This newsletter covers the June - October of 2002.
It was released to an unsuspecting world on October 8th, 2002.
Watch
out, this might turn into a long one… (as the Conservative Whip said to the
back bencher…)
Yep,
as usual, another newsletter from us where all the Major events involve
Curries…
(Perhaps a brief explanation for our U.S. readers.. the big news story in the UK for the last week has been the startling revelation that dull, boring ex Prime Minister John Major had a 4-year affair with MP Edwina Currie in the 80s.)
But
seriously.. this is our first chance since our last newsletter (published as
long ago as May 27th) to sit down and get caught up on all the
intervening events.. as I’m sure you’re all aware, the thing that’s been taking
most of our time has been our re-location back to the UK, and the associated
knock-on events. Sadly, just as we’d got settled in SF and had built up various
social circles of friends, the US economy went AWOL and it was no longer
cost-effective to maintain the SF office. So we heard (during our annual
‘friends, family and Folk Fest’ trip in July) the operation was to be closed,
and we were headed back to the UK where (thankfully!) the business climate was
not so bad, and in fact the WhiteCross UK operation was short of staff. The US
economy was starting to pick up following ‘9/11’, but then along came the ENRON
and Worldcom scandals, and everything suddenly went very quiet.
Very
sad all round, especially as my US work visa extension (which would have
allowed us 2 more years in SF) was granted on the same day we heard about the
office closure.. (don’t you just love those sort of ironic coincidences?)
ANYWAY..
what that means is that we’ve been extremely busy since then, organising the
move and getting re-established here in the UK – and also trying to make sure
we got to say a proper ‘farewell’ to all our new-found US friends and
colleagues. I suspect that we’ll still be doing an annual transatlantic trip
where we visit friends and family - but in the other direction from now on,
synchronised with U.S. music festivals (maybe Sebastopol Celtic Festival in September??).
And I think there will now be a broader audience for these newsletters which
will span the Atlantic – so please forgive any colloquialisms that you’re not
familiar with which may slip in from time to time. (If I remember, I’ll try to
explain any archaic references).
But let’s get back to some sort of chronological account of what’s happened since the last newsletter.. June was very pleasant, with some good music/Morris events.
[Lynne] It got off to a
fun start with the Black and White Tour. In San Francisco there's the Black and
White Ball, a very prestigious event in the Society calendar - I wonder if the
Black and White Tour is Bay Area Morris' answer to this? Organised by Jocelyn
Reynolds of Goat Hill, Dead Ringers and English Week Committee, the idea is
that everyone from the Bay Area Morris community is invited to take part and
'kit' for the day is black and white only, turning all attendees into a single
performance side. Dances are selected in advance from the repertoires of all
the sides represented. These are covered in a series of 'open' practices to
give anyone interested a chance to brush up and perform other sides' dances. On
the day of the tour, all dances are open to anyone who wants to do them, so it
turns into a spectacle of multiple sides and large bands. For me it was a great
opportunity to play along with the musicians from the other Bay Area sides.
Thanks, Jocelyn, for the work that went into organis(z)ing it…
[Back to Dave] The debut (and
only gig so far) of the ‘Spoil the Broth’ band at the San Francisco Free Folk
Festival followed. (Click here for a couple of pics.
Regular readers may recall that this is
the band Lynne put together to play at an English Ceilidh workshop, and it
included myself and Lynne’s daughter Claire on keyboards (hence the band’s name
- since too many Cook(e)s ….. ) as well as our pal Dave on guitar. Great fun, a
good time was had by all, and only a few glitches (and of course, as a friend
of mine contends “in music there are no errors, only bad recoveries”).
Hopefully we’ll have chance to do similar stuff now we’re back over here in UK
(unless the market is already saturated!!).
Shortly
after this Claire headed back to UK after 6 weeks with us in SF.. but not
before we all went out for a send-off bash at Teatro ZinZanni which is a
combination of restaurant/nightclub/circus in a vintage 1920’s Spiegeltent on
the SF waterfront. It had been fun having her around, and I know Lynne missed
the twice-weekly ‘mum and daughter yoga sessions followed by a leisurely lunch
in the sun’ – but at least Claire managed to get an extended SF visit in before
we came back to the UK.
The other
thing of note in June was the annual Morris event with Goat Hill Morris to
dance the sun down on the Summer Solstice. The location for this event was
again Sutro Park, which is on top of a cliff overlooking Ocean Beach and facing
west looking out over the Pacific Ocean – last year there was a spectacular
sunset, but unfortunately this year the famous San Francisco fog prevailed and
there was no sight of the sun.. but we presumed it did set as things got pretty
dark around 9:00pm. When we were there last year we could see from our elevated
position many bonfires on the beach, and so this year we decided to do one ourselves.
After some initial problems getting
the fire going (given that by this time there was a gale blowing) we managed it
with the help of some petrol (gas) and a flaming juggling torch. About 15 brave
Berkeley Morris souls spent a jolly few hours munching various goodies
(including hot pasties (thanks Mark!), Smores (a toasted marshmallows and
chocolate sandwich tasting every bit a sweet and sickly as they sound!) and
singing/playing around the campfire. I think my bongos are still somewhat
sandy. (Which sounds like a phrase from the Monty Python translation guide).
So
on to July, which is when we got to see many of you during our annual UK jaunt.
At the last minute it turned out that the WhiteCross powers that be wanted me
to attend a meeting back in the UK in early July, so after a frantic and
frustrating four hours on the phone to Virgin Airways and Travelocity.com I
managed to get myself, Lynne and Michele all on the same flight back to UK
which gave us an extra week over there/here. It was Michele’s farewell to San
Francisco as she’d decided back in April that she wanted to return to UK to do
her A-levels (oops – perhaps a bad choice, given recent events!). One nice
treat was that when we got to the airport and picked up the tickets we found
we’d been upgraded because of all the hassle (and after all, we are Virgin
frequent fliers.. nice to know it counts for something).
So
in the second week of July Lynne was off visiting her family in Wales and the
South West, while I was working in Bracknell and Southampton.
[Lynne] After being
accused by my sister of never taking any photos of 'people', and making an
extreme effort to get family groups together, I've lost one of the two
disposable cameras I bought to record this bit of the tour. D'oh! Anyone seen it?
We
managed to meet up for a few social events, most notably the Hereburgh Morris
15th Birthday tour where they visited the Village Fete at
Ascot-under-Wychwood - origin of
Hereburgh's very first dance 'tradition'. We then joined up when my work was finished
to do more family visiting (Crowthorne and Mansfield) before finally trading in
our rental car for a campervan/RV. This one was a bit smaller than last year’s
monster, but did the job. The prize for monster
dwellings went to colleague Neil who brought his six-berth trailer-tent, complete with full kitchen and (rumour has it)
a jacuzzi in the west wing, though I think the amazing Hereburgh double gazebo
(gazebi? - [Lynne] my guess is
gazebum - any other suggestions?) deserves a mention too. Click here for pics.
As
always, Warwick was a great festival and despite earlier rumblings and rain
managed to (yet again) have brilliant weather. An ever-increasing circle of
friends (Ade, Linda, Colin, Janet, Chris, Kate, Mark, Neil, Jo, Michele, John)
homed in on us and the Hereburgh crowd for a great weekend. And a special
mention for Laura – a Berkeley Morris muso who was in the UK and who joined us,
bearing all the necessary accoutrements to make PROPER Martinis. . Wonder how many folks we’ll get next year??
Undoubted
star of the show this year for me was Harriett Bartlett – amazing 14 year old
accordion prodigy – but also great concerts from Show of Hands, Bob Fox, Ouse
Washes Molly and Dog Rose Morris.
After
the festival it was August, and time to
head back to SF and begin planning our escape in earnest – not a trivial job as
it involved organising packing and shipping lots of stuff (both personal and
business) as well co-ordinating giving notice to both our landlord on Treasure
Island as well as our tenants over here such that our furniture arrives in the
UK (following its summer ocean cruise) around the same time as a UK house is
vacated, while at the same time leaving us in ‘no fixed abode’ limbo for as
little time as possible. Pretty much an impossible task, but we ended up
deciding to move back into Lynne’s place in Warwick initially (since my
tenant’s lease has several months to run, and we’re making a profit on the
rental).
However
the 2 months notice required by Lynne’s tenants meant that we can’t get back
into her place until October 21st (which is hopefully around the
time our furniture will arrive from its ocean cruise). In the meantime, we’ve stayed at Lynne’s
brother John’s place in Crowthorne for a couple of weeks, interspersed with
occasional trips north and overnight stays with various Hereburghers. Many
thanks to all you hospitable people, by the way – we’ll be happy to reciprocate
should the occasion arise. Happily, via WhiteCross colleague Phil, we heard of
a house in Bracknell (i.e. close to the WhiteCross office) which was available
for a short term rental to fill the gap until we move back to Warwick – so
we’re now installed in this place, where we have a slightly less temporary
‘place of our own’for the next 2-3 weeks.
But
I digress.. having returned to San Francisco we had the sad task of telling all
our US friends that we’d be heading back to the UK in a few weeks.. and thus
began a frantic round of farewell parties, lunches, dinners, etc, etc.. We also
managed to squeeze in a few final visitors – my brother Peter & wife Julie,
and UK pal James were able to sneak in and spend some time with us doing a
final round of the usual SF tourist spots, favourite restaurants and music
venues. James managed to capture the infamous Sylvie the sax player doing her
solo up on the bar at the Saloon (dangerously close to my beer).
And
then it was down to the painful task of packing up both the office and the
house prior to shipping everything out. The process of winding down (or as the
Americans say, ‘winding up’) the office was slow and disjointed, ending with a
frenzied couple of days as various packing materials, documents, shippers, junk
collectors (from 1-800-GOT –JUNK… really!) etc etc all converged at the last
minute. I won’t bore you with the horror stories of trying to dispose of
various things, (not to mention all the very bouncy trips down 14 floors in the
goods lift with large overweight palettes). What was really sad was that since
everyone was also having to organise their own departure, packing, last minute
trips and so on, there really was no single definitive ‘end of WhiteCross San
Francisco’ event where all the staff got together to raise a glass or 2.
However,
as you can well imagine, this meant there were several other smaller gatherings
– I’m sure the Holding Co had a profitable few weeks (but will now no doubt be
in danger of liquidation!). Having set our departure date for Sept 10th
(since there were a lot of seats available on that flight… possibly due to the
fact it would arrive in London on Sept 11th..) we worked backwards
from then and managed to arrange a schedule of
final packing and shipping of household goods, as well as a
‘house-cooling’ party, together with an ‘on-line yardsale where we advertised
most of our electrical stuff on our website.
This
was pretty successful, with just about all the big stuff (which I thought would
be difficult to sell) being snapped up very quickly. We eventually bought a few
transformer plugs to enable us to bring back some of the smaller items which we
wanted to keep. We’d also heard that the folks in charge of Treasure Island
were planning to replace the back gardens (or ‘yards’ in American-speak) with
either new topsoil or concrete, as there had been some scare on another ex-Navy
site regarding contaminated soil. We therefore added an extra web page listing
all our shrubs etc and inviting people who came to our party to bring
a trowel and take away anything they wanted.
This
all worked well with a good turnout at the party, which happened to coincide
with UK friends and colleagues Mark and family and Dave being in town. Several ex-WhiteCross
and ex-Teradata pals turned up as
well as pals from the Holding Co, the Yacht club and friends from the Morris
community.
Also
in the final days of August, we were treated to a farewell party by the Yacht
Club, where Lynne arranged for some of the Berkeley Morris folks to come along
and do some dances. This was a great event – it was touching to see such a
large turnout and the BerkMos performance was much appreciated by all.
Many thanks to all at TIYC for their good wishes, and for the cakes!
Later that
week was another TIYC-related event – the club was providing the official media
boat for the grand parade of Tall Ships - the
start of a week of sailing events based around the 30 or so tall ships which
were in SF for the week. Lynne and I were asked if we’d like to see this from
the press boat and take some pictures for the club website, so of course we said
yes.. So at the appointed hour we boarded El Nido, a 45’ Grand Banks luxury
motor cruiser owned by club mates Jim & Sandy. Unfortunately, while the
weather in the bay was fine, the famous San Francisco fog and wind was out in
force when we got outside the Golden Gate, so there was an uncomfortable half
hour bobbing around wating for the parade line to form up. (in fact, our pal George, secretary of TIYC was heard to
say "This is summer on San Francisco Bay. Never mind that calm weather crap. This is what old salts like." Unfortunately (or not?) we were on the media boat, so this quote appeared on the
front page of the next day's San Francisco Chronicle.
Once back in the bay, things were brighter and smoother and there were some spectacular ships to
be seen, including the huge square-rigged Europa and the Lynx, complete with
officers in 19th century uniform and a working cannon
I’m definitely going to miss all the activity on the bay now that we’re landlocked back in England.
Then
we had an excellent afternoon at the annual ‘A la carte A la park’ with our friend Gloria.
This is held in Golden Gate Park,
and many SF restaurants and bars set up stalls around the arena selling really
good food and drinks. A stage is set up and bands play through the day. We got
to see Jeff Halford and the Healers
(local 'Americana' songwriter very much in the John Mellencamp camp (?)) , The
Saw Doctors (ace Irish party band..), Lavay Smith and the Red Hot Skillet
Lickers (local jazzy big band) and Vonda Shepard (of Ally McBeal fame)
. All excellent - and in retrospect a very well thought out bill, a bit of
4 different music styles (and interestingly 2 out of the 4 bands featured
accordions at several points in their sets), but both interesting enough and
not too outrageous to alienate anyone in the big diverse audience.Again there are pics on the
website.
Scattered
amongst the ‘big events’ were some smaller farewells with friends – thanks
again to Gail, Harlan, Steve, Anna, Peter and Donna for excellent hospitality –
it was much appreciated, and we’ll be more than happy to return the favour when
you’re over here in the UK. Then
came the days when the shippers came to get our personal effects packed and
shipped out – this took place over 2 days, one for packing and the second for
final dissembly (disassembly?), packing and loading. This was a strange time, as there
wasn’t too much for us to do except sit and watch the team do their stuff (they
have to pack everything, otherwise it isn’t covered by the insurance) and
provide occasional direction. The final day was a hoot – a huge truck with a
full size container turned up outside the house.. (there will be a pic on the website soon- but the bits required to
download it from our digital camera are in mid-atlantic right now). Anyway,
to our surprise we managed to fill about 2/3rds of it! Once this was all done,
we moved into a hotel downtown for our last 4 nights in SF. The
last big event was on the Sunday before our departure – the annual Solano
Stroll (link) - a big street fair over in the East Bay. As last
year, Berkeley Morris together with 3 other dancing sides had reserved a spot
in the middle of everything, in front of Schmidts pub. This meant we had a
great view of the parade etc from the raised terrace of the pub. A great day,
very hot, and chance to say final goodbyes to the the local morris dancing
fraternity (as well as Steve, Anna, Peter, Donna and Kate who turned up as
well). Lynne was presented with some extremely Berkeley-esque gifts, including
several bumper stickers (including such gems as ‘Subvert the dominant
paradigm’,’I’d rather be smashing imperialism’ and ‘Practice random kindness
and senseless acts of beauty’) and a ‘Socialist Republic of Berkeley’ T-shirt
(complete with hammer & sickle logo)
– but I think the favourite was a set of psychedelic tie-dyed hankies –
which seem to have impressed Lynne’s UK morris dancing side no end. Lynne danced
a final solo jig in the T-shirt and hankies – pics to follow (when we get our stuff back!) We ended the day
with the BerkMos in a local Indian restaurant for a ‘last supper’ of curry,
which seemed appropriate at the time. Thanks again to all the Berkmos for
making Lynne and me so welcome and for all the great times over the last 2
years – see you all again soon we hope – maybe over this side of the pond. This
just left us with a day of final odd jobs to do (e.g. diverting our mail,
organising access to US bank accounts from UK, and delivering last bits &
pieces (including our US cellphones) to charity shops). And then it was time to
head to the airport and from there, back to UK. It was a(nother) glorious day,
and we managed to wangle an upgrade by using some of our mountain of airmiles.
A very sad feeling as we took off over the city, and got spectacular views of
the downtown area, Golden Gate Bridge and (of course) Treasure Island before
heading north and east across the delta and over the Sierra Nevadas (that's the mountains, not the beers). But at
least we got chance to do it, and we’ve had an amazing 3 years in San
Francisco… To
finish the story, and bring us right up to date, we’re currently still ‘of no
fixed abode’ and living in the rented place in Bracknell (as described above),
with about 2 weeks to go before we get back into Lynne’s place in Warwick. We’ve
managed to fit in a weekend in Plymouth visiting Lynne’s sister Anne and to
pick up Anne’s old car to get Lynne mobile (and it's now sporting a snazzy 'Celebrate diversity' bumper sticker, courtesy of Berkeley Morris). And this week, after a couple of
weeks of dithering, I finally bought another MR2 so I am mobile again. We did an extended ‘test
drive’ up to the midlands for the Hereburgh morris practice on Wednesday (where
incidentally we worked out that Lynne managed to reduced the average age of both
Berkeley and Hereburgh Morris sides by moving back to the UK), then carried on
further north to visit my mum & sister on Thursday before returning south
via the Peeping Tom ceilidh. So we’re slowly becoming re-integrated into the
UK, though it'll probably
realistically be nearer Christmas before we’re installed in Lynne’s house and
properly settled in. Having said that, there’s already a few concerts coming up
that we’re planning to go to, and we’ve already seen Martin Carthy and Dave
Swarbrick at Nettlebed folk club (a bit like the Freight and Salvage in
Berkeley… but with a bar!). And
to finish off, to try to (partly) answer the question that everyone keeps
asking us, which is some sort of variant of ‘what do you miss about SF/what’s
good about being back in UK?’.. Good
things about being back in UK: That’s
all (and probably way too much!) for now folks..
Things
then got really hectic during the final week before our departure. The day
after the Tall Ships parade we took a day out to (finally!) visit Yosemite. It
was one of those things we’d kept putting off, on the grounds that we’d have
chance to do it later in our stay.. well, it was ‘now or never’ – and it didn’t
disappoint. A long but glorious day, and we’ll definitely return, probably for
an overnight stay next time, and perhaps in the spring so we can see the waterfalls in full flow. Like the Grand Canyon, pics
or videos can’t really do it justice, but there are a few more of my efforts on the
website.
Being
back with family and old friends
Radio
4
Autumn
(fall) colours staring to appear
Not
so good things about being back in UK:
Petrol
prices!
Insipid
instant coffee
Not
living on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay
Missing about San
Francisco/California
EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING!
© Copyright Cooke-Shuttleworth Enterprises 2002