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!

The difference between "I have" and "I need"

I was returning from the Post Office on busy Mill Road last week when I found myself trailing a middle-aged couple.  They were locked arm in arm and deep in conversation.  So, it was difficult to pass on the narrow pavement that, here, earns its name: side-walk.  I didn't mind the pace; they were walking at a fair clip.

But I was disturbed by the conversation.  

"I need to pee!"  The woman said.  She was insistent and very definite.  "Ah need t-hoo peeee!" she complained, exaggerating the words "to pee" as a child would from the back seat of a long-haul vacation get-away.

All right, I thought to myself, she could probably duck into an alley and pee, protected from sight, by the rubbish bins.  Every home has two: one green, for compostable waste, and another black, for trash that will go straight-away to landfill.  Both are big enough to hide the body of Jimmy Hoffa let alone the body of dumpy middle-aged woman.  Yet, despite the repetition of her statement of need, neither of them seemed to be in a hurry.

"I need to pee," she began her singular story again.  "... 'and, I just don't have it!' I told him."  I had more of the story, but it now it made less sense than ever.  How could you need to pee but not have pee?

There had to be more of the story.  It probably began at one of the small grocers further up the road.  Unmistakably, the gist of the story was about coming up short.  "I need to pee ..." she'd repeated the statement so much so the repetition seemed to be compensation for something.

"You can sell it to me or not," she recounted, "but I just don't have the 2p needed to purchase the milk outright."  The British two-pence coin is nearly the size of a martial arts throwing-star.  And, this 2p now hit me like one.

So, what's the difference between "I have" and "I need"?

Well, "I need" implies want or, in this case, wont of 2p.  For wont of that simple cultural reference, I'd not have had this misunderstanding.  "I have" implies ownership and sometimes the necessity of a disposable income, in this case unavailable.  The woman didn't have the two pence needed to complete the purchase; and, she didn't have to pee either.  If only I had listened more carefully.  She'd been recounting the story of pleading with the merchant to cover the small difference.

Thank, God.  No one appeared to be reading my mind.

I watched British comedy on American TV for nearly two decades, but I still find myself wanting frequent translations.  And, I'm not alone.

In a commercial, a British couple order coffee in an American diner.  They ask for cream and shoe-gah with it.  The waitress looks puzzled.  "Shoe-gah?" she asks as if it might be an instruction to "go and get it quickly".  "Yes, coffee with cream and shoe-gah", the couple confirm.  The waitress looks around the diner, pleading with anyone who would listen: "Shoe-gah?"  The cook responds, "They want Splenda."  "Oh", the waitress cries, "Splenda!"  The waitress brings the Splenda.  The husband remarks, "Slendid".  And, the waitress is there without passing a beat, "No honey," she retorts using the name of *another* natural sugar, "It's Splenda."

The commercial is, as the British say, "Simply Brilliant!"  And, it is.  It is brilliantly simple.  Everyone knows that coffee is made with wah-tah.  Every first lesson for restaurant conversation in any Everyday English Phrasebook is responding to the waitress' suggestion "Might a designah wahtah be bettah?"  "No," you might respond, "I think that a be-ah might be bettah.  Make it a bittah?"  And when asked what kind of bitter, I suggest a Bombah-deE-ah.  The better pub beers in my opinion are always bitters.  They tend to come from true, wooden casks rather than metal kegs.  Additionally, bitters, unlike the beers consumed by most Americans, are low in carbonation.  And, that makes them more drinkable.  My favorite, so far, is Charles Well's Bombardier.  But, the Adnams Broadside and other are also fine.

By the way, take care not to ask for an "Ad-nams" or "Ad-nums".  It sounds more like "Adams".  Who'd have guessed.

Anyway, when Ford recently introduced a new car here in the United Kingdom, they called in the "Ka".  Everyone immediately took this for the generic "car".  The first time I heard the name, I was entering a room where a TV commercial was airing.  I wasn't paying attention to the screen.  Because the commercial didn't actually address about anything you'd normally associate with cars: gas mileage, leather interiors, tire pressure, but rather with life-style issues, I found myself wondering what crows had to do with life-style.  I wonder what crows say here in England?  Or, if you can't take the MidWest out of the Ford.  One has to be careful qualifying "ford" here.  A ford is a shallow spot in a body of wattah, such as a rivvah, where one may cross by walking or riding an animal, such as a hawhs, or in a vehicle, such as a Ka.  Cambridge is at the center of the Darwin bicentennial.  I wonder what Dahwin would have thought of a crow fording a rivvah in a new Ka.

A Norwegian friend was just here, visiting.  She recounted stories from her last few days in Cardiff, Wales and London, England switching between British English accents without a touch of Norway.  And, she offered commentary in an American English accent to boot.  I can't help footnoting the origin of the Old English phrase "to boot".  It had nothing to do with footware, no good, swift kick in the pants to indicate affirmation.  That would be "the boot".  Nah, this boot is derived from the old English bōt, indicating compensation.  The long o was eventually stretched rather than hardened.

She explained that the British say everything slowly, deliberately, syllabically.  She added that when she speaks American English, she can speak so much more quickly.

I would add that British English also distinguishes itself from American English in that the former breaks words into syllables with the wrong stresses.  Try: Nick-ar-rah-gew-wah, or, Gew-wah-kah-mohe-lee.  Sometimes, lee lays as in Gew-wah-kah-mohe-lay.  Words with the wrong stresses, by far, tend to be borrow-words, most frequently it seems from Spanish.  My favorite is tap-ass.  That's not sexual harassment or a form of endearment among American football players.  It's the dim-sum of Hispanic restaurants.

Words borrowed from Asian languages fare no better.  I overheard two men arguing the merits and demerits of Nick-on v. (that "Vee") Cah-non.  What Nick was on, who knows.  Since to nick is a popular word for steal, I imaged that maybe he was on about stolen property.  Cah-non, meanwhile, struck me as Franglais.  "Car.  No!"  It didn't make sense.  The conversation took a turn for the absurd when the name in Nick's corner started talking about his knickers and specifically, in one instance, how to twist his knickers onto his body.  Knickers, of course, in the British for shorts or underpants.  When finally realizing that the two men were photographers, the conversation began to click.  American photographers have similar debates about their Ni-kons and Ni-core lenses and Can-ons.

Whatever the speed of conversation, I find that I am not easily mastering the Queen's English.  All of this could have been more difficult.  We almost moved to Zurich, where we'd have had to learn German.  When we decided to move to the United Kingdom, we joked, "at least, we won't have to learn the language!"  Oh, prophetic ironies.

Leaving a conversation, one might reflect on the American penchant for "see ya' later" and say "Cheers" as do the Britons.  If the conversants are both male, one or both might say, "Cheers, mate."  But, knowing what words to say isn't the battle.  Cheers is pronounced something like "Chee-yahs".  And, cheers mate might be pronounced "chee-yahs might".  Furthermore, depending on where the speaker is from, the British penchant for swallowing weak syllables, can make cheers sound more like "chuice".  That's right; juice with a consonant shift, replacing the j with a soft ch sound.  The first time that I was left with "chuice might", I was left wondering what juice might do.  It might keep me from developing scurvy.  And, it didn't help that I was in a supermarket and had forgotten to buy the orange juice that had been on my list.

Penchants being what they are, an American would more likely speak about proclivities.  Both words mean roughly the same thing.  Why Americans have proclivities, I'll never know.  Proclivities sound slightly naughty, don't they?  Perhaps the use of the more Latinate word has to do with the profound influence of Catholicism in 19th Century America.  Catholic immigrants were flooding into North America from Germany, Ireland and Italy.  And, the Catholic church then still used Latin as its lingua franca.  The Briton, on the other hand, tends toward his penchants perhaps because England, following the Norman Conquest, was occupied by France.  Penchant is derived from the Old French, pencher.  But, again, learning to frequent a different word for my own proclivities hasn't been half the challenge that minding my pronunciation has been.  I'm looked on quizzically when I speak of my pen-chants.  "The Japanese have singing toilets.", the Briton probably reasons.  "Why shouldn't an American have a singing pen?"  I find myself thinking the absurd to remember.  I must, for example, remember to "pawn Sean Penn".  ... Just like Madonna did before marrying a Briton, Guy Ritchie, who uses pronunciation similar to that of contemporary French.  His penchants are "pawn Sean" or "pawn Shawn", if you like.  Lord knows what his penchants actually are, but it's clear they've nothing to do with Sean Penn.

I am also still having difficulty with the Poes.  Of course, with the rock band of that name to be certain.  I was never a fan.  But, also with the Po-lease, which thankfully one may call Bobbies.  And, no, I haven't been nicked for nicking goods at the grocery store.  I'm having more logical difficulty with Poe-land whose citizens are Poes.  Poland does mean home of the Poles.  So, it makes some sense to speak about Po Land as one speaks about Scot Land as the home of the Scots.  Little matter that the Poles actually call themselves Poles, well, Polska properly speaking.  Let's blame the French (tongue in cheek as post-South Park Americans blame Canada).  Their Poland is Pologne, pronounced something like Po-loan (/pɔ.lɔɲ/).

There's a popular TV show here: Noel's HQ.  It's described as "feel good tele."  Noel is a one man Make A Wish Foundation, doing good deeds for those in need.  A Briton will tell you that they are pronouncing the l in both Noel and Pole.  In fact, they're swallowing almost completely out of existence.  Hearing it, again, without seeing it, on TV commercials for the first time, the concept of No HQ sounds something like a remake of the late 1980s British comedy, Blackadder Goes Forth, set in World War I.  I'm doing a lot of listening to TV without actually watching it, you see.

Whatever we might think about long o's and weak syllables, there's one more troublesome letter in the British English alphabet.  That's the letter A.  No word better exemplifies its evils than "pasty".

Mention pasties to the average Briton and he or she will immediately conjure up a stuffed pastry that looks something like an empanada or a Jamaican patty.  This Cornish pasty is more hearty than its Spanish and Caribbean cousins.

Americans should be careful not to request a paste-tea for lunch.  This kind of pasty isn't edible, at least not that I know of.  This is the kind of pasty you'd find on the beaches of the French Riviera and in the burlesque houses of Amsterdam or worn by pole-dancers in strip joints across North America.  I believe that you'd never find one much less two of this kind of pasty in this region of the United Kingdom.  Cambridgeshire, after all, gave England its Puritan in Chief, Oliver Cromwell.

The Cornish pastry is a pass-tee or, depending upon where you're from, a paws-tee.  Americans are cautioned not to break the work into syllables where you normally would.  Further, be advised to please do stress the syllable that your instinct tells you is wrong.  And, if you get any funny looks, quickly pretend that your native language is Spanish.  Alternately, walk away smiling with the knowledge that, though you've come from the land bequeathed us by the Puritans, you've just titillated a handful of Britons with thought of sex before lunch.  Of course, that could be why Britons eat lunch at 1 p.m. rather than at noon.