Appalachian folk. We’re all about long vowels, pass the chicken and praise the Lord. Until we move to the city. Then it’s a little more staccato, foie gras and well I use to be a Baptist.

Vowels were never a friend to me in the slow lazy way they are to some people. My primary school speech therapist, an Episcopalian from Connecticut, pulled my ear and called me a hillbilly if I drew them out too much.

I stopped eating fried chicken when I moved to England because the Pakistani Proprietors of the ‘Kansas Fried Chicken’ takeaway on the corner couldn’t work the same soul food magic Ma did.

I still send up Hallelujahs, but they’re sometimes in Latin. (I really don’t think God speaks American.)

Moving to another country changed me in more ways than one. No doubt about it. But I think life itself did the real trick. No matter where you hang your hat….people change.

Take Earl. I hear she’s getting married. Earls don’t get married. They drink and party until the early hours and then go home to a pet rottweiler.

Flynn’s not her old self either. Rock. Retro. Raging Feminist.

Jo has a job. Who’d have thought.

And Chris. Chris use to wear baseball caps and sweatpants. Pajama’s and bad breath to class. Now she wears diamond studs and a watch worth more than a midsized sedan.

Me, I still like pearls and expensive shoes but I wouldn’t eat the family cow if you paid me.

Yes. Sometimes people change. Even in the mountains.

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
Ernest Hemingway

It’s huntin season in the mountains and my brother is going in for the kill. He sent me a Christmas card. A photo of him and a big horned deer, in mid field-dress. Captioned with the seasonal greeting: ‘Ohio Bow Kill. 2005.’

I blame Pa. Pa’s a squirrel man. Least he use to be. “Back in the depression….you ate anything that didn’t eat you.”

Billy got an air rifle when he was ten. Spotted an American Gray in an oak tree. Thirty six shots to the side of the head and down it went. He never really took to squirrel gravy though. Despite Pa’s admonition it was the best thing since sliced bread.

When he was twelve he blew a rabbits head clean off. Tickled him to death. He made a stew with the rest of it (a bit of a chef my brother) and my little sister had nightmares for a month. My six year old brother (Stewie Griffin with long blonde hair) said the child really ought to be put down and if the parents weren’t prepared to do it perhaps the authorities should be called in.

Today, Billy’s license plate reads: I B HUNTIN. He paid for that.

In all other ways my brother is a normal 27 year old man. Someone to look up to. To learn from.

He has a nice job. A nice home. The appropriate number of pets. (This can sometimes be a problem in the South.) He’s educated. Polite. A mathematical savant. He likes football and calculus. A good man. With a good heart. Never had a bad word to say about anybody. (Unless they forgot to do the dishes.)

Full of logic and practicality. Ten months of the year. But for a while, in the fall, when the snow starts, and it begins to get cold, he goes a little insane.

He has a wall full of pigs, bear and deer to prove it. He’ll show you if you ever stop by.

The cousins are a mess. Least thats what my Aunt says.

One keeps walking around the house saying ‘breasteseses’ and knocking people out. She’s a fighter and you better believe it. She use to have this really guttural voice, then she got her ears unstopped. People think shes softened up because now she sounds like Betty Boop. She hasn’t.

The other one wastes three hours a day on flawless makeup and blows her student loan monies on Louis Vuitton. Grandma says she spends too much time around men; but she looks like Catherine Zeta Jones and women just don’t like her. The other day she hit her boyfriend in the head with an ovenette. Yeah. The kind you bake bread in.

Boop is pure hell. Hateful as all get out. Stare her in the eye if you dare…she looks like an evil little garden imp. Funny as can be though, cause the thing is, she’s really not that bad at all. She’s just a put on. Because she’s blonde and has big boobs and doesn’t want people to think she’s a push over.

Zeta’s the best. Like a sister to me. And I mean that. Despite her spectacular fits of temper, she’s one of the sweetest people I know. (If it helps, she and Boop only beat up men.) She’s a debutante. A southern belle with brass knuckles. She dropped out of med school. Too much science. Zeta’s all about Social Policy, because socialising is her thing. Her powers of persuasion are amazing. She can talk a Mexican into anything.

Gotta love them cousins.

I walked those hills for years back in the forties….when I was a boy. Comin’ home from town in the early morning.

Up on the mountain, its dark. And its cold. Some nights I couldn’t see to put one foot in front of the other….had to feel my way up and over. Head of Grapevine was the worse. That wind beatin’ at you from the four corners. Coldest place in the world in the middle of winter….in the middle of night.

Top of that mountain’s covered in cemeteries. Somebody was always diggin’ a grave somewhere. Somebody else was always comin’ along and fallin’ in.

Me and Ezrie use to find us one and hunker down in it. To get warm. …. a hole in the ground’ll keep the wind off. Weren’t no shame in it. You’d freeze to death if you didn’t.

Had to know what you was doin’ though. How deep the hole was. You couldn’t see so you had to know. Else you’d get stuck. They dug ‘em deep back then.

Ezrie spent two days in one once. Crawled in and couldn’t get out. Thought he was saved when he heard Poodank and Slim comin’ along.

It was black as black that night and Poodank was scared of just about everything. Them boys didnt know the grave was there. Didnt know Ezra was there either. They fell right in.

Couldn’t see a thing.

Ezra bout cried…and told ‘em…….”You cant get out.”

“But they did.”

W.C. Powell

“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”

Mark Twain

Spangles, bangles and sparkles. All kinds of gold. The desk-ridden jammed into their a-little-something-leather and alotta-something-gauche.

Offices begin to spill into the streets at lunch time. To make merry and drink sherry (and whatever else the free bar has to offer) until the wee morning hours.

I left my own a bit later. Sometime after dark. Made my way to Deansgate and forgot all about the Hungarians and their pig in a tent (The lunch hour was spent watching marketeers slice pork from the back of a grinning pig.)

I stepped over a fallen reveler and two of her friends. Covered in drunken jubilation. Laughing. Hysterical. Because everyone knows there’s nothing funnier than a couple of forty-something females who cant hold their liquor and think a trip on the pavement is a good way to cool down until the next round.

I rolled my eyes and smiled like the pig. Christmas Vacation. Two weeks of nothing but net. And presents. And wine. And a pound of smoked salmon.

I caught a train to Wales because I couldn’t be bothered waiting for my own. It was tattered and dirty the way Welsh trains sometimes are, but it was going in the right direction, and in a round about manner I got home.

The evening was spent with a glass of wine and a fresh faced young man, decorating a blue spruce rather like the one Clark Griswold brought home in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. (Looked much smaller in the forest.) There was sap. There were needles. A little bit of strop. Some chocolates filled with mint.

Plans were to spend Christmas in Shepherds Bush. Boxing Day in Buckinghamshire. Hosted by two lovely sisters. Plans change.

Tomorrow my mother flies from Charlotte to London. She’ll love my tree. She’ll hate my shoes. I’ll tell her to cut her hair. She’ll tell me to mind my own business. We’ll argue over politics. She’ll tell me I’m mean. I’ll shop. She’ll sleep.

There’s nothing like a Griswold Family Christmas.

I’ll dream in columns and construction law this week. I’ll walk through European markets full of goulash and gingerbread men. I’ll spend five hours at Starbucks drinking green tea and envying sausage and bean sandwiches, and six hours at the gym.

I’ll run for the train, get all sweaty and not stop to buy a ticket. My feet will hurt but I wont care because my shoes will be fabulous. I’ll sew buttons onto my favourite winter coat and then leave it at home because it makes me look fat. I’ll clean from beneath my bed and throw away stuff I want to keep. I’ll read Vogue, Marie Claire and Glamour. The Metro News every morning. I’ll buy the Guardian and get annoyed.

This week I’ll pack bags full of me for a jet plane and America. I’ll sit at my laptop and try to write. I’ll ask again for that brush I want and watch the man in the pub window at 10am. The lady in the church will forget to turn her mobile off and I’ll feel bad for her. I’ll stare at streets full of Christmas decorations and listen to professionals and their word bingo lingo.

I’ll freeze to death in the office and wish I had brought the pashmina that doesn’t match anything but keeps me warm. I’ll kiss a man with a beard. I’ll forget to pray and then remember. I’ll wish I looked like Eliza Dushku, because she’s hot. I’ll burn candles that smell of cookies and cook apples and oatmeal. The guy next door will show off his new Ferrari and I’ll think its ugly - and mean it.

This week I’ll walk around London and collect a passenger from Gatwick. I wont forget the shower curtains or the dry cleaning or the dinner gifts. The swedes will go bad because I never eat them. I’ll exchange that one thing because its scratched. I’ll worry over my eyebrows and think about doing my taxes.

Next week I’ll worry over something else.

I use to spend my summers in the John Rylands Library writing (about something else) or networking with friends from Casablanca and Russia (get in good, spend a holiday abroad). Some days I’d go to the beach. Others I’d just end up at O’Neills with one of those designer drinks that taste like fermented Kool-Aid and come in cool urban packaging.

Nowadays I visit the mountains. When my friends jet off to Marrakesh and Cape Town, I head over the Atlantic to a place no travel agent has ever heard of. I spend six weeks in Iaeger, West Virginia.

Iaeger is where Pa’s at, and where I use to be. It swelters in the summer. Visitors puddle in their own sweat and vomit from the heat. It’s not like the rest of WV. Something about the way the air cant get down in the hole you’re in. The one-time-mining-town sits at the bottom of a big bowl of mountains. A valley full of topland. There may be life on the other side. But you’d not know it from there; and you wouldn’t really care.

The Dairy Bar offers some relief from the atmosphere. Functioning air condition. Pac-man arcade. Good beans. And April. April is a short order cook who whips up burgers and fries for blind uncles and interesting aunts. She does it with a smile and then delivers it to their door. Most people wouldn’t trek through the mountains for a blind uncle and an interesting aunt. Not for 5 bucks an hour. But April does. You always feel lazy when you’re around her. Last summer she worked through her vacation and then went home every evening to build a wall. A wall. How do you even do that?

She doesn’t talk much. She’s too busy. When she has time to stop and think she laughs. The way my grandfather does when he’s just come out of the field. When he’s too tired to break his back any more. Its the realest sound you’ll ever hear. It makes you want to be a better person…….because some people already are.

“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”

Truman Capote