GRUB!: Christmas Style

Yes you're right, there was no blog last week, and I am unrepentant.  What is my excuse? Well, last weekend I had a lovely few days in Brussels where I ran around the city with hashers, crawled pubs, drank some truly excellent Belgian beers, had a formal dinner, danced to ABBA, stayed out until 4am two nights in a row, met some fun people and topped off the beer with am generous helping of mulled wine.  I had a really excellent time, but the schedule was packed and didn't leave a lot of time for blogging, so I took a week off.  Get over it.  And now, on to your irregularly scheduled blog post:

It's a festive fiesta over here at GSWPL today!  Time to talk about some traditional English Christmas treats.  First up:

Mince Pies:

Mince pies are tiny sweet pies filled with mincemeat, a dark, thick jammy substance made by cooking suet with stuff like apples, raisins, sultanas, currants (or other dried fruit) candied peel, spices, sugar, and a generous measure of something boozy like brandy or whisky. Astute GSWPL readers will note from this list that mincemeat has no MEAT in it (Thankfully, and oddly, because over here hamburger - ground beef - is actually called MINCE.)  Still, mincemeat... no meat.  This has not always been the case, because the recipe seems to have originated as early as the 15th century when they were much more cavalier about mixing sweet spices and fruit with meat.  Over the centuries the meat faded into the background, leaving us with modern mincemeat which often now even skips the suet in favour of a vegetarian fat of some kind, resulting in a pie that looks very much like this:

A tasty pile of mince pies from our work Christmas Lunch.  Yes, LUNCH.  It's normal over here to have the big Christmas meal - turkey, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, gravy, Christmas pudding - in the middle of the day,  possibly right after the Queen's Christmas Message.  Presumably you then lie around semi-conscious for the rest of the day pondering when you might next be able to cram something into your mouth.

In fact, mince pies are quite yummy, though possibly an acquired taste.  Luckily, it's a taste I developed as a child, having grown up in a family that embraces a whole lot of traditional English foods and customs (including steak and kidney pudding, another food which sounds like it can't decide whether it's dinner or dessert, and which is definitely a whole other post.)

Mince pies are utterly ubiquitous at this time of year.  They appear in grocery stores in boxes of 6 (for about £1! Fantastic!).  It's also impossible to enter a coffee shop without being presented with a pile of mince pies.  They are a staple at any Christmas function, and I've even seen them given away on the street for store promotions.  There is no escape, meaning that I have consumed approximately 7.3 times my bodyweight in mince pies in the last three weeks.  Luckily, they're small.  Unluckily, this makes it easy to eat nine in a row without noticing (it's the Jaffa Cake Conundrum).  Sadly, the power to resist mince pies decreases precipitously in a direct relationship with your consumption of:

Mulled Wine:

Red wine, heated through with a mixture of spices like cinnamon and clove, and often with sliced apples and oranges added.  Like mince pies, mulled wine is everywhere.  In Brussels and many other European countries it's called gluhwein.  In France it's vin chaud.  Brussels even had it for sale at outdoor gluhwein stands in the Christmas markets, which was quite lovely.  I've had it at work functions, on the street, and at house parties.  (Where it was once served with bits of chorizo sausage added for extra zip, though I am assured by other that this is a highly unusual practice.  Still, what is it about this place that makes people put meat in places where meat was not meant to go?)

Mulled wine is generally made with pretty cheap plonk, since it makes no sense to spend any more than you need to on a bottle (or box) that's going to be stewed to within an inch of its life in a pot full of cinnamon sticks and, if it's unlucky, a bit of sausage.  This means that it's not particularly high quality alcohol, hence it can be the cause of a wicked hangover.  It's very Christmassy, but should be approached with caution.

Selection Boxes:

I've heard it said that Christmas is not Christmas without a selection box.  Technically speaking, a selection box is a package containing a range of sweets from a single manufacturer.  A box of Pot of Gold chocolates would, over here, be referred to as a selection box.  And last week I got a Cadbury's selection box that had six different Cadbury's chocolate bars in it (Cadbury Flake, Dairy Milk, Fudge, Buttons, Crunchie and Caramel!).

But at Christmas time it seems the two grandaddies of the selection box game are Quality Street and Cadbury's Roses.  Chocolates in these kinds of tins are generally made with pretty low quality chocolate, but are fun because they're all different shapes and wrapped in brightly coloured foil, so it's easy to develop favourites, like the Quality Street long skinny gold one, which is toffee.  Or the green triangle.  Or the famous Purple One, which used to be a whole Brazil nut covered in chocolate, but is now, for reasons unknown, a hazelnut.

A tower of Quality Street selection boxes, in my local Sainsbury's

Brussels Sprouts:

Pity the poor Brussels sprout!  Trotted out at Christmas every year and often boiled into oblivion, they are the nightmare of British children the nation over.  (Last year I read a tongue-in-cheek article outlining key dates in the run-up to Christmas and somewhere in mid-November appeared the helpful hint: "Grans: Last chance to put the sprouts on to boil!")

Roasted Brussels Sprouts with bacon and chestnuts, which are very traditional accompaniments

Sprouts get a bad rap, probably because of the aforementioned overcooking, which can release a chemical compound (glucosinolate sinigrin) that makes them smell sulphurous and hence less-than-yummy.  Much better to sautee or roast them.  But everyone I've talked to says that Christmas dinner is not complete without a bowl of sprouts that get politely ignored by most people at the table.  I like them myself, though this was not always the case.  Apparently they're often served with bacon and chestnuts, which sounds excellent.

Christmas Pudding:

Christmas pudding is the truly proper end to a Christmas dinner (whether served at 1pm or 7...) and is familiar territory for me.  I've had Christmas pudding every year since, I suspect, I was in utero (except one).  And it bears repeating that in England "pudding" is a very broad term.  North Americans might fall into the trap of thinking a pudding is a smooth, gloopy, spoonable dessert advertised by Bill Cosby.  No so in England; here the term is used generally to describe any kind of dessert.

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure: a Christmas Pudding is another one of those mixtures of suet, dried fruit, sugar and booze (no meat this time!) with a touch of flour added to bind it all together into a batter.  It's traditionally cooked by pouring the whole mixture into a ceramic bowl called a pudding basin and then steaming it for hours, which results in a moist, rich, dense cakey sort of thing that resembles half a bowling ball in colour and weight when turned out onto a plate.  It's normally served by dousing it in brandy or rum and then setting it alight, and is accompanied by custard, brandy butter or - my favourite - hard sauce.

Christmas pudding (the bowling ball on the right), hard sauce (down centre) and a few mince pies thrown in for good measure.

(Aside on hard sauce: It's not hard, nor is it really a sauce.  Instead, hard sauce is a tooth-achingly sweet mixture of butter and sugar, possibly with a bit of vanilla or booze mixed in, which makes it quite thick - more like a spread.  My association with hard sauce goes back as far as my association with Christmas pudding.  Because a Christmas pud is very rich and dense and sort of challengingly flavoured - especially for kids - it was always a bit of a tough sell at our table.  The hard sauce, though, was a guaranteed hit.  Hence it was decreed that if you wanted hard sauce, you had to have at least a small slice of pudding to go with it.  This resulted in many years of being served a slice of pudding so thin you could read The Times through it, topped with an enormous helping of hard sauce.  Happily this tactic worked, and I'm now completely won over to the charms of Christmas Pudding.  As long as there's hard sauce.)

Christmas Crackers:

No, not crackers as in things-to-be-crumbled-into-soup.  These are crackers as in things-that-go-Crack!  Despite my Anglo-centric upbringing, this is one Christmas tradition that never made it into my personal list of Christmas Must Haves.  But over here Christmas crackers are mandatory.  A cracker is a small cardboard tube wrapped in paper so it ends up looking like a giant hard candy.   The intention is that the tube is pulled apart to reveal the contents inside.  The crack part comes because the tube is also fitted with a thin strip of cardboard impregnated with some kind of chemical banginess, so it make a sharp cracking noise when pulled apart (sort of like a cap gun).

Traditionally it takes two people to pull a cracker, with each person grabbing one end.  Similar to breaking a wishbone, the person who ends up with the larger bit after the pull is the winner, and is entitled to claim the entire contents of the cracker.  At less cutthroat tables, each person has a cracker and keeps its contents to him or herself, though the actual pulling of the cracker is still definitely a two person operation.

Crackers normally contain three things: a brightly coloured tissue paper hat, usually shaped like a crown (which must be worn); a small plastic toy of some kind (which must be crappy); and a small slip of paper containing a joke (which must be very very bad and which also must be read out to the rest of the table).

A cracker and joke from the office Christmas lunch.  I told you the jokes were bad. (Other joke that appeared that day: Which side of a chicken has the most feathers? The outside!)

And there you have it - a few English Christmas traditions to chew on (ha!) over the holidays.  I'm heading back to Canada soon for two full weeks of friends, family, jetlag, food, presents, sleeping in and Christmas pudding with hard sauce.  I may blog while I'm there, and I may not... you'll just have to tune in to find out.  

Apropos of Nothing, son of the sequel

More short, random observations of life on this side.

On the oddly bi-polar nature of driver's licences:
First of all, they're not called driver's licenses, they're called "drivING licences". I guess it's not the person that's licensed, it's the act.  I recently traded my Canadian driver's license for a UK one, which was relatively painless and not even that expensive.  The annoying thing is that driving licenses in the UK require you to take your test in a manual transmission vehicle if you want to be licensed to drive a manual transmission car.  Of course there's no way to prove that I took my driving test (27 years ago...ohmygod) in a manual transmission car because no one in Canada gives a damn about that and hence no records of that are kept (oh, also I didn't take my test in a manual, but that's not the point.)  The point is that I wasn't able to get a manual transmission license.  This, despite the fact that every vehicle I've ever owned and registered was a manual.  I suppose the fact that I owned them is no guarantee that I drove them.  So now I have to arrange to take a test to upgrade my license, because about 90% of vehicles in the UK are manuals, which is all kind of boring.  That's the first bi-polar thing about driving licence - the manual/automatic differentiation.

The other thing is the physical licence itself. It comes in two parts, like the old Saskatchewan licences.  There's the plastic photo card part that most people carry around, which is familiar. Then there's the "paper counterpart" which is a full A4 sized sheet and is a legal part of the licence itself. Theoretically you're supposed to carry both halves at all times, which almost no one does, partly because it's a pain and partly because it's just a flimsy piece of paper that will decompose in a wallet in no time flat.

 

It says: "Important Document - The photocard and paper counterpart should be kept together. Both must be produced when required."  And that's my photocard in the corner, the pink thing with the EU symbol and the unflattering photo.  Then again it's not nearly as unflattering as the ID photo on my new Olympic Park pass which makes me look 70 years old, three-quarters dead and supremely uninterested in everything. People gasp and make involuntary vowel sounds when they see it.  Then their eyes start bleeding...

On the similarly dual nature of laundry detergent:

Again, we've got a linguistic clarification to make here.  It's not actually called laundry detergent here, it's called "washing powder".  Also, dishwashing soap is called "washing up liquid" because doing the dishes is referred to as "doing the washing up". "Washing up" is apparently a phrase that refers exclusively to the dishes.  So it's "washing up liquid", unless it's "fairy liquid".  Not because it comes from fairies, but because the best-known brand of washing up liquid is Fairy.

Lemon Fairy Liquid, though it's most common form is Mild Green Fairy Liquid.

But back to the washing up powder, and something that baffled me for a long time after I arrived before I finally got off my butt and asked about it.  All washing powder over here is clearly divided and appropriately labeled as belonging to one of two camps: Biological and Non-Biological, usually abbreviated to Bio and Non-bio.

See what I mean? Clearly labelled.

And what's the difference?  According to our friends at Wikpedia (and let's just pause for a moment and consider that there are actually people out there who care enough about this subject to write a short but reasonably informative article about it) (Oh, and let's also have a short moment of reflection to admit that I am also in the process of writing about it.) (And don't forget you are reading it, so don't get snooty)... but back to Wikipedia, which says that biological detergent contains "enzymes harvested from micro-organisms such as bacteria adapted to live in hot springs... whose purpose is to break down protein, starches and fat in dirt and stains on clothing... for example food stains, sweat and mud."  Apparently those enzymes increase the cleaning power of the detergent, especially in cold water, which is odd if they're harvested from hot springs.  (And exactly how does one harvest micro-organisms from hot springs? With extremely tiny nets?)  I can't believe there are enough hot springs in the world to produce enough of these enzymes to fill the shelves at every Tesco, Sainsbury's , Lidl, Waitrose and Asda in the UK.  (Especially not the Asda at Putney Vale, which I think is large enough to be visible from the International Space Station.)  

No matter, the bio stuff supposedly works about 10-15% better. However the bio stuff is also harsher, probably because those enzymes must have to be pretty tough characters to survive in steamy, mineral-laden hot springs. Hence the existence of non-bio washing powder for babies, people with allergies and anyone who is generally just a whinging wimp. Nonetheless, the wholesale and absolute division of the entire laundry detergent world into two discrete types was disconcerting - a bit like walking into the grocery store to find the entire dairy section had separate areas for left-handed and right-handed yogurt.

On the most excellent nature of Christmas lights on Oxford and Regent Streets:
Oxford and Regent Streets are the hub of retail consumerism in London, centred at the intersection (or junction) of the two main roads, called Oxford Circus. There is handy tube station at Oxford Circus which I have NEVER exited without being completely disoriented.  This is because unless you were to conduct an exhaustively mapped, years-long, three-dimensional study of the various exits from Oxford Circus Station, I think it's completely impossible to know upon exiting which direction you need to walk to get to the Apple Store. I generally stumble up out of the tube and try to locate All Souls Church, which I firmly believed to be in an easterly direction along Oxford Street, and then orient myself from there.  Naturally it turns out that All Souls is actually north up Regent Street.  And surprisingly it also turns out that Regent Street and not Oxford Street is the one that curves south and east into Piccadilly Circus. Huh.  This goes a long way to explaining why I've always found Oxford Circus a tad confusing.

Navigational challenges aside, Oxford Circus is a shopper's paradise.  The area is home to big department stores like Selfridges, Debenham's, and the beloved Marks and Spencer (which really deserves a post all its own), and to the flagship stores for a lot of major retailers like Apple, Uniqlo, and the famous Hamley's toys store.  And because Christmas is high season for shopping, the Oxford/Regent Street businesses really do up the place with festive lights, which is really fun.

This, for example, is a Boots Drug Store (Chemist):

Nice work Boots, but not quite as classy as:

Debenham's, which I would say is roughly equivalent to The Bay.  But bigger, of course.  And highly skilled with the Christmas lights.

Lights like this are generally called "fairy lights".  So if it's Christmas time you could theoretically make a batch of fairy cakes and then wash up the bowl with fairy liquid all under the gentle glow of fairy lights.  How lovely.  Especially the cakes.  And not so much the washing up.

Brixton Station Steel Drum Band:

Lastly, a little taste of one of the things that makes living in Brixton fun and cool.  There is an Iceland store just next to Brixton Station (Iceland is another of the grocery chains,this one with a particular focus. And I'll admit now that it took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to understand that focus.  This after I'd had numerous trips to Iceland wherein I'd wander up and down the aisles thinking to myself, "Damn, they have a LOT of frozen food in this place. Weird."  Yep.  Iceland sells... frozen food.  Not one of my shining moments.)  Anyway, the front of the Iceland is a popular spot - usually for guys selling sticks of incense which is smelly and annoying and which I strongly suspect is a thinly-disguised front for drug sales.  The Bible-thumpers tend to hang out a little farther down the street around the same place as the Communists, but when the stars align the steel drummers come out, which is my favourite:

How fun is that?  All they need is some fairy lights and we'd have it all.

Stuff I miss from home

As requested by Karen, a few thoughts about, well, stuff I miss from home.  These are not the big obvious things like family and friends and properly insulated housing, just niggly items that crop up and make me think, “Darn.”

Half & Half: You know, the stuff you put in coffee. Or at least the stuff I put in coffee. Or at least the stuff I used to put in coffee. I love having cream - as opposed to milk - in coffee, but alas over here that love has mostly gone unrequited. I find this odd because the English are particularly good at the whole notion of cream. This is, after all, the home of the cream tea, whose central feature is the scone spread with clotted cream and jam. And the average grocery store is home to a (literally) heart-stopping array of cream products. To wit:

• Single cream (also known as pouring cream), at 18% milk fat
• Double cream, at 48% milk fat (do not ask me about the math there...) 
• Extra thick double cream, also at 48%, but heat-treated to make it so thick it can't be poured and must be spooned and spread over whatever it accompanies (aaaahhhhh!)
• Clotted cream, at an artery-clogging 55% fat, and the proper topper for scones in a traditional cream tea.

They also have the normal range of milk products, but the colours of the cartons are all wrong. You know how skim milk is always in a blue carton? And 2% is in red or pink? Well here blue is whole milk! And skim milk is red! And 2%? Green. Also notice that sour cream is here called soured cream. It’s a parallel universe, I tell ya.

But back to the cream. As I say, I like to have cream in my coffee. Milk just seems a bit sad and stingy, especially the lower fat versions, which turn the coffee a joyless kind of grey colour.  For a while I tried making my own half and half, but it seemed to go off quickly, so I’ve resigned myself to a milk-only existence when it comes to coffee.  Sad.

Robertson Screws:   How is it that the rest of the world hasn’t yet caught on to the brilliance that is the Robertson screw? 

Robertson screwdrivers are easy to use one-handed, because the tapered socket tends to retain the screw, even if it is shaken. They also allow for the use of angled screw drivers and trim head screws. The socket-headed Robertson screws are self-centering, reduce cam out, stop a power tool when set, and can be removed if painted-over or old and rusty. In industry, they speed up production and reduce product damage.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, Wikipedia. Here it’s all Phillips (or the slightly improved Pozidriv, which is simply a Phillips in sheep’s clothing).   If only Peter Lymburmer Robertson had been slightly more open with the licensing rights, the rest of the world could know the pleasure of brandishing a screw gun with a screw secured stuck to the end, ready for action.  Phillips! Bah!

Chocolate Chips, and the cookies thereof:  I’m not saying it’s impossible to get chocolate chips here, but its certainly not as easy as it is at home.  When I decided to bake a batch of banana chocolate chip muffins I took myself off to my local Tesco and spent several fruitless moments scanning the baking section to try and find chocolate chips, to no avail.  I finally flagged down a passing employee who took me to the chocolate chip section, and it quickly became clear why I’d had such trouble finding it.  It’s because chocolate chips come in packages approximately the size of a postage stamp, hence they are extremely well camouflaged on the shelves.  I ended up buying about 4 packs, because they were so ridiculously petite – about half a cup per package.  Half a cup? What am I supposed to do with that? That’s about how many chocolate chips are consumed simply in the testing / measuring out process, before a chip ever graces a batch of batter.  (Or is that just me?)

And chocolate chip cookies also exist, but they seem to be very much in the second tier of cookies.  I’d venture to say that in North America the default cookie is chocolate chip.  Here, I’d venture to say the biggies are: digestives, chocolate covered digestives, custard creams, bourbon creams, and rich tea biscuits (that’s a laugh… if there’s any biscuit on the planet that does NOT deserve the adjective “rich” it’s the rich tea biscuit.  They are the saddest excuse for a treat I have yet encountered – dry, bland, crumbly and beige.  Yet they are sooooo English in their utter modesty.  In North America for something to be called “rich” it would have to be dipped in melted butter and then covered in whipped cream and chocolate sauce.)  But back to good old chocolate chip… trust me when I say chocolate chip cookies would be way down on the list somewhere after Jammie Dodgers. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that “chocolate chip biscuit” just sounds weird.

Seasons: There was a small moment some months ago when I thought to myself, “Oooh, it will be nice when summer gets here.” And then I realized it was JULY.  Summer was here, it was just that the difference between spring and summer is, to be charitable, subtle.  Add to this the fact that it was a notably miserable summer in Britain – the average temperature was 13.6 degrees (sadly, that’s only 0.4 degrees below average).  There were only 10 days when the temperature got above 25 degrees over much of the island, and rainfall was higher than average.  And winter?  It’s not really winter for someone who’s lived for decades on the Canadian prairies.  Temperatures rarely dip below freezing, and snow is a relative rarity (as evidenced by last Christmas’s Heathrow debacle).  So sometimes it’s sorta cold, and sometimes it’s sorta warm, but mostly it’s somewhere in between.  This means that it feels perpetually like spring or fall.  Yes, there have been a few warm days, but the number of times I felt compelled to put on a pair of shorts and sandals can be counted on the fingers of one finger.  And yes, there are chilly days where you might have to scrape frost off a windshield, but your nosehairs are never going to freeze together, you know what I mean?  It’s like the big invisible rhythm of life is muted.  Thank God I don’t live on the equator.  Or in Australia!

Hockey:  First let me clarify for our misguided European readers:

FIELD HOCKEY:



REAL HOCKEY:



(Jeremy take note: I will NEVER concede this point.)
I’ve been a Habs fan since my Dad gave me a jersey for Christmas when I was about umm… seven? Eight?  I’m now on the third iteration of the Habs-jersey-from-Dad-for-Christmas. I think this one was even worn to the Conference final game in 1993 when the Habs went on to win their most recent Stanley Cup.  I also wore it to the riot after they won.  And the parade. And I brought it all the way to London. But I digress…).  Let’s just say that I do miss settling onto the couch on the occasional chilly Saturday evening for a classic Habs vs. Leafs or Habs vs. Bruins match-up.  The play-by-play, Coach’s Corner, the three stars at the end… fantastic.  I’m sure I could watch NHL games on the internet, but it’s really not the same. 

Yeah, I miss watching a bit of hockey.  But what I really miss is playing. I am no Hayley Wickenheiser by any stretch of the imagination.  I wasn’t one of those kids who grew up on skates at the neighbourhood rink.  I’m an adult-onset hockey player and I’ll always be slower to the puck than most.  But I do know that when I started playing ten or twelve years ago it was like I was fulfilling some kind of genetic destiny.  And when I’m skating down the wing on the world’s slowest breakaway I am Guy Lafleur and it’s the Stanley Cup Final and I feel sooooooo… Canadian.  There’s something about the game that’s in my blood I guess, and I miss the sounds and smells of the rink, and the satisfying snap of a perfect pass and the cameraderie and the sweaty, spent feeling of sitting on the bench in the locker room after a game.  Luckily I only miss it when I think about it and because hockey is very much not A THING here I don’t end up thinking about it much.  And due to the aforementioned problem with the unemphatic nature of the seasons over here there is never that moment when you step outside and the air is unmistakably sharp and the first flakes fall and you know it’s time to sharpen the skates and hit the ice.

Hockey does exist here.  I know I mentioned that it turns out there’s a rink down the road, but I haven’t found the time to check it out and I suspect I just won’t, especially with a new job and an extra-long commute eating into my schedule.  So it’s not that there’s no hockey at all, it’s just much more effort to find it.  Where in Canada you simply can’t avoid it, here there are far fewer rinks and hence fewer teams and less ice time.  Also, equipment is harder to find and more expensive.  I may just see if there’s room to bring back my skates when I go home for Christmas.  It would be nice to strap them on again, even if it’s just for a turn around the outdoor rink at Hyde Park.  Then again, maybe not. At £13.50 per hour for tickets I might just have to get my skating fix in Canada!

And I might just have to drive a few Robertson screws while I'm home too.  While I'm having a nice cup of coffee with cream.  And a chocolate chip cookie.

Oh yeah.

The annoyances of London: A whining blog post in 4 acts.

Sometimes London really gets up my nose, you know?  Don’t get me wrong – I love the city and most of the time I feel happy and lucky to live here and all that palaver, but honestly sometimes it’s like the place is out to get you.

Take last Sunday for instance.  I had a lovely invitation from a visiting blog fan Phoebe and her husband John to meet for a stroll around Kew Gardens and a congenial pint.  Never one to turn down a gimme kind of blog topic like Kew and a beer in the bargain, I happily agreed.  I even set the alarm on a Sunday (which is practically criminal) so that I could get out there a bit early, do the guided tour, poke around on my own, have a picnic lunch and some quiet time with the crossword, and generally feel like I’d absorbed enough to be able to blog in my usual semi-coherent seat-of-the-pants fashion. 

And so it was that I set out early on my bike intending to collect a few bits for lunch and then cycle to Vauxhall and get the train from there.  It was a sunny day, and everything seemed right.  Then I got to the Sainsbury’s and encountered…

The Annoyances of London, Act 1 (Inadequate labeling of discount items and the perils of not paying attention):  They have this deal at Sainsbury’s (and Tesco and Marks & Spencer and blah blah blah) where you can get a sandwich, a bag of crisps and a drink for £3.

The £3 Deal, along with the fine print.

It’s a good deal, but because you can only choose certain things as part of the deal I’m forever arriving at the checkout with forbidden crisps or something because the labeling of what is and is not part of the £3 deal is often less-than-obvious.  And so it was that morning.  I ended up at the self check-out and watched everything tally up on the screen and trusted that my discount would be applied at some stage and only when I’d already seen my £5 note sucked into the machine did I realize it hadn’t been.  So I called over an employee to complain and she explained that I’d chosen the wrong kind of bottled drink (of course) and for some reason this aggravated me to the point where I actually made that gritted teeth “grrrrrrrrr” noise and then stomped back to the shelves to discover that the label on the drink I’d chosen was not only NOT for the £3 deal, it was for a 2 for £2 deal, so I’d therefore managed to benefit from neither discount.  I know I should have just considered the whole episode a £1.55 Not Paying Attention Tax, but it just really got under my skin and I left fuming and encountered:

The Annoyances of London, Act 2 (London Weather): Though I’d only been in the stupid Sainsbury’s for approximately 7.5 minutes, by the time I walked out the sky had turned from sunny and promising to completely grey and foreboding.  London weather.  Sigh.

The Annoyances of London, Act 3 (The need for an inconveniently extreme level of bicycle locking): I cycled to Vauxhall Station and managed to get sweaty and uncomfortable en route though it’s really a short, easy ride.  (How is it that I see business men every day on my commute riding bicycles in shirts and ties and looking perfectly cool and comfortable, yet I can’t get from Brixton to Vauxhall without looking like I’ve just completed a mountainous stage of the Tour de France?)  (To clarify: it’s the businessmen wearing the suits and ties, not the bicycles.)  And just getting to the right part of the station was a pain because it’s in the middle of a snarl of roads and rail lines and underpasses and one-ways and crap.  I finally got to the bike locking place under a railway arch (otherwise known as The Scene of the Crime), and commenced to locking up my bike. 

The Scene of the Crime

And here I have to explain something that has gradually become clear about my bike locks: they are a royal pain in the ass.  The first one (astute readers will remember there are two) is one of those rigid u-shaped ones.  I try to use it to lock the frame and front wheel to whatever immovable object I’ve chosen but the particular u-lock I bought seems to be precisely one millimeter too narrow and/or one millimeter too short to be useful in 98% of the locking situations I find myself in.  When I do find some scenario where it actually fits the two pieces have to be aligned so precisely in order to fit together that one wonders whether laser guides and micrometers are meant to be involved.  I’m not kidding, that lock has sometimes brought me close to tears and usually at least causes me to swear out loud.

The second lock is a heavy, enormous chunk of hardened chain covered in a nylon sheath.  It’s much more well-behaved in the locking/unlocking department, and being chain it’s much more flexible.  This lock’s downfall is the black nylon sheath that invisibly collects smudges of chain grease that are then transferred to my hands, face, clothing and belongings every time I handle it.  Every time.

But no matter.  After cursing for several more minutes I got everything secured satisfactorily and walked out of the bike-locking underpass towards the station entrance, sweaty and be-smudged.  Then the doubts started creeping in… I was, after all, leaving my new bike locked up in exactly the same place where the old one had been stolen.  But it was fine, right? I had two new (stupid) fancy (frustrating) expensive (heavy) locks.   Sure, the place was littered with lesser locks that had not withstood the test of Vauxhall Station, but my locks were better than those.  And there were TWO of them, so no worries right?  Then I spied exactly the same chain lock I’d just used on my bike lying forlornly on the pavement, still wrapped around the locking frame but certainly lacking the bike it might once have secured. 

Lonely lock.

F*ck.  So back I went to my bike, undid the stupid, frustrating, heavy, dirty locks, wheeled it out to a more public area, and sweated and cursed one more time until it was all secure again.  Then, and only then, did I proceed into the station for…

The Annoyances of London, Act 4 (The unreliable nature of public transit on weekends): I like Vauxhall Station mostly because it’s small and easy to navigate.  Big stations like Waterloo can have 15 or 20 different platforms and if you don’t get the same train to the same place from the same platform every day, you are required to stand in a huge crowd of people scanning 15 or 20 electronic signs to try and discover which platform your train will be leaving from.  This is further complicated if you’re not going to the terminus point of that train, because then you have to scan every stop listed on each of the 15 or 20 signs to try and spot your station as it scrolls past. 

The information boards at Waterloo

This is complicated even further if you’re not supremely confident of the geography of southern England, since it means you can’t really safely eliminate many trains from contention.  Yes, I know Kew Gardens is not on the way to Edinburgh or Liverpool, but Portsmouth? Sutton? Guildford? Bognor Regis?  I have no idea.  It’s a stupid, frustrating, mostly non-functional system as far as I’m concerned.

That’s why I like Vauxhall; usually I can quickly scan the 3 or 4 signs in the corridor, figure out the right platform, and proceed apace.  Naturally, though, Kew does not appear on any signs at Vauxhall, and being in a somewhat fragile state of mind already I elected to simply ask a helpful employee on which platform one could expect the next train to Kew.  (I usually only have to resort to this tactic when facing the above-mentioned Bognor Regis Conundrum.)  So I waited politely behind someone else who was being served by an elderly gentleman who finished with that query and then proceeded to ignore me so patently that I was actually a bit incredulous.  He kept his head down so he wouldn’t have to acknowledge me and filled his time rooting around in the inside pockets of his jacket rearranging bits of paper in a decidedly leisurely fashion for such a length of time that you’d think he was employing the Dewey Decimal System.  I stood there for a long, awkward, annoyed moment, and then gave up and turned to his colleague who promptly told me that there was no train to Kew and I’d have to go to Barnes and get a bus from there.  “What? Is that normal? Or is that just today?” I said.  “Oh no, it’s just today.”  Of course.  And I’m honestly not exaggerating when I say this almost made me cry.  Yeah sure this sounds extreme, but keep in mind that my day had started out like an English Tourism brochure and in the space of about 25 minutes had degenerated into a sweaty, anxious, grease-smudged, increasingly time-sensitive blur.

Vauxhall Station, looking deceptively innocent

So my choices were to get the train to Barnes and then get on the Rail Replacement Bus Service (four of the saddest words a train lover can hear) or give up on the train and get the tube, which would be slower and more annoying, but not as annoying as the bus.  The trouble was I’d already tapped my Oyster card at the gate to enter the train station, and if I left I’d be charged.  So I had to go downstairs to the ticket office to get my fare refunded, and then escaped to the tube, thus negating the whole point of riding my bike to Vauxhall in the first place since it would have been simpler to just get the tube from Brixton if I’d known there was no train, thus eliminating all of the stupid, sweaty anxious, grease-smudged bike locking episodes, and the utterly unsatisfying interaction with Mr. Paper-Shuffling-If-I-Don’t-See-You-You’re-Not-There.

So do you see what I mean about how London can sometimes really wind you up?  Luckily, by the time I actually got on the tube train things calmed down considerably, and I cooled off.  And Kew Gardens was quite nice, and Phoebe and John were lovely, and the sun even came out (eventually).  But now you have to wait until next week to hear about that, because after wading through 1,700 words worth of ranting and whining, you and I both deserve a break.



(Oh, except for this: I GOT A NEW JOB.  Yes, I know I only just got the job I’m in, but that was always likely to be short term, and this new new job is kind of a big deal and kind of the thing I came over here in the hopes of doing, so I’m kind of totally excited.  What’s the job?  Well, let’s just say there’s a certain major sporting event coming to town next summer, and there will be a little show or two involved in the opening and closing celebrations of said sporting event.  And I’m going to have a tiny part in putting those shows together.  And really, how cool is that?)

(And to answer your questions before you ask: No, I can’t get you tickets to the 100m Final, or the Beach Volleyball, or even the ceremonies themselves.  And no, I can’t tell you anything about the show.  There will, in fact, be a non-disclosure agreement, so just don’t bother.)

(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

The Tube

Today I've decided to spend a bit of time delving into something that's a central feature of life for many Londoners: the Tube. Or, to be more correct, the London Underground. 

My Tube station – Brixton – proudly displaying an enormous version of the London Underground roundel (the big red circle), the instantly recognizable symbol of the Tube.  This picture was taken on a rainy Friday morning from the top of a double-decker bus.  (The Tube, a double-decker bus, and rain.  It’s a London trifecta.)

First things first, let's talk about pronunciation, and this is a bit subtle.  I know it looks like it should be pronounced “toob” like it rhymes with “lube”, but this is not correct.  The correct pronunciation is “tyoob”.  There’s a crucial “y” sound in there that should not be omitted.  When in haste, or if you want to sound a bit South London (pronounced “Sarf London”), you are allowed to say “choob”.  Those are your choices: “tyoob” (when speaking the Queen’s English) or “choob” (when pretending you are Jamie Oliver).  What it most definitely is NOT is a subway.  A subway is an underground pedestrian tunnel.  Access to the Tube is often via a subway, but the thing itself is the Tube.  (It’s also not a Metro, in case you were wondering.)  The Tube is also capitalised, presumably to differentiate it from all other random, unimportant bits of hollow roundness.

The London Underground is the world’s oldest underground railway system, with the first lines opened in 1863. (1863!  That’s before Canada was even Canada!)  It currently operates 260 different stations over 11 lines and has 250 miles of track, making it the second largest in the world, after Shanghai.  The Tube serves approximately 3.4 million people on an average weekday, hence it’s difficult to overstate the importance of system to London, though anyone who has lived through a Tube strike has some idea.  I’ve been through two Tube strikes in the last year.  Luckily, buses normally keep running but they get so overburdened, and traffic is so much worse that they also almost grind to a halt.  The best options are bike, foot, or staying put.

When the Tube is running, though, it’s a remarkably efficient way of getting around the city.   It may seem a  bit daunting but really, it’s all quite straightforward if you familiarise yourself with a few basics: (Mom, I’m talking to you.)

Tube Basic #1: The Tube Map
The first requirement for getting around on the Tube is the Tube map, which has become rightly famous as an icon of design since it was first devised by Henry Beck in 1931.  Maps of the system existed before that time, but they often didn’t show the whole system, because the scale of the more far-flung stations made the centre areas too small to read.

1908 Tube Map

Beck’s genius was to realize that when travelling underground, passengers didn’t need stations to appear in the correct geographical positions as long as the lines and interchanges showed the correct relationships.  He spaced the stations evenly along each line and restricted the lines (including the River Thames) so they only run horizontally, vertically, or at 45 degrees.  Hence, the modern tube map was born, a portion of which today looks like this:

Centre section of the current tube map, not including Brixton, which is two stops past Vauxhall (bottom centre), on the pleasingly light blue Victoria Line.

Because of Beck’s lack-of-scale, the modern tube map can be a bit misleading.  For instance, on the map the distance between Covent Garden and Leicester Square looks the same as the distance between Hatton Cross and Heathrow Terminal 1, which is certainly not the case.  Covent Garden is a pleasant 400m stroll from Leicester Square.  Walking to Heathrow from Hatton Cross would be a dreary three mile slog and is therefore not recommended, especially if you’ve got a plane to catch.  Despite these limitations, Beck’s essential concept of the tube map has been copied by most similar transport systems around the world and is also one of my Favourite Things (if only because of this). 

Tube Basic #2: The Oyster Card
Tube fares can be not cheap.  The fare system is divided into zones 1 through 6, with 1 being the most central and 6 being approximately at the outskirts of Glasgow.  A single ticket to travel within Zone 1 and 2 will cost £4.00 if you’re paying cash, which is nothing short of highway robbery.  What you need to prevent this thievery, even if you’ll only be in London for a few days, is an Oyster Card. 

My Oyster Card, displayed along with the current paper wallet, which is themed exactly how you think it’s themed.

The Oyster Card is a contactless, re-loadable card that allows access to all London Underground, buses, proper mainline trains within London, and a variety of other odd offshoots like the Croydon Tramlink, the Docklands Light Railway and some riverboat services.  You can charge the card with pay-as-you-go credit, or a weekly or monthly pass, or a combination of both.  You touch it to a card reader when you enter the system, and you touch again to leave, and credit is automatically deducted.  The big advantage (other than convenience) is that the same £4.00 fare I quote you above will only cost £1.90 if you’re not traveling during a peak period. Like I said, those cash fares are highway robbery.  Get an Oyster Card!  In fact, if you’re coming over, let me know and I’ll get one for you. They are mandatory.

Tube Basic #3: The Escalator Rule
When using an escalator on the Tube (and there are a LOT of escalators involved) the rule is: Stand on the right, walk on the left.  This means that if you’re just going to stand like a lump and let the escalator do the work you must park your lumpish self on the right hand side.  People who wish to climb up or down while the escalator is in motion do so on the left.  Therefore if you’re lumpishly blocking the left hand side you can expect to hear an almost inaudible “Harumph” from someone trying to pass by, which could escalate (ha!) to a pointed “Excuse me please” if you don’t get the hint.

The escalators at Angel Station (Northern Line), which purport to be the longest in Europe. 

Tube Basic #4: Mind the gap
Anyone who’s travelled on the Tube is aware of the infamous GAP.  The gap in question is the distance between the train and the platform, which, due the the curved nature of some platforms vs. the faceted nature of tube trains, can be significant at some stations.  Public address announcements exhort everyone within range to “Mind the gap” with such regularity that the phrase itself has become a bit of a joke. 



I say it’s a bit of a joke but some random bit of Tube trivia I read somewhere said that there were 87 gap-related accidents on the Tube last year.  Even that didn’t really sink in for me until last week when a colleague at work actually HAD a gap accident wherein he was jostled at the door to the train and ended up putting his foot down the gap and, I think, sank up to about the knee, and sort of got stuck, and needed medical attention.  He ending up taking the day off work and came back with the knee in some kind of brace only to find that the guy across from him had thoughtfully recreated the “Mind the gap” warning in white tape on the floor beside his desk.  It’s good advice, really. (Other good advice: Don’t share an office with a smart-ass Norwegian who has too much time on his hands.)

Now that you’re all up on the Tube Basics, let’s get on with something even more London-ish than the Tube, and that is: moaning about the Tube.  Londoners, like all English, love a good moan, and moaning about the Tube is pretty much an official subcategory of moan.  You can moan about the trains being slow, or overcrowded, or hot, or not running at all.  You can also moan about unplanned delays, which are usually explained on the public address system like this: “Due to passenger action at Farringdon, trains are delayed by approximately 3 minutes.” (That’s usually someone blocking the closing doors while trying to get on.) More cringe-inducing is the announcement “We are currently experiencing significant delays on the Victoria and Piccadilly lines due to a person under a train at Finsbury Park.” Luckily, that’s not one you hear every day.

A Bakerloo line train, looking uncharacteristically bright and pleasant, mostly because it’s on a bit of track that’s not underground.  Only 45% of the track is in tunnels, but it’s the bit in the middle where most of the traffic is.  As the lines get farther out, they move above ground.

Because the system is 148 years old, and because the rolling stock comes in about 47 different types and sizes, the maintenance and upgrading of the system is a more-than-full-time job.  With the Olympics coming in less than a year, London Underground have been pouring on the hours to try to get the system into better shape.  This means that every weekend huge chunks of the Underground get closed down completely (oh, the moaning!).  I get an email from the good folks at Transport for London every Thursday detailing every line and station affected and this week alone there are disruptions on 8 of 11 lines.  Often whole lines are closed down, which can be a bit of a nightmare.  But it can also be the source of amusement, as evidenced by @haikunewsuk, a twitter feed I follow that tweets topical, funny news in haiku form:

What’s long, thin and blue
And stops working most evenings?
Victoria Line

Yes, the Tube can be a source of frustration, but during the Blitz in WWII, it was an important lifeline.  Because the deeper stations are really very very deep (a maximum of 221 feet at Hampstead, but in central London about 135 feet) people instinctively flocked to them as ad hoc air raid shelters.  At first officials discouraged this, but later they capitulated due to public pressure (and the fact that thousands of Londoners were doing it anyways).  The system became formalised and authorities eventually provided 22,000 bunks, and latrines and catering facilities.  There were even libraries and night classes at some stations.  Eventually, more than 170,000 people were sheltered in Tube stations and tunnels during the war.

A Tube line inhabited by Londoners who’ve actually set up light housekeeping on the tracks themselves.  One can only assume the power was cut off… (There was a recreation of the whole Tube Air Raid Shelter experience last fall in a disused Tube Station at Aldwych which sounded very cool and which I naturally did not attend because I suck.)

Despite the depth of the stations, some direct hits did result in fatalities at Marble Arch and Balham.  By far the worst disaster, though, was at Bethnal Green, where a crowd of 1,500 attempting to gain access to the shelter panicked on the stairs causing someone to trip and fall on top of the next person, while the crowd continued to push. Before the downward motion could be stopped, 173 people were crushed to death.  It was the largest single civilian loss of life during the war.

And on that cheery note, let’s wrap this up.  I’m cycling to work these days (the Double Lock System is holding so far) and when I don’t go by bike I take the bus, so I don’t spend much time on the Tube anymore.  Back when I was commuting from Arsenal I used to crush onto a Piccadilly line train every morning, and change at King’s Cross, and then crush onto a Northern Line train, and then get a bus.  It was all a bit much at 7am (and was immeasurably worse at 8:00…). The Tube may be efficient, but using it during rush hour requires a sort of stoicism that I’m happy to leave to others.  But you should totally take the Tube when you come to London because despite the occasional moment when you're stuck with your nose in someone else's armpit, it really is a remarkable service.  Just remember to MIND THE GAP.

The Crossword

(Insert standard excuses/apologies for lack of bloggage here.  Long hours at work, lack of inspiration, general indifference, mea culpa, blah blah blah.  Moving on…)

It's a rainy Saturday afternoon, so what better time to settle down with a fresh crossword puzzle?  Failing that, how about a blog all about the crossword?  Or to be more specific: the Daily Telegraph Cryptic Crossword, which is not to be confused with the Daily Telegraph Quick Crossword, or the Telegraph Toughie (or the Times Crossword, or the Sunday Times Crossword, or The Guardian crossword, or, well, you get the idea.  This is a nation that loves its newspapers, and every paper has at least one crossword).  I first encountered the Telegraph crossword while on my trip around the world, and since moving to the home of said newspaper have become a daily consumer of said puzzle.  (Let's leave aside for the moment the awkwardness of being a regular consumer of a newspaper whose political bent is decidedly more right-leaning than my own.  Left to follow my own inclinations I suspect I'd be a Guardian reader.  As it is I feel a bit like those men who read Playboy "for the articles".  Honestly, I only buy it for the crossword!)

Thanks to the determined efforts of my Crossword Coach Patrick - he who introduced me to the pleasure and pain of the cryptic crossword and schooled me in its intricacies - I've reached a level of crosswording proficiency that means that every day there is an admittedly small but still existent chance that I might actually be able to finish the whole puzzle. (Note: It only counts when you fill in the whole grid correctly, without help from any person or website, on the day of publication.)  I've actually managed this feat a grand total of THREE times in my life.

Coach Patrick, puzzling

For those not familiar with cryptic crosswords, they are similar to their more mundane cousins - the ones where the clues are perfectly straightforward variations on something like "Capital of Peru (4)" (LIMA).  However, with cryptic crosswords each clue is a word puzzle in itself, as opposed to a simple definition.  As Wikipedia puts it:

In essence, a cryptic clue leads to its answer as long as it is read in the right way. What the clue appears to say when read normally (the surface reading) is a distraction and usually has nothing to do with the clue answer. The challenge is to find the way of reading the clue that leads to the solution.

There are several types of cryptic clue, one if which is commonly called the  "double definition"' and is an easy way of illustrating the kind of wordplay that's involved in cryptic clues. Take this simple one for example:

"Attempt rugby score (3)" (The number in parentheses indicates how many letters are in the answer)

Naturally, the answer is TRY.  To attempt is to try, and a try is major scoring play in rugby, similar to a touchdown in (American/Canadian) football.  See how that works?  Easy peasy. Or not. Because cryptics are a mostly British invention they often require knowledge of particularly British things like rugby, or the names of the different positions in cricket, or British slang, or local geography, or nicknames of (English) football teams, or obscure Northern Irish politicians, and so on.  It can be tricky work for a colonial like me.

In addition to the "double definition", cryptic clues can also feature hidden words like this:

"Mad ogler harbours rover (3)"

Here the answer is DOG.  No, really.  The word "harbours" is a clue that we're dealing with a hidden word.  "Ma(D OG)ler" is harbouring the word DOG, which is defined by "rover".  Clear as mud, right?

My favourite type of clue is an anagram, where the letters in one part of the clue are meant to be rearranged into a new word or words that are defined by the other part of the clue.  Anagram clues always include the definition you're after, the letters to be anagrammed, and some indication that things are to be muddled about.  A basic anagram clue would be something like this:

"Stain spoiled fabric (5)"

By "spoiling" (rearranging the letters in) stain, we get a fabric: SATIN.  "Fabric" is the definition, "stain" is the anagram, "spoiled" is the indication of anagram. Tic tac toe, it all hangs together.

There are many forms of cryptic clues - reversals, odd/evens, charades, homophones, containers, initialisms, deletions, abbreviations, and even devious combinations of several forms in one clue.  If you're really that interested, look 'em up yourself.  Or better yet, find yourself an experienced cryptic crossworder and get them to take you through a few clues.  That's how I was lucky enough to learn.  Once you're up to speed you can dive in with my whole daily ritual.  The correct procedure for doing a Daily Telegraph crossword, refined to the point of OCD since my arrival in London, is as follows:

1. Stop at local newsagent on the way to work and purchase Daily Telegraph for £1.00. (Or, if you are lucky enough to have a housemate who works in a media-related job with access to many editions of many newspapers every day, and who works nights, and who often ends up arriving home with an armload of fresh papers just as you are leaving, simply take the Daily Telegraph that's been thoughtfully deposited on the kitchen table, likely alongside The Guardian and The Independent. That is, if you're lucky.)
2. If taking the bus or tube, proceed to bus stop or tube station. While waiting for bus/tube to arrive, remove the useless Business Section and discard in an appropriate recycling bin. The Business Section is like one's appendix - largely unnecessary, and to be excised if even slightly irksome.
3. Glance briefly at front page, and then turn over the whole section to reveal the crosswords on the back. Carefully fold back the top of the paper, just above the mid-point.  Then fold the right side under the left side, leaving the pristine crossword perfectly positioned for puzzling. At this stage you can also examine the quality of the "working out" side of the paper, which is the section of ads opposite the puzzle.  Good ads contain lots of empty, light-coloured space for noodling about with anagrams and potential answers.  Bad ones have large dark areas or cram in lots of stuff and leave no proper working out space.
   
   The WORST ad for working out space, which appears with dismaying regularity.  Honestly, there's barely room for a four-letter anagram in there, and besides that it's a particularly poorly designed and ugly offering.  (Dear HSL Chairs: Please reconsider your advertising strategy.  Yours peevishly, Pam. )
   
4. Count the total number of clues in the puzzle, which will generally be between 28 and 32.  Write the total, surrounded by a small box, in the bottom right hand corner of the space under the puzzle grid.  This is your goal.
5. Scan the clues for multi-word answers and add appropriate marks to indicate same on the puzzle grid.  Grumble slightly if there are no multi-word answers, since they seem to be slightly easier to figure out..
6. Start with 1 Across, and proceed from there.  (Getting 1 Across right away is a good omen.)  When you get an answer fill in the grid in capital letters.  Make a small dot next to the completed clue in the list, and make a tick mark under the puzzle to keep a running tally of the total number of clues completed. The correct method is to use pen; use of "The Pencil of Shame" is a breach of crossword honour, as declared by Patrick the Crossword Coach.
7. When you have completed half the clues, honour is satisfied (according to Patrick). Pause for a brief moment of satisfaction, and note the time at which this milestone was achieved in the area below the puzzle.
   
   A properly annotated crossword in progress
8. Take breaks.  Progress often comes in fits and starts, so be prepared for long dry spells.  It's usually best to set the puzzle aside every once in a while so you can come back to it with fresh eyes.  A few hours away allows a sort of gestation time which often means you can come back to a clue that previously seemed utterly impenetrable and is suddenly glaringly obvious.  This is one of the joyful/maddening things about the cryptic crossword.  The "Time Away Factor" is also handy if you happen to be saddled with something so inconvenient as a full time job, or the need to buy groceries, or do laundry, or bathe, or sleep.
9. Carry on until one of these things happens:

• You finish! In which case note the time of finishing, add exclamation points if desired, do a little dance, send a tweet, and generally feel smug.



The first puzzle I ever completed all by myself, on October 21, 2010, finished at the astonishingly early hour of 11:20am. (Yes, there's Liquid Paper at 18 Across, but that's what happens sometimes when you eschew The Pencil of Shame.  There is no disgrace in the Liquid Paper of Reconsidered Cleverness.)

• You get fed up, the hour is late, and decide you need a bit of help.  Just on ONE clue, mind, and just a HINT.  In which case, you go to Big Dave's Crossword Blog, a brilliant site that gives hints (and cleverly hidden answers) for both of the Telegraph cryptic puzzles every day. The beauty of Big Dave is that he gives hints in a way that usually makes it easy to figure out the answer, but is just slightly less than cheating.  He also explains the logic behind the clue, which is highly instructive.
• You go home and leave the unfinished puzzle on the kitchen table, from whence it will be taken up by your newspaper-fetching housemate who is making dinner in preparation for leaving for work that night, and who will glance briefly at the unfinished clues while chopping onions or mashing spuds, and will fill in at least half of them without breaking a sweat, or even pausing politely.

So what is it that I like about the crossword?  You might have gleaned from the slightly obsessive routine noted above that I like the ritual of the thing - folding back a fresh paper, counting up, diving in.  And even though I'm a huge consumer of technology and a confessed gadget freak, I like that it's a physical chunk of newsprint, and a real ballpoint pen. (A Space Pen, if course.  I could do the crossword underwater, upside down, or in the vacuum of space!) I also like the challenge, and the fact that because you can tackle each clue from a couple of different angles, in some ways it’s easier than a conventional crossword.  I mean if you don’t know the capital of Peru, you just don’t know.  But if the clue also mentions something about chalky horrible little beans, or is, perhaps: “Capital initially looms in meal abhorred (4)”, well you’ve got a fighting chance, right?  Also, it makes me feel kind of cozy to be sitting on a train, or a double decker bus, or at a cafe along the Thames with a Daily Telegraph crossword.  And yes, there is a sense of superiority to feel that I'm bending my mind to that somewhat esoteric task instead of zoning out to an iPod.  

The crossword has also been a catalyst in a few rewarding social moments. For instance, it's been my habit to arrive a bit early at hash runs when I can.  This leaves a moment to relax in the pub before the run starts, and allows some excellent crossword puzzling time.  This fall at the Green Man pub in Putney I ended up striking up a conversation with a guy standing at the bar who had just started working on the day's Telegraph puzzle.  We ended up chatting for much of the evening and finished the puzzle together.  He's now in my cell phone under the name "Dave Telegraph Crossword Green Man", and we spent a pleasant while texting back and forth in the suceeding weeks with messages like "Do you have 15a?" and "How did I NOT get 29d?" and such.  It was a nice thing. (I should really get in touch with Dave again.  I wonder if he got 16 Across today...)
 
More importantly, when I first came to visit the happy house in Brixton to meet its inhabitants and allow them to determine if I might be a suitable housemate I was careful to take the crossword puzzle with me.  I thought, "I want these people to know that I am the kind of person who does the cryptic crossword.  Or at least the kind of person who ATTEMPTS the cryptic crossword."  It turns out this was a good move because I think casually displaying the crossword, and professing modest Scrabble skills, were a couple of the things that put me over the top, allowing me to move into the place I now call home, which has been one of the most consistently happy things about my life in London.

So thank you Patrick, for giving me the Daily Telegraph Crossword. I owe you a drink.

And finally, of course:
"Oy! Walk past vile, gory, confused website (2,4,4,4,4)"
 

P.S. Anyone who can't unravel this elementary clue is not allowed to read the blog anymore.

Apropos of nothing

This is a catch-all posts that lets me cross a few items off my “Blog About This” list.  These are small things I’ve noticed that are odd or interesting or annoying, but also things that even I can’t churn out a whole blog post about.  So let’s launch another new tag for the sidebar and dive in.

On the Dickensian nature of locks and keys:

When I started work way back last September, I was issued a set of keys.  These are my keys:


I’m not kidding.  I have three skeleton keys on my ring for work (and one that goes with my keys for home).  These are not ancient keys passed down for generations that fit locks installed sometime when Victoria was still on the throne.  These are keys that were freshly cut for me, to open recently-manufactured locks installed in normal, modern doors.  And no one finds this strange.  I have certainly encountered more familiar keys, but they are no more common than this crazy Ebenezer Scrooge variety.

And padlocks? Many of them are equally charming / baffling / annoying.   Yes, you can get the kind of padlocks we North Americans are all familiar with: a heavy-duty rectangular body with the spring-loaded u-shaped thingy that pops up and open when you turn the key and can be snapped shut even if there’s no key present.  However, a significant percentage of the padlocks I’ve encountered over here have been like this:


First you have to slide over the little flap to reveal a big keyhole-shaped keyhole.  Then you insert a skeleton key which always fits very loosely and requires much wiggling to settle in properly.  Then you turn - which direction is anyone’s guess.  If you’ve chosen the right direction, the main bit flops away from the u-shaped bit in an unenthusiastic way that clearly indicates nothing as advanced as a spring is involved.  To close the lock you have to hold the whole thing shut with one hand, shove aside the little flap, insert the key again, wiggle wiggle wiggle, turn, no no turn the OTHER way, no no keep the thing held shut WHILE you’re turning, no no no… the OTHER OTHER way… and so on.  I mean honestly, what am I , Bob Cratchit?  The next thing you know I’ll be having to ask for an extra shovel-full of coal to make a spark of heat while I scratch away with my quill pen…


On the impenetrable nature of oven dial labeling:

So if locks and keys are so Olde Worlde then why is the oven so complicated that I – a reasonably experience home cook – have absolutely no idea how to turn it on in any kind of predictable way? I mean what am I to make of this?:


It seems that these symbols indicate different combinations of top element, fan, and bottom element.  So how come when I turn it to top bar – empty space – bottom bar, I can still hear a fan?  Is the fan always on?  Does that mean when you turn it to top bar – asterisk – bottom bar, the fan goes on more?  And if top bar – asterisk – bottom bar is the equivalent of “all engines on full” why does it take 30 or 40 minutes to cook a lousy frozen pizza when the same process took about 16 minutes in my primitive Winnipeg-based oven that only had a temperature dial?

And what about all those other symbols? Like that one at about one o’clock on the dial: “European Union Symbol Surrounding Black Snowflake”.  Maybe it’s a setting for producing EU-compliant licorice-flavoured Baked Alaska?  Then there’s the one at about 2:30 that looks a bit like a Tim Hortons sour cream glazed donut - that could be promising.  But what about five o’clock, that when rotated into the active position at the top of the dial appears to be tiny triangles suspended over, or perhaps falling into the symbol for the fan?  Huh?  I’m sure there was once a manual for the device that explained all these hieroglyphics, but it departed the house long before I arrived, so all I ever do is turn the thing to the setting I think of as “Full Whack” and hope for the best.
 
Oh, and it’s not even called the oven here, it’s called the cooker.  And it’s not topped with a stove, or even a range.  The bit on top with the burners? That’s the hob.

(Interesting cooker-related side note: Over here “grill” means “apply intense heat from above”, not “cook over an open flame / BBQ-like thing or otherwise apply intense heat from below".  Grilling something here means putting it under the grill, which is the top element in the oven – what we’d call the broiler.  So a grilled cheese sandwich doesn’t exist here, or at least not as we know it.)


On the parallel universe nature of stationery products:

Standard loose paper over here is not 8-1/2” x 11”.  It’s A4.  In fact, much of the rest of the world except North America uses the A(something) system for paper sizes (technically called the International paper size standard ISO 216, and “based on a single aspect ratio of the square root of 2”…whatever…).  A4 is slightly taller and slightly narrower than 8-1/2” x 11”, which seemed weird at first but now feels totally normal.  Now when I encounter a rare letter-sized sheet it seems oddly squat.

And you know the bog-standard three-ring binder?  No such thing over here.  Binders here have two rings, or sometimes four, but never three. 

And Liquid Paper is called Tipp-ex.  But just like Liquid Paper, it’s become a generic noun and a verb too.  At home, you liquid paper a mistake. Here, you tippex it.

And a ballpoint pen is a biro (“BUY-roe”).

And scotch tape is sellotape.

It’s like the whole universe of stationery in North American and UK  diverged very very slightly a hundred years ago, resulting in a completely familiar yet subtley different parallel system.  I mean it’s not like we’re writing with syringes of squid ink on 3D spherical pages bound into concentric onion-layered note-globes and housed in giant filing vaults shaped like gumball machines.  The differences are subtle but noticeable.


On the magical nature of the Belisha Beacon:

A Belisha Beacon (“buh-LEE-shuh”) is a particular type of pedestrian crossing marked by tall black-and-white striped poles topped with flashing yellow globes.  They’re named after Leslie Hore-Belisha, who introduced them in 1934 as Minister of Transport.  Belisha Beacons are the ultimate in road crossings because they require no action on the part of the pedestrian.  You don’t have to wait for a light or push a button or anything; they’re always on and the lights are always flashing.  All you do is step out into the street and any vehicles are required to stop.  And amazingly, they pretty much always do. 

Here is a rare triple-barreled Belisha Beacon in my old Arsenal stomping grounds.  Three crossings, meeting at a centre island.  Watch how the car just automatically stops for the guy!

Magic!

I might write more about pedestrian crossings in general some time, if only because there are so many different kinds and they have the BEST names: zebra crossing, pelican crossing, penguin crossing - even toucan and pegasus crossings. (Apparently it’s a zoo out there.)

Oh, and you know how traffic lights at home start green, then go yellow, then red, then back to green?  Here, they start green, then go yellow, then red, then yellow again, then back to green.  This gives drivers stopped at a red light the chance to rev up and get primed for the green light, so as to save precious nanoseconds on start-up (as opposed to North American drivers, who have to watch the lights in the other direction to achieve the same goal).


And finally, apropos of kind of everything:


On the nature of life in general as related to This Time Last Year:

On this day last year, May 31, 2010, I boarded a plane in San Francisco and flew home to Winnipeg after being away for 351 days and circumnavigating the globe.  An entire year has passed since my big trip ended and just like that year I can’t believe how quickly this one has gone by.  In some ways I feel like I’ve done so much less this year.  I mean I haven’t ridden an elephant in the last twelve months, or run on the Great Wall of China, or even spent the night wandering the Duty Free shopping concourse of the Dubai Airport.  I’m such a slacker.

Then again I have managed to set myself up in a completely new country, starting from scratch.  I came over nine months ago with a small-ish wheelie suitcase and a resume full of Canadian experience and Canadian references.  Now I’ve got a room full of stuff, and a proper full-time job in my chosen field, and real professional contacts that I’ve earned, and friends and routines and running routes and favourite tv shows and a working knowledge of the London bus system.  It’s all not nearly as exotic as an elephant ride, but it’s much more real, and more meaningful.  And when I think about it, I’m quietly proud of how far I’ve come.

Now what about next year?