Peterborough..Peterborough...wherefore art thou.... Oh for Pete's sake!!!

Mishappen mishaps!

PART I

K now. What I am about to pen is not as bad as the title suggests. In fact, my escapades may seem a bit incongruous with the biiiiiiiiiig title...ya that's right! the one that says 'misha...blah blah'. But hey, what the hell! It's my blog. So, welcome to my world and to my very first blog! Now, before you read/ go any further, kindly take a peek first at the 'non-bold smallest' lettering and THEN at the 'bold-smaller' lettering right at the bottom of the page. I tell ya, identifying this is going to be a cinch for those avid bloggers who spend every waking moment capitalizing the first letter of the first word of the first paragraph to each of their new posts, while the rest of the para may or may not have a different font, colour, text etc... I can virtually feel some of you nodding your heads in agreement and clapping your hands in vitriolic glee....weirdos!

This is all about my very first impression of the place I have been living in for around 7 months now. I think all I did the first two (yes, 2...I walked all of 2 days ONLY) days was walk around. By around, I simply do not mean around the very small room in the compact little B and B and by compact I mean, do u remember the story of the old lady who lived in a shoe? You could cover this entire room in exactly 5 steps... yes 5 steps with my feet and my shoe size is a size seven. Apparently THAT's why the British economy is great and they call it 'value for money'. You can sleep, wake up, finish your morning ablutions, and eat, while remaining in the exact same position as god intended....yes, I AM refering to the foetal position.

So, here I am, in this not-so-new country...well not quite new to me, but i honestly don't know if a 10 day trip to parts of the United Kingdom end 2005 and early 2006, constitutes as having a knowledge of their customs (ya right!) or etiquette. I will most certainly be elaborating on these 2 deceptively simple words a little later. I guess the 10 day trip gave me an insight into certain things like how they shape their vowels and as some local and Indian folks who had settled in those parts told me, certain 'parts' of England were 'tolerant' and hospitable, while certain other 'parts' weren't. I am going to tell you right here and now that, this is the most obscure, generic phrase that doesn't convey a thing and that a through-bred consultant would have been proud of, understood, assimilated and made an even more obscure pitch about 'why anyone must experience the beauty and spirit of the United Kingdom', that I had or have ever heard!

I had been having a lot of fun just walking around town and discovering the place and in those 2 days (yes! the ONLY 2 days that I ever walked but am acting like i walk regualarly...gotcha!) I began to feel like I was pretty familiar with the place. I think that's what walking 4-5 hours a day (BEAM!) will do to you. Of course beyond a point, I didn't think I had any feet left.

My first impression of Peterborough was 'Gosh (NOT my Bengali friend)! This place is lovely!' You know it was a typical English countryside or my take on what a countryside was all about or what some of my ignorant friends from London, other cosmopolitan cities from the United Kingdom or United States and other 'developed' nations thought construed a countryside (poor misguided sods). Now these poor demented friends of mine are the kind to go ballistic with joy and perform cartwheels when they spot a blade of grass amongst masses of concrete. In fact, you may have seen them around if you are a travel buff. They will of course be the ones that continue to spew out a monologue, while assuming that people are gaping at them because they are such scintillating conversationalists, as they continue pointing towards several blades of grass next to a sign saying 'The ..... Park' and hailing the lord for being blessed with the 'best of both worlds' - the blades of grass and conrete, as they see it.

Right.... now coming back to what started this verbiage, the perception of countryside. It was a typical English countryside, like the ones you may have seen in picture books and story books that you may have read when you were a child or if you had one or your sister, mom, dad or any other relation had one ...now right here, if we analyse this very sentence, the possibilities are endless... your mom or dad together or with their other partners if they are divorced or separated may have had children much later, resulting in them being much younger than you and that may have resulted in you having read out stories to them.. or say lets look at scenario two.. you like/love reading short stories and continue to do so while an adult, much to the chagrin of your relatives, friends and other associates, who pretend not to know you while at functions or parties, or in a fit of petulance and having drunk 10 glasses of bloody mary's while saying three hail mary's for all their alcoholic binges, and, am NOT saying that this has happened to me, lock you in a cupboard while proclaiming loudly to the other 'inmates' that they 'don't know you and you are a sweeping lady' or better still, how about this one...'have you seen ....? I haven't seen her in ages' and 'Oh, nor have we... it's a little family secret of ours and it's like the family skeleton in the cupboard..(all me... used to be one)..but remember when we said she's gifted and is so good with kids and stories? Didn't know why she got along with them so well and continued liking children's stories until recently!' ....as if! FUMME... Right... I have totally digressed...

Before I started on this rant, I wanted to just say, remember the countryside with the grass and few flowers, a lake and swans, etc.. that's what this place looked and surprisingly still continues to look like. I use the term 'surprisingly' because if you look at places like Mumbai and Chennai where so many buildings are being built so fast so as to earn the tag of an 'ultra-developed' metro and all that, so much so that Superman must be having trouble sleeping at night wondering what people must say when they saw him fly from one building, jump off another, then fall down since he missed a step before taking off, then continue to flit from building to building in utter confusion like a bumblebee since poor chap lost his way and all that.... oh right, he's dead..so why does he care....but didn't they bring him back..like Sherlock Holmes? Oh, never mind!

From now on it's all about Peterborough. So there's the COUNTRYSIDE that we all know about intimately now and then, bang in the middle of the township, are all the shopping malls, church, library, bus station and train station. Now my first day...(ya ya... I digressed again...so shoot me)in Peterborough was just, well, atypical...actually in a way expected...new place and all that jazz. After landing in London (not me..the flight... well me and the flight..since Superman is dead or alive and I can't claim to be his living relative blah blah) at 11pm on a Sunday, we (my significant other, another Homo sapien) were totally exhausted. Remember the B & B I'd written about earlier? well, this was a typical, quaint inn/ B & B called 'something... Lodge'...rather the owners called it 'something.... Lodge' since it obviously is inanimate and can't name itself...actually after Tolkien, Terry Pratchet and well Rowling..u never know..maybe it's alive! yaaaaaargh! Anyways, here i use the word 'typical' loosely as the room ends before it begins! It was total fun tiptoeing aorund in the loo as the slightest sound reverbrated down the entire corridor. When these folks say 'strict' mealtimes, they mean it and I found this out the hard way. Now, breakfast is served between7 am and 9 am and after my mate left for work, I went down to the restaurant at 9AM...sharp! I thought that they would take pity on a confused and befuddled soul. The following is what ensued.

I asked the landlady for food beseechingly, but no, she didn't fall for my imploring ways and said ," Sorry dahling! No breakfast"... At that point, I felt 3 inches tall and pictured her coming down to my level and wagging her finger at me...oh, she had a bulbous nose of course... hehe...

So I said, in a determined manner (or so I thought), " But you said 7am to 9am and its 9am" (indian fashion...bharathmata ki jai!).

She then looked at me with her sweet beady eyes and said,"Mah dahling! It's now 9:01...sorry about that!"

I think that she waited for a full minute to say that.

So the English are very punctual about their mealtimes, but I found a loophole in the form of an expensive restaurant down the road (now that was according to them as according to me..down the road is NOT a mile!) called 'The Boathouse'. This was a charming pub cum restaurant overlooking the lake and the lovely countryside (ya ya as discussed) and it serves meals the whole day.. I must have looked like a raving lunatic as the barman came running to me with a very concerned expression on his face and asked me, "Madam , what will u have to eat...?" and I said 'anything.. just some food' and in typical fashion displaying the subtle English humour that obviously only the English are known for, he said,"But madam, that's what we serve here"...sigh...I threw in the towel then and there. After eating a very sumptuous lunch and paying the bill, I figured that I should begin the process of starving myself over the next couple of meals to make up for the money spent.

In the meantime, my poor mate fell sick and we used advanced communicating skills like hand signals to communicate and we progressed rapidly towards monosyllabic words in just a few short days. Then on the third day of our sojourn at P'boro, I managed to successfully lock myself inside our new apartment. While you may ponder even more now than you did while trying to decipher complex differential equations and ask, how this could be possible, well it apparently is (as I soon found out). I then scrupulously, punctiliously, meticulously....whatever you call it.... fumbled around trying to locate the keys for around an hour, and then realised that I had kept it very neatly inside a drawer and I didn't even remember doing that. I really and truly understood at that point, looking at my symmetrically placed keys (they all have to be 30 degrees apart at all times) why my poor mate calls me Monica! (ya the one in Friends or fiends...as you like it!)

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