Serving Texas hamburgers in Cornwall, part 2: the definitive recipe

Posted on August 14, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

I already told you that the only ingredient in a Texas hamburger is beef, and that’s true but I may have oversimplified things. So I’m going to give you the full, formal recipe. Don’t leave here without it.

Before we get down to business, though, I need to explain that the difference between a Texas hamburger and any other kind of American hamburger.

Screamingly irrelevant photo: Tree at Madron Holy Well, near Penzance. The tradition of tying cloth to the tree goes back to pre-Christian times, when it was believed to cure illness. Exactly why people do it today is anyone’s guess. Maybe to cure an illness; maybe to brush shoulders with something ancient or add their bit of cloth to something compelling. I was tempted, because it is compelling, even though I don’t believe it can cure and wasn’t sick to begin with.

People don’t notice regional differences in countries that aren’t theirs, but if you live there, they matter. A California burger comes with lettuce and tomato, and if you live in California it’s just called a hamburger. It’s the rest of the country that calls it a California burger. And a Texas burger? It has one ingredient no one else can match and it has its own cooking method.

The ingredient is attitude. A Texas hamburger has it, and much as I love other parts of the country we just can’t rival Texas for its outright and usually charming bullshit. Without the good ol’ Texas bullshit, what you have is a plain ol’ American hamburger. That’s not bad, but it isn’t from Texas.

If you’re not from Texas can you do Texas bullshit? Probably not. Many and many a year ago in a queendom surrounded by the sea, we were trapped across a table in a broken-down train with an Englishman who lived in Texas and thought he’d learned the trick. What he’d learned to be was loud, self-important, and obnoxious. What he hadn’t learned was charm. It was a very long wait for that train to get moving again.

What do I recommend, then? A) Invite a Texan and turn her or him loose, B) offer your burgers to a group of people who don’t know about the secret ingredient and won’t miss it, or C) call it an American hamburger. Do not, under any circumstances, try to substitute a low-cost bluster for Texas bullshit. You’re better off without it.

And the cooking method? You cook the burgers outdoors, on a hot grill, and you cook them, at most, medium rare. When the burger’s almost done, put the top half of the bun on it. This spreads the grease on it. Wild Thing assures me that’s good.

The grill has to be hot, so the outside gets seared and dark. If you’re using charcoal, Wild Thing tells me you have to let the coals get white hot. Tossing a bit of water on them will release some steam and heat everything up. It’ll also bring a little drama to the process. She uses a gas grill, and she buys hardwood chips, soaks them, and tosses them into the grill to give the meat a smoky flavor. Oak is good, but any hardwood will do. Pine won’t.

What about the folks who can’t bring themselves to eat their burgers rare? We-e-ll, it’s up to you, of course. I suspect Wild Thing’s becoming a bit of a missionary about this, but the fact is that she did re-grill the hamburgers that were brought back to her. Whether she can bring herself to do it a second time is anyone’s guess.

So here’s the recipe. Be sure to get the proportions right:

Texas Hamburgers

Good ground beef

That’s it. Nothing else. Not even salt and pepper. No eggs, no bread crumbs, no shoelaces. Don’t (as I’m sometimes tempted to do) buy cheap ground beef, telling yourself the fat will cook out. Get the good (for which you can read more expensive) stuff, divide it up, pat it into shape, and grill the hell out of it. Put it on a bun, put some ketchup on it, and eat it.

And remember, you got the recipe from a vegetarian.

Serving Texas hamburgers in Cornwall

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Texas ran head-on into Britain last weekend and—. I was going to say that I’m not sure who won but it wasn’t a contest so maybe no one had to. Let’s say that both sides learned something.

Maybe.

Our village hall held a fundraising barbecue, and Wild Thing volunteered to make and grill Texas hamburgers.

Irrelevant photo. Four people. Evening. The cliffs.

The first thing you have to understand is that barbecue is one of those words that look like they’d mean the same thing on both sides of the Atlantic but don’t. In Britain it means cooked outside, on a grill. In the U.S., it has to do with sauce, fire, secret rites and recipes. It’s close to being a religion. Maybe it is a religion. I’m a vegetarian and originally a New Yorker, so you shouldn’t take my word on the subject.

The second thing you have to understand is that hamburger’s another of those words. In the U.S., it’s both the raw meat and the cooked thing that you eat. It’s made with ground beef and nothing else. In Britain it means only the thing you eat. The meat it’s made from is called mince, and to make it into a hamburger you add stuff and then cook it. Not just stuff, though, all kinds of stuff. Onion, egg, bread, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, garlic, sweet chili sauce, cumin, coriander, tomato puree, breadcrumbs, bicycle tires. Not all in the same recipe, I admit, but one recipe I found tossed thirteen ingredients into the meat.

It’s enough to drive a Texan to tears. Or drive her to say she’ll make the burgers and everyone else should stand back.

The number of ingredients explains why so many people here buy their hamburgers ready made. Because it never occurs to them that they can just divide up the meat and flatten it. They have to empty the contents of their kitchen cupboards into a bowl and mix it all up before they have—as folks here would say—a proper hamburger.

I don’t suppose I can go any further without mentioning that there were some scandals here a couple of years ago about horsemeat working its way into the food chain and showing up in, yes, preformed hamburger patties. They’re a perfect host, since they have enough extraneous ingredients to hide anything that doesn’t belong there. You could probably slip in a screwdriver and call it chopped onion, only onion’s cheaper so why would you bother?

If you’re from a culture that doesn’t eat horsemeat, finding that you just chowed down on it is shocking. More serious, though, is what its appearance in the burger patties says about how much any of us knows what we’re eating. Is someone selling not just the wrong animals but diseased animals? You can see the problem.

Anybody want to bet that the funding for food inspection has been cut?

Enough with the politics, though. We’re talking burgers.

So Wild Thing bought the beef and shaped the patties. She had some help, but if anyone had been tempted to add anything but beef she was right there to fight them off. Then she stood by the grill, flipping the meat and promoting the politics of the Texas hamburger. When meat’s involved, she does tend to, as J. puts it, open a can of Texas.

So how did the hamburgers go over?

A lot of people liked them enough to ask what was in them.

Beef.

Yes, but what’s in them.

Beef. You don’t add anything.

A. stopped by yesterday to say they were the best hamburgers he’d ever eaten, but he had trouble believing they wouldn’t need something to bind them together. No egg?

Just beef.

So that was one group of people.

Then there was the other group. They brought theirs back and asked if Wild Thing would put them on the grill for another few minutes. Or another twenty. Two or three brought them back again because they could still see pink. If a trace of juice landed on the bun, it wasn’t done.

A couple of the re-grillers volunteered that they liked their steak rare but couldn’t eat hamburger that way. No matter how much Wild Thing begged them to close their eyes and try.

So Wild Thing put them back on the grill. She’s not given to tears, but if she was she’d have wept to do that to good beef.

Who learned what? It’s hard to say. Wild Thing thinks she’s learned that she won’t get to grill the hamburgers next year, although it’s too early to know if she’s right. A few people learned how to make an American burger. If anyone learned to eat their hamburgers rare, I haven’t heard about it.

Terror at the seaside: we all get hysterical about gulls

Posted on August 7, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

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Let’s talk about wild beasts. Specifically, let’s talk about gulls, since they’ve been in the news here lately. They’re vicious creatures who dive bomb innocent civilians and steal their ice cream cones. Visit to the coast and you’re gambling with your life and your sanity. I’m exaggerating, but at least I admit it.

Yes, friends, the British press is getting hysterical again, so let’s settle for just one link. Enough is plenty.

A rare relevant photo, although it’s from Belgium, not Cornwall. From Wikimedia, by Loki11.

Before I tell you the terrible tales, I should let you know what I’ve learned about gulls:

They’re not really called seagulls. They’re gulls, and since we’ve already irresponsibly established that they’re vicious we don’t want to make ‘em mad, so we’ll call them what they want to be called. If you don’t believe me that they don’t like being called seagulls, just ask one.

If you dare.

According to Wikipedia, they’re “of the family Laridae in the sub-order Lari. . . . An older name for gulls is mew . . . This term can still be found in certain regional dialects.” That, irrelevantly, explains a song that mentions seamews. I always wondered what they were. Play nice or I’ll sing it to you.

But back to gulls. (Nice birdy. I’m leaving part of my sandwich right here for you. Leave the finger. I need that.) There have been some incidents, and as usual if they happened to me I wouldn’t be happy about them, but I don’t know how new, or newsworthy, any of this is.

In the most serious incidents, a small dog—a yorkie, a breed that can get so small they’re not really big enough to be dogs—was killed by gulls and a tortoise was ditto. With those two things at the top of the page to draw our eye, column inches have been devoted to cafes and take-away joints trying to protect their customers (and their food) from birds and to children and adults being frightened, and occasionally hurt, by the birds.

Ever since I moved here, I’ve been reading about problems with gulls, or seeing segments on the local news. Or protecting my scones from them. Cornwall’s full of seaside towns and villages, and seaside towns and villages are full of summer visitors, and with the visitors come picnics and ice creams and chips (those are french fries if you’re on the left-hand side of the Atlantic) and so on. And gulls are nothing if not scavengers. If food’s around, they want to know about it. As a result, in some places they now nest on roofs instead of (or more likely, in addition to) the rocky offshore islands they used to like. I seem to remember hearing about a street where the letter carrier refused to deliver mail after getting swooped on once too often. That was a few years ago, then the story disappeared and we never found out what, if anything, got done.

Oddly enough, although gulls sit around on our roof and our neighbors, they don’t do anything more right here than yell and get into the garbage if a fox has already torn the bag open. As far as I know, they don’t even tear the bags themselves, although I can’t swear to that.

In response to this latest flap, the prime minister, David Cameron, has pontificated—sorry, announced that we need to have a big discussion on the subject. He’s counting on the subject disappearing with the summer leaves before he has to figure out needs to be said in the discussion, never mind what has to be done–or worse, have to spend money on it. Should we kill all the gulls? Shut down the seaside? Issue visitors with plastic bubbles?

Saint Ives used to cull gulls and use birds of prey to keep them from nesting. They also had a van driving around town playing loud noises to scare them off. What the van did to the tourists, I don’t know. I wouldn’t think they’d be crazy about loud noises themselves. It probably kept them from nesting on the roofs too.

The thing is, all of that is expensive. A cull costs £10,000. We’re in an age of austerity. That it’s artificially induced (in my not particularly popular opinion) is beside the point. Local governments are having to choose between libraries and leisure centers and then realizing that they can’t afford either. So St. Ives is trying flapping colored flags. I don’t know how well that’ll work on gulls, but I tried flapping computer disks to keep the birds (blackbirds, I think) off my raspberries. After the first day or two, they were onto my tricks. They not only ate the berries, they set up their laptops on the outside table.

Truro is trying paint that reflects the sun’s UV rays. My guess is that we’ll be seeing gulls with sunglasses in the center of town.

When this first came out, I heard a scientist interviewed on the BBC’s Radio 4. He’d designed a study of urban gulls with an eye toward finding a solution to the problems they present. Embarrassingly enough–not for him but the the government–it was first funded but then defunded before it ever got going. It’s an age of austerity. We can’t afford that sort of frippery until everyone gets hysterical and starts yelling that someone had better do something. Even if it’s random and ineffective.

An update on political absurdity

Posted on August 5, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

This British American Life has a funnier example of American political absurdity than the one I sent out a little while ago. Follow the link to learn about the paperwork you have to submit if you want to be reimbursed for going to the moon. Because you can never tell when you might need to know that.

And while we’re talking about absurdity, don’t you just love that I provided a link back to my own post, even though I said wasn’t as funny? Anybody want to place bets on how many people will follow it?

The Mother of Parliaments and the mother of all silliness

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

After I promoted a post on political absurdity, a Google+ user, Andrew Knighton, wrote to say that “when Caroline Lucas [Member of Parliament for the Green Party] became an MP she received a ceremonial dagger on a ribbon days before she received the computer equipment she needed to do her job. I love absurdity as much as the next man, but as a Brit I’d really like to see the traditions swept up and replaced with decent processes.”

I can’t disagree—what happened is completely batty and I’m sure politics would make more sense if they stopped handing out ceremonial daggers and started handing out computers—but you have to admire the sheer insanity of it all. Or at least, I do.

Before I go on, I should either remind or inform you that Parliament likes to call itself the Mother of Parliaments. I’m not enough of a historian to know if that’s a fair claim, but it does at least explain the title I used.

Screamingly irrelevant photo: Minnie the Moocher (left) and Fast Eddie

With that behind us, I should tell you that I tried to confirm that whole dagger business by googling variations of Caroline Lucas, ceremonial dagger, and so forth. I ended up with articles on Sikh ceremonial daggers, The Vampire Diaries (I’m sure there’s some connection but I didn’t click through and try to figure out what it is), fracking as a dagger pointed at I didn’t click through to find out what—the heart of England, if I had to guess—and so forth. I did click through to something about the City Remembrancer, whose role dates back to 1571 and who does I didn’t read enough to find out what but damn, wouldn’t it be fun when someone asks what you do to say, “I’m the City Remembrancer”?

Anyway, I can’t confirm that the thing about Lucas and the dagger is true, although I’m sure it is. It’s too batty not to be. What I did find was an article by Lucas on what no one tells you before you enter Parliament.

Among other things, she reports that although the parliamentary smoking ban dates back to 1693, snuff is available at taxpayer expense. She’s never seen anyone dip in, but she did try it once, just to see what it was like. She says Parliament is like Hogwarts meets Gilbert and Sullivan. In the old palace, “The wood panelling is gloomy, the carpets have come straight from a 1970s pub, and there’s a pervading smell of school dinners.” Ah, the majesty of it all.

MPs don’t refer to each other by name when they’re speaking in the chamber. They call each other “the honorable member from [wherever]” or if the person being talked about is of higher status “the right honorable. . . .” She capitalizes all of that. There’s probably a rule about that too. These people can talk in capital letters. Me, I can manage italics once in a while, but I’m sparing with capital letters.

She also writes that most MPs have no idea what they’re voting on, so they have to follow party discipline and vote the way they’re told.

She doesn’t mention daggers, but I recommend the article anyway. Whether you agree with her politics or not, this woman can write. And she’s got a sense of humor.

Crime in Britain, part 3: emergency calls

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Ever wonder what it’s like handling emergency calls? You know, the pressure, the life-and-death situations, the idiot who calls because a parking meter ate his change?

Okay, I made up the parking meter, but the real stories are better. The Avon and Somerset Police took to Twitter in the hope that it would educate us about what the word emergency means. I’m not convinced it will, but it’s been fun.

For all I know, they weren’t hoping to change things but just wanted to keep themselves amused.

Anyway, since I’ve been writing about the serious side of crime lately, I thought I’d let you know what emergency calls are like before I move on to some other topic.

Let’s start with the man who reported being chased by a vicious badger. He dangled his keys at it and scared it away, he said, and he wasn’t sure where it had gone but he thought maybe someone ought to know about it. Just to put it on record, I guess, so in case it attacked again it would have a prior—well, not conviction exactly. Convictions are only possible if you’re human, so let’s just say something vaguely related to a prior conviction.

Relevant photo. I couldn’t help myself. I had no idea what a badger looked like before I moved here, so I thought I ought to toss one in. This is from Wikimedia, taken by Prosthetic Head, and don’t ask me what that means. I’m only repeating what the data says. It’s scarier than the badger if you ask me.

He and the call handler agreed that he should maybe call animal control, and that got him out of her hair. Then the story was tweeted (and probably press released), and both the BBC and the Western Morning News picked it up, and even though I’m adding my miniature noise to the uproar I do kind of feel sorry for the guy.

Okay, moment of conscience over. What are the other calls like?

A man called because a gull stole his sandwich, and a woman called because a guest house owner refused to cook her a breakfast.

Let’s assume she was a guest there.

A caller asked to speak to the queen. Someone reported being splashed by a puddle. That makes it sound like the puddle was the active agent, which means I could safely insert vicious, as in splashed by a vicious puddle. Someone else complained that a taxi seat belt was too tight. A man found a melon on his doorstep, cut into slices. That’s the melon, not the doorstep. A woman reported that Mary Berry kidnapped her. Mary Berry, for those of you who don’t live in the U.K., is a TV presenter. She bakes, and she’s neither young nor threatening looking. If she kidnapped you, you could expect cake and a nice cup of tea. You might, however, have to wear an apron and learn to use a whisk. But I’m getting sidetracked. A drunk asked for a ride home. A woman reported a wisp in her house. A man reported that his mobile phone provider was robbing him because he had no service.

It’s a dangerous world out there.

The police tweeted this kind of stuff for twenty-four hours at #ASP24, where you can still find it—or could last time I checked; I’m not sure how long these things hang around. There’s also some lovely insanity mixed into the general self-promotion if you go to @ASPoliceLIVE. I can’t put those in as links because Twitter links don’t work. Who knew that? Raise your hands please.

Even before I knew that, though, I knew they’d wreck the sentence.

And with that, I’ll wish you all a safe and happy weekend. Try not to call cops, the fire department, or an ambulance, no matter how vicious the puddles are where you live.

Are American politics absurd enough?

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

No one’s complained yet, but it’s been weighing on my conscience that I make fun of British politics more often and more joyfully than I make fun of American politics. I have several excuses, all of them true but none of them good enough:

I grew up in the U.S. and spent most of my life there, so its absurdities are less visible to me. Mostly. If you want to see what’s right in front of you, it helps to be an outsider.
Britain wraps its political absurdities in such glorious traditional craziness that it invites satire, from the little loops in the parliamentary cloak room where you can hang your sword, assuming you weren’t in such a hurry that you rushed out without it this morning, to the prayer cards MPs leave on a seat because it’s the only way to reserve one and there aren’t enough to go around. It’s like saying dibs, but infinitely more grown up and bizarre.
U.S. politics (like most—or maybe that’s all—countries’ politics) can be despicable, but most of the time they fail the absurdity test. If I could recommend a change to my fellow Amurr’cans, as Lyndon Johnson used to say, it would be that we cultivate a bit more absurdity in our political lives. It’d be good for us. Both sides of the political spectrum could unite in an effort to eliminate it. And in the midst of fulminating or being depressed about the problems we face, we could share a good laugh at ourselves.

But T. sent me an email a while ago that allows me to even the balance a little. According to Reuters News, the Pentagon has been—and here I’m going to abandon the balanced language of Reuters for a minute—throwing money in the air without bothering to count it.

Speaking of absurdity: From the pose, this could be Washington crossing the Delaware and threatening to tip over the rowboat, but it’s a picture of someone in a House of Lords robe. I’m not sure what period it’s from. The hairstyles and the poses have changed but the robes? Not much. From Wikimedia.

How much money are we talking about? Oh, $8.5 trillion or so. Not enough to worry about. And that goes back to 1996, so, you know, per year and all it’s not that much. Just a few hundred billion or something. You can’t trust me with numbers, especially when we’re dealing in amounts I can’t even imagine, never mind count. Let’s just say a number with a whole bunch of zeros following it. Per year. I do understand years.

Apparently, the problem is that the Pentagon uses “a tangle” of accounting programs that can’t talk to each other. “ ‘It’s like if every electrical socket in the Pentagon had a different shape and voltage,’ says a former defense official who until recently led efforts to modernize defense accounting.” (The quotes here are from a series of three Reuters articles. I won’t include separate links. Follow the link above and you’ll find them all.)

Record keeping, as Reuters puts it, is “rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.”

That leaves the military storing physical object that are out of date and buying new ones it doesn’t need because it has no idea what it needs. It has “a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.”

When it comes to veterans and serving personnel, in some cases they aren’t being paid what they’re owed. In others, they’re overpaid and then the overpayment is clawed back all at once. Or an amount they haven’t been overpaid is clawed back because some computer system somewhere thinks it was overpaid, so poof, the income a vet had every reason to rely on stops coming. In a case Reuters followed (a mistaken claw-back), no explanation was offered until Reuters got involved, at which point—surely this wasn’t connected—the mistake was corrected.

In fairness, the Pentagon has tried to fix the problems but ended up making them worse.

“In 2000, the Navy began work on four separate projects to handle finances, supplies, maintenance of equipment and contracting. Instead, the systems took on overlapping duties that each performed in different ways, using different formats for the same data. Five years later, the GAO said, ‘These efforts were failures. . . . $1 billion was largely wasted.’ ”

But, y’know, $1 billion? What the hell.

The Pentagon is the only federal agency that’s never been audited. So how much of that $8.5 trillion has been paid out legitimately, how much wasted, and how much stolen? We don’t know. And more to the point, they don’t know either.

But it’s only money, as my father used to say whenever an inappropriate situation came his way. You can’t buy happiness with it.

You can, however, buy a lot of other stuff. And no doubt someone has. We just don’t know who or what.

So there we go. Absurdity in American politics. But you’ll have to admit, it needs a few swords and a wig to make it funny.

Crime in Britain, part 2: the village edition

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Miss Marple doesn’t live in our village, but she’d be bored silly if she did. We’re short on murdered vicars and poisoned husbands.

What would she have to make do with?

Before I tell you about crime in the village, here’s my disclaimer: After drawing your attention to crime on the Scilly Isles and to the guy who was arrested for charging his phone on the London Overground trains, some of you were left thinking Britain’s a land with no serious crime. That’s my fault. The police really do have better things to do than arrest disoriented seals who wander into town. Or at least other things to do.

Marginally relevant photo: fog stealing the top of the cliff

But for you non-Brits out there, the point is this: Britain’s a real place and part of the same world you live in. That’s another way of saying that it does have crime, and none of it is fun if you’re on the receiving end. Even the petty stuff can feel big. In contrast to the U.S., though, very little of it involves guns. They’re tightly regulated. People who want to get lethal are more likely to pick up a knife, but even so, things can get ugly.

I’m not going to tell you about that, though. I live in a village of some 600 people and I’m going to tell you about what Miss Marple would have to content herself with if she lived next door.

Theft

A few years ago, two men went into the village store in balaclavas. Even in winter the Cornish weather isn’t balaclava-level cold, but that doesn’t really matter since it wasn’t winter. They made the guys stand out a bit.

S. was the only person working there at the time, and when they pulled out a knife and demanded the money in the cash register, she gave it to them. Two of them plus a knife, and one of her? I’d do the same. Then they demanded the money from the post office, which is part of the store but separated by a lockable door and glassed-in window.

Now, the post office in Britain doesn’t just sell stamps. You can start a savings account there. You can buy travel insurance, or foreign currency. You can pay some of your bills. So you might expect it to have a bit of cash. But the village post office is closed on Wednesday afternoons, and this was a Wednesday afternoon.

S. said, “Well you can’t have it, can you? Because it’s closed.”

And they said, “Oh,” and left.

They drove out of the village still wearing their balaclavas and were arrested before they got to the main road. All the police had to do was look for two guys in balaclavas, but in case that got too complicated one of the store’s owners followed them in his own car.

Wild Thing thinks they should be grateful to have been arrested. They weren’t cut out for a life of crime.

Drug smuggling

A few years before we got here, someone tried to smuggle in drugs (I’m not sure what kind, but if I had to guess I’d say cocaine) from a boat. If you don’t live here, you could convince yourself that with all these empty beaches and fields nobody would notice a thing. You’d be wrong. Apparently the police already knew about the plan beforehand, but if they hadn’t somebody would have noticed. Whether they’d have called the police I don’t know, but someone would have seen them.

Arson

A year or two after we moved here, somebody set fire to a telephone box. H., who lived opposite, had done some consulting with British Telecom and told us (several times) that part (or for all I know, all) of his pay was a commitment that he’d always have a telephone box outside his house. I’m not sure why he wanted one, since he had a house phone. Maybe he liked the look of it. Maybe he thought it was good for the village. But you know those tales where someone makes a pact with a genie or a god or the devil and it all sounds great until they read the fine print and find out they got eternal life but not eternal youth or a lifetime supply of cake but it would all be nonfat and dry? Well, he forgot to say “a working telephone box.”

Fast forward to the era of cell phones–or mobile phones, if you prefer–and phone boxes aren’t making money anymore. BT’s getting rid of them anywhere it can. And then someone sets this one of fire.

BT left it in place for a while, fulfilling the letter of the agreement, then they carted it away and H. didn’t protest.

Wild Thing suspects they paid someone to burn it down. Me, I doubt they’d invest the money, but whoever did it hasn’t been caught. In fact, I never heard any rumors about who it might have been. Which in this village is highly suspicious.

More theft

We used to have eggs for sale in several places along the road. They were free range, fresh (or as A. puts is, “Still warm from the hen”), and cheaper than in the supermarket. Plus the money went directly into the farmer or smallholder’s pocket instead of the supermarket’s.

Then someone started stealing the money and eggs. Now most of the egg boxes are gone. I’ve heard lots of speculation about who it might’ve been—a visitor? someone local?—but no one seems to know.

Wild parties

There’ve been two loud dances, which escalated to property destruction (a toilet paper holder was broken) and people harassing the sheep in the nearby field. I can testify that they were loud. Wild Thing and I went to one but stayed outside because it was too painful to be in the room with the band. The rest is hearsay. We left before the party had really gotten going and already people were peeing in the hedges. I don’t know—maybe that’s just part of a good night out.

Other stuff

On a public level, that’s pretty much it unless you count some property destruction. Or rumored property destruction. Stories have a tendency to change shape as they circulate, so I won’t present this one as fact.

We also have some drug use. Or reliably rumored drug use. Sorry, but I stopped doing first-hand research into that years ago. How much is some? Quite a bit. Doesn’t that sound like a more accurate measure, even if it isn’t? No one’s been arrested, so I’m not sure it counts in the crime statistics.

A couple of people have been arrested for drunk driving. And I’ve heard about a theft that apparently involved someone settling an old score. But no one involved the police in that. We’re off the beaten track here. You have to work at it if you want to get arrested.

A couple of years ago, a police car parked on our corner every so often and sat there for ten or fifteen minutes, then drove off. And no, the cop was looking away from our house. In fact, he was barely looking at anything. He did a pretty good impression of someone hiding from a job he liked even less than killing time inside a parked car. The rumor was that it was a community policing effort, although I’d have thought getting out of the car would have made it more effective. Anyway, that lasted a couple of weeks, then he stopped coming.

And then there’s private crime—the kind that happens behind closed doors, within families, and isn’t remotely amusing. Once in a great while these spill into the street and get noisy enough to wake the neighbors. Some of us wonder who it was and eventually someone tells us. The fine art of gossip is alive and well here. Mostly I’d guess that whatever happens inside doesn’t get heard. That kind of crime is as common here as it is in cities, I’m sure, and as unlikely to be known about by outsiders.

We did find out about the guy who was arrested for trying to kill his wife with a knife, but there was no mystery involved. The police came, and the papers ran a story. It wasn’t good for much more than a paragraph. It’s by far the most serious crime I’ve mentioned, but I’ve dumped it here under Other stuff because it’s not funny.

Still, some of us—including me—watched the papers for details. It’s horrible, that fascination, and I indulged as much as anyone else. Miss Marple knew how to harness it, but the rest of us? We just pass the tales back and forth and shake our heads. J. works with a women’s center that deals with sexual violence, putting her head-shaking to good use, but all I do is write the occasional blog post.

The current crisis

Last Sunday night, Wild Thing woke up to hear a crash and a car alarm, then a car racing away. She looked at the time so she could remember it. Why do people do that? Because on TV shows it’s what the cops want to know. Or Miss Marple, only she’d ask if it happened after the vicar took the trash out. (Do vicars take the trash out? I don’t really understand what a vicar is or does, but it sounds good, somehow.)

The next morning Wild Thing told me the exact time it happened, but it involved numbers so I promptly forgot.

It’s all very suspicious. And you heard it here first.

Community life in a Cornish village

Posted on July 21, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

Some days you find an adventure around every blind curve in the narrow road. At least if you’re 144, as Wild Thing and I cumulatively are (I think; don’t trust me with numbers), it’s enough to pass for adventure.

We drove to a garden center on Sunday to buy a dwarf hydrangea. Doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing you do when you’re cumulatively 144 years old?

Irrelevant photo: St. John’s wort, or rose of sharon

We weren’t yet at the main road when we saw a ewe and two lambs on the road. I slowed to a crawl and thought I’d edge past them, but they weren’t having it. The ewe led her lambs straight ahead, so that I was either driving them back toward their field or further from it, only I had no idea which. Either way, I was adding stress to their day.

City kids that we are, we’ve lived in the country long enough to know we needed to stop at the nearest permanently occupied house (this is second-home country, and vacation-rental country, so not just any house would do). But we weren’t near the nearest house—we were near fields, none of which had sheep in them.

Wild Thing got out of the car, thinking she could edge them to the side of the road, but they treated her the same way they treated the car: They kept going down the road.

Eventually we—me in the car and Wild Thing on foot—came to a field gate and they plastered themselves against it. I drove past and got out of the car while we talked about what to do. It was tempting to open the gate and let them in, but it was a recently mown, sheepless field. Wherever they came from, this wasn’t it. (If it had had sheep, we’d have had no way of knowing if it was the right flock, but never mind, it didn’t.)

We drove on and stopped at the next house, which turned out to belong to people we know slightly. They narrowed the possibilities down to two farmers and promised to call them both. In the meantime, a litter of six springer spaniel puppies swarmed us in that charming, brainless way that puppies have and they—that’s the people, not the dogs—said they had two left, did we want any?

I dragged Wild Thing away before she could claim them both and we got back in the car feeling very much like part of the community. Which is something, I suspect, that only people who aren’t quite part of the community bother to feel, but never mind, it felt wonderful.

We drove on and about a mile on the other side of the main road picked up two hitchhikers carrying skateboards. They were, at a wild guess, somewhere in their late teens and facing a long, long walk if they didn’t get a ride.

Wild Thing’s part of a group of people trying to create a skateboard park in the village. The group was kicked off by a couple of fathers whose kids—well, one of them is just walking and the other hasn’t gotten that far. So you can think of this as a long-term project. The village is a great place for young kids but not so great for older ones, and a skate board park wouldn’t solve the problem but it would help a bit. And it might keep the kids from skating on a stretch of road between two blind curves, where sooner or later somebody’s going to get smooshed.

So Wild Thing talked with them about skateboard parks and they loved the idea that someone wanted to build one. The three of them happily traded information for a few miles. They talked about how adults tend to treat skaters like a threat to the fabric of society—I’m paraphrasing here; I can’t remember their exact words—and I talked about how generation after generation adults are convinced that whatever kids are into is a threat to the fabric of society. The only thing that changes is the activity. When Wild Thing and I were kids it was hanging out on the street corner.

We dropped them in Launceston and left feeling like—you got it—part of a community. Then we bought a blue dwarf hydrangea and some pansies. I’d told Wild Thing just the day before that I wasn’t going to grow pansies anymore because the slugs and snails love them (yumm, salad) but they were so cheery that I bought them anyway. And I’ve been out slaughtering slugs and snails pretty consistently in recent weeks, so I might be able to get away with it.

From there, we drove home and walked to a village tea that was raising money for the Air Ambulance. We shared a table with two women from a nearby town and Wild Thing got a conversation going, which isn’t always easy but she has a gift. As they were leaving, Wild Thing said we’d stop by on Monday to help them eat the cake they were buying. They said we’d be most welcome. It was gracious thing to say, and since we don’t know their address(es), a safe one.

Then some people from the village joined us and J. wanted the recipe for a chocolate cake I brought to a party last week. Actually, she’d asked the day before and I hadn’t gotten around to sending it, but she explained that she needed it that day because she wanted to make it on Monday.

The recipe’s based on one in The Joy of Cooking, and I’m in love with it at the moment. British pie crusts are richer than the ones we make in the U.S., but their cakes tend to be drier. And I’m on a mission to mess with British baking anyway. Not because I don’t like it–some of it’s wonderful, and I’ve learned how to make a mean ginger cake. But what culture’s national cuisine couldn’t be improved by peach cobbler and New York cheesecake?

Anyway, being asked for the recipe left me with that same feeling of being part of a community, and we waddled home, happy and full of cake and scones.

Crime in Britain

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Ellen Hawley

101

Let’s talk about crime in Britain.

On June 14, the newspaper carried two crime-related stories. The first took place on the Scilly (pronounced, yes, silly) Isles.

You have to understand that if Cornwall’s rural, the Scillies are not just rural but cut off by a whole lot of water. The only way to get there is to take a ferry or a small plane to the largest island. From there, you can take a boat to the smaller ones. None of the islands have much in the way of crime, so it made the news when someone slapped a phony parking ticket on a rented golf buggy and upset a tourist. I think a golf buggy is a golf cart in American, but I can’t swear to that because of my sports allergy, which is too severe for me to get near a golf course, never mind learn the vocabulary. Whatever it’s called, it was being used as transportation because forget bringing a car onto the islands. And it was parked, but not illegally.

Irrelevant photo by Ida Swearingen, who’s a better photographer than I am.

The police say they consider the ticket a malicious communication, which can lead to a six-month jail sentence.

First, though, they have to find the culprit.

What else have the local cops been up to? A seal pup had wandered onto the main street (that’s the high street if you read British). They let it go with a warning. They also broke up a drunken fight between two chefs. It was about whether rock salt was better than sea salt.

Tough neighborhood. If you visit, don’t leave your wallet in your back pocket.

Those of you who aren’t British and followed the link may have been struck by the hats. People who want to be cops in Britain have all sorts of personal reasons, but I’ve never understood how they could get past the hats. I know one serving and one former cop and I’d ask them but I can’t think of a diplomatic way to word the question.

But someone will tell me why the hats are great, and that’s what makes a horse race, so let’s move on.

In Islington, a man was arrested for charging his phone from a socket on the London Overground Trains. He was handcuffed, hauled off to a British Transport police station for abstracting electricity, and then also arrested for unacceptable behavior and becoming aggressive. I’m not sure if this second arrest involved a second set of handcuffs and if the additional charge won him a third set, but I’m fascinated by the idea that they didn’t just throw extra charges at him, they rearrested him—presumably before they’d let him go in the first place.

Abstracting electricity carries a maximum sentence of five years. It’s enough to make a person think the phone isn’t all that important, y’know?

The culprit—sorry, the alleged culprit was later de-arrested. Give me back all those handcuffs, you malefactor!

As far as I know, nobody here uses the word malefactor, but the police really, honestly do use the word villain. With a straight face. It’s just, y’know, what they say. So they arrested the villain for abstracting electricity.

And here we should pause and consider the word abstracting. I know you can’t see electricity, but it seems real enough to my untutored mind, not abstract or theoretical or anything. But I didn’t go to law school, so what do I know? I still get thank-you letters from the schools I might have applied to because my grades were good and they just might have had to accept me.

Well. I apologize for not giving you a link to this earth-shaking article, but I read it in the print edition and can’t find it online. If you rely on electronic media and you can spend your life in ignorance of the things that matter. And maybe that means it really is abstract.

In a different week I might have skipped over both articles, but not long before I read them an expat website sent me a survey about crime “where you live.” I think they meant Britain, but since I live out in the country I told them what it was like literally (and I’m using literally in the literal sense of the word) where I live. I don’t usually answer surveys—it’s hopeless; give me two choices and I’ll pick the third—but for some reason I answered this one.

I wrote that a lot of people in our area leave their doors unlocked. Not everyone, but more than a handful. I know people who leave their keys in the car. It keeps them from wondering where they left them. Them being the keys, not the cars, which are still there in the morning. Except for the time two people who shall remain nameless (especially since I’ve forgotten who it was) decided they were too drunk to walk home so they’d have to drive. They’d walked to the pub, but they knew someone nearby whose keys were always in the car. I won’t get into either the wisdom or the ethics of that—they’re too obvious to bother with. Everyone lived and the car was returned.

That’s not the full list of crimes in the village. I’ll write about them another time.

Notes from the U.K.

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

Tag Archives: humor