Love, death, and adverbs: It’s the news from Britain

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Residents of a care home in Surrey were sent Valentine’s cards–red heart, pink bow, all the traditional stuff—from that most caring of senders, a local funeral home. A spokesperson for the care home said residents were thrilled to get the cards, and doesn’t the involvement of a local business go to show how deeply embedded the care home is in the community? Read the quotes and you can hear “Look on the Sunny Side” playing between the lines.

Residents’ families, on the other hand–at least those who were quoted–said things like “appalling” and “insensitive.”

The funeral home itself said, “Oops” (that’s a rough summary), followed by some verbiage about “unintended distress,” and it’s that “unintended” that makes this a particularly British story. Because tossing in screamingly unnecessary adverbs is a very British thing. My favorite is when newsreaders tell  us that someone “sadly died.”

As far as I’ve been able to figure out—and I’ve lived here for almost 18 years now—you can’t die in this country without doing it sadly. You can’t die absurdly, or with a sense of relief, or even unnecessarily. Above all, you can’t die unadorned. The word died isn’t allowed out in public until it’s fully dressed and the correct adjective has been buttoned up to the neck.

Irrelevant photo: An azalea blossom. Indoors.

 

Immigration and the search for an enemy

Ten years ago, when Britain’s anti-immigrant fringe was still searching for a group of people frightening enough to rile up the populace, the Home Office discovered foreign students and offered them up as a target for some of the free-floating hate that drifts across the island with the rains that blow in from the Atlantic.

Why foreign students? The better question might be, Why not foreign students? They needed someone. The Home Office was led at the time by Theresa May, and she was working to establish her right-wing credentials by declaring a hostile environment for illegal immigrants, which ended up creating a hostile environment for legal ones. A hefty number of them were deported, but it’s never enough to satisfy the anti-immigrant lobby, so lucky Terri, Santa Claus brought her the off-season gift of a BBC documentary about cheating on the English-language competency tests that foreign students had to pass before they could renew their visas. The documentary focused on just a few test centers, but Terri turned off the TV and said, “Right. We’ll cancel the visas on 35,000 of them.” Or to put that another way, 97% of the people who took the test.

Is it even vaguely credible that 97% of the people who took the test cheated and, until Terri turned off that fateful TV program, got away with it?

Who cared? It played well with the anti-immigrant lobby, who by then had left the lobby and were occupying seats in the House of Commons.

Cue dawn raids, students held in detention centers for months, lost degrees, lost careers, lost reputations, and deportations before anyone had a chance to appeal or prove that their English was just fine, thanks. What the hell, they were a bunch of foreigners. Of course they cheated. Give them a chance to appeal and they’ll tie this mess up in red tape forever. Give them a chance to demonstrate their competence and they’ll only make us look silly.

Foreigners are sneaky like that.

So here we are, ten years late. Some 3,000 former students have won appeals and a new group is starting what sounds like a mass appeal. And since a TV series dramatizing a post office scandal drove politicians of all parties to make noise about compensating some deeply wronged sub-postmasters, a group of the former students are working on a TV script about what happened to them. To date, noise is all that’s come of the political agreement about the sub-postmasters, but still, if you can’t get justice, the illusion of it is comforting.

*

Lest you should be silly enough to expect consistency from the Home Office, lately it’s been closing its eyes and flinging work visas in what sound like some dodgy directions. Not because it now loves immigrants. It’s at least as anti-immigrant as it was under Theresa May, although it’s found a new boogey man: refugees who cross the Channel in small boats. They make for scarier headlines than foreign students.

The current crop of visas are meant for people to work in the care sector, which is understaffed and underpaid and relies heavily on immigrant workers. But the visas don’t go to individual care workers, they go through care providers, who get licenses to sponsor immigrant workers, and those providers are popping, mushroom-like, out of the soggy ground of our political bog. Or of our overdone metaphor.

One company that was granted 275 visas didn’t exist; 268 companies have never been inspected and some aren’t registered with the watchdog that’s supposed to do the inspecting. Some don’t have addresses, only post office boxes. Some have been formed so recently that they’ve never filed company accounts. One has a website with reviews from clients named John Doe and Jane Smith.

I could go on, but I’ll spare you. And myself.

The assumption is that the companies are selling the visas. I’ve seen reports of immigrant workers in the care sector paying as much as £15,000 for visas and once they get here being “housed in sub-standard accommodation and even forced to share beds.with colleagues.

“Some have been paid for just a fraction of the hours they have worked or [been] subjected to racist remarks, harassment, and intimidation if they complain about the treatment of the people they care for.

“Others have worked for several months without being paid by their employers, who claim this is to recoup fees towards the cost of the migrant workers’ training or accommodation.”

The number of companies with the power to sponsor visas more than doubled between 2022 (41,621) and 2023 (84,730).

 

How much for that Mao in the window?

A London auction house was selling artifacts–that’s a fancy word meaning stuff–from China’s Cultural Revolution, and a rare early edition of Mao Tes-Tung’s Little Red Book was expected to sell for more than £30,000.

What’s wrong with this picture? So much that I have no idea where to start, so I’ll leave you with the picture and save my adjectives for the time when, sadly, I have to report a death.

 

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a free stuffed toy . . .

. . . I can tell you how to get one.

This didn’t happen in Britain, but with a little work it could’ve, since it could happen any place where attractive nuisances entice people to trade coins for a chance to pick up stuffed toys with a mechanical claw and drop them down a chute so their kids can take them home and love them for ten minutes or so. Or not drop them down a chute, because no matter how simple it looks the machine never gives you quite enough time to get the toy where it needs to be.

In Australia, a three-year-old found a better way to get what he wanted. In the half-second when his father got distracted, he climbed up the chute and materialized inside the machine, standing upright among all the stuffed toys any kid could dream of.

Since using the claw to drop him back down the chute didn’t seem like a good idea, the father called the claw machine company, which asked helpful questions like, “How much money did you put in the machine?”

The only thing stuck in the machine was his son, he said, and he’d like to have him back.

The person on the other end of the line wasn’t programed to deal with that and the police ended up smashing the glass and extracting the kid. The media is (sadly) silent on the all-important question of whether the boy got to take a toy home.

 

From the Department of Historical Preservation

In an effort to polish Britain’s reputation for eccentricity and historical hoo-ha’s, the owner of a pub in Staffordshire, The Crooked House, has been ordered to rebuild it, brick by brick. It was built in 1765 and sank into the ground either because of mining in the area or a nearby water wheel (no, I don’t understand that last one either), until it sat at a 15-degree angle. It had been propped up in various ways over the years and was doing just fine until it was sold and–oops–mysteriously caught fire.

Then, just to make sure of things, the new owner had the shell bulldozed.

Local people got up in arms. Or up in containers, which they used to store 23,000 bricks that they salvaged from the rubble, and the new owner’s been ordered to put them back where they were, and at the pre-fire angle. Unless the owner appeals, they have three years, but they may be too distracted to bother, since the fire’s being treated as arson.

31 thoughts on “Love, death, and adverbs: It’s the news from Britain”

  1. I encouraged my children to send a Christmas card to their 98 year old great grandmother because she might not be with us much longer. My eldest wrote on the card, “Merry Christmas, great granny, but sorry you are going to die soon.” Great granny loved it.

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    • Well, that gave me a good giggle–the kind where you hold your hand over your mouth because you suspect you shouldn’t find it as funny as you do. I’m glad Greatgranny had a sense of humor.

      I’ll enter that story in the Be Careful What You Say to Kids column.

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    • The idea that a book by the advocate and architect of a fairly bare-bones form of socialism should be one sale for silly amounts of money and be sought after by collectors–well, it’s the definition of irony. And not just any book, one that was held up (literally) by an army of passionate–cultlike, really–followers, as the repository of his wisdom. Holy shit. I can’t begin to imagine what he’d have made of it.

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  5. As much as I like to follow you in many respects on this blog – I can not see what is “wrong” with selling Mao’s book (early edition, rare, collector’s item). It is a commodity / ware, like anything else. As you remarked in your answer above, it is one of history’s ironies, but this thing today is just something someone wants to possess, willing to pay a price for it.

    I find it very interesting that the gouvernement gives aspiring entrepreneurs such a nice chance to get a foot into the visa business, a real incentive. Only cynics would call it “slave trade Mk 2”. Direct import ?

    What I can not understand is how those pesky kids manage to get into these toy grab machines. One should think that they can make these apparatus pesky-kid-safe, similar to squirrel safe bird feaders. But no.
    The companies should throw in little plastic skeletons to help parents’ efforts on “education” : “See what happened to little Tammie.”

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    • The plastic skeletons. Hmm. You think it might, just maybe, take some of the optimism out of the game? As for the Little Red Book, yes, it’s the commodification (thanks for bringing the word “commodity” into the discussion–it brings me closer to what I was reaching for) of Chairman Mao that makes it so ironic.

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      • Tah, see what you made me do : I fished out my Kleines Rotes Buch (Peking 1972), and astoundingly I knew where to look (found it in minutes), while I usually have to search for other titles for quite some time.
        Of course I bought it once, but always preferred the un-dogmatic (non ML), anarchist faction, so read my Bakunin, Malatesta, of course R. Rocker, Souchy, those guys (Spain, late Thirties, all that). 
        (B.Traven, still my “hero”. I detest the word & concept, but have nothing better right now, sorry.)
        All that crap a young Edelmensch has in his brian, deeply Romantic in the end.
        I even found a Studentenausweis as marker, 1986, Geschichte zur Promotion, yeah, what else ?

        Mao says nothing about tinnef-grabbing-machines.

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        • I haven’t read much of B. Traven, but I read The Carreta when I was in my teens and it stayed with me in a way that many of the books I’ve read didn’t. I consulted Lord Wiki just now to remind myself of everything we don’t know about him. If you’re going to have a hero and dislike the word hero, he’s not a bad candidate since almost nothing about him is solidly known. It fits well, don’t you think?

          I’m surprised to learn that Mao left such an important gap in this writings.

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  6. To leave a comment simply click harder. and repeatedly with unbounded optimism. sincerely the WP happiness engineers and technicians. sometimes it takes a moment or more to get the blood and the binaries flowing…

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  7. Dang ! I thought the right-wing anti-immigrant policies Over Here were the prize winners. I (sadly) stand corrected. On the other hand, you Over There don’t seem to be spending the taxpayers’ money to fly the immigrants from one shire to another, as in Ron DeSantis version of “neener-neener-neener”

    I left a comment on your last post, had to jump through several hoops and sign in again, but it never showed up, so we’ll see what happens this time.

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    • You have appeared. I should probably write to WordPress and give them some grief over it being hard to leave comments. I doubt it will help, but it’ll make me feel like I did my bit.

      Since you mention taxpayers money, I should tell you about the plan to fly immigrants to Rwanda. It’s yet another cynical and expensive way to make refugees miserable, because otherwise it’d be such fun to flee your home and seek safety someplace else. The idea is that they’ll dump them there and then consider whether they have a right to be in Britain. And after the Supreme Court ruled that Rwanda isn’t a safe country, they rewrote the plan, declaring it to be safe as if that addressed the problem. It would be incredibly expensive, it’s been declared unconstitutional, and will probably never happen, but they’ve sunk a lot of money in it already.

      And to save money on housing refugees (who aren’t allowed to work while their cases are considered for endless lengths of time), they’ve spent a shitload of money on a barge docked off the southern coast, which is supposed to house refugees for less money–unsafely and uncomfortably, but hey, that’s the point. It’s been tied up in objections and has had a few poor souls dumped there but will probably never house the number of people it was meant to, although I expect it’s cost more than the old system would’ve. So taxpayer money? Yeah, we’re setting it on fire here too.

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      • Liberia was supposed to be populated by repatriated slaves….even Lincoln favored this policy for a bit…or probably more accurately he hoped it might help solve the problem. The freed slaves weren’t very interested in “returning” to Africa.

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        • I don’t know that pocket of history very well, but my memory is that it was–predictably–a disaster. And another example of people assuming they could just dump a new group of people in someone else’s land because, hey, from this distance it looks empty to us.

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  8. Students? Surely it’s one thing to tell foreigners there aren’t jobs waiting for them, and another thing to show prejudice when the brightest apple-polishers in the country agree to pay double the already exorbitant tuition fees and be watched like chicks by hawks for a few years before the investors who sent them over want them back? Were some students doing worse things than cheating, or what?

    Students are so cute, so harmless, and so well behaved. At least when you’re watching.

    PK

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    • There was some cheating going on, and some schools had been accredited that weren’t (I’m working from memory here, so don’t trust me too far) legitimate schools–they just enrolled students for the tuition. The numbers were, relatively speaking, small, although the way the Home Office responded almost guaranteed that we’ll never have the real numbers. Many of the ones who were thrown out were legitimate students whose English was just fine, thanks, including some who’d grown up bilingual. For the Foreign Office, though, it was a numbers game. The most foreigners they tossed out of the country–whoever they were and whatever they’d been doing here–the better they thought they looked. So, an incredibly cynical move, and one of many.

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  9. The “sadly died” thing does become quite irritating. I suppose it allows newsreaders to announce the death of miscreants and recognise the lack of national grief simply by omitting the “sadly”. I don’t think anyone said, “Jimmy Saville has sadly died.” I can’t remember if the BBC said Margaret Thatcher just “died” or “sadly died,” but I do remember the parties.

    I was telling my American friend about the death of my partner’s friend and, after saying this person had died, I found myself adding, “passed away,” as though he might not understand the shorter word or be offended by it. I seem to have got the impression that Americans pass away rather than dying.

    Speaking of Americanisms, I work at a visitor attraction, where I have to tell people the location of things like the food kiosk and what English people call “the toilets.” One of the many Americanisms people are adopting here is to call these “bathrooms”. Sometimes people pre-empt my spiel by asking, “Do you have a bathroom?” Alas, no, I ought to answer. There’s the river, or you can wait for it to rain, which isn’t usually long, but we have no bathroom.

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    • Thanks for brightening my morning. I’ll head for the river right after lunch. It’s small and shallow, and the air around it is cold, but I should, at least, be able to get wet, if not clean. (I can’t vouch for the state of any of the country’s rivers these days.)

      A hundred years ago, when my partner and I first visited Britain, I asked for the bathroom in a fast food restaurant. I was rewarded with a double take the likes of which I’d never seen before and have never seen since. The problem here (and I’m going to step in and speak for all Americans) is that although toilet is itself a euphemism, at some point we figured out what people did there and that toxicated the word thoroughly, so we substituted bathroom. If we’re being superpolite, we can substitute ladies’/women’s/men’s room–or even powder room, because we’re beginning to have a hunch about what people do in bathrooms.

      We do, however, die. Only polite people pass away. I consulted my partner on that and this is our collective opinion. We’ve been gone for 18 years, though, so you shouldn’t take us too seriously. The thing to do is ask some of the American visitors you’re afflicted with whether people die in their country. Hell, that’s how I carry out most of my research.

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      • Yes, that’s it, euphemisms lose their politeness value after a while. Wikipedia tells me that “toilet” was a “little cloth” used in hairdressing, then became generalised to acts of washing and dressing, similar to “lavatory” (a place to wash).

        I’m quite used to Americans asking for the bathroom; it’s the locals that give me an inner cringe. For youngsters in particular, American English is becoming the norm. It won’t be long before they’re talking about sidewalks and fawcets and calling the last letter of the alphabet “zee.”

        None of that makes my ancient synapses shudder quite like another corruption that’s taken hold over recent years: “haitch”. The “Enn Haitch Ess” and “Haitch Ess Two”. I’m not sure where it’s come from, but it doesn’t seem to be an import from over the pond this time.

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        • Nope, you can’t blame us for the haitch. We’re strictly aitch people. The funny thing is that Ida–my partner and a somewhat random accent adopter–has picked up the haitch from a friend of ours, so it lands in the middle of her mostly American English.

          I’ve assumed it’s either a regional or class accent, since so many pronunciations and word choices here are. That’s not because I have actual information on the subject, it just seems like a safe bet.

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    • The foreign student fiasco is the one that really offends me. It’s ruined people’s lives, all in a race to the bottom of the moral swamp. The funeral home cards–I’ll admit to thinking that’s kind of funny. (A friend told me they missed a trick by not sending hearts that said, “Be Mine.”)

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