Comparative racism part 2: What’s it like in Britain?

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After writing a guest post about American racism I don’t seem to be ready to leave the topic. My mind keeps circling back to something I’ve avoided writing about until now: British racism.

Why am I avoiding this? Tact? Nah. I have the occasional moment of tact, but as a rule I’m not paralyzed by it. That it’s a hard topic to be funny about? In part, but I hope to manage a bright spot here and there. Ignorance? Well, yeah, there is that. I’ve lived in the U.K. for nine years. That doesn’t make me an expert. It’s a huge, sprawling topic. Plus I live in an absurdly white part of the country. Although my friends and family are a multi-hued (and multi-many other thinged) group, my friends in this country, for the most part, are not.

But still, I listen. I hear things.

Beyond irrelevant photo: grasses after an autumn rain

Beyond irrelevant photo: grasses after an autumn rain

Before I go on, though, I need to explain something. I appreciate it that a lot of people say things like “he used the N-word” in order to avoid using a deeply offensive word. I’m about to use the word, though—not because I think it’s okay, but because I’m writing about people who do, and to dance around the word itself is to dance around the racism it embodies. You know the phrase she wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful? Well, we’ve got a mouthful here, and I am going to say shit.

Since I moved to the U.K., I’ve been in a couple of situations where people used the word nigger, not as I’m using it here, to discuss racism, but as a way of talking about black people, and I’ve argued with them about it. If you don’t say something, you become complicit. Besides, I’m not constructed for shutting up about things that matter to me.

Argued makes the interactions sound more reasoned than they were. What I’ve found myself saying is variations on You can’t say that in front of me. Because screw the reasoned argument, people already know why I’m objecting and why explain it one more time? What might make some difference is putting as high an emotional price as I can on using the word.

I won’t argue that it’s the best way to respond, but it’s the one I can manage.

So why am I talking particularly about Britain? It’s not that no one uses the word in the U.S., although I can’t remember the last time anybody in the U.S. crossed that particular line with me. I didn’t live in such a white area, and I’d guess that makes a difference. Or maybe it needs to be explained some other way. I’m not sure. But I’d be surprised if, in a similar situation, anyone in the U.S. would react the way people do here, and if I’m wrong, tell me, because I’m interested. What happens here is that people regularly respond by saying things like, “I like the word,” or, “I don’t mean anything offensive by it,”  which seems to say that nobody should be offended and presumably the argument can then turn to what’s wrong with people who are offended when they shouldn’t be.

Insert a brief incoherent shriek here if you would. I don’t know how to spell one convincingly or I’d insert it myself.

I’ve heard the same argument made about golliwogs—Little Black Sambo-like dolls that make my flesh crawl. I never saw one until I came to Britain, but they have a history here and I’ve met any number of whites who tell they had golliwogs when they were kids and they loved their golliwogs; to them, the dolls aren’t racist. Never mind that they’re caricatures right out of the 1920s-style School of Shameless Racism.

A few of these comments have come from people who are clueless and/or racist, but more of them come from people of genuine goodwill—people who’d be horrified to be thought of as racist. And yet the compass that tells them what’s racist resides inside themselves, not out in the world, among the people most affected by it.

Admittedly, to at least some extent we all have to trust our instincts. But we also have to listen to people who are closer to the front lines on this. Being part of the group in question give you an intense apprenticeship in tuning yourself to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, anti-WhatHaveYouIsm. And those of us who aren’t part of the group? We might want to listen. And think about what we hear. Because if we’ve lived in a society full of anti-WhatHaveYouIsm, we can’t help but be affected by it. We breathe it in. The spores settle in our lungs and they want to multiply. Hearing from the outside world is a sort of antibiotic. And I’m going to bail out of that metaphor before it goes out of control. I only passed high school biology because the teacher wasn’t what you’d call rigorous.

That’s far from a full report on the differences between American and British racism. (Did I really need to say that?) But it’s an aspect that fascinates and baffles me. I’ll be interested to hear what you can add.

Comparative racism: link to a guest post

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Sophie McNaughton from Moon Child invited me to write a guest post about the United States and racism. She lives in Scotland and having followed the news from the U.S. had begun to wonder if the country was being demonized (or in her word, demonised) or if what she was reading and hearing was accurate. If you’re not already up to your eyeballs with what I think, follow the link and read it.

Why is Britain called Great Britain?

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The question of why Britain’s called Great Britain popped up in a comment thread, and if I were a better person I’d go back and figure out where it was and link to whoever raised it (it was a British reader in case that strikes you as being worth knowing) but I’m crazed lately. I made a note to do sixty seconds of research on the topic, forgot to copy the link into my notes, and here I am, without a clue where we were at the time.

Sorry.

But the question persists. What are we talking about when we say “Great Britain”?

If you wander around London long enough, you’ll eventually stumble into a street called Great Russell Street. It’s not a particularly big street, but I’m assuming it’s bigger than (not great) Russell Street, which you’ll also stumble into if you stumble long enough. (All this stumbling relies on the same principal as those thousand monkey on typewriters who will eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare, assuming you can convince monkeys to type. And assuming I can get you to wander long enough. You’re welcome to stop for tea as often as you like if that helps. Or a beer.)

Great, my friends, isn’t a value judgment in either context. It means big. Big honkin’ Russell Street, Big honkin’ Britain.

Irrelevant photo: Fast Eddie is growing and would now like to be known as Great Eddie.

The first person to use great in the context of Britain seems to have been Ptolemy, who wasn’t writing in English so we’re fudging our facts here, but it’s interesting anyway. He called what we now know as England, Scotland, and Wales (and Cornish nationalist would add Cornwall)—in other words, the bigger landmass hereabouts—Great Britain, and Ireland—the smaller one—Little Britain.

Then everyone forgot about it for centuries. They had other things on their minds. In the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth called that bigger landmass Greater Britain to distinguish it from Lesser Britain, which wasn’t Ireland but Brittany. And then they forgot about it all for another long stretch of time.

The phrase pops up again in the fifteenth century in a not very interesting context, then gets serious in the seventeenth century, when James united what were still and continued to be two separate countries, England and Scotland, under a single monarchy—and (although it’s not relevant to our discussion) claimed Ireland and France as well. In the next century, England and Scotland were united into a single country. Wales had been conquered some time before all this and the English had gotten into the habit of thinking it was part of England (the Welsh thought differently), so it didn’t get a separate mention right then.

James, by the way, was either the first or the sixth, depending on whether you’re standing in England or in Scotland when you count. I told you not to trust me with numbers—they go all shifty when I’m in the room. It should also be noted that James couldn’t spell for shit. He called himself the king of “Great Brittaine,”

Well, he was king. He got to spell it any way he wanted. Who was going to tell him he had it wrong? Besides, pretty much everyone did that back then, with pretty much any word they set their feathery pens to.

Fast forward to the days when Britain had an empire. The Great in Great Britain must’ve been handy and did take on the tone of a value judgment. But the origin? Big. Nothing but big.

These days, Great Britain means England, Wales, and Scotland. (The link here is basically a footnote in case you’re seriously interested. I could also link to some kid’s school paper, which for reasons I won’t stop to think about came up at the top of Google’s list, but I won’t.) And Cornwall, as the Cornish nationalists would remind us. Along with some of the surrounding small islands but not others, which are self-governing dependent territories.

Don’t ask.

It doesn’t include Northern Ireland. But in everyday speech, people often use British to cover the entire United Kingdom, which does include Northern Ireland. A website called Know Britain says that from a legal point of view this is inaccurate—and just afterward it notes that the phrase is often used to mean exactly that in legislation, especially in reference to nationality.

So there you go. Are you confused yet? Then my work is done. But because I don’t like to leave a topic until I’ve overdone it, I should add that Know Britain says the British Islands is a political term meaning the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man. But the British Isles is a geographical term meaning Great Britain, all of Ireland, and all the smaller islands around them. Don’t you just love this language?

Someday when I’m feeling particularly brave I’ll tackle the question of which categories of people would say, “I’m British,” and which ones would say, for example, “I’m English,” or “I’m Cornish” and so forth, and what all that means. Or may mean.

But for now we’ll end there . It may not all be good, but it’s great, isn’t it?

Dealing with the public, U.K. style: part 2

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Last Friday I posted a piece about what it’s like dealing with the public in the U.K. Then I did the grocery shopping and became the public.

I need to bore you with a bit of personal background here. On Thursday, I made pizza for Wild Thing, a friend, and myself. Two pizzas to be exact, because our friend is young, with youth’s boundless and enthusiastic ability to eat a lot of whatever’s available. I make a decent pizza, if I do say so myself, with homemade dough but, sadly, bottled sauce. I used homemade sauce once, and although it’s good on spaghetti it was all wrong on pizza. So I use bottled stuff.

But pizza calls for mozzarella.

Irrelevant photo: beach huts at Swannage

Irrelevant photo: beach huts at Swannage

Now unlike the U.S., Britain never attracted a serious wave of Italian immigrants, and it’s a poorer country for it—something that’s worth keeping in mind as we battle it out over how many refugees we’ll allow to reach these green shores. So Cornwall shouldn’t be your first stop if you’re planning a mozzarella tour of the world. When you ask for mozzarella here, most stores will show you little wet balls of the stuff, called fresh mozzarella, sealed in soft plastic coffins.

Do I sound biased? I’ve never tasted truly fresh mozzarella, but I’ve read that it has 24 wonderful qualities and one is lost in each hour after it’s made. The stuff in plastic coffins, then? It’s edible, even if I can’t get excited about it. But it’s Italian, and we’re all impressed with Italian food, so it sells. As the British recover from a traumatic food history, which includes not just rationing during and after World War II but long exposure to baked beans and overboiled cabbage, they’re exercising their gourmet muscles, trying to build up—well, maybe not a reputation as a gourmet nation but a something, a, um, gee, I seem to have gone all flappy and wordless as I try to describe this.

Okay, here’s what I’m trying to say: I opened Saturday’s paper and turned to the recipes while I worked up the courage to face the latest brutalities of the refugee crisis. Because—I know, in the context it’s grotesque, but our world a grotesque place these days—I love reading recipes, and trying a few of them. And the ones I found called for orange blossom honey, fresh curry leaves, and quails’ eggs. And good sherry vinegar. If you have any of the crappy stuff, don’t use it. Not to mention fennel bulbs. (Bleah—licorice flavor. Shudder, shudder, shudder.)

Not all in one recipe, to be fair about this. But still, you know, it’s not the stuff every home cook keeps on hand. Or the stuff rural supermarkets stock.

I can’t help thinking that these things get tossed into British recipes to establish the gourmetocity of the cooks who write them. You know: Look at us. Aren’t we worldly? Don’t we know our ingredients? So what if you never cook it: Aren’t you impressed?

I’ve wandered. Where was I? Fresh mozzarella in little wet packs that preserve it for so long that calling it fresh violates every Truth in Advertising standard ever established. It’s trendy. So the supermarkets sell it. Hell, even our village store’s been known to stock it. And it’s useless for pizza. Once, in desperation, I tried squeezing the water out of it and using it. I might as well have boiled the pizza.

I do not recommend repeating the experiment.

Plain ol’ mozzarella—the nonfresh stuff; I guess you could call it the dry stuff—is hard to find where I live. Maybe in cities it’s easier. For a while our local supermarket, Morrison’s, sold it by the block, which was great. Then they didn’t sell any. Then they sold it grated. Then that disappeared and was replaced with a mozzarella and cheddar mix, which is blasphemy. Then, finally, they sold a Morrison’s brand grated mozzarella again. And all was at peace in North Cornwall.

Until of course it wasn’t. Because the stuff I bought and used on our most recent pizzas? It was white and it melted—so far so much like mozzarella—but it didn’t taste like cheese. The packaging was the same as the mozzarella I’d bought before, but they’re substituted some uncheeselike substance.

And this in a country that takes cheese seriously. That makes and eats wonderful cheese.

And now we return to Friday, when I was shopping in Morrison’s, having made two bad pizzas the day before, and I was in the dairy aisle, where a kid was stocking something and on an impulse I asked him, “If I made a comment on one of your products, is there anyone who actually listens to that sort of thing?”

To which he said something along the lines of, “Gee, I don’t know.”

We both laughed. There was no point in going on about the mozzarella, but there was also no way not to, so I told him about it. We stopped to unscramble that I didn’t mean the fresh stuff, I meant the grated (since they no longer sell it in bricks).

“I only buy the red Leicester,” he said, “and to be honest that’s crap too.”

How could I not like this kid? I seem to remember Wild Thing swearing off red Leicester years ago, for just that reason, although on the basis of our recent experience I’m ready to guess that we don’t know what red Leicester really tastes like. I don’t remember what else we said, but as we were winding down I said, “Well, if there’s anyone to pass my comment on to, tell them some crazy American who lives here complained about the mozzarella.”

He said he would. We were both, I think, pretty sure he wouldn’t, because who was he going to tell? I thought about calling the emergency services number—which is 999 here, in case you need to know that—but I restrained myself.

Dealing with the public, U.K. style

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A recent article in the Guardian listed the reasons people call local government. The information was compiled by the Local Government Association, and what journalist could resist? Other papers ran versions of the story as well. People asked:

What was the name of the James Bond baddie who liked cats? (That was for a crossword puzzle.)

What size pan does Mary Berry’s strawberry tart call for? (At least they didn’t ask what kind of fruit it calls for.)

How much water do you need to cook super noodles? (A lot. What are super noodles?)

What are the rules for mouse racing? (First you catch your mouse…)

What should you do if you eat an out-of-date pork pie? (Write your will. It’ll keep you busy until you come to terms with the fact that you’ll live.)

Would you take my cat? (No, for my cat is a jealous cat. My other cat probably is as well, but he’s young and can’t imagine other cats moving in on his territory.)

swanage 078

Cliffs near Swannage, Dorset. That woman soaking in the sublime scenery? She’s looking at her phone.

I don’t know if those are particularly British questions—except of course for the Mary Berry one. She keeps cropping up here.  The emergency phone system fielded a call from someone who said Mary Berry had kidnapped her. The consensus among people who left comments here was that we should all be so lucky. We’d get a nice cup of tea and some homemade cake.

When you deal with the public, you hear and see pretty much everything. My dealings have been with the American public, but basically weird calls are weird calls. I used to work for a writers organization, and it ran a series of contests. Every time the rules confused someone and they called to ask for an explanation, the organization responded by making the rules more specific. And longer. Which confused more people. Which led to more calls. My favorite went like this. “I see it says to staple the submission in the upper left-hand corner. Whose left is that?”

As an organization, we never did seem to catch onto the connection between increased length and increased calls. So who, I ask you, should I be making fun of here?

Cornwall Gay Pride

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We’re a diverse bunch here at Notes, or an ill-assorted one if you like, and I love that, but once in a while it means I second-guess myself before I post something. To be specific, how’s a more conservative subsection of readers going to feel if I talk about a Gay Pride celebration? Am I going to run anyone off?

When I worry about running someone off it’s not about numbers. Sure, I check my stats as obsessively (and pointlessly) as any other blogger, but mostly it’s because I don’t want Notes to turn into an echo chamber for voices who all agree on a 674-point charter that we argued over until we all hate each other. I value the comments I get, and the people behind the comments. I don’t want to lose contact.

But that can’t come at the expense of being who I am. If I shut myself up every time I might drag a reader outside their comfort zone, I’ll bore us all to tears. And right after that I’ll stop writing altogether, because good writing carries an element of risk. You’ll have to judge whether the writing here is that good, but as a goal? It’s what I aim for.

All that long-windedness leads up to this: I went to Cornwall’s Gay Pride Day last weekend, and if that makes anyone uncomfortable, I hope you’ll stay with me anyway. If you don’t, I regret it but that’s what I’m writing about today.

Cornwall Gay Pride.

Cornwall Gay Pride. Photo by Ida Swearingen.

After all that rigmarole, of course, I’ve made myself wonder if anyone who’d be uncomfortable with Gay Pride Day is still around. If you are you’re more than welcome and if you left quietly by the side door I’m sorry to hear it. Thanks for not letting it slam.

Wild Thing and I been in together for 38 years now, which is long enough to have seen a lot of changes in the way same-sex couples are received in the larger world, and a lot of changes in Gay Pride celebrations as well. Here’s what struck me about this one:

First, Cornwall’s a rural county, so it wasn’t a huge gathering, but it was bigger than I expected. It was very much a family celebration: gay people and their families and friends, transsexuals and their families and friends, straight people who weren’t related to anyone but turned out to show support or buy a burger, sit on the grass, and enjoy the entertainment. Little kids, including one girl in a rainbow tutu. And dogs. Lots of dogs.

Organizations had set up booths promoting themselves—hotlines, political parties, the environment agency (!), the fire department (more exclamation marks), the police (multiple exclamation marks). Parents and Friends of Gays and Lesbians had a booth, and they always leave me with a lump in my throat. They were started by a woman whose gay son had been beaten up while distributing gay-related leaflets. First she wrote a letter protesting police inaction. Then she went on the radio and TV, then she joined a Gay Pride March. Soon she had an organization on her hands, and it’s been going ever since.

When so many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual young people have been rejected by their families, it means the world to see families stepping forward in this way, embracing their relatives and their right to live in the open. Which leads me to this: To the families of the gay etc. kids in my life, I hope you know how spectacular you are, and how much you mean to me.

And here I have to stop and say a word or seventeen about that phrase gay etc. For a while the most common phrase was simply gay, then it was gay and lesbian, then it was gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender, which was unwieldy enough that it was usually shortened to GLBT, which I can’t help thinking of that as gay, lesbian, bacon, and tomato. Recently I’ve seen a bunch of other letters added to the string, probably standing for pickles and mayonnaise and a side of chips, which in Britain are crisps, just in case this was in danger of sounding simple.

The world insists on getting more complicated. I’m as baffled as anyone else.

With the possible exception of mayonnaise, adding all these categories does make our language more accurate, and people get both passionate and political about it when they go to name an organization or write a leaflet. But it does make for a lot of words. Or letters. So for the moment, let’s settle for gay etc. I won’t argue that it’s the best phrase or the most accurate one, but it is the shortest.

With that out of the way, let’s go back to the involvement of the police. To understand why this struck me, you need two pieces of background.

One: Back in the day, when gay etc. sex was illegal (note: in Britain only sex between men was illegal, I’ve read, because Queen Victoria refused to believe that women would carry on that way), bars were one of the few places people could meet. The police could raid them at any time, though, because by definition what went on in there was illegal. Not that people were having sex on the premises necessarily. Dancing together was enough. Touching someone was enough. Being there was enough. People would be arrested, lose their jobs, lose their families. Lives were ruined.

Ah, the good old days.

Two, and this isn’t about the politics of being gay etc.: During one of the New York blackouts, a friend’s parents were in Grand Central Station. The friend’s father had MS, and when everything went dark and people started running around in a panic, his wife was struggling to keep him from getting knocked over. She saw a cop and went to him, saying, “Excuse me, but my husband has MS. Can you help us?”

To which the cop said, “Get outta my way, lady, I gotta help the people.”

And they were both straight and white.

God, I love New York.

I had a similar experience with a New York cop after a fender bender, but it wasn’t quite as outrageously absurd, so let’s stay with this as an example of what I expect from cops. I’m not even going to get into Ferguson, Staten Island, and black lives matter, but they’re not unrelated. When you’re outside the mainstream, you don’t assume the policeman is your friend. The history of the police and the gay community? Not friendly. And here they were, setting up booths about diversity, asking us to sign a petition to restore funding that’s been cut from the Devon and Cornwall police budget.

Wild Thing and I had been to a Cornwall Gay Pride Day before, so this wasn’t a complete surprise. That helps explain my final story.

On our way to the park, Wild Thing and I ran into friends, one of them in a wheelchair. We knew the name of the park but weren’t sure how to find it, and we asked a cop if he could point us in the right direction. You can’t do that just anywhere. But he offered to walk with us, and when the way got steep he took over pushing the wheelchair. He was young. We were once, but it was a long time ago. The pride I once took in doing that sort of thing myself has taken second place to the practical problems of bad backs and creaky shoulder joints and the need not to set that wheelchair rolling downhill when it’s supposed to be going up.

I did take responsibility for the liter of milk he’d been carrying.

So there we were, a young cop pushing a woman in a wheelchair to a Gay Pride gathering and three of us following behind with his liter of milk. I won’t argue that the world’s problems are over, but a few things have changed, and it gives me hope to see it.

People risked a lot to make that happen—their jobs, their families, their education, their peace of mind, sometimes their lives. In places around the world, they’re still taking those risks. Here’s a moment of silence to acknowledge them all.

Me, elsewhere: a link

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To help you through those long, long days between my Friday post and next Tuesday’s (oh, how you miss me; it must be awful), here are two things in one place: a guest post I wrote on Barb Taub’s Tales from Null City and Barb’s review of The Divorce Diet. For her take alone on what the central character would have done if it had been set in various other decades it’s worth a click or two.

Knowing all the answers in Britain

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I can’t continue to write about life on this strange island without talking about the quiz.

No, I’m not talking about the test I had to take in order to stay here. That was a test. If you judge it on length it might have passed for a quiz, but it had too much riding on it. What I’m talking about is the British addiction to quizzes in general.

Am I using the word addiction loosely? No, your honor, I am not. I maintain that the population of this country (which is spread over all of one island and part of another, so I was using the word island loosely in my first sentence) is heavily dependent on the quiz and incapable of going for more than a week without one. This doesn’t apply to every individual, but if we take the population as a whole, addiction isn’t too strong a word.

Chairs for rent, facing the beach. Swanage.

Irrelevant photo: chairs for rent, facing the beach in Swanage

I submit:

Exhibit A: the pub quiz. These are held for entertainment while the participants are in varying stages of inebriation. Pubs that hold them schedule them weekly, indicating that problems would arise if the time between them is extended beyond that interval.

Exhibit B: multiple Radio 4 quiz shows, some of which make fun of quiz shows (see, for example, Exhibit B.1, I haven’t a clue) but are still quiz shows. These also repeat at seven-day intervals and give social approval to quiz addiction.

Exhibit C: village fundraising quiz nights. Yes, people pay money to show up and take a quiz. These are social events, where people compete in teams, reinforcing each other’s addiction. They are held at random intervals, but the social aspect makes them insidious.

And here we’ll take a break from court and gossip in the hall, where I can tell you that I was once asked if I’d pay a pound for a quiz supporting a local folk music group. After a blank moment during which my brain argued about whether I should say “No, I hate quizzes” or buy one and use it for scratch paper, I compromised by saying I’d pay a pound for the privilege of not participating. Everyone went away happy.

I think.

If you’re British, none of this (except maybe my shock and horror over it—and, yeah, the word addiction) is news to you. Of course you think quizzes are entertainment. But if you’re not British—or at least if you’re American, since I’m not all that sure where the rest of the world stands on this earthshaking issue—you’re thinking, They pay money to do what? So let me repeat: The quiz is a form of entertainment in Britain.

But let’s drop the addiction argument, since I only threw it in to justify organizing my examples into exhibits and write “your honor.” We all know an argument like that will fall apart if it’s left out in the rain. And it does rain a lot here.

I have a hard time finding the fun in a quiz. They’re something I escaped when I got out of school—those moments of Quick, prove you finished the reading and understood it. 

Wild Thing, like me, has trouble figuring out how this is fun, but unlike me she has a phenomenal memory. I’ve come to think of her as my external hard drive. She should do well on them. But a fall-back category of quiz questions involves British pop culture circa, let’s say, 1970. Or whenever. It depends on the age of the person who puts the quiz together—and if the quiz-maker’s playing fair, on the age of the audience. This is stuff Wild Thing can’t possibly know. We weren’t here then.

Every so often, she’ll give the person who put the quiz together a hard time about discriminating against Americans. This is done in fun, although (as the idea that the quiz is entertainment proves) fun is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t know that it’s always heard as a joke. And I don’t know that there isn’t a sharp edge lurking under the joke’s padding.

Talking about what I don’t know may not be a bad place to end a post on quizzes, because they have a way of reminding me what vast fields of knowledge lie beyond my horizons. There’s so much stuff I don’t know. Some of that is a problem, either often or occasionally, but the stuff I can’t answer on the (very few) quizzes I’ve participated in has never yet been anything I care about not knowing.

I understand that not everyone cares about the same things. For some reason—damn, the world’s a baffling place—nobody’s brain is a replica of mine, and the things our brains hold onto and value vary. Why should we score ourselves or let other people score us according to some standard that isn’t ours?

Sorry, that sounded way more serious than I expected. Take it lightly, folks. It won’t be on life’s final exam, and life’s final exam won’t be graded anyway.

Chasing lifestyles in Swanage

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Wild Thing and I just got back from a few days of bumping around Swanage, a beach town in Dorset, where we were playing tourist. Or holidaymakers, if you want to get all British about it. I’m not sure why one’s a singular and the other’s a plural. Let’s pretend it’s one of those American/British things instead of a rule I just invented.

But forget the grammar. The important thing is that I came home with a burning question: What’s a lifestyle?

The question landed in my head because two shops there seem to sell lifestyles. One advertises lifestyle clothing, the other homeware (singular) and lifestyle.

Marginally relevant photo: a couple by the beach in Swanage. I don't know if this qualifies as a lifestyle.

Marginally relevant photo: a couple by the beach in Swanage. I don’t know if this qualifies as a lifestyle. Probably not, and I like them for it.

Now homeware demands its own moment of thought before we move on to lifestyle, because they’re related. Really they are. I’m guessing homeware is an upscale version of housewares (plural)—the boring stuff I vaguely remember my mother stopping to look at while I pulled on her arm and whined. (I was a charming kid.)

Now that I’m 203, I stop to look at housewares myself, and they’re more interesting than they were in my mother’s day. It’s amazing how the world’s gotten better, in at least this one not particularly useful way.

But homeware? Holy shit. Homeware isn’t just stuff you shove in a cupboard and take out when you need it. It’s made up of lifestyle items.

What am I talking about? I haven’t a clue, and I’m guessing that whoever paid to get that sign painted, if pushed, wouldn’t be able to tell me either. What it implies, though, is that if I own (and therefore, crucially, have bought) enough of this stuff, it will change my life. Or its style.

Are my life and its style the same thing? The slogan implies it. It also implies that if I change the style—the thin outer shell—my life will also change.

From the context, I can guess that if a cereal bowl is a lifestyle item, it costs more than if it were just, you know, a cereal bowl. How much more? Ten percent? Fifty percent? More than that? How much is a lifestyle change worth?

The higher price is essential. If you could get your hands on lifestyle cereal bowls for the cost of ordinary ones, would you believe in their power to change your life? Doesn’t all this depend on the lifestyle object being out of other people’s reach, so that owning it puts you in a special category?

Since we’d been talking about all this, Wild Thing stopped outside the lifestyle clothing store’s window and called my attention to a yellow, semi-see-through blouse. It wasn’t a fully transparent kind of see-through, but if you looked closely enough it you could see the stitching on the seams.

“If I wore that, it would change my lifestyle,” she said.

You need to understand that Wild Thing’s as likely to wear a see-through blouse as she is to wear a suit of armor, but if she did, it would still be Wild Thing in there, and wildly out of place.

None of which exactly addresses the question, which has now expanded from What’s a lifestyle? to include Whatever it is, can you sell it?

Let’s start with the first, What’s a lifestyle?

Years ago, when having a partner of the same sex shocked more people than it does today, someone told me she didn’t approve of my lifestyle. I can’t remember who she was, where we were, or how that came up, but I do remember thinking (and, unfortunately, not being fast enough to say), It’s not a lifestyle. It’s a life.

That wouldn’t have gotten into why she thought I should care what she approved of in my life or my style. We’ll set that aside, though, because our topic today is lifestyle, not silly, self-important people from the past who’d been programmed with a phrase or two that let her think she had the world figured out.

In the context of same-sex relationships, lifestyle was a word tossed around by people who—how am I going to characterize them? People who spent a lot more time than was good for them thinking about what other people did (or might do, since I doubt I could live up to their imaginings) in bed. And their choice of the word made my life sound like something I’d chosen from a delicatessen counter. I’ll have a slice of the blue cheese, please, some Kalamata olives, and, gee, what else do I want today? Maybe a partner of the same sex who the world at large disapproves of? Oh, fun.

So I’ve never been impressed with the word’s accuracy. And now (touching briefly on our second question) I find out lifestyles are for sale. In stores that sell cereal bowls and less-than-opaque blouses.

How times have changed.

It’s worth asking if the objects we own and use change us. They do. If you’ve never spent a day in high heels, try it and you’ll understand. Or an hour. Or, hell, walk from one end of the house to the other and you’ll catch a glimpse of how this works. Now apply that to the more serious changes like fire, or electricity, or central heating. Or clean water and sewage pipes.

Trust me to dive right into the most romantic objects, right?

If our lives demand that we live in and use objects that don’t suit us, we’ll be out of place in our own lives. All I have to do is imagine myself in a corset to know that objects matter. Getting rid of the wrong ones matters. Getting enough of the right ones matters. Having more stuff, though? Or more expensive stuff? What matters there is knowing that it doesn’t, in any deep way, matter. This is about knowing the difference between need and want, and between our own genuine wants and the ones foisted on us by the good folk selling us lifestyles.

I’m not immune to the lure of a beautiful object. Heels aren’t my thing—give me running shoes any day—but I often find myself looking through our mismatched mugs for the one I most want to drink out of. It’s silly—they all hold liquid—but I do it and take some small pleasure from it. It’s not a lifestyle, though, it’s a mug. To be a lifestyle, I suspect, you have to back away from your stuff and your choices and see your life as a creation, an art form. A kind of make-up applied to the face of your existence. Which, to me, seems to create something brittle.

Some bloggers call themselves lifestyle bloggers, meaning (I think) that they write about their own lives. Or maybe they write about the make-up on the face of their lives. Maybe for some of them all it means that they don’t fit any of the other prefabricated niches the blogosphere offers so they pour themselves into this one, whether or not they’d use the word if they weren’t pushed to it.

I’ve struggled with the niche issue myself. I don’t seem to fit any of them and haven’t claimed one. Notes isn’t (as far as I can figure out) an expat blog, isn’t a humor blog, and isn’t, may all the gods anyone ever believed in preserve us, a lifestyle blog. Because I’m not going to blog about something I suspect of being blue smoke and mirrors.

If a lifestyle can be marketed and then constructed out of things we buy, it’s no more than a veneer, a shell, an image we present first to ourselves and then to the world to say, Look how beautifully I’m living. Aren’t I just happy?

And behind that? That’s where the person lives, as happy or unhappy, as wise or foolish, as before the lifestyle goods arrived.