Sumeria: just the guide for modern living

Occasionally we come across a religion that seems to speak directly to our hearts, because it embodies our own feelings about life and we can relate immediately to its underlying principles.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition sets the origin of mankind in the Garden of Eden. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a garden. I particularly like the small one we have at home. And I like it not just because under the careful hand of my wife Danielle, it’s becoming an increasingly attractive place to eat outside on the few occasions our English weather allows it, but also – dare I admit it? – because she’s decided to have flowers, vegetables and trees, but no grass.

Mowing strikes me as one of the deadliest punishments invented by man for the torment of his fellow creatures. Though I have to say that breaking clods of earth up is even worse, and schlepping great sacks of compost isn’t far behind.

So I’m not sure about a religion with its roots in a garden. That’s why I was so inspired by a recent visit to an exhibition about Sumerian society. Even though those guys lived in Mesopotamia some five millennia or so ago, they had a message which spoke directly to me down the ages. 

OK, so they may have been a bit odd on style,
but they knew a thing or two about life

Their creation myth was based around the city.

Now I really like cities. They’ve got theatres and cinemas and museums and shops and restaurants. And cafés. The café, or at any rate the coffee it serves, is on its own sufficient evidence that human evolution hasn’t been entirely in vain, that despite appearances to the contrary, there has been some progress towards civilisation.

It has to be said that the city in the Sumerian creation myth left a little to be desired. Uru-ul-la, the city of distant times, was black and bleak, inhabited only by dead souls, making it somewhat lifeless and dismal. Think Birmingham on a wet autumn evening, perhaps just at the fag end of the rush hour. And if you don’t know Birmingham, I’m sure you can think of other examples.

Gloomy and miserable it may have been, but it was the model on which all other cities were based. It was the birthplace of the gods and it there even before living beings had emerged. They came along when one of the gods, Enki, decided to create men, as helpers to make things a bit livelier. Presumably, he needed some of them to be barristas in the cafés which, no doubt, he knew the cities would eventually attract.

Clearly, we owe it to Enki and his human assistants that we can enjoy Chinatown in San Francisco, Covent Garden in London or the Ramblas in Barcelona.

Pretty smart: the Ramblas brings the garden into the city

Now that sounds like a religion worth following. Certainly preferable to all that stuff about apples you should or shouldn’t eat. 

I mean, when it comes down to it, wouldn’t it be more fun to have the apple in the form of a cold cider on a café terrace anyway?

Land of surprise and curiosity

Amazing how one can become passionate about, or at least interested in, something to which one was previously pretty much indifferent.

Here I am opposite San Francisco, surrounded by colleagues who live here, and who almost universally support the 49ers. Who are the 49ers, I hear you ask, where by ‘you’ I mean practically anyone who lives outside the USA? Well, they’re the local team in the grand old game referred to in this country as ‘football’ and more or less everywhere else in the world as ‘American football’.

I can make no claim to any kind of expertise in this sport, although funnily enough after a childhood spent despising any kind of professional game, the first match of any kind that I ever attended happened to be an American football game. It was between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Browns. Practically the only thing I remember about it is a man in a brown scarf jumping up and down and chortling wildly when the Browns scored. He was silenced by a single, quiet scowl, probably because it was being directed at him not by one man by about 50, sat all around him.

Coincidentally, it was the same New York Giants who were playing the 49ers yesterday. The San Franciscan team hadn’t, apparently, been enjoying much success in recent seasons, so when they scored a dramatic, dying gasp win over the New Orleans Saints last week to qualify for the semi-finals of a prestigious championship against the Giants this week, it was a moment for jubilation throughout the City and among my colleagues.

That persuaded me to watch the game yesterday, and I found it surprisingly enthralling.

The first thing to say about the experience was that it was extraordinarily long. If you take a standard rugby game, say, the eighty minutes of actual playing time plus ten minutes of half-time break, usually takes about 100 to 110 minutes to complete. During the Six Nations Championship, for instance, you can be pretty certain that you can safely start a second game a couple of hours after the first without much danger of their overlapping.

An American football game only lasts sixty minutes, not the eighty of rugby. But yesterday’s match ran from 3:30 to after 7:30. It takes four times as long to complete as the playing time. 

What’s more, in a rugby game, the great division in a side is between the forwards and the backs. The forwards tend to be bigger and heavier and their major role is to drive the ball forwards, while the backs are lighter and quicker and their major role is to run with the ball. But they’re all on the field at the same time and part of the beauty of the game is how these two divisions mesh with each other.

In addition, when the forwards aren’t driving the ball, they’re trying to prevent the other side driving it back the other way, and when the backs aren’t running with the ball, they’re tackling their opposite numbers to stop them breaking through their lines. In other words, both divisions play both in attack and in defence.

In American football, although each side only has eleven players on the field at a time, it can actually be made up of 53. You get a group that specialises in attack, or as they like to call it here, offense, a group that specialises in defence, or defense as they call it over here, and a group that specialises in specialisation (I kid you not: you get a ‘specialist’ team). This means that every now and then, a whole team will leave the field to be replaced by a whole other team specialised in different skills.

Together with the fact that the play stops every few seconds for another set piece - both sides line up against each other, offense against defense, and pause before the side with the ball launches another brief flurry of frenetic activity - it’s not in the least surprising that it takes forever to get through sixty minutes. In the course of yesterday’s match I even had a brief siesta and a bath and managed not to miss any of the actual scoring action.

On top of that there are commercial breaks several times an hour, to make sure you don’t get too engrossed in the action.

Despite all these layers of sophistication, the whole match ultimately came down to that simplest of events, the bane of teams in every imaginable sport, the defensive blunder. And not just one but two of them - by the same player. Spare a thought and a little compassion for poor Kyle Williams from the 49ers, a beginner or, as they like to say over here, rookie who twice let in the other side - once to take the lead, the second time to win the match and qualify for the finals. What a morning he must have woken up to today!

Whoops! Williams spills the ball in his second match-losing error

Amazing the game hasn’t caught on around the world. What could be better in our bankrupt economies than to play a sport that requires 53 players to field eleven? If it got popular enough, it could actually seriously dent the unemployment figures.

Postscript: French at the wheel. The United States is not particularly celebrated around the world for its mastery of foreign languages. I always remember a Louisiana senator some decades ago announcing ‘if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me,’ one of the more delightful examples of the kind of captivating wit that makes it such a pleasure to visit this country (and which compensates for some of its less attractive features).

These days, Spanish is pretty ubiquitous but other languages barely get a look in. So Danielle and I were amazed to discover in three cab rides that our driver was French-speaking. On one occasion, we were a little offended by the taciturnity of the man behind the wheel, who answered our polite comments in monosyllables until he overheard us talking French to each other. At that point he revealed himself as Algerian and chatted to us cheerfully all the way to our destination. Of the other two, one was also from North Africa, the second from Guadeloupe. 

Not what I’d have expected in the US. But then one should never underestimate this country’s capacity to surprise.

Prayer, miracles and wonders

It never snows but it pours. All of last week we were wondering when the snow would finally reach Lake Tahoe. In the end, with our departure due the next day, we travelled up to the ski slopes on Friday to take our chances on the man-made snow, since the natural variety just wasn’t showing up. No sooner had we got there, though, than the real kind started to fall, so we had our day’s skiing under grey skies and with tiny, wet snowflakes stinging our faces as we struggled through the wind. 

We were even told, in the café on the slopes where we stopped for lunch, that we’d ‘timed that pretty damn’ well’, as they were going to shut immediately after our orders, having just been told that the ski-lift was closing down. One of the ski patrol people did tell us, with a charming smile (the friendliness and warmth of everyone we met was in stark contrast to the bitterness of the weather), ‘sure, you’ve got the time to eat your sandwiches, but don’t hang around, and if you look like being the last out, make a move for the door’.

By then the blizzard had got well under way, and all we could do was leap on the lift just before it shut and ski back down to the main station. It was a great day all the same, but truncated. Which made me think with wry amusement of the sign, we’d seen in the café where we had our lunch: ‘pray for snow’.

Faith invoked to overcome the drought

By next morning, the prayer had been miraculously answered, and the place was under a good blanket of snow, right down to the lakeside. We even had to fit chains to be able to drive away. Of course, for us, a day earlier would have been no bad thing. Timing is so important, isn’t it? A day’s skiing on fresh snow would have been a delight; instead we got to drive through it, which is much less fun.

Even so, I’m not complaining. We had a great time, however difficult the conditions and however short the day. And it was a relief to see some snow whenever it came, after so long when it looked like there’d be none. I even have to admit that, despite the lousy performance of most weather forecasters, who just kept pushing their prediction of snow back by a day each day, making me feel justified in thinking that one might just as well flip a coin, the local crowd did really well: right from the beginning of the week they said the snow would come on Friday, and they were bang on. They at least got the riming right. And showed me up for maligning them so mercilessly as I usually do (and no doubt will again).

An answer to a prayer - and vindication for a forecaster

Postscript. I loved the sign in the ski station, at the stop for the shuttle back to town: ‘Shuttle Bus to Gondola’.

A miraculous metamorphosis that would have been a wonder to behold

Now that’s a transformation I’d have loved to have seen. Would the driver have turned into an Italian with a fine tenor voice? Would his wooly hat have turned into a straw boater? Would his fleece-lined coat have turned into a stripy shirt? He might have been horribly cold, in the conditions.

But I never found out. We were in a hurry to get away. Timing again, you see. I had to be satisfied with miracle of snow falling in answer to a prayer. The even more miraculous conversion of a bus into a gondola was a wonder I would simply be denied.

Post-postscript. When we got back to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was struck by a pair of road signs: to the left ‘Ex’pression College’, with that apostrophe, for which I can think of absolutely no meaning; to the right, the ‘National Holistic Institute’. 

‘Yes’, I thought, ‘we’re back in the San Francisco area.’ All it would have needed to complete the picture was a few chanting monks in saffron robes. 

That evening Danielle and I went out to Japantown, which we'd never previously visited, travelling as we have on every occasion in this visit, by cable car. At our age, behaving like complete tourists no longer embarrasses us, so we can just let ourselves go and enjoy the pleasure. As well as a pleasant Korean meal in Japantown (yes, yes, I know, we thought it was Japanese until we were inside), we were delighted by the many people we met on the way back, who were all heading for an Edwardian evening.

Wonders of the San Francisco streets

A wondrous sight, and just what one might hope for from that great city, it provided a good way of wrapping up Danielle's visit here. I stay on for another six days.

Enjoying the present, reliving the past

In a memorable line, the Comedian Eric Morecambe assured his audience that he was ‘playing all the right notes, though not necessarily in the right order.’

We've never been that good at getting the order of things right. When the judge granted Danielle, then married to her first husband, her divorce, he took a look at her belly and said ‘I expect you’d like me to reduce the time lag before the decree becomes absolute to the minimum.’ He took it down to a week from the normal six, and as a result Danielle and I were married just eighteen days before our son Michael was born.

With Danielle’s first son David with us, and Nicky showing up not that long after Michael, there was no way we have a honeymoon at the right time - i.e. then. So instead ten years later, with a business trip to San Francisco in the offing, I suggested that Danielle come along and take the opportunity to have a delayed honeymoon. Better late than never, after all, and we would enjoy it all the more for having waited so long.

And we did enjoy our trip to what quickly became Danielle’s favourite city anywhere. We stayed at a hotel which boasted a penthouse which was more a pentshack: a wood and glass construction placed on the roof, with breathtaking views of San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge and the city, where we were woken in the morning by the sea lions barking and could watch a flock of parakeets flying past our windows.

When, nearly twenty years on, I again got the opportunity to take a business trip to San Francisco, Danielle announced ‘I’m coming along.’ It struck me as a good idea, so she’s at my side as I write this.

This time we did everything much more by the book. The first evening we were in China Town to indulge ourselves in truly superior Chinese cooking. The next day we had a walking tour through part of the city, enchanted but shivering through weather that had turned to bitter winter overnight. To warm up we headed to a vegetarian restaurant, Green’s, where we had an excellent meal against the background of yet another view of the bay and the bridge.

Our first visit to San Francisco had left me with only one regret: we’d had a remarkable breakfast at the famous Cafe Roma, sitting in the tiny back terrace area, under vine leaves through which the surprisingly warming October sun was shining. But I chose not to wash down the meal with mimosa, the combination of orange juice and champagne that would have been the perfect complement to my scrambled eggs and smoked salmon.

So I took great pleasure in correcting that omission while I was at Green’s, and we had mimosas there - though as befits the constant innovation that marks the city still, this one was made with pomegranate juice rather than anything so pedestrian as mere orange.

Ready to enjoy mimosas and correct an old omission
Pomegranate, no less - my dear, the style, can you imagine?

Then we set out to find our hotel with the pent shack again, which was not as straightforward it sounds, since we couldn’t remember the name let alone the address. But we tracked it down, and found the San Remo unchanged, and still endowed with its jewel of a pent shack.

We also travelled round the city by the most appropriate means, cable cars, even hanging on for dear life to the outside on a couple of occasions. That was a mode of transport we’d disdained first time, this trip has really seen us being quite exemplary in ensuring we did things properly.

The right notes in the right order, for once. And the notes themselves are pretty special, they resonate with us. San Francisco remains Danielle’s favourite city. 

And I have to say that I too find it hard to imagine one to prefer to it.

The American on the Truro train

On a Truro to London train, I met a retired trial lawyer from San Francisco. He lived there from 1963, a time and a place ‘where it was good to be a single.’ But in his late forties, with the latest woman he’d been seeing heading back East, he began to wonder whether he was getting to an age where ‘no-one gave a damn any more’ and he might turn into a sad figure hanging around bars hoping for action that would never happen.

It was approaching Christmas in 1985. A niece rang him. She knew an Englishwoman – more specifically a Cornishwoman – who was living in Detroit, where she was editing a magazine. She was going to be spending Christmas in San Francisco, and it seemed to the niece that the uncle should meet her.

The uncle allowed himself to be persuaded and phoned the Englishwoman at her home. The call was taken by her then seven-year old son, who ‘for the only time in his life took a message correctly. He’s never done it since and he’s 32 now.’

As arranged, the lawyer called at the flat where the Englishwoman was staying. She sent someone else to answer the door, in case she couldn’t stand him. The man who opened the door said ‘who are you?’ gruffly.

‘I’m the uncle,’ came the reply.

They went out and liked each other. They met again on Boxing Day, at which point in his words they ‘hit it off’. I’m not quite sure what he was implying but he did add that there was nowhere open for them to eat, so perhaps he meant that they were forced indoors and indulged in more than polite conversation.

He suggested they should meet again. She had a pretty packed schedule, but said she would try to get him an invitation to a dinner she was going to. He turned up and found that of the eight people there, he already knew two, one of them a former client.

It soon became clear to the others what was going on between the two of them, particularly when she announced that she didn’t want to go back to Detroit as planned on the 31st, and not just because she didn’t like Detroit. There was, however, a problem.

‘I can’t cancel,’ she wailed, ‘I have a plane ticket.’

‘Of course you can,’ explained a doctor who was present, ‘you have terrible earache.’

She stayed on another week. He was introduced to the delights of organising babysitting so that he could meet his new girlfriend.

Eventually she had to go, however. So he went down to the local TWA office. A strike was under way; for the first and only time of his life, he crossed a picket line. ‘What you’re doing,’ he said, ‘is temporal, but this is important.’

He laid $1000 in cash on the counter and said ‘give me as many round trip tickets to Detroit as this will buy.’

The answer was ten. This meant that for the next several months they visited each other every other weekend. That phase ended only when, in the early summer of 1986, they married.



San Francisco

Today he’s in his seventies. They share their time between a place near San Francisco and another on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. ‘If you’d told me when I was young that I would end up living in Cornwall I wouldn’t have believed you. At the time, I didn’t know where Cornwall was, let alone the Lizard peninsula or the hamlet of 50 people where we actually live. The most active business in our village is a hole in a wall, the village post box.’

Urban life in the The Lizard, Cornwall

At least it explains why we met on a train up from the lovely Cornish city of Truro.

When you're crossing the country, you may meet some interesting people