Month: May 2016

As anyone who has been here knows, the US is sports-mad.  This is a country truly obsessed by sport.  TVs show sport all day in bars, airports, and even offices.  People sit in bars and happily discuss sporting statistics for hours on end.  There is a 5% reduction in the country’s electricity usage during the Super Bowl, when more than 115 million people turned off other appliances and gathered around TVs.  Sport is big.

The obvious American sports are American football, baseball, (ice) hockey and basketball.  A few years ago, the stereotype was that Americans knew no sports outside these four.  This is definitely changing, and it’s alarming when some of my colleagues here know more about the Premier League than I do.  They can even pronounce “Leicester” correctly…!

However, I haven’t – yet – managed to educate any of them in the finer points of cricket or rugby.  To be honest, cricket is never going to have that much of a market in the US, but rugby is taking off and could be big – and I reckon the US, given its population and general sporting prowess, would be really successful at rugby if the sport ever really got going.

Charleston is not really a sporting hub.  The local baseball team, the RiverDogs, is a minor league team and is perhaps best-known for having local celeb Bill Murray as co-owner and “Director of Fun”.

But the reason for this blog is not actually to show off how little I know about professional sport in the USA.  Rather, I want to talk a bit about how the relentless obsession with professional sport affects the general population, particularly in our “family” sport, swimming.  Although Great Britain and Australia both punch above their weights, if you will excuse the metaphor-mixing, the US dominates world swimming events.  Why is this?  Partly it’s about facilities.  There are just way more high-quality swimming pools in the US than there are in the UK.  This is also true in Australia, where there were two 50m pools within walking distance of my hotel in Sydney last year.  Charleston, population under 150,000, has an Olympic-sized swimming pool, not to mention any number of smaller pools.  Meanwhile in the UK, we read that the City of Derby has closed its one remaining public pool, leaving World Record Holder Adam Peaty without his home base to train in.

(This is in Sydney – can you imagine anything like this in the UK?  And look how many people are using it!)

So the number of facilities is one thing.  The other main factor is how seriously everything is taken.  This summer, Alice has joined the summer swim team at our local sports club.  Today was “Swim with an Olympian” day for the swim team.  A former US Olympic swimmer came to give a motivational talk, let the children wear his gold medal, and then there was some racing.  Even the younger children – Alice is in the 7s and 8s age group – raced, with numbers written on them, and had their times recorded.  Once you start doing this at a young age, it becomes normal to compete and take sport very seriously.  Hence there are more people who would even consider becoming a professional sportsperson in the future.

(Incidentally I was once in a swimming race: I represented my Scout Troop in the Harrogate & District Scouts swimming gala, I think in 50m backstroke.  I made it to the final – but the Scout Leader didn’t notice.  Thanks a bundle.)

I feel life I have a bit of writer’s block at the moment, which explains the lack of blog last week and frankly the slightly Christmas newsletter style of this one.  My editor has been suggesting all sorts of changes, additions, corrections: mostly all met with a “nah” from me.  Hopefully normal service will be resumed next week!

So here goes…

It’s hard to believe we’ve been here for four months already.  In a strange way, time has been running at two different speeds simultaneously.  The weeks here are flying by, but at the same time, our old life in London seems long gone.

As you can imagine, we’re gradually slipping into a routine.  I take Alice to school three days a week, which I could never have done in London.  Even better, my office is only about 15 minutes from the school, so I can be a lot more involved with what she’s getting up to at school: yesterday, for example, I went to watch her in a dance recital at lunchtime.  Charlie is juggling three jobs: two different Pilates studios and subbing at Alice’s school.  So far, she’s taught Spanish to some early teens, taken a class of first graders all day, and helped with younger children.  Whilst the school teaching has a lot more responsibilities attached than Pilates, it’s true that teachers do it for love rather than to get filthy rich.

Alice is doing everything that we hoped: swimming a lot, cycling, playing outside with neighbours her age, and living the outdoor lifestyle.  The other week she decided to wade around in the marsh, get covered in sticky black mud and lose a shoe.  I did try to find it, but almost lost my own shoe too.  It’s not uncommon to get through several sets of clothes per day – and that’s just me…

The good news is that, even though some parts of daily life are getting routine, other parts are not.  We’re finding it easier to do many more different things, from spending a weekend at the beach to taking the bunnies for a drive on the golf cart in the evening.  We’re enjoying every minute of it, and almost every day we find time to stop and appreciate how lucky we are.

 

(no filter!)

 

One thing that Brits abroad complain a lot about is the tea.  Wherever you go, it’s just not the same as you get back home.  Not in the US, nor in France, nor Germany, nor Italy (“You want tea?  Not espresso?”) nor anywhere else I have been.

Of course, tea is part of the history of the British Empire (along with opium, but this is a family blog) and it has become part of the British psyche.  Generations of Brits have “a brew” every day, whether it’s hot or cold outside.  This is why, about 9 years ago, you would have found me wandering the streets of a small town in California looking for a cafe that would make two cups of tea, hot, with milk, and definitely no lemon.

(As an aside, there are definite advantages to not having a tea culture.  The removal men who came to pack up our house in the UK arrived and promptly started drinking tea.  It must have added a good 2 or 3 hours to the packing time.  The guys who unloaded in the US refused a brew and completed the job in double quick time.)

What I didn’t know until arriving here is that just south of Charleston is the only tea plantation in the USA.  Being fans of a cuppa, we thought that was worth a visit, so off we went.  Charleston Tea Plantation is on Wadmalaw Island, about half an hour from the city. The drive is actually rather beautiful – the urban environment gradually dissolves into a rural idyll of trees overhanging the roadway, bridges over creeks, and marsh all around.

About 15 years ago, in one of my previous careers, I visited a bunch of coffee plantations in Southern India.  This was fascinating: coffee plants grow best in almost jungle-like conditions, shaded by trees.  The berries are bright red, and after picking there’s a lengthy – and smelly – process of washing and fermentation before you even get to roasting.  So I was interested to see the tea process too, and relive my “Man from Del Monte” days.

This tea plantation is run by just a handful of people.  In some countries they have hundreds of people picking the new leaves from the tea bushes, but the Charleston Tea Plantation manages with just five and a machine called the Green Goddess, a version of a cotton-picking machine, that drives over the fields and cuts the tops off the bushes.  It’s only the very newest leaves that are used for tea, which is why the bushes in the photo below look like that – as soon as fresh young leaves appear, they are picked.

A lot of people in the Deep South drink iced tea, often flavoured with fruit, which suits the climate a lot better than a hot cup.  There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, that iced tea was invented at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, when the East India Company pavilion was trying – and failing – to give away hot tea under the sweltering Missouri sun.  So, rather than throw it all away, they mixed it with ice and discovered that the punters rather liked it.  I’m yet to be convinced, though I have found peach tea very refreshing on a hot day.

Finally, in case any Limeys need reassuring, we have found a place here to buy Yorkshire Tea.  So that’s all fine.