Category Archives: Other Stuff

Beer and British politics: The Pub Landlord runs for office

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British politics just got a bit less depressing: A new candidate just entered the race for a parliamentary seat, a comic named Al Murray running under the name of his comedy character, the Pub Landlord. His party’s logo looks a lot like the one the U.K. Independence Party (Ukip) uses, and although I hate to give Ukip any space in my earth-shatteringly influential blog, the joke doesn’t work unless you know a bit about who the Pub Landlord’s making fun of.

Ukip wants to take the U.K. out of the European Union and get rid of all of us pesky foreigners. Or maybe they don’t want to get rid of quite all of us, because Ukip’s leader is married to a woman from Spain, so presumably they’ll make exceptions, but basically they don’t like furriners coming over here, taking British jobs and speaking funny languages on their streets. Last I heard, the party leader’s wife had a paid job in his office, but I guess that wasn’t a British job, it was some other kind of job, so it must be okay.

Irrelevant Photo: Mulfra Quoit, an ancient monument in West Cornwall

Irrelevant Photo: Mulfra Quoit, in West Cornwall

What else does Ukip stand for? Well, it sort of depends when you ask and who you ask and what sort of mood they’re in. And whether they’re still in the party, because periodically one of their candidates goes too far and gets thrown out. One proposed banning Islam and tearing down mosques. Another posted anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements on his Facebook page. A third was convicted of assault. Let me quote the Mail Online here: “The Ukip official charged with vetting the party’s election candidates has revealed he spends half his time ‘weeding out the lunatics’. . . .

“The remarks come after one Ukip candidate was recorded making homophobic, racist and obscene comments—while another was exposed as a fantasist after becoming embroiled in a public sex scandal.”

Ukip does stand for a good pint of beer, though—that’s been pretty consistent and to date no one’s been thrown out for it. And they’re polling well considering that they’re a minor and basically bonkers party. Well enough to scare the bejeezus out of the major parties and drag them all into a discussion of what to do about immigration, as if everyone agreed that immigration is what’s wrong with—and probably the only thing wrong with—the country.

But back to the new party: Its name is Free United Kingdom Party, or FUKP. (Yeah, go ahead and pronounce it.) And what’s its platform? The Pub Landlord promises to burn down the Houses of Parliament for the insurance and brick up the Channel Tunnel to keep immigrants out. His most inspired proposal is revaluing the pound so it’s worth £1.10. About cutting immigration, he says, “This is the greatest country in the world and people want to move here. We need an MP to make things worse. Look no further.” On corporations and globalization, he says, “Blah blah blah paradigm blah blah blah, blah blah dialectic blah blah blah blah blah blah game-changer.” Which is pretty much what all the politicians are saying.

Finally, he pledges that the U.K. will leave Europe by 2025 and the solar system by 2050.

Politics hasn’t made this much sense since Screaming Lord Sutch ran on the Official Monster Raving Loony Party ticket.

A new page

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For  anyone who’s not sick and tired of me yet, I’ve added a page of links to essays, posts, and assorted other stuff I’ve published elsewhere on the web. You’ll find a damn good recipe for carrot-pineapple cake, an article on uplifting music and TV shows about breakups (hey, I’ll do damn near anything to promote The Divorce Diet), and all sorts of other weird stuff.

Cops and guns, U.S. and U.K. style

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No jokes today. Sorry.

Not long after the grand jury voted not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, policeman Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown, Wild Thing and I were sitting around the kitchen table with J. and M., talking about cops and guns. J. is a retired British policeman, which is another way of saying that he’s used to working without a gun. U.K. police forces do have armed response teams, but they’re the exception, not the rule. The cops you see on the street are unarmed.

J. did some training for the German police, who are armed, and he came away from it convinced that the gun can be a liability.

Deeply Irrelevant Photo: Red berries in the fall

Deeply Irrelevant Photo: Red berries in the fall

“Everything they do is about protecting the gun,” he said, angling his body so one hip was away from us and one elbow blocked the imaginary pistol. It means they keep a distance, he said, and that means they have to talk louder. So instead of de-escalating a situation, they stand apart, shouting directions, and everyone gets anxious and angry. In some situations, their guns gave them a false sense of security. He once saw them not search the area around a prisoner in a drug den, although a chisel was within grabbing distance.

What J. learned in his career was to de-escalate. Even in a drug raid, when he was leading a team that had just broken down an apartment door, he found he could keep a normal distance and speak quietly, bringing calm to the situation.

Not carrying a gun, he says, means British cops have to be sensitive to danger and attentive to what is going on around them; carrying a gun means having to keep your distance, because if someone comes at you quickly and you’re too close, you won’t have the chance to use it. That distance changes how policing works.

It’s something to think about.

Domestic Wildlife

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Monday: We have a mouse problem. At least we think we do. The four-legged residents are paying a lot of attention to one corner of the spare room.

Let me be clear about this. We have two cats. Two of them. Enough, you might think, to vanquish even the wiliest of mice, but no, it’s the dog who usually gets rid of them. The dog who looks like a wind-up toy dreamt up by a particularly extravagant little girl. And not some tough, tree-climbing little girl, but the over-the-top stereotype of a little girl in the pink princess dress, complete with the wings and the wand. If she got the job of inventing a wind-up dog, Minnie to Moocher is the one she’d invent.

Never underestimate a foo-foo little dog. Or a girl in a pink princess dress. She—that’s the dog, now, not the girl—is a stone cold killer.

Minnie the Moocher, also known as Killer

Minnie the Moocher, also known as Killer

But we have to start back a way. We live in the country. The weather’s getting cold. Mice are surely looking for a nice warm place to bed down for the winter, but that’s not how the current one got in. I’m sure of that. Our younger cat, Smudge, brings them in. He wants to start a captive breeding program. We’ve discussed this with him, but have you ever tried arguing with a cat? Save your breath. They’re always right. He thinks like a feudal king: Once he stocks the forest—or the back room—with enough game, he’ll keep himself amused forever.

The little horror is one hell of a hunter. When he was younger he brought in birds, mice, voles, rats, and moles, some dead and some living. I’m not sure which were worse, the ones that were so mangled we had to kill them or the ones that were so unmangled that we ended up crawling all over the house, throwing furniture as we went, while we tried to catch them.

One of the rats was in perfect health. He’d brought it in courteously and left it to explore its new surroundings. I was nowhere around, lucky me—I think I was doing the book tour for Open Line—and it took Wild Thing a full day but she finally killed it by bashing it with the bread box. The hunt involved a lot of yelling and some interesting language, none of it on the part of the rat.

Wild Thing did not get her name by accident. And I really do call her that a good bit of the time.

When we found the second of the moles, it was trying to dig its way out through a wall. It’s almost a swimming motion, the way they dig. I got a plastic box with a lid and Wild Thing got the heaviest pair of gardening gloves she could find. She lifted it into the box, it tried to bite her, I put the lid on, and we drove it to a nearby field. The whole time it was in the box, it kept making those swimming motions, digging its way to freedom. When I let it go, it hit the earth still digging.

I’m a city girl so I don’t really know, but I hope the farmer didn’t mind an extra mole in the field.

When we have to catch living creatures, I’m no worse than Wild Thing. Okay, I’m not much worse. She’s bolder about it, but at least I’m useful. I am squeamish, though, about the wounded and the dead, and for the most part I leave those to her. It’s almost fair. She’s squeamish about cleaning the litter box or dealing with cat vomit. But when she had ankle surgery (which has happened three times now, and she only has two ankles) I’ve had to get over it. The first time, post-surgery, that I looked at a mangled but still living bird, I asked myself, Could you kill it if you were being chased by a bear?

I admit, the question makes no sense. If I were being chased by a bear, killing a wounded bird wouldn’t be at the top of my to-do list. I mean, how would that help? But it did focus my mind. I pulled myself together, took the poor thing outside, and bashed its little head in. It was quick and it was the best I could do for the poor beast.

I dealt with the dead and the mangled for many long weeks. Then Wild Thing started moving around without crutches and I got squeamish again. Funny how that works.

These days, Smudge doesn’t bring his prey home as often, and what he does bring is more likely to be fully dead, and if I find the corpse first I can make myself throw it away without waiting for Wild Thing to play undertaker. I use a broom and dust pan, then wash my hands as thoroughly if I’d just juggled a dozen dead rats and then gutted them, but still, I do get rid of it.

Wild Thing picks ‘em up by one foot or the tail.

Tuesday: We haven’t caught the mouse. For the past week, Wild Thing has had some kind of bug that involves waking up at 3 a.m., turning on the light, and coughing for half an hour, so she’s been sleeping in the spare room—the mouse room. Unless (we haven’t seen it yet) it’s a rat. Last night, when she went to bed, she heard some rustling in the corner.

You have to understand something about our spare room. It’s not large, but it does contain a single bed, a bedside table, a tall, narrow chest of drawers, a computer and computer chair, roughly 150 copies of the village calendar plus a box of envelopes for them, 196 plastic sleeves to protect exactly 4 posters for the village calendar, the prototype of the Soyuz space capsule, manuals for every piece of computer equipment that ever passed through our lives, most of which we no longer own, and a cement mixer. Plus a full-size Cornish gig, with all six oars.

I may be exaggerating, but I flinched away from taking a true and unflinching inventory. There’s a bunch of stuff in there, okay? And a mouse. Or quite possibly a rat.

Wild Thing, as I think I’ve already established, is not faint of heart. Her mother once faced down a pawing, snorting bull armed with nothing better than a broom, and won. Wild Thing is worthy of her heritage. But, c’mon, she was going to be asleep. And a rat—well, we both New Yorkers enough to know that rats are capable of crawling up to a sleeping person and taking a bite if their lips have a trace of food, and she’s been living on cough drops. When I say her lips are sweet, I’m not talking being romantic.

When she heard the rustling, she called out to tell me about it, at which point Smudge the mighty hunter went out the window.

I will say in his defense that he’s as sleek and beautiful as any cat, and as self-involved.

Wild Thing went into the living room, where Minnie and our older cat were still sprawled in front of the wood stove. She picked up the Minnie (who’s not allowed in bed), and took her to bed.

There were no rats in the bed that night. By the time Smudge joined them later in the night, there wouldn’t have been room for one.

The older cat is around 17 and never was much of a hunter. She killed a bird once, and Wild Thing took it away from her. She’s convinced Wild Thing ate it herself and she gave up hunting.

Wednesday 10 a.m.: After I wrote Tuesday’s section of this post, we set a trap, closed off the spare room, and caught nothing. As I type, Wild Thing’s tearing the room apart (I just heard a small avalanche; it sounded like paper mixed with broken crockery). Any minute now she’ll check the cement mixer and see if the mouse bedded down there. I expect it moved into the kitchen, though, or the living room, before we closed the room off. On Saturday we have a bunch of people coming over for a delayed Thanksgiving. Last year a mouse crashed the party and provided no end of entertainment. I’m hoping it doesn’t turn out to be an annual event.

Wednesday 4 p.m.: The spare room has a floor. I hadn’t known that. Everything that used to be on the floor is now piled on top of something else and looks frighteningly well organized. If you don’t look too closely. But what matters is that there were no traces of mouse or rat. What Wild Thing found was a set of wings. (Smudge is known for leaving wings, or the heart and lungs. What can I tell you. He’s a fussy eater.) I don’t want to think too hard about what Wild Thing heard and what the story of the kill was, although I’m sure Smudge would be not just happy but proud to tell the tale, in full detail and bleeding color.

We hope to get through our mis-timed Thanksgiving party without a mouse this year.

For the Americans reading this, hope you had a fine and mouseless Thanksgiving.

More about Format

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Thanks to everyone who got back to me about whether the extra click would be a problem if the email you receive only carries the beginning of my posts instead of the whole shebang. The comments were useful, and enlightening, and guilt inducing. Because even though a couple of people said the extra click was a pain in the neck, the number of visits to the blog went up. And the gods of blogdom like visits. I do want to keep everyone happy, but the gods must be appeased. So at least for now, I’m going to keep the opening-only format for emails. I hope you’ll click through to the rest of the posts. And I  hope you’ll love me anyway.

Or–to hell with love–I hope you’ll read me.

Cutting Waste in Britain and New York

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One of the things that impressed me when I first visited Britain was that they had public toilets. Not just along the highways, where I’d learned to expect them, but in towns and villages and cities. I mean, do I resonate with the romance of the place or what? Forget your castles, your prehistoric monuments, your green and pleasant land. Will you look at those toilets? An entire nation had noticed that humans have this recurring, messy, polluting need and had responded logically.

Well—as the kids on my block used to say—holy shit.

I grew up in New York, where if you’re out on the street and need to pee ( or anything else along those lines) you’re—oh, I can’t help myself: shit out of luck, because New York doesn’t do public toilets. You need one? Sorry, that sounds like a personal problem. You can’t expect the city to solve it for you.

Deeply Irrelevant Photo: Fountains Abbey

Deeply Irrelevant Photo: Fountains Abbey

If you have money, the problem’s manageable. Money has that effect on a lot of problems. You duck into the lobby of a hotel and head for the toilet (which, this being the U.S. and all, is called the bathroom), and if you’re dressed well enough and act like you belong there, you won’t be challenged. Or you stop someplace to buy a cup of coffee and you use the toilet there. That’s a solution that carries its own problem, since you’ll need another cup later on to get rid of the first one, but still, it’s doable.

If you don’t have money—well, that’s one reason so much of the subway smells of urine. I remember seeing a woman at a bus stop simply straddle the curb and let a stream loose from under her skirt. I was torn between shock and very reluctant admiration.

On my first visit to Britain, when I was so impressed with those public toilets, I didn’t find it easy to say “toilet” instead of “bathroom.” I’m American, and was even more so back then. Americans don’t say “toilet” if we can help it. In fact, I was in a café and asked someone who worked there where the bathroom was. She must’ve thought I was going to tear my clothes off and jump in a tub of hot water, because she did a visible double take. I made myself say, “Toilet,” but it didn’t quite repair the damage. She was in no shape to put words together, but she did manage to point.

In Britain, a bathroom has a bathtub. If it has a shower instead, it’s a shower room. If it has neither, it’s a toilet. Even after eight years, though, I feel crass when I say “toilet.” Much more so than when I say “shit.”

The human brain is a wondrous and baffling thing.

These days the U.K. has a government dedicated to cutting the deficit by cutting waste, and—okay, you see the pun coming, don’t you? I can’t help myself. It’s true. The talk’s all about reducing waste, but the reality is about public services crumbling: the health service underfunded, libraries and various kinds of community centers closing, all sorts of infrastructure not being maintained, and yes, toilets closing. Food shelves—which weren’t needed when I first moved here—are springing up and much in demand. A lot of the cuts are being pushed down to the local levels of government, which depend on the central government for a lot of their funding. Since that’s been cut, they have all the fun of deciding what to cut, and they get blamed for cutting it, since they look like the bad guys.

In our village, we initially heard that the county would be closing the toilets by the beach. The parish council entered into endless negotiations over how to keep them open and who’d bear the cost and who’d own them and who’d committed to a long-term cleaning contract that either would or wouldn’t have to be carried over by whoever either did or didn’t own the damned things.

And so on.

It went on for a long time, and in the end the village managed to keep them open. Not only does the cleanliness of the beach depend on them, but so do two local cafes. But not every village or town has managed to find the money, and many toilets have closed.

Maybe it will teach us all to rise above their physical urges.

Let’s hear it for cutting waste, folks.

A Question about Format

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If you’re following Notes, you may have noticed that I just switched the layout so that now you only receive the beginning of the post, along with assorted Link buttons, instead of the whole thing. Or I think I’ve switched it. I’m never sure, once I start clicking various options, that I’ve done what I set out to do. I’d love to know what you think–or whether you care at all. Are you as likely to read the post as you were before? Is it a pain in the neck?

The Writing on the Sidewalk of a Cornish Village

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Either I’m engaging in antisocial behavior or I’m the last defender of decency in Cornwall. Some days it’s hard to tell.

Wild Thing and I live on what’s called the estate. If you’re American, that sounds all grand and Downton Abbey, but what it really means is “the subdivision.” We live in a tiny fragment of suburb, even though we don’t have a city to be suburban to. Our village is spread out—a village without any center—so this is the most densely populated bit. By dogs as well as humans.

Irrelevant Photo: A view of the south coast and St. Michael's Mount

Irrelevant Photo: A view of the south coast and St. Michael’s Mount

Yes, dear ones, I’m writing about dog shit, and I’m not going to call it poo because I just can’t. When I first moved to Minnesota, I heard a wonderful phrase: “She wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful.”

Well, I don’t have a mouthful, but I did skid through the stuff and come away with a shoeful, and I can’t see why I should call it anything else. It’s not a beautiful word, but then the shoe wasn’t looking so good either.

Shit was the mildest word I yelled. I’m sure someone was behind a window saying, “Oh, that’s one of the Americans.”

Never mind the language, though. The important point is that somebody hasn’t been cleaning up after their dog.

I know two things about this dog: It’s large and it likes to spread its bounty as far as it’s physically able. I walk with my eyes on the sidewalk these days, the way I did as a kid in New York, before dog owners were expected to clean up after their dogs. My family had a dog. We thought we were being good citizens because we got him to shit between the parked cars. In fact, back then the city put up signs saying “Curb your dog.”

After the shoe incident, I bought myself a box of chalk. Then I waited.

Several days later, I found another deposit. Right by the red metal box that everyone (even me) calls the dog poo bin. I knelt on the sidewalk and chalked, “Clean up after your dog, please.”

I stepped back to admire my work. I’d forgotten the your, so it actually read, “Clean up after dog, please,” as if a computer translation program had written it. I used to work as an editor, so that missing word bothers me, but it did get the point across. And at least I hadn’t forgotten the please.

Good manners are more important here than good grammar. No matter how ungrammatical—or, for that matter, rude—a note you tack up somewhere, you can make it okay if you write “Polite Notice” at the top. I can’t tell you how many signs I’ve seen that declare themselves Polite Notices. Even if you were to say, “Pick up after your dog, you miserable, lazy, unclean excuse for a human being,” if you also said it was a polite notice, it would be okay.

And even if the rest of your wording is polite, you still have to open with “Polite Notice.” Actual politeness isn’t what matters. You have to remind everyone that you’re being polite.

I didn’t open with “Polite Notice.” I didn’t figure a chalked notice on the sidewalk had to, but then (as I’m often reminded) I’m not British. Wild Thing’s sure that what people mean when they say that is that we just don’t get certain things, and that the speaker feels sorry for us. I’m not sure she’s right. I tend to hear it as a statement of fact: We really aren’t British. Or we are—we’re citizens—but on some deeper level we never can be.

I don’t necessarily want to know how the speaker feels about this.

So it’s hard for me to be sure how significant that missing “Polite Notice” is. I may have offended someone other than the dog walker, but I can’t tell. I’m not British.

A Link to Before Sundown

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It hasn’t been long since I made jokes about adding an Obnoxious Self-Promotion Page when I created a page about The Divorce Diet (my forthcoming novel, she said with great subtlety). As far as I know I got away with self-promoting without being too obnoxious.

I may be crossing the line now, because you can only be cute about self-promotion just so many times. Still, I’m going to risk it one last time, and after that I’ll quietly add links to the Divorce Diet’s page—reviews, interviews, anything that comes up. At least I think that’s what I’ll do. But before I acquire a dose of good manners, here’s a link to Before Sundown, because Christine Robinson has been kind enough to post an article about me and The Divorce Diet, and I appreciate it.

And if anyone wants to let me know when I do cross the line, you’re invited. It’s information I need.

Update: A Disabled Rider, a Small Cornish Village, and a Crowdfunding Drive

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With five days left to go, the crowdfunding drive for Emily Skerrett has raised more than three-quarters of its goal and needs one last push to get it over the top. I’m being vague about the amount because by the time I post this, it will have changed. If you’re new to Notes from the U.K., Emily’s full story is in an older post, but briefly she’s a disabled rider who’s got her sights set on reaching the Paralympics, and her coaches say she’s good enough to get there. At this point, it all depends on persistence, money, and of course luck. She’s not a wealthy woman, and some of us in the village have gotten together to raise money to keep her riding.

If you’ve already contributed, we have our gratitude. If you’ve already passed the word on, you have our gratitude again. If you haven’t and can do either or both of those things, this is the time. We’re close. Spread the word. And share the link.

Thanks.

Emily Skerrett and Woody

Emily Skerrett and Woody