Expat in the Land of Marmite

Mysteries of the Universe

The Absurdity of Tiny Horses

TUESDAY: I've got something a bit different today: an onion bagel with haloumi, basil pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, and chopped red pepper. It's slightly reminiscent of a place I used to love in Seattle for sandwiches, the now defunct Bruegger's Bagel Bakery. Although a classic lox, cream cheese, capers, tomato, and red onion sandwich on an onion bagel never went amiss, I also liked one of their vegetarian sandwiches which involved Havarti cheese and roasted red pepper on a sun-dried tomato bagel. There were several bagel bakeries in my neighbourhood until I went away on holiday for a couple of weeks. When I returned they had all closed down. This was not as traumatic as my previous flights which caused major earthquakes and riots, but it was still a bit disturbing.

In memory I'll christen this sandwich the Lower Queen Anne.

THURSDAY: Lunch is a restorative houmus and cream cheese with the usual crunchy bits and plenty of black and cayenne pepper. It's Election Day in the UK, and all of my British friends are battling with the decision of whom to vote for. I think it's obvious myself, yellowishly obvious, but I won't be voting because I'm not a UK citizen. Perhaps that's why I'm so fascinated by the election.

There has, however, been something else on my mind. Recently I've been reading about Einstein, the horse whose owners claim is the smallest horse in the world. Considering he's 14 inches high and weighs 6 pounds, we are indeed talking about a tiny horse. Apparently the Tiz Miniature Horse Farm in Barnstead, New Hampshire breed these tiny horses. In contrast Shetland ponies range from a lofty height of 42 inches down to a minimum 28 inches, towering over poor Einstein. So it sounds like he has broken the record.

But what's the point? Why create a tiny horse? Isn't there a reason why horses, when left to Mother Nature's genetic devices, are the size that they are?

For one thing, although a child can ride a Shetland pony, nobody can ride a horse the size of Einstein -- not that a horse who never carried a human on its back would miss that experience. But if you kept a tiny horse as a pet, although it would be the same size as a medium-sized cat or small dog, it would make a lousy lap pet because of those sharp hooves. And it would look absolutely ridiculous peeking out of a woman's handbag or sprawled between the sheets with its owners. Imagine the insult to its proud equine nature if you dared carry it to the vet or on a train packed safely away in a pet carrier. A horse needs to feel the grass and dirt under its heels, not blankets or bits of carpeting or overstuffed furniture.

And what about the dangers of being so small? Imagine a tiny horse grazing in a pasture near the sea, quivering with fear every time a seagull flies over and eyes it as if it's some tasty morsel of human snack detritus. A tiny horse is not even safe from large dogs. Not that a large dog would necessarily want to hurt a tiny horse; but a particularly horny dog might find the horse attractive and, well, one can't be blamed for trying.

I suppose the advantage of owning a tiny horse would be that it wouldn't cost much to feed or demand much room. A small garden would probably be sufficient, and if you had a lawn you could probably retire your lawn mower.

FRIDAY: Lunch is a one-off: a potted scallop sandwich. The "potted scallops" are leftover bay scallops from the other night, originally sauteed in butter with vegetables, and the leftovers were chilled in the fridge. The sandwich also includes lettuce. It's like...leftovers in a breadcake.

THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY: Lunch is cheddar and wasabi mustard with a selection of chopped Greek olives, spring onion, and red pepper on a granary breadcake. As the breadcake is quite large I decided to go easy on the cheese and let the olives and wasabi do the talking. It's a mixture of Japanese and Greek, perhaps the Japanese language written in Greek characters or vice-versa. Wasacheddakkis!

I'd much rather say "Wasacheddakis" then talk about the new coalition government. I'm sorry, but there's not much I can say at this point except that I'm a bit concerned; but we shall see what happens in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime I'll click my heels together ten times and say "Wasacheddakkis!"

Living "Over There" and Rewinding Life

MONDAY: Lunch is a thrown-together Edam, pesto, Romano pepper, and spring onion sandwich with a good dose of fresh basil leaves in a seedy Sainsbury breadcake. For some reason I slept too late this morning and had to rush through everything. I don't understand what happened, because the alarm on my mobile went off once and I did hit Snooze once, because it was in the Snooze mode when I was hailed from downstairs a half hour later. Ah, well, at least I've caught up with myself by now, so I don't have to run any faster than I normally do.

I was fascinated last week by an episode of BBC 2's "Horizon" about time. Brian Cox, a particle physicist whose soft boyish face has the appearance of moving slowly backwards in time, addressed the question "What time is it?" He described the difference between Einstein's theory of time -- that the past, present, and future are all happening simultaneously, which to me explains past-life experiences and the accuracy of prognostication -- and the particle physics theory of time moving in one direction. The point he made that excited me was the fact that the answer to the question "what time is it?" is relative, depending not only on what time zone you're in but also how fast you're moving and how high above the Earth you are. This coincides with my own theory of why time seems to go faster for a 24-year-old than for a 4-year-old. As the 24-year-old is likely to be quite a bit taller than the 4-year-old, her or his head is higher off the ground and therefore rotating faster with the Earth than the 4-year-old's head, so time definitely goes faster. (I have yet to come up with an airtight theory as to why time seems to move faster for a 74-year-old than for a 24-year-old, but I'm working on it.)

I think about time a lot, especially as I live eight time zones away from my mother and all of my close friends on the Pacific Coast of America. I realise that when I'm arriving at work first thing in the morning, my friend Mistah Rick is probably sound asleep but might be in the process of staying up late. And when I'm enjoying an after-work pint my friend Schwartzie is probably on her first or second cup of coffee. And when I'm having my lunch my mother is probably sleeping -- er, wait, considering her insomnia she's probably up and about already, feeding her dog and cat and waiting for her coffee to brew. And as I'm settling down into bed my friend The Barb is still in the middle of her workday.

The first time I visited the UK was the first time I'd ever been off the continent of North America. I remember my first jetlagged night, crawling into the welcoming November bed at my Sussex friends' house and thinking, just before I drifted off into slumberland, about the amazing fact that I was All The Way Over There now, whereas my home was currently on the other side of the globe. I had this distinct feeling of being On The Other Side Of The Earth, and I embraced the feeling of gravity holding me onto Over There. And I thought about the fact that everybody I knew "At Home" was experiencing the middle of their daytimes, and it all felt so wonderfully exotic. Sadly, now that I've lived Over There for so long that it's now Home, and Home has become Over There, I often forget about that wonderfully joyful sensation of walking down the road as I simultaneously imagine myself walking along the arc of a globe through the Over There I always dreamed about as a child.

Which brings me to an intriguing feature of our new high-definition television with built-in hard drive. Accompanied by a manual the size of a phone directory and a massive jumble of cables and inputs, this new appliance can not only record anything one wants to watch with the ease of pressing a single button, but it can also recall many programs from previous days and weeks which one might have missed to watch at a later time.

But the most impressive feature is that of pausing live TV. If you're watching a live broadcast -- a football match, say -- and you miss a bit of action, you can rewind a bit and watch it again, and then either watch the rest of the program in this state of slightly past tense or else zip back to the present. Watching Life a Few Seconds Ago is not that different from real life, as we already live slightly in the past. For example, by the time our mind has become aware of the fact that a Frisbee has just conked us on the head, the Frisbee conking is already a historical event which happened a few fractions of a second back in history. But rewinding the present back a half hour is distinctly different. I suppose, aside from the fact that it would be very disorientating to be existing 30 minutes behind everybody else, this might be beneficial for perennially late people like myself. If I could have rewound a bit of my Monday morning I wouldn't have had to rush so much.

Sadly we can't actually fast-forward live TV. I wonder if anybody's working on that technology...

WEDNESDAY: My sandwich today is an odd mix of the last (and the ripest) bits of the Somerset Rustic Brie beefed out with some Edam, sunblushed tomatoes, spring onion, and fresh rosemary. I picture a sunny field of rows of tomato plants divided by rosemary hedges somewhere in Flanders. And there's a farm girl in a dress and bonnet -- and perhaps René Magritte is standing nearby painting the scene.

Wait a minute -- what's this bowler hat doing in my sandwich?

God Particles and Poodle Perms

TUESDAY: Lunch today features a new Sainsbury's flavour of houmus with roasted red pepper and basil pesto. It's quite nice. I've got it in a whole wheat breadcake from my local bakery with cream cheese and my usual garnish of red pepper/spring onion. It's a slippery sloshy sandwich that, along with my slippery sloshy container of fresh raspberries, cherries, nectarines, and melon, makes for quite a sloppy meal.

This morning my bus was packed to the gills, but I managed to squeeze behind a massive hooded man into the only free seat on the bus, a window seat facing backwards. Like most slightly neurotic people I prefer facing the front and gazing into the future rather than watching the past slip by. But today, as we spent a very long time stopped at the next bus stop, I had a perfect view right into my local neighbourhood dog grooming shop. I watched as the groomer clipped a large curly dog, rendering its hairs into the past as a small terrier watched disapprovingly from an adjacent cage. From my view through the door I could see part of the price list on the wall, with an entire menu for Poodles, one for Spaniels, one for Collies, and one listing miscellaneous breeds. And I smiled happily when I realised that being the only rear-facing passenger on that side of the bus, I was privileged to have my own private viewing experience.

WEDNESDAY: Lunch is odd: a marriage of not enough haloumi for a sandwich with not enough mature cheddar for a sandwich. Like Marmite and peanut butter they go surprisingly well together.

Last week I hungrily devoured the Guardian's supplement about the LHC or Large Hadron Collider, the new particle accelerator at Cern which is due to be turned on later this summer and will hopefully, by colliding two counter rotating beams of protons, recreate the conditions and energies that existed shortly after the Big Bang. I suppose I'm a bit more excited about this than most of my friends and workmates, but I do have a strong interest in physics. Although my love of mathematics when I was young was stalled a bit in high school by an extremely boring teacher whose Texas monotone took all the fun out of trigonometry, I still love to read about physics and maths from a laywoman's point of view.

Ten years ago I became so enamoured with chaos theory that I read probably 10 books in a row on the subject, branching off into complexity and symmetry breaking, and then I wrote a novel based on the butterfly effect and my idea of fractal time. So this huge, massively expensive particle accelerator -- which has the potential to answer many of the greatest questions of physics, not to mention philosophy -- excites me in a way I can't describe without becoming just a bit obscene.

One of the questions it is hoped the LHC will answer is if the Higgs boson, aka the God Particle, actually exists. It is theorized that this subatomic particle is responsible for mass. So if it is discovered that the Higgs boson doesn't exist, does that mean we're all figments of our imaginations? And although Michio Kaku, author and professor of theoretical physics, explains that any potential black holes created by the collider will be so minute they will dissipate instantly, why are so many people fearful that he could be wrong? I mean, if a black hole were created that was big enough to swallow the universe, as some sceptics fear, would it really matter? We'd never know the difference, would we? Have you ever been swallowed by a black hole? Me neither. I wouldn't think it would hurt much. And I think my lifelong California-born fear of being on the toilet when the Big Earthquake strikes just wouldn't come into account.

Another theory the LHC is hoped to prove or disprove is string theory, which proposes that the physical universe is based not in 4 dimensions of Space-time but in 10 dimensions. This worries me a bit, as I've been very excited about string theory ever since I first read about it. In fact, in one of my coffee columns I suggested my Ball of Superstring Theory based on the fact that cats seem to perceive matter in not only more than 3 physical dimensions but in several differently timed dimensions as well. To me this is the obvious explanation of why cats seem to have so much fun. And if string theory is disproved, life just won't seem nearly as entertaining.

On the other hand, how will they go about proving or disproving string theory? Do they need a bunch of cats watching the results? In the £2.6 billion budget for the LHC, I certainly hope they've allowed for enough catnip.

Blog Servers, Catholic Time Travellers, and a Recipe

TUESDAY: I took the time this weekend to roast a red pepper, so my sandwich today is Leerdammer cheese, spring onion, and roasted red pepper on a sun-dried tomato rustic roll. It’s so cheap and easy to make delicious roasted red peppers for sandwiches, especially if you have a jar of capers in the fridge. For those readers who suffer from capsicum phobia or who refuse to eat anything that doesn’t come with a list of ingredients and a sell-by date, you should skip the following paragraph. For those interested in my recipe, here it is:

Take a red bell pepper -- or even better, one of those big long pointy red peppers -- cut into fourths, discard seeds and stem, and roast skin-side up under the grill on a piece of foil until the skin is well blackened. Then wrap the hot pepper pieces in wet kitchen roll and leave for a couple of minutes. Then remove the skin, slice into strips, and place in a lidded container with a little vinegar from the capers and maybe a tablespoon of capers –- or, if you have no capers, a little wine vinegar will do. Add a splash of lemon juice, a small dollop of olive oil, and a dash or two of cayenne. If you have some fresh basil around throw a bit of that in as well. These will keep in the fridge for a good week or two, and they make any sandwich special, and they’re also good in salads or to just eat.

Okay, I’m done. As you may have guessed, I don’t have much to write about today because at the moment I haven’t even been able to upload my blog for last week. I think 20six is a brilliant blog site as far as user-friendliness, ease of customisation, and the number of features available. But why is their site always down? I’ve become accustomed to it being down every Saturday morning when I try to upload my blog. But this past weekend I couldn’t access it on Sunday, either. I have mixed feelings about 20six at this point. I just hope and pray they get their act together soon, because I do like to imagine that somebody somewhere occasionally reads my blogs. Maybe some Internet junkie with no offline life who lives in Podunk, Nebraska or Ysvdst, Siberia and reads blogs all day –- or perhaps an expat Sheffielder living in Seattle who positions her laptop in front of a mirror so she can read a reflection of my Expat-Seattleite-in-Sheffield blogs.

Or perhaps it’s only you, Steve.

THURSDAY: Spring is finally in the air, and boy, is the flora confused. A lot of daffodils aren’t that bothered about showing their faces this year, and deciduous trees are hesitantly budding, wondering if the weekend will attack with a freak blizzard or a killer heatwave.

But plants aren’t the only confused souls. I’m still reeling from the fact that Irish bishops decided to move St Patrick’s Day from 17th March (a Monday) to Saturday the 15th of March. I mean, can they actually do that? Does this mean Christmas is in danger of getting moved to the nearest Saturday? And what about New Year’s Day? Perhaps we should ring in 2009 on Sunday January 4th instead, so that we can all have a bang-up Saturday night New Year’s Eve celebration.

And then we should all have the privilege of moving our birthdays around. That would really confuse the astrologers, wouldn’t it? Let’s see . . . since my next birthday conveniently falls on a Saturday, maybe I just might move it 7 days forward to the following Saturday so I can have a more economically viable end-of-the-month party. Or to avoid growing older so quickly, I could just postpone it for six months. Perhaps I’ll reschedule my 2009 birthday for 2019 so I can sit back and enjoy my current age for a few years.

If we start moving dates around willy-nilly, we really need to be sure that Time will accommodate such whims. After all, if we decided to move 1 June to 15 August this year, what sense would a use-by date of “JUNE 1 2008” make on a jar of Marmite? If we knew that the jar of Marmite was able to travel 2.5 months into the future, then we’d have no worries and, considering the nature of Marmite jars, perhaps this is possible.

But can you imagine, if people and objects start bouncing backward and forward in time, the massive traffic jams and tailbacks on Time’s multi-dimension-laned superhighway? The potential of those arrows of time crashing head-on is a bit frightening. I can picture a horrific pile-up of midlife crisis sufferers and 2-for-1 packets of king prawns, with blood and brine streaming everywhere –- and all for the sake of a more convenient time.

And how would the insurance companies cope?