Happy Anniversary, Bizarro Bayswater

    Anniversaries. Don't you love them? We always did, too, until our husband tore out our heart, stomped on it, and then mashed it up and fed it to his girlfriend while we cried ourselves to sleep every night for months. But we do have an anniversary to celebrate this week. Namely, the trip we took to London and Berlin last year at this time, and which we never dreamed would include a wild fling, getting tossed out of a club in London's West End, an encounter with the London police, and a sketchy morning in Berlin during which we had no access to our stateside bank account. And it all started here...

    The church in the picture is Our Lady of Heaven on Queensway in Bayswater, London. We were in London with our younger son, TW who was enjoying an early graduation present before starting his senior year of high school. We were enjoying another visit to our second favorite city after a summer filled with painful interactions with the man who mashed up our heart for his new girlfriend's late middle age luncheon. It was our last night in town before catching a plane to Berlin at five the next morning, and TW wanted some time on his own to do a bit of filming (his passion) on the streets. In fact he insisted, reminding me that he was, after all, only a month shy of 18 and perfectly capable of taking care of himself in a city far less dangerous (at least statistically) than our own. So after a quick bite at a sushi joint in Oxford Circus, we said good-bye to our boy and took the train back to Bayswater, where we were staying and where we planned to spend a quiet evening collecting our thoughts and energies for the upcoming visit to Berlin.
    But guess what happened?
    We had arrived at the Bayswater station and were heading back down Queensway to our hotel when we passed Our Lady of Heaven, realized it was time for Saturday night Mass, and decided to attend the service. It seemed just the thing to soothe our ragged heart and so we went inside and took a seat in a back pew, sang the songs, recited the words, tossed a bunch of change into a roving basket, and listened to a sermon on the complexities of the relationship between fathers and sons. We don't remember much about the sermon, but we think it was probably very inspiring. We were one of only a handful of non-Asian or Black worshippers in the church, but we felt perfectly welcome and were only disappointed that we weren't given any wine when we received Communion. No one who received Communion was given any wine. There was body, but no blood. And on leaving the church after the service, we felt an almost primal desire for blood (i.e. red wine) before we returned to our hotel for the evening. So we stopped here.

Lord Alfred's Pub in Bayswater

  We were no stranger to Lord Alfred's Pub because, it being so close to our hotel, it would have been rude not to stop in at least once a day to say hello and show our support. So it made sense to seek help there now as we tried to quench our thirst for a glass of red wine. And of course the girls behind the counter were more than  happy to oblige. Within minutes, we were sitting at our favorite corner table by the window, drinking a glass of red wine and listening to some young Italian jerk at the next table badmouth Americans while admitting that he had never visited the country. He was just lucky that we were only a few minutes out of church. But don't get us started on self-righteous Europeans. We don't have all day, and young Italian men with more bravado than brains are not our main problem.

Inside Lord Alfred's Pub. We can still taste the wine, the bangers and  mash, and his lips.
 
   On that Saturday night last September, our problem was leaving London, which we never enjoy doing, and flying on to Berlin. Nothing against Berlin, which is a cool, arty, progressive city with a dark past, wonderful beer, the world's best meat and cabbage dishes, a well-maintained zoo with luminous spiders, and the most interesting looking men, but we are hopelessly besotted with London. And we had only been there for five days! But TW, though English by blood, has a fascination with Germany, speaks the language very well, and was primed for the trip. So we were thinking about that, and the sadness to which we would return to in the States, and were about to scarf down our second and (we thought) final glass of Cabernet Savigaun when someone who looked like this sat down at our table.

Three words: Gorgeous, classy, unavailable.

We wish! But, no, unfortunately, Carey Grant was still dead that night last September. The man who sat down at our table looked more like this....

....but a few pounds heavier and with a rounder face and he was wearing a striped dress shirt. He asked if we were on our own, but in a manner that made it clear he had been observing us and already knew the answer. We were so not in the same mode that we thought he wanted us to go sit at the bar so that he and his friends could use the table. But it turned out that he wanted to buy us a drink and chat us up because he thought we were "'luptuous" and "interesting-looking." It took a while for us to glean this information because Mark (as he subsequently identified himself) was a Northerner, which meant that he sounded like Paul McCartney talking on speed and ended every sentence with a question, as in "You're a good-lookin' woman, aren't ya?" or "I'm probably not clever enough for ya, am I?" and my favorite, "You look better than a woman yer age, don't ya?" We were a bit stand-offish at first because we had a plane to catch so early the next morning and weren't looking to make friends with cute, 40-year-old Northerners (we were 51) who approached us in pubs, but he was very charming and insistent and our battered little heart was surprisingly responsive to the straightforward way in which he outlined his hopes for the remainder of the evening. We made it clear that those hopes were not going to be realized, but we did...finally..agree to share a portion of our last night in London with him. So, after a few more drinks, an arm wrestling match (he won, but it was no cake walk) and a lot of banter about English and American stereotypes, we departed Lord Alfred's Pub for London's West End because, since our son was supposedly filming scenes like these...

Camden Town 

View From Under The London Eye

....we thought it would be somewhat safe to try to actually enjoy ourselves in a place that looked a lot like this.

   And we did, despite our initial reluctance and discomfort over the fact that it had been 25 years since we had kissed a man other than our husband. Sorry. Ex-husband. We ordered drinks and danced to really, really, really loud music on a dance floor that was so crowded we could barely move. We were buzzed enough not to mind when Mark took the opportunity to kiss us on the way back to our table. In fact, we kissed him back and continued to kiss him at our table. The kissing was much more enjoyable than we had imagined it would be, and before we knew it, we were kissing and groping, and in a moment of wild abandon, we unbuttoned our shirt because we were sick of feeling sad and depressed and undesirable and we didn't want to waste another nano second regretting our seeming inability to have fun like a normal person who hadn't been tossed away after 25 years of marriage. And for a little while, we were free and in semi-synch with the other hedonists still writhing on the dance floor. Then the bouncer came and it was all over. We'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that there's a club in the West End of London in which this Anglophile and a Northerner with his own plastering business whose name is Mark are forbidden to ever show our faces...or anything else...again.

   Fast forward to the walk back to our hotel, during which we resisted Mark's attempts to convince us to accompany him to his flat. We parted ways without drama or sentiment (although we did let him give us his number) and hurried back to our hotel, knowing that we had been gone too long and expecting to pay for our crime with a few sarcastic comments from our son and no sleep before heading off to Heathrow. We were wrong. When we stepped through the door of our hotel....

We were greeted by two men who looked something like this...

.

..and a very displeased son who thought that we had been kidnapped by a pirate taxi or something even worse and had called the police and reported us missing. The hotel manager was also involved, it turned out. A devout Muslim, he had taken it upon himself to pray with TW for the safe return of his mother, a fact which did not stop the manager from giving us a sharp reprimand for having gone off on our own without telling our son about our plans. We wanted to explain that our son had insisted on going off on his own earlier that night, and that prior to this one, very singular incident, we had done nothing but try to make him happy, our attempts fueled by a sense of guilt over a divorce that we had never even wanted in the first place. But we knew that it was neither the time nor the place, and so we told the police that we had run into some old London acquaintances at Our Lady Of Heaven and had accepted an invitation to join them for dinner, during which we had done nothing but talk about church and rainbows and things that make us smile. The boys in yellow wrote it all down, advised us to be more careful in the future, and left. Cut to an hour and a half later as guilt-ridden mother and sullen 18-year-old scion depart the Phoenix Hotel for Heathrow, sleepy and tired and silent, on our way to Berlin where we were sure we would find redemption. But the thing about Berlin is that...

...Germany is such a large country that the citizens don't necessarily learn English in school as do, say, the Danes. That includes city officials. So we had to rely on TW to interact with the locals on our behalf, which was difficult because he was a bit surly that first day in Berlin. Add to which that that for the better part of the morning, we had no money because our bank card was rejected by every cash machine within walking distance of our hotel due to it having been identified as stolen by the bank system. Mother and sons spent those hours walking around the Kreutzberg district, waiting for the bank to fix the error and talking, which, it turned out was a good thing for both of us. We asked TW why he was angry at us when he seemed perfectly accepting of his father's alliance with "the other woman." He told us that he was fine with what had happened, he had just been genuinely worried, which for some reason embarrassed and irritated him. By the time our bank card situation was resolved, the mother and son dynamic was working as well as it ever had since the advent of "the troubles." And thus ended our first day in Berlin...a Sunday, beautiful and warm and languid, a welcome respite from the frenzied pace of London...as we sat here....

People actually smoke cigarettes at their tables

.....eating and drinking things like this....

....,,,almost losing our suitcases in a beirgarten here....

The Berlin Zoo

You have to pay extra to see the entire zebra

They don't look real (kind of freaks us out)

Hate spiders, love the luminous

They're so graceful when they swim

...and shopping for TW's school clothes here.

 (We spent a lot of time at the H.M. in London, too, as well as Top Shop, TW's favorite at the time.)

And then, four and a half days after we had first arrived on that sleep-deprived Sunday morning, we left Berlin for Amsterdam and then flew home. TW started and completed his senior year of high school and has never mentioned that night in London again. Today he stepped onto his new campus for the first time as a full-fledged university student. We still have duct tape around our heart, but we don't cry every day anymore, and we didn't cry at all when we lost Mark's number. We really did like him, but he belongs to that night, and it's over. Even so, we're raising a glass of Peppermint Schnapps in his honor as we toast the anniversary of our bizarro fling in bizarro Bayswater on a Saturday night in September almost one year ago this week. Skol, Mark. Vi heller ikke glemmer dem.

Now we're ready for the next adventure.