Tag Archives: England

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.

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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.

The Emmits Come to Cornwall

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Summer in Cornwall and the place is full of emmits.

What’s an emmit? A tourist—or in British English, a holidaymaker. And it’s not a compliment. In Cornish, it means ant, and when I asked a friend why tourists were ants she said, “It’s because they line up on the cliffs and look out to sea.”

I’ve never seen ants line up on the cliffs and look out to sea, but I’ve only lived in Cornwall for eight and a half years and all sorts of things happen around here that I don’t know about, never mind understand.

I can’t remember who told me that, but I suspect it was the same person who, when I asked what twee meant, said, “It means”—brief pause here—“twee.”

After that, I bought a dictionary of British English, and just to be on the safe side, one of British slang. Twee, they tell me, means “affectedly quaint.” They don’t mention this, but it does also means “twee.” You just can’t argue with that.

The beach at sunset

The beach at sunset

Anyway, the place is full of emmits. And that’s good, because now that the mines are closed and the seas are damn near fished out, the tourist industry makes up a huge part of the Cornish economy. Emmits rent cottages and flats and rooms. They buy art and ice cream and little plastic spades for the beach. They buy groceries and funny hats and touristy stuff that they’ll throw out in six months. So we need them.

They also drive us nuts.

Wild Thing was driving to Boscastle last week, on a narrow road that for most of its length is too narrow to have lane markings. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t wide enough for two cars to pass. In the winter, we barely slow down to pass each other. But summer brings us traffic jams. The car in front of Wild Thing stopped every time it saw an oncoming car.

This isn’t a bad thing to do, really, and Wild Thing and I are the last people who should be snotty about it, although that doesn’t stop us. When we first came here, we snuggled our rented car into many a hedge and cowered there while other drivers judged the width of the road for us. Not because we’re not timid drivers—we’ve both driven cab for serious lengths of time—but because we weren’t used to the roads. The lanes (where there were lanes) were narrow and almost every turn was blind, on top of which we were driving on the wrong side of the road. It was better to pull over and annoy everyone than to scrape another car.

Now that we’re part of the everyone who’s being annoyed, though, it’s easy to forget all that.

Eventually, the emmit-driven car ahead of her met another emmit-driven car and both of them stopped, each waiting for the other driver to judge the distance. For several long minutes, it looked like a World War I battlefield, with both sides dug into their trenches and no one able to gain ground. Wild Thing was about to get out and ask if she could drive the closer car past when, finally, someone inched forward and, at long last, the deadlock was broken.

She told the story yesterday, when M. and M. and J. all dropped by our house, and J. said that there was plenty of room for two cars to pass. Except, she added as a sort of footnote, in a couple of places.

That’s what we’re like, the everyone the emmits annoy. There’s plenty of room except where there isn’t. What’s the problem? A car and a bus can pass in most places, we agreed, and so can a car and a tractor. You’d have thought it was a highway, the way we talked.

I should now confess that when I’ve written for Americans planning to drive in Britain, I’ve suggested pulling over on the narrowest of roads if the driver’s not sure there’s space to pass. It may drive us nuts but we don’t want an accident either.

Do you notice how neatly I’ve slipped into saying we? Wild Thing and I, with our unreconstructed American accents, don’t think of ourselves as emmits anymore.

When I put emmit into Google to double-check the spelling (I worked as an editor for much longer than I worked as a cab driver, so yeah, I would do that), I was first led to a Wikipedia entry that claimed the word was ancient British. I wasn’t sure what that meant, since ancient British was several languages, so I looked further. Under the spelling emmet, though, I found an entry that defined it as (and I’m quoting from memory), “Holidaymakers who sit their fat asses down on our beaches.” I thought about providing a link but figured someone would edit that out pretty quickly. It now says nothing about beaches or fat asses, but it does say some of the “local Cornish Folk” use the word to describe anyone who hasn’t lived here for twenty-five years.

It’s okay. I drove cab. Believe me, I’ve been called worse.

Pronunciation and British Geography

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Let’s start out by all agreeing that English spelling is an invention of the devil—a being whose existence can only be confirmed by studying the way English is written.  The experts tell us that English spelling was systemized at a time when the pronunciation was still changing, so it’s correct enough for the way words were pronounced at the time. And I’m sure that’s true (sort of—it doesn’t allow for regional variations, but let’s keep this simple), but honestly, did we ever a letter like C when either an S or a K would have done just fine? If we needed it to spell chunk, couldn’t we have assigned it the CH sound and saved it for that alone?

Mousehole02

Mousehole, in Devon. Photo by Waterborough


So let’s agree that the spelling of a word isn’t a trustworthy guide to its pronunciation. Place names, though, are the real killers. Along the north Cornish coast is a town called Widemouth Bay, pronounced WIDmuth. Drive northeast and you come to Sandymouth and think, Right, that’s SANdimuth. Wrong. That’s SANdymouth. Go figure. (That’s an Americanism, by the way—something I found out only recently, when I used it and was met with a blank look.) Keep driving and you come to Woolfardisworthy, which has gone so far out of whack that the road sign actually gives the pronunciation: WOOLsery, only they don’t capitalize the accented syllable, so presumably you could think it was WoolSERRy. Or WoolserrEE. It makes as much sense as anything else. Go to the south coast and you’ll find Mousehole, pronounced MOWZul. A couple of years ago, I drove through a town called Towster (we’re not in Cornwall anymore, Toto, but the pronunciation problems carry over), which is pronounced TOASTer. Yes, the spelling and the pronunciation both make sense, in an English-language, devilish sort of way, but that only points out how little sense the spelling of toaster makes.

I expected to reach Coffee Pot in a few miles.

No one thought a town called Towster was funny except me. I was grief-stricken to be left alone with the joke.

Turn the British loose on American place names and they fall victim to their own language. Michigan becomes MITCHigan. (For all you non-U.S. readers, it’s MISHigun.) Houston becomes HOOSton. (It should be HYOUSton.)

Guys, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Giving Directions in Cornwall

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Britain’s as romantic as it is confusing. Outside the cities, British house are more likely to have names than addresses. You want to name your house Island of the Floating Feathers? As long as you work it out with the local council, you can. Although I don’t know how the council would react to that one. They’re more used to The Smithy, The Old Schoolhouse, Oak Tree Cottage, Trelawney. Every village in Cornwall has a house called Trelawny (or Trelawney), after John (or Jonathan, depending on your source) Trelawny, a Cornish national hero who got in a wrangle with James II back in the 17th century and had a song written about him in the 19th, by which time it was too late for him to appreciate it. That’s the sad bit about being immortalized.

But going back to the Island of the Floating Feathers: The council might agree to it. You can be pretty sure there won’t be a duplicate in the village, which is another reason to nix a name. And it’s not as if you’re calling it My Neighbour Painted Her House an Ugly Colour, which any council could find a reason to turn down.

Rock Cottage, by Geography 2013

Rock Cottage, by Geography 2013

The advantages of house names are romance, atmosphere, self-expression, and tradition. Ah, tradition. There’s a lot of that over here. I don’t know when houses were first given names, but it was long before civil engineers were invented. Naming houses is as natural as naming people. You have a bunch of these things, and you have to distinguish one from another. As soon as a settlement got too big for everyone to know everyone, a medieval village, say, might start informally talking about the manor, the blacksmith’s cottage, plum tree cottage, river cottage, bridge cottage, the old lady with the wart’s cottage. Eventually those became the houses’ names, only sooner or later the old lady with the wart’s cottage would be shortened to Wart Cottage, until someone new moved in and said, can’t we change this to Island of the Floating Feathers? And the person in charge at the council replied, “Please state your reasons for wanting to change this house name.” In triplicate and black ink. If you have to file a paper copy of anything official in Britain, they’ll want it in black ink.

Except for the black ink and the business about the wart, of course, I’m making this up. House names probably started much earlier than the medieval period. But it’s good to remember that everything started somewhere, at some time, with some set of people who had no idea what they were setting in motion.

The down side of this arrangement is that anyone from outside the village is immediately lost. Say you’re driving a delivery van with a package for Craken Wartha, and you’re new on the route. You’ve found the village, but after that you have two choices: Drive around aimlessly and hope you see a sign that says Craken Wartha or stop and ask directions. Or you can do both, one after the other after the other, with increasing degrees of frustration. Anyone marketing a sat-nav system with all the house names programed into it would make a fortune, but no one’s done it yet, so imagine you spot two women walking a small, silly dog. They look local, by which I mean they’re not carrying the beach or hiking gear that would mark them as visitors. Salvation, you think, and you roll down the window and ask where Craken Wartha is.

As it happens, the two women are Wild Thing and me (which should, grammatically speaking, be I, but c’mon, who actually says it that way?). And we smile and point and say, “Go down the hill, cross the ford, go up the hill, take a right at the chapel,” and so on, but you’ve stopped listening because we don’t sound like locals.

Have I mentioned that Wild Thing and I have American accents? And that we came by them honestly? No one who asks for directions believes a word we say. Their eyes glaze over and their faces get this look that says, There has got to be someone else I can ask.

Sometimes we don’t know the directions. It’s surprising how many times you can pass a house but not remember where it is when someone asks for it. It’s tempting to spew out a string of lefts and rights and obscure landmarks, since no one’s going to follow them anyway, but we don’t. We say what anyone else would: “Ask at the post office. They know everything.” And we point them to the post office, knowing that if they see anyone else on the road, even if they’re staggering under a load of beach gear or a snootful of alcohol, they’ll roll down the window and hope to hear the right accent.

English Food: Cheese

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The last time I wrote about English food, it was to make fun of baked beans. So let’s talk about a good part of English food: The English are known for their cheese, and justifiably. Cheddar takes as much space in the cheese aisle as baked beans do in the canned vegetable, only it tastes good. And it’s not just connoisseurs and food snobs who go in for the strong stuff, it’s normal people—kids, adults, people who eat baked beans on toast. Cheese turns up in soups, in sauces, on baked potatoes. Okay, everything turns up in baked potatoes, but still. If a store only sells one vegetarian sandwich, it’ll be cheddar. And it’ll be grated, not sliced.

English Blue Stilton. Photo by Dominik Hundhammer

English Blue Stilton. Photo by Dominik Hundhammer

Every year, at Cooper’s Hill in Gloucester, people race—or slide, or roll—down an insanely steep hill chasing a wheel of double Gloucester cheese. The winner gets to keep the cheese. And a generous portion of mud. The race’s official site says of the 2013 race:

“Due to warnings from the police … a substitute, plastic cheese was used this year, so a real cheese was not in fact rolled*.

“This did not seem to matter to either contestants or spectators, but it was a failure as it just did not have the weight to roll properly! In the ladies race, one lady (not the winner) picked it up and carried it down to the finish line.”

“*Upon careful analysis of the movement of the cheese in the videos of the events, it appears that the “cheese” in the first event was significantly heavier than the ones used in subsequent races, it was the only “fast cheese” of the day, it also bounced a lot higher. There is a strong suspicion that this was a ‘real Cheese,’ the ones in the remaining races were made of foam plastic and were much slower, in most cases being passed by the contestants.”

The only injuries that year were a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg. It took more than two hours to get the guy with the broken leg off the hill, with the rescuers walking backward and held back by ropes. It’s that steep. But, hey, the prize is a cheese, right?

One winner said publicly that she didn’t like cheese and was going to offer her prize on E-bay. The bids didn’t come up to reserve price and I hope she learned to love the stuff, because she was the proud owner of an eight-pound wheel of the stuff.

English Dog Owners

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This has happened to me twice now: I was walking the dog—a lovely cluster of fluff and enthusiasm—when another dog walker stopped some 20 feet away and asked, “Is that a dog?”

I looked at her as if I needed to check. Half of me did it to play along with the gag and the other half did it because the question was so strange that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to check. Yes, she was still a dog. Small, I grant you, but so am I. It doesn’t change what we are.

I looked back up.

“Um, yes,” I said. Even the second time, when I knew better.

Would you have to ask if this is a dog?

Would you have to ask if this is a dog?

The other person, both times, reeled his own dog in, explaining that the dog’s snappish with other males, although he’d be fine if my dog were a bitch.

By this time, I understood what the other dog walker saying—bitch, female; dog, male—but excuse me, you can’t call my dog a bitch, and while we’re at it, you can’t tell me my dog’s not a dog. I mean look at her, she’s down there wagging her tail. My cats don’t do that. You want bitch, buddy, talk to me.

But that little drama plays out in my head. When you live in a village you don’t run around starting wars on a whim. Or, yeah, some people do, but their wars enter to gossip chain and circulate forever. Think of it this way: The village keyboard has no Delete button. And whoever you just started a war with? You’ll run into them for the rest of your life.

I admit, I wouldn’t have started a war over this if I was still living in a city. It’s too silly, and I’m not that quick to fly off the handle. But living in a village colors the way I don’t say it. I kept the vague smile that had landed on my face I was first asked if my dog was a dog and I said, “Oh. That. Female. She’s female.”

At which point, both times, the other person let his dog approach and they gave each other a good sniff. The first time, the dog who would have been fine if my dog had been a bitch turned bitchy himself and snapped at her before being hauled off. Which goes to show you something, although I’m damned if I know what.

I won’t swear that any of this is particularly English. We have dog breeders in the U.S., and they probably talk about dogs and bitches, but no one in the States ever asked me if my dog was a dog. Not once.

Folk Music and English Accents

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I’ve lived in Cornwall for eight years, and I’ve gotten used to the gap between, on the one hand, Wild Thing’s and my accents and on the other the accents of pretty much everyone else we know. Most of the time, I don’t hear the difference. Even when I listen to the other Americans in the village, I don’t notice their accents. I’m listening to words, not what they’re wrapped in.

Except for the times when I do, of course, when it’s like being hit on the head with a rock. A small, soft rock, but still a rock.

I was at Singers Night at a nearby pub last week when out of nowhere I heard my accent. Whack: small, soft rock to the side of the head.

Irrelevant Photo #2: Bude Canal in the late evening light. Photo by Ida Swearingen

Irrelevant Photo #2: Bude Canal in the late evening light. Photo by Ida Swearingen

Singers night is a wonderful, unpredictable gathering of mostly amateur singers, although one professional shows up regularly, for the sheer love of singing. In the summer, the place gets crowded, with some of the visitors singing and others listening and occasionally taking pictures, which is strange since they’ll go home with pictures of a bunch of people in chairs, with their mouths open. But who am I to judge? This particular night gathered in a strong group singers, and any song with a chorus sounded great—rich voices, good energy, harmonies. I admire the hell out of people who can harmonize spontaneously.

G. had started a song whose chorus repeats the line “Didn’t I dance?” and we must’ve sung the words three times before I heard myself: dahnce. My accent had melted into the accents around me instead of sending that good ol’ American A up my nose to spin itself so flat you could use if for a plate.

Dahnce? I thought. Dahnce? Who the hell am I turning into?

Some people pick up accents when they move, but I’m not one of them. To lose my accent, or even modify it, has always seemed like a much larger loss, as if I’d be losing some part of who I am, or hiding it behind a cardboard cut-out of a personality. I lived in Minnesota for decades without picking up more than a bit of shading on the O. Or so M.’s friend, who’s a dialogue coach, tells me. I’d have sworn I still sounded like the purest of New Yorkers, but she has an ear for accents, so I’ll have to take her word for it.

I’m not claiming my attitude’s better than anyone else’s, and to demonstrate how little sense it makes, I’ll tell you that I’m not bad at picking up accents in other languages. In my head, that’s a matter of respect—for the language; for the people who speak it. In English, though, I count the same act as disrespect.

To make even marginal sense of this, I have to mention the toxic history that imitating other people’s accents has in the U.S. When I was a kid, whites imitating African-American or Mexican accents did it badly and to make fun of them. It was skin-crawlingly awful. These days, I know white kids (okay, they used to be kids; you turn your back for ten minutes and they grow up) who adopt African-American accents because they like them and want to blend in. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I don’t suppose it matters, because it’s not my feelings that count.

My point here is that there’s a do-not-cross line in my head that keeps me from picking up accents in English, but there I was, singing dahnce.

Every language, and every accent within a language, is a song. I’d love to claim credit for that insight, but I heard someone say it in a radio interview. Unfortunately, I haven’t a clue who it was. A woman, I think, so that narrows it down a bit. Whoever you are, I apologize for not crediting you. But to illustrate your point, whoever you are, when I was still living in the U.S., I heard a recording of kids playing in a schoolyard, and without being able to catch a single word I could tell they were English. The song of their accent rose free of the words. And that’s what swept me along in that chorus: the song.

British singers often sing in American accents. It drives the purists nuts, and they blame it on American rock music. If you listen to enough of it, the accent pours itself on top of the notes and you may not even notice that you’ve picked it up.

Unfortunately, picking up an accent doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get it right. You’re likely to revert to your own accent at any time. Sometimes a word is so firmly stuck in your head that you don’t notice you’re reverting: Michigan comes out Mitchigan; Houston comes out Hooston. The line that tickles me is from a hard-luck, down-and-out folk song with the line “I can’t go back home this a-way.” Only it was an English singer, and it came out as cahn’t. “I cahn’t go back home this a-way.” Hard-luck, down-and-out meets silver-spoon. Cahn’t isn’t limited to a silver-spoon accent here, but put it in an American song and it sure sounds like one. And that’s one of the problems with singing in accents that aren’t your own.

Me? I avoid songs that demand an accent transplant. Most of what I sing is American folk music, and the U.S. is a long way from here, so if I end up singing songs I can’t lay claim to by right of either geography or heritage (and I do; they’re fantastic songs), from this distance they don’t sound as absurd as they would if I were back home.

To the extent that I sing English songs, I keep my accent in place and avoid anything I know is going to sound ridiculous. And if anyone who’s heard me wants to warn me off some particular song because I do sound ridiculous, just throw a nice, soft rock at my head. It would be a kindness.

Tea

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Americans think tea’s something you drink with your little finger in the air, as if you’d broken it and put it in a splint. We think it’s something you put on a funny accent to ask for. And America’s tea snobs reinforce that. You can’t just drink tea, you need tea made from leaves that were picked while the morning dew was  still fresh on the plant and which were then individually dried and sung to the whole time—by a tenor, thanks; a soprano might crisp the edges and a bass would leave them open to mold. And you need to pay lots o’ money for the resulting tea. I’ve been to restaurants, when I still lived in the U.S., where asking for a cup of tea meant the waiter had to haul out a wooden chest left from the time when restaurants kept a set of dueling pistols on hand in case, you know, a customer needed them. Only now it holds a complete set of hermetically sealed packets, each entombing one lonely teabag. And after all that, they bring you water that isn’t hot enough to lift any flavor out of the tea so you end up with, basically, a cup of bath water.

Irrelevant Photo: Launceston Castle

Irrelevant Photo: Launceston Castle

An English friend was so traumatized by her visit to the U.S. that she still talks about “that gray stuff you call tea.”

I hate restaurants like that. Not because of the tea. And not because everyone who works there is dressed better than I am. I’m used to that: I’ve always been dyslexic about style and have now gone entirely post-fashion. It’s because I keep thinking I’ve wandered into some private club and the butler’s going to throw me out any minute.

Are there still butlers loose in the world?

Anyway, tea: In Britain, it’s just a drink. If someone comes to fix the leak under your sink, you ask if they want a cup of tea. If you want to know why three guys are digging a hole in the middle of your street, you wander over and ask if they want a cup of tea. Add a biscuit—which is a cookie, and it doesn’t even have to be homemade—and they’ll tell you anything you want to know. Tea is the kind of drink you put in your thermos to take to work, if you happen to take a thermos to work. People talk about ordinary tea, or breakfast tea, to distinguish it from the fancy teas—Earl Grey, say, of green, or herbal (they pronounce the H). A. calls it builder’s tea, and sometimes builder’s butt tea. Her husband’s a builder, so she gets to say stuff like that.

A builder, by the way, builds buildings. Or fixes them. And a joiner’s a carpenter, not someone who belongs to a lot of organizations. All of them will drink tea. And so should you if you visit, because Wild Thing, who was once a dedicated and not at all fussy coffee drinker, tells me the coffee’s terrible. I gave up coffee long before I moved here, so I can only take her word for it.

A cup of tea is also a measure of time. If I drop by someone’s house and they offer me a cup of tea, they want me to stay long enough to drink it. Friendship is a highly caffeinated undertaking.

Summer Solstice in Cornwall

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This far north, the longest day of the year goes on for 26 hours.

Okay, that’s not the literal truth. It’s more like 27.

This morning, Wild Thing and I got up at 3:15 (that’s a.m.), staggered out to the car, and drove down the hill to pick up J. so we could drive to a double set of stone circles some 40 minutes from here and join a group of people who gather at the summer and winter solstices to sing up the sun.

Waiting for sunrise

Waiting for sunrise

If that sounds new agey and corny, it probably is. I’m not given to new aginess myself, but when you’re surrounded by ancient monuments the way we are here, you can be forgiven for sliding into a bit of nouveau-pagan celebration once in a while. Those who take it seriously do, and those who don’t can still stand inside a stone circle put up by prehistoric people for purposes we can only guess at and be overwhelmed by the scale of human history. It’s the closest I’ve come to touching my ancient ancestors—who (by way of full disclosure) aren’t my ancestors at all, except in the spirit of all humankind being one family. But humankind is one family, and those circles get to me. Not for any magical properties, but for their sheer age.

Sunrise

Sunrise

At the stone circles, we joined some hundred other people, dressed in everything from long skirts and ivy-leaf hair thingies, to shorts and blankets, to winter jackets (it gets cold on the moor), and we sang, and the sun came up, as red as it ever was when our ancestors watched it all those thousands of years ago. Then we headed to village pub, which had opened early for us, and we ate breakfast. It wasn’t an exact replica of the way our ancestors and not-ancestors celebrated the solstice, but everything changes with the times.

Stone circle

Stone circle

This evening, a group of women from the village will gather on the beach to watch the sun go down. J.’s organized the gathering for several years running, but this will be the first time we’ve gone. All I know is that it involves a bonfire and food. Our ancestors would have understood.

Wild Dartmoor ponies, happy to have the moor to themselves again

Wild Dartmoor ponies, happy to have the moor to themselves again

This is the first year that J. started the day by getting up at silly o’clock to watch the sun come up, and I told J. I half expect the evening to end with her falling asleep on the beach and everyone gently carrying her home.

She said everyone would be more likely to dump her in the sea.