English Report the Last
Hello, jammy readers of the English Report. This issue completes your set — I am home again and I mailed my thesis a few hours ago.
It’s over now, so this issue is therefore dedicated to what was lovely in England. Much is.
- The high duck per square foot ratio
It is possible to ignore many striking things about a place if they quack. Ducks, not lions, should be the English national animal. Just as the English would not stay in the North Atlantic, ducks are not content to stay in “duck ponds”. In the mornings they depart and waddle across roads in groups of four or five, where cars slow down for them, and make their way into outdoor markets, college courtyards and fields. For a while I wondered about them, because there are no ponds for swimming nor bread for eating in any of these places. Then I understood. They come to entreat us by their example to live better lives. So I ask you, is a duck not a loving thing? They usually appear in male and female pairings, and now that it’s spring, with ducklings. They possess an irrepressible good humor about their station, the kind I wish I had. As proof they feel this way, I cite the lovely noise they make. Hack hack hack hack hack. Ducks and I have signed an eternal alliance.
- Newspaper culture
There are five major English newspapers: the right-of-center Telegraph, the left-of-center Guardian, the lefty Independent, the Murdoch’s unpredictable Times, which currently has the most claim to be a newspaper of record, and The Sun, also Murdoch’s.
The old saw about them goes like so. People who are in government read The Times. Those no longer in government read The Telegraph. Those who will soon be out of government read The Guardian. Those who will never be in government read The Independent. And those who like to see pictures of naked women read The Sun. Naturally The Sun is the largest English-speaking newspaper by distribution.
Since it looked for a moment like I would go into copy editing, I really like living in a place where people care about the news enough to subscribe to two or three of these papers (in Lib-Dem Cambridge, it’s usually The Times, The Guardian and The Independent). I went to formal lunch at John’s once and had coffee afterward in their break room. Though the lunch had been lively, no one spoke in the break room, because it was full of newspapers from all parts of the world and everyone sat down silently to read.
By the way, I have been told The (London) Times is the original “Times” newspaper. It will be launching a United States edition soon, and I plan to subscribe. English media tends to be better than ours, in my opinion, because it is fiercer. They are not afraid to ask Tony Blair loaded questions, such as “Why are you attempting to strip the English people of their rights natural to their heritage?” And he comes up with good answers. How different from our situation. The English media is free to do so because it does not pretend to neutrality. If you want to get “both sides” of an issue in England, read two papers.
- English women playing Frisbee at John’s backs
No lovelier sight exists. They can’t throw and have to scamper to fetch a disc that changes direction even slightly. I think that is a good use of the word scamper.
- Fens
A good English town like Cambridge will preserve some parts of town unused. These are designated for the walking out of problems and the careful avoiding of cow dung, for cows as well as ducks wander about town pretty freely. It can be pretty surreal to be sitting in the university pub, Granta, and watch out the window as four or five cows ford the Cam. The fen I am thinking of, which starts outside Granta, comprises an overgrown field adjacent to a feeder stream. It runs alongside the stream, in this case all the way to another town. After a mile and a half of countryside you arrive in a traditional English village, Grantchester.
A traditional English village is defined as a small town with darkly clustered houses, surrounded by pubs, surrounded by woods.
It has been customary, from “time immemorial” as they say, to walk down the fen (or, for those with strong arms, to punt down it) to Grantchester, and get tea at a tea garden called The Orchard. The Orchard is essentially a house in a meadow in the aforementioned woods. You go inside to get your tea and the cake you fancy, in my case blackcurrant tarts, and then exit into the meadow where you have your choice of seating under one of various flowering trees. Walking to The Orchard and back is a really, really good time.
So good that they have pictures on the walls of past students who have similarly enjoyed it. It makes you feel part of a tradition of great fen-walkers and tea-drinkers. Some of the captions of these pictures read Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, et al, and some are sitting right at the very table you’re at.
Take a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orchard
And time immemorial, according to Wikipedia, is defined as 1189.
- The lower class
The lower class in England lack academic or professional ambitions. Naturally they are happy. These people, who work repairing the city pipelines, or as bar tenders, or builders, are often better educated than they choose to appear. They are also foul-mouthed in that delightful way and in my experience willing to lend a hand. My bike broke on the side of the road and two or three English from a road repairs company came over, surveyed the problem and sat down to fix it, teasing me as they went. They recommended the use of this one kind of screwdriver and it was going to be a huge amount of trouble to get it out of the box but it would be done for the sake of diplomacy. They were going to teach me how to fix it like a good Boy Scout, and didn’t I know that the Boy Scouts were invented by the English (I didn’t), and thus let me tell you the history of the Boy Scouts, and so on. This did not happen once.
I can’t say the English professorship has similarly impressed me. I was not happy about working with them. Unlike the working people, they do not see it as their job to assist. I have been told through silence and raised eyebrow that anyone asking questions must be a stupid American. It is rather hard to get them to explain something in their offices. The best English can be found right where you would expect to find them, happy in the tea house or pub.
- Learning to like Ah-mur-ica
I have had time to reflect on what I did not like about England.
When the Americans crossed the Atlantic they left behind British worldliness and realism, their best virtues. When all was lost what remained was naivety, an attractive thing in its way. Americans take an unguarded, if superficial, interest in their fellow man. They expect good will — and get outraged at hypocrisy, which the British tolerate as part of the course of things. It irritates the stiffs across the pond to say “have a nice day,” because they long since bothered with pathological ideals like fellowship. Bully for them — hooray for us.
- So long
Cheers,
Corey