To appease Fast Eddie’s fan club, I’ve added a new page of hopelessly cute kitten pictures. I’ll add to it once in a while, and as far as I can figure out WordPress won’t send out a notice, so if you need a kitten fix, stop in and see what–if anything–is new.
Fast Eddie, fast asleep
You can’t walk far in the U.K. without stubbing your toe on some bit of history. Today’s bruised toe comes from the Cornwall’s Coast Path between Tintagel and Trebarwith Strand, which Wild Thing and I walked last week, in beautiful, if windy, weather.
Cornwall’s traditional industries were tin mining, slate quarrying, and fishing. The soil here is rocky, so most of the farming involves grazing. Plowing this soil must’ve broken many a heart, not to mention a back.
The tin mines were closed under Maggie Thatcher, and although every so often I read that one or another of them is going to reopen, so far none have. A few boats still fish commercially, but factory fishing has left the seas seriously depleted. And some of the slate quarries still operate, but the primary industry these days is tourism, leaving Cornwall with stunning views, low-wage, seasonal work, and high house prices.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to brood. We’re taking a walk. The weather’s perfect. Smile, everyone. We’re starting at St. Materiana church, outside Tintagel.
An abandoned slate quarry, with a bit of thrift growing on the right
Slate
This is spoil from an abandoned quarry–the rock that wasn’t usable. The Coast Path goes right by it. Note the tilted horizon. That’s my doing. The real horizon is just where it belongs. Work in quarries like this must’ve been hellish at times, out on the cliff edge in the wind and driving rain. From what I’ve been told, young boys were sent over the clliff edges in baskets to blast the rock. They were lighter than grown men.
It’s one thing to mourn a way of life that’s been lost, but let’s not romanticize it.
Dry stone walling
With all that rock in and on the ground, the easiest method of dividing fields is building dry stone walls, and they’re everywhere in Cornwall. The dry in dry stone wall means not that you take them inside to keep them out of the rain but that they’re built without mortar–just stacked perfectly, stone on stone on stone. The way they’re built hasn’t changed over the centuries. I’ve read that the only way to tell the age of a wall is to count the varieties of blackberries growing in it. Blackberries grow wild here. If you’re not careful, they’ll take root in your bed, so change those sheets regularly, folks. The problem with the system is that I can’t tell one variety of blackberry from another. But never mind, because somebody can. And anyway, I’ve never yet needed to know a wall’s age.
A dry stone wall. The pattern’s called curzyway in some places and jack and jill in others.
A well-built wall can last for centuries. I took a one-day workshop on wall building and then built us a low one around a flower bed. The first stones fell out after a year, and I’ve been putting them back in place ever since. What did I expect from a one-day course? And it doesn’t matter. I’m proud of it anyway, in the way a seven-year-old is proud of an art project: not because it’s good but because it’s hers.
The patterns of an area’s walls depend on the local rock. And yes, that’s obvious once someone says it but until someone does you don’t necessarily think of it. In other parts of the country, hedges serve the purpose that stone walls serve here. You work with what’s at hand.
A bit of stone wall, partially grown over
Not all of Cornwall’s stone walls are visible, because plants take root in between the stones and after a while can hide them completely. Roads often have what look like overgrown earthen banks on both sides, but inside that soft-looking mass may be a spine of stone.
These days some walls are mortared but keep the look of dry stone walls.
But back to our walk. We passed several abandoned quarries and skirted a series of fields, with their stone walls. The Tintagel-Trebarwith path goes into only one field. I’l write about foot paths another time, but they cross private land–usually farm land. That too is history, and deserves its own post. This particular field often holds sheep, but it was empty last week, so I didn’t have to put the dog on a leash. When she was young and impressionable, she looked in the mirror and thought she saw a collie–or what the rest of the world calls a border collie; a sheep-herding dog–and she’s been trying to chase sheep ever since. The farmers do not find this cute.
Stiles
A stile. With the dog who thinks she’s a collie.
No, we’re not talking fashion. You don’t want me to talk about fashion. Remember the mankini? This is stile as in “he found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.” For some reason, American kids end up learning that nursery rhyme–or at least I did–in spite of not living within a thousand of miles of a stile. I used to wonder what one was.
They’re ways for a wall to let people but not animals get over. Simple, timeless, and clever. The (I can’t help myself) style of stile varies from place to place. This one let us into the field and has a space underneath that a small-to-medium-size dog can crawl through, as Minnie the Moocher is demonstrating in the photo. In places, paths go through field gates instead of stiles, and most walkers have the sense to close them, but there’s always one, isn’t there? Stiles solve that problem. The walkers get over and the sheep–or cows, or whatever–stay inside. You don’t have to open them and you can’t forget to close them. All you have to do is be able to climb over.
Wildflowers
Stonecrop, which planted itself between the rocks
Speedwell, growing in the grass
Spring and early summer are the best times for wildflowers. When I first came to Cornwall, I was overwhelmed by the numbers. After Minnesota, it all seemed unbelievably rich. The stonecrop on the right is probably English stonecrop, but I’m not great at identifying wildflowers. If I can identify the family reasonably accurately, I’m happy. I haven’t even taken a guess on the speedwell. It could be field, slender, American, thyme-leaved, wall, heath, pixilated, pontificated, confabulated, etc. The list is as long as my finger, in small type. And yes, I did make up a few of those.
The rest of the walk
After following the cliffs, the path descends into Trebarwith Strand, which is now given over to what everybody but me calls holidaymakers, who are drawn by the wide sand beach that appears at low tide. I’m not sure what called the village into existence originally. I doubt it was fishing, because the beach is covered at high tide and there’s no harbor at all. And it wouldn’t have been farming, because the valley’s too steep for any fields. Possibly the slate quarries. There’s another, also abandoned, in the valley just to the southwest. Today it has a cafe, a few shops, a pub, and a lot of holiday rentals. It’s a great place to get a cup of tea before heading inland to take the short route back to the car, which is what we did.
On the road, we passed one more bit of history. If you look carefully, you’ll see GR on the front of the mailbox. That shows who was king or queen when the box was put into the wall. In this case, it was George. We met a guy who collects them, by which he means not the mailboxes themselves, just the sight of them. Before we met him, we’d never noticed the initials. Now we look.
Someone asked me a while back if I would ever set a novel in the U.K.
I’ve been tempted. I even have the first few scenes of one on paper. (Yes, paper. You remember paper. It’s that stuff the kitten chases when you crumple it into a ball.) If I’m smart, or at least cautious, a few scenes is as far as that novel will go. Because it doesn’t take long before I/you/whatever writer we’re talking about here comes to one of those spots where British and American English branch off in different directions and chooses the wrong path.
A good copy editor could save our writer, but a good copy editor doesn’t always pop up at those forks in the road, so the writer marches bravely off in the wrong direction and ends up wandering through the wilderness. Days later, she stumbles into town, having missed a few meals and sporting twigs in her hair and mud on her clothes.
Screamingly irrelevant photo: Fast Eddie attacks the laundry basket. I’ll impose a short moratorium on cute kitten photos after this.
Where was the copy editor? Semi-comatose at the computer. Or firmly rooted in the wrong version of our shared language. I’ve been a copy editor. We can’t be specialists in everything. We do a bit of fact checking, but nothing guarantees that we’ll check the right facts. And a word we recognize as right? Unless we’re fully bilingual in English, we won’t stop to question it.
When you’re paid by the word, you don’t have time to ponder deeply.
So I don’t assume a copy editor can save me. Whatever version of the language I write in, I’m responsible for getting it right.
I’m not a careless listener. When I started writing fiction, I trained myself to hear not what I thought people said but what they really said. Because speech isn’t even close to the English that we’re taught is correct, and nothing sounds as phony as characters speaking in perfectly formed sentences. I used to listen to snippets of conversation and then write down as much of them as I could remember, paying attention to word choice, to unpredictable phrases, to pauses, to the ways people waited each other out and cut each other off, to run-on sentences and sentence fragments, to the genuine and glorious insanity of the spoken language.
A high point in my eavesdropping career was a conversation between a Minneapolis cop and a man—white and presumably drunk, although I couldn’t swear to that second part—who was lying on my neighbors’ front lawn. The cop was trying to persuade him to move on, and the man, by the time I started listening, was sitting up and holding a hamburger in the air like Exhibit A.
They said a few words back and forth, then the man was on his feet and heading down the street and the cop yelled after him, “I’m gonna come to your house and sit on your lawn and eat hamburgers. See how you like that.”
It was a mix of things that made this memorable. The “and…and…and” rhythm of the cop’s comment. The “see how you like that,” which made him sound like a twelve-year-old. But mostly it was the sheer craziness of a cop, with his gun and his club and the full weight of the law’s machinery on his side, threatening to sit on someone’s lawn and eat hamburgers.
I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down as much of the exchange as I could, because if I let it wait I wouldn’t believe I was remembering it accurately.
So, there’s my proof—my hamburger; my Exhibit A—that I’m not an untrained listener. Move me from Minnesota to Cornwall, though, and my carefully tuned ear goes off key. I do listen to the Britishness of British speech, and I keep a mental list of phrases I love, because even the clichés sound fresh to me. Someone says, “Oh, she’s away with the fairies,” and I laugh as if she’d invented the phrase. I’ve been hearing it for nine years now, but it still makes me picture fairies.
M. has two stock phrases that sound fresh to me, although I know she didn’t invent them: “He’s all talk and no trousers” and “she’s all frill and no knickers.”
When we bought our house, we asked a different M. to give us some advice about the garden. She showed us a broken pot with blade-like leaves growing out of it, which had been left behind.
“If you have to have these,” she said, “make sure they stay in the pot. Those,” and she pointed to some other plant, although I can’t remember what, “are invasive, but this is a thug.”
I laughed and got one of those blank looks you get when you’ve laughed at the wrong thing. She wasn’t being immensely clever. Thug is a category of plant that any gardener here recognizes—one step worse than invasive.
So yes, I listen and I appreciate and I remember. But I still hesitate to write either Cornish or more standard British dialogue. Sure, I can tuck in a phrase or two, but after that? I’d write something I think is neutral and without knowing it rely on something hopelessly American. Because it’s not the phrases you hear and remember and are delighted with that matter. It’s the ones you don’t hear. It’s the times you don’t stop to question yourself but turn out to be writing your native English instead of that other, related language.
I catch British journalists doing this when they interview Americans: “I just reached into the drinks cabinet,” they’ll have someone say. Into the what??? We don’t have drinks cabinets in the U.S. We have— Wait a minute, what do we have? Liquor cabinets? I never actually had one, so it’s not a phrase that has much life in my mind and I can’t remember what to call the damn things.
Let’s fall back on another example. A while back, I read an interview in which some American actor talked about his mum. His what? Americans have mothers and moms and mamas, but we do not, in any regional or ethnic accent I ever heard of, have mums. But it’s what the writer heard because it’s the word the writer uses. We translate without noticing.
I love running into stuff like that. It makes me feel gloriously smug. Not because I couldn’t do exactly the same thing but because this particular time I didn’t.
For a post about paying the tax on my car, I wrote about being in the post office and trying to conduct a bit of business that we couldn’t finish and couldn’t abandon and if you ever want to bring a small post office to a halt, talk to me because I know how to do now. After what seemed like forever, I was able to step aside and the woman behind the counter called out—
What the hell did she call out? At first I wrote, “Can I help the next person?” I was pretty sure that was wrong, but I left it because it got the job done.
The next day, hesitantly, I changed it to, “Can I help?” and then to “Can I help who’s next?” which is a weird phrase, and grammatically strange enough for me to believe I didn’t invent it, but I checked it with a friend anyway, and she confirmed it: That’s what the woman would have said.
So I got away with it, but I hesitate to write more that a few lines in any of the many versions of British. Because it’s not the stuff you hear that trips you up but the stuff you don’t hear. The stuff you take for granted, that your brain translates automatically. It’s the drinks cabinet. It’s the mum.
A politician made a valiant attempt to defend the honor of a colleague last week and accidentally brought the whole British Parliament into disrepute. Or further disrepute. Or just possibly none of the above. Take your pick once I tell you the tale.
Sir Malcolm Bruce, a former deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, tried to defend Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael by saying that if every MP was kicked out of office for lying “we would clear out the House of Commons very fast.”
(Note: You can follow that link safely. Unlike the one in last Tuesday’s post, you won’t find any mankinis on the other end.)
Did Bruce mean that lying was widespread in public life? a BBC interviewer asked.
“No,” he said. “Well, yes.”
Irrelevant photo: Fast Eddie, fast asleep.
Or, just possibly, both of the above. I’m a great fan of all of the above and none of the above, especially when they’re not logical possibilities. They give us an illusion of choice and expansiveness and—well, I don’t think freedom is too high-flown a word for this. Sure, the world may be falling apart and the weather’s getting stranger by the year, but the range of what’s possible just expanded beyond what’s possible and if that ain’t freedom, my friend, what is?
So once again, take your pick. And if you want it to be both all of the above and none of the above at the same time, be my guest: Pick both. There’s no charge.
But back to our story. Carmichael got into trouble by authorizing a leak before the recent election and then denying that he knew anything about it, and it was the denial that caused the problem, not the leak or even that the information he leaked was apparently inaccurate. Or made up, which is a polite way of saying a lie. You can take your choice there too. We’re just rolling in choices today.
For the sake of both British and non-British readers, I won’t go into the details. Brits have already heard about it and for everyone else I’m already teetering on the edge of incomprehensibility with all this talk of Lib Dems and MPs and disrepute. A politician’s in disrepute? American readers are asking themselves. And this makes the news why? (Am I being unfair here? Are readers in other countries asking the same question?) Besides, the content is almost never what matters in these scandals, it’s cover-up that gets politicians in trouble. How come? Because that’s what we, the ordinary newspaper readers and evening news watchers, can wrap our heads around.
Oh, sure, if someone someone slept with someone they weren’t supposed to sleep with, we can follow that without waiting for the cover-up. But the real scandals? The ones involving billions of dollars, or pounds, or whatevers? The ones, say, involving the banks and the Great Recession of 2008? They’re so deeply incomprehensible that our eyes go glazy the minute we hear about them and I’d better end this paragraph fast or you’’ll all click onto something else.
I’m almost inclined to admire ol’ Malcolm. (Sorry, I just can’t call anyone “Sir.” Like ironing, it’s against my religion.) The impulse to defend a colleague, and for all I know a friend, led him to tell the truth as he knows it, which is that in politics almost everyone lies. Or maybe that should be everyone. Yet another chance to take your pick.
I don’t know which you chose just then, and I don’t suppose it changed anything, but didn’t it give you a wonderful feeling, as if your life had just grown larger?
I just got a note from my publisher that from June 27 to August 7 the ebook of The Divorce Diet is on sale for $2.99 at “all major retailers.” Define the words in quotes as best you can, because I can’t.
For today’s story, we’re traveling to the Cornish resort of Newquay to find out why the mankini’s been banned, along with other “inappropriate clothing.”
Yes, boys and girls, women and men, dogs and cats and everything in between, in Newquay enough people—and I have to guess they were of the male persuasion—wore mankinis that they became worth banning.
A Guardian article reports that the ban was part of an attempt to cut down on anti-social behavior. It doesn’t comment on whether the mankini is, in itself, anti-social, but I think a good case could be made.
Semi-relevant photo. Primroses, taken in May (they’re past their best now). I thought the primrose path might actually have a connection. If you want a picture of the mankini, you’ll have to follow the link above, because, no, I just can’t do it. They’re too ugly.
And here I have to interrupt myself: Since English place names need a pronunciation guide if you’re going to have any hope of knowing how to hear them in your head, never mind say them out loud, I’d better tell you that the town’s pronounced NEW-key. I should follow up by saying that once upon a time, in a more innocent (and possibly more boring) past, it was the place Sunday schools went to hold their picnics. They drank lemonade and ate Victoria sponge cake. What else they did I’ll leave to your imagination, because the world of Sunday schools is so deeply foreign to me that I’m not even sure how to poke fun at it.
Inevitably, though, Sunday schools lost their hold on the culture. Time passed. More time passed. At some point Newquay became the place for stag and hen parties to get drunk and throw up in the street. What fun. Isn’t modern life glorious? We’ve done such wonderful things with our liberation. According to mayor Dave Sleeman, in the 2000s “you couldn’t walk the streets on a Saturday without seeing someone wearing a mankini or what have you.”
Eventually the teenagers joined in. Being new to the art of drinking, they got so drunk they fell off the cliffs. Which is not only serious but fatal, and it happened twice and suddenly people started saying out loud what surely some of them were already whispering: “I think we have a problem here.”
Not long after that, residents and business owners marched to “take back their town,” as they put it. Cops started meeting trains in the summer and shaking the kids down, looking for the booze they were still too young to buy so they had to bring it from home. I don’t know if that would have stood up to a legal challenge, but no one seems to have made one.
Then the town banned the mankini, the what have you, as the mayor so cogently put it, and other inappropriate clothing. It’s hard to define inappropriate clothing, and even harder to define what have you, but never mind, because reports of anti-social behavior dropped and crime is down. Mankini sightings are rare or nonexistent. What have yous stay both in the suitcase and behind closed doors, where god intended them to be kept. Or not kept. The bible isn’t specific on the handling of the what have you, so we have to guess.
How well a ban on inappropriate clothing would hold up on appeal I don’t know. It’s a vague term. Your inappropriate may be my fashionable, or my comfortable, or my hysterically funny, or even my perfectly normal, although I have never and will never be seen in a mankini. That’s a solemn promise, and folks around here will be relieved to hear it.
The definition of appropriate varies wildly with time and place. There was a time when the jeans I’m wearing would have been inappropriate enough to get me in serious trouble. I’m guessing an appeal would stand a fair chance. But launching one depends on someone being sober enough not to throw up in (or wear the mankini to) the lawyer’s office. So I’m not holding my breath.
I’m not going to defend the mankini. I may be dyslexic about fashion, but I do know ugly and ridiculous when I see them. In fact, that may be part of my problem with fashion, but let’s skip over that. I’m also not going to defend throwing up in the street, or the hen and stag party. The hen and stag groups I’ve seen wandering the towns and trains look dismal, and I’m always glad not to get invited to any because after a while I’d run out of contagious diseases that could keep me away at the last minute.
I also sympathize with the residents of Newquay who want something like a normal life. Living in the middle of someone else’s party isn’t a whole lot of fun—especially when it reaches the stage where people fall off cliffs. It’s the approach that makes me hesitate.
But something baffles me about the article. This is coastal Cornwall. People I know sit around saying, “I want to go someplace hot.” You can hear the italics in the way they say it. They want to lie in the sun and sweat. They want to be incapacitated by heat. Because it doesn’t get hot here very often. The summer here may give you a hot day or two, but basically they range from comfortably warmish to comfortably cool. If it gets up to 80, the newscasters talk about heat waves. Mostly we have the kind of weather where sleeves feel good. When I asked an acquaintance if she wasn’t freezing in a spaghetti-strap sumer dress, she said, “We just have to wear them anyway, otherwise we’d never get to.” Go to the beach and you’ll find windbreaks, cover-ups, sweatshirts. I’m writing this on June 1, and I’m wearing three light layers, and they feel good.
How, I ask you, are men running around in mankinis?
A while back, I mentioned that I’m sometimes asked if I’m Canadian. When your accent stands out, people feel free to ask questions. Sometimes I’m fine with it, sometimes I’m tired of it, and sometimes when no one comments I wonder why they haven’t noticed. I mean, here I am talking in this improbable accent that I have and nobody’s saying a word about it. I might as well be giving an impassioned political speech wearing a rabbit costume.
Which I should probably try some day.
Sometimes, though, the comments get strange.
Irrelevant photo: A view of Gloucester, from the path to the Cheese Rolling.
Wild Thing was in a store, winding up whatever business they’d transacted, and as she got ready to leave the kid working there said, “Say it.”
“Say it?”
“Go on, say it.”
He was almost begging.
“Say what?”
“G’day.”
So she said, “G’day?” Complete with the question mark, because how could she leave it out. It stood in for, “You do know that’s Australian, right?” as well as “You do understand that this isn’t an Australian accent, don’t you?”
“Brilliant,” he said. Which the American side of my brain still misunderstands as gee, you’re smart, even though the side that tracks British usage knows it’s just an indication that the speaker’s happy.
He was happy. Ill informed, but happy. Why interfere?
*
And in case you wondered why I posted two pieces at almost the same second on Tuesday, it’s because I screwed up. I’d scheduled one in case I didn’t finish the Cheese Rolling post on time. When I did finish it, I rescheduled my backup post, or I thought I did, but clearly I was wrong. Apologies. I do know most of you have other things to do in the course of a day other than read me. Although I can’t think why.
That great institution the House of Commons meets in a room that doesn’t have enough seats for all its members (called MPs–Members of Parliament).
A good part of the time, this is fine, because most debates take place before an almost empty chamber. That probably says something depressing about how much the debates matter, but let’s move on, because it’s not the point right now. The point is that sometimes everybody does want to be present, and the only way to reserve a seat is to show up before 8 a.m. and put a prayer card on the seat you want.
Yes, a prayer card. It indicates that you’ll attend the prayer that opens each day’s session. And when you do, you and all the other MPs will stand facing the walls behind you.
Irrelevant photo: fields
Yes, the walls behind you. No one knows why, but a fact sheet published by Parliament itself says it’s attributed to “the difficulty Members would once have faced of kneeling to pray whilst wearing a sword.” Never mind the awkwardness of that sentence, or the use of whilst, pay attention instead to the explanation it offers: It would have been difficult to kneel, so they all stand backward? Couldn’t they stand facing forward? Or kneel backward? And would kneeling backward really make a sword fit any better? I’d experiment, but I don’t have the right benches on hand. Or a sword. I come from the wrong class. And country. As far as I know, none of my ancestors ran around wearing swords, never mind praying with them.
But never mind all that. We haven’t dropped into a world that puts a high priority on linear logic. Since I began researching this post, I’ve come to appreciate Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass in a whole new way.
But we were talking about seats: Having reserved one, an MP actually has to show up for the prayer, regardless of what his or her religion, or lack thereof, may be. Such are the joys and absurdities of established religion.
According to another tradition—one that makes instinctive sense to me, but probably only because I’m used to it– the MPs seat themselves according to party, with the governing party on one side and the opposition on the other. That was simple enough when two main parties controlled the Commons, with a third much smaller party in the background and behaving itself nicely, but the Scottish National Party (SNP) has become a major player very quickly, and it’s feeling its power and not inclined to play nice, so all hell’s breaking loose.
It turns out that on the first day of Parliament, the prayer card rule doesn’t apply. Well, of course it doesn’t; it also doesn’t apply when a litter of all-black kittens is born precisely at noon on a Wednesday in 10 Downing Street. (Yes, I made that up about the kittens, but it makes as much sense as anything else.) So the first day of this new Parliament was a scramble. Having taken a political seat from Labour in the election, an SNP member parked himself in the physical seat that has belonged, unchallenged, to a Labour Party MP, Dennis Skinner, since forever. He and Skinner managed not to wrestle over it, but Skinner was upset enough that he wedged himself into a crack between the seat he considered his by right and the one next to it.
After that, the SNP took a row of seats behind Labour’s traditional front bench. Apparently this defies another longstanding tradition, but I have no idea what that is. As far as I know, Labour MPs didn’t pile in and sit on their laps, but I don’t know why not.
And there you have it. The mother of Parliaments, in all its sober glory.
What I won’t do in the interests of researching British culture.
Wild Thing and I just got back from the Gloucester Cheese Rolling and I hardly know what to say, except that humans are a very strange species. The Cheese Rolling works like this: The contestants line up at the top of an insanely steep hill. Someone starts a wheel of Gloucester cheese rolling down the hill. Then the contestants run after it. The first one to the finish line wins the cheese.
Runners sliding down the hill. The camera’s at an angle and doesn’t do justice to how steep the hill is, but keep scrolling down.
Sounds simple. Did I mention that the hill is steep? Steep enough that before the race started I told Wild Thing I was going to see what was happening at the top. I got maybe ten yards uphill and thought, No I’m not. I was tipped forward, almost on all fours, and my feet were sliding backward. It would have been easier if I’d had a walking stick or two. Or possibly three. Cleats would have helped. So would a tow rope. But with anything short of a tank, it would’ve been a helll of a climb. And then I was going to have to turn around and come down, which is harder. So forget curiosity. Forget pride. I gave up and wedged myself back in where I started out.
Wedged because unless you find a bit of bumpy ground to keep you in place or dig your heels in and put those thigh muscles to work, you slide downhill onto the people below you. You’re not sitting so much as clinging. That’s the hill they’re running down.
Not many of the runners stay upright. They skid, they cartwheel, and they get hurt—or some of them do. At the bottom, the local rugby team lines up to catch them, otherwise they’d keep going until they reached the Severn, or possibly the Atlantic. If that happens to be the direction they’re running in, which I couldn’t swear to but I think it was and it does sound romantic that way. What I can swear to is that they build up some serious speed. As does the cheese, which someone near us claimed hits 70 mph by the time it gets to the bottom, which happens well before the runners get there.
Helping an injured runner off the hill. Notice how the helpers are struggling to stay upright.
I didn’t see the rugby team stop all the runners. I was focused on the people who were struggling downhill, but I did see a few tackled to the ground. Others were blocked, or caught and hugged. Maybe it depended on their size and how fast they were going, or maybe a full-on tackle was a favor saved for friends. A few runners dodged off to the side, and given the heft of those guys I might’ve done the same.
Not that you’ll find me chasing a cheese down a hill. I say, if your cheese goes free-range, let it go.
A runner looks a hesitant about getting caught by the rugby team.
One of the strange things about the cheese roll is that as a nation Britain takes health and safety seriously. I was once told in a second-hand store where the clerk said she couldn’t sell me a crochet hook because of health and safety. But before you start muttering about government regulation and the nanny state, consider the cheese roll. It goes on. Because it always has. Because no one’s thought to pass a law banning people from chasing cheese down a hill.
The crochet hook business had nothing to do with government regulation, by the way; it was just someone being a pill.
A few years ago, the group that organized the cheese roll couldn’t get insurance coverage. Tell me you’re surprised. This is where the real health and safety problem comes in. A tradition was about to die, but the community refused to let it and the races were held anyway, with no official organization (at least as far as I understand) and no insurance. If you get hurt, you’re on you’re own, because there’s no one to sue.
The local police hate the cheese roll. Maybe because of the crowds and the traffic and the injuries, or maybe because it’s basically insane, but they haven’t been able to stop it. They close off the nearest highway and people park outside the exclusion zone and walk past them to get there. It must drive them nuts.
We hiked in and ended up sitting next to the partner and son of a local legend who had won, if I remember right, six times in the past. He went home this year with two cheeses. What did they do with all the cheese? I asked her. The first year, he gave a lot to family and friends. After that—and here there was a pause.
“I have a lot in my refrigerator,” she said.
There are several races every year, she said. How many depends on how many cheeses they have.
Well, of course.
Sometimes they don’t have enough cheeses to satisfy the runners, so an extra race pours downhill anyway.
A first-time runner was standing near us, and after his race I asked how it had been.
“Fast,” he said, “and exhilarating. And terrifying.”
One of the races is for kids, but they go uphill, shepherded by the rugby team catchers and a few adult runners. It’s safer going up. Of course, then they have to come back down to rejoin their families, and inevitably some of them run. And some of them scoot down on their butts. And some of them are terrified. The adult shepherds were very sweet about coming down with them. A rugby player scooted on his butt alongside one kid. Another led one by the hand. The last kid off the hill got a round of applause.
The kids’ race.
This being England, a few adult runners showed up in costumes—what’s called fancy dress here. One guy came to a halt near us, stopped to make sure someone who’d fallen was okay, then pulled on a mouse’s head and finished the race in it. Another was dressed as a banana in a top hat. Well of course he was. Other costumes I saw were a kilt, a cape, and a tutu combined with a Canadian flag tee shirt.
According to an awkwardly worded Wikipedia entry, “Two possible origins have been proposed for the ceremony. The first is said that it evolved from a requirement for maintaining grazing rights on the common.
“The second proposal is pagan origins for the custom of rolling objects down the hill. It is thought that bundles of burning brushwood were rolled down the hill to represent the birth of the New Year after winter. Connected with this belief is the traditional scattering of buns, biscuits and sweets at the top of the hill by the Master of Ceremonies. This is said to be a fertility rite to encourage the fruits of harvest.
“Since the fifteenth century, the cheese has been rolled down the hill, and people have competed to catch it.”
As is usual with these things, no one knows for certain. One woman from the area thought the race’s history was measured in decades, not hundreds of years. All I know for a fact is that the country’s full of traditional festivals, and some of them are stranger than this one. I hope to get to one of them later in the year.
If you want to know more about the cheese race, here’s a link to an article from a local paper, one to the official site, and one to cheese race pictures.
The reader who asked about the history of the U in British English has been found: She’s Lia, of Lifestyles with Lia. So you can go check out her blog if you want to.
Notes from the U.K. 