In preparation for London’s mayoral election, the Conservative Party ran an ad on what used to be Twitter saying London has been on the brink of chaos since its current mayor, Sadiq Khan, “seized power.” It had become “the crime capital of the world.” To prove its point, it showed a video of a panicked crowd running through what was supposed to be the London underground but turned out to be New York after a rumor about gunfire. 

The rumor turned out to be false, as did, according to a fact-check, all the claims in the ad. Khan didn’t seize power; he was elected. The murder rate has dropped under his tenure and under the two mayors before him. New York–to everyone’s surprise–is not London. And so on. 

Two things about Khan drive the Conservatives nuts: 1, he’s from the Labour Party and 2, he’s Muslim. I guess I could add 3, in spite (or because) of 1 and 2, he’s still London’s mayor.

Mind you, some Conservative MPs are Muslim, but–

You know what? I was going to explain why it’s okay to be a Musim if you’re a Tory but not if you’re Labour, but I’d be making it up. I’m not inside these people’s heads and I have no idea what goes on there. What I can tell you is that a month ago Conservative MP Lee Anderson claimed Khan was controlled by Islamists. All hell broke loose, although nowhere near as much as if you’d said a Jewish politician was controlled by Zionists. Accusations of antisemitism kick up a far more powerful dust storm than accusations of Islamophobia. (Yes, I’m Jewish. Sorry to spoil the fun but you can’t accuse me of antisemitism for saying that.)

A Conservative Party source sort of defended Anderson by explaining, that “Lee was simply making the point that the mayor . . . has abjectly failed to get a grip on the appalling Islamist marches we have seen in London recently.”

Appalling Islamist marches? Those would be the ones against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. 

Anderson has since defected to a party further to the right, Reform UK and the ad’s been taken down, although the memory lingers on.

 

Easter eggs on the island of Sanday

Britain does Easter in a big way. Good Friday’s a bank holiday, which is Brit-speak for a national holiday. Easter Monday? That’s a bank holiday unless you’re in Scotland, in which case you’d better set the alarm and waddle in to work. But if you’re not in Scotland and you’re working a Monday-to-Friday job, you get a four-day weekend. 

Easter’s also the marker for schools to take a couple of weeks off. 

Your friendly local Jewish atheist–in case we’re not being clear about this, that’s me–had heard about Good Friday before moving here, although she did kind of vaguely think all Fridays were good, but Easter Monday was news to her. Having them as holidays reminds–okay, this her stuff is getting awkward. Having them as holidays reminds me that although Britain’s not a particularly religious country, it does have a state religion. That creates an interesting, contradictory picture.

What’s Easter like in the US? It doesn’t bring us any extra days off work, which immediately downgrades it to a minor holiday. For those of us who don’t see it as a religious holiday, it boils down to seeing rabbitty things everywhere. Maybe we go wild and buy a chocolate egg or something. For some families, it’ll involve a special meal of some sort. Parents who aren’t philosophically opposed to it put Easter baskets together for their kids. Or at least they used to. I hope they still do. Easter baskets are one of life’s small joys. They involve jelly beans, chocolate, and things that look eggish, rabbitish, or chickish. And fake grass. The fake grass is important, although to the best of my knowledge it doesn’t have any religious significance.

The British, on the other hand, go in for huge single chocolate eggs filled with various sorts of candy, and that brings us to the reason I’m telling you this: a small shop on the island of Sanday–one of the Orkney islands, way the hell up north, off the coast of Scotland–ordered some of those big Easter eggs, as any small food shop will as the holiday approaches. Unfortunately, the owner got careless and ordered 80 cases instead of 80 eggs, ending up with 720 eggs. For a population of 494.

Once he pulled himself together, he set up a competition, with the winner getting 100 eggs and the proceeds going to the RNLI–the Royal National LIfeboat Institution. He figured most people would give them away, but a few told him they were hell bent to eat all hundred if they won.

Last I read, he’d raised £3,000, but Nestle–a big-league maker of Easter eggs–offered to match donations up to a £10,000 limit and he might just make it. The story spread–how else would I have picked it up?–and donations and letters were coming in from around the world.  

As were orders for Easter eggs. Wjhy walk to the corner shop and buy one when you can order it from Sanday, so he’d busy mailing them. In fact, he had to order more to keep up with the demand.

Now that Easter’s over, he may be able to squeeze in a night’s sleep.

 

Think you know everything the Romans brought to Britain?

One of the less well known things the Romans brought was the bedbug. Or to be more accurate, since they never travel singly, bedbugs, plural. 

A team of archeologists at Vindolanda, a Roman garrison near Hadrian’s Wall, found evidence of Roman bedbugs. They’ve been found at one other Roman site, Alcester, but the Vindolanda batch dates to about 100 CE, making it Britain’s earliest bedbug find. The going theory is that they’d have arrived in whatever the Romans brought with them–clothes, straw, grain.

On the other hand, the Roman philosopher Pliny wrote that bedbugs helped cure ear infections and other illnesses, so I can’t help wondering if someone brought a few over as–well, not quite pets but supplies. 

How do we know Britain didn’t have bedbugs before the Romans came? I doubt we can absolutely, but no one’s found evidence of them, so until further evidence shows up we get to blame the Romans. 

The Vindolanda batch is long dead. It’s safe to visit.

 

Your reward for getting this far

A local paper, the Bude and Stratton Post, had a glorious headline this week: “Cost of parking rockets in Bude.” I read it three time before I stopped wondering, Who parks rockets in Bude? and realized, Oh. It’s a verb.