TV Licence

Everybody who owns a television in Britain has to pay an annual tax, called the TV Licence Fee, for the privilege. Right now we pay £145.50 annually. This tax is supposed to fund the services of the BBC, but like so many things here it’s not quite that simple. The current government negotiated with the BBC last about how much they would reduce their budget and take on new obligations such as the World Service, which is a bit like Radio Free Europe. Further, some of the Licence Fee goes to subsidise other broadcasters.

There are frequent adverts on TV to encourage us to pay up and reminding that if we don’t they’ll fine us. The way they keep track of who owes the Licence Fee is pretty straight forward: when retailers sell a TV set, they report the customer’s name and address to the TV Licencing Authority who then collect the tax. They’ve actually used this method for a long time, but they used to think that we needed an extra incentive to pay in case the fine wasn’t enough.

And what they cooked up provides a fascinating insight into the British bureaucratic mind. Remember those old World War II movies where the Gestapo used radio detectors mounted on little vans or cars to triangulate radio signals and locate the clandestine radios of the French underground or British spies. Well, the men in grey suits came up with the idea that these Nazi radio detectors must be so fresh in the minds of Brits that it would be a spiffy idea to use the same image to scare everyone into paying the Licence Fee.

So we used to see these little vans driving around with strangely huge antennae mounted on the roof. We were told that these vans could detect TVs inside houses by diving past in the street and picking some mysterious radiation supposedly emitted by TV sets. Yes, really! And here are a couple of examples.

I have no idea if the detector vans were effective in improving the compliance with the tax, but they were a lot of fun. I suspect that there must have been a lot of people left over after the war who used to work in espionage but after the war needed new jobs. Fortunately, the TV Licence Authority was there to recruit them.

Here’s another one about English drivers…

We just heard, on the four o'clock news on BBC Radio 4, that an English retired couple had just returned home from a 16 month around-the-world trip in their cherished 1957 Bristol Coupé. The car survived the trip without a scratch. When they got home, they stopped at the local supermarket to stock up the fridge and parked their much-loved car in the supermarket car park.

While they were shopping, somebody drove into their car.

Isn’t It Exciting?

As members of the local Neighbourhood Watch, Susan and I receive a monthly newsletter from the Leominster Town Local Policing Team. The newsletter lists all of the contact names and phone numbers of the team and regional contacts. It also usually warns us about scams happening in the area and gives a summary of local criminals arrested. I enjoy reading the newsletter, not only because it’s so badly written, but also because I like the warm, neighbourly feeling.

But the newsletter isn’t often exciting. This month it was! On the back page under the heading A look at some of the good work done recently, there was a paragraph titled The Flasher. Here’s the item in full:

“Over the last 14 months there have been incidents of male “flashing” in and around the Leominster area. I am pleased to say that with some excellent work by your Local Policing team and a member of the public who managed to take a photograph, the offender has now been caught. He has admitted nine offences and is currently awaiting a court hearing.”

And finally, the newsletter ends with:

“And last but not least………

Your Local policing team at Leominster would like to wish you all a Happy and safe Christmas.”

Well, I’m happy in spite of all the holiday traffic and crowded shops.

Big Competition

If you have Google Earth on our computer, you have probably seen some of the 3D model buildings set in their real location in the world. One of my hobbies is making these models. Most of mine are fairly close to where I live in Herefordshire. I've done models of Stonehenge and 22 old churches in the county, but my biggest project has been modelling the buildings in the commercial centre of Leominster. Right now there are about 70 finished model buildings done. Between now and the end of January, I plan to add about ten to 20 more to the collection. Some of the new ones are already done but not yet uploaded and others have to be done from scratch. (To have a look at progress so far, Open Google Earth and make sure that the 3D Buildings Layer is checked in the list on the lower left of the screen. Leominster is located 15 miles North of Hereford and about 30 miles West of Worcester in the north central part of Herefordshire. Once there, zoom in on the town and explore.)

For the second year, Google is sponsoring a competition called Model Your Town. It’s open to modellers all over the world; the guy who won last year modelled a neighbourhood in Lima, Peru. This year I’m planning to enter my Leominster models in the contest. The winner gets a lot of publicity for their town, but the big deal is a $25,000 prize for a local school chosen by the winner.

The competition closes on 1 March 2012 and Google will announce five finalists shortly after. The final winner will be chosen from the five finalists by a public vote. I’ll naturally try to generate a lot of local interest and I’ll also shamelessly solicit votes through this blog if I get into the finalists.

Wish me luck!

Safe Driving in England

For several weeks I’ve been thinking about helpful hints to foreigners planning to drive a car in England. I’m not really concerned here with drivers who are not accustomed to driving on the left side of the road; you either learn that or you don’t. There isn’t much I can add to the process. On the other hand, there are a few observations that I’ve made driving here for 25 years that could be helpful. Fore warned is fore armed, to coin a phrase.

I used to be very favourably impressed by the consistency with which English drivers signalled their intention to turn. In fact, I often found myself bragging to American friends and family about this because the habit was often lost in the States. Recently, however, I’ve noticed that signalling seems to be going rapidly out of style. A fraction of drivers – big enough to be scary -- don’t use their signals at all, so beware. With quite a few opposing cars you just don’t know what they plan to do. This lack of signalling is calls for particular caution at roundabouts.  There’s another, subtler twist to signalling turns: To save effort, I suppose, a lot of drivers, when intending to execute a turn, delay the signal until the wheels are already turning. Here’s what I think is going on: One finger movement can be avoided by turning the steering wheel and tripping the signal lever with one motion. As the driver starts to turn the wheel, a finger is extended and as the wheel goes around, the signal is tripped. Sadly, it’s a little late to initiate the signal after the turn already in progress.

My advice is to be especially cautious when approaching an intersection where cars coming towards you could be turning left. The illustration on the left (imagine you’re driving the red car) shows what you probably expect to happen. What actually happens,  is that the drivers opposite, when making their left turns swing out to their right side and then make their way around the corner as shown in the right-hand picture (you’re still in the red car and your clear lane just got smaller.)

Every country has them, but in England they’re universally called Boy Racers. These are the, usually young, drivers have two defining characteristics: First, they cannot abide following another car going at the speed limit or below; second, they cannot resist the adrenalin rush of passing on blind curves.  It’s long been a curiosity to me why nobody seems to be concerned about the obvious gender bias in the name Boy Racer.

A variation on the Boy Racer, or maybe a sub-set, is the white van driver. For those not familiar with English traffic, most trades such as plumbers, carpenters, gardeners, etc. drive around for their work in small to medium white vans. They are always in a hurry to get to the next job or delivery, or the nearest pub for all I know. Other road users are well advised to observe the same caution with white van drivers as with Boy Racers.

The opposite of the Boy Racers are the elder drivers. (I must come clean hare and confess that I am something of an elder myself, although hopefully not an “elder driver”.) For some reason most elder drivers own the smaller models of Volvos, so they’re easy to spot. These cars come equipped with a speed governor, maybe just a block of wood taped to the underside of the accelerator pedal. This device limits the Volvo’s speed to 30 miles per hour regardless of the legal or safe limit on the road. The most fun is to be had watching a competition between and elder driver and a Boy Racer approaching a blind curve.

Herefordshire is a very rural county and the predominant local industry is agriculture. A lot of apples and potatoes are grown around here. For historical reasons, most English farms are made up of fields that are not next to each other. One farmer’s land can be scattered over several different fields that can be quite a distance apart. To get on with the business of farming the farmers need to move from one of their fields to another with some considerable frequency. Now, tractors are designed to be powerful rather than fast. I think the newest models are able to move along the highway at a maximum speed of about 40 mph, and older ones are slower. The result is that long tail-backs are very common on the main roads where the speed limit is 60 mph. As these parades make their way along our curvy roads, the Boy Racer and white van drivers can be depended upon to keep the situation from becoming boring.

Kosher Dill Pickles

I suppose that most people living away from their birth country miss some of the foods from “home”. For me it was hamburgers and kosher dill pickles to go with them. In butcher shops and restaurants they sell things called hamburgers, but they’re not real hamburgers. We go to very good butcher in Ludlow and they have hamburgers labelled 85% beef. Come on!

Susan has solved the hamburger problem by buying good rump steak and grinding it up at home. With high quality meat, these are really good burgers. But kosher dill pickles are nowhere to be found, at least not around here in darkest Herefordshire. Last year, Susan once again came up with the solution: she grew pickling cucumbers in the community garden and we found a good recipe on the internet. This recipe was from an American woman living in New Zealand who had the same problem as me.

I’m no cook, but I followed the directions and the results were almost like a New York deli. Thank you nice American woman in New Zealand.

Confused About Time

Every few years (it seems like five to eight years) the incumbent government of the UK proposes to study the possibility of changing the British time zone to that of continental Europe, i.e. one hour ahead. This week the current government has done exactly that. Whenever this happens, the people of Scotland, especially farmers, protest that it would be bad for them.

Right now Britain has Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) from the last Sunday in October ‘til the last Sunday in March. The rest of the year we have British Summer Time (BST), which is one hour later. Ireland and Portugal are the only other European countries in this time zone. The rest of Western Europe, up to a north-south line running from Finland to Greece, is one hour ahead of British time all year round.

The Scottish augment rests on the fact that they are very far north, and so their days are shorter than English and Welsh days. They complain that the farmers in Scotland would have to milk their cows in the dark; kids would have to walk to school in the dark and would therefore get run over by cars more often; and there would be a lot more traffic accidents. I guess that the Scots have a pretty low opinion of their own ability at night driving or maybe they believe that English drivers, not used to driving after dark, would be knocking off the Scottish kids walking to school. (Someone should do a study the ratio of child-on-the-way-to-school accidents in Norway and Italy.)

All this time business has always confused me. I’ve never really understood why the time has to change from winter to summer anyway. It would work just as well if schools, government offices, businesses and shops just opened and closed at different times to give people extra time for their summer evening barbeques. This concept applies even more dramatically to farmers! Before times were standardized in the nineteenth century, farmers must have milked cows when it was convenient or when the cows needed to be milked. These farmers didn’t need some official time to get their work done. It’s beyond me why present-day Scottish farmers aren’t able to organize their work in the traditional way. But no; if the government in London says that it’s seven or eight in the morning, then that’s when you have to milk your cows, dark or not.

There’s another angle on this: why does Scotland have to be in the same time zone as England? If the two ends of the Channel tunnel can exist quite comfortably being an hour apart on the clock, why can’t Scotland and England also be an hour apart. Nobody in The British government or the Scottish complainer ever brings this up.

Or here’s yet another idea: if the whole world was just one time zone, then people in different places, north or south east or west, would pretty soon arrange things in the most convenient way. Some farmers would milk their cows at midnight on the clock and others would milk at noon.

These are a few of the reasons why I’m confused about time.

Bureaucrats Gone Mad

Last night on the Channel 4 News there was a story about an amazingly stupid Ministry of Defence (MoD) screw-up. About a year ago a British soldier was killed in action in Afghanistan. This week his family got a hand-delivered letter from the MoD informing them that the final settlement of his pay had been incorrect and they were deducting £433.13. And thirteen pence!!!

It turns out that he poor guy died ten days before the end of the month and therefore he didn’t earn all of his vacation pay for that year. Hence the error!

The MoD has since apologized to the family for “… any distress caused.” They also helpfully pointed out that this sort of adjustment was routine for dead soldiers. The insensitivity of the letter and the “apology” are dreadful and the public relations consequences are appalling, but the financial impact should also be examined.

From the government’s point-of-view they were able to claw back £433.13. As they are constantly reminding us, these are difficult times, the country’s debts must be paid off and we’re all in this together, even the parents of dead soldiers. On the other hand, I wonder how much it costs to hand deliver a letter from the MoD in London to a bereaved family in Lancashire. I’ll bet it cost more than £400. I’m also curious about the cost of the MoD’s PR consultants’ fees to deal with the media for this incident. I’ll bet that was a LOT more than £400. My guess is that the government has incurred a serious net loss on this transaction. Oh well, we’re all in this together, even the MoD.

By the way, the Minister of Defence had to resign a few days ago for violating the Ministerial Code.

Manhole Covers, Trains, etc.

Times are tough here in the UK. Unemployment is high and rising higher; right now it’s a bit over eight percent. Wages and salaries are going down on average in both real and absolute terms. The prices of gasoline (petrol), electricity and gas are rocketing upward. And, on top of all this, there is no economic growth at all. I know all these things are true in other countries as well to a greater or lesser degree, but there’s a symptom of the economic trouble here that seems to be peculiarly British.

The theft of all things metal is becoming a national emergency. Thieves are prying up manhole covers. They’re cutting down high-voltage power cables and the cables from electric train lines. The lights go off, the trains stop and local government must pay a lot of taxpayer’s money to replace the manhole covers.

All this metal gets sold on the scrap metal markets. This activity is well reported on the news programs, so I suppose most people know about it. What I can’t figure out is why the cops don’t just drop in on all the scrap metal dealers and have a look around. I mean manhole covers should be pretty easy to spot. They could bust dealers with manhole covers for handling stolen goods. That should soon put the thieves to work finding something else to steal.

Oh, but the government is cutting police budgets by an average of around 20%

The Green Dragon

Hereford is our county town (county seat in American) the HQ of our local government. It’s about 15 miles from Leominster. Susan and I go there several times a year for our dentist or to shop. Hereford is a busy town with a big central square and a good number of shops.

Hereford’s cathedral is appropriately large and seemingly always under serious repair work. In the cathedral there is an interesting museum that has the Mappa Mundi, a thirteenth century depiction of the then known world. There is also the Chained Library. This is a collection of the cathedral’s oldest books, some dating from eighth century. The “Chained” part comes from the practice of chaining the books to the shelves so that they couldn’t be stolen.

Just up the street from the Cathedral is a large hotel called the Green Dragon. I’d guess that the name derives from the fact that the dragon is the symbol of Wales, which is not too far away. On the wall facing the street the hotel flies four flags. One of these flags shows a dragon emblem.

The dragon on the flag is red.

Who’s the Russian Composer?

This one made me laugh out loud. BBC Radio 4’s lunch time program, “You and Yours”, is a variety magazine format focussing on issues that affect their listeners. One of the items in today’s program was about questions on the UK test for new citizens that have incorrect answers. A naturalized citizen who described himself as an academic gave several examples from the book issued to prospective new Brits. In this book there are practice questions and answers and quite a few of the answers were wrong.

At the end of the program the presenter repeated a story attributed to Peter Ustinov. When he was newly arrived in Britain he was once asked a question on some kind of test that went like this, “Name one Russian Composer.” Ustinov answered, “Rimsky-Korsakov.” When his test was returned, the question was marked “Incorrect, the correct answer is Tchaikovsky.”

Red Squirrel, Grey Squirrel

At some point in the dim past grey squirrels were introduced into the UK from North America. It seems that these immigrant squirrels were more successful in their new environment than the native red ones. It is a commonly held belief here that the greys beat up or killed the reds. In fact, they were just better at eating and breeding in England. Over time the grey squirrels gradually displaced the natives to the point where there are very few of the latter left. This situation makes the grey squirrels a convenient and much used metaphor for Americans in general. The subject of red (good) vs. grey (bad) comes up several times every year on BBC Radio 4 and sometimes in nature programs on TV as well.

The recent big news story of Amanda Knox is a case in point. Ms. Knox, an American, was convicted four years ago in Italy of murdering her university roommate, Meredith Kercher, a British subject. This week, in a re-trial, Ms. Knox was found, on the basis of faulty evidence, to have been wrongly convicted and was released from prison to return to her home in the USA. This has been on the front page in the papers and the lead story in the broadcast media all this week. The tone of these stories suggests, subtly, of course, that there might be something wrong with the new court ruling. After all, she is an American accused of killing a Brit.

Grey squirrel vs. red squirrel all over again!

Our Nice Library

Last week a group of Leominster residents formally constituted the Friends of Leominster Library. We have a very nice local library that Susan and I use all the time. We’re both serious readers and the library saves us a lot of money. They also rent DVDs for a small fee, which we use from time-to-time.

Last winter there was a notice on the Library counter soliciting interest in a friends group. We signed up for the next meeting and went along to find out that the manager of our library and the guy in charge of libraries for the county were driving the formation of the group. The idea was that we would volunteer our time to help out at library events, promote the use of the library to various community organizations and raise funds to purchase things for use in the library that official funding would not cover. We were told that, in spite news reports that many local government authorities in England were closing libraries due to central government funding cuts, Herefordshire libraries were not currently at risk. Our time and money would not be used to replace paid library staff or offset existing budgets.

After the first meeting the group continued to meet monthly with control of the meetings gradually shifting from the county libraries manager to us as we got to know each other and began to focus on what we wanted to do. In the summer we realized that if we wanted to tap into existing sources of funding, we would have to constitute our group as a quasi-charity with a constitution, officers and a bank account. It took us about three months to agree on the wording of the constitution and we finally passed it last week. And, guess what, I was elected as Chair of the Friends.

We have a Committee that will organize the Friends’ plans and activities. We agreed that the Committee would meet in a couple of weeks to get things started. This was going to be worthwhile and a lot of fun.

The following morning I received an email from somebody I hadn’t heard of at the council with attachments explaining about an on-going project to reorganize “cultural services” in the county with a view to saving some money. They wanted a response from me to a questionnaire about my ideas on stuff like third party operation of the county’s libraries or merger with other services or other counties. This started off a flurry of emails to and from the other Committee members and a lot of Google research.

It turns out that this is not a local initiative at all, but part of a central government program to “rationalize” local cultural services. Herefordshire and Shropshire are working together as one of ten pilot projects in a program controlled by the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. Now, our Prime Minister has made a lot of speeches about what he calls the Big Society. One of the principal parts of this Big Society is Localism, which is supposed to be the shifting of decisions away from London and out into local communities. So that’s why it took a lot of digging to find out what was really going on: it was supposed to look like a local initiative instead of a government project.

Maybe this Friends group isn’t going to be quite so much fun after all!

Hooray for Border Collies!

We used to have a border collie called Jesse. The farmer’s collie bitch across the road from us in Warwickshire had a bunch of very cute puppies. For a long time I had not wanted to have a pet and Susan did. Well, one day she went to visit the new puppies and one of them ran over to the fence and started licking her hand. She was immediately smitten and came home to tell me she wanted that puppy. Long story short, I said something like, “Oh, hell, go ahead, but you have to take care of it and clean up after it as well.” Naturally she agreed and a few days later we got a new dog. Susan named him Jesse after Jesse Jackson because, she said, he was black and beatiful.

The first night, locked in the kitchen, the poor thing was frightened and missing his family. We had lined a box with some old blankets for his bed and we tried to get him to sleep in it, but he just cried and cried. I spent most of that night in the kitchen with Jesse stroking him and talking quietly to make him feel safe and loved. Yeah, that’s me: born again dog lover!

Jesse had a pretty good life in Warwickshire, California and Gloucestershire. The worst thing was when we moved back from the States to England and he had to stay in a quarantine kennel for six months. When it was over, we took him home to our little thatched cottage in Gloucestershire worried whether he would be able to make his home. He was fine with the house and garden and took ownership straight away.

When he died at the age of fourteen, the farmer form across the road came over with a spade and helped me bury him in a corner of our garden. It’s a good thing he did because I was bawling so hard I couldn’t have dug the grave by myself; born again dog lover that I had become!

In those days, there was a television series called “One Man and His Dog”. It was a sports program showing sheep dog trials, a competition of shepherds and their collies moving some sheep around a defined course, put them through gates and into a pen. I think we enjoyed the program because of Jesse. Anyway, we sort of missed it when it was finally taken off the air.

Hooray! Thanks to digital satellite TV, the sheep dog trials are back on television. This time it’s the world championships with shepherds and dogs from a lot of different countries.

All the sheep are English.

Car Advertising on TV

Last night there was an interesting car advert on TV: Vauxhall cars, the British brand of General Motors, seems to want to remind us that it is an English car, not Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish. The ad showed England flags and people wearing white English rugby jerseys. My first thought was that the advertisement was intended to differentiate Vauxhall from the German GM brand, Opel, but Susan thought it was just a crude attempt to tie the brand to some idea of patriotism.

England Flag

I wonder if anybody buys a car these days because it’s made in England. There are lots of cars built in Britain these days, but with only a couple of very small specialist builders these plants are owned by foreign companies. Car companies from Japan, China, India, Germany, France and the USA all build cars here.

Maybe that’s what the ad was about.

Which Side Should I Walk On?

OK, driving on the right or left is pretty arbitrary and you just have to accept the local rules wherever you are. But what about walking? Growing up in the States, I came to understand that most of the time people tend to walk on the right, the same as driving. This rule seems to work on sidewalks and supermarket aisles.

Not here! I was, and still am, surprised to find that there is no left-walking rule here. People walk all over the place. When the supermarket has two doors, shoppers go in and out of both doors all the time.

Quality TV Revisited

When I was writing the other day about the perceived relative quality of British and American television, I hadn't seen a brochure titled “Quality First, The BBC’s year 2010-2011” published by the BBC Trust. On the first page the brochure says,

“The BBC Trust is the governing body of the BBC – made up of twelve trustees supported by a team of professional staff. It is our job to get the best out of the BBC for licence fee payers. We do this by supporting and challenging the Executive, those who deliver the BBC’s services, and by making sure all licence fee payers get good value for money.”

A short word about the licence fee is in order: By law, every household in the UK must pay an annual tax if they watch TV of £145.50 called the Licence Fee.

This brochure is mainly devoted to demonstrating the quality of BBC programing. It lists drama, comedy, sports, news, music and children’s programs that are meant to illustrate this quality. Then it goes on to show the results of various surveys done by the BBC itself on different measures of quality. Here’s a sample of the results:

1.       Distinctiveness and quality

a.       Per cent who gave the BBC a high score (8 or more out of 10) for high quality; Last year 36%, This year 42%.

b.      Average score out of 10 for high quality; Last year 6.4, This year 6.8%.

c.       Per cent who strongly agree BBC television programmes are original and different; Last year 37%, This year 36%.

2.       Approval

a.       Per cent who gave the BBC a high score (8 or more out of 10) for approval; Last year 38%, This year 42%.

3.       Restore trust in output*

a.       Per cent who gave the BBC a high score (8 or more out of 10) for “I trust the BBC”; Last year 31%, This year 37%.

b.      Average score out of 10 for I trust the BBC”; Last year 6.0, This year 6.4.

I don’t know about you, but less than 40% for trust and just over 40% for quality doesn’t strike me as particularly worthy of the bragging. If all the people on BBC Radio 4 who think British TV is so much better the its US counterpart are right, then American TV must be a lot worse than I thought.

*Restore trust? I wonder what trust was like before.

Why Is American TV So Bad?

When we lived in London in the 70’s a business acquaintance form New York was in town on business. As neither of them had been to England before, the guy brought his wife along for the trip. Susan and I invited the couple for a meal one evening. They were naturally interested in in our life in London; me as a foreigner and Susan as somebody married to one.

The couple were staying at a hotel at Lancaster Gate in the centre. It seems that they had decided to take a walk in the neighbourhood of their hotel. This area of London is very densely built up with most of big, old house broken up broken up into flats. It’s about a ten minute walk from the hotel to Paddington Station.  Across Bayswater Road from the hotel is Hyde Park. So, it’s a real city centre sort of area.

Over dinner they told us how much they were enjoying getting to know London, but they were curious about one thing: Why were there no supermarkets in London, where did Londoners buy their food? Of course, we explained that there were, in fact, supermarkets in London. We mentioned that we did a weekly shop at our local Safeway in Kensington. The point of this little story is that generalizing from a limited sample is rarely a good way to come to conclusions about a new place.

One recurring theme with BBC Radio 4’s commentators and interviewees is that, on visiting the US, people found American television, particularly the news programs, to be pretty bad. I’ve often wondered about this because TV here, in my opinion, is about the same level of quality as the American counterpart: some of it’s good and some of it’s not. The most common complaint about TV news in the States is that it’s all local with no international coverage. At 6:30pm most evenings we watch the BBC West Midlands regional news program. Surprise: there is no international news covered on this show; it’s local! Is it possible that Brits visiting the US turn on the TV in their hotel room and get the local New York or Los Angeles, or more likely, the Orlando or Las Vegas, news?

Generalizing from the particular, if I ever heard it!

Sports

The British media and, I presume, the people who read, watch, listen to it absolutely love sport. This love often manifests itself as “We are”, “She is”, “He is” the Best in the World. Sometimes this is even true as, for example, in the current cricket test series with the England side trouncing the visiting Indians. On the other hand, the build-up to sporting events offers an opportunity to anticipate the Best in the World status for the British team or player.

BBC Radio 4 and BBC1 TV are two of the media channels that can’t seem to resist this impulse. For reasons that I’ve never been able to understand, this applies especially to tennis and particularly to the prospects for Andy Murray and, before him, for Tim Henman. I like tennis and am a faithful watcher of the Wimbledon tournament every summer. In the two or three weeks leading up to Wimbledon, the BBC manages to interview a surprising number of “experts” who dutifully predict that this year Murray/Henman will surely win. Of course, so far the experts have all been wrong.

During the tournament BBC TV has several hours a day of coverage of the matches with expert commentary by former players. Between matches the commentary team spends its time interviewing each other mainly about how Murray is up to win this one.

In my opinion, Murray is not a bad player; maybe a bit too emotional, inconsistent and sometimes not very sportsman-like for my taste. If it weren’t for players such as Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, Murray could probably win one or two of the major tournaments. Unfortunately for the BBC those competitors are there.

I have to grudgingly admit that the BBC’s promotion of Murray year after year is pretty entertaining.

Road Signs

Every country has its own conventions about road signage and that’s as true of the UK as anywhere else. Most of the time the meaning of the signs is clear and the information or warning useful. Here's a small collection of my favourite signs.

This just means that you've come to the end of a posted speed limit and the speed reverts to the normal limit for the type of road you're on, i.e. 70 mph on a motorway, 60 mph on other roads outside built-up areas or 30 mph in built-up areas. That's a lot if information for one sign!

This sign tells you to be careful of Evel Knievel wannabes jumping motorcycles over cars on the road. 

Low Flying Aircraft
DUCK!!!

You don't want to see this sign in January.

The Magic Roundabout is in Swindon, Wiltshire. I can testify from personal experience that it is indeed scary

The sign above is the UK Slippery Road sign; the one below is the US version. Please note that in the UK, your wheels will cross each other when you skid.
And the US one has a driver in it!

Funny Thing about Accents

I was just going up to the chemist’s shop (pharmacy) to collect a prescription, when a guy stopped me in the street and asked if I lived in Leominster.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Is there a Lloyds Bank in Leominster,” he wanted to know. I told him there was one and gave him walking directions to the bank. Then he asked me if I was Canadian.

Six years ago, Susan and I moved back to England after five years in the States. I would have thought that my accent then was even more American than usual. It’s natural for people who hear my foreign accent to ask where I’m from, but since returning, I’d say that 70 or 80% of the ones who decide to guess about my origins opt for Canadian. In my previous nineteen years in England, I can’t recall anybody mistaking me for a Canadian. It doesn’t bother me to be thought a Canadian, but the change from a few years earlier is a curiosity.

Susan and I have discussed this phenomenon and we’ve wondered if it has something to do with the presidency of George W. Bush and the Iraq war. Bush and Americans in general became very unpopular in Europe including the UK.  This development came at the same time that we were in the USA.

Our conclusion is that English people who have the natural curiosity about my nationality feel that it is more polite to guess Canadian rather than American. The logic being that if I am, in fact, a Canadian, I won’t be insulted by being mistaken for an American. On the other hand, if I turn out to be an American after all, well, no harm done.

Or maybe I really do sound like a Canadian.

Community Garden – Follow-Up

Both of our local papers, The Hereford Times and The Hereford Journal, featured articles about the arson fire in the ECHO community garden the other day. The stories mentioned the damage that had been done to the garden and the tools, shed, composter and water butt that were lost. And, guess what: people have contributed spades and forks, a new composter, a lockable storage box for tools and even a new shed for the garden.

Is that community spirit, or what?!!

National Health Service

Somebody in the States asked what I thought about the National Health Service here in the UK. I’ve been meaning to write something about the NHS for a while now, and this is a good excuse. First of all, it’s not completely free. Everybody in work pays a specific tax for the NHS much the same as the Social Security tax in the US. I think this money just goes into the Treasury like all the other taxes and then the Government doles out the money to fund all the various parts of the healthcare system.

From there on it’s free to the users who are all the people who live here legally. This means that when we need to see the family doctor, called General Practitioners or more commonly GPs, there are no bills to pay. The GPs are organized into small groups called surgeries that contract with the NHS to provide services in their area. For example, our surgery has seven or eight doctors and the associated staff of nurses and clerical people. Most of the time we can make an appointment with the same doctor each time, however, in an emergency, we have to take whichever doctor is available.

The GPs are the gatekeepers for the rest of the system providing prescriptions, arranging for hospital treatment and so forth.  A couple of years ago I needed an operation on my right hand. It was arranged that I would have the procedure at the hospital in nearby Hereford. Our small, local hospital doesn’t have the facilities for surgery. Anyway, during the pre-operation tests they found out that I had a minor heart problem that needed to be fixed before the operation could be done. My GP was the one who took charge of all this. The short version is that the heart issue was sorted out and the operation was a success. Then I had to have a series of work sessions with physiotherapists at both the Hereford and Leominster hospitals. The only thing I had to pay for was the parking at the Hereford hospital; parking in Leominster is free.

If you’re old like we are (over sixty) all your prescriptions are free as well. This also applies to people who receive certain social benefits. If you don’t qualify for free prescriptions, you pay a fixed price for each prescription regardless of the drug being prescribed. We just take the GP’s prescription to the pharmacy and it’s free. I have three renewable prescriptions that I renew on surgery’s web site. It gets passed automatically to my nominated pharmacy and two days later it’s there.

The dental services work a little like prescriptions except they’re not free for elders. There is a fixed list of prices for various dental procedures that are much lower than the private sector. I even get my glasses paid for by the NHS.

Right now the new Conservative led British government is trying to reorganize the NHS and reduce its cost. Budgets are being cut, but the reorganization plans have had to be diluted after serious public and media objections.

What do I think about the NHS? I think it’s great! Sometimes it’s a little slow and bureaucratic, but, hey, I’ll put up with some small inconvenience for all this free service. There are other ways to provide social medicine; the more common way in continental Europe is to build the system on subsidized, one-source health insurance run or supervised by the government. These plans provide excellent healthcare as well. If I were living in the US, I would be campaigning for some kind of social medicine. It’s hard for me to justify an advanced country whose citizens don’t receive these benefits.

Morality and the Riots

There’s a phone-in program on right now on BBC Radio 4 on the subject of what should be done to prevent the recurrence of the recent riots in the future. One of the themes that has come up frequently in the last week, and has been emphasised on this program as well, is the idea that the people at the top of the society behave as if they are entitled to whatever they want. Politicians, bankers and the Murdock newspapers are usually cited as examples of the concept. Regular rules of society don’t apparently apply to them. The conclusion is that, with these bad examples in front of them, kids from poor neighbourhoods say to themselves, “Why not take what we want too.”

There may very well be some truth to this theory. My problem with it, though, is that it picks out specific, defined sub-groups of the general society as behaving as if there are no rules for their own behaviour. One of the things that surprised me when I first came to live in England was the pervasive disrespect for rules of any kind. Having previously seen the UK from an outsider’s point-of-view, I came here expecting to find a very polite, orderly, queuing-up sort of society. What I found instead was that, except for bus stops and supermarkets, queuing is not so common.

In a pub or shop it is often necessary to demand your turn to be served in pretty direct terms. Otherwise other customers will just keep pushing to the front. On the road the experience is the same, only scary. During the day, delivery vans commonly park in no-parking zones and block half the street. It always seems to me that the courteous and logical thing to do is take turns passing the illegally parked van. But that is not the way it works. If one car heading in one direction around the van is successful, all the cars behind it will close up the gaps and follow. Cars heading in the other direction don’t have a chance to pass on.

Staying on the subject of driving, speed cameras have become very common around England. They’re a cheaper way to enforce speed limits than having cops do the job. The funny thing is that most people here feel strongly that the cameras are unfair, unsporting really. The idea is that since there aren’t enough cops in cars to patrol the roads properly, drivers are entitled to drive at whatever speed suits them.

The conclusion that I draw from all this (and a lot more in the same vein) is that it’s not just kids, bankers and newspaper editors who aren’t subject to the rules of society. A significant portion of the general population feels the same way. Of course, there are issues of degrees. Most of the population isn’t rioting, but there is a continuum from trivial to serious of exactly the same mind set.

Measuring Things

I read once that Thomas Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to get the new United States to adopt a kind decimal measuring system. And I recall that, during Lincoln’s presidency, the US Congress passed a law or resolution making the metric system the official measurements of the country. That didn’t seem to take either.

Here in the UK, the business of measuring stuff is a bit different. We have a nice little Skoda Fabia car with a trip computer that calculates, among other things, the average fuel consumption while you’re driving along. I have a lot of fun with this trying to get the most economy from the car. This statistic is displayed in miles-per-gallon. That’s fine with me; I’ve used that measure of fuel economy for most of my life. However, gasoline/petrol is sold here by the litre, so it’s pretty difficult to calculate the cost of driving the car. All our road signs are in miles to the next place of interest. Speed limits are posed in miles-per-hour.

Some years ago, the British government was required under prevailing EU treaties to enact regulations mandating that things would be sold in metric measures. But, they negotiated a couple of exceptions: milk and beer would still be sold in multiples of pints. Now in most shops and supermarkets everything is labelled with both metric and imperial weights and measures.

For a while, the BBC weather forecasters were moving away from reporting temperature in Fahrenheit degrees and rainfall in inches. These days, they report temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius degrees and rain comes in inches as well as millimetres.

That reminds me of another curiosity: in Britain there are no centimetres. Everything is measured in millimetres. I wonder if there isn’t a little know government department somewhere that has responsibility for deciding what measurements we use. And the civil servants in this department don’t think that Brits are capable of understanding that centimetres are ten times as big as millimetres and metres are one hundred centimetres long.

By the way, I weigh 95 kilos or about fifteen stone.

Plumbing

Living here you’re surrounded by old, historical stuff: castles, thatched cottages, Roman ruins and plumbing. Sooner or later, I knew, I’d have to write something about English plumbing. Here’s what I've learned about the history of English plumbing:

·         The pressure in the public water system used to be unreliable, sometimes strong and other times weak or non-existent. So if you opened a tap you were always in for a surprise.

·         Because of the problem with the pressure, a work-around had to found and it was. Every house has a cistern in the attic space with a ball valve connected directly to the mains water supply. The tank fills up when the pressure is good and the ball valve shuts off the supply when the tank is full.

·         The cistern has to have a lid on it to guard against dirt, bugs, etc., but the lid doesn’t seem to work very well. These tanks, over time, tend to attract dead mice or birds, insects of various kinds and mould infections.

·         All the taps in the house are connected to the cistern in the attic, except for one. As the water from the cistern can’t be guaranteed safe to drink, the cold water tap in the kitchen sink is not hooked up to the cistern, but draws directly from the mains water supply. So, we’re only supposed to drink water from the cold tap in the kitchen.

·         When single spout kitchen taps became fashionable, there was an obvious problem: The hot water comes ultimately from the potentially contaminated supply in the roof. But, once more, a work-around was found. All single spout kitchen taps in the UK have a partition all down the middle of the spout to keep the clean cold water separate from dodgy hot supply.

The two pictures tell almost the whole story about British toilets.

I said "almost" because of something I saw on the web site of B&Q, a big chain of DIY stores here in England. They are now selling Fluidmaster Toilet Cistern, Valve & Pushbutton Kit to replace all that machinery in the toilet tank; rather like the toilets in the rest of the modern world.

Driving on the Other Side

I just realised that I’ve been driving a year longer in cars with right hand controls than with the wheel on the left. I’ve never had much of a problem switching back and forth between the two arrangements. When I drove a rented car in England for the first time, everything was okay except that I had a tendency to look up and to the right for the central rear-view mirror. That issue went away a long time ago.

Sometimes I wonder if there is any aspect of the arrangement of controls in a car that’s inherently better than the other. The only thing I’ve come up with is that, as the majority of drivers are right handed, maybe it’s better to use the left hand on the gear shift and keep the right one free to steer, but I’m not too sure about that theory.

However, it is a bit stranger to drive a right hand control car in a country that drives on the right or left on left, if you see what I mean. Susan and I drive to Belgium three or four times a year to visit friends and relatives. Everything’s fine driving down to the Euro-tunnel or the Dover ferry docks. But, diving out into France we’re now on the wrong side of the car or the road, depending on your point-of-view. Surprisingly, this isn’t too bad. The only real issue is passing other cars and trucks when you can’t see around them from the driver’s side. On the Freeway/AutoRoute/ Motorway/Autobahn (FAMA), where there’s plenty of room and the traffic is divided, even this isn’t very taxing. In towns and cities a lot of the streets are one-way so that’s pretty easy as well.

For a few years, we had a Fiat Spider that I’d bought in the States and dragged around a few countries. This model was never made in a right hand control version. So we drove around Warwickshire, where we lived, on the wrong side. Now, this was a little more challenging. In those days, there weren’t any FAMA’s in Warwickshire and the main towns, Stratford, Leamington, Warwick, don’t have very many one-way streets. So, the whole county was pretty much a no-passing zone for us.

So I’ve concluded that switching sides of the road and sides of the car just isn’t a very big deal most of the time.

Americans in Britain

The Office of National Statistics here estimated that there were about 189,000 American citizens living in the UK in 2009, or around one third of one per cent of the total population. I noticed this long discussion in the Evening Standard blog titled Why do Britons Hate Americans so much? Just about the whole range of opinion on the subject is expressed in these contributions, except one: Americans are stupid.

Back in the 1980’s I heard a phone-in program on the BBC Radio WM. I can’t even remember now what it was about, but I do remember an exchange where the BBC moderator disagreed with a caller’s statement. At one point, the caller said, “… Americans are stupid.” The BBC host interrupted him saying, “Yes, but…”, that is "Yes, that’s common knowledge" ; "But, I don’t agree with whatever else it is you’re saying."

Jeremy Clarkson, the Top Gear guy, used to have another program on the BBC, a sort of variety thing. He sat at a desk with a big world map on the wall behind him. All the countries of the world were shown with one exception: where the USA would normally appear, the map was blank.

The Falklands War

The Falkland Islands, Las Malvinas in Spanish, lie off the coast of Argentina in the South Atlantic several thousand miles from the UK. The islands are a British Overseas Territory, which I think means Colony, but maybe not. (See Fuzzy Boundaries below, 1 August 2011.) In 1982, when the Argentinian army invaded the Islands, I was living in Venezuela and working for a Venezuelan company, but at the beginning of April that year I was in London on a business trip.

 It was a convenient time for both the Argentinian and British governments to have a little war to distract attention for their low popularity figures. On top of that, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s husband, Denis, was a major shareholder in the Falkland Islands Company. As soon as the news broke in London about the invasion, the whole country went a little crazy. In the railway stations there were blackboard signs announcing the immediate cancellation of all military leave. Mobilization for a counter-invasion force to depart was completed in just four days and the task force sailed for the South Atlantic.

I had flown back to Caracas on the day after the invasion, and was attending a cocktail party with work colleagues the next night. Naturally, the Argentinian action in Las Malvinas was just about the only topic of conversation that night. Venezuela and Venezuelans were very much on the side of their fellow South Americans and the invasion was seen by most people as anti-colonial in nature. The general feeling was that the British task force was a bluff and that the Brits wouldn’t really bother with fighting a war over these far-away islands.

At that party I was a lone voice arguing that most Brits really liked a good fight and a significant minority had to make due with Saturday night brawls in the clubs and pubs. Furthermore, I said, Thatcher wasn’t bluffing; this was her chance to prove she had bigger balls than President Galtieri in Buenos Aires. It worked. Thatcher had approval ratings in the low 30’s before the invasion and she won the next election with a comfortable majority. And, I don’t know for sure, but I guess Dennis’s share holdings probably turned out alright as well.

Our Quiet Street

There’s not very much vehicle traffic on our street. It’s a dead-end so most of the cars are local residents or people parking here to walk to the shops in town. The street is three blocks long with a sidewalk on one side all the way to the end. Where the street stops, a grassed footpath connects our neighbourhood to other houses further down the path.

It’s a walk of two or three minutes from our end of the street to the main shopping area of Leominster. With the footpath the street is a convenient shortcut for people to get from home to the shops and a lot of people take advantage of it. The strange thing is that the majority of these pedestrians don’t use the sidewalk, but walk in the middle of the street instead. Some of them move over to the side when they hear a car coming and others don’t.

What’s up with that?

Yanks

Last night I was telling Susan that I wanted to write something about the British meaning of the word Yank since I had used it in the title of this blog. I mentioned that yank or Yankee was a pejorative term here. She said that it used to be that way, but you don’t really hear it any more.

I think the prejudice is still here, but I guess it must have a new name that everyone is too polite to say in front of me.

Another Nice Cop Story

December, 2009 brought us a lot of snow with blocked roads and the whole winter wonderland thing. When the main roads were cleared a bit, Susan needed something from a shop in Ludlow and I volunteered to drive up and get it for her. The drive wasn’t bad, but the parking lot in the center of Ludlow was a real mess with about a foot of snow all chewed up from the cars going in and out.

After my errand, as I was walking back to the car, I reached into my jacket pocket for my keys, but my pocket was empty. I went through the pantomime of patting all my other pockets; no keys. I guessed that they might have fallen out of my pocket when I pulled out my gloves, so I went back to the car and started looking around on the ground. Of course, I couldn’t see anything in the chewed up snow of the parking lot. Then I retraced my steps to the shop scoping the sidewalks on the way. I checked in the shop in case I’d dropped them there. Still no luck.

I’d have to take the bus back home, borrow Susan’s keys and return on the bus to Ludlow, a round trip of a couple of hours. Fortunately, we have old people’s free bus passes. This brought up another problem: I’d only paid for an hour in the parking lot and there was no attendant there. I phoned the Shropshire Council offices in Shrewsbury and explained the situation, gave them my car registration number and it was all arranged that my car would not  be towed away or get fined.

I finally got back and collected the car with no problems.

The next day, a Sunday, I got a phone call from the West Mercia Police station in Ludlow. Some good citizen had found my keys in the parking lot and turned them in to the cop shop. I drove right back to Ludlow; went to the police station; identified myself and got the keys back.

But, I asked, how did they know the keys belonged to me and how did they get my phone number. Here comes the cool part. On my key ring I keep one of those little tags from the supermarket for their customer loyalty program. The cops had called the local Tesco and gave them the number from my tag and got my name, but the Tesco manager wouldn’t give out my address or phone number for confidentiality reason. They knew where the keys had been found and called the council office to see if they knew anything and got my registration number. From this they contacted the Vehicle Licence records office in Swansea, Wales, and got my address. The on-line phone book gave them my home phone number.

Can you believe it, all this to return a set of keys!? Nice cops.

Community Garden

Susan has volunteered for the last couple of years with a local charity called ECHO helping to build a community vegetable garden. ECHO has a range of activities that support local people with learning disabilities. The garden is one of these. Four ECHO participants and a small team of local gardeners have made what was a derelict piece of land into a pleasant and productive garden that is an asset for the whole community.

In the last few months, there have been vandalism and thefts from the garden. God knows what kind of people are doing this stuff, but everybody in the neighbourhood thinks it’s pretty disgusting.

Last night at about three in the morning, I was woken up by some noises in the street outside our house. I looked out the front window and saw two police cars and a couple of firemen rolling up their hoses. I could see lights and hear activity down the path from the end of our street leading to the garden. A little while later a fire engine backed out of the path and left the area.

This morning I walked down the path to see where the fire had been. Someone had burned down the garden shed, which in turn destroyed a number of evergreen trees on a neighbour’s side of the fence. The fire destroyed some of the vegetable beds and melted a plastic compost bin and a nearby plastic water butt. On my way back to tell Susan what had happened, a police car drove up and the cop called me over. He was here to find out who was in charge of the garden and write up the arson report; nice young Community Relations Officer.  Susan and I got him fixed up contact info for ECHO and away he went.

It was not a very good morning, but the cops around here are pretty good.

The Battle of New Orleans

Here’s a curious little story about the teaching of history in this country that is so steeped in its own history. Sometime, way back in the 1970’s, Susan and I were discussing American history when I made some remark about the War of 1812. Susan, who is well educated and very well read, had never heard of it. I explained what happened and hit the highlights: the siege of Baltimore and the writing of the Star Spangled Banner, the burning of the White House in Washington and the battle of New Orleans and Andy Jackson. We speculated that this war had been left out of her education because the British didn’t win. Two in a row against the Yanks would have been would have a bit of education too far.

According to Wikipedia, “Johnny Horton's 1959 version is the best-known recording of the [Battle of New Orleans], which omits the mild expletives and much of the historical references of the original. Horton also recorded an alternative version for release in British Commonwealth countries which did not have unfavourable lyrics concerning the British: the word "British" was replaced with "Rebels", along with a few other differences.” Lonny Donegan, of Skiffle Group fame, also recorded the song in England using almost the same lyrics as Horton’s American version.

Now days, the song comes up on Radio 4 every couple years, and guess what, it’s always the Horton British version with Rebels instead of British who ran though the brambles.

Fuzzy Boundaries

One thing that’s always struck me as odd about Britain is that it’s not very well defined. Geographically the boundaries are, at best fairly fuzzy. For example, the islands surrounding mainland Britain are sort of British, but, in some cases, not really. The Scilly Isles off the Southwest tip of England are definitely part of England; in fact, they’re included in the county of Cornwall. On the other hand, the Chanel Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and a few more rocks, speak English, are loyal to the queen, use the pound as their currency, drink English beer in English pubs and allow the government in London to set foreign and defence policy. But, they have their own local government and legal system. The Isle of Mann in the Irish Sea is in a similar situation. By the way, the Manx parliament is older than the British one. I won’t even begin to get involved with Gibraltar.

Scotland and Northern Ireland are also in the sort-of-but-not-really category. For a while now Scotland has had its own government in Edinburgh that gets more and more autonomy as time goes by. And since the last election, the Scottish National Party (SNP) has had an outright majority in the Scottish parliament. It is the expressly stated policy of the SNP to hold a referendum in Scotland on independence, well, sort of independence.

Northern Ireland also has its own quasi government, but a lot of the decisions are made in London and the Irish government in Dublin has an informal veto on some things. Half its inhabitants want to be Irish citizens and the other half prefers being British.

My theory is that all this fuzziness has to do with two main things:

•        The first is imperial history. When the English/Norman kings consolidated their control in London, places like Wales and the Northern half of England were viewed as colonies of a country that existed primarily in the Southeast of the island. William the Conqueror (also known as the First and the Bastard) even sterilized a strip of farmland right across the middle of England to separate the North from the South. The echoes of these attitudes can be heard today. Everyone talks about Britain or England as if they represented a real country when the fact is that most of it is really a colony of London and the surrounding counties.
•          The second is the fact that the Brits never got around to defining their idea of nation and government in a constitution. So, each incumbent government makes up the rules as they go along.

The result of this history is a sort of country that continually redefines, or fails to redefine, itself.

Europe is the other big problem. The UK is sort of, but not quite, a member of the European Union. In normal discourse, the word “Europe” is used to designate a foreign place on the other side of the English Channel. And no British Government is crazy enough to join the common currency, the Euro. On the other hand, successive British governments have signed up to most of the treaties that make up the EU. The result is that a lot of laws and regulations that have effect in Britain originate in Brussels and the court of last appeal is a European court.

Most of the tabloid press and a healthy proportion of the voters are definitely anti-Europe. On the other hand, the biggest proportion of British exports goes to other European countries. So, is the UK a European country or not? Emotionally it’s definitely not; economically and legally it is. The whole idea of Britain in Europe is a bit fuzzy actually.

Ludlow, Shropshire

The other evening there was a program on BBC2 TV about the town of Ludlow. It’s a lovely little town in South Shropshire about twelve miles from where we live. Every Wednesday there is a market in the square in front of the castle entrance. Ludlow also has a Tesco supermarket across the street from the train station.

Susan likes to buy her lunch from a woman she has gotten to know who has a stall in the market. So on Wednesdays we drive up to Ludlow to go to the market and do the weekly shopping at the Tesco. From there we drive a couple of miles out of town to the Ludlow Food Centre, a very good butcher and deli. It makes a nice day out and sometimes we stop for lunch and a drink at either the Charlton Arms Hotel by the river or the Church Inn, a super pub near the square.

There are only two drawbacks in this otherwise very pleasant day. The first is the illegal parking, mostly by delivery vans that jams up the traffic and makes a mess of the streets. The second problem derives from the peculiar habit of English people, especially English tourists, to walk in the middle of the street. In Ludlow some of the streets are quite narrow as you would expect in an old town like this, but there are pedestrian sidewalks provided on every street. Still there are almost always people strolling down the middle of these streets where the cars are meant to be.

I tend to shout a lot.

Electricity

Anybody coming to Britain from the USA for the first time has to be impressed by the size of the electric plugs. For normal, everyday use, these plugs must be the biggest in the world. I’m not exaggerating; the extension cord in the photo with four plugs in it is about a foot long. The reason for super-size electrical stuff is a little obscure and probably historical as well. This is England after all. At first I thought it had to do with the 240 volt current in the UK, like those big plugs on electric ovens in the States that use 220 volts.

But that can’t be right. In continental Europe the normal household current is 220 volts and that’s now the standard in the UK as well. The second picture shows the charger for our German electric toothbrush. The plug is about an inch accost the widest part. So what’s going on here? My theory is that there is a disproportionate fear of electricity in this country. The reason the plugs a so big is what’s on the inside. All the regular plugs have the capacity for connecting for three wires: hot, neutral and ground or earth as it’s called here. Furthermore, they’re all fused internally for 13 Amps. The extension cord is also fused, the wall outlet is fused and there is, of course, a circuit breaker in the main electric service box. That’s four fuses between me and the electricity company.

Fear of electricity? In the UK it’s prohibited to have anything electric in the bathroom. Maybe sometime in the early days of household electricity thousands of unsuspecting souls were dispatched when they took live toasters with themselves into the bathtub.  For that reason the charger for our electric toothbrush is in the kitchen rather than the bathroom. In fairness, I should mention that it’s okay to have a special outlet for electric shavers because it uses a lower voltage.

I’m guessing here, but it’s feasible that at some point people wanted to get rid of candles in the bathroom and replace them with the same electric lights they had in the rest of the house. But there was an obvious conflict with the no-electric-stuff rules. The clever solution was to allow electric lights in the bathroom provided there was no switch. But, since always-on and always-off were both less than desirable, another way had to be found. And those cunning early British regulators came up with the solution: if the switch was on the ceiling where nobody in the bathtub could reach it, the chance of electrocution was pretty much nil. Now here’s the really impressive part: as no one could reach the switch in the ceiling, why not tie a piece of string to it. That way anyone standing in the bath could pull the cord and turn on the light, but since the string in not a conductor of electricity, everybody is safe. In our bathroom today there is a light switch on the ceiling with a string hanging from it and it works. I’ve yet to be electrocuted in our bathroom.