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.

A Day (or Three) Out

You know how I mentioned earlier that London is great, but sometimes you just want to get out for a while?  Well that feeling came over me last week when I inadvertently ended up with a week off before starting my big exciting new job.  There I was with time on my hands and a definite need for a bit of relaxation before diving into what will certainly be the most demanding and high-profile gig of my life (so far…).  That, coupled with the fact that the Eurostar goes directly from St. Pancras Station, London to Gare du Nord, Paris in under two and a half hours and it was clear what was required.

How could I not?

I’ve been to Paris before.  Many of you will recall I had about ten days in the City of Light when I was on my Grand Tour, and this meant that I’d done a lot of Paris’s big sights: the Eiffel Tower? Check. The Louvre and the Mona Lisa? Check.  The Musée D’Orsay? The Catacombs? The Champs Elysée? The Arc de Triomphe? Montmartre? Check, check, check, check, check.  I even visited the museum of the Paris sewers.  All this meant that I was able to have a much more relaxing, less touristy time on this little break.  My plan was to arrive, sleep in every morning, seek out neighbourhood bistros, eat a lot of macarons,  sit in cafés with the crossword puzzle, check out a museum or two, and wander around a lot.  And I was, I believe, spectacularly successful in executing this plan.

So what were the highlights?  Well, I did find that neighbourhood bistro I was after. (Thank you Lonely Planet… it was nice to have your familiar blue presence at my side once again.)  It was a little place just around the corner from my cheap (but still over €100 a night!) hotel, and they did a fixed menu – starter, main course, cheese platter, and dessert - for €32 a head.  That’s all they did.  If you wanted to eat there, you made your selections and that was that.  There were no printed menus, just a bunch of big chalkboards with the day’s choices written on them.  When you were perusing the menu they just propped a board up on a nearby chair so you could contemplate the options.  It was perfect.  Even better, the first night I went there (I went twice…) I ended up seated at a table next to a chatty American business man who was friendly and interesting so I even had a dinner companion. (Nice meeting you, Mark!) 

And the cheese platter… mon Dieu.  After they cleared away the main course (first night: breast of grouse, second night: scallops roasted in the shell) the waiter came by with an enormous tray of cheeses – probably about ten different choices.  He left the tray on the table along with a side plate, and you were free to slice off bits of whatever looked good and decant then onto your small plate to be smeared onto the contents of the ever-present bread basket.  When you had what you wanted, off the tray went to the next table.  Brilliant.  So yeah, I went there twice.  The second night I was practically a regular and ended up helping translate some things for an Asian couple that the waiter was struggling with.  The poor guy was flapping his arms to try and get across the concept of poultry.  I loved that place.  LOVED.* 

In order to justify my continued trips to the cheese platter I also did a lot of walking.  Like most great cities (London, Rome, Hong Kong, San Francisco…) Paris is excellent for walking, and a lot of the best sights are really close together.  I did a couple of guided walking tours with Paris Walks, who I highly recommend.  We took in interesting sights, sacred and secular, and the guide was friendly and knowledgeable and a bargain for €12. I especially liked when he pointed out quirky things like this:

This small tile mosaic is the work of an urban street artist known as “Invader”.  He adorns city walls all over the world with these characters inspired by the video game Space Invaders.  Each tile is about an inch square, and once they’d been pointed out, I saw them all over the place.

This one was my favourite – on top of a building next to the Canal St. Martin.

Thursday night was another highlight.  On my last visit to Paris I had a very quick tour to the Musée des Arts et Metiers which I liked very much, but which I recall having to rush through in order to catch a train.  This time I could linger, and (BONUS) it turns out the museum is free after 6pm on Thursday nights!  It could not have been more perfect.  “Arts et Metiers” translates literally as “Arts and Crafts” but it’s really more a museum of the history of industry and technology and a repository of scientific instruments and inventions.  They’re probably best known for displaying the original Foucault pendulum, which French physicist Léon Foucault used to prove the rotation of the earth in 1851. They also have examples of original metres and kilograms and astrolabes and models of bridges (!) and early cameras and adding machines and looms and transport of all kinds and a lovely flying machine. 

Flying machine

But the thing that really made me smile was… the gears.  I realize here that it is insufferably geeky to be so jazzed about gears but I’m telling you that I lingered at those display cases with the goofiest grin on my face for an embarrassingly long amount of time.  But I ask you, how could you not find this incredibly cool? (Karen, I am talking to you.)

Toothed rolling curves with frame and quadri-lobed wheels!! (And look at that one in the background: a logarithmic spiral gear pair!) (And I am NOT making up those names.)

So what are our highlights so far? A cheese platter, mosaic space invaders and gears.  Well, that’s what everyone goes to Paris for, isn’t it? How about something a little more typically Parisian: pastries!

These are macarons – not to be confused with macaroons – the haystack-ish sort of coconut thingies, which are also quite lovely but not at all the same thing.

Macarons like the ones pictured above are about an inch and a half across (two perfect bites) and go for €0.65 to €1.00 each.  And though they look sort of meringue-ish, they are actually sort of chewy once you get through the impossibly light and fragile outer crust.  They come in 7.5 zillion flavours of which the best is (no surprise) chocolate.  I actually had to resurrect my Italian gelato rule and repurpose it for macarons while in Paris.  The gelato rule had two parts.  First: when in Italy, one must have gelato at least once per day.  Second: when ordering gelato, one must always order two flavours at once, and only ONE of these flavours can be chocolate.  This forces one to try other potentially good flavours, but also allows the backup option, in case the non-chocolate flavour turns out to be a dud.  I tried coconut milk, salted caramel, pistachio, raspberry, lemon, vanilla and passion fruit.  And four kinds of chocolate.

I did actually go to one gallery on my trip, though it was a small and sort of manageable one (not like the Louvre, which is daunting in a Hermitage – Prado – Uffizi kind of way).  The Musée de l’Orangerie is home to Monet’s famous Water Lilies, which are housed in two purpose-built oval shaped rooms designed by Monet himself.  I didn’t realize this, but the series of paintings we call the Water Lilies are actually HUGE.  There are eight in total – two sets of four – and they take up whole walls. 

One of the rooms.  I told you they were big…

The paintings themselves are quite lovely, of course.  What I found less lovely were the other people in the gallery.  There are signs as you walk in asking you to enjoy the place in silence which were roundly ignored by most people.  One particularly odious guy was taking long series of photographs of each mural that involved him sitting on the bench and panning across the room while his camera shutter clicked loudly like a tiny machine gun.  He did it once… then again… then again and again and again until I was seriously contemplating violence and glaring so fixedly at him that I’m surprised he and his camera didn’t spontaneously combust from the force of my hatred.  But like I said, the paintings were nice…

And, as I mentioned, I did a lot of walking.  On Friday morning I wandered along much of the Canal St. Martin and got to see TWO excellent bridges that swing out of the way of passing boats.  Since I have already subjected you to pictures of gears I will spare you the video of the pivoting bridge, but I was really tickled when I came upon it unexpectedly just as a tour boat was going past.  I also walked around the Latin Quarter and the area around the Bastille.  The Bastille was particularly good, and included a stroll along the Promenade Plantée, which is just what it sounds like – a planted promenade.  It’s a section of an old raised rail line in the area that’s been revitalized in a really clever way.  The arches that support the rail line have all been renovated into artist’s workshops and galleries, and the rail bed itself has been turned into a kind of very skinny 3 mile long park.  There are stairs and elevators interspersed along the way, but mostly it’s just this lovely green space, with fantastic long views of the city of the sides.  Very cool, and great for running on. (Not that I did any running… I was far too busy with vital cheese-related activities.)

The Promenade

And the view

I did manage a fair bit of sitting in cafés as well, and I squeezed in a visit to the Musée du Moyen Age (The Museum of the Middle Ages, not The Museum of Middle Age, as I first suspected.  Though the latter might have been fun, it likely would not have had the same extensive collection of tapestries.) And that was quite enough for three days, thank you very much.  I planned to blog on the train on the way home, but it was all I could do to keep my eyes open.  Though I did manage to do that long enough that while I was staring blankly out the window into darkened French countryside I spotted the end of a fireworks display off in the distance and watched it for long minutes as it grew closer and then disappeared behind me.  It was oddly compelling to watch from so far away, lacking the noise and spectacle that fireworks usually have - like a tiny little silent film just for me.  And when we finally rolled into St. Pancras Station and I turned my feet to the tube line for the quick hop home, my heart filled with contentment when I realized I was just a few minutes away from a nice cup of tea.



* If you are actually going to be in Paris in the near future and are interested in checking out my bistro, send me an email to gostayworkplaylive AT gmail.com.  I’ll give you the details.  

Off the tourist track: Open House London

All of London was off the tourist track for a couple of days recently, because it was the annual Open House London weekend. To quote their website:

"Open House London celebrates all that is best about the capital’s buildings, places and neighbourhoods. Every September, it gives a unique opportunity to get out and under the skin of London’s amazing architecture, with over 700 buildings of all kinds opening their doors to everyone – all for free."

What this means is that all over the city buildings that are normally closed to the public open their doors and welcome people in for a look behind the scenes. This could be somewhere as grand and monumental as the Bank of England or as small and quirky as a brand new eco-friendly residential house just down the street. They say it's free which is technically true, except that you really need the guide book to figure things out. The printed-and-mailed dead tree version of the guidebook was £6.50, but the downloadable PDF was only £3.50, arrived instantly, and was pretty friendly on the old iPad, making me feel very au courant. There was even an iPad app for $4.99, which might have been even better because I think it had interactive maps so you could fire it up, see where you were standing, and zero in on any Open House sites nearby. Perhaps next year...

Some of the site are very popular and require you to pre-book to hold a space when the program becomes available in early August. Because I was late to the party this year I was shut out of anything that required pre-booking, which meant my options narrowed a bit, though not a lot because as mentioned above, there were more than 700 sites. I eventually whittled down my choices and on a sunny Saturday morning I set out on the tube, leaving the bike behind to avoid a repeat of my continuing bike locking woes. I hit quite a few sites over the weekend because though I made certain plans I also stayed flexible, meaning that if I unexpectedly happened on the welcoming green Open House poster as I was on my way from point A to point B I was free to veer off to investigate point C. Some point Cs were places where I just poked my head in before deciding they weren't for me, and some were perfectly excellent. For the purposes of this blog post we shall concentrate on the excellent, glossing over the so-so. (There was, for instance, the archeological remains of the western gate of the Roman wall around the city, which were situated in a damp, locked, unmarked room that was part of an underground parking lot. That was only so-so, mostly because though the site was significant, there really wasn't much to see beyond a pile of rocks in the vague shape of a wall.  Also, the whole place smelled of exhaust and gasoline. And there was the aforementioned Bank of England, which I skipped because the queue was around the block.) Instead, let's talk about a couple of the hits:

St. Botolph's Aldgate Bells and Belfry:

My first stop on that sunny Saturday morning was to see the bells and belfry of St. Botolph's without Aldgate church (as distinct from St. Botolph's Aldersgate church, which astute GSWPL readers will remember from my blog about Postman's Park). The Open House program promised a visit to the belfry itself and a demonstration of bell ringing, which it turns out is a lot more complicated than just yanking on a bit of rope.

St. Botolph's

I had to wait around a bit after I arrived because space in the bell ringing room was limited and demand was high. After a half hour wait, and armed with a numbered bit of paper for the 11:30am visit, I ascended the steep, narrow, winding circular stairs up to the ringing room to find a surprisingly comfortable, airy space dominated by eight ropes hanging down through holes in the ceiling.


There was a gentleman there from the church's band of bell ringers who gave us some interesting facts about the bells and the craft. There are eight bells at St. Botolph's, which are normally rung in the change ringing style, meaning that a group of ringers will ring each bell in a sequence which changes as they go along. In order to be able to ring in such a controlled fashion, the bells are each hung in a rotating frame that's essentially like a giant pulley with the bell fixed inside it, upside-down. The ringer pulls on the rope, which runs in a channel along the outside of this giant pulley, thus rotating the bell down and back up the other way, almost 360 degrees. Along the way the bell's clapper strikes the side of the bell. The art of bell-ringing is in being able to time that strike to happen exactly on cue, even though the action of pulling the rope is separated by a second or two from the action of the clapper striking. Apparently it takes about six weeks before a novice bell ringer can reliably be expected to be able to, as the local ringer put it "make the bell go dong". And that's just the beginning. 

The real art comes in ringing the changes. This means that instead of simply ringing the bells from highest to lowest (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8), they vary things by changing the order in which they ring according to a series of mathematical patterns which I will not attempt to explain because the charts they had hung up in the ringing room looked to the uninitiated like either 1) meaningless columns of numbers with coloured diagonal lines crossing through them or 2) a EEG with numbers written on it in apparently random places. The guy kept saying that it was all quite simple and all a ringer had to do was concentrate on his little bit of the puzzle and know where in the order he was without having to keep track of the whole thing. I am not buying it.

A video of ringing at St. Botolph’s.  (Sadly, this is not MY video of ringing at St. Botolph’s because I continue to be completely flummoxed by actually getting any of my videos to upload successfully to Blogger or Flickr or Youtube, which is starting to really piss me off.  Any technical assistance would be appreciated.)  

Hung around the ringing room were plaques commemorating the completion of what they call a "full peal" meaning that the ringers successfully completed every possible permutation of ringing eight bells in a different order (5,040 for those keeping track). A full peal is a bit like the marathon of the bell ringing world - it takes about 3-4 hours to complete one and you get no breaks once the peal has started. Also, if anyone screws up the peal is ruined and you have to just stop, give up, and go down to the pub to drown your sorrows. This means that full peals are only attempted rarely and on special occasions like the Queen's Jubilee or the appointment of a new rector at the church. I suspect that the ringing of a full peal is a bit of an event in the neighbourhood as well, since listening to ringing church bells is lovely for a few minutes on a Sunday, but for three and a half hours might start to be classed as tedious and possibly even unsociable. 

The eight bells of St. Botolph's range from the treble bell, (the name for the smallest one) to the tenor bell, which weighs in at 1.25 tonnes. All were cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which is just down the road from the church and one of only two bell foundries remaining in England. The foundry really deserves a blog post all it's own, since it was established in 1570 and is therefore the oldest manufacturing company in Britain. They cast the Liberty Bell and Big Ben! (And they do tours on selected Saturdays, though I think they fill up fast.) I even got to see that actual Whitechapel Foundry bells at the end of the ringing demonstration, when they took people up in small groups to see the belfry itself. 

The treble bell, positioned in its upside-down ready-to-ring state. Note the writing on the side indicating that the bell was cast in 1744.

The whole experience was really cool, and exactly what the Open House thing is all about - seeing something you'd never get to see otherwise. That is, of course, unless you decided to join the band of ringers at St. Botolph's, who seemed a thoroughly likeable lot and included the landlord of the local pub. And just think, it would only take you six weeks of Friday evening practices to learn how to make the bell go DONG, which I bet feels amazing.


The Grand Entrance Hall to Brunel’s Tunnel under the Thames:

This was a site I discovered when I realised that the index of the Open House Program had a whole section devoted to industrial sites like pumping stations, distilleries, engine houses and even the Royal Small Arms Factory.  Naturally, being something of an engineering geek, I was immediately taken with the description accompanying the entry for the Brunel Museum:

“Guided descents of subterranean chamber half the size of Shakespeare’s Globe. Self guided train tours of Thames Tunnel, one time shopping arcade, banquet hall and fairground. Award winning river gardens.”

Subterranean chambers? Shopping arcade? Banquet Hall*? It all sounded worth a visit, even though it meant another trip to the dreaded Canada Water – far flung home of the bike shop I’ve visited too many times.  Off I went. (And now, while I make my way out to Canada Water, a little back story on the Thames Tunnel and the brilliant Brunels, pere and fils.) 

By the early 19th century shipping traffic on the Thames had increased to such a volume that unloading ships sometimes had to wait months for a space to open at a dock so they could unload their cargo.  Once cargo was finally unloaded it could only cross the river on small ferry boats or by means of the two nearest bridges – London Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge.  London Bridge was closest to the docks, but so congested that it could take days to cross.  An alternative crossing downstream of London Bridge was desperately needed, but any bridge would have to allow tall-masted shipping traffic through, and  these were the days before steam engines were powerful enough to raise bascules like those of Tower Bridge.  (Remember Tower Bridge was not opened until 1894.) 

Enter Marc Brunel: French-born engineering genius who is probably best know for siring his much more famous engineering genius son, the fantastically named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Brunel Sr. decided that a tunnel across the Thames was the way forward, despite the fact that the ground under the river was notoriously soft and difficult to dig, giving rise to the problem of the river impertinently pouring itself into any previously attempted excavations. In order to make it possible to tunnel in soft ground, Brunel invented the tunneling shield, whose basic principle is still in use today. His son Isambard, despite being merely 19 years old, actually supervised the work on the tunnel from 1826 to 1828, when a catastrophic flood of the partially completed tunnel injured him seriously, and forced him to leave the project.

The whole story of the tunnel is of course much more complicated and interesting than I can go into here without causing your coffee to go cold while you’re reading (even though it’s already probably decidedly tepid), so on to the aforementioned “subterranean chamber”.  This turned out to be what was once the Grand Entrance Hall to the south end of the completed Thames Tunnel. It’s actually a large round brick structure that was built above ground and allowed to settle into the earth until it was low enough to become the start of the tunnel.  It was once beautifully finished with sweeping curved staircases winding around the interior walls to allow the great and the good to access the tunnel. 

The entrance to the tunnel when it was opened.

Now, it’s a dank, bare brick hole which even the most imaginative would struggle to love:

The “Grand Entrance Hall” today. 

Far from being the “eighth wonder of the world”, as the Victorians (and the Brunel Museum’s website) claimed, it is in fact, disappointing.  However, we must pity the poor Brunel Museum, because the fact is that Brunel’s tunnel was so good means it’s actually still in use.  London Overground trains use it to pass under the Thames between Rotherhithe and Wapping every day.  If there were no railway, we could likely have descended into the tunnel itself, which would have been very cool.  Instead, visitors were offered the “self-guided tour” which was actually just a photocopied sheet with a few interesting facts that one could read while taking the train journey from Rotherhithe to Wapping.  I chatted with a woman from the museum to get her take on it and she confirmed my suspicion that there really isn’t much to see from the darkened windows of a speeding train.  Apparently last year during Open House weekend they actually agreed to slow down a few trains and turn the lights on in the tunnel so that people could see the grand arches and brickwork.   However, so many people complained about the slow trains that this year they weren’t available.  Because people suck.  

Still, I found the Brunel Museum quite plucky and charming, and even bought their little book about the Brunel’s and their tunnel (a mere £5, including an introduction by Michael Palin!).  They don’t have a lot going from them the poor Brunel Museum folks.  The location is not exactly central, and their big reason for being – the tunnel itself – is actually impossible to see properly.  The building the museum is in is the old engine house, and it’s small and a bit rough around the edges.  But they manage, and have some nice displays about the history, construction and opening of the tunnel.  And they have a good display of books for sale beyond just the one I bought, and they do actually have a lovely patio garden and a tea shop with nice looking proper cakes.

See? It’s a nice spot on a sunny Sunday. 

So I was generally satisfied with my visit to the Brunel Museum, especially since it was free (Thank you Open House London) and the day was warm and sunny, and it afforded me the chance to wander along the Thames path towards a more congenial tube station than Canada Water, during which wandering I discovered a whole other hidden gem of a spot which I’m not going to tell you about now, because your coffee is either gone or stone cold and I think it’s probably wise for me to keep a topic or two in my back pocket for leaner blogging times ahead.  Also, it’s my bed time.
 
 
* Ok, I should probably explain the “banquet hall” bit.  During the construction of the tunnel there were a couple of big floods.  After the first, smaller flood, investors needed some reassurance about the feasibility of the project, so Marc Brunel arranged a banquet in the pumped-out, dried out tunnel itself.

“In the western archway, draped in crimson, a long table was covered in white damask and elaborately set with silver and crystal for a sumptuous banquet. Fifty selected guests, lit by decorative candelabra from the Portable Gas Company, dined while the uniformed band of the Coldstream Guards  played the National Anthem, Rule Britannia and See the Conquering Hero Comes.”

(from “The Brunel’s Tunnel”, my £5 bargain.)

GRUB!: Flapjacks

No, not THAT kind of flapjack.  Not the pancake kind served in stacks for breakfast, drenched in butter and maple syrup.  Over here that kind of flapjack is decidedly rare on breakfast menus, which astute GSWPL readers will remember run heavily to eggs, bacon, sausages and beans.  (In fact, you mostly hear about pancakes on Shrove Tuesday when recipes and cooking techniques appear in newspapers and on morning talk shows all over the place.  However, it seems the emphasis is not so much on eating the pancakes as it is on flipping the pancakes using only arm/wrist action with no helpful utensil between you and the foodstuff in question.  It’s weird.  Last Shrove Tuesday the media was awash with stories about celebrities (minor and major) flipping, or attempting to flip, pancakes.  I’m sure I saw a bit in the paper about William and Kate at some charity event where they were photographed, frying pans in hand, trying to coax pancakes into turning over. I don’t think I ever saw a picture of anyone actually eating a pancake.  It’s like they’re just props or something.)

(Additional pancake aside: You can buy pre-made stacks of cooked pancakes in cellophane wrappers in the baked goods section of grocery stores. I think you’re supposed to microwave them. Uck.)

But we’re not here to talk about pancakes because it’s not Shrove Tuesday.  Instead, we are talking about flapjacks!  Flapjacks are sweet oat bar kind of treat not miles away from granola bars but definitely more indulgent.  Granola bars frequently masquerade as vaguely healthy.  Flapjacks, on the other hand, are definitely in the cookies/biscuits/slices/bars category.

A “home made” flapjack from the canteen at work.  This one has raisins and dried cranberries.  I know it looks all rolled-oatey and wholesome looking, but it’s really so much more than that. And it was very, very good with my morning coffee.

Flapjacks are available pre-packaged in convenience stores, usually with different additions like raisins, chocolate chips, dried fruit and nuts and chocolate coatings. 

An array of industrial flapjacks, photographed in their natural habitat, a corner store shelf.

Industrial flapjacks are ok, but certainly not as good as the home made variety.  How do I know this?  Because ever your humble servant, and devoted as I am to bringing you the most accurate information possible, I actually made a batch of flapjacks just so I could blog about them. And that’s how I discovered why flapjacks are so good.  It’s because 3 of the 4 ingredients involved are decidedly on the indulgent end of the spectrum.  What are those ingredients? Butter, brown sugar, golden syrup and of course oats.  How can you go wrong with a lineup like that?

The Holy Trinity.  And oats.

(Aside about golden syrup: Golden syrup is a light type of treacle, which is a byproduct of refining cane sugar. It’s not dissimilar to corn syrup, though it’s definitely thicker and, if such a thing is possible, stickier.  Lyle’s Golden Syrup – pictured above – is the classic in the UK.  Have a close look at the iconic green and gold tin. That picture in the middle is actually the rotting carcass of a lion with a swarm of bees. Charming.  Apparently its some kind of biblical reference. I bet the marketing guys love that: 

Marketing Guy: Say, how about this time around we leave off the rotting lion carcass?
Lyle’s Golden Syrup Guy: No way, it’s been there since 1885. My father’s father’s father’s father designed that label.
Marketing Guy: Erm… yeah.  Look, I know this may come as a shock to you, but our focus groups say they’d rather not buy food products with images of decomposing animals on them.
Lyle’s Golden Syrup Guy: You’re fired.)

Here’s the recipe I tried which I got from Allrecipes.co.uk, with amounts adapted to provide slightly less than one million flapjacks, which is what the original recipe seemed bent on producing:

Traditional Flapjacks

Ingredients: (with helpful conversions, substitutions and hints)

250g or 1 cup butter (preferably unsalted)

150g or 2/3 cup golden syrup (or corn syrup in a pinch) (or honey, but not really) (Hint: coat your spoon, measuring cup, hands, and all other kitchen surfaces with a light film of cooking oil before approaching the golden syrup tin. You’ll thank me later.)

167g or 1 cup brown sugar, lightly packed 

333g or 5 cups porridge oats / rolled oats 

OPTIONAL: 100grams or 3/4 cup raisins (I say optional, but really, they’re better with raisins.)

Method: (with helpful conversions and editorial comments)

1. Preheat oven to 160 C or 320 F or Gas Mark 3 or 433.5 degrees Kelvin
2. In a large pan on low heat melt butter, sugar and syrup till well combined and runny. Mix in the oats in batches, making sure none are left uncoated by the butter-sugar-syrup mix.
3. Pour into a cookie sheet (9” x 13” or 225mm x 320mm) lined with parchment paper. Level out the mix with a spatula. Bake for 25-35 minutes (or 1.5 million to 2.1 million milliseconds).  (Note that came with the recipe: These should look seriously under-baked, that's the point. When they are done, if you grip the pan and give it a little wobble, it will look uncooked. This is perfect.) 
4. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave for a whole day or overnight till completely cold. (Pam’s note: You’ve got to be kidding me…) If you try and turn them out before, they will be ruined. (Pam again: Not true in my experience, but see caveat below.) When they are completely cold, turn them out and cut into bars. Wrapped in cling film / saran wrap or foil these will last a week at least. They freeze well too! (Pam says: This remains to be seen.)

Yield:  about 2 dozen modestly sized bars (1-1/2” x 3” x 3/4” or 35mm x 70mm x 18mm)

My flapjacks

This is a super easy recipe to make, and it worked out fairly well, especially if you consider the fact that I had the oven on the wrong setting at first (of course) and hence was broiling (for UK readers: grilling) my lovingly made flapjacks for a while.  My personally annotated version of this recipe now bears the note: “use the oven setting with the picture of one solid bar along the bottom”. (As opposed to the setting with the picture of tiny triangles suspended, points down, at the top, of course.  Duh.)  At least this slight overcooking meant that I didn’t have to wait EIGHT HOURS for my flapjacks to cool and firm up, which is a damned good thing.

And there you have it – a little project you can try at home to get a taste of the UK wherever you are, as long as that place is somewhere you can get butter, sugar, oats and golden syrup.  And if you’re somewhere you can’t get those things, I advise you to leave immediately.  I mean really, what are you thinking?

Tourist Stuff: Kew Gardens

When last we left our intrepid blogger she was whining about Sainsbury’s and bicycle locks and uncooperative trains and London in general.  Let’s just abandon that sordid episode and get on with today’s topic – Kew Gardens.  Or, as it is more properly known: The Royal  Botanic Gardens, Kew. (Note that the word is gardenS, plural, because what we now know of as Kew Gardens is actually an amalgamation of gardens in Kew and neighbouring Richmond.) 

The idea to visit Kew came from blog fan and friend-of-a-friend Phoebe, who was due to be visiting London with her husband John and thought that a walk around Kew would be a fun way to meet, and would also set us up well for a pint or two at a local pub once the plants got to be a bit too much. (In other words, at Pimm’s O’clock.)  I decided to go early to get in some serious blog-worthy photography and fact-finding, so I got there at about 10:30am.  I entered through the Victoria Gate, which is the one closest to Kew Gardens Tube Station, as distinct from Kew Bridge Rail Station, which is just across the river (and which was woefully lacking anything so useful as a train on that particular Sunday), and grudgingly paid the exorbitant fee of £13.90 for a day’s entry.  (The Friday before I’d been chatting with a woman at work who, while grey-haired, is certainly not notably antique and she said she could remember when the admission price to get into Kew was tuppence.  Well, times have clearly changed, but no matter; that’s the price I pay to bring you this kind of high quality bloggage.)

Speaking of high quality bloggage, anyone who read my last blog (the witty and informative Go See Run Eat Drink) will recall that I am a big fan of guided tours when tackling large and complicated sights. This is especially true when the tours are a) free and b) conducted by volunteer guides who are there because they love the place you’re touring and want you to love it too. Happily, both those things were true at Kew, and I set out on the 11am tour with Sheila, who winningly reported that she always finds something new every time she visits Kew, and she’s been going for fifty years. 

Sheila, guiding her little socks off.  (Important tip for anyone wanting to take the free guided tours at Kew: Show up at least 15 minutes before the tour is scheduled to start and sign in.  This is mandatory - several people were turned away the Sunday I was there, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

We started with a bit of history, and Kew has a lot of that, having been there in one form or another for 252 years. It started life as an exotic garden owned by Lord Capel  John of Tewkesbury in 1759 and was enlarged by the Dowager Princess of Wales, Augusta.  It was further expanded by George III.  Private collections of exotic plants like those at Kew were status symbols for the wealthy in 18th century, partly due to the proliferation of scientific exploration.  The Gardens are still home to the smallest royal palace, Kew Palace, which is a relatively unassuming red brick edifice that was built in 1781 as a Royal Nursery (the kind for young princes and princesses, not the kind for young plants, ironically).  However, Kew really came into its own starting in the mid 19th century as a storehouse and showcase for the thousands of specimens of exotic trees and plants that were collected as Englishmen spread their empire across the globe.  (Scene: Englishman in pith helmet and crisp linen suit addressing native tribesman: “Hello there my good man.  I’d like to propose the following arrangement: you take these lovely glass beads, and we’ll take everything from here to the horizon. God save the Queen!”)

The famous Palm House – Kew’s most iconic structure – was completed in 1848, by architect Decimus Burton (Yes, he was the tenth child in his family, how did you guess?) and shipwright Richard Turner, so its perhaps not unusual that the thing looks a bit like an upturned ship’s hull.  It’s famous for being the first large scale structure to be built of wrought iron, and all the panes of glass are hand-blown (and many curve in two different planes.)

The Palm House, on a cloudy Sunday.  I was kind if miffed that it seemed the windows were so dirty, but it’s mostly condensation on the inside. 

Naturally, Sheila took us through the Palm House, and pointed out some really excellent bits of tiriva.  For instance, she showed us this fantastic tree whose name I couldn’t be bothered to write down because everything at  Kew is labelled with its Latin name.  But the tree itself was great – its roots reach down from the skinny trunk like flying buttresses, helping to hold the whole thing stable.

The Flying Buttress Tree (arborem fuga trajectura) (Ok, I just made that up by plunking stuff into Google Translator)

The Palm House is also home to the world’s oldest pot plant, which is probably not what you’re thinking.  Over here they use the term “pot plant” like we use “potted plant” in North America.  (I don’t actually know what they say when they mean the not-precisely-legal thing you’re all thinking of.)  Anyway, the (probably) world’s oldest pot(ted) plant is an Eastern Cape giant cycad, which looks positively jurassic, and has been at Kew since 1775, thus predating the American and French Revolutions, the invention of the steam engine, the moon landings, and the introduction of New Coke.

The aged cycad, which has gone distinctly horizontal

Sheila also told us a sad but heart-warming story about one specific palm tree in the Palm House.  As palms trees are a particularly tall and fast-growing species there comes a time in the life of many of the largest of the Palm House palms  when the top of the tree starts to threaten the top of the Palm House.  At these times the directors at Kew are forced to make the decision to remove the tree, as unfortunate as that may be.  This was the case for a palm that Sheila pointed out to us.  However, just after the decision was made to remove the tree, it started to flower, and it is a type of tree that only flowers once in its lifetime and then dies.  Thus as if it knew its time had come, the tree put out a display of fantastic drooping clusters and the directors at Kew decided they’d let it live out the end of its days in the Palm House having reached the ripe old age of twelve. (I told you they grow fast.)

The aforementioned drooping clusters of flower-ish stuff

Yet Kew is more than just a collection of interesting plants in diverting surroundings.  It’s actually one of the world’s largest herbariums (a collection of preserved plants), with over seven million specimens.  It also employs more than 650 people, many of whom are not just there to mow the lawn and tend one of the largest compost heaps in Europe, but are actually proper botanists.  One of the great works of Kew is the identification and cataloguing of new species of plants, which they do 2-3,000 times each year.  There is also a seedbank, one of the world’s largest botanical libraries, and a forensic science department that once “were able to ascertain that the contents of the stomach of a headless corpse found in the river Thames contained a highly toxic African bean.” (from Wikipedia, or possibly from the script of the pilot episode of CSI:Q).  They even have an iPhone app, which I naturally downloaded and used throughout my visit. (It’s well worth the bandwidth.)

However, despite all the exotic plants and beguiling vistas and plucky palm trees, my favourite part of Kew Gardens was an unassuming building tucked away in the Richmond end of the site:

The Marianne North Gallery

It was recommended by a friend who claimed it was “not to be missed”, and it turns out he was absolutely right.  (Thank Jeremy!)  The gallery is the home to an enormous collection of paintings by one woman – Marianne North, who was born in 1830 and devoted her life to traveling the world painting the native plant species of the countries she visited.  This really is an impressive feat, because though she came from a wealthy family, she did a lot of her traveling alone at a time when that was certainly not the kind of thing women generally did. (Even I, 131 years later, ran into some incredulity when it was discovered I was traveling unaccompanied.)  When North at last returned to England she approached the director of Kew Gardens at the time, Sir Joseph Hooker, and offered to pay for the construction of a gallery at Kew for displaying her work.  Hooker agreed, and the gallery was built and opened to the public in 1882.  (Note to aspiring artists – offering to pay for the construction of your own gallery is a great way to get your work into the public eye!)

And what’s so special about the Marianne North Gallery?  Well, let’s just say that North was an exceptionally prolific artist and the view on entering the gallery is… unexpected.  Since most of you are unlikely to be there any time soon, I will spoil the surprise and give you a look at the inside of the Marianne North Gallery:

The gallery contains 832 paintings, all by North, and all displayed like this, in just two modestly-sized rooms.  It was “a condition of the bequest of the paintings to Kew on North’s death that the layout of the paintings in the room may not be altered”. (Wikipedia)

It’s such an arresting thing walking into that first room and seeing the almost absurd number of paintings and their claustrophobic layout (arranged by North herself, over the course of a year) that I think I laughed out loud.  It was fantastic.  And because it was pouring rain (of course) and I wasn’t due to meet with Phoebe and John for at least half an hour I had the leisure to linger and really take it all in.  The paintings are arranged geographically, with all the works of a particular region clustered together, and with tiny numbers painted under each.  The numbers correspond to short descriptions on cards that run along the ledge below the paintings (“Angraecum and Urania Moth of Madagascar” and so on).  It was easy to while away half an hour just letting my eyes slide over the walls until something popped out that caught my attention, and then letting my eyes wander once again.

What I especially liked was finding paintings of places I’d been to – India and Japan in particular – and seeing that those 130 year old paintings still looked a lot like what I’d seen myself.  Yes, there is a preponderance of paintings of trees and flowers and leaves and whatnot, but  there are also a lot of paintings of people and buildings and more general landscapes, which I found more interesting than the plants. You can see thumbnails of all of North’s paintings on the Kew website, via this link. 

Eventually the rain slackened and it was time to go meet Phoebe and John, and we hit it off well and had a nice time wandering around that Gardens.  I spouted off incessantly with all the bits of trivia that Sheila shared, and we did the tree-top walk (beware: the elevator is out of order), and went to the Water Lily House (built specifically to house the giant waterlily) and saw the pagoda (which looks like a cross between a Chinese pagoda and a large brick bell tower), and went to the Temperate House (the largest Victorian glass structure still standing), and the Japanese Garden (including a four-fifths replica of the the Karamon of Nishi Hongan-ji in Kyoto).  And I dragged them to the Marianne North Gallery and didn’t tell them what to expect, and their reaction on entering was exactly like mine, which was immensely satisfying.

And then is was Pimm’s O’Clock and we wandered out of the main gate, past a quite-respectable (according to John) cricket match, and ended up at The Greyhound,  where they had real ale and Yorkshire puddings the size of hubcaps and Phoebe and I had our picture taken.

Me and Phoebe at The Greyhound, in a photo that Phoebe didn’t like but it’s not her blog so tough luck for her.

And thus my day at Kew Gardens ended much more agreeably than it had started.  Phoebe and John went off to their next engagement, and I went back to the tube and retrieved my bike from Vauxhall Station (it was still there!) and pedaled my worn-out self home.  And I do believe I went to bed early.


(As usual, more photos of my day at Kew can be found in the Flickr set here.)

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.)

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

Words, words, more lovely words

Honestly, I’m having a bit of trouble thinking of things to blog about these days, so I hope you won’t think it’s a cop-out to give you a bit more local lingo to chew over with your morning coffee.  And if you do mind, well, too bad.  It’s my blog, and I’ll make it boring if I want to.  Today it seems we’re concentrating on somewhat more poetic words for otherwise mundane things (with a few mundane things thrown in too).

fairy cakes = cupcakes!  This is so much better a word than cupcakes that I think the entire English-speaking world should adopt it right now.  I mean what would you rather have – a cake that comes from a cup, or a cake that comes from fairies?

See, they’re even sprinkled with fairy dust!

fairy lights = twinkie lights.  Those strings of tiny lights you put on a Christmas tree, or hang up on the patio.

gubbins = an excellent word that occupies a similar place in my mind as “faffing about” but to do with things as opposed to actions.  Gubbins are bits and pieces or add-ons, or general clutter, often more specifically the inner workings of something.  As in “We’re moving house at the end of the month and I just have no idea what I’m going to do with all this gubbins!” Or: “Henry spent the whole afternoon in the garden shed faffing about in the gubbins of our old telly.”

telly = television.  Normally said without a trace of irony or sense of how unbearably English it is to say “telly” when you mean tv.

vest = a sleeveless undershirt of the type sometimes referred to in North America (rather distastefully) as a “wife-beater.”  Not at all poetic, but this is apparently the completely normal word for this type of garment, as was brought home to me was I was working on a crossword puzzle with Patrick (the Crossword Tutor) and, unbeknownst to me, the answer was “vest”.  At first Patrick couldn’t understand why I didn’t get the answer immediately, and then he kept trying to give me hints like this:

Patrick:  It’s a kind of undergarment.
Me:  An undershirt.
Patrick:  Yes, but what else would you call that?
Me:  An undershirt.
Patrick:  No no, what’s the other word for a shirt you wear under another shirt?
Me:  An undershirt.

And so on.

This happens every once in a while.  I’ll be having a perfectly normal conversation with someone and they’ll use a perfectly normal word but in a completely unknown way.  Imagine sitting at your desk and having a colleague ask you to pass them the carburetor.  Your mind races… carburetor… carburetor… what’s that one again?  And again they say “The carburetor, right there, next to your elbow.”  And you look at the spot next to your elbow and you think the only thing here is a stapler, and you say, “Do you mean this stapler?”  And they say “Yes, yes, the carburetor, hand it over.”  And you think “These people are all mad.” And then you hand over the carburetor and you think “I definitely have to blog about this.”

(Totally unrelated aside: the word “carburetor” appear in the above paragraph six times.  And I did not spell it correctly once in those five times, even after I allowed spell-check to show me how to spell carburetor.) (I also got it wrong both times in this aside.)

Lollipop man = crossing guard.  Again, how cute is that?  They’re called lollipop men (or women) because they carry a round stop sign on a pole that looks like a giant lollipop.  The popular image of a Lollipop man is a grey-haired gentleman of retirement age who plays a sort of benevolent, grandfatherly role.  Like John Hunter of Edinburgh, who was a Lollipop man for 10 years and was popular with the kids for high-fiving them and sometimes giving out sweets.  That is, until a parent complained about the health and safety risks of him high-fiving the kids and he was asked to stop.  It’s elfin safety gone mad, I tells ya.

Not John Hunter of Edinburgh.  (Apparently the black strip on the sign is for recording, with chalk, the license plates of motorists who do not stop.  Under UK law it’s an offence to fail to stop when signaled by a Lollipop person.  Lollipoppers often stand at zebra crossings.)

Zebra Crossing (pronounced ZEB-ruh, not ZEEB-ruh. It rhymes with Deborah) = crosswalk.  You know, the ones with alternating dark and light stripes painted on the road, like a zebra?  It makes perfect sense, and it’s fun, so why wouldn’t you call it something lovely like a zebra crossing? (Let’s set aside for the moment the fact there could possibly be some confusion about whether or not one might have to be wary of actual zebras in the zebra crossing.  Though of course the last native English zebra was killed, stuffed and mounted in the dining hall at Eton in 1883.)

The world’s most famous zebra crossing, at Abbey Road

Sleeping Policeman = speed bump. Literally those raised bits of pavement they put down in residential areas to force you to slow down lest you leave your muffler scattered in pieces through the streets of Lesser Wortstable-on-the-Snorfy.  I’m telling you, these people have a way with words. (And place names, but that is definitely another post)

Cluedo (pronounced “CLEW dough”) = Clue, the board game.  Apparently this is the original name of the game, which was developed in England in 1949.  The name is a play on the name of a traditional English game called “Ludo”, on which the layout of the board is based.  This is another one of those carburetor things.  When I ask about why it’s called “Cluedo” and not simply “Clue” people say, “Well I suppose it’s because of “Ludo” isn’t it?” and what I think is “Ludo?  What the…?” and what I say is “Suuuuuuure it is…” And then I back away slowly.

 The original 1949 board layout.  In the UK version the green piece is “Reverend Green”, not “Mr. Green”.  And the victim is “Mr. Black” not “Mr. Boddy”. And of course it’s a spanner, not a wrench.

naff = nerdy, uncool, embarrassing, out of fashion, tacky, etc.  Basically, any parent of a teenager is naff.

torch = flashlight.  Again, I think this is sort of charming.  It’s like they’ve been around for so long over here and they’ve gone through so many iterations of the handheld light source that they just can’t be arsed to think up a different word every time something new comes along.  It’s like the guy whose job it was to name the thing was thinking, “Damnit, 'torch’ worked fine in the 11th century. Why do we need a new word just because the blasted thing’s got a battery?”

“Can’t be arsed” =  “Can’t be bothered”.  Or: to be disinclined to get off one’s arse.  (And yes, it’s definitely your arse, not your ass.)  As in: “I would really love a curry right now, but I just can’t be arsed to go all the way to the Indian takeaway.”  Or, more likely:  “I would really love a curry right now, but I just can’t be arsed to reach for the phone to order it.”  


And that, loyal readers, is all I’ve got for you today.  Because it’s late on a Sunday night, and I’ve got to be at work early tomorrow and really, I just can’t be arsed…