This particular Saturday in Cambridge, the UK2011 June 04

Thinking of you.  It's been too long since I've dropped you a line. 

Here are just a few snippets of my Saturday:

     At the wine merchant: Professor Fauxpaye, have you had trouble with this card before?  The Professor, in a Spanish accent, No, I never have had before.

     Odd a Spaniard with a French name meaning "false payment" having trouble buying wine.  The merchant, generously, did not make note of it.

     At a traffic light on the way to the wine merchant's shop, a Dolly Paton look-alike jumps out of a cab, runs over to me on my bike and gives me a big hug, then runs back to the waiting cab.

     A John Cleese look-alike thinks that she has abandoned the cab.  A small scuffle ensues.  Certainly, we are all on film, now being processed for TV.

I should note that I have seen this motion-picture before.  My last cab ride from Atlanta's airport toward Emory University.

The cabbie turns to me in the back seat, pointing out the window to our right.  That's Ted Turner's building, he says proudly.  There's a commotion outside.  There's Ted Turner, himself.  He has Dolly Parton in a bear hug.  Strange. I think, What mama-bear wears a sequin dress?

Then, I have a flashback to a Christmas party at my step-parents house.  One of the guests, the then food editor at USA Today, a woman who looks as though she's truly enjoyed all of the food she's written about, has elected to wear a red sequin dress.  It fits like a latex glove.  In it, as she waits beneath the mistletoe, she's more Betty Boop than Dolly Parton.  All evening she's popping out of the dress; or, rather, the sequins are flying from it with an explosive force comparable to the seeds from an impatiens' pods.  Over the course of the next month, I count as many sequins as she must have had on the dress.  I don't recall having seen her leave.  And, I'm wondering now:  IF, . . . If I had sown them back together, might she have reappeared?

     From my home-office window, I can see my neighbour returning home.  She leaves the cab wearing a Dolly Parton outfit.

     The Strawberry Festival — more strawberry fields than strawberry fruit — is on.  Cambridge is exploding with character(s).

If this were a postcard, the tag line would read, Wish you were here!

Hope your weekend is as odd as mine . . .

And, just when Pantomime season should have been over!

 

Now Back to our Regularly Scheduled ProgrammeLIFE IN CAMBRIDGE

An odd collection of September days.  Awaiting fall like a leaf on a planetree.

On this 29th day of September 2011
(Cambridge, the United Kingdom)

   

Another freakishly hot day here in the UK; and, with the autumnal sun low to the horizon, it feels as though a miracle’s about to happen …     this can’t be good.

    

People are already leaving their clothes behind.  Granted, they’re sunning themselves on Parker’s Piece, where it’s like Miami Beach in the Winter  —  the Dutch descended, as a nation, upon the sands.   And, some folks are already rising toward heaven.  Yes.  Of course, they're only playing football (uh, soccer), doing headers, whilst others are straining to catch Frisbees.  As signs go, I take what I am given.

      

I haven’t seen any wolves lay down with lambs.  But, my dog pulled me into the shade of a plane-tree on the banks of the River Cam.  There he laid himself down, panting, beside the bulls that normally feed on the fen grasses.  No, and nor have I seen four horsemen.  But, the schools have just ended the day’s sessions; and, their munchkins are travelling in packs on bicycles in the spirit of emissaries of Mongolian Khans.   — No one is safe!

   

And, this being the United Kingdom, I can attest: everyone is speaking in tongues, the tongues both of these isles and those of their commonwealth together with those of the continent over which many Britons despair.

   

No, this cannot be good.

   

There is not a cloud in the sky.  And, come nightfall, Jupiter will again herald the hour when the NBC and CBS World News programs are broadcast.  They'll be carried live, like water from a well.  ... Broadcast well beyond bed-time, suggesting that the working day is done.

     

I bet that tomorrow will be hotter, still.  Hotter than bright.  Hotter than hell!

   

      

On this 28th day of September 2011
(Cambridge, the United Kingdom)

   
[while out walking the dogs, Max and Maya]

   

It’s a scream bloody murder night in my neighbourhood.

HELP ME! can be heard as I round the corner from City Road, which is less urban than the name might suggest, onto Fitzroy, a shopping street.  The call is loud.  It is persistent.  Oddly, it is male.

Fitzroy, by the way, is archaic English meaning son of a king; its translation, this evening, is somewhat closer to son of a queen.  Neither is exactly what I’m hearing as I approach the young man.  He’s speaking a bit of English mixed with Russian.  He is accompanied by three friends: one male, one female, and the other is a bottle of vodka.  In Russian, he’s asserting that his male companion, who has him in a headlock, is a Nazi.

We travel in proximity until we reach New Square, where Max has a rendezvous with the lawn.  The Russians continue on, loudly.  One of the young men will punch the lights out of a road sign, literally.  It is an internally lit road sign.  Regardless, the sign takes it well and fights back like a Weeble.

(I think Weebles, here in the United Kingdom, are known as “roly-poly men”, or, since the days of Noddy on kiddie TV, “wobblymen”.  But, that’s beside the point.  In Russian, they’re known as “tilting dolls” or “candidates not-named-Putin" in a Russian presidential contest.)

A bit later.  From the direction of the city centre.  Screams of RAPE! from a young woman and HELP ME! from a young man can be heard coming upon us as we head home.  I remind myself that Yob (that’s Boy spelled backward, an English invention, meaning poor wayward lad) … that Yob only sounds like a Russian word.  These are American voices.  They’re probably travelling with a silent friend, Jack Daniels; but, I can’t see them yet.  They’ll overtake us soon enough; Maya is taking forever to find just the right tree to fertilize.  It’s amazing how loud people, regardless their nationality, can be here after dark.  Anyway, the speed with which they are approaching suggests that the only rape presently occurring is that of a peaceful night.

The voices, Russian and American, are odd book-ends for what is heard on the return approach to Fitzroy.  English accents, this time.  No, you sodding arsehole! a male voice screams.  The English have a lovely way of intoning the word No, of elongating it to demonstrate insistence, as if in this case “sodding” didn’t lend enough support to the word "arsehold".  It’s followed by Get your own tree.  The sound of it is, well, incongruous without recalling childish conundra (erm [um], conundrums) such as Does a tree fall in the forest, if … and Does the Pope shit in the woods, if …  As I round the corner onto Fitzroy, I spy them. 

Three young Englishmen, plus one, the sodding one.  Each of them, lined up like Elgin Marbles.  Each of them, minus the sodding one, standing stolidly beside one of the line of trees fronting the Waitrose grocery store.  The sodding one seems aimless, like a just-fired pinball, banging about.

Inside the store, a sixth friend is buying a fifth friend for the evening; it looks like Lamb’s Navy Rum — amongst rums, a rather rough tasting liquor but very English.  It’s a pity that the sixth friend emerges from the store with a puzzled look on his face.  He doesn’t get the classical reference.   Athena Parthenos! shouts one of the tree men.  We are about to play a game of “See no evil.  Hear no evil.  Speak no evil.” with these cheeky monkeys.  Athena was the goddess of the forest! shouts another.  It's obvious; they've escaped from a classics degree for the evening.  And, the final of the three tree men, staring into the eyes of the emerging friend with his fifth of Lamb’s, screams Parthenos! … She was the VIRGIN, to which the fourth man — pin-ball man, the sodding one — adds sheepishly Parthenos.  That’s Greek.

Ah, college men.  I wonder if they know the old British naval saying.  Would it be too crass to remark upon it here?  I’m oddly tempted to scream it out, You need a cork at night to get any sleep!  Disappointingly however, I believe that the trees are London Planetrees.  Americans call them Sycamores.  No cork there.  And, none for The Night of Loud Voices either.

 

On this 25th day of September 2011
(Cambridge, the United Kingdom)

   
Max is developing a new habit.  On walks he pulls toward the Veterinary Surgery (that's "the vet’s office" in American English).  Max seems to have developed a fondness for the vet since his last check-up when sweet nothings were whispered, in German, into his ears.

It’s a curious development, as Maya has been known to run home from the vet’s office.  (It’s only three blocks away; and, she hates needles.)

Walks in the direction of the office are becoming painful.  Both Max and Maya are amazingly strong.  I often have one dog pulling me toward the vet, the other pulling me away.

[Meanwhile]

I’m trying to suppress cravings for German and Polish pastry, dairy-rich morsels that threaten early death by coronary.  (The English have never, apparently, mastered the dark arts of death by deserts.  English pudding, for example, is just under-baked cake.)

I’m wondering how a pastry run to Munich or Warsaw will look on my application for permanent residency in the United Kingdom.  The application requires one to state where one has travelled outside the UK, for how long and to what end.

    

On this 3rd day of September 2011
(Cambridge, the United Kingdom)

A well dressed, immaculately groomed older woman called to me from the coffee shop across from the Indian ladies news outlet this morning.  It took me a while, speaking with her, to realize that she was speaking well formed gibberish.

The coffee shop owner told me that she used to drop in irregularly.  She’s now become a regular.  Forced retirement pushed her over the edge.  He said that he doesn’t mind.  She drinks the coffee and draws in customers.

The shop is something of a mixed bag.  In the morning, it’s a French pastry and coffee shop.  It makes its own croissants and pastries each morning.  The shop normally draws a crowd of older men in casual-ware with nothing better to do.  They drive up in their expensive sports cars and park them on the pedestrian mall.  Come evening, it’s a traditional family style Chinese restaurant, drawing the mainly Chinese students of the English language school next to the Indian ladies news outlet.  Mid-day, it is a little French-colonial era Hanoi.

       

On this 1st day of September 2011
(Cambridge, the United Kingdom)

   
The Indian ladies at the news store have decided that I should learn Gujarati.  That’s one of the squiggle languages.  Fortunately, they’re not making me write.  Speaking it is quite enough.

I’ve had to take a rather bizarre approach just to wrap my head around it.  Just so: I made the Urdu-speaking Pakistani delivery men laugh — nervously, but laugh — when I gave the Indian women a very polite greeting, Jeshi Chreshna — literally, May God be with you.  I felt rather like a trained monkey, what with the bounding voice with which I spoke the words.  Their laughter actually followed my response to their question, How you know that?      Jesus Christ, I said courtly, It kinda sounds like 'Jesus Christ'.  I've a motion-picture in my head, playing a video of the Hare Krishna devotees back in Gainesville, Florida.  Everyone is happy, swaying to the beat of cymbals and drums.

Knowing that they were Urdu speakers, and likely Muslim, I then greeted them with Allah Ismarladik (which to me, in my quirky world of language-learning sounds like "Is-Marla-a-Duck?") — that’s Turkish actually, for God be with you usually meaning "Goodbye" rather than "Hello" — what can you do in a pinch?!, … anyway, since Turkish is close (geographically if not linguistically) to Arabic, I figured that Urdu would be close as well.  It was.   Or, at least the delivery men pretended that it was.

Fortunately — perhaps wisely — they didn’t ask, How you know that?  I might have told them something my mother loved saying, Lord (Allah) … Lord, love a duck!  That probably would have been a big no-no.  But, I’m learning.

Anyway, may God be with you too!

Twisted Tongues

(1)

Russian is one of those languages (like Arabic, Dutch, Frisian, and Turkish) that I thought I’d pick up while disappointed with my progress speaking French or English.  One of the magical things about this blog is that my posts seem to be read only in the Russian Federation.  With all of the comments that I’ve been receiving in Russian, the old language skill is both coming in handy and noticeably old.  And, it comes about just when I was thinking that I should brush up my French before travelling to Paris to visit a friend who recently took a job there.  Or, thinking about brushing up on Dutch for a quick nip to Amsterdam, and, to better spot Daniel Defoe’s inside jokes while analyzing Robinson Crusoe.  Or, … Turkish, because it seems a marketable compliment here in the United Kingdom.

There seems to be a natural ebb and flow directing my desire to twist my tongue around another language.  They usually take the form of a conspiracy of events.  To the average eye and well-balanced mind, they look coincidental. Take, for example, events associated with three days of recent conference meetings.  

First, there was the presentation by the Russian information scientist from New York State.  Her accent was thick in the fashion of Natasha Fatale, the femme-fatale of the The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.  To think of her now, I realize that her fashion was rather that of Natasha as well.  During a break, she’d later confess to me: “Since moving from Rossija, I find I must take the cream in my coffee.”  ”Me too”, I admitted.  I was thinking of my first coffee, of the little foothold of little Bavaria in the foothills of south-western Ohio where I grew up.  ”Of course”, she qualified her statement, “not when I am at home.”   This was almost one of those odd dating moments, when the terribly mundane seems charged if not flushed.  Almost in unison, the two of us amused the other with the confidence that “it’s so much richer there” where we can grind the darkest of beans to the finest of grinds for the deepest of flavours.  What better reason to brush up my Russian?

Then, the next day, there was the presentation on the oral history project in Russia.  Its work product was mounted in St. Petersburg and mirrored in London.  Not too fine a point was put on the past.  The oral histories documented the Stalinist past.  And, the St. Petersburg master web-site was now defunct.  Federal security police took it down with the near-Stalinist of claims that it was promoting “subversive elements”.  The security police literally brought the computer hardware down to a waiting car and drove it away.  I wonder what a server gives up when sat down in a dark room with a light shining into its face plate?  I shouldn’t make light of this intrusion on the digital lives that were snuffed out as a result.  But, as a projector’s light focused samples of the British mirror on the auditorium’s screen, the bits of holographic Russian seemed to decode themselves for me.  I found myself reading them as though they might have been English.  This was a puzzling moment.  Puzzling, the way a foreign movie is puzzling after twenty-five minutes or so when you realize that the actors are not speaking English and, yet, you comprehend every word that they’ve just said.  Puzzling, the way subtitles puzzle when they’ve performed their magic.  Smoke and mirrors after the fashion of the light beams splattered up against the screen.  It was another sign.  ”LEARN to Speak and Read RUSSIAN”, it said.

And finally, while riding the train home from London to Cambridge each evening, I pulled my notebook from its pouch.  I’d noticed before scrawling a few lines in hopes of bringing the day to a close that, during the boring presentations, I’d been attempting a few lines of poetry in English, albeit using a proto-Cyrillic script.   Бог тро́ицу лю́бит!  (God likes a trinity!)

[Post-script: on my last return from London, I caught a bit of what was on the tele: "Cambridge Spies"  A mini-series about the lives of young Cambridge graduates who go to work in London, spying for the Soviet Union.  На Бо́га наде́йся, а сам не плоша́й.  What's the English expression: "Trust in God, but lock your car!"  I took this as reason to avoid thinking of Russian further.]

[Secondary post-script: the morning's news carries a story almost all but snuffed out by the mysterious crash of a commuter jet in Buffalo, New York.  Boris Berezovsky has accused Vladimir Putin, now Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, of using "dirty money" to control British companies.  Who knows what to believe anymore.  Russian money keeps Iceland afloat. Chinese money banks on a recovery in the U.S.A.  And, money from the United Arab Emirates keeps Manchester United, England's premier Premier League team, well ... it keeps it premier.  Maybe Nikita Khrushchev, if not Stalin, was right about the Western democracies.  Maybe it is high time to learn Chinese and brush up on both Arabic and Russian.]

(2)

Travel between Cambridge and London wasn’t all that bad.  Fifty-four minutes is enough time to read a newspaper, or, edit a document in my computer, or, take in the landscape.   On my first day in, I saw a full-moon rise with sunrise giving chase.  The farm fields were still white with snow.  And, crude white windsocks in East Anglia’s fields betrayed Easterly winds, meaning that the weather would soon change.   Even the grey stations that the 7:45 Express Train passed without other notice seemed to swell with a soft reddish glow, the rouge of a child in from play out in the cold.    I suppose that, over time, I’d even learn to sleep through stops and magically awaken at my own.

London, at King’s Cross, in the morning, is a bustle.  It is as though there is a massive complex of conveyor belts beneath the pavement.  A seamless The Jetsons.  The area is a confluence of trains.  The great Eastern land lines bring passengers in from Anglia as well as regions further North.  This mass is fed down the waterfall of steps and (de-)escalators into the subterranean world of the Tube.  And, though most people are packed away to more distant reaches of the London environs, a teaming mass is still left to the streets of King’s Cross.  Here too, just beyond the Tube station, is St. Pancras station, home to the EuroStar, the high-speed train linking London to Paris.  In a winter morning’s light, the new station’s grand glass walls seem another form of waterfall.  It is the kind of waterfall behind which there is a secret cave where lay buried treasure.

Cambridge, on returning at night, is swallowed by the dark within not less than twenty-five paces of the station.  This measure of the distance between London and Cambridge is immense.  And, yet after a night’s rest, waking to Cambridge seems princely.  There is little that is neat about Cambridge, particularly in Winter, but even amidst its bustle, it feels peaceful.  

Today, Parker’s Piece was an idle in a painterly sense: action caught in still life.  The weather alone promised to freeze it in motion.  Indeed, a snow-storm not an hour later would try its best to do so, but it would fail.  Among those amidst the storm: mothers strolling their babies in prams.  Surely, this must be an English means of building immunity to seasonal disease.  And, each pram was covered in plastic, of the kind that my grandmother used to cover her couch: thick but crystal clear.  Inside, each baby was a kind of precious jewel, a miracle.  How they survive being covered in plastic, I think, might be the miracle.  How did the baby’s breath not fog the plastic?  Did the baby draw any breaths?   Still, in London, the only things being moved about in this manner by wheels were the suitcases that people here in the U.K. drag about as a means to transport goods.  Baby : Dry-goods.  Life form : Still life.   Before I discovered delivery, I used to use a big wheeled suitcase, myself, to drag groceries home from the supermarket.  Nothing teaches one better how to consume less than having to literally drag it home. And, nothing else makes one wish more that this cargo would grow to walk on its own two legs. At least, for the contents of the prams, the likelihood of wish fulfilment seems high.

Back on Parker’s Piece, also braving the cold: the local football and rugby teams.  The footballers pretence of not noticing the storm, despite their footballer’s short, was belied by their intensified play.  The field grew more chaotic with each passing second and every falling flake of snow.  If anyone didn’t notice the storm, it was the members of the ruby team.  They might have been ice as they stood awaiting play wearing only rugby kit: short-sleeve shirts and rugby shorts.  Rugby shorts, by the way, are shorter than football shorts.  They look like the men’s boxer-briefs style of beachwear that one sees along the Red-neck Riviera of Pensacola, Florida - where if that beach weren’t so solidly within socially conservative Republican territory, one might think these bathers gay.  One young Rugby lad, probably trying to hot-up all the young, pram-pushing mothers, could even be seen stripping-off on the Piece and changing into his uniform.  As he argued with another lad, he stood there nearly naked from the time I first passed the field on my way to the Market at 15:30 (3:30 p.m.) until my home-bound return with a quickly cooling loaf of fresh baked bread at 16:10 (4:10 p.m.).

On a day such as this, the sight of young skin leaves no tongue wagging.  It reminded me of my trip to Cambridge after landing at Gatwick airport, south of London.  Along the way, as we travelled into East Anglia, a feral piglet crossed the path of my taxi.  ”Around here,” the driver instructed me, “that passes for a black cat.  We should say a prayer, mate.”  Feral pigs, of course, have dense coats usually of black fur.  It is only domesticated pigs that appear to be all pink fleshy skin.  In London, King’s Cross courses with dark two and three piece suits.   On second thought, the rugby player reminded me of the salmon cutlets that I’d pulled from the freezer for dinner.  I’d left them defrosting on kitchen counter. I had to hurry home.

The cold in the air confounds everything.

(3)

Here was to have been a discussion of the corporate body in American and British English.  I’ll have to let that twist in the wind.  It’s past my bed time.

Recreation through Translation

Recently, I wore a pair of new shoes to a meeting with a client.  What a mistake.  I had to take a taxi home, unable to make the 15 minute walk that normally seems so easy.

The taxi driver had an accent - that is, not any of the American or British accents one hears here in almost any course of affairs.  So I asked her where she was from.

"Slovakia", she said.  The word was followed by a bit of nervous laughter.  Perhaps, because Eastern European immigrants are taking a bit of heat here: seen as taking jobs in hard times.  Perhaps, because, as she'd later tell me, most Britons wouldn't know where Slovakia is if you hit them with the Iron Curtain.  I sympathized; when I studied in Kentucky, one mid-1980s survey found that only nine percent of its citizens could find it on a map.  I lived in Ohio, so I didn't count.  But, I never got lost on my way to University.

I followed tentatively with "Bratislava is its capital?"

With the pain in my Achilles Tendon, my brain had been slow to visualize a map of the country.  The map was also dim and flickering something like a computer monitor suffering power failure.  But, that and its implications are another story.  The name, Bratislava, was difficult to read from the mental map.  And, distractingly, it conjured up an image of a plump, white Brat roasting on an outside grill.  It was lunch-time, I thought, and excused the image on a savory bun as hunger.

At my recognition, she was overjoyed, turning her head from the ruthless Cambridge traffic, offering a broad-smiling, "Yes!"  She turned back just in time to see the woman riding down congested Mill Road in the middle of the street as though she either owned the lanes or had a death wish.  Taxis, cars and loris were dodging the woman like a piece of gum you don't want on the sole of your shoe.

By the end of the ride, our short conversation had travelled miles, sometimes as if meandering down country lanes, sometimes with the intent of Dr. Viktor Frankenstein searching out buried body parts and stitching them together.

I'd walked because parking a bike in Cambridge is a hundred times worse than parking a crutch on the walls of the Cathedral at Lourdes or St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal.

When finally home, I Goggled "How to break in new shoes".  One of the more highly ranked sites was a Spanish blog.  "I can deal with Spanish," I thought.  "I've held tri-lingual conversations with colleagues in the Caribbean where no one speaks anyone else's language.  This should be easy."

The English language sites gave lots of now useless or seemingly absurd advice.  "Wear new shoes with thick socks," for example.  This advice was useless; I'd already thought to do just that when putting the shoes on in the morning.  "Soaking [the shoes] over night and wearing them the next day until dry," was an absurdity.  Certainly, I could agree with the logic that wet leather would be likely to dry formed to the contours of my feet.  Wet leather, though, tends to shrink when dry.  I had the O.J. Simpson trial ringing in my ears: "If it does not fit, you must acquit"  . . . as well as an old form of torture-to-death practiced in the late 18th century by certain Western American native populations.  In any case, this was a strategy best not attempted during the wintry cold snap that Cambridge was now experiencing.

The Spanish blog had none of that.  Instead, it seemed fixed on the legalities of the practice.  It was flush with all of those common journalistic questions: Who would want to [break into a pair of new shoes]?  How would you get in?  Maybe unlacing would do the trick.  Might the wearer be asleep?  Or, per-chance, fixated on a newspaper while, say, riding a train?  Surely, no one would want to break into a pair of vacant shoes, would they?  And, once in, what would you steal from a pair of new shoes?  Laces?  Perhaps, one might silence their tongues as well, to keep them from naming you as the thief. 

I assure you that nothing was lost in my translations.  I used BabelFish to ensure that I hadn't gone crazy.  (I'm winking and nodding, knowingly.)

With books on this and that for dummies, I'm wondering if I might launch a new career here with a line of books: "Idioms for Idiots".  I'm sure that the description frequently includes myself.  I should be well qualified to author at least one.  There's no end of British idioms that have already gotten me wrong.  But, more on that later.