Guardian Angle: Binge Britain

I'm in the Guardian again today, a Comment piece that had been pinging around in my head while I was living in England. The premise: The Brits don't have a problem with binge drinking. Well, they do, but that's just because they have a problem with binge everythinging.

So, welcome to any Guardian readers who have washed up here at my blog. I'm afraid it's a little stale, given that my day job has reaffirmed its primacy in my life. And that job is as a columnist at The Washington Post. Most of what you'll find here in Voxford are impressions of the 10 months I spent living in Oxford. I hope my affection for your scepter'd isle comes through (even if the Daily Mail did infuriate me).

I'll actually be in Oxford this weekend, where I hope to do a little bingeing of my own. Pint of Old Hooky, please, barman. Oh, make it two....

Signs o' the Times

Clearing out some of my iPhoto catalogue I came across a few typically English shots. This sign was tacked to a door at Green College:



There are two things going on here. The first is the expression "on the latch," a veddy British expression which means to leave a door so it doesn't lock. I don't think we have that phrase in the U.S. The great U.K. pop band Squeeze includes the line in its song "If I Didn't Love You":
Taking a bite on a biscuit
The record jumps on a scratch
Tonight it's love by the fire
The door of your love's on the latch

Then there's the sign's final authoritarian note: "It is in your interest." I love that.

And I loved this sign at a butcher's in Oxford's Covered Market:


"Hand raised" pork pies. I can just see the little baby pork pies, no bigger then a biscuit, being hand-fed from a bottle of warm gravy. If only they were free-range, hand-raised pork pies, gamboling about the kitchen.

Strange Things I Have Seen

At the Science Museum in London on Saturday I visited an exhibit called "Dan Dare & the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain." Dan was a 1950s English comic book hero, devoid of superpowers but possessed of that plucky can-do spirit that the British so love. The exhibit nicely integrated the futuristic comics with the strides the UK made as it pulled itself out of its post-WWII doldrums. There were examples of "modern" design and objects from the early high-tech sector. Among the artifacts on display in a section on Britain's airplane industry was this sign:


I love that wording: "Car parking inadvisable." Ya think? Huge spinning metal blades--huge experimental spinning metal blades--and, just maybe, you shouldn't park your car near here? That's taking English understatement to an extreme.

The New Christy Menstruals


There's really nothing exceptional about this paper bag, which I snapped hanging in the bathroom of the lodgings I stayed in in Cambridge last month. And yet it seemed to be begging for deconstruction.

PHS is a provider of "washroom services." "Disposal Bag," well that's sort of redundant isn't it? It's the drawing that struck me most. How best to illustrate the bag's true purpose: to dispose of certain feminine hygiene products? With a woman, obviously. But a bare-shouldered woman in an antebellum hoop skirt, the front pulled up coquettishly, exposing a single foot? Does that say tampon to you?

Just as it would have been too much to replace "Parking Inadvisable" with "No Parking," so the people at PHS can't bring themselves to replace "Disposal Bag" with "For the Disposal of Feminine Hygiene Products."

You Spin Me Right Round
I'm getting obsessed with capturing the world around me in all its mundane glory. Or should that be glorious mundanity? Watch this video and you be the judge:

Beer, Glorious Beer: Touring Hook Norton

"Do not put your hands in any tubs of liquid," said Nick, our guide, as we entered the Hook Norton Brewery last week. Sensible advice anywhere, really. Putting your hands in strange tubs of liquid is a good way to lose your hand. It's also a way to get you kicked off a brewery tour. And since the whole point of a brewery tour is to get to the end of it so you can sample the beer you've just seen being made, that would be a Bad Thing.

My Lovely Wife and I toured the brewery the day after we toured the Mini factory. The effect was, quite literally, like going from the 21st century to the 19th century. If the Mini factory is all robots and laser beams, the Hook Norton Brewery is all bags of malt and tubs of liquid. Oh, there's also a steam engine: a 25-horsepower number believed to be the only one still in use for its original purpose, that original purpose being moving things--mainly water--around the brewery, since you don't really need a steam engine to make beer.



The steam engine has a seven-foot flywheel and its original 109-year-old drive belt. I don't know where you'd go if you needed a new belt. It would probably have to be custom woven from sheep intestines, kapok and gutta percha.

There were 11 of us on the tour and that was about twice as many as we actually saw working in the brewery. Occasionally as we climbed a narrow staircase or pitched up on a landing there'd be a casually-uniformed employee. A scientific-looking woman in a white lab coat was visible behind glass in one office, an array of test tubes in front of her. But otherwise, the place was almost deserted, imbued with the languid feeling you get after your third pint on a rainy day.

For a rainy day it was, absolutely pissing down. We'd taken two buses from Oxford, the first a double-decker to Chipping Norton, the second a tinier coach to Hook Norton that the driver piloted as if it were a Zodiac inflatable full of commandoes. He plowed through the narrow, twisting, flooded roads, pedal to the metal, spraying great rooster tales of foam behind us. By the time we alighted, trembling, in Hook Norton I needed a beer.

The brewery building itself looks Dickensian, and I suppose it is. They've been brewing beer in Hook Norton since 1849 and the Victorian tower brewery looked like a workhouse or asylum, steam curling up from various chimneys:
It reminded us of the building in the Japanese anime film "Spirited Away," a living, breathing thing. Inside was the best technology the Victorians had to offer: copper vats and toothed gears, sprockets and cogs and belts. It was like being inside a massive pocket watch.





Some of the cogs--as big around as dustbin lids--had wooden teeth. You never want metal against metal, Nick explained, since if the cogs seize up it's a horror to get them unstuck. If one cog has wooden teeth you can just knock them out with a hammer, pull the assembly apart and replace them. I don't know what this guy is doing, probably putting goose fat on the gudgeon ring or something:

I don't understand the chemistry of brewing beer. I have a better grasp on the consumer end of things. I believe the process involves water--called "brewer's liquor"--which at Hook Norton is pumped up from an underground well. Malt--which is roasted barley (who knew?)--is added. Hops do something important. Yeast helps things ferment. We couldn't go into the fermenting room--a stray bacterium can ruin the whole process, evidently--but Nick opened the door and swung it back and forth to waft the odors to us as we crowded outside.

"Oooh, that's lovely, that," said an older woman. "You're in the pub."

The process from start to finish at Hook Norton takes 11 days, or about as long as it takes to make 9,000 Minis.

Back in the little tasting room in the brewery's museum Nick pulled us half-pints of the various Hook Norton offerings: the malty Hooky Dark, the golden Hooky Bitter.... He opened a bottle of Cotswold Lion, a seasonal beer that tasted faintly of citrus. They were all very nice but I confess I'm partial to the beer I order whenever I'm down the pub: Old Hooky. "Beautifully balanced with a well-rounded body," is how it's described.

Like beer, like beer drinker, I say.


Can't make it to Hook Norton? Try a virtual tour instead.

The 71 Roundabouts

You'd think I would have learned my lesson. After traveling from Oxford to Cambridge by bus last year I did it again this week. It's a punishing trip, not dissimilar to the Middle Passage that ferried kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic. Three-and-a-half hours and only about 20 minutes of that are on roads of anything wider than two lanes. I wrote before about the nausea-inducing whipsaw motion the bus takes every time it goes around a roundabout. And there are lots of roundabouts.

How many? Seventy-one. I counted them:



There are big roundabouts of the sort that funnel vehicles onto and off of a motorway. There are tiny roundabouts, just card table-sized raised white circles on the tarmac. There are about 10 roundabouts in Milton Keynes alone. Or, rather, the bus goes around roundabouts 10 times. Some of them are multiple passes at the same roundabout, like a bull repeatedly circling back on a toreador or a pinball pinging between posts.

I don't begrudge the English their roundabouts. It's part of what makes this country great. I had an epiphany, though. Many well-traveled English people I've met talk about how they crossed the United States "on a Greyhound bus." They have fond memories of this life-changing journey, describing it as if it was something out of Bob Dylan or a Creedence song: This is the real America. I realize now that, though they may not know it (these things operate on a subconscious level), what they are reacting to is a bus ride without roundabouts. It isn't the sharecroppers' shacks sliding by in the Deep South or the Rocky Mountains marching majestically to the horizon or even the anomie of American ex-urbia that makes such an impression, it's the fact that the Greyhound isn't continuously lurching back and forth like a drunkard looking for a dropped coin.

Seventy-one roundabouts. Between them the bus would pick up speed and the rapeseed fields would flash by, their yellow blossoms making it look as if extra sunlight was pouring down from the sky. I listened to the people around me. A group of teenage apprentices behind me unwound after a day at technical college in Bedford. They were joking about their ineptitude--the roofs they'd fallen off of, the carpet they'd cut wrong--but under that self-deprecating veneer was a new pride. One boy told his friends about the tools he used, his own tools, not rented ones, tools he'd bought with his own money. "If they got nicked I'd be out of pocket well back," he said. There was a girl on the bus sporting a wristful of polished wooden bracelets. "I could make them," he told her. "I'm a carpenter. It's my job."

The boys traded drinking tales--the bartender who knew they were underage but served them anyway, the friend who bizarrely only drank top-shelf liquor, the vomiting, the hangovers.... When they talked about booze they were loud and boisterous, but when they talked about sex--about a girl they knew or wished they knew, about whether "she did or she didn't"--their voices dropped to a whisper. They talked softly for a while, comparing notes, filling in gaps in their knowledge, then the talk turned to football and they were shouting again. "I was playing this kid one-on-one," said a boy. "He says, 'I had a trial with Man United.' Man United must be hard up 'cause I won 5-1 and I'm useless at football."

The bus stopped at one village and a laughing woman with an arm in a cast got on. She nodded to a man weed-whacking his front garden. "He said you'd gone," the woman said to the driver. "I asked if the bus had come and he said it had. If I'd been talking to him you would have gone right by. It wouldn't have been your fault."

She sat down behind me and told the story to everyone around her, how she'd almost missed the bus and how it was her good fortune that she hadn't.

BritNews RoundUp: It's the Pits

Let's jump straight to the news that's been sweeping the United Kingdom this week:

You will recall that "The Weakest Link's" Anne Robinson was lampooned in the Daily Mail not long ago for having a "trout pout," the unfortunate byproduct of poor cosmetic surgery. The good news is that Robinson's trout pout is gone. The bad news is the Mail's long camera lenses have been trained on her armpits. The pit-arazzi snapped the gameshow hostess arriving last week at a party and the Mail announced she "had apparently overlooked a step in her preening routine, giving onlookers more than they bargained for with her unsightly hairy armpits."

I know what you're thinking: Well it's all well and good to zoom in on Anne Robinson's underarmular regions, but what about Sarah Jessica Parker's pits? Does she do the Gillette tango? Wisely, Parker decided not to expose her underarms to Fleet Street's ravenous photogs on a recent trip to England. But she forgot to wear oven mitts, prompting this headline in the Mail: "Veins and the City: Sarah Jessica Parker reveals her old woman's hands on a night out in London."

I'm sure it's just a matter of time before someone invents a hand-held CAT scan so we can be treated to: "Pirates of the Duodenum: Keira Knightley Can't Hide Her Polyp Heartbreak."

Sorry about that. Cleanse your mental palate with this sweet story about a golden retriever in Cheshire who is nursing her six puppies and six kittens. All together now: awwwwwwww. Don't like puppies and kittens? How about cygnets?

Okay, that's enough sugar. Who can explain the English affection for corporal punishment? Perhaps it has something to do with the boarding school culture. It's all a harmless bit of fun (well, not harmless) until it shades over into sexual predation. Which takes us to the trial of an Oxford man charged with asking teenage girls to kick him in the groin. "They each kicked him a number of times," said the prosecutor in the case against David Aston. "Eventually he asked them to stop because it was hurting." I'll bet.

Among the many great lines from Monty Python is the one that goes: "I fart in your general direction." I'm not an expert in gas dynamics, but "general direction" seems about as specific as you can get with a fart. Unless you're David Nye, a Kent office manager who regularly "lifted his right cheek" and broke wind at his employee Theresa Bailey, 43. Mother-of-three Bailey was awarded 5,000 pounds by an employment tribunal for the abuse she had to suffer at the firm. Nye is being scouted by Britain's Precision Farting Team.

I don't think I can really add anything to this headline from the Telegraph: "Lost cat spotted on webcam by woman in US," unless it's "Lost cat spotted on webcam by lonely, obsessive woman in US."

Finally, the expression "fat cat" isn't just a metaphor. Nor is "fat guinea pig" or "fat squirrel." Meet the world's most obese animals.

Gargoyle of the Week
According to its web site, Oxford's Merton College has "been on the cutting edge of teaching & research for over 700 years." Wow. I wonder what sort of research they were doing back then. "Advances in witch detection" "Cupping or leeches: Which is best for curing excesses of yellow bile?" "Lead into gold: We're nearly there."

Or maybe "Gargoyle Engineering 101." Writer and blogger Sarah Laurence toured Merton last week and sent me this example:


Is he giving the international symbol for the Heimlich maneuver?

Chew your food carefully, shave your underarms (or not; really, it's up to you) and have a good weekend.

Big Brother Is Watching You

It saves time when life imitates art. If you've read the book or seen the movie you don't find reality quite so surprising. Thus I find it helpful that England in 2008 is just like the England depicted in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

"Dear Mr. Pritchard-Kelly" [sic] began the letter from Britain's TV Licensing authority. "We have been advised that you bought television receiving equipment in February 2008 from Dixons Stores Group. However, we have no record of a TV Licence in your name for the above address. Using TV equipment to watch or record television programme services without a valid licence is against the law."

"We have been advised." I love that. What you mean is you have your paws in all sorts of records that help to confirm whether or not residents own a TV and thus whether or not they have paid up so they can watch television legally. (Briefly, for those not living in the UK: Residents here pay a 140 pound annual licence fee that supports the commercial-free BBC.) For Valentine's Day My Lovely Wife bought me a Freeview box, a $40 device which allows us to pull in more than the five terrestrial broadcast channels.

You may be wondering whether this is an appropriate Valentine's Day present. I suspect it was designed to mollify our kids, who were starting to go into serious TV withdrawal. What's interesting is that the TV Licensing folks work every angle. They issued a special press release on Feb. 13, warning licence scofflaws that they faced capture on Valentine's Day. TV Licensing spokesperson Joanna Pearce said: "Getting a knock at the door from TV Licensing while you're trying to impress the object of your affection is likely to leave any would-be lover red-faced. At TV Licensing, we'd rather spare you your blushes, and are taking this opportunity to remind you that we'll be visiting unlicensed homes on Valentine's night like every other night."

TV Licensing catches about 400,000 people a year. Would I be one of them? No, because I'd paid our fee. I'd even considered framing the certificate that came in the mail. But it was lost among the piles of papers in our house. The second threatening letter came about 10 days later: "We still have no record of a TV Licence in your name." I dug out the proof of my law abidingness, called the Licence Confirmation Line and punched in my reference number, clearing my good name.

The Fixed Penalty Support Unit of the Thames Valley Police was the next government office to drop me a line: "In accordance with Section 1 of Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988, I hereby give notice that it is intended to take proceedings against the driver of motor vehicle AJ08GOU for the alleged offence of EXCEED 30 MPH .... This allegation WILL be supported by photographic evidence at any subsequent court hearing."

I had (allegedly) been photographed traveling 37 mph in a 30 mph zone in a rental car and the good people at Alamo had ratted me out. I don't doubt that I was speeding. The Vauxhall Vectra longs to run wild and free. But nowhere in the three pages (!) of material did it say how much my ticket would be. All the Fixed Penalty Support Unit cared about was getting my signature on a statement admitting that I was driving the car--mailed back, I should point out, in my envelope and at my expense.

I'm hoping I can avoid a fine by taking a safe-driving class. After all, you can study just about anything at Oxford.

Britain loves its CCTV cameras. I read somewhere that there's one camera for every 14 citizens. You'd think that with that sort of saturation coverage people wouldn't bother committing crimes and when crimes did occur they'd be solved quickly. But that isn't the case. A report last week revealed that only 3 percent of street robberies in London are solved by CCTV. One of the problems is that officers don't like the drudgery of flipping back through hours of video to see what they've caught there.

Maybe they should put the TV Licensing people in charge of that.

Who'll Stop the Rain? Not the Bloody English

Last week it rained so much I thought I would sob. I thought I would literally break down weeping as I mounted my sodden bicycle seat and prepared to ride to yet another seminar in yet another ceaseless drizzle. That I decided not to cry is due less to some reservoir of inner strength and more to the fact that I didn't want to be any wetter than I already was.

When my little moody had passed, and as I felt my trousers dampening and the rain seeping down the back of my neck as I cycled down the Woodstock Road, I got mad. How long have the British lived in the British Isles? Centuries. Millennia. People have lived in Britain for thousands of years and in all that time they've done nothing about the rain. They haven't constructed a huge transparent umbrella stretching from the White Cliffs of Dover to Hadrian's Wall. They haven't paved over the rivers, lakes and streams that inconsiderately evaporate into the atmosphere--only to fall to earth and ruin my shoes. They haven't installed complex machines to break up rain-bearing clouds or force them over to Holland and France. You mean to tell me that the people who invented the steam engine and radar can't stop the bloody rain?

What did they do instead? Invented waterproof clothing and a boot for walking in the mud, as if anything in this country could be truly waterproof, as if the mud ever goes away. Not only does the rain not seem to bother them, they revel in the stuff. They celebrate it in all its horrible diversity--the drizzle, the mizzle, the downpour--the way Eskimos embrace snow. After about day five or six of constant rain I sit on the floor of the lounge, my hands around my knees, my body rocking back and forth, a loaded revolver a few feet away. I...just...can't... take...it...anymore.

And then, with no warning, for no apparent reason, the rain stops. The sun comes out--a warm and bright sun, almost Mediterranean. You notice a hundred different greens, a kaleidoscopic spectrum in leaf and hedge and grass that didn't seem to be there when everything was a palette of grays and browns. Then there are the flowers--so shockingly vibrant--and the blossoms, their scent a thick, perfumey odor.


I'm left uncertain which is the real England but suspicious that you can't have one without the other.

A Blog Too Far
Henrik Ornebring, a colleague at the Reuters Institute, perfectly encapsulates the difficulties of blogging in a hilariously confessional posting on his site, Doctor of Journalism. It takes a brave man to admit that the promises he made for his blog at its inception managed to sound "both naive and pretentious at the same time." I don't think it's so bad, Henrik, but I'm already liking what you're doing with DoJ 2.0.

On the Street Where We Live

To understand the cartography of North Oxford it's helpful to imagine a tuning fork. St. Giles in the center of Oxford splits into Woodstock Road and the Banbury Road to the north. Our house is between the tines of Woodstock and Banbury, in a neighborhood called Summertown. We're fortunate, though, that our street doesn't link those two arteries, and, thus, we don't have too much traffic.

But we do have some and we are often entertained from the comfort of our lounge by watching trucks try to negotiate our tiny lane. We'll be seated at the dining room table or on the couch when suddenly the sky will darken and a lorry from Argos will ease slowly by. It reminds me of a ship passing through the Panama Canal. It's a tight squeeze. You can park on both sides of our street and the space that remains is about as wide as a double bed:


That white box truck has just navigated the road. They don't all make it. Europeans know that when they parallel park they should fold in their wing mirrors, but even that won't help if the lorry is just too big. Occasionally a massive truck will turn down our street, its driver desperate to leave the warren of lanes in this part of Summertown. Hoping to find the sweet release of the Woodstock Road, he instead discovers that he just won't fit. He throws it into reverse and searches for another way out.

When we arrived here last September it was in a rented VW Transporter. It was the biggest vehicle they had at the airport and the only thing that would accommodate our ragtag traveling circus (children, suitcases, dog, dog's wooden crate, family of Latvian aerialists). With my heart in my throat, and my own wing mirrors tucked in, I carefully threaded the needle, silently cursing Volkswagen for putting three coats of paint on the van instead of two. There's nothing like going 24 hours without sleep, flying across the ocean, going through passport control, retrieving your luggage, retrieving your dog from the quarantine facility, and then driving on the wrong side of the road in a vehicle that has the steering wheel on the wrong side of the dash.

I pride myself on my driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road skills. We hire a car every few months and I can go from motorway to hedgerow-sided lane with ease. The only thing I can't do is parallel park on our street. Doing it is like trying to do a Rubik's Cube while looking in the mirror with an eyepatch on.

14 Minutes Left
I'm supposed to be on Sky News tonight around 7:30, talking about things on the web. It means going all the way to London for about 3 minutes of air time. But who was it who said one should never turn down the opportunity to be on TV? Gore Vidal? Paris Hilton?

Pesky Tesco: Tough 'Love' in Thailand

We won't be shopping at Tesco anytime soon. It's not really a hardship. There isn't one nearby. We're in Co-Op/Somerfield/M&S Simply Food/Sainsbury's territory. Still, it makes me feel better to think I'm boycotting the supermarket giant.

And why? Because its Thai subsidiary, Tesco Lotus, is suing two journalists for allegedly printing anti-Tesco statements. The dispute centers on Tesco's expansion in Thailand and the fear that it is harming homegrown stores. The latest libel case involves a business columnist named Nongnart Harnvilai, who in a tongue-in-cheek piece wrote that Tesco Lotus "doesn't love Thais." The supermarket chain is asking for 1.6 million pounds in damages.

Will Tesco Lotus have to prove in court that it does "love" Thais, and if so, how? Does it buy them chocolates? Take them dancing? Bear their children? Care for them on their deathbeds? It's a crazy allegation, designed to stifle a free press in a country that has a shaky enough grasp on these kinds of things without the local subsidiary of a British corporate giant entering the fray.

So I won't be shopping there. Hasn't Tesco been testing the waters in the U.S. too? If so, where's the love?

BritNews RoundUp
This may be the single most important article printed in any newspaper this week: Research has shown that "drummers are natural intellectuals." I knew it all along and will be packing a copy of the Daily Telegraph story in my drumstick bag to show to all those snooty guitarists and pampered lead singers in the future. Okay, maybe the "intellectual" tag is a bit of a stretch. I think of an intellectual as a nearsighted, leather elbow-patched professor droning on about Habermas and Derrida, not a drummer in a black sleeveless Motley Crue T-shirt. Still, researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet had subjects tap a drumstick while answering 60 psychometric questions. Those who could keep better time were better at answering them. Take that, Bono.

The British love getting drunk. And when they get drunk, they like doing interesting things. Some of them involve sex with inanimate objects--regular readers of this blog will remember fences, bicycles, lamp posts, Members of Parliament. And some of them involve reaching out in unusual ways to our mammalian brethren. Or sistren, for "Dave," a wild bottlenose dolphin often spotted off Folkestone coast, is actually a female. And it was Dave with whom two British men were convicted of "interfering" after an all-night drinking party. (The men were drinking; Dave, we assume, was sober.)

Michael Jukes, a 27-year-old pipefitter, told Dover Magistrates' Court: "It was approaching us. We were touching it, but not in an aggressive way. I was not hurting it." The court thought otherwise, fining Jukes and Daniel Buck 750 pounds. Dave did not testify and she hasn't been spotted since the incident.

While we're in the water, a British sailor who got into a spot of trouble while 700 miles off the coast of New Zealand knew exactly whom to call: His wife. When Tony Curphey's sailboat starting taking on water, he radioed his wife Susanne, who was in another sailboat about 150 miles away. He said he didn't want to trouble rescue services. I don't know what's odder, the fact that Curphey called his wife, or that the two of them are sailing around the world in separate boats. Perhaps that's the secret of a long marriage.

A 93-year-old former Pentecostal minister from Glamorgan has decided to give up driving after flipping his Ford Fiesta while driving through an auto dealer's parking lot. Jack Higgs was uninjured but the same can't be said of the two Porsches his car landed on top of.

Gargoyle Roman Appendages of the Week
The Italians just don't do gargoyles. I thought I'd collect a bunch but I didn't see a single one. Of course, the Romans have plenty of old statues. Many of the statues have seen better days, though. Like this one, from the Vatican Museum:


And this one:



I think this was my favorite, though:


A big big toe. There's probably more beauty in that big toe than in a hundred lesser sculptures. If it hadn't been about the size of a medicine ball, and just as unwieldy, I would have snuck it under my coat and back to my hotel room. It's just toe-riffic.

Have a great weekend. There's rain in the forecast here, but I hope it's sunny wherever you are.

Pillow Talk

I get the basic rationale behind this tag, which is on the pillows in our Oxford rental home:



Don't smoke near the pillow. Yes, it's made of flame-retardant material, but absentmindedly putting out your cigarette on it is a bad idea.

What I don't get is what's printed on the other side of the label:


Shake and refluff daily? What happens if I don't? Will the pillow burst into flames? And how much work should a pillow be anyway?

I love England, but normal domestic life is filled with this sort of maintenance. Our dishwasher has a filter that must be cleaned regularly and a salt reservoir. We have to add special dishwasher rock salt every now and then. (And when I say "we," I mean My Lovely Wife.) Our washing machine stopped working a few weeks ago. It just wouldn't rotate and the lights blinked mutely. The rental agency was called, a workman was summoned, and he gave his diagnosis. We hadn't cleaned the washing machine filter. It was behind a bit of wainscoting at the bottom of the machine. It didn't say anything in the instruction manual but the guy said we should occasionally be prying off the paneling, unscrewing the filter, and rinsing it out. Riiiight.
It's like owning an old Bentley.

We Americans like to push a button, walk away and return 20 minutes later to find our clothes washed, our plates clean, our pillow pre-fluffed. I'm not saying that's a good thing. That kind of mindset is what got us in trouble in Iraq. "You mean we have to add salt? And clean the filter? I thought I'd just push the 'shock and awe' button.

Seen in London
I jotted down the wording on a sign in a Pret a Manger the other day: Over a photo of a "hot wrap" was the legend "Fresh from the oven. Naturally."

Naturally? Is there an unnatural way to take something from the oven? Do other restaurants remove their toasty sandwiches in a perverse manner?

The Digital Divide, or: If the Glove Fits...

Over the last few months I have been photographing lost gloves and mittens that I find in the street and on the sidewalks of Oxford. This is the sort of behavior that worries my family. It embarrasses them but it also frightens them, since it seems just one more stumble upon the slippery slope that ends with me not able to remember who's president or discern a wristwatch from a tea kettle.

But to those who would ask me "Why do you photograph lost gloves?" I can only give an answer that echoes that given by Mallory when he was asked why he wanted to climb Everest: "Because they're there."

Lost gloves are the inevitable byproduct of winter. This particular English winter, I'm told, has been mild. And yet it's affected me greatly. Frustratingly inconsistent, it's been blustery and biting one minute, sunny and pleasant the next. Just yesterday we had every form of microclimate it's possible to experience in one 12-hour period, including an uncharacteristically hard-driving rain, glorious sunshine that made me sweat, and hail. It's no wonder I feel slightly schizophrenic.

Of all our articles of clothing, we have the closest relationships with our gloves. They protect our hands, the structure of which separates us from our nearest mammal cousins. Every time we slip them on we recreate that most intimate of acts. Whether leather or fabric, expensive or cheap, gloves fit us like, well, like a glove. Gloves are metaphors for connection, a connection not just with their owner, but with another glove. Every glove is a twin, sharing the secret language that twins share.

And so every one of these errant accessories--soggy and forlorn on the pavement--has a story, a past: where they were bought, when they were worn, and culminating in that awful moment when all relationships were severed. Running for the bus, pulling out the change, answering the mobile. One minute you had two gloves and then you had one.

But you don't figure that out until later. "Where's my glove?" you wonder.

It's on the ground, looking like the victim in a crime-scene photograph. Or it's on a wall or fence, propped up by a passerby who thinks such a display will increase the chances of a reunion.

But it rarely does. Like a good friend snatched too soon that glove is gone. Oh well, you think, I can always buy a new pair. And besides, spring is on the way.

Here is my gallery of lost gloves:

Friday Grab Bag: Drink Up Edition

Britain's new budget is out and starting Sunday a pint at the pub is going to be more expensive. Yesterday Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling announced an increase in the alcohol tax, a move he says is designed to stem the tide of binge-drinking.

Binge-drinking is a popular topic for the media here; newspapers are full of stories about plastered teenagers and vomiting shop assistants. I'm not out on the streets when the clubs close so I don't see the worst of it, but there are enough empty cans of cider and bottles of vodka in the park when I walk my dog each morning that I believe it's an issue. I don't see how this tax is going to address that, though.

The 4 pence increase on a pint of beer will probably be absorbed by supermarkets, where a pint averages 99p. The cost is unlikely to go up. Pubs are skating on thin ice, though. In a pub a pint costs 2.60. I expect that will rise. With their wafer-thing profit margins, pubs can't afford to eat it the 4p.

Just as frequent as binge-drinking stories are pub-closing stories. I don't sympathize with publicans who blame the smoking ban, but I do feel sorry that the new tax will hit them. I'd rather see store-bought alcohol get taxed more, with tax breaks for pubs. The government should encourage people to drink in the warm, lovely atmosphere of a pub, rather than on a park bench.

BritNews RoundUp
In her last movie, "The Golden Compass," Nicole Kidman's character had a "daemon," the animal manifestation of her soul. It was a nasty little monkey, but according to Britain's best-selling paper, the Daily Mail, another animal might be more appropriate. According to the paper, Kidman has used so much botox that she has the face of a bat. The Mail thoughtfully includes a pair of photos for comparison. That's Kidman on the left. (And if Kidman's daemon should be a bat, Britt Eklund's should be a trout, as this Mail story from a few months ago suggests.)

Poor Daily Mail. Lisa Marie Presley is suing the paper for calling her fat in an article last week. The story was really quite bitchy, illustrated with photos of Presley chowing down in a mall food court and featuring a faux "we're concerned she's eating herself to death, the way her father did" tone to it. I'd link to the piece but it's no longer on the paper's web site. I think that sort of screams guilt and I don't know why they're backing down. Presley is fat, but she has reason to be: She's pregnant.

If her strange prenatal cravings include asparagus, she might consult Jemima Packington, Britain's only "asparamancer." She uses stalks of asparagus the way others might use goose entrails or the I Ching. According to the Daily Telegraph: "Ms. Packington, from Worcester, throws the asparagus spears onto the floor and makes her predictions based on how they land." I predict you will watch this BBC video of her at work. I hope it doesn't make your pee smell funny.

Last month's news from Italy was that Italian men are no longer allowed to touch their genitals for luck. This month comes news that Italian women who commit adultery are allowed to lie about it. That was the ruling from Italy's highest court, who said that a 48-year-old woman referred to only as "Carla" did not make a false statement when she told police she did not lend her mobile phone to her lover. She was only protecting her honor. I love this line from the BBC's story: "She had lent her telephone to her secret lover, Giovanni, who then used it to call Carla's estranged husband, Vincenzo, and insult him." And Giovanni was probably making rude hand gestures while he was doing it.

The Mirror is looking for Britain's "sexiest fish and chip shop girl." I'm sure all that grease does wonders for the complexion.

I'll be spending today in London, or as participants in a survey by the TripAdvisor web site describe it: Europe's dirtiest and most expensive city.

Gargoyle of the Week


Okay, this isn't a gargoyle. It's a human face that seems to emerge from a house in Wolvercote, just north of Oxford. It's an odd little architectural feature, one of two visages that peer out of the light blue house:


To be honest, the faces are a little creepy, and I would worry that late at night, a little tipsy, they might give me a start. Of course, I can barely afford to get tipsy these days, let alone drunk.

But don't let that stop you. Have a great weekend and don't forget to tip your waitress.

Just Desserts: Pictured Around Oxford

This is a tasty British dessert. Can't quite make out the name? Here it is:



"Fru Fruity Puds." Even knowing that the last word is pronounced like "poods" as in "pudding" rather than "pudds" as in..., well, let's not go there, does not ameliorate the unease I felt upon consuming my zesty lemon cheesecake.

Tickets, Please
If you park illegally in Oxford you may find your windshield adorned with a brightly-colored plastic bag with a ticket inside:


Your first reaction upon getting an expensive ticket may be to wish the whole thing would just go away. That would be unwise, for as the plastic bag warns:



It's like they read my mind. Luckily, I don't have a car in England, so it's nearly impossible to get a parking ticket.

Nor do I have much in the way of a lawn, so I don't have to worry about mole infestation. Lest you think that moles are random creatures, take a look at this, near Godstow Abbey:

I love the sinuous perfection of that mole's work.

Doubleplusgood Choco Chip Biscuits

There are some foodstuffs the English do very well. Beer, for example. And roast lamb. They have an amazing variety of potato chips, too, imbuing the humble "crisp" (as they call it) with all sorts of exotic flavors. Then there are the things the English don't do very well, or don't do at all. I'm talking about the cookie.

The English don't even have cookies. They have biscuits, which aren't really the same thing at all. There is a place for a biscuit--dipped in a mug of milky tea, for example--but it doesn't satisfy the longing, the craving, that an American feels for a cookie. I hope I will get no argument if I suggest that the king of the cookie is the mighty chocolate chip.

You never notice how ubiquitous the chocolate chip cookie is in the United States until you are denied it. It has become such a part of the landscape that you can purchase one literally almost anywhere. I guarantee you that eight out of 10 cash registers in America have a stack of chocolate chip cookies next to them, wrapped up in plastic and awaiting that impulse buyer. We Americans consider the chocolate chip cookie a birthright, like potable water and easy access to firearms.

That isn't the case in Britain. This isn't to say that chocolate chip cookies are completely unknown. There's a stand called Ben's Cookies in Oxford's historic Covered Market that sells something it calls a chocolate chip cookie. But it has a disappointingly cakey mouthfeel, not the satisfyingly granular mouthfeel of a true CCC. And you can buy factory-made chocolate chip cookies at the grocery store. The brand names they go by suggest that the Brits are trying to capture some of that American magic, even if they are a bit misguided:


Funny, I don't really think of Maryland (or "Merry-land," as an English person would say) when I think of chocolate chip cookies. Then again, nor do I think of Tennessee:


The Tennessee High Quality Chocolate Chunk Cookies are actually made in Germany, where they apparently have less of a grasp of that particular baked good than in England. (I love that little picture of the antebellum mansion.) I suppose I should be thankful I'm not shopping in Japan, where the brand name would probably be something like HomeRun Armadillo Cookie Chip.

How do Maryland and Tennessee chocolate chip cookies taste? Not that good, though you will notice that both those packages are empty, so they must be good enough. Luckily, My Lovely Wife, after much experimentation, has successfully baked real, American-style chocolate chip cookies in our idiosyncratic little cooker. Hopefully we can get through the next five months without withdrawal symptoms kicking in.

I Heart My Heart
Of course, I shouldn't be eating these things at all given that they aren't the healthiest of choices. But I strive for moderation in all things, which is sort of the point of a little piece I have in today's Washington Post Health section. It's about how my life has changed since having a heart attack in 2001. I'll be chatting live with web readers toay at noon Eastern Standard Time (5 p.m. here in Britain). If you want to join us, just go here.

I Don't Know the Muffin, Man
We Americans are no better when it comes to geographically mis-named food. "English" muffins, anyone? A British person would look at you blankly if you asked for one. Not that I recommend the English tea cake, a baked good beloved of little old ladies in tea shops. It resembles nothing so much as the bottom half of a toasted hamburger bun. That's pretty much what it tastes like, too.

For sheer breakfast grotesquery, nothing can compete with the American Cinnabon. Talk about a heart attack on a plate....

Water, Cool Clear Water

When I was a boy my father used to sing me cowboy songs. These songs often involved cowboys coming to bad ends: bleeding to death after a shootout or dying of thirst out in the desert. You know: cheery little ditties perfect for pondering as you drift off to sleep. I decided early on that if ever I were to become a cowboy I would carry an extra canteen and a styptic pencil.

The best song was "Cool Water." Like many good cowboy songs, it's sung to a horse. Mirages tempt a cowboy and his trusty beast, Dan, as they trudge through the range: "Old Dan and I with throats burned dry and souls that cry for water, cool clear water." The listener can't help thinking the pair are going to give up, their bleached bones discovered years later when the interstate is put through or the Sizzler steak house thrown up.

I thought of Old Dan and the cowboy when I saw this story about how restaurants in Britain are being urged to serve tap water, rather than charge for bottled water. (Or, as I'm convinced happened to me the other day, charge for tap water they put into a bottle.)

In a country that puts the "surly" in "service," the restaurateur's disdain for free tap water is what bugs me the most. Ask for nothing and you will receive nothing. Ask for water and you will receive a bottle of water (one pound fifty at the last restaurant I ate in: $3). Ask for tap water and you will be given a withering look of disgust, as if you just wet yourself. In a country almost comically obsessed with "being green" it's strange how people would rather drink water out of little bottles with a big carbon footprint than quaff the liquid that comes out of the pipes.

Well, perhaps this campaign will make a difference. Old Dan and I will do our part and stick to tap water. Either that or cut the top off a cactus and suck the juice out.

Come Don't Fly With Me
Dueling announcements from various governments about making flying "safer" make me consider using a rowboat to next cross the Atlantic. Yesterday the Guardian had a story headlined "Bush Orders Clampdown on Flights to U.S." (Putting "Bush" in the headline is guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of Guardian readers.) The European Union is upset at American demands that armed U.S. air marshalls be allowed on flights originating in Europe and that passengers provide detailed information even if they're just overflying the country.

Today's front page news in The Post that European countries may require fingerprinting for U.S. travelers almost sounds like a tit for tat but it's more tat for tit, given that the U.S. already requires fingerprinting and photographing. Treating everyone as a suspect will continue to do wonders for America's standing in the world. Why don't we just tell people we don't really want them to visit?

More Cowboys
Now I have cowboy songs on my brain. "El Paso" by Marty Robbins is a good one. The song about an ill-fated romance with lovely Mexican beauty Felina has that great lyric: "Something is dreadfully wrong for I feel a deep burning pain in my side." (Or, as Marty Robbins sang it, "my siiiiIIIIIiiiiiiiide.") Yes, unnamed protagonist, that means you've been shot.

Then there's one of the saddest songs my father used to sing, "Streets of Laredo." A cowboy--"wrapped in white linen, as cold as the clay"--lays dying in the street. It's a cautionary tale, as the dying hand admits to his misdeeds, tells the passerby to notify his next of kin and even makes his own detailed funeral arrangements.

Cowboys really knew how to live back then and they sure knew how to die.

Human Nature Loves a Vacuum

This is our new vacuum cleaner. I guess here in England you would call it a "Hoover." (Like Kleenex, that word comes from a brand, Britain's best-known electric floor-cleaner. The art deco building where they were once made was celebrated by Elvis Costello in his song "Hoover Factory." I pass it on the bus into the Big Smoke [the building, not the song]: "Five miles out of London on the Western Avenue....")

Oddly, the best thing you can say about a vacuum is that it sucks. Our old one didn't suck. Its hose also had the irritating habit of popping out of the canister when you tried to pull it across the room. This made vacuuming even more of a maddening chore than it normally is, since you had to walk over to the canister and push it along as if it was a quadriplegic. It was such a pain to vacuum that we hardly did, leading to the build up of huge drifts of black dog hair. Sometimes I couldn't find my house keys in the mess.

We asked the rental agent for a new vacuum and she yes, we'd be getting a Henry. A Henry? Whatever is that?

Well isn't he the cutest thing? Those eyes. That smile. He looks like a character from a children's book. Henry comes from a family of vacuums that includes James and Charles. (Basil has evidently been discontinued.) Okay, it's a bit disconcerting that Henry cleans with his nose, sucking up dirt the way Kate Moss snorts lines of coke. But he gets the job done--he could suck the white off an egg--and he makes me happy.

Let There Be Light
Speaking of good design, Summertown--the Oxford suburb where we live--is getting new streetlights. Road crews have been using cranes to pull the old streetlights out, a process that looks like a doctor removing a nasty splinter. I don't know if anything was wrong with the old streetlights. I guess they looked a bit dated:



And here's what the new ones look like:


Snazzy, huh? So sleek and high-tech. Notice the smaller, secondary light that shines on the sidewalk. There also appears to be a yardarm jutting out horizontally from the main shaft. It's oddly nautical. Perhaps they will hang festive flags from it--or dangle British youth.

Good design is important, whether it's on a Hoover or a streetlight. A well-made, well-proportioned, well-thought-out appliance, vestment, piece of furniture, automobile or building pleases the eye and, subconsciously perhaps, lifts the spirit.

Disraeli Gears


The design on this can gets the job done (the cap is a nice touch), but what I love most about the product is the name: Squirty Cream. That's exactly what it is.

More on Anthony Lilley
There was one thing I thought I should add to yesterday's review of the third Lilley lecture: When Lilley described how he would structure a networked BBC, he was at pains to say: "Don't touch news. Don't touch factual." I believe those are two departments currently on the chopping block.

Here's to Your National Health

"So, is this the National Health?" I asked the doctor.

"Well this is my little piece of the National Health," she answered.

"It's not what I expected," I said, putting my shoe back on.

"What did you expect?"

"Oh, I don't know. Screaming crowds of children in the waiting room. Cancer patients stacked up outside the door. Misery and anarchy. That sort of thing."

What I'd found instead was no waiting and an unhurried 20 minutes with a Scottish doctor who wasn't wearing a white coat.

For the last couple of weeks I've felt a pain in my right foot whenever I walk. It's like a hot fork plunged into my sole between the big and second toes. (Why a fork and not, say, a dagger? I don't know; it's just more fork-like.) It only hurts when I walk and it hurts most in the morning. I can poke and prod the foot and it's fine, even grab my toes and wrench them back and forth like I'm trying to tear off a hunk of crusty bread. Nothing. But walk on it and ouch!

I felt there might have been two causes: I'd taken up jogging again as part of the British Army Fitness Program printed in the Guardian. Although my knees usually go before my feet, maybe I'd done my foot an injury. Then there were my new shoes: I'd bought a pair of cheap yet fashionable slip-ons, somewhat pointy of toe, and with a sole about one micron thick. Then I spent the day walking around London in them. I basically walked until I couldn't walk anymore. It felt like someone had taken a tire iron to the bottom of my feet.

You think maybe that could have been the problem?

Whatever the cause, I was afraid I'd broken something. Aren't we taught that the human foot is a fragile assemblage of bones, each no thicker than a drinking straw? Might I have snapped one of these? I waded into the National Health.

My college here has a practice that it sends students to. I phoned the doctor's office to explain what was up, went in on Friday to fill out some paperwork and returned for my appointment yesterday. True to form, by this point my foot wasn't hurting nearly so much. It still seared in the morning but by the afternoon it was just a dull ache.

There was one young lady in the waiting room when I arrived but she was in and out in 10 minutes. The doctor called me in and listened as I described my symptoms. I always feel a bit of a fraud in situations such as this. I mean, people are getting their arms hacked off in Africa and my widdle footsie has a boo-boo. But the doctor showed no disgust. She examined my foot, asking if it hurt here or here or here. No, I said sheepishly.

I think in the States the doctor would have ordered an X-ray, a blood test and a full-body CAT scan. Instead, my National Health doctor diagnosed plantar fasciitis, demonstrated some stretches I should do and printed out a leaflet. She was going to prescribe a powerful anti-inflammatory but noted that it might interact with my heart medication and so decided against it. I'd just have to wait it out. If the pain wasn't better in a few weeks I should make another appointment.

And that was it. An altogether pleasant experience and no bill to pay. Of course, I might feel differently if I'd been denied some cutting-edge cancer treatment. (The local paper is full of such stories.) And if it turns out I do have a broken bone and my foot falls off in a week I'll be annoyed. (The doctor assured me there were no bones where it hurts.)

I have very good health insurance in America. It's also very expensive, paid for by my employer and by me. And as much as I'm glad that my children and I are covered, I can't help but feel a little guilty when thinking of all those children and parents who aren't.

The NHS doctor's waiting room was a typical assemblage of months-old magazines and children's books. I did notice one interesting thing on the wall: A review of the Michael Moore film "Sicko." Five stars the Guardian reviewer gave it.

By the Time We Got to Woodstock...

The mechanics of a successful pub must be the subject of great study in Britain: where to situate the pub, how to decorate it, what beer to serve, what food, what pub games and theme nights to offer. The exact combination of these factors combine to create a place people want to spend their time and their money.

Pubologists would do well to study the Woodstock Arms in Oxford--and then do the exact opposite. I haven't done enough research to determine what is the Sorriest Pub in Oxford but the Woodstock Arms certainly deserves a shot at the title. Or it would have, if it hadn't closed last week. I was walking the dog one morning and a lorry was parked outside. The pub's furniture was being loaded inside of it. The Woodstock Arms is shut tight now, though one blackboard sign leaning against a tree across the street, announcing 2-pound drinks for all of January (a good deal, if a desperate one), was somehow left behind.

The Woodstock Arms is right around the corner from our house but I've only been there twice--three times if you count the time I stopped by on a Saturday night around 10 p.m. a few months ago to find the place locked up tight. The times I was there it was like a funeral inside, but without the laughs. Where was the bonhomie?

The day after the Woodstock Arms closed I saw a headline in the Oxford Mail: "Celeb Chef Jamie Buys Local Pub." My heart leapt! Perhaps in a few months' time my local would be a gastropub operated by Jamie Oliver. But no, Oliver's opening an Italian restaurant in the city centre.

I have been to some lovely pubs. The Trout just outside Oxford is worth a walk, though I hear it's impenetrable in tourist season. The Turf is supposedly where Bill Clinton didn't inhale. The Bear is a quintessential pub: tiny, ancient (13th century, some claim), warm and cozy. The Rose and Crown has become the unofficial watering hole of the Reuters Fellows. The Argentine Fellow Abel is trying to be adopted by the landlady. Barring that, I think he wants to be reincarnated as a beer mat, so he can spend eternity in the Rose and Crown, gazing up at the amber liquid of his dreams.

The Woodstock Arms failed, I'm told, because the population of Summertown is too old. Plus, it's on a busy road, on the other side of the town from the main shopping strip that supports a more popular pub, the Dew Drop Inn. And, of course, it had no atmosphere. Whatever magical combination of attributes that a pub needs the thrive, the Woodstock Arms didn't have it.

What do you think makes a good pub?