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.