The English Report (II)

(:title The English Report (II):)

THE ENGLISH REPORT — est 2005

My good fellows,

Though by now I should have had some deep Cultural Experience to relate, the English essence remains subtle and mysterious to me. But I did go to see an American movie last week.

Well, I take that back. I did attend an amusing philosophy comedy show given to alumni (I pretended to be a graduate to get in). A series of chortling and snorting English academics presented some droll “campaigns” to decide which famous home-brewed Cambridge philosophers should be voted the most important. The choices were Russell, Wittgenstein, Ramsey and Francis Bacon. If you care about philosophy, well, first you will be ashamed to hear I paid ten pounds to see this… but second it will give you an idea of how absolutely in thrall to science our philosophy department is.

Not much else (of substance…) to say. All I do is only-study. Even writing this e-mail has given me cause to contemplate whether, as we’d say in econ, the shadow price of the opportunity for study I forego is worth paying the time-cost to write you yanks.

Here follows my usual helping of embarrassment:

• If you ever come here, do not under any circumstances try to put cream in herbal tea.

I swear I almost made an English girl faint when she saw me edging close to the cream dish. The English take tea seriously.

In fact, judging by the conversations I’ve had with our economics program’s best and brightest, the most thoughtful of our future social theorists, those eager minds full of nuance and wit… the set of cultural items that the English take seriously has two members: tea and cricket. Cricket is an inexplicable pastime. Its admitted virtue is that it drags on so slowly that one can do something else while keeping an eye on the game.

• It can be mathematically proven that wherever you stand in Cambridge, a pub is across the street from you.

I’m not kidding. And they do good business, because the first question everyone asks after class ends is, “Shall we go to the pub, then?” Not that I’m objecting. Multiply fifty people times three quid a pint and you start considering entering the pub business. (That’s five bucks a glass to you yanks, and yes they really do say quid here… sometimes it is hard not to laugh. I keep hoping someone will call me “squire.”)

• It takes seven to ten days to get a bank account here because they still use PAPER.

The country is generally technologically backward. I even had to fill out a form and wait a few days to enable my internet access in my room. By the way, if you ever want a sweet job, consider working in the office of a Cambridge college. They get to work around 9:30 and take what must be a two-hour lunch break, 12:00 to 2:00, finally departing at around 4:30. Ah, university life.

• The “adverts” before films here last soooooooooooo looooooooooong
• And the English don’t get advertising.

The movie I mentioned — it was slotted for 8:20 but started at 9:00. That’s right, a half-hour of adverts and ten minutes of previews. The ads were in some respects more relevant to English culture than the movie, since the movie was American. So here are my reviews of the ads I can remember:

1. Don’t speed or you will kill this beautiful little girl

MY RATING: TWO out of TWO HORRIFIED EYES SHUT

Public service ads are everywhere in England and man are they brutal. This horror show of a commercial begins with a close-up of a vacant-faced girl lying crooked against a tree, bleeding from her cracked, twisted neck. The camera pulls back to show her pale-skinned arms are lying at unnatural angles.

Then, as if animated by demonic puppeteers, her body slowly is pulled into the street amid a chorus of crackling bones, and gradually, you realize that this is a reverse replay of getting hit by something. As if she were a mime, her body is curved around a surface as if to indicate a car. Then, like a scene in the Exorcist, her bleeding face slowly tilts itself aright and you can see ripples move under her skin has her bones reattach. Fully repaired, the girl begins to skip away. A big “30 kilometer speed limit” sign is overlaid on the screen, and guess what, this is a commercial about how if someone is hit at 30 kilo they have an 80% survival rate, but go much faster and you’re basically going to mutilate their body.

2. Chocolate ice cream of the “red swirls” variety

MY RATING: FIVE out of FIVE UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY AWKWARD PEOPLE

The camera pans, spins and generally acts like it’s on a roller coaster in some bizarro pastel world consisting of only raspberry stripes in chocolate ice cream. An acid jazz soundtrack backs up some deep-voiced guy talking about how you shouldn’t actually watch or listen to this advert unless you’re prepared to buy their ice cream. Again, the famed British sense of irony fails to extend to advertising.

3. Don’t smoke or everyone you know will die and think only of you as they smolder in hell.

MY RATING: A FEW CIGARETTES short of a PACK.

Some smoker scrolls down their cell phone list with all their friends — mom, dad, girlfriend, best mate — and as he scrolls down he’s deleting them all because, as the announcer explains, they’re all dead. See, he’s killed his family and friends through secondhand smoke. So. If that won’t make you stop smoking, you filthy, vice-ridden excuses for human beings, what will? HOW MANY MORE WILL HAVE TO DIE? HOW MANY?

• More on smoking: It kills.

The surgeon general’s warning is of such a large font here that only the logo of the cigarette brand survives above it. It’s like staring at a wall of propaganda leaflets, all reading “smoking kills,” behind the counters in convenience stores and grocery lines.

• I want to kiss Alpha Chaing’s feet.

He wrote the series of textbooks on fundamental economic mathematics that is saving me from looking like a neanderthal in a semiconductor fab. Seriously, I don’t know what I’m paying Cambridge for; it’s not the teaching. It’s certainly not the lightning-quick and Promethean office workers. The classes mostly serve as a venue to point out to you what you don’t know and have to look up in a book.

Grad school is for serious. I am actually spending “an hour out of class for every hour in class,” just like all my guidance counselors said I would. And let me tell you, if it weren’t for my beautiful and intelligent neighbor who is French *and* a girl, I’d be going insane. (But there’s no chance of anything romantic, on account of I am unworthy, so I’m just enjoying the company.)

• OK

So, if that wasn’t superficial enough, wait a few weeks for the next edition of THE ENGLISH REPORT! And send love.

C.O. G---