In Hermosa you can do any sport you like! (Except one).

You can do all sorts of sports in Hermosa Beach. It's the sportiest little beach town I know. For a start there are the obvious SoCal activities: surfing is huge, and Hermosa hosts several volleyball tournaments from the serious to the sublimely silly. There are runners, cyclists, skateboarders and rollerbladers carving up the Greenbelt and the Strand all day long.

There's a yoga or pilates studio on every corner and at least two Crossfit boxes. If you want to go old school there's a 24 Hour Fitness, and the resolutely gritty Yard gym for pumping iron. A quick count on Google maps gives me at least 25 gyms in Hermosa. That's a lot of options for a town of that's less than 1.5 square miles.

Then there are the less obvious options. Beach Tennis isn't troubling too many volleyball courts just yet but the Sexy Beach Tennis people are recruiting aggressively (hence the name, I imagine). Rather less beachy, right smack in the middle of town, between the baseball field and the hall where they run Jazzercise classes, stands Hermosa Beach Lawn Bowling Club.

And now, Hermosa has found a space for Pickleball - apparently the fastest growing sport in America. Pickleball, for the uninitiated, is like tennis - but played on a court half the size, with a plastic balls with holes in and wooden paddles. The courts have been busy pretty constantly since they opened, even on a quiet Wednesday afternoon when the tennis courts are deserted. So they must be on to something.

Given all there is on offer in this sports-mad town, it makes the obvious gap even more bewildering. Believe it or not there isn't a public pool. In fact, there isn't even one in a private gym - although members can drive a couple of miles in either direction to use the Bay Club pools in Manhattan Beach and Redondo. High school students can use their school pool. TLOML drives to Hawthorne to train with his South Bay swim team. P swims at her Montessori, obvs. The shining ones who are happy to splash out $15k or so to join the Manhattan Beach Country Club can swim there. But for non-members, there's nothing.

Okay, there is the Pacific. It's big and it's free. But it's a little sharkey and rather too swellful for me. Good job I have running, crossfit, and a rusty old bike to keep me busy.

Adventures in foreign food

Not usually the most adventurous eater, I wasn't sure how P would cope with all the strange foreign foods she'd be faced with on our trip to the UK.  How would she fare when we spend time with children who eat such exotic foods as salmon, shepherd's pie, and pizza with actual pizza sauce on. I expected to be slightly embarrassed as she stuck to the plain pasta, toast and eggs that make up much of her staple diet.

But to my delight she tried a lot of new foods. She even liked some of them.

Sadly it wasn't asparagus, Dorset crab, rhubarb, cucumber sandwiches or even scones (too many raisins). In fact I'd have been happy if she got a taste for Heinz baked beans.

Here she is one bite into her first scotch egg, trying to decide if she likes it.

 She loved it.

Other big wins included my mum's egg salad sandwiches, broccoli (amazing what peer pressure will do), proper pizza, and proper French bread. Any variation on sausage meat and eggs, and anything breaded or battered, and fried also went down well. So sausage rolls, fish and chips and scampi were hits.

Now I'm not really sure what good this does me. As I said, I was hoping for rather more new vegetables - in which category I include baked beans. I suppose egg salad and proper pizza (i.e. not a homemade cheese-only version) are welcome additions to the list of dinners I can prepare in 15 minutes. But scotch eggs and sausage rolls are not available at our local grocer (and I'm not sure I'd trust them if they were). Nor is decent French bread.

And so it is that I find myself breading and frying scampi for her dinner.

What a faff...

...and an oily smelly mess

Just don't expect to see me making a scotch egg or a goddamn baguette from scratch anytime soon.

Trade-offs and the trip home

P's annual English immersion experience is over for another year. Now she's four the time in transit is an awful lot easier and the whole trip even more fun. She loved riding the tube and double decker buses, making friends with our friends' kids, playing with her cousins and all her quality time with my parents and sisters. She did some dam building on the beach, saw a jousting display at Leeds castle, petted lambs, and played a lot of elaborate games with her cousins in granny's garden.

It wasn't all about P. We enjoyed a week's holiday in Kent with the friends we used to holiday with pre-parenthood. It was just like the old days but our afternoons drinking wine and chatting in the sun now have a backdrop of children arguing over whose turn it was on the swing. Pretty blissful, as it goes. The week in Kent did rather squeeze our time with my family, and meant a couple of fewer days in London, but it made the trip feel more like a holiday. Quality time with fewer people than we might otherwise spread ourselves thin trying to see:  that's the trade off. Life, it seems is all about trade-offs, and making a deal you can live with. We traded an easier, more secure life in the golden state for our beloved London - with the sweetener of a return trip every year. Now the key is to get the balance right on those return trips. We can never do everything, or see everyone, but I think we made the best of our limited time.

P did pretty well at blending in as a Brit, I thought. She ate Scotch eggs and proper bangers with relish and went on walks in the rain without complaint. There were, however, a couple of giveaways. I had to remind her what a nettle was a few times (of course, she could school her British peers in earthquake safety but that's not nearly as useful as nettle-awareness when you're negotiating the playing fields and country lanes of Yorkshire). And as we pulled up outside my sister's beautifully proportioned, terraced, Victorian townhouse she commented that 'the houses are all stuck together!' adding that in her opinion, this was 'crazy town'. Perhaps one day she'll have her own blog about transatlantic differences. 

Now we're home, back into the routine of work, and play, and the sunny beach life. It ought to get easier to return. After all, I am more settled here, bolstered by more places and people I love with each passing year. But London's grip is tight: I still suffer a little bereavement every time we leave. Nothing a Tuesday taco and an afternoon watching volleyball under a perfect blue sky won't cure, I'm sure.

Welling up at the drop of an (English) hat

It's right and proper and only natural that I would miss dear friends and family from the UK, and be commensurately sentimental when I see them again on our annual trip back. And I think it's understandable that I feel a tug at my heart strings when I experience some quintessentially English scene, or eat something which evokes my childhood.

And even a Brit would find this scene somewhat heart-stirring, I think.

But sometimes I wonder if I've taken my indulgence in missing the UK, and my sentimental delight on reconnecting with my roots, a little too far.

Things which have made me well up with joy on this trip so far include:

1) Wearing shorts and a cagoule (even the word 'cag' made me emotional) on a partly sunny, partly rainy day.

2) Sainsbury's, and Boots, two long standing British retail brands I'm absurdly attached to. Which is akin to an American being soppy about Vonn's.

3) This menu outside an average looking restaurant, with its rarebit, ox tongue and quail. Especially knowing that the asparagus is probably only on the menu for about a month.

4) A pub landlord being slightly gruff when we showed up 5 minutes before the end of lunch service.

Before you know it I'll be crying with joy when the waiter neglects to bring me water after the third time of asking, or I have to dry laundry on the bannisters.

Good times are around the corner

Not that these times right now aren't good. But they are not without their challenges. For months I've been working long hours in a chaotic team, where goalposts move daily, nothing is ever entirely clear or fixed, and the emails and IMs and Slack messages and texts JUST DON'T STOP.

Like most parents with day jobs I want to do a good job - but in as little time as possible. I actually really want to do great work, and go above and beyond what's expected as often as I can. But not as much as I want to do the school run.

These last few months P has watched more hours of TV than I care to count, so I could clear my email inbox. TLOML has done the morning routine almost every day - the pancake making, hair braiding, driving to school and talking about the day ahead stuff which is mundane and sometimes wearing but just basically the stuff of life. I'm working in the evenings so often I haven't made bouillabaisse for months. I know. It's bad.

It's not just family life that has suffered, but also my health: I have skipped many workouts in favour of actual work. Which is not a very South Bay thing to do, and that behaviour absolutely needs to stop. And I'm living on toxins: I have never so frequently felt an urgent need for espresso or gin (sometimes at the same time) as these past few months.

Here's the good news: it's about to end. As of today. My last day in the crazy job. A new, calmer job begins on Monday. With a sane, calm, clear team and reasonable hours. And in the month ahead we have opera tickets, a night away at Terranea, a trip to the UK, and absolutely no plans to work nights and weekends. Hurrah!

PS I might churn out the odd blog post again too. Lucky you ;-)