I was waiting for a train, and idly watching a young Asian woman whose gaze was intently fixed on the station platform. She forced me to look at the platform too, which was a perfectly ordinary slab of filthy concrete covered in squashed chewing gum, and to remember all the other platforms, sidewalks, stairs, floors and parking lots I have gazed at in my lifetime.

Any object can be a distorting mirror. It beams your own uneasy memories right back to you. A dirty station platform, like Proust’s infamous Madeleine, recalls all the dirty station platforms you have ever seen. And that in turn recalls all the thoughts you have ever had while gazing at dirty station platforms.

I remember the platform where I waited for the commuter train that took me to London every day in the early 1960s, and thinking: Is this all there is? Will I be standing on this wretched platform every morning forever? I remember the platforms at the Gare du Nord in Paris that were at the beginning and the end of some romantic and unromantic journeys, and a windswept platform in Amsterdam where I waited for a military transport train, and other platforms in Milan and Rome that stuck in my mind for some reason. I remember very vividly standing on the platform at Pennsylvania Station in New York, when I started commuting again in the 1980s, and thinking: Is this all there is? Will I be standing on this wretched platform every evening forever?

There’s a whole lifetime history of moments on those platforms, which were all different yet all the same – all in a way continuous as if I can walk mentally from one to another to another, right to the spot where I saw the young Asian woman yesterday. They are, in my blurry memory, a single long platform, united by the fact that I have stared at them. The world is indeed flat, and all connected. My local station platform is no less alien and no less disgusting than one I stood on in Calcutta. The same anonymous feet walk on all and both, going nowhere.

If you don’t have these kinds of thoughts, be thankful. I blame them on early exposure to the literary existentialists, especially Camus, Sartre, Barbusse, and Hesse. They forced me to look at the surfaces below the everyday surface, and to find extraordinary meanings in ordinary things. I think it was in Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre that the narrator Roquentin fixes his eyes on a pair of dirty purple suspenders worn by a café proprietor, and finds nothing in them but sheer horror.

The bottom line is that every object becomes a puzzle, a potential threat, or a potential subject. I’ve written essays about sticks picked up in the woods, dead fireworks, jars of rusty nails, writing implements, and many other everyday things. They all seem (to me) much more meaningful than they appear.

Nobody ever writes to me about these essays, or comments on them. Perhaps they are too dull, or too peculiar. But I will keep on writing them, and blaming it all on the existentialists who corrupted my innocent youth.

Copyright: David Bouchier

Am I the only person who has problems these days with writing letters, and especially with beginnings and endings? The rules used to be extremely clear: you started a letter with a salutation: “Dear Mr. Jones,” “Dear John,” “My Dear John,” or “Dearest Emily, don’t let John see this letter,” according to the degree of intimacy, and signed off with “Sincerely” or “Very truly yours,” or “With love.” That’s how I’ve been writing letters all my life, allowing for some small transatlantic variations, and I feel comfortable with it.

However, as you know, these old-fashioned rules have completely evaporated. The freewheeling world of electronic communications doesn’t seem to need any such formalities. Young people send e-mails and text messages with no salutations or closings at all, and no names. I suppose the recipients can figure out who sent them, but it seems rather abrupt, not to say impersonal.

I haven’t learned the new style yet. One of my correspondents complained “You write an e-mail as if it was a letter.” Well, as far as I’m concerned, it is. But it’s true that the traditional forms do now seem a bit archaic. Consider the salutation “Dear” as in “Dear Mr. Jones.” It is oddly intimate, and the longer you think about it the stranger it seems. How can you address your accountant, for example, as “Dear” without seeming to make a veiled complaint about his fees. Just how dear to your heart are most of your correspondents? When it comes from a business it’s even stranger. Corporations often address me as if I was both a friend and a complete abstraction: “Dear Valued Client” (if I was so dear and so valued you’d think they could remember my name), or “Dear Frequent Flyer” as if I was a migrating bird. On the other hand informal salutations like “Hi” or Hello” seem too juvenile to use in writing to another adult.

Closing a letter or e-mail is even more difficult than opening it. Instead of the familiar phrases of formal correspondence we have a chaos of slipshod and meaningless exit lines: “Regards,” “Best wishes,” and sometimes simply “Best” (which leaves the recipient wondering, best what? I sometimes receive “Warm wishes,” presumably from Florida, “Cheers” and, most desperate of all “Have a nice Day.” As the late Peter Ustinov once said, when so addressed: “Thank you, but I have other plans.”

Lovers, if they write letters at all, are limited only by their imaginations and vocabularies. But the rest of us no longer know how to close a friendly communication gracefully. It’s all too easy to strike a false note. Foreign cultures are doubly treacherous. The British write “Love” to just about everybody of any sex, and Americans may misunderstand this. An innocent greeting in French: “I would like to send you a kiss” may, colloquially, mean very much more.

I suppose that no letter writer in our busy times can be bothered with the subtle gradations between “Truly yours” and “Very truly yours.” Still less do we want to go back a century or more to the days when letters were typically signed: “I am, Sir, Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant,” even if there were any humble and obedient servants left to write them.

When I looked on the web, to see what instant up to date guidance is available to letter writers, I found that almost everything was geared to business letters and job applications. The few sites dedicated to personal letters were, I’m sorry to say, selling software containing ready-made letters and e-mails for all occasions. All you have to do is add the name. These are the modern descendants of those old-fashioned books of letter writing etiquette, that (for example) advised young unmarried ladies how they might properly correspond with young unmarried men, and vice versa, without the appearance of impropriety. Those books don’t appear on the bestseller lists any more.

Sometimes I feel nostalgic for the stylish letters of the past. The charm of a good personal letter is that, like a dance, it combines intimacy with formality. It shows care and respect for the person on the receiving end. Totally informal communication is like yelling at someone across a street. It’s just tacky. Yours, most sincerely, David Bouchier.

Copyright: David Bouchier

The countdown to February 14 is a difficult time for a man. He must suffer the embarrassment of buying heart shaped boxes of chocolates, the pain of ordering flowers at extortionate prices, the mental agony of trying to find a card that doesn’t literally make him nauseous, and above all he must reserve that restaurant table.

A man can get carried away with the need to impress his Valentine, and choose the most expensive-sounding restaurant he can find in the yellow pages. This is a big mistake. The fancier the establishment, the greater the probability of a complete romantic disaster.

It’s not just that the more you pay the less you get, although that is certainly true. A cheap restaurant will deliver a meal that would choke a hippopotamus. If you spring for a really expensive place, you’re likely to get two or three tiny fragments of food floating on a sea of colored sauces, and you will have to get a pizza later.

But the real problem is that it’s hard to make a good impression on the woman of your dreams in a high-class restaurant. The waiters are rigorously trained to humiliate their customers: especially their male customers. Most of them don’t want to be waiters at all. They are resting actors, or trial lawyers in training, and they make sure that you know it. A clever waiter can have cruel fun with nine incomprehensible specials, five different kinds of vinegar for the salad dressing, and a wine list the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but not written in English.

Menus in expensive restaurants are not user-friendly. The suburban fashion these days is an ethnically mixed or “fusion” cuisine: a bit of French, a bit of Thai, a bit of Italian, a bit of Lebanese, and a touch of nouvelle cuisine with Scandinavian undertones. This produces a kind of gastronomic vertigo. These menus are designed by and for people who eat in Manhattan all the time, and have therefore lost all sense of the ridiculous. At the upper end of the restaurant scale, adjectives replace food almost entirely. Eating seems like a gross intrusion into the chef’s literary fantasy.

Then there’s all that cutlery. Are you allowed to get the escargots out of their shells with a toothpick? Is it ok to use the third fork to stir the salad dressing? The probability of being humiliated in front of the woman you want to impress is virtually one hundred per cent.

It is much safer to choose a simple country restaurant for your big night out. You know the kind of place I mean. It looks like a hut outside. When you get in, it still looks like a hut. Chef Randy was trained at the No-Frills School of Culinary Arts in Hicksville, Long Island, and cooks absolutely any combination of chicken, beef, flounder, tomato sauce, pizza dough, cheese, and frozen shrimps. The menu tells you what you are going to get with such brutal clarity that you might think that Chef Randy doesn’t even own a thesaurus. From time to time, Chef Randy may take a day trip to the upper west side, and return with exotic recipes for blackened BLT or cheeseburger brioche. But his customers soon put him right.

These modest restaurants are friendly places, dedicated to the instant satisfaction of big appetites. The table service is just like you used to get from mother at home, only more casual. There are no overbearing waiters, no excess of cutlery to cause confusion. At Randy’s place, the table is reassuringly furnished with one knife, one fork, ketchup and brown sauce. You can get Thousand Island dressing for your salad, instead of Raspberry-Champagne Vinaigrette with Virgin Olive Oil. And you can almost guarantee that, just as you reach out your hand across the ketchup bottle in a romantic gesture, a gigantic pepper grinder will be thrust in your face, big enough to lovingly season every marinated steak in the tri-state area from February 14 until Memorial Day.

Where else can you get friendly service, good eats without humiliation, and a free floor show? Take your sweetheart to Randy’s place next Valentines Day. She may adore the food, and praise you for your honest and simple tastes; or she may leave you before the frozen, pre-packaged dessert, and never speak to you again. There is no better way of testing a relationship.

Copyright: David Bouchier

This has been a splendid century so far for people who like to worry, and for those who make money out of the worrying habit. Sales of gas masks, antibiotics, concrete bunkers, guns, tranquilizers and lucky charms have reached all time highs.

The interesting thing, at least to me, is that most people have carried on as before, worrying just about as much or as little as they always did. This behavior fits a theory that I first proposed many years ago. My theory is that every person has a more or less fixed Anxiety Quotient (or A.Q. for short). That is to say that we each worry all the time at our personal level. Events in the outside world may re-arrange our worries, but the intensity of anxiety stays constant, high or low as the case may be.

A really first-class worrier will maintain a state of high anxiety 24/7, regardless of any real cause. When the daily news doesn’t provide enough material, he or she will resort to old standbys like terrorists, electromagnetic fields, Radon gas, hurricanes, asbestos, asteroid strikes, global warming, and of course The Unknown. With the unknown, you never know.

Amateur or inadequate worriers drift through life ignoring all these terrible threats, and fretting only occasionally about small matters like how to pay the bills or how often to change the cat litter.
This difference between people’s anxiety levels is so marked that I was sure that a genetic marker, a “Worry Gene,” would be found one day. When I tried out this theory on professional psychologists they simply sneered and talked about “environmental factors.” Well, how nice it is to be vindicated! The “Worry Gene” does exist. Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health reported that gene number SLC6A4 is the one that controls anxiety. The size of the gene determines how much anxiety gets through to the brain. Our worrying level is hard wired.

This is very good news, because it means that we no longer have to worry about worrying. It also means that perhaps we can look at our worries in a more realistic way. If I review my worrying history, which goes back all the way to childhood, I can’t think of a single major worry that was justified by events. Even my school exam results were usually better than I had feared.

Thomas Jefferson, who was a pretty good worrier, recognized how these gloomy forbodings had blighted his own life. He wrote: “How much pain we suffer from calamities which never happened.” It’s the sort of wisdom that dedicated worriers don’t want to hear. But of course Jefferson was right.

Worrying is a complete waste of time because we never worry about the right things. Life always delivers the unexpected. Terrible accidents are caused by such everyday objects as toothpicks, vacuum cleaners, lobsters and paper clips. In Britain, where they keep careful track of these things, thirty-seven people were severely injured by tea-cosies last year, and 13,132 were hospitalized by vegetables. In a little book by David Pryce-Jones called You Can’t be Too Careful you can read true stories about people who were impaled by flying beach umbrellas, blown up by exploding beer kegs, choked by peach stones and swallowed up by unexpected holes in the ground. It’s a reasonable bet that none of the victims had been worrying about any of these things in advance.

Now I know for sure that the worry gene exists. But I don’t know whether my own is as big as an incoming asteroid, or as small as a Prozac pill, so I don’t know how realistic any of my worries are. I lie awake at night worrying about it.

Copyright: David Bouchier

A New Year: it’s a strange liminal date at the best of times, full of anxiety and hope and empty resolutions. The artificial changing of the calendar makes us feel that something momentous should happen, but it never does. This annual New Year Anxiety Syndrome reached its height in the Millennium hysteria. A lot of people must have felt very silly on the morning of January 1st, 2000, when they woke up and found themselves and the world unchanged, apart from the usual damages of time, as they and it will be again next January 1st, and the one after that.

We like to think that we are living in a time of history-making events, but we may be living in a footnote to a book already written. The ancient Greeks believed that history was cyclical: the same events repeated over and over, like the programming on some public television stations. This is a comforting philosophy. Nothing entirely unexpected can happen, because it has all happened before in the great turning wheel of time. From this perspective, we might expect that the twenty-first century will be essentially a rerun of the eleventh century. In that century the world was divided into an infinity of warring tribes, fighting over religion, wealth, and territory, and the Christianity versus Islam Crusades were just getting started. Cynics may say that this is just another example of the irony of history. But history is not so much ironic as simply repetitive, which is why each New Year surprises us by being very much like the one before.

There are reasons to be anxious about the future, but change is not one of them, and nor is danger. There’s nothing new about danger. Even in the so-boring 1950s we had the looming threat of the bomb, and the even more imminent horrors of Rock and Roll to worry about. You just never know.

It’s not surprising that we prefer to turn our backs on the enigmatic past and the opaque future, and focus on ourselves. That’s where New Year’s Resolutions come in. We may not be able to control the great forces of politics and economics, but we imagine we can at least take charge of our own personal lives.

This is a notion that can apparently survive any amount of disproof. We all know people, some of them very close to home, who have been making the same resolutions about diet and exercise and smoking and drinking for decades. The resolutions are always consigned to oblivion by Easter, and often as early as Valentine’s Day.

This is because we make the wrong resolutions. They tend to be punitive and puritanical, rather than prescriptions for pleasure. Diet and health resolutions are doomed before they start, and indeed they may soon be unnecessary. Just last week I read two news items that promise salvation to couch potatoes and hearty eaters everywhere. From the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio comes the news that volunteers who were asked to “visualize and imagine” themselves taking a training session, actually gained muscle strength without doing any real exercise whatsoever. From Israel we read of a new technique that melts fat away without the need for diet or surgery. When we learn about discoveries like this our motivation to discipline and punish our own bodies is undermined still further. Why bother with New Year’s resolutions that will only cause misery now and embarrassment later when, just around the corner, is a technological fix that will solve all our problems and cancel out all our weaknesses?

In fact, polls show that fewer and fewer people are making New Year’s resolutions these days. It may be that, after long experience, we have lost faith in our power to change or that, quite sensibly, we are less inclined to inflict pain on ourselves. To that extent, we’ve become more realistic (or cynical if you prefer). But it seems a shame to launch into the New Year without at least a token resolution, so how about trying something that gives pleasure instead of pain?

A resolution doesn’t have to be a discipline or a strait jacket. In fact, it shouldn’t be. The etymology of the word “resolution” stems from the Latin verb “solvere,” meaning to loosen or reveal, or set free.

So my resolution is to set myself free from negative resolutions, and give myself the gift of a positive one. I want to take more pleasure in small things, to become more naïve, to regress. The older we get, the more we tend to take everything for granted and find the whole world tedious and predictable. I would prefer to move in the opposite direction, so that I find everything interesting, new, worth doing, and fun.

A couple of years ago I was at a conference in Iowa, and attended a reception organized for us by a group of senior citizens. I fell into conversation with a lively octogenarian, a tiny sprite of a man with a long white Santa Claus beard. He wore a T-shirt with the inscription: I AM SIX, and he was a delightful companion, full of enthusiasm for everything.

That’s my resolution for all the future New Years I am lucky enough to see. It’s not going to be easy, especially if all my friends really do get fit, give up drinking and finish their eternal novels. I may have to climb back on the puritanical bandwagon. Meanwhile, I’m not giving up anything. I am six.

Copyright: David Bouchier

From Aniane, Herault, 2001

Winter in the south of France was not the way we imagined it, and probably not the way you imagine it. We watched the evening weather forecast on TV with as much attention as New Englanders, and storm clouds came marching across the screen with tedious regularity. French weather forecasts are more stylish than ours, but the end result is much the same: it rains a lot. On winter mornings the village was usually wet, dark, deserted, and almost sinister.

There were many winds, with poetic names. The Tramontane from the northwest gave way to the Mistral from the north, then the Marin from the south. Sometimes they all blew at once. People didn’t pay attention to the poetic names: they just huddled indoors.

The odd thing was that nobody seemed prepared for this. They seemed to imagine that they were living in the mythical south of France where starlets at the Cannes film festival are always disrobing on golden beaches under a blazing sun. Even villagers whose families had been there for generations hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact that they had a winter – every year.

Many of the older village houses didn’t have heating. It wasn’t that the owners couldn’t afford it, but they seemed to feel that they shouldn’t need heating, down there by the Mediterranean, and therefore it would be an extravagance. When invited out to dinner, we soon learned to dress in layers.

We were fortunate to have a kind of heating system in our house – an oil stove, strategically situated between the kitchen and the living room. It was more than just a stove: it was a whole home entertainment system.

In America our heating system was invisible and inaudible. It whispered into action when the thermostat fell below comfort level. So we found this oil stove a bit daunting at first. Starting the thing up was only slightly less complicated than launching the space shuttle. It began down in the wine cellar, where the oil tank was lurking. We checked the oil level with a long stick. Then we switched on the pump, which made a noise like a very old food processor, whipped the lid off the stove, and shone a flashlight into its stygian depths. A black trickle of oil might eventually appear, dragged up from the basement by the pump. One of us would hold the flashlight while the other would throw lighted matches at the oil until it caught fire. This usually took six or seven matches. Then we clapped the lid before being overcome by the fumes, and waited until a fierce smoky flame appeared. This was the signal to turn the main control up. Then we had heat. Things could and did go wrong at every stage of this procedure, and other things could affect the outcome – for example if the chimney was cold, or the Mistral was blowing hard, or our horoscopes predicted a bad day.

From time to time the oil ran out. Then we had to call the oil deliveryman. In Long Island or Connecticut, oil companies phone almost every day, with tempting special offers. They deliver oil on a regular schedule, so that you never run out. In Aniane, getting oil was more of a challenge. The street was narrow, so we needed an oil deliveryman with either a very long hose, or a very thin truck. There was only one, and his whereabouts and his movements were an impenetrable mystery. It took weeks to persuade our neighbors to disclose his secret phone number, and he refused to say when or whether he might actually deliver our oil. One of us had to wait in the house all day, every day. At last he came dragging his long hose, and sloshed a few hundred liters of dark, smelly stuff into the tank. He wanted to be paid in cash, of course. Everyone in France demands cash. I just don’t know how they keep track of it all, when the time comes to pay their taxes.

Just before we left Aniane we learned that natural gas was coming to the village: clean, economical heat, always on line. They were digging trenches and installing meters along all the streets. I hope that the oil deliveryman is re-thinking his business strategy right now.

Copyright: David Bouchier

The history of human evolution is the history of garbage disposal. Our earliest ancestors tossed their rubbish into the back of the cave. When they ran out of space, they found a new cave. All through the slow climb towards civilization, human garbage was treated with no respect – emptied out of windows with little regard to passing traffic, piled up behind houses or thrown over the walls of castles. These unsanitary habits provided a treasure house for present-day archaeologists. But they didn’t do much to improve the environment at the time. Most towns, villages, and cities were full of stinking garbage.

Civilization really began with the professionalization of garbage in nineteenth century France. Most Americans, as they trundle their bins out into the cold dawn, don’t realize that they owe this convenience to a famous Frenchman, Monsieur Eugène-René Poubelle (1833-1907). This convivial, multi-talented man was a historical figure in more ways than one. As a professor of law and a radical democrat, he was suspected of treason by Napoleon III. But he survived, and after the fall of the Empire, M. Poubelle was appointed Prefect (or Governor) of the Paris region, where he made many improvements in architecture and public services.
But the thing he really wanted to do was clean the place up. Not to put too fine a point on it, Paris was a filthy city. In 1884, Prefect Poubelle introduced a law that required each homeowner to provide a special bin for garbage, which was then collected at regular intervals by carts which traveled around the city, announcing their arrival with blasts on a hunting horn. Nobody had proposed such a simple and radical reform since the foundation of Paris some two thousand years before. Proper garbage collection had arrived, and it was enormously popular with the citizens, who made M. Poubelle into a kind of hero.

The original garbage cans were round, and made of galvanized iron. The modern French version is square and plastic. But, however different it looks from the 19th century model, it is still called a Poubelle. There’s immortality for you!

Like all the other aspects of our culture, garbage collection had become more complex. But, in the end, we all agree on one thing. We just want our garbage to go away. French villages like Aniane have a neat system. There are large, square communal bins on wheels parked in convenient (and inconvenient) spots all around the village. Wherever you live, there is one quite close by. In hill villages, these bins-on-wheels are held precariously by small railings in the street. One might expect vandals to send them careering downhill, but they never do. The French have too much respect for their garbage.

When we had accumulated a respectable amount of garbage, we put it all into one of those the pale blue plastic bags favored by the French. Wine bottles, because of sheer quantity, had to be recycled. We carried the blue sack down the street, tossed it into the to the nearest bin, and our duty was done. Two or three times each week – usually very early in the morning – all the Poubelles were rolled down to the central square with a noise like a several major earthquakes happening at once. They were tipped into a big truck, with more impressive sound effects and away they went, nobody knew where.

We enjoyed this logical, convenient system of communal garbage disposal. But there was something secretive about it. In America, our neighbors can see and note exactly the amount of garbage we produce. Here we got no credit, either for extravagance or economy.

Whenever I set off down the street with the blue bag, I would say: “Just going out to the Poubelle.” And so I always remembered the jolly, brave Prefect of Paris, who made it all possible. Most of us would like to be remembered for something even half as useful.

Copyright: David Bouchier

By mid-December it already feels as if the Holiday Season has been going on forever. “It’s the music,”complained one of the checkout ladies at the supermarket, as I bagged my groceries, “It never stops.” Even as she spoke, the sound of “Silent Night” dribbled down from the speakers in the ceiling, played in that unique Holiday Season style which can only be called schmalzissimo: lots of violins, and a tempo so slow that you fear it really will go on forever. The festive symbolism also gets to you after a while. How many plastic Santa Clauses and reindeer and candles can a person absorb before suffering permanent brain damage?

The long drawn out torture of the Holiday Season is an old complaint, of course. All over the nation, anguished cries are heard when the first Holiday catalogs clog the mailboxes at the end of August. Many people, I sure, watched in disbelief as shoppers raced into the stores with their carts, literally at dawn on the first Friday after Thanksgiving.

A group Canadian of citizens in Montreal, saddened and frustrated by the ridiculous length of the holiday buildup, have taken direct action. They hate the fact that Christmas arrives at the end of summer, obliterating the special pleasures of autumn. They don’t want to think about Christmas before the middle of December, and they have actually vandalized stores decorated for the season in November. They call themselves A.N.A.L.T. – “L’anti Noel avant l’temps” (no Christmas before its time).

These subversive folks are, you will guess, French Canadians. They don’t care about being compared to Ebenezer Scrooge, because they’ve never heard of him. There is no Scrooge in French literature and, if there were he would certainly be a spendthrift, a bon vivant, and very probably an atheist into the bargain.

The French do Christmas differently. In the French village where we spent one Christmas, there weren’t any signs of the festive season until December 20, when the town hall was decorated with one string of colored lights, and Madame Lilli’s boutique displayed cards and a few seasonal objects in the window. That was it: no houses were visibly decorated, no stores played Christmas carols over loudspeakers. It’s true that, in the nearby big city of Montpellier. Christmas decorations and window displays appeared as early as December15. But we all know that big cities are sinful and self-indulgent places.

My theory is that the French take Christmas so coolly because of their great revolution. In 1792 the revolutionaries, hoping to erase memories of the old regime, introduced an entirely new calendar, with new names for the months and new festivals. Christmas was not included, and Christmas shopping, decorations and music were therefore eliminated overnight. I don’t think the French have ever forgotten what a glorious relief this was. Ever since Christmas was restored to their calendar by Napoleon in 1806, they have been rather half-hearted about it.

This is a lovely season, and it’s a pity to spoil it by sheer dilution. No single day could ever live up to such a long anticipation. The first Christmas came as a surprise. There was no six-month long preview. Christmas before its time is no Christmas at all.

Copyright: David Bouchier

We have plenty to be thankful for, more than our ancestors ever did. We should be thankful for our incredibly safe and cushy lives compared to ninety per cent of the other people on the planet – thankful we’re not in Iraq or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or just about anywhere really. We don’t know who exactly to thank for all this good luck. So, at Thanksgiving, we express our appreciation in a general way, rather like sending out Spam on the Internet, in the hope that some of it reaches the right destination.

It’s a pity that Thanksgiving is such hard work. First there’s the nightmare of travel – at least thirty million Americans will be on the highways this week, and about five million will pack into the airports to fly towards their families.

Then there’s the anxiety of getting together with remote and complicated families, who may be almost like strangers. It’s no longer a simple case of “Over the River and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House we Go.” The fashion for multiple marriages often means that we have a large choice of grandmothers and mothers to visit at this time of year. Sometimes there’s even a choice of fathers, assuming they left a forwarding address. It’s not Norman Rockwell’s picture any more.

But the really challenging thing about Thanksgiving is the food. Not only does the traditional menu contradict every known principle of diet and health, but also there is the inescapable fact that somebody has to cook it, and almost nobody remembers how to cook any more.

The baby boom moms are doing Thanksgiving these days. One thing we know about the baby boomers is that their lives are too busy for cooking. They never got into the habit eating of home-cooked family meals around the table. The fast food industry was created by them and for them. The papers fill up with neat recipes for delightful little Thanksgiving extras like roasted cauliflower, raisins, and anchovy vinaigrette or spiced sweet potato pudding. The New York Times offered a food preparation timetable that ran for five full days. Who has time for this? The harassed modern mom can only spare an hour or two away from her corporate desk to buy a packet or vitamin-enriched turkey-flavored artificial food product and zap it in the microwave, while talking to the Tokyo office on her cellular phone. The prospect of cooking a multi-course meal with six vegetables and dessert for a whole house full of people is her worst nightmare. It’s like trying to pilot a Boeing 777 when your only flying training has been with a kite.

Millions of single people head for Miami or Marrakech to avoid the danger of food poisoning, and the family slide show. More families each year spend the holiday in hotels, or have Thanksgiving catered. Our local deli will deliver the whole gastronomic tsunami to your home for a very modest price. Health insurance is not included.

It’s probably best this way. The old kitchen skills have faded, but also the old kitchen slavery. I remember my mother in law working incredibly hard to cook a huge dinner for fifteen at Thanksgiving, which may be easy for a trained restaurant chef in a professional kitchen, but not for an average domestic cook in a kitchen the size of a closet. Progress and the catering industry have liberated us from all that. We can enjoy the sociable part of the holiday, and not worry about the food. That’s yet another thing to be thankful for.

Copyright: David Bouchier

For anyone who grew up in Britain November Fifth has the same kind of resonance for children over there as July Fourth has over here. Both dates mean fireworks.

November fifth, otherwise known as Guy Fawkes’ Night, was my favorite night of the year when I was growing up in England. I remember majestic Roman candles, whizzing Catherine wheels, and unreliable rockets that we launched out of old lemonade bottles, and that might land almost anywhere. Every backyard was ablaze with colored lights, and many houses were ablaze too. The fire engine and ambulance bells clanged throughout the night, adding to the excitement.

This was long before the days of safety warnings on everything. We were allowed to hold the smaller sparklers in our hands, sometimes with painful results. The popular fireworks called “bangers” went off like grenades, and sounded even better inside an iron garbage can. Every child carried a supply of jumping firecrackers that shot off unpredictably in all directions, sometimes lodging in people’s clothing, and exploding as they went. Strategically used, these firecrackers could send elderly aunts into a state of nervous collapse, so they had to be revived with smelling salts.

This was the most fun we had all year, the most fun that any small boy could possibly hope for. Yet the real glory and centerpiece of Guy Fawkes’ night was the bonfire, a huge construction as it seemed to a child. The material was lovingly collected weeks ahead, and the fire was ritually lit at dusk. Atop the fire sat the central symbolic personage in this strange festival, the Guy, a human figure made of straw and dressed in old clothes, complete with mask and hat, who was burned at the height of the celebration.

There was great competition between small boys for the largest and most lifelike Guy. For about two weeks before the Fifth, Guys were displayed in the streets with the ritual cry “Penny for the Guy,” and this was in the days when a penny was really worth something. The money was used to buy more fireworks, especially the most forbidden and dangerous kinds.

After immolating the Guy, and by way of recycling his symbolic death into our lives, we ate baked potatoes, cooked black in the embers of the fire. It was altogether a superb evening’s entertainment.

Our schoolteachers explained, although we never listened, that our heartless execution of the stuffed Guy represented a piece of British history. In 1605, on this date, a man called Guy Fawkes and a number of co-conspirators concealed twenty barrels of gunpowder in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, with the aim of blowing up King James I and his chief ministers. You won’t be surprised to hear that the plotters had a religious grievance. But they were caught before the gunpowder could be exploded, and briskly executed.

In retrospect, it astonishes me that my gentle parents enjoyed this barbaric ceremony. After all, we had just lived through a war – real rockets and real bombs had crashed around our house, night after night, month after month. We spent a lot of time in the air raid shelter. But there was my family, each November Fifth, in a blaze of fire and explosions, having a thoroughly good time.

What’s even more poignant about this story is to realize after all these years that that romantic, historic figure, Guy Fawkes, was in effect an early terrorist. From the point of view of his technique and his target, he might even be considered the first modern terrorist.

He failed. In the end terrorists always fail. And perhaps it’s not a bad idea to remember them, and even to commemorate them with appropriately symbolic rituals, just to keep that fact in mind.

Copyright: David Bouchier