Easter candy in the U.S. and U.K.: Special late edition

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Our friend J., having read my post about Easter candy, sent us some from the U.S. Her cover note said to read the back of the Peeps package because it might inspire me.

“What’s a Peep?” you ask if you’re not from the U.S. It’s sugar, corn syrup, gelatin, yellow #5 (tartrazine), potassium sorbate (a preservative), natural [unspecified and I’d say hard to detect] flavors, and carnauba wax. Yum. They’re gluten free and fat free and shaped (if you have a bit of imagination) like a chick that came into existence by being spat from a spout. Each chick contains 28 calories. That’s 140 calories per serving, because, as an essential part of a balanced diet, serving size has been scientifically determined.

Irrelevant photo: Thatched cottage with gorse and may in bloom.

The text on the cover claims they’re marshmallow, but they taste like nothing that originated on planet Earth.

No, I’m going to backtrack on that, because I think carnauba wax is used on cars. On planet Earth. So if you’ve ever used your tongue to wax the car, the taste will be familiar. That means, all you Peep Corporation lawyers out there, that I retract my statement about planet Earth. Don’t sue. Please.

The text on the back of the package says that opening it “opens a world of possibilities! [Oh, the thrill implied by that exclamation mark. I’m so carried away I’ll add one of my own: !] From creative crafting and imaginative artwork, to delicious recipes and more, let the fun begin!” And I feel compelled to tell you that the repetitious use of open is theirs. They were aiming for one of those rhythmic poetic thingies. Isn’t it wondrous, the uses writing techniques can be put to?

So basically, what they’re saying here is that these things last forever and therefore can be used in any form of artwork. The Mona Lisa in Peeps? Why not? A Peep perched Thinker-like on the toilet? Sure! More exclamation marks? You got ‘em!

When I worked for a writers organization in Minnesota, one (or possibly two) of my illustrious co-workers impaled a Peep on the bathroom ceiling, where it remained for months without changing in any noticeable way. I’m not sure whether that was craft or art (it gets tricky sometimes, that art/craft question), but I do know the Peep didn’t rot or stretch or draw ants or roaches or anything else that would normally be drawn to food. Those insects? They know stuff. We could learn from them.

I have a bit more trouble with the delicious recipes the text promises. Peep pie? I don’t know what happens to them in the presence of heat. I’m not sure what happens to them, in fact, when they’re eaten. They appear to be indestructible. Do they pass through us whole or does the digestive system work its magic, even on Peeps?

Dedicated as I am to this blog, and to exploring every last aspect of the cultures of the U.S. and Britain, I draw the line at offering myself as a test subject. But I do, once again, wish those of you who celebrate it a happy Easter and those of you who don’t a happy non-Easter. To those of you who love Peeps, I offer my apologies. Our package has been promised to an American Peep-lover in the village, and she’s thrilled by the prospect of all those exclamation marks landing in her house.

And finally, to J. I send my profound thanks. For both the candy and the suggestion. I wouldn’t have thought to turn the package over and read it if you hadn’t told me to.

A very British form of protest

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Someone was recently convicted of disrupting prime minister’s question time—called PMQ by those in the know—by throwing marbles in the general direction of the MPs. (“Marble-throwing PMQs protestor gets suspended prison sentence”)

No, that’s not the part that strikes me as particularly British. We’ll get to that. But before we do, I should explain that it takes an expert to tell when someone disrupts PMQ, because the MPs bray at and heckle and bully each other like a classroomful of twelve-year-old boys whose teacher stepped out for a smoke a month ago and still hasn’t come back. (My writers group, whose members are an invaluable and giddy guide to all things British, advises me that the MPs sound like public school boys, which if you’re American means private school boys, because public schools here are private, but that’s too much confusion for one post. Let’s thank them politely and not get into it here.) All that braying and harassing are politics as usual. The reason this guy stood out was because he was in the visitors’ area.

And, yeah, the marbles. I admit that.

Plus his language. The MPs are allowed (even expected) to be horrible to each other, but their language has to be pristine.

Blackthorn in bloom on the North Cornish coast

Irrelevant photo: Blackthorn in bloom.

What kind of language did the protester use? That’s in dispute. The prosecutor claimed he stood up and said, “I’m sorry about this, ladies and gentlemen. You fucking wankers, you’re just liars.” But the protester, who as far as I can figure out had already pled guilty, interrupted, shouting, “Can I just say, for the record, I didn’t call anyone fucking wankers. I called them dishonourable bastards.”

That “dishonourable”? That’s British. The next person who interrupts the American House or Senate will not, I guarantee, use the word dishonorable, even though I switched to the American spelling to make it a fraction of a percent of a probability more plausible.

The “I’m sorry about this, ladies and gentlemen”? That’s also British.

I’m still not sure what our protester was protesting. According to the article, he has (as the current phrase puts it) mental health problems and felt his life was wasting away. In response, I’m sure the government will make more speeches about putting mental health on a par with physical health and keep on underfunding both.

They’d outlaw marbles but Parliament’s dissolved until the election.

Department of Futile Exercises: Summing up the U.K. and the U.S.

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Recently, a teachers’ conference objected to the government’s drive to teach British values in the schools, saying it was becoming “the source of wider conflict rather than a means of resolving it.” (“Teachers urged to ‘disengage’ from promotion of British values”)

I’ve been hearing about British values since I first came to this country, and I always wonder what they are. Standing in orderly lines? Forming brass bands? Not using sunscreen on the beach, even though you’re light-skinned and have already turned an alarming shade of pink? It’s a heavy responsibility, settling on a handful of characteristics to sum up an entire nation.

Irrelevant photo: The coast on the same hazy day as the last waves-in-the-haze picture I posted. The haze was caused by a sandstorm in the Sahara.

What did the Department for (not of, thank you very much*) Education decide were the ultimate British values when they pushed the nation’s protesting teachers under the wheels of this particular train? “Democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths and beliefs.” (“Schools ‘must actively promote British values’ – DfE”)

Don’t you just love a politician who can say stuff like that with a straight face? Because, of course, no other country in this battered old world can lay claim to those ideals. If you’re startled awake some night and hear that set of values marching down the street behind a brass band, you’ll know right away what country you woke up in.

Any discussion of British values is complicated by a central reality of Britain, which is that the country’s a mash-up of four (or five, if you’re a Cornish nationalist) nations**, and the people most likely to call themselves British seem to be those of us who aren’t English, Scottish, Northern Irish, or Welsh. Or Cornish. In other words, those of us who came from someplace else. Those of us whose children the Department for Education is worried about Britishizing.

As far as I can tell, summing up either a country or its values is a messy business, whatever country you pick. When I still lived in the U.S., I taught briefly in a community college, and we’d read an essay by an immigrant that made a passing reference to, if I remember right, “being more like an American.”

“What,” I asked, on the spur of the moment, “does it mean when you say someone’s like an American?”

It wasn’t a question I had an answer for, and as it turned out no one else did either. The class broke into small groups, and a couple of them set about finding some essential trait that would separate the Americans from the non-Americans, but pretty much everything people suggested fell apart. Being born in the country? Nope. You could still become a citizen, and a citizen was an American. Being a citizen, then? Well, legally, yes, but some non-citizens are as culturally American (whatever that means) as any citizen. One small group, pushed, I think, by a single enthusiast, decided that speaking English was a dividing line, but the other groups didn’t jump in to endorse that. Personally, I’m all for speaking the language of a country you live in (British and American expats in non-English-speaking countries, are you taking notes?), but not every immigrant can learn a new language. My great-grandmother never did, even though the price she paid was not being able to talk freely with her grandchildren. It wasn’t lack of motivation. She wasn’t young when she immigrated and she couldn’t make the adjustment. Maybe she wasn’t good with languages. Maybe she was terrified. I don’t know.

No one, including me, thought to mention that other countries speak English and it hasn’t made them particularly American. In fact, some countries—mentioning no names—think they speak it better than we do. And then there are the Puerto Ricans. They’re U.S. citizens by birth. If some of them speak only Spanish, either by choice or because it’s their only language, are they any less American?

I won’t go on. We couldn’t say what being American meant, although we all thought we knew.

So, British values? Sorry, folks, but I’m not hopeful. I will, however, have a hell of a good time listening to the debate as it staggers on.

—————–

*My spies tell me it used to be the Department of Education, but the name was changed at some point. I’m sure the education system is better because of it.

**I owe the insight about the U.K. being a country of four (or five) nations to my writers group. The United Kingdom looks a whole lot more united from the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, Scotland came very close to leaving in 2014. Somebody tell me: Did that get any coverage in the U.S.?

Class and power in rural Cornwall

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

I was listening to the radio a while ago (Radio 4, a BBC station, has some great shows, along with some deeply strange ones) and someone said in passing that in the U.S. class is all about money. And I stopped mid-stir (I listen to the radio either in the car or when I’m cooking) and thought, Well, what else would it be about?

Why, heritage, of course. Generations of titles and inbreeding and self-congratulatory silliness. The system’s antiquated and doesn’t match the realities of power anymore, but it’s still creaking around the room on its arthritic legs and interrupting the conversation with irrelevant and embarrassing observations every chance it gets. An aristocratic family may have given its grand house to the National Trust because it couldn’t afford the upkeep, it may have sold it to a celebrity or some foreign oligarch, or it may have kept the place and opened part of it for the riffraff to wander through and gawp at (or as much of the riffraff as can afford the entrance fees, which range from the predictable to the exorbitant), but by god it still has a name and thinks it matters. (We all have names, I remind myself, but they’ll be happy to tell you that they really have names. The rest of us just have a bunch of sounds for other people to call us by. And in my case, the family name has changed a few times, so that says something about how important we thought it was.)

Irrelevant photo: The cliffs on a hazy day.

But even in Britain, class isn’t all about heritage anymore. Pick any village and someone’s likely to think they’re the lord or lady of the manor. It’s possible that their ancestors once were, but it’s equally (or maybe even more) likely, at least in our part of the country, that they moved down from London a few years ago, bringing a pile of money made doing who knows what, and now that they’ve bought a big house in a small village it’s all gone straight to their head. They throw their weight around in village events and committees, half expecting to recreate the days when Lord Hooha’s word was law. But whether or not they actually are Lord Hooha, it’s not the nineteenth century, never mind the middle ages. Sometimes they get away with it but often they don’t. Either way, the rest of us are torn between annoyance and mockery.

British and American English: The Easter update

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

The Methodist Church in our village has its annual egg roll at this time of year, and you need to understand that this is an event, not something to eat. If it was something to eat and if we were speaking British, it would be an egg on a roll. If we were speaking American, it would be a deep-fried appetizer from a Chinese restaurant—what the British call a spring roll. But no, this is more along the lines of the Gloucester Cheese Roll, only without insanely steep hill and the ambulances. And the cheese. It’s a bunch of kids rolling eggs down a hill. The one who reaches the bottom first (or at all, since chickens never designed their eggs for racing) wins. I’m not sure what the prize is. A deep-fried appetizer from a Chinese restaurant? An egg sandwich? A chocolate bunny?

I’ve never gone to the event, but I was specifically invited the year A. was a judge. Unfortunately, I got sick and stayed home, and that left me free to imagine it any way I want. What I imagine is that Easter in Britain is about rolling an egg down a hill.

Irrelevant photo: A tiny waterfall. Looking at this, you can almost believe the legends of fairies and little people.

In its more commercial form, Easter’s also about chocolate eggs, and these are massive things—not American football size, but moving in that direction. All your childhood dreams of greed, shaped like an egg. The Guardian (that’s a newspaper, in case you need to know) likes to compare the prices and qualities of different brands of food, and this year’s chocolate Easter egg comparison shows that some of them get into silly money territory. Hotel Chocolat? £27, and it’s filled with smaller chocolates.Harrods? £29.95. The paper recommends that one for Russian oligarchs, who aren’t known for their sense of humor so let’s assume the paper’s not making fun of them, and for safety’s sake neither am I. Marks & Spencer has one for £40 and that kind of money buys it its very own link. (FYI: Links here are not for sale unless I’m making fun of something at the other end, in which case no one’s likely to offer me money. I am so pure I’m almost invisible.) M & S’s egg is a “giant golden lattice egg with a delicate show-stopping small egg perched inside. . . . Because they’re so special, we’ve only made 7,500 eggs, each one numbered on the presentation box for an extra touch of luxury.” And then you eat the sucker and it’s gone, leaving you with nothing but that numbered presentation box and a bunch of adjectives. Spend enough money and you get a lot of adjectives. The original copy had even more, but I’m still an editor at heart and just had to cut some. And in case you’re worried, the gold is edible. Which is another adjective but an important one The Guardian doesn’t specifically recommend this particular egg for Russian oligarchs. I’m not sure why.

Back in the land of the sane, you can find chocolate eggs in supermarkets for £5, or for £2.99.

And we still haven’t gotten to chocolate bunnies. I’ve seen these in two sizes: nestle in your palm size and coffee mug size. I brought a small one home from a grocery shopping trip and Wild Thing reports that they’re good.

In the U.S., you can’t make your way through a store in the weeks before Easter without tripping over egg-dying kits. Or—well, I assume that’s still true. It’s been a long time since I’ve been around, never mind at Easter. In Britain, though, making Easter eggs from actual eggs don’t seem to be a big thing.

And this seems to be a leap, but it’s not: When I first started to write fiction, I wrote a transparently autobiographical story about my Jewish atheist family that included the sentence, “We celebrated Easter.”

My father read it.

“We never celebrated Easter,” he said.

I think that, in his quiet way he was scandalized. He was also, in my opinion, wrong.

It’s true that we didn’t celebrate it in a religious way. But we dyed eggs every year, and found people to give them to (who may have wondered about them but were kind enough not to ask). My brother and I woke up to Easter baskets—jellybeans, a chocolate rabbit (in my memory, they were huge), a panorama egg with a sugar shell and little cut-out figures inside, small chocolate eggs in foil wrappers, all of them nestled in fake grass.

Give a kid candy like that and she’ll think it’s a celebration. Add dyed eggs and, yes, you have a holiday. Sorry, Dad.

It didn’t turn me religious, but it did leave me with a fondness for chocolate bunnies, even though I don’t eat them anymore. I worked in a candy factory when I was in my twenties, and it left me immune to candy’s lures. The one exception is good, and very plain, dark chocolate. But I do like to see chocolate bunnies in their gorgeous foil wrappers.

I can even get sentimental about jellybeans. They never did taste good, but I ate them anyway. Like Everest, they were there. How could I not?

So if you celebrate Easter, happy Easter. And if you don’t, I can still recommend the chocolate bunnies. They don’t care what you believe.

The British countryside and Winnie the Pooh

Posted on March 31, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Nothing reminds me that I’m living in the British countryside quite the way crossing a ford does.

I know. Fords have been around ever since people and small rivers were first introduced, but even so the fords in our village make me think I live in Pooh Corners. And for the record, no, I’m not sure there were any fords in Winnie the Pooh, but there was a stream and—well, I don’t want to pretend I’m being reasonable about this. What I’m remembering, I think, is one of the illustrations, about measuring the height of a stream during a flood.

Funny what sticks with you from your childhood.

Irrelevant photo: North Cornwall’s coast on a hazy day

This all goes to show you what a New Yorker I am. New York City doesn’t do fords. In fact, it doesn’t do streams. As far as I know, many years before I was born, someone (or more accurately, some many) maneuvered all of New York’s streams into pipes and then paved them over. The city does have three big honkin’ rivers (or two, or maybe one, depending on what you count as a river and what you count as a straight), and that’s plenty, thanks.

When you grow up with pavement, not having streams seems natural. So much so that I used to wonder where streams came from. Not where rivers came from. They came from upstream, as any fool could see. In case you need further proof of how attuned I was to the natural world, I once looked into a huge hole in the street and was surprised to see earth and rock under the pavement. I don’t know what I expected, but scaffolding probably wouldn’t have surprised me. So living in Cornwall not only with streams but with fords? That’s exotic.

Wild Thing grew up in Texas, and her family used to spend time in Colorado. She swears that when they came to a ford and the river looked higher than usual, her parents would have her wade across to make sure it was safe for the car. She never got washed away, so I’m guessing these weren’t raging torrents. Her parents weren’t reckless or neglectful, but it’s also true that they never stopped her from exploring abandoned mine shafts, so I don’t have the impression that they were over-protective either.

In fairness, she wouldn’t have told them she was exploring mine shafts, but a different set of parents might have asked. Or discussed. Or at least warned.

Whatever the pluses and minuses of their approach, she came out of it with an enviable gift for gauging the depth of a stream, and that’s something I don’t have. I understand three levels: low enough to wade; higher than the waterproof part of my shoes; and ask Wild Thing before taking the car across. The first two are reliable. The third? It’s helpful only if Wild Thing happens to be with me. So far I’ve managed not to get swept away, which is why I’m sitting here typing this. I’ve turned back only once, and I probably I didn’t need to, but I figured it was better to wonder than to be wrong.

Years ago, some government agency set up gauges beside the fords. These look like gigantic rulers and go from 1 at the bottom to You’re in Deep Shit at the top, although in my city-bred opinion you’re in trouble by the time the water reaches 1, because for the most part the gauges sit serenely above the normal flow and I’d turn back long before the water reached them, even though at most fords that means having to back a long way. I’m good at backing a car. I’m not good at estimating fords. Give me a choice and it’s pretty clear which I’ll take.

I’m not sure what the gauges are for, really. Maybe so that, Pooh-like, we can measure the depth of the stream for no better reason than to know if it’s still rising. The valleys here are sharp and narrow, so the rainfall spills into the streams quickly. In a heavy storm, a stream that’s normally a trickle can rise to a torrent, especially if the ground’s already saturated. It can fall just as quickly as it rises, and I suppose a gauge could keep you amused while that’s happening, although you might be smarter to go back to your nice warm kitchen and wait. You could also look for another route if you’re driving. If you’re walking, the fords have foot bridges, so you should be fine. If the water comes up over that, you’d be smart to get out of there instead of watching the gauge.

In my city-bred opinion.

And unrelated to that, Notes has now been updated, with a new theme that looks one hell of a lot like the old one but should work on phones. In addition to that, it was going to have all sorts of added Googlery that would tell me if a gnat flew past your screen while you were reading it, and which would also reach through atmosphere and hijack unsuspecting readers, launching my stats to astronomical levels, but the whole thing went wrong and instead my posts stopped reaching most of you. The ancient Greeks called it hubris. So the googlery’s disappeared, everything except the new, barely discernible new theme is back (I hope) to where it started, and I’m toning down my ambitions. Or looking for another way to channel them.

Thanks to the people who wrote to say they couldn’t click through to the “Trouble, trouble, trouble” post. It’s now reappeared (along with a great comment from Cats at the Bar) and I’ve lost another post, which was nothing but an attempt to update the people who couldn’t click through to “Trouble, trouble, trouble.”

Don’t worry about it.

If you have any trouble let me know. But if you get this, that probably means you’re not having any problems.

Arghh.

Going postal in the U.S and Britain

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

In my unending efforts to compare Britain and the U.S., I helped out with a bulk mailing on Tuesday night. Bulk mailing is an American term meaning “damn, we have a lot of paper here.” I’m not sure how you say that in British.

Back in Minnesota, I was the entire staff of a very small writers magazine, and in the early years part of my job was to gather a crew of volunteers and mail the thing. Because it was cheaper to do a bulk mailing, we did a bulk mailing. (Hey, we were a nonprofit. Money was tight.) This involved crawling around the floor, attaching address labels, and sorting everything according to zip code, and it was this last bit, the sorting, where we’d get into trouble. Every month, I introduced new volunteers to the post office’s bulk mail regulations in tooth-shattering detail, but I never found the right words to make it all clear. That was because what we had to do ran off the edge of the English language.

A footpath in Cornwall, with wildflowers.

Irrelevant photo: The primrose path. Really. These are wild primroses growing along Lover’s Walk. I don’t think the flowers are why the path got that name. Lover’s Walk is one of the few paths in the parish where a couple stood any chance of finding a little privacy.

It was something like this: If we had more than ten addresses in a single zip code, we’d band them together. If we have less, we’d combine it with others in nearby zip codes according to some complicated system I barely understood at the time and can’t come close to remembering now. Even if did remember, though, it ran off the edge of the English language so no explanation would help. Then we’d label the bundles and combine them in some equally obscure and incomprehensible way and dump them in canvas sacks, which again had to be labeled before we hauled them down the stairs and threw them in the back of my car.

That last bit? The one that involved heavy lifting? That was the easy part.

Then I delivered the sacks to the loading dock of the main post office and waited for the phone to ring, which it often did a day or three later. It would be someone from the post office would tell me to come back down, pull the sacks out of the canvas wheelie things they’d been thrown in, and fix the mailing in some obscure way I barely understood at the time and don’t understand at all now.

Remember those new volunteers I said I had trouble explaining the system to? Well, none of this was their fault. If ever there was a system calculated to help me screw up, the U.S. Post Office had found it.

Eventually the organization I worked for paid another organization to do the mailing. Whether that was for efficiency or mercy, I don’t honestly care. I’m still grateful, and the Minneapolis Post Office held a three-day celebration. No mail was delivered until the hangovers wore off.

And now here I am on British soil, and by one of the universe’s little ironies, I was the one who organized last Tuesday night’s mailing. The Truro Post Office is hiring crisis counselors already and we haven’t even delivered the boxes.

What we were mailing was called an election address (anyone but a post office would call it a leaflet) from a parliamentary candidate who has about as much chance of winning the election as I do of following complex instructions from the post office. Any post office. The candidate’s not running to win, although I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if he did, but to raise awareness of the way the National Health Service is being chopped up and privatized and underfunded. I won’t go off into a political rant here, and if you disagree, that’s fine, because the political bit ends here. The point is, even though he’s not running in our district, six friends and I thought it was important enough that we gathered to help out, together with one chocolate cake (which had no opinions on the subject and didn’t survive the night), many rubber bands, five or six kitchen scales, and an awful lot of paper.

Parliamentary candidates in England (and I assume the rest of Britain) have the right to mail one, ahem, election address to everyone in their constituency (which I’d call a district, but I’m not in the U.S. now, so constituency it is). These don’t have to be individually addressed, mercifully, or we’d still be there, pasting and sorting and gashing our teeth. And probably, by now, throwing chocolate cake.

But addressed or not, a post office is a post office, and it has its regulations. The leaflets had to be sorted into bundles of a hundred and banded. We could use either one rubber band on these or two. My instructions didn’t say what would happen if someone used three, but none of us was brave enough to try. Every last leaflet in the bundle had to face the same way. We weren’t sure if the bundles all had to be placed in the boxes facing the same way, so we made sure they did.

We had 24,000 leaflets to mail, which I kept calling 2,400 and, occasionally, 44,000, which helps explain why I shouldn’t be allowed out in public but doesn’t explain why anyone let me to stay in the room while numbers were in use. Rather than count all 24,000 (or 2,400, or 44,000) sheet by sheet, the campaign office had told us to count a few initial bundles and weigh them, and that’s what the scales were for. A hundred leaflets weighed 792 grams. Except when they weighed 790 or 798, because kitchen scales aren’t as accurate as the digital displays make them look like they are. Or except when I’d drift into my dys-whatever-it-is that people allergic to numbers have, and I’d weigh out 992 grams and a few minutes later someone would ask why one of the bundles was so thick and reweigh it.

Then the bundles had to go into boxes, all facing the same way, thanks, and each box had to have a printed label that included a blank spot for the number of leaflets inside. For the sake of our sanity, we put the same number of bundles in each box—twelve.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to count to twelve?

Never mind. We finished in time to eat the cake and all get home by ten. The boxes have to be dropped off on Friday—the day I’m posting this—at a tightly scheduled time, and the person dropping them off has to wear a hi-vis jacket and safety shoes. If male, he has to part his hair on the right and wear black-framed glasses; if female, she must not have used hair spray for two days prior to appearing at the post office and should wear contact lenses.

I’m waiting for the post office to call me down to Truro so I can fix whatever I screwed up. A bundle deep inside one of those boxes has 98 leaflets. Or 102. I’ll have to unband and count them all to find out which one it is.

The post office doesn’t have my phone number, but it’ll find me anyway. Some things that you do in life will follow you, no matter where you hide.

Strange British traditions: cheese roll and flaming tar barrels

Posted on March 20, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

The other day, Wild Thing and I were talking with friends about the Gloucester Cheese Roll. Unlike an egg roll, which in Britain is an egg on a roll and not (as it is in the U.S.) Chinese veggies and sometimes meat or seafood deep-fried inside a wrapper, this is not cheese on a roll but an event where people chase a wheel of cheese down a very steep hill. (The event is also called the Cheese Rolling and the Cheese Race, but let’s stick with the more confusing name, please.)

In Britain, what Americans call an egg roll is called a spring roll. In the U.S., a spring roll is an unfried egg roll and in case you need to know, I like them better. That’s all as irrelevant as it is confusing, which is why I include it.

For endless images not of an egg roll but of the cheese roll follow this link.

Irrelevant photo: Launceston Castle, with a church in the foreground

But back to the event: The winner of the race gets to keep the cheese. The ambulances at the bottom get to carry selected losers to the emergency room, which in Britain is called Accident and Emergency.

That business about the ambulances? That’s not a joke.

“Why,” I asked (and you may need to be reminded at this point that I was sitting around with Wild Thing and our friends), “do people do this?”

“Boredom,” D. said.

Both friends, irrelevantly, have names that begin with D.

“Think of it as a Saturday night in February in a small-town Minnesota bar,” Wild Thing said. “A couple of people go outside and punch each other, then they come back inside and everybody keeps drinking.”

I never lived in small-town Minnesota, but Wild Thing did, so I’m going to have to take her word for this. I do understand boredom, but my way of dealing with it doesn’t usually involve hospitals. So I told D. and D. about our village’s earring fishing contest, which is an ordinary enough fishing contest except the contestants have to use an earring as a lure. It’s been running for a few years. I told them about the Boscastle raft race, in which the teams build rafts but can’t use anything nautical. Last year was its first year. My favorite entry lost. In fact, it sank. It was a picnic table on beer kegs, with a parasol that blew off either before the race started or right after. If I remember correctly, the raft was paddled with skateboards. Still, no ambulances were harmed in the making of either the race or the fishing contest (although the contest didn’t amuse the fish particularly), so I have less trouble understanding them.

From what I’ve seen on the internet, the official cheese roll ended a few years ago, when it couldn’t get insurance, and it’s now organized by an informal (and presumably un-suable) group. The mention of insurance reminded D. (well, one of them) of the flaming tar barrel race in Ottery St. Mary, which went on safely for years, even though people were racing around with, yes, flaming tar barrels, until some idiot tossed an aerosol can into one, and the can did what aerosol cans do when exposed to flaming tar: It blew up. No one—as far as I know—was hurt, but I’m willing to bet a lot of people were scared shitless.

The race continues. I don’t know what they do about insurance. Or aerosol cans and idiots.

The events we talked about fall into two categories: new and ancient. Many of the ancient ones seem to reach back to pre-Christian times and then piggyback themselves onto more recent holidays—May Day; Guy Fawkes Day. You can see the echoes of spring fertility celebrations, of the fall equinox. The tar barrel race is in the fall and you get fire, and days growing shorter. It’s insane, but I do see a connection. The cheese roll, though? It’s in the spring and I may be missing something, but it doesn’t strike me as an obvious way to celebrate the earth’s fertility.

What does it say about a culture that it creates these wonderful, lunatic events? I don’t have a clue, but I do know that they’re not commercial inventions, and they’re not the synthetic creations of a bunch of people nostalgic for the good olde days when knights were bolde and old crones knew the use of every weed that grew in the hedges. They’re created by real people, in place after place. Sort of like weeds, since I just mentioned them. No one plants them; they just grow. If you want folk culture, you could do worse than look here. And I can’t help imagining that they all start in the pub. Go back to Wild Thing’s February small-town Minnesota bar. Boredom plus beer. What could be more powerful? But instead of a simple brawl, these are elaborate events that demand months of planning. Commit-tees. Meetings. Ambulances. Delayed gratification, if you like. Which may be a good thing and may not be. If what you really want is the adrenaline of a fight, you probably fall on the not side. You end up starting a war. Or running through the streets with a flaming tar barrel. Or getting someone else to do it while you stand on the sidelines with a starter’s pistol, you clever devil.

In the interests of learning more about my new home, I hope to get to this year’s cheese roll, and to report back. If all goes well, we’ll discuss the tar barrel race. I make no promises.

The cheese roll is in May and I’m keeping my eye on the calendar.

Stereotyping the English

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

In response to “An update on search terms,” Drewdog 2060 wrote, “I am finding it difficult to comment as my collar, freshly starched by my butler this morning, is restricting my air supply. Too many good dinners at the gentleman’s club in Pal Mal. I do not, of course subscribe to stereotypes.”

Which got me thinking about stereotypes a bit more—okay, I’m not going to say seriously, since I try not to take my seriousness too seriously here, but a bit more than I had been. Even though I was the one to raise the topic.

When I was a kid, my father would sometimes give voice to a character he called the Constipated Englishman. The CE was a kind of Colonel Blimp figure (more about him in a minute) who never managed any real words but harrumphed a lot and made my brother and me giggle.

Irrelevant photo: Field patterns, late winter

Ah for those innocent days when you could insult an entire nationality and not have to wonder if it was a good idea. I offer you a verbal wince on my father’s behalf, because wasn’t a person to go in for stereotypes. He never made racist jokes and, with this exception, didn’t make jokes about entire nationalities either. But the English had been winners in the global poker game for so long, even though by then they were losing their chips, that they must’ve struck him as fair game. Besides, he had two giggling kids begging him to do the voice again, on top of which he probably saw the CE not as representative of the entire country but of a particular type of person it had given rise to.

I was too young to understand anything that subtle, so for years I more or less believed the entire English nation was male and upper class and constipated. And yes, if I’d stopped to think about that I’d have known it defied the laws of physics or probability or something else scientific, but that’s the thing with stereotypes—most of the time you don’t stop and think about them. They just drift around in your head like wisps of fog, obscuring one thing and leaving the rest clear. You can stop noticing that they’re there at all.

And here we should get back to Colonel Blimp, who was a cartoon character created by David Low as a result of overhearing two military men in a Turkish bath arguing that cavalry officers should be allowed to wear their spurs inside their tanks.

Um, yes indeed they should. Not to mention their swords. We can discuss the horses another time. I want measure the tanks they used back then before I give a definitive opinion.

Unlike the CE, who never even had a name, Colonel Blimp encapsulated the officers Low overheard so well that the entire type is now named after him. He was a character—particular and individual, even when he stood in for a group. You might want to argue that he was a stereotype, but it would be a harder argument to make.

All this is on my mind because when you write about the differences between cultures—and especially when you try to be funny about it—it’s easy to slide into using stereotypes and being, basically, a shithead. So if I cross the line here, I invite you to throw a rock. Or a cavalry officer’s spurs or a tank—whatever’s handy. Or better yet, a comment. It’ll annoy the hell out of me, and I’ll be grateful.

And in case you’re interested, the profound sociological, nonjudgmental reason that stereotypes are wrong is because they make the person who broadcasts them into a shithead.

Aren’t you glad I’m around to present these things dispassionately?

What people want to know about Americans in Britain

Posted on March 13, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Like so many other bloggers, I’ve become obsessed with my Stats Page. To the point where I have to remind myself that yesterday’s stats won’t change, no matter how many times I check them. And having told myself that, I check them again anyway. (I use the old Stats Page, because it has yesterday’s stats. And because I hate the new one.)

But the most interesting bit of the Stats Page is what I find under Search Engine Terms. This is where I see what people really want to know about Britain. Or about Americans in Britain. Or about life, poor dears, and then they get shunted in my direction and who knows what happens to them next. Nothing good, I’m sure.

Irrelevant photo: Where cats hide on gray days

Before we get to the list, I should admit that I’ve edited out the most sensible entries. This isn’t sociology, kids. We’re trying to have fun here, so settle down in the back row. Pay attention.

I’ve left the spelling and capitalization as I found them. When they think no one’s watching, most people are as lazy about capitalization as I am. Of course, it’s possible that either search engines or WordPress turns everything into lower case and the handful of capital letters are only there because I imported them without noticing. Either way, we’re becoming nations of illiterates.

Sad, isn’t it?

Enough. Here’s the list.

british english obsessed with the letter U

tea in motion

slang used today

beech loses sand

lemon drizzle cake american measurements

guy with a camera

lemon drizzle cake notes

why does cnn anchors talk with accent

musical quavers and crotchets

manners American

musical notes in British

uk.com sex (this showed up two days in a row; don’t ask; don’t even think about it)

american chocolate chip cookies uk

what should we do to show good manners in public places in britain (twice in one day, once without the S in manners)

show good maner in public place in britain

What do we learn here?

That what Americans most want to learn about Britain involves lemon drizzle cake, which, sadly, they won’t learn here since we pretty solidly established that the recipe I posted wasn’t a true lemon drizzle cake but some other kind of lemon cake in disguise. In its defense, it was measured in cups.
That what people who could be from anywhere most want to know about Britain has to do with good manners and musical notation. In the case of manners, they sound a bit desperate. I feel bad about that, because I can’t think I’ve been much use on the subject. I’m not sure what subject I have been much use on. I’m nervous about being made an Authority, even if it’s by something as arbitrary as a search engine.
That somebody wants to know about American manners and assumes we have some.
That a lot of strange stuff gets typed into Google and that some of it gets shunted here for no apparent reason. Guy with a camera? Have the words guy and camera even showed up in my posts?

And what could we teach, if anyone who asked was listening? That CNN anchors talk with an accent because if human beings stop talking with accents they don’t talk at all. It’s like breath: no breath, no speech; no accent, no words.

And the uk.com sex query? That sounds a bit desperate, and it makes me want to know what have you lot up to when I wasn’t looking.

Notes from the U.K.

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

Tag Archives: anglophile