Looking back, it's kinda funny

I wrote this post up a few weeks ago; now that the financial world is in complete meltdown, it seems a good time to post it.

Colin


Wednesday, 3 Sept 2008

I got a bank account. This took all day.

I walked in to Cambridge this morning (20 mins) and stopped at a branch of Barclay’s, one of the largest banks in the UK. I had with me: my passport, my tenancy agreement, a letter from the President of Rutgers University detailing my salary, a letter from the chair of my department describing what I would be doing in Cambridge, a letter from Clare Hall announcing that I’d been elected as a Life Member and was welcome back at any time, a bank statement from my account in the U.S.A., and several recent pay stubs. A nice woman looked at all of these, shook her head sadly and said that what I really needed was a letter from Clare Hall confirming that I was a life member, and indicating that I indeed lived where I said I did. I pointed out that I did have all these things, just not in the same letter. No dice. But if I could produce such a letter Barclay’s would be most happy to have me as a customer.

So I hoofed it out to Clare Hall (20 mins) to see if I could find someone to create a letter. Alas, the only secretary who could do such a thing was on holiday—for 3 weeks. She’d only just left yesterday. Sorry.

Was there anyone else who could possibly help me?

If you’ve spent any time in the UK you’ll be familiar with the particular kind of relationship that passes for customer service here. You come into an office, say, or stand in line for a half hour at the post office, and the secretary or clerk looks up at you with a bedraggled expression that says, “you’ve come here expressly to ruin my day, haven’t you?” Being a friendly American, you smile and say hello and make your request in the nicest possible way, and the secretary or clerk slumps a little bit more, and perhaps sighs, and shakes her head as if she thought that people stopped making requests like that years ago.

This is the point at which most Americans will give up and slink away, feeling not only defeated but naïve, as if, in our innocence, we had just assumed that the world was there for the asking. “No,” this encounter tells us. The world isn’t like that. Not at all. In fact, it’s a gloomy place where nobody ever smiles or pretends to be having a nice day.

But the key here is not to give up. In fact, you’ve almost broken through. You try your request one more time, and this time the secretary or clerk gives you a look so defeated and despairing that when she gets up you’re afraid she’ll announce that she’s just going to nip off into the next room and poison herself. Instead, she gets up and finds the one person who actually can help you out. Success! And the funny thing is, it’s clear that she actually enjoys being helpful; by the time I leave, she’s telling me about her grandkids. She wishes me a nice day. She smiles.

Letter in hand (the production of which takes 40 mins) I hoof it back in to the center of Cambridge (20 mins). I go to Barclay’s. I sit down with a bank manager. I proudly produce my letter and passport and ask for a bank account. She examines the letter, then my passport. She shakes her head. Apparently the letter refers to me as “Colin Jager,” whereas on my passport I am “Colin Lovell Jager.” Well, yes, “Lovell” is my middle name. This is a problem, you see, because the name on the letter and the name on the passport have to be exactly the same.

“But nobody told me about the middle name business,” I plead.

“They should have known at your college how we need it done,” is the reply. (This is a common, if implicit, refrain in many dealings with the English. You should always have known something beforehand, and the fact that nobody told you is entirely beside the point.)

“Well,” I say, going into my winsome American mode once again, “the secretary who normally handles such things is on holiday, so a different secretary did the letter for me as a special favor, and perhaps she didn’t know the proper form.” As I say this, I subtly emphasize the words “as a special favor.” I feel sure that the manager will immediately recognize that she too is being invited into the special club of nice people who have recently done nice things for the nice American placing himself in their nice, capable hands.

No response. Perhaps I am being over-subtle. And suddenly the jet lag hits me and I am tired and hungry and I’ve walked an hour and chatted up secretaries and dodged bicycles and raindrops and I’m stopped short by a middle name that I didn’t even like until I was 20 years old.

I ask her to call Clare Hall and get another letter. I go home for lunch, and promise to be back at 2:30.

I walk home (20 mins).

I walk back in (20 mins).

Even though I have a booked appointment with her at 2:30, the bank manager is seeing another customer. I suspect I’ve been thrown over. Either that, or she was developing feelings for me and didn’t want to mix business with pleasure. At 3:00 a different manager tells me can see me. Still no response from Clare Hall. I start pulling out every form of identification I have. Bank statements, mortgage statements, tenancy agreements, my US driver’s license. Hey, look at that: my driver’s license refers to me as “Colin L Jager.” Maybe that “L” is close enough to “Lovell” to get me in the door? I pull out my last smile of the day, and it really does feel like my last. She checks with someone behind the scenes, whom I now suspect of being some puppet master who has been pulling strings and torturing me since 10 o’clock this morning. She comes back. She smiles. I’m in!

An hour later, I am the latest member of the Barclay’s family.

I walk home (20 mins), triumphant.

Total time spent: 7 hours.

Miles walked: 6.

When I get home, Wendy hands me a cup of tea and says, “You knew it would be like this.”

Barton Village and Church

Almost every morning I cycle Olivia to her school in Barton Village, just over 3 miles from Cambridge. Barton seems like a quintessential sleepy English village, with a pub and post office and some 900 residents. When Olivia and I pull off the road in the mornings we can hear the roosters behind the pub announcing themselves to the world.

When Cambridge University was founded in 1209 (by some monks who got kicked out of Oxford), Barton was already a thriving village. It’s mentioned 3 times in the Domesday Book. (The Domesday Book is an account book instituted by William the Conqueror to try to get a handle on the country he’d just invaded.) And there are records of a church in the village dating from the 12th century. The present church, built about 1300, sits at the center of the village, just across a lane from Olivia’s school. Like many of the oldest churches in the area, it’s a simple Norman structure, made of stone. It feels thick and substantial, as though, having been around for 700 years, it has no intention of going anywhere soon.

Before the Reformation the inside of the church was filled with paintings, which were then covered over by Cromwell’s troops (Cromwell actually hails from around here; I’ll have to do a post on him at some point) and remained hidden until 1920, when they were discovered and cleaned. Here’s what they look like now; I thought the knight in the upper left might be St. George, which would be appropriate enough.

One day last week, after dropping Olivia off, I wandered into the church. It’s hard to describe the feel of this place. One is struck by a density of historical time that simply has no analogue in North America. People have been present at this site for a thousand years, marking the chapters of their lives: birth, baptism, marriage, death. As is generally the case, the churchyard surrounds the church, so that one is literally encompassed by those who have come, and gone, before. Standing in this church, whatever one’s feelings about religion, it’s impossible not to feel that the urgency of one’s own preoccupations fade a bit as they brush up against everything that has already taken place here.

I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s great poem “Church Going,” which is too long to copy out here (go read it sometime), but which meditates on the many impossibly old and now largely empty churches scattered around the English countryside. It ends like this:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Llamas Land Park

Looking out our apartment windows and across the busy street is Llamas Land Park. It's about 25 acres of open green space with lots of climbing toys, tennis and lawn bowling courts and a wading pool. We have been here every day since we arrived and will probably be there every day until we leave. On the weekends this place is packed with families from all over town. During the week we can pop over after dinner for 20 minutes and we might be the only ones there. Both of the kids love the climbing frames. They call the one Olivia is sitting in "The Spider's Web." There are a couple of toys that seem like a remnant of days gone by like the five seater horse and the round-a-bout, which happens to be Eliot's favorite. He runs around and around with it, jumping on and off and I'm sure he's going to fall and yet he hasn't. I get dizzy just watching him.

The wading pool is the most unsanitary piece of standing water I've seen in a long time. Of course, it's not really warm enough to get wet here and yet the last 3 days that pool has been filled with British kids prancing around in their underwear or nothing at all. Olivia and Eliot have been wanting to go wading every day, so yesterday I finally said, "Yes." We walked over, it must have been about 65 degrees or so and I took one look at the murky, yellowish water with various flotsam and jetsam in it and said, "If you guys go in here you are really going to have to scrub up well tonight." Eliot immediately said, "Okay!" and went in in his underwear (not in the nude as we're not that European yet) and had a blast running back and forth. Olivia studied the water, rolled up her pants and walked back and forth a few times, and got out and went over to the monkey bars. I sat on the side wondering how this passed for anything close to a pool.

A Visit to Grantchester

This past Saturday we cycled to Grantchester, a small village about 2 miles south of Cambridge. It’s a pleasant cycle near the river Cam, with lots of cows and hedgerows and other bucolic scenery. Grantchester itself is small and pretty, with a very old church, a couple of pubs, and—our destination—the Orchard Tea Rooms. If you arrive at the Tea Rooms on a reasonably pleasant morning, as we did, you order tea and scones in the small kitchen and then bring them outside to sit in Orchard, among the apple trees. It’s really nice, and almost unbearably English.

The kids had a great time exploring around the orchard while Wendy and I sipped our Earl Grey. After awhile Olivia asked why they hadn’t mown the grass, because her trousers and shoes were all wet with last night’s rain. “It’s more natural this way,” I explained. A blank look. “The English like sitting around in orchards,” I tried again. “Why?” she asked. By this point I knew I was in way over my head. How do you explain Englishness to a seven-year old? “Go play with your brother,” I said, and turned back to my Earl Grey.

Later, we wandered up to the village church. In the picturesque churchyard behind it the kids spotted a small animal that turned out, upon investigation, to be a monkjack. It’s a kind of young deer, but with much shorter legs than a North American fawn. It was very fast and an impressive jumper. A nice woman at the church explained that they were always getting trapped in the church yard because of its high walls, but they eventually find their way out. She gave the kids some orange juice—or what passes for orange juice in this country, which is a highly concentrated liquid to which they add copious amounts of water. The kids were nice about it, at least.

You can’t visit Grantchester without running into the spirit of Rupert Brooke, a mediocre poet who had the good fortune to die young. Brooke was a student at King’s College, Cambridge, and after that he lived at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester (currently occupied by Jeffrey Archer, it turns out). For some reason he impressed various members of the Bloomsbury group, including Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell, and they took him up. He doesn’t seem to have been good for much beyond looking beautiful at their tea parties and composing terrible verses about how lovely life in Grantchester was:

Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

I mean, yikes. Still, Brooke certainly looks like a poet; Yeats apparently called him the “handsomest young man in England.”

Brooke enthusiastically signed up for the war in 1915, and died later that year, on his way to a battle in Turkey. If he hadn’t died, he would have been forgotten; as it was, his sonnet “The Soldier” was read from the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday, and no less a personage than Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in the Times. Here’s the sonnet, which isn’t bad but tells you everything you need to know about the guy’s penchant for self-mythologization:


If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


Wilfred Owen it’s certainly not. Brooke got to celebrate the war because he never really fought in it. Things were looking pretty different by 1918, when Owen called sentiments likes these “The old Lie.”

Nonetheless, when you go to Grantchester today it feels like it’s still 1914. And, in case you were wondering, there is honey still for tea, though I myself prefer sugar.

Going To Barton C of E Primary School

Here is Olivia on her first day of school. She wears a uniform which consists of a blue sweatshirt, cardigan or fleece along with a checked skirt, grey pinafore dress or trousers. At this point she prefers the trousers.

Barton is a small village 3 miles west of Cambridge and they have had a village school associated with the church for hundreds of years (more on that later). The C of E in the school's name stands for the Church of England, which is the state church of England. The school is a public school, in that you do not pay any fees to attend, but it has a religious component due to its long standing affiliation with the village church. We do not have this category in the United States.

Olivia loves school so far. She commented tonight on how kind the students are. It seems like a very warm environment. Her class consists of Year 3s (equivalent of 2nd grade) and Year 4s (third grade). There are 34 students in the room, which is a lot, but there are 2 full time aids along with the teacher, so the overall student to adult ratio is good. Every morning they have a brief chapel session, followed by 2 1/2 hours for either literacy or numeracy (math). After an hour for lunch and recess,the afternoon is devoted to various subjects like: foreign language, music, P.E., religion, art, history/geography, design technology (sort of like home ec. and shop, if I'm understanding it correctly) and science.

Colin bikes her there each morning, and she gets a ride home in a carpool. The bike ride takes them about 25 minutes and they are well equipped for rain but haven't had to deal with that yet, thankfully. Two weeks in and we are well pleased with the situation.

Here we are

Hi there. We'll try to chronicle some of our doings over the course of this year. The idea is that it will be interesting to people who know us but are not necessarily our immediate family. So we'll do our best to keep the "adorable kids" stories to a minimum. Anyway, welcome.

About the picture at the top of the screen. This is the "Bridge of Sighs" over the River Cam. The Cam is a shallow and rather narrow river that flows through the heart of Cambridge, and there are lots of picturesque bridges spanning it. This one, on the grounds of St. John's College, is probably the most famous. It's a replica of the original "Bridge of Sighs" in Venice. That bridge spans a canal and back in the day it connected two halves of a prison. The cells were on one side of the canal, the execution chamber on the other. Prisoners led over the Bridge of Sighs didn't come back. Hence the name.

Cambridge built a replica of the bridge, and so did Oxford. But the one at Oxford only spans a street. So this one looks more like the real thing. In the centuries-old battle between Oxford and Cambridge, these kinds of things matter.