German Engineering

One of the benefits of travel is that it makes you appreciate the place you came from. But another byproduct of travel is that it makes you question the place you came from. While it may be true that there's no place like home, it's also true that home can sometimes use a little improvement.

That's what I decided after spending the weekend in Berlin. Clean, efficient, cosmopolitan--the antique intermixed with the modern. A subway, trams and bicycle lanes. I think Washington could benefit from a bit of Berlin style.

It probably helped that the weather was great. All of Europe seems to be gripped in the throes of beautiful climes. Parachute anywhere from London to Gdansk and you'll find blue skies and warm temperatures. But it was more than that. I find Berlin incredibly art-directed, with an attention to style that stretches from the way its people dress to the typefaces of its street signs and posters. I suppose it might grate after a while--perfection can extract a painful price--but thinking of the room Washington has for improvement, Berlin definitely had some appeal.

I compared the shopworn and crowded Smithsonian museums to the tidy German History Museum. It was wonderfully empty, leading me to wonder if that's because the Germans already know their history, don't want to know their history, or just would rather spend a gorgeous spring day outside rather than in.

It was probably the latter. That impulse is the same wherever you come from. And after we'd returned to England and were on the coach back to Oxford, I was reminded how achingly green and beautiful this country can be. The verdant landscape rolled by outside the window looking like a ripe fruit begging to be bitten. That's what nine months of rain does. What am I doing sitting here?

Mother of an Invention
In honor of Mother's Day, The Washington Post Magazine yesterday published my story about Daisy Breaux and W. Clark Noble, a pair of wacky characters from the 1920s who attempted to build a memorial to America's mothers. The final design looked like something from Batman's fevered imagination and the whole thing ended just the way we journalists like it: in recriminations and lawsuits. I'll be answering questions about the story online today at noon Washington time; that's 5 p.m. England time. Click here to join the conversation at washingtonpost.com.

Citizen Bane
Kyle MacRae founded Scoopt, the service that pioneered putting citizen photographers together with newspapers and magazines. Now he blogs about citizen journalism for the Frontline Club. I provided a guest post last week outlining some of my thoughts on the issue. Honestly, I'm beginning to think that the whole thing is becoming less consequential to the mainstream media, not because it isn't important but because so many things are battering newspapers, for example, that they barely have the time or energy to think about it.

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.

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:

The War of Fog

And so out the door and down the street on my daily mission to empty the dog and fill the mind. After rain, sun, cold, sun, sun, cold, frost, we're back to fog here in Oxford. The impenetrable pea soups of Dickens's time are long gone but there's still the feeling of walking through a feather pillow as you amble out in the morning. Noises seem oddly present--the honk of low-flying geese, the rhythmic tick of a bicycle chain, the flatulent putt-putt of a diesel motor, the crash and tinkle of the glass-recycling men.... Headlights loom out of the clouds like monsters' eyes.

A sign outside the newsagent's (I've learned that its proper name is a "news bill") suggests good fortune has visited my colleagues:


Alas, it's a story about 14 Oxford postal workers who've been pooling a pound each a day for four years and have won more than 55,000 pounds. Good for them. The other side of the bill promotes another odd story:



"Meat fight"? It sounds oddly disturbing: sausages at 20 paces, ground beef hand grenades.... But no, the front-page headline clarifies: "Halal of a Victory." That's a pun, son, one the Oxford Mail has been using ever since this particular story broke. An Oxford elementary school switched to halal meat for its lunches, figuring it tasted no different from non-halal meat but was acceptable to its Muslim students. It would be cheaper than making two separate lunches. Unfortunately, the principal didn't tell the parents, and when they found out there was, according to the Mail, "One Halal of a Row." (That's another ill-chosen pun. If the issue had involved kosher food I wonder if the headline would have been "Jew Must Be Joking.")

The school should have leveled with the parents from the start, explaining what it was doing, but the protesting parents exhibited that particularly British strain of xenophobia that seems to relish ignorance. Halal meat was somehow "bad" for their offspring. "Parent power" won the meat fight and the school backed down. "The school has now decided to offer youngsters a choice of normal meat, a halal option or a vegetarian dish," wrote the Mail. "Normal" meat? Someone should really tell the Mail that it's wise to choose words, um, wisely.

I'm sure the fog will lift eventually.

Friday Grab Bag: Wet, Wet, Wet Edition

I understand that it snowed in Washington yesterday: lovely, sticky snow, up to six inches deep in places. We love to complain about snow in Washington, about how it snarls our traffic, springs our students from school, inspires manic trips to the supermarket. And yet I love it. Or, loved it. The chances of a little snow visiting Oxford fall somewhere between slim and "When an English tennis player next wins Wimbledon."

Instead, we get English sunshine. We've had gallons of the stuff this week, enough to cause flooding in some of the places that were flooded last summer. ("Let's see that war spirit again," reads the headline over today's Oxford Mail editorial, exhorting readers to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of the deluge. I expect we will soon be taking in some ragamuffins from East London to keep them safe from the Blitz.)

The English take rain as a matter of course. It runs off them like, well, like water off a duck's back. They grin and bear it. Well, bear it, anyway. They're not really a grinning people. I've become stoic myself, except when it comes to cycling. I hate biking in the rain. Unless you wear a rubber suit that you strip off at your destination, you will arrive wet. And because my bicycle seat seems to be made out of a sponge, even when it's stopped raining--even after I've squeezed the seat as much as I can to wring the water from it--I spend the day walking around with a moist crotch. ("Moist Crotch"? Wasn't that Spinal Tap's under-appreciated seventh album?)

Of course, what I should do is wrap a plastic shopping bag over the seat, like so:


That's what most cyclists in Oxford do. For some reason, I can't bring myself to do that. I just tell myself that it will stop raining soon.

The Darfur Flies
At any one time, dozens of lectures on a variety of arcane topics are being offered in Oxford. That's one of the great things about the university and about my fellowship: I can drop in to whatever I like and fill up the old brain pan. Yesterday I attended one on Darfur, co-hosted by my fellow Fellow Meera Selva. Meera covered Africa for the Independent and wrote about the troubled area of Sudan.

Like many Oxford lectures, it attracted a diverse group: students, academics, journalists, former aid workers, people interested in free cookies. Most interesting of all, though, were the four or five officials from the Sudanese embassy in London, who sat in the front row, vibrating with anticipation. As soon as the lecture was over and question-time started, the communications minister leapt to his feet. The Darfur crisis was misrepresented in the Western media he said. How come no one writes about the good things happening in Sudan? I'm sure President Bush feels the same way about Iraq. What about all the people who aren't being killed every day?

BritNews RoundUp
A tourist council in Suffolk is reprinting one of its brochures after someone noticed that the cover has a photo of a girl picking her nose.

Which married media star has fathered a love child? This column in the Daily Mail doesn't say. But he ought to be pretty easy to find. According to the photo that accompanied the story, the father has very dark skin and a big question mark in the middle of his head:



The dirtiest hotel in Britain is in Oxford, according to users of TripAdvisor.com. The Nanford guest house was described as "squalid," "horrendous" and a "total and utter dump." The owner of the guest house is keeping that war spirit: "I don't give a damn what TripAdvisor says," he told the Guardian.

Cats in the news, Part I: A man in Wales was arrested for murdering his girlfriend after police secretly taped him confessing to his cats. "I don't know if they can prove it or anything," he allegedly said to one. Unclear whether the cat is cooperating with police but given how duplicitous they can be, I wouldn't doubt it.

Cats in the news, Part II: A Bournemouth cat named Sgt. Podge takes a mile-and-a-half walk every night and waits in the morning in the same place to be picked up in the car by its owner. "I know where to collect him - as long as he's not wandering the streets," said owner Liz Bullard. Great. A cat with a carbon pawprint.

And just so my dog Charlie doesn't get jealous: A Hungarian scientist has developed a computer application that can translate a dog's barks. Sadly, it translates them into Hungarian, and what good is that?

Gargoyle of the Week



Sorry, haven't the slightest idea where I saw him, but he reminds me of Tom Hanks.

Have a safe and happy weekend.

The Fiery Furnaces, or 'On the Boil'

Who said God doesn't have a sense of humo[u]r? One look at the recently discovered jerboa rat and you know He cracks Himself up all the time. I'm convinced, though, that what He really has is a great sense of irony.

Example: We've been having trouble keeping our Oxford house warm. This isn't due to an overarching British design problem (though these exist; more on that later). It's a specific issue with a part in our boiler, the machine that heats the water that runs through the pipes that sluices through our radiators that keep us warm.

In the midst of our back-and-forthing with the plumber here we received a call from the couple who are renting our house back in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. The furnace man had come for his annual inspection. He'd discovered a cracked heat exchanger and had "red flagged" the unit. Carbon monoxide was leaking into the house, which is not the sort of thing that encourages renters to pay their rent on time, since if undiscovered it can, um, kill them. Just try collecting the rent then, what with all the inquests and lawsuits.

Ironic, huh? Our heat goes on the fritz at the same time their heat goes on the fritz. Of course, it isn't that cold here. You folks in Silver Spring, on the other hand, just had snow. The plumber is scheduled to replace our old gas furnace today, so I hope lovely warm air will soon be pumped through our house. Hang in there, Gordon and Leslie! Good thing you brought your dog!

Meanwhile, on our side of the Atlantic, we're waiting for a new part for the boiler. The problem has been this: The radiators go cool but can be coaxed back to life by pressing a red, glowing button on the boiler, a contraption about the size of a mini-fridge that hangs on the wall in a back room. The radiators heat up, but then the boiler stops and the button glows red again:


This has been going on for over a week. Like the characters in "Lost" we are conditioned to push the button repeatedly throughout the day. It may very well be that we are the only things keeping the world from ending.


Every memoir I've read by an American living in the U.K. has included a section on how cold the author found the houses. This is not necessarily our case. Though we're currently having technical difficulties, most of the house is warm enough most of the time. I say "most of the house" because apparently there's a law in England that one bathroom must be kept at a near-freezing temperature. I said "bathroom" but I meant "toilet." British houses invariably have one tiny, stall-like room that has only a toilet. (A toilet that is flushed by pulling a chain that hangs from a tank mounted high on the wall. I think this design is to allow every Englishman to fantasize that he's summoning the butler.)

Our arctic toilet is just across from the boiler, but gets not a BTU of heat from it. If we ever needed a place to hang meat, that's the room. Every English house I've ever been in has a subzero bathroom. We had lunch with some friends last week and I could see my breath in their downstairs loo. It was the same at another friend's house in Oxford's Jericho neighborhood. It takes a brave man to lower his buttocks onto that gelid seat when he expects to see Walt Disney's frozen head leering back at him from a beaker on a shelf.

It isn't just basement toilets that have been reclaimed from disused coal sheds that set the teeth a-chattering. The house I lived in as a teenager, outside Cambridge, had an upstairs loo that you could carve ice in, as if the house's architect had specified it not be insulated.

Why? I can only imagine it's to remind the English of their Druidical past, of how their forebears had to move their bowels while seated on a hollowed out tree stump in a raging gale. All I know is, it's quite bracing.

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.