Scotland Burns

Burns Night is Friday, 25 January.  Burns Night is to Scotland what Thanksgiving is to Canada and the USA.

I just bought my "fresh" haggis from the butcher.  I've made my own haggis in the past (using my grandmother's recipe - a German variant).  But with several hours of prep time though, it's much easier to have the butcher make it.  Before the Scots announced their drive for independence, it was easier to find haggis in the grocery stores.  This year (2013), it seems to be invisible.

Haggis will be the dinner's main course.  In more traditional homes, the haggis is addressed with a poem.  You could say that the address is similar to the prayer before the Thanksgiving meal.  But, it's more like an irreverent Passover ma nishtana, the "four questions" reciting the story of Passover.

Haggis is a meat dish that folks tell me requires a special palate.  I find its taste similar to Lebanese kibbeh or maybe a Turkish köfte.  That description probably doesn't help you, does it?  With its mixture of meats and grains, it has a nutty, savory taste.  If you don't know what's in it or what it is in, it's easy to eat.  If you know, well ... raise the mental blockades ... it can be like eating a pet dog or pet cat served in its own gut.

My partner, D, dreads this night of all nights.  Haggis, he says, is a ruminant regurgitated to be chewed again, which isn't entirely untrue.  And, offal, he says, is simply mis-spelled.  He refused to eat it last year, so this year he'll be served pseudo-haggis, a lean beef mince mixed with pre-cooked pin-head oats, cooked in a mini-tajine.

I also doubt he'll not take either the Balvenie or the cullen skink .  A moderately aged Balvenie, from NE Scotland's Speyside coast, is comparable to a well aged Kentucky bourbon. Sacrilege that it is, we may break open the King's Ginger instead.  The King's Ginger is English.  It represents everything Scotland remembers and both loves and hates: Empire.  It's a liqueur with the bite of fresh ginger and the pucker of a tart lemon.

And, cullen skink?  "Skink" is the Scots word for "shank".  Cullen skink is a light, creamy soup made from smoked haddock and potato.  I make my own skink using a French bisque method that liquefies the fish and potatoes.  So rich; it is a heart-attack in a soup cup!  Takes forever as well, but it can't be bought outside the 3-star Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, in Oxfordshire, where it requires a Monarch's ransom.  Le Manoir, in any case, doesn't do "takeaway".

For desert last year, we had cranachan -- a kind of pudding with raspberries and whisky.  D. refused that too.  I think he starved, actually.  I'm thinking of going with clootie this year -- a kind of brownie with baked-in fruits, served with whipped cream and, yes, more whisky.  I'll have shortbread ready, as a back-up.

Here, in advance, is to Scotland.  Scotland, you gave my country so much -- mostly Kentucky and Tennessee.

   

   

Oh, wasn't the snow just lovely!

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

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

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

Dragons. Oysters. Pearls. Swine.

Max thought that the world was ending. 

7:30 a.m.   Yellow lights, prying at the wooden Ventian blinds guarding the windows.  Almighty hisses and unearthly growls threatening the front door. It could only a dragon.

The truth was almost as fantastical.

♠ 

But first, the scene needs be set with the boring bit.   ♥ We live on a narrow, Industrial age street.  The distance between street and door is less than one pace (@ 2.5 ft).   ♥ Our home is a converted church school.  The windows are high; so high, the neighbour children play handball against it with a soccer ball.  There's no proper peeking (peeping, in the British vernacular) through those windows.   ♥ A storm water drain resides where street and sidewalk meet outside our door.  Max has developed the habit of lifting his leg over it. What's a castle without a moat?

♠

So, when we opened the door to see this dragon, our view was filled fully by this.  A bilge truck.  One black tube fed a stream of pressurized water into the naked drain.  Another tube, larger, equipped with what appeared to be a kind of Archimedes' screw supped up the content of the drain: decaying leaves, cigarette butts and packaging, candy wrappers, train tickets and receipts, used tissues, and God-knows-what-else. 

A huge modern, yellow oyster on wheels.  It was simply a marvel.

Walking and Street Trash

15 December 2012. The day in review. 

(1)  Walking

You all know that the British drive on the wrong side of the road. But, at least they do so consistently. When it comes to walking, it's a different story.

For consistency's sake, some, say half, want to walk on left side of a pedestrian street. According to one cabbie in Birmingham (UK not Alabama - something to remind your small town airport check-in staff of if flying to Birmingham, UK, say from Gainesville, Florida), this has everything to do with the placement of one's lance 'whilst' jousting. Most people are right handed. So, the majority of lances were held in the right hand. That meant driving your horse up the left side of your opponent. I've never seen anyone hold a lance while driving a car, but the British do love their heritage. (This, by the way is the reason that they make Americans living in the UK learn how to drive. The lance in the modern horseless conveyance is a stick-shift, which is daftly handled in the left hand.)

Meanwhile, the other half of British pedestrians walk on the right. I firmly believe that these are contrarians. Only countries that have experienced revolutions drive on the right side of the road. France. The USA. Haiti. Venezuela. The Russian Federation. (I predict, incidentally, that the U.S. Virgin Islands will never throw off its colonial yolk for this simple reason: they drive on the left, mostly with American cars, which makes riding through the narrow streets of Charlotte Amalie, the capital of the USVI, something of a seat-of-your pants thrill for a passenger in a colleague's car.) 

The result, amongst pedestrians, is a super-collider on a human scale. As people try to make their way, chaos - the mathematical patterns of chaos - results. 

Pedestrians in London

Now, why is this important? 

Firstly, it make the British a more tolerant and self-effacing people. Ask yourself, how many times could you excuse yourself for someone bumping into you before you exercise your second amendment rights. Americans, because they all drive and walk down the same side of the street, have a certain directness to them that is, well, direct. I have yet to walk straight down a British street. No wonder the UK is slightly ahead of the USA in matters of equal rights for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered.

Secondly, in American eyes, it makes the British inconsiderate. Not intentionally. If they paid attention to every on-coming obstruction, they'd have a meltdown either from indecision or having to make so many decisions. It is a marvel - and I write this with admiration - a marvel that there are not more accidents. Britons have developed the reverse polarity of magnets. To achieve the same unadulterated sense of personal space a New Yorker has to wait on a rain-storm and start swinging his or her umbrella like Occam's razor.

Sadly this marvel of modern British movement results in the 'law of metal'. If it has more metal than you, you get the hell out of its way. An American cyclist, though he runs red lights as diligently as any British cyclist, would stop to give way to a pedestrian. And, a car's driver in the USA certainly would not roll down his window to scream at the cyclist he's barely clipped, "You don't flippin' pay the road tax, do you!" If it's an American cyclist, he's left with the puzzle: what did he mean when he told you to "get back on the pavement"? The pavement is what they British call the sidewalk. You and the car are riding on what the British call the "tarmac". Lord knows what the planes and jets are flying down. But, if you have to ask, you should review the 'law of metal'.

 

(2)  Street Trash

David Sedaris moved from France to the UK, and . . .   I'll let that sink in. Many people I talk to think that David Sedaris still lives in the USA.  . . . and, what's the first thing out of his pen after he settles in? "The British are pigs!" -- in the Sunday Times (of London) no less.

They are! Pigs. You would have to be blind not to notice. The carefree abandon with which the British abandon stuff on the streets as they walk is impressive in its audacity. It's easy to believe that the entire country operates under the assumption that "Your mother lives here." She probably does: Live here. Before she died, while I lived in Florida, my mother lived in Ohio. That's like saying my British neighbour's mother lives in Finland or Italy. He can drop all the stuff he cares to. His virtual Italian mama might as well be a Pope in the woods. As it is, there's always someone to pick up after him.

Walking the dog up the "High Street" -- that's "down Main Street" in American English -- on a Saturday night, the average American dog walker could be forgiven for concluding that an army of bag-laddies had blown themselves up, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, on the streets and in the parks.

Before moving on, I feel, I need to comment on the difference between Britons walking up High Street and Americans walking down Main Street. It's the riddle of "The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond". America was settled by the Scottish, where as Britain - ask any Englishman - was settled by the English.

Of course, not all of the British are pigs. And, there are pigs in the USA too. There are even historical reasons for this slovenly behavior. While Americans were being blitzed by public service campaigns insisting "put it in the can Gator fan!", the British were in the midst of "The Troubles". The Troubles was that period during the conflict in Northern Ireland when the Irish Republican Army was planting their bombs in trash cans up and down the British isles. The result, whether through the removal of trash cans or blowing them up, was the creation of a nation that discarded its trash anywhere it felt like it. 

Americans taking the UK citizenship test puzzle over the question, "What is the purpose of a wheely bin?" A wheely bin is the ubiquitous British trash bin. We've got black ones for garbage. Green ones for compost. And, Blue ones for recyclables. Any philosophy or linguistics teacher will tell you that a purpose does not necessitate a use. While out walking the dog, you're obliged to pick up its "mess". You tell yourself as you carry it away, "I am a Buddhist monk. And, this bag holds the jewels of refuge: dāna, sīla, and bhāvanā . . . alms, restraint, and concentration." You know that the next trash can you see will probably be back home.

So, what would David Sedaris do? (WWJD? you might ask.) In his Sunday Times article, he asks Britons to be ashamed and to bin it like the good Americans we all suspect they want to be. (They don't want to be European, that's for sure.) BTW: Bin it, that's British English for "put it in the can Manchester United fan".

Discarded nappy - a bag of baby poo.

Sunday Evenings, Late

Something about late Sunday evening dog walks encourages he off-cant.
   
(1)

     I, I know Florida, said the nice man Max just met on his evening walk. That's where ...
     I've heard this - Mickey Mouse - a million times, but no ...
     That's where Neanderthal Man comes from, says he.
     No, I say, George W. Bush comes from Texas.
     

   
(2)

     Another delightfully weird Sunday late-evening dog walk in Cambridge.
     Sitting outside the Starbucks - closed at this hour, we came across a man who looked like Dusty Hill of ZZ Top, accessing the Wifi on an ultrabook. He was blogging.

     A celestial event - he said.
     Good night for it - I said - an unusually warm evening. - Tribute? - I asked.  Sir Patrick Moore, a distinguished British astronomer died today. He'd been the world's longest running TV host for a program called, "The Sky at Night".  It was like watching your dowdy old aunt pull the frumpy sitting room furniture out onto the lawn to watch the stars.
     No. I am reporting the progress of that orb . . . - He said - . . . the one hovering in the sky over your shoulder.
     I turned to see what might be described as an orb, stationary in the sky.  The sight of sky lanterns isn't unusual here.  They're used to mark weddings, births and deaths.  This was brighter, however, than any sky lantern I've seen.  It was roughly on the flight path used by planes landing at the local airport.  But, aircraft wonted for a soundtrack: the reverse thrust of jets eventually landing, the beat of helicopter rotors, ...  Even the jets sent to pound the hell out of Libya during the revolution made a mighty roar.
     How long have you been here? - I asked, assuming he'd tell me how long the orb had been laying about.
     Fifteen. - He said nothing of how long he'd seen the orb.
     Ingenious! - I said - I'd never have thought of coming here to use the Wifi at night.
     I have Internet at home - the tone of his voice seemed to say, "I'm not crazy", as he continued - I came here to see the orb.
   
     What characterizes late Sunday evening encounters is the need to just go with the flow.  It's claimed that Cambridge is a UFO hot-spot.  But, there are also UK and US air bases near-by.  Lord knows what they're flying off into the night sky.
 
 

What shall we be today?

This as part of a submarine. A periscope.
 
The Empire of England remakes its objects as they age, as purpose becomes obsolescence. Drains without feed are become submarines. Lamp posts without light, a temple's ruins. Alone, each seems to ask, "What shall we be today?"
 
I once attended an international conference on literature for children. Standing in the farthest reaches of the conference theatre, among the rafters like a planet in deep space, I heard "just-so" and "might-be" stories the likes of how coyote learned to call, or, crocodile came to smile, or, in translation from the near-Asian steppe, why mommy took a wife.
 

---

 
You put your head to the window of the periscope and you can see them. The race that sails round and round the stationary scope. Traveling millions of miles if only in their own special sense of distance. Like a set of chattering plastic teeth at the end of a wind-up key held stationary, or, planets laid out on a mechanical form.
 
The mirrors that take the light down bend it along with the images of the over-land world above. I come out, below, with a broad nose and thin lips as is fitting an alternate reality. My eyes, sadly though, read like a bad poem. With gravity far beyond their years, those eyes - at first sight - spark broad panic. It dies down, but, not without much discussion of the blinkered code they might be sending.
 
Aware of your own distortion, you consider that the mermaids you see there, below, might be sea cows. Might they survive on the refuse washed down drains from the nearby open-air market's fruit and vegetable vendors, you allow yourself to wonder. Meanwhile, those below create myths in which we gain the role of gods. We should be honoured but wary. What goes down must come back up.
 
Indeed, whether mermaids or sea cows, they're ravenous with a propensity to belch. Initially, we've mistaken the gurgling sound for conversation. Attendant malodorous scents, however, neither suggest nor confirm that our hypothesis is false. But, they certainly rise as quickly as our hopes give rise to having discovered intelligent life beyond, if inside, our own world. If they, below, only knew what our scientists are saying!
 
Having described the submarine below as a kind of sit-n-spin, they've now moved on to postulate that those farthest aft experience age in advance of those closer to the spout. A society of contrarians labels the theory "Daft", outlining a mocking theory that considers those to the rear are stern and those forward are loopy. They refuse, simply, to allow prevailing theory to be edified by uncertain observations of the subterranean world. Indeed, reminding us of smoke-and-mirrors, they suggest, it may be our world, not that below, that is spinning.
 
   

Far and Away

I * L O V E * Trafalgar Square.  You never quite know who you'll meet there, or, sometimes how you'll communicate with them.

This is a lovely Japanese woman, whom I met on the Square.  She was bravely traveling alone without a word of English in her vocabulary.  Somehow, we managed with what I like to think of as international sign-language and the photos we'd logged on our cameras that day.  She was making her way across London, photographing herself in front monuments, buildings and bridges. I had on my camera what a friend calls "vacation snaps", only not my vacation.  A visual log of conversations missed or started.

When I was a student in college, in the early 1980s, I used to take off for the hills on weekends.  Literally.  The hills of Appalachia.  I'd go as far as half of my pocket money would take me, end up in some small town, and sit myself down in the public square with my camera.  Even when it had no film (and there usually wasn't film - I couldn't afford it), I'd point it at the passing traffic. Invariably someone would stop.  A conversation would pick up.  I'd be invited off for dinner and hard liquor. 

I can't tell you the number of times I heard, from those who took me away and gave me a room for the night, that I was incredibly stupid.  I suppose that the Silence of the Lambs was a possibility.  But, it struck me that if you invite a stranger into your house, the stupidity was mutual.  — It strikes me now, this is a person I've hidden from almost all of you.  Something about a photo of a woman whom I really couldn't talk to reveals it.  Maybe it's just age, with its impulse to review what is written in, as a preacher I met called, "The Lord's little book of light".

I met all sorts of people.  Grannies who lost sons to the big cities up north or on the coast, and, who just wanted to feed someone.  Single men who wanted to talk about life far away.  Some were sailors, the closer I got to the sea.  I was taken in by couples, who wanted to talk about red-neck music, or, who spoke a language I barely understood.  Sometimes, we went to backwoods bars that smelled of beer on oak floors.  Then, there was Nate, the fellow who lived on a tobacco farm — had several barns in which to dry staked shoots — converted one into a disco.  A disco in the middle of nowhere, complete with mirrored ball and choreographed colored lights.  We kept in touch, infrequently.  I learned last year, he died in a car crash, broadsided at the intersection of two roads crossing a flat field in Indiana.  He had to cross the Ohio River on a ferry from western Kentucky to ride to his death; there's something poetically ancient in this fact.  There was the lesbian couple who'd been together for ages.  I remember they ordered what would be my first Hawaiian pizza.  The delivery boy knew them both well enough to come in for a Coke.  This was a time when the broadsheet of America outside small towns would have run them out.  There were good up-standing Christian women, and, small-town bankers, and, students from local colleges.  The latter wanted to talk about life in the "sin city" I'd come from, some thumped bibles, others were liberal with weed and dreamed of moving on.  I met police and undercover cops.  The undercover boys — they were always young — would come sailing into the public square like they owned it.  They wore tight fitting jeans and shirts untucked.  It was the black shoes and white socks, gave them away.  Then, there were the conflicted, usually male high-school teachers and seminarians, who just wanted to talk all night about nothing in particular.  Soft drinks were their choice of beverage; they needed a clear head, unless they took an impulse to action.

I wish, now, that I'd had film in the camera.  Their stories would come back to me the more easily if I had had photos to linger over.

Generations (above).  The elevator on Trafalgar Square is a glass cube.  With reflections of cloud cover imposing themselves, it seemed they might sail away into the sky.