A foreigner’s guide to Christmas in Britain

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

You can say anything you want about the meaning of Christmas, but I’ll tell you what the meaning is here: brussels sprouts.

What? you ask.

At Christmas dinner, you eat brussels sprouts. Even if you don’t touch them for another 364 days, you put one on your plate and chop it into pieces and poke at it so it looks like some part of it entered your stomach and is becoming one with your body. It doesn’t seem to be a law, but it’s a very powerful cultural imperative. And when someone uses a fancy phrase like cultural imperative, you’d damn well better do it.

Christmas pudding with flaming brandy. Photo by James Scott-Brown, on Wikimedia.

The brussels sprout is so completely symbolic of Christmas that D. and D. just gave us a box of chocolate brussels sprouts for a Christmas present. Rest easy, though, because they’re purely symbolic. No vegetables were harmed in the making of the candy.

Why is a round green vegetable synonymous with Christmas? Because they grow through the fall and by Christmas they’re ready to eat. And if you’ve got a vegetable so cooperative that you can harvest it in the winter, you’d better include it in the holiday meal. Even if you hate it.

Christmas also involves crackers. Not the crumbly kind you eat with cheese, but rolls of shiny paper and cardboard with bad jokes and riddles, a little plastic present of some kind (about what you used to find in a box of Cracker Jacks, if you’ve ever seen those), and a tissue-paper crown inside. The way to open these is to pick yours up when everyone else does, cross your arms so you can simultaneously offer yours to the person on one side and seize the one the person on the other side is offering you. Then, in unison, everyone pulls and the crackers tear open and spill out their giftlets. Inevitably, someone ends up with two short ends and no goodies, and if you’re over the age of five you redistribute the riches and everyone ends up with, at the very least, a silly paper crown to put on his or her head. Then everyone who can’t avoid it (and I usually can) reads the jokes and riddles out loud.

In the spirit of Nothing Exceeds like Excess, Christmas demands two desserts: a Christmas pudding and a Christmas cake. The cake is a heavy fruitcake that’s been soaked in brandy for two months and coated in not one layer of icing but two, one of marzipan and another made with egg whites and sugar. The double dose of icing is enough to send even a non-diabetic into a diabetic coma, and that’s without the cake. The pudding, again, has dried fruit and alcohol, but this time with suet and spices and a bunch of other stuff—you’ll have to look up the recipe online if you’re interested, because I’ve never made one—and then it’s steamed (this is why I’ve never made it: I can’t be arsed, as our much-missed friend B. used to say) and soaked in yet more alcohol for a month or so. If you need a bit more in the way of excess, you can serve it with rum or brandy sauce, or with custard, and you can also serve it with flaming brandy if you promise not to set the house on fire.

Strange holiday habits of the British and of one wandering American

Posted on December 16, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

The attack of the Christmas cards has begun, and if we don’t deliver ours quickly we’ll have to leave the village. Come December, forget conversation, companionship, helpful acts, even love: Cards are the only measure of friendship. If we don’t give someone a card, they’ll think we don’t like them. Or that we’re such socially awkward clods, we’re not worth liking.

Actually, I’m making that up. I don’t know the thinking behind it is, although I do understand that Christmas cards are more important here than on any other part of the planet. Everyone gives them to everyone, and you have to do it. For all I know, everyone hates it but is as intimidated as we are. The entire country is running around buying and delivering cards only because they’re afraid other people will think they’re either awkward clods or hostile.

Whatever lies behind it, though, we’ve stocked up.

Season’s greetings, y’all. Photo by Ida Swearingen

Where we live, people sneak up to the door and push them through the letter slot. We don’t see the people, just the cards. We’ll be sitting around, our minds so sublimely at peace that we’re levitating inches above the floor, and flap, a card drops through the slot. We flop painfully onto the floor and pick ourselves up to collect the card, but by the time we open the door no one’s out there. Except for the signatures, which we recognize, they might as well be messages from the fairies.

People have a saying here: “Oh, she (or he) is away with the fairies.” (It always seems to start with “Oh.” Maybe that makes is wispier, more away-with-the-fairies-ish.) A number of people Wild Thing and I know could be, and have been, described that way, and maybe they’ve sent these back from wherever the fairies live. The fairies have a delivery service. That’s very thoughtful. But it only works at this time of year.

Okay, a few people deliver their cards in person. They stop in and have a cup of tea. Or they bring them to meetings and hand them around. If you belong to a club or go to any regular activity, people will show up in December armed with cards and pass them out. Most people write name on the envelopes, which means they have to flip through them, once, twice, fourteen times, to find the right one. Some bring a few spares with no names in case they’ve forgotten anyone, or someone they didn’t expect shows up. It’s an odd mix of touching and impersonal when you get one of these.

It made us feel like awkward clods when we didn’t come with a stack of our own, so we’ve started bringing some (nameless, because we’re not well enough organized to predict who’ll be there). But bringing them makes me—although not Wild Thing—feel like a hypocrite. Not because I don’t normally send Christmas cards, but because handing them out this way strikes me as deeply weird.

I’m not going to try to justify that. It’s just one of those deep cultural weird things.

But I can’t talk about Christmas cards without talking about deep cultural weird things, so here we go: I grew up celebrating Christmas, but in a family of non-religious Jews. The kind of Jews who celebrated a non-religious Christmas. Our Christmas cards always said “Season’s Greetings.” I think that was to accommodate other people’s beliefs rather our own. I mean, we did celebrate Christmas, so I can’t see where saying “Merry Christmas” would be insensitive to our beliefs, but somehow I was left with the odd feeling that it would be. Were we such tender souls that we had to be careful not to insult ourselves? Not by a long shot, but don’t expect this to make sense entirely.

When I was old enough to send my own cards, I searched through box after box, reading the little tag on the back that said, if I was lucky, “Greeting: Happy Holidays.” Or “Season’s Greetings.” I’d settle for either one, although I like the second better. That search was a part of who I was. But it also made practical sense. My—and later our—friends included Christians, Jews, and atheists, and as time when on Buddhists, Muslims, some self-described pagans (no, don’t ask me what it means; my understanding of the word is that it’s what Christians called earlier religions, not what those religions called themselves, but if someone wants to call themselves that, it’s not up to me to call them something else), and some people I’ve left out because I’m not sure what they are. I’ve spent a good part of my life learning not to make assumptions and the learning’s never complete, but I don’t want to summarize where I’m not sure.

So Season’s Greetings it was, even though we all know a Season’s Greetings card is nothing but a disguised Christmas card. A more inclusive one, but still a Christmas card.

And then I moved to the U.K. Where I live now, way out in the country, I’m the only Jew of any description for miles around. I don’t know of any Muslims or Buddhists in the immediate area, and the pagans at least used to celebrate Christmas, whether they do anymore or not. Like the many people around here who aren’t religious, they come from Christian backgrounds, even if you have to go back several generations to find anyone who treated that as a religion. So Season’s Greetings cards are hard to find. And largely irrelevant, since after our first year here, when we sent cards to friends in the states and discovered that the postage cost a small fortune, we give them mostly to friends in the village. In other words, everybody we’re giving cards to celebrates Christmas—some with a religious bent and some without, but Christmas all the same. None of them, I’m sure, celebrates it with the complications that I bring.

And guess what? I still want my cards to say “Season’s Greetings.” It’s like my accent: It’s a part of who I am. I’m a Season’s Greetings kind of person, living in a Merry Christmas kind of place. (I have no idea why I’m capitalizing that except that it’s capitalized on cards, so it becomes a habit. This is what happens to copy editors when they retire: They do all kinds of inconsistent things, and they notice, and wince, and in my case leave some of them uncorrected. And find a perverse joy in that.)

Actually, people here say “Happy Christmas,” not “Merry Christmas.” But that’s a different complication.

Over the years, Wild Thing has alternated between impatience and understanding when I turned over box after box of cards to read the greetings printed on the back. Then she took up photography and we started making our own cards. They can say whatever we want.

Problem solved.

But we still have to sneak up on our friends and neighbors and shove the cards through their letter slots. Otherwise they’ll think we don’t like them.

Or something. I don’t know what they’ll think, but I do know we don’t want them thinking it.

So whatever you celebrate, Season’s Greetings.

What to wear if you want to annoy Buckingham Palace

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I don’t care how silly it is, I have to weigh in on the flap over how the U.S. press corps dresses when Will and Kate (W. and K. from here on, because, hey, I don’t care if they’re royal, why should they get to use their full names here?) meet with President Obama (President O.).

If you haven’t been following the story, then congratulations: That shows good sense, which you can now pitch out the window while I tell you about it. Buckingham Palace issued a dress code for journalists covering the event, and threatened not to let them in if they violated it. It specified:

No jeans.
No trainers.
No casually dressed members of the media or technicians.

Irrelevant Photo: Cornwall’s north coast

To which one press corps member responded, “First of all, what are ‘trainers,’ or for that matter, ‘technicians’? And second, why should the United States’ press corps—who barely bother to brush the muffin crumbs off their polo shirts before lobbing questions at the President of the United States—schlep extra pieces of clothing to work just so they can make small talk with a (perfectly nice-seeming) British air ambulance pilot-in-training and a former chain-store accessories buyer?”

Buckingham Palace fired back by asking, “What’s schlep?”

Okay, that part hasn’t been publicized. It’s just one of those things I intuit.

Having established a constructive dialog, Buckingham Palace (B.P., for the sake of even-handedness) then canceled its dress code and left it up to the White House (what the hell: W.H.) to establish one. Or not. The press corps celebrated by tucking the pajamas they’d planned to wear to the press conference back under their pillows and hanging their toothpaste-flecked bathrobes back on the peg behind the bathroom door. Which strikes me as kind of sad, since I’d have loved to see the footage.

But the silliness goes on. When I looked the stories up online so I could provide links, I dipped into the comments (you’ll find some at this link and others at the link above) and found people, in all seriousness and in some cases with considerable heat, debating whether all Americans are slobs; what the W.H. press corps actually does wear; whether or not it was a sad day for the U.S.; whether the country under discussion is the U.S. or America; who won the war (unspecified, but presumably the War of Independence, a.k.a. the Revolution); whether and when K. wears underwear (don’t ask me, folks; I don’t care if she does or not, although I question the motives of people who spend their time writing about it); when (no whether involved here, apparently) Harry (sorry: H.) visibly doesn’t wear underwear and shows the crown jewels to all and sundry; and why the dress code was a violation of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment, in case you’re wondering, covers freedom of speech, assembly, and religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” The founders meant to say something about dress codes but they were rushed that day. These things happen. Setting up a new country is a chaotic business. Besides, I’m not sure pajamas had been invented yet. It was still all nightshirts and nightcaps. This is the problem with a strict interpretation of the constitution.

One particularly heated commenter seemed to be confusing the Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper phone hacking scandals with the British government’s phone hacking scandals. Lots of us suspect Rupert Murdoch runs the country, possibly with a little help from his friends, but honest, he isn’t the government yet.

The comments are even more fun than the original flap. Or sadder. Or possibly both. Anyway, they all provide an insight into the contrasting insanities of the two countries . And let me be clear about this before someone thinks I’m insulting either of them: I’m convinced that every country on this planet has its own set of insanities. The two that have had it in their hearts to issue me passports are not unique in this.

And trainers, for those of you who need a translation, are running shoes. Or athletic shoes. Or whatever. You know—those things that I’m still convinced we should call sneakers.

Cutting Waste in Britain and New York

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

One of the things that impressed me when I first visited Britain was that they had public toilets. Not just along the highways, where I’d learned to expect them, but in towns and villages and cities. I mean, do I resonate with the romance of the place or what? Forget your castles, your prehistoric monuments, your green and pleasant land. Will you look at those toilets? An entire nation had noticed that humans have this recurring, messy, polluting need and had responded logically.

Well—as the kids on my block used to say—holy shit.

I grew up in New York, where if you’re out on the street and need to pee ( or anything else along those lines) you’re—oh, I can’t help myself: shit out of luck, because New York doesn’t do public toilets. You need one? Sorry, that sounds like a personal problem. You can’t expect the city to solve it for you.

Deeply Irrelevant Photo: Fountains Abbey

If you have money, the problem’s manageable. Money has that effect on a lot of problems. You duck into the lobby of a hotel and head for the toilet (which, this being the U.S. and all, is called the bathroom), and if you’re dressed well enough and act like you belong there, you won’t be challenged. Or you stop someplace to buy a cup of coffee and you use the toilet there. That’s a solution that carries its own problem, since you’ll need another cup later on to get rid of the first one, but still, it’s doable.

If you don’t have money—well, that’s one reason so much of the subway smells of urine. I remember seeing a woman at a bus stop simply straddle the curb and let a stream loose from under her skirt. I was torn between shock and very reluctant admiration.

On my first visit to Britain, when I was so impressed with those public toilets, I didn’t find it easy to say “toilet” instead of “bathroom.” I’m American, and was even more so back then. Americans don’t say “toilet” if we can help it. In fact, I was in a café and asked someone who worked there where the bathroom was. She must’ve thought I was going to tear my clothes off and jump in a tub of hot water, because she did a visible double take. I made myself say, “Toilet,” but it didn’t quite repair the damage. She was in no shape to put words together, but she did manage to point.

In Britain, a bathroom has a bathtub. If it has a shower instead, it’s a shower room. If it has neither, it’s a toilet. Even after eight years, though, I feel crass when I say “toilet.” Much more so than when I say “shit.”

The human brain is a wondrous and baffling thing.

These days the U.K. has a government dedicated to cutting the deficit by cutting waste, and—okay, you see the pun coming, don’t you? I can’t help myself. It’s true. The talk’s all about reducing waste, but the reality is about public services crumbling: the health service underfunded, libraries and various kinds of community centers closing, all sorts of infrastructure not being maintained, and yes, toilets closing. Food shelves—which weren’t needed when I first moved here—are springing up and much in demand. A lot of the cuts are being pushed down to the local levels of government, which depend on the central government for a lot of their funding. Since that’s been cut, they have all the fun of deciding what to cut, and they get blamed for cutting it, since they look like the bad guys.

In our village, we initially heard that the county would be closing the toilets by the beach. The parish council entered into endless negotiations over how to keep them open and who’d bear the cost and who’d own them and who’d committed to a long-term cleaning contract that either would or wouldn’t have to be carried over by whoever either did or didn’t own the damned things.

And so on.

It went on for a long time, and in the end the village managed to keep them open. Not only does the cleanliness of the beach depend on them, but so do two local cafes. But not every village or town has managed to find the money, and many toilets have closed.

Maybe it will teach us all to rise above their physical urges.

Let’s hear it for cutting waste, folks.

The Writing on the Sidewalk of a Cornish Village

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Either I’m engaging in antisocial behavior or I’m the last defender of decency in Cornwall. Some days it’s hard to tell.

Wild Thing and I live on what’s called the estate. If you’re American, that sounds all grand and Downton Abbey, but what it really means is “the subdivision.” We live in a tiny fragment of suburb, even though we don’t have a city to be suburban to. Our village is spread out—a village without any center—so this is the most densely populated bit. By dogs as well as humans.

Irrelevant Photo: A view of the south coast and St. Michael’s Mount

Yes, dear ones, I’m writing about dog shit, and I’m not going to call it poo because I just can’t. When I first moved to Minnesota, I heard a wonderful phrase: “She wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful.”

Well, I don’t have a mouthful, but I did skid through the stuff and come away with a shoeful, and I can’t see why I should call it anything else. It’s not a beautiful word, but then the shoe wasn’t looking so good either.

Shit was the mildest word I yelled. I’m sure someone was behind a window saying, “Oh, that’s one of the Americans.”

Never mind the language, though. The important point is that somebody hasn’t been cleaning up after their dog.

I know two things about this dog: It’s large and it likes to spread its bounty as far as it’s physically able. I walk with my eyes on the sidewalk these days, the way I did as a kid in New York, before dog owners were expected to clean up after their dogs. My family had a dog. We thought we were being good citizens because we got him to shit between the parked cars. In fact, back then the city put up signs saying “Curb your dog.”

After the shoe incident, I bought myself a box of chalk. Then I waited.

Several days later, I found another deposit. Right by the red metal box that everyone (even me) calls the dog poo bin. I knelt on the sidewalk and chalked, “Clean up after your dog, please.”

I stepped back to admire my work. I’d forgotten the your, so it actually read, “Clean up after dog, please,” as if a computer translation program had written it. I used to work as an editor, so that missing word bothers me, but it did get the point across. And at least I hadn’t forgotten the please.

Good manners are more important here than good grammar. No matter how ungrammatical—or, for that matter, rude—a note you tack up somewhere, you can make it okay if you write “Polite Notice” at the top. I can’t tell you how many signs I’ve seen that declare themselves Polite Notices. Even if you were to say, “Pick up after your dog, you miserable, lazy, unclean excuse for a human being,” if you also said it was a polite notice, it would be okay.

And even if the rest of your wording is polite, you still have to open with “Polite Notice.” Actual politeness isn’t what matters. You have to remind everyone that you’re being polite.

I didn’t open with “Polite Notice.” I didn’t figure a chalked notice on the sidewalk had to, but then (as I’m often reminded) I’m not British. Wild Thing’s sure that what people mean when they say that is that we just don’t get certain things, and that the speaker feels sorry for us. I’m not sure she’s right. I tend to hear it as a statement of fact: We really aren’t British. Or we are—we’re citizens—but on some deeper level we never can be.

I don’t necessarily want to know how the speaker feels about this.

So it’s hard for me to be sure how significant that missing “Polite Notice” is. I may have offended someone other than the dog walker, but I can’t tell. I’m not British.

Messing with British Baking: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Posted on November 11, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Since moving to Cornwall, I’ve made it my mission in life to mess with the Britishness of British baking. Not because British baking is bad. It isn’t; it’s fantastic. Have you eaten shortbread? Or scones? Or pain au chocolat? Or—wait a minute, that last one’s French, isn’t it? (And in case you’re not familiar with the stuff, it’s not pronounced like the English word pain, it’s closer to pan, and it’s basically a croissant with chocolate inside. Mmmm.)

So okay, we’re not talking about a tradition that goes back, unmixed and unmessed-with, to Alfred the Intolerable. British cooking has done what pretty much every culture does: it’s adapted, stolen, borrowed, and claimed as its own whatever bits happened to work—so much so that now people ask, with an almost straight face, “What’s more English than curry?”

How am I carrying out my mission? I’m baking, and I’m feeding my friends and neighbors. It all sounds so harmless, doesn’t it?

Irrelevant Photo: Fountains Abbey

So here’s my recipe for chocolate chip cookies, because chocolate chip cookies are even more American than Mom and apple pie. They’re probably more American than the flag. The recipe’s in imperial measures. (Shouldn’t we start calling them American measures, by the way? The empire’s gone and—does any country other than the U.S. still use them these days? And I’m not sure how many people know what imperial measures means.) But back to my point, I’m not going to try translating it into anything sensible like the metric system because the last time I did lost three weeks of my life and didn’t get it right anyway. So forget it. Besides, what’s more American than an irrational and antiquated system of measuring that we inherited from a country that’s since abandoned it and which we will fight to the death rather than give up?

Am I off the topic yet?

The recipe was adapted from one my friend J. found in the Duluth, Minnesota, News Tribune. The introduction explained that the more sugar a cookie has, the more it spreads out in the oven. The original minimized the sugar, which suited me because my chocolate chip cookies had been turning into chocolate chip wafers and I like a thick cookie. I’ve cut the sugar back even further and substituted oatmeal for some of the flour. If that sounds healthy, don’t kid yourself, they’re lethal, but you can increase the sugar if you like. I’ve left the amount a bit vague (a scant ¼ cup, in one place) for exactly that reason. Not to mention because I’m exactly that sort of cook—a bit vague, probably even a bit scant.

If you want the cookies to turn out well (and why would you make them if you didn’t?), you have to find really good dark chocolate—preferably chocolate chips. In the U.S., that means semi-sweet—none of that milk chocolate mess. In the U.K., I’ve had a battle to find good chocolate chips. For years, all I could find were brown waxy things that tasted like buttons that had popped off an old-fashioned shoe. If that’s all you can find, don’t buy them. Chop up chocolate bars (I’ve used 70% chocolate) with the back of a knife and make chocolate chunk cookies, but chunks of chocolate bars don’t keep their shape the way chips do. They’re good but not the same. For some time now, friends have kept us supplied with American chocolate chips, which is a real luxury, especially when you look at the cost of postage, but recently I’ve discovered that Dr. Oetker’s make decent chocolate chips, even if they come in itty bitty bags and are overpriced. In the U.S., you can buy chocolate chips in industrial-size bags. We’re seriously serious about chocolate chips.

If you’re in other countries, I have no chocolate chip advice to offer, but I do know this: If you open the bag and taste them and they don’t taste like much, they won’t get any better when you stir them into the batter and bake them.

The recipe makes an insane number of cookies. (I did warn you that, as a cook, I’m a bit vague.) I freeze whatever we don’t eat on the first day and take them out when we have company. They’re good frozen. Maybe even better. Honest. I discovered this the time I hid them from myself and—surprise surprise—found them. And ate them on the spot.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 c. whole wheat flour

2 1/3 c. plain white flour

1 ½ c. rolled oats (any thickness will do)

2 tsp. baking soda (that’s bicarbonate of soda)

2 tsp. salt

12 oz. (that’s 3 sticks if you’re American) butter

Scant 2/3 c. brown sugar

Scant ¼ c. white sugar

4 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla

Lots of dark chocolate chips (about 2 ½ c.)

Cream the butter and sugars. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla. Mix in the dry ingredients, then the chocolate chips. Drop spoonfuls onto greased cookie sheets, leaving some room for them to spread out.

Bake 9 – 11 minutes at 375 F., or 185 c., or 165 c. with a fan oven.

Cool 2 minutes or more on baking sheets before removing.

Consulting the Internet and the Chicken Entrails about Cornish Roads

Posted on November 7, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

I went to a meeting the other day, and I consulted the internet about it the night before. That’s the modern version of killing a chicken and consulting the entrails to find out how your trip’s going to go.

The internet entrails told me I’d need one hour and one minute to get there.

I figured I’d allow myself an extra ten minutes and be heroically early.

In the morning, I forgot about the ten minutes, but how many meetings start on time anyway? I punched the post code into the sat nav I stole from Wild Thing because I don’t believe in them unless I need one, in which case see I steal hers. That gives me access to both a sat nav and the moral high ground.

The sat nav spit the post code back out. I punched it in again. The sat nav offered me a list of alternative post codes, some of which were close but close wasn’t what I needed. I could find the town without the damned thing. What I needed was the final details.

We went through this several times until it accepted the post code. I will, of course, swear that I entered it correctly all sixteen times and that the sat nav was both pigheaded and wrong for the first fifteen, but you probably won’t believe me. I’m not sure I believe me either.

I was now going to be late. I was also now ready to accept that you can’t get from my house to Pool, where the meeting was, in one hour and one minute. And I’d kind of known that the night before, but I wasn’t ready to question the wisdom of the chicken entrails then.

I drove, telling myself I’d make up lost time. This was, of course, a crock. (A crock, my writers group tells me, is an Americanism. It may also be as out of date as I am, so if you need guidance, allow to me ask you, ever so delicately, to imagine what I’m implying is inside the crock.) Unless you’re on one of our few four-lane highways (or the occasional, very short, three-lane stretch), you have to be a whole lot crazier than I am if you’re going to make up time around here.

At the Pool turnoff, I realized that the sat nav hadn’t been speaking to me since I left the house. Why hadn’t I noticed? Because I don’t enjoy her conversation, so I hadn’t missed it. Our sat nav, by the way, is a her, and her name’s Dorothy, and she’s been losing her voice a lot lately. The last time it happened, Wild Thing fought with her until she started speaking again but she—Wild Thing, that is—wasn’t sure what she’d done, so I stood no chance of reproducing it. It involved a lot of swearing, which I can reproduce effortlessly, but I’m guessing that wasn’t the effective part. And I didn’t have time to wrestle with the sat nav anyway—I was already heroically late—so I drove into Pool trying to keep one eye on the little brown arrow.

Tell me, I begged the universe, that this isn’t a part of the county where sat navs don’t work.

I didn’t expect the universe to answer and it didn’t. Begging the universe is just one of those things I do to pass the time when I’m coming unglued. I fully expected the little brown arrow to direct me into an abandoned mine shaft or the frozen food aisle of the nearest supermarket. That optimism meant I was ready for it when the little brown arrow told me to turn where there wasn’t a street.

You can’t fool me, I told Dorothy, and I drove on.

The hell she couldn’t. The little brown arrow disappeared.

I turned around and tried again, somehow expecting to get different information this time. The little brown arrow still wanted me to turn onto a non-street, but it was at least paved, so I tried it and ended up in a supermarket parking lot.

I turned around before we got to the frozen food aisle and I drove back to where the arrow had disappeared, pulling into the parking lot of a small business. I walked inside and threw myself on their mercy.

They must’ve been used to this. Not only were they kind, they’d heard of the complex I was looking for and gave me usable directions.

“Sat navs,” I said, trying to look as befuddled as, in fact, I was. I felt—I have no idea why—that I owed them that.

“Sat navs,” they said, nodding and looking wise.

I got to the address, which turned out to be a Free Public Attraction (please note the capital letters, because they’re not mine; I’ve borrowed them from a sign I passed) about Cornish mining. With a not-at-all-free parking lot. I hadn’t counted on that and hadn’t brought much change, but I plugged in what I had, which was enough to carry me to the 11 a.m. break, when I might be able wangle change out of someone somewhere.

Or leave if the meeting turned out to be as pointless as I sort of suspected it would be.

I could probably have used my phone and credit card to pay, but (remember the internet and the chicken entrails?) I was late.

So in a gentle Cornish mizzle, I walked in through what must once have been a working mine complex and now that the mining’s gone is a tourist attraction. I thought melancholy and ironic thoughts about hard, dangerous work and low pay and tourist attractions but didn’t have a lot of time for them because I found the right building and went into a tasteful and (I assumed) expensive modern lobby where there was no sign pointing me to my meeting, only one saying Memory Café.

You know about memory cafes? They’re for people with some degree of dementia, to orient them to I have no idea what. Reality, I suppose, which at the moment didn’t strike me as a particularly wondrous gift.

I found an office and asked a woman about my meeting. She gave me a blank look. I produced my agenda.

“That’s tomorrow,” she said.

I could have gone to the memory café but reality wasn’t looking particularly good so I drove home.

British and American English: The Accent

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

Two words spoken in an American accent reliably crack up the British: water and butter. It has to do with the difference between English R and the American R, which as far as I can figure out is this: Americans have one and the English have a sort noticeable absence—something you might write as an H, or an apostrophe. WAWtah, as opposed to WAWterrrr.

WAWterrr. Photo by AdriannaNicole

I’ve spelled that first syllable the same way but no way does it sound the same. No matter how much I mess around with the spelling, though, I can’t come up with the difference. Put it this way: The English first syllable is well behaved and sits in its chair with a perfectly straight back. The American one slouches and puts its feet on the coffee table.

That may not help. I do understand that.

Okay, I’m writing about English pronunciation as if the English had one single accent. They don’t, but let’s not get into that here. I’m oversimplifying, the same way I’m oversimplifying the American accent, because if I don’t I’ll never write this. I’ll lose myself in complications and sub-points and convolutions so badly that I’ll shut down the computer, go back to bed, and pull the covers over my head. Pretty soon I’ll be joined by two cats and we’ll spend the day there.

They’ll think it’s a day well spent.

Any number of British friends will, in the middle of a conversation involving food or drink, lose all restraint and repeat after us, “BUTTerrrr,” or “WAWterrrr.” They can’t help themselves. It just breaks loose. Even if it was going to fly around the room and break the dishes, they couldn’t keep it in. Sometimes they don’t even wait for us to say it first. I’d love to criticize, but if Wild Thing and I are in the car when the weather comes on and the winds are moderate, we’ll repeat “MAWderit” and laugh as if it was the first time we’d done it. Some jokes just don’t get old.

We’re lucky, though. We have the accent that people think is cool because they’ve grown up watching Hollywood movies. Well, we sort of have it. We have versions of it, with regional flavorings that, from this distance, most people don’t hear. So we don’t get the disapproval that goes with having accents people look down on, or are afraid of. A wave of let’s-all-worry-about-immigrantion is breaking over the country just now, and our accents mark us all. Wild Thing’s and mine get us sorted in the Immigrants We Accept pile. It’s uncomfortable sometimes, but not as uncomfortable as being in the Immigrants We Don’t Accept pile. Still, it’s odd when people react to your accent, even favorably. It’s a bit like having people react to your nose. You’ve been walking around with the thing all your life. You’ve forgotten it’s there and are thinking about something else, but people want to talk to you about it. Over and over.

I’m in the supermarket and the woman at the checkout says, “I love your accent.”

What am I supposed to say? It’s my accent. I’m not responsible for it. When I was a kid, if I’d known I could choose I would have chosen a different variation on the New York accent. Now it’s too late. The glue that holds it in place set long ago.

So I say thanks, just as if she’d said she liked my sweater. Which she’d have called a jumper.

Heavy Traffic in a Cornish Village

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

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

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

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

“So much traffic!” Wild Thing said.

Irrelevant Photo: Fall Berries of Some Sort of Other

You need a little background here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gardening in Cornwall: What We Do When Autumn Comes

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Ellen Hawley

J. is a serious gardener, and she grows the best tomatoes I’ve eaten since I moved to the U.K. I don’t know how she kills slugs and snails on her patch in the spring, but I know she does, because if you’re going to grow anything around here, you have to. Otherwise they mow down every plant you stick in the earth. They move through like a scene from Slug Apocalypse, leaving nothing behind.

Irrelevant Photo: The North Cornwall Coast

A couple of us were at J.’s house and we went outside to admire the garden. It was that beautiful time of the evening when the sky’s a tissue-paper blue and you can almost convince yourself that the world is at peace, even though, yeah, of course you know better. Even though it was late in the year, she still had some flowers in bloom.

On the edge of a flower bed was a slug. The big, creepy kind, easily the length of my ring finger.

J. flicked it away—and I’d have to say she did it gently—with the toe of her shoe.

“That’s why I don’t come out at this time of day,” she said.

So it’s not just me. Everyone who gardens knows they’re out there. And at least for part of the year, we don’t look. If we did, as surely as if we’d sworn an oath, we’d have to kill them. And really, you can’t dedicate your life to eliminating an entire species, even if it’s only from a small patch of ground you call your own.

Notes from the U.K.

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

Tag Archives: anglophile