The case of the Chimney Pots and the Spy

This was originally posted to JPG Magazine using ShareThis with an unrevised narrative.

Look up.  Don't point your camera at anyone.  These were the thoughts that passed through my view finder and out of the lens toward objects of unsung desire.  I was walking down one of the narrow streets of Cambridge (U.K.).  And, the crowd was growing more dense as the lane ahead narrowed.

Years earlier, while I had been photographing a library in Botswana.  The images were needed to illustrate a report on preservation conditions and structural enhancements.  One of the library's readers, who assumed that I'd been photographing her, took exception.  She broke the silence of the Rare Book Reading Room with a verbally violent attack.  Her index fingers were alternately making stabbing and jabbing motions into the air as she charged toward me.  Nothing short of sharing the images I'd taken with her would satisfy her paranoia.  When she got her fill of shots of doors and windows, glass and metal, and of the sunlight pouring down through the building's perfect diamond-shaped glass ceiling, she turned to me pacified.  Adopting a conspiratorial tone, she remarked simply, "So, you like to photograph things that stand witness."

Stand they do: these five red pots on a pedestal, demanding attention.  Five little Rockettes, they might just break out into dance as stand posing.   But, it is the crowd looking on that draws my attention.

The dull pot in the foreground. And, its sibling ducking behind a dormer. A third, revealed only in the shadows, painted on the canvas of white wall.

The north/north-west facing windows, themselves.  Standing poker-faced in hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil panes of three, they repeat themselves like the name, rank and serial number of a prisoner.   Turned from the interrogation of the sun, they reflect nothing.  They are not illuminated within, the life has literally gone out of them.

The drain-pipe standing sentry at the corner of the background building.  Functionally literate.  Yet, almost unnoticed among the lines of structure.  A quite character in an architectural morality play: black lines for a white building like the stain of sin or of a functional body.  The white trim of the black building, winking: only playing dead.  By nightfall each window will host a play of its own.

And, most of all, the spy in the scene.  The antenna, communicating silently with a subject beyond view.  The lie is put to it.  It turns in the shadows.  Quite unlike the dull chimney pots that present themselves forthrightly, it is smarter. Using lines formed of the painted mortar, it imagines a clock painted on the wall.  It can tell time.

I like to photograph things that stand witness, even false witness.  Everything has a story to tell.

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.

International Departures: Rock, Paper, Scissors.

This is a story about transportation.  I have none.  Well, actually I have a bike and my own two feet.  But, I have no motorized transport to speak of.  I suppose I could ride the bus, though Cambridge is so walkable that I’d feel ridiculously shameful.  I have occasionally taken the train to distant places: Birmingham, Ely, London, and York, so far.  But, a train is on the order of airplane.  It is not something I ride - not yet anyway - with any regularity.  And, as long as I may remain a tourist in London, the subway is more amusement ride than means of getting here or there.

I have to say that the Tube, London’s underground transport, scares the hell out of me.  But that’s another story, here only in brief.  I should clarify that it is not the tubular stations and roundish trains that scare me.  It is the narrow platforms.  Most of them leave me dizzy.  I’m one of those people that Tube station announcers refer to as having gotten “sick on the tracks”.  That’s a euphemism.  What they mean to say, though English civility prevents them, is “suddenly severed” into, oh, let's see: head, two arms, torso, and two legs.  What’s that: six parts.  Some people might count that as better than drawn and quartered.  But, I hug the station walls, hunched over like a lower-case f and looking to the world like a man who has been homeless for too long.

I have begun studying the Highway Code and other driving instruction manuals helpfully issued by the British government.  The road guide is 250 pages long.  The road sign guide is 100 pages long.  That’s much longer than the short little pamphlets drivers get in the U.S.A.  In one hundred and eighty-five days,  when I can legally take my driving tests, both theoretical and practical - I imagine that I will have a reasonable chance of passing.

One hundred and eighty-five days is the amount of time that the British give foreigners - those of us, anyway, who learned to drive on the wrong side of the road - to forget our bad habits and to learn new ones.  

David isn’t having anything of it.  He is afraid, I suppose, that an old dog can’t be taught new tricks.  When asked recently to lead next summer’s geology study-trip to Spain, his remark was, “Well, at least I can drive there.  I’ll be on the right side of the road.”  Don’t ask me which the right side of the road is.  I’ve never learned to tell my right from my left.  So, I guess David figures that I’m kind of a blank-slate, here.  Ready and able to learn.  That will make me the designated driver in the United Kingdom.  And, that’s saying quite a lot for David who’s never trusted my bat-out-of-hell style of driving.

A Brummie - that’s someone from Birmingham, England - a cab driver once told me that Britons drive on whatever side of the road they drive on because that’s the side of the road they used for jousting.  The comment conjured up visions of cars equipped with harpoons.  It is something I could have used back in Florida with all of its old, slow driver.  But, I haven’t seen it here yet.  I imagine that I will when I really get out on the road.  A country that maintains driving on the jousting side would almost certainly have maintained a jousting tradition of some sort, right?

The jousting comment is easily rationalized.  Most people are and would have been right-handed.  So, they would have carried the jousting pole firmly in their right hand.  Let’s just imagine that a horse, unlike a car, steers itself pretty much with little or no attention.  All one’s left hand would have to do is


hold onto the reins.  If my pole is in my right hand, that must mean that I’m driving on the left side of the road.  On second thought, the logic is kind of counter-intuitive.  It’s far easier to simply maintain that the steering wheel is always near the middle of the road.  Unless, you happen to be in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where all bets are off.  Driving an American car on the left side of the road, as is their custom, is probably necessary to keep the tourists off the roads.  Anyway, here in the United Kingdom, it doesn’t help that Britons park on either side of the road in any direction they please.  It confounds one’s sense of the proper flow of traffic.  And, not a lick more helpful, Britons seem to prefer, when able, to drive in the middle of the road.  That sense of owning the road is probably what gave rise to jousting.

So, why do you think the French drive on the right?  They too had a jousting tradition.  I am certain that the reason had little to do with contemporary Continental advice to Drive right!   I have an idea, thinking ahead to the day I can drive again.  Maybe it was practical experience shifting.  While a lazy leftie can hold the reins of a horse, that left hand has to take charge to shift gears.  Just thinking about it makes the fingers of my left hand slightly dizzy.  - I won’t say “spastic”.  The term is politically incorrect here in the U.K.   The disability of palsy with which the term is associated here, however, more aptly describes the motion sickness of my left hand than does the American sense of “spastic” associated with the self-deprecating awareness of the off-spring of the nouveau riche.  I’m going to have to get a car with automatic transmission to pass my practical test.  Driving a standard transmission here might just trigger one of my, so called, classic migraines.

David’s uncertain ability to drive on the wrong side of the road isn’t the only thing that unnerves him.  ”I’ll be able to read the signs”, he also said of driving in Spain.  I was puzzled by the remark.  ”But, they’re in English here.” I observed.  ”Exactly!” came his reply.  In Spain, you know that you have to translate.  You’re always translating.  In our experience driving in the Mexican highlands, when the sign translated as “The road dissolves ahead of you”, you knew that the road was literally going to dissolve.  And, experience soon taught that it would usually dissolve on a hair-pin turn, falling away into a mountain-side ravine that the locals tried to fill with a bus-load of tourists on their way to Palenque or Oaxaca or San Cristóbal de las Casas.

In the United Kingdom, all of the signs are in English.  If a road sign indicated that the road ahead would dissolve, you'd probably stop in panicked disbelief.  A more likely encounter with a sign indicating a soft verge might leave an American, familiar with converging traffic, wondering if skating across lanes were not only possible but encouraged.  You don’t know what needs to be translated, really.  A “carriageway” is eventually sensible enough as to be understood.  But for the newly arrived American, it might just as readily elicit a sense of driving through Pennsylvania Dutch country.  You go slow, keeping an eye out for horse-and-buggy.

The U.S.A. is the country where the French yogurt company, Danone, decided to go about its business without its e.  Americans would be more likely to think Dan-One than Danon.  We’re a simple people.  Some of us would end up in the supermarket asking for Dan One thinking he might be the store-manager.  ”I need to speak to Dan One.  The commercial said he’d know where to find the new yogurt that will restore my health.”  What then do you think we make of a road sign reading “adverse camber”.  What the hell is a camber?  The more educated of us might recall that Camber was the legendary king after whom Cambria, or ancient Wales, was named.  We might take “adverse camber” as a reminder that we’re not in Wales.  Mindful of dry British humour, such a reminder might make perfectly quirky sense.  Wales, being something like the U.K.’s Oz.  I am not actually certain how an American road sign might label an “adverse camber”.  ”Turns into the gravitation forces of the bend” probably wouldn’t be understood.  My guess is that an American would find the sign “Speed


Kills” on the approach to an adverse camber.  Or, maybe more poetically “Death Awaits” in certain parts of Appalachia.  I’m pretty sure that the simple sign “Bend” suffices.  But, I’m also certain that “Bend” means nothing to us.  ”Yep.  That was a bend!” I’d tell myself taking a curve in the road at 75 mph in a 45 mph zone.  Adverse gravitational effects have always acted upon cars travelling roads made for horses and buggies. 

This is to say nothing of signs indicating multi-lane round-abouts.  They might as well read “three ring circus in hell”.  But, most bear no English other than the names of nearby places.

Neither signage nor the Highway Code is helping me much as a pedestrian.  Road crossings, in the United Kingdom, sometimes present considerable risk.  It doesn’t matter if I’m in a Zebra, a Pelican or a Puffin, or even a Toucan crossing.  What I feel that I sometimes need is a massive Trojan horse.  A prophylaxis.  A personal crossing guard, if not the national guard.  I am not a cat.  I have one life.  I have no aspirations to live it out as a hood ornament.  Not even the slightest curiosity, though I am intrigued by what it might feel like to be a lolly on the windscreen of a lorry, in need of scraping off.  I should Americanize that: I am intrigued by what it might feel like to be taffy on the windshield of a truck, in need of scraping off.

The rule is simple: traffic stops the second I plant one foot inside the crossing.  And, until I do that I’m fair-game to be taken as target practice.  ”Bag the buck, blokes.  C’mon, can’t ya see that target on me vest?”  I prefer to live by a simpler rule: Rock-Paper-Scissors.  Only, rock never crushes scissors.  He might paint them a different colour, however.  If you’re ahead of me you can see why I’m so intrigued with lollies on windscreens.  Bikes take out pedestrians.  Cars take bikes.  Buses take cars, or, lorries take small caravans (um, trucks take out small vans and SUVs).  And, trains on level crossings take buses and lorries.  The rule is based on one simple principle: the more metal you’re pushing, the more clear your right-of-way.  I should put that in terms Americans can easily understand: might makes right.  

Honestly, I am amazed, actually, that Cambridge is rated as one of the United Kingdom’s safest cities vis-à-vis traffic accidents.  Mindfully, as a pedestrian, one has to realize that one is at the lower end of the food chain.  No one crosses the road without looking both ways.  This caution lends a keen sense of irony to driving scenes in the British sit-com Keeping Up Appearances.  That oft-repeated line, “Mind the pedestrian, Richard”, spoken by character of Hyacinth Bucket to her husband is awfully hilarious.  Drivers do yield to a pedestrian crossing an intersection, but the pedestrian yields to the bike and car more generally, except at a signalled crossing.

For a cyclist, the fun begins in the bike lane, presuming there is a bike lane.  Bike lanes are easily followed where they exist.  They’re painted blood red, probably with real blood.  There aren’t many bike lanes.  So, if they are painted with real blood, that is probably good.  There certainly seems to be enough cause for blood to be spilled.  Just before the year-end holidays, the local newspaper ran as series of He-said/She-said articles.  He, by the way, was the driver of a sport-car.  She was a cyclist.  It just happened that way.  In reality, the sexes are equally represented among both car drivers and cyclists.   The commentary of each on the other, however, was a vicious as any arising out of the 1970’s sex wars.  The enmity of the opposing camps aside, real circumstances: road quality and the number of people on the road regardless form of transportation, render selfishness a third and distant wheel.

I’ve seen bikes travelling 15 mph passed by cars going 30 to 40 mph with just inches between them.  One delivery driver came to my door not so long ago, muttering.  Mine was his last stop in Cambridge.  He couldn’t wait to get out.  ”Too many cars, on too narrow streets, headed right for you!  Whilst too many cycles seem as though they’ve got a right to the motorway!” he said with a certain exasperation that print can’t capture.  The rub is that these streets weren’t designed for the traffic that they carry today.

Something has to go first.  Rock-Paper-Scissors is as sensible as any rule of the road.

At another time, I might have been logging an experience from the road, in Ankara, Turkey.  There I once hired a taxi to take me from the city centre to the airport.  With all direct routes in grid-lock, the driver turned onto a one-way street.  We were headed in the direction we needed to go, but we were travelling against the traffic.  The experience was very much as David feels now.  It had movie-qualities.  Rush Hour 2.  Goods were flying and pedestrians, running for cover as the driver made a lane of the broad sidewalk.  Reading the fear telegraphed from my eyes into the rear-view mirror, the driver explained in broken English, “You pay me.  They no pay.”  I could only mutter: “Dış hatlar gidiş, lutfen.  Dış hatlar gidiş.”  International departures, please.

Purple on the Green

The jewels of Cambridge are often hidden; but, they are here.  Most are secreted amid the bustle and over-crowding of the city centre.  All lay within the walls of the colleges.  When spring comes, they will be at their most beautiful.  And, for their beauty, they will be flooded with tourists.  I can live with tourists for the jewels beyond the drab gates and self-deprecating doors of Cambridge colleges.  

I passed St. John’s College recently.  In the stark light of late afternoon, the sand-coloured walls seemed stolid.  City life flowed past them like a river passes through a canyon good for fishing.  

Just as I stood opposite its entry, making my own passage over the cobblestones, the College door swung open.  Keening with the pressure of an opened sluice that held back, even protected, fresh waters, the door revealed an emerald court, and another beyond.  Each pooled amidst the same sand-coloured walls as those facing the street.  The hour was that sliver of day when sunlight crests the College roofs and cascades down upon the lawns.  

The door had been opened by a pair of professors in their flowing black robes for the singular purpose of leaving the College.  It seemed, selfishly in my mind’s eye however, as though the doors were opened simply to release the light.  Tourists on the street with me stopped to memorialise the moment.  The flashing of their cameras’ lights, then, seemed the movement of white-water.  And, their excitement vocalized as gasps and exclamations: white-water’s rising din.

But, I paint the scene purple.  

The doors closed almost as quickly as they had opened.  Saint John’s was again a reservoir, closed to the passing of the city’s turbid stream.

Divine Relief

(1 : just warming up)

The Sunday Times of 25 January 2009, in its “Weird but wonderful” reporting on page 20 of Section 4, notes a former politician’s peculiar admission as reported earlier in Total Politics magazine.   The politician, a man of advancing years found himself in need of a pit stop.  Unable to find or to make it to a lavatory, he stopped his car, got out, and popped open its hood to have a look see.  Availing himself of the guise of a breakdown, he relieved himself.  Shortly thereafter, the report continues, a passer-by stopped to advise the politician of  the potential cause of the breakdown.  ”I think your radiator is leaking”, the passer-by suggested, seeing nothing else amiss.  Yes, sir! His coolant gone, I imagine that the politician was hot by time he made it home.

(2 : oh, bother)

The keep Britain clean laws being what they are here, and for reasons of public health and welfare, I have to pick up my dog’s poo almost as soon as it hits the ground.  I’m okay with that.  I may be an American in the United Kingdom, but I like to think that I am part of the public being protected.  But, perhaps, I may be doing more harm than good to the environment.

Of course, I am using bio-degradable bags.  Bio-degradable is great, though I am a bit worried one will degrade as I use it.   You see, I purchased a massive load of bio-degradable bags before I left North America; and, I brought them with me.  The fact that the bags were not sold with use-by dates, however, suggests that I am relatively safe.  So what have I to worry about?

Recent studies - which I can’t seem to find my way back to - found that the plastics, even bio-degradable plastics, will remain in the environment for ages to come.   Actually, reports of harmful environmental effects of nurdles, those plastic remains, have been floating around for nearly a decade now.   That kind of bothers me.  When I was a kid, if my father had had to pick up poo, he’d have used a paper bag.  That is, if he’d had to use a bag.  Paper bags only kill trees - don’t they? - and trees are replenishable, assuming that forests are properly stewarded.  Even as late as 1972 in the movie Pink Flamingos, Divine used a paper bag - the kind that mothers across America used to pack school lunches - to handle her dog’s poo.  But, I really have to wonder, “Is that sanitary?” 

Divine’s use of a school lunch bag was actually a cool little bit of what they call “fore-shadowing” in the industry - the two-bit English-major’s-got-a-major-movie-obsession industry that is - ¡May John Waters live forever in our memory!  It’s at the end of the film; Divine eats the poo.  I would later think to myself, “That’s probably what eventually killed Divine!”  Of course, Divine died after making the movie Hairspray.  And, breathing in the hydrocarbons from hair spray more than likely did the trick.  Oh, the humanity!

That leaves the question on the table.  Is handling dog poo, let alone eating it, sanitary?  

Well, the TreeHugger site seems to have been pondering the question simultaneously.  It makes me wonder if it isn’t true that “You can take the boy out of America, but you can’t take America out of the boy.”  The quarks firing our minds have not yet been separated by the consumption of English food or, the better, the Kingdom’s bitters. TreeHugger is “a Discovery Company”.  You know, the folks who bring you and me the Discovery Channel, worldwide.  You’d presume it’s got some street cred.  So, I am not entirely some dumb wush-backer who’s got a crazy new idea, or, phobia, anyway.  Just yesterday, in it’s 28 January 2009 post, TreeHugger suggests that Eating Dog Poop Could be Good for You.  

Well that headline may be a bit of an overstatement.  I’ll let you read all about it; and, decide for yourself.  But, let’s face it: cheese wouldn’t be so tasty if it weren’t for dirty little bacteria.  Or, as a college roommate once observed, “mushrooms grow out of shit” - composting rot would be more precise, but you get the picture.  A more scholarly proof of concept is suggested by Jared Diamond’s 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  The first American’s die off in massive numbers because they were clean after a fashion of the germs that killed them.  But, that’s a far stretch from dog poo and from my concern.

My family had several dogs when I was a kid.  I can’t ever recall that my father used paper bags to pick up poo; he was, however, quite the fan of the shovel.  Sometimes after a day of free-ranging the dog, there’d be a whole lot of divots in the yard where the shovel exposed the naked earth.  Had I been British, and of a certain privilege, I might have believed a polo game had taken place on the lawn.  I just wonder what Britons would think of me were they to see me walking the dog with a shovel on the horizontal, a wafting load and maybe a few blades of grass in it’s pan?

I tell myself that the bag is a convenience, worth the price of their knoodling nurdles.  Juggling a shovel while walking an eager, often unruly, and sometimes overtly anxious dog would be quite an inconvenience.  I should suggest bags, or, a shovel to the mother who left a used nappy (that’s a diaper for you Americans) on the narrow crossing of the bridge over the Cambridge rail lines today.  But, that doesn’t begin to touch my concern.

People are kind of odd about dog poo here, obviously in a way that they aren’t concerned about human waste.  Not that they shouldn’t want me to pick up after my dog.  I want people to pick up after their dogs and themselves, too.  It would make walking into the park so much more pleasant.  But, more than one person has stopped and glowered at me, even after seeing me with hand in bag bending over for the pick-up as the dog tugs at me to move on to the next best thing.  I wonder how many people actually pretend they’re going to pick up poo, waiting until the observer is out of sight.  None.  Not one.  That’s how many.  Onlookers glower. They stay put until the poo is in the bag.  I want to stick my tongue out at the watcher after I’ve bagged the poo; but, I think that would induce gag response.  The poo smell just recently up my nostrils, I’d barf all over the bug-eyed onlookers.  But, that doesn’t bother me either.  Not really.  I am sure that I glower at the parents of children in the public brace and bit.  

As I bent down to retrieve a recent discharge, this little spot of bother became clear.  I noticed that Spring’s flowers have popped their little heads up through their protective coats of earth.  And, I momentarily lamented having to remove nature’s fertilizer.   I saw a vision of my dad, shovel in hand, carried away toward the compost pile.  

So, it appears that there will be flowers in the garden anyway.

Melting Down the Queen

So the news of the day (late January 2009), here, is grim.  

The image of the Queen, which graces all of the realm’s coins and bank notes, seems a bit rough for wear.  The British Pound, “Sterling” as it is known, has hit a low of $1.37 USD (at one point today $1.36 USD).  That’s the lowest it has been since 1985.  Trading at $2.00 USD just six months ago, the British Pound is worth, today, less than one Canadian Dollar.  The last time I was personal witness to a currency’s fall of this nature, it was … well … only last year, when the US Dollar took its backward slide against the Canadian Dollar.  The British Pound also closed at 1.06 Euro.  While down slightly from yesterday’s 1.07 Euro value, the Pound is up since two weeks ago when the British Pound and the Euro were at near parity.

Things could get worse.  Well, if you’re listening to the official government line, as I am, the responsible thing of the hour is not to spread panic.  So, no.  No, I’m not spreading panic.  I can’t afford to panic.  So much of life, my life is now valued in British Pounds, panic just wouldn’t be sane let alone reasonable or rational or, at the very least, responsible.  Besides, D. is my resident panic button.

Not that he need panic.  The BBC certainly led the charge, even without using the word panic as did D.  Inflation is soaring.  Joblessness isn’t just on the rise, it’s well beyond a roll.  Housing prices continue to fall, though by what measure who knows.  No one is selling.  Who could afford to, with both the value of real estate and the currency in which it is locally valued falling.  You’d be taking a double bath, like a car wash.  And, the government’s borrowing to stimulate the economy, or, to keep the banks from failing is itself failing.  Barclays, one of Britain's largest banks, lost 25% of its stock value last Friday.  Today’s reports suggest it has lost another 7 to 9% each of the last two days.  That’s not a rosy average, those numbers are to be summed.   The banks probably should lose that much stock value for propping up the ponzi scheme - I realize that it wasn’t really a ponzi scheme - in the housing market and the market for bad housing debt acquired from the States.

Anyway, as if that didn’t put too fine a point on it - the British are not dullards, you know, they can reason and read between the lines of BBC reporting - an American investor is given the news microphone to should: Bring out your dead!  Translation: dump British currency as quickly as you can.  Great news, for D.  So, where what this American investor when the US Dollar was the Canadian Dollar’s shrinking violet?  Well, he says, look at the United Kingdom.  ”You” sell only two things to the world: North Sea Oil - and that’s on the decline, expected to dry up over the next decade - and London, specifically the financial centre that London had become.  What else has the UK got to prop up the Pound?  Good question.  Don’t you think?  

Before I consider the question, I want to point out one delicious iron in his statement.  North Sea Oil … that’s Scotland.  Scotland is north of England.  And, while yes it is part of the United Kingdom, that means that it is also north of London.  41 - billion or million, I’m always losing my zeros (zeds as they’re known here) - 41 whatever Pounds of the current problem arises from bad debt acquired by the Bank of Scotland (BoS) - not the Bank of England.

You can almost here the tongues wagging here.  The UK treasury - listen to the Scottish and Welsh: translation, the Bank of England (not exactly, but close enough maybe) - the UK treasury saved the BoS (as in the moniker often given to Bruce Springsteen) by partly nationalizing it, saving it before it went under.  When that happened, you could hear the smile in the English voices stating the fact.  There goes Scotland: Scotland which had been poised to declare independence sometime this year, 2009.  And, now we own at least half of it.  Well, now - now, it seems like it was a poisoned pill, doesn’t it.

But all can’t be blamed on Scotland, particularly not when Scottish oil is keeping English (and other UK) home warm this winter.  English banks have had their share of glory as it were.  Barclays, known locally as the banker to the University of Cambridge, is an English bank for example.

Here in the UK, the government stimulus package - giving money to the banks which usually lend money to those who need it to buy, buy, buy the country out of debt - … the package didn’t work out so well.  The banks kept it on hand.  Ostensibly, they kept it because they couldn’t trust the other banks to which they would lend it on its way to being lent to the people who would hock their futures.  They might have been hanging on to it, to cover their own bad lending, to shore up their portfolios against the kind of turmoil on the stock market that we’ve witnessed over the past two days.  Anyway, we’ll soon see.  Banks, here, are required to file their reports by February.

So that question? …

So, what else has the UK got to prop up the Pound?

First, let’s consider the irony of the UK’s prop poverty.  A few weeks ago, a financial analyst for the BBC speaking to the Pounds fall against the Euro declared, I paraphrase, we haven’t got the manufacturing that those Euro countries have got.  I was listening while riding the train on my way to York from Cambridge.  The English country-side was rolling by.  It was lovely.  Verdant.  Well irrigated.  Still apparently, mostly family owned.  But, where were the factories that industrialized this country that lead the Industrial Revolution?  To be fair, the part of England that I was rolling across was marshland.  It was suitable for farming but not for industry.  To this day, the farm field sit in pans below the rivers and streams that irrigate them.  It’s not great land for heavy industry and large cities.  Still, if the comment on the whole were true, what a sad statement on the history of the nation that it could have come so far and now be left so far behind.

The British will tell you that they’ve got quite a bit more.  Grocery stores in the States are stocked with designer jams and jellies for example: all British.  I am what I eat, so the only examples that I have are foods.  There’s shortbread too.  Yummy.  But, I’m sure that other stellar goods populate the stock of other areas of the economy.  Insurance, for example.  Lloyds of London.  Gee, I hope that the insurance business isn’t too closely linked in with the Lloyds group.  Like City Bank in the States, it did its civic duty earlier by buying up the assets of one of the troubled banks.  Good idea, keep what was good, get rid of what was toxic.  Too bad no one is buying anything: good or toxic.  And, with eyes open, I don’t imagine that anyone would buy anything toxic now.  Any wonder that the British government is now talking about buying up all of those toxic assets and creating a bad bank.  I understand that’s an idea they’re thinking about back in the States too.  The British, ever mindful that they could as easily be a State of Europe, however, have something to prove.  So, they’re a bit further along on the idea.  But, think of it for a moment: you are what you eat.

As the British say: BRILLIANT.  Bril-li-ant!  So you have been hiding from the world the fact that you’ve borrowed twice your weight in gold, er, sterling.  Brilliant!  Marvellous, indeed.  Do you really, now, want to form any association that may allow the world that holds your debt to equate your currency with toxic money?  Heavens, you might allow the world’s powers to presume that you are a lesser ape, in need of the spoils of their protection.  And, there rests the obvious answer to the American investor’s question.

Britain might take a page from its own history.  It might “turn the page”, as they say.  Britain, the former colonial master, might become the colony as a means of paying its debt.  China could send its war ships up the Thames.  It might even set up opium dens in the heart of London as a means of pacifying the people.   The Gulf states, who’s practice of slavery was ended by the British, could raid Birmingham and Manchester for human capital.  Of course, this may not be such the plumb I think it to be.  China is already sending its war ships up the Thames and unloading its equivalent of opium dens: large screen TVs, DAB clock-radios, cell phones, even lowly bathroom tissue holders.  And, the Gulf states are already exporting human capital, mostly to their gleaming new cities in the sun: state of the art, mushroom universities and banking with a human touch or, at least, Islamic banking strictures.

Britain has what colonized nations have always given: land and people.  Of course, with plenty of verdant farmland, it could become a Leak and Potato Republic.

Please realize, that a good bit of the above was Tongue in Cheek.    ”TiC - TiC - TiC” as the French say.  Of course, they say that to express their disapproval.  But, Tongue in Cheek, none the less.

When D. was panicking today - and we set out to move our money around, I noted that the Icelanders were now insolvent after similar events, but that they were still alive.  What I didn’t tell D. was that they’re still alive and rioting in Reykjavik.

Incidental Realities

"The majority of correspondence that we receive on this topic," were the first words I heard when channel surfing recently, after moving to the United Kingdom. It was a voice from the States that had seemed to follow me here. Sally Jesse Raphael was summarizing the statistics of alienation. "Four of five people," she said, "suspect that they were adopted, displaced at birth, or ..." were otherwise apart from the family that claims them. I am one of those people.

When I was eighteen, I sent my parents a postcard from a long trip to France. "Home is where the heart is," I wrote, "and, I feel so at home here." My mother would tell me, not long after my return, that she feared I would not come back. She had been aware of my isolation. I was forever, effortlessly seeming to prove my differences from my siblings.

Long before that on warm summers' nights, my brothers would join my father on the front porch. An earphone connected them via their transistor radios to the Reds game, whether downtown or away. Being there was as mandatory as was tossing ball before the sun went down. My escape, then, came in the form of a shortwave radio. After initially listening in on a game I didn't understand, I tuned in at first to English Canadian and British broadcasts and, later, to Quebecois and French. I'd become a traveler, if the only thing that connected me to far off places were the clear skies that carried the signals.

Unlike travelers who make their way in planes, on trains and long-distance buses, I was becoming a solitary traveler. The voices I heard on the radio were the first signs of intelligent life a the universe beyond that in which I lived.

Later, as I began to travel in planes or by train, I found that I'd learned to hear the silences amid conversations. And, as I began carrying a camera with me, even in densely populated cities, I began to notices that I was seeing the spaces between the people. In those few instances where a photograph recorded the presence of another person, I was capturing them in their own solitary states where I felt I'd intruded or from behind, as though they'd already left the moment to me and me alone.

My own sense of reserve, if not of reservation, more recently leaves me traveling populated places with a camera that can be concealed. The resulting images, taken without the aid of view finder, aimlessly focused, usually behind me on subjects even I haven't seen, have begun to suggest a world of everyday introspections, seemingly separated within a common space. I've begun to look at them as "found" photographs, incidental realities.

DEPARTURE

 

Awaiting the departure of my plane from the Port-au-Prince airport. I'd been separated from the Haitian travellers and made to wait in the Diplomatic Lounge. There I placed my camera atop the bar and clicked away aimlessly. In the mirror, it seemed to reflect upon a conversation's pause, a still life with human subjects. It was one of those moments in which the camera seemed an intruder.

A VISION IN PORT-AU-PRINCE

I had come to Port-au-Prince, Haiti on work. It had been a fair walk back to my hotel from the National Archives. Evenings of boredom between work days was often spent photographing the hotel's ceiling fans. It had become a joke among my colleagues: "portrait of a ceiling fan, number 43". When I thought I'd prove that my aimless methods could capture something else, I was shocked to discover that the camera found the ceiling fan nonetheless.

RESTAURANT ARC EN CIEL -
THE RAINBOW ROOM

I set the camera on the table and pressed the button.  Though the open-air restaurant not far from the centre of Port-au-Prince was crowded, those of us eating there to disappear in the taking of the image, leaving only the resaurant workers to their tasks.

THREE WOMEN, TURNED

Most visitors to Aruba go to the beach. I sought out the isolation of the Alto Vista Chapel in the north-western desert. Finding that I wasn't alone in seeking solitude, I decided to allow the camera to photograph the view as I waited for the other tourists to leave. While I held the camera behind my back, taking images without intent, the camera found these three women making their own isolation, forming their own solitary contemplations.

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE

Once inside the Alta Vista Chapel (Aruba), I discovered that I was still not alone. Others were there, in prayer.  And, I felt it disrespectful of them to photograph. I hung the camera to my side, and allowed photographs of the space behind me. The floor seemed to describe the aspirations of my father's religion. The doors seemed both to reflect and belie those aspirations.

TROUGH

Again, I'd set out for another location on Aruba that I though would led itself to isolation. When I arrived the Donkey Sanctuary was a solitary place. But no sooner had I taken the cap off of my camera, a bus of tourists arrived. As I lowered my camera, finder still at the ready, the camera captured a world divided between natural forms and man made lines. The interjection of granny-smith-apple green seemed to suggest that the man made was forcing itself upon nature.

RESEARCHER

I had come to London with a visitor who was interested in seeing the mineral collections at the Museum of Natural History. I find myself bored inside museums, I'd rather look at the museum building itself. The building, more than its collections, express purpose. Here, my camera found the perfect sense of purpose within the building.

THE RED HAIRED WOMAN IN ORANGE LIGHT

She had been intently examining the Museum of Natural History collections when I first saw her. Yet, when my camera saw her, it was as she passed from one room to another, alone and in sympathetic light.

THE HUSBAND

A husband goes shopping with his wife. The idea of lingerie may even turn him on. But, once he in the store, he's bored out of his mind for wont of a living model. My camera finds that a husband who follows his wife to the museum may be equally bored. And, so still, he might be one of the camera's specimens.

THE RED LIGHT

Crossing a busy intersection, my camera seems to find the only people who cannot be seen, those closed away in their cars, stopped cold in their tracks.

WAITING

With a queue stretching out the door, it's hard to imagine being in a fast-food restaurant and finding oneself entirely alone. Actually, this is often where I find myself. In that sense, it was surprising to see that my camera had somehow managed to take a self-portrait.