Dancing at a Home Party with an English Family by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

  

Dancing at a Home Party with an English Family by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

After our hostess made the trifle, the wife of another one of my husband’s colleague’s arrived with her little boys. 

The boys played with Florence and called her “baby doll.”  The women drank cuppas of tea, and  I supervised; Florence was small and real and not a doll despite running around and pushing the boys on the floor.

I was discovering that baking was an English woman’s great asset.  We ate a beautiful apple-spice cake that the other woman guest made at home before visiting.  I knew that walnuts in banana muffins were what vegetarians considered to be a hidden protein and thought baking was a tremendous skill to acquire one day.

After tea, our hostess began to chop vegetables as we talked.  I volunteered to help, but our hostess would hear none of it.

At 4 pm, another set of sons arrived home from school, they changed out of their uniforms and played a little with Florence before going at each other to play mock-rugby.

Florence rejoined the ladies where we could feed her biscuits and juice.  The men arrived around 6 pm and dinner began.

We ate the crudités with the hummus and taramosalata.  Our hostess ordered Indian “take-away curries, masalas, and saags.”  “Take-away” means “take-out.”  I loved my British English lessons.

The wines I selected at Tesco went well with the spicy Indian food – a Sauvignon Blanc from the Touraine and a Soave from the Veneto.  I also bought a Chianti like everyone did in the 1990s, but it was not right with the food.

We put on some Rolling Stones, David Bowie, the Bee Gees, and Elvis Presley music and danced.  I danced with the kids in a circle and Laurent was teaching “The French Rock” moves imitating Travolta to the English women. 

The guys came over to dance with Florence, the boys and me in a circle.  The kids conked out, and the adults kept dancing until the windows steamed up.

We opened up the windows for air at 3 am and finished eating the spicy, Indian saags, masalas, and curries.

Laurent and I went home laughing and wanted to come back and visit Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Northern England one day.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Touring Epping (London Suburb, UK) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Touring Epping (London Suburb, UK) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget – Ruth Pennington Paget

While Laurent went off to work, I got Florence all dolled up after breakfast to go out strolling in the town of Epping on the east side of London. 

Epping is on the Underground (Subway) line, which really makes it a suburb of London.  You can read a book on the way into the City from this pretty place with a huge forest outside it and be rested and relaxed when you get to the office. 

Your spouse can drive you to the station in Epping while he or she shops for groceries, gets kids at school, and does car maintenance during the week, making the car available for traveling on the weekend.  In an emergency downtown, everyone could Uber or Lyft out to their homes or emergency pick-up point.

I think that life situation is a pretty good set up, which you can have in Epping.  People in Chicago live like this.  (Check out the towns of Geneva and Batavia around Chicago.)

Epping has a lot of sidewalks, so I walked into town with a stroller with no problem.  My husband’s colleague gave me British translations for my non-stop American English:  “We call ‘sidewalks’ a ‘path’ here.”

I wondered if the British beat the paths of London like Americans beat the sidewalks of Chicago.  I had already done a lot of sidewalk beating in my short lifetime:

-looking for jobs

-delivering project bids

-selling consulting services

-fundraising for libraries, youth groups, and school activities

At this point in my life, I wanted to beat the sidewalk for cultural enrichment.

Our first stop in town was the Tesco supermarket where I bought food for Florence.  You can learn a lot about another culture by visiting a supermarket.  The first thing I noticed in the store was the limited selection of baby food.  There were only seven kinds and that worried me.

I suspected that the British started giving children “adult” food sooner than the French.  The wife of one of Laurent’s British colleagues confirmed this for me.  The French at that time gave children a liquid “cereal” in a bottle, which I did not like. 

I made food for Florence, used some French liquid cereal, and bought expensive American baby food.  My daughter is strong and healthy as an adult, and I am glad I fed her the way I did.

The store had lots of custard and pudding desserts, which you did not have in France.  Even the group Pink Flloyd made fun of pudding, but it is full of calcium and protein for building muscles.  Tesco also only had concentrated juice and not fresh juice.  I liked to drink orange juice once a day as an American.

I learned quite a bit about what kinds of foods the British like to eat on my 45-minute shopping trip to the Tesco supermarket. 

Living in Japan as an exchange student and hosting foreign exchange students from many countries (Youth for Understanding, People-to-People, Sister Cities, and American Field Service programs) taught me what good places supermarkets are for buying souvenirs like cookies, candy, and magazines for learning English and foreign languages (British English dialect and punctuation in my case).

With the souvenirs and baby food in hand, I set out to explore Epping, which I saw as a nice suburb of London, if we ever had to live in London one day.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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