Heavy Traffic in a Cornish Village

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Wild Thing and I were walking the dog the other day and we’d just turned off the main road when a car made the same turn. We moved to the side of the road, stood in the weeds, and corralled the dog so that she did the same. She’s convinced that if her nose is out of the way, that takes care of the problem.

The car passed. The driver waved. We waved and moved back onto the road.

Then another car came past. That’s roughly two cars more than we usually see on this stretch of road.

“So much traffic!” Wild Thing said.

Irrelevant Photo: Fall Berries of Some Sort of Other

You need a little background here.

First, what I just called the main road? It has two lanes, goes from no place in particular to no place else in particular (I’m going to catch hell for saying that), and no one’s even bothered to give it a name or a number. That’s why I call it the main road. What else am I going to call it? Marlena? Suzette? It’s as main a road as the village has. Everything else is even smaller.

Second, Wild Thing and I are both New Yorkers. I was born and raised there and she lived there for ten years. So it’s not that we’ve never lived with traffic. But human beings are adaptable. When I lived in Minnesota, I noticed that 40 degrees F. was cold in the fall and the most blissful warmth in the spring. So we’ve adapted. Two cars in a single day on the road past the ford? In the off season, when the emmits have gone home? Outrageous!

And we’re not the only ones who resent seeing two cars in a row. Someone who shall not be named, nay, not even by initial (okay, I’ve forgotten who it was), set out a Road Closed sign on one of the back roads. For years. Long after whatever was once wrong (if anything ever was) had been fixed. He didn’t like the traffic.

The locals all knew to drive past it, and when I became a local I taught myself to do the same, although the first time expected to find that the ford (this is a different ford) had risen out of control; that a downed tree had left the power lines sprawled across the road; that a herd of wild elephants had set up camp by the ford and were scavenging downed limbs for firewood. Even though I knew better.

In one version of the story—and no story in the village has only one version—he got tired of people with long vehicles taking the road and getting stuck at the ninety-degree bend where the road narrows down. In another version, a delivery truck got stuck and its cargo had to be off-loaded onto a smaller truck. In a third version, the company kept sending big trucks and they all got stuck—one, two, three pretty trucks, all with the same logo and all stuck where the road bends. It’s a wonderful image. Sadly, it’s the least likely of the versions. A single truck could get stuck there if it was long enough, but by getting stuck it would sacrifice itself for its fellow trucks, who’d have to back up a long way and then cross the ford backward before backing up some more, but they wouldn’t be stuck. That’s village gossip for you. Whatever story you hear, you have to figure it’s related to something real, but you can’t necessarily tell what the relationship is.

Anyway, it’s the off season here in the village, and the traffic’s horrendous. If you were thinking of visiting, wait till it calms down a bit.

New Page Added

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I just added an Obnoxious Self-Promotion Page to Notes. It’s titled “The Divorce Diet” and you’ll find it at the top, in the black bar under the photo of the Cornish coast. Even here, in this nearby yet tastefully promotion-free space where we’re speaking, you can hear its crass bass thump leaking through the walls.

But that’s the kind of thing you do when you have a novel coming out. You set all shame to one side and promote the hell out of it—anywhere, everywhere, and in just about any way you can. Does it make a difference? I haven’t a clue, and everything I’m hearing says that no one else has a clue either, but the book’s close to my heart and (sorry to be the one to say this, but I will anyway) I think it’s good, so to hell with manners. The page is up. Feel free to explore. Feel free to pre-order a few thousand copies, to review it online, and to tell 500 of your closest friends about it. Or feel free to ignore the whole shebang. It’s up to you.

After a while, you get used to the bass thump and it doesn’t bother you quite as much. Or you invest in earplugs or poison the neighbor who has the loud sound system. I’m a New Yorker. I know these things.

And while I’m promoting things, you can check out a beautifully written (and, ahem, favorable) review on The Zombies Ate My Brains.

Irrelevant Photo: Boscawen Un, an ancient stone circle

Declining an Award

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Notes from the U.K. was nominated for a Very Inspiring Blog Award a while back, and it threw me into a quiet little crisis. I was flattered and even inspired, but also flummoxed. It was Angie K. from Not Another Tall Blog who nominated me, and in her acceptance post she admitted to taking two months to accept her own nomination and do all the things a nominee is supposed to do.

What’s a nominee supposed to do? Thank the person who nominated me and link to them: Angie, many thanks. List seven facts about myself. Display the award and nominate 15 other bloggers. Figure out how to display the award. Follow the person who nominated me. (I did that and it’s been a pleasure; she’s a good writer).

Irrelevant Photo: A hut circle near Rough Tor, part of a prehistoric settlement

But I coasted for a while before I did anything public, figuring that if it took Angie two months, I could hide for a month or three and still be a moderately good citizen of the net. Or at least not an awful one. Because something made me put off doing those things, and it wasn’t just that I couldn’t figure out how to copy the award so I could display it, although that didn’t help.

At some point during this time, I read a blog that declared itself an award-free zone, and it rang one of those silent brain-bells that are preinstalled in all of us. Yes, I thought. I don’t have to do this, however flattered I am.

So I’m declaring Notes an award-free zone. Why? Partly because jumping through the hoops that come with breaks the focus of the blog. I write about the joys and absurdities of living, as an American, in the U.K. At least in theory I could write about the joys and absurdities of living in the Internet, and somebody probably should, but that somebody isn’t me. So flattered as I am, I’m going to pass.

But I will tell you two facts about myself: I’m as short as Angie K. is tall and I’m the kind of person who can say, in all sincerity, thank you but I have to pass on the honor.

And one final fact: Last week I bought a pair of jeans that didn’t need hemming. I can count on one stubby little hand the number of times that’s happened to me.

Trying to Count the Cornish Wildflowers

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Wild Thing and I hadn’t really seen the Cornish countryside until we discovered the footpaths, and the wildflowers bowled me over. I was living in Minnesota then, and when it isn’t frozen solid and buried under snow Minnesota is green and beautiful and all that, but you wouldn’t be tempted to call it lush. It’s too cold for too much of the year. What wildflowers grow there always struck me as self-effacing, somehow, as if they didn’t want call attention to themselves.

A lot the people are like that too.

T. and S., whose roots are in western Minnesota, swear there were more wildflowers when the farmers didn’t use pesticides as enthusiastically as they do these days, and I’m sure that’s true, but still, Minnesota’s a bit like the Puritans were: It’s never going to encourage a wild profusion of stuff it doesn’t absolutely need.

Montbretia, pronounced mombresia. Or something like that. Considered not just a weed but a thug. Isn’t it gorgeous?

So, while I was on parole from Minnesota, I’d walk along the footpaths in Cornwall and try to count how many kinds of wildflowers were in bloom. To understand what a misguided undertaking this was, you have to know that numbers and I are not on good terms. Ask me to remember the number 3 for more than a minute and I’ll need to check my notes. Ask me to solve a word problem (Train A left station B at 3:44….) and I’ll weep. Or at least I’ll want to. So voluntarily counting anything indicates an extreme state of mind. In this case, it was extreme happiness. So much color. So much life pushing up out of the ground. I’m tempted to say so much unnecessary beauty, but yeah, the ecosystem, the necessity of so many things we humans don’t think are necessary because we can’t make any immediate use of them. All of that. Still, you can see what I’m getting at.

The problem with counting wildflowers was that first, if I’m distracted at all, I can’t reliably count from 1 to 70 without losing my way. Did I say 70? Make that 10. But second, and more to the point, I couldn’t keep track of which flowers I’d already counted. If you don’t have names for things, it turns out, it’s hard to remember them. Little yellow flower, bigger yellow flower, little yellow flower that isn’t like the first yellow flower because it has four petals, although maybe the first one did too because I wasn’t noticing petals, only color and size at that point. Little yellow flower that also has four petals but they’re pointy. Little yellow flower that I might have counted already but I don’t think so.

I often wonder how animals remember in the absence of words. Of course, as far as I know they’re not counting, but they do other complex things, like remembering smells and places and long routes. It’s not all looking at a plant and thinking either yumm or bleah, that tastes foul.

Anyway, I bought the first of my wildflower books and began attaching names to what I was seeing. And the odd thing is that this allowed me to see them better—to notice and then remember petal shapes, leaf shapes, the ways leaves grew on the stem, and from there stem shapes and whether the leaf or stem was hairy or smooth. I’m still useless with some of it. Talk of sepals sends me into a panic. Heights given in centimeters might as well be written in an alphabet whose origins aren’t on this planet for all the good they do me.

That first book led to the next book, which was organized differently and promised more, better, deeper. And another book after that. One that had photographs. Another that had drawings. Each one had advantages and drawbacks. Then one organized by color, which I’d always thought would be simpler but still leaves me flipping through page after page, looking for a match for something new that I’ve brought home. Or something that isn’t new—I know I’ve seen it before—but I’ve forgotten its name since last year at this time.

I’m still a barbarian about it all. One of my books (and I pulled it out of the shelf at random) lists 15 kinds of violet, including common dog, early dog, pale dog, heath dog, hairy, sweet, and dame’s. And speedwell? Alpine, blue ivy-leaved, fingered, germander, marsh, spiked, thyme-leaved, wall, water, wood, and on until you reach 25 of them. I’ve tried to see the differences, really I have, but I’ve decided to be happy to look at the damn plant and say, “Violet; speedwell; close enough.”

Although I do love being able to identify the ivy-leaved toadflax.

No matter how many I learn, though (and I haven’t learned that many), there are always more.

If this sounds geeky, that’s because it is geeky, but it’s not about checking off how many flowers I’ve seen or how many names I can recite. By learning the flowers, I’ve learned a new way to watch the seasons roll past. The first wild primroses come into bloom when it’s still winter, and they tell me spring’s coming. Then the celandine comes out. It’s a low-growing yellow flower. Spring progresses with each new flower, and I think of it as a yellow season.

Damn, it’s beautiful here.

Mrs. Baggit Struggles to Keep Britain Tidy

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

The first time Wild Thing and I visited the U.K., Maggie Thatcher was the prime minister and whatever ministry was in charge of roadsides had planted them with metal signs saying, “Mrs. Baggit Says, ‘Keep Britain Tidy.’”

That bit of brilliant public relations was finished off with a picture of a tied-off bag with a face—Mrs. Baggit’s, presumably, happily stuffed with garbage. It was impossible not to connect her image with Mrs. Thatcher’s, and some small part of my brain continues to insist, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that Thatcher’s real name was Maggie Baggit.

irrelevant Photo: Rose Behind Bars, by Ida Swearingen

We did a lot of driving on that trip, so we spent a lot of time looking at the signs and finding funny voices to quote them in.

“Mrs. Baggit says…”

Mrs. Baggit had a lot to say on that trip, all of it scold-y, although I can’t remember exactly what it was anymore. Except, of course, for “Keep Britain Tidy.”

To understand why that kept us amused, you need to know that tidy sounds different to an American ear than to a British one. To me, tidy is fussy. It’s small. All I have to do is think about it and I want to make bitsy motions with my fingertips, as if I’m cleaning up a dollhouse. As far as I can tell, none of that is true in the U.K. It’s just a word here. It means neat and doesn’t make your fingers do funny things in the empty air, although H. tells me the Mrs. Baggit part sounds fussy.

I should stop here and admit that when I started that last paragraph I was going to speak for an entire nation: For us (us here being all Americans—every last differentiated, argumentative one of us) tidy is fussy. Then some minimal sense of modesty (not to mention accuracy) caught up with me and I thought it might be nice if I didn’t mistake my mind for the mind of an entire, not to mention large and varied, country, even if I did grow up and live most of my life there. So I’ve backed off a bit. But I still hold that it has different overtones to an American ear than to a British one. That much, I think, is fair.

Language is like that. We think of it as a solid, but it’s not. It’s one of those slow liquids, like Silly Putty, that changes shape depending on what holds it, or who.

So how successful was the campaign? I never saw British roadsides before it started, so I can’t make a comparison, but I know this much: If you look for litter here, you’ll find it. And if you don’t look for it, you’ll find it anyway. I’ve seen places with more, but Mrs. Baggit hasn’t stopped the litterbugs mid-throw.

And who in their right mind thought she would?

More about Tax Discs

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

In an earlier post, I mentioned that starting this month the U.K. has abolished tax discs—little round things that go on the car to prove you’ve paid tax on it. This change was made possible by the infallibility of computers. So yesterday I opened the paper and, guess what? “The DVLA’s new vehicle tax website crashed yesterday owing to the large number of people trying to renew their tax online on the day that paper discs were abolished, with the system relying instead on digital records.”

Old Tax Discs. Photo by Jerry “Woody”

I shouldn’t enjoy this so much. Really I shouldn’t.

And, of course, to prove I didn’t make this up I need a link.

DVLA, by the way, stands for Department of Vehicular Lunacy and Associatedmayhem.

Spider Season in Cornwall

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Spiders have moved into M.’s house, something he’s mentioned because he’s phobic about spiders and even with what he calls the arachnavac he still feels at a disadvantage. Even though he’s in the neighbourhood of six feet tall and none of them even come close. But being in possession of a phobia or two myself, I won’t try to make too much sense out of his. These fears don’t follow the rules of logic, they simply are.

But back to spiders: They’re moving into our house as well as his.

A Spider–Not One of Ours. Photo by Stefan-Xp

On an expat forum, I read a comment by an American asking, more or less, “What is it with all these spiders in the shower?” He was in some other part of the U.K., so based on that small and unscientific sample, I’m going to be reckless and say this is a nationwide issue.

A few years ago, I read that if you put a horse chestnut in every corner of a room, they’ll keep spiders out. This struck me a vaguely reasonable, since I happen to know that chestnut wood was used in the beams of at least one French chateau because it was thought to deter spiders from building webs.

Notice the weasel-word “thought” in that sentence. I didn’t notice it myself when I heard about the beams. I also didn’t—and still don’t—know how closely related the chestnut is to the horse chestnut. Still, when a catalogue slid through my door offering a horse-chestnut scented, spider-deterring spray, I bought a can. And sprayed around the windows most of that summer—or for as long as I remembered and could be bothered, whichever came first, and you can pretty well guess which that was.

I spent the rest of the summer sweeping cobwebs off the windows, just as I have every summer since I moved here. But I hadn’t been meticulous about using the spray, so I couldn’t have sworn the it didn’t work.

The next fall, Wild Thing and I were in Derbyshire (which in case you’re not British you’ll never guess is pronounced Darbysheer, but that belongs in another post), and horse chestnuts lay around for the taking. And take I did—enough for our house and a different M.’s as well, since she also has a thing about spiders. I didn’t know about the other M.’s spider phobia at the time or I’d have brought home all the horse chestnuts in Derbyshire.

Back in Cornwall, I set horse chestnuts in every corner of damn near every room, and M. did the same. It was late fall by then, and the spiders had already moved in, so it was hard to tell if the horse chestnuts worked. Winter came. A mouse came. The mouse found a horse chestnut and thought it had moved into the promised land.

The mouse got tossed back outside, without its prize horse chestnut.

The horse chestnuts waited for spring, and then for summer, and then for fall, when the spiders get serious about moving in.

I wish to report that horse chestnuts do not keep spiders away, and since they make mice very happy I’ve thrown ours out.

Every few days, I run around with a long-handled duster and dislodge as many spiders as I can from the ceiling and walls and, when I can, I carry them outside. Where for all I know they die of cold, but I’m not in charge of nature’s plan. At a certain point in this world of ours, you just have to turn off the empathy spigot. The trick is not to turn it off too soon and not to send yourself into meltdown by keeping it funning at full force every moment of every day. Sometimes I’m reduced to smashing the little bastards with my hand, which for all I know is kinder than letting them die of cold. Or quite possibly not. A certain number of them, though, hunker down in corners where I can’t get them out with a duster, and where the arachnavac won’t even get them loose. (Yes, I have arachnavacced. It strikes me as a miserable way for a creature to die, but I’ve done it.)

One particularly big spider lives down a duct that covers a heating pipe, and last winter I got serious about trying to get rid of it and thought I had, but I saw it again last week. Unless it’s another one. If I were arachnophobic, I’d be pretty well phobed out by it.

When I lived in the U.S., we never had spider season, and I don’t know if that’s because I always lived in cities (I’m way out in the country these days) or because the parts of the country I lived in didn’t have as many spiders or if the U.K. is some sort of spider capital to the world. If you’re in the mood to comment, I’d love to hear about what it’s like where you are. Do you have spiders moving in with you in the fall? Does it happen in cities or only in the countryside? Have you found a way to keep them out?

The Strange World of the Book Giveaway

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Friends, I’m entering the weird world of the Book Giveaway, which is a small and theoretically habitable planet in the Book Promotion system. Here’s how I got there:

I have a novel, The Divorce Diet, coming out on December 30, and the publisher just sent me a box of advance reader copies, also called uncorrected proofs. I know they’re uncorrected because the bio shaves twenty years off the time I lived in Minnesota.

Having gloated over them for as long as I decently can, I’m ready to offer one to half a dozen people who promise to post a review online somewhere—preferably on a site people actually read. Goodreads or BookLikes accept early reviews (or so I’m told); Amazon and Barnes & Noble (again, I’m told) don’t accept reviews until a book’s been published, but if you’re more organized than I am you can wait and post it on New Year’s Eve. Early on New Year’s Eve, before you get too happy. Hey, do I know how to celebrate or what? If you have a blog yourself and want to review it there, that would also be great. It doesn’t even have to be a good review, just an honest one. Of course I want everyone everywhere to fall in love with the book, but that’s one of the many things I can’t control. I’ll be grateful for any visibility you can give it.

So here’s what you do if you want one: Before October 5, send me your email address as a comment. I won’t publish it, just set it aside, so that if you win I can contact you to ask for your mailing address. If more than half a dozen people want one, I’ll use the high-tech approach and toss the names into a hat.

The publisher also sent me a stack of covers and I have no idea what to do with them. Anyone want to dozen or more? They’d make the perfect placemats for, I don’t know, a divorce party or something.

Raising Money in Cornwall

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

In our village, no event ends before we hold a raffle. I dread the day we run out of raffle books, because we’ll be trapped together at the end of some play or tabletop sale, waiting not for Godot but for more raffle tickets.

The tickets cost a pound for a strip of five. It’s as predictable as if it were governed by law, which it may well be. It’s one way to raise money, and it works if all you need to do is cover the cost of renting the hall or raise a bit of money for the local hospice or the Air Ambulance, because a thousand other villages are also raising money for them and it all adds up.

But this post is about a local fundraising effort that’s going to take more than a raffle, and if you’ll forgive me I’m going to abandon my usual wise-ass tone.

Emily Skerrett is a local disabled paradressage rider who has a good chance of making it onto the British Paralympic team. I didn’t know what paradressage was until I started working on with this, so I’ll explain: Dressage is a kind of horseback riding that doesn’t involve flying over hedges or doing anything insane like that, so it’s kind to a disabled rider, which explains the para part.

Now set aside your assumptions about the piles money people who are drawn to horsey sports must have, because she’s not a rich woman, and so a group of us from the village have come together to form Team Emily and raise enough money to keep her going until she reaches national level, at which point funding will become available.

The village is like that. Not always, but sometimes. And sometimes, in this battered old world of ours, isn’t a bad track record. It’s enough to give me a spark of hope for this human race we all belong to.

Emily Skerrett and Woody

A bit of background: Emily has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which used to be called hypermobility syndrome. It means her joints are so loosely held together that she can dislocate a shoulder just by rolling over in bed. She lives with a level of pain that would drive me to despair, and to cover any distance she uses either crutches or a wheelchair. She has two young sons and she loves them but can’t carry them any distance. Oddly enough, on the days she rides she can lower her usual dose of painkillers. Riding is, both physically and emotionally, good for her. And she’s good at it. Clive Milkins, who’s a Fellow of Riding for the Disabled and a world-class trainer with multiple gold medals at European and World levels, said, “Emily and her horse have . . . the ability, the potential and the determination to reach the very top.”

In part, of course, she’s wants to make the team because she loves the sport and because it would be good for her as an individual, but in part she’s doing it to demonstrate that being disabled doesn’t mean being unable, and to show her sons that, although their mother can’t do many of the things other mothers can, there are things she can do.

Team Emily is trying to raise £10,000 through crowdfunding. We need small donations. We need large donations. We need help from people who can’t make any donation at all. We need people like you to paste a link to her crowdfunding site (or to this post) on Facebook, or to tweet the link, or to email it to friends, or to pass it on in any other way you can think of. This is one small human being fighting the limitations that illness has imposed on her life, and it’s inspiring. If you can help in any way, you have our thanks.

And let’s be honest: It’s the closest most of us will ever come to the Olympics, para- or otherwise.

And now I’m going to be obnoxious and put the links in one more time.

Crowdfunding: to donate, watch a video of Emily riding, or get the address so you can let people know about it

Facebook: to follow Emily

Blog Hop

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I should start by telling you what a blog hop is, because I didn’t have a clue when I said I’d be part of this one. It’s a series of bloggers linking to each other and, in this particular one, answering a series of questions about their current or forthcoming novels. The common thread here is that we’re all published by Kensington. Not that I’m, ahem, trying to promote my novel or anything, although it will, she said with great subtlety, be out in January.

Sabine Priestley

Last week, in her blog, Sabine Priestley wrote about her book, Alien Attachments. Sabine grew up in Phoenix, but has lived in Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Texas, Massachusetts, and Florida. She has a B.S. in electrical engineering technologies and did everything but her thesis for a masters degree in cultural anthropology, looking at the nexus of culture and technology. She was a project manager, flying back and forth between Tucson and Boston when she met her very own alien. She spent a year running the Q.A. department for a seriously cool and underappreciated computer telephony system, then moved to California, where she ran a small tech support group for a company making DSL routers before anyone knew what DSL was. She is a lifelong fan of science fiction and romance novels, so Alien Attachments naturally gelled in her imagination. Sabine lives in Florida with her husband, kids, cats, and whole mess of characters in her head.

And that brings us to my part of the blog hop.

What is the name of your character?

Abigail.

Is she fictional or a historic person?

Definitely fictional, but everything that’s best about her was inspired by my friend Janneen Love, who got through a difficult breakup with grace, helped along by her love of cooking, her love for her daughter, and a whole lot of tea.

When and where is the story set?

In the United States, at this very moment.

What should we know about her?

Abigail’s an involuntarily single mother, advised by an invisible weight-loss guru. Yes, I know, but in the context, it makes perfect sense. In an out-there sort of way. She’s struggling to support her daughter and make enough money to move out of her parents’ house.

What is the main conflict?

Abigail’s most immediate conflicts are with her soon to be ex-husband and with her parents, who she loves and respects but who have a gift for turning her back into a teenager. But—never one to shy away from the impossible—her underlying conflict is with the way the world is organized: Her husband has kept their house, since she couldn’t afford to, while she and their baby are living in her childhood bedroom. He has a new girlfriend while she can’t call up the thinnest wisp of a thought about sex. He’s still going to work in a clean white shirt while she’s waiting tables, because even though she’s a gifted cook he wasn’t enthusiastic about her getting any formal training and she thought, Well, a woman has to sacrifice something if she wants a marriage to work. On top of which, if she’s very careful and saves every penny of her tips, she’ll be able to afford her own place in forty years. Maybe. She’d work up a theory about all that, but she’s too busy and she couldn’t afford the upkeep on it anyway.

What is the character’s personal goal?

To raise her child and make a living doing what she loves, cooking.

Is there a working title for this novel and can we read more about it?

It’s called The Divorce Diet, and it goes on sale in January 2015. Actually, December 30, 2014. I’m sure there’s a reason for that but I’m damned if I know what it is. I’ll have a link on the blog as soon as it’s available. Or you can watch the Kensington website and do your very own countdown.

Kristi Rose

Next stop on the blog hop: On Monday, September 22, head over to Kristi Rose’s blog to see what she’s working on.

Notes from the U.K.

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

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