Denis, when he’s not watching cricket, watches golf, and when he’s not watching golf, plays it. Or did, until he did something to his back. He played off 12, but used to be a 6, and what he would really like, besides to have a house on a golf course somewhere, is if I could stop saying Jack Nicholson when I mean Jack Nicklaus. Golf, see, like cricket, is not really my thing. [see post: Not Cricket]

Soon after I got to England, Denis had to play in a celebrity charity tournament down in Foxhills, Surrey, and I, being new to the game, tagged along for the fun of it: 95 crazy people sloshing a ball around while it’s coming down like stair rods, which is a Brit expression meaning “raining cats and dogs”, stair rods being those brass poles that run horizontally on stairways to hold down old-style carpet runners (and unlike rain, of course, which runs vertically, so I don’t get this) and I spent the first four hours being glad I tagged along in an ice box called the clubhouse, reading trophy plaques.

After my third lunch (buffet: ham glazed with that nasty white paste and maraschino cherries, turkey, curried something, cold salads, most of them with beets, so pink), the rain stops, halleleulia, so I decide to follow the rest of play (golf talk), and 12 miles of ducking balls later I catch up to D King and team on the 13th hole, looking a little damp, but not as unhappy as I would have looked, in fact did look.

Den takes a shot, I clap, the heavens let loose, I trudge back to the clubhouse and spend the next four hours in front of a hand drier in the ladies locker room, because you have to hang around these events till everyone’s in (done playing) and gotten changed and hair all combed for drinks and dinner and the awards.

Then guess what happened? Denis won (!) Second prize. A new golf trolley.

This is exactly what had been missing from the living room in our little Belsize Park love nest but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it until then and, the real bonus, it went with the other two he had there. (Yank Golf Wimps may be interested to know that in England you don’t use buggies i.e. electric carts unless you’re 102 or your leg’s broken, the idea here is to get out in the wind and the wet and get some exercise, you therefore use a golf trolley and pull your clubs yourself, or carry them.)

I’m embarrased to relate what happened next.

Golf lessons, for me. Even though I’m not the first person you’d think of for sport, or want on your team, because not everyone can get an “F” in Badminton at Vassar (“$8000 a year it cost us to send her to the best school in the country and she was up there failing badminton? Christ Almighty.” - Peg Lynch Ronning) but I thought it would be good for Denis and me to have something to do together in our old age besides sit in front of the TV watching the Ryder Cup and me falling asleep.

DK was delighted, needless to say, and happily made arrangements with Peter the Pro up at Hampstead Golf Club, a nine hole course on Winnington Road, NW London, where we’d only recently been reported to the Secretary by some irate female member who didn’t care for me accompanying Den in a halter top and short shorts and taking the odd putt (summer had arrived for a few seconds, see, and I didn’t want to miss it).

Peter the Pro said I had terrific style and nice form and a good swing, and that it was sandwedge, not sandwich, and tee shot, not T-shirt, my only handicap being I didn’t keep my eye on the ball, which is what the game seems to be about.

“Stop,” said Peter. “You’re not looking at the ball.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t stop looking at how big my feet look in these unbelievably ugly golf shoes.” Huge navy and white saddle jobs with a fringed flap. (Wouldn’t heels aerate the greens or something?)

Reservations about my future as a golf nut mounted.

I felt guilty when I didn’t go practice, because Den had shelled out for all this equipment for me to cart around (I don’t much care for skiing either) but then felt guilty when I did go practice, because life is short, and who wants to waste it playing golf. I did get a hat out of the deal though, a visor, which I liked, except it messed up my bangs, which they call fringe over here, like sofa trim, and also a matching bag and some tees (but only one glove).

I was supposed to have tea, with the female Secretary of the club to see if they’d like me as a member, and she, Pauline something, phoned to say some of the lady members (in their giant baggy culotte outfits) might want to play a “round” with me after, which sounded interesting, not to mention terrifying, since I hadn’t even played a hole yet, but in the end it never happened, since I was much too busy out on the fairway giving Den a run for his money by hitting five air shots in a row (where you miss the ball completely), bursting into tears, saying “I hate this game! I hate it!” and walking back to sit in the car and have a cigarette and contemplate what was turning out to be the biggest miscalculation of my life, not counting my first marriage, or when I drove under the back of a truck on the Q Bridge in New Haven, Connecticut in my orange Pontiac Firebird after looking down for one second tops to find lipstick.

I told Den I’d only do golf again if I could have pink golf shoes.

The world held it’s breath, and, one wonderful Valentine’s Day, they arrived. I wore them twice up at Hampstead then around the bedroom a few times but eventually loaned them to actress friend Maureen Lipman who needed them for a TV show but then of course, had nightmares: what if she forgets to give them back? What if I never see them again?

Some things are just too horrible to even contemplate.

It occurred to me that I don’t look for recipes in magazines any more. Maybe it’s because I don’t have any magazines. Or trust them (more on this to follow). My mother used to subscribe to you name it, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Cooks and I’d lug them back here to the UK, couldn’t wait to read, there’d always be two or three things that caught my eye, which I’d try, and file with a “YES!!” even if DK only acted polite about it.

True, Denis grew up in a place called Hornchurch, Essex, and during the war, but I’m trying to decide if this is a good enough excuse for being such a culinary dolt. He says he remembers dried egg powder and collecting shrapnel and never seeing a banana until he was nine. When his Auntie Nora died his mother told him she’d gone to heaven and when he asked what heaven was like, was it nice, his mother said oh yes, beautiful, they give you bananas every day, so Den marveled at that and has maybe been spreading the word every since.

By the time I got him in 1980 he liked, let’s see, bananas, and something else, oh yes, the cheese that tastes like sealing wax, or is it pencil erasers. English Mild Cheddar. What he was not so keen on was about 2000 normal things like apples, anything with “bits” in, such as raisins, or capers, wasn’t a huge fan of gravy or sauce since it might be hiding “bits”, and there was no saying here honey, yum, and shoving a treat in his mouth and telling him afterwards he’s just eaten, say, raw herring. I didn’t know any of this until I got over here, obviously.

Back to magazines.

Den was closeted in his office one day composing (or decomposing, as he says) and I was killing a little time between lunch and dinner looking at some Brit “Women’s Own” type magazines I’d bought earlier while killing a little time between breakfast and lunch, and here is what I learned:

- For Fettucini Carbonara you’ll need “10 oz. of re-heated noodles, 1 tin of Egg and Ham Hot Toast Savoury and a few shakes of garlic salt, if liked”.

- Chocolate Shell Pudding will require milk, eggs, cocoa powder, brown sugar, and 4 ounces of pasta shells.

- For Chili, you “buy a tin of baked beans and add half a teaspoon of chili powder to it”.

- For Hamburgers, which you first of all need to call Beefburgers because “there is no ham in them”, you’ll need “mince”, which is ground beef, then they want you to put in onions, worcestershire, grated potato and breadcrumbs.

And then for Cheeseburgers all you do is “add a tin of mornay sauce”.

We had a Brit director friend of Den’s named David William over one night for pot-luck, which in fact turned out to be cheeseburgers, my kind i.e. real ones, but I still apologized for being basic and boring and uninventive and lazy.

“A cheeseburger,” he says, eyes widening. “I don’t believe I’ve ever had one. How exciting!”

It occurred to me that looking like the Galloping Gourmet over here wasn’t going to be too Herculean a task.

Friends of Den’s invited us over. I’d never met them. I asked if there was anything I could bring, she says no, I say are you sure, no trouble, she says well okay, a pudding then, and I ended up making a Norwegian Rum Pudding, which was in fact a lot of trouble because I didn’t have the mould or the recipe to hand, but I didn’t know that in England pudding doesn’t just mean pudding, it just means dessert, in which case I might have just brought, I don’t know, grapes.

Anyhow, we get there, it’s a second story flat, and right off I see there’s no table, which means laps, which you can live with, but then I go into the closet they’re calling a kitchen to put the rum pudding down and I see there’s no sign of dinner, only a skillet full of grey hamburger meat (or “mince”). Mrs. Friend of Den’s has filled a small pot with about two cups of water and turns to me, concerned.

“Do you think this will be enough?”

“For what?” I ask.

“Spaghetti,” she says.

“For all of us?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

So I help her find a bigger pot, like she’s never seen this kitchen before, and a lot of wine and no hors d’oeuvres later, she and her husband bring in eight tons of spaghetti, which comes to one ton each, topped with a mountain of grey hamburger meat. Dry. No sauce. They’re calling it Spaghetti Bolognese.

“Anyone for grated parmesan?” she asks, brightly, and eight people kill themselves trying to get to the salt cellar full of it first.

Then comes silence, as we eat and eat and eat and eat and no one’s making a dent except maybe the hosts, and finally after a few hundred choruses of whew, no more for me thanks, couldn’t eat another thing if you paid me, the Norwegian Rum Pudding and Raspberry Sauce enters and everyone dives in like they haven’t eaten all year, except me, who’s too mortified. Anyhow both legs have gone to sleep so I can’t reach.

About six months later, the Spaghetti Bologneses move to the country and are dying for us to come see what a great place they’ve got and what a cute kid their three year old Parmesan is. They’ve bought what the English call a two-up-two-down, as in rooms, on the minute side, with low ceilings. Also terraced, meaning attached to other two ups and downs on either side. Bleak. Damp. Smells of coal. Just what you’d want waiting for you every day after a two hour commute from London.

But let’s get critical for a minute. If you were buying a very large Three Piece Suite [see My First English Sunday Lunch and Other Culinary Mistakes] you’d measure the living room first, yes?

The main problem with the Bologneses new place, as I saw it, is you couldn’t get in or out without moving furniture around. Mrs. B apologized a lot.

On the culinary delight front, they surprised us with a table and ten of us were crammed around it along a narrow passage between the kitchen and lounge, eating a little roast instep of wildebeest maybe, and wondering when the cute kid’s bedtime might be, when Denis cued me in to telling a favourite story of ours, which began like this:

“Well! We’d gone over to [Some Mutual Friends’] for [some congealed armpit of yak] and I, like a good guest, helped clear. The kitchen is a wreck. Stuff everywhere [you know yak] and I’m looking for a place to set plates down when I see what appears to be a long bookcase about this high with nothing on it and I say ‘Oh! Is it all right if I set these down on—what is this thing anyway?’”

Now. Normally, this is where, in the story within the story, Mrs. Mutual Friend says “That, my dear, is my hostess trolley! I simply couldn’t live without it! Why, you can make dinner at 3:00 in the afternoon, plug it in, and everything stays warm for hours until you need it!”

And then everyone groans with disgust and I get a big laugh.

But. But but but. Now, at the Bolognese’s, just as I’m getting my hostess trolley yuk! face ready, I can see, past DK, who’s suddenly shifted in his chair, through and into the Bolognese’s kitchen and what do I see? A hostess trolley.

So. I pause. And the table full of people gets even more itchy for the big hilarious payoff.

And finally, I say, with lightning wit, “And that’s what it was all right. A bookcase.”

The thigh slapping in the room was of course pretty deafening and I felt like a Complete Arsehole of the Highest Order and Denis of course thought I’d lost my mind and said (subtly) “Darling! That’s me you’re kicking!” and even looked under the table.

Now this was interesting. All told, I encountered, during that first year, seven hostess trolleys in seven Brit homes. It was, I decided, quite possibly an epidemic and decided that if we ended up catching one I’d grab it for shoes, as there was room for about three pairs in DK’s wardrobe (no closets in England, a subject to be addressed at another time).

I shall conclude with an appetite-whetting recipe not only pulled from a magazine (I asked) but was actually set down in front of me as a first course at a dinner party once up in Hertfordshire: Ricotta cheese, mounded in a parfait glass, topped with a slice of kiwi fruit, and sprinkled with instant coffee. I won’t go into the Mains.

DK, when he wants to smell a trace of something in the air, gets taller. He stands straighter, raises his head, then nose, then does a series of loud exaggerated sniffs while turning around in all directions, sort of like a cartoon character would, a bear, say, getting wind of nearby steak on a campfire. I watch this and think, really? Actually no, I don’t think, I mention it, because I can’t not.

“What are you doing?? Just smell! Why are you making such an issue out of it?!” I say, helpfully, and Den’s stunned, seriously has no idea what I’m talking about until I expertly demonstrate getting a whiff of something just using my nose without moving any body parts, and after a few minutes of this we can get back to whatever’s so important we’re supposed to be smelling for and one of us goes outside or pokes his or her head into the boiler cupboard and we can sniff however we like, unobserved.

I am now reminded of an evening of olfactory bliss years ago in London chez Kings.

Den and I were supposed to go out for dinner with close friend playwright Jack Rosenthal and actress Maureen Lipman and afterwards to see a production of Light Up The Sky by Moss Hart, I think in Hammersmith, but Den, not being a big theatre fan, unless he wrote the music, and even then it’s not a given, didn’t want to go, so we stayed home for Me Making Omelettes and doing dishes.

“There’s a funny smell in here,” Den says, from the living room.

“I didn’t use gruyere. Honest. I told you.”

“No, no. Like something’s burning,” he says, so I come in and we sniff the fireplace and the video machine and so on but can’t pinpoint anything until I open a little door under the eaves that leads to a crawl space, and smoke wafts out. Not a lot, but visible. DK immediately goes downstairs to pull the fuse on the gas boiler, just in case, and I stay with my head upside down in the crawl space, coughing and trying to see anything besides smoke.

“Do you think we should call the electrician?” says Den, coming back into the livingroom.

“I think we should call the fire department.”

Seven minutes it took them. Two engines, screaming up Parliament Hill NW3, lights flashing, sirens blaring, even though I’d said we weren’t engulfed in flames yet or anything.

Soon, 11 firemen all the size of Godzilla are traipsing up three flights of stairs and trying to get into this crawl space that even Denis has trouble with.

I must mention that after I rang them I immediately put on some make-up and a bra, and a better sweater, though this turned out to be unnecessary since the first thing they did was to cut the power to the place, so nobody could see a thing, and we all kept stumbling up and down until one of the fireman, maybe the head guy, said “Does anyone feel like nipping down to the truck and getting a light?” and there was a big moan over this because of all the stairs.

Meanwhile, I’m standing hostess-style at the very top by the kitchen door (it was what’s called a maisonette over here—a duplex, to Yanks, and with living room and kitchen and roof terrace up top, three bedrooms two baths below) and greeting all the hulks emerging from the depths, all of whom ask what’s going on, the answer being “There’s a fire but no one can find it. Want an oatmeal cookie? They’re homemade.”

Finally, the sveltest of the Crawl-Space Brigade reports from between the floors that he’s found the fire. Smouldering only, as yet, but beginning to flare up. The bad news is he can’t get to it because of a supporting beam, so preparations are made for the living room carpeting and flooring to be ripped up until one of them, the one I decided would be going into my Will, points out that the fire is in fact directly over the ceiling light in our downstairs bathroom, which will be easier to get at, whereupon the ones with axes ready are disappointed and eleven firemen hit the stairs and pack into the bathroom.

A dropcloth is suggested. I had only some old plastic paint sheeting at hand, which I figured would melt, so after some more whingeing a fireman was sent down to the truck again, for one of theirs, which turned out not to be some heavy-duty asbestos wonder but also just a plastic paint sheet which, needless to say, melted, as, in due course, our bathroom ceiling was hacked apart and burning embers rained down upon it and thence, the rug. A step stool was at one point suggested, about when it occured to me that I didn’t want them using one of my upholstered dining room chairs as one, and the same fireman, still panting, was again sent down to the truck for a proper one.

During all this, the phone rings for DK with a job offer from Sweden, which Den answers on the phone next to our bed, which is next to the door which is next to the bathroom full of firemen. Then George, Den’s fixer rings (he arranged musicians, not drugs). Then Sweden again. Then the fixer. And so DK’s trying to talk dates and money and saxophones and find out where Malmo is and answer questions about what fuses go with what circuits and who did our wiring and when was it done, none of which he’s too clear on either, and then it turns out that the fireman who hates stairs (but likes listening to phone calls) has actually been to Malmo, which turns out to be just across the water from Copenhagen, and Den got to hear all about his holiday there with his wife and her brother’s family.

The fire it seems had been caused by “some idiot” electrician who had installed the bathroom ceiling light wrong, flush against the beam, so that the heat from the bulb heated the metal housing, which melted the plastic wire insulation, which caused the fire, which burned the beam, that held up the floor, that held up the house on Parliament Hill that Astrid and Denis and Jack and Pat Whitehead and some student nurses lived in.

After all the embers had been extinguished using a spray foam that went everywhere, we gave the firemen coffee and more cookies, turned on the lights so we could all see one another’s outfits (Denis had been phoning by candlelight, making everyone nervous), and after fond farewells and promises to do this again sometime, they left.

And now I can’t yell at Den for never going to the theatre anymore. (I mean, Light Up The Sky, right? What a perfectly-titled show to have missed.) Oh and this is funny. Well, mildly. Ironic. Jack Rosenthal had been doing research all week on the fire service for a TV series he was creating (which turned into the wonderful London’s Burning) and after the curtain had come down on Light Up The Sky he’d spent the night at Hornsey Fire Station, observing the fire boys in action and soaking up the atmosphere. Not knowing he could just as easily have come straight to us, and had an omelette to boot.

Today was Win King’s, my mother-in-law’s birthday, and I am reminded of her 74th, way back when. I’d had to concoct a celebratory dinner for her, nothing too “unusual”, Win being strictly a Tough-as-Old-Boots-Unidentifiable-Piece-of-Meat, potatoes and two grey veg person. [See My First English Sunday Lunch And Other Culinary Mistakes]. You’d say “We had the best lobster in Massachusetts!” and she’d say “Ooo, I wouldn’t like that!” but then hear that one of her favourite things to do growing up in Manchester was to go to the butcher’s, ask for a bit of fresh tripe, put a little vinegar on it and eat it raw.

Anyhow. The fillet steak she wanted well done, she wasn’t too excited with there being horseradish in the shrimp cocktail sauce (or shrimp, which were normal shrimp-cocktail-size ones instead of Brit micro versions) and she’d never heard of mange toutes. Snow peas. The rewarding thing about feeding any member of the King family is no matter what you give them, they’ll all go suck on a Gaviscon (indigestion tablet) afterwards.

The crepes suzettes, however, Win’s favorite, were a hit, and to round off the celebrations DK and I gave her a pound of chocolates and a twin tub. What is a twin tub? Ah.

Many moons earlier, Win had expressed the desire to have a washing machine. Turns out she’d been doing everything by hand, would you believe, in the bath tub, including sheets and towels, and then hauling out a big heavy cumbersome spin dryer, not tumble, from under the stairs, before hanging the still damp stuff outside to dry in a Brit downpour sort of way, on the line. Her eldest son Mike, DK’s brother, the leisure devotee of no fixed abode except people’s guest rooms until they got tired of him, which never took too long, had thoughtfully been bringing his laundry over to Chingford for her too.

Well I’m stunned. By hand.

But she won’t let us buy her a real washer to have plumbed in, she doesn’t want us to spend the money, doesn’t want the mess or the upheaval in the kitchen, where would her drawer of baking tins go etc. You couldn’t argue with her. Well, you could, but you didn’t win. With Win.

So, without telling her, Den and I sent away for a compact counter-top combo washer-tumble dryer we’d seen in a catalogue for £79. Fortunately Mike happened to be over there sorting his whites the day it arrived, because Win told the delivery man she certainly hadn’t ordered any washing machine and sent him packing, and poor Mike, not crazy for exertion, had to chase after him.

This compact model turned out to be something of a swine.

You know those pictures of leaf-cutter ants carrying a leaf 500 times their size? This was Win heaving the washer-dryer onto the drain board, where it’s now too high for her to see into, so to open the lid she has to climb on a chair, after climbing on a stool to get to the chair, to see that it holds about two hankies tops, and then it’s Hose-Hook-Up City and the whole room shaking and Win wondering how’d she get so lucky to have me around messing up laundry habits of a lifetime. Obviously it had to go back.

Mailed, actually (fun) and just when I was about ready to talk about something besides washing machines, Win saw an ad in the local Chingford paper for a “USED TWIN TUB” for £47. Which we then bought her as a part of this 74th birthday celebration, because that’s the kind of incredibly generous son and daughter-in-law we are.

This Used Twin Tub turns out to be the biggest thing you’ve ever seen in your life and, as twin-tubs go, not particularly featherweight for something that lives under the stairs and needs manoeuvering by a diminutive 74-year old down the hall to the kitchen.

“Ooo no! It’s not automatic!”, Win says, setting me straight when we’re next over there and I asked what all these hoses were criss-crossing all over the place.

Not automatic. I thought all machines were. What’s automatic mean then and why’d we get it?? Plus the dryer’s not tumble but spin, which she already has. Some present. She loved it.

Time passed. A few years later, we dutifully headed over to Chingford for Sunday lunch, as we did every week, and in between Roast Instep of Kudu and dessert I happened to ask how the old twin tub’s been getting on, because you know, you worry.

Actually it was a Monday, sorry to have misled you. An Easter Bank Holiday Monday. Banks need holidays here, see. You can have plain old Bank Holiday Mondays too, without Easter, and these happen about every other second in May and August. A popular way to spend any Bank Holiday Monday is to get in your car and go look for traffic, and on this particular Monday we’d taken the long route to Chingford, as opposed to the really long route, where you get both bumper to bumper and roadworks, to be discussed another time.

“Ooo! The twin tub packed up ages ago!” says Win, not sounding too bothered.

“What?? Why didn’t you tell us!? How’ve you been doing your laundry??” Not to mention Mike’s.

“Ooo, I do it by hand. It’s not all that much. I don’t mind.”

I’m stunned, again, and thinking well, here we go again. And couldn’t wait to see what we gave her next year, besides a case of Gaviscon and maybe a sleeping bag. Which, I can tell you now, turned out to be an outside tap, because she didn’t have one, and had been happily running the garden hose off her kitchen sink, not that she needed any more hoses in there.

It used to be, when you turned on the TV of an evening, here in the UK, if you were very very unlucky, you’d find sports on all three channels. (Don’t misunderstand, I love sport. So long as I don’t have to watch it or read or hear about it. I realize I am missing out on one of the great pleasures in life. But I am happy with that knowledge.) There’d be snooker, which is like pool but played in tuxedos, or soccer, or golf, or Wimbledon, or One Man And His Dog, which is sheepdog trials, which is men with whistles on moors trying to make their collie get half a dozen sheep into a pen, first. Or Championship Darts, which is fat men with pints of beer throwing darts in a pub. Then came satellite and more channels, so you can now watch sports non-stop if you want to. The one you want to avoid most though is cricket: a) because it lasts five days; and b) it’s boring. I opened my eyes at one point to see someone take a huge crack at the ball and the ball sail lickety split out into the field and hit a seagull square on the head, knocking it unconscious. But then it got boring again.

Except cricket players do things like scamper off for “tea”, mid-match, which appeals to me, but they don’t televise this part.

“So, who feeds them?” I asked DK.

“The Cricket Club. Why?”

“What do they get, just tea, or what?”

“I don’t know darling, it’s a proper tea! Sandwiches. Salads.”

“Salads! What kind of salads? Green, or—”

“I am trying to explain the game to you. The tea menu is irrelevant.”

You can just see the Yankees stopping for snack, can’t you, bases loaded, top of the ninth.

I could talk sports all night.

How cricket works is you have two teams. There’s 11 players on each team. You have bowlers, batsmen, fielders, and a wicket keeper. They used to wear all-white or cream but now they can dress in colours and pajama-type outfits like baseball players. There used to be guy in a white coat looking like a dentist, he’s the referee. The object of the game is to win more runs than the other team.

The area of play is called the pitch, at each end of which is the wicket, which is three wooden stakes with two little wooden cylinders called bales balanced across them. If a bowler hits a wicket with the ball and everything goes flying, or a batsman inadvertantly knocks one over with his leg or bat, it’s an automatic out.

The batsman stands on a line in front of the wicket called the crease, and hits the ball (hard and covered in red leather with nice stitching) with his bat, which looks like a short fat oar, then runs to the opposite wicket. If the ball goes over the fence into the audience it’s an automatic six runs. If it hits the little wall in front of them it’s four runs. If it flies in the air and someone catches it, it’s an out, if someone races after it and throws it to someone near a wicket who can knock the bales off before the runner gets to it, it’s an out. Seagulls don’t count. At each end of the field is a big white backboard thing on wheels called a sight screen and it’s so batsmen can see the ball coming at them more easily. A top bowler can bowl (a windmill like overhanded throw) at up to 90 mph. Batsmen wear helmets, shin pads, gloves, and a hard plastic cup in their jock straps called a cricket box.

When the batsman hits the ball, he runs back and forth between the two wickets as many times as he can, depending how far the ball’s gone and how clutzy everyone is. On the opposite wicket will be another batsman on the same team who has to run while the other guy’s running, but in the opposite direction, meaning you always have two guys running at once, crossing each other. Whoever ends up on the batting-wicket end will bat next. You bat and run until you’re out for whatever reason, and then another batter replaces you. If you get out without scoring any runs you are “out for a duck”. There’s two innings for each team, six bowls is called an “over”. “No Result” means no one’s won, even after five days of this.

Important field positions include Silly Mid On, Silly Mid Off, Short Third Man, and Long Leg. Important cricket teams are Pakistan, West Indies, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Australia, and England. In London the two big cricket grounds are the Oval, south of the river in Kennington, and Lords in St. John’s Wood. The expression “not cricket” means not fair play. Test Matches (like the World Series) start at around 11:00am and go to 6:00pm. The Ashes is the big deal one played between England and Australia, the winners getting to take home a terracotta urn full of ashes from a burnt cricket ball. Rain cancels play. Tarps are pulled over the pitch until the weather clears and everyone waits or has tea. Cricket spectators can bring food and drink (and umbrellas) into the stands and when a player does something good, you clap. If you can figure out what the hell he’s done. The only thing worse than having a cricket match explained to you is golf lessons.

Zebra Crossings

These are for people, not zebras, and pronounced zebra-to-rhyme-with-Debra, and defined by black and white stripes painted across the road and flashing yellow globe lights on striped poles called Belisha Beacons. If you see anyone stepping off the curb onto one of these you’re supposed to stop. Ditto at things called Pelican or Toucan Crossings, which look only slightly different and have lights and maybe signals and beeps or something but the idea’s the same, just stop for whatever’s there, and also at Puffin Crossings, Puffin being an acronym for “Pedestrian User Friendly Intelligent Crossing”, or did you guess. No sign of any Great Tit, Dodo or Yellow Bellied Sapsucker Crossings, as yet, but will let you know. How can you not love this country.

The Most Annoying Zebra Crossing in England is the one near Abbey Road Studios on Abbey Road in St. John’s Wood, London, the one immortalized by the Beatles on their album cover by that name.

Suicidal Beatle fans can be found at all hours of the day miming being in mid-stride across the road, like on the album cover, while someone, also in the road, takes their picture. I spent eight years slamming on the brakes here twice a day doing the school run, which is how quite a few kids in our son’s class learned to yell “FUUUUCK!!!” from an early age, should their mothers still be wondering. There are in fact actual Beatles tours you can take, if you’re so inclined, and haven’t yet been mowed down on Abbey Road. A Brit musician friend told me he was escorting some cousins from Minneapolis on one once and when the tour guide said “And over here on our right is where Ringo Starr once had a flat!”, meaning apartment, about 20 Americans practically tipped the bus over scrambling to get a shot of the curb.

Let’s relive a moment in zebra-crossing history from the mid 1970s.

My friend Annie and I were over here from Connecticut one summer seeing how much theatre we could cram into a week and, dithering one day as to which way our hotel was, and not knowing Zebra Rules, did about ten minutes on and off and on and off, making a few drivers on the King’s Road crazy, or maybe it was the mini-skirts. Eventually we crossed and headed on down the road, only to notice we’re now being tailed by some young guys in a buzzy blue convertible who keep pestering us to jump in until suddenly one of them shouts “Scarper! It’s the filth!”, whereupon they floor it, shouting “Evenin’ Lily!” as a police van pulls up in their wake.

Lily’s short for Lily Law, we find out later, which is a Cockney expression for the Filth, which is Brit for the Fuzz, what an instructive day.

So. Lily’s very nice, two Lilys in fact, they ask if those creeps were bothering us, we say no we’re just fine thanks, just lost, so they say hop in, and this is how the manager of our hotel in Earl’s Court and a tour bus full of arriving Swedes got to see us jumping out the back of a paddy wagon looking like a couple of returned hookers, when all we’d done wrong was see a matinee of The Seagull with Joan Plowright.

Seems Lilys One and Two (not quite done with this story) want us to go with them to a Policeman’s Ball the following night, which isn’t high on our list but they say they’re not leaving the lobby until we say yes, so we finally say okay sure what a hoot and as soon as they’re out the door we hurry and pack and change hotels. And that’s how I guess you could say I was once wanted by the law. So you want to watch these zebra crossings.

In fact, only the other week, I rammed into the back of some Ford with no brake lights (I’m almost positive) which had stopped for a sudden zebra-crosser in front of the Royal Free Hospital on Pond St. in North London and the impact sent a pretty cement garden planter crashing into the front seat and a good silver clip-on earring flying out the window. Now, the thing is, I’d just read an article called “Never Say You’re Sorry!” about accidents and insurance, and what it said was no matter who appears to be at fault in a traffic accident, whatever you do, never apologize, since it could be used against you later in court.

So. I’m sitting there watching this Lurch of a Ford driver get out of his car to come over to be furious about his broken tail light, and I’m thinking gee, that’s too bad, because “Sorry!” would be good here. Besides which I am genuinely sorry, there’s dirt and daffoldils all over the show, my white’s skirt’s a disaster and I’m on my way to a birthday do, and now the hood/bonnet’s bent and a red light is on and there’s steam coming from somewhere.

I leaned out the window.

“Hi,” I said with a big smile. “Could you do me a favor? See that earring there by your foot? Could you just hand it to me please? And my sunglasses.”

I mean, what a stupid jerk female thing to say. (But he did it.)

Blue Plaques

Like round blue china plates with white lettering, these are found on the faces of buildings in which a famous person once lived and they are physically impossible not to read if you spot one, because your heart starts racing, because every single one of them is thrilling to happen upon. Oh! Oh! Oh! you say (you do, honest), this is where John Constable painted! This is where Elgar composed! Where Keats heard his nightingale! Hampstead in north London for example is full of plaques. Sigmund Freud, D.H. Lawrence, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Edith Sitwell, Huxley, Gropius, Breuer, Delius, Du Maurier, Anna Pavlova, Romney, Galsworthy, I could go on forever, Sir Flinders Petrie the famous Egyptologist I’d never heard of until driving past one day and almost hitting a tree trying to see who he was.

NOTE: blue plaques are equally hazardous to happen upon on foot, especially if you step backwards off the curb into traffic to study the house from a distance.

Blue Bushes

Real name “ceonothus”. Someone said they’re called California Lilacs in the States, maybe so, but I’ve never see one there. Can vary from a deep, rich indigo blue to a stunning periwinkle that makes you veer into oncoming cars trying to get a good look, even if you’re not into plants (although when we lived in London, Denis had to walk under a giant bright cobalt blue one every day when he went down for the newspaper but when reminded of this just now he said “What blue bush?”). Some of them are enormous tree-sized jobs too that blot out the whole building they’re in front of. There was one on Wellington Road on the mosque side of the street just past the entrance to Regent’s Park, and you’ve never seen anything this big, this blue, ever.

In fact you want to watch Spring, in general, in England. I don’t think you can even buy anything here that doesn’t flower, and then it’s as if everyone buys six of each and sticks them in this tiny plot they call their front garden and pushes START. You drive down a street in March, April, or May and I swear, it’s like going through some ballerina’s closet it’s so fluffy and beautiful. (And then, of course, you get to watch everything drown, in full flowering magnificence. There’s a tree up at Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath called a Handkerchief Tree. Not of course as eye-catching when wet but still worth a visit.)

Empty Lane Syndrome

This is not precisely a hazard, but merits a mention. Here’s how it works: you’re coming to a stoplight. Two lanes. There’s a long long line of 28 cars stopped in one lane and nothing in the other, as if there’s something wrong with it or everyone knows something you don’t. Do not hesitate. Floor it right over into the empty lane because it’s absolutely fine over there, no dead bodies, no holes to China, nothing, Brits just like queueing and if they see one? Irrisistible.

There was a thing in the paper today about a man who’d gone berserk at Hong Kong airport and started ripping the place apart. For a second I thought it might have been my ex-husband, but then I read the guy is British. Plus this had been arrested for illegal possession of Viagra, whereas Frank as I recall was hauled off by the State Police for disturbing the peace, mine in particular.

Flashback. Flashback…

Frank, an actor, had been hired to appear in a television commercial to be filmed in Nashville, Tennessee for Spanish corn. It had been arranged for months. The money was excellent, Claud Akins, his co-star from his last television series, then being shown in Spain, would be involved and, because I’d never been to Nashville, and it was free, I’d decided to tag along. At the time we’d been renting a house in North Branford, just over an hour’s drive from Bradley International, Hartford, Connecticut’s airport.

While Frank discussed a possible daytime soap opera deal over the phone with his agent in L.A, I stood poised by the front door with our bags.

“Frank we we have to go,” I said, for the five hundredth time, thinking wouldn’t it be nice, just once, if we could arrive somewhere on time. Eventually he hung up.

“They want my hair short.” He checked his reflection. “What do you think?”

“I think we’re going to miss the plane.”

After a frantic search for the sheet of paper that had all the necessary Spanish corn information on it including the name of our hotel, we jumped into the Toyota jeep and lead-footed it up to Bradley, 20 minutes north of Hartford, where we had reservations on the 7:00pm Allegheny Airlines flight to Nashville. And where, contrary to all expectations, we arrived two hours early, our flight having been delayed due to a runway having been taken temporarily out of service to remove a dead deer hit by a patrol car that had for some reason been on the runway.

The ground staff made a big fuss over Frank.

We checked in, received our boarding cards and, suddenly finding ourselves in the unique position of having time to kill, got back in the jeep and drove 20 minutes back south on I-91 to Hartford in order to grab a quick bite at a new restaurant we’d heard about and been wanting to try, situated in a former bank vault. Happily, the meal was excellent. Though the savings bonds were a little chewy. When we emerged, however, it was snowing, and furthermore appeared to have been doing so for some time, something we perhaps might have noticed had we not been sitting underground in a bank vault.

Our evening proceeded to deteriorate.

We brushed the snow off the windows, Frank shoved the jeep into 4-wheel drive, and we pulled into downtown Hartford smack into rush hour, eventually joining nine million other vehicles also heading north on I-91. We inched up to Bradley. Arriving somewhat on the late side.

As soon as they saw us, the Allegheny Airlines ground staff grabbed us and with precisely six minutes to go before takeoff, raced us along the concourse and through the airport and down the stairs to the gate—my heart pounding, dinner bouncing up and down, unable to breathe, but Frank as yet unperturbed, this being after all his normal mode of departure, leaping for a wing or a wheel.

There was a hold-up at the gate. We were asked to wait. An Allegheny ground staff person emerged from the door leading out to the plane, informed us with some embarrassment that the flight appeared to be full, and suggested we return with her to the main Allegheny check-in desk upstairs to see what other arrangements could be made. Behind her, another Allegheny ground staff person took down the “NASHVILLE” sign and bolted shut the big steel exit door.

Frank cocked his head, as if confused. “Wait just a second here. Are you saying you’re bumping us off this flight?”

“If we go upstairs, sir, I’m sure they can—”

Frank dropped his shoulder satchel with a thud and told the Allegheny woman he wasn’t going anywhere except through “that fucking door”. The woman stiffened.

“Frank. Please.” I tugged at his arm. He paid no attention.

“You know what these are?” He waggled our boarding cards them in the woman’s face.

“Yes, sir, they’re boarding cards—”

“And what are boarding cards for?”

“They’re for boarding. Sir, I’m very sorry but—”

Frank insisted we be let onto the plane. He was refused. He insisted more strongly. He was again refused. A small crowd gathered. Frank whirled round and, hands on hips, chest heaving, stood facing out the big windows that overlooked the tarmac. Breathing heavily.

“Look,” I said, quietly, “let’s just go see what can be done. It’s our fault. We were late. They’re trying to help.”

“Help?? Ha! They think they can get away with this! And they do, too! And you know why?” he said, his voice taking on a strangled quality. “Because people are like sheep! And do whatever they’re told!”

He whirled round and, eyes blazing, addressed the assembled group.

“Well I’ll tell you something! I’m no sheep! Understand? I’m not one of your fucking sheep!”

Just then the Nashville plane pulled past the window and away from the gate. At which point Frank, not to be confused with a sheep, began to violently short-circuit.

“You!” he snapped, at a Delta Airlines purser who happened to be passing and had nothing to do with anything. “You get on that thing (Frank jabbed his finger at an official-looking telephone) and get that plane of yours back here! Now! Because my wife and I are getting on it!”

With that, Frank took off upstairs. Flames shooting from both port and starboard engines. I picked up his shoulder satchel and hurried after.

You will be surprised to hear that things did not go particularly well up at the main Allegheny Airlines counter. Frank took an instant dislike to the gentleman manning the check-in desk, and his hair style. As I arrived, with a squeal of heels, having run the length of this airport twice now in 15 minutes, Frank was pointing his finger at the agent and shouting “Listen, Harry Hot-Comb, don’t tell me the plane is full!”

After which he pounded his fist down hard on the counter and a pile of luggage tags went flying. And I suggested he calm down. And he kicked the counter.

An unfortunate chain of events then occurred, which I shall endeavor to recall in the right order. Frank, in a fast and unexpected move, ripped Harry Hot-Comb’s plastic name plate off the check-in desk, which was incidentally screwed to the desk, and flung it onto the floor. Nearby Allegheny personnel took note and a couple of involuntary steps backwards. Frank demanded to talk to “someone who wasn’t an asshole”. Harry Hot-Comb swiftly vacated his position and an Allegheny supervisor appeared.

It was explained to us that when we were late in arriving, our seats had been sold as Stand-Bys, that he was very sorry but it was airline policy. Frank said fuck airline policy. Two women from according to their windbreakers the Laguna Hills Seal Beach Bowling and Tennis Club approached the counter with pen and paper for Frank’s autograph. I interceded. They retreated. Disappointed but alive.

The supervisor offered us seats on the next day flight to Nashville leaving at 10:00am. Frank said that was no good, we had to be in Nashville tonight, spelled T-O-N-I-G-H-T, because he had to start work there at six o’clock the next morning. The supervisor said he was very sorry but there were no other flights. Frank demanded that Allegheny either charter him a private plane or pay him $20,000 as compensation for lost wages. The supervisor declined. Frank exploded.

In quick succession, he snapped off the entire row of Allegheny plastic name plates, and then when the counter itself wouldn’t budge, lunged for the metal scale thing next to it you weigh your luggage on, and this he tore free and sent crashing Godzilla-like over the counter and into the Allegheny backstage area. He then spun round, spied one of those metal stanchions they have so people form lines, the kind with ropes swagged between and, with a mighty roar, grabbed it, raised it above his head, and sent it hurtling down the concourse. Drawing, in the process, considerable attention to himself. Especially as the stanchion was attached, by aforementioned ropes, to other stanchions, all of which went banging and clanging after it.

I stood rooted, like everyone else, stunned and horrified, and with no idea what to do. A problem solved almost immediately by two Connecticut State Troopers who burst through the doors, handcuffed Frank and took him away. Leaving me with even less of an idea as to what to do, and trying to ignore people’s stares. Eventually it occurred to me to find a phone.

I rang Frank’s lawyer. Not home. My mother’s lawyer. Not home. My mother. Not home, but my father answered out of breath to say they were at a party at the Salvini’s down the road and he’d only dashed home to get his pipe tobaccco. I told him what had happened, he said “Oh Christ! Oh Christ!”, I said I’d call him back when I knew more and, having ruined his evening, went back to the Allegheny counter and asked Harry Hot-Comb if he knew where I might find my husband, besides in front of a firing squad, and was politely directed to State Trooper Headquarters, three flights up in the control tower.

Frank was seated on a wooden chair when I walked in, refusing to give his name and address to a weary-looking state trooper who sat facing him and who was holding Frank’s driver’s license up so Frank could see it.

“Look buddy. We’re not talkin’ state secrets here, we just need you to confirm the information.”

“Say nothing!” Frank shouted, as soon as he saw me. “Don’t tell them anything!”

The trooper rolled his eyes.

I walked up to the main desk and identified myself.

The sergeant-type there informed me that Frank had been arrested for breach of peace and that his bail had been set at one hundred and fifty dollars. I asked what exactly that meant in terms of what happened next, explaining that this was all new to me.

“All you gotta do,” he said, busy writing, “is hand me one hundred fifty dollars, in cash, and you can take your husband home with you.”

“I see,” I said, then paused. Because why rush into things. “What if I don’t have enough cash?” Which as a matter of fact I didn’t and neither did Frank.

“We keep him here.”

“For how long?”

“Until we get sick of him. Which ain’t gonna be too long, I have to tell you.”

I found a pay phone and called some friends who put on their coats and went to the one cash machine in New Haven in 1977 and drove up to Bradley at 11:30 at night with the $85 still needed to get Frank out of the State Troopers’ hair and he was released into our custody around midnight, Allegheny ground staff keeping their heads well down as we went past.

At 1:30am we flew to Newark, New Jersey. Not quite Nashville, but one step closer. We checked into The Holiday Inn at Newark Airport, littered with leftover prom kids in crumpled tuxedos and ballgowns throwing up in the corridors. We lay down in our clothes, closed our eyes, received our wake-up call about three seconds later, got up, checked out, and climbed into a Holiday Inn shuttle bus with high expectations of being shuttled over to the terminal where we were to catch a 6:00am flight to Nashville. After a few minutes, when no driver appeared, Frank got out and went back to the lobby to see where he was.

“They said he’s coming,” he reported, climbing back in. We waited. A group of pilots and flight attendants got on. When no driver appeared, Frank got out and went back inside, came back, said the same thing, and we waited some more.

“Right!” he said, flung open the door, went round the shuttle bus and hauled himself into the driver’s seat, hit the ignition, and floored it out of the parking lot, an action I believe in some circles known as Stealing A Motor Vehicle. The pilots and flight attendants cheered. The Holiday Inn doorman and concierge chased us down the drive.

Oddly, we got to Nashville with no further hitches and without Frank getting arrested for anything else, or flying the plane. He filmed his commercial for Spanish corn, which was by the way in Spanish, which he didn’t know until he got there, which in fact posed some problems, but in the end turned out okay, the corn people seemed pleased, and everyone went home happy. With of course one exception. Who had in fact been finding it difficult to be anything more than civil to her husband since the disruption at Bradley the night before.

Should the legal aspects of the case be of interest to you, I can report that Frank eventually had to appear in court and pay a small fine.

He was also put on probation for six months and told he couldn’t leave the state during this period without informing his probation officer. However, after phoning the man at 5:00am for three days running to report he was just leaving to catch a train into New York it was suggested that in Frank’s particular case they might relax the rules a little and I believe that was the end of the whole thing. Although for the next year or so a fun thing to do if ever you found yourself up at Bradley Airport was to have Frank’s name paged over the PA system with instructions to report to the Allegheny counter immediately, and then go watch them get nervous.

I feel compelled to point out here that, in contrast, travelling anywhere with my current husband, Denis King, has been a piece of cake. So far. Mind you, it’s only been 43 years.

Soon after I arrived in the U.K, Denis and I piled into his car one Friday and zoomed up to Laverock Hall, writer Willis Hall’s 15th century stone igloo up in a place called Keighley, near Ilkley Moor, in Yorkshire, about a four hour drive from London and surrounded on this particular day (and indeed on every successive visit) by pea soup fog. The idea was to introduce me to Willis and his wife Valerie plus Willis had some ideas for a musical adaptation of Treasure Island to discuss with Den, ideas which I’d gladly pass on to you but it was difficult to hear with my teeth chattering.

The big worry about Laverock Hall, besides being able to see your breath in the front hall, was that we had to spend two nights here. Or even one night.

The guest room’s like a meat locker. I asked about this.

“Don’t be so bluddy soft!” says Willis, incidentally in shirt sleeves. “Central heating cooms on’t four o’clock!”

I spent the rest of the day looking at my watch and trying not to gag from the smell of the coal fire, the only source of heat in the living room, and in front of which I rotated, spit-like, every few seconds so as to melt evenly—when, that is, I wasn’t shooting out to the car saying “Be right back! Just have to get something!” and leaping in for a quick blast of the heater. At 4:00pm on the dot I’m upstairs like a flash, hugging our radiator, which got luke warm for about two seconds then clicked off.

Meanwhile, Willis is insisting on going for walks across the moors in what they call freezing fog and I call pretty much the last thing I want to do but went anyway to be polite (and get away from the coal smell).

“You can’t see it, but down there (Willis points into the fog) is a bluddy fantastic view over t’Howath (Bronte country). And over here (Willis disappears into the fog), if you look t’ right where you can just about make out’stone wall, there’s sheep. Hundreds of the bluddy things.”

Den and I more or less died all night in twin beds wearing everything we’d brought, and the bathroom down the hall’s got the window open so you don’t want to stick around to brush your teeth even. Somehow, we slept. But not for long.

“Open t’bluddy door!”

“Who is it?”

“Who’d you bluddy think it is!”

Willis, with cups of tea, at dawn, “knocking us up”, which is Yorkshire talk and maybe elsewhere-over-here talk meaning “waking”, not making pregnant.

“What time is it?”

“It’s time to bluddy get up, you daft buggers!”

Can’t fault these Yorkshiremen for style.

I came down for breakfast in leg warmers, and saying my hat was on because my hair was dirty, to find Valerie, Willis’ wife, in the kitchen, definitely the place to be because of something called an Aga, a big cast iron range like the ones you imagine your grandmother’s great grandmother used to cook on, and which made the kitchen marginally warmer, to be sure, than, say, the Arctic, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say toasty. Finally I couldn’t stand looking at Valerie in her little T-shirt anymore.

“Valerie you have to be cold. Be honest.”

She laughed and said no, she wasn’t, at all, although when she first came up to Yorkshire from Kent, which is south, where she grew up, she almost froze to death, she said it took her about a year to get used to it. (I never would have married the guy.)

So. Now. The whole time we’ve been talking there’s been a major production number going on. The kitchen table’s covered in a project, Valerie’s been beavering away, measuring this, measuring that, putting little piles of flour on little pieces of paper, little piles of sugar, little piles of butter, fussing with a big iron scale, adding lead weights, taking them off, putting them on again, adding to this pile, adding to that, looking like some apothecary from the 19th century.

“Valerie. What are you doing.”

“Oh!” she laughs. “Nothing terribly exciting. Just an apple pie.”

An apple pie. Can you bear it. I sent her a measuring cup as a thank-you present. These pushy Americans with their new-fangled inventions.

Fortunately, a few years later, a musical adaptation of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s timeless seafaring tale of adventure, book and lyrics by Willis Hall, music by Denis King opened with much fanfare at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. I say ‘fortunately’ because, well, you wouldn’t want to think you froze your tits off for nothing.

Should you wish to mount your own production, say on the Rhone Glacier, the musical is licensed by Concord Theatricals (formerly Samuel French)

To whet your appetite, here is a short clip about this particular production of Treasure Island, taken from Episode 10 of DK’s memoir, Key Changes entitled “Disasters, Dames and Dom Perignon” and read by the little maestro himself. Full series incidentally now available wherever you get your podcasts.

We’ve been going through old VHS video cassettes taking up space in the attic, boxes and boxes, because I can’t believe we need them anymore. Technology has moved on. DK and I have now hauled them all down to the living room and The Plan is to find, also in the attic, our old VHS machine, and the right cord, and play these cassettes to see what’s worth having digitised and what we can pitch. Ideally I’d like to accomplish this project without DK: a) because I’m a better decision maker; and b) because Den would rather be doing something else anyway, such as watching the golf or cricket or football or rugby. But it seems rude to chuck stuff, especially if it’s his, without asking. Not that this has stopped me in the past, say with that ugly acid-yellow nubby cardigan his first wife bought him that he had on, though not for long, when we first met. But these cassettes are his work. Mostly. Well, some of them. And important. Maybe.

“Hon? Honey? Denis.”

“What?”

“’Big Night Out’. Roy Castle. The video cassette. In your hand. DO WE WANT TO SAVE IT OR NOT?”

DK regards the cassette, acting in fact rather surprised to see it there, turns it over, like there’s going to be a big surprise on the underside, Roy, maybe, suddenly shouts “Come on, my son!” or “What a pillock!” or something else at the TV, and sets the cassette back in the pile from whence it originally came.

So help me here. I’d like to at least tackle Box 1.

• I’ve got my first wedding, where I got married on stage at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut and which I know I will never look at again because I looked fat. I can lose these, right? Two cassettes.

• My second wedding, four cassettes worth, where DK and I got married in my parents’ garden in Massachusetts, and which I probably would look at again, because I catered it, and there’s some excellent behind-the-scenes footage of me in aprons, shouting orders, swearing, and being excited unmolding the lemon mousse at finding the blue Band-Aid from my thumb I’d lost the day before. Plus I’d get to watch DK quoting Sammy Cahn again saying love is even lovelier the second time around, which was certainly true in 1984 and which maybe he’d like reminding about again, say at half time.

• What about Morecambe and Wise? Not the whole TV shows, just seven segments from the ones on which The King Brothers, DK’s old boy band, featured. Ernie Wise gave them to us. They’ve already been uploaded onto DK’s YouTube channel. Am thinking pitch? It’s not like Ernie signed them.

King Bros on Morecambe & Wise sample

• Twelve Lovejoy episodes. Pitch, yes? I mean, the whole TV series (71 episodes) keeps being re-run on satellite if we need to see it. Okay, yes, these would be a record at our fingertips of DK’s incidental (background) music for them. But. Will we ever in a million years need to know really quickly what he scored for, say, Episode 7 at 21 minutes 23 seconds in, ‘Lovejoy and Tinker race off in the car leaving Lady Jane standing openmouthed in her drive’? DK says no. But I also just asked was it cold in here and should we light a fire. So let’s leave these until I confirm. Then burn them.

• 27 cassettes from 27 (out of over 200) other television series he wrote themes for. We’ll Meet Again. Between The Wars. All At Number 20. Madsen—another Ian MacShane series but didn’t take off like Lovejoy. Hannay—Robert Powell, gorgeous. About Face. Will save that because I wrote it. Well, wrote one of the episodes. And Maureen Lipman starred. And we’re still friends. Dick Turpin. Smuggler. More. Some Eric Sykes stuff. He was funny. Deaf, when I met him, but funny. Moon and Son. No idea about any of these. Minder on The Orient Express. Save? Why? Did you ever see We’ll Meet Again? About the Yanks based in Suffolk during WW2. There’s a very annoying actor in it playing “Red”, Gavin O’Herlihy (son of famous actor Dan, who played Robinson Crusoe in the movie) who I knew from my high school years when I was dating his roommate Ed Davison up at Andover (boarding school) and he once came to our house along with Ed and left his skis and boots and my mother had to mail them back to Andover and I never heard the end of it. Still. Loved the series. And they’re not re-running it for some reason. I can fast forward the Gavin scenes.

• And now. At the very bottom, where they belong, two cassettes labeled “Freebie” which, as it happens, I do know what to do with. We’re now going to talk horses for a minute, specifically the correlation between Genuine Horse Flesh and Anything In That Department Which Might Appeal to Kings 1 or 2. We’ll start with me.

My boyfriend in Junior High, Chris Dorflinger, had a horse. Candlelight. A school mate Camilla Fortune also had a horse, named I don’t know what. I asked my mother if I could have a horse. I mean, there was room. We had a barn with four big box stalls, empty. Peg said “Sure,” but added that I would be expected to take care of it, that it would mean getting up early every day before school to muck out the stall, feed it, curry it, braid its bangs, do whatever else it is that horses need at 6:00 in the morning and, shortly after that, in fact she hadn’t even finished speaking when I went off the idea and I have been happy with that decision ever since. Horses, I discovered, are fine for other people, and for me to admire across a field. I can ride, but don’t, much, though am keen on the outfit. I can locate both stirrups, mount and dismount, hold the reins, stay on, know how to duck, and prefer Western to the other one because I like the hat better. You might have spotted me years ago at the Fairfield Hunt Club or local gymkhanas striding around with purpose carrying something important-looking like a bridle but I was only there because Chris Dorflinger was competing. I was a fake. And anyhow am deep down more the sequins and fringe WEE HAW! rodeo type. Let’s now move on to Hubby’s Horse Preferences.

Basically, DK’s preference is to be nowhere near a horse, ever, and, after scoring the theme and incidental music for 52 episodes of The Adventures of Black Beauty television series, would be happy never seeing another one again.

Which brings us back to two VHS cassettes entitled “Freebie.”

One day, sometime in the late 1980s, it so happened that actor friend Julian Holloway, being momentarily skint and out of work, decided what he needed most in the whole world was to buy was a racehorse, and came up with the undeniably brilliant Part Two of this idea, which was the needing of three other people to go in on it with him, since racehorses are expensive (not to mention boring). Okay. Thinking caps on.

Who do we know, who’s bigger than a jockey, just, has zero interest in horses, but who quite suddenly fancied the idea of standing in the winner’s circle with a noose or is it wreath around his neck.

I mentioned to Denis a few hundred times I thought the whole idea stank but next thing you know we were £3700 poorer and owned a quarter of a racehorse, which worked out to one leg each: one for Jules, one for Stewart his trainer friend, one for film producer friend David Korda, and one for DK. Each of the four owners then shelled out £58 per week so that this horse, who would be living somewhere in Surrey and not with us in London NW3, the only good news, had spending money for oats, stabling, trainer’s fees etc. Many, many dinners out had to take place in order to decide on a good name but then they came up with “Freebie”. The phone rings the next day.

“D.K. It’s Jules. Freebie’s got ringworm.”

“Oh. Is that good or bad?”

“It’s extremely bad!” says Julian, devastated. “She won’t be able to run for at least six months!”

Meaning we’re now all saddled with vets’ fees and medical bills and special stabling with special hay and possibly Freebie’s college education.

“I just might have made a ricket here,” said Den, for the tenth time.

Six months later and, hurrah hurrah, Freebie’s feeling better, no thanks to us holding her hoof, but Julian’s still besotted and trying to organize field trips down to Surrey to see her ‘work out’, citing figures about running speeds and so on, and for some reason you have to go watch her do whatever it is she does at 5:00 o’clock in the morning.

“You’re sure you can’t make it?” Julian says. “Stewart says she’s looking good!”

“I wouldn’t go to Epsom at five in the morning to see my own mother run,” says DK.

Freebie then embarked upon a highly distinguished racing career, I think even running in the wrong direction once. I swear, not a day went by that we didn’t wake up thanking God how lucky we were to own part of a horse, but finally, one bleak afternoon, Denis sold our scrag end of nag to Julian, as opposed to the butcher, for about two pence. The next morning the phone rings.

“D.K. it’s Jules. Freebie’s won a race! Up in Newcastle!” (Nice going, Seabiscuit.)

Julian’s absolutely over the moon ecstatic. Except, when the film crew of some TV guest shot thing he was doing that day heard he had a horse running in the 2:30 or whatever, they asked for the inside scoop ie should they back it, and Jules had of course said forget it, absolutely not, Stewart the trainer says she’ll hate the ground so by no means put money on her. So no one did. Except Jules, who couldn’t stand not to, and at the last minute put down £20 to win at eight to one (odds, not time) and if you get out your calculators you’ll see this is £160, which is about what it cost Jules to buy the extremely pissed off film crew drinks all night.

Finally, and we’d been counting the seconds for this, we had to go over to Julian’s flat in West Hampstead to watch the celebratory video he’d had made from the Newcastle footage, entitled “FREEBIE WINS A RACE”. You can just make out a line of black dots disappearing into the fog, and then it’s over.

So, really, I don’t think we need more than one copy of this.

Onwards to Box 2. And thank you. You may think you didn’t contribute much but, like many challenges, it’s the knowing you were there.

The daughter of a friend of mine has just taken a job as Prop Girl at a theatre somewhere up north. She’s very excited. I remember that feeling. It was just before discovering that being a prop girl is a totally thankless job, badly paid, and should only be considered if the quota’s full down at the local Sewage Works or Actors Equity. Okay sure, there are a few perks: you sometimes get a free glass of wine from producers on First Nights and sometimes free access to costume storage for funky First Night outfits; plus, after the show’s over, you can steal stuff no one wants (or knows is missing) for your flat. So it’s not all bad.

The dictionary defines a prop as a moveable object used on the set of a film or play. Technically, anything an actor takes onstage i.e. lighter, pen, wallet with the secret code and so on is called a personal prop; a practical prop is anything that has to work, meaning lights up or needs wiring, such as a lantern, stove, radio etc; a perishible prop, as its name suggests, is anything that gets used up or destroyed each performance— food, “wine”, cigarettes, balloons, breakaway bottles and so on. Everything else is called set dressing. Ideally, actors should not be allowed to touch props but this is difficult to enforce, even if you agree to marry them. In fact especially if you agree to marry them, but that’s another story.

The role of the prop girl is to procure these props and set dressing to the best of her ability, as cheaply as possible, and to keep everything in mint condition for the run of the play. And to look as cute as possible while doing it.

I’ll run you through the basics.

1 - Never be seen in flat shoes or trainers, even on ladders. The idea here is to dispel the notion that props is an unglamourous profession. You want to aim for big hair and make-up and heels that clickety-click from a mile off so everyone knows you’re coming. A roll of gaffers tape and a hot melt glue gun stuck in your belt lends an air of authority to the outfit (because something better). Accessorize with one of those butch official-looking She-Knows-What She’s-Doing aluminium-metal-box type clipboards that opens, in which to hold pencils, scissors, staple gun, earrings, lip gloss etc.

2 - Never read the script, it will only confuse you. Wait to be handed The Prop List by the Stage Manager and then ask pertinent questions to show you’re on the ball i.e. “This seagull that this Nina person holds, is it supposed to be alive or dead?” or “So for this duel, Hamlet and Laertes both need swords, right?”

3 - Learn to pepper conversations with words like Chippendale and Jacobean, Pre-Raphaelite and Restoration, Windsor, Shaker, clawfoot and credenza. Antimacasser. Aubusson. Chiffoniere. Depression Glass. Spatterware. Newel posts. Architraves. Fret-rails. Half-tester. Pilaster. Rococco. Say anything you hear the Set Designer saying. It may not be for the right show but it sounds good.

4 - There is no law that states you need permission to remove furniture from your mother’s living room. (What’s the big deal about missing end tables, anyway?)

5 - Don’t accept dates with antique store owners, flea market stall holders or Persian carpet warehouse proprietors unless absolutely necessary (say if they offer to loan you everything for nothing). In which case feel free to head to Tahiti with them, or Southend. Tell everyone you’re on a prop run. Don’t get too tan.

6 - Occasionally, a prop involves carpentry skills. Enter the scene shop clickety-click etc, greet the stage carpenters, approach the band saw with enthusiasm and confidence, place a piece of wood in position, casually place your left hand on the wood as if you didn’t realize this was the perfect way to get it severed at the wrist, and reach slowly towards the “ON” switch with your other hand. The carpenters will simultaneously screech “STOP!” and dive in your direction and with any luck your prop will be made for you while you go get coffee.

7) The first technical rehearsal, when the cast gets to see the real props on the real set for the first time, should coincide with any hair appointments you’ve made. Tell them you’re off tracking down the Act Two kettle or something crucial. Before leaving the salon, dab red pencil around your lids and smudge dark shadow underneath to make everyone think you’ve been up for three days trying to make things perfect for them (the way male directors don’t shave during tech week to cover the fact they’ve been out having nice dinners every night while everyone else has been hard at it and scarfing down dead pizza on the run).

8 - Don’t answer when someone yells “Props!”, respond only to your name or anything sweet like “Prithee, what ho, oh Clever and Invaluable One?” Be seen taking copious TO DO notes (grocery list?) and whenever you move, do so briskly and with urgency. If possible, try to keep Stage Right and Stage Left straight at least ten percent of the time.

9) Deal intelligently with actors. This is tricky so I’ve broken it down.

• Remember that every prop they touch will break, so have two of everything and never give them anything vaulable. (Would you lend toddlers your Royal Copenhagen for their tea party?)

• Secondly, often due to an inability to do two things at once, such as talk and hold something, actors will be unhappy with their prop and request it be made longer or shorter. Curtsey, disappear backstage with the offending quill pen, walking stick, parasol, telephone cord etc, go to the loo, fix your hair, call your mother, tell her what a pig the show is, order yourself flowers and charge them to the producer, wait five minutes, then return the prop to the actor along with the happy news that it has been altered to their specification.

• Thirdly. An actor left onstage unmonitored for any length of time will discover a prop he’s never noticed before, perhaps a book on a table, a figurine, a pillow, a music box, a delicate side chair—and want to mess with it. The answer is hot glue. Cement all set dressing firmly to desktops, sofas, walls, floors etc. An exception would be anything you’ve attached a small explosive to.

• Lastly, actors, with good reason, are wary of firearms onstage, specifically those pointed at them by another actor and fired at close range. This is where a prop assistant, the dumbest one you can find, comes in handy.

10 - Never read reviews, few critics mention props. Shows don’t fold overnight because of bad set dressing (so far). If and when the closing notice does go up and the everyone’s moping around looking like their dog just got run over, smile, bake brownies for everyone and hum. It wasn’t your fault (for once). Then load your car and step on it.

“The sun has got his hat on, hip hip hip hooray, the sun has got his hat on and he’s coming out to play!”

This is an Olde English ditty which I believe nicely captures prevailing local optimism that prevailing local precipitation might give way to picnic weather sometime before the year is out.

I picked something simple and waterproof to meet Denis’ parents in. This was June of 1980.

The idea was to drive an hour of stop lights away from Hampstead, in north-west London, to Chingford, in north-east London, for English Sunday Lunch, a tradition whereby you eat a big heavy meal in the middle of the day and then pay for it all night. The idea was also to make the Kings, staunch Catholics, fall in love with me, a married lapsed-Episcopalian Yank with eye makeup out to here living in sin with their married son, on sight.

No sweat. I brought flowers, and a white cake layered with a lemon filling and covered in Four Hour Frosting. This is exactly the same as the more common Seven Minute variety, except you beat it in a pan that’s teflon coated so black bits flake into it, so you have to throw it out and start over in a smaller pan, which turns out to be too small and the kitchen gets coated in white goo. You then go out and buy a decent pan, come home, start again, see there’s no more sugar, go out, buy some, come home, make it, and that’s pretty much all there is to it.

The Kings lived in a small ground-floor flat with a teeny back yard which you have to call “garden” here because yards in England denote not-so-nice cement areas or something. Their living room or “lounge”, they said, like it’s an airport, was filled with what was called a Three Piece Suite. This is furniture, and a Brit idea, and one which reigned supreme until new stores like Conrans, Habitat and IKEA began talking sense into these good people. Three Piece Suites were acquired thusly: go buy a big overstuffed couch with fringe on it, two big matching overstuffed chairs come with it, and there’s you done with living room furniture shopping. Even without heels on, your knees come up to your ears when you sit, which is an interesting way to make small talk with prospective in-laws.

Winifred King, Den’s mother, known as Win, was petite and apple-cheeked, sparkly and delightful. I liked her immediately. Bill, Den’s dad, baldish with glasses, white shirt with tie, suspenders (called braces), teeth permanently clenched on a pipe, was also warm and welcoming and except for him trying to force feed me some gaggy yellow liqueur called Advocaat that looked like amoxycillan antibiotic, along with ginger wine, and the entire contents of the liquor cabinet, which all started because I said sure to a little sherry, I liked him right away too. Kings and more Kings then kept arriving to pack the lounge and check out Den’s New American Lady. You may care to memorize them, for fun, and where they lived:

Eldest brother Mike, divorced, of no fixed abode. Leisure devotee. Will years later end up permanently ensconced in our guest room watching TV all day and putting his feet all over the good quilt Nina made me. But I get ahead of myself. At the time of first meeting he was busy spongeing off old girlfriends and a rich sheik from Bahrain named Abdulla, though over the years was nevertheless available to house-sit whenever we needed someone to run up our phone bill, forget to lock our car and get the radio stolen, or let our plants die while we were away. Formerly married to British Cathy Come Home actress Carol White. Two grown kids in the States, Sean and Steve. Both called him Mike. As opposed to stuff I came up with.

Middle brother Tony, two years younger than Mike and two years older than Den, from Folkestone, which is Kent, married to Candy, a former dancer, and their kids Simon, Nicola and Joanna. Tony’s forte was running through recent golf games hole by hole until the room emptied. Years ago Denis and Tony and Mike were in a famous pop group called The King Brothers [video link], a singing trio with Den on piano, Tony on double bass, and Mike on guitar. The group disbanded in 1969 when Denis decided what he wanted was to write music, not perform, and Mike went on to become an ex-King Brother and Tony became an insurance salesman, then a plumber’s helper, then a milkman, something else I can’t remember, and then a bank teller. After being made redundant at the bank and not wanting to sit around doing nothing Tony took classes at the local “Y” down in Folkestone in tap dancing, French, and Yoga.

“Yoga!” said their mum, astonished.

“It helps me to relax,” he told her, “and to think.”

“About what?” Win says.

“Golf,” he said.

Finally, there was baby sister Moira, pronounced Moy-ra. Dental nurse. Lived down the road from Win and Bill with husband Del, short for Derek, of Irish extraction and something to do with banking. Three girls, Siobhan, Donna and Juliet. Moira brought her mother her ironing to do (which made me feel okay about doing it later on).

So there we all are, jammed into Win and Bill’s four by four lounge full of Three Piece Suite, apparently the first time All Kings have all been together since Denis’ first wedding in 1969, so am flattered, but nervous, and holding court with a lot of teeth and saying how much I like rain, and doing a lot of “Don’t think all Americans are like what you see on TV!” but looking straight out of Dallas with huge earrings and shoulder pads, plus doing a lot of jumping up every two seconds with “What can I do to I help, Mrs. King?”, and finding forks and folding napkins and swabbing counters like this is just normal fastidious me and aren’t I a catch, and eventually Win says I should call her Win. (They like me! They like me!)

Now. Out in this teeny steamy kitchen of hers is the smallest stove you’ve ever seen, doll house size, like the kind I had for a doll called Patty Play-Pal growing up, and which they’re calling a “cooker”. Four burners arranged in an almost-touching square, so your pots can’t be big or overlap or there’s only room for one. Oven’s underneath, also minute, and opens sideways like a door, at shin height, so your head’s around your ankles to see in (too bad it’s not across from the couch) and there’s a second door inside the first, glass, like a storm door, so you can get burned twice. The Kings had to hear all about the giant six burner stainless steel Chambers range I left behind in Connecticut with the combo gas-grill-cum-griddle like I’m the European sales rep, but you don’t want to do too many everything’s bigger and better in America stories on the first visit.

This is how you created English Sunday Lunch Chingford Style. Or so it appeared:

Go to the butcher’s and say you’d like ‘a nice joint’ or ‘a nice bit to roast”, the butcher hacks off a hunk from whatever carcass is hanging nearest, you take this home and on Sunday morning you shove it in the oven and when the Knee of Gnu or whatever has shrunk to about one eighth of its original size and resembles a bran muffin with a bone sticking out of it, it’s done. Somewhere along the line, you melt what’s called White Flora (like Crisco), add potatoes, bake until the consistency of oily tennis balls whilst simultaneously boiling cabbage or anything green until it’s grey, then chop using the side of old china saucer after adding a big spoon-full of Regular Flora (butter substitute). Gravy is melted White Flora from the potatoes and Bisto, instant gravy granules. Carve Gnu using poultry shears until it looks like it’s been through a lawnmower, divvy everything onto plates, immerse in gravy, carry to table in lounge and eat, re-sharpening hacksaws as necessary.

“Does this seem a—bit tough to you, Mum?” DK asked politely. Win had made a big thing of having bought a really expensive piece of meat for once, a sirloin.

“It does rather,” she said, frowning, “I don’t understand it. I cooked it for at least four hours.”

Dessert in Chingford was called a “sweet” and served with either long-life cream (the kind you buy from a shelf, not a cooler, and have to stir to get the lumps out) or Wall’s strawberry ice cream full of ice crystals because it’s been refrozen.

“Gosh, that looks lovely. Win,” I said, as she set the sweet down on the table. “What do you call it?”

“Mile High Lemon Meringue Pie!” Win says, and then starts giggling, which is good, because it makes it okay for me to, because this is the flattest dessert you’ve ever seen in your life.

“So, what happened?” I said, and she says she has no idea, she followed the recipe exactly. I said well let me see it, so she goes and gets it and I start going through it, outloud, listing off the ingredients, and the whole time I’m doing this she’s saying stuff like “Salt! Ooo! No! I wouldn’t put salt in a sweet!” or “Six? Ooo! No! I wouldn’t waste six eggs, I only used two!” and so on until finally I say “Win, you can’t expect it to look like the picture if you’re not going to do what the recipe says!” but by this time we’re all laughing so much we’re crying and the strawberry ice cream’s all melted and looking even more revolting and, not counting having once seeing Win comb Rupert her Yorkshire terrier on the kitchen table right before rolling the pastry there for the steak and kidney pie, which is also something you might care to miss, it was certainly one of the more memorable Sunday Lunches to come over the next 20 years of visiting Chingford.

Win, for the record, over those same 20 years of her life, began every single meal at our house by placing two Gaviscons, indigestion tablets, next to her plate.

So it worked both ways.

And I miss her.

Driving on the wrong side of the road will at first look hard. It isn’t. Just do what everyone else is doing and try to judge left hand turns better so you can stop bouncing your wheels off the curb, making you look bad. If you’re ever not instantly positive which side of the road you want—say you’ve been whizzing back and forth to Massachusetts a lot doing Good Daughter Duty and have lead-footed it out of a parking space here in the UK and suddenly drawn a blank—here’s a good rule I made up:

Always position yourself and the steering wheel in the CENTER the road, and make the passenger side of the car be the closest to the CURB.

This works either here or in the States. Except of course if you’re driving a European or American-made car over here, or a Brit one in the States, in which case the steering wheels would be on the wrong side. In which case maybe call a taxi.

My first solo behind the wheel occurred about a month after moving to London. Denis had just bought a new car, something he’d been wishing for all his life and could now afford because he was doing music for 9,000 commercials a week and had no big expenses except rent (and maybe now me) and this dream car was a Porsche.

Silver, nine-two-something, the “cheapo” model he said, but it looked okay to me, and if you like lying down to drive and having your nose be at curb level and dishing out your life’s savings for things like windshield wipers, it was unquestionably a gem.

The two of us were loaded into this contraption down near Hyde Park one day, DK at the controls, when he became incensed by a Jaguar trying to do a U-Turn and creating a huge bottleneck in all directions.

“What an appalling piece of driving!” Den said, bursting with British indignation, and as we pulled level with the Jag, he lunged for his electric window button, the idea being to fling his head out and yell something obscenely polite the guy wouldn’t be able to hear anyway but he hit the wrong button and my window went down and he slammed his head into his, giving himself a big bruise we had to hear about for the rest of the day.

We then drove on to his lawyer’s, where DK dashed in to drop off his I think divorce papers (and get some ice for his head), leaving me lying in the passenger’s seat listening to the world of “shooting brakes” and “articulated lorries” and other unnecessarily-long-named Brit vehicles go by as I marvelled at the half-timbered buildings and diamond-paned windows and cute narrow streets I could just about see if I raised my head a little—when along comes a traffic warden who says move or get a ticket, unfortunate timing, since I’d been counting on putting off my great London soloing moment indefinitely, since: a) I’d only learned to drive a stick shift two weeks before moving to England and certainly hadn’t tried it left handed; and b) I couldn’t stand the idea of me putting the first dent in the dream car and Den being polite about it.

So. After a few headstands and a couple of Here’s Me At The Gynaecologist’s impressions, I manage to hike my legs and the good suede boots with the four inch heels up and over the gear shift and slither over and down into the driver’s well, start her up, and spin out into the maelstrom of traffic on famous Fleet Street, which is now experiencing rush hour, and it’s dark, and it’s raining. In fact, why don’t we just always take it for granted that it’s always going to be raining, everywhere, at anytime, unless I specify otherwise.

So there I am, Jacques Cousteau in this silver submarine, taking an extended tour of the law courts and getting really sick of a one-way system that kept sending me back and forth over Waterloo Bridge when suddenly, about six years later, there’s Denis(!) crossing the street in a panic, looking for me, when his own Porsche cheapo nine-two-something with no lights on nearly runs him over.

And I’ve been out there ever since, trying not to hit something.

Now. You can drive legally in England for a year on your American licence, just guessing at what all the traffic signs mean, but then they want you to get your British one. I missed this information, as it happened, back in 1980, when I first arrived, and drove quite happily here on my Massachusetts license for 20 years (I had thought, see, that every time my passport was stamped as I came into the U.K. my “year” began again, but it doesn’t work this way, it should, but it doesn’t) until someone at our car insurance place heard about it and had a coronary, whereupon I applied for my British one. This involved taking two tests, one written and one road.

The easiest thing is to call BSM, the British School of Motoring, and get them to organize everything for you. Book a two hour lesson. An instructor (I had an Indian gentleman named Darpad) will come pick you up in an embarrassing little red car which has BSM written all over it. Tell him you want to know everything you’re doing wrong, i.e. not Brit Style. You’ll probably be told you don’t look in your mirrors enough, go too fast, and that you cross your hands on the wheel when turning. Brits are taught to “feed” the wheel when making turns, which involves little arm motions similar to juggling but with the hands never leaving the wheel, just sort of sliding along it. It’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen and now I know why it takes everyone about 20 minutes to turn in anywhere. Bring something to read for when the car ahead of you starts signaling.

BSM, for the record, frowns on doing hair and lipstick at stop lights, rifling the glove compartment for mints while reversing, horn honking, rude gestures or derogatory remarks directed at vehicles clogging the road i.e. garbage trucks, milk floats, flatbeds unloading scaffolding, or when you’re behind a parade of army horses from the St. John’s Wood barracks.

BSM will give (sell) you little books on how to pass your tests, with sample questions to study, and a booklet called The Highway Code, which includes pictures of all the road signs you’ve been scratching your head over for years. For example that white circle with the black diagonal line you’ve been seeing everywhere? Means the National Speed Limit Applies (which may be something you care to look up, too).

Plus you get confirmation, in print, that the red triangular sign with the silhouette of a man about to open a large black beach umbrella, does in fact mean Men Working even though you never see any men, or any work being done, or any beach umbrellas (it’s supposed to be a shovel and a pile of dirt).

Memorize all the information in all the books. You can take practice tests online or get your husband to quiz you. It’s fun, like being back in high school. Plus it gives you something to do in bed besides the New York Times crossword puzzle.

BSM will book your appointment to take your Theory Test, the written one, at the nearest testing center. I went to a place called Wood Green, near where terrorists had recently been discovered making ricin poison gas. Bring your U.S. driving license with you in case anyone gets inquisitive seeing you drive up alone (or in a gas mask).

You take the test, multiple choice, in a room with about 30 to 40 others as I recall, using computer screens, and get 57 minutes to answer 50 questions. There’s a three minute break, then you take a Hazard Perception Test, also on screen. You can leave when you’re done. The other test-takers stare at you in disbelief if you leave before the time allowed.

Once you’ve passed your Theory Test (a woman from BSM rang to congratulate me and I overheard her say excitedly to someone in her office “She got all fifty right!!”) you’ll get your Road Test about a month later. I had to go to a place called Hendon across from a police training center. Bring someone with you this time because the examiners can see into the parking lot from their windows and you don’t want to raise eyebrows right off by driving in alone (and with all those cops across the road).

Pull in where there’s a space. The other cars will belong to other test-takers, and be backed in. You find out later this is so when their test begins, they can drive straight out and not have to do anything tricky right off, like reversing. Go inside, read the road safety posters, have some styrofoam coffee, and wait for your examiner. The two of you now go get in your car. Don’t hit the ignition until you check doors are closed, seat’s right, steering wheel’s right, seatbelt’s on, mirrors right, lip gloss fine, etc. Apologize ahead of time for not crossing your hands on the wheel. Say you’ve been doing it your way since you were 16 and you’re trying, really trying, but it’s not second nature. They’ll say fine and give you secret points for being honest. Check to see your husband isn’t standing behind you waving “Good luck, darling!” as you’re wowing everyone with reversing skills, then drive off.

Then just do as you’re told, smile and be pleasant, answer questions about Massachusetts and how pretty it is in the autumn, and the rest is a piece of cake, not counting a Magimix of an intersection near The Great North Way where double decker buses come at you from all sides and for one brief moment there would appear to be more to getting your license than you’d thought.

Before you get out of the car back at the testing center, you’ll be told if you’ve passed or not, which you will have. You’ll get your temporary license and be sent your permanent one. By this time you will know that hoods are bonnets, trunks are boots, median dividers are central reservations, fenders are mudguards, freeways are motorways, windshields are windscreens, glove compartments are glove boxes, a gear shift is a gear lever, sidewalks are pavements although sometimes so are roads, turn signals are indicators, tires are tyres, flats are punctures, and if your husband yells at you to “Filter!” he means to merge. Oh, and a small car crash is “a bit of a prang”. After about a month you can stop boring everyone at parties with How I Passed My Brit Driving Test with Flying Colors stories.

And that’s it. Now just start driving around. Begin with your neighbourhood first, then widen the circle, gradually going further and further afield until you can arrive home without throwing your arms around your husband and sobbing “I thought I was never going to see you again!”

Today I bought two frozen cooked lobsters at Aldi’s for £5.99 each and got excited. My my MY how my standards have fallen. Normally, in fact for over 44 years, I have only once eaten Brit lobster. Too expensive. Swimming in garlic butter. Overcooked. And about the size of a large prawn. Anyone who has grown up in the States and eaten Maine lobsters or even Connecticut lobsters would complain, it’s not just me. Well, maybe it is. But I like a lobster to taste like a lobster, I want it to weigh at least 1 and 3/4 pounds, and I don’t want to be rushed. I like to get every morsel out of every joint. I suck the claws, even the small ones, and I like the tomalley, the green stuff. The Aldi lobsters will be a major disappointment, I know this. I don’t care. I have Lobster Withdrawal. And I am desperate.

My plan is to defrost them, remove the meat, flash-saute it in 12 pounds of butter, maybe a little lemon, open and fill a grilled (and buttered) until-kind-of-browned-and-crispy hot dog roll, the kind that opens along the top, and create my own lobster roll the way I do or used to do in the States. The only difference is the meat this time will be from a frozen Aldi lobster and not from, say, one I caught myself. Yes. Really.

My skills as an ace lobsterwoman are, what’s the word? Legendary. And I imagine the old salts who used to sit around the town dock in Stoney Creek, Connecticut chewing the fat all day are still talking about me. I know I used to impress them by wearing high heels as I leapt around trying to tie up our boat and even doing so, on occasion, with a line that turned out to be actually attached to the boat. Ahoy Lisbon! I was clearly cut out for life on the briny, no question, until, one day, after roughly six years of Long Island Sound sea-faring, I wasn’t. And lobsters were the trigger. I will explain.

You have to check lobster pots every other day. Otherwise, if there are lobsters in there, they’ll die. Not that they’re not going to anyway, but still. The dilemma, in which I found myself, in 1979, in New York City, on my first day of work as a set decorator at CBS Television, is that my then husband, an actor named Frank Converse, had gone off to do a play in Boston without first checking our lobster pots, as he had promised to do before leaving. Home at the time was a three acre island off the coast of Branford, Connecticut. And having lobster pots was his idea, not mine.

I called him to ask what I should do.

He said he couldn’t talk, rehearsals were about to start. (You see, if you’re late for rehearsal, you keep the other actors waiting. Wouldn’t this be a terrible thing.)

“Should I call Dave?”

“Yes! Call Dave!”

I hung up and called Dave, our veterinarian-lobsterman friend, to have him check the pots for us. Dave turned out to be in Canada for a week. I rang Ed Cooke, another possibility. Not home. I rang Rick Squerri. Away in Hollywood being a stunt man. Actually being a parking lot attendant while looking for work as a stuntman. Cars must look nice. I rang the Collopys. No answer. I called information and got Bob Freschette’s number. Gone fishing. Hope CBS liked me using their phone.

I called Frank, left a poignant message via an assistant stage manager, and got on a train to Connecticut, hope CBS liked me taking a day off right away.

How you check lobster pots, works like this:

You get in your boat—ours was a 15 foot wooden what they call “lobsterman’s scow” with a 35 horsepower outboard motor—and head over to where one of your floats is bobbing around—ours were red and white striped—grab onto the rope attached to it, and pull. On the other end of it will be your lobster pot. Lobster pots, also called traps, are wooden slatted crate-like contraptions about four feet long and two feet wide, with nets in them. You may have seen some used as coffee tables. But not in my house. The pots are baited with pieces of rotten fish, the idea being that the lobster is attracted to the rotten fish, crawls in, eats it, but then can’t get back out because of the net arrangement and sits there waiting for you to come rescue it. So to speak.

You haul on the rope, which is green and slick with plant life, until it stops being easy, at which time you lie down on the bench (seat), brace with your feet and give a series of short but powerful tugs until your arms come off. The pots are weighted with cinderblocks so they’ll stay put on the seabed. What you are trying to do is break the suction created between pot and mud. And your lower two vertebrae. The pot is then ready to be brought to the surface and up and over the side and down into the boat.

Picture a rope, on the other end of which is a grand piano.

Once you have the pot in the boat, you inspect it, noting the presence or absence of lobsters. If the pot has one or more lobsters in it, you open the little door, put on heavy workgloves, remove the lobster and, with a special metal measurer thing attached to the boat with a piece of twine so you don’t lose it overboard when you drop the lobster and yell “Eek!”, you measure from the lobster’s neck to the beginning of it’s tail. After telling it to hold still. “Keepers” are lobsters that are up to or over the legal size (a pound or just over in weight) and are kept in a bucket of seawater in the boat until they can be placed in what’s called a holding pot—ours was tied underwater to our dock—until you’re ready to eat them. You may at this point put large elastic bands on their claws to keep them from hurting each other or from attaching themselves to a work glove. Undersized lobsters are tossed back into the sea, to grow and be caught at a later date.

We had six lobster pots.

I caught four keepers and three throw-backers but threw them all overboard and hauled the empty pots back to the island and stacked them artistically by the flagpole. I then hosed down the boat, now slathered in a thick grey evil-smelling sea ooze, like myself, and went up to the house and got in the shower. I had just put the shampoo in my hair when the water went off. This being an island, our water line was a long black plastic hose that snaked out from shore. Clamdiggers, I could see from the window, had yet again inadvertantly raked up our water line along with their clams, causing it to become uncoupled.

I put on a bathing suit, got back into the boat and headed over to the Trap Rock Gravel Company, a quarter of a mile away on shore and from whence our water line began its journey. I tied up the boat, climbed over a six foot chain link fence with the sign that said “WARNING! GUARD DOGS PATROLLING!”, opened a manhole, climbed down a metal ladder, found the right valve and turned it to OFF. Whereupon I retraced my steps, this time motoring slowly back towards the island and hauling up the black plastic hose until I found the break, about 100 yards out. Whereupon I mended the break with a new metal coupling, dumped the hose back into the sea, returned to Trap Rock, climbed over the fence, went down the manhole and turned our valve back to ON, retraced my steps, sped back to the island, got back in the shower and rinsed.

Half an hour later I was back in the boat, then the car, then onto a train and into New York and into a cab and was back at my desk at CBS on West 57th Street by 4:00pm. My husband being tied up with rehearsals.

At my mother’s lawyer’s in New York, to whence I cabbed posthaste forthwith, you could even say in high dudgeon, as well as heels, when my soap, as in opera, as in As The World Turns, finished taping—I pulled up a chair, told the lawyer I was unhappy with my marriage, that I felt handcuffed to Frank inside a small cage slowly being lowered into the Atlantic Ocean, and wanted out before we both drowned. Or finished the rotten fish.

There is so much more to this story. Some of which DK himself relates in his podcast series, KEY CHANGES - A Musical Memoir, if I may just get a plug in here. You want Episode 9 “Musicals, Magic and Matrimony”.

And now if you will excuse me, the Aldi lobsters should be defrosted by now.

I don’t know what to do with all my “First Night” dresses hanging in the attic. You know, fancy ones for theatre opening nights and awards dos, those kind of dresses. I brought them with me when we moved up here to Suffolk from London 20 years ago and am still trying to figure out where or when I thought I might be wearing any of them again.

Still, hard to get rid of. Especially a long fitted black strappy number with a millions-of-tiny-pleats silk taffeta diagonal flounce at the bottom kind of like a mermaid that came from Dickens & Jones, a nice-ish store once up a time in London. I’d tried it on and loved it, even though it was too long, so I couldn’t walk, but thought I might find a seamstress to re-hem it, so bought it. I then thought I might get a scissors and cut it, because former prop girls like hacking things off almost as much as glueing, but then didn’t, and only remembered it was too long until about 10 minutes before we were due out the door for an opening night, so out came the pinking shears.

Turns out this pleated flounce is about six miles long. Den’s downstairs yelling “Come on! Come on! Let’s go! What are you doing?!” and finally has to come in from the car to find me on the floor in my underwear, cutting and cutting and cutting.

“I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it!” he says, shaking his head, but finally I’m done and in the dress and have a two inch wide strip of black silk taffeta that accordion stretches all the way across the bedroom and down the hall and out to the landing. Now. Help me here.

I know I’m not a dressmaker (did you spot this?) so maybe this is normal, but every time I wore that dress I had to cut more off, in order to walk, so my question is: does silk taffeta grow? I wore the same heels, didn’t get shorter, it didn’t get wet. So what’s the story? Hello Dickens & Jones? Magic Dress department please. Be good if it could have grown sleeves for winter.

I wore the dress, freshly cut, when actor and old friend George Hearn, fresh from Broadway, came over to London to star in La Cage Aux Folles in the West End with another actor and old friend Denis Quilley.

George had invited us to be his guests for opening night and at the party afterwards at the Waldorf. He also invited my mother, Peg, whom he knew, and who was visiting from Massachusetts. We were all excited, even though DK isn’t keen on first nights, unless they’re his own, as it does involve leaving the house. A week before opening, George rings.

“Gee,” he says. “I sorta hate to ask y’all this—and don’t be gettin’ your tail up over your back here (George is from Tennessee) but how would you folks feel about jus’ comin’ to the show?”

“Oh? Problems?” I say. Well, yes. Heck, says George, seems the producers are telling him he can only have two tickets for the After Party and he needs them for his wife and mother, or her mother. Or someone related. Anyhow I don’t understand.

“So tell them you need more tickets.” I know he can get them, I used to get as many as I wanted for God sakes, for Sardi’s, and I was only an assistant prop girl.

“Gee, I kinda hate to do that,” George says. “They’ve been so nice to me an all. They’re sayin’ space is very limited. I sure feel bad about askin’ you guys not to come.”

“George. The Waldorf’s huge.”

“They said they’re real sorry.”

“George, you’re the star! You can get three more tickets, honest!”

The one time I need an actor to act difficult and demanding and what do I get, humble and grateful.

So. Three hundred more phone calls later, with Cinderella here getting more and more ticket obsessed by the hour and DK getting more and more irritated and saying he doesn’t want to go anyway and George getting more and more frantic especially after learning that about 50,000 of his bar buddies from New York are flying over to surprise him on his big night (and me saying “Did they get party tickets?”, just checking, because actors sometimes have trouble with loyalty), George finally says well to heck with the dumb old Waldorf, we’ll just have our own shindig, at some nearby bar he knows (all fifty thousand and three of us) and just as soon as he can get away from the Waldorf, where he really oughta put in an appearance, the producers bein’ so nice an all, he’ll join us at this stupid bar faster’n you can pluck a chicken or a minnow can swim a dipper, and I’m sayin well flip my garter, George, what a dumb idea, I reckon I’d just as soon eat a bug, because once I hears Tennessee talk there’s no stoppin, I takes to it like a hog after persimmons—well THEN, at the eleventh hour, and by this I mean we are just going out the door (one of us in a too-long black silk taffeta number) when George rings to say the producers have pulled through and hurrah hurrah, we all get to go to the ball. Den’s thrilled.

The plan is I’m to go backstage with my mother after the curtain comes down, kiss everyone and tell them how wonderful they are and pick up the tickets to the party from George’s dressing table. Denis, meanwhile, is to walk nine miles to wherever we’re able to park and, if we’re not clamped or towed, meet us at the stage door.

And it all worked fine, except my mother and I took too long drinking champagne and dishing praise in the dressing rooms, so Den was beady when eventually we appeared in relatively high spirits, plus everyone in London had found a car that night and wedged it into Soho and ETA at the Waldorf was looking like next Tuesday. Plus it was raining. Because when isn’t it.

“You’ve got the tickets then,” Den says, gripping the wheel, trying to see.

Tickets. Tickets.

Oh my God.

The tickets.

Plum forgot.

“I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it!”

We inched our way across London, Den seething, my mother and I trying not to giggle because it looked like it might be the wrong moment, and pulled up at the Waldorf about a year later. Peg and I waited while Denis went to park (and to make sure he was coming back) whereupon all three headed for the Palm Court, where there’s two guys in gold braid flanking the doorway, who—and here’s the funnier than chiggers at a hootenanny part—instead of saying “Hold it sister, not so fast! Let’s just see those tickets!”, they smile and nod and say good evening and hold open the doors and we walk straight in and hit the food table.

Didn’t see too much of George, as it turned out, a few million photographers needing a few million shots of him partying, like this is rare, but on one of my re-fill trips to the buffet, Tony Randall, the actor (you know him, The Odd Couple), was coming up the steps as I was coming down.

“That,” he said, stopped in his tracks, is an incredible dress!”

“If you only knew!” I said, beaming, then stepped on the flounce, which had apparently had a growth spurt during the second act, and went flying, knocking over and then flattening Tony Randall and spraying the Palm Court with free buffet food.

You kinda hate to get rid of a dress like that, is my feeling.

Glorious George Singing I Am What I Am from La Cage at the Hollywood Bowl

Here’s how dinner works in our house: I make it. I make it because I am good at it and I am organised. Very very occasionally, Alex our son makes it. Even less than very very occasionally, DK, to whom I am married, makes it. In which case we either get Lamb Chops Cooked To Death, new potatoes and peas, or Chicken Piccata, new potatoes and peas. The recipe for Chicken Piccata is from Dad’s Own Cookbook, something Den gave me for Christmas about 20 years ago, thinking, for some reason, that: a) I might like it and; b) it had anything I might need to know in it. The book has chapter headings like “What is an egg?” and as far as I can see was designed to help non-cooking fathers who have their kids at weekends.

“I’ve got the receipt,” Den said, automatically, as he does after pretty much every gift.

However. I kept the book because, my idea, I thought it might inspire Den to make dinner more than once every ten years.

I am now reminded of Poverty Casseole.

Back when we lived in London, pre Chicken Piccata days, Franklyn our accountant used to come for lunch, not as exciting as it sounds, I’d provide something homemade and wonderful and wonder how come Franklyn could only do meetings at mealtimes and Franklyn would provide a few million pages of figures so we could have as much math with our meal as possible and, after he left, Denis would say something like “Did you understand any of what Franklyn said about pension plan relief?” and I’d say no and he’d say me neither.

Franklyn, on one such visit, indicated over Hot Chicken Salad with Blueberry Corn Muffins that what with DK not employed as much as he had been, we would soon be running out of money. The proposals put forth were: selling our London flat and going God knows where; renting our London flat and going God knows where; or continue full speed ahead towards disaster and pray the phone rings with a lucrative job offer, which I was pushing for, because in show business everything can change overnight, which is probably what keeps us all in it. (For the ultimate in financial security, always marry a musician. If you can’t find an actor.)

After Franklyn left that day, Den slumped down on the couch and sat there looking morose until finally the suggestion arose that if one of us is frantically busy writing a book and doing mother-and household-related things and the other is busy doing zip except waiting for the phone to ring with lucrative job offers, why doesn’t the zip person try his hand in the kitchen say once a week.

DK said fine.

So then all I hear about is this dinner, and had to keep re-directing him away from Lamp Chops Again and point him towards the wall of cookbooks in the kitchen. And then immediately had to take The Mobile Alabama Junior League E-Z Church Suppers away from him (where’d I get this??) and about ten others I didn’t even know I had and get him going on Sara Leah Chase’s Cold Weather Cooking and then what does he pick, something called Poverty Casserole. In case I missed Franklyn saying he thought our Waitrose bills were a little high. Life then got almost indescribably exciting as ingredients were checked and re-checked, I said “Yes we have canned tomatoes” a few million times, and shopping lists were prepared and cross-referenced and re-copied neatly.

“Denis. It’s a hamburger casserole. Relax.”

Next thing is he’s buzzing me on the intercom every five seconds, which didn’t work from my end, which he’d forget, so I’d have to get up from my desk and go out and shout up the stairs to tell him where the grater is or what a grater is and then come back and sit down and think isn’t it nice someone else is getting dinner, and I’m listening to this symphony going on overhead of cupboards banging and drawers being opened and shut and finally I can’t stand it anymore and have to head up.

“What is going on up here?”

Den’s in my “H.B. for Me” apron, which stands for Honey Bunch, and I see Honey Bunch Two is on his knees swabbing up some major floor spillage. Seemed peeved.

“I didn’t know sodding mozzarella packets had sodding water in them! It’s all over the sodding place.”

“You’re not putting that dish in the oven are you?”

“Yes. Why?”

“The handles will melt.”

“Anything else?”

“You have tomato paste on your ear.”

“It’s deliberate.”

Allow me to say now one more time, even though you missed the last 50, since you weren’t at the interrogation table, which we also eat at, that DK’s Poverty Casserole is excellent, absolutely, I’ve never tasted better Poverty C anywhere, ever, and I’ll let you know when I get tired of talking about it, maybe when he does. He then branched further afield with Sara Leah Chase’s help to something called Three Glass Chicken, which was even better with four, not counting the broken ones and—well, that pretty much covers DK’s culinary repertoire over 44 years and brings us back to Chicken Piccata from Dads Own.

Which, I am pleased to say, dads everywhere take note—is a triumph. Really. It is. Even if you overcook the chicken, put in too much lemon, not enough lemon, make too much sauce or not enough sauce. It’s a keeper. All Kings are now Expert Piccata Makers and when DK announces he will be getting dinner we know we will at least enjoy it. In fact the only downside to having DK at the less-than-very very occasional helm is there’s no saying “Mmm, honey, yum!” and moving on to other subjects, you have to work When Den Made That Wonderful Chicken Picatta into every sentence for the rest of your life. Plus look at him with great respect when he’s still trying to see where the colander goes despite there being a big empty colander shaped space on the wall.