The things we call ourselves: British titles

Posted on September 23, 2016 by Ellen Hawley

One of the joys of living in Britain is seeing what titles that pop up when I fill out a form online. I’m not talking about book titles or album titles, but personal titles. In my former life in the U.S., I got to choose between Mr., Mrs., Miss, and Dr., usually in that order.

In Britain, though? I was using a web site a while back and on the Personal Details page I pulled down the Titles menu. They offered me:

Mrs

Miss

Mlle

Mre

Sir

Lord

Lady, and

Reverend

None of the titles had periods after them. That may be a cost-saving measure. Those periods can get expensive, even when you buy in bulk.

Strangely relevant photo: This is a plant called lords and ladies.

Wild Thing and I argued about what Mre was. She favors Meals Ready to Eat, but I lean toward a misspelling of Madame: Mme. Exactly why a British web site needs to have French titles, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because someone imported it from another web site, which happened to be French.

These things happen. When I worked as a freelance writer, some real estate developer hired me to write a brochure, and I was told to basically copy it from some other company’s brochure. Why they needed a writer to do that I have no idea, but they were willing to pay me for it and it didn’t seem like a good time to argue.

The original brochure said the apartment complex had an indoor elevator. I copied that in, but at almost the last minute I asked the woman who’d hired me if that didn’t seem, um, strange. She looked at the original. She admitted that, yes, it did seem a bit odd since elevators had a habit of being indoors.

We changed it. We also changed the drawings and enough of the wording that we couldn’t get nailed for plagiarism. So I do understand how easy it is to import very odd stuff into unimaginative text.

That only makes me more curious about how those French titles ended up on the list.

But back to the actual list I pulled down: Prosaically, I checked my standard Ms. But it did remind me that we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Full disclosure: Wild Thing and I never were in Kansas. We were in Minnesota. Where they do get tornadoes but where Lord or Lady don’t show up in pull-down menus. Neither does Reverend, despite the U.S. being a more aggressively religious country than the U.K.

Further full disclosure: Although Wild Thing and I got married last summer—we both think it was in June but, romantics that we are, we’ve already managed to forget the date—neither of us goes by Mrs. We can’t see why women should be stamped with their marital status every time they fill out a form or open the mail. It’s a holdover from the days when a woman’s marital status determined her legal status and, hell, her entire life. Calling me Mrs. is a reliable way to make me bristle. I mention that in case making me bristle appeals to you.

For as many titles as Britain offers, Ms isn’t as commonly available as it is in the U.S. I’m sure it means something, although I don’t know what.

But let’s not get stuck on Ms. and Mrs. when we have so many other titles to play with.

I once took part in a letter-writing campaign to the House of Lords, which was considering a bill that has since made a complete hash of the National Health Service. As an American, I’m all too aware of what the alternative to the National Health Service looks like, so I was passionate about this. So passionate that I was willing to write to the members of an antiquated, expensive, and silly branch of government.

A government web page helpfully explains how to write to the lords who populate the House of Lords, because if you’re a lord you just might take the question of how you’re addressed very seriously. And if you’re not a lord but a letter writer trying to convince a lord of something, you don’t want to piss her or him off with your first line. So you read what the government writes and you don’t snark about it until later, when you get to write a blog post and can get as snarky as you want.

To the women lords, you say, “Dear Baroness Whoever,” but to the men you say, “Dear Lord Whoever.”

It’s interesting that you don’t say, “Dear Lady Whoever,” to the lady lords. I would have thought that lord and lady went together. You know: bacon and eggs, bread and butter, lord and lady. But lady must mean something different—probably the wife of a lord. Or—well, how would I know? I’m a barbarian and happy to remain so.

Somewhere deep in the convolutions of the British civil service is a department staffed with people who not only know all this stuff but care.

I was tempted to add a discreet touch of italics to my letters to the men, “Dear Lord,” hoping it would call up an image of my head drooping hopelessly onto a supporting hand, but diplomacy won out and I kept the whole line in respectful Roman type (which is what non-italics are called, so now 96% of you will have actually learned something from this post; an additional 3% already knew it; and the remaining whatever% stopped reading paragraphs ago).

All my discretion didn’t help a bit. The bill passed in spite of my Roman type, and the NHS has turned into organizational hash, which was the goal all along, because the American health companies are circling it like vultures around someone lost in the desert and barely able to crawl. But I won’t go on about that because I’m too angry to be funny.

One baroness did write me back, at length. That seemed like a hopeful sign. She didn’t even open her email, “Dear Plebian.”

So I wrote her back. And she wrote me back. And on we went for maybe half a dozen long emails on each side, and they got increasingly strange, because we seemed to be writing past each other rather than to each other. In other words, she wasn’t interested in what I was saying, so why was she taking her time? I was taking mine because she had some power, or at least the semblance thereof, and for quite a while I suffered from the delusion that I might convince her of something. Gradually, though, I began wanting to ask, “Don’t you have a country to run or something?”

I was grateful when at long last she stopped writing.

Her name later showed up on a list of lords who had financial interests in private health care companies, which should have disqualified them from voting on the bill but didn’t.

Dear lord.

I still want to know why she took the time to write me. Is she so at sea in the House of Lords that writing pointless letters to a random stranger gives her some feeling of purpose?

I notice that Baroness isn’t one of the choices on the pull-down Titles menu. If the baronesses use the site (and I have no idea at this point what the site actually was), They have to be either Lord or Lady. Or if they want to go slumming with the rest of us, Ms or Meals Ready to Eat.

Gay marriage, romance, and village life

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Ellen Hawley

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Wild Thing and I got married a couple of weeks ago. It was a Wednesday morning and we wore jeans and running shoes (and, yes, other stuff), which is probably enough to tell you we didn’t make a big production out of it. We’ve lived together for thirty-nine years now. We’ve had a civil partnership for—um. I’m not sure how long. Eight years? Let’s pretend it’s eight years. I’m probably wrong. Something larger than five but still in the single digits. Neither of us knows when the anniversary is. Sometime in the fall.

I was the one who suggested converting our civil partnership to a marriage, even though I’m not a fan of marriage. As far as I’m concerned, if you want romance, go live together. Skip the confetti. Don’t ask for blessings from either church or state. Skip the ceremony, save the money, don’t even want the presents. For me, marriage is tainted by its long history as a property arrangement and as a way to control people’s sexuality. I won’t argue that you should agree with me, I’m just reporting on how I see it.

A surprisingly relevant photo: This is a flower.

But as we get older, the realities of state recognition have started to matter. If one of us is hospitalized, we want the other one to be automatically recognized as the person in charge. Sure, we can draw up legal documents and we have, but how many of us have them in our back pockets when we need them?

Civil partnership gave us all that within the borders of the U.K., but recognition is iffier when we travel.

What really decided it, though, is that we probably won’t die in tandem. Since we’re spread across two countries and the U.S. doesn’t recognize civil partnerships formed abroad, converting our civil partnership to a marriage seemed like a practical decision. It will leave the survivor less of a mess at a time when she’ll have more than enough to deal with.

Cheerful, aren’t I? But y’know, we’re getting older. We think about these things.

I was reluctant—I was married a hundred or so years ago and didn’t like the woman-as-appendage feeling it gave me—but practicality won out.

An old romantic, that’s me.

I might as well admit at this point that when gay marriage first became a viable political possibility my brother asked me what I thought of it.

I want it to pass, I said, so I can take a principled stance against it.

It was a good joke and it leaves me with the itchy feeling that I need to explain myself.

I wasn’t going to tell anyone—and I mean anyone—but blabbermouth told J. Then I told J. not to tell anyone. But telling people is one of the things J. loves in life, so this was unkind. Then we told someone else and I went back and lifted the ban on telling people and—well, it went from there.

J. wanted to have a party.

No party.

J. wanted to be a witness.

We didn’t need witnesses. All we had to do was sign some papers.

J. wanted to throw confetti and see me to wear a white dress.

I haven’t worn a dress since I went into court for my divorce—wait, let me count—forty-four years ago. Or a skirt, thanks. And I only wore whichever it was then because I was intimidated. And because it was a long time ago, when slacks weren’t as widely accepted.

J. back to wanting a party.

No party.

Two days later, I saw J. again and seized my chance.

“What makes you think it’d be me wearing the dress?” I asked.

I didn’t get an answer, but that was okay. It took me two days to come up with the question. I didn’t really need an answer.

That’s the thing about gay marriage, though. You don’t know what to count on. You just have to stand back and see how the couple’s going to play it.

Somewhere along the line, one of us told G., who I sing with sometimes, and I’d blame blabbermouth but it was probably me. So G. and some other people from singers night gave us a card and a dwarf magnolia to plant in the back yard, and for all that I wanted to keep the whole thing to ourselves, I was touched and, irrationally, began to feel less reluctant.

What can I tell you? We’re social animals and we’re not entirely rational. If we even get that close.

When Wild Thing made the appointment with the registrar, we were told that we’d have to prove that we are who we think we are (are you still with me here?), so we’d need to bring two forms of identification. A passport and a driver’s license would do, but because Wild Thing has macular degeneration and no longer drives, she’d need something official with our address—a recent utility bill or bank statement, for example.

Both of which have gone paperless. And no, she couldn’t just print them off. It had to be on letterhead.

No problem, she figured. She’d go to our local bank branch and ask them to print it. But the branch can’t do that anymore. The central office no longer trusts them with paper. Who knows what they’d do with it? The only way to get a printed statement is to call some central office somewhere and wait a week to ten working days while a scribe in the back office writes it out by hand with a quill. By this time, of course, we didn’t have a week, never mind ten days.

Wild Thing begged. She explained. She was her most charming and desperate.

The woman at the central office said she’d talk to someone. Then she called back. She’d put a rush on it.

How much of a rush? We couldn’t be sure. Wild Thing gathered alternative papers. A letter from the NHS. A—oh, never mind the list. Everything she could find. It made quite a stack. We had no reason to think any of them would be good enough.

I started thinking about my parents’ tales about their own wedding. They were already living together, which—well, this would have been early in the early 1940s, I think. You didn’t do stuff like that openly then. They were working for the same union, in the same building, and took different subway trains to work so they’d show up at different times.

They fooled no one. Their co-workers would look at their watches and nod knowingly.

They’d have gone ahead and gotten married but my mother’s divorce wasn’t final. When it was, they went to City Hall on their lunch hour and discovered that the office they needed was on its own lunch hour.

They went back the next day and got married, borrowing a ring from someone and giving it back as they left the office. Their honeymoon was on the subway on their way back to work. They stayed together more than 50 years and were very close. So I grew up thinking that ceremony isn’t everything. In fact, I sort of assumed it was an annoying nuisance.

If Wild Thing and I couldn’t get married on the date we’d planned, at least we’d be part of a tradition. And we’d have a good story.

J. stepped in.

Bring a council tax statement, she said.

Onto the stack the council tax statement went, and on Wednesday off we went with all of it, wearing our best denims. Or at least our clean ones.

We saw a deputy registrar who chatted as she worked her way through the form: identification, names, dates of birth, all that stuff. Any previous names. Would I spell that?

I would. I’d meant to keep my own name when I got married that first time but didn’t take whatever steps would have made that possible in those dark days when a woman had to fight to keep her own name, so it was changed for me, which didn’t help with that woman-as-appendage feeling I mentioned.

The deputy registrar, Wild Thing, and I chatted about people who don’t like their names and people whose names end up being popular names for dogs.

We do it with such good intentions, she said.

You couldn’t help liking the woman, although I’ll admit we didn’t try.

Would you confirm your gender? she asked.

You do have to ask these days, I said.

She said she did have to, and some people got angry about it. A few offered to prove their gender, which was more than she actually needed.

The world’s gotten complicated, if it ever was simple. Some people do get pissed off about it.

She asked if either of us was changing her name.

Not a chance.

Eventually we got around to my father’s middle name.

Kropotkin.

Would I spell that?

Well, yes, I would. Slowly.

We’d already discussed Wild Thing’s middle name and why she hates it. I don’t have a middle name, which could be a discussion all on its own but wasn’t. My father’s, though, seemed to call for some explanation. We were having such a nice visit. And she was such an easy person to talk to.

My father’s parents were Russian revolutionaries, I said. Which is an exaggeration but it’s what I found myself saying. What they really were was Russian Jewish radicals. They didn’t actively foment revolution. For one thing, they were busy raising four (at the time they emigrated) kids, and trying to feed and clothe and educate them, which is enough to keep most people, radical or otherwise, occupied. For another, I’m not sure revolution was on the agenda when they were still Russia, and I don’t think they’d have felt at home in the parties that wanted a revolution.

When they got to the U.S., I went on, they felt free to name their kids anything they damn well wanted to, and my father was their first American-born child so they named him after a Russian anarchist prince, Peter Kropotkin.

Talk about middle names that aren’t easy to carry through life. I learned to use his middle initial only when I filled out school forms. Using his full middle name gives me an odd, can-I-really-do-this? feeling.

She printed out the form, all of us signed it, and that was it. We were married.

By way of a honeymoon, we went to the supermarket and picked up some fruit. We were getting low. It’s summer. We like fruit.

When we got home, J. and A. had broken into our house, with M.’s help, and left a banner, a balloon, flowers, fruit, vegetables, cards. The kitchen table was practically overflowing. Our brave dogs—our watch-shih tzus—had done nothing to guard the house. And when J. and A. had trouble with the key, the neighbor gave them a hand.

So much for security.

We now had enough fruit to start a fruit stand. Every time I looked at the kitchen table, I started laughing all over again.

We put some of it away and took ourselves to lunch at the local café, which sent us home with a massive piece of carrot cake as a wedding present. They were afraid, I think, that the marriage wouldn’t be valid if we didn’t have cake.

So here we are, and I’m happy to report that nothing’s changed except that we’ve been eating more fruit than usual. Friends have snuck a bit more celebrating in on us, including F. showing up with a one-week anniversary present and friends throwing flower petals.

Not long ago, M. asked Wild Thing—teasing her, I think—which of us is the wife.

The answer is, neither of us. Or in a pinch, both of us. Or the same one who was before we got married, which goes back to the first answer: no one. It’s not about our legal status, it’s not about who plays what role. It’s about the relationship.

Comparative idiot-proofing

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Ellen Hawley

Brits are smarter than Americans. Want proof? They’re surrounded by less idiot-proofing and they—or at least enough of them to keep the country staggering forward—survive.

Example number one: The cliffs here in north Cornwall are high and dangerous, and in places the footpaths run right along the edge. And no one builds a hand rail or fence (unless the fence is there to keep the cattle or sheep back; the humans are left to fend for themselves). For the most part, no one even puts up a sign. They’re cliffs. It’s assumed you’ll have sense enough not to walk off the edge. Besides, you’d have to fence off half the Cornish coastline if you wanted to protect everyone from themselves.

Our local beach does have a sign about falling rock on one side. People ignore it, but short of installing sheepdogs to herd them away, the council’s done as much as it’s willing to. No fences.

Irrelevant photo: The beach on a much nicer day than the day when I’m typing this. The gusts are high enough that I took the dogs on a stagger, not a walk.

Example number two: Our car doesn’t have as many you-idiot buzzers as American cars, and I assume other people’s are the same. The makers count on you having the brains to take your key out of the ignition when you get out. In the U.S., they know better, because as it turns out I don’t have the brains–and let’s pretend for a moment that I’m typical of the human race. The other night, I not only left my key in the car, I left it turned so that it drained the battery. (On the positive side, the car was still where I left it.) So in the morning, when I went to drive Wild Thing to a doctor’s appointment (ah, yes, excitement; we were younger when she first got her name, but she still manages to live up to it) the car was dead, dead, dead.

You wouldn’t expect a person to complain about a car not insulting her intelligence, would you? But it does make me miss my insulting American car, which would’ve given me some sort of nasty you-idiot sound and I would have rolled my eyes and put the key in my pocket and sworn I didn’t need the reminder.

Here, the only thing I do (and I do it fairly regularly) to make my car give me the you-idiot noise is leave the lights on. You know, when it’s not dark enough for me to see that they’re on but overcast enough that they made me more visible. And then I forget I turned them on but the car—thank you, car—remembers.

When I drove cab—and we’re going back a few thousand years here—the company bought a bunch of new cars that, for the first time in Blue & White Cab Co. history, made a deeply aggressive you-idiot noise when the driver didn’t wear a seatbelt. A sizable percent of the drivers were of the Don’t You Tell Me What to Do persuasion, and they dealt with it by either fastening the belts permanently behind them or unplugging the wire between the belt and the screamy thing.

They even took a certain joy in it, as if they’d snatched back some control over their lives from an overwhelming and powerful system, and I do understand the impulse, just not the direction they take with it.

The going justification for not wearing a seatbelt was that we jumped in and out of the cab dozens of times a day—to open doors, to load and unload groceries and luggage, to ring doorbells and roust out passengers who said they’d be outside waiting for us but weren’t, so who could be bothered fastening and unfastening the damn thing each time?

Well, me, actually. Maybe it was just innate caution and maybe it was tales from friends and family who’d had their seatbelts fastened during accidents and had come through without a scratch. Maybe it was the accident I had, in a car with no seatbelt, where I ended up in the back seat with the lid of a coffee pot on my head and one boot still beside the gas pedal, ready to keep driving even without my foot to help it. I didn’t have a scratch on me, but I was dazed for the rest of the day.

We didn’t really jump out of the cab that many times a day. I mean, come on. Open the door for people? Only for the elderly and for people who needed to be, um, encouraged to leave. We weren’t fuckin’ limo drivers, trying to make our passengers think they were aristocrats.

Yes, cab driving did wonders for my attitude.

Anyway, I wear a seatbelt so regularly that it took me nine years to find out our current car screams when the driver doesn’t wear one. But I now officially miss all that other you-idiot buzzing. I not only had to ask our neighbor to drive Wild Thing to her appointment, I had to call the roadside assistance, which I’m grateful that we have because we don’t have a charger. While I waited for them, I was so pissed off that I tried out a hot cross bun recipe I’d found on the internet. I couldn’t think of anything else to do with myself. But the recipe turned out to have some uncertainties: How sticky a dough is a somewhat sticky dough? Is that bread flour or plain flour? Are those photographs really the buns you made or did you download it so we’d be impressed?

I used bread flour and left the dough too sticky, so the buns flattened out and even if they hadn’t they wouldn’t have been round anyway because I’m a practical baker, not a decorative one, plus they didn’t taste particularly like hot cross buns although they weren’t bad, and since I couldn’t be bothered putting a cross on top because the cross is decorative and I don’t have a lot of patience for that and would feel kind of weird about the religious symbolism anyway although I wouldn’t if I were buying them instead of baking them [quick pause for breath here], they ended up being cold secular buns. Not at all bad but not hot cross buns.

Then the guy came to jump the car and the world looked like a marginally better place. I don’t need a buzzer to keep me back from the cliff edges, but I will not complain about being insulted by my car.

If you want a cold secular bun, stop by soon. They’re going fast.

How people find a blog, part 2. Or 3.

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Ellen Hawley

What does the world really want to know about Britain? For the second (or possibly third; I’ve lost track) time, I’ll tell you. And how do I know? you ask (if you have any sense). I track the questions that lead people here, and this is an entirely scientific and reliable system because search engines are entirely reliable and the internet is a place of complete sobriety and good sense.

Semi-relevant photo: Fast Eddie, who gets a mention below.

People have asked about:

Geography:

Why Britain is called Great Britain. This is the most commonly asked question and it comes in assorted forms and with an interesting misspelling or three thrown in to keep me amused. It’s also one of the questions I actually answered.

The Silly Isles in Britain. This search is so logical and so wrong. Give the writer credit for knowing how the islands are pronounced, then get out your red pen and write “Scilly Isles.”

Do Brits still like American tourists? I’m not sure. Did they ever? Maybe not, because people also want to know Why Brits hate American tourists, Not to mention Do Brits see Americans as naughty children? and (irrelevantly) Why do Americans love the British? None of this is exactly geography, but I’m assuming the writers are thinking of traveling. Close enough. And really, folks, the answer to all of this is that there is no single answer. The British haven’t achieved a unanimous opinion on this. I’m tempted to add “or on anything else,” but that’s just wise-assing around. They have a consensus and maybe even unanimity on the weather and on baked beans.

Culture:

Gloucester cheese rolling. I’m glad to see it getting some recognition. This is a deep and resonant part of British culture. It must be, because I can’t think of any other way to explain it. Someone was also looking for British culture celebrations, although it’s hard to know if they wanted deep-rooted folk traditions (in which case see not just Gloucester but also the flaming tar barrels) or high culture, in which case go elsewhere because I’m useless.

(A note about why I’m providing links on some topics and not on others: Some posts are easy enough for me to dig out. Others are buried somewhere in this morass, and as people here say with such style, I can’t be arsed.)

American and British manners. That’s easy: We (that’s Americans) have none; they (that’s the British) have lots. I’ll group this with American and British dinner manners TekeT. What does TekeT mean? For all I know, it’s some obscure element of British dinner-table manners that I haven’t picked up on and, oh, how I’ve been offending people. Or the cat walked across the keyboard. But what I really want to know is how the writer got two capital letters past Google’s No Caps filter, because those capital Ts are from the actual search question. And no, it’s not really a question, but let’s move on. For no particular reason, I’ve added caps into the questions in this post, except for those two Ts. But to answer briefly, British eating is knife right, fork left and how you hold the fork indicates your class. What should a foreigner do? Dive for cover, because whatever impression you want to leave people with—except the impression that you’re an outsider—you won’t get it right. Americans, on the other hand, juggle the tableware from one hand to the other. Not the plates, though. Or the glasses. Sorry. Just the fork and knife. What should be done to show good manners in Britain? I had a burst of these, possibly from some single person who didn’t find an answer but kept coming back, and possibly from the misdirected half of a class whose teacher assigned the question. It’s an interesting concept. I always thought of good manners as something you have—you know, the way you have a dime or a stomach ache or black hair. But this is about showing them, the way you show a bus pass. If I ever figure out the answer or why the difference is significant, I’ll write a post.

Poster showing difference between city life and village life (maxi…). I’m guessing that “maxi…” is a word limit that got cut off, although how a word limit applies to a poster I don’t know. But whatever the word limit is, kid, go do your own homework.

American swearing vs. British swearing. Ah, now this is important. Sadly, I don’t feel I can do justice to the British side of the topic. Maybe we could explore it as a community. If we put all our twisted little minds together we’ll learn something interesting. As for me, I swear in American and if you’ll forgive me for bragging, I’m not bad at it. Still, I don’t want to monopolize that side of the conversation, so I welcome all contributions, British, American, and other. I’ll open by saying that Americans don’t use bloody as a swearword and—if you’ll forgive a generalization—aren’t sure if it’s a mild one or a strong one. Who’s next?

The British and their pets. They have them. They love them. (Sorry—more generalizations. When you write about a culture as if it was all one thing, that happens.) If you want to start a conversation, look for someone with a dog and ask about it. Or talk to the dog. The person may answer.

New subsection, same topic:

Why are these stupid wigs worn in court? This came from a lawyer or judge. Notice that phrase “these stupid wigs.” The writer has one in hand. Or on head. And is not happy about it. I sympathize. I got several versions of the question. Most included the word stupid, one was about judges’ wigs, one was about lawyers’ wigs, and one was about ill-fitting wigs.

What has happened to Mrs. Baggit signs? Ah, nothing goes to the heart of British culture like a judge’s wig or a Mrs. Baggit sign. They read (and that read can be read as either present tense or past; take your pick), “Mrs. Baggit says, ‘Keep Britain tidy.’ ” But to answer the question, I have no idea. They are (or if they’ve all disappeared, were) so obnoxiously fussy that I just loved them. In a twisted sort of way. If they’d been in the American countryside, they’d have been used for target practice. Or they’d be decorating the walls of some teenage bedrooms.

Do bearskin hats grow? No. Once the bear’s dead, the hat can’t grow.

Neutral accent different from British accent if migrating to UK. There is no such thing as neutral accent, my friend. Every accent’s an accent. Even yours. Even the one you teach yourself in order not to sound like yourself.

British pub archive quizzes. Sorry, if an archive exists, you won’t find here. I hate quizzes. Go make up your own.

Who are the emmits? If you’re asking, sorry, dear, but you are. And so am I.

Tutting in U.K. This also goes to the heart of British culture. Probably even more than the Mrs. Baggit signs, the wigs, and the baked beans. Since I’m not only an emmit but a foreigner, I can’t give a tutorial on either tutting or being tutted. All I can tell you is that if you’ve been tutted, you broke one of the culture’s unwritten rules. And the laws of probability state that it was probably about standing in line—or queuing, as the British say. It’s the national religion and if you sin you will be tutted.

Brit TV. Yes, they have it here. Some of it is good. Some of it isn’t. And some of it is the Chelsea flower show. Or Springwatch—an hour a day for an entire week on wildlife in spring. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your taste in TV.

Crime in Britain. They have that too. Possibly even at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Flying the flag, U.S. & U.K. They tend to do it less here. I’m guessing they already know what country they’re in. In the U.S., we have to reassure ourselves about that.

Food:

Scheme to compliment Dorset cream 68. Does it have to be a scheme? Can’t you just come out and tell it it’s wonderful? But before you compliment the Devon stuff, you should at least check out Cornish cream. They’re exactly the same (as far as this emmit can tell), but in bitter competition. But about that “68”: It worries me. If it’s a year, the cream will have gone bad by now.

Toffee sticky pudding recipe. (Also sticky toffee pudding recipe.) A few people knows what matters in life.

Must eat sprouts during Christmas in U.K. I had a burst of questions about brussels sprouts and then silence—maybe because the season was over. They’ll be back next year.

Why English beer tastes like American beer. Dunno. I always heard that it didn’t.

British garlic cheese. I haven’t seen any anywhere. On the other hand, I haven’t been looking. It doesn’t taste like American beer, though.

Scones with jam in the middle. You put the jam in the middle after you bake them. Scones are like toast that way—a do-it-yourself operation. The only time I can remember seeing them pre-jammed is at village events, probably to keep anyone from taking too much. Or (to put a kinder interpretation on it) because it’s faster and less messy .

Lemon drizzle cake using cup measurements. Every time I review the searches that lead people here, someone—and usually several someones—is (or are, take your pick since we’re working with both the singular and the plural) asking for a lemon drizzle recipe using cup measurements. Sadly, I completely bungled the one I posted. Will the shame never end?

A nice cup of tea analysis. Is that Freudian or chemical? Did someone spill tea on the couch? What does it all mean, doctor? Who wrote on making tea? Um, lots of people. Including me. Which goes to show you that it doesn’t take an expert. As far as I know (and that’s not far), Freud had nothing to say on the subject.

Random:

The difference between US and UK bureaucracies. What a strange world. Someone actually asked that and more or less found an answer, although I wouldn’t offer it as a definitive one.

UK headline style. That came from someone with the mind of a copy editor, only instead of going to an authoritative source (as any good copy editor would) he or she cast his or her (this gets silly very quickly, doesn’t it?) self at the mercy of Google and the internet and just look where he or she landed. In a blog written by someone who wants to use they as the generic pronoun but hesitates to do it in a sentence about copy editing even though she (that’s me—or I, if you like) does (or do) it elsewhere. Oh, stop. Even I lost my way in that mess, and I once knew what I was trying to say. Anyway, I don’t know what the official style guide is over here. I’m retired and even if I weren’t I doubt I could adjust well enough to edit in British. But having worked as an editor and copy editor in the U.S., I can insist on finding some authoritative source, which is to say NOT THIS BLOG.

Season’s greetings. I’m afraid it’s a bit late for the holidays. This seems to be an email that someone typed into the search box. I had no way to let the sender know it went astray. I feel bad about this one.

Weather:

I had a bunch of questions about naming storms in the UK and in Ireland, maybe because that was in the news for a while. The topic’s dropped out of the news and so have the questions, but storm Jacob was pounding us on Wednesday morning, when I started writing this. One of the dogs got blown over on the way to the store. Not that the winds were apocalyptic. He’s the pup—the silly one you’ll find in the photos here—and he was off balance anyway. But it was wild out there. I got them home just before it started hailing.

Not about Britain but too good to leave out:

Could a bat have flown into a high shelf for shoes in my closet? Yes, I’m pretty sure it could have. Did it? Well, it didn’t take the train, so if you found one there I’d say the answer’s yes. Are the shoes relevant to your question? Probably not, but they’re interesting. It never crossed my mind to put shoes on a high shelf. At my house, they go on the floor, where my feet spend their time. That’s either logical or unimaginative. Or maybe it’s just because I’m short.

American greeting rituals. Mostly we just say “hi,” but occasionally we tear off our clothes and run three circles around the nearest piece of furniture while waving feathers. Then put our clothes back on and act as if nothing happened. But that’s only with people we know well. As a casual visitor, you’re not likely to witness it or have to take part.

Sex scandal American. What, was there only one?

Americans commenting on your U.K. accent. Ah, yes, they will. But they’ll love it. Even if they make fun of it, somewhere in there they’ll believe it’s the most sophisticated accent on earth.

The cutest kitten in the universe. That would be mine. Just ask him. But he’s almost a cat now. He’s still cute, but he’s lost that kitten factor. Very sad.

All-time strangest search:

Veri veri sepr sex. I’m reasonably sure that’s not Latin for I had super sex last night and want to tell someone I don’t know all about it. But I never studied Latin, so don’t take my word for it.

Britain and fandom

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Ellen Hawley

Every so often I get contacted by someone who wants me to slip a commercial post into the blog. Or to get out of the way so they can slip it in. They swear that what they write will blend seamlessly into my style, to which I can only say, “Oy vey.” (That’s Yiddish–most of the Yiddish I know, in fact. It means, roughly, oy vey. You can translate it to holy shit if you like, which preserves just the tiniest bit of the spirit and is an extremely non-literal translation.) But back to the commercial posts: The writer would have to be as unlikely as I am to make a post blend.

I’ve also been asked to review products, during which review I’d have to swear blind that I haven’t been paid/asked/whatevered to promote whatever it is. I’d need to present myself as objective and moved by who knows what spirit to let you know about this thing. It’s not clear what happens if my post consists of “this product is crap.”

The whatever that they offer in return for any of this is generally a bit of promotion–tweets, mentions, that sort of thing. Whether anyone pays attention to their promotion they don’t say.

Admittedly, Notes isn’t such a massive blog that I get approached often, but it does happen.

Irrelevant Photo: Why Wild Thing hasn't been able to take a photo of the puppy.

Irrelevant (and blurred) photo: Why Wild Thing hasn’t been able to take a picture of the puppy.

The most tempting approach was a request to review the Poldark series that PBS had picked up from the BBC to broadcast in the U.S. It wasn’t tempting because I like the show but because it just screams to be made fun of. (Note: I don’t dislike the show, I’m just lukewarm on it.) But I’m never going to win the making-fun-of-Poldark sweepstakes, so what’s the point of trying? It’s already been won by whoever put together the Proper Poldark series, which adds a new soundtrack to the clips from the show. The characters look serious and discuss silly topics in the thickest possible Cornish accents. I don’t know why they haven’t been sued, but—. Oooh, come to think of it, I don’t know that they haven’t been sued, I’m assuming it. I hope they haven’t.

Poldark’s strengths seem to be: 1. Aiden Turner taking off his shirt to (pant, pant) cut hay. I welcome the scene as a counter-balance to all the under-dressed women who get shoved in front of a camera (although the scene is less gratuitous than under-dressed women’s usually are), but personally? Not interested. Men’s pecs just don’t do it for me, even when you add in a nice set of stomach muscles. 2. The scenery, which is beautiful, although I don’t think that’s what keeps the ratings up. 3. I’m sure there’s something else but I’m not sure what it is. The costumes, I guess. The re-creation of the period. Aiden Turner without his shirt, which if you’re into that sort of thing is very much that sort of thing.

Last fall we were down west (translation: in the part of Cornwall where the show’s filmed) and fans were so busy mobbing an outdoor set that the crew could barely get its work done. Did Aiden Turner have his shirt on? I don’t know.

Anyway, I said no to the invitation to review it. I don’t do reviews, and that saves me a lot of grief.

Then last week I got an email with a link to a map of Downton Abbey locations, in case my readers might be interested in using it to plan their vacations. Did I want to mention any of my favorite locations, review them, and link to the map? No, I didn’t. No language on the planet can hold a description of how much I don’t want to do that.

Wild Thing and I did watch Downton Abbey for a while—I’m usually a sucker for a costume drama—but after a while we just couldn’t stand it anymore. All that sentimentality about an ossified class system got to us. Plus we weren’t impressed with the writing and Wild Thing passionately wanted the noble valet, whatever his name was, hanged. Or hung. Whichever form of the verb would get him off our screen fastest. And since the scriptwriters wouldn’t cooperate, we found our own way to doing him in: We turned the TV off.

Why am I writing about this? Mostly, I think, because when I wrote back and said I wasn’t a Downton fan, the woman who’d contacted said she hadn’t been sure I was (translation: she’d figured I wouldn’t be) and she came off as an actual human being, which is rare in this sort of interaction. But also because her email started me thinking about fandom in general and fandom of all things British in particular.

I live near where Doc Martin’s filmed. Now the character Doc Martin started life in a very funny movie, Saving Grace, about a widow and quintessential English gardener who turns to growing weed as a way to keep from losing her house. Which is in Cornwall. If you haven’t seen it, you should. (That’s as close to a review as you’re likely to find here.) For reasons I can’t begin to understand, someone gave the Doc Martin character a personality transplant and a TV series all of his own. I’ve watched it once or twice and don’t like it. (That’s close to a review too, isn’t it? You see how easily a person can abandon her principles?) The scenery’s great and any number of people from our village have been extras, but that hasn’t been enough to hold me.

But never mind what I think of it, because its fans love it and have turned Port Isaac, the village where it’s set, into a no-go area in the summer. They love the show so much they want to crawl inside it and live there.

What is it about fans? I understand fantasy. I understand loving a show or the world it takes place in. I understand wanting to live inside it. But I also understand that it’s not possible. No matter how much you rub yourself against the stones of Port Isaac, you won’t be transported inside Doc Martin. You’ll be the same person you started as. Even if you moved there, you’d still be you. The people who do live in Port Isaac have real lives, with real problems, not TV-show problems.

Ditto Downton Abbey and its locations.

But here’s the link to the Downton Abbey sites anyway. If you want to rub against the stones of the great houses, I won’t stop you, but someone who works there might ask you to stop before you scare a busload of other tourists.

If you’re non-British, be aware that there’s an entire real country over here and it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than the pretend places we watch on TV.

And all that should be enough to get me in trouble with the fans of both Doc Martin and Downton Abbey. It’s also enough to remind me of my own hypocrisy, because I’m not above trying to tempt fans into reading me.

But whatever you want to say, go ahead and throw comments. I welcome them.

On an almost related point, my thanks to the people who’ve suggested topics for new posts. I’ve followed up on some of them and haven’t written about others. If I haven’t tackled your topic, it’s because I just couldn’t make it work. It may have been a brilliant suggestion, but nothing I wrote did it justice. Maybe at some point the light bulb will switch on and I’ll come back to it. In the meantime, I’m not ignoring you. I look at the list nearly every time I start a new post and check for the switch that would illuminate that light bulb.

If anyone wants to suggest new topics about life in either the U.S. or the U.K., I’ll write about them if I can. I love getting suggestions.

A foreigner’s guide to class in Britain

Posted on January 22, 2016 by Ellen Hawley

No American who comes to Britain late in life will fully understand its class divisions. You have to be steeped from childhood in the toxic brew of British class snobbery to catch all the nuances and signals—the accents, the clothes, the first names, the last names, the words for meals.

Example: I was listening one of Radio 4’s strange radio dramas and one of the characters was a self-involved, snobbish, clueless upper-class twit named Lulu. My completely random and occasionally involuntary research into class in Britain has taught me that Lulu is the perfect name for an upper-class twit in Britain.

Lulu?

Yup. Lulu. A name to aspire to if you aspire to be an upper-class twit.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll admit that my research didn’t offer me the word twit. That’s my addition. Let’s take it as an interpretation.

Irrelevant photo: near Minions. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

Irrelevant Photo: Bodmin Moor. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

Where and when I come from, Lulu was the hapless central character in the Little Lulu comics. It was one of those names history had left behind and it would have taken the combined efforts of all the gods humanity ever believed in to protect the child whose parents named her that. To me at least, it still carries those overtones.

On the other hand, Trevor and Clive, which Americans think of as quintessential English upper-class-twit names, are just names in Britain, with nothing twittish about them: they’re just what some people are called.

I’ll skip over the ways clothes signal class. I’m dyslexic in fashion, so you shouldn’t take my word for anything related to it. But the words for meals? Someone who knows the signals can tell your class from what you call the evening meal. But full understanding isn’t as simple as memorizing a list. You also need to know what part of the country a person comes from, because everything turns into its opposite when you cross some invisible north-south divide.

No, don’t ask me. And if I’m wrong about it, blame someone else. I’m American. I can’t be expected to understand the nuances. But that north-south divide also has something to do with class. I think.

Then there are the accents. This island (and that leaves out Northern Ireland, which is outside of my experience) compresses so many accents into a small space that spontaneous combustion is a real danger. All those accent molecules rubbing against each other can generate serious heat. Some of the accents are class or regional (which relates to class, but we’ll get to that in a minute), but others are national, as my writers group pointed out to me and as I had sort of known without really knowing it: Britain isn’t one nation, it’s four—England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—all compressed into one country.

And if you’re a Cornish nationalist, you can make that five nations.

And each nation has at least one accent. Think there’s such a thing as a Scottish accent? You’d be wrong about it. The Edinburgh accent is different from the Glasgow accent, and your intrepid researcher recognizes the Glasgow accent only by her inability to understand it.

Will it surprise you to learn that a whole lot of call centers are based in Glasgow?

I’m sure Scotland has other accents as well, but I live a long way from all of them so I’ll quit before I expose any more ignorance.

Cornwall isn’t recognized as a nation yet, but it was once its own country, with its own language, and the Cornish have very recently been recognized as an official minority. All the signs are that the county will soon have some political power (or the illusion thereof, she said cynically) devolved to it. Whether that will lead to recognition as a nation I don’t know, but it certainly has its own accent.

Incomers and the children of incomers don’t tend to pick it up, though. They choose from a grab bag of other accents and how they fix on one rather than another is anyone’s guess. Presumably they pick the ones that mark their class or education or aspirations. Or maybe they don’t pick, they just acquire, without a clue about what they’re committing themselves to. That’s the way I acquired my own accent: with no idea what I’d be signaling for the rest of my lie.

The regional accents (and there are scads of them) are looked down on by the kind of people who think it’s important to look down on these things and on the people who have them. Some middle class people will swear they don’t have an accent because the culture approves of the way they talk, and that keeps them from hearing it as an accent–it’s too clearly right to be an accent. And some will have shed a regional or more working class accent to achieve a middle-class accent. In fact, some people will send their kids to private schools just so they can pick up a middle-class accent. This is called received pronunciation, or RP.

When an abbreviation goes into ordinary speech, you know it’s worked its roots deep into the culture.

Depending on the kind of work you do, you may need to lose your accent to pick up a job.

You want proof of how much RP matters? Type Received Pronunciation into the U.K. version of Google and the predictive feature will offer you Received Pronunciation Training before it bothers with Received Pronunciation Definition. Everyone knows what it is, what matters is how to get it.

Customer service in the U.S. and Britain

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Ellen Hawley

The British seem to think the U.K.’s hopeless at customer service but that the U.S. has mastered the art. Even Wild Thing, when a British web site has chewed her up and spat her out unserved and turning the air blue, is prone to believing this.

Me? I’m not convinced.

Just before we left the U.S., For Your Convenience signs had started appearing in stores. Business letters threw the phrase around as if it would banish all complaints. These say things like “For your convenience, this store will be closed on Saturday.” “For your convenience, your water will be turned off between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. next Wednesday.”

Whatever we’re doing, we’re doing it for you. Now that’s customer service.

Irrelevant photo: Evening at Trebarwith Strand. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

But we don’t have to travel to the U.S. to find an example. All Wild Thing and I had to do was sit at our kitchen table and get chewed up by our U.S. passport renewal forms. I’m not sure we’re exactly customers in this relationship, but we do get charged for the privilege so I think it’s a fair example. In my mind, there isn’t much difference between government bureaucracy and corporate bureaucracy. They’re equally impenetrable, although they tend to set off different political resonances in people.

I wrote a bit about this experience already, [https://notesfromtheuk.com/2015/12/04/adaptation-and-pig-headedness/] but the part that needs repeating came up in the post’s comments section, and (you do have a life, don’t you?) you may not have memorized every word of it: The only way the embassy will accept renewal forms is if you send them with a private carrier. And not just any private carrier, it has to be one specific private carrier. You can’t send them through the mail, even though it’s perfectly reliable; you can’t use a different private carrier; you can’t do it online, even though you fill out the form there; you can’t drop them off in person, even if you live next door; and you can’t wrap them around a rock and throw them through the window, no matter how tempting the idea gets. You can only use that one service.

Is it run by somebody’s cousin or spouse or campaign donor? Call me a cynic (or a New Yorker, which at heart I always will be and which is more or less the same thing), but I can’t help thinking it must be.

How does this square with the American religious belief that competition is good because it drives the price down and the quality of service up? Well, as it turns out we only worship at that church when it suits us, and in this case it doesn’t. Monopoly is more efficient today, so shut up and arrange for a pickup, and if the system burns extra fuel and adds to global warming because the carrier doesn’t normally operate in your village, that’s more efficient too.

Somehow.

I will admit that the web site worked flawlessly. It was a little intimidating, but even I couldn’t screw it up, and I’ve seldom met a form I couldn’t fill out wrong. But when I printed out my completed form, it came with four pages of instructions that ended with a paperwork reduction act statement, which I can’t resist the temptation to quote in full:

“Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 40 minutes per response, including the time required for searching existing data sources, gathering the necessary data, providing the information and/or documentation required, and reviewing the final collection. You do not have to supply this information unless this collection displays a currently valid OMB control number. If you have comments on the accuracy or burden estimate and/or recommendations for reducing it, please send them to…” and a mailing address follows.

As a way of reducing paperwork, I just love this: an extra paragraph, addressed, as far as I can make out, to the public, although there’s no way your average member of the public can understand it—and I say that as someone who used to copy edit a low-budget hunting and fishing magazine, which gave me samurai-level training in turning murky prose into something approaching human language. The first sentence means, “It should take you 40 minutes to fill this out and gather the information you need.” After that, you’re on your own. What’s an OMB number and how would I know if the collection displays a valid one? What collection are we talking about exactly? What information don’t I have to supply and how do I renew my passport if I don’t supply it? And why—why, why, why—would I care that their time estimate is unrealistic? It is, since we had to submit photos in a format that’s not commonly used in Britain, but even if we lived in the U.S. it would take time to get photos printed in the right format. What, though, would make me want to tell them all that? What would change if I did?

Nothing and nothing.

But then the paragraph isn’t written with an eye toward getting anyone to do anything. It’s an extra paragraph written because someone was told to reduce paperwork, so here that someone is, proving that it’s been done. Yes! More paper in the name of less! That’s what I call customer service.

By the way, since we filled the forms out online, there’s no real need to print off the instructions—we could just as easily read or ignore them online. But once you hit Print, out they tumble, reducing the world’s paperwork by adding four extra pages.

Adaptation and pig headedness

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Wild Thing and I need to renew our American passports. To do that, we each have to send in two passport photos measuring two inches by two inches. British passport photos measure something else by something else, as do driver’s license and everything else photos, so we can’t just plonk ourselves in that little booth in the supermarket entrance, looking our worst, plug some money into the slot, and walk away with photos. And for all I know, an inch in the U.K. isn’t the same as an inch in the U.S. Why should it be when a cup, a pint, and yea, even a breath of air all change size as they cross the Atlantic?

But don’t let me sulk about that. I have and it didn’t help. The U.S. embassy is very clear about what it wants. Send us the wrong size photo, it warns, and we’ll send them back.

And put us on a watch list so we’ll never be allowed to fly again. Because the wrong size passport photo? It’s an indicator of political unreliability and who knows where it could lead.

Irrelevant photo: The beach in a storm. The wind was high enough that I had stop walking during the gusts.

So we went to a local photography studio. We walked in looking our worst and came away with two two-by-two photos each. In the process, we got to know the photographer’s two dogs (sorry—I’m not making up the numbers; there really are that many twos involved) and their histories and friendships and enemyships. (Did I mention that if you ask about a dog around here, you’ll find out about the dog?) A neighbor stopped by with a chew stick for each of them, as she does every working day. We discussed dogs a bit more, then moved on to being Cornish (“you have to have four generations in the ground here before you’re Cornish,” the neighbor said).

Wild Thing said we had dual citizenship. I can’t remember why that came up, but it made sense at the time. The neighbor said that if we were British we had to say—and I may well get this wrong but I’ll do my best—“dyual.” Or maybe I should spell that DYOO-wel, as opposed to the American DOO-wel.

The photographer agreed.

The hell we do, I thought and didn’t bother to say. It’s not something I need to argue since I have no intention of doing it.

But Wild Thing’s an accent adaptor. She repeated “dyual.” I don’t know how close she was but close enough that they accepted it for at least the effort.

I tell you this story because when I asked what people wanted to know about either Britain or the U.S, bethbyrnes wrote, “My family is from England and I grew up with a lot of rules. When I go back to the UK, I get the impression that the Brits (my family included) see Americans as naughty children and treat us accordingly. I so love England and thought of moving there eventually but I feel I might resent being seen in such a negative light. What do you think? Am I imagining this? I hope this isn’t too rude to ask!”

That isn’t even bordering on rude. But then, I’m an American, and not one with an ear for subtle rudeness.

I suspect the answer depends in part on how seriously you take dual/dyual comments. I heard the conversation as good-humored bullshit—the kind of thing you say to someone so that you have something to say to someone. In other words, teasing. Which has an ugly side, a side that not only hurts people’s feelings but also enforces conformity, but it also a we-all-agree-not-to-take-this-seriously side. What people really mean is often a matter of guesswork, and I tend to hear that second side more often than the first. I won’t argue that I’m right, only that I tend to hear it that way.

Wild Thing, I think, takes these comments more seriously than I do. When—as often happens—people talk about some TV show or comic that they find hysterically funny and we say it leaves us cold, someone’s bound to say, “Oh, well, you’re not British.” Wild Thing hears an element of pity in it. I hear a simple statement of fact. I don’t know who’s reading the signs more accurately.

I can’t remember ever thinking that we were being treated as naughty children, although we’d be an easy target for that. J. did once say that now that we were British we had to start eating dessert with a dessert spoon (which I’d have called a soup spoon) instead of a fork, but again I heard it as good-humored teasing and kept right on using my fork. I do set out dessert spoons for our friends, but you’ll find forks right beside them. Choose your weapon. This comes up often since we’re part of a small group devoted to eating dessert, discussing politics, and occasionally taking action. Not to mention trading the odd bit of gossip. The group meets at our house. So setting out spoons? I don’t expect my friends to change the way they eat any more than I expect to change the way I do. But I’m hard headed. I can take a fair bit of criticism, comment, and teasing, as long as it’s well meant, without feeling like I’m under attack.

And when a comment is meant seriously? When people genuinely do think I should eat differently, talk differently, or turn myself into their idea of what a person should be? I don’t spend much time with people like that and they don’t go out of their way to spend time with me, oddly enough. They’re welcome to their opinion and much good may it do them.

So yes, people like that are out there. But another group seems to think of Americans as free spirits and envy us our lack of inhibition. But Wild Thing, who was a family therapist before she retired, makes an interesting distinction between being uninhibited and being emotionally free. Americans, she says, are indeed less inhibited, but not necessarily emotionally free. I had to think about that for a while, but I’ve come around to her way of seeing it.

Even if it’s not true that Americans are free spirits, though, the belief’s a great counter-balance to the you’re-doing-it-wrong group.

Both responses, I think, stem from the number of rules the British grow up with. As does teasing people about differences. People learn not to call attention to themselves in public. Say you’re out in public and you trip and people rush to help you up. Huge embarrassment. Sat people you know wave their arms to get your attention from a distance. Ditto, apparently. And so on. Not everyone abides by the rules to the same extent, and there are patterned ways to break them, but the rules exist.

Whether as an American you’re treasured or criticized because you break them will depend on who you hang out with. And whether the comments you hear bother you will depend on how deeply you take these things in.

Comparative tipping

Posted on November 9, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

According to Kate Fox in Watching the English, you don’t tip bartenders in England (and by extension in Britain), you buy them a drink. Which I always thought was code, in the U.S. at least, for I’ll leave you the price of a drink and you decide whether to drink it or put the money in your pocket. Admittedly, I never spent enough time in American bars to know the rules, so no one should take my word for that. But in Britain it really does mean I’ll buy you a drink. Which the bartender will eventually drink, nodding his or her thanks to you.

Of so Fox says, and I’m sure she’s right. She sees this as marking a sort of official class equality between bartender and customer, regardless of what the class divisions (and oh, will both sides ever be aware of them) are.

Screamingly irrelevant photo: pampas grass, which is (I think) called something else here. Don't you love it when I'm informative?

Screamingly irrelevant photo: pampas grass (and the tip of Wild Thing’s lens). I think it’s called something else here. Don’t you love it when I’m informative?

(I haven’t given you a link to Fox’s book this time, although I have before. I’d link back to the embedded link but I can’t remember which post it was in and, hey people, I only get just so much time on this planet. Besides, you know how to find a book, right?)

But back to our topic: In the only pub where I spend much time—and that only because I like the singers night—the bartenders are also the wait staff, and they do get tipped for serving meals, so it takes a finer eye than mine to figure out the distinction. But it’s true that people don’t tip at the bar.

Except me. For a long time I behaved myself and didn’t tip when I bought a drink, but I’ve worked for tips, as both a cab driver and a waitress, and after a while I just couldn’t help myself. I started tipping. Sometimes at first I had to explain myself—one or another of the bartenders would think I’d miscounted my money and return the extra.

“I’m American,” I found myself telling one of them. “I tip. I can’t help it.”

I also remember saying, “I’m awkward but I mean well” since I hadn’t managed to make it clear that I was tipping—although in the U.S. I expect it would have been more than clear enough.

But no one seems insulted. The tip goes into the jar with the tips from the tables and my behavior goes into the Weird American category.

This comes up because Dan Antion commented that before he visited the U.K. he read that the British don’t tip, so he didn’t.

Sorry Dan, but they do. Not as much as Americans—or at least not as much as New Yorkers and Californians. Midwesterners are more, um, cautious with their tips. Or stingy, if you like. I haven’t done a full survey of the two coasts or of the south and west, so I won’t go out on a limb about how they tip. But the British? They tip wait staff in restaurants and (mostly) in pubs. Either many or most cafes have tip jars. And if they don’t? Wild Thing and I leave the tip on the table.

As far as I can tell, people tip cab drivers. We sure as hell do. And if something gets delivered that’s a pain in the neck for the delivery person, we tip—which often involves offering the money for a drink after work, which may or may not turn into a drink but who cares?

Around the holidays, some people we know leave money for the folks who pick up the trash and recycling and who deliver the mail—although the last one is, I think, never supposed to happen and the post office is probably coming to arrest me for even writing about it, never mind doing it. (I never said I did it, Your Honor, I only implied it. And I could’ve been lying.) Anyway, you can call those tips or Christmas presents or whatever you like. They happen, although not universally.

I’ve been reading, both online and in the papers, about campaigns to stop restaurant chains from stealing their employees’ tips. Yeah, some do that, both in Britain and in the U.S., especially if the customer puts the tip on a credit card with the rest of the bill, but sometimes even when the tip’s in cash—or in some cases if there’s no tip at all, because the restaurant acts as if there was one and charges the waitron what it figures he or she must have gotten. And it’s all okay, because if a businessman can’t steal from people with less power and money than him, how’s he supposed to make an honest buck?

Social media’s been effective at shaming the shit out of some chains that did this, but I expect others are still at it.

So whatever country you live in, tip, and do it in cash. And follow Wild Thing’s dictum: Nobody ever went to hell of overtipping.

What the world wants to know about Britain

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

If search engine terms are any measure of what people want to know about Britain, I’m full of insight. And that other stuff, but it’s not what we’re talking about right now. I’m disguising myself as a sensible bloggist, so behave please. We’re in public.

I keep a list of the search engine terms that lead people to Notes, and that list tells me everything I need in order to fake my way through a serious topic. So here we go, with Google’s lower-case style and lack of question marks carefully preserved where I quote directly. Somehow adding quotation marks seems—oh, I don’t know, un-search-engine-like, so I’ve left them out, even though things would be clearer if I added them.

Profanity

I had four searches about these: who swears more, us or uk (I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’ll depend on what you consider a swear word) and usa vs uk profanity. Both of these popped up twice, each worded the same way and in a short space of time, marking them as two repeat searches. What do we learn from this? That the people who are interested in swearing try repeat their searches and return to sites where they probably didn’t find an answer the first time.

Irrelevant photo: Chun Quoit in the fog. This is an ancient monument near Penzance. No one knows what it purpose was, but it looks a lot like a giant stone ironing board.

Irrelevant photo: Chun Quoit in the fog. This is an ancient monument near Penzance. No one knows what its purpose was, but it looks a lot like a giant stone ironing board.

Manners

On a vaguely related topic, I was on the receiving end of five searches about manners: british have nicer manners (than who?); manners and how they started (twice); american manners for brits (see next question); what about manners in the us (we don’t have any, so don’t worry about it). The idea of two polite Brits brushing up on American manners in advance of a trip is touching, in a sad sort of way. It’s thoughtful, it’s polite, and oh sweetheart, it is so not going to help.

Food

The world—and I’m exaggerating only slightly; it’s called the multiplier effect and it allows me to lie in good conscience—is obsessed with lemon drizzle cake. I have no idea why. I mean, it’s good, but I never heard of it before I moved to Britain so how did everyone else? I had three searches for recipes in cup measurements (those would be from Americans), and one asking for metric, one that just asked for and measurements, possibly of the ingredients, possibly of the resulting cake, and possibly of the person who ate it all in one sitting. Plus one wanting an easy american english recipe—presumably that’s one with the excess U’s left out because they’re fattening. I did write a post or two about this, but in trying to come up with a recipe in cup measures I screwed the whole thing up so I’m not going to link back to it, even though it’s the most important topic I’ve written about. Other searches wanted to know about english food, british food, food about england in short note (I am notably short, but I don’t think that’s what this is about), tea, and an american expat making chocolate chip cookies in England (which is cheating a bit since it’s not exactly about Britain but let’s include it anyway because that’s me; I made a batch last week, since I’m the proud hoarder of a new stash of chocolate chips).

Tourism

Tourism sites think we want to know about beaches, castles, and places to stay. Bullshit. Here’s what people want to know: do the british mind american tourists; american tourists hated; annoyed by tourists? Cornwall (the question mark, being in the middle, survived); why are british so mean to american tourists. So, with that level of paranoia, we can answer the next two questions: why so few american tourists (because they think no one likes them) and are americans in awe of Britain when they visit (they might be if they weren’t so busy worrying about whether anyone likes them and why they don’t). And three people wanted to know about emmits, which is a Cornish word for tourists, although not necessarily American ones. It’s not a compliment, so maybe those tourists and would-be tourists are onto something. And in a neat little irony, I just googled emmits notes from the uk to locate the link to the back post on emmits.

Accents and language

Three people want to know how to pronounce the Widemouth part of Widemouth Bay (Widmuth, to save you the search). No one wants to know how to pronounce anything else, although one asked about british place of interest or towns consonants missing. I don’t know what this obsession with Widemouth means. Maybe it’s the center of the universe, although you wouldn’t think so to drive through. Other searches are: talking in british english a sex (no, I don’t understand it either, but then I’m American so maybe I’m not supposed to); do the english have accents to the aussies (is a bear Catholic? does the Pope shit in the woods?); table british accent (this may have to do with food but it may have to do with parliamentary procedure, in which case it’s complicated because to table means different things in American and British usage); british accent are fascinating (yes, but not half as fascinating as Google searches); pure english word list (sorry, kid, but English isn’t a pure language). And finally, about the U.S., what do americans call cats (we call them cats, or sometimes kitty).

Music

The questions here were: raunchy folk songs british (sorry, most of my raunchy ones are American); british musical notation; why is british musical notation weird; british “folk music” strange accents. So, we’re interested in raunchy folk songs in funny accents written in weird notation. I’m so glad people aren’t judgmental about cultural differences.

Wigs

Lots of people want to know about lawyers and their wigs—their history, what lawyers think of them (they all, of course, feel the same way), whether they’re itchy, why lawyers wear silly wigs (no judgment there). Apparently if you know three things about Britain, one of them is that lawyers wear wigs. Another is that people eat lemon drizzle cake. The third? That a lot of weird things go on.

Neighbors

Someone typed in neighbor wants to know everyone’s business uk. I can’t help wondering if they had someone specific in mind. Another was interested in british dog village life and a third in british neighbors and a fourth in miss marple village. If that last one is about Miss Marple’s village, it’s worth knowing that she’s a fictional character, living in a made-up village, where 150% of the population has been murdered. Visiting isn’t recommended. Or, strictly speaking, possible.

Intercultural explorations

These were: what caused strange british traditions (sunspots) and why do english use chocolate eggs not hens’ to celebrate easter (the British have developed chocolate hens and those are their eggs, thank you very much). Don’t you feel better knowing that people are still out there wanting to learn about other cultures?

Other stuff

One person wanted to know about british schoolgirls in uniform and wanted to know it three times. He (and yes, I’m making assumptions; wanna bet I’m right?) didn’t find any photos here but kept coming back anyway. Don’t think about it too much, because it’ll only upset you. Three wanted to know about Mrs. Baggit, including one who wanted to know where to buy a Mrs. Baggit sign. One wanted to know how to break into a british phone boxed. Yes, boxed. It should be easy, since the doors don’t lock—all you have to do is pull. Phone boxes are made that way—the phone company wants you to come in. Or used to when they could still make money on them. The hard part these days is finding one. Maybe the real question was how to break into the money boxes inside them, in which case save your energy, because they’ll be empty.

Someone asked about jack rusel parkins, which baffles me since a jack russell is a dog and a parkin is a kind of cake. Google jack russell parkins, though, and you’ll end up with links to sites about the parson jack russell, which is a specific kind of jack russell.

Someone else seems to have mistaken Google for email and wrote “perhaps you would like to come for lunch or afternoon tea on a s…” It struck me as so forlorn that I’d have gone if I’d known who wrote it. If they weren’t too far away. And if—well, never mind. It’s not going to happen. But I did put quotation marks around the invitation to buffer it from this harsh world.

Other people wanted to know: who funds cornwall gay pride (Moscow); what a crooked stile is; why I (or some vague set of someones) think Britain is called great (in case you’re keeping track, I capitalized that because it’s paraphrased, but what I or whoever thinks is pretty much irrelevant to even a semi-serious answer); the metric system in great britain; winter in cornwall; british sex scandal blog spot; and she steps on snails (oh, indeed she does).

And earning its own paragraph for its sheer oddity, someone was looking for uk bkhgum pales gurd xxx. And landed here, with his or her head still spinning from the ride.

A final searcher was looking for notes from the uk. And found it. Which sounds like the ending to a kid’s picture book.

Notes from the U.K.

Exploring the spidery corners of a culture and the weird stuff that tourist brochures ignore.

Category Archives: Intercultural Mayhem