Cross-cultural adventures: Two Americans call a cat in Britain

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Fast Eddie went over the fence for the first time this week. We knew the day was coming, but we’d hoped it wouldn’t come quite so soon. He’s still a very small cat in a very large world. He’s built for climbing, though, and climb he did.

The first we knew about it was when we heard a bird doing what Wild Thing calls checking and our neighbor calls alarming.

Fast Eddie, the fiercest kitten for 10 yards in any direction

Americans and Brits agree on what the noun alarm means, but use it any other way and we get into that odd stuff that happens when we think we share a language. In the U.S., if you’re alarmed, you’re moving in the direction of panic. It’s a feeling. Once you cross the Atlantic, though, being alarmed is more likely to involve wiring, as is demonstrated by the signs that say, “This door is alarmed.”

And there I was thinking the door was an inanimate object. So now I’m alarmed myself. The announcement seriously destabilized my world view.

Alarm can also involve actions—for example, the bird we heard was alarming, as in making an alarm call, not as in scaring the hell out of us.

So, with today’s language lesson out of the way, let’s go back to the bird. We heard it making a checking / alarming sound, and Wild Thing asked if I knew where Eddie was.

Insert a moment of, ahem, alarm here, because he was nowhere in the house. We went outside and called. He still wasn’t in the habit of coming when we called (we’re working on it), but we did it anyway because, what the hell, humans are a very strange species and it was something we knew how to do.

I need to interrupt myself for a minute here to talk about cross-cultural cat calling. I can’t swear that this is universal, but the Brits I’ve noticed calling cats tend to bend over, rub their fingers together, and say something quiet, like “puss, puss, puss.”

How do Wild Thing and I call our cats? With a two-note call that’s approaches a yodel: “kitt-TEEEE. KITT-teeee” You can hear us most of the way to Devon. Even in Minnesota, it marked us as not being local.

Okay, it wasn’t the only thing that let people know that, but I do remember standing on our open front porch one night when the air was so cold I thought my lungs would shatter and calling our cat by yodeling, “FUZZbucket, KITT-teeee.” (Go ahead, laugh at the name. Everyone else did. A friend used to call him Fuzzbuster and Fuzzduster, with the occasional Fussbudget thrown in for luck. I still think it was a great name.) From the far end of the dark street, a man’s voice echoed, word for word and note for note, “FUZZbucket, KITT-teeee.” I’d call, he’d call, I’d call, he’d call. He had the notes and the tone down perfectly, and I figured if Fuzz had any intention of coming in the echo wouldn’t hurt.

He didn’t, of course. He was a cat. And an old lady down the street used to feed him canned shrimp and keep him with her during the coldest weather. I’m sure he told her he had nowhere else to go.

But that’s a different story and a different place. In this place, I was worried that Eddie might have gone over a fence and discovered that the other side didn’t offer him a way to climb back, and there he’d be, a very small kitten on the wrong side of a tall wall.

So Wild Thing went to our over-the-tallest-fence neighbors. They don’t live on our street and to get to them you more or less have to run up to London, then Hamburg, and then come back to Cornwall to our village to a different street and go through their front gate, which sometimes sticks so badly that you need a chisel and a hammer to get through, and all of that is necessary because, unlike Minneapolis, the neighborhoods here don’t have alleys and the yards here don’t have back gates. In fact, they’re not yards at all, they’re called gardens, and if they’re close together they have barricade-like fences or hedges meant to screen you and your thoughts from any awareness that you have neighbors. It gives back yards (sorry—they’ll always be yards to me) a sense of privacy and quiet, but it could strike someone used to American yards as unfriendly. (I’m not one of them. I like that sense of quiet.)

So Wild Thing was gone for a while, hiking to London and Hamburg and Cornwall and then through the neighbors’ gate, which didn’t happen to stick that day, and I couldn’t think of anything useful to do with myself so I worked on the bread I was making, which was ready to shape into loaves. And at some point something almost weightless brushed against my ankles and I looked down and found Eddie, who hadn’t a clue in the world that he’d just caused an uproar and wouldn’t have minded much if he had known.

So I did what any dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker would do: I went out back and bellowed for Wild Thing. When I was a kid, that’s how the mothers in our neighborhood called us—they leaned out the windows and bellowed our names. (What the ones whose apartments didn’t have windows on the street did I never stopped to wonder. Chose not to reproduce? Lost their kids forever? Waited till they got hungry enough to wander home? I just don’t know.) That was also how we called our mothers: We stood on the sidewalk, tipped our heads back, and bellowed up. To this day, my voice–well, no one who hears me is left with the impression that I’m shy. If you want to bring down the walls of Jericho, leave the trumpets at home and convince me that they need to come down.

Back in New York, every mother somehow knew her own kids’ voices well enough that they didn’t all pop their heads out in unison when one of us bellowed, even though we all yelled the same word, “Mom.”

Oh, damn, I’m getting teary. Thanks for being able to pick my voice out of the maelstrom, Mom. I miss you.

Minnesotans never seemed to bellow for their kids. I don’t know how they got them home. Compared to New Yorkers, Minnesotans are indirect. Or repressed, if you prefer. Or well behaved. It’s all in how you see it. Maybe the intensity of their frustration sends out a vibe that the kids pick up.

But however long I’ve been away from Manhattan, I’m still a New Yorker, so I bellowed. And Wild Thing, who’d just gotten into the neighbors’ yard, answered in true New York fashion (she lived there for ten years and picked up the important skills).

She started the long trek home, and our neighbor, G., who’d somehow managed to hear all this (damn, that man has good ears) popped up on his side of a different fence (we have three immediate neighbors), which is about shoulder height, even on me, and said he’d heard the bird alarming, then seen Eddie running along the top of the fences. The fences make a fine highway if you’re a cat.

Then, G. said, he heard us calling Eddie.

And no doubt laughed his ass off at the volume and sheer uselessness of it all, but he was far too kind–or maybe that’s well behaved–to say so.

Publishing on Medium.com

Posted on June 17, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Apologies for the extra post (what do you all do with your week when you’re not hearing from me?), but I just published a piece through The Coffeelicious, a magazine on Medium.com, and since both of them are new for me, I’m going to shamelessly promote it. And introduce Medium to anyone who hasn’t explored it yet.

“I Pledge Allegiance to the–Queen?” is about taking U.K. citizenship, which turned out to be a surprisingly emotional issue for me. If you like the essay, it would be great if you’d hit the Recommend button at the end. If you don’t like it, you won’t reach the end, so don’t worry about it. (Seriously, I wouldn’t ask you to recommend anything you don’t like. It’s almost like–am I really going to say this?–faking an orgasm. Yes, apparently I am going to say that. I’m not sure what I think about it, never mind how I feel.)

Shockingly relevant graphic. Not mine. I found it on Wikimedia.

And with that out of the way, the rest of this is for those of you who either write more than blog fodder–and I know that’s a good number of you–or read more than blogs. Because not everything belongs in a blog, and I’ve been looking for outlets beyond mine. I’m hoping this will move me in that direction.

Medium describes itself as a place “where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends.” In theory, at least, it helps you find your audience. We’ll see. Technically, Medium makes it fairly easy to publish, although I obsessed about the mechanics for weeks before submitting anything, and only did it after investing something like $10 (it seems to be $12; never trust me with numbers) in a probably unnecessary but still helpful manual.

From what I’ve read, the good thing about Medium is that stories have a chance to build slowly–it’s not all about the first few hours, or days, or even weeks. Stories recommended by a lot of people become more visible. And we all like to believe that those are the best ones. They may be. It would be nice to think so. It also explains why I was asking people to hit that Recommend button. (I should mention that you have to sign up to recommend anything. It’s not a big deal, says the person who closes down her computer and hides under a chair when asked to sign up for anything. You can do it with Facebook or Twitter–and if you plan to publish on Medium, you should eventually add both connections.)

Medium also sets it up so that as a reader you can follow writers you like and get a notification when they publish something new (which, of course, lets writers, with luck, build a following) or follow magazines that filter and gather the work that’s most relevant to you. I’ve found some good writing there. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a browse.

Writing British English & Writing American English

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

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.

Defending the honor of a British politician

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

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?

A Cornish beach town bans the mankini

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

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 here.

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?

Accents: Brits sorting Americans from Australians

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

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.

Lewis Carroll and the British Parliament

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

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.

Bizarre British festivals: Gloucester cheese rolling

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

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.

Strange stuff non-Brits want to know about Britain

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Two stray questions about Britain that people have asked me to address, which I’ll group together because they’re 600% unrelated: kinky sex and the letter U.

Are the English particularly kinky?

Katie Powell wrote, “I want to know why English folks are so kinky.” I asked her to be more specific and she answered, “The Brits exude this very staid exterior, but then there is the underbelly of kinky sex — maybe the kinkiest in the world? Not violent or dangerous, just kinky . . . .”

Sadly, I’m not willing to do any original research on the topic. Nope, not even for my blog. A few other things I won’t do, in case you need to know about them: I will not eat haggis in order to tell you what it tastes like. Not particularly because it’s haggis but because it involves meat. You can get vegetarian haggis, but that’s like vegetarian bacon—it is vegetarian but it’s not bacon, so it’s not much use if you’re trying to report on bacon. I also won’t get stinking drunk so I can find out if the tendency of drunks in this country to sing is cultural or due to some mysterious influence of the geography. So, sex in the British Isles? It does go on. I’m sure of that. But Wild Thing and I have been together for—wait, let me wrestle with a few numbers—38 years now. That’s long enough, really, for a person to make a commitment to a relationship. To get comfortable in it, and not want to wreck it. And then there are my own tastes to consider (which, forget it, you don’t need to know about, and very probably don’t want to).

Screamingly irrelevant photo: Fast Eddie and the laundry

I can report that back in the Stone Ages, when phone booths were the kind of thing you found on any city street, lots of London phone booths were plastered with stickers advertising sexual services designed for specific tastes–mostly S&M, at least as I remember it. I’d never seen the sex trade advertised that way. Does that mean the tastes of actual people here are kinkier than they are anywhere else? I haven’t a clue. Maybe they’re just out in the open more—although I’ve known some Americans whose interests were far from white bread and who had a lot more to say about them than I, for one, wanted to hear. They didn’t plaster them on phone booths, but then they weren’t in business, so they had no reason to.

So this separates into two question: Is there a difference in kink level? Do different cultures channel their kinks in different directions? It’s also possible that the definition of kinky is worth some thought. It assumes there’s a standard practice out there, and I wonder how standard anyone really is. I haven’t a clue, but I’ll leave you with that thought and move on to a question where I can be more useful.

History of the letter U in British and American English

Once upon a time I knew who asked me about this, but I didn’t paste either the name or the link into my notes, and although I swam back through the comments trying to find where it came from it, it was too far and I sank. That’s me you’ll notice on the bottom of all your insightful, hysterical, wonderful comment threads, blowing the last electronic bubbles out of my lungs.

Bad blogger.

So I’m going to be rude and not acknowledge the source of the question.

However. Someone asked me to write about the history of the letter U in British and American usage, and if you’ll let me know who you are I’ll provide a link to your blog. In the meantime, the tale takes us back to two of the most influential compilers of early dictionaries.

When the British first settled in North America, English spelling was still fluid. You went to school, you were issued a toolkit with 26 letters, and as long as another person in possession of that same basic toolkit could figure out what you meant, you were free to spell a word any old which way you wanted. I may exaggerate a bit, but not much.

It was Samuel Johnson, in the eighteenth century, who’s usually credited with (or blamed for) standardizing English spelling, although—as is usual with this kind of thing—there was a general movement in that direction and rather than creating the momentum himself he rode in on its tide. But still, if you don’t like the U in British spellings of words like favour and honour, Old Sam Johnson’s your bad guy. Up until then, English had used -our interchangeably with -or. According to an article in Bartleby Johnson “established the position of the u in the –our words. . . . Other lexicographers before him were divided and uncertain; Johnson declared for the u, and though his reasons were very shaky and he often neglected his own precept, his authority was sufficient to set up a usage which still defies attack in England.”

He was so knocked out by the U (which I’m capitalizing and the Bartleby entry doesn’t) that he tried to introduce translatour, emperour, oratour and horrour. Oddly enough, although he kept exterior U-less, its opposite was interiour.

Johnson’s reasoning was that the -our form acknowledged modern English’s French roots. If you know any French, you’ll have noticed that the argument’s shaky. French uses -eur, not -our: honeur; faveur. But never mind, an argument doesn’t have to make sense to be effective. British English is firmly committed to sticking a U into any word it possibly can. And, hell, they’re free, so why not?

If Johnson’s usually credited with standardizing English spelling, Noah Webster’s usually credited with divorcing American spelling from its British ex, although here too other people were already agitating for that and he too rode a tide he didn’t create. The United States was a new nation. It wanted a new culture. You know what it’s like: You have a revolution, you rename the streets, tear down the political statues, replace the schoolbooks.

Webster came down heavily on the side of simplified spellings, and his early books deleted a lot of the language’s silent letters: the B in thumb, the O in leopard, the A in thread. You could cut a 300-page book down to 150 pages if you kept that up. Also the K that was then in frolick, the spare L in traveller and jeweller. He transposed the -RE in words like centre.

“Those people spell best who do not know how to spell,” he said. Or quite possibly wrote. But let’s not split hairs. The point is that they were spelling phonetically and logically, and he set out to follow their lead with spellings like wimmin, tung, porpess, and fantom.

They didn’t all catch on, and as a result generations of schoolchildren toddle home with spelling lists to memorize for no better reason than that they’ll look ignorant if they don’t spell the words in the approved way. Think what they might have time to learn instead if our language made sense.

George Bernard Shaw, in demonstrating the need for rationalized English spelling, is said to have argued that, given the rules of the English language, you should be able to spell fish ghoti: GH as in tough, O as in women, TI and in nation.

Don’t use that on your standardized exams, kids. The people who mark them won’t be impressed.

Miss Marple and World War II evacuees

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

I’m sure Miss Marple would agree: There are no secrets in the village. But there’s a lot of misinformation, and if you want to unravel a story, that’s where you start.

Wild Thing and I worked on the village newsletter for a while. Then we stopped and the newsletter continued on. Long story there and not one I’m going to tell (sorry), but I mention it because we got a letter last week addressed not to either of us but to the newsletter’s secretary—no name, just the title—with no street address and a post code that would land you somewhere in the village but not at our house, or even close to it.

And it reached us. Because we used to get mail for the newsletter, and because the letter carrier remembered that.

Remains of a church, destroyed in the bombing of Exeter city center, now preserved as a monument.

I took the letter to M. She’s not the newsletter’s secretary, but then neither is anyone else. It works just fine without one. She does work on the newsletter and part of her job, at least when I was still involved, was to type up announcements that come in on handwritten scraps of paper, so it more or less made sense to choose her. Here was a handwritten bit of paper. Not a minute’s walk from our house was M. So I rang her bell and handed her the envelope.

“You didn’t open it,” she said.

I hadn’t. Not because I’m virtuous (although, oh, I am; painfully so; if I didn’t swear so much, I’d float a good six inches off the ground) but because I hadn’t been curious about it. Mostly—let’s be honest here—the newsletter’s pretty dull. Suddenly, though, I did care. We were holding a secret and we were inside the village. We were two bad kids, about to be find out something that was none of our business. Except that it was, but let’s not argue, the feeling was delicious.

She tore open the envelope.

The letter turned out to be from a woman who’d been evacuated to the village during World War II, asking for information about someone she’d known. M., who’s much better than I am about knowing who’s related to who(m, if you insist), immediately started talking about who would know. And there I left it. She’ll make a few calls. People will ask around. The network will be activated. If nothing else works, the newsletter will run the letter. Maybe it’ll run it anyway, because other people will want to know about it, and it may trigger reminiscences of those times, and all of that is the job of a village newsletter.

If you don’t know the history of the World War II evacuations, or if you’re interested in how it affected the Southwest: Many British cities were heavily bombed and children were evacuated to safer areas. It was a measure of the desperation families felt that they’d send their children off into the unknown, to live with strangers. Most of the evacuees returned home at the end of the war, but a few settled locally, and more than once we’ve met people who, when we asked if they’d always lived in the area, said, “I was evacuated here as a child.”

Of the nearby big cities, Plymouth was heavily bombed, and Exeter was bombed but not as heavily. Unlike Plymouth, it wasn’t targeted for its industrial or military importance, but for its cultural and historical interest, which no one had expected, and although children were evacuated from Plymouth (a predictable target), they’d been evacuated to Exeter, which must have seemed safe. The BBC has compiled a list of bombings in Cornwall and some memories of evacuees and others who lived in Cornwall during the war (and elsewhere in the country, but the link will take you to the Cornwall pages). The memories especially are worth a look.

Notes from the U.K.

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

Tag Archives: Americans in Britain