Tag Archives: Britain

Mrs. Baggit Struggles to Keep Britain Tidy

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The first time Wild Thing and I visited the U.K., Maggie Thatcher was the prime minister and whatever ministry was in charge of roadsides had planted them with metal signs saying, “Mrs. Baggit Says, ‘Keep Britain Tidy.’”

That bit of brilliant public relations was finished off with a picture of a tied-off bag with a face—Mrs. Baggit’s, presumably, happily stuffed with garbage. It was impossible not to connect her image with Mrs. Thatcher’s, and some small part of my brain continues to insist, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that Thatcher’s real name was Maggie Baggit.

Irrelevant Photo: Rose Behind Bars, by Ida Swearingen

irrelevant Photo: Rose Behind Bars, by Ida Swearingen

We did a lot of driving on that trip, so we spent a lot of time looking at the signs and finding funny voices to quote them in.

“Mrs. Baggit says…”

Mrs. Baggit had a lot to say on that trip, all of it scold-y, although I can’t remember exactly what it was anymore. Except, of course, for “Keep Britain Tidy.”

To understand why that kept us amused, you need to know that tidy sounds different to an American ear than to a British one. To me, tidy is fussy. It’s small. All I have to do is think about it and I want to make bitsy motions with my fingertips, as if I’m cleaning up a dollhouse. As far as I can tell, none of that is true in the U.K. It’s just a word here. It means neat and doesn’t make your fingers do funny things in the empty air, although H. tells me the Mrs. Baggit part sounds fussy.

I should stop here and admit that when I started that last paragraph I was going to speak for an entire nation: For us (us here being all Americans—every last differentiated, argumentative one of us) tidy is fussy. Then some minimal sense of modesty (not to mention accuracy) caught up with me and I thought it might be nice if I didn’t mistake my mind for the mind of an entire, not to mention large and varied, country, even if I did grow up and live most of my life there. So I’ve backed off a bit. But I still hold that it has different overtones to an American ear than to a British one. That much, I think, is fair.

Language is like that. We think of it as a solid, but it’s not. It’s one of those slow liquids, like Silly Putty, that changes shape depending on what holds it, or who.

So how successful was the campaign? I never saw British roadsides before it started, so I can’t make a comparison, but I know this much: If you look for litter here, you’ll find it. And if you don’t look for it, you’ll find it anyway. I’ve seen places with more, but Mrs. Baggit hasn’t stopped the litterbugs mid-throw.

And who in their right mind thought she would?

Spider Season in Cornwall

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Spiders have moved into M.’s house, something he’s mentioned because he’s phobic about spiders and even with what he calls the arachnavac he still feels at a disadvantage. Even though he’s in the neighbourhood of six feet tall and none of them even come close. But being in possession of a phobia or two myself, I won’t try to make too much sense out of his. These fears don’t follow the rules of logic, they simply are.

But back to spiders: They’re moving into our house as well as his.

A Spider–Not One of Ours. Photo by Stefan-Xp

On an expat forum, I read a comment by an American asking, more or less, “What is it with all these spiders in the shower?” He was in some other part of the U.K., so based on that small and unscientific sample, I’m going to be reckless and say this is a nationwide issue.

A few years ago, I read that if you put a horse chestnut in every corner of a room, they’ll keep spiders out. This struck me a vaguely reasonable, since I happen to know that chestnut wood was used in the beams of at least one French chateau because it was thought to deter spiders from building webs.

Notice the weasel-word “thought” in that sentence. I didn’t notice it myself when I heard about the beams. I also didn’t—and still don’t—know how closely related the chestnut is to the horse chestnut. Still, when a catalogue slid through my door offering a horse-chestnut scented, spider-deterring spray, I bought a can. And sprayed around the windows most of that summer—or for as long as I remembered and could be bothered, whichever came first, and you can pretty well guess which that was.

I spent the rest of the summer sweeping cobwebs off the windows, just as I have every summer since I moved here. But I hadn’t been meticulous about using the spray, so I couldn’t have sworn the it didn’t work.

The next fall, Wild Thing and I were in Derbyshire (which in case you’re not British you’ll never guess is pronounced Darbysheer, but that belongs in another post), and horse chestnuts lay around for the taking. And take I did—enough for our house and a different M.’s as well, since she also has a thing about spiders. I didn’t know about the other M.’s spider phobia at the time or I’d have brought home all the horse chestnuts in Derbyshire.

Back in Cornwall, I set horse chestnuts in every corner of damn near every room, and M. did the same. It was late fall by then, and the spiders had already moved in, so it was hard to tell if the horse chestnuts worked. Winter came. A mouse came. The mouse found a horse chestnut and thought it had moved into the promised land.

The mouse got tossed back outside, without its prize horse chestnut.

The horse chestnuts waited for spring, and then for summer, and then for fall, when the spiders get serious about moving in.

I wish to report that horse chestnuts do not keep spiders away, and since they make mice very happy I’ve thrown ours out.

Every few days, I run around with a long-handled duster and dislodge as many spiders as I can from the ceiling and walls and, when I can, I carry them outside. Where for all I know they die of cold, but I’m not in charge of nature’s plan. At a certain point in this world of ours, you just have to turn off the empathy spigot. The trick is not to turn it off too soon and not to send yourself into meltdown by keeping it funning at full force every moment of every day. Sometimes I’m reduced to smashing the little bastards with my hand, which for all I know is kinder than letting them die of cold. Or quite possibly not. A certain number of them, though, hunker down in corners where I can’t get them out with a duster, and where the arachnavac won’t even get them loose. (Yes, I have arachnavacced. It strikes me as a miserable way for a creature to die, but I’ve done it.)

One particularly big spider lives down a duct that covers a heating pipe, and last winter I got serious about trying to get rid of it and thought I had, but I saw it again last week. Unless it’s another one. If I were arachnophobic, I’d be pretty well phobed out by it.

When I lived in the U.S., we never had spider season, and I don’t know if that’s because I always lived in cities (I’m way out in the country these days) or because the parts of the country I lived in didn’t have as many spiders or if the U.K. is some sort of spider capital to the world. If you’re in the mood to comment, I’d love to hear about what it’s like where you are. Do you have spiders moving in with you in the fall? Does it happen in cities or only in the countryside? Have you found a way to keep them out?

Driving in Cornwall: When Good Technology Turns Bad

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My spies tell me that sat navs are called GPSes in the States, but in spite of my last post about keeping my American vocabulary pure I’m going to write about them as sat navs, because I’m writing about the way they work here. And also because the idea of purity in language is complete and total bullshit and I don’t want to take myself too seriously on this subject.

I needed a spy network to pin down the word GPS because I never needed one when I lived in the U.S. Or, well, yes, I could have used one during the five years that I drove cab, but they didn’t exist yet, so the thought I need that couldn’t exist either.

Not that I’d have spent the money on one.

I’m a technophobe. I’m a techno-I-don’t-need-it, but even I have conceded that in Cornwall I need a sat nav. Or, to be entirely accurate, I don’t need one myself but will steal Wild Thing’s now and then. She’s a major prophet of the Church of We Need All the Techno We Can Get, so this seems (to me) like a reasonable arrangement.

Irrelevant Photo: Boscastle, Evening.

Irrelevant Photo: Boscastle, Evening.

Now in Cornwall, and probably in the rest of Britain, before the invention of sat navs, people would leave home with a set of directions to a place they’d never been before and 70% of them were never seen again. On a dark night, you can see the faint gleam of their headlights passing like ghosts, still looking for a house called Craggy Bottom, which was supposed to be on an unmarked road somewhere off the A39.

The incident that made me a sat nav user was looking up directions to a meeting on MapQuest or Google Maps or something like that and reading, “Turn right on unmarked road.” Which unmarked road? They couldn’t tell me. Because that’s the thing about unmarked roads: They’re unmarked. It’s one thing if a friend says, “Turn after you pass the bungalow with the brown egg box out front,” but internet directions won’t give you that level of detail.

But sat navs have their own problems. First, you become dependent on them. They tell you to cross the roundabout, third exit, and you cross the roundabout, third exit. The next time you come the same way, do you remember that? Hell no. You need the sat nav again.

But the second problem’s more serious. In parts of Cornwall, they don’t work. Some years ago, Wild Thing and I were walking the dog past a ford and waved down a guy in a delivery van as he was about to leave a paved (and unmarked) road and go up an unpaved, washed out axle-breaker of a vague memory of a former road.

“You can’t get up that,” we told him.

“The sat nav says.”

I don’t think he quite finished the sentence. He had that blank, terrified look of someone who wasn’t taking in anything we said. Part of it would have been our accents—we couldn’t seem any less local if we carried signs saying “We’re not from around here”—and part of it would have been sat nav dependence. The rest, though? When a man doesn’t take in what a woman’s saying, it’s hard not to go back to the words man and woman and think, hmmm.

But never mind. We told him only a four-by-four could handle the hill he was about to go up. We told him he’d wreck the van. He told us the sat nav said.

We shrugged and watched him cross the ford and start up the hill. If a van can look fatalistic, I tell you, his did.

He was lucky. It was a rainy year and the mud was slick, so he didn’t get far enough up the hill to wreck an axle. He slid back, still looking blank and terrified, and he drove back the way he’d come. On foggy nights, I’ve seen his headlights pass me like ghosts, still following directions from his sat nav.

This kind of thing happens all over the country. Sat navs send massive damn trucks down streets that are so narrow they get stuck.  Really they do. They send cars down stairs. Some of the problems you couldn’t predict, but some of them—well, the truly crazy thing is that people do what they’re told. And yeah, I know I shouldn’t laugh but when I see some of the pictures I laugh anyway. It’s the oldest joke humanity knows: Somebody falls down. Follow the link and see if you don’t do the same.

We’re not, all told, a very nice species.

And maybe our sat navs know that, because with the detached serenity of gurus, they’ll spend hours talking us through the mazes we’ve laid down on the surface of the earth and call roads, and then, with no warning, they turn on us. Wild Thing’s first one did it in the middle of the Tamar Bridge—a long, high bridge connecting Devon and Cornwall.

“Turn left,” it commanded.

We came out of our sat nav trance and decided maybe that wouldn’t be a good idea, so she escalated.

“Turn left immediately.”

There really is a lot of water under the Tamar Bridge. And I’m not much good with either heights or water. We turned the sat nav off. It already had a history of going wild when we crossed the moors. If you’ve read the Brontes, you probably know about the moors as a metaphor for something wild and free and frightening, and our sat nav was in tune with all that. It would tell us, “In 18 yards [and it was always 18 yards], turn right.” Or left. In 18 yards, though, there was no road, only hedge. It had an image of us, I guess, breaking loose and driving wild and free across the fields.

Wild Thing retired it and bought a new one whose quirks are more predictable. But even so, near Scorrier both our new sat nav and everybody else’s try to kill people so consistently that the county’s put up a sign, in a panicky set of colors that they use for nothing else, saying, “Turn off sat nav.” The highway entrances were rerouted at some point and sat navs seize the opportunity to send cars the wrong way down exit ramps onto the wrong side of the highway.

So yeah, you need one around here. And you never turn your back on it.

A Clash of Words: Keeping My Vocabulary Pure

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What does it take to keep my American vocabulary pristine here in the U.K.? Well, let me tell you a tale.

I was working on a post about those thingies people keep in their cars to tell them how to get where they want to go.

You’ll notice that I’m using technical language here: thingies. They’re called sat-navs here, and since I’m hell bent to maintain the purity of my American vocabulary, I wanted to know what they’re called in the U.S. so I could slip the word casually into my post.

Now, I admit that in the Wasting Your Time Sweepstakes, keeping a language or culture pure runs neck and neck with keeping white jeans clean. And for the record, I also admit that the belief that you can keep dirt off white jeans has done a lot less damage in the world than the notion of cultural purity. But I’m not claiming that any one set of words is better than any other, it’s just that I’m a writer and I need a matching set of words.

Irrelevant Photo: Stannon Stone Circle, by Ida Swearingen

Irrelevant Photo: Stannon Stone Circle, by Ida Swearingen

But we were talking about directional thingies. I seemed to remember that they’re called GPSes in the States, but I didn’t own one when I lived there, so I never called them anything. Who needed to? When you don’t talk about something, you don’t need a word for it.

But as I’m sure I need to remind you, we live in the age of the Internet, so I googled a bunch of terms that seemed vaguely relevant, and Google, in its wisdom, sent me to U.K. sites, even when I added U.S. to my search terms.

It’s great to have a browser that knows what I want better than I do. I remember reading an essay arguing that this is one reason the U.S. is so politically and culturally polarized: You can go online and never encounter a single opinion that you don’t already hold, because search engines only show you what they think you want to know. I won’t go as far as calling that a cause, but I doubt it’s helping much.

After getting diverted one too many times, I gave up and emailed T.—a virtual colleague from my days as a freelance copy editor—because only a fellow copy editor would understand why I cared.

She wrote back, “I usually refer to it as a GPS unit–but I’m low-tech when it comes to finding addresses and will often use a paper map in the car as our portable GPS is usually collecting dust in my husband’s office.”

I sympathized.

She also went online and checked the Best Buy website, which, just to be helpful used both names, but what I really trust is what she instinctively calls it: a GPS unit.

And with that, I can pretend my vocabulary hasn’t budged one inch in the eight plus years that I’ve lived here, when in fact it’s floating in the New York harbor and drifting west.

Measuring Butter in a Cornish Kitchen

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I made a pound cake a few years ago and a friend asked for the recipe. I copied it for her, and a day or two later, she called up.

“What’s a stick of butter?” she asked.

I was afraid she understood it as a verb: Stick that butter where? The thought threw me enough that it took a bit of back and forth in my head before I got stick of butter translated.

“A quarter of a pound? Four ounces? Eight tablespoons?”

Irrelevant Photo: Cows.

Irrelevant Photo: Cows. They never heard of a stick of butter.

Butter here isn’t sold by the pound, and no one over a certain age thinks in ounces. But when the U.S.—or what later became the U.S.—was young and impressionable, Britain convinced its population to use a completely batty system of measurements: 8 ounces to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon, but look out because ounces are both a measure of weight and a measure of volume but they’re not interchangeable, you just sort of have to know which one the recipe means. Sixteen ounces in a pound. We’re not going to get into bushels and hogsheads and their even more obscure friends and relatives, and I have no idea how many feet to the mile but, for no apparent reason, there are three to the yard. Then the British gave the system up and adopted the completely logical metric system. (Mostly. Car-related distances and speeds are still measured in miles. Go figure.) There was a predictable backlash from people convinced civilization was coming to an end, but by that’s faded away now, leaving us with no quarter pound and no ounces, although they do still use teaspoons and tablespoons sometimes. (Three teaspoons to a tablespoon, in case anyone asks.)

Even I’ve adapted. I stopped asking for a pound of lunchmeat at the deli counter, because even though they’re theoretically bilingual they always thought I was talking about currency—a pound’s worth. Which these days isn’t much. And since no one says half a kilo, I ask for 500 grams.

And I’m a vegetarian.

What does this have to do with butter? When you buy butter here, it doesn’t come marked into tablespoons because you subdivide it by the gram, which unlike the ounce is a measure of weight and only of weight. The packages are close enough to half a pound that I still think of them that way, but they’re not cut into sticks, the way god also intended, they’re sort of flattish and clunky. Hence my friend’s confusion. No one talks about a stick of butter here because there are no sticks of butter.

Sad, isn’t it?

If you plan to bake over here, you need kitchen scales—not just for butter, but for most ingredients, because they’re measured by weight. Of course, a few gifted cooks just know how much of an ingredient they need without having to measure. I knew a woman like that back in Minnesota. I asked her for her pancake recipe once.

“You start with enough milk for pancakes,” she said.

“Edith,” I said. “Never mind.”

British English and American English

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If you browse the expat blogs, you’ll find gleeful posts tracking the dividing line between British and American English. And a wandering line it is. Are pants those things you wear under your jeans or are jeans one kind of pants? Is the fanny pack a bizarre medical procedure or a practical but geeky accessory? When you live your life in a semi-foreign language, all that stuff becomes important.

It also cues the kind of giggles you get when an eight-year-old has a chance to say “fart.”

Irrelevant Photo: Rocks near Minions, eroded by the wind. By Ida Swearingen

Irrelevant Photo: Rocks near Minions, eroded by the wind. By Ida Swearingen

But pants and fanny aren’t even on the real dividing line. Only I know what really divides the Englishes: It’s the use of that and which.

I know: Speaking of geeky. Only someone who’s worked as a copy editor even notices, never mind cares.

I have worked as a copy editor, though, and I do. American publishing follows Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and British publishing doesn’t. The distinction has to do with lawnmowers. You never thought of lawnmowers as a grammatical concept? See what you missed out on? Example A: The lawnmower, which is in the garage, is broken. This means we have one lawnmower. Example B: The lawnmower that is in the garage is broken. This means we have more than one, so use the other. I left it on the dining room table.

British publishing doesn’t care about lawnmowers. This—to a recovering American copy editor—is as shocking as wearing your pants inside your trousers.

It all has to do with restrictive and non-restrictive clauses and is too obscure to bother explaining. Which is lucky, since I don’t trust myself to get it right. And (she said defensively) you can be a perfectly competent copy editor and not be able to explain any of it. All you have to be able to do is apply it. It’s like not being able to explain electricity but knowing how to charge your phone.

Legend has it that Strunk and White introduced the that/which division because they thought it would be useful, if only it could be pounded into millions of recalcitrant little heads. In other words, they weren’t telling us about something that already existed, and so the aforesaid heads resisted the distinction because it wasn’t native to the language. But the owners of those heads still manage to mow their lawns and figure out, when and if it matters, how many lawnmowers they have.

So the that/which distinction is arbitrary and unnecessary, and in the long run the spoken language will always win out against the silly twits who tell us what’s wrong with the way we speak. But having made a career—such as it was—out of knowing this sort of stuff, it’s painful to watch as entire country consign it to the dustbin of irrelevant grammar. Even if it belongs there.

On an emotional and philosophical level, I’m on the side of spoken English, in all its barbaric glory. I’m not impressed with formal writing, for the most part. I believe that the language gains its power from use and that the hair-splitters are fighting a rear-guard action. If you break the rules of grammar idiomatically and well, the force is with you. And, in case you care, so am I.

On the other hand, I’ve read enough tin-eared writing to value the rules of grammar. Not because they keep us from barbarism and illiteracy, but because they keep us from incoherence. So I’m passionately on both sides of this battle, and if it ever turns violent both sides will call on me to shoot myself as a traitor.

True Confessions: I Misread My Tax Disc

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The is a P.S. to my last post, which was on bureaucracy and trying to pay the tax on my car. Just after I posted it, I gathered up every vaguely relevant piece of paper I could get my paws on and presented myself at the post office, hoping to convince an actual human being that my car was real.

For anyone who doesn’t live in the U.K., I should explain: The post office isn’t just a post office. And it’s capitalized—the Post Office. Sorry. I’m just a lower-case sort of person. The Post Office is also a bank and a place to pay some of your bills and some of your taxes. In a village, it’s not a bad place to get gossip, two onions, and a container of milk, because it’s also a small store. So going to the Post Office wasn’t a measure of how far around the bend I’d gone but (at least in my mind) a clever attempt to outwit computerized insanity.

But I had to go to a larger, non-onion, non-gossip Post Office, because our local sub-Post Office can’t handle car taxes anymore. I’m sure that makes sense to someone and I doubt it would to me if they explained it.

Irrelevant Photo: The Cornish Coast

Irrelevant Photo: The Cornish Coast

I talked with a very nice woman, who scanned my eleven-digit number, told me—with just the slightest air of panic, as if I might get dangerous any moment—that she didn’t need the rest of the papers I was toting, and began the process of registering my car.

I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t tell her the tale about how the computer wouldn’t recognize my car, but it took less than a minute before the words were out of my mouth. You know how that works. I know you do. She didn’t refuse to go any further, though. She laughed. Maybe that was the point where she decided I was safe to have around.

Or at least entertaining. There was no one on line behind me.

She called someone else over, and they looked at the screen together.

“When does your tax run out?” she asked.

“On the twelfth.”

I’ll summarize, because the conversation was long and I don’t remember most of it anyway: Car taxes can’t run out on the twelfth. They run out at the end of the month. Any month. Whatever month. If I saw a twelve on the disc, it must run out in December.

I was fairly sure it didn’t, but—in that strange way that you can believe two opposing things at once—I also believed it must. Otherwise how did twelve come into the conversation?

Have I mentioned that there’s nothing involving numbers that I can’t screw up?

I could, she told me, go ahead and pay the tax, but if there was an overlap I’d be paying double for those months. For a fleeting moment, the idea appealed to me. It would be done. Even if I paid double for eleven months, I wouldn’t have to think about it again until—well, whatever September plus eleven comes to.

Or twelve. Wouldn’t that be twelve?

I asked her something—I can’t remember what—that she could only answer if the second person came back from doing whatever he was doing, which involved another window, Canadian dollars, U.S. dollars, and time.

We waited. She looked at her screen. A line was building up behind me.

“It’s not showing up as expired,” she said.

I think she told me that in a couple of different ways before I understood: At the very least, the car’s okay until the end of this month. It hasn’t expired. It can’t expire on the twelfth.

“They’ll send you a letter,” she said.

“They still do that?”

She said they do. I’m not sure I believe her, but it would be very sensible if she turned out to be right.

“Why don’t I wait, then?” I said.

She handed me back the one bit of paper she’d actually needed and I moved aside to fit it back into my folder, thanking her as I went. Recalcitrant bits of paper were trying to escape and make their way back to her window, but I wrestled them down, then turned to everyone still in line and apologized for holding them up. It was—for reasons I can’t define—a very un-British moment and I had an odd glimpse of myself as a street entertainer. I had to stop myself from taking a bow.

No one had yet moved up to the window I’d vacated. They were waiting.

“Can I help who’s next?” she said.

I finally got to my car and looked at my tax disc. They’d shown me how to read it, so it almost made sense this time. It expires at the end of September. There isn’t a twelve to be seen.

Bureaucracy, U.K. Style vs. U.S. Style

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I do love bureaucracy. Wild Thing swears that customer service in general and web sites in particular are worse in the U.K. than in the U.S., but I’m not sure she’s right. If anyone wants to weigh in with an opinion, I’d love to hear it.

My senior rail card runs out in not so many days, and I’ve been trying to renew it. Online. On the phone. By intense psychic messages. Quick, because if I can’t get this done before it expires I have to drive 40 minutes to renew it in person by presenting proof of my existence, my age, and my warm feelings toward Network Rail.

I begin online. I still believe this will be easy, and I answer their questions.

Password? I get that on the second try.

Renew? Yes.

One year? Three years? A thousand years? Oh, a thousand. Think of the discount.

 

Irrelevant Photo: Boat. Photo by Ida Swearingen

Irrelevant Photo: Boat. By Ida Swearingen

“We save your details at every step,” the second or third page chirps at me. “Just log back in to pick up where you left off.”

It doesn’t tell me this, but I’ll damn well need to pick up where I left off because I won’t be able to finish on this visit. I’ll be coming back and picking up where I left off until I’m so old I qualify for a SuperSenior Rail Card. Which doesn’t exist yet. They’ll introduce it just for me.

But I don’t know that yet. In all innocence, I move to the next page, fill in my credit card details, and hit the Irretrievable Commitment button. The internet takes a few moments to contemplate the obesity of the universe and comes back with a message saying my card’s been rejected.

Well, that card’s difficult. Sometimes I want to buy things that the issuing bank doesn’t think I need. It’s the strict parent. But I have another card—the indulgent parent—and I enter that one.

It won’t take that either.

I call and we go through all the same details. When we run out of details, the guy I’m talking to says their payment system’s down. But he can give me a number so we can pick up right where we left off.

He couldn’t tell me this at the beginning of the call?

I write the number down on a shred of paper in the morass I call a desk. I keep a pad on the desk—for all I know, I keep several—but it sank to the bottom months ago, so a shred will have to do. He tells me to call back in an hour.

But I’m no longer the sugar-fed fooI I was at the beginning of the process. I wait a full day, then go back to the web site. Most of my information really is still there. I fill in what’s missing and hit Buy Rail Card.

I get a message saying I already have one. I don’t, but there’s no one to argue with and I’m locked out of the payment page.

I call and, in a rare moment of good organization, find my transaction number and read it out. Just to confirm that I am who I say I am, the man I’m talking asks for my name, my address, my date of birth, and everything the first guy asked. But it’s okay because we’re saving time here and it’s much more convenient.

Then he tells me the payment system’s down—either again or still, I don’t have the heart to ask which. I can call back in 45 minutes.

I wait another day and try the computer. When I get to the message saying I already have a Senior Rail Card, it suddenly hits me that maybe I really do. Maybe my transaction of two days ago went through. Maybe my transaction from two days ago went through twice, once on each card. I may now have two rail cards. I may have to prove I’m over 120. This worries me, as does the possibility of being charged twice for my, ahem, discount card.

I don’t call. I’ve lost the magic number that saved me eons of time, besides which I lack the moral fortitude. Besides, I may really have a rail card so I should wait to see if it comes in the mail.

The next morning, for a change of pace, I go online to renew the tax disc on my car. In the past, we’ve been able to do this at the post office, but come October this has to be done online and we won’t get an actual physical disc to put in the car windshield, it’ll all be tracked by computer, because computes are infallible. If we fail to register our cars, we’ll be fined £1,000 pounds and hung by the neck until very, very sorry.

It’s not October yet, so I could still go to the post office, but as far as I understand it—which is not very far—I’ll have to register online by October anyway, so why not get it all done at once?

Under the old system, every car owner has gotten a reminder letter, but to save money in this age of budget cuts these are being stopped, and the only warning has been a bare few back-page newspaper articles and whatever gossip we’re lucky enough to pick up. And the newspaper articles weren’t all that helpful. Exactly what were we supposed to do and how? They didn’t say. They probably don’t understand it either. But we are all going to be in a lot of trouble if we don’t do it. In other words, the new system is being introduced with all the competence I’ve come to expect of the current government.

Just the day before, I asked at our repair shop, figuring, you know, cars, registration, they’d know this stuff. They hadn’t a clue and of the two women at the counter, one’s registration was about to run out and she was catching that first panicky whiff of trouble herself. It smelled like the burning-rubber-on-the-highway scent that tells you your car’s about to do something unfriendly, like catch fire maybe.

So they couldn’t help me. I can count only on myself this sunny morning. After googling several wrong terms, I find the right section of the right department of the right government website and I enter the eleven digit number from my log book.

The web site would have also accepted a different number, I think it was thirteen digits, from the letter they didn’t send me, but since they didn’t send it this year—well, just because they didn’t send it doesn’t mean they have to stop asking, does it?

I entered my information. The website reported that my car doesn’t exist. But it’s okay, because they have a phone number.

I dial. The system is automated and I punch in my eleven-digit number. I’m told that my car doesn’t exist but that I may have punched the numbers in wrong. I didn’t, but there’s nothing involving numbers that I can’t screw up, so I try again, checking each digit as I add it. Nope. I try a third time. At the end, surely  they’ll have pity and let me talk to a human being. But in these days of budget cuts, human beings are like my car: They don’t exist. I’m no longer the system’s problem. Goodbye. I have a non-existent car. I have a tax disc that’s about to go out of date. I have a phone and a computer and neither of them will do me any good.

The Department of Non-Existent Car Registration is going to hang me by the neck until very, very sorry.

Your honor, I’m already sorry. Very extremely sorry. And I have a magic number, somewhere, from Network Rail. Couldn’t I read that out and save us all some time and trouble?

I need a break, and since the letter carrier’s come and gone without bringing my imaginary rail card, I dial the rail card line. I wait for it to ring and go blank about what I’m trying to renew. I gaze at the shreds of paper on my desk. Call Simon, one says. Write Emily piece, another advises.

I understand these, but I still can’t remember who I’m calling.

An automated voice says something about rail cards. Yes! Rail cards! I need a rail card! I punch 5 without waiting to hear my choices. That’s how well I know rail cards. A man answers and I ask if the payment system’s working.

“As far as I know,” he says.

I’d kind of hoped for a yes, but I read out my magic number, which has resurfaced, and he asks for my name, my address, my date of birth. We save more and more time. I give him my credit card number. He tells me my card will arrive in three to five days. By which time I may have found a way to convince someone that my car’s real. Or that I don’t have a neck and am therefore exempt from punishment.

Tomorrow I have to do something about my U.S. voter registration. I sent the form in, but I just checked online and I’m not listed.

Taking the Train to London, or Adventures in Choice

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I took the train to London.

That shouldn’t be the opening sentence of a tale, but bear with me, because I had choices to make.

Arrival time. Okay, sane enough thing to choose, but arrival time wasn’t so much about the time I needed to be in London but how much time I needed to allow for delays so I could be sure I’d get to London by the time I needed to be in London. Train problems? Let’s say half an hour. Tracks? Same. Signalling problems? File that with tracks. No floods at the moment. Someone throwing themselves on the line? Hours. Everything stops while the police do the whole crime-scene routine and finally release the train and its traumatized driver to finish the run.

Wild Thing and I were on a train once when this happened. After that, it’s something you calculate. Or decide not to calculate, which is what I did. I’d take my chances.

Irrelevant photo. The coast near Fowey, Cornwall.

Irrelevant photo. The coast near Fowey, Cornwall.

Having weighed all of this and chosen a time, I had to choose a website. Google offered me over 40 million results. I confess, I didn’t check them all, but every one of the promotions I did read claimed to be cheap, cheapest, cheaper, or more discounted, better looking, and thinner than all the others. I compared. I contrasted. I did my best impression of a careful shopper. But this wasn’t just about comparing sites, because trains on a single route are priced differently. Why? Because the train companies want to make us crazy. Not to mention because finding the cheapest possible ticket is a full-time job and most of us don’t have the time and dedication, so—hmm; they wouldn’t be making money from making us crazy, do you? Anyway, the question wasn’t just what time I wanted to be in London, allowing for as many delays as I was willing to allow for, but how much I was willing to pay to arrive at the time I wanted to arrive, or how willing I was to get there earlier or later if I wanted to save a few quid.

On the train I chose, the 11:40, the cost of an advance ticket with no rail card ran from £46 to £46. I was grateful to have done my comparison shopping, because it was going to save me big bucks. That was, of course, before taking into account that many of the web sites charge for using a credit card, using the web site, using your own keyboard, and breathing air. I bought my ticket from the train operator, First Great Western, which is what I would have done if I hadn’t done my comparison shopping.

Another confession here: I do have a rail card, and I use it, which reduced the cost of the ticket by quite a bit. It had damn well better, because I have to pay to have it. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.

I made more choices: Quiet coach? Noisy coach? Morris dancing coach? Forward facing or rear facing seat? Aisle or window? Inside out or upside down? Enter your credit card details and prepare to be boarded by pirates.

My tickets came the next day.

On the day I was traveling, I left an extra half hour to get to the station because I live in the country and it’s easy to get caught behind a tractor or a herd of cows. I got caught instead behind a garbage truck, which is less romantic. It lumbered its way along the highway at ten miles under the speed limit, but eventually I found a straightaway and passed. But in Exeter, traffic was backed up to—well, it was backed up to where it’s always backed up to and I thought I’d allowed for it but I hadn’t.

If you miss your train, you can always buy a last-minute ticket for the next train, I told myself.

This was supposed to spread inner peace throughout my being, but I’ve read about the cost of last-minute tickets, so it didn’t. No one understands the pricing system, but we all understand that buying last-minute tickets is insane. Everyone complains and agrees that we’re getting ripped off.

I fretted about the traffic, reminded myself that I could buy a last-minute ticket, fumed about the cost, bumped forward a few car lengths, checked the time, rehearsed parking problems I hadn’t had yet, and generally enjoyed my tour of Exeter. Which, if you’re in the mood for it, is a beautiful city.

I wasn’t in the mood. It was ugly.

At the station, I used a phone-in/credit card system to pay for my parking. The alternative was to plug the machine with more coins than any normal human is physically able to carry. The phone-in system gave me another choice: I could pay for 48 hours and be pissed off because I needed—allowing for brake problems and signal breakdowns on the return trip—let’s say 28 hours, or I could pay for 24 hours and risk a ticket. I wasn’t offered the choice of 24 hours plus four. Having chosen to measure in days, I seemed to be stuck measuring in days.

I paid for 48 hours was pissed off.

I had ten minutes before the train was due and stopped at the departures board. Where I didn’t find the 11:40.

Now, I raise numerical incompetence to the level of high art, so the night before I’d checked the departure time on my ticket at least three times. It might have been more. I don’t really trust myself to remember the number three. Still, I was almost sure my train left at 11:40, but there I stood before a board listing exactly two London trains, and one at 11:55 and the other was at 12:13.

Fine, I thought. Either I’ve mixed up the time or it’s been rescheduled. Just get on the 11:55 and don’t worry.

And even as I heard myself think that, I remembered newspaper articles about people catching the wrong train for one reason or another and having to pay the full, absurd, last-minute fare as well as a penalty fare. Punch “wrong train ticket” into Google UK and you get 3,480,000 results. Approximately. The 8 or 10 thousand (okay, the 1 or 2) that I checked personally are testimony to how intricate and incomprehensible the system is. People write in and ask, “What happens if I catch the wrong train?” and are warned about penalties and unpaid fare notices and the possibility of prosecution.

Do not get on the wrong train, the saner part of my brain warned.

It’ll be fine, the other part said. I’m always being taken for a tourist. I’m expected to be an idiot.

The last two statements were true—my accent is unchangingly American—but the first was not, so I thought I’d ask the man at the ticket barrier about my train. He’d helped me and half a dozen other people get through when we put in the wrong ticket and the barrier didn’t open. You should understand that every passenger gets two tickets, and they look almost identical, but only one of them opens the barrier, so it makes sense to pay someone to stand there to keep people moving through.

Sort of. I seem to remember reading the privatizing the trains was going to get rid of inefficiencies. And give us choice, which is a good thing because it gives us choice. But those are serious issues, so never mind.

Before I had time to bother him, I spotted another column of numbers on the board. Numbers are like that for me. They can be right in front of me and stay invisible.

The new column was the time the trains were scheduled, and there was my 11:40, delayed until 12:13. I left the man at the ticket barrier in peace and made my way to track 5. Which I checked twice, although the London train’s always at track 5.

The later train, the 11:55 pulled in, but those of us who were booked on the 11:40 couldn’t get on without incurring the wrath of First Great Western and of the Great God of Railway Tickets, who is an angry god and afflicted with obsession-compulsive disorder, so lo, although we looked on longingly, we waited.

The train doors closed. The train sat. It sat a while longer. A man got off, pursued by the angry and, I should mention, invisible God of Railway Tickets.

“I got confused,” he said to the milling crowd.

He was not fined or penalized or beheaded, presumably because the wheels hadn’t yet turned.

I have no idea how he found out he was in the wrong train. Maybe he tried to claim his reserved seat and found someone else had a better claim.

A couple with tickets for the later but earlier train—that’s the 11:55 in case I’ve confused you as much as is appropriate to this tale—appeared but weren’t allowed to board because the doors had closed. The platform guard told them they were required to be on the train two minutes prior to departure.

They argued: They’d used the elevator that allows the disabled to cross the tracks, and it was slow.

It is slow. I’ve used it when my partner was recovering from ankle surgery.

“The doors close two minutes prior to departure,” the platform guard said.

The train started to roll, ending the argument. They now had two useless tickets. They could return them for a refund, minus a booking fee, but they couldn’t use their tickets on our earlier but later train because they weren’t for that train. They either had to go home and forget the whole thing or buy two outrageously expensive last-minute tickets.

Thank god privatization freed us from the stranglehold of bureaucracy.

I don’t know what they did because I headed for the café, where I bought a cup of tea to take on board, because the café on the platform gives you a full cup but if you buy it on board a full cup is too dangerous—you get about three-quarters.

Don’t ask.

I passed a man whose tee-shirt said, “Forever Delayed.” I figured him for a regular rider.

Our train pulled in. My seat was in the last row, just in front of the train manager’s compartment, so I got to eavesdrop on the conversation when a woman knocked on the door and asked if he’d sign her ticket so it would be accepted on a later connecting train.

He did. What would happen, I wondered, to all the people who hadn’t ask him to do that? Maybe, knowing a train was delayed, the train managers would be kind. And maybe not. Maybe since the system is now broken up, they wouldn’t know that a train run by another company was delayed.

Two women ahead of me began a cross-aisle conversation about whether one of them would get to Gatwick in time to catch her flight. She was Spanish-speaking, and I got into the conversation half to help out and half for the pleasure of speaking Spanish. Her connection was tight and she was worried.

I knocked on the train manager’s door, and he talked her through the two trains she could catch—one direct but later, the other a involving a transfer but earlier. He recommended the later, easier train, but she was too worried about her flight to take the risk. We discussed platforms and staircases and the name of the stop where she had to change trains, all in a mixture of English and Spanish.

Mercifully, we the gaps in our vocabularies didn’t match.

Although she lived in Spain, she was from Colombia and her Spanish was as beautiful and easy to follow as any I’ve heard. She was also extremely tense. If she missed her flight, her ticket would turn to ash.

The train manager printed out two bits of paper that looked like cash register receipts, detailing her route. I asked if he needed to sign her ticket and he said no.

I didn’t ask if he really needed to sign the last woman’s.

After the Colombian woman left the train, I got into a conversation with the man in the seat next to me. He lives in Plymouth and his wife travels to London for two days each week. He’d become a ticket geek, he told me. The cheap tickets are released twelve weeks ahead of time, so he’s up early on Saturdays to buy one before they sell out. We’d both read that it’s sometimes possible to lower the cost of a trip by booking separate tickets on a single train—Exeter to Reading, say, and then Reading to London, all without getting off the train. He’d never gone that far. It’s a system that begs you to make mistakes. I’d end up putting myself on different trains, or on the same train on different days.

“Choice,” he said, shaking his head.

It is indeed a wonderful thing.

Everyday Driving in Cornwall: Who Backs Up?

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In response to my most recent post, “The Emmets Come to Cornwall,” Motherhen wrote, about driving English lanes, “I often reverse when it’s not my turn, just to save time.”

My turn? I thought. Do we all agree about whose turn it is?

In her experience, yes. In mine, not always.

If you haven’t been to Cornwall, though, you need some background. The roads are narrow enough that in places cars going in opposite directions share a single lane. And it’s a narrow lane. So two drivers will sometimes end up radiator to radiator and have to wrestle with one of life’s deep philosophical questions: Who backs up?

A narrow street in Fowey, Cornwall.

A narrow street in Fowey, Cornwall.

I learned to drive in the U.S of get-out-of-my-way A., and my early experience of British driving destabilized me deeply. Forget about driving on the wrong side of the road. Forget about the steering wheel being hidden on the right-hand side of the car, where I kept forgetting to look for it. Forget the narrow roads, even. They were nothing. What threw me was the courtesy drivers showed each other. I’d see two lanes of traffic merging into one and they’d slot into each other as neatly as the sides of a zipper, with no one jockeying for position. Or I’d see some poor soul stuck in a side road, waiting to cross a lane of traffic, and someone would stop and let her or him across.

Now, that is mind-scramblingly amazing. And impressive. It takes the competitive sport of driving and turns it into a cooperative enterprise.

Back in Minnesota, long before I’d been destabilized by British driving, I got so pissed off at a driver who wouldn’t let me in when two lanes were merging that I allowed his car to slice open my wheel well rather than back down. I was holding out for that zipper arrangement and he was holding out for a him-first arrangement. And in case I’m in danger of sounding noble here, the one-from-each-lane arrangement favored me as surely as the him-first arrangement favored him. But he was driving what I remember as a very large a pickup and I was driving a VW beetle. If his pickup was even scratched, I couldn’t see it. Interestingly enough, neither of us stopped and neither of us reported an incident. I’m not sure what he was thinking, but I didn’t want to explain my part in it to anyone, least of all my insurance company.

The papers here carry the occasional road rage story, and people are duly horrified. And people I know have met some true nutburgers on the roads (as, come to think of it, have I), but all that, I think, is outweighed by the cooperation.

On the other hand, yeah, it’s still the real world, isn’t it? It’s never all sunshine and light. Mr. Slice-my-wheel-well-open has relatives on this side of the water. Where a bit of road has a sign giving priority to oncoming traffic, they ignore it. Where they’re closer to a wide spot, they still want the other driver to back up. Where an oncoming car’s already in a narrow stretch, they enter it—not because they just came around a corner and didn’t have time to react but because they own the world and the rest of us had damn well better make way. So although I’m usually happy to back up, it becomes a point of honor not to. I had a standoff here as well, but it’s a longish tale, and I’ll write about it another time.

Other people I know feel the same way. H. told me a tale about doing refusing to back down in Camelford—a narrow town with serious traffic and two spots that pinch two-directional traffic to a single lane. She turned off the engine, turned up the radio, and made herself comfortable. When T. got into a standoff, he unfolded the newspaper on his steering wheel and poured a cup of tea from the thermos he’d had the foresight to bring along. Mr. Slice’s cousin must’ve been mad enough to chew his steering wheel and spit the pieces.

*

Note: I’ve been writing madly since I started this blog, and posting twice a week. It’s been great and all that, but Wild Thing reminds me that there’s an entire world outside this house and away from the computer screen. Which is kind of funny, since I remember times when it’s taken two cats, one dog, and a small, fierce person to detach her from her own screen. But in the interest of sanity, and of seeing what’s left of the sun before winter snatches it away, I’m going to post once a week for a while. I’m not sure how long “a while” is, but least in theory I’ll post on Fridays.