The iconic British phone box goes literary

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

BT (that’s British Telecom—a.k.a. the phone company) has been uninstalling the iconic red British telephone boxes all around the country in recent years.

Now, I understand that pay phones aren’t a money-making proposition anymore, but where cell phone coverage is spotty (and around here it has a bad case of the measles) they can be a lifeline. Besides, people like them. They’re iconic. They’re red. They’re shaped like Dr. Who’s police box.

In places, villages have fought to keep them, and as far as I know they’ve lost the battle, no matter how good their arguments. My village lost two—one by the beach, which could potentially have saved a life because it was in a measles spot, and another along the road, which was less important, although could have presented a better argument for keeping that one if somebody hadn’t set it on fire.

In a few places, though, villages lost the phones but kept the boxes and turned them into tiny red libraries, where people take books, leave books, and, judging by the number of images online, take pictures.

Relevant photo for a change: a phone box library at Wall, Staffordshire. Photo by Oosoom.

In Banbury, Oxfordshire, a (rare, and probably endangered) working phone shares its red box with a working library, and BT recently made enemies by threatening to remove the shelves because, they wrote, they’re “concerned the books and shelving could cause injury if they were to fall.”

No doubt. They’d cause an even worse injury if they exploded, but neither one is likely, and local residents launched a twitter campaign to save the library: #Saveourphoneboxlibrary.

I haven’t a clue what this has to do with the usual intercultural mayhem I write about. I’ve seen neighborhood-maintained libraries in the U.S. They looked like oversize birdhouses, not phone boxes. But then, I don’t think the U.S. has any phone boxes left in the wild–they’re all in zoos now, where they fall into despair and refuse to breed. Maybe that says something about our cultural differences. I leave it to you to figure out what.

Comparative swearing: U.S. vs. U.K.

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

In a comment on “More about manners in the U.S. and U.K.,” Karen at Fill Your Own Glass [sorry, everybody; that’s almost the end of the links] wrote, “My impressions have been created solely by movies, but I have believed that people in the U.K. are less inhibited when it comes to cursing and talking about sex.” (She went on to say that it was an insightful post, but I wouldn’t want you to think I’m the kind of person who’d mention that.)

I haven’t a clue whether her impressions are true. What fascinates me about the comment is how you’d measure either.

Near Minions

Let’s say we want to compare how inhibited or uninhibited people are in talking about sex. I mean, I want to be scientific here. How do we compare passing references to serious what-I-did, what-I-didn’t-do, and how-I-feel-about-it conversations? Do we measure in frequency, in length, or in depth?

No puns, please. We’re being scientific here, so settle down in the back row.

If we’re talking about a serious cross-cultural comparison of swearing, how do we balance frequency against intensity? How do we measure the weight do various swear words carry?

People I know here (and it’s entirely possible that my friends swear more than the average Brit) say “bloody” fairly often. How often? Oh, you know, often enough. (You can see why I never became a scientist, right?) But how intense a swear word is bloody? I’d always heard that it’s religious—actually, sacrilegious—in origin and assumed that it packed quite a punch. But a Wikipedia entry raises several milder and way less interesting possibilities. My Dictionary of British Slang and Colloquial Expressions calls it simply “an intensifier,” which makes it sound mild to the point of insipidity. Of course, I once heard a linguist talk dispassionately about the way Americans use the word fucking as an insertion. In fact, he called it “the fucking insertion,” which both illustrated how it was used and cracked me up for weeks afterwards. From this I gather that linguists, like all scientists, whatever their passions, prefer to present a dispassionate surface.

I’ve heard bloody said often enough that it’s made itself a home in my head, and it’s trying to push its way into my speech. It wants to be said, and I want not to say it. Not because I don’t swear—I do, and without being immodest here, I do it well—but because I don’t have a sense of its proportion, its weight, its impact. I don’t like to throw things until I can gauge their impact.

Besides, with my accent it’ll sound very odd.

So there you are, folks. Comparative swearing. I look forward to hearing what you have to say on the subject.

More about manners in the U.S. and U.K.

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

“What do you like about living here?” someone asked me recently.

The questions comes up often enough that I should have a neat answer by now, but for whatever reason, I don’t. Instead I blither vaguely about place and people and history, and sooner or later the other person either takes pity on me or gets bored. Either way, the conversation moves on.

This most recent time, it moved on to the feeling of freedom that the person who’d asked me—let’s call her S.—had when she visited the U.S. To her, Americans are expansive, expressive, and probably a few other ex-things. Expository. Ex post facto. Expresso. (Yes, I’m spelling that wrong. Oddly enough, Spellcheck hasn’t noticed, which is why I’m whispering. It does, however, object that it’s not a full sentence. I love technology.) When S. got back to the U.K., everyone struck her as closed in. She mimed what they looked like and if I’d suggested miserable I think she’d have agreed, although as far as I can tell the people I know here are no more (or less) miserable than the people I know in the U.S.

Irrelevant photo: a camellia, coming into bloom in late winter.

Still, I’ve heard this kind of comparison before. A British man married to an American told me he wanted to move the family to the U.S. before his kids started school. The kids would grow up feeling freer, he said.

Before anyone starts waving flags and getting out the marching bands, no one’s talking politics. They’re talking emotions, behavior, deep-rooted culture–hundreds of years of culture. People here complain, just the way people do in the U.S., and the way people have throughout history, that kids these days are badly behaved, but the ones I know are so well behaved they terrify me. They say “please” and “thank you,” not occasionally but often. They say, “Yes, please.” Sometimes I want to ask, Who’s in there, under all those good manners?

I know: I’m an adult. I’m supposed to like good manners, and up to a certain point I do. But—maybe it’s the American in me—beyond that certain point, I get uneasy. I can’t tell who I’m dealing with. All I see is polished surface. I’d rather catch an occasional glimpse of the unplanned person. I mean, if I try to feed you something you don’t like, I’d rather hear about it than worry that you’re choking it down and struggling to look happy.

That’s not good manners, that’s self-punishment.

So yes, on that level, Americans may be more ourselves, although Wild Thing argues that we—and by that I mean Americans—aren’t so much free as disinhibited, which many people mistake for freedom.

Think about it for a while. I’m guessing she’s on to something.

The place where the British are, I think, less about surface than Americans is in the area of looks. My small and unscientific survey reveals that people—and especially women—in the U.K. feel freer to look like themselves than their counterparts in the U.S. Do a comparison of actors—again, especially women. A wider range of looks is acceptable in the U.K. In the U.S., most of them look like they’ve been squeezed out of the same Plastic Princess tube.

Admittedly, as soon as you talk about what people want to look like, you have to talk about income and region and ethnicity and sex and sexuality and gender and a dozen other ways to subdivide the population, and the impact all those things have on how we present ourselves. But I still think that, overall, we’ve locked ourselves into a set of ideal looks that have damn little to do with ourselves.

When I kicked the question around with Wild Thing, she reminded me of the time we looked through A.’s family album with her, when we still lived in the U.S. In the pictures from the thirties and forties, each person looked distinct. As we got into the fifties and beyond, they started to blur and become almost generic—the women most markedly, but the men as well.

But I’m not basing my wild and unscientific theory just on TV, movies, and one family album. I’m basing it on the people I see.

A bit of background, though, before I go on. I’m somewhat face blind—a phrase I learned late in life, which describes an embarrassment I’ve lived with since I was a kid. I have trouble recognizing people I don’t know well. It’s not my eyes, it’s something about the way I process what I see. Basically, within some broad categories (you know: male, female; tall, short; old, young; black, white; scarred, not scarred), everyone looks pretty much alike—two eyes, one nose, all that sort of thing. Back in the U.S., when I taught fiction writing I struggled to sort out which of my students was which, and somewhere along the line I realized that I had more trouble with the women than the men. Why? Makeup. Hair products. Fashion. They worked hard to look alike—at least to my incompetent eye. The men looked more like themselves.

In the U.K., I still have trouble recognizing people, but I don’t think I see as much surface. They don’t all seem to be going for the same set of looks. Some of them don’t seem to be going for any look at all, they just look like what they look like. That’s not the same as not caring what they look like. It’s that they care to look like themselves.

Which is a radical, and freeing, idea.

Having said all that, I’d better repeat that this is all based on a wildly unscientific survey. And now it’s time for everyone to tell me why I’m wrong. Or right.

Measuring time in the US and UK

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

When I was fielding comments about the insanities involved in figuring out what I weigh in the U.K., I caught myself just before I wrote that at least we all measure time the same way.

Are you sure? I asked my more-than-usually bewildered self. I imagined someone jumping out the magic surge of the internet to tell me that yes, the hour has sixty minutes everywhere but the minutes are longer in the U.S. Why there? Because everything’s bigger in the U.S. Or that’s what people in Britain tell me. Houses, rooms, scones, the spaces in our parking lots. People. So wouldn’t it be just like us to want a longer minute?

It might, but as far as I know the minute really is the same everywhere. And no, Americans don’t all live in mansions any more than the British all live in castles, although the scones and the parking spaces really are bigger. And some of the rooms and houses. I’m not sure about the people.

Irrelevant photo: freezing fog on Davidstow Moor.

What were we talking about?

My point about time is that we may measure it the same way, but someone always finds a way to complicate things. Usually me. A few years ago, I was working out a time to pick up M. for—I think—a movie.

“A quarter of,” I suggested.

“What does that even mean?” he said.

“A quarter of six.”

Then I realized he wasn’t asking about the hour, he was asking about the quarter of part. I tried translations.

“Five forty-five? A quarter to? Fifteen minutes to six?”

He shook his head.

“But what, grammatically, does it even mean?”

Well, it means a quarter of, obviously, and I had to say the phrase one more time to realize that it doesn’t, but any sort of logic, mean a thing. A quarter of what? Of nothing. It’s just what we say. We know what it means, so what’s your problem?

On the other hand, the British say “half six.” That’s three, right? No, that’s six-thirty. What, grammatically, does that even mean? About as much as a quarter of. But if you’ve grown up with it, it makes all kinds of sense.

Mercifully, no one’s come along to divide the traditional clock into a more rational system—ten hours, 100 minutes. You know, something easier to calculate with. Because some of us would convert to the new system and some of us wouldn’t and we’d all fight about it, and we’re having enough trouble as it is.

Weighing myself in the U.K. and in the U.S.

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

J. wrote me early in the year, saying (among other, more interesting, things) that she needs to lose ten pounds of holiday weight. I almost wrote back to ask, “What’s a pound?”

It’s not that I’ve forgotten exactly, and it’s not that no one measures in pounds here. Like everything else about living in a country that isn’t at heart your own, it’s complicated.

In theory, most weights are still given in two systems, metric and imperial, to humor the folks who grew up calculating in a pre-metric world and are either too old or too cantankerous to switch over. Or in my case, too old, too cantankerous, and too mathematically incompetent.

Right. That’s me, weighing myself. In grams and kilos. Photo by senov.

Our bathroom scale measures in both kilos (2.2 pounds) and stones (14 pounds). Stones are subdivided into pounds, so it’s not that the pound isn’t on there, just that it’s illegible. To make room for two ways of measuring, the manufacturer had to use small print. Insurance-form size print. But even if the print was large enough for me to read and therefore know that I was something stones and something else pounds, I’d still have to multiply the stones by fourteen, which I’m incapable of doing on the hoof and not interested enough to do with a calculator or a pen and paper. I mean, as long as your clothes fit, who cares?

Well, me, at least enough to step on, if not enough to work out the result.

A sensible person—or one who seriously cared to track her weight—would forget about pounds and switch to one or both of the new systems, but you might as well ask me to track my weight in tablespoons, or in cubits, because the new systems don’t mean anything to me. I look at the numbers. I think, I should remember this. And then I walk away, remembering only that I should remember. Numbers do that to me. I look at them and see an elaborate version of almost nothing.

I do have a kind of geographic memory of where the needle usually sits: halfway between two of the larger marks. When it creeps toward the one on the right, I’ve put on weight. When it creeps to the left, it’ll move back to the middle any day, so it doesn’t mean much.

What are the numbers that the needle sits between? I’m not being coy here; I honestly don’t remember. I mean, I still haven’t learned the multiplication tables. You expect me to know my weight in imaginary measurement systems?

But my weight in pounds? I could remember that. At least I remember what it was when I lived around scales that measured in pounds, because I understand in my body what a pound is. Maybe it comes from growing up with them—from measuring in pounds and feet and inches the growing amount of space I took up in the world. To the extent that I can guesstimate a kilo, it’s only in relation to a pound—twice as much with a little extra thrown in.

And a stone? Are you kidding me?

When I first started buying lunchmeat at the deli counter in our local supermarket (which no one but me calls a supermarket, but that’s a different tale), I asked for a pound. Because that’s also an amount of money, the kid behind the counter froze in front of his scale. Maybe I wanted a pound’s worth of lunchmeat. That’s a measurable amount, although not a hell of a lot, but no one asks for it that way. I said, “Half a kilo?” since in the essentially nonmathematical world I inhabit, that’s close enough to a pound to make me happy. He still looked as if he’d been swept up by a tornado and dumped back in math class: If lunchmeat A leaves display plate B at 10:45 and arrives on scale C weighing half a kilo, how long will it be before my manager yells at me for upsetting a customer?

“Five hundred grams?” I said, feeling as if I’d been swept up by that same tornado and dumped in some alternate universe where I could solve a math problem more easily that some other human being. It was destabilizing, but relief flowed over the kid behind the counter as visibly as if someone had poured it over his head from a bucket.

He weighed my five hundred grams, stuck the label on the bag, and handed it over.

To me, the vegetarian. But that, too, is a whole ‘nother story.

So I haven’t a clue how much weight I’d like to lose. Some of my clothes fit just fine, but the washing machine’s been selectively shrinking the smallest of my jeans. They’re not making denim like they used to. They are, sadly, making desserts exactly like they used to, and my body remembers them fondly. It doesn’t want to let them go.

What I know is this: I weigh something or other. It doesn’t really matter how much. When I stand on the scale, the needle moves and I’m reassured that I’m still present in this strange world of ours.

Winter in Cornwall, Winter in Minnesota

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

It’s winter here, and it’s behaving the way winter does in Cornwall. I can’t bring myself to say it’s cold.

I lived through forty Minnesota winters, but through all that I never really was a Minnesotan, I was a transplanted New Yorker, but there’s nothing like transplanting myself again to let me know exactly how much of a Minnesotan I became. Because this isn’t cold. It’s chilly, yes, but that’s as far as I can go.

A quick break here for anyone who’s not sure where Minnesota is: Fold the US in half from north to south and it’s right there on the fold, up by the Canadian border. Okay, more or less on the fold. I haven’t actually tried this, but you get the idea. It’s inland, it’s north, and it’s cold beyond anything I ever imagined as a kid in New York City.

Not Cornwall. This is Minneapolis after a 15-inch storm in 2010. The Metrodome roof collapsed under the weight of the snow. Again. Photo by Kevin Jack

Minnesotans talk about Minnesota macho, and that doesn’t have anything to do with bullfights or bar fights or street fights, it has to do with the cold. The high school kids who wait bare headed for the bus at twenty below, their ears daring the frost to bite them? They’re an emblem of Minnesota macho. The auto mechanic I used to know who refused to own gloves (or a hat, while we’re at it), even when he had to work on a car outside in January? You got it. We all had our own version of it, even those of us who went out in so many layers of clothes that we couldn’t lower our arms to our sides. We might look like giant fire hydrants, but we all found some small way to defy the cold—or to tell ourselves we had. Some days, just getting to work qualifies you: You dig out the car; you start the car; you drive the car over ice or snow without having a wreck. Or you wait for the bus. It’s heroic, all of it. There are days when you’d be forty degrees warmer (that’s Fahrenheit) it you sat in your refrigerator. And you could have a snack while you were at it.

Minnesota winters drive people to all sorts of extremes. If you talk about getting cabin fever, everyone knows what you mean: You’ve been stuck inside too long and you’re getting a little strange. When I worked for a writers organization, we gave the winters credit for the number of writers the state produced. This year’s winter has driven P. to working literary jigsaw puzzles. He writes, “As Ezra Pound wrote, ‘Winter is icumen in. Lhude sing goddamn. Stoppeth bus and sloppeth us. Sing goddamn,’ etc.

“If April with his shoures soote pierces the drought of March, it’ll be a fooken miracle.”

Umm, yes. I guess that’s true. But I’m in Cornwall, and last night we had (gasp, wheeze) a frost. Yes, folks, the temperature dipped one or two horrifying degrees Fahrenheit below freezing. Not only that, some white stuff fell out of the sky in the late afternoon, and since it didn’t stick I’m willing to admit that it looked very pretty while it did it. And the weather folk on radio and TV were all cranked up about it: Cold! Snow!

Well, okay, north of here the weather may be doing something vaguely serious. I’m not there and I can’t say. Cornwall’s the southern bit of the UK, where Britain sticks its toe into the Atlantic, so it’s warmer than the rest of the country. But I listen to the weather forecasts and I swear, even after eight—almost nine—years, I fall for it. I’m ready to wrap myself in a quilt before I go out, since I gave away my winter coat when I left Minnesota and my current one would barely stand up to a Minnesota spring. Then I look at the numbers and realize I’ll be fine. Last night we slept with the window open (that’s for one of the cats; he campaigns all night if he’s locked in), and no heat, thanks. It was fine.

So when someone says, “It’s cold,” as surely they will at some point during the day, I’ll manage to say, “It is chilly.” And I’ll make it sound agreeable, almost as if I’m agreeing, but I’m not exactly.

British and American accents: Talking trash to an I-Pad

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

M. and Wild Thing and I were trying to figure out what time it was in Singapore. You know how sometimes you just need to know that kind of thing? So Wild Thing grabbed the I-Pad she bought last week and said, “Hey, Siri.”

“What?” M. asked.

“She has an imaginary friend,” I said.

“I’m talking to Siri,” Wild Thing said.

My point exactly.

In extended and increasingly colorful ways, M. and I said, “Sure you are.”

Irrelevant photo: Our dog, who’s real, even if she looks like a windup toy

“Siri?” Wild Thing repeated to her I-Pad.

She might as well have been talking to the teapot. So while M. and I discussed the nature and uses of imaginary friends (in increasingly colorful and bizarre ways), Wild Thing—in the bits of air time she managed to snatch from us—explained that she’d set Siri up to have a woman’s voice and an American accent but that she’d reverted to being a British male—and a posh one at that.

Trust Wild Thing to have an imaginary friend with a sex change and an ambiguous national identity.

Because of the new accent, Wild Thing said, Siri couldn’t understand her, and that was why she wasn’t answering.

Unless he wasn’t answering. I don’t want to be insensitive, but this sex change business gets confusing when you’re dealing with invisible friends and virtual beings.

But forget about gender—it’s simple compared to accent. To what extent is an invisible British friend able to understand an American accent? I mean, just how parochial is she or he? And if the American accent’s a problem, is he or she (or, well, whatever) able to understand a working class British accent? Or a Welsh one? Or—well, you get the point: How narrow a range of tolerance are we talking about here? What happens if you have, let’s say, an Iranian accent in your English? Do you have to, and for that matter can you, set up your invisible friend to have her (or his, or whatever’s) very own Iranian accent in English?

I haven’t been impressed with the breadth of understanding demonstrated by virtual voices. We were in New Zealand once, and Wild Thing was on the phone with a computerized system.

“Yes,” she said in response to it doesn’t matter what question.

“I’m sorry,” the computer said, “but I didn’t understand that. Did you say ‘address’?”

“No, I said ‘yes.’”

“Did you say ‘guess’?”

And so forth until Wild Thing pinched her nose and, in her best imitation of a kiwi accent, said, “Yiss.”

“Thank you,” the computer said. (And sent a dress to the wrong address. Not that the address mattered. The last time Wild Thing wore a dress, splinters hadn’t been invented yet. And no, we’re not going to discuss how long it’s been since I wore one. It’s enough to say that I may still remember which end faces the feed.)

But back to that New Zealand virtual voice: What happens if you have a lisp and your yiss sounds like yith? You can’t order 80 kilos of chocolate covered Turkish delight by phone, that’s what, because you can’t confirm your order. You can’t call for a cab. You can’t let the bank know that your credit card just wandered off without you. Because the voice is set to the local accent—one local accent, and if it doesn’t happen to be the one you have, you’re skunked.

Or that’s my, admittedly limited, experience.

Apply this to invisible friends and you have to wonder, How much do they have to be mirror images of ourselves in order to understand us, or in order for us to accept them? If the posh, imaginary British man can’t understand (or be accepted by) the un-posh but entirely real American woman who’s talking into her teapot, what chance do the flesh and blood inhabitants of this planet to have to work out our differences?

M. and Wild Thing and I didn’t have time to explore that question, although no doubt the world would be a better place by now if we had. M. was heading home and we were out of time, not to mention cookies.

Wild Thing had addressed her I-Pad multiple times by then and swore Siri had answered her. Me, though? I didn’t hear a thing. And I’m prepared to speak for M. as well: She didn’t either.

Protecting children from English geography

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Breaking news: Programs intended to protect children from online pornography and in-head dirty thoughts are filtering out sites whose names include the words Essex and Sussex. Wessex wasn’t mentioned, and I’m not even going to try to explain that.

So there you go. You heard it here first. Or possibly second, since the BBC broke the story. I’d give you a link but it doesn’t seem to be online.

What, you say, an earth-shattering story like that?

Indeed. And I’m sure there’s a conspiracy out there to suppress it.

Screamingly irrelevant photo: What we do on a winter evening

Beer and British politics: The Pub Landlord runs for office

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

British politics just got a bit less depressing: A new candidate just entered the race for a parliamentary seat, a comic named Al Murray running under the name of his comedy character, the Pub Landlord. His party’s logo looks a lot like the one the U.K. Independence Party (Ukip) uses, and although I hate to give Ukip any space in my earth-shatteringly influential blog, the joke doesn’t work unless you know a bit about who the Pub Landlord’s making fun of.

Ukip wants to take the U.K. out of the European Union and get rid of all of us pesky foreigners. Or maybe they don’t want to get rid of quite all of us, because Ukip’s leader is married to a woman from Spain, so presumably they’ll make exceptions, but basically they don’t like furriners coming over here, taking British jobs and speaking funny languages on their streets. Last I heard, the party leader’s wife had a paid job in his office, but I guess that wasn’t a British job, it was some other kind of job, so it must be okay.

Irrelevant Photo: Mulfra Quoit, an ancient monument in West Cornwall

Irrelevant Photo: Mulfra Quoit, in West Cornwall

What else does Ukip stand for? Well, it sort of depends when you ask and who you ask and what sort of mood they’re in. And whether they’re still in the party, because periodically one of their candidates goes too far and gets thrown out. One proposed banning Islam and tearing down mosques. Another posted anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements on his Facebook page. A third was convicted of assault. Let me quote the Mail Online here: “The Ukip official charged with vetting the party’s election candidates has revealed he spends half his time ‘weeding out the lunatics’. . . .

“The remarks come after one Ukip candidate was recorded making homophobic, racist and obscene comments—while another was exposed as a fantasist after becoming embroiled in a public sex scandal.”

Ukip does stand for a good pint of beer, though—that’s been pretty consistent and to date no one’s been thrown out for it. And they’re polling well considering that they’re a minor and basically bonkers party. Well enough to scare the bejeezus out of the major parties and drag them all into a discussion of what to do about immigration, as if everyone agreed that immigration is what’s wrong with—and probably the only thing wrong with—the country.

But back to the new party: Its name is Free United Kingdom Party, or FUKP. (Yeah, go ahead and pronounce it.) And what’s its platform? The Pub Landlord promises to burn down the Houses of Parliament for the insurance and brick up the Channel Tunnel to keep immigrants out. His most inspired proposal is revaluing the pound so it’s worth £1.10. About cutting immigration, he says, “This is the greatest country in the world and people want to move here. We need an MP to make things worse. Look no further.” On corporations and globalization, he says, “Blah blah blah paradigm blah blah blah, blah blah dialectic blah blah blah blah blah blah game-changer.” Which is pretty much what all the politicians are saying.

Finally, he pledges that the U.K. will leave Europe by 2025 and the solar system by 2050.

Politics hasn’t made this much sense since Screaming Lord Sutch ran on the Official Monster Raving Loony Party ticket.

Manners, American and British

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

The British have manners. They have such good manners that from time to time they’ll throw them out the window to scold strangers for their lack of them.

Wild Thing and I were in the outdoor section of a café once—a cramped, eat-your-lunch-and-get-out kind of place—and as a couple who’d been sitting nearby wove past our table to leave, one of them said, “In this country, we say please and thank you.”

Sadly, by the time we’d processed the words, they were too far away for a snappy comeback, but “In our country, we’re polite to strangers,” did come to mind. It may not be true, but I still wish I’d been quick enough to say it.

Irrelevant Photo: Fountains Abbey, in Yorkshire

I have no idea what we’d done, or more likely not done, to piss them off. I’ve been a waitress. Wild Thing and I have both been cab drivers. We’re not the kind of people who think that if they have the money for a meal, or a cab ride, or a tube of toothpaste, it gives them the right to be obnoxious. But we are, I admit, incapable of saying thank you as often as the British do. Buy something at a small store and when you hand in your item to be rung up, the clerk will thank you. When you hand over your money, you’ll get thanked again. (A variation: The clerk may look at the twenty you handed over for something costing less than a pound and say, “Lovely,” or “Brilliant,” as if you’d handed them a slice of chocolate cake, or exact change just when they were about to run out and the banks had all closed and the vandal hordes were all lining up to do their shopping and none of them had brought the exact change.) Then when you go to leave, unless some other customer’s diverted the clerk’s attention, you get thanked a third time, often with the phrase, “Thank you very much, thank you.” Or, “Thank you. Thank you very much, thank you.”

At least it’s like that way out in the country, where we live.

I can’t do that. Can not. Am constitutionally incapable of. I also can’t manage to say you’re welcome three times for a single transaction, especially when I haven’t done anything. I mean, you’re welcome? For what? I bought something. I wanted it enough to hand over money. That’s not a gracious act that I should say “you’re welcome” for. Sometimes I find myself saying “thanks” instead, which is also absurd but doesn’t feel quite as bizarre as “you’re welcome.”

I asked S. once how often she said you’re welcome in response to the multiple thank-yous. She looked startled and said she didn’t think it was “called for” unless you’d done something particularly—well, kind may not have been the word she used but it was the impression she left me with. Unless you’d gone out of your way, somehow. But I doubt she’d never noticed how many times she got thanked per transaction. It’s that old thing about the fish and the water. She swims through an ocean of thank-yous and wouldn’t notice them unless they stopped.

Or that’s what I thought, anyway, until A. and H. told me that you’re welcome is an Americanism, although H. added that there’s an equivalent phrase in Welsh. R. swore that it’s a class thing: If you’re working class, you learn to say “you’re welcome.”

At this point, I understood two things: 1, It’s complicated, and 2, I’ll never completely get it.

“What do you say?” I asked.

“That’s okay” would do, apparently. So would “cheers.” But “cheers” can also be used to mean goodbye, or as a kind of toast—when you lift your glass to someone. According to my British English A to Zed, it also means here’s how! What does here’s how! mean? I looked it up and it’s either too obvious or too unused to include, so I don’t know.

I asked M. and Wild thing what here’s how! meant and they were as blank as I was.

So in this country we say “please” and “thank you,” but we don’t say “you’re welcome.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think that was rude.

Notes from the U.K.

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

Tag Archives: England