What Else Is There To Write About?

There doesn’t seem much else to write about other than The Wedding.  What with the weather and the friendly crowds and everyone exuding good cheer and happiness, it was a brilliant day, wasn’t it?  I watched it on the telly with enough family around to make it feel a bit like a party and the nice thing about watching it in the comfort of one’s own home, is that a) you can put the kettle on as and when b) you can make all the comments that you want to make in church but are constrained by the social decencies from voicing.  Like, isn’t Kate’s dress gorgeous and thank God it’s not a meringue crossed with a circus tent and isn’t she beautiful?  And will her poor father ever get the circulation back in his hand? (Never did a bride grip her Dad’s hand more tightly).  And didn’t the trees in the church look good?  And what on Earth were Eugenie and Beatrice wearing on their heads? And isn’t William handsome? And, come to that, Harry isn’t half bad either.  And aren’t the titchy bridesmaids wonderful, especially the little one, firmly shepherded by the lovely Phillipa Middleton, who kept one hand on her head with an iron grip on her wreath?



London in party mood is a great place.  I was there for the Jubilee and the whole city becomes one happy place where complete strangers talk, don’t push, make friends and are simply glad to be there.  It’s great to stand on Westminster Bridge with no traffic, to have people from all over Britain and all over the world chilling out and being nice, picnicking on the grass and – on occasion – bursting into song.  I don’t know why it’s so great to stand by the Victoria Memorial with thousands of other people, singing their hearts out, but it is.  And there’s another Jubilee next year…

Take the Pascal Moon away from the first moon you thought of…

Hasn’t the weather been wonderful?  I’m only hoping it lasts until Easter Sunday, as we’ve got eight for lunch plus a few more relatives in the afternoon. As Easter is very much a Movable Feast, I hope we can get out in the garden!

Easter is, of course, the season of new life.  The name is the last remnant of the worship of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the Spring, Estre or Oestre.  As to when Easter should be celebrated (here comes the movable feast bit) we celebrate it on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, where the day and night are of equal length, causing, if you believe the archeological programmes on the telly, a lot of people long ago to build stone circles and chant a lot.

Now, I must admit, should anyone think I've got this sort of information at my fingertips, I looked it up, but this is where it gets confusing.

The spring equinox – pay attention at the back there! - is fixed for this purpose as March 21 and the "full moon" is actually the paschal moon, which is based on 84-year "paschal cycles" established in the sixth century, would you believe. It rarely corresponds to the astronomical or actual full moon.  Just to make life even more interesting, the Eastern churches, such as the Greek and Russian orthodox, count it up the same way, but use the Julian calendar (on which March 21 is April 3) and a 19-year paschal cycle.

I think I’ll just check the calendar same as usual and celebrate at the same time as everyone else.

The new life bit is absolutely unmissable though. The garden’s gone mental.  Only a few weeks ago, there were bare patches on the so-called lawn and now it looks (from a distance) green.  All over. Mostly.

Mind you, I did help it along. To the intense amusement of my Other Half, I bough a pair of rigid plastic sandals with huge spikes sticking out the bottom and walked around the grass, aerating the lawn.  Apparently grass-roots like a bit of fresh air, which makes you wonder why it grows underground.

I mean, if  the roots likes air that much, why not stick them above ground to take a breather now and again, rather than waiting for someone with huge spikes sticking out of the soles of their feet to come and give it a dose of the much needed?  It seems like a rum state of affairs to me and one that might have given Darwin a bit of pause for thought.  It’s hardly survival of the fittest, is it?  Although, by the time two dogs and various humans have romped over it, it’s more a case of the survival of the flattest.

Happy Easter everyone!  I hope you get lots of eggs.

Simple machines

It was my birthday yesterday (21 again!) and my lovely Other Half bought me a new sewing machine.

New to me, that is, as it’s actually one of the last made by the Glasgow factory in 1934.  The thing is, it’s so wonderfully simple.  Lucy loves it because it looks like something out of Sylvanian Families (you know, those cute toy dressed rabbits and squirrels and so on that come with little houses and lots of stuff for children to collect) but it’s actually a very solid, beautifully made machine that works.

I’ve had an electric sewing machine before and the principle is more or less the same as a hand operated machine, but the damn thing goes so fast that when you make a bish of things (and as a very plain sewer, that’s what I tend to do) it very soon becomes an inextricable mix of knots and problems.  This goes at my pace (slow) but it works.

Understandable mechanical stuff is one of life’s more simple pleasures. Don’t get me wrong, electronic stuff is great – I’m typing this on a computer, I’ll watch a DVD on the TV later today and I love my ipod but you can’t see how those things work, can you?  You can’t lift the lid and see cogs connected to wheels powered by springs or whatever. Being able to see how things work puts us in control in a way that pushing a button simply can’t.  I think that’s why understandable machines, such as steam engines, old aeroplanes, vintage cars and stonking great big engines in old cotton mills or historic ships generate such great affection.

Oh, and I’ve made a tea towel!

Spring Forward

I made a garden gate this week.  Not that, you understand, the Gordon-Smith garden has been hitherto open to the public to wander in at will.  No, this is an additional gate to stop the ruddy dog howling at the bottom of the garden.

Lucky, the aforesaid Ruddy Dog, only has three legs.  We got him from the dogs’ home in this tripoded condition (I imagine his card was marked as soon as he was called “Lucky” by his previous owner).  He lost his leg by taking issue with a lorry. Despite making a fair old bit of it, the Dumb Chum hates noise.

And, at the bottom of the garden is a street with children racing up and down with roller skates, skateboards, little prams, bikes and all sorts of things with incredibly noisy wheels.  Lucky, taking this as a personal affront, goes and howls through the gate at them.  And, by the way, when I say “howl” I mean it.  It’s not a polite little wuff.  The animal stands there simply baying; take a line through the hound of the Baskervilles in the big scene when it comes tearing out of the Dartmoor mist and you’ll get the idea.

So I made another gate to enclose the area that leads to gate proper, if you see what I mean, solely to baffle the dog.  And, when working on the gate, it was totally weird how quickly the light went once the sun went down.  Yes, yes, yes, I know, night is a well-observed phenomena and has been with us on a fairly regular basis for some time, but we’re so used to having light literally at the click of a switch, it’s strange to have to stop work just because it’s dark.

Next week, after the clocks have Sprung Forward an hour, I’d have another hour of daylight to work in and that extra hour is why, during the First World War, British Summer Time was introduced.  Although the idea was first proposed by an Englishman, William Willett, an early-bird type, in 1907, it took until 21^st May 1916 for the government to be convinced.  Germany and Austria had introduced Daylight Saving Time on 30^th April of that year and that seemed, to some parliamentarians, a good reason why we shouldn’t have it in Britain.   Lord Balfour, obviously a man who wanted to be prepared for every eventuality, asked his fellow peers to consider the plight of twins born during the change of the clock, with the result that the second-born might be held to have been born earlier than the first-born and thus mess up the first-born’s inheritance.  Wow.

Anyway, we got BST and in the Second World War there was double Summer Time.  There’s a story of an American GI out with a girl and looking for some privacy.  When moved on by a policeman, he said in disgust, “Say, doesn’t it ever dark in this country?”  Poor guy.

Don’t forget to put your clocks forward!

This blog is not about a bus with a gas-bag on the roof

We’ve all met gas-bags on the top of buses. The woman who won’t stop talking, the man on his mobile phone… Here’s a picture of one in real life

I’ve put the picture in because my pal, Jane Finnis, was astounded that such things could be, and it does look a bit odd, I must say.  It should really have gone with the last blog but better late than never, as they say.  Jane voices her incredulity in the comments.  Mind you, Jane’s last post on her blog, (have a look at it on http://janefinnisblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/beware-the-ides-of-march/) left me scratching my head a bit.

It’s about how the Romans dated things.  You know, as in, “Shall we meet up on the 19^th?” “No, make it the twentieth, instead.”  You couldn’t have this conversation in Ancient Rome.  They had a peculiar system, involving counting backwards and forwards and probably turning round three times, crossing your fingers and making a wish.   Considering how we’ve all been told that the Romans were a red-hot superpower, with efficiency as their middle name, the truly bizarre way they worked out their calendar does make you think a bit.  Jane and myself once did a talk at the library together which more or less turned into a debate on which of us had the best historical period to work with.  Jane loves her Romans dearly and was a persuasive speaker, but I think I’ll stick to my Agatha Christie-like 1920’s.  At least you can get the date right to actually turn up at the talk without mental gymnastics and possible recourse to black magic.

Talking about Agatha Christie-ish stuff, there’s been a dickens of a fuss this week caused by the remarks of Brian True-May, the executive producer of Midsomer Murders. Mr True-May said that the success of the programme is down to – get this -  “The lack of black and Asian faces.” He told the Radio Times, the official magazine of the BBC, “that the programme “wouldn’t work” if there was any racial diversity in the village life.
“We are,” said Mr True-May, “the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it like that.”

I loved the response of David Edwards, a café manager in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, the real-life setting of the fictional Midsomer.  Mr Edwards is black, and he reckons that Midsomer is the safest place in Britain to be black, granted that every one of the victims of the 272 murders to date have been white.

True-May’s comments, apart from being offensive, are nonsense, of course.  The murderous English village, in all its fascinating glory, is associated indelibly with Agatha Christie, and her villages are very diverse indeed.

Mysterious foreigners?  They turn up by the bucketload.   Not black or Asians, particularly – this is pre-War Britain, after all – but Greeks, Italians, French, Eastern Europeans etc., etc.  Poirot himself is Belgian, of course, and often travels to fairly exotic locations.  “Englishness” is a subject which often comes up.  Take this, for example, from Murder On The Orient Express. The very English Colonel Arbuthnot comes to the defence of the very English Mary Debenham.

“About Miss Debenham,” he   said rather awkwardly. “You can take it from me that she’s all right. She’s a pukka sahib.”

Flushing a little, he withdrew.

“What,” said Dr. Constantine with interest, “does a pukka sahib mean?” (He’s Greek, you’ll notice.)

“It means,” said Poirot, “that Miss Debenham’s father and brothers were at the same kind of school as Colonel Arbuthnot.”

Time and again Agatha Christie punctures that pompous idea of “Englishness” with that most English weapon, humour.  Dave Edwards, the café manager, was pictured grinning his head off.  So who’s got the last laugh now?

Getting it right

In Finding Nemo, Albert, the clown fish’s wife and whole family-to-be- of clown fish eggs are eaten at the start of the film.  One egg, which hatches into Nemo remains and, when Nemo gets lost, Albert sets out to find him.  It’s a delightful story and very funny, too.  However, when a mother clown fish is killed, the male clown fish turns into a female.  I know this, because the director said so on the DVD extras.  The makers of Nemo chose to ignore it because it would make the film just too damn complicated and they were absolutely right.  That’s a creative decision that makes the story work better.

However, on the weblist DorothyL this week, a point was raised about accuracy in historical fiction.

The heroine of a book set in the First World War motors around Britain without any thought of petrol rationing.  Was there, Dave Bennet asked on the list, any fuel restrictions?  The question pulled him out of the world of the book.  The notion of fuel restrictions should at least have been raised, because there were petrol restrictions and, like most things which seem like a problem at first, the very problem could have been creatively used to give a better sense of the period.

Restrictions, in the form of licences, were imposed early in the war and were tightened up as the war went on.  I had to think about this for my WW1 spy thriller, Frankie's Letter, where the villain whizzes round in a Daimler (so handy for kidnapping heroes and carrying them off!). That's 1915, but by the following year, newspapers would report incidents of joy-riding very censoriously.  Private driving became semi-respectable again in the summer of 1917 by attaching large gas-bags, which looked like miniature Zeppelins, on a wooden frame to the car with six feet of pipe for recharging at gas-points.  There were plenty of cases of drivers filling up illegally at lamp posts! (All lamp posts were fuelled by gas, often tapping into the sewers for a supply).

Is it important to get it right?  On one level, no.  The story can be good and the writing fine, but if you are setting a story in a particular era, it seems like only fair play to the eventual reader to at least try to get it right.  And, by getting details right, the chances are, the overall impression of the time will be right, too, so the reader gets the impression of living in another world.  Besides that, it’d be fun watching the heroine get free gas from a lamp-post!

University Choice 2

I recieved a fascinating response to the blog I wrote about the TV series Bones and how to choose a university (it's last but one in the blogroll).  I thought Kathy's response was so interesting, I've posted it here rather than in the comments section.

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Kathy Phillips  wrote:

I read your comments about the “Bones” bit where Cam’s got problems with her foster daughter about school choices.  I’ve spent a good bit of time in England, especially in my late-teens (London, Somerset), and I’m pretty familiar with your educational system.   Your definitions of “student” and “academic hot-shot” have no parallel in this country, and particularly not for a student in a Washington D.C. area school system.  At 18, our kids graduate high school and are not nearly at a level that compares to your university-bound hot-shots.  Out SATs are generic exams that colleges use for admission criteria, but they bear absolutely no relation to your A-Levels and O-Levels.  Achievement here is a relative thing.  Grades here are a relative thing.

Not to put too fine a point on it, American kids, unless coming out of the premier prep schools on the level of Phillips Andover or Choate, are largely immature, and even the better students have merely achieved success when measured against a less than elevated standard.  I could go into details that would make your eyes glaze over (no classics, history limited to American history or “world civ” – a general overview that makes no effort to distinguish between cultures and norms, English literature studies limited to the very most basic texts).  The simple fact is:  American education is available to everyone through the age of 18 – or the 12^th grade – and the numbers that have to be reached insure that the standards are lowered to meet a mean of ability.

In any event, Michelle’s comments were very familiar to many of us.  At least in theory.  I’ve known some pretty sharp kids choose schools based on weather, sports, appearance of campus, and nearby cities.  And I wouldn’t have said no to any of these criteria.  My extremely bright goddaughter (whom I help to raise) chose to go to Duke University, a premier school in North Carolina.  She just liked it, liked the feel of the campus and – yes – the weather.  She had no idea what she would major in so she wasn’t looking for any particular school or academic.   Frankly, we don’t expect our very brightest kids to achieve very much in school – unless they go to Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, Princeton and the like after attending a premier preparatory school – and to find their feet in graduate school.  Kate is now in medical school after the kind of search for a place to study along the lines that you describe in your blog.  She knew then what she wanted and went after it.  But even a very smart and mature 18 year-old kid here isn’t going to apply the same criteria to their choice as one of yours would.

Good luck to Lucy.  I hope she gets to do what she wants to do.  But I’d give her advice I’ve gleaned from my nephew’s education:  he went to Princeton University, one of our premier institutions, intent on becoming a mathematician.  Princeton is known for its math and physics departments.  After a year, he was disillusioned and floundered around a bit – he didn’t like the department or the professors.  He found his footing.  He graduated from Princeton summa cum laude with a degree in Chinese Language, Literature and Linguistics and is now a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Poetry and Linguistics from Harvard University.