fLEXICOLOGY

f LEXICOLOGY

or, How to Speak English in England:

An irreverent introductory lesson.

A Norwegian friend visits.  Flights from Bergen to Cambridge are relatively short and inexpensive.  We’re having beers at a pub overlooking the River Cam.  Out there, on the river, the punts are hopelessly self-guided.  They are more like floating cigar-shaped billiard balls, crashing into one another, than the genteel watercraft of a bye-gone age.  It is easy to suspect that most of the punters have been drinking.  Indeed, many raise a bottle in greeting as they pass beneath our windowed roost.  Most of them are tourists.  Nearly all attempt to ward-off inevitable collisions with the waving of hands and a Babel of words, spoken in nearly every imaginable tongue, roughly meaning watch out and turn now, you senseless idiot.  Contemplating these failures of navigation and communication can generate conversation that runs as deep as the River Cam.  This afternoon, however, it is just good fun.

Back inside, my Norwegian friend is holding forth.  Her English is perfectly accented.  She loves to talk.  And, she relishes engaging people.  One of our party, an American, compares her to the turret of a Bradley tank.  She’s become the center of our attentions, and, fires-off with striking accuracy at each individual’s interests.  We are an international party: Norwegians and Americans; English and Scots; a Dane; a Canadian; and an Australian.  English is our common language.  And, what strikes me about her English is that it is accented differently and perfectly for each person to whom she speaks.  When speaking to the Englishmen, she speaks flawless British English with a beautifully cultured accent.  A Norwegian who masters English can be expected to speak English with a British accent, as the availability of British TV and radio is prevalent across Europe.  Even so, she directs spot-on Midwestern American English to the Americans.  And, when she speaks to the Dane, who learned his English in Ireland, it is his Danish-accented Irish English that she is using.  I can barely understand a word of its tick-broke; the thick brogue of his airs (i.e., his Rs) roiling like water over a rapid.  And, her English, the Scots remark, is perfectly Glaswegian.  One of them is so astonished that he address her as “lass”, before telling her that her sweet tongue is as “surprising as, though much more delightful than a Glasgow kiss”.  This is the Scot who plays rugby with the take-no-prisoners spirit of a Klingon.  Who knew that he had rough poetry within him?  Another of the Scots — the one who has been rendering the Dane’s English into British English for me — explains that a Glasgow kiss is a headbutt.  Our Norwegian friend, meanwhile, has gone on to demonstrate her command of the Canadian and Aussie accents in their colloquial English.

We are so amazed that the conversation lingers not simply on her — turning from her tales of new motherhood — but on her speaking abilities.  “You Americans,” she says to the fellow across the table from her, “you can finish reciting a paragraph in the time it takes a Briton to recite a sentence.”  I suspect that she is exaggerating a tad, but there’s a kernel of truth to it.  “You speak English like the French speak French.  Fast.”  Consider that Americans “while” away their time, whilst amongst Britons the world moves at a different pace.  Even in our indecision, Americans “um” and Britons “erm” — though both words are pronounced in exactly the same way, the British require an extra letter.  And, it is true that American English sometimes swallows whole syllables with the intake of the breath needed to speak; and, that it prefers contractions, like I’m or there’s, as if words need to quicken their pace for time is fleeting, or, as if for every moment describing the action an action was wasted.  Odd then that Americans love to tell stories.

Here, my thoughts were diverted.  One of my grade-school grammar teachers preferred the word allision to contraction.  Contractions are what women have before childbirth, my mother would explain, attempting to clarify my teacher’s choice of word.  As my teacher was a woman — indeed, as all of my grammar teachers had been women, my mother’s clarification only lead me to wonder what grammar and childbirth had in common.  The puzzle of contractions in the English language remained an enigma for some time thereafter.  “An allision is a collision between a moving vessel and a stationary object.”  Thomas J. Shoenbaum wrote in his Admiralty and maritime law (4th edition — St.  Paul, MN : West Publishing Co., 2004).  That’s American English.  Like the actions of punters lacking common skills, language, sometimes even common sense, it is the product of so many immigrants — and, apparently, child bearing women — screaming to be heard.

British English has the patience to be heard as to be understood amidst the cacophony of languages that is neighbouring Europe.  The Norwegian turns to the most proper of the Englishmen in our company.  “British English,” she says, polishing every consonant, then pausing for emphasis, . . . “British English pronounces ever syllable, distinctly and clearly.”  It’s a right fine posh accent she’s usin’, indeed.  And, there’s the rub.  I’ve heard more English accents alone among the native English than I’ve heard across the whole of North America.  She is, it seems to me, nonetheless right to say that there is a cadence in the oratory of an Englishman’s English that is wholly different from, or, at least slower than the cadence of American and Canadian English.

Certainly, it might be said, some British English sounds, like that of the letter /a/, are drawn out as no one would draw them in the Americas.  . . . Except, perhaps, in the heart of Boston, or, as a Southern Belle — who must wait for her hoop skirt to catch up — must speak them.  My high-school music teacher, a mannerly woman from Dothan, Alabama, was a human metronome.  She would count out the beat of the music: “Quwah-tah.  Quwah-tah.  Quwah-tah.”  [The face of George Washington is on the Quwah-tah, the USA's twenty-five cent coin.]  For a northerner, Dothan was as back-woods as you could ever hope to be.  Yet, my music teacher’s Quwah-tah is a direct relation to the upper-crust English mother, calling out to her children playing rough-and-tumble beneath the summer sun: “Children, wah-tah?  Wah-tah anyone?”

These two words, quarter and water, are wonderful examples of the syllabic rhythms of the British, or shall I say the English accent.  They make subtly apparent what may be the most profound difference between North American English and English English.  It’s all about Location, Location, Location as any (real) estate agent will tell you.  It’s about where one places stress within a word.  Stressing a letter, as my captivating Norwegian friend claims, can change more than the music of a language.  If we were speaking Turkish, stressing or elongating the /a/ sound would change the word sat (/sawt/) into saat (/saw-aht/), and, the meaning from sell to hour.  . . . Elongation would put time on our hands.  But, English is not Turkish.  Meaning does not change, not necessarily.  Active listening is required, nonetheless, to ensure understanding.  — You can axe me, anything! Here’s a simple example from increasingly-used American English that the casual British listener might presume to be evidence of a truly violent US culture.  Of course, you may ask me anything.

While Britons quwah-tah their wah-tah, North Americans usually quart-er their watt-er.  There’s something oddly appropriate about quarts to water.  It’s almost electric!  So, how much does the placement of stress suggest the character of a people?  Consider the following examples, current in British English.  They stress the letters “er” in such a way as to give them a long /a/ sound.

At the 2011 Brit Awards, a London rapper by the name of Tinie Tempah — as in, that’s one small temper and one large talent for mankind — was nominated for British Male Solo Artist of the year.  The name telegraphs the up-bound beat of Tempah’s rap on subjects as rosy as a love of tea.  Who’s a tempest in a little tea-pot, eh?  In this United Kingdom, there is none of the big bad-tempered rap of those United States as anyone having voted for Plan B will attest.  Plan B, of course, was another British rapper also nominated for British Male Solo Artist of the year.  At the age of 27 — as of anyone over the age of twenty-five, he’s considered a geezer.  That’s a rap gee-zah, as in, The pyramids at Giza were built by some old Egyptian.  I suppose that we might think of Plan B as a gee-zah rap-pah, but that could easily be taken to refer to the day old news-pay-pah in which a take-away meal of fish-and-chips is sometimes wrapped.  He may be old-ah, but there’s nothing fishy about Plan B.

Myself, I prefer the more dangerous and racy examples that litter the language from A and Z, from adult to zebra.  These examples are more about the placement of stress within a word than upon a particular letter or letter combination.

The common definition of geezer is adult.  For speakers of English-accented English, the word, adult, remains close to its Latin roots.  An adult, is the sum of its Latin parts: ad and ult — as if an addition of ultimates, meaning someone of advanced age.  Now, for added emphasis, speak the word as if it were two words, giving equal emphasis to both: ad [breathe] ult.  With its added emphasis, ult should sound like the German word “alt”, meaning “old”.  An adult is someone not just old but someone very old.  For speakers of American-accented English, the word, adult, offers the possibility of less erudite, but perhaps more nuanced meaning.  An American divides the word not at “ad” but at “a” rendering the spoken word as /a/ + /dult/.  Now, just for fun, swallow the /u/ sound.  Say it with me: a dolt.  I’m not saying that most Americans are dullards compared with the British.  But, that meaning might be taken without careful, contextual listening.

I am reminded, here, of a former employee who told me that I should write such things in the presence of the irony-face emoticon —   ;-)   — to signal my perverse sense of humour.  I love the fact that “dolt” enters modern English as a noun having formed from a past participle.  The word dolt is akin the British English “learnt” or, as it is spelled in American English, “learned”.  ”Dolt”, one presumes of American English, might be spelled, “dolled”, as in, Perchance, when I am old and grey, and batty as a three dollar bill, I may doll myself up and stroll down the street: “Lolly too dum day!”  What’s that?  You’re too young to remember the Burl Ives song of that title, “Lolly too dum day!”  Dolt, originally spelled “dulte”, meant made dull.  One would not doll-up but, rather, dull-down.  I digress.

By the way, or, by way of continued digression, a “nine pound note” is the British idiomatic equivalent of the “three dollar bill” of American idiom.  At today’s exchange rate, £9 is roughly equivalent to $14 US or $14 Canadian, or even $14 Australian.  Quite a bit more than $3, eh.  It’s nice to be valued.  But, almost everything is more expensive in the UK, or, "more dear" as they say here.

At the far end of the English alphabet, zebras may be more colourful than they might at first appear.  I’ll spare you the etymology of zebras.  Let’s get straight to the hunt.  The British have “Zeb Rahs” … as in Zebulon sounds like a lion defending a kill.  How odd, to hear a horse-like creature roar!  The American, meanwhile, has “Ze Bras” … say it as if a fictional Frenchman, say Inspector Clouseau, perusing a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, ou là là.  I imagine a horse photographed wearing a bra for a two-page spread in the Sunday Times’ fashion section.  Until, I remind myself that “bra” is French for “arm”.  So, I redraw the image.  Eh voilà, a Centaur.  That’s much better than playing on the American stereotype, to suggest that a zebra is a horse bearing arms.  An AK-47, perhaps.  Wild zebra use their stripes to conceal themselves, while zebra in zoos have been shaken down for the public’s protection.  As if to confound the matter all the more, I’m unable to remove my mother’s colourful description of her bra as her “gun holsters” from my brain.  So, a zebra is a horse hiding a weapon in its bra!  This much — I apologize, especially to my feminist readers — has been nurture, not nature.  On second thought, perhaps we should stick to the bra alone.  Make love, not war.

Back in the pub, my Norwegian friend announces to no one in particular that she has to “use the head”.  No sooner than she’s spoken these words, she excuses herself for their use.  The phrasing she’s chosen is out of character with stories about motherhood and banter about what it means to find herself an adult buying kiddie lit filled with pictures of talking zebras doing housework.  She has been a salty dog, in recent years, who has spent almost as much time at sea in the company of rough men as she has spent on land.  She corrects herself, asking, “Will you excuse me?  I have to use the loo.” Perhaps because she is speaking to all of us, for the first time we hear her speak English using a Norwegian accent.

Each of us has been in the United Kingdom long enough to know what she means by the word loo  (that's "restroom" in polite American parlance).  Those of us who speak French as well as English even take the word back to its archaic French, lieux d’aisance, literally, places of ease, long since replaced in Paris by the British English invader: WC —Winston Churchill’s quaint water-closet.  But, her accent rounds the word lovingly with her lips.  And, to some of us, it sounds as though she’s incongruously invited them to join the mile-high club of lovers using the lavatories for sex on a long-distance flight, albeit here at sea level.  It is the Scots who are taken aback.  In some parts of Scotland, the word loo survives as a shortened version of the English word “love”.

Give me a moment here.  I need to savour the thoughts swelling with the intonation of loov and, perchance, the war-weary Frenchman who is speaking it.  He had been sent to Scotland, in 1545 during the War of the Rough Wooing, to help the Scots resist the advances of an English king’s drive to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland through arranged marriage.  Pity the poor French lad.  As he spoke the word to a Scottish lass, he couldn’t help but think of his own king, ensconced in the Louvre, then a royal palace, and, of other places far away in his beloved France.

The old Scots loo survives in the new world’s children’s song, “Skip to My Lou”.  It uses slang to tell the tale of a young lad who has lost his partner to another man.  He encourages her to return and to skip to his lou . . . to skip to his love, the beat of his heart, or, else to free him to find himself another love.  Why is it always the men who get hurt?  I should be clear, perhaps, for English readers - skip : that's archaic British English — still used in the States, meaning a sort of hopping walk.  It is not what American's would call a "dumpster", though I am sure that a dumpster of love, a skip for love's refuse has charm all its own.

It is a good thing that my Norwegian friend is not a man.  She might have confounded us with the word “urinal”.  A urinal, for the sake of clarification, is a kind of passive bidet (/bee-day/) that hangs vertically on a loo wall and that serves a slightly dissimilar purpose.  My father, a plumber, thought that I’d gone soft the first time he heard me use the word bidet.  To him, the observation that you’re not likely to find a bee day in the country just didn’t seem to make much sense.  Bees are more likely to have country days than days in the city.  My bidet was his bid-ette.  My English friends, hearing talk of bid-ettes, might conjure the image of a bouncy blonde calling out, Place your bets now.  Place your bets, beside a casino’s craps table.  Oh, my father did love the craps!

That diversion into the world of the bidet was for my amusement.  I’ve used the time to humour myself, hearing each of you say the word “urinal” as though there’s nothing funny about it.  To illustrate the humour, I want to take you to a men’s room in the international airport at Kingston, Jamaica.  Now, there are dee smahl Jam-ay-kahns, and there are dee tahl Jam-ay-kahns.  This loo was made to serve both of them: dee smahl and dee tahl.  The loo had two urinals.  One urinal at its base hung less than 1 metre or about 2.5 feet off the floor, while the next urinal at its base hung more than 1.5 metres or about 5 feet off the floor.  A man of average height would have to make this cruel choice: to pee, he could either kneel or jump.  A spliff might have helped one to see the music in the joint.  But, if you took the grout-lines of the tile on the wall as music’s staff lines, it was easy to see the two urinals as musical notes.  If we’d then asked two men — one American, the other English — to sing the notes, to sound the word “urinal”, we would have heard two very different notes.  The American would have sung to the Englishman: ♫ you’re in all ♫.  And, the Englishman of our little, two-man opera might have taken offence.  So, in response, the Englishman might have criticized the American singing, ♫ your eye in all ♫.

I pause here to get it out of my system.  I am reminded of the schoolboy humour with which an American teases out the pronunciation of “Uranus”, the name of the seventh planet from the Sun.  But, Uranus has other, and, quite different business in the loo.  The American would naturally croon, your-an-us, as offering an Appalachian homage to partnership: you and us.  In this instance, however, the schoolboy prefers the British pronunciation, your-anus.  In the mouth of the schoolboy, it’s as sophomoric as a “Your Mama’s so big” joke.  But, no British astronomer will hesitate to confirm that Uranus is the seventh planet from our sun.

[I pity the poor ESL — English as a Second Language — learners who may have been pointed to this essay as a means of testing their English.  Many are now wondering if they haven’t stumbled into a Tardis of science-fiction rather than an essay on speaking English.  This is not about speaking English as much as it is about having fun with the language.]

I first heard the word, urinal, with its British accent in Birmingham, after landing on a trans-Atlantic flight.  I hadn’t been able to sleep on the red-eye coming over.  I was groggy and had been searching the baggage hall for my luggage.  Not finding my bag, the possibility had just dawned on me that it may have flown to Birmingham, Alabama rather than with me to England.  And, now, the bag-check receipt was confirming it, when a perturbed voice beside me suggested, got to use your eye in all, son? As I looked up, I thought, Well, that’s cheeky of you, now, isn’t it.  Kick a man when he’s down.  The speaker was a man walking away; his young son, dancing a jig beside him as they made their escape.  It was rude, I thought, to criticize and then just turn your back on further discussion.

Since our Norwegian friend went to the loo, our table has fallen silent, like the open-mouthed balloon released by a party several tables over and that now lay scuppered between our glasses.  None of us would ever be the life of any party —   ;-).  Outside, there’s a commotion.  Two lads are running what we’ll later learn to be the “First Annual Cam Underwater Bicycle Race”.  The River Cam, as it turns out, is not that terribly deep.  I’m afraid that one or both of the riders may be speared by the punters’ poles.  I need to contain the thought for fear that I might leap out of the window to save them proactively from their certain fate, or, to save me from mine: boredom.  But, just then one of the Englishmen continues our language lesson.

He’s been asked about his up-coming travels.  First, he’s off to visit his wife’s family in Poland, before flying off to a lecture at Michigan State University in the USA.  Po-Land, he says, as if he were referring to the Land of the Po.  His pronunciation is actually rather faithful to the Polish, polanie (/po-lan-yah/), the word meaning “field” from which Poland is likely derived.  Incidentally, Po is the Polish word for “about” or “of the”.  So Po-Land might as well be an odd graft of Polish and English, appropriately taken to mean “of the land”.  The North Americans are more used to hearing Pole-Land — a land of pole-makers, no doubt.  Pole is another Polish word meaning “land”, albeit a slightly different, more generalized type of land than is meant by polanie.

It’s the Englishman’s pronunciation of Michigan that pulls the wheels off of the acoustic go-cart.  To North American ears, it is the equivalent of poking a stick into a turning bicycle wheel.  Mitch Egan, I hear the Englishman say.  Where is Mitch Egan State University?  This is the /ch/ of the English “church” rather than the softer /sh/ of the French fur traders who worshiped in the wilds of Michigan and borrowed the name from the native Ojibwe people.  It’s similar to the name of the French tyre (tire) company, Michelin.  Here in England, a country that prefers the French word “flambeau” to the older Middle English “torch”, the proximity of England to France is for naught.  The English, who incidentally have reserved the word “torch” to mean “flashlight”, know the Michelin Man as Mr. Mitch E. Lan.  Given this glottal stop mid-word, Michelin has the sound of a flat tyre, going thumpity thump in British English.

The penchant of British English for men’s names doesn’t end with Mitch Egan and Mitch E. Lan.  Mr. Nick On is a Nikon camera man for example.  At those prices, I once overheard a middle-aged woman in an electronics store remark, I dare say he will nick on, right out of me pocketbook!  Nick, in common British parlance, means to steal, you see.  It’s been my experience that, in the world of cameras, however, you get what you pay for.  A North American photographer might say, It was a nigh con.  I just couldn’t buy that camera.  I’d have to buy a whole new set of lenses as my Canon lenses just will not fit this camera.  Fortunately, “nigh con” is now rather archaic American English, meaning “to be nearly taken in”.  Meanwhile, in its corporate offices in Japan, Nikon — pronounced /knee con/ — actually means a feeling of extreme gratitude, even for the smallest things in life, like Thank God, we didn’t build a car and market it as a Nova in Puerto Rico, where “no va” means “it does not go”.

I’m beginning to wonder if our Norwegian friend will ever return from the loo.  It’s possible that she’s gone outside, to teach the punters a thing or two.  Let a real salty dog tell you, she might say, a thing or two.

   

  

Zombieland : Scene 1 - Revenant Fictions

(originally published in the dead of Winter 2011 on my now defunct old blog)


I've had two new computers since I've moving to the UK.  — That's one a year!   Now, I use computers hard, like a post-rider carrying the mail horseback through hostile territory. But, it strikes me that one a year is much worse than should be. I may go back to building my own computers from trusted suppliers of trusted parts.

Anyway, my experience has left me wondering if others here have had similar experience.  And, with tight regulation on the disposal of electronics in the UK and Europe — much, much tighter than regulations in the USA (that's a very good thing) — I've been wondering what people do with their old computers, clock-radios, TVs, etc.  It is easy enough to recycle a mobile phone for cash, even if it is a bit disheartening to think that I only got £50 for the mobile phone that could do everything when I bought it shortly after it came to market three years ago at a cost of £450.  But, the rest!?

I eventually donated my old bits to a local charity.  A happy lad — son of Frankenstein — recycles them, piecing the good parts from several old computers into one, even using electricity to bring them back to life.  Imagine that!  Some of the reanimated are sold on to the local poor for little more than the cost of the young man's time.  The bulk are sent off, at no cost, to village schools in sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia.

With the recent cold snap, I think that I've discovered what my neighbours do to manage the regulations.  Evenings bring — shortly after the masses return from City-jobs — the distinctive scent of melting plastics and burning wires.  It is a strong scent, too.  Some streets, where the air is particularly still, become dead-zones.  You'ld expect to see a litter of pedestrians and cyclists dead on the pavement, like so many fish killed off by red-tide, were these streets any more open to passage.  It is easy to imagine Husband-X calling out to Wife-Y, "I'm cold. Throw another clock-radio on the fire, will ya."  The whole neighbourhood smells of burning electrics.

I'll ask you to believe me.  Imaging that the particular scent is fed on old transistors and motherboards is more restful than thinking a house-fire is in progress.  With our neat little row-upon-row of conjoined homes revenant of the Industrial Revolution, one house-fire could bring the entire neighbourhood to life.

Elephant walks home

(Originally published on a now defunct blog, 2011 June 13.)

   

    

Don't blame the Italians, my grandfather used to say.  Your uncle is in the Mafia.  You don't want to wake up with a dead rat in your bed.  This was before the Godfather movies gave us the mystique of dead horse heads.

He was speaking about Toni.  (I’ve changed his name to protect my innocence.)  Toni was a fit man, defined by a six-pack and a muscular chest, long before gay men made them popular.  He was tall, dark and handsome.  It was easy to imagine how he had swept my aunt off her feet.  And, he was just what the family needed, as my own pearlescent skin-tone should suggest.  At the age of five, I was already certain that we’d descended from a line of Transylvanian vampires.  I was losing my baby teeth and waiting for my fangs to descend.  If my grandfather had to make up stories about Mafia muscle to explain the ripple in the family gene pool, so be it.

The line about the rat came from a story Toni told after a Christmas dinner when his ethnicity became a topic of conversation.  Toni had known a "rat", whom he called a wise-guy, who "squealed" on a mob boss in Cincinnati.  They buried him, Toni explained, in a "real-live” coffin. ... "real-live" was a 1960s way of adding emphasis, but I think it may also have been Toni's little nudge toward a joke.  His southern Italian humour could sail across the ears of his southern German in-laws like a whisper in the wind.  Before they closed the lid, they'd filled the coffin, so he said, with lots’a live rats. . . . He paused to stretch back in his chair and extend his arm around my aunt’s shoulder.  . . . They buried the coffin only an hour or so later, after the screams from inside stopped.  The looks of horror he received were met as though they’d been the silent question: "How could you say such a thing. This is a Christmas dinner."  What?, he exclaimed in reply, You don't wake up no dead.  Toni was a drop-dead serious kinda fellah; you could never tell when he was making something up.

I remember, once, when we stopped at a Pizzeria for a take-out that my aunt and mother had ordered, Toni thought that I was going to stay in the car while he went in to retrieve the order.  So when I followed him out of the car, and, he slammed the door on my finger, he showed no compassion or remorse but instead said something like, Looks like we already got our pizza!  That thing's flat and is covered with sauce.  To emphasize the contention, Toni jumped back into the car as if he were preparing to leave.  Instead, he pulled a first-aid kit from the glove compartment and handed it to his wife.  Here, he dead-panned.  I’ll go inside.  It looks like they didn’t put any pepperoni on that thing.  My mother and aunt where left standing there like two Andrews Sisters missing a third.

Anyway, when asked where his smart-fellahs got so many rats — I mean, really, how many rat farms can there be — he said, da pet store!  I must have looked puzzled by the thought of cute-and-cuddly furry white, pink-nosed pet-store rats.  Don't matter, he spoke, reading my mind, how cute they are.  They turn vampire with hunger in there.

The moral of the story was clear: "Watch what you say about the Italians.  I would hate to see you end up as some rat's last supper."  But, it’s here that this story begins, with a rat’s last supper.

I have a rat, well, had a rat.  Not a pet rat, nor an ersatz rat à la Banksy.  A wild rat.

This isn't something that I would normally admit.  Not that I normally have rats as houseguests.  In fact, I haven't had many houseguests of any species since moving to the United Kingdom.  To me, rats, outside of a temple or two in India, suggest unseemliness, a general lack of cleanliness.  A local grocery store, for example, appears to invite the rats I've seen scampering over cereal box-tops.  It can't seem to keep the place clean, . . . though that may be because the rats keep spilling cereals and pasta into the aisles.  Of course, I won't say that I'm not capable of being delighted by their play.  Isn't a rat nesting in a loaf of bread something like a child hollowing-out an igloo from a mound of snow?

Ignoring for the moment that it’s dead, allow me to repeat: I have a rat; and, though neither a pet nor invited, it is a special rat.  But, I'll come to that after telling you something about it.

First, I should say that I hate rats.  Genetically, I'm compelled to find them disgusting.  Did I mention that I'm descended from a line of Germans?  Stereotypically, we — my family, that is — compulsively turn off lights in unused rooms and refuse to acknowledge that we might be the font of any filth, let alone of the sort that might attract rats.  Rats, when they appear, are not a natural hoard, but a punishment for something we must have done.

Rats remind me of Quasimodo, Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Creepy, with their mincing walk and fervent devotion to games of hide-and-seek with the dog.  Yet, compared to rats I've seen in North America, rats with ardent eyes and knurled teeth, unkempt coal black fur and possibly the mange, more Morlock than Quasimodo, this rat has inquisitive eyes and groomed brown fur.  In a word, it seems respectable, a character of the sort you'd expect to see in a children's book.  Though it has that hunchback's posture, there is — or, was — something likeable about this rat.  Ask the dog.  The two of them were up all night, playing games, running up and down the stairs, turning on the motion-detection lights.  It seemed to bemuse the dog rather than challenge him to ownership of the water bowl.   In the short time since it climbed in — I thought — through an opened sky-light window, it seemed to have grown to think of itself as part of the family.  That, however, isn't what makes it special.

In fact, there is nothing special, per se, about rats in Britain.  According to the Times, which ran an article on their recently purported population explosion, they are, as we Americans say, “a dime a dozen” — “ubiquitous”, as they say here — “legion”, as they say amongst comic book heroes and heroines.  Legion!

No, what is special about my rat is something entirely beyond its nature, as a rat, that is.  You see, this rat is a messenger, a kind of homing-pigeon for divinity.  It is a horseman for the elephant god, Ganesh, of the Hindu Pantheon.  At least, that is what the women of my neighbourhood news-stand tell me.  I won't patronise their faith.  Indeed, I'm inclined to believe them, . . . not for their reasoning, nor because the day that the rat appeared marked the start of Ganesh Chaturthi.  That's the festival of Ganesh, the patron of wisdom, prosperity, good fortune, and creativity.  The iconography of Ganesh often depicts him as riding on the back of a rat.

Since Ganesh Chaturthi, in the Fall of last year, my rat has put in appearances on every Hindu holy day since.  And, only on the Hindu holidays.  While the neighbours' rats are reported to appear indiscriminately, I'd say that my rat is pretty special.  I was a bit disappointed with him when Holi rolled around though.  Holi is the holy day that marks the beginning of Spring.  Westerners usually think of it as a kind of Indian spectacular water-balloon-fight.  It's the day when children of all ages pelt one another with vibrant powered dyes traditionally made from the flowers of the palash tree, which once — when forests were still as ubiquitous as the rat remains today — was called the "Flame of the Forest".  My rat appeared to have little to celebrate.

When he appears alone, the women explain, the rat prepares the way for the Lord of Creation [Ganesh] to enter your life”.  My consulting business has gone done the tubes with the rise of European austerity.  I could use a rebirth or, at least, a little good fortune.  And, frankly, since the chain supermarket opened around the corner from them, the Indian women could do with a little prosperity-engendering fortune as well.  I'll send him over when he's done at my place, I tell them.  They laugh.  I suspect that, while they're delighted to hear of this sign from Ganesh, they're also rather glad to know that his rat has been billeted nearby rather than in their store.  The health inspector would shut them down.

There’s some Bible-banger in Birmingham, Alabama, just about now posting email to me that reads, Man, you are seriously screwed.  By that, I'm certain he means that I will not be going to heaven.  For starters, he is typing, everyone knows that elephants are afraid of rats.  That’s actually a myth — that elephants and rats are like oil and water.  Anyway, religious precepts are seemingly made to defy perceived wisdom.  Who in America hasn’t seen oil float on the surface of water, whether it’s a motor-oil stain in a rain-soaked parking-lot, or, on TV, scenes from an oil-spill at sea?  It may be the improbability of a belief in elephant gods riding on the backs of rodent chargers that suggests the power of creativity.  Sometimes, even a rat alone prompts a re-assessment of the world.  I, for example, searched and filled all potential points of entry into my house.  I would have done the same if it were water rather than a rat.  And, that could be the reason that it’s now dead.

The rat was special, too, because it filled me with a sense of acceptance rather than of violation.   It had invaded my home, I told myself, testing my limits.  And, what was a rat doing in a new-build anyway? I asked, expecting that if I couldn’t feel outrage toward the rat, I could feel disgust with my builder and surveyor.  Still, I felt nothing.  Instead, I calmly herded the rat into my study and closed the door on it.

Blood sport should have followed in true it's-him-or-me spirit.  It didn't.  And, though I still have a rat, albeit a dead rat, I have to say that I'm relieved.  Relieved, not simply because I would have never satisfactorily explained its death at my hands to the women at the news-stand.  No, I was relieved that some flinty spark of humanity allowed it to live despite the eat-or-be-eaten instinct.  I may be a chicken, but I am not going to kill a rat! I told myself defiantly.  Over night, I left the door closed, a window inside the room opened, and laid out a feast of peanut-butter and Appenzeller cheese on the sill to make a route of escape obvious.

In Florida, I once woke to the screams of the woman who lived in the garage-apartment above me.  Her screams were accompanied by the thundering sound of line-dancing.  She and her boyfriend were fresh from the backwoods; and, they frequently came home, from late nights out, in drunken reverie.  I presumed that this was the evening’s last dance.  And, eventually so, the footfalls slowed.  Then, the wooden screen-door of her apartment complained of its opening, as it had on occasions before when she lingered on the porch after sex to smoke a cigarette.  And, eventually too, the voice of the woman's boyfriend replaced her screams with the reassuring words, Now, let's go to sleep.

In the morning, she knocked at my door.  Can I wake the dead? she chirped.  I hope not, I replied, still groggy from the evening before and motioning toward the grave-stone of “Baby Girl Elder” that I kept in the window of my ground-floor flat as a deterrent against thieves.  Is that what you were trying to do last night? I asked.  You heard us then! she confessed.  Jerry was so cute, she continued.  The tone of her voice implied the familiarity of girl-talk.  Now, you probably already know where this story is going; but at the time, I could only image that I was about to hear the details of how she'd "slain" Jerry the night before.  A tale of wild sex and the intimate lives of cow-folk was the last thing I needed on a Sunday morning.

It was just then, a cartoon played in my head.  Tom and Jerry.  The mention of her boyfriend's name always had that effect.  It was a name that he shared with a cartoon mouse.  The vision couldn't have been more incongruous with reality.  Her boyfriend looked as though he'd been plucked from a Lynyrd Skynyrd album cover.  Son of Johnny Van Zant!  Jerry was so cute last night, she repeated herself.  You should have seen him.  All he was wearing was a pair of cowboy boots.  She paused intentionally to gauge my reaction.  Now, I don't know what she saw in the man, but seeing him in nothing more than cowboy boots probably wouldn't have convinced me that Jerry was the mouse that roared, let alone as cute as his name-sake.  All he was wearing was a pair of cowboy boots, when he killed that rat and threw it outside, she said, pointing into the yard where a lump of fur lay lifeless.

In the morning, I tore apart the room in which I had trapped the rat, to confirm that it had made its escape.  I opened the door to my study cautiously and let myself in, closing the door behind me.  I recall being fearful of a pre-emptive attack by a hungry rat — Thank you, uncle Toni.  Crossing the threshold was like stepping into the frames of Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit.  Every action seemed to be taken in stop-gap motion.  The rat was no-where to be seen.  But, a rat can be a wily creature.  It can lay flat amongst sheets of paper.  It may have been as afraid of my wrath as I'd been of its meeting its rabid hunger.  To be certain, this was no Plan 9 from Outer Space experience.  It held no take-me-to-your-leader moment.  It was 7 a.m.  The street was still.  And, I was hopeful.

Perhaps the rat that rests, mouldering, now behind the wall of my larder is yet another.  I have noticed that, in the Do-It-Yourself stores, there has explosion of rat e-RAT-ick-a-tion stuff.  To paraphrase Paul Simon, there must be at least fifty ways to kill a rat!  A woman I met there plies me with folk-wisdom and, reassuringly, with the assessment that where there’s one, there are ten.  I don’t brother to tell her that I see the rat only during Hindu holidays or that, as the women at the newsstand tell me, we must be very blessed indeed.

I left the store with hole fillers, bricks, concrete, and the like.  Ganesh was going to have to billet his rat somewhere else.  Little did I know that I'd gone home to seal him inside a wall.  So, . . . now that it's dead, there's a big blue elephant that's going to have to walk home alone.  Heaven awaits.

   

   

Goat Boy, Captured!

I’m listening to a new album of Ottoman court classics.  Closing my eyes, I can see Istanbul, a city that I love.

Meanwhile, outside, the neighbour kid is breaking in his new skateboard.  He’s practising tricks that will allow him to hold his own at the skate park not far away.  The skateboard’s sound, as it grinds down the granite curb, is oddly appropriate accompaniment, notwithstanding the distraction of worry that the boy might break his neck on the pavement below my office window.

Playing on the streets of urban Cambridge can sometimes be a dangerous proposition, even during the quite hours of the working day.  But now, it’s 4:23 p.m.  When his father arrives home, the sun has nearly set.  Drivers are already racing down the street in hopes of finding one of all too few parking spaces for the night.  Drivers, at this and in the hours to come, will be single-minded.  Their desperation will make them more dangerous the darker it gets.

Conversations between father and son usually begin in the father’s native Spanish.  They often communicate instructions.  Presumably, they’re in Spanish as much to save the child face among the friends who usually accompany him on the street, as for the bonds strengthened by a family language.  As a child, I’d often wished that my father would have spoken to me in his parents’ German, to save me the indignity of being seen to bow to his will.  But, on this street, the kid is aware perhaps that Spanish separates him from his English mates.  So, the father’s Spanish is usually interrupted with the son’s pleading, Ah, Dad. Speak English!

This evening, I’m not paying much attention to the conversation.  Living so close to one another, one learns to tune out the conservations of others and to blindly stare past open windows blazing light like a beacon to sailors on the sea.  Besides, my Spanish is rather poor.  By time it registers that it’s an argument I’m hearing in fact, it has gone well beyond Ah, Dad.  The father who has in the past been, by measures, friendly, fatherly, and stern is now audibly angry.  It’s a single word, one that I rarely hear in public, that pins the specimen to the board. . . . cabrón . . . It’s spoken as the verbal equivalent of the slamming of a door, or, the breaking of a dish.  Surely, it’s not meant to be understood by anyone other than the son.  This is the language of family.  Nonetheless, I can’t help overhearing it, or, attempting to understand what it conveys.

Language is, for me, like a mechanical flip-clock with its split-flap display.  It has teeth.  They go Tick. Tick. before the moment of comprehension.Tock.  To understand this word, I have to be refreshed, by words more immediately familiar to me.  Along the way, I will have collected up all of the similar sounding words that I know, whatever the language.  It’s as if I need to see the stepping stones across a stream before I will make the crossing.  It’s caballero to which the dial first spins.  Sir. Mister. Cowboy. in translation.  Caballero is a word that I’ve frequently heard used in the heat of debate.  It seems particularly New World Spanish.  Often, it accuses another of being cavalier if not arrogant.  Cabestrillo next takes its place.  I once heard this word used in an argument between a Colombian and a Venezuelan.  Go hang yourself with an arm-sling! one quipped to the other.  The comment was, certainly, a cavil.  The use of an arm-sling would be rather ill-suited to a hanging.  But, as argumental rhetoric, it was effective, as considerable offence was taken.  Other words from my mental dictionary step forward in mechanical succession.  Cabra = Goat.  And, Cabro = Boy, quickly tick up.  Destinations to which my train of thought has already departed.  I sense that I’m honing in on a precise understanding despite the fact that Goat boy . . . Niño de Cabra lights upon a cultural reference.  Cayetano Muriel, El Niño de Cabra as he was known, was a Spanish flamenco master-singer.  In a sense, this is the model of the kid’s skateboarding practice: to master the sport’s art form.  This is interesting!, I think.  Earlier in the day, the Indian news-ladies, gave me new words.  Gujarati, not Spanish.  Doebo, one said, this, it means “Boy” or “Goat”. Doe-Bo, I repeated.  But, the other interjected, Doe-Bee, it means “Stupid”.  Her timing was perfect.  She must have seen me flashing through yesterday’s lesson: Kew-Tro = Male Dog and Kew-Tree = Female Dog.  I mustn’t accidently call their teenage sister “stupid”.  Internationally, it seems, goat boys can be synonymous with “stupidity”.  When cabrón finally goesTock!, it’s the slur of Caribbean Spanish.  So vile is it that, when used among Domicans and Puerto Ricans, it can’t be put into English print.  I’ve dredged up words from arguments overheard while working or traveling in the Spanish Caribbean, and come to this.  A word that dare not speak its name.  Certainly, in Continental Spanish — the language of this father and son — its use must be less vulgar.

On the street, following its use, the argument goes silent.  No longer is the skateboard grinding down the granite; it — itself — is curbed.  There’s no slamming of the door; its closing is muted.  Here inside my office, the music of the Ottoman court plays on.  I close my eyes; and, as I do, I see the notes transformed to numbers that hang themselves on the grid of a musical scale.  Passerines.  Magpies.  Birds with a beautiful song.  I remind myself that their Spanish name, spoken while spitting, is maricón.

The Weather Report

(Originally published on 16 August 2010 on my now defunct personal blog.)

"It might just rain today."  I've always wanted to say that to someone I've more than casually but less than intimately known since over-hearing it years ago when I was still a young man.  It was spoken by one of two older men in a dusty pick-up park in a small southern Utah town.  If it ever rained there, I'd be a little more than surprised.

"Yep.  It might just rain today.  I think so." the other man nearly repeated.  Yeah, I thought, in Florida, but not likely here.  In Florida, the 3 p.m. beamer lets loose on the heads of the British tourists who've never heard about mad dogs.  It falls as no rain has ever fallen on England, just as a father, lowered to his knees, hand over shoulder of his young son, extols the glories of Empire on the ramparts of an old fort in north Florida.  Both are imagining tall ships in the inlet at Saint Augustine in the moment before Spain traded the whole of Florida to a burgeoning Britannia.  There, rain, like the American belief in Manifest Destiny and American Greatness, is a certainty.

Back in southern Utah, the line is delivered with less certainty, reflecting the probability rather than the certainty of rain, if not the desperation of old men for something to talk about.  It doesn't matter. It is something to be said now.  Overheard, it might even seem normal, if banal, conversation.  It is a means of making contact with the man who has been slowly inching toward the first, marking the ground like a hen scratching earth in search of feed.  I've taken the line too literally.  I don't notice, at first, that this little bare-rock park at the foot of a hiking trail is a pick-up place.  Here, it's about lonely hearts, and, bodies aching like the soil for rain.  Watching these two over the next few minutes is like watching clouds gather overhead.  The promise, of rain.

Here in England, I might just use the line with the quiet fellow who shares our communal garden, who tends its plants religiously.  But, I need to consider his reaction.  He's not a stupid man.  I am as certain of it as I am that he is intensely quiet.  The only sound I've ever heard coming from his flat was the sound track of a porn flick.  The bird gratifies the cock with her vocalizations.  -- Bird and cock, of course, being British slang.  Reminds me of the cock fights I witnessed in smoky Puerto Rican rings, where the winner gets the hen and the looser, well.  The looser might just be the fire roasted wings ordered by the fat man two levels down from me.  It's a different world.  But, it might just be the opening line to a budding friendship.

It might just rain today, I would say.  He might smile back.  This is England after all.  English reserve is renowned as rain on the sunny plains of Spain.  Anyway, Summer is already leaning into Fall.  Rain, though unpredictable by Florida standards, is almost certain.  The quiet man will take it for what it is.  A lead, maybe a leash.  A line fishing for a connection.  But, he is neither dog nor fish.  "Yep", he might say  -- or, the British equivalent of it.  Politely though, not looking away from the plant he's tending.  Trimming the dead blooms to ensure a longer flowering season.  Prolonging summer like childhood memory into adulthood.  The observation, the prediction - really - of rain is a kind of trap that will hook him into conversation.

The other night, as I was walking my dogs, I passed him on the street.  Recognition was a fleeting - now there's a word apt for the English historical experience.  That almost furtive moment of boy first sees girl, or, if you like, of boy first sees boy.  If I say nothing in passing, she'll notice that I've noticed but think me too shy to have asked her to dance.  On the rather desolate streets of urban England near dark, there are no plants to tend.  No comfort zone to retreat into.  As I head toward home, in any case, I notice that he's dressed in man's best bar-man's black.  His clothing, perfect for his unofficial role as observer, as purveyor of potential connections.  If appropriate at his destination, I can imagine him leaning into the light, delivering the line or some such other, as smoothly as bill into a G-string.  It appears he's headed off in the direction of the Lap Dance Club - the name says it all with a frankness more American than British.  With my own vicarious life to seed with visions of alien worlds, I'll want to hear all about it later.  Of course, more than the Lap Dance Club can be found in the direction that he is headed.

The next evening, opportunity has come.  I shorten the line to, Looks like rain!  My dog, Max, is taking an endless pee into the storm drain outside the front of the house.  Max is standing over the drain, letting loose with perfect aim.  His performance draws the attention of passers-by, who generally find it as adorably cute as a cat trained to use the indoor loo.  This toilet has something more exhibitionistic on offer.  Perhaps, it is a good thing no one can read my mind.  Looks like rain! has the nostalgic twitter of my maternal grandmother's rough English.  Looks like a cow come a peein' on the flat rock uv the ruff! she would say of an approaching thunderstorm.  Like the walloping a good thunderstorm could give the green-fields, Max's pee kills all greenery.

Most people, thank God, are just amazed to see my boy using the storm drain.  When I lived in New York City, my roommate would borrow the old neighbour lady's dog, Gretchen, for a walk in the park.  Unabashedly straight, he called the dog his "Babe Magnet".  Max is a kind of magnet.  For example, of the men who stop, I can read from their expressions flashbacks to their own potty training, when their mothers floated targets in the toilet to encourage them to aim.  Most dogs here pee in their private gardens.  Max prefers the storm drain.  No doubt, the percussion of it are as deeply gratifying to him as the sound of water on water.

On this evening, the man who stops is the adjacent neighbour rather than the fellow who shares the communal garden.  This young man is from one of the Steppe countries that most Americans collectively call "The Stans".  His name is Mohammed Omar.  The name makes him sound prematurely old.  He's actually rather much younger, a student at the nearby polytechnic university.  It's Ramadan.  He's on his way to break the day's fast.  Looks like rain! breaks the silence that would normally pass between us.  They say in England that you notice but ignore your neighbour twenty times before you might finally say "Hello".  I don't know that that's so much different from my old neighbourhood back in Florida.  There heat and humidity, or, the distance between homes rather than a national reserve abetted the dysfunction of neighbourliness.

Later, when I am asked, "Who was he?" or "Where's he from?" or "What does he do?" and so on, I find that I've gathered up more information than I thought I could have done.  It seems as though conversation was a spider's web, spun for the purpose of catching the dew.

I used to complain that my parents were capable of only talking about the weather.  I was their alien child.  Destined to live in a far off land.  Back home, in Ohio, this evening as my mother lay dying, I try to call her.  It's her birthday.  A monumental day, marked by the Perseid Meteor Shower, by the Catholic feast of the Assumption.  No one answers.  And, all that's on my mind is the chance of one more rain.

   

   

Une bonne idée, comme un bon fire!

(This was originally published on 05 November 2009, on my now defunct blog.)

[Warning: this may be bawdy - it's from England afterall.]

The Americans gave the English Haloween, the least I can do is give America this reminder of a very British holiday.

Tonight is Bonfire Night / Guy Fawkes Day ….
In case you’d forgotten!

We all head over to Midsummer Common at sundown – which is at 4:23 p.m. today.  (… which means I’ll be in the dark before the end of lunch time in Florida or not quite the end of breakfast in Texas.)

We’ll all join hands around a huge, literally flam’n fire.  There’s already what looks like the worlds tallest wooden Christmas tree on the spot where the Circus – Zippos : yes that’s a lighter in the states: they were hot – tent stood just last week.  And, on the pile (a word that means "stately mansion" in the British English of the posh, the well-to-do, or "home-sweet-home" in the British English of the common folk), which is formed from remnants of shipping pallets, there is hung the dried cow-pies (pats in British English) left on the Common by the grazing chocolate cows only just days before Zippos arrived.

And, once our hands are locked, we will all sing Who-Ha Who-Ha – or whatever Who-s hear when they’re not being heard by Horton.

And, then, … then, we will set off bigger-than-Fourth-of-July fireworks to commenorate the Gunpowder Plot that might have blown up a Reformation Parliament if ol’ Guy weren’t caught and, himself, set alight first.   Fawkes told those who stopped him that he was just rolling a kegger into the keep for the Parliamentarians to get high on after a hard-day’s work.  (Days are short here, if you haven’t gathered, in an English Fall and Winter.)  No one bought it.  But, that’s why they don’t serve beer on the Common.  That and, I suppose, they don’t want any drunken Yobs stumbling out of the Common, across Butt Green, an adjacent expanse of pitted lawn, and into the traffic of Maiden’s Causeway, which is a road.

I understand that a local Vicar – that’s a priest who is married – our former neighbour, Roger Williams, may give a benediction.  David just can’t stop marvelling: he came all this way from Road Eye-lan, only to encounter the reincarnation of the State’s founder, erm (that’s how we spell “um” here – same pronunciation … the “r” - when not at the beginning of a word - is like an “h”), Roger Williams.  The name is even pronounced Rog-ah Williams as it is in Providence, RI.  (Yes, Barbara Walters fans, Pwahvidence, Roe d'Eye-lan.)

After the fireworks, we’ll try to clog our various blood vessels with deep-fried fish’n'chips or toad-in-ah-hole (that’s something like a pig-in-a-blanket, only much, much bigger) and either served in a dur-ee news-pay-pah, which they call “dead common” here.   Don’t ask me what "dead common" means.  “I’m dying!” used to be shouted during the act of procreation.  So, maybe they just mean that they weren’t born royalty.  British slang is like that: backward after a fashion.  Say in ain’t so: you don’t say NO you say it’s ON.  (I jest.) … Like your American “bad” meaning like Michael Jackson when he was still alive, or, Phat with its Khmer (oh, Cambodian) spelling.

I understand that chili is a more traditional food for the night – but it kinda won’t stay in the newspaypah.  The Cambridge News doesn’t hold much news as it is.

Anyway, I’m actually looking forward to the candy floss.  It is perhaps the only floss you don’t want between your teeth.  No more said.  No more.  You all call it cotton candy in the States.  Unlike fish and the toad that’ll be wrapped in newspaypah, the floss will be wrapped around newspaypah.  We like recyclin’ ‘e-ah.

We were all told to bring our torches and to watch out for the Yobs.  When they said “torches”, I assume they meant flashlights – British English is so quaint.  But, if a flashlight is torch, what then is torch?  I keep seeing that Frenchman’s painting: Zees ees not a peep, and, envisioning a scene from Frankenstein: the villagers carrying fire at the end of a fag – speaking of quaint, a burning fag is not what it used to be in the American deep south, i.e., not me set on fire; it is, rather, a bundle of sticks – fire wood, in other words.

Nor do I know how a flashlight helps you watch out for the Yobs, unless they really meant a torch.  What, you ask, is a Yob?  You can be forgiven if you think it a troglodyte, arisen from the pages of H.G. Wells 1895 Time Machine.  Like tonight’s fireworks, it is set in England too.  But, those were Morlocks.

The first time I heard the word “troglodytes”, I thought I had heard “frog luddites” - some frogs, you know, do savage themselves away in caves, adverse to the technological progress of home building, as depicted in 19th Century kiddie-lit (in evidence I offer you Caldecott’s 1889 Frog a would a wooing go), or, the wonders of high speed Internet.

No, a Yob – literally boY, spelled backward – is just a social misfit.  Maybe they take their Swift – the writer, not the bird – seriously here in Cambridge.  I’m refering to his treatise of 1729 on eating Irish babies; A Modest Proposal, it was called.  Why should it not be turned on the wayward, hoodie-youth gathering in our parks, on our greens (that's a park, not a salad) and lurking amidst our commons (that's a park too, just more sociable)?  I understand that, like chestnuts, they’re best over an open flame.

You ask me, that’s what happens when you go holding a mirror “up to society”.  The social contract fails you, ev-ery time.  Socialized medicine, indeed.

A swift, by the way – the bird, not the writer – is a troglodyte too.  It gets confusing.  That’s why we have fireworks this evening.  Clears the mind in the same what it clear's the night sky of birds.  Though apparently, it may make getting to work a bit difficult tomorrow morning, what with all of the bonfire smoke laying over the low, rolling East Anglian landscape.

Oh, yeah … now I remember.  When in doubt as to an English word, speak French.  If a British torch is an American flashlight, then an American torch is a British flambeau.   Flambeau: that’s French, for flambeau.

Expect to hear it during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.  “Dame Brindley is now carrying the Olympic flambeau into the stadium.”  Of course, they may duck the issue for the international audience and call it simply, "the Olympic flame".

Forgive me for thinking of Dame Brindley.  1948 was the last time that the Olympics was held here, in London – Austerity Olympics they were called; post-war deprivations and all that rot.  It's austerity England again.  And, with so many librarians being put out to pasture, I imagine Dame Brindley, THE Librarian, would jump at the chance to enlighten a stadium.

Rot, by the way is an example of that other fine tradition in British slang: the Rhyme.  You see it all over children’s books.  No wonder there are Yobs and Lirgs bounding to the assistance of old ladies everywhere as they cry out: I floss me teeth in a glass of wahtah on each an’ every night!  Translation: she looses it when frightened, calls the bobbies ’round, who rolls them Yobs off to a jail cell for the eve-nin.  Rot doesn’t mean rot.  It means lot … as in all that lot.

Anyway, the Olympics previous to 1948 was the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

My mind is just crack’n, I suppose.  ‘36.  Berlin.  Nazi.  Fire.  Book burning. – Librarian’s humour. -  And, voila (that’s English for “sha-zam!” and French for "told you so") … Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library.  I can just picture it, she places the flambeau into the Olympic cauldron, and, racing outward around the stadium’s electronc displays …. pages of books and manuscripts held in British libraries: Magna Carta, Doomsday Book, etc.  And, what could be finer for the Austerity Olympics of 2012.  The Magna Carta, which started it all!  And, the Doomsday Book … it is going to be 2012, after all.

Well, the world’s not going to end this evening – okay, this afternoon.
But, I wish you were here!  It's Bonfire Night!