The Nativity Pageant At Holy Trinity

This morning Eliot and Olivia participated in the annual Nativity Pageant at the church we attend here in Cambridge. You see Olivia standing outside the church with some of her friends. Olivia was Mary and Eliot was Sheep #1. Both had lines to memorize and said them perfectly. As these things go, the pageant went off fairly well considering there were, at a minimum, 15 three year old sheep.

The Barton School Christmas Fayre

This morning Olivia and I attended her school Christmas Fayre with two of her good friends, Heidi and Morgan. And no, I didn't spell it incorrectly. Based on my first experience, the annual school Christmas Fayre seems to be a Christmas bazaar and school carnival rolled into one. The school's multipurpose room was filled with stalls selling Christmas crafts that the children had made, baked goods and various games you could play for a small fee.

Olivia tried her luck at the "Lucky Lolly"stall (received a unmarked lolly, so no prize), the "Jammy Jar" stall (won a jar full of goodies only a kid would love: plastic monster finger puppet, plastic bear, plastic bendy pencil and a box of smarties - which are like M&Ms and probably made of plastic), and the snowman raffle, where to my amazement she won a stuffed snowman on her first try. The odds were against her so I thought that one would be a safe. At least the snowman wasn't plastic.

She finished the morning off with a visit to Santa in his grotto. There, for a mere 2 pounds, you are allowed behind the tinsel barrier and escorted by an adult elf, through a little maze of what I think are supposed to be snowdrifts, but which really look like piles of boxes covered in white sheets bedecked with candles, to an elderly Santa crouching in a dimly lit corner. I think we both thought the set up a bit odd, so I accompanied her. After a brief visit in which Santa asked her her name and her age, but not where she lived, she received a wrapped gift. It turned out to be a set of plastic craft beads.

Abroad during Election Day

Today is the first time since we've been here that I wish I was back home. I'd like to stand in line with some other Americans at the polls and feel like I'm part of history. As it is, we printed out and mailed in our absentee ballots a while ago and there's nothing to do today. By the time the first polls close it will be after midnight here. I doubt we'll still be awake. Being abroad during a presidential election, especially one like this where so much is at stake, seems wrong. I've been reminded, though, that the English do care what happens in America. More than Americans ever care about what happens in another country's presidential election.

This past Saturday, I was chatting with a man at a rummage sale, and his eagerness to talk about the election was genuine. He wanted to know what I thought and was eager for my response. He knew all about the candidates. For the last 6 weeks, every Sunday morning, at the church we attend, prayers have been offered on behalf of the American people and the candidates running - that God will guide and direct our decisions and our next president. I attend a women's Bible study on Tuesday mornings. We begin with someone opening in prayer. This morning a prayer was given by a woman named Maggie. Her only prayer was for the people of America as they voted today, and she asked that whoever is elected will guide the country with wisdom and justice. She prayed that her grandchildren, who are American citizens, would never have to fight in a war. And I realized that we are all hoping for the same.

It's good to be somewhere else and be reminded that the decisions we make do affect each other - greatly. And it's good to be reminded how to care about the rest of the world too.

Those Friendly Brits

A few weeks ago, when we visited Bury St. Edmund’s, our kids were clambering around on the ruins of the old Abbey there. The ruins are in a lovely public park, open to all. It was early in the morning, and we were some of the first people there. An older British couple wandered by, and the woman looked at our children for a moment. I expected her to make some comment about how cute they were (that’s what usually happens). But instead, she looked at me and said, in her proper middle-class British way: “These are very important ruins; I don’t think children should be climbing on them.”

I was, admittedly, taken aback. There were no signs saying to keep off, the place is a public park, and indeed, within an hour, there were probably 50 kids dashing around and over the ruined walls. So it’s clear we weren’t breaking any rules. The key here is the woman’s phrasing: “I don’t think….” She apparently felt perfectly entitled to give her opinion about the behavior of our children, despite the fact that they were a) not disturbing her; and b) not breaking any rules. She probably also heard our accents and saw our backpacks and pegged us as stupid Americans who wouldn’t know culture if we fell over it.

Of course, I spent the next hour thinking of all the clever and devastating things I could have said. Like, “Oh, these are very important ruins? I thought they were just a bunch of old stones!” Or, “I just love the warmth of the British people, you know?” Or, “Thanks, but no one asked you.” Or maybe, “Where I come from we still have an empire, not just ruins” (though, on second thought, that one’s not strictly accurate). Anyway, what I did say was “I don’t think they’re hurting anything,” which I thought was all right given the circumstances and considering that I’m a pretty conflict-averse person. And, amazingly, she came right back at me: “They still shouldn’t be climbing on them,” she announced, before turning on her heel and marching away.

I was reminded of this incident the other day, during Halloween. As Wendy mentioned in her earlier post, trick-or-treating isn’t really that common over here. But it’s not because people think there might be a danger to children, or someone might give them poisoned candy. Just the reverse, actually. Apparently 6-year olds requesting candy once a year is both an invasion of privacy and terrifying for pensioners (aka senior citizens). The other day a local newspaper noted, very seriously, that “Halloween can be harmless fun, but sometimes members of the community can become distressed by unexpected callers.” (Unexpected callers? How could they be unexpected, unless you’ve somehow missed that it’s Halloween?) On the BBC web site today there was a story entitled “Should Halloween be banned?” And lots of communities give away signs like the one on the right. And on reflection, though I'm sure some of Olivia's disappointment this year had to do with not scoring much candy, I wonder if there's a deeper level as well, in which she was forced to confront that fact that kids just aren't at the center of the world here, even on a day (like Halloween) that's supposed to be for them.

So part of it is that the British just don't indulge children the way that Americans do. And the over-60 crowd can be particularly chilly. But the other part is this sense of privacy, which is interesting because, of course, in many ways people over here live much less private lives. Their homes are smaller and closer together, they're outside in public a lot more, they take public transportation more often. All these things help make European quality of life much higher in all kinds of ways. But there may be a kind of compensation in which you've got to protect what few boundaries you have left. In the US we barricade ourselves in huge homes and sentimentalize children. In the UK they do neither.

Halloween

Here is Olivia dressed up as a witch for Halloween. She was invited to a friend's house for a party and I think she had fun, but came home with only 3 pieces of candy. She said, "Now can we go trick-or-treating?" but, of course, they don't really do trick-or-treating here. She was so disappointed. We'd told her before, but you know when you hear something you don't like, it's best to forget it. I asked her if it was the going door to door she missed or the candy and she said, "Well, the candy mostly." I promised she could pick out a small bag of candy at the candy stall in the market this weekend. That seemed to satisfy her. Cultural clash temporarily diverted. I've got to get thinking about how to deal with Thanksgiving.

Punting this past Sunday

Since the weather has been uncommonly sunny for autumn in England, we've been trying to do lots outdoors. This past Sunday we packed a little picnic lunch and went punting after church. We thought a nice tour along the backs of the colleges would be an educational event for our children. Despite their father's best efforts, they remained somewhat ambivalent to the glorious wonders, history and architecture of our surroundings. Their main interest seemed to be who got what half of the large gingerbread man recently purchased in the market as a special treat. Eliot's comments consisted of exclaiming, "Punt Crash!" every time we came close to another punt, even though we were never close to crashing. He also toyed with the idea of blowing the whistle on his life jacket and kept asking why he couldn't. Olivia said she was tired. Perhaps you will find the pictures from the afternoon enlightening since the verdict is out on whether the kids did or not.


Ivy covering one of the buildings at St. John's College.



Coming out from under the "Bridge of Sighs."


King's College chapel and Trinity College to the left.

Bury St. Edmunds

On Saturday we took the train to a town called Bury St Edmunds, a bit less than an hour from Cambridge. St Edmund was the last king of East Anglia (the easternmost region of England); the Danes killed him in 856, and his body was reburied here in 903. A thousand years ago this whole region of England was under pretty much constant attack by rampaging Scandinavians. Why they wanted it I’m not sure, since much of it was under water. But that’s a story for another day. Anyway, the town gets its name from the shrine to St. Edmund; pretty quickly a powerful Benedictine monastery grew up around the shrine, and became a famous pilgrimage site. The abbey is mentioned in the Domesday book.

St. Edmundsbury Abbey was apparently the wealthiest abbey in England by the time Henry VIII got his big idea, so it really took a beating in the 1530s. Henry liked to collect "evidence" of just how bad the abbeys and monasteries were; when he sent one of his goons to Bury in 1535, the report noted "much guzzling, gambling, wine, and women." Much to our disappointment, none of these were in evidence during our visit. Today the abbey is just a picturesque ruin, spread out over many acres, which the town maintains as a huge public park, with lovely flowers, a playground, and so on. The walls themselves are pretty worn down; it turns out that after the dissolution the good townsfolk of Bury used it as a quarry. So the stone is spread all over town; a kind of literal dissolution, I guess, which nicely matches the literalistic tenor of the English Reformation. Anyway, it’s a really great place, and the kids had a terrific time clambering about on the walls.


Henry’s sister, Mary Tudor, the queen of France, had been buried in the Abbey. But when Henry stamped out Catholicism in England, and the abbey along with it, he had to exhume his own sister and then re-bury her in nearby St. Mary’s church. I guess there are some unforeseen consequences when you pick a fight with the Pope.

While Wendy and the kids were romping about in the ruins, I wandered off a bit and happened, quite by chance, on the Greene King Brewery. Greene King is the largest brewer in this part of England, and they’ve been based in Bury St Edmunds since their founding 150 years ago. Beer is made from barley, and apparently the barley in East Anglia is the best in England. There’s a museum at the brewery, so I wandered in. It turns out that beer has been brewed in Bury St. Edmunds for an awfully long time. The monks were apparently going at it full tilt by the 12th century, selling beer to all the pilgrims who came to the abbey and presumably making a nice little profit. But a lot of the product never left the abbey walls. According to the account books, in the 13th century the monks were allowed a ration of a gallon of beer a day. If they were ill, this was increased to a gallon and a half per day.

Now, I’ve long thought that I would be a good candidate for the monastic life. (Wendy, who knows me pretty well, thinks this is preposterous. You be the judge.) But I was never quite sure why it was so appealing. Now I know. A gallon of beer a day! Sure, the poverty and the chastity would be hard, but, sheesh, that’s a lot of free beer.