Oh, wasn't the snow just lovely!

Oh, wasn't the snow just lovely!
The snow that fell heavily throughout the weekend, here in the UK, was lovely indeed.  But, several days on, the British response to snow is evident almost everywhere.  It is not nearly as lovely.  The snow is no longer lovely, nor is it still snow.  It is ice, several inches thick.
  
The British don't do snow removal from sidewalks, paths, and minor roads.  People tread over it where it falls.  Layer is compacted upon layer until it becomes an ice-sheet, a glacier.  As sidewalks and paths become iced over, pedestrians and cyclist travel farther afield, into verges and finally into fields.  Eventually, the fields and parks become large sheets of ice.  A dog walk or simple stroll to the corner market becomes a danger to well being for the most able bodied, the young.  The old disappear from public life over-night, preferring to remain locked-in rather than to fall.
  
The British distraction from the snow removal is nurtured by several factors. 

• Time, of course.
  Remote jobs consume time.  And, the slower commute necessitated by walking or cycling through snow or over ice consumes more time.
     
• Snow shovels, or the wont of a good shovel, found another.
  Snow shovels sold in the local stores, even the local hardware store, are thin plastic.  They are good for snow removal only before the snow has been packed. And, they're expensive.  Health-care is pre-paid.  The cost of a snow-shovel digs into one's cash reserve.
     
• European environmental attitudes are yet another factor.
  In the case of snow and ice that means the spreading of salt.  It isn't natural.  The British prefer not to employ it.
  Instead, they use grit or sand.  But, they employ it before rather than after the storm.  In advance of an advancing storm, gritting trucks are in service late into night .  As amazing as gritting before snowfall is the way in which they grit.  North American gritting/salting trucks use mechanisms that allow grit and salt to be spread as the truck travels.  Not here, not on the minor roadways and paths anyway.  Here, a gritting truck is parked every so many feet, the driver gets out, grabs a shovel, and throws grit from the truck's bed.  It seems oddly inefficient and incongruent from the country that gave the world Grand-Theft-Auto, the game.  But, isn't it quaint!
     
• Ownership is yet another factor.
  Streets and sidewalks are the property of the Highways Agency -- in Cambridgeshire, administered by the county government.
  In years past, whether in the common mind or in the opinion of the Agency, it was commonly held that cleaning a sidewalk conferred a degree of 'ownership' or, at least, responsibility for the cleaned portion to the cleaner.  If you slipped and fell on an uncleaned sidewalk or roadway, liability was shared between the Highways Agency and the pedestrian.  If, however, you slipped and fell on ice remaining on a cleaned sidewalk or roadway, liability fell to the cleaner and the pedestrian.
  That opinion was reversed by Government last winter.  Any cleaning of sidewalks and roadways, Government held, was a public service that reduced accidents.  Unfortunately, reversal has had only modest effect to date [the winter of 2012/2013].

Interestingly, in my experience, streets with cleaned sidewalks are most likely populated by immigrants.  I don't know why that should be so.  My Spanish and North African neighbours rarely saw snow in their home country.  Many of my French and Italian neighbours, likewise, are from the Mediterranean coast where snow is as rare as it is in Florida.  It is possible that immigrants come from countries with a different sense of civic responsibility.  It is also quite likely that immigrants have more time on their hands.  At the moment, I certainly do have more time than work.
   
Whatever the case may be, the ingenuity of those cleaning sidewalks is plainly evident.  My Spanish neighbours use straw-bristle brushes and brooms.  When they clean the sidewalk in front of their houses, it looks as though they've fielded a curling (i.e., ice-shuffleboard) team.  The local French hotelier attempts to clean his steps with a flat floor mop.  It functions better with dust than with snow and ice.  But, the hotelier's tenacity suggests that the French are not "surrender monkeys" as the Simpson's groundskeeper Willie slurred.  My Italian neighbour uses a sheet of thick plastic wedged against his abdomen as he pushes forward.  It becomes springy against the resistance of the ice -- a force which he uses to jettison the snow and ice built up on the plastic sheet into the road.  This year, I've abandoned my own impromptu tools -- large kitchen serving implements -- for a dedicated snow shovel.  It's actually a coal shovel.  It's sturdy; the neighbourhood's ice-breaker.
    
Today, as I made my way into the city centre, I was thinking that I should have driven my ice-breaker in front of me.  Walking was hell on ice.
   
   

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.