Afghanistan - stick or twist?

Should we pull out of Afghanistan? Is America doomed either way?

A conversation with the Major suggests yes. He posits this theory: that by pulling out, America will once again demonstrate its inability to win, even against a seemingly less substantial force (c.f. Vietnam). Everyone will think they are losers, despite their manpower on the ground in troop terms. Result: America is doomed as a superpower.

They stay in - troops are killed, innocent civilians are killed, but they do not feel able to pull out for the reasons demonstrated above. All their economic power goes towards keeping the war going; in the meantime, Russia and China creep up and beat them to the top in the superpower stakes. Result: America is doomed as a superpower.

It's simplistic, but he has a point. What is the solution to Afghanistan?

The taxi driver, the lesbian and the following of rules

To St Louis, as I mentioned in my earlier blog, where I encountered three people who left a lasting impression.

To invert the order of my title, I'll start with the lesbian, because she came first (metaphorically speaking). We were in a bar - pretty rowdy (it was Mardi Gras); I was enjoying my first martini of the night, still huddled in my furry coat because it was bloody freezing. She came up to me and started stroking the coat. She complimented me on my choice of drink. Then suggested a martini was like a woman's breasts. I wasn't sure if I'd heard her right, so smiled and nodded. We grooved a bit. She stroked my arm again and left. A minute later, I saw her kissing another woman.

I felt pretty chuffed. This woman was hot - great hair, figure, clothes. If I'd been that way inclined I'd have gone for it. Do I just have a massive ego, that i can now say I'm fanacied by women as well as men? Or was she just drun?

To the taxi driver. He was from Nigeria. Still had a strong African accent. We chatted - about the city, how long he had been here, whether he liked being a taxi driver. He was noncommital but explained it allowed him to pay for his children's college educations. His daughter was at Harvard, he continued.

That taxi driver summed up the American dream - that whatever your station in life, or wherever you came from, you can go anywhere. Nice to see it in action.

Next day, we visited the impressive Gateway Arch of St Louis - apparently the tallest national monument in the U.S. at 360 feet. We decided to watch an excellent and beautifully produced (by National Geographic) film depicting Lewis & Clark's intrepid expedition from St Louis tot he Pacific.

It was a beautifully large auditorium; plenty of room for everyone, cupholders in every chair. Although we were informed, once in, that all food and beverages were strictly prohibited. Anyone who had come in with something to consume could leave now. The lady in the row in front surreptitiously slipped her latte into the cupholder and covered it with her coat.

About a quarter of the way in, she decided to have a cheeky slurp. Big mistake. The lady in charge came marching over to her row. "Out, now," she hissed, pointing (and ruining my view in the meantime). The lady meekly obliged and the attendant marched back to her place.

Why? I can sort of understand the imposition of such draconian rules (although not, then, the addition of cupholders to seats), but surely there's room for a little flexibility? The woman had a lid on the cup for goodness' sake. She was an adult, not a messy toddler. Couldn't the attendant have turned a blind eye? But no, that is not the way it is done in the Land of the Free. Rules must be abided by. Thank heavens I'm only here for two years.

What, no books?
The Major and I took a trip last weekend, to St Louis. We went by train.
I like train journeys. I like that you don't have to concentrate on the road, that you can stand up and walk around, and visit the friendly people in the dining carriage for a hot chocolate and a burger (calories don't count on trains). I like that you can look out of the window and daydream.

But most of all I like the opportunity to read.

I love reading, in fact it is possibly my favourite thing in the whole world. If I was told I couldn't read any more I think I would actually die. So for me, a five and a half hour train journey is the perfect opportunity. I couldn't do any of the niggly, nitpicking jobs that take up reading time normally (like cleaning or washing up) and I didn't have my computer, so I couldn't blog.

I had taken books with me, of course, but another of my favourite things to do on trains is to catch up - and I mean really catch up - on some news and comment. So I will buy a selection: a newspaper, The Spectator, Private Eye - maybe a copy of Vogue for some light relief - and read them from cover to cover. It's my train treat.

We arrived in St Louis in plenty of time - almost an hour early. The perfect opportunity to buy some reading material - maybe even a new book. But although we searched high and low, there was not one place to buy such a thing.

We were in Kansas City, a sizeable city, with an enormous and impressive station, a hangover from the golden age of train travel. Lots of trains come in and out of Kansas City - it's right in the middle, after all. But although we could have, should we have chosen, purchased a fancy bodum cafetiere, a variety of African artefacts and every sort of food type under the sun, from sushi to bagels, we couldn't buy a book. Or a magazine. or a newspaper that wasn't the Kansas City Star and wasn't several days old.

The bookstore, we were told, had closed down a few weeks ago.

It is beyond me how anyone about to embark on a potentially long train journey (and they are mostly long in these parts, they don't have high speed rail yet) would not want to furnish themself with some reading matter.

Perhaps the travellers in America are all very organised and buy in advance. But surely half the joy of a journey is agonising over which magazine to buy, and coming out of Smiths or wherever with a fat carrier bag under your arm? I just don't get it.

A call from someone at the gym:

Gym man: "I'm just calling to confirm your appointment at 7pm tonight"

Me: "Yes that's fine. Is there any chance I could come a little earlier?"

Him (seriously thrown by this): "Errr, I'm not sure, I don't believe so."

Me: "So you can't see the schedule?"

Him: "Yes that's right."

Me: "You mean you can't see it?"

Him: "Yes that's right"

Me: "Can you see the schedule, or can you not see the schedule?"

Him: "Oh no. I can not see the schedule. I'm just the guy who calls people."

Sigh......

Am in the process of filling in two forms that will shortly be winging their way to the American government.

Form number one: one page.

Form number two: four pages.

Total number of pages of instructions to fill in the two forms: 18.

And they have the gall to pompously announce a"Paperwork Reduction Act' on the last page of the instructions....

I'm now blogging for The Lady magazine - check their website out here.

There is one thing here which really gets my goat, and that is tax.
Ok, so tax, or taxman are pretty dirty words whatever country you live in, but here the problem is more than just the yearly return to the Inland Revenue. Specifically, tax here is the VAT imposed on every single thing that you buy - except, unlike in the UK, it is not built into the price. Instead, each state, and each area within each state has its own rate or tax, which is then added to the total of whatever you buy.
This morning, the Major and I went off to the gym to sign up, thinking it would be a good idea to try and burn off some of the excess calories from the enormous portions - and besides, we had heard that this particular gym did very good deals for military folk. The total for the remaining ten months of this year would be something like $457 for the two of us. Bargain, we thought. Only, we had forgotten about the tax - so the actual total was something over $500.
It's like this everywhere. You think that something is an incredible bargain at $2 or whatever, but forget about the tax. It's made more complicated by the different rates in different places, so you can't just do a simple sum in your head so as not to get such an enormous shock at the check out (although admittedly, I'm not very good at simple sums, and even less so when the figure is something like 1.756%). It's pretty disappointing, particularly when you're already having to do mental arithmetic to work out how much something is in pounds (although I'm sure that will fade eventually).
What I have yet to discern is whether Dollar General (the US equivalent of the pound store) figures tax into its prices, or whether everything is actually more than a dollar. I'll keep you posted.

If you'd told me, six months ago, that I was going to take up quilting and become really rather excited at the prospect of sewing, I wouldn't have believed you.
Nevertheless, it has come to pass. Quilting is pretty big stuff round here, and in an effort to produce some material for this blog, I decided to go along to a free class. What I hadn't expected was to b quite so seduced.
After an hour or so of learning about the different terms and what works in terms of colour, we all (there are about five of us in the class) sped off to a little quilting shop in Eudora (one horse town, feels like you're in a wild west movie). A sign in the window proclaimed that Jesus is Lord, and the background music was primarily worship music, of the syrupy variety. Nevertheless, there was a ot of lovely fabric. I had intended to stay 40 minutes at most. Two hours later I walked out, dazed, parted of cold hard cash and clutching a pile of material. I vowed to complete the quilt and tick it off the list.
Yesterday, I found myself outside a fabric emporium in another town. I am now in posession of two sets of different material. That's two quilts. Perhaps I have a new career ahead of me.

I forgot to write about something really rather fabulous that the Major and I did last weekend.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have joined a choir since arriving over here. Indirectly through this, we ended up spending last Saturday singing with prisoners and raising money in the process.
It's all through a brilliant charity called Arts in Prisons, which pretty much does what it says on the tin. They decided to have a singalong fundraiser, where anyone who could read music could come along for the afternoon, rehearse for a couple of hours and then warble joyfully under the expert guidance of Weston Noble, one of America's top conductors (in his 80s, but he's still got it). So we did. And it was wonderful. The men's choir - the East Hill Singers - were particularly wonderful, and really moving. A note in the programme quoted one of the inmates, who pointed out that when you're in prison and used to being told that basically you're a shit, to get applauded at a concert is completely life affirming. So we applauded them, loudly, and they applauded us. It was all rather jolly.

I was thinking today about my initial dread of coming to America, and my terror at what seemed like a blank, open, empty life stretching before me, bereft of all the things that shaped my daily life back in London: going to the gym, travelling to work, working, seeing friends, the necessity of doing housework, of cooking - all the while having at the back of my head an awareness of what a fabulously rich culture London has to offer in terms of theatres, lectures, art galleries, historical sights and all the myriad of things that make up its teeming, bustling kaleidoscope of a microcosm.

Today I realised just how much of my time in London was spent in trying to fit everything in - friends, laundry, cooking, gym etc etc. The nature of London was such that everything became exhausting - yes, I could pop down to the shops when I needed a pint of milk, as opposed to here, where I have to get in the car and drive, but everything equally took so much longer. I lived in Clapham, and if I wanted to go and see a friend in Fulham, it would often take me the best part of an hour to get there, despite it only being a few miles away. Then I had to consider the last tube home, or trying to find a parking space when I got there, or remembering the lights for my bike if I was cycling. Meanwhile trying to fit everything in meant that I always felt on the back foot - guilty that I hadn't seen a friend with a new baby for weeks, short changed that I hadn't been able to spend long enough at the gym, hassled and stressed that the laundry was never ending and always had to be fitted in between the breakfast toast and trying to leave the house on time for work. As for taking advantage of the culture - forget it. Occasionally I would get to an exhibition - and leave feeling guilty that it was something I didn't do more often, wracked with that emotion rather than the pleasure of simply enjoying what I had seen and learnt.

Here the same daily tasks apply - there is still washing to be done, we still have to be fed. But, in the absence of so many friends, and living in something more akin to a wilderness than a big city, life becomes pared down somewhat - simpler, less stressful. With that comes an opening up of horizons. With fewer demands on my time in the form of having to make money (I am very lucky in that I don't have to have a job out here) and fit in a hectic social life, I am discovering that the world is my oyster with very few boundaries on what I can and cannot do.

Of course there is still a tension - there is so much that I want to do that I feel the familiar guilt creeping up every so often - that I have not spent long enough reading the text for my next writing class, or that I wish I could spend longer writing this blog, for example. But surely that tension is what makes up the joy of life in some capacity? After all, what I was dreading was a surfeit of time - an existence spent solely doing those menial tasks that so quickly become unsatisfying in their very repetitiveness - the laundry, the cooking, and so on. I am one of those people for whom life needs to be full in order to achieve anything - if I have very little to do I end up doing nothing at all, whereas if my day is so jam packed with things that it seems there is not enough time to do anything, I manage to achieve much more, and, arguably, an output of far higher quality. If I did not have a full calendar, for example, I would have nothing to write about in this blog, other than the daily view out of the kitchen window. The joy of moving to somewhere outside of your comfort zone is making something meaningful out of life. I had forgotten what that was like. I was so comfortable in my daily routine of stressfully trying to fit everything in that I had failed to reach out and try the new things - there simply wasn't time.

I'm not sure if I'm making much sense here, but perhaps I can make an analogy through landscape. London is a series of villages. Despite living in one of the greatest cities in the world, its inhabitants tend to stay in their own areas and rarely venture out into new areas of the capital to explore. There's no need, after all - everything is on your doorstep. And so we settle into that comfortably full routine of trying to fit everything in and not stretching our horizons.

America, by contrast - or certainly Kansas, is huge, vast - a wide open expanse of rolling hills (yes, hills, it's not all just prairie). And you have to travel to get to certain things - I drive 40 minutes twice a week to get to Lawrence, where the university is; we drive the same distance the other way to get to Kansas City. You have to do it - there's nothing where we are. And, as you drive through the landscape appreciating just how huge it is, you get a sense of possibility, of the vista opening up. It is intoxicating, this feeling of being able to do anything, be anyone. Having foolishly dreaded being forced out of my comfort zone, I have come to appreciate it enormously. I highly reccommend it.