The Lambeth Country Show

It's a gorgeous July day as I write this - warm but not too hot, and the sun is shining, and it's pretty much perfect.  Unfortunately, today is NOT the day of the Lambeth Country Show.  The Lambeth Country Show was last Saturday and Sunday, when the weather was like this:

 Great for a nice day out in the park...

Despite the fact that the skies alternated between long stretches of ominous threateningness, brief moments of tantalising sun, and short, frequent and violent episodes of absolutely CHUCKING it down, I still ventured out on Sunday to see what it was all about.  After all, it was just in Brockwell Park which is a mere hop from home, and I'd been walking past the poster near the Tesco since about February, so I thought I really ought to make an effort. (It had a duck on it!  The poster, that is.  Not the Tesco.)

The Lambeth Country Show is sort of an odd thing.  Apparently it started life as a simple village flower show, but  it expanded in 1974 and now it's still got the horticultural portion, but it’s also part rural fair, complete with livestock showing and best orange marmalade competitions and such, and part music festival, including a couple of live music stages, and part food festival (oh, the food…), and part amusement park, and part community gathering place and part, I dunno, everything.  I'm not sure how a little flower show grew to become a huge annual fair in the middle of Brixton, but I think it definitely qualifies as "off the tourist track". After all, how many tourists are going to travel to the end of the Victoria line to ride bumper cars (here called "Dodge'Ems”), view champion beetroot, and either pet a goat, or eat goat.  Or both.  In fact, you could probably have taken your plate of curried goat over to the goat pen, which would have been weird. Like munching a sausage roll while visiting the heirloom pigs (which you could also have done).

I wandered over after waiting out a particularly vicious spell of rain from the comfort of the couch, and then spent most of my time just wandering and waiting to work up an appetite.  I happened on the food stalls first, and there were ZILLIONS of them.  Here's a partial list of what was on offer that day: cookies, curried goat, malt drink, jerked chicken, real ale, salt beef on a bagel, roti, onion baji, popcorn, cupcakes, cheese, jerked chicken, cakes of all kinds, pizza, calzone, Guyanese cuisine, Pimm’s, noodles, sausages, strawberries and cream, strawberry tarts, jerked chicken, paella, whole roast hog, ice cream, toasties, champagne, fresh-squeezed juice, coffee, burgers, jerked chicken, fudge, cider, chips (of course), tagine, crepes, and jerked chicken. (It is Brixton, after all, the the Carribbean influence is dominant.  And there really were a LOT of jerked chicken stalls.)

So you can see why I needed an appetite.  Eventually, after an appropriate amount of wandering, I opted for a slice of pizza, and a stick of liquorice.  Oh, and how could I NOT have one of these?

Two GIANT chocolate chip cookies, sandwiched together with an obscene amount of vanilla icing.

I also hit the fun fair, which was a pretty typical offering.  I've seen this kind of thing in Brockwell Park a few times before - a fairly standard mix of spinning, twisting, hurling, flinging, bumping sort of devices for inducing nausea, along with a liberal sprinkling of impossible-to-win game stalls filled with equally impossibly large stuffed toys.  Still, there is something charming about encountering this kind of travelling fair in a large green space instead of in a shopping mall parking lot, which is where you'd normally encounter that type of outfit in Canada.  I makes the whole thing seems more festive and less pathetic.

A long shot of the fun fair.  And check out that sky. I told you the weather did not cooperate!

And a lovely Horsey-Up-And-Down.  (Or at least that's what they SHOULD be called according to the lovely and talented CB.)

The more country-ish bits of the show were particularly charming.  I liked seeing the rows of tables showing the entries in the baking competitions, and the vegetable growing competitions.  The winner of the cupcake decorating contest was a favourite:

 Monster cupcakes!

And the vegetable carving competition was also fantastic:

Cauliflower and eggplant poodle

Warty squash crocodile

The livestock tents had petting areas for little kids, and a show ring where people nattered endlessly about the charms of artisanal swine and demonstrated sheep-shearing and gave pony rides and other such rural delights.  The pigs were actually quite nice, and it was a bit like seeing "Babe" live.

 See? Cute!

I also really enjoyed the Owl Tent, where they had at least a dozen birds calmly sitting on perches (tied down, of course).  You could pay £2 to have an owl sit on your arm, which seemed very popular and allowed great close up photo opportunities if you happened to be standing right next to a young person sporting an owl.  Very Hogwarts.

Look!  It’s Pidwidgeon! 

The music stages were less interesting to me, as they generally seeming to be equipped with a sort of generic reggae kind of thing most of the time.  Perhaps I’ve just been overexposed since moving to Brixton, but I quickly grow weary of the stereotypical Rasta-Mon vibe that seems to accompany any gathering of more than 15 or 20 people in this area.  (Though the steel drum band that sets up outside Brixton tube station every once in a while is a cheery change from the mega-phone sporting evangelists who are there most of the time but have yet to succeed in saving me from eternal damnation.)

There were also some more activity-based areas, including the mandatory climbing wall, and I found these people!

The Streatham Chiefs 

It turns out that just half an hour’s bus ride up the road from me is Streatham Ice Rink, home to the Streatham Chief’s men’s team AND the Streatham Storm, London’s only female hockey team.  And here I’m talking about proper  hockey, played on skates and ice, and not the infinitely inferior, sad British variety which is played on a field and requires far too much running, employs annoyingly short, oddly curved sticks, and seems to be mostly about bashing other players in the shins.  Nope, there is genuine hockey within striking distance, which was an exciting enough discovery to have made the whole sodden trip through the Lambeth Country Show worthwhile, even without the enormous chocolate chip cookie.  I might just have to get my skates sent over…

And that was the Lambeth Country Show.  Other than that it’s been a relatively quiet week, but for one overly exciting bike trip home from work last Tuesday, which was really much, much more exciting than called for.  As my friend P put it, “How the Hell do you get run over twice in one go?”  To clarify, I didn’t actually get run over at all (I’m fine Mom!).  But I did end up on the pavement twice, and once there was a moment of airborne acrobatics, and my bike’s rear derailleur and hanger is now at a jaunty and less-than-perfectly-functional angle. 

What happened was this: I was riding home having just left work, travelling on a very quiet street parallel with Waterloo Road.  As I was going south a car approached going north and, to my great surprise, decided to turn right as if he hadn’t even seen I was there (which of course he hadn’t).  I executed a very last minute braking maneuver and was silently congratulating myself on stopping just before hitting his front bumper, thus preventing my bike’s front wheel from being turned into a Pringles potato chip, when I realized that while my bike may have stopped moving forward, I had not.  I was continuing to accelerate, which vaulted me off my bike and over the front right-hand side of the car’s hood.  I’m not exactly sure what kind of move I did in the air, but I ended up landing on my butt, just outside the driver’s door.  Luckily, that’s one of the more well-padded bits of my anatomy, and even as I landed I was thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe I’m ok” (And yes, I do wear a helmet.  I’m not stupid.)

The driver got out with a stream of “I’m so sorry"s and “Are you all right?”s and “I didn’t see you”s and “I thought it was a dead end road”s and more “Are you sure you’re all right?”s.  Then he helped me get the chain back on my bike, and apologized some more.  I was just interested in getting home at that point; the bike seemed fine, I was in one piece, and I just wanted it over.  So off I rode, only to realize that the bike wasn’t really fine, since it made awful grinding clunking noises whenever I tried to shift into any gear lower than four.  And it turns out I wasn’t really fine either.  As you might expect I was actually bit shaky and pumped up on adrenalin.  This meant that when I was remounting my bike after a stop on Kennington Road a mile or two later I ended up losing my balance and toppled over sideways (in the rain, of course) and lay on the wet pavement for a moment thinking, “Seriously?  AGAIN?”  And then I got up, and put the chain back on my bike AGAIN, and kept going.  I did have to get home, after all. 

And then the most chilling part: traffic was blocked as I got closer to home due to an accident involving a car stopped in the intersection of Brixton Road and Stockwell.  I say it involved a car but it also must have involved a very unlucky person because the car had a disturbingly deep person-sized dent in the windshield that gave me a real start, considering the events I’d just experienced.  Part of me was grateful to think that I was not  the person who’d made that dent, and part of me was thinking about how close I’d come to making my own dent.  And then I got back on my bike and made it home without further incident, and poured myself a large glass of wine and sat very still for a little.  Then next morning I yanked my gearing mechanism back into some semblance of order, noted the deep ache in my right butt and, oddly, my right shoulder blade, and got back on the bike and rode to work.

And that’s how things stand.  The bike still needs work, and so does my shoulder, though neither is a cause for great concern (and yes, I’ve seen a doctor).  I’m sure I should have taken the details of the careless freak in the car who started it all, if only so I could maybe squeeze a few quid from him towards bike repair costs, but I really couldn’t be asked at that point.  Really, it’s all FINE.  But would someone pass the ibuprofen, please?

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.

Cracking on with a few more words

Time for some more fun with words.  Today we concentrate on a few of the colourful turns of phrase that pepper the language over here.  Many of them have North American equivalents, but a few are purely English.

”Painting the Forth Bridge” – The Forth Railway Bridge is the famous Victorian-era cantilevered railway bridge in Scotland, which crosses the Firth of Forth between Edinburgh and Fife.  It is, to put it mildly, rather on the large side.  Hence the task of painting the bridge is assumed to be so immense and time-consuming that once you daub on the last brushful it’s time to go back to the other end and start over again.  Thus, “painting the Forth Bridge” is a colourful way of describing a never-ending job.  North Americans call this type of Sisyphean labour “painting the Golden Gate Bridge”.  Sadly the  phrase must soon be consigned to the bin because the Forth Bridge is currently getting a big makeover that involves blasting off every layer of paint until bare steel is revealed, making any necessary repairs, and then coating the whole bridge in some kind of super epoxy stuff that’s supposed to last for 25 to 40 years.  This means the Brits will have to come up with some new phrase to denote a job that never ends;  perhaps something else culturally appropriate like “Watching ‘Coronation Street’”.  Or maybe we could simply say “blogging”.

Yes, that’s a gigantic cruise ship passing under the Forth Bridge.  I told you it was big.

“Cheap as chips” – When something is really inexpensive, it’s cheap as chips.  The phrase is so well known and used so much it’s often shortened to simply “cheap as…”.  As in “Let’s go round to the curry place down the street.  It’s cheap as.”

“Chalk and cheese” – A phrase describing things that are so dissimilar in nature that they can’t be fairly compared, like “apples and oranges”.  It’s also often used to describe people who are very different, as in “That Gavin and his brother, I can’t believe they’re related.  They’re chalk and cheese!”  (Note: In reading up on the phrase – yes, I actually do research some of this stuff – I came across a few variations from other languages some of which are too delicious not to share.  Lots of languages employ the slight variant of “apples and pears” (boring), Latin American Spanish compares “potatoes and sweet potatoes” (yawn), and the Welsh compare “honey and butter” (slightly better).  However, the Serbs employ the much more interesting “grandmothers and toads” comparison, and the Russian use the more abstract “warm and soft”.  But I think the prize goes to the Serbians.  When they contrast two wildly dissimilar things, they compare “the cow to the longjohns”.  Of course.)

“Popped his clogs” – Just one in the long line of irreverent phrases used to describe someone who is, well, dead.  Like six feet under, kicked the bucket, pushing up the daisies, shuffled off this mortal coil…

That parrot has popped his clogs.

”Sod's Law” – The British equivalent of “Murphy’s Law”, but with subtle and highly culturally revealing differences. Murphy’s Law is commonly quoted as “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. Sod’s Law includes that idea but is broader, encompassing what Wikipedia calls “a general sense of being ‘mocked by fate’".  Therefore Murphy’s Law would apply if you go out without an umbrella and it rains.  Sod’s Law applies when you pack your umbrella, rain coat and wellies and the day turns out hot and sunny.  Similarly the fact that Beethoven, the brilliant composer, became deaf… well that’s just Sod’s Law, innit?  Do you see the distinction?  Sod’s Law is for a people who don’t just expect that things will go wrong, but also expect an ironic twist of the knife while it’s all going down the pan.  In other words, Sod’s Law is for the English.

”Muck in” – Pitch in, help out.  As in “If we all muck in we’ll be done in an hour.”  Or, “I don’t mind mucking in a bit, but where would I even start? The whole thing’s gone completely pear-shaped.”

“Pear-shaped” – When something’s gone pear-shaped it’s all gone wrong, off the rails, down the tubes.  If the Apollo 13 astronauts had been English they would not have said “Houston, we have a problem”.  They would have said, “Excuse me Houston… terribly sorry to bother… but if you’ve got just a mo’ we thought you might want to know that things up here have gone just a tiny bit pear-shaped.”

“Crack on” – Get started, get on with it.  As in, “The boffins in Houston have come up with a way of fixing that oxygen filter with a bit of cardboard and duct tape, so let’s crack on lads!”

“It’s not cricket” – something that’s unfair or unsportsmanlike can be referred to as “not cricket”.  The phrase is derived not from the insect but from the game of cricket, which is held up as a gentlemanly ideal of good sportsmanship and fair play, an important concept for the English.  For instance, recently it’s been revealed that hundreds of coveted 2012 Olympics tickets have been held back from public sale and reserved for VIPs, which is not cricket.  (Nevermind that the game of cricket has recently had troubles of its own, especially related to game-fixing by the Pakistani international squad last summer.  Several Pakistani bowlers were accused of taking bribes to bowl “no balls” at specific points in the game, which is most certainly NOT CRICKET.)

“Pushing the boat out” – Has nothing whatsoever to do with boats. To “push the boat out” is to do something more extravagantly than usual, especially related to spending generously on a special occasion.  For instance they really pushed the boat out on Will and Kate’s wedding.  It’s also great to use ironically, as in “Wow, half a pint of lager shandy.  You’re really pushing the boat our tonight!” (Note: lager shandy is a half-and-half mix of lager and lemonade (7-Up).  So a drink that’s already watered down and then can’t even be tolerated in proper pint form is weedy in the extreme.)

“Lost his rag” – got angry.  Similar to “blew his top” or “blew his stack”.  As in, “All I did was ask him to move his BMW off my foot and he totally lost his rag at me!”

“Taking the piss” – this is a phrase that goes right to the heart of all things English. To take the piss out of someone is to mock, tease or ridicule them, especially someone who is especially full of himself.  The English have a finely honed sense of when people are getting a bit too uppity, and are quick to deflate them when they do.  So taking the piss is a combination of the Englishness of not pushing oneself forward, and the all-pervasive sense of humour, and it happens all the time.  Whole TV shows are essentially just extended sessions of taking the piss (“Mock the Week”, anyone?). 

“Taking the piss” can also be used to describe an action or situation that’s out of line or unfair.  For instance, I recently tweeted about the price of a pint of lager shandy in a Richmond pub.  £3.95?  For a lager shandy?  That’s just taking the piss. 

The phrase is sometimes euphemistically changed to “taking the Mickey” in mixed company.  I’ve even heard the phrase “taking the Michael” as a variation on Mickey.  (“Mickey” is a Cockney rhyming slang substitution, but I’m not even going to contemplate getting into Cockney rhyming slang right now because that is most definitely a whole other post.) 

”Give it a bit o’ welly!” – A phrase used to request a greater level of effort be employed in the task at hand.  Similar to “put yer back into it!”.  As in, “Come on now lads, give it a bit o’ welly! That 17 tonne pile of gravel isn’t going to shift itself!”

“On the piss” – as distinct from “taking the piss”.  There are two different meaning for this phrase, and I strongly suspect one is derived from the other.  In the first instance to be “out on the piss” is to spend a night out drinking excessively.  As in “The lads are out on the piss tonight.”  As a corollary, for reasons that should be obvious, something that’s “on the piss” is wonky, or leaned over, or otherwise not straight up and down.  As someone who is frequently required to fit large, bulky or awkwardly shaped items into the back of trucks, it’s a useful phrase.  As in, “I don’t think that thing will go in straight up and down, but it might fit on the piss.”

The Leaning Tower of Pissa. (Note: using this photo in illustration of this phrase could also be described as taking the piss.  Ah, it’s a subtle, malleable, expressive language…)

Two friends, five courses, one memorable evening

It’s been Visit Pam time in London these last few weeks.  First it was my sister and brother-in-law (they of last week’s Full English Breakfast), then close on their heels came a quick stop by Rob H (frequent blog commenter) and travelling companion Wes.  They were over to participate in the First Night Riders charity motorcycle ride in aid of The Theatrical Guild. (It may still not be too late to sponsor…).  Before the ride started Rob and Wes had one night in London which they decided to spend having fancy cocktails and even fancier food, and just to make things even more fun (or at least more fun for ME) they invited your humble blogger along.  As Rob said in his email, “There are 3 choices for most courses, so you see, we NEED you so we can just plain order everything.”  I was happy to oblige, though I admit I was somewhat intimidated when I saw that the place we went – the Gauthier Soho – actually had a Michelin star.  I was scheduled to meet the visitors after a full day of work, but had last-minute jitters about my wardrobe choice and almost decided to forgo the pre-dinner cocktails to allow time to get home and change into something more posh (not to imply that my wardrobe has a vast selection of “more posh”, but I did think I could muster something a bit more appropriate).  Then I remembered who I’d be dining with, and what they’d likely be wearing, and I relaxed and hopped the bus towards Liverpool Street to find the first venue of the night, a fancy cocktail bar.

Both the evening’s establishments had been exhaustively researched by Wes, the serious foodie in our midst.  The cocktail place was called Lounge Bohemia (go ahead and click on that link and tell me if you can figure out how to get in…).  It’s a place that specializes in a sort of molecular gastronomy style of cocktail making, meaning that while it’s possible to get a straight-up bottle of beer there, it’s much more fun to order something from the less traditional side.  I tried a relatively tame combination of stout, raisin vodka and something else which was pleasant enough.  Wes adventurously ordered some kind of tasting menu that purported to be a fresh take on old classics.  When I arrived he was working on something that included a pile cotton candy made out of Amaretto (or possibly some other unlikely boozy ingredient) that he was twisting onto a swizzle stick and eating like, well, cotton candy. He also had a “White Russian”, which ended up being a small marshmallow infused with White Russian-ness served in a spoon of (I think) vodka.  (Shades of “a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat…).  And then there was the margarita, which arrived as a pyramid of small salty bubbles called “salted air” and an aerosol container of margarita foam, leading to the quote of the night: “I hate it when you run out of salted air before you run out of margarita foam.” Rough life.  And that was just the starters, we hadn’t even got to the restaurant yet.

Despite our late arrival at the restaurant, we were surprised to discover that our table was not ready.  We were also surprised to find out that the restaurant did not have a bar, or a waiting area, or even a corner in which to crouch, so the Maitre D’ actually asked us (admittedly with a certain amount of bowing and scraping) if we would mind wandering around the neighbourhood for fifteen minutes or so.  Instead, we hung around outside studying the menu and posing for photographs.

Hungry Canadians, out on the street.  Rob on the left, Wes on the right.

Once we were in it was magic.  Our table was in a small room all by itself, except for about a zillion bottles of wine lining the walls, which we all thought was auspicious, especially when Wes said, ”I was thinking we should start with a prosecco…” just as a waiter appeared with three glasses of prosecco. It was like the place was bugged.  Or perhaps they just give everyone a glass of prosecco when they sit down, especially if they’ve been forced to loiter in the streets while waiting for a table.  Whatever the reason, it was cool.  After the prosecco came a few tiny amuse-bouche, one of which was actually a foie gras macaron, and one which was a sort of layered dip with breadsticks, and one ceviche thing.  And there was the waiter who came in with a tray the size of a parking space covered in about eight different types of rolls and breads. And this was all before we’d even ordered.

And now we run into the problem that if I were to describe everything we ate it would take a very very long time - Rob and I each had five courses and Wes had the tasting menu of seven, meaning we had about 15 different dishes (there were one or two repeats, like the black truffle risotto) and that doesn’t even include the extra bits that seemed to pop up frequently, and the second round of the giant bread tray and so on.  It’s also slightly possible that you might tire of hearing the blow-by-blow description of each course, so let me just highlight a few of the, er, highlights:

• I tried sweetbreads! They were quite mild tasting, and not terribly organ-y at all.  The consistency was more like lobster tail than anything.
• I also tried foie gras for the first time.  Yes, I know it’s horrible for the goose involved, but I think trying it once is fair enough.  In fact, I found it so rich that it was almost like slicing into a slab of butter so I’m not sure I actually need to have foie gras again.
• There was a seafood dish that featured smoked sea bass and a langoustine that was so sweet and tender that it made me make that sort of disbelieving “Are you kidding me?” face, and then slice off a small portion for Rob to try, who also promptly made the “Are you kidding me?” face.  There was a lot of that going around all night.

Rob, NOT demonstrating the “Are you kidding me?” face.  I’m not sure what this face is, but he’s the one who kept exhorting me to put more pictures of people on the old blog, so he brought this on himself.

There were other things of course, and we all traded tastes back and forth so I got to sample just about everything on the menu.  And following the prosecco there were, um, three bottles of wine, so it’s just possible that we may have reached the “jolly” stage by about the third course.  That could be why I found myself taking a photo in the stall of the woman’s washroom.  Or it could be that I couldn’t quite believe how remarkably gay the photo above the toilet was.  And I don’t mean that in any kind of derogatory way, because really how else would you describe this?:

Flamboyant, perhaps? (Later on there was a problem with the Ladies, so I was directed into the Gents toilet where I can report that the artwork was, if possible, even more gay.)

The highlight, though, must have been when the waiters swooped in some time after the fourth course (pigeon), and the Maitre D’ introduced me to my new favourite word: PRE-DESSERT!  How can it be that I’ve reached 42 years of age and never been privy to the concept of the pre-dessert?  It’s so elegantly simple.  I mean it’s clear that if one dessert is good, then two dessert must be double good, so why not simply slide in a bit of pre-dessert before the main event?  It makes perfect sense.  My first-ever pre-dessert was a sort of deconstructed cherry crumble with sour cherries in a warm sauce sprinkled with bits of spicy crumble.  And that was before the dessert I’d actually ordered which was a chocolate thing (of course) that was so densely chocolatey that it was like a black hole of chocolate, which was then perched on top of a disc of crunchy praline.  With gold leaf.

I say that pre-dessert was the highlight, but really the whole evening was one big highlight.  As Rob pointed out: we could have had a cracking night just hanging out in a pub eating fish & chips and enjoying the great company.  Or we could have had an astounding meal with people who were annoying or stupid or just plain boring.  Instead the food and the company were a perfect match, which raised the whole thing to another level.  This meant that even though I had to be at work at 8:00 am the next day we lingered until the wait staff were hovering and trying not to get caught looking at their watches.  We finally left some time after midnight and weaved through the West End towards Leicester Square tube station, where I ended up getting the last train home to Brixton and fell into bed in a state of perfect contentment.

A truly excellent outing. The only other thing I can say is: Thank you Rob and thank you Wes, for coming over in the first place, and for making the time to visit with me, and for inviting me along for such a memorable evening.  Come back again any time.  Next time the first round of thymus is on me.

GRUB!: The Full English Breakfast

I mentioned in my last post that I recently had a visit from my sister and brother-in-law who came over for an 8-day whirlwind tour of London (with a brief overnighter in York, just to spice things up).  They arrived on a Friday, which was an excellent excuse for me to take the day off work to show them the sights.  And since they landed at an ungodly hour in the morning it seemed only appropriate that we fuel up with a proper breakfast before hitting the town.  After fetching them from Victoria Station and forcing them to drag their wheelie bags through the Underground and up the stairs at Brixton station, I gave them the choice of two places for breakfast. (Note to self: making people who’ve been up for more than 24 hours and have just flown through seven time zones make decisions about where to eat turns out to be asking a bit much.)  The choice was between the traditional greasy spoon caf I ate at the morning I visited Brixton Market, and a place I discovered after waddling out of that caf and crossing the street, which seemed a fair bit more upmarket, and potentially interesting.  There was a bit of faffing around, but they eventually chose the traditional route, so in we went to the Phoenix Cafe for a Full English Breakfast. (Note: That’s not a spelling error above.  “Caf” is the correct colloquial abbreviation for the kind of down home place where you can expect to get a proper Full English Breakfast.  A caf is the UK equivalent of a greasy spoon.)

For those who have never had the pleasure, the Full English Breakfast (often abbreviated to simply the Full English) is an artery-clogging, gut-busting delight, best attempted when hung over or jetlagged.  Like its North American cousin, the Full English starts with eggs and breakfast meats but it’s the local variations that make it special.  Here are what I’d consider the basic components of a standard Full English Breakfast:

1. Eggs - usually two and always fried.  I have never been asked how I’d like my eggs when ordering a Full English.  I suppose it’s theoretically possible to have scrambled eggs, but I wouldn’t want to be the one to ask.  And poached? Well it just doesn’t seem to be in the right spirit at all. You might as well order the Vegetarian Full English which is a bastardization of the form I will not stoop to discuss here.
2. Sausages – normally the standard breakfast sausage variety, unless you’re somewhere posh where they will be artisanal Cumberland sausages made from pigs raised on a diet of truffles and sparkling water or some such menu-speak rubbish.
3. Bacon - it’s important to note that bacon in England is not like bacon at home.  It definitely comes from a completely different part of the pig and is more like what we’d call back bacon or what Americans inexplicably call Canadian bacon.  What we know of as bacon is here called “streaky bacon”.  In fact bacon in general, and the incomparable bacon sandwich (or, more properly, bacon sarnie) might possibly warrant a separate blog post, since it seems to be an entire food group over here.
4. Baked Beans – Yes, beans.  The kind that come in a can, traditionally with a blue label emblazoned with “Heinz”.  They are an indispensable part of the Full English Breakfast and form a sort of puddle that the rest of the items nestle in/around.
5. Toast – usually with a choice of white or whole wheat, buttered, normally served on a side plate, and never accompanied by anything so hospitable as a bit of jam or peanut butter.  You can often get some kind of sweet spread on request but often it’s best just to use your toast to sop up the beans.
6. Tea or coffee – In the case of a really traditional caf, the coffee will almost certainly be instant but is often served mixed with frothy milk that makes it quite tasty.

The items listed above are the cornerstones of the Full English Breakfast, which can come in different proportions (fewer eggs, more sausages, etc…) but I think it’s fair to say that anything that doesn’t include all of the above doesn’t properly qualify as a Full English Breakfast.  However, there are several additions that are not uncommon and worth mentioning.  In fact, if your Full English didn’t come with at least one of these items in addition to the above list, I think you’d be well within your rights to sniff dismissively and mutter under your breath, in a properly English display of displeasure.

1. Mushrooms – fried, of course.  Plain button mushroom, sliced and fried up.  Or in a more posh place, big whole mushroom caps.
2. Tomatoes – fried, of course. Either slices of tomato, or a whole tomato cut in half.  Sometimes put under the broiler (grill) instead of being fried.
3. Fried Slice – bread, fried of course.  I think it may actually be fried in the bacon fat.  Or possibly deep-fried.  I’ve only had it once, and that was enough.
4. Bubble and Squeak – referred to simply as “bubble” by those in the know. Bubble and Squeak is a traditional dish in its own right, composed of leftover mashed potatoes mixed with leftover vegetables, most usually cooked cabbage.  The variety at the Phoenix Café is an alarming shade of green, but really tasty.  Bubble in a Full English is normally pan-fried.  Of course.
5. Black Pudding – fried, of course. And yes, it’s sausage made out of blood, but give it a chance!  Black pudding is actually quite tasty and spicy, with a smooth-ish texture and a nice peppery kick. Served as a large round slice and fried (of course) so the outside is sort of crispy.
6. Chips – Did you honestly think that the English would let a meal go by without the opportunity to eat chips?

The Phoenix Cafe’s Full English Breakfast.  Note the Sea O’ Beans and the martian-coloured bubble. Also pictured: The Partial Canadian Sister. (On the issue of the Sea o’ Beans, I feel compelled to pass on this crucial travel tip for anyone planning on ordering a Full English Breakfast in Spain.  Apparently the wily Spanish purveyors of the FEB are known to overload on the beans in order to bulk up the plate at low cost.  Therefore the wise traveler will order his or her FEB without any beans at all in order to force the cook to serve up a proper amount of the really good stuff like bacon and sausages.  Thanks for the tip Patrick!)

 

In addition the these variations there are regional differences that crop up when you cross a border.  For instance, while black pudding is relatively uncommon in the Full English, the Full Scottish Breakfast would seem incomplete without it. White pudding also makes regular appearances in the Full Scottish.  Regional bread products are also often encountered, such as soda bread or farl (fried - of course - potato bread) with the Full Irish, or tattie scones north of Hadrian’s wall.  Apparently the Welsh even do some kind of pan-fried carbohydrate called laverbread which consists of “seaweed purée which is then mixed with oatmeal, formed into patties and fried in bacon fat” (of course).  Ahhh, those wacky Welshmen.

Pictured above is an Amsterdam Irish Pub/Hostel’s take on the Full Irish Breakfast, served to me on a bleary morning after an overnight train ride from Copenhagen.  Black pudding is pictured in the foreground, with a very unusual appearance by tater-tot style hashbrowns at the top of the plate.  And yes, that’s a half a pint of Guinness in the background.  What can I say?  It was a long night.

You may have noticed that almost all of the elements of the FEB are fried – beans and coffee being the only two ingredients that escape the pan with relative certainty.  For this reason a full breakfast is often called a fry-up.  (The Northern Ireland variety is known as an Ulster Fry.) 

Finally, I have to report on a particularly terrifying bastard child of the Full English Breakfast that I could not help but purchase when I saw it in a Sainsbury’s several months ago.  Behold, the horror:

Breakfast-in-a-can

The label says “Baked beans in tomato sauce with sausage, button mushrooms, chopped pork and egg nuggets with cereal and bacon.”  Shudder. The entire contents of the can are meant to be tipped into a pot and heated gently (“Do not boil”, it says, as if to imply that over-heating will ruin the delicate nuances of flavour in the egg nuggets).  But really, for the love of God, what is an egg nugget? And how can cereal possibly be included in the above list?  Even I, primary participant in the Steve’s Weird Food project at my last blog, have not yet mustered the courage or intestinal fortitude to open that can.  (Or perhaps I just haven't been hungover enough and house-bound enough at the same time).  Because in the end, the Phoenix Cafe is just a short walk away and I am perfectly certain that they will never, ever serve me an egg nugget.

Tourist Stuff: The Tate Modern

Bad but unrepentant blogger – another two week gap between posts.  This time my excuse was an eight day visit from my sister and brother-in-law which was most excellent, but the visit on top of the full time job left little time for blogging.  So mea culpa once again, and let’s just move on.

We had another Bank Holiday Monday recently, which caused me to recall a holiday not so long ago when I tweeted about being ever-so-slightly bored and got a quick response from JT in Toronto requesting that I take my bored self down to the Tate Modern for him and report back.  On the day in question I seem to recall frittering away my time uselessly, but when another Bank Holiday came up I decided I needed to make plans.  I think you all know how it goes – you live somewhere and somehow you never end up going to see the stuff that’s right on your doorstep.  This is as true for Winnipeg as it is for London, it’s just that in London the stuff that you’re missing is on a sort of blockbuster scale.  Like St. Paul’s Cathedral?  Haven’t managed that yet.  Nor have I visited the Natural History Museum or Hampton Court Palace or Kew Gardens or blah blah blah.  I’ve been trying to be conscious of this trap, and I think (despite the list above) that I’ve made a greater effort than most Londoners.  So, determined to have a go at another one on the list, I hopped onto the trusty #59 bus for a trip down to the South Bank. (Note here the term South Bank is capitalized since I’m not referring to just anywhere on the southern side of the River Thames, but in fact to the area called South Bank, which, not surprisingly, is on the south bank of the river, roughly between Westminster Bridge and London Bridge.)

The Tate Modern is a modern art gallery located in the aforementioned South Bank area, right across the river from St. Paul’s Cathedral.  It’s housed in the old Bankside Power Station, which was closed in 1981.  The conversion of the building into a gallery started in 1996 and the finished building was opened in 2000.  It is, according to Wikipedia, the most visited modern art gallery in the world, which surprised me until I realized this is likely due to the fact that, like so many of the great museums and galleries in London, admission to the Tate is free.  Well, most of it is free.  There are special exhibitions for which admission is charged, but if you just want to walk in and have a look at the permanent collection it’s completely free.  As is the British Museum and the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert and on and on and on.  By contrast, the Museum of Modern Art in New York costs $20 to enter, so I guess it’s no wonder the Tate trumps MoMA’s admission stats.

So there really was no reason for me NOT to spend a sunny late morning walking along the Thames taking in the sights and wending my way to the gallery, which is exactly what I did.  The Tate’s permanent collection is displayed in four main areas and grouped into sort of themed areas - “Material Gestures”, “Poetry and Dream”, “Energy and Process”, and “States of Flux”.  Whatever.  I found these titles confusing and really unbearably arty, but I suppose they can be forgiven for the artiness part because, well, you know.  In any case, I selected the “Poetry and Dream” gallery, which is dedicated to Surrealism, and had a look around.
 
Some of you migrants from Go See Run Eat Drink might remember I have a little game I play in art galleries – something to help me pay a bit more attention to what I’m looking at.  The game, as explained in a post about my visit to the Museé D’Orsay, is this:

I like to wander around and think about what piece I would take home with me if the management of the Musée were to approach and say something like, “Madame, you are clearly not an average tourist, as evidenced by the fact that you have lingered for more than 4.2 seconds in front of this painting. Thank you also for not simply approaching, reading the tag, taking a digital photo of yourself with the painting, and then moving on to repeat this process with each piece in the room. Please, it would give us great pleasure to present you with a small memento of your visit. Perhaps this Monet? Mais non, we insist.”

The Surrealists, however, mostly defeated me.  Perhaps I was just not in the mood, but I struggled to really connect with anything.  In the end I found this one quite interesting, so I earmarked it as a finalist in the Gallery Game:

 “A Symposium” by Julian Trevelyan (1910-1988) 

And then what did I do? I left.  I’d been there for an hour at most, and I just wanted a break.  This is perhaps the most delicious thing about the combination of Living in London + Free Admission.  I felt no compulsion to see it all in one afternoon, unlike when I was traveling and knew that the next day I might well be on another continent.  It was really civilized. (Apologies JT, if this is simply rubbing salt into the wound…)  So I wandered a bit further along the riverbank and stopped at a café and had a nice café au lait and a pain raisin and I sat and worked on the crossword.

Thus fortified, I decided to give the Tate another go.  This time I opted for the “Energy and Process” gallery, which turned out to be just excellent. The gallery focused on the Arte Povera style of modern art, which I can’t possibly be bothered to explain here.  (If you’re actually interested, here’s the Wikipedia link.)  In any case, those Arte Povera types did some really interesting stuff, largely in the way of big interesting sculpture / installation sort of things, many of which were made from found materials.  I liked a lot of them, including this one called “Tree of 12 Metres” by Giuseppe Penone.  It started life as a tree which was felled and sawn into a big square chunk of timber.  Then Giuseppe came along and used chisels to remove the squared off bits and find the tree shape that was still inside.  This photo only shows part of one sculpture, but there were two, and, as the title suggest, they were up to about 12 metres high. I thought is was really clever.

There was also a video installation by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky which I found utterly mesmerizing. Filmed over a two year period in Manhattan, it “traces the almost balletic movements of discarded remnants from an urban consumer culture.  Projected on a large scale, these seemingly random and insignificant materials are transformed, taking on momentary sculptural or architectural quality before they move fleetingly out of the frame.”  In other words, it was a 15 minute movie of garbage blowing around on city streets.  It’s hard to describe, but it was charming and funny and I have to tell you that watching an empty foam clamshell that once held a double cheeseburger skitter around on the pavement is oddly absorbing.  I watched the whole thing and I think there were moments when I laughed out loud.

But I think the piece liked most that day was “Staircase III” by Do Ho Suh, also in the "Energy and Process” gallery. I took several photos of it (all up at the Flickr account) but I must have been so taken with it that I forgot to write down any details.  Luckily, the internet is all-knowing and all I had to do was Google “red stairs tate modern” to be led to this excellent video of the piece at the Tate’s own website.  How cool is this?

Sadly, the people at the Tate did not offer to let me take “Staircase III” home, which is probably just as well, because even if Do Ho Suh made a specially dimensioned ceiling for the installation, it would still be somewhat challenging to live with the piece in a room that’s a mere 12’ x 13’.

Finally I have to mention one piece that I didn’t get to see at the Tate, but the story of the which is too fascinating not to pass on. The largest exhibition space at the Tate is the Turbine Hall, which I presume once housed the turbines of the old power plant.  It’s an enormous room - five stories high with more than 36,000 square feet of floor space.  It’s used to display specially commissioned work, and the piece that was on display last fall was one called   “Sunflower Seeds”, by Ai Weiwei.  The work got a lot of media attention, and rightfully so, since it consisted of approximately 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, each of which was painted by hand. 


The seeds filled the entire Turbine Hall to a depth of a about three or four inches and at first, gallery-goers were able to walk around on the seeds.  You could feel them crunch under the feet and dig your hands down into them.  Then, after just 48 hours, the Elfin Safety Police descended declaring that the fine porcelain dust produced when the seeds broke “could be damaging to health following repeated inhalation over a long period of time.”  And the wankers closed down access to the exhibition, allowing viewing only from the side or from the gallery one floor up.  Thus, a work of art made up of things smaller than your fingernail could only be viewed from twenty feet away.  I tell you, it’s ‘ealth and safety gone mad.

I missed it because I was too lazy to travel the 45 minutes down to the gallery last October during the two days while it was possible to actually interact with the piece.  (In my defense it seemed like there was no rush, since the seeds were scheduled to be there until April.) However, there is an excellent video on a permanent loop in a viewing area near the Turbine Hall about the process of making all those sunflower seeds.  It’s a fascinating film, showing how the raw materials were mined and refined in the traditional way in China.  There are great shots of the enormous kilns used to fire the seeds.  And it shows the small workshops in the city of Jingdezhen where hundreds of local women sat hunched over work tables for months (or possibly years) painting each sunflower seed individually.  It’s a lovely little film. 

Sadly, the reason that it’s still being shown is as part of a protest by the Tate.  This is because “On April 3, internationally acclaimed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained at the Beijing airport while en route to Hong Kong, and his papers and computers were seized from his studio compound. Ai’s whereabouts remain unknown and due process under Chinese law has been denied him.”  The Tate, along with other major galleries around the world have launched an online petition calling for his release.  Details on the petition are here.

And that was my afternoon at the Tate Modern: a little Surrealism, and little coffee break, a little sculpture and a little protest politics.  All for free, except for the coffee and pastry, which was £3.34.  And that’s a bargain no matter how you slice it.

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?