Rules for fools

 Above, the Fool on the Hill: Too bad there were no rules for him 

Two weeks ago, when I was preparing for the second coming of the UK Driving Test in Norwich, the classroom instructor answered a student's question as follows:

"Rules are for the obedience of fools, and the guidance of wise men."

After the class, I asked him for the origin of the quote, and he wrote it down and attributed it to Douglas Bader.

I had no idea who Douglas Bader was until a few moments ago, when I looked him up on the endlessly useful, not-much-less-accurate-than-Britannica, Wikipedia. (Truth: someone studied it and found little discrepancy.) Bader was a WWII British flying ace who brought down many German aircraft before being brought down himself and spending time trying to escape from a German POW camp. Amazing enough to survive and badger one's captors, but Bader had two prosthetic legs to contend with, one of which was damaged when he was ejecting from his plane. He had the prosthetic legs before he became a WWII flying ace.

I suspect Bader broke a lot of rules, although he broke them carefully. He successfully made his case for his flying ability despite having lost his legs in an earlier flying accident, and was returned to the air in time for the Battle of Britain. Courage, it would seem, must accompany wisdom when one wants to break the rules. But wisdom sometimes accompanies age and experience; when he was a flying cadet, in 1928, Bader was almost expelled because of his fondness for forbidden romps in motorcars. Racing motorcars.

One can see how Bader might have developed his attitude toward rules, though. It would seem a bit ridiculous to forbid energetic young men engaged in the dangerous pursuit of flying airplanes to cavort in cars.

By the time he engaged German airplanes in battle, Bader had developed three additional beliefs. They were:

• If you had the height, you controlled the battle.
• If you came out of the sun, the enemy could not see you.
• If you held your fire until you were very close, you seldom missed.

These apply as well to life in general. You are foolish to "attack an enemy"--that is, proceed in some adversarial contest--unless you hold the high ground, ethically, monetarily or whatever pertains to the situation in question. The concept is often more mundanely rendered as, "Don't piss into the wind."

You are also foolish to show an enemy your position in a negotiation. If you want a good deal on your new house, do not flash your money around, nor by the same token, present yourself as a penniless sad sack. In either case, you are giving away your position, which the other side may then use to its advantage. Again, there are mundane versions of this concept. Keep things close to the vest is one.

If you can hold your fire, you will prevail in life as in combat. Do not prematurely fling your talking points at others; the longer you wait and let others talk, the more likely you are to gain the information you need to succeed in any negotiation. Years ago, a woman I was interviewing for an article used the term, "Ears open, mouth shut." It works. Every time. And it's simple, but not easy, especially if you have a tendency to let your ego gain control.

Which is precisely what Douglas Bader must seldom have done. His ego didn't seem to enter into his thought processes. He paid attention to business, not to his growing reputation as the British answer to WWI's Red Baron. As a POW, he took it as his mission to bedevil his captors as often as he could. After the war, he became CEO of the aircraft division of Shell.

He wasn't, however, perfect. Another of his great quotes, on entering a gathering of former Luftwaffe pilots in Germany after the war, was, "My God, I had no idea we left so many of you bastards alive," according to a Wikipedia-cited source. He was a political conservative, Victorian in his beliefs and just a tad bigoted. He absolutely objected to Rhodesia gaining independence, for example.

Still, one needn't throw out the baby with the bathwater--since we are on the subject of pithy sayings--and so may consider Bader's best quote for what it is, a darn good prescription for a reasoned life by anyone except morons.

I was going to take a cheap shot and note that thereby, Bush, Bachmann, Palin et. al. are left out of it, but I won't.

BTW: I passed the driving test, despite telling the examiner, when he asked what I'd like to be called, that he could call me Your Grace. 

The American car god has at last caught up with me...in England!

We all know how I HATE photos of myself: I'm supposed to be on the other end of cameras. But this is the least I could do for my instructor, Andy. (Used by permission of Five Day.)

Whew!

Briefly, after an incredibly agony-filled two months, I took the UK Driving Practical Test on Saturday in Norwich, and passed.

Correction: I did not simply pass, I passed with a miniscule 2 minor errors. One is allowed 15 of those and can still be awarded a license.

How can this be, considering that less than four weeks earlier, in Cornwall, I had failed?

Correction: I had not only failed, I had failed miserably. Although the examiner could manage to find only 10 minor faults, he rearranged reality and made them into THREE, count 'em, THREE SERIOUS DRIVING FAULTS. During the debrief, he also delivered a little lecture about how endangered he had felt when my directional signal flipped off of its own accord on a curve up a hill to an intersection and I chose to shift first and reapply the signal second in order not to stall on the FREAKING MOUNTAIN because I had an Audi on my tail! My Cornwall instructor (one must have one of those to learn those hinky backing-around-corner things and to rent a test-worthy car) was aghast when he heard the examiner deliver the "fail" verdict. I was aghast, and as angry as I've ever been.

No points on my license
In 46 years of driving, I have had NO POINTS on my license. None. In any state. You're welcome to check. No accidents, except for a deer hitting me, and a woman bashing my bumper when I was stopped at a light. Total lifetime auto damage? Under $2000, all in.

So...that gormless examiner in Cornwall drove me to several things. To wit:
1. I joined the Association of British Drivers so I can put my two cents in.
2. I decided to retake the test at a more sophisticated venue where the examiners might possibly have seen aliens before, and had become unafraid of us.
3. I decided on an intensive course with test at the end, far from home for two reasons: no demands by husband, dog and cat, and I wanted some time in a city.

I found Five-Day online, chatted online, phoned and talked with a live human, and booked a week's tuition in Norwich.

Five Day intensive driving course deals with a riled Yank
As it turned out, I was still so emotionally scarred from the Cornwall experience, I wanted Simon to turn around and fetch me home after he left on the Monday morning of the course after driving me there on Sunday. I managed to persevere, but went to the first session in a rare foul mood. (Not that my foul moods are rare; it was rare in its intensity.) Each day was one hour of classroom work followed by four hours of driving.

The classroom teacher was ex-military, and he--Bob--gave as good as he got. And brother, he got some shite from me that first day. To his immense credit, by the end of the week, we were having fun sparring with each other, and giving each other favorite quotes and so on.

The part on the road was wonderful, too. The driving instructor, Andy, is possibly one of the nicest, wisest, most knowledgeable people I have ever met.  He, too, got a dose of my wrath that first day. But we went for a drive, and after an hour, he asked why I was there, said I drove just fine, and should just tell the office to book my test so we'd get it booked by week's end. (The company has a full-time person who trolls for cancellations so they can book tests WAY faster than the timing the DSA--Driving Standards Agency--offers.) I told him about Cornwall, and I told him I really did need to learn how to back around a corner, because of being a Yank and therefore not having the DNA to permit it. (There are four maneuvers an examiner can choose from to test applicants: backing around a corner, parallel parking, backing into a parking bay and a three-point turn.)

To make a long story short, Andy and I had a great week driving and became friends out of it all. When Simon showed up to get me on the Friday--they could get no closer than Tuesday for a test booking, so I decided to go home for a week and take a Saturday, June 18 slot, instead--he chatted with Andy. We all decided that it's a shame we are six hours away...but sometime, Andy and his wife and Simon and I will get together for some dinner and a laugh, we have all agreed.

But the test. Ah, the test. Andy said at least a few times every single day, "If you drive like that, you should have no problem passing."

Professionalism at the DSA, Norwich
On the appointed morning, my nerves were shot--as they had been since the horror of that first test. At the test center, Andy was positively shrink-like in his efforts to chill me out, showing me photos of another instructor's new puppy since he knows I love dogs, assuring me that either examiner I got, Michael or Harry, would be a decent human being--a nice guy, in fact, who just wanted to see if one could drive safely and not whether one would wither under jackbooted and illegal commands, a la Cornwall.

That would be a change.

Harry was a great guy. Not only was he great, but he was charming. We had a nice drive, interspersed with conversation about cars, England, his job, my job. At the end of it, when he delivered those lovely words, "I'm pleased to tell you that you have passed your practical driving test," I was so delighted that I told him he was a lovely man, which Andy--approaching the car for the debrief--overheard, and laughed about. Then Harry thanked me for an enjoyable, confident drive. Amazing!  And then Andy took my picture for the company website--I submitted, with better grace than I had shown a couple of weeks earlier when the mental, physical and spiritual erasure of the Cornwall experience began--and it appears currently on the second page of student photos. (Look by date and name; I passed the test on June 18, written 18/06/11 in British usage. You can "like" the photo if you want.)

How, one wonders, could this experience have been so different from Cornwall? In the interim, I had not driven at all, except for the days with Andy. Basically, after the backing stuff was through my skull, that was just getting the lay of the land. Norwich is a real city, lots of traffic, cross-hatched boxes, every kind of pedestrian crossing, narrow roads, country roads on the outskirts, motorways...everything. Cornwall? Not so much. Simple, by contrast.

When bureaucracy goes rogue
I finally realized, driving back home yesterday after a lovely weekend in Norwich (great shopping, and the cathedral is magnificent), that I had been verbally abused in Cornwall. I recall every instant of that examiner's remarks to me. I recall his fumbling around about the parallel park, asking me whether there was a person sitting in the target car and deciding for me that I didn't want an audience. Why not? Did he think I could possibly have parked for the previous 46 years with never a soul on the street to watch? In NYC? I recall him telling me to go straight when it was actually a left turn and all the left-turn things needed to be done, and I did them. I recall his snorts, and his lousy directions that sounded as if he wanted me to go into a car park when he really wanted me to go downtown, and his following up my ALMOST taking a wrong turn with, "Did you think I wanted to go shopping? My wife drags me shopping enough." And those were the good parts. I recall that he said nothing about my perfect emergency stop, not at his bidding as can be required at a test at examiner's discretion, but because a motorcycle shot out from between two stone walls into the roadway. I made a textbook emergency stop, and a textbook departure when the incident was at an end.

My conclusion is that the Cornwall examiner was a gormless creep, at best, and possibly too incompetent to be judging the competence of others.

Harry? A total professional, competent, looking for what one wants on the roads: safe driving, good decisions, control of the automobile according to DSA standards, knowledge of British roadways...all that sort of thing. The same things any good driving examiner on earth would be looking for, not the ability of  already tense applicants--especially foreigners--to endure waffling, imprecision, illegal requests and derision, which is what the Cornwall examiner delivered.

So...is the car a god in England? Yes, much as it is in America. There are a few false prophets around who have tarnished that god well and truly, and have meaninglessly made experienced American drivers into shuddering hulks. You doubt it? Just read the stories by Americans on the internet about their UK driving tests.

But there are also true priests serving the god of the internal combustion engine, and I am thankful I found several in Norwich.

Thanks to Andy, thanks to Bob, thanks to Peter and the rest of the Five Day staff ..and thanks to the DSA's  Harry, too. I'm proud have met all of you, and not to have been judged lacking.

New York Moments

Don't even THINK about ordering decaf in this neighborhood's cafes; it's for sissies...and they don't like sissies. (Wiki Commons photo)

I probably should save these for my long-awaited memoir.

OK, now that the first laugh is out of the way, here are a few true gems from the World's Greatest City.

@  When I was in college in Binghamton, NY, and already married, we went to Long Island to visit my parents, and then to Manhattan to visit my husband's aunt. We drove. We were broke, of course. We forgot that the bridge back to Long Island--or perhaps I should use the local patois and call it Lawn Guyland--cost 50 cents.  We pulled off the highway, scrounged around in pockets and car seats (the old bench seats, down which coins regularly disappeared) and came up with a fifty-cent combination of coins, mainly pennies. When Paul put them in the toll both attendant's hand, the guy asked us, "How long you been savin' up for dis trip?"

@  After college, I moved back to The Big Apple. The most obnoxious teller at the Bank of New York branch where I did my banking was named Mrs. Rascal. A toll-booth attendant at the Newburgh exit of the New York State Thruway was named Mrs. Bovine.

@  One day, the escalator from Columbus Circle down to the subway stop 50 feet underground was broken. Most people just took the stairs, steep ones, while a mechanic worked at the top on the escalator. One guy stopped and when the mechanic looked up from the becalmed grated moving stairway, said, "I lost a quarter down there last week. Did you find it?"

@  When I owned some "gentrification ready" rental housing in Newburgh, NY, I joined the local Landlord's Association. The president thereof told me, when I collected the rent, to stand to the side of the door, not in front of it, when I knocked. Why? "Because sometimes they shoot through it."

@  Walking up Eighth Avenue on a Wednesday, matinee day in the nearby Theatre District, on a late winter afternoon, I heard two women from Queens (one of the boroughs, NYC and yet not NYC) talking. The younger one said, "Look, Ma, dere's only buses and taxis here, no caws."

@  While having breakfast in a diner on Manhattan's West Side one morning, I overheard a couple of German tourists ordering breakfast from the Puerto Rican waitress. They asked for dark bread, soft eggs in their shells and some fresh fruit, using whatever English they had to make these requests. When the waitress yelled out the order to the kitchen, staffed by Greeks a la Saturday Night Live, she shouted, "Two eks over izzy, hull whit toast an' a slice of candle lope." Lord knows what the Germans had for breakfast; I had left before their order came.

@  Later that day, in another diner, a waiter told a patron that the special was lantalzoup.

@  One night at Larre's, for a long time an institution among pseudo-French NYC restaurants (but closed now for many years), I came back from the ladies' room to find my husband laughing quietly. While I was away, the waiter had come back to inquire about the vegetables we would like with our order. "You like piss?" he asked. Peas.

@  While trying to rent an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, NY, as Step One on our trek back to Manhattan from Newburgh, we went out to have coffee until the rental agent, who had called the doorman to say he would be late, arrived. I also needed a toilet.

Carroll Gardens is, to New Yorkers, well-known as a middle-class Italian neighborhood--clean, safe and family-oriented. (Only sometimes, you don't ask what they mean by Family.) It is also the location for the movie Moonstruck, despite the fact that most people, including Wikipedia, think Moonstruck was filmed in Brooklyn Heights. Brooklyn Heights lacks the essential element: front gardens with lots of flowers and a shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It also lacks Italian families, which Carroll Gardens has in boatloads. In Moonstruck, you can see the very streets on which we ended up walking our dogs, eventually, and the front-yard shrines, just like in the movie.

Anyway...with about an hour to kill, we found a corner coffee shop and went in. I asked for the ladies room, and Burly Hulk behind the counter--gold religious medals peeking out from the pelt on his chest above his half-open silk shirt, knuckles groaning under the weight of gold and precious stones--ushered me to the back room. To the far side of the back room. Past all the adult men looking down at the cards in their hands and the piles of money on the tables. At ten in the morning on a weekday in October. Don't ask. Wouldn't be healthy.

I relieved myself behind flimsy pine panel walls, and hurried back to my husband, looking neither left nor right on that rite of passage. I didn't want to be able to identify anyone later, if asked.

My  husband drank only decaf at the time--Sanka--but astonishingly was sitting over a cup of espresso, while another tiny cup of black gold awaited me. I asked about that.

"I did order an espresso for you and Sanka for me. The guy leaned over the counter and said, "Yiz want two espressos. Sanka is for sissies."


@  And my all-time favorite: My brother, my husband and I were walking from the car park to the entrance of Smith Haven Mall, a large enclosed shopping center on eastern Long Island, or perhaps I should use the local patois, on eastern Lawn Guyland. We were following a woman with a baby stroller holding one brat and a few other kids in tow. Another lady--with oversized rollers in her hair, the better to create  a Married to the Mob hairdo--pulled her station wagon,  crammed with half a dozen bambinos, alongside.

"Where ya been?" asked the stroller mom.

"We was at da pizza parlah," replied stationwagon mom.

"Yere, I could see. Yiz got saw-ace all ovah ya face, ya little piggy."

OK. One more. Not New York...except Larry (my brother) and I are in it. So it is.

@  About 13 years ago, I was staying with Larry, his wife Donna, and daughter Caitlin for a couple of months until I found a place to live for myself and my dog. It was almost Christmas. Caitlin was in bed, but Larry, Donna and I were watching the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree on TV. One of the performers was Rosemary Clooney (yes, George's late auntie.) She was telling tales on herself, one of which was about her tremendous weight gain. (We particularly enjoyed the 96 yards of electric blue sequined dress she had on.) Clooney said, "I went to my doctor last week. He took one look, and said, 'Rosemary, what have you been doing'?"

As one, my brother and I replied, "I been eatin'."

Moral: You can take the kids out of New York, but you can't take New York out of the kids.

STD: Sexual disease? Or Save the Date...a disease in its own right

A wedding of this magnitude might rate an STD...but real royals wouldn't do anything that common! (Wiki Commons)

I am pleased to announce that from the following date onward―from June 15, 2011―any “save the date” notice that enters my house will be immediately immolated and its sender consigned to the column in my address book called “Hopelessly Crass Humans.”

The first time I got a “save the date” card regarding a wedding, I was appalled. It happened about six years ago, and to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t addressed to me, but to the man I was about to marry. Nonetheless, as I was now essentially the co-head of household, I was within my rights to deal with the thing as seemed best to me in the running of my household. I tossed it in the bin because it was so cheeky.  No, it was tacky. And crass. Mainly, it was presumptuous. Yes, that.

Still, I guess I should have figured such things were in the wings the first time I heard of a pre-engagement ring some years earlier. What the heck is THAT? When one becomes engaged, it means the man has asked the woman to marry him. (I am not dealing here with other combinations of humans agreeing to love, honor, cherish and set up house. It’s bad enough sorting out the excesses in traditional marriages in a single column; other permutations will have to wait until the oldest is out of the way.)

What, then, does a pre-engagement signify? That the man has told the woman that if she wears this semi-precious ring, later on he’ll probably get down on one knee and pop the question? Although popping, at that point, would seem the wrong image entirely. What ever happened to going steady? What about shacking up? I realize going steady has been gone since Ozzie & Harriet left the TV screens of America. But shacking up is still around, and indeed, as far as I can tell, most people who engage in pre-engagement and engagement are already quite fully engaged, so to speak.

So now there is the “save the date” card at some time before the bona fide wedding invitations go out, which is traditionally six weeks before the wedding. These days, when one’s family and friends often live a couple of plane rides away, perhaps six weeks is a bit short notice. But why not just send the invitations at, say, eight weeks? That “save the date” thing we received came in February, a week or so before our own wedding. We didn’t want too much fuss for ours―being older―so we booked a venue, ordered a cake, and sent out some hand-written invitations about three weeks before. Amazingly enough, two cousins made a long-distance trip anyway, although I was not expecting to see them. Not getting too wound up in all this does allow one some nice surprises.

That first ever "save the date" card, arriving in the dead of winter, was for a wedding in December, almost a full year hence. We didn't attend.

Is a "Save the Date" card appropriate for a Princess Bride?

What, though, is wrong with sending a “save the date” card if one is planning a big, extravagant, expensive wedding and the last thing one wants is surprises? Simple.

Sending a “save the date” card is assuming far too much. It is assuming that seeing Ms. Kerr wed Mr. Wang is the most important thing on one’s entire social calendar for the year.

And yes, it would be announced in the paper as the Wang-Kerr wedding, which might almost make it worthy of being the most important event on one’s yearly calendar.  As an aside, I always loved the wedding announcements Leno did on the Tonight Show. (Loved them more than bits about the Stupid Criminals who demanded money from banks by handing the teller an envelope with the criminal’s own return address on it.) Other favorite weddings include the Large-Beaver wedding, the Lovegrove-Butts wedding, the Phillips-Bragh wedding, the Small-Johnson wedding….

The sniggers engendered by surnames aside, there apparently is some etiquette surrounding the execrable cards.  On the iVillage website, a short article is devoted to this. The author contends the cards developed as a way to respect guests’ time and “make sure they can attend the wedding.”

Oh? I was of the opinion that attending a wedding or declining the invitation was purely a matter of personal choice, and not something for the person doing the inviting to worry about. This making-sure aspect seems to violate the age-old conventions involving issuing invitations and awaiting the positive replies of those who choose to attend―which is true for any event, not just weddings―and the regrets of those who cannot or will not attend.

In a world in which the least desire of the Princess Bride must be catered for, the making-sure aspect of  “save the date” cards doesn’t even come under the faux pas as enumerated in iVillage.

Advice from the iVillage sage

Here is, abbreviated, the iVillage sage advice:

One is advised not to send the “save the date” cards immediately upon the engagement due to vagaries in family relationships and pressures on wedding budgets.

One is advised not to send a card that’s off-color or seems to celebrate drunkenness and so on. One is advised to be tasteful. (Hasn’t that horse already left the gate if one is even thinking about sending a tacky, obnoxious, imperious card in the first place?)

The best part of it the STD card

One is advised to boldly inform recipients of the “card” when it isn’t a card at all but a fridge magnet, lest they inadvertently lay it down on a computer component and erase memory.  This was my favorite, actually―such total tackiness―until I read the next bit of advice: Senders are advised to give complete information about the wedding venue in the miserable s-t-d card because “Guests need to know how many days they'll need to take off of work.”

My answer to that would be “None.” Regardless. None.*

Finally, one is advised not to fill the envelope with confetti or sparklies as people get annoyed when they must vacuum after opening the mail. “A better enclosure is a sheet of vellum with a poem or something that can be kept - or tossed - with ease,” says the iVillage writer.

If the sender is clever, the recipient can display that poem on the fridge, held in place by the magnet with the smiling pre-nuptial faces of Tiffany and Scott.

Or, if the recipient has any sense, he or she can toss the whole lot in the bin, and spend any time off on something more enjoyable than toting a hundred bucks worth of Pilsner glasses wrapped in white and silver paper to an event where they’ll have to eat cold food, totter in high heels at the non-free open bar trying to kill the pain of the feet and the fête, and pretend to enjoy flapping their wings when Wedding Band Willie cranks up that all-time favorite, The Chicken Dance.

If you’d like to read the entire iVillage instruction article for sending “save the date” cards, click here.

*We did take a day off to attend my nephew’s out-of-town wedding. But his fiancée had not sent the tacky std cards…and they were both surprised when quite a few of us who lived far away chose, without coercion, to attend a lovely small lakeside wedding at an historic hotel in New York’s Finger Lakes region.

Bluefus' first venture outdoors

Bluefus enjoys his first al fresco breakfast in Cornwall. (SP Tiley photo)

For a while--a very long and unfortunate while--I was married to a man who had virtually no discernible sense of humor, little appreciation for the cultural aspects of life, and absolute disdain for those small ceremonies that seem to cement relationships, as large ones cement nations. Thank goodness, that's in the past.

Moving on...I am now married to a man who delights in all the little ceremonies we have, in the six short years to date of our marriage, invented. I thought it was his Britishness; my father once told me that the British are sentimental, and if I didn't want that, don't marry a Brit. (He also told me that the Irish were unreliable, despite the fact that he was half Irish and the most reliable person I've ever known...but then, he was of a generation that tended to generalize facets of a race into the entirety of that race. He can be excused for that. And he would have liked Simon.)

For his birthday, the first year we were married, I gave Simon a spitting fountain made of metal and in the shape of a dog. We named him Rufus, and put him in the gazebo, where he held sway until we moved to England. He was pretty bunged up by then, what with water splashing his little metal feet continuously for about seven hot Maryland months a year. So we buried him, up on the hill behind the house we've since sold, surrounded by the cats, one of whom--Tootsie--existed into my time and whom I loved dearly until he died of great old age.

When we bought this house in Cornwall--or not long after anyway--I saw an advert online for a metal dog sculpture, not a fountain this time, but a planter. Corny. Yes. Corny. But the animal face looked so much like Rufus, the name of our late gazebo fountain. So I ordered him, have filled his planter with lobelia, and given him a shady spot to guard beneath the hedgerow out back. Of course, his name is Rufus II.

Today, he had a visit from another non-canine dog in our house, Bluefus.

Bluefus is a coffee cozy. For a bit more than a year, since we found him in a store in Padstow, Bluefus has been keeping our morning pot of French press coffee warm. Today was the first day it was warm enough to have breakfast on the deck. We hadn't breakfasted outdoors since at least mid-September 2009, a couple of months before we moved to England. While there were days warm enough when we lived in the flat in Devon, and we had a small seating area behind our living room windows, the table was uncomfortably close to the windows of the Gorgon who lived next door, so we simply didn't do it. While I don't mind if people know about our relative nuttiness...or possibly British-style eccentricity--I didn't think she needed to hear our early morning secrets, or natterings as the case may be. So we didn't, simply didn't, use the table more than three or four times for afternoon coffee and a time or two for cocktails.

Bluefus quite liked his excursion. He is hoping for another one tomorrow, and the weather from the Met Office says he will probably get it. And possibly...just possibly...Sunday as well.

And then it appears that March will return. No matter. I'm sure Bluefus is better off for his serving of fresh air, bearing today the scent of new-mown hay from across the Tamar Valley. I suspect we all are.