Falling for London

by Sean Mallen

  We went back to Pergola that night for supper, and with my rudimentary Italian I attempted to engage the owner in a little conversation, managing to discern that the place had been in his family for decades, and that business had been particularly good the previous few days, thanks to the media circus in town, but that it would shortly be back to the usual off-season sleepiness of January.

  With unjustifiably growing confidence in my Italian, I asked him to recommend a dessert. He pointed me to the house specialty. I asked him to describe it, but all I could understand was that it was E’buono. He was right, it was good — some kind of chocolate ice cream thing.

  The drive back to Rome the following morning was easy, and much faster than the trip up, which gave me more time to buy presents in a modest effort of reconciliation for my latest departure. Leonardo da Vinci Airport offered many gift opportunities and I opted for food: a nice chunk of pecorino Romano cheese, some pesto, a tray of mini-Nutella jars for Julia, and a couple of small bottles of wine. The latter may well have been more for me.

  Sure enough, Julia screamed with delight at the Nutella bonanza and Isabella appreciated the wine and cheese. I immediately regretted not buying more. The homecoming was relatively smooth, considering the frosty communications of a few days earlier.

  But there was a surprise waiting for me at Fuckland Buckland: Isabella pointed to our fake fireplace in the reception room, which had begun spewing out a dusting of little bits of rubble over the carpet. She’d witnessed their arrival earlier, as the workmen upstairs were busily pounding away. It was the latest ominous sign from the renovation that was underway over our heads, joining the cracks in the ceiling plaster just outside the door to our flat.

  A complaint to the management company produced a blithe assurance that there was absolutely positively no chance of any plaster falling, but just in case they would ask the landlord above us to install some “battens” (new word for me) to assuage our silly fears. Said battens had yet to make an appearance.

  Isabella now sent pictures of the detritus emerging from the fireplace to the property management company. They responded with the usual level of helpfulness that they had no jurisdiction within flats.

  I now called the new upstairs landlord directly. He was effusively apologetic, saying he had arranged for his cleaning lady to come and clear up the mess in our flat. His plan, he said, was to do only minor renovations before moving in himself and that he had always lived in Belsize Park and looked forward to becoming our neighbour.

  He sounded like a genuinely nice bloke.

  But when Isabella met and quizzed the cleaning lady a couple of days later, it became apparent that Upstairs Landlord was yet another London bullshit artist. He was constantly buying, renovating, and flipping flats, with a team of workers on retainer going from job to job.

  We could see that his guys were hauling a huge amount of wood upstairs. One day, Isabella decided to investigate, knocking on the door and asking the workers if they minded if she looked around, that she had a genuine interest in renovations. The guy who seemed to be the leader of the work crew looked wary, claimed to speak little English, and said a tour was not possible.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, clearly worried she was there to complain about more damage below.

  Even standing in the doorway she could see that the whole place had been gutted. Some “minor renovation.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Julia was born after nine years of marriage and after a stressful period when we seriously began to doubt that we would ever have a child. Knowing that she would likely be the only one, I took four months off to soak up the experience, to try to learn how to be a father at forty-seven and, in theory, to establish a bond. In her early months and years, Isabella and I shared the duties of taking her to bed.

  But the London experience changed things. First, I disappeared across the pond for five months, leaving Isabella as a single mother in Toronto. Even after they arrived, my long hours and trips meant that mother and daughter were often solo. Julia now often gravitated more to her mom.

  In an effort to spread the parenting around, Isabella organized a daddy-daughter activity at the Little Hands sewing school where they both took courses. Run by a German expatriate named Astrid (who had married a Brit), it was a wonderful little gem on a Belsize Park side street — and it quickly became one of Isabella’s and Julia’s favourite places in London. For Isabella, sewing at Little Hands in the company of a diverse group of fascinating women had become a gentle, meditative antidote to the trauma of being uprooted from the life and career she had built back home.

  Crafts, in truth, are not my thing. My family is full of people who are adept at working with their hands: both my brothers are talented builders who carried out major renovations to their homes, and my late mother was a prolific knitter and woodcarver.

  I am the runt of the Mallen litter when it comes to building — inept, and often laughably incompetent. A summer job as a carpenter’s assistant while in university ended colourfully when the boss fired me after I managed to put the roof of a cottage on crookedly. To this day I can see him standing on the frame of the building, swinging a sledgehammer and shouting “FUCK” with each blow as he attempted to pound out my mistake.

  Aside from reattaching the occasional button on a shirt (usually stabbing myself multiple times), sewing had never been a part of my life.

  But this was my daughter and here was a chance to share an activity with her at a place she loved. The task of the day was to make stuffed creatures out of old socks. In the process, I would be making my debut at the controls of a sewing machine. I eyed it warily, imagining how I would explain in the emergency room of the Royal Free Hospital how I had managed to sew my thumb to a stuffed sock.

  I was by far the oldest person in the room, the only male, and by some margin the clumsiest seamstress. But I did not care and neither did Julia, who had great fun mocking my misadventures with the machine, rolling her eyes with a big “Oh, Daddy” at each screw-up. I seemed unable to keep the thread properly attached to the needle, in no small part due to my fear of injury, and regularly had to send a rescue plea to the twentysomething woman who was leading the craft. She patiently advised the old guy how to put things right.

  Somehow by the end of our two hours I managed to produce a stuffed tube with buttons for eyes — crookedly configured, of course, in a salute to that long ago askew cottage roof.

  The daddy-daughter reunion tour continued the following weekend when her friend Zoë was to have a birthday party that started in the pool at Swiss Cottage Leisure Centre. My task was to bring Isabella’s and Julia’s swim gear and meet them in the lobby as they were coming from sewing.

  With supreme confidence in my courier abilities, I arrived at the agreed time and place with the packages, then headed to the men’s change room while they went to the ladies’.

  The party was to be held in the kiddie pool where, awkwardly, I was the first to arrive. Nothing like being a middle-aged guy standing by the side of a pool full of little kids, being eyed suspiciously by the staff. Normally I would have Julia by my side to verify that I was there for legitimate purposes. Not now.

  So I hopped into the pool for partial cover.

  “Sir, I’m afraid you have to wait for the lifeguard to arrive,” warned a staffer. Rules are rules in London, even if the water only came up to my waist.

  Out again, now not only ill at ease, but dripping wet.

  “Uh … I’m here for the birthday party,” I explained to the staff guy, who appeared unconvinced and kept a careful, skeptical watch on me.

  After a very long couple of minutes, other parents started arriving with their kids, along with the lifeguard, which give me licence to get back into the pool. The party commenced, with me as bystander because my wife and daughter had not yet arrived. Minutes passed. Anxiety rose.

  After about a quarter of an hour, I realized that something was clearly wrong. Then: there they were at poolside,
Julia sporting a new black one-piece bathing suit, shaking her head at me, Isabella staring daggers at me. Instantly I realized the issue: I forgot to pack Julia’s suit.

  “You only had ONE THING to do. Just one thing,” said my wife. Turns out that once it became apparent I had neglected a key ingredient for a pool party, my daughter’s swimming costume, she had to run up and down the stairs of the leisure centre several times to try out the new ones for sale at the front desk, then scramble to a bank machine for cash.

  While I was now effectively a grey-haired turd floating in the kid’s pool, Isabella jumped into entertainer mode for the other children. She has a knack for amusing small children, this time pretending to be a monster and drawing huge screams and giggles.

  After a few minutes of silent contrition, I made my way over to Julia.

  “Okay, you get to splash me in the face three times for forgetting your suit.” She administered my punishment with great enthusiasm.

  After an hour of watery fun, the party adjourned to Roxane and Dave’s nearby flat, where I saw that they were scarily adept at organizing food and entertainment for the girls — mainly due to Roxane’s talents as a chef: her job before she devoted herself full-time to her two daughters. She devised a craft that enthralled the girls: building towers out of marshmallows and toothpicks. The birthday cake she had made for Zoë was a work of art — decorated with a marine theme, complete with a jumping dolphin on top.

  Chatting with Dave, I learned that they had enrolled their two girls in the Village School in Belsize Park for the fall — a place I had never heard of. The change of ownership at the Royal School was bringing not only renovations, but also a changed mandate — it was to become a school for older girls in the fall, meaning all of Julia’s classmates had to make other plans.

  We were still uncertain as to whether we would even be staying another year, but, in the meantime, had accepted an offer to have Julia go to a school owned by the same education conglomerate that had bought the Royal. The news that Zoë, one of her best friends, would be going somewhere else was a complication — especially given that we had also become close to the parents.

  Several deadlines and decisions were about to converge on us: the future of my work, a school choice, and also whether to vacate Fuckland Buckland. I had already had an initial conversation with Vancouver about doing another year, in which I gently broached the topic of having the company pay for Julia’s school — something I had learned was a basic element of most expatriate deals.

  Coincident with the complications of domestic life was my planning for our next big trip: Russia. I was going there to cover the presidential elections that were to bring Vladimir Putin back to the throne that he never truly vacated.

  For two months I had been working my way through the inscrutable bureaucracy of the foreign ministry in search of journalist visas.

  Russia was one royal pain in the ass for the uninitiated. It started with an agonizing call in December to someone named Marina in the Foreign Ministry. She had rudimentary English and minimal interest in being helpful, or maybe it was the Russian way of showing affection.

  After several tortuous minutes, I discerned that we needed to send her our photos along with letters of assignment from head office and also fill out an online application that asked us the name of our Moscow hotel and to list every single country we had visited over the last ten years. I wondered why they didn’t also demand my shoe size, whether I preferred boxers or briefs, and to submit a book report on War and Peace.

  I screwed up the online part twice before finally getting it right. For the hotel, I just consulted Google Maps for the closest brand name property to Red Square. Only afterward did I check the actual room rates, which started at $700 U.S. per night, slightly above our usual budget (well, catastrophically above), but I decided to worry about it later — a choice that I and the budget people back in Vancouver would eventually regret. A reporter with more experience with the Russian ways later told me that he just made up the name of a hotel for his visa. If only I had known.

  Marina in turn would send an “invitation” to the Russian Embassy in London, where we would go through yet another layer of bureaucracy to get the actual visas. By February, we actually succeeded in getting the required document, only to discover that we needed to separately apply for two more accreditations: one to cover the election and another that would authorize us to shoot in polling stations.

  With a deep breath, I picked up the phone to call Marina in the Foreign Ministry again. After another session of mutually poor communications, I learned that for the election accreditation I needed to email more photos to her, along with a scan of the visa. She read her email address to me twice, with ever-decreasing interest and comprehension. Naturally, it bounced back when I tried sending it, and when I called back there was no answer — Russian Foreign Ministry bureaucrats evidently wrap up their workday shortly after lunch.

  By this time, though, we had hired a fixer to work with us during the campaign. I asked him to get us the right address, and to explore the procedures for the polling station accreditation. For the latter, he advised that we needed yet another letter from head office — but this one needed an official seal with the logo of the company.

  This touched off a massive search across the network in Canada for the keeper of the Great Seal of Global Television. I never knew that there was a Great Seal of Global Television. But, in fact, one existed, in the hands of the legal department in Calgary. So: the letter was written in Vancouver, couriered to Calgary, where the Great Seal of Global Television was affixed, then FedExed to me in London, where I in turn shipped it off to the Kremlin.

  At this point I concluded that perhaps I should stop mocking Russian bureaucracy.

  I had developed an appreciation for its ability to stymie any kind of useful activity, but I was to learn that it had further weapons in its inscrutable arsenal. Our fixer found the correct email address to submit our accreditation application, but days after having sent it, Ministry Marina emailed that she had not received it. It seemed that the ministry’s address for receiving accreditation applications had a filter that prevented it from receiving applications. A Kremlin version of Catch-22.

  Marina gave us a fax number, but it rang endlessly — the machine clearly having been briefed on the proper protocols for frustrating foreign journalists. By this time, it was Friday night and I was about to be away on vacation for a week, so I left all the information in the office for Dan and Stu to FedEx to Moscow on Monday morning.

  As for me: the ski hills of Austria beckoned.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The lengthy breaks in the British school system are not only a huge headache for parents, they also reminded us of the class divides. Most parents of kids at the Royal were several tax brackets above us. We heard of vacations at five-star resorts in the Maldives. A very friendly mother told me about family ski resorts in the Alps, which, upon checking, would cost me roughly the value of a new car for a week.

  But as we were living in Europe, if only for a year or two, we were determined to go somewhere. Luckily, I had the equalizing factor of my travel writing, which I exploited for all it was worth.

  Our Canadian friends Roxane and Dave were avid skiers. Dave was particularly passionate, and had even developed his own spreadsheet of potential resorts in the Alps, breaking down the average temperature and expected snowfall. Organized people that they were, they determined early on that they would be going to a family friendly resort in Austria called Serfaus.

  Knowing how much Julia enjoyed Zoë’s company, I got to work on generating a travel story. Emails were fired off to the local tourism promotion people, explaining how much I would love to bring the story of Serfaus to a Canadian audience, adding links to stories that I had already published to verify my credentials. Oh, and uh, by the way, do you, uh, offer any support for visiting journalists with commissioned stories? At times, it’s occurred to me that such requests quite resemble an e
legant form of begging, but in fact the tourism agencies get publicity that is easily worth far more than the costs of subsidizing a reporter’s trip.

  My efforts paid off with a few nights free at a nice hotel (a four-star, compared to Roxane and Dave’s five-star), some lift tickets, rentals, and lessons for Julia. It was a score.

  Getting to Serfaus was a bit tricky: fly to Frankfurt, transfer to a regional flight to the small city of Friedrichshafen on the north shore of Lake Constance, stay overnight, rent a car, and drive two hours across the border to the resort.

  We were flying Lufthansa, so we counted on German efficiency to ensure we made our connections. But we did not account for the challenges of flying out of Heathrow. It is always up to the brim of capacity and a stray twig on a runway can cause backups that resonate all over Europe. So it was that a “ramp problem” caused us to take off forty-five minutes late.

  Had we been on time, we only had seventy minutes to make our way through the vast Frankfurt airport to our connecting flight. We scrambled off the plane and started to run, only to encounter a lengthy lineup at passport control.

  “We’re screwed,” I observed.

  My wife’s Italian heritage, however, taught her to pay little heed to queues.

  “Come on,” she ordered as she led us to the front and talked her way into the line.

  More running. We arrived at a security checkpoint where my carry-on bag betrayed me. Forgot I had a bottle of water on the flight.

  “This is mine now,” barked a stern Frau who ordered me to go through again.

  Isabella and Julia ran ahead and were waiting for me at the gate with my boarding pass. The connecting flight was late, so we made it — unlike all our bags.

  Upon arrival at Friedrichshafen’s little airport, one piece of luggage never appeared. It was not a tragedy, given that we were already staying overnight anyway, so we headed into the town and the hotel that I had booked online.