I don’t know if it is because it is near to Guy Fawkes Day, but there have been lot of fireworks going off around here for the past week. It’s great to view it from our flat since we are up high enough to see over the surrounding buildings. They were even shooting them off when there was a fog layer that made it hard to see more than a block. Thursday was the actual Guy Fawkes Day and there constant pops and booms. Apparently, the big fireworks shows are on Friday Night this year (I’m writing this on Friday morning), although rain is in the forecast.

Guy Fawkes was infamous as the revolutionary who was caught guarding a big pile of dynamite under the House of Parliament, as part of Catholic plot to kill King James I. Poor Guy (and undoubted his co-conspirators and other people he knew), of course, was tortured and killed in that very slow, excruciating and public way that the British seemed to love in that era. In response to the thwarting of the “Gunpowder Plot”, Parliament passed an act in 1605, authorizing celebratory fireworks. It was referred to as the Thanksgiving Act and I wonder if it led to the American holiday. Underlying this whole thing was the fight between the Protestants and the Catholics for control (which is still going on in Northern Ireland), so, for a long time, Guy Fawkes Day was also Attack the Catholics Day. After centuries of this, it has turned into an excuse to set off fireworks (endlessly and apparently for at least a week).

Kitchen Confidential 1: Here is an unanticipated odd thing about living here: The water is so hard that it leaves a lime residue on things that builds up and interferes with things like dishwashers and kettles. So I have to add this special salt to the dishwasher and occasionally use “Scale-away” to clean the kettle.

Kitchen Confidential 2: I have gotten so fed up with the miniature combo washer-dryer in our kitchen that I have decided to just get a big percentage of our clothes (and especially things like sheets and towels) laundered by an outside service. Like the grocery service I use, all I have to do is go on-line and give them pick up and drop off times and someone appears at the door and the whole thing is magically charged to my debit card.

Kitchen Confidential 3: I miss US supermarkets. I’m sure there are good grocers somewhere in London or in the suburbs, but there aren’t any near here. There is no place to get fresh fish. I have no chance of walking anywhere to get a turkey for Thanksgiving (and can’t imagine carrying one on the Tube) and will have to order one on-line. No real butchers in the neighborhood either. The closest place is really Borough Market, which is only a 10-15 minute bus ride from Liverpool Street Station. I’m just going to end up shopping there more, but I have to beat the lunchtime crowds, when it can be hard to even move around.

Kitchen Confidential 4: Every time I try to make something in our kitchen, I realize that I am missing some key pan or tool (or that I can’t possibly get the ingredients because the groceries are so limited). I have been hesitant to buy stuff for the kitchen since we aren’t going to be her that long, but I just weakened and bought an emersion blender and a nice spatula.

Kitchen Confidential 5: The Unitarian Church we attend has a large percentage of vegetarians. We decided to try going to one of their covenant groups, which starts with a meal and I asked Rev. Andy what sort of things people bring. He told me that they usually don’t serve “flesh” when I suggested bringing ceviche. Thanks to years of cooking for Hannah, I was able to come up with something–Roasted Autumn Root Vegetable with a Balsamic Maple Glaze. I also brought wine to the group, which was a change in the culture, but seemingly a welcome one.

Here is a new painting that I have just finished. It is loosely based on the view from the incredible villa we stayed in on the Amalfi Coast. (Thanks again Cheryl!) You may or may not recall that I had decided that I was using too much of a paint-by-numbers approach and trying to paint within the lines. So I made a conscious effort here to paint in a freer way. I didn’t sketch out the design on the canvas first and decided to use only a pretty large flat brush and I didn’t worry too much about getting the perspective perfect, which the mathematical side of me likes to do. (I am always attracted to artwork that has a kind of mathematic underpinning. I should probably try that some time.) The one thing about painting this way is figuring out when to stop. (Before I would stop when all the spaces were filled.) I’m not sure that the final result is any better, but I think I find it more satisfying to paint in this way.

I don’t know if losing the lead at 4:00 AM is really more painful than losing it at 11:00 PM, but it sure felt like it. The Mets blew  yet another game in the World Series. They really could have won the Series, but ultimately didn’t deserve it. The Royals just played better this week. Here are some thoughts (if you are not a baseball/Mets fan, feel free to skip this post entirely):

It is pretty easy to second guess Terry Collins: The Mets manager was on a great run where everything he did seemed to work and then in the World Series nothing worked. His robotic approach to his bullpen, which is justifiable (maybe) in the regular season, was exposed. Clippard hasn’t really pitched well in weeks, yet Collins brought him in to pitch a crucial inning in Game Four (rather than Familia) because he was the guy who pitches the eighth. Coming into the Series, one of the Mets’ great weapons was Familia, but in the Fourth and Fifth Games, Collins waited too long to use him and ended up putting him in impossible situations. The Fox guys kept comparing leaving Harvey in the game to Jack Morris and the Twins, which is valid, but they might have also referred to Grady Little leaving Pedro in too long and losing to the Yankees, which, as it turned out was the better analogy. I didn’t mind sending Harvey back out, but I would have brought in Familia after the walk. But I don’t really know what he could have done to get them to hit, which was ultimately the biggest problem.

The aliens who kidnapped Daniel Murphy gave him back: The Murphy in the Series was, unfortunately, the one that Mets fans know: He is a journeyman player whose only real skill is making contact with the baseball when hitting (which is a real skill, not to be minimized). But as the Series showed, he is a barely competent fielder and proved it by making some critical errors. He really is not a power hitter either, despite his post-season heroics. I’m not complaining, since his historic home run binge helped get the Mets to the Series to begin with and was a nice cap for his Mets career. I’d be very surprised if the Mets pay him what it would take to keep him as a free agent and I won’t miss him that much.

The Mets never saw the real Cespedes: In the last two months of the season, especially August, he was just incredible. A Willie Mays-like Superman, having probably the best two month stretch of any position player in Mets history. In October, not so much. He didn’t really hit well at all. He was over-swinging terribly and there seem to be holes in his swing that top pitchers can exploit. To make matters worse, he looked pretty bad in CF, starting with misplaying a fly ball in the fist inning of Game One into an inside-the-park homer. He is a much better player than he was during the World Series and for much of the playoffs and not close to the god-like player he was in August. He is a free agent and someone (maybe the Mets) is going to give him a truck load of money. But what will they be getting?

Defense is key in the post-season: And the Mets didn’t play good defense in the Series. Good teams that are playing well (who are the teams that end up in the World Series) are teams that capitalize on mistakes. If the Mets had played tight defense, they would have won the series. But Cespedes kicked the ball around in the outfield, Murphy’s lousy fielding was exposed, Duda threw the ball away when a good throw would have ended Game Five and Wright made a couple of errors. And d’Arnaud and the Mets pitchers proved incredibly easy to run on, playing right in the Royals strategy. The couldn’t turn double plays against a ground ball hitting team. The often-criticized Wilmer Flores, shockingly, was the steadiest fielder on the team.

The Royals played really well: Their pitching pretty much stopped the Mets offense and their defense was good, although they made a few big errors. And you have to appreciate their approach at the plate and their willingness to cut down on their swings and just try to make contact when they have two strikes. The majority of Mets hitters (and the majority of MLB players) just don’t do that. The Royals give up power and are essentially a singles hitting team, which is a tough way to shape an offense, unless you can take lots of extra bases and keep games close with pitching and defense. They are well designed for their large stadium, although I’d have to say that they had the worst bunch of hitters on their bench that I can recall in a post-season. A team with a tighter middle infield that could control the running game would have given them trouble. But they took advantage of the breaks and lucky bounces they got and never gave up. I’d like to say that the Mets blew it, but, really, the Royals won it.

Wait ‘Til Next Year: The Mets are going to be good for a couple of years going forward, simply because they have historically great young starting pitching, combined with a great closer. Conforto has a chance to be a star and you could do worse that Flores at second or short. D’Arnaud is a good young hitter and catcher, but they need to work on his throwing. I’ve come to really appreciate Granderson, who was the Mets MVP this year. Wright’s a pro, but his back is a perpetual concern. Duda is too streaky, but I don’t know that they can really do any better. Murphy is likely gone, but how much money do they want to blow on Cespedes? I’d like to see him back, but not with contract that cripples their budget for years to come. They have some decisions to make, but, for the first time in a very long time, they are starting from a strong position,

It’s hard to know where to start. It has been a bit of lost period, thanks to the Mets and the damn World Series keeping me up to all hours. Fortunately, that looks like it may end tonight and, in any event will end soon. I will probably devote a future post to thoughts about this whole post-season, so I won’t say much about the Series here. But the Mets could as easily be up three games to one as down by that amount and arguably should be. It has been kind of a Series between old-time small ball strategy and more modern sabremetric thinking, with small ball winning, much to the delight of that antediluvian moron, Harold Reynolds. It will be a pleasure to stop listening to him. There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of baseball commentators, former players, sportswriters without newspapers anymore and random people off the street who would be so much better than him, that you have to wonder what it is that Fox sees in him. I actually tried to switch to the radio feed for the audio, but it is on a ten or more second delay, so it is too out of joint with the game action on the screen.

Regardless of the outcome and the lack of sleep which has left me “Met lagged”, it has been a wonderful run. A week ago, at the Unitarian Church, when I lit a candle to the Mets, I explained that I was really lighting it, not because they had won, but to reflect on the intergenerational ties that they formed in my family and countless others and to be thankful for the joy that they had brought to my son Alex, to my friends and, if you believe in an afterlife, to my father. It is really the interconnected joys, sorrows and frustrations that are what being a Mets fan is all about. It isn’t about winning. (This may be the essential difference between Mets fans and Yankees fans.) But Let’s Go Mets anyway. It’s not over until it’s over.

Last Sunday, after the Unitarian service, I went to a meeting of the “Sunday Gatherings Team” to see what it was like. It turned out that Rev. Andy likes to get a lot of input form people about what the services should be like and how the congregation could be better. One of the things he did is break us into small groups to brainstorm ideas on each of the upcoming services for the month. He had already chosen the topics and I chose the service that was today on the topic of friendship. It was fun and a few of my ideas found their way into his message (he doesn’t like the term sermon apparently). He also asked for readings and I found two readings from Winnie the Pooh, which I thought reflected on friendship. One was between Eeyore and Rabbit and was about how you have to have real conversations and go out of your way and make an effort to see others and the other was a wonderful excerpt in which Christopher Robin asks Pooh what he likes best in the world and Pooh says:

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best?” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have: and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, “What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying ‘What about a little something?’ and Me saying,’ Well, I shouldn’t mind a little something, should you, Piglet,’ and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing.”

I ended up actually reciting the the two readings (which brought back repeatedly reading these stories to my kids) and they were incorporated nicely into the message. The people in the congregation loved the readings and came up to me afterward to talk about them. One woman had been to the Hundred Acre Woods with her family in the prior week and played Pooh sticks there (which sounds like something I need to do). Another guy commented that he always thought of Winnie to Pooh as being read with a British accent and the hearing me read it was odd, but not unpleasant. He said that he pictured Pooh and Christopher Robin living somewhere like Vermont as he listened.

It was nice to get involved in this particular service because I have been thinking a lot about friendship in the past few weeks. I’ve realized that what I miss is not my house, or Montclair, or doing things in NYC, or going up to the country, or wine tastings or dinners, or our UU congregation, it is the people. And it isn’t anything big. It is just knowing them and what has happened to them over the years, watching their kids grow up, recalling special moments and just being able to start a conversation in the middle, without an introductory part. It is that sort of deep and regular personal connection that is missing from what is our delightful life here. It is the biggest reason we are going to the New Unity Congregation, which I think is our best hope for making connections of any depth.

I have been thinking about why it seems so difficult to make friends here. Have I been too much like Eeyore, waiting for people to come to me? Not really, although perhaps I could try to get out more to try to meet other people somehow, although I don’t think that mere proximity necessarily leads to any sort of significant friendship. It all seemed so much easier when we moved to Sydney so long ago. Was it because we were different then or that Aussies are friendlier than Brits? The answer to both of those questions is yes, but I think the real reason was Alex. Having a small child is an incredible lubricator in the creation of relationships. It gives you an instant and meaningful connection with other parents and also I think that walking about with a cute, verbal two-year old is a little like walking a puppy. It attracts people who want to come and talk to you and to him. Anyway, we are lacking that lubricator here and Judie working in a smallish branch of a law firm is not like working at American Express in Sydney.

Thinking about our friends in Sydney is a nice segue into the Rugby World Cup. As probably almost no one in America knows, New Zealand beat Australia in a really exciting final yesterday. They are two creative teams that do not play the smash-mouth, run-it-up-the-middle-and-kick-it-away type of game that most teams seem to play. New Zealand took a pretty big lead early in the second half and the game looked over, but Australia came roaring back, scoring 14 straight points, before New Zealand took control at the very end on some wonderful plays and won 34-17. One absolutely delightful discovery that came out of this World Cup was that our old friend Mair Lustig, the Welsh wife of my college roommate Rich, is a fanatical rugby fan. I never would have guessed it, but she followed it all and knows the history, especially of the Wales team. We’ve known Mair for close to forty years and never knew this about her, which I guess fits somewhere into these ruminations about friendship and seems like a reasonable place to conclude.