Bravery in the Chilterns

There is a lot of talk in England nowadays about the failure of ordinary people to take action when they encounter criminal or thuggish behaviour. The newspapers bemoan the way that people avoid getting involved when witnessing abusive behaviour in the street (not like the old days, they cry). Perhaps people avoid involvement because much is made of the rare times when people confront these criminals and are murdered as a result.

Well, today on my train coming home, three horrible young men got on and began swearing, threatening girls, and slamming the wall. People watched out of the corners of their eyes, pretending to be very absorbed in what they were reading or listening to so that they would not be next. The worst of the men reeked of booze and stared me down when I stood up to get off the train at my stop. Here comes the bravery bit: a middle aged woman stood up right next to him, pulled out her mobile phone and took a picture of his face. "What you taking my picture for?" he asked with a threatening sneer.
"I wanted a picture of your pretty face," she said primly.

He blocked the doors for a moment when the train stopped, and I wondered if he would take her phone or refuse to let both of us off, but he stepped aside finally. It is sometimes the people that you wouldn't expect, the unassuming ones, the middle-aged women, who will step up and do the brave thing when it needs to be done. Lady with the mobile phone, I salute you.

Frogger

I screamed when I saw this sign as we drove through a local market town on Sunday.

I wonder exactly how many frog casualties there were before the authorities got together and posted this? Were the streets routinely littered with the fallen corpses of slow and careless frogs
before they took action? And where does one procure such an object?

I'm guessing that cautious motorists now slow down and scan the road for any sign of amphibian crossing, patiently waiting for the frogs to complete their dangerous journey to the other side. Either that, or they stare at the sign as we did, eyes agog.

Yum, it's disgusting!!!

Marmite: a quintessentially English food? I don't remember what first possessed me to try Marmite. It is a thick brown salty slightly yeasty spread. Maybe I thought it would broaden my life experience, like trying drugs or speaking French. It's . . . not bad (to my taste buds). I actually buy it and even eat it sometimes.

Leave it to the English to create an advert that shows people retching in response to the taste of the product they are flogging (see below). Wow! Not only does the smell of Marmite make some people retch, it will even make a beautiful woman lose her sex appeal. Try it!

Merry Easter

This island has some funky weather. Ain't never see snow - not a speck all winter - then spring rolls around, the daffodils are blooming, and here it comes. Merry Easter.

It's always funny to hear the hysterical news reports of wild weather and motorist chaos followed by a description of the snow, not in inches, but in millimeters.

Welsh Cheese

We are having a county food fair in the village over the Easter weekend. It is, as they say, the most fun the village has seen since the war. Large white tents are set up in the park, and camper vans have been parked on the grass since Thursday.

We bought strawberry jam in a bear jar, some soggy Italian olives, and a delicious Welsh goats cheese. That Welsh cheese is some good stuff - I highly recommend. It was almost worth the £3.90 adult ticket to walk through the tents. Oh, I almost forgot about the scraggly celebrity chef who demonstrated how to cook eggs inside meatballs (an appetizer?) before trying to get off with the girl running the dried pineapple stand.

A Hottie

I never used a hot water bottle before I came to England. My mother had a plug-in electrical heating pad for when we were sick. I'm sure that hot water bottles must exist somewhere in the US, but when I was recently describing one to my American friend, she got the wrong end of the stick and thought that it was meant to be drank from, like a thermos.

Today is freezing cold despite the sunshine, so I may get one last use out of my hottie before spring arrives. My husband's mother sometimes warm the beds for her family with hot water bottles in winter, and there's something very comforting about it. Heat the kettle, fill up the rubber bottle, 'burp it', then slip the fuzzy cover on. It is a nice, cheap, immediate source of heat. Especially useful when we lived in a place that was heated by only a small coal fireplace and some electrical heaters (summer was freezing - we moved out before winter came).

The cover, which is furry and doglike, was bought for me by my husband when I was jonesing for a dog. Now that we have a dog, we sometimes leave him with the hot water bottle if he seems cold.

The Sweet Smell

We use these poo bags when we take the corgi out, and what I really love is that their designer has made a real effort. Sure, he's just creating the packaging for little plastic bags used to pick up shit, but he's really run away with it. First the slogan: "Number two bags for your number one dog." It's catchy, yet so accurate! Then we've got a pug wearing sunglasses, whose doggie brain is apparently not too busy thinking about eating or sniffing wee to consider the environmental impact of his feces. Finally, there's the dog in the upper left-hand corner. He makes me feel a little uncomfortable. I'm not exactly sure what's wrong with him, but he makes eye contact with this pained expression. And he's sweating - or panting. I can just imagine the company's CEO: "It's perfect! That's exactly what people want to see when they're buying bags to pick up poo."


So, we're pretty responsible about picking it up, but unfortunately there's this one field where we walk that is absolutely filled with the stuff. This wasn't a problem until recently. For some reason, after months of perfect behaviour, our corgi has discovered the unique pleasures of rolling in poo. At first it just happened once in a while. We like to walk him off the lead, and he was always very responsive when we called him back to us. That is, until he became addicted to diving into piles of the smelly stuff. Suddenly we were powerless. Dog cookies lost their appeal when he was faced with a pile of poo. Horse manure was worse - he would roll until it was embedded into every fibre of his fur. And here's the thing: if we tried to call him away, he would look at us and I swear to God, he'd laugh at us before diving back in.

I told him I wouldn't let him off the lead anymore if he kept it up, and things seemed to be getting better. I carry a little bit of chicken in my pocket to keep him keen, but today, the moment I turned my back, he threw himself to the ground and rolled about, and he just seemed to be enjoying himself so much that I couldn't fault him.

Shoeless

The shoe shop in our village is closing down. It's been run by the same family since 1919, and my mother-in-law has fond memories of buying her school shoes there in the 40s and 50s. We are lucky enough to live in a place where we can walk out the door and within minutes buy groceries, flowers, clothing, cards, coffee, a meal, or a pint (all without driving). There is a post office and a library, along with a train station that links to London (seven minutes walk from our cottage). I don't drive over here, but I take the train to work without problems. So in some ways, we are living in this bastion of sustainability - the antidote to urban sprawl. Yet, in the time that I've lived here we've seen shop after shop close down. New places open, but many don't survive. Other shop fronts remain vacant, which is depressing.

We try our best to support our local shops, but other than my pink wellies and some shoe cleaner, I've never purchased anything from the shoe shop. It had limited selection, kind of matronly shoes and high prices. The interior was dingy. Sometimes it was closed when it was meant to be open. The sales lady wasn't especially friendly. Maybe it deserved to close. I went in to have a look at their half-price closing down sale and it was still too expensive for me. And on a final note, their wellington boots were not included in the sale.

Really Irish

If it wasn't for the shamrocks on Google's homepage, I would've completely forgotten that today is St. Patrick's Day. Considering that St. Patrick was born in England, and that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, there is not much ado about St. Patrick's Day in England. No green beer, parades, or shamrock themed displays in shops (I'm not including London - London has a parade for everything). No green clothing in the school where I work. No St. Patrick's day greeting cards.

I know that the people back home (in the US) are no doubt wearing funny leprechaun hats and eating cupcakes with green icing today. I've noticed that Americans and English people have a very different approach to heritage. Many of my American friends consider themselves very Italian or Irish culturally, although their last relative actually born in that country may have died in the 19th century. My husband was very tickled recently when an American friend of mine described herself as really really Irish. When we questioned her further she explained that just one of her grandparents was Irish.

When I taught in America, there was a boy in my senior English class who decided to get an enormous green shamrock tattooed onto his bicep just before graduation. It really was distinctive. But hey, it's pride man, etched onto skin for everyone to see.

In England, if you were born in Ireland and speak with an Irish accent you're Irish. If both your parents are Irish but you are born and raised in England, you're pretty much English. I've never heard someone called an Irish English, or an Italian English. For that matter, there's no such label as African English, the way that you might be 'African-American'. I don't think that English people are disinterested in their cultural heritage (quite the opposite), it's just that they don't seem to wear it on their sleeve in the same way that many Americans do.

People like me, who were born in other countries and moved to England will always be '(place of origin) living in England'. No matter how long I live here I will always be an American living in England, rather than an 'American British' (if such a label existed). And if I have children over here, I suppose they will be English.

So I was ruminating on all of this when I came across this article

St. Patrick's Day is . . . cancelled?

Well, that explains it.

Into the wild

We took our corgi hiking in the woods on Saturday. We managed to get ourselves a little lost, which is to say, it took us slightly longer to reach the car park than we expected. We weren't lost lost the way you might be in the woods in America. It never ceases to amaze me how footpaths can be found absolutely everywhere in the UK. Places might be rural, but rarely are things wild in a really dangerous way, at least not where we live. I should add that some friends of ours were once rescued by helicopter from Mount Snowdon in Wales after getting confused in some bad weather - so obviously everything's not perfectly safe, at least not from embarassment.

One thing that I love here: being able to carelessly walk through (or lie down in) a meadow of tall grass. I never would've dreamed of doing this without wearing long trousers (with white socks pulled up over the cuffs) back in Connecticut. I grew up in tick country, where we had to scrutinize every inch of exposed flesh (even after walking through someone's unmown back garden) to avoid contracting the dastardly Lyme disease that our local ticks carried. When I was about nine, I remember screaming (along with my younger sister) while watching our babysitter trying to cut a tick off my sister's neck with a steak knife. My sister was okay and the tick was eventually destroyed in our garbage disposal. Uggh.

It's nice not having to worry about poison ivy, ticks, Lyme disease, West Nile Disease, poisonous spiders, poisonous snakes, rabies, and bears. Sure, we do have stinging nettles, but apparently these can be made into soup, so not a real hazard. And if we want excitement, we can always walk through a cow field around calving time. Those cows are bullies. I've been ganged up on by cows more than once, and I heard a story about a grown man who was once run over by an angry herd. Are cows dangerous? You be the judge.

Ye Olde Village

The word 'village' can sound really old-fashioned. If you asked me to describe a village when I was growing up I would have imagined a quaint, dusty, remote place, like something out of Little House on the Prairie. There would be people drawing water from the well, a shop where you could buy penny gumdrops and cinnamon sticks, and a little one room school house. Okay, so a lot of this was influenced by childhood visits to Sturbridge Village, but nevertheless, telling people back home that I live in a village still makes me giggle.

Our village does have a lot of old-fashioned elements (which I will get into more as this blog progresses), but we also have some of the trappings of modernity: Chinese and Indian restaurants, a Somerfield grocery shop, a Wine Rack, and my favourite - a kebab van which sells hot meat out of a van parked on the side of a field every night. Most of the shops in our village are still independent (no Walmarts/Asdas, no Tescos or Starbucks): we've got two cafes, a bakery, a chemist (drug store), a few pubs, and even a card and gift shop where you can buy things like this:


This is a baby book about Minky, a monkey who likes dressing up in funky outfits. My husband told me that Minky can actually mean something quite rude, but let's give Minky and his banana pajamas the benefit of the doubt, especially considering that I bought it to send to my friends from college who had a baby boy this week.

One of the hard things about living so far from home is that I miss a lot of the big events in people's lives. Births, deaths, operations, important birthdays. And babies grow up really fast! In this past week I've missed one new baby being born, a kidney operation (my dad), and a heart attack (my uncle). It's not usually this extreme, but with my family everything seems to happen at once. I missed three out of four of my grandparents' funerals a few years ago. Kids, take note, Junior Year Abroad can sometimes turn into Whole Life Abroad. Choose wisely. And save up your frequent flier miles.

How did I get here?

So how does a thirty year old American who grew up in the suburbs of New England adjust to life in a small English village? I've got the wellies (pink), the corgi (a cross actually, adopted at the ripe old age of nine from our local rescue centre - but still, quite a royal little dog), and I make a fine cup of tea.

So how did I end up here - a place where the police are more likely to be called out to capture a loose sheep in the road than to fight crime? Well, my husband is English - I met him during a fateful year abroad in college. He has done his best to 'civilise' me to the English way of life. He started before we were even dating (You mustn't say bathroom, say you're going to the toilet - he always told me). Really? Toilet? Isn't that kind of explicit? Well, ten years later, my scatalogical humour is finely tuned and I even say 'tomato' in a way that people can understand.

I hope that you'll find my blog amusing as I describe life in our little village. I like it here, and I hope that you will too.