Britain and fandom

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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

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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.

Naming storms in Britain and Ireland

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The Met Office, weather forecasters to the U.K., has started naming storms. We’re not talking about hurricanes, just storms big enough to stand out. The idea is that if they have names the public will take more notice of them, and presumably of the danger they pose, and I’d love to make fun of that but as far as I can tell it works. Sad, isn’t it, not to make fun of something just because it’s sensible?

Here’s my evidence that naming works:

When I started writing this, we were waiting for storm Frank to hit. That means I wasn’t just sitting around waiting for some nameless storm, I was waiting for something with more definition than a bunch of unnamed isobars, however tightly packed, on a weather graphic. Frank didn’t pose any particular threat this far south, but we were expecting a bit of drama and I’m a sucker for finding out what’s going to happen next. Without the name, though, I’m not sure I’d have been so consciously keeping an eye out for it.

Borderline relevant photo: Boscastle in the evening--and more to the point summer--light.

Borderline relevant photo: Boscastle in the evening–and more to the point summer–light.

Back when I lived in Minnesota, we didn’t have an official naming system for storms, but a few got themselves named anyway, and those names give me a hook to hang my memories on.

The Superbowl Blizzard hit during a major football game. I never watch football—I have a serious sports allergy and, sorry folks, I just can’t—but the name means the storm has stayed well defined in my memory. I doubt an unnamed storm would be. The weather had been spookily warm just before the blizzard, and it rained. Then the temperature dropped so quickly that water froze in the storm drains and on the streets. That was followed by a heavy snow, which (do I even need to say this? oh, why not?) fell on top of the ice. The driving was lethal and the walking wasn’t much better.

I was driving cab at the time and had a sort of roommate (we rented a house that split neatly into two apartments, hence the sort of) whose brother came over to get snowed in with us. Minnesotans do that, at least at a certain age. In the morning, none of our cars started—it was too cold. let’s say it was 30 below, but understand that I’m inventing the number. Think of it as a poetic way to say it was brutally cold. I caught a cab to work so I could drive a different cab back and jump all three cars.

That’s one of the things about driving cab. No one really knows what you’re doing once you leave the garage.

Jumping the cars didn’t help—that’s how cold it was. But by then I’d taken the cab out and there was nothing for it but to put in a day’s work. I don’t remember if I made much money—probably not, because although almost no cabs were on the road and every third person in town wanted to get somewhere without risking their own car, the driving was slow, and you can’t make much if the driving’s slow. Still, I remember that day’s work as sublime. Snow brings a special kind of silence to a city, and a sense of gentleness. I passed a man skiing down Cedar Avenue near Lake Street. Almost no one was around except for him and me and one car, stopped at a red light.

In a heavy storm, Minneapolis normally begins clearing and salting the major streets even before the snow stops falling, but the storm had overwhelmed them. The streets that had been plowed were as icy as the ones that hadn’t been. The few cars that were on the streets moved in slow motion, because the only way to stop on ice is very, very slowly. What accidents I saw happened equally slowly, almost as if we were all wrapped in cotton wool.

Would I remember that as clearly if the storm didn’t have a name? The images would still in my head, but I doubt I’d remember that they were from that same storm.

The other named storm that hit Minnesota while I lived there was the Great Halloween Blizzard, which hit before any small storms had given the city a reason to salt the streets. That meant the pavement hadn’t built up a salty residue. (I should admit that the city stopped using actual salt years before this period, but let’s call it salt. It sounds better than non-specific ice-melting chemicals.) So we had a wet, heavy snow hitting bare asphalt and welding itself to it. The first layer of snow packed down to a thick layer of ice, then more snow piled up on top of it. Again, the city was overwhelmed by the storm. And again, the temperature dropped dramatically.

Coming so early in the season, the whole thing took people by surprise. A student in a writing class I taught told me he lost two lawn chairs and a lawnmower under the snow. He’d taken a break in his mowing and—well, I don’t know how long the break was but by the time he went back out it was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to finish the lawn until spring. By which time I doubt he’d be using the mower he started with.

Trick or treaters came to our door that year wearing winter jackets over their costumes.Plus snow boots and gloves and hats and gloves. Unless they had a mask, you had to take it on faith that they’d put on a costume. But not many ventured out. Around 8, a small knot of teenagers showed up, saying, “We’re the last ones. Why don’t you give us whatever you have left?”

They were so outrageous about it, and so damned cheery, that I gave them almost all the candy in the bowl, keeping only a few bits of in case they were wrong.

When the city finally plowed and salted, instead of clearing the streets they made potholes in the ice, and cars crept and bounced through rush hour after rush hour. It was weeks before traffic started moving normally.

I’d remember the storm even without a name because it hit the same day that my 90-year-old father was hospitalized in New York with meningitis. It was days before I could get out of Minneapolis to see him. (He did recover.) But if the storm hadn’t found its own name, I’d have remembered it with a more private name—the Storm When Dad Got Meningitis. That’s a testimonial to the power of names, and to our need for them.

Which brings us back to this current naming project. The U.K. and Ireland are collaborating on it, since the two countries are parked in the Atlantic like a car and a truck, and if a storm hits one it’s likely to hit the other next. Collaboration strikes me as significant, because British weather forecasts ignore the Republic of Ireland. They tell us what the weather will be for Northern Ireland, but across that border into the Republic? Silence. It’s as if Britain’s still sulking that Ireland went independent and by god it’s not going to acknowledge any Irish weather. I don’t notice this so much when I’m listening to the radio. The various regions of Britain get mentioned and I almost never catch the one I’m listening for because either my mind wanders or the puppy starts barking or the oven explodes or the phone rings or, you know, life interferes in one of the many glorious ways it has. But it is noticeable on TV because Ireland’s right there on the BBC weather map but no weather ever touches it. Northern Ireland? Yes, it gets wind, sun, rain, all that stuff. But the republic? Nope. It doesn’t have weather.

I know the Irish aren’t the BBC’s target audience, but still. I’ve heard France mentioned in weather forecasts. I’ve heard the word Spain. But Ireland? Silence.

That must make this collaboration over storm names interesting. Or maybe the word I’m looking for it tense.

But even without the BBC’s ban on Irish weather, the politics of naming storms would have to be tricky. How many names will be Gaelic and how many English? Does each country get so many names per head? Do they have to take account of the number of Irish names that are of English instead of Gaelic origin? Or does each country get to pick the same number of names? Will either country acknowledge the presence of immigrants by picking a name from some third or fourth language group?

Listen, everything’s political. Breakfast cereal is political. A length of blue ribbon is political. My fingernails are political.

Here in Cornwall, Frank didn’t turn out to be anything special. We’ve had so much rain lately that it’s hard to tell one storm from the others. Even the named ones are basically water landing on top of more water. Mercifully, none of them have done worse than leave us wet and wind-blown. But farther north it brought flooding and misery to places that hadn’t recovered from earlier flooding and misery. I’ll have to hear from someone up there to know whether having a name for the storm made them any more aware of it ahead of time or if it only gave them a better way to talk about it.

Customer service in the U.K.: a link

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For another American’s take on customer service in the U.K., check out Life in London, American Style. And if anyone else has posts about customer service on either side of the Atlantic–or, hell, anywhere else in the world–send me a link. Or leave a comment. It should be interesting to hear not just what people’s experiences are but what their expectations and assumptions are.

Customer service in the U.S. and Britain

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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.

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.

Comparative weather

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I was once stuck on a train next to a man whose idea of a conversation starter was to tell me that Britain has the most varied weather in the world. I’d only recently moved here from Minnesota, where the temperature ranges from unspeakably hot to unimaginably cold, with an unbearably beautiful week or three in the spring and fall, and I was still having trouble distinguishing the British winter from the British summer, so I nodded vaguely and opened my book. I mean, if I was going to argue, or even discuss this, where would I start?

So what’s the weather really like? I live in Cornwall, which is the southwest tip of the island, so I apologize to the rest of the British Isles if I’m misrepresenting them, but here’s how I know it’s winter: It rains and the sky’s gray. How do I know it’s summer? The tourists (who are called holidaymakers) show up, and they buy ice cream cones and dress up in hiking gear and drive our narrow roads slowly, looking terrified. Or they dress up in beach clothes and sit on the sand till their skin turns a painful shade of boiled lobster. It rains less but it’ll probably still be gray. Everything grows madly. I love the Cornish summer, but it’s basically an absence of winter, plus ice cream.

Vaguely related photo: the cliffs in summer. If you look closely, you'll see an ice cream cone just outside the frame, on the left.

Vaguely related photo: the cliffs in summer. If you look closely, you’ll see an ice cream cone just outside the frame, on the left.

When we left Minnesota, Wild Thing and I gave away our winter jackets. Talk about burning your bridges. They were good to a thousand below (Fahrenheit or Celsius; at that temperature, who cares?) and wearing them made us look like short versions of the Michelin Tire Man. What we wear as winter jackets now would get us through the early part of a Minnesota fall and after that would be about as useful against the cold as blue paint and wax paper.

I will admit that the Cornish summer is warmer than the winter, but a hot day gets into the 70s and it’s a rare day when the breeze doesn’t have a gorgeous cool undertone. If it gets into the 80s, everyone—including the papers—talks heat wave. I know it’s touched 90 when people around me wilt. Mostly it’s in the 60s, and I’m not complaining about that. In the winter, it rarely drops below freezing, and if it does it’s not likely to stay there once the sun comes up. And I’m not complaining about that either.

The biggest difference between winter and summer is the length of the days. Summer evenings go on forever. As do winter nights. Cornwall is further north than Minnesota, even if we think it’s the tropics. On the other hand, there’s lots of north to the north of us, so I don’t want to make it sound too extreme. The sun does come up in the winter, and it goes down in the summer.

Every so often in the winter, the local weather report will warn us, in a sobering sort of voice—the kind could induce controlled panic—that it’s going to get cold. Wild Thing and I get ready to sew the dogs into their long underwear. But before we have time to get out the sewing box, they put the three-day forecast on the screen and we realize that they’re talking about a five degree drop. Admittedly, that’s centigrade, but still, that’s something like ten degrees Fahrenheit. So it’ll be cooler, and it’ll probably be grayer and windier, but the dogs have fur and live indoors and they’ll be fine. We can leave the window open at night and not die of it. A fire will feel nice in the evening but once it goes out the house will be unheated and the pipes won’t going to freeze.

I’ve lost track of the number of times our pipes froze in Minnesota, in spite of central heating. I got to be good at thawing them out. For a long time we used the hair dryer, then we discovered electric paint strippers. They’re wonderful. Finally a plumber—clever man—moved the pipes away from the north wall and they never froze again. I don’t remember where the paint stripper ended up, but we didn’t dare give it away. Minnesota’s like that. You don’t want to be unprepared.

The weather I take seriously these days is rain. Here in Cornwall, we’re getting off lightly, by which I mean it’s nothing worse than wet, windy, and miserable, but the flooding in northern England and in Scotland is serious–people flooded out of their homes, bridges collapsed (okay, one bridge, but it was dramatic), power out, rescue services working like mad. I’ve been reading a lot recently about the value of flood abatement as opposed to flood defenses: letting rivers meander, the way they did before we clever little monkeys got in there and straightened them; planting trees on hillsides, which take major amounts of water out of the ground; letting fields flood, as they did before we clever little monkeys decided they shouldn’t, all of which (and more) could save cities. None of it is as sexy as big engineering projects, apparently, although speaking just for myself I never could keep sex and engineering in my mind at the same time. But to each his or her own, and if you’re a fan of engineering I won’t argue–except, just to contradict myself, to say that there does seem to be a whole side of flood prevention that we’re ignoring.

Christmas carols in the U.S. and Britain

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As Christmas approaches, carols leak into the folk (and occasionally other kinds of) songs at the pub’s singers night. It happens every year, and every year I ask myself if I shouldn’t take a week or two off to avoid them.

I have a couple of reasons for that. The first and simplest is that I expect carols to be unchanging and over here they’re not. Some have the same words as the American ones and at first the tunes sound like they’ll behave, then they take a sharp left and head off in some new direction, leaving me all alone and on the wrong note. Usually at full volume. In others the tune stays the same but the words are different.

Sending you light in the darkness and good wishes for whatever you celebrate.

Sending you light in the darkness and good wishes for whatever you celebrate.

The first few times I heard that, I’d turn to someone nearby and say, “That’s not the way we sing it.”

I might as well have said how shocked I was that gravity was operating over the holidays. Whoever it was would say, “Oh, I know. That’s the Cornish version.” Or the Boscastle version. Or the Padstow version. They’d learned a different version back in Shropshire, or Essex, or Truro, or Wherever.

I’d explain: In the U.S., Christmas carols are harder to change that the Constitution, which (to simplify things a bit) only needs a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate and then the approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures. It’s a high standard to meet, but at least a procedure’s mapped out and ready to use. Christmas carols, though? Sorry, but we don’t have a way to change them, so they stay fixed, the North Star of our culture.

Whoever I was talking to would hear me out and then tell me all over again about Shropshire or Essex or Wherever. Eventually I stopped trying.

So that’s one reason I think about disappearing for the holidays. The next is that some of the carols are—well, let me tell you a story instead of trying to sum them up: Wild Thing and I went to a school Christmas concert to hear a friend’s daughter, and one of the carols was about Mary’s womb. And there we were expecting “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Which, by the way, I hate.

Wild Thing leaned over and whispered that the Methodists in Amarillo never talked about Mary’s lady parts, let put them to music. In Amarillo, it was all “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o(etc.)ria.” They sang the same carols I did, whose religion had, at least to my ears, been worn away by repetition. But change the words a bit and toss in Mary’s womb and you’ll jolt me out of my dozy acceptance. It starts to sound, you know, religious.

I should add that the word womb doesn’t make for a particularly singable line.

I grew up celebrating Christmas as a secular holiday. The extended family came to our apartment (and later, to our house) to eat, give the kids presents, and enjoy an argument or two, usually about politics. What can I tell you? Arguing was a form of entertainment in my family. But one year an older cousin’s girlfriend played the piano and we gathered around and sang carols, and every Jewish atheist one of us knew the songs as well as the few non-Jewish family members did.

It’s a moment I remember fondly. It was decades before I stopped to think what deeply weird picture it makes.

Then I moved to Minnesota and started to feel smothered by Christmas, and that’s my third reason, if you remember after all these words what we’re counting. In New York—at least in the circles I traveled in—there were enough Jews around to create a space for people who didn’t celebrate, and that made celebrating feel voluntary. I never paid much attention to who was Jewish and who was something else, but this wasn’t about individuals. It was about the impact of demographics. (At the time, my experience was pretty much limited to Jews and Christians. I don’t know if the New York created space for other forms of non-Christians over the holidays.)

Minnesota, though, is packed with people who even if they’re not religiously Christian are at least culturally so, and that left less space for people who didn’t celebrate the holiday. Celebration stopped feeling voluntary, and I developed mixed feelings about it—part celebratory, part crabby.

And in Cornwall? As far as I know, I’m the only Jew for miles around, and probably ditto for the only person whose family wasn’t, at some point, Christian. I still celebrate the holiday, which is good since Wild Thing never saw a holiday she didn’t want to be part of and has a strong historical claim to this one, but the more insistently it surrounds me the more footnotes, caveats, reservations I add.

This year, the carols weren’t overwhelming at the pub, and the harmonies on a couple of them were stunning. My crabby meter registered only minimal grumpiness. Maybe repetition is starting to blunt the edges of the religion.

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Whatever you celebrate and whether it’s religious or secular, I wish you a good one of it. And if you don’ t have a holiday at this time of year, tuck my good wishes away and save them whenever your next holiday comes around. If you still remember by then where you left them.