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.

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.