Monthly Archives: April 2018

What’s new in Britain?

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The news from Britain? Oh, you know, the usual. Somebody wants to nominate the queen for a Nobel peace prize. They wanted to nominate me, but I didn’t feel right about it so they moved on down the list. A replica of Francis Drake’s ship is up for sale. Friday’s the best night to hear gossip in the pub. A badger’s conquered a castle. (Okay, that’s clickbait, and about as accurate as most clickbait.)

Is any of this worth a post? Of course it is. And if you have to ask why, you’re probably right to but please don’t because I’ll only have to come up with an answer.

Let’s start with the queen. Not because she’s the queen. If I won’t give her a capital letter, you don’t think I’d let her jump the queue, do you?

Irrelevant–and out of season–photo. Cornwall in the snow. It snows every ten years, give or take a decade. First we all tell each other how beautiful it is and when it doesn’t go away within two hours we decide the world’s ending.

A brief interruption here for the sake of readers who aren’t British. Jumping the queue is the only real sin in Britain. It means pushing in at the front of the line, or as we called it when I was a kid, butting into line.

What line are we talking about? Any line. Britain’s full of lines. Not because things are in short supply, but because that’s how people here handle more-than-one-person-type situations. If people are waiting for a bus, a ticket, or the attention of the person behind the bar, they form a queue. It may be what Kate Fox, in her glorious and slightly mad Watching the English, calls a disorganized queue (you can’t see it but everyone involved knows about it, and knows where they are in it) or even a queue of one (I’m here first and if anyone else comes along, they’re after me), but it’s still a queue–a kind of implied queue.

I’m happy to make fun of queuing, but it does take the anxiety out of those situations. Not to mention the hostility. And I say that as a sharp-elbowed New Yorker who knows how to push with the best of them. It’s nice not to have to. And occasionally it’s annoying to know I can’t. But jumping the queue is an offense against public decency, the natural order of things, the secular religion, and everything your mother taught you, and you do it at your own risk, and possibly at risk of your mortal soul.

So, no, the queen doesn’t get to jump the queue here at Notes. The newspaper clipping mentioning her just happened to be at the top of the pile. And I’m as hesitant to mess with the order of my clippings as I am to jump the queue. No one but me would care about my clippings pile, but the prospect of picking that mess off the floor and putting it back in its original disorder makes me cautious.

But back to our story: “Senior political figures and ministers” want to nominate her for the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her more than 60 years of service to the Commonwealth. She takes the Commonwealth seriously, and that’s a large part of what’s held it together. Or so they say. You shouldn’t take my word for it, though, because I’m having to take someone else’s.

What does the Commonwealth do? Good question, and I should write a post about it, if for no better reason than that I might find an answer, but in the meantime let’s quote Philip Murphy, the director of Commonwealth studies at the University of London, who can be presumed to know something on the subject and who recently published a long article about it. It’s in a different, equally fragile, pile of clippings, I can’t pull it out and read it through just now. A closer read will have to wait.

It’s online, you say? Don’t bother me. I have my excuses in order and the dog really did eat my homework.

For now, let’s grab a couple of pull quotes (those are those things in biggish type that publications use to fill the page when an article is, awkwardly, a couple of hundred words too short to reach the bottom).

“Many members of India’s policymaking elite see the Commonwealth as little more than a quaint relic of imperialism,” one says.

“If the Commonwealth really is the future, then we’re in even more trouble than I thought,” says another.

Oh, go on, let’s have one more: “For Britain’s administrative elite, the Commonwealth is a bit like a grandfather clock that has been in the family for generations. It hasn’t told the right time for decades, but no one has the heart to take such a treasured heirloom to the tip.”

The tip is the dump. The place where you throw things out. So if Phil’s right, the Commonwealth doesn’t do a hell of a lot.

The importance of this nomination is highlighted by how weird it got when I googled “queen nobel prize.” I found someone at Queen’s University who won a Nobel in physics and someone at Queen Mary University who won a Nobel in something else. I found Queen Latifah, who hosted the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in 2014. And I found a page from the official Nobel Prize website called “the Queen’s Gowns,” which is about a different queen, Silvia. As far as I can tell–and I didn’t stick around to be sure I had it right–it documents the gowns Queen Sil wore to the awards ceremony in every year since she was queenified in 1976. I’m sure the world’s a richer place now that the information is available to an eager public.

I mention all that in case you think “the queen” is a definitive description.

Will Liz get the award? As someone or other pointed out, the bar was set pretty low when Henry Kissinger won it, and it didn’t help that Barack Obama was awarded one before he’d had time to do anything. So it’s a definite maybe.

But enough of the queen. What about Drake’s ship? It was called the Golden Hind. Sort of. I’ll come back to that, but first, who was Drake?

Well, it depends who you ask. According to a website promoting visits to the ship, he was “the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, on an epic expedition of discovery and adventure.”

Sounds like a movie poster, probably from the fifties.

Drake’s purpose, it says, was “to intercept the gold and jewels, which the Spanish were removing from South America . . . and shipping back to Spain.” It adds that he made vital discoveries, etc., etc. Step right up, folks. Adult tickets are £7, kids and doddery old people get in for a fiver.

It’s okay, I’m old enough that I get to say “doddery.” If you’re under 65, you’ll just have to wait. Unless you want someone to say you’re making fun of the elderly..

On the other hand, if you read Wikipedia (and if no one’s changed the entry yet), Drake’s voyage was about privateering.

What’s that? An early form of privatization. The Mariners’ Museum defines a privateer as “any individual granted license by their government to attack shipping belonging to an enemy government, usually during a war. . . . They receive a Letter of Marque from their nation’s Admiralty, which grants them permission to raid enemy ships and keep a percentage of the spoils – so long as they pay a cut of that bounty back to the government.”

So basically Drake was operating as a licensed pirate, although according to WikiWhatsia Queen Elizabeth I’s support was unofficial, so he probably didn’t get his letter of marque. And it probably didn’t matter. If he’d been captured by the Spanish it wouldn’t have helped anyway.

In 1579, Drake captured a Spanish ship with so much treasure that it took six days to transfer it all to the Golden Hind. Liz’s share of the takings was enough to pay off the government’s entire annual debt and leave enough to invest in a new trading company operating in the Levant, which is roughly and not quite accurately the Middle East.

If you wonder how Britain got to be an imperial power, that’s as good a place as any to start unraveling the thread. If you want my opinion–and nobody asked but you’re too late to stop me–neither country was in the right. The Spanish were plundering their colonies in what’s now Latin America and the English were plundering the Spanish.

Step right up. Adult entry’s just £7.

The ship was originally called the Pelican but Drake renamed it in the middle of the voyage to flatter his patron, whose crest was a golden hind–a female red deer. How can you tell it’s a red deer if it’s gold? That’s too deep for me, but I’m sure there’s an answer out there somewhere. 

Why bother flattering his patron when he was in the middle of the ocean and his patron wouldn’t know a thing about it until he got back–if he got back? Because those long voyages got boring, and jigsaw puzzles weren’t invented until the 1760s.

Two replicas of the ship exist, one in London and one in Brixham, Devon, and it’s the second one that was up for sale, with a guide price at auction of £195,000. Presumably it’s been sold by now, but if not you can probably bargain them down a bit. It’s too big for the bathtub, but if you want a bit of British history in your front yard, it’d look great.

If you have a big enough front yard.

Moving back to modern days, researchers report that the best pub gossip can be heard on Friday nights.

How are they defining best? The newspapers don’t say, but the most common topics are, in order, old memories, something completely random, TV shows, funny stories, gossip, the news, film, music, jokes, and football.

Why’s football at the end of the list? I’m not sure but it may mean that the historic gender imbalance in pubs has been corrected.

What kind of category is “something completely random”? A garbage can category. Again, the papers don’t say what it means, or why, if it means anything else it’s not at the top of the list. I’m going to jump in with both feet and guess that this isn’t a well designed study, just something fun to report on.

One in five people in the study have been offered a chance to buy something odd while they were in the pub. How odd? A hundred dead pheasants. A broken snooker cue. Four packets of bacon.

Pubs are closing down all over the country. How the culture will survive without them, I don’t know.

In Scotland, a “very angry badger” was found in a tunnel in Craignethan Castle, in South Lanarkshire, and Historic Scotland has closed off the tunnel while it tries to lure it out using cat food and honey. I suspect that means tries to lure it into a trap, but it doesn’t sound as friendly when you put it that way. Let’s pretend it’s a little trail of cat food and honey, leading to the great outdoors.

The story’s undated, so I have no idea when this happened. It could have been centuries ago, during one of the many Scottish/English battles for all I know. When I was a kid, we told each other stories about Japanese soldiers hiding in caves on isolated islands who’d never heard that World War II was over. I suspect they were complete bullshit, but we believed each other. Maybe this is the Scottish/English equivalent: a Scottish nationalist badger still fighting to keep out the English, completely unaware that it’s actually fighting Scottish Heritage.

And now your bonus for getting this far in the post: The Mary River turtle, in Australia, can breathe through its–no, I don’t make this up–genitals. As a result, it can stay underwater for as much as three days, and I like to think it has a good time while it’s there. It also grows a punk haircut–a kind of green mohican. If you have nothing better to do with your life (and you’re reading this, aren’t you?), you should check out the photo.

Unfortunately, the turtle’s on the list of 100 most endangered reptiles.

How is spam changing?

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Spam’s changing, and here at Notes we like to stay on the cutting edge.

That’s a horrible image. Forget I ever wrote it. Here at Notes we have enough sense not to play with knives. Still, things are changing and we should all keep up. I’m not sure why, but it’s a near-universal belief and we’re too intimidated to go against it, so let’s act as if it made sense.

What’s new in the world of spam? Well, I’ve just come back from playing in the spam folder, so I’m completely up to date.

Irrelevant photo: Fast Eddie, in not-so-fast mode.

I’ll give each spam comment its own line except where I got more than one version of it. And I’ve put it in italics to make it feel welcome. Also so you know I didn’t write that mess.

aBhh

aBhh’OupwUmIKSsZt

aBhh’) AND 6021=6292 AND (‘iLRH’=’iLRH

aBhh’) AND 4141=4141 AND (‘lAGH’=’lAGH

aBhh

Taken as a group, these have an interesting symmetry. Each line’s a variation on the one before, and the group resolves by repeating the first line. Is it a poem? Is it encoded instructions on how to hack an election? Is it an attempt to lure me into clicking on the address of the sender? I’d be tempted to, but I’m afraid my computer–or possibly the entire world–would blow up and it would all be my fault.

You can’t be too careful these days.

Besides, whoever sent those messages closed a couple of parentheses before bothering to open them. If there was ever a reason to not click on someone’s email address, that’s it.

But even the strangest approach gets old. After a page of so of the code / poem / effort to blow up the world, I was glad to find a newer new approach: misspellings. Not your garden variety misspellings, mind you, but garblings you can only create on purpose, probably with a program that juggles the letters for you. So what’s the plan here? That I’ll be so intrigued or annoyed that I write back, saying, hey, you spelled difficult wrong? And as soon as I do that, the world blows up?

Well, I’m not that dumb, thank you. If you woke up this morning noticing that the world was intact if a little battered, that was me, not clicking those links.

But enough. Let’s talk about content: Most of the comments tell me I’m wonderful in one way or anther. I am, of course, and I like hearing about my wonderfulosity, but please, I’d like the compliments to be a little more convincing.

Samples?

I’m impressed by your writing. Are you a professional or just very knlebedgealow? / I’m impressed by your writing. Are you a professional or just very kndeeeogwabll?

Tough choice. I probably lean more toward kndeeeogwabll than knlebedgealow. If you look at the root of the word, you’ll see that kndeeeogwabll comes from the Latin for knee-deep in bullshit, and by the time I’ve finished some of these posts I’m at least knee-deep and sometimes in almost to my eyeballs–which, short as I am, are still well above knee level. 

Begun, the great internet edocatiun has.

That came from Yoda. He didn’t say so–modest, Yoda is–but I can tell.

To think I could educate Yoda. 

Another group of comments rests on the assumption that I’m here to help people figure out why their lives have gone to shit. Or maybe even tell them how to de-shittify them. A lot of the blogosphere is about telling people how to deshitify their lives by following the writer’s example and (a) letting go, (b) clinging on, (c) eating more fiber, (d) eating less fiber, (e)drinking more, or (f) buying something the blogger’s getting paid by.

That’d be beer, not water.

Me? The only advice I give is to tell people to approach Notes with caution, and that’s not advice, it’s a health and safety warning. 

Now I’m like, well duh! Truly thfnuakl for your help.

This was in response to a post about brussels sprouts.

How much help do people need with their brussels sprouts? Scads. Brussels sprouts are a subtle vegetables and at certain times of the year can be downright devious. If your life’s gone to shit lately, get your brussels sprouts straightened out and you’ll see the results within days. Hours, even. That’ll be £20, thanks.

TYVM you’ve solved all my prbmelos

This came from someone called Destry, whose prbmelos are beyond any help I could give, even if I was in the help-giving business. For starters, what does it do to a person to be named after a cheesy movie? And while we’re at it, how much time in a spammer’s day (or moments in a program’s whatever programs divide their time into) goes into thinking up new names? Did all these comments come from one person, using the same program and many names or are thousands of spammers writing to me using the same program and their own legally recognized names? If it’s the second, Destry, I apologize for my crack about the movie. I’m sure it looked just fine in 1954.

Okay, I don’t believe they’re using their own names. I get multiple copies of some comments from multiple (and equally unlikely) names.

How does anyone come up with all these names? After you’ve exhausted all the name-your-baby books, where do you look? Facebook? Old movies? Abandoned nightmares? 

And while I’m asking questions, does anyone happen to know what TYVM stands for? I could google it but the world might blow up. Which leaves me to my imagination, so we’re not going to be G-rated today. It stands for Trusting Your Vaginal Mastery.

And Destry thinks she has problems.

I was so confused about what to buy, but this makes it unandstaerdble.

This comment scares me. It was in response to a post on guns and American schools. So now the writer know what to buy. Wonderful.

Could you write about Phicyss so I can pass Science class?

No, sweetie, I don’t think I could and you should be grateful because you’d be so guaranteed to flunk if I helped you out. And it’d serve you right. I could write about not using capital letters unnecessarily, though. Or word-garbling programs.

Another group of comments works on the assumption that I’m here to give emotional support. Or to get it. Which again says a lot about the blogosphere.

At last! Someone who undedstanrs! Thanks for posting!

That was in response to a post about Cheddar Man, a prehistoric Briton (or pre-Briton, since the country didn’t exist yet, but let’s not complicate the thing) whose skeleton was found in a cave in the Cheddar Gorge. Given that his skeleton was lying around unused, I went and assumed he was dead, but apparently Ched’s still with us and I’m the only person who understands him. Ched, my apologies. I’m glad you’re still here and, yes, like you I feel that we have a lot in common, although, frankly, I tend to keep my skeleton where other people can’t get at it. Still, if I find one or two more people like us I’ll put together a support group. In the meantime, hang in there. I understand. I really do.

Then we come to the comments on my writing.

If you want to get read, this is how you shluod write.

Yuor rgthi. I’ll tyr ti.

Phmenenoal breakdown of the topic, you should write for me too! / Phamenenol breakdown of the topic, you should write for me too!

These came–isn’t it amazing?–from two different people, and I’m going to take both of them up on the offer. I’ve always dreamed of writing for an editor (or possibly publisher; who can tell?) who has two separate identities and can spell phenomenal more than one way. And who offers my fuckin’ nothing in return for my writing.

Knewgodle wants to be free, just like these articles!

Oh, hell. I thought we got Knewgodle out last week. A friend had the bail money and swore she’d get it downtown asap. I’ll sort this out today. Thanks for letting me know.

Finding this post has anerewsd my prayers

That came from someone called Pebbles, who was just a stone’s throw from getting what she or he needed, or possibly wanted, before finding my post, so I can’t claim too much credit.

Pebbles’ comment came in response to a post about what people in the U.S. and U.K. use for size comparisons. What, you ask, was Pebbles praying for? Sorry, I’m sworn to secrecy.

But it’s not all deliberate misspellings and pseudo-poems out there in Spamland. First the compliments:

Hahhaaah. I’m not too bright today. Great post!

I got that same comment from several people, which is an amazing coincidence. Let’s call the senders Queenie et al, since Queenie sent the first of them. There’s no feeling like being told your post was great by someone who also tells you she’s not too bright.

Noithng I could say would give you undue credit for this story.

I’ve spent days trying to unravel the meaning here but I end up so woozy that I have to abandon the keyboard and lie flat on the floor until the syntax stops spinning. Still, I need all the undue credit I can get, so yeah, whatever it means, I’ll take it.

Then the advice–this time not people looking for it but the ones who offer it. One comment contained a link for Cialis. It urged me to “start off your personal rich compost heap. It really works much better and is less than business fertilizers.” The connection between Cialis and compost heaps goes over my head, but it’s not like anyone ever gets to know everything about sex. There’s always something we haven’t imagined. And erectile dysfunction isn’t a topic I know much about. That’s one of the things about being with another woman: It’s not an issue.
[Sorry about the spacing. My computer’s in rebellion and frankly I sympathize with it.]
But that didn’t discourage someone else (or the same person using another name) from sending me a Viagra link. After a bit of preliminary bullshit, the comment offered me advice about snoring. So what’s the connection? Does Viagra keep men awake or put them (or possibly their partners) to sleep? The world needs to know.
Another comment offered me advice on brushing my teeth. I shouldn’t use a brush with difficult bristles and should make sure I clean my teeth “for around 2 moments.”
Spammers, beware of the thesaurus. It is a powerful but dangerous tool and that leads the unwary into deep woods where they are surrounded by people they can’t see who are laughing at them. For reasons they–the thesaurus users–don’t understand.
I know, I know, you’re going to tell me the spammer wasn’t using a thesaurus, they were using a Something-to-English dictionary, and you’re probably right, but the bilingual dictionary and the thesaurus have this in common: They give you a lot of overlapping words that have very different meanings and they don’t explain what the differences are. You go, for example, to your Something-to-English dictionary and look up the Something for hard, and the dictionary gives you English words that range from difficult to tumescent. And if you don’t cross-check those meanings with an English-to-English dictionary (or at least with the English-to-Something side of the dictionary you’re already using), you end up telling people not to use a toothbrush with tumescent bristles.
Which is probably good advice. So forget what I just said. Use the dictionary. Or the thesaurus. Send the spam. The world’ll be a better, safer place because of it.
I also got comments offered me advice on playing golf, buying stocks, coping with sleep apnea, and getting rid of zits. Because someone out there wants to know this stuff and is happy to have an imaginary stranger tell them what to do.
And finally, limping in at the end comes the flattering request comment, a theoretically surefire way to hook the target’s flagging attention.
! I realize this is somewhat off-topic but I had to ask.Does building a well-established website such as yours require a large amount of work?I am completely new to writing a blog but I do write in my journal everyday.I’d like to start a blog so I can share my personal experience and views online.Please let me know if you have any kind of recommendationsor tips for new aspiring bloggers. Thankyou!

 

That came from Alberta (an alleged person, not the Canadian province), and no, Alberta, it’s not hard at all. All you do is get yourself a clever computer program, input the letters of the alphabet (make sure you don’t leave any out–that’s the hard part), and let ‘er rip. Your blog will write itself and all you can sit back and gather up the compliments.

Village raffles and the Cornish Methodists

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Until recently, I believed that if you got more than three people together in Cornwall, and possibly anywhere in Britain, you had to hold a raffle. It wasn’t required by law, I’d have said, but by custom, which is much more powerful.

This wasn’t some random belief snatched from the dreamfluff in my mind. At every event we went to, from the village theater group’s performances to the Christmas craft sales, from fundraising lunches to anything else you can think of, there was a raffle. As soon as you went in the door, someone sold you a strip of tickets.

So we assumed raffles had been around from the time of the Druids.

Yes, the Druids. You know why they held the oak tree sacred? Because they used the bark to make raffle tickets.

 

Irrelevant photo: A rare bit of snow on the whatsit shrub in February.

I’m giving you a link here. Not because it proves the Druids made raffle tickets from oak bark but because it says they held the oak sacred, proving that I didn’t make that part up. I’ve gotten cautious since a web site picked up my riff about Druids worshiping the Great Brussels Sprout and repeated it as—may the universe forgive me, especially for still half-thinking it’s funny—verifiable truth.

So in the name of caution, please remember that there’s a difference between saying the oak was sacred and proving it. I can’t tell you, from my own knowledge, whether it’s true. But that Druid/oak stuff happened a long time ago, and how many of us really care? It’s a side issue.

Were there Druids in Cornwall? The best Lord Google could give me was a bunch of uproar about modern self-proclaimed Druids. So I’ll give you a definite maybe on that. Cornwall has its own history, and it’s not your standard-issue English history.

But we were talking about raffles.

I found out a few weeks back that raffles haven’t been in the village since the Druids (if they were ever in the village). They’re an import. Some Cornish villages don’t hold them at all.

Why not? Because of the Methodists.

The Methodists are not to be confused with the Druids. If you’ll forgive a generalization, Methodists 1) don’t paint (or possibly tattoo) themselves blue and 2) don’t consider the oak sacred. They also don’t drink or gamble. Or at least the early Methodists didn’t. More recently, the church has taken the position that “total abstinence [that’s from alcohol] is a matter for individual choice. It is not a condition of membership. Methodists are recommended to make a personal commitment either to total abstinence or to responsible drinking.”

Communion wine is nonalcoholic.

They’ve also eased up on minor-league gambling, although they do say that just because they’ve loosened of the rules that doesn’t mean chapels should think they can open up a new revenue stream.

Methodism is an important part of Cornish history, and we’ll get to that in a bit. In the meantime, what you need to know is that the great historical divide in the village is between church, which is to say the Church of England, and chapel, which is to say the Methodists.

“Historical,” in this context, means before the flood of incomers guaranteed that the larger divide would be between the old village and the new.

It was the incomers who introduced raffles.

Since I’m neither church nor chapel, I’m not the best person to sum up the differences, but I’ll tell you a story about them:

I was part of a village committee a few years ago and the topic of church and chapel came up. For some reason, it struck me as a good place to ask one of the really important questions that was bothering me: Why is it that chapels have toilets but churches don’t?

“Keeps the sermons short,” someone told me.

I haven’t heard of any village Methodists getting into a huff about the raffles that incomers imported, but I have heard of one who’ll donate a pound to whatever cause the raffle is raising money for but refuse his strip of tickets. I’ve also heard of a nearby village where you wouldn’t dare hold a raffle. There are various strands to the Methodist Church, and in that village they’re old school Methodists.

How did Cornwall become so heavily Methodist?

According to Bernard Deacon’s Cornish studies resources, “On [John Wesley’s] very first visits [to Cornwall] large numbers of people turned out to hear him preach in the open air. Even the opposition stirred up by some local gentry during the politically sensitive time of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 could not prevent a growing interest in what the Methodists were saying. It wasn’t long before chapels began to appear, especially after the 1760s. By 1785 over 30% of Cornish parishes contained an active Methodist society. Growth then really accelerated and by 1815 the vast majority of parishes (83%) possessed a Methodist presence. By the time of the Religious Census of 1851 a higher proportion of Cornwall’s church-going population attended a Methodist chapel than anywhere else in the British Isles.”

He goes on to say that “the Church of England was failing in Cornwall by the 1770s. Numbers of communicants in that decade were very low in some parishes…. Formerly, the finger of blame for this state of affairs was pointed at its non-resident and distinctly unsaintly clergy. They subcontracted out the business of caring for parishioners to underpaid and incompetent vicars, while preferring to spend their time eating, drinking, chasing after foxes and in general hobnobbing with the landed gentry (to whom many of them were closely related in any case). Yet, research indicates no connection between attendance at Anglican communion in the late eighteenth century and non-residence. Furthermore, energetic and evangelical churchmen were not unknown in Cornwall…. Although the Anglican church in eighteenth century Cornwall…does not appear much worse than anywhere else.”

He suggests several reasons for Methodism’s appeal here. Cornish parishes (meaning Church of England parishes) were larger than they were in England, loosening the church’s control. And industrialization increased this by creating new population centers that were far from the churchtowns established in the medieval period.

I can’t find a definition of churchtown, but our parish has one. It consists of the church and a small handful of houses. Our village doesn’t really have a center, but the churchtown is very much off on its own and most people would’ve had a hike to get there on a Sunday.

The Cornish gentry were also scarcer than the English, “to some extent squeezed out by the Duchy of Cornwall’s manors,” and by a tradition of people making a living as combined smallholder and tinners, which left a tradition of social independence. “The influence of squire and parson” could never be taken for granted, and with the rise of new money, neither could social deference.

At the same time, industrialization—which in Cornwall mostly meant mining and which Deacon points out was rural, not urban—meant that people’s livelihoods weren’t secure. Their jobs and incomes were tied to global fluctuations, and an increased population meant that a smaller percentage of people had smallholdings to fall back on in hard times.

“Traditional life may have looked familiar in the mid and late eighteenth century [but] it was steadily being hollowed out.”

All of this created fertile ground for Wesley’s message, which “assured people that redemption was open to all and anyone with sufficient faith could be saved. This was the news that was energetically propagated by charismatic preachers, many of them local men and some at first women, who spoke the Cornu-English dialect of the people and arose from the people. Moreover, a flexible, adaptable organisational framework of classes and bands, grouped into societies, soon created a vigorous Methodist community that paralleled that of the Church of England, but one that was both bottom-up and much more participatory.”

Historians argue about whether Methodism was a conservative force or a radical one. My best guess is that the argument goes on because it contained elements of both. On the one hand, “it imposed quietist values of self-discipline and patience in the face of suffering in the expectation of the joys to come in the next world, values that dissolved class antagonisms.” On the other hand, it gave a voice to women, to miners, to the disenfranchised. “It legitimated the morality and structures of ‘traditional’ Cornish society. It upheld and validated the cottage as a socio-economic unit in the face of the changes being wreaked by an external modernity.”

For a bit of period detail, let’s quote from The Cornwall guide, which adds that “On one of [Wesley’s] very early visits…the gruelling six day journey from London was made even more difficult by heavy snow on Bodmin Moor. With no road yet built and fearing to get lost as night fell, Wesley sent his two companions ahead to look for refreshment. They arrived at Trewint Cottage, near Altarnun, and asked for food. The owner of the cottage, Digory Isbell, a stonemason, was out, but his wife Elizabeth offered them ‘bread, butter and milk and good hay for the horse’ and refused payment. To her amazement, before they left they knelt on the floor and ‘prayed without a book.’ A few weeks later they returned, this time with John Wesley himself, who had already achieved a modicum of fame. Three hundred neighbours came to hear him preach and Digory was inspired by a passage from the Bible to build an extension onto his house, for the use of John Wesley and his preachers whenever they came to Cornwall.

“Cornwall took to Methodism like no other county in England

“Wesley’s practice of preaching outdoors and in barns and cottages suited Cornwall’s geography; the rural population was huge and many villages were isolated from the parish church. Huge crowds of up to twenty thousand people were drawn to open-air meetings in places such as Gwennap Pit, where Wesley preached eighteen times.

“For a community of miners, facing danger at work every day, farmers and fishermen, threatened by creeping industrialisation, Wesley’s simple doctrine of justification through faith and instant salvation offered comfort, security and hope. John Wesley also set up health and literacy facilities in order to help the impoverished improve their lot, thus making Methodism the religion of the people in contrast to Anglicanism, which had always been the preserve of the rich.… Originally a movement designed to invigorate the Church of England from within, Methodism, certainly in Cornwall, began to drift apart from it.”

So here we are, more than two hundred and fifty years on, and in any village enterprise, attention to the church has to be balance with attention to the chapel and vice versa, even though if you mixed the two congregations together and put them on one side of an old-fashioned set of scales and then compressed the rest of the village on the other, the rest-of-the side would thunk down heavily, lifting the congregation side high in the air. Which can either be a metaphor for being closer to heaven or for losing touch with the ground. Take your pick.

Celebrating April Fool’s Day in Britain

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How do the British celebrate April Fool’s Day?
Dangerously. The newspapers–or at least some of them–sneak in a fake story and wait like giggling ten-year-olds to see if anyone spots it.
Late in the day on April 1–some good long time after I’d read the paper–I remembered the date and realized I hadn’t spotted any obvious April Fool’s joke. That made me nervous. What had I fallen for? That the school funding crisis could swing the election against the Conservatives? Nope. I’ve followed that story. It’s real. That the candy company Ferrero says Britain leaving the customs union and the single market when it leaves the E.U. “could affect an array of chocolate products, leading to shortages, delays, higher prices, limited ranges and merchandise going stale in warehouses.”
Good candidate. It’s not going to send anyone into a War-of-the-Worlds type panic. Or maybe a few people, but not many. Still, it’s not far enough out there for a prank story.

Irrelevant photo: Yet another whatsit plant, in bloom. We grow a lot of them and they have a surprising range of blossoms.

Full disclosure:I’m doing a small bit of lying for the sake of verisimilitude. And I’m using long words for the sake of impressing you. I didn’t actually go back over the headlines to see what I’d fallen for. When I started writing this post, I called up the headlines from the Observer, the Guardian‘s sister paper, to remind myself what they were that day. My memory, sadly, is more decorative than functional.

By then, the real fake story was making small headlines, because a pair of BBC presenters had broadcast it. It was a story claiming that an Italian tech firm had created emojis for the opposing sides of the Brexit debate, and it quoted members of parliament who were outraged by how divisive they were. One emoji was called the Brexit Bulldog and the other Starry Blue, which picked up on the European Union flag. I mention that because I can’t remember knowing what the E.U. flag looked like before I moved to Britain. Or possibly before the Brexit debate.
When the BBC presenters were told what they’d just stepped into, they did two things: One, admitted it to their listeners (“sheepishly,” according to the story I read; bravely, in my opinion), and two, said, “Oh my goodness.”
Or one of them said that. Surely no two people would actually say “oh my goodness.” It’s improbable enough that one of them did.
But the Observer wasn’t the only media outlet playing April Fool’s gags. A different BBC show ran a story on a kraken, a legenadary sea monster said to live off the coast of Norway and Greenland, being spotted on the Thames. The Mail said Prince Harry’s stag party would involve laverbread smoothies and chakra realignment.
A few companies piled in as well. Coca-Cola announced that it was releasing avocado-flavored Coke. Burger King swore it would be selling a flame-grilled chocolate patty with raspberry syrup and vanilla frosting. Plus candied oranges and a bun made of cake. And Heinz was coming out with chocolate mayonniase.
The West Yorkshire Police announced that they now have a police rabbit. It wears a little blue police harness and looks fearsome.
Historically, my favorite spoof is from 1977, when the Guardian ran not just a story but an entire seven-page supplement on the island of San Seriffe, commemorating the tenth anniversary of its independence from I’m not sure who. Wikipedia–that most reliable of sources (actually, it doesn’t do badly)–says it was one of the most successful recent hoaxes. If you consider 1977 recent, which, being 103, I do.
San Seriffe was revived in 1978, 1980 and 1999.
The name, in case you don’t live and breathe this stuff, refers to a kind of typeface. Typefaces come in two flavors, serif, which kind of melts outward at the bottom, as if the pavement’s too hot, and sans serif, which runs downward in a straight line and could be driven into the ground if you had a tiny little mallet.The S is silent. Or if you like it better, blends into the S of the next word.
April Fool’s Day had passed when I read the Wikipedia entry, but I do wonder about that seven-page supplement. I’ve never worked in newspaper publishing, but every kind of publication I had anything to do with was printed in multiples of four. You could, if you really had to, cut a four-page sheet in half and get two pages–one sheet of paper printed on both side–but since paper inherently has two sides–. You see the problem, right? I suppose you could run a page of ads and call that not-part-of-the-supplement but I feel this pull on one of my legs when I so much as think about it.
I could be out of date–I’ve been gone for eleven years now–but when I was still living in the U.S., all an adult had to watch out for on April Fool’s Day was silly phone messages. You know: Please call Mr Bear, followed by the phone number of the nearest zoo. Or kids switching those unpeeled hard-boiled eggs you’d left in the refrigerator for the uncooked ones.
What’s the history of April Fool’s Day? According to the Metro, there’s an ambiguous reference to April Fool’s Day in Chaucer (1390s), and then no written reference for the next 300 years, when in 1686 there’s a reference to “Foole’s holy day.”
Thirteen years after that, “On April 1, 1698, several people were tricked into going to the Tower of London to ‘see the Lions washed’, which was perhaps the first large-scale April Fool in British history.”
The Metro also says Scotland celebrates April 1 with Hunt the Gowk Day. “The pranker asks the prankee to deliver an envelope requesting help, but instead the message inside reads: ‘Dinna laugh, dinna smile. Hunt the gowk another mile.’ The recipient, upon reading it, will explain they can only help by contacting another person, and sends the victim to this next person with an identical message, producing the same result. And if that’s not enough, they also celebrate Taily Day on April 1, which involves “trying to put ‘kick me’ signs on people’s backs, plus plenty of posterior-based jokes.”
I was inclined to think this was all an elaborate joke, but I find enough references to both to think they’re probably real.
April Fool’s Day isn’t specifically British. Lord Google tells me that some version of it is celebrated–if that’s the right word, which I suspect it isn’t–throughout Europe and in Iran, India, Lebanon, the Phillipines, many Spanish-speaking countries, and the U.S. I can testify that it’s celebrated in the U.S. Beyond that, on this subject I’m not taking anybody’s word for anything.