Tag Archives: humor

British parliamentary traditions

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I know, I just wrote a post about red phone boxes and came down on the side of tradition, but really, folks, there’s a limit, and I believe a recent BBC TV series on Parliament has helped me locate it.

The series looks at everything from the building itself (which is falling apart) and the people who keep it running to the MPs and what they do and how they do it. How they do it is often in very arcane ways. How does one MP hand over some papers for a particular category of bill he’s introducing? He walks five steps, bows, walks five more steps, bows again, then walks the rest of the distance and hands over the papers. Makes me wonder what would happen if he didn’t bother bowing, or walked six steps. We played a game like that when I was a kid, Captain, May I? It involved giant steps and banana steps and going back to the starting line if you got it wrong.

Surprisingly relevant picture: a Yoeman of the Guard. Picture by Snapshots of the Past.

Surprisingly relevant picture: a Yoeman of the Guard. Picture by Snapshots of the Past.

The series is alternately fascinating, boring, and horrifying, and it wouldn’t be complete without a few Parliamentary traditions that predate the ox cart. And possibly the ox itself. I will, therefore, ignore the serious stuff and dive directly into the silly (in case I haven’t already done that with the MP and his banana steps). Because we all have enough serious stuff in our lives.

Before the Queen’s Speech (which gets capital letters, implying that it’s her only speech; for all I know, she maintains a regal silence the rest of the year), the Yeomen of the Guard walk through the basement pounding the corridor floors with fancy staffs, checking for barrels of gunpowder. It’s quite a sight, since these are the guys—and these days, I’m happy to say, at least one woman—who wear those memorable red uniforms.

But excuse me? Gunpowder? Barrels? Has anyone heard of drones? Or, I don’t know, intercontinental ballistic missiles? Semtex? There are so many ways to blow things up these days. And explosives aren’t the only danger a monarch faces. She could trip on the hem of her cape. She could fall victim to some prankster substituting one of my posts for the approved speech and there she’d be, with the wrong sheaf of papers in her hands and nothing to do but stop, doggedly read on, or ad lib. And ad libbing doesn’t look to me like one of the skills she’s practiced much.

She reads, by the way, from real paper. Yes, folks, paper. Talk about traditional! And while I’m interrupting myself, I can tell you that I just googled Semtex to make sure I wasn’t mistaking an explosive for a dishwashing liquid. That probably put me on somebody’s watch list. If I wasn’t there already.

But never mind all that. They tap the floors for gunpowder, not semtex and not rogue blog posts. It all dates back to Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot.

I want to be clear about this. I’m not recommending you blow up Parliament. Regardless of how you feel about monarchy or the British government or anything else, it would not help the political situation in any way. But there are certain ideas that shouldn’t be planted in people’s heads, and this is one of them. They made it all so picturesque. And I can’t help playing with scenarios. I’m a fiction writer, your honor. And a vegetarian.

No, I’m not sure that’s relevant either, but I mention it just in case—

[A late insertion here: When I first posted this, the paragraph above read, “I’m recommending” instead of “I’m not recommending.” Thanks to K.B., who wrote to say I really would end up on someone’s watch list. This is what happens when you recast a sentence too many times. Bits and pieces of the earlier versions get left in until it becomes meaningless, or means the opposite of what you meant it to mean, your honor.]

Let’s move on before they pass sentence. The Queen’s Speech also involves Black Rod. This is a guy dressed in clothes from another century—possibly another planet, but then who am I to judge?—and he runs around with, yes, a black rod. At the State Opening of Parliament, he’s “sent from the Lords Chamber to the Commons Chamber to summon MPs to hear the Queen’s Speech. Traditionally the door of the Commons is slammed in Black Rod’s face to symbolise the Commons independence.

“He then bangs three times on the door with the rod. The door to the Commons Chamber is then opened and all MPs—talking loudly—follow Black Rod back to the Lords to hear the Queen’s Speech.”

That, by the way, is from Parliament’s own web site. You can tell it’s not mine by the British spelling of symbolise. Not to mention the quotation marks and the straight-faced tone.

This bit of symbolism dates back to the 1600s, when Charles I tried and failed to arrest five MPs, which Parliament considers to mark the autonomy of the Commons from the crown. Slamming the door in Black Rod’s face is like checking for gunpowder. It meant something once and they’ve been re-enacting it ever since.

So as far as I’m concerned, that’s where the far edge of tradition lies. I am, honestly, fascinated that the more, ummm, picturesque traditions continue on. I imagine that with each century they take on a more ceremonial and less meaningful tone, but no one can get rid of them. Maybe no one wants to. Maybe it’s only rude outsiders who see it all as a touch—shall we say bizarre and unnecessary? I don’t want to sound like I think the U.S. has it all figured out. We’re at least as crazy as the next country. But in other and (to me, at least) less picturesque ways.

The iconic British phone box goes literary

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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.

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.

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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.

late winter 002

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.

About inconsistency: US and UK headline style

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If you’re a regular here, you may have already read that I’ve worked as an editor and copy editor. And if you’ve worked as either one and scrolled through the site, what will jump out at you are not my screamingly irrelevant photos but my screamingly inconsistent headline style. Not to mention the editorial sins I commit in a smaller typeface.

What’s going on? I retired, that’s what. I turned in my Chicago Manual of Style. Really. I no longer own a copy, either current or out of date. That’s the bookcase equivalent of saying, “Screw it.”

Irrelevant photo: Late winter landscape. Yes, that's grass. It's been sitting there, green, all winter.

Irrelevant photo: Late winter landscape. Yes, that’s grass. It’s been sitting there, green, all winter.

So where do I go to check my style decisions? Nowhere. On some days when I’m writing a headline I capitalize the first word after the colon and on other days I decide not to. For the most part, I’ve stopped using the American style, which capitalizes all the words in a headline except for the ones that never get capitalized because the rules are complex and copy editors need to prove we know something the rest of you don’t or why else would anyone hire us? The British headline style is simpler. As far as I’ve decoded it, it treats the headline like a sentence, which is great because you don’t have to worry about all those American exceptions: Everything but the first word and the proper nouns is lower case.

Ah, but what about the first word after a colon? I’ll break down and confess: I haven’t checked whether it’s capped or lower case because—cue maniacal laughter—I’m retired and I don’t have to.

It’s not that I don’t notice the inconsistencies in my headlines, and it’s not exactly that I don’t have a headline style, it’s just that on any given day I’m likely to decide that I don’t like the style I was using so why don’t I change it—without going back and changing the old ones so they conform?

Of course, once fussbudgetty editorial thinking lodges in your head, it doesn’t vacate willingly, so I haven’t danced unthinkingly off into inconsistency. I’ve danced off while throwing explanations and disguised apologies over my shoulder. So, sorry folks. I am thinking. I am noticing. I just don’t care enough anymore.

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

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“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.

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

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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.

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.

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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.

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

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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.

Minneapolis after a 15-inch storm in 2010. The Metrodome roof collapsed under the weight of the snow. Again.

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 English: Talking about tea

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Tea isn’t just a drink here, it’s a meal and a marker of class. (You’ll find lots of those if you know how to look.) If you’re working class, tea is the evening meal and dinner is lunch. If you’re upper class, the evening meal is supper. Are you still with me? You won’t be for long, because A. adds, “But we all say supper now.”

Who’s “we”?

Sorry, you’re on your own there.

Screamingly irrelevant photo. He doesn’t care what the meal’s called.

And in case this isn’t confusing enough, I’ve read that all this turns into its opposite in other parts of the country, so you have to know where someone’s from to know what they’re eating. Or drinking. Or talking about.

Wild thing was on the phone with H. and invited her to stop by for tea after something they were doing together. H. told us later that she hung up the phone and thought, I wonder what I just got invited for? Because Wild Thing and I don’t play by the same rules as anyone else does, so who knows what we mean when we say “tea”?

We sure as hell don’t.

Everyone seems to agree that afternoon tea (as opposed to just plain old tea) is afternoon tea—you know: a cup of tea and a little something—but if you want that little something in the morning it’s either morning coffee or elevensies. Morning tea? Sorry, there is no such thing. It’s morning coffee. And if you don’t drink coffee? No problem. You can get tea. But it’s still not called tea.