Look

I am, the epitome of the elegance of travel last seen in a bygone era, soigné and sophisticated, my butler “Bunter” is tarrying behind as usual, bowed under a ziggurat of  scented  monogrammed  valises made from ostriches hand reared on a diet of Jersey double cream and rose petals.

Dream on woman!

There are some things that don't travel well. Ripe cheese, jars of tadpoles and German zeppelins.  Alas, yours truly was made for travel. 

What has brought this on? Nothing other than the good fortune of an impromptu design meeting.  I love to fly by the seat of my pants, turn on a dime, or take life as it comes.  Although, I would love to have a butler.  Is it too late to put an advert in the LA Times?  Capable experienced butler required as ladies' companion.  Bar tending experience an advantage.

Barbados for three days!

Perfect.

Back soon you know where to send the expired Valium prescriptions and anything else.

Hotel desk if you are reading this, I'll be in the bar at 11 pm for bubbles.

Nature I salute thee.

Departing in austere times.

"I have been a most unconscionable time dying, but I beg you to excuse it."

-Charles II

It’s been a rough first quarter!  Painfully made aware of the contribution we Baby Boomers are making to an “unbalanced” federal budget I feel personally responsible and therefore shall make provisions in case I degenerate into a less than perfect senior citizen.

So, I'm designing and making arrangements for a program called let’s-go-in-style-at-age-one-0-one.  With an option to extend should I not be bonkers and a burden by that age (nothing like a deadline to motivate a decorator).  Friends say it’s absolutely top drawer and sign us up, please.

Therefore, I won’t do the customary thing and preserve the family fortunes. What I have in mind is a glorious affair: ideally one in which I can choose to discreetly expire lounging in a plush armchair, perhaps at The Diogenes Club, London?   I will still be elegant and witty, sipping from a tumbler, whilst a white haired Benedict Cumberbatch quietly reads to me from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

Not all Englishmen make great lovers.

No, and not all Frenchmen are great cooks.

Mona, evoking Cary Grant’s name in her last post, sparked a lively discussion about Englishmen. 

It’s true that Cary Grant became an American citizen and that, as a universally loved film star, he was a citizen of the world.  But he was, at bottom, English.  He had the charm, the wit, the self-deprecating humor of the cockney, which he was, and the stylish diffidence of the sophisticate, which he became. 

“Cary Grant could bring out the sexuality of his costars,” Pauline Kael wrote in her essay “The Man from Dream City.”  “He’s the greatest sexual stooge the screen has ever known; his side steps and delighted stares turn his co-stars into comic goddesses.”  He was, added Keal, “willing but not forward. . . . The little bit of shyness and reserve in Grant is pure box-office gold, and being the pursued doesn’t make him seem weak or passively soft.  It makes him glamorous-and since he is not as available as other men, far more desirable.”

Of course, not every Englishmen is Cary Grant.  In fact, no one is Cary Grant.  But some of his qualities are part of the mix that makes Englishmen great lovers, so Angela assures me, and Beata and Syl confirm. It’s a subject I’ve researched over the years, albeit at random, but in depth.  And although I know that such a characterization of the Englishman is contradictory to every myth of his nationhood, before you fall down laughing and remind me that they've all got knobby knees, consider Cary Grant. Consider, too, some of their other romantic heroes: In fiction, they've had Heathcliff, Mr. Rochester, Tom Jones, and James Bond - although, strictly speaking, Bond was a Scot. In film, Leslie Howard, Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Jeremy Irons, think Michael Gambon, Bob Hoskins, Alan Rickman, Tom Wilkinson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Bill Nighy, just to name a few.

Henry VIII made his own particular contribution to these annals of British history. It's said that women in London, before they are married, sometimes visit the Tower of London, where Henry's armor is kept, and for luck, touch his codpiece.

Englishmen make great lovers, in practical terms, because there are more of them. Statistics show that there are more men than women in England. Women treat their guys with a certain casual abandon, and this keeps them from getting swelled heads. That reticence (often mistaken for repression) with which Cary Grant charmed us goes with a serendipitous enthusiasm. "Englishmen," says Angela, "have this marvelous feigned innocence when it comes to sex. It's like a Boy Scout taking instruction in knot-tying from a scoutmaster. And all the time, they know perfectly well how to do it. But they're far too polite to say so.”  Or too clever.

But here's the heart of it. Unlike in most other countries, in England the models for machismo have nothing to do with sex and women. With schools, maybe, or sports or clubs, but rarely with l’amour, and so there's no pressure. "When I was younger, I worried about performance," says a former English schoolboy. "But it was really because I didn't want to let the side down."

This is not true elsewhere. An Englishwoman I know was raised on the idea that Italians make the best lovers, and so, at a ripe but tender age, she made her way to Rome. Gorgeous men packed the streets, men who did not cruise you covertly like the boys back home or call you a "good brick," but who eyeballed you with blatant pleasure, tossing you compliments right out where everyone could hear. What she failed to notice at first was that they did it only where everyone could hear.  She was in seventh heaven. Before long, she acquired one of these fabulous creatures for her very own. There was kissing on the Spanish Steps and picnics by moonlight in the Forum. Time passed. She began to feel a little uneasy. Her Roman lover spent a lot of time looking at himself in the mirror, and he was more interested in his own clothes than in hers. In amorous matters, he was, however, expert. A little too expert.  You know those beautifully aged Europeans you see in restaurants who can peel a whole piece of fruit with a single, fluid twist of the wrist? That, she says, is how she began to feel just before returning home to her rough but ready English beau-like a peeled fruit.

It's pretty much the same in France, according to Pamela, an American who was married to a Frenchman for nearly a quarter of a century. “What kind of Frenchman doesn't know everything about l'amour? As with food and wine, they are practically inscribed for the course from birth. Like their Italian cousins, Frenchmen are awfully concerned with the drapery, but while the Italians spend a lot of time on their clothes, Frenchmen spend a lot of time on yours. Falling in love is great in Paris; staying in love is hard work. The man who looked into your baby blues and pronounced you formidable will soon hint that you could do with a few less kilos on your hips and a new dressmaker. He may even criticize your verbs. His status, after all, depends on how you look on his arm.”  The exact center of the Frenchman's world-moral, romantic, and philosophical, Pamela pointed out-is his navel.  To be fair, maybe it's tough being a Frenchman, what with all those memories of Charles Boyer and Jean-Paul Belmondo to live up to.

A race of talkers, Englishmen will natter about everything under the sun, except themselves, which is considered bad form. A dazzling ability to manipulate the lingo makes the English the world's best flirters, and that includes the toothless old gent who sells you the papers and calls you "ducks." The sheer spritz of wall-to-wall conversation seduces.

Englishmen, moreover, never talk about the meaning of sex or the psycho therapeutic value of, well, doing it, preferring to leave something to chance. They'd rather go dancing, or mess around in their gardens or with their cars or pets. They like getting their hands dirty. And, as Woody Allen says, "sex is only dirty if you're doing it right." What the Brits understand, to paraphrase another American, Norman Mailer, is that sex without guilt isn't any fun?

Jeffrey Archer, when deputy chairman of Britain's Conservative party, resigned his post following allegations that he'd paid a prostitute to go abroad so she wouldn't talk about their relationship. The local press, whose prurience can make the National Enquirer read like the Wall Street Journal, had a field day. It was, of course, the peep-show quality of it that everyone loved. When the news broke, as everyone sat down to the Sunday papers, you could just hear a national sigh of furtive bliss.

Let's say for a minute that I've persuaded you that the enthusiasm, the wit, the charm, the absence of machismo, and the readiness to carry on in any situation (some women say Englishmen are great lovers because they love getting out of tight spots) make Englishmen appealing. Surely, you add, even then not all Englishmen make great lovers. No, and not all Frenchmen are great cooks. It's merely a national characteristic.

For instance, I saw Sir John Gielgud at the National Theatre, as smooth and sexy as ever, and he wowed us all, and that was at the age of 82. This was something, considering he was only in the audience.

I had a mild suspicion that my friend’s penchant for Englishmen was a personal prejudice, an eccentricity they acquired on their travels and from watching Cary Grant movies.  But there is documentary evidence.  Lovelaw, a television series, looked at the customs, habits, and attitudes connected with love and sex around the world. From California to Malaya, Hungary to Kenya, all the factors were accounted for-romance, procreation, taboos, seduction rituals, feminist aspirations, and the lot. The conclusion I drew from this series was that if you're a woman, the best place in the world to be is Western Europe. And that in all of Europe, the very best place for a woman to be was England.

When it comes to Englishmen, however, no one summed it up better than Mae West in She Done Him Wrong. Looking at Cary Grant, she said, "You can be had."

ت

Playing for Change.

Depending on the day of the week, time of the year or lead story of the mainstream media news parade, I admit to alternating between a died-in-the-wool idealism tempered with a no-holds-barred cynicism which leaves me,

hopelessly,

ambivalent.

Yet, I continue to hold dear my penchant for good old cock-eyed optimism and discover from time to time, miracles are still to be found. An interesting concept and idea is something called “Playing for Change.” Its genesis is simple: born out of the idea that we have to inspire each other to come together as a human race, why not try doing that in the most fundamental of ways — through the universal language of music.

Started years ago on the streets of Santa Monica, California, founder, Mark Johnson and his crew recorded a lone musician, Roger Ridley, singing “Stand By Me.” That simple recording spawned a journey throughout the world, through subways and streets, native Indian reservations, African villages, Himalayan Mountains and hamlets in the heart of Dublin. None of the musicians had ever met; it was the music that united them, that, and the belief that we can do more for this world by working together than apart.  A worthy ideal deserving of a few minutes of our time. 

apropos  ت

Warming up to a sauna.

When I was invited to join two friends in a traditional Finnish sauna, I wasn't sure I'd been properly raised to go rolling in the snow with naked Northwomen. My grandmother had taught me to avoid drafts after a bath, and nothing sounded draftier than bobsledding in the buff.

"It'll be a complete rebirth for you," a friend had told me, "and you lose a lot of weight."  I told him I had visions of being reduced to a Halloween decoration.  "No, all you lose is water," he said, "and you drink it right back."

And so, early on New Years Day, I went to the home of a friend named Britta; and I took Angela, a jovial Englishwoman, to give me support.

As Angela and I approached the house through the snow, a shudder raced through my barely covered bones.

"This will refresh both your mind and body," said Britta as we undressed. "It will put you at peace with the world."

"Just in case the peace is permanent," I said, "please remind my sister to call Lloyd's. I wonder if it's double indemnity for death by accidentally running nude through the snow."

"Oh, we'll skip the snow," she said. "And we'll start at only 180 degrees."

With a flash of panic, I remembered a day in Las Vegas when I was all but roasted to my reward in a mere 110.

"I'm really sort of allergic to heat," I told her as we went to the indoor sauna, a 6-by-6-foot wooden room that for some reason kept me thinking about capital punishment.  Now naked, we carried towels and also palletlike pieces of wood to sit on.

As Britta opened the door for us, I decided to be a ‘man’ and try it for a second or two, so I went inside and sat down on the lowest level. My plan was to get beneath the heat and then yell for help, a principle I had learned in a pamphlet from the fire department.

"In Finland the sauna is a big Christmas social event," said Britta.

I smiled at her with visions of a barbecued bacchanal.

"Oh, not that social an event," she said, reading my eyes. "It's too hot."

"It feels fine so far," said Angela with that British fortitude so irritating to Adolf Hitler and me.

"There is one thing, Ms. Edna," said Britta. "If you have low blood pressure, you may feel a bit dizzy."

I did not have low blood pressure, but these two women were just waiting for me to faint and reveal American decadence; so I decided that instead of crawling out, I would stay and teach them a lesson by fainting without excuse. My eyes now were gently rolling on the waves of heat that were coming from an electric stove in the corner of the room, a stove that cooked black rocks.

"You see, it's easy to take now," said Britta, pointing to a dial on the wall, "because the humidity is zero. But watch what happens when I pour some water on the rocks and I make the löyly the steam of the sauna."

She applied just a ladleful of water from a wooden bucket, and I felt a stifling blast of humidity.

"You see, it's not the heat, it's the humidity," she gloated. "It's actually good for the skin-gets out the dirt."

"That's what they told Joan of Arc," I said.

After 7 minutes the temperature was 190 and the humidity 10 percent. I was making notes; I wanted science to have a log of my disappearance so mankind would know precisely how much cooking a woman can take. Britta was now saying merry things about the workout our arteries were getting, but I couldn't keep recording them. My metal pencil was too hot to hold.

"Aren't we supposed to be beating each other with branches?" said Angela cheerily. She thought of everything.

"Let's not gild the torture," I said weakly.

"That whipping with branches-it's called the vihta-is sometimes done to help the circulation," said Britta, "but it's not as common as most people think."

As the temperature rose to 195, I dizzily sank toward the floor of my hygienic hell and tried to hang on by humming Finlandia.

"Don't overdo it, Ms. Edna," said Brita. "Go out anytime."

"Oh, I feel fine," I said softly from the floor, where I had slumped on my pallet like a big rare hors d'oeuvre. "This is just like a day at the beach."  The beach I had in mind was the one by the river Styx, but I didn't mention it because my country's honor was at stake. My brains had now been cooked into such a state that I actually felt myself in a kind of home-fried Olympics against Finland and England.

At the 10-minute mark, with the temperature at 198, Britta gave me a way to save face and body as well.  ''I'm going to throw on the sausages now," she said. "Why don't you take a cold shower, Ms. Edna, and then we'll have a snack in the living room."  "I just might do that," I said, lunging for the door. 

A few minutes later I met Britta and Angela in the living room, where we stretched out in naked lassitude.

"Now don't dry yourselves with a towel," said Britta. "Just let the air do it. I'll get us all a drink."

"No, thanks," I told her. "I don't drink. I don't smoke, either. I've even cut out egg rolls with monosodium glutamate." I smiled in pious contentment. "I'm really too healthy for a sauna; but now that I've done it, I must admit that it wasn't bad."

"You haven't done it," said Britta. "We're going back. You see, the best thing is to take the heat awhile, then shower and drink, and then go back.

She soon convinced us that it was foolish to stop just a few degrees from inner peace; and so back we all went for a final trial by fire.

"Why, look at that: it's 210," she said with misplaced mirth. "Something must have happened to the regulator."

I must here explain that the difference between 198 and 210 is purely academic. At the 3-minute mark, perhaps because some connection in my brain had started to melt, I suddenly did the unlikeliest thing: I actually moved up to the highest bench, where Britta and Angela sat cooking on all pores. I suddenly wanted to expire not kneeling in prayer on the floor but seated proudly and stupidly near the ceiling like a real woman.

"You know, Finnish women used to give birth in saunas," said Britta, who was seeing to it that I would die educationally. "And the Finnish kids sometimes they put beer on the rocks and inhale it."

To inhale anything at 210 degrees calls for asbestos nostrils; my nose now burned so much that I could breathe only with my mouth. Britta and Angela had also switched to mouths; and there we sat, gasping away, three rational women who were slowly but definitely disappearing.

After 5 minutes at 210, I took no comfort in noting that the humidity was still at O. The ancient adage that it's not the heat didn't seem to apply. At 210, it's the heat.

"How about some löyly?" said Britta, picking up the ladle.

And so the end was about to come, not with a bang but a dipper.

"I'll just put on a few drops. You wouldn't be able to stand too much."

Before I could make a final statement-I had decided to be cremated since I was having such a nice start-Britta applied the deadly drops and the humidity instantly jumped to 5 percent. Now the heat became what the poets call g*****n unbearable. I had a burning desire to get out.

"It's still only 5 percent," said the Marquis de Baker. "Why don't we take it up to 10?"

"Well," said Angela, "Ms. Edna seems a bit distressed."

"Oh, that's all right," I said. "I really don't feel it."

I wasn't lying: I had suddenly transcended the heat stroke barrier and was feeling the opposite of freezing to death. Just as men dying in the Alps are said to feel a final flush of warmth, I now seemed to be getting colder.

Another ladle of water took us not to 10 but to 25 percent, where we stayed for the next 6 minutes as we prepared to beat the world's record for unbearable heat set by a broken Turkish bath in Benghazi.

"I think that should do it," said Britta. "If it's all right with you ladies, we'll quit." It was all right with me, and I shot Angela a look suggesting it had better be all right with her.

Britta led us not to the living room but to the back door, which she opened to reveal the countryside in all its icy splendor. We took a timid step or two.

"See how you're insulated from the cold by your sweat?" said Britta.

It was a lovely theory, and it applied for the entire period until your sweat froze. I imagined future archaeologists making a splendid find: three neo-Finnish faddists perfectly preserved in ice and salt. It was this thought that led me back to the living room after lingering luxuriously in the snow for 5 or 6 seconds.

"You should be feeling a nice lassitude," said Britta when she joined me.

And she was right. I felt a nice lassitude all during the week, for I had lost 10 pounds and had contracted a leisurely cold. Luckily, however, the sauna has given me the vigor to make a fast recovery: in less than a month I should be good as new.