JACK'S PLAICE

      Because life must be lived come what may, and because we can surely tear our eyes sometimes from the thunderclouds to pick a daisy, here is a thoroughly silly story about nothing very much about anything very much at all.

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

      It was early enough in our marriage that Mr. Los Angeles and I still had fresh tales to tell, and one crisp fall evening I was entertaining him with tales of my jolly student japes at Royal Holloway College, a proud outlier of London University set in the rolling Surrey hills just outside the small Anglo-Saxon town of Egham (or Egeham, as the johnnies-come-lately of the Domesday Book would have it).

       “… and then,” I was telling him, “after a rousing afternoon of dwile flonking and a spot of roof thatching, we’d finish bell-ringing practice, toss the dwile across the maypole and repair for a mug of foaming ale at the Barley Mow on Englefield Green.”

       “Oh, you merry band of wags and wenches!” cried Mr. Los Angeles, slapping his knee in delight.

       “And when mine host had called time,” I continued, feeling really rather pleased with my tale, “we’d morris dance down the hill into Egham for supper at the fish and chip shop, which, believe it or not, was called … Jack’s Plaice!”

       There was a pause while Mr. Los Angeles regarded me in a fashion some might have described as kinda funny.

       “Ye-e-es?” he said, after a moment.

       “Jack’s Plaice!” I explained. Because Jack, who was indeed a wag, had wittily named his establishment after the delicately flavored flatfish called plaice, a taste much enjoyed by diners across the length and breadth of England’s green and pleasant land.

       There was another pause, while Mr. Los Angeles digested this.

       “Jack’s Place,” he repeated, thoughtfully, after a moment. Subtly but palpably, the temperature in our cozy living room had dropped a degree or two.

       “No!” I said. “Not Jack’s Place! Jack’s Plaice! It was his place! Do you get it?”

       “The place was owned,” said Mr. Los Angeles, “by a guy called Jack.”

       “Yes! “ I agreed.  “And it was his Plaice!  A fish and chip shop!”

       Mr. Los Angeles sighed just a little.

       “Jack had a fish and chip shop,” he said.

       “And it was called Jack’s Plaice!” I said. And since some further explanation appeared to be in order,  “With an ‘i’ in it.”

       Mr. Los Angeles pondered further, and a less confident spouse might just have suspected he were quietly scanning the room for implements that might cause bodily harm.

      “Jack kept an eye on his fish and chip shop?’ he ventured.

       “No!” I said. “Not an eye.  An ‘i.’”

       “Not an eye,” said Mr. Los Angeles. “An eye.”

       It was clearly time to start again from the beginning.

         “OK,” I said, preparing to return to the very basics of Anglo-American communication. “You know what a place is?  Like a pad, or an apartment, or …”

       “Or a fish and chip shop?” suggested Mr. Los Angeles helpfully.

        “Right,” I agreed. Now we were getting somewhere. “And you know plaice?” I continued.  “The fish?”

       “Place the Fish?” said Mr. Los Angeles.  “Is that like Pin the Tail On The Donkey?”

       “No,” I said. I was beginning to wonder if this marriage business might just not be all it had been cracked up to be. “It is not like Pin The Tail On The Donkey.” And prepared myself to start all over again.

       “The fish,” I said.  “Plaice …”

       “Yes,” said Mr. Los Angeles. “The fish place.  The fish and chip shop, right?”

       How far, how immeasurably far, we had come from the merry mug of ale in the dear old Barley Mow.

       “I’m sorry,” said Mr. Los Angeles at last. “I really have not the slightest idea of what you’re talking about.”

       “There is,” I said, heroically resisting the temptation to fling myself on the floor and speak through a mouthful of Mr. Los Angeles’ nattily-socked ankle. “A type of fish. That is called. Plaice.”

       “I have never in my life,” said Mr. Los Angeles, “heard of a type of fish called plaice.”

       There was another pause while it was my turn to digest new information.

       “Haven’t you?” I said.

       “No!” he said.

        It turned out that the fish called plaice, while much-loved throughout England in general, had not been loved enough by me in particular that I had ever thought to seek it among the bounty of tuna, salmon, Pacific halibut, Chilean sea bass, orange roughy, rainbow trout, scallops and plumply lovely mussels that was regularly laid out to my eager gaze at Santa Monica Seafood. Had I attempted to do so, I would have learned that the mild-tasting plaice is as foreign to West Coast American waters as is the venerable pastime of dwile flonking.

       Which would explain where the confusion had arisen, really.