We are in London.
My first time in England was not a few weeks ago, when we disembarked at Heathrow's terminal four.
And my first time in England wasn't years ago when I worked for a Chiswick (West London) publisher, the cold yet whimsical SilverPlatter Information.
Splatter, my abbreviation, was my third tech job, and it would prove to be one of my longest, three years, which I realize might sound short but it really isn't in Silicon Valley. I wrote software that scrunched and compressed and retrieved information, which brings to my mind Newman's employer, the PO, the "controllers of information". But I didn't work in Splatter's Chiswick digs, unfortunately, but in their charming old-mill Wellesley office, and later, in a gorgeous Sausalito waterfront office. And why oh why you might ask, just why did we have a Marin office? Because of its popularity, post-Antelope, with followers of the Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, one of whom was our president. I don't know but these might even be related to the saffron-robed people that used to wander the airport. But I digress.
Oh yeah, I was talking about England. Well, working for Splatter I got to make the occasional trip to London, usually staying at a pleasant inn in Sloane Square, to make meetings at headquarters between evening explorations of the city, by foot and tube.
No, my first time in England was at my beginning. I was born at a hospital in the West London borough of Ruislip, then spent my first few years in the charming Farnborough home pictured below. Farnborough, a town associated with aviation, is west of, but not West London.
Of course I don't remember those years, but mom shared fond memories of that period, so I'll go with that. We were in Farnborough because my dad, an officer in the US Navy, was stationed out of Ruislip. It was the Navy that took dad around the globe, and at one of his stops, Shanghai, he met a young woman, a Russian immigrant, who later became my mother.
After those years in England dad was called back to the states. A few more moves later he chose to retire from the military, something he later regretted, and we settled in his home state of Texas. A far cry from England, mom was never crazy about Texas, but she made the best of it.
And I, of course, fled Texas at the first opportunity.
