Fun with British people: The Gin Story

(My four days in SoCal were more packed with interesting incident than the average four weeks back home. I'm definitely going to run out of steam before I even exhaust the highlights, but I hope to make a good effort.)

Sunday night, I found myself playing cards with four Oxonians. I'm not even sure what we were playing. The Great Goddess called it "Egyptian rat screw", but I doubt it was--she ended up restating the rules at least four times, completely changing the victory goals at least twice. (Is it any coincidence that she won the first six hands? Believe it or not, she insisted it was.)

I was the only sober person there, though up far later than I should've been. The rest all drank like college kids--Russian college kids. (To give you an idea: All told, there were six people staying in the house and three in a nearby cabin. There were another half dozen (including me and monshu) who often stopped by. On Friday night, the Abbot dropped off a GALLON jug of Chivas Regal; by Sunday, it was more than half empty--despite the fact that most people weren't even drinking from it! monshu stuck to the bottle of single-malt he'd picked up, whereas most of the party drank wine or gin.) By the sixth hand, the gin was exhausted--or so we thought until some scrounging turned up a travel-size bottle of Tanqueray in the freezer. It needed to thaw before it could be opened anyway, so I suggested we make it the prize for winning the next hand. Everyone agreed, we set it in a bowl, and started playing. It was I who had the good luck to break GG's winning streak, but I wasn't interested in chugging hard liquor so close to bedtime. So I donated the bottle to the winner of the next hand and slipped off to bed.

The next morning, I related this story while en route to LAX with Brother Chauffeur, my better half, and a lovely couple from Surrey I'll call Mater and Pater, all of whom had been in bed at the time. "That wasn't gin," Pater told us. How did he know? It was his bottle from the flight over which he'd refilled with water and frozen for taking along on walks. "I was wondering what happened to it." I'm wondering, too. Who was the victim of his inadvertant prank--and was he too drunk even to notice?

Fun with British people: The Raccoon Story

So while I was playing cards with an Old Testament scholar, two monks, and an Ethel Merman impersonator (all of whom--until the play became serious--were bursting into song at the slightest cue), Mater and Pater were out on the terrace with Weirdo[*] and the Lads.

"The Lads" is really an ironic name (despite Pater's contention that Americans "don't do irony"); others called them the "Brit Twits": Three posh young Oxonians (although, ironically, the only one with a title was a Yorkshireman with a thoroughly Irish name), all friends of Father Medlar from his studies there. We rode in with them from the airport. As we were waiting (interminably, it seemed) for Father Chauffeur to pick us up, monshu said: "What do you bet that they're all gay and the average age is 23? If I'm right, just give me a wink." He was wrong: The oldest was 23; the average age was 20. (No, I will not do the math for you.)

Their skittishness was a source of endless amusement to me. The first night, Huey and Dewey (Louie seemed to spend the entire time napping) wanted to go on a flashlight hike, so a New Yorker (who developed into our boon companion) and I tagged along to make sure nothing happened to them. They were terrified of the local wildlife, including coyotes, rattlesnakes, and pumas. Of course, we played on this, alternatingly mocking them for their wimpishness and telling (in my companion's case, sometimes making up) terrifying stories of nature red in tooth and claw, alien abductions, and plain old ghost stories. We took an easy stroll to the Grove, a stand of poplars planted by Father Lulu fifty years earlier; even though Little Lord Huey had been there not four hours earlier, they were scared to go in. Typical exchange:

Dewey: Now I definitely huhd thomething theya.
Huey: Theh's something moving in the bushes!
Boon: Sounds like a wolf!
Me: It's the sprinkler. It'd been going all day.
Dewey: It thoundth awfly irreguelah...

(I took the flashlight from them, promising to go ahead and investigate. Then I walked a few feet away and turned it off.)

So it came as no surprise Sunday night when an agitated clump of British bluebloods entred the parlour in a state of extreme agitation. "There's a raccoon on the roof!" Huey informed us. So what? was the general reaction of the three Americans in the room. Now, to be absolutely fair (though I see no reason why I should be), the monastery was littered with alarmist signs announcing "RACOONS ARE DANGEROUS AND THEY BITE." I figured this was only a necessarily histrionic response to a rash of Disneyfied suburbanites trying to treat raccoons like pets and paying a price in emergency room visits; I didn't expect people with experience hiking and hunting to take it to heart.

In any case, after some coaching, they all went back out to the patio. Moments later, there was a loud noise, the sound of something breaking, and they were back, led by Mater. It seems that one of the raccoons had left the bushes and COME RIGHT TOWARDS THEM! "I thought it would be afraid of us," Mater explained, "but it wasn't; it kept approaching." "It was probably begging," I replied. Only Pater (a Santa Monica native if a naturalised British resident for 25 years) had kept his cool; local boy Brother Weirdo had inexplicably tossed a metal chair at the beast, shattering a wine glass in the process.

Dewey refused to step outside again. "You can sit on my lap," I suggested, "I'll protect you from the mean nasty killer raccoons." When he rejected my offer to snuggle up next to Ethel on the bench, I said, "You realise that this is like being scared of a hedgehog, don't you?" Later, someone asked me, "How did they ever hold down an empire?" "It wasn't the English upper class that did that," I pointed out, "it was the ordinary Scots and the Irish!"


[*] GG: Is Weirdo still out there?
Me: Who's "Weirdo"?
GG: Brother ********.
Me: Ah, figures that in this crowd "Weirdo" means the one straight male.