Throwing in the Towel

There are some things I will never understand about the British: their strange affection for Marmite and Hobnobs, for example, or why they pronounce "lieutenant" the way they do. But chief among the Mysteries of the British is their embrace of the common tea towel.

Figure 1: A tea towel in its natural habitat.

A tea towel is a roughly 16-by-23-inch rectangle of fabric. While a normal towel's primary purpose is to absorb liquid, a tea towel is designed to repel liquid. It's woven from a special water-repellent type of cotton. Even so, the English keep tea towels in their kitchens to deal with spills. The towels don't sop up the spills. Instead, if you're confronted by a little puddle of water--on a countertop, say--you use the tea towel to push the water around. The water won't soak into the towel, but you will eventually produce enough friction so that the water starts to evaporate.

Starts to evaporate, but never completely evaporates. The British love moisture. It may have something to do with living on an island. Surrounded by water, they crave dampness. That's why convertible tops in MGs and Triumphs leak, why windows and roofs in English houses let in the rain--and why tea towels shed water like the back of a duck.

But the tea towel is more than just a maddeningly inefficient household tool. It represents one of history's most stunning cartographic achievements. For example:

Figure 2: Devon in all its glory.

Note that various Devon tourist attractions are depicted on the towel above. There is also a map of the county, with the positions of more than two dozen towns--from Ilfracombe to Torquay-- marked with red dots:

Figure 3: Mercator would be proud.

If the level of detail on that towel is too coarse for safe navigation through Devon, one only need grab a tea towel that depicts North Devon:

Figure 4: North Devon.

In addition to crudely-rendered images of such attractions as an Exmoor pony and the Hartland Lighthouse, there is a map of North Devon's major population centers:

Figure 5: Ilfracombe and Woolacombe.

All of Britain is graphed out on tea towels, down to a scale of 2 cm to 1 km, just like on Ordnance Survey maps. I'm pretty sure that during World War II the Ministry of Defence confiscated the more detailed tea towels, lest they fall into German hands.

Showered With Affection
Here's a strange question I hope you'll answer in the Comments section: When do you bathe? The question came up yesterday when a gaggle of acclaimed international journalists were trying to make their way to the bottom of a bottle of wine. The Chinese journalist said before he traveled to England, friends told him that the British shower in the morning. Chinese, he said, shower in the evening.

It's the difference between a shower as a relaxing activity at the end of a stressful day and a shower as an invigorating activity at the beginning of a day. Thoughts?

She'll Never Be Hungry Again
On my blog of Sept. 26 I described how My Lovely Wife resurrected a 1928 hand-cranked Singer sewing machine so she could recreate Scarlett O'Hara's famed barbecue dress from "Gone With the Wind" out of some old bedsheets. Here she is at work:


Why would she want to do this? So our younger daughter could wear the dress to Book Character Day at her school. Some bedsheets, some wire hangers and My Lovely Wife's scary competency resulted in this:


Pretty amazing, huh? Beatrice literally stopped traffic this morning as she walked to school. There is a Plantation Road in Oxford, but I don't think they've ever seen anything like that.

Friday Grab Bag

The Friday Grab Bag
A little bit of everything today, from the sex lives of squirrels to voyeuristic firemen. And introducing a new feature: Gargoyle of the Week.

Feeling Squirrelly
The Daily Telegraph reports that environmental officials are eager to start a mass sterilization of gray squirrels, an invasive species that is threatening Britain's native red squirrel population. Scientists are trying to develop a bait that would render the pests infertile.

I'm thinking tiny little squirrel condoms.

Cuckoo?
Patients waking up at hospitals in the Liverpool area will soon be hearing something other than the beep of respirators and the moaning of their fellow inmates. Award-winning sound artist Chris Watson recorded the "dawn chorus," the morning concerto provided by British songbirds, and will play it back at five medical centers. His hope is it will uplift and recharge patients.

"The dawn chorus is believed to be a cathartic process, the combination of sound and the transformation of light to dark providing hope and inspiration," reads an entry on the Web site of the sponsoring group, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology.

If the Privet's a-Rockin', Don't Come a-Knockin'
This headline caught my eye in the Times yesterday: "Firemen Are Disciplined for Disturbing Orgy in Bushes." Four Avon fire fighters returning from a call shined a flashlight into a bush where four men were having sex. One of the bush-sex men later complained of the intrusion and after a three-month investigation the fire fighters were disciplined.

Two were fined 1,000 pounds, one was demoted and the fourth was given a written warning. All have been required to take a two-day course called “Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender Equality in the Fire Service – an absolute taboo?”

It's illegal to have sex in a public place, but really, how public is a bush, even if there are three other people there? Larry Craig's lawyers may want to look into this case.

Gargoyle of the Week
I snapped this yesterday at St. John's College:



Have a great weekend and thanks for reading.

A Bright Idea

There has been a fluorescent explosion in Britain. Everywhere you go you see retina-searing articles of clothing: a sort of electric lime green color emblazoned on jackets, vests and bags. Apparently, these items are designed to keep the wearer from being flattened by a truck. (Or "lorry," as the British quaintly insist on calling them.)

Here's a construction worker in one of these "high-visibility" garments:



Here is an off-duty bus driver:


Where you mostly see them is on cyclists:



I bought my daughter a green and orange "tabard" for low-light cycling. (I love that noun: tabard. It was originally the sleeveless tunic a knight would put over a suit of armor. The English never really left the Middle Ages, did they?) I also bought a couple of safety patrol-style bandoliers for us to sling on when we take to the streets. And, of course, no cycling outfit is complete without a bicycle clip. When I lived in England as a teenager, a bicycle clip was just that: a metal anklet for keeping your trouser leg out of your bike chain. Now it's Velcro and it's reflective:



Alexei Sayle had a column in the Independent the other day about the phenomenon, and whether we will become inured to it. If everyone is in a high-visibility jacket,
will anyone be visible? Or more visible than anyone else?

I had the same thought when Canada mandated daylight running lights for its cars. Snowbirds pouring down Interstate 95 with their headlights burning certainly stood out. And now I see more cars in the U.S. driving with their lights on in the middle of the day. But if every car is like that, are we going to have to add sirens and Congreve rockets to our vehicles to make sure they're noticed?

I also worry about the environment: With all those high-visibility jackets being sold in England, surely the famed Day-Glo mines of Cornwall must be in danger of being depleted.

What's Going on in Burma?
Of course I'm not spending all my time here in Oxford snapping photos of workmen in green jackets. I'm pondering what's known as "citizen journalism," the movement to democratize the media via the Web. If you saw a shaky cell-phone video of the saffron-robed monks marching on the streets of Rangoon, or read a blog by a Burmese citizen, you experienced citizen journalism. Glenda Cooper provides a good overview of what's been going on there and how it may change the media equation.

Ad today many bloggers around the world are supporting the citizen journalists in Burma, and indeed the citizens, by posting a "Free Burma" banner on their Web sites.

Seen on the Street

Determined to be the compleat digital journalist, before leaving Washington I bought a compact digital camera, the sort you can slip into a pocket and produce at a moment's notice, like a magician pulling a coin from behind an unsuspecting ear. (And really, aren't all ears unsuspecting, when you get right down to it?)

I also bought a laptop computer, an Apple MacBook. So equipped, I was ready to snap away and surf away and blog away.

Then I boarded the airplane at Dulles, shoving my laptop into my briefcase before stowing it in the overhead luggage compartment. When I arrived at Heathrow I discovered that as fragile as laptop computers may be, they're sturdier than digital cameras. The MacBook had intersected with the camera in such a way that the camera's screen was cracked. Only the bottom third of the screen worked. It's amazing how often you need to see the top two-thirds of what it is you're taking a picture of.

So I bought a new camera in Oxford, a nicer one actually (at great expense: 1 dollar = 50 pence). And I bought a case for it. Why, here's a photo I took just today:



It's a Chinese restaurant not far from the Oxford train station called "The Oriental Condor." And what's that hanging in the window? Could it be? Yes, it's...



...Peking condor!

Of course it's not Peking condor. It's Peking duck. Or maybe it's an art installation by Damien Hirst.

We haven't been eating out much since we've been in Oxford (1 dollar = 50 pence, remember). We haven't had a curry, the best fast food in Britain. There isn't a fish and chip shop near us (an outrage, if you ask me). There's a mobile kebab stand that rolls up each evening a few blocks from our house to serve drunken teenagers who are eager to conjure up from their stomachs something more colorful than an evening's worth of Foster's when they inevitably succumb to their binge-drinking.

Here's the kebab place I want to sample:

That logo makes the Kebab Kid look like the James Dean of take-away halal food. Or is it the Fonzie of falafel?

I'm fascinated by the streetscape of Oxford. It isn't all dreaming spires. There's an understandable tension between the architecturally notable buildings that tourists take pictures of and the greasy spoons that I've taken pictures of.

Earlier this week, noted Oxford resident Philip Pullman, author of the wonderful "His Dark Materials" trilogy, complained that development is threatening the city's unique character. He's among those protesting redevelopment down by the waterfront, in a cool neighborhood called Jericho. The argument can be made that if Oxford needs tourists to survive, the more you do to make the city less attractive to tourists, the fewer who are going to come. And the counter argument is, Screw the tourists, I live here, I want a cheap kebab.

But enough about that. I had two more photos I wanted to share. One is of a candy wrapper my older daughter brought me a few days ago, knowing I would find it appealing:



The candy's name--"Tangfastics"--is not to be confused with the tanning salon in Wilmington, North Carolina, that I snapped back in August:



I took that "Tan-Fastics" photo with my old digital camera--may it rest in pieces.

Look, Up in the Sky...

Sunny? Yesterday My Life Was Filled With Rain...
The British media doesn't seem to obsess about weather to the degree that we do in the States, at least like we do in the Washington area, where it seems that every TV station has its own doppler radar and cloud-seeding airplane and where, come winter, meteorologists Bob Ryan and Sue Palka compete to see who can go the longest without sleep.

(For those of you reading this blog in England, imagine a local TV newscast where fully a third of the program is devoted to the intricacies of the weather: that day's actual highs and lows; that day's perceived highs and lows [they're different somehow]; the amount of precipitation at various spots around town; computer graphics in an endless loop showing the eastward march of clouds and wind and minute fluctuations in isobars; that day's deviation from normal temperatures; the deviation from record temperatures; a quick round-up of statistics compiled by amateur weather buffs tending back yard anemometers; a five-day forecast; a seven-day forecast; a 10-day "extended" forecast. And if there's any possibility the weather may be slightly extreme--a slight chance of snow for example--the TV weather machine goes into overdrive, with reporters dispatched to snowplow marshalling yards, tricky intersections and the milk aisles of supermarkets. We take our weather seriously in Washington.)

Perhaps because the weather is so changeable in England--sunny one minute, rainy the next--TV weatherfolk don't get too invested in making ironclad, and apocalyptic, forecasts. Or maybe it's that the weather is pretty much the same all the time, so there's no reason to get all freaked out over minor blips in the status quo. The weather report at the end of the evening news is just the briefest of snippets, delivered almost apologetically.

I still care about the weather, though, and I can't shake the habit of asking out loud "What's the weather going to be like today?" before pulling on an outfit. For the last few days--and, it looks like, for the rest of the week--I think there's just one answer to that question: "English."

The weather will be English today.

That translates as "moist and raw." There hasn't been anything so vulgar as a driving rain, though. Instead, England seems to specialize in a nebulous mist. The sky spits out a fine precipitation as if from a celestial soaker hose. You never actually get anything as common as "wet." After venturing into it you return to your house sort of dampened, like a tennis ball that's been carried in the mouth of a Labrador.

Indoor Fireworks
Over on the island of Jersey a man named Terry McDonald was eager to recapture his world-record crown for the most pyrotechnic devices set off simultaneously. He was planning on launching 110,000 fireworks in August, breaking the Guinness record of 56,405. But environmental concerns forced him to scrub the endeavor. Officials didn't want the detritus from all those rockets littering the beach.

You can sort of understand that. Here's the rest of the story: According to a brief item in the Daily Express Saturday ("The world's greatest newspaper," according to the motto printed on the front page, though its Web site leaves something to be desired), McDonald has had to sleep in the same room with all the fireworks for the last two months, guarding them, presumably against accidental detonation. "It's a living nightmare," he was quoted as saying.

This is probably not a guy you want to sneak up behind with an inflated balloon and a sharpened knitting needle.

How Green Was My Alley?
I haven't yet decided how I feel about the British preoccupation with the environment. I'm pro-environment, of course, but there's a hectoring, sanctimonious tone to much of the conversation here. People drag their carbon footprints around like a family ghost. They wear their green-ness on their sleeves. (Greensleeves?)

That does leave room for comedy, though, and a columnist named Terence Blacker has a funny, satirical piece in the Independent today about the upper class's embrace of All Things Green. It's not often you see the expression "tickety-boo."

Reuters Foundation
At the end of this week a half-dozen journalists from around the world will arrive in Oxford, the latest crop of fellows to study at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, where I'm hanging out for the next year. The institute, and the fellows, are sponsored by the Reuters Foundation. Yesterday's Guardian had a story about the foundation and the work it does.

One of its most important functions is training journalists in foreign countries. Instructors don't, foundation folks insisted, tell people what to write, just how to gather information. "You have to be cautious about trying to impose some kind of neo-colonial pattern on it," Oliver Wates, a former Reuters reporter running a seminar on reporting on climate change, said of the training.

They may rank somewhere below used-car salespeople in the public's perception, but most journalists really do try to do the right thing.

Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

"I have a feeling I'm going to eat my weight in cheese today."

That's a comment I overheard Saturday at the Great British Cheese Festival. It about sums up the day: cheese, cheese and more cheese. We're talking cow milk cheese, goat milk cheese and sheep's milk cheese; cheddar, Wensleydale, Stilton, Caerphilly.... Specially-trained cheese experts were judging cheeses in all sorts of categories, from "Semi-Soft" to something called "Modern British: Hard."

The names of the individual cheeses show what poets the British are: Norfolk Dapple, Dorset Blue Vinny, Extra Mature Smoked Gubbeen, St. Tola Fresh Crottin, Celtic Promise (a bronze winner in the semi-soft rind-washed category), Cornish Yarg, Old Sarum, Stinking Bishop.....

How'd you like a nice slice of Stinking Bishop?

I could tell you about the festival, and some of the cheesephiles I met there, but I've decided to show you. Here's my first Voxford Video:





I've also put the video on YouTube (if it isn't up yet, it should be soon, once it's done processing; I'm new to this Web video stuff):



I hope this doesn't make you too hungry. What was my favorite cheese? Smoked Lincolnshire Poacher. It's a cheddar-style cheese, lightly smoked. It was fabulous.