At the pool

calling home to inconvenient England

The next Jane Austen book club (about Mansfield Park) will now be on 28th September not 7th September. On 14th September the Shakespeare book club will discuss All’s Well That Ends Well. **These book clubs are now open to everyone. You do no need to pay to attend.**

Everything I write is now free. The paid tier is for archive access only. Please cancel your subscription if you do not want archive access (such as for old Shakespeare posts). I ask for no payment. I ask for no subscriptions to support me or to be nice. More here about why this change has happened.

If you have questions, please email commonreader@substack.com.

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America is easier. In the supermarket, you are not constantly dodging staff leaving large carts in your way, lumbering around like this is their living room, surprised to see you trying to reach the shelf. In the airport, they move the queue along. When street work is being done, you can walk on the half-finished side of the pavement, rather than have to go around; heck, you can walk on the un-topped rubble! They give you store discount when you forget your card. There are more plug sockets in my old house than you will find in any new build in England. The road signs are often large and obvious and not behind a bush. The librarian wanted proof of address and I said oh I don’t have a letter and she just wanted anything, like, my wifi app was fine. Also: you can borrow as many books as you like. Imagine that in England! People have put their own personal numbers into the system to make purchases work for me. When you say oh I don’t have an SSN the woman on the line finds another way. There is so much like that here. People just want to get stuff done. Obviously, this isn’t always true. I still had no hot water as of Monday night, and no washer, or dryer, as of Wednesday morning, because of the foot draggers at the property management company. But when the water tank guy arrived on Tuesday and saw the tank was in a difficult place, my wife said “oh you can’t do it?” he replied: “you’ve been given enough excuses, we’ll do it.” He was efficiency itself.

At the pool. In the afternoon, a trio of girls, in their late teens or early twenties. Their voices carried in the lilting, nasal way that gossip can often be heard but not overheard. They were calm, orderly, sensible. Occasionally they reapplied sun-cream. They reminded me of C.K. Williams, who once wrote, “how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.” That evening, in contrast, two teenage boys arrived. They were louder, brash. You could hear everything they said. They picked up two large floats, dragon shaped, designed for children. One of them tried to sit on the float but fell off immediately, clinging onto the pool steps. “Upper body strength, bro,” his friend told him. The lifeguard put on her sunglasses and placed her hand over her mouth. I chuckled quietly in my lane. The silent swimming woman carried on pushing the water as if none of us was there. The boys had come to battle. The faller kept falling. Then the friend picked up a red noodle float, slapping it on the water, waving it diagonally. “Bro I’m Darth Maul.” I left as twilight was arriving and one of them mistook their mother signalling twenty-three (as in twenty-three minutes past the hour). “Twenty three? As in eleven?”

I had to call my English bank. Three times. You cannot change an international address in the app. You cannot change it on the phone in less than ten minutes. The first person I spoke to, a cloth-eared boy from Leeds, misspelled my address by aspirating the street name. They should play My Fair Lady in schools. The next person corrected that, but I then realised the word Virginia was also misspelled. The last person I spoke to, by now I was almost crying tears of rage, was not from Leeds, but had a thick Eastern European accent. She was quicker and easier to deal with and spotted the error herself.

Sometimes the First Direct app logs me out for security while I am chatting to them about my account. Me: “I am trying to rent a house and you blocked my payment. I am living in a hotel with my kids.” First Direct: “For your security we have logged you out.” When I told them they are very hard to deal with internationally, the sullen boy on the other end said “actually, we’re a British bank.” Yeah, your customer service standards make that quite obvious.

At Mama Chang in Fairfax I had exceptional Chinese food. I walked a mile and a half from the Metro. It was hot, but not so hot I couldn’t walk. I saw the sprawl: houses lined against the wide, wide roads; large intersections; sometimes a path so narrow it vanished to the grass of a parking lot. Mama Chang has its own huge parking lot, like everywhere else. From the window you can see a McDonald’s, a gas station, a nail lounge, more and more parking space. That sort of thing. So, I asked, does Fairfax have more of a downtown area? No, this is peak Fairfax. But who cares how it looks when the Sichuan tastes that good?

To Primrose in DC, for delicious roast chicken. The Uber rode for twenty minutes, north from Capitol Hill Books (I got some Faulkner, some Melville). Small houses, townhouses, nothing especially pretty. You quickly feel like you are leaving town. And then this restaurant, on a corner, where the chickpea poppers were so good I could have had three plates of them.

Driving past the Pentagon at night. The rows of square windows dimly lit. On one side of it is the Arlington National Cemetery. On the other side, a large shopping mall.