tickets for the Glasgow show, I thought nothing could be as bad as my previous experience. Being that it was in Glasgow, I was positive they wouldn ‘t cancel because of a wee bit of rain.

How right I was.

It rained, it poured. It was wet and dreary, and it ended up being that Glasgow was the perfect place to see Radiohead. For the second time in my adult life, I’ve never been so wet. And it was fabulous. And utterly worth it.

It all boils down to the fact that Radiohead are an excellent band to see live. They have such a large catalog of music that they were able to play for 2 hours, with quality. You wouldn’t expect them to be able to play their music live with the same quality as it is recorded, but the case is that they can. It’s really impressive. Songs that came along during the night were Weird Fishes, Karma Police, Fake Plastic Trees, Bodysnatchers, and my all time favorite, No Surprises. Surprisingly, they didn’t play Creep. It really was one of the longest playing concerts I’ve been to, which was a pleasant surprise.

The night was full of highlights. Not only was the music excellent, but Radiohead were a sight to see. Thom Yorke wore some funny, skinny red pants (that’s trousers to you Brits out there – now stop laughing!) and at one point in the night did a funny little dance on stage. He hopped around and did a jig which was highly entertaining.

The light display behind the band was quite neat as well. Very basic, just long lines of lights which reflected different colors while the music played.

Have a little taste of No Surprises which Paul shot with our little Sony camera. It’s only 23 seconds, but it’s worth a look.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk1dgSWDRrQ

I also have to mention that one of the other highlights of the night was something completely unexpected. The toilets were AMAZING. I have never seen such an efficient system anywhere. Essentially, they were just port-a-johns, but the way it was set up was genius. The line was enormous, but it moved quickly because they had attendants that kept things moving along. They were also the cleanest toilets ever seen at a concert of this size.  The attendants made sure the toilets were empty and clean before they moved the next person along. I don’t know if they do this everywhere (this sure wasn’t the case when I went to see U2 at Twickenham), but it was the best concert toilet experience ever. Ok, I’m done using the word toilet now.

Simply put, Radiohead rocked. And as I said, they were so cool; people were going bananas over them. It was definitely worth the rain.

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