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.

Immigration and Immigrants

Susan and I had a country pub for a while, sort of a last adventure before retirement, but that whole story is for another day. Some of our regulars were not really exemplars of the liberal thinking end of English society. They read and believed (!) the tabloid papers. And for the tabloids, when there was no royal wedding or divorce going on or any celebrity nonsense to write about, a perennial fall-back story was how immigrants were the source of all crime and mayhem in the country and besides they were only here to get the unemployment benefits and anyway they take all the jobs away from the otherwise hard working Brits.

Thus immigration was a regular topic of conversation and debate (well not really much debate) in the bar of our pub. One evening, the complaints were targeted on the Polish immigrants who, under EU treaties, had a perfect right to live and work in the UK just as British people had a right to live and work in Poland. I confess that after months of working behind the bar and listening to this racist diatribe, I was well and truly fed up. So this particular evening, I interrupted the flow and said, “Hey, wait just a minute, I’m an immigrant!”

The regulars almost chorused, “No you’re not!”

“Sure I am!”

“No you’re not.”

The point that I was missing was that someone who spoke English, had a pale complexion and was the landlord of an English village pub couldn’t possibly be an Immigrant.

The Envy of the Rest of the World

On the whole England is a pretty nice place to live. In our neighbourhood we have an active Neighbourhood Watch scheme that gives us chance to get to know each other and get to know our local cops, which can be a handy thing. As a retired guy, I’ve got time on my hands and have become something of a mister fix-it in our street. Mainly I get asked to fix electronic stuff like computers that don’t want to do email anymore or tuning TV sets and VCR’s when the digital switchover happened. Well, it keeps me out of trouble.

One of the things we enjoy at home and in the car is the BBC’s Radio 4. The station has a lot in common with NPR in the States: news, discussion, documentaries and drama. It has comedy too, but, with a couple of exceptions, it’s not very funny. A particular joy for me is the frequent opportunity to shout at the radio when the news presenters ask stupid questions or the interviewees, mostly politicians, give stupid answers.

One oddity that British interviewees on Radio 4 share with Texans is claiming that everything here is bigger or better than anywhere else. I first began to tune in to this phenomenon back in the ‘90’s when two or three times a week, for reasons that I can’t remember now, some politician or other would state categorically that London’s Heathrow airport was the biggest or busiest in the world. It wasn’t, of course. Both Atlanta and Chicago O’Hare handled more passengers and Dallas-Fort Worth and Hong Kong’s new airport covered more geography. Somebody must have written in to Radio 4 to point out the oft repeated error because after a couple of years, interviewees started qualifying the claim with more and more complicated statistics, like Heathrow had more take-offs and landings than any other two-runway international airport. Finally the consensus settled on The Most International Flights. For all I know this could have been true at the time. I don’t think it’s true anymore, but I could be wrong again.

Whenever there is a political scandal or something goes seriously off course with the government, the standard answer is that “the British parliament is The Envy of the Rest of the World!” One time a junior government minister in the Transport Department was being interviewed on the morning news, the Today Program, about a story related to the growing problem of brake failures on big trucks and causing accidents on the motorways. The guy actually said that everyone knows that British lorries have the best brakes in the world.

I think there must be a secret training school for politicians, probably hidden away in the Welsh hills, where they all have to go for a two-week course in stock answers for interviews on Radio 4; something roughly similar, I imagine, to the old KGB secret language schools where Soviet spies learned to speak English with an American accent. The final exam is most likely a mock Radio 4 interview about break failures.

The Electrification of Ebrington

One of the regulars at the Ebrington Arms was a wonderful old guy named Tim. Tim had lived his whole life in the village and had spent his working life on the farms in the immediate area. One evening he was telling me about the village when he was a young man, Just after the Second World War, there was gas generating plant for the village where the cricket ground is now.

Tim went on to tell me about the arrival of electricity in Ebrington. The first house to have this new luxury was the manor house of Lord Ebrington. By dint of stringing a cable from the manor house to the pub, the Ebrington Arms became the second house in the village to get electric lights. This happened in 1949.

I was born in Indiana in 1941 and have never lived in a house without electricity.

Berkeley Square, the White Cliffs of Dover and All That

We used to live in a pretty village in Gloucestershire (GLOS-ti-sheer) called Ebrington. A typical village in the Cotswold Hills, it had a fair number of honey-colored stone, thatched cottages and one main winding road down the middle. Ebrington is located a couple of miles up the hill from the popular little town of Chipping Campden. All of this makes for a very nice place for tourists to visit.

The village has one pub, the Ebrington Arms, that in those days was a bit run down but still charming (it’s spruced up nicely now.) During our years there, we spent a lot of time in this pub. It was one of the social centers of village life, the other being the church. Now the landlord of the pub, a nice guy named Gareth, had previously been a professional musician and I guess that was the reason that there was an electric organ in the bar. Nobody ever played the organ; it just sat on one side gathering dust.

One of the clever things, from a business point-of-view, that Gareth arranged was to pay a small gratuity to coach drivers with tour companies out of Stratford-on-Avon to bring their coach loads of tourists, mostly Americans, out to the Ebrington Arms for a drink in the evening. This arrangement was a win-win-win: Gareth sold a lot of drinks to the tourists, the tourist gat to experience a nice country pub and the drivers had a few extra quid in their pockets. And, there was another win: the locals taking up all the stools at the bar had a great time teasing and joking with the tourists. It was all good, friendly fun. I was sometimes introduced as Ebrington’s own token Yank.

On summer evening a coach pulled up outside the pub and offloaded 20 or 25 American tourists. Once they got inside and everyone has a drink, the usual jollity got under way. But this particular evening something was different. One of the Americans noticed the organ, opened the lid and turned the thing on. It turned out that he played the piano and this organ wasn’t that challenging. This guy started playing old songs from the WWII era like A Nightingale Sings in Berkeley Square and Blue Bird Over the White Cliffs of Dover and most of the rest of the tourists gathered round and to sing the old songs. They were having a wonderful old time. Both Susan and I later said that we recognized the scene from the old war movies with the gallant pilots drinking and singing in their leather jackets before going out the next morning to die.

Of course, none of the locals joined in the singing. Nobody had ever heard the organ being played and singing in a pub was not something that normal people do.

After an hour or so of the fun, it was time for the Americans to get back on their coach and move on to the next experience organized by the driver. The last to leave was a well groomed, middle aged guy who stopped by the bar to say goodbye and thank you to Gareth. “I can’t wait to get back home to,” he named a town in Iowa or Kansas, “and tell the neighbors about our evening in a real English pub.”

Place Names

It’s not uncommon to hear people here laugh at the way tourists, especially American tourists, pronounce the names of counties and towns in England (Welsh names don’t count because they are impossible to pronounce anyway.)  And I have to confess that I sometimes think it’s funny too. The problem seems to stem from literal way Americans read letters. In English place names a lot of letters and whole syllables don’t count. For example, I live in a small town called Leominster. To the innocent tourist, it might be sensible to refer to the place as Lee-o-min-ster, thinking that the place was probably named after somebody named Leo. The people who live here call it LEM-ster.

Leominster is in the county of Herefordshire (pronounced HAIR-i-ford-sheer) where the hereford cows come from. That's the same as her-furd cows in the US.

The other day I heard on the radio about a charitable program supported by Dolly Parton to give books to young kids in order to form the habit reading at an early age. To promote the program in England, she visited a town in Yorkshire called Rotherham. One of the first things she said in a public speech was something like, “I’ve been practicing and I hope I’ve got it right. This place is ROTH-rm.” Good for you Dolly, you nailed it first time out!

OK, maybe somebody tipped Dolly off about the funny way Americans pronounce English place names. Fair enough, I say. It worked. In Rotherham the audience cheered and applauded that line. But the interesting thing for me is that the place name confusion is reciprocal. This is curiously obvious with news reporters and commentators on the BBC radio and TV all of whom travel in the States and some live there. The list of consistently mispronounced US place names includes Tucson (Tuck-Sun) and Houston (HOO-stun.) And I suspect that I am the only one laughing.

By way of a foot note, I should point out that not everyone in England agrees on the correct way to pronounce names. In Warwickshire (the second w is silent) there is a small town called Alcester. Some people say All-ster and others prefer Al-ces-ter. Or how about Shrewsbury in Shropshire. It’s either Shruz-bry or Shroz-bry. Shropshire, by the way, was spelled Salop until it was officially renamed Shropshire in 1980 and the folks that live there are still sometime called Salopians. 

What happened to the R?

There are, of course, a great number of differences between the American version of the English language and the British version.  One fascinating one is the way the letter R is treated in speech.  Most Americans pronounce it fairly strongly, similar, in fact, to the way it’s pronounced in the South West of England. In London and the surrounding counties it’s more often pronounced as an H in American. This is also true for people who speak with RP (Received Pronunciation), received, that is, from a certain type of expensive education.

Once, when I first started to visit England on business trips, I was listening to the radio in my hotel room when I heard an advert for a brand of soap call Pears (like the fruit.) At first I thought it was an ad for Pez, those little rectangular candies that come with their own dispenser. So “park” comes out as “pahk” and so on.

After a while I got used to this and don’t even hear it anymore unless I’m deliberately listening for it. But, there is one R related phenomenon that I always hear. In any country, I suppose, there is some small proportion of the population who simply cannot pronounce R’s so they sound instead more like W’s. But in the English media, there seem to be a disproportionately large percentage of people with this affliction who, as nearly as I can tell, have no other signs of speech impediments. I can only conclude that the missing R is an affectation. I have yet to discover why anyone would want to pretend to have this particular impediment. Maybe I’m “wong” and sometime in the past ”thewe” was a genetic mutation that made it impossible for a lot of media people to pronounce R’s.

The Kettle

Like just about everybody in the UK, we have an electric kettle to boil water for tea and coffee. Ours has the name of a venerable English brand of household electrical goods, as a good kettle should. The biggest advance in kettle design in the last few decades is a sort of portability. Most kettles now sit on a base that plugs into the wall while the kettle itself can be picked up off the base and taken where it’s needed. Of course, this means that you can take the kettle to the sink to fill it up with water.

It’s the filling up part that makes our kettle special. Most modern kettles have some kind of glass or plastic window or visible tube on the outside so that you can easily see how much water is left in it or, when filling the thing, you don’t fill it past the maximum safe water level. Ours doesn’t. The body of our kettle is a sort of brushed steel with a black plastic lid and handle, but no window or tube.

I try to be conscientious about safety things around the house, especially electrical things, and most especially of all, about electrical things that have water in them. Consequently, I have always tried not to over-fill electric kettles. Our kettle has a maximum level mark like all the others; I suppose it’s required by the kettle safety regulations. But, unlike most others (all others in my experience), the “MAX” mark on our kettle is on the inside. And not just on the inside, but on the inside opposite the spout on the same side as the black plastic handle. So, think about it, when you take the kettle off the base to the sink to fill, you have to look over the open lid and back towards your own hand holding the handle while it’s filling up with water from the tap. And it’s dark in there.

Since we got this kettle less than a year ago, I’ve been wondering what kind of idiot designs a kettle where you can’t see the maximum safe fill level without contorting yourself into an awkward yoga position and even then, unless you shine a light directly into it, it’s too dark in there to see the mark.

What' this about?

When I moved from Brussels  to London, my then secretary gave me a dictionary, a British-American, American-British dictionary. The most interesting thing about this dictionary was its size; it was something like 150 pages long. In some ways that book has served as a convenient metaphor of my experience of living in England: the extent of the differences are often surprising.

For a some time I've been thinking about writing about my 25 odd years of living in England. I first came here to live in 1976 and since then have had three breaks with moves to Venezuela, California and North Carolina and always returning to Britain. My intention is to describe life in the country, particularly for American friends and family, to comment on events here and talk about some of the good and bad stuff.

A little history is in order. My first visit to England was on a vacation in 1966. I landed at London Heathrow airport and took a bus into central London and found hotel. The next morning, I picked up a pre-purchased Sunbeam Alpine, my first sports car, from a dealer in Piccadilly. The plan was to drive the new car around Europe for three weeks then ship it back to the States, thus it was configured with left-hand controls. Driving the new car out into London traffic with the wheel on the wrong side was something of an adventure for me and for the policeman I nearly hit in the first couple of minutes. Anyway, I was able to get the car back to the hotel and eventually down to the ferry at Dover, a hundred miles away. The rest of the trip is for another day or another blog.

My next encounter with The country was in 1969 on a trip in the middle of my two-year MBA program. I was luck to get one of three fellowships that year from the University of Washington called Journey for Perspective. Along with MBA students from four other West coast business schools and a few faculty, we were sent around the world to study and compare economic and business systems in countries from Japan to the UK and quite a few in between. When we got to London, we met with former Prime Minister Alec  to Douglas Hume in the House of Lords and J. Paul Getty, then one of the world's richest men, at his country estate outside of London. Phew, talk about pissing with the tall dogs!

During the next few years, I made a fair number of business trips to London while working for Boise Cascade's International Finance department in Boise, ID, and Paris, France, and Chase Manhattan in Brussels. In 1976 I was managing a small consulting company, a subsidiary of Chase in Brussels when the bank decided to move the operation to London and me with it. Working abroad for an American bank has a big advantage, subsidized housing. Because of this I was able to live in a comfortable, four-story town house near Holland Park in Kensington. I worked first in the City of London, England's equivalent of Wall Street and later in Berkeley Square in the West End.7. Nice!

I should say that my partner at this time, and my wife now, is English. From 1978 to 1982, I had the good fortune to work as the corporate Treasurer of Cerveceria Polar in Caracas, Venezuela. The job was terrific but the life style, especially for my partner was pretty difficult. So, we moved back to England.

In Caracas I had been contacted by representatives of the University of Aston in Birmingham, England, who were recruiting for their doctoral programs in business. I was able to reach an arrangement with the Venezuelan company to carry on as an advisor/consultant in financial management, particularly investment strategy for the pension fund. with this source of income secured we bought a five-hundred-year-old house in a village near Stratford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, and I signed up for the doctoral program at Aston, a half hour train commute. It was in this village that I discovered for the first time that there was a good deal of prejudice against Americans in rural England.

After a couple of years, the program at Aston proved to be less than expected and later an opportunity came up to start up a new consulting company in Los Angeles with an old friend from my Caracas days. So, it was off to sunny Southern California in 1988. It turned out that the only work we got was my own clients from before and |I was just splitting my fees with somebody else. So, after 18 months, back to England we go, this time to a another small village not too far from Stratford. This place was in the North Cotswold hills in the county of Gloucestershire and another old house. We had an idyllic life here; the house was great, the village pretty and very friendly and the pub had good beer. We could have stayed here forever. In fact we stayed for  ten years 'till we ran out of money.

Hoping that the vigorous US economy would provide some job opportunities for a n older guy, we moved back to the States, this time to North Carolina where I had some family. It turned out that we were wrong about the job scene, but one of my sons wanted to start a dude ranch in the Great Smoky mountains so I agreed to help out with the planning and financial side. We worked on the ranch for four years, but without our own capital, we could'n't pull it off. What now? Back to England of course.

We decided to take over a country pub in Herefordshire.