Christmas Crackers

Getting cozy af

It’s Christmas night and I’m wearing a crown—I must be in England.

There are so many subtle things about this country, I guess it’s my job now (well, one of my jobs) to decode, embrace and celebrate them. I imagine I’ll also be mystified and eventually infuriated too — and then I will have assimilated.

Part of the holiday festivities in the UK is pulling jolly Christmas paper crackers open and putting on a paper crown, then everyone eating dinner with their crowns on, til you’ve all forgotten you look silly and just carry on having a nice time. Is it something to do with the Royal Family, going back centuries, a tradition no one even questions? I don’t even want to know— I just want to join in the fun.

Our friend Karen brought some extra fancy paper crowns, and I have to say they look great. Eric looks positively papal. I feel like a character in Alice in Wonderland. I’d say my first Christmas dinner as a resident is a success. Aside from the crackers and crowns, there’s nothing too traditional about it. Eric makes boeuf bourgiugnon. Earlier in the day we took a walk through North Walsham, deserted except for a few pubs that opened from 11 am to 2 pm. It was a good chance to admire some of the old buildings that are the basis of this town but not necessarily the first thing you notice. This is a workaday place, with people going about their business, except on Christmas. Train station, supermarkets, charity shops. Nail salons, a Costa and a few cafes. Paston College, where Lord Nelson went to school and the shiny new leisure center. There are modern (well, 1980s?) flats and other parts are so old I think they must be trying to pull one over on me: St. Nicholas’ Church dates to the 1300s. I have yet to go inside, but I like walking through its grounds. What serves as the bandstand in the center of town is actually a listed building called the Market Cross or Town Clock, built back in the 1500s. If you didn’t live here, you might never bother visiting, except maybe to visit Waitrose, the posh supermarket, or have a beer in one of the pubs.

Let me back up a little to December of 2019. Or maybe even further, to December of 2017. I think that’s when I felt like I almost sort of lived in the UK part-time. Eric’s mother Dorothy, who we often stayed with in Shoreham, down in Sussex near Brighton, had just gone into the hospital. She was an amazing individual, cantankerous and full of imagination and fun like her son and she had hung in there, living on her own in her own place, for years. With lots of help from Eric —they were a fearsome mother/son pair. We lived in New York, but often toured in the UK, together then separately. Eric often dropped in to help out, also to pick up the equipment we stealthily stored in an upstairs cupboard at Dorothy’s. Many nights one of us would chat and drink tea with Eric’s mum while the other loaded amps and a keyboard onto the stairlift in the hallway to help the gear ascend to the first floor (second floor to Americans). If she noticed or cared that we were using her place as a lockup, she never objected. I think she’d come to see either me or Eric play in Brighton earlier that year, 2017. She was 93.

But December of 2017, it was all changing. Dorothy’d had one too many falls and though we tried desperately to spring her from hospital in time for Christmas, they insisted she stay there at Worthing. I remember we came in on Christmas Day and I knew how much she loved red wine — she was a dear drinking buddy of mine— we brought a few small screw tops of the stuff, and a basic iPad so she could watch movies and listen to music. There were times when Dorothy had clearly lost the plot and other times when she was wickedly lucid: “So, how are you and Eric doing…really?” she’d ask, when her son had left the room. Oh Dorothy, I miss you so.

Nursing home, unsuitable care home, then a decent place on the south coast where she passed away in August 2018. Eric and I kept touring while we emptied Dorothy’s house to get it ready to sell. We decided to find a small place not far from Eric’s daughter Luci and her partne and their three kids we got to spend a little time with but not enough. Luci had lost her own mum suddenly in this tumultuous year and turned inward, not surprising. We faced our search further northeast, to Norfolk, the county home to Norwich, where Eric lived when he and I got together. We were always happy visiting North Norfolk, staying with our dear friends Karen and Peter and my goddaughter Daisy. They let us keep the amps and the keyboard from Dorothy’s cupboard in their loft; fed and looked after us when we’d pass through in between tour dates.

There was something so sweet and unpretentious about Norfolk. It was like going back in time. The landscape is open skies, and a gentle but powerful coast that faces north, then east. Back when we lived in France and often visited, I’d found a hairdresser I liked in Norwich, a small city with an art college and growing number of independent shops. Craig was fun, he was fabulous— he was a talented haircutter who’d been kicked out of the Big Brother house Season Six. I remember sitting in a chair in his cute salon and a crowd of teenagers ogling him through the shop window. He ended up moving his salon to Cromer, a picturesque town right on the Norfolk coast, with a distinctive cliff top promenade and pier.

“Cromer’s really coming up,” Craig said. “Hard to believe, really.” He’d grown up there.

There’s coming up like the East Village of NYC, and Williamsburg Brooklyn, and Nashville,

and pretty much every place I’ve ever lived except rural France. Cromer isn’t really one of those places. But it has the sea, and a train station and the beach and holidaygoers having a lovely time. We got a small flat there in late 2019. We were fixing it up (well mostly Eric was, I did learn how to use a crowbar and what an Erbauer multi-tool can do…) when the world shut down. I’d gone back to New York in January, Eric in February and we were days away from heading back to the UK for my book tour and more work on the flat.

Cromer flat in 2019

I met a crowbar and wore a mask Dec 2019

Like most things in our lives, we act fairly spontaneously and think about and deal with the fallout later. There was no big plan with the flat, maybe we’d rent it out or stay there ourselves. It was never big enough for a studio and workspaces that we need for recording, artwork, screenprinting and all the equipment/carpentry work/sawdust that seems to follow Eric around like Pigpen and his squiggled lines. But the pandemic made it clear that going back and forth across the ocean wasn’t as straightforward as it had been. Eric had a heart attack. My stepmother died, my dad got deeper into dementia, my daughter moved to the West Coast. The grandkids were growing, changing—getting bigger and we were missing it all. My dad passed away. We decided to find a place to live full time in England. Fix up the house in Catskill to sell.

That was our focus from this time last year to…well, now. Months of painting, packing, and looking for a place where we could do what we do. All while finishing and getting out my album in August 2023, booking and playing gigs and trying to keep working on new projects so that we can keep playing gigs and working on new projects etc etc til we drop. “How are you settling in?” has been a question I couldn’t even stop to answer since we moved in early August. Until now. The lead up to Christmas. I remember last year in December wishing we didn’t have to fly back to New York. My daughter was spending Christmas in Los Angeles and the festive, slightly frantic atmosphere in Norfolk, cheery lights and still-green landscape seemed so appealing. “It would be so good to just be in one place,” we thought. Which we really rarely ever are.

Except for…now.

A Salvation Army band sounding dreary and glorious all at the same time, just in front of the Sainsbury’s supermarket that is a three minute walk from our house. I call it “the pantry” like, let me just go get those olives, that mustard, more milk or parmesan or whatever, from the pantry I mean supermarket.

The nice family that lives to our right, waving and cheering for the Light-Up tractor parade that rolled right past the front door. So many tractors! This is a farming community. I was amazed how many women farmers there were, but then realized cause the tractors are right hand drive like cars are here, they were the ladies of the farmers. Still, it was a cheery spectacle.

A visit to Happisburgh (pronounce Hays’burrah) we took in the power of the North Sea which is gradually and then suddenly wearing away the coast in spots, large swathes around here having fallen in, swallowed up by waves. Eric and I braved the pub in this tiny village on a Sunday afternoon, I’m always expecting an American Werewolf in London scenario in these situations where the whole pub turns to check you out - and they did but were friendly. We ordered a pot of tea and sat in the empty backroom to film a few clips to make a video for the holiday track we recorded to inaugurate the studio. It helps to have to find sleigh bells, or drumsticks or other random bits of equipment on the fly, putting everything into place is a daunting task best broken up into random jobs needing doing. Eric has been working on the studio off and on since we got here in August, soundproofing, paneling, building a desk and racks to hold equipment and lodge amplifiers. But having a song to record and a hard deadline (it is a holiday song after all, and December 25th was looming) helped break the ice. I think if I ever had to teach someone how to write or make music, perform, do artwork or anything creative, that would be the gist of it—just break it up into one compelling task at a time. The big picture is just too damn big. Maybe that’s why my career is Super 8 or 16 mm —not Cinemascope— but it keeps going somehow. Grab a shaker and make some noise.

Staying in one place for Christmas, our new home, meant reading all the tips for “How To Sleep On An Airplane” article in the NY Times, in such depth I wondered if I actually missed trying to sleep on that transatlantic flight that’s been such a part of my life for years. It’s kind of enjoyable from a distance to imagine that moment of actually falling asleep on an airplane, no matter how many tips people share it’s a kind of magic trick when it happens.

We got to see Luci and her gang for a festive meal in a pub (the planning now immortalized in the holiday track we recorded - as art is life so life is art!) Eric had driven down a few days before to do some carpentry work at Luci’s place, so sweet to see him putting those skills to work somewhere else AND hanging out with his grandkids. All our touring that took us to Luci’s for visits near to Christmas, I remember being passed out on the floor of their cozy living room in the middle of the afternoon, just so tired from traveling. Eric would often be next to me, laying in front of the fire, unable to move. I wondered what the kids must have thought of us, these weird showfolk. Were we scary? Yet I also remember a six or seven year old Tiger, the oldest, now fourteen, handing me my guitar saying “PLAY IT” because she loved our song Sombreros in the Airport.

Anyway, it took me a bus and four trains to reach the south coast for the holiday meal, but for the most part I really enjoyed passing through this British landscape by train: bus to Norwich, train from Norwich to Stratford (the ABBA Voyage dome all lit up with colored lights) Stratford to Farringdon (just past Liverpool Street on the Elizabeth Line, so all kind of Londoners on and off and riding up the long steep escalator to) train to Gatwick, I felt the travelers with rolling suitcases’ anxiousness, catching a flight is always stressful and Gatwick is insane these days…then Gatwick to Polegate, which Eric and I know mostly for its Starbucks on the A road (I think it’s A21, will the network of M motorways and As and even B roads become as familiar as the interstate web in the US is to me? It’s already happening) And then we were in picturesque but quite crowded East Sussex in a festive pub. I climbed some stairs looking for our party and thought “that’s weird, there’s a baby gate at the top of the stairs in this pub” and then found myself in the landlord’s flat above the pub. This is where I lay on the sound of that American “r” in the word “sorry” - I probably threw an “oh gosh, I am so …” in there to win the sympathy vote from the landlord’s family. I felt like Dorothy pulling the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz - ah, so this is how it all works!

That visit south was the extent of our travel this holiday season, unless you count the trip to Happisburgh (six miles away) or Cromer our old haunt for the butcher and the good stationery store and serviceable coffee shop, and maybe one more meal in a pub or some fish and chips by the sea. It’s feeling like a big deal to walk around the little market town we now call home, looking at the Christmas lights. I also spent time in our garden. That’s kind of a miracle to me, about living here, or maybe it’s just a mild winter, but back in Catskill it was rare to even breach the back patio after December. Ice, snow, freezing temps…more snow. Today I raked leaves from the flower beds in a light mist. It was almost dark at 4 PM but I felt like I just melded with nature, breathing in the rich soil and dead-but-not-for-long plants. I thought of Germaine Greer’s book The Change, how she talked about turning into this glorious crone who wrote part of the day and stalked her orchard the other part - that part of the book always felt like a cool snippet of a road map. It was so quiet back in the garden, except for one little bird who kept me company.

Still green in the garden….

This is the first time in twelve years I haven’t worked in the bookstore/bar over the holidays, and I do miss it. A few days before Christmas, I found myself in a small village bookstore up the road, to pick up a book I’d ordered. The woman behind the counter must’ve been filling in, she didn’t seem to know their system for special orders. I felt myself wanting to shove her out of the way and get behind the counter: “That’s okay, I’ve got this. Where did you say the wrapping paper is? Hey could you grab the phone?”

But I’m new here and don’t want to be pushy and I don’t actually work in or run a bookstore …yet. I’ll just do my best to fit in, til I’m a local too. It’s only a matter of time, right?

Thank you so much for reading and subscribing here. I appreciate it so much, especially while I try to get acclimated to a new place, it helps hugely to keep that connection going while everything else feels like it’s in flux. I hope you find some peace and joy this holiday season and here’s to being a source of support for each other through whatever 2025 throws at us!