Young Nation, My Foot

I was getting upset about the Americanisation of Britain this week after someone of a similar background to my own misspelled the medical term anaemic in the American way, ‘anemic’.  This sort of thing seems to be happening at an alarming rate.  As part of the fallout from the same incident, it was even mentioned that I was 'stuck in the Dark Ages' and that this is progress don't you know; that we ought to bring Britain kicking and screaming into the future, with this young, hip superpower by our side.

He doesn't look so young and hip to me.

America is almost universally supposed to be a young, forward-thinking country, lacking our medieval vestiges because in the Middle Ages it wasn’t even there yet.  It was only in 1776 that the legal separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain occurred, so the little darlings are only 236 years old.  To hell with Gangnam; let's celebrate it George Washington style and have a double ration of rum.  (Take it from me, Washington wasn’t the first British colonel to go mad in the wilderness, and he certainly won’t be the last.)

However, it has recently come to my attention that America is lying about his age.

If you ignore the Vikings, which I admit is often a hard thing to do around my house, John Cabot, the Anglo-Italian navigator and explorer, discovered North America on 24 June 1497 under the commission of Henry VII of England.

Most people forget this happened.  True, Cabot did not advance 'beyond the shooting distance of a crossbow', made no contact with the natives, took on fresh water, raised the Venetian and Papal banners, claimed the land for the King of England (whilst, of course, recognising the religious authority of the Roman Catholic Church – Protestantism would not get invented for another twenty years) and buggered off to explore the coast on his way home to Bristol.

Then, he was horribly overshadowed by someone else.

I'd imagine you've all heard of Christopher Columbus, who completed four round-trip voyages between Spain and the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1503 under the sponsorship of the Crown of Castile.  During his first voyage in 1492, Colón (as his name was actually spelled) landed in the Bahamas archipelago, and then over the course of three more voyages he visited the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, and Central America, claiming them for the Spanish Empire.

Apparently, for the emerging United States, John Cabot’s English and (posthumously) Canadian connections made him a poor national hero, and so the veneration of Columbus in America took wing from colonial times onwards.  His adoption as a founding figure of New World nations and the use of the word 'Columbia', or even simply 'Columbus', spread rapidly after the American Revolution.  Numerous cities, towns, counties, streets and plazas are named after him.  He was a candidate for sainthood in 1866, and on the 400th anniversary of his first arrival in the Americas, in 1892, monuments to Columbus were erected throughout the United States and Latin America.

But Cabot's got the hero stance
and EVERYTHING.

Poor show, America.  How can you claim to be a Young Country when you are praising the chap who found your bottom and Colón-ised it in the late 1400s?

So, perhaps America isn't really that young, and the 1490s still certainly qualify as the Middle Ages round my neck of the woods.  But it's still ‘forward-thinking’, surely?  Well…

Because the typical American lived on an isolated farmstead as recently as 1910, most American dialects changed far more slowly than English did in Britain, which was densely urbanised by 1850.  One of the effects of this is that many words, spellings, and punctuation marks now in use in the USA were actually fairly normal for the England of the early 1700s (but not since).

Yea, Verily!

Before 1755, most people used future 'British', future 'American', and future 'incorrect' spellings interchangeably – or according to what language the word was borrowed from, i.e. '-our' for French and '-or' for Latin.  But after Dr Johnson came down firmly on the side of '-our' for all such words, and his US counterpart Noah Webster equally firmly on the side of '-or', this became a new type of national distinction, where before it had just been academic or random.  The spellings 'honor' and 'realize' and the like were commonly used in England in the 17th century when the majority of the Thirteen Colonies were founded.

Today, opinions in Britain, the Commonwealth, and the EU vary on whether '-ize' and '-yze' endings are American Imperialism, or just very, very old-fashioned.  But of course, they are both.  The University of Oxford (in contrast even to Cambridge) does not help the situation, in that it supports the ancient spellings out of respect for ancientness; and its popular dictionaries can be pointed to by Americans to 'prove' that their preferred i.e. 17th-century spelling is more right than ours even in our own country.

It is clearly time for Oxford to put a sock in it and realise that they should spell realise realise.

Even as I write this on my computer, I am faced by those damned red squiggly lines under 'recognising' and 'realise', even though I set it to ‘UK-English’ some time ago.  Even Mr Gates's famous software is subliminally brainwashing us (but I won't tell him that, right now, I've also got a squiggly line under 'honor'.  Surely we can’t all be wrong?).

Mind you, as a personal favour, if he could stop automatically correcting the word 'wellies' to 'willies', I'd be most appreciative.

While we’re on the subject of language, here's another thing I'd like to point out to our younger brother.  The 'county sheriff' riding down the 'highway' with his 'posse' – short for the Latin posse comitatus, 'power of the count(y)' – was a common occurrence in England in the Middle Ages.  The US is rather special for the persistence into recent times of highways and posses, as well as county sheriffs with the equivalent power, and equivalent bad attitude, of our semi-legendary twelfth-century Sheriff of Nottingham.

Speaking of posses and such, England last hanged a man in 1964 and abolished hanging in 1969.  The US, meanwhile, is seemingly not even capable of abolishing it, due to that country's bizarre patchwork of more than fifty different competing systems of law, education, and taxation: an arrangement that makes Mr Colón’s medieval Italy look tightly organised in comparison.  And as to this 'Commander-in-Chief' business, the British head of state last commanded an army in war in 1743 or possibly 1746, and (without meaning any disrespect to Their Majesties) our win/loss ratio has been improving steadily ever since.

At best, America is not younger, but about the same age: we remain strangely susceptible to Patty Duke Show-like visions of the Atlantic Alliance, England and America as each other’s Bizarro World, driving down opposite sides of the road but in the same direction forever, my Laurel to their Hardy, their Heckle to my Jeckle.

But facts are facts.  Our flag and name 'United Kingdom' only date back to New Year's Day 1801, making us younger than America by 24 years, 5 months, and 28 days.

We're also much, much cuter.

 

A Little Less Ray, If You Please

We have just finished watching The Paradise on our updated Philips G22K550 single standard colour television. And by updated, I mean that Henry now holds a Freeview aerial just outside the drawing-room window, instead of an analogue aerial.

The Paradise is, of course, based upon a book, Au Bonheur des Dames by Émile Zola.  The novel is set in a department store in Paris, which was still a new development in the mid-nineteenth century retail world.  The establishment in the book was modelled on M. Aristide Boucicaut’s Le Bon Marché, rumoured to be the first of its kind in the world.  The BBC's latest costume drama relocates the story to North East England, and shortens the name of the shop from Au Bonheur des Dames to The Paradise.  So far, this makes a sort of sense, as the actual world's first department store was Bainbridge's in Newcastle upon Tyne.

My first criticism from day one was that about 96% of the time, the store owner John Moray has his named mispronounced as more-ray, rather than Murray, which sounds particularly odd when applied to an actor from Edinburgh.  But, you see, they kept the French pronunciation of the original character, Octave Mouret (like Merlot.  Yes, it does have a silent 't'.  Claret, on the other hand, does not).

Our protagonist is Denise Lovett (no silent t’s there), who has moved down from Peebles to a fictional or at any rate unnamed north-east town to work in her uncle’s draper's shop.  However, he is unable to provide any work because The Paradise over the road is poaching all the local custom.  So, without further ado Denise (illustrated, above right) walks across the street and takes a job at the very place that is causing her uncle’s ruin.

After much flouncing about, drama, silly class blindness, drama, unconvincing star-crossed lovers, silly accents, drama, unconvincing missing arms, drama, silly tartan suits, and more drama, it ends on a rather abrupt note with lots of loose ends and some bland kissing, as if the writers just got bored of all the drama and stopped writing, a mere eight episodes in.

Don't worry, they've been commissioned for a second series, so all ends will be tied, I'm sure.

However, while you are waiting, here are Lady Cynthia's recipes for how it ought to have ended:

Pornography

Moray finds Denise out in the yard.  She's got tears in her eyes and she's all hot and bothered from wearing all those black skirts whilst endlessly folding ladies’ scarves.  He's in his wedding gear, tearing the buttonhole flowers from his jacket and tossing it into the mud by the loading dock.  He marches over to his forbidden shop-girl; she turns around and is swept off her feet into… one of the conveniently placed stables, away from the prying eyes of the lower classes.  Oodles of bodice-ripping and poorly-tied-necktie-untying ensues, and her heels are merrily bouncing off his bottom as they go for gold in the straw.  Moray's jilted bride turns up and gasps, but then throws her veil over the nearest horse, hoists up her skirts and joins in.  Fade to black on Moray's dimpled behind, as everyone continues having a jolly, jolly, jolly good time.

Horror

Dudley, the assistant manager, comes into Moray's office, telling his friend that it's time to go to the church.  A close-up on Moray shows a twitch; he starts screaming.  Spinning around, he grabs a desk chair, smashes it and stakes Dudley in the heart.  Blood gushes all over Moray and his fine wedding suit.  The shouts bring in some of the shop assistants, and Moray picks up his silver letter opener, breaks a table, taking one of the legs as a club, and wildly bludgeons or stabs the staff to death, (depending on which of his hands they are nearer to).  Moving through the store, Moray stabs, bites, claws and batters any person he comes across.  He stops briefly to hump the haberdashery counter, before running out to the yard to find Denise.  She spins around in terror, as he charges at her with a broken crystal decanter from glassware.  Swiftly, she roundhouse kicks him in the face.  As he falls, she grabs the decanter off him and stabs him repeatedly in the stomach and groin.  Now that she is the embodiment of a strong-willed woman who has been wronged by men, she goes up and down the street, killing any man that looks at her funny.  Coming across one-armed personnel director Jonas, she cuts off his other arm, hitting him the soggy end.  She is only stopped by Tiny Tim lookalike Arthur, as he pushes her in front of the carriage bringing Moray's jilted bride from the church in search of her missing bridegroom.  Scene fades on the blood dripping off the sharp edges of the decanter in Denise's hands as she twitches in her death throes.

Slapstick Comedy

Dudley comes into Moray's office and promptly slips on a banana skin.

Steam Punk (Or as Henry and I call it, ‘life’)

Moray grabs his steam-powered jet pack and runs to find Denise.  He finds her in the traders' yard holding her magnificent steam-powered blunderbuss, and they hold onto each as they take off and catch their steam-powered steamship from Newcastle and set steam-powered sail for Somalia to kick some steam-powered pirate arse until they die very rich and very happy, with lots of screaming steam-powered great-grandchildren crowding their steamship.

Science Fiction

Very early on it is revealed that Moray’s bride-to-be, Lady Katherine Glendenning (illustrated, above left), is actually a cyborg from the future intent on destroying all human feeling in the world, because the consumerism of the future is greedily feeding off innocent people due to The Paradise expanding so much, and Britain is just a floating department store, with lingerie taking up most of Wales.  Kath-Bot is foiled by Denise, who is revealed as a time-jumping policewoman, stopping cyborgs from changing fixed points in time, of which the Notional-upon-Tyne haberdashery department of Summer 1892 is naturally one of the most important.  Moray sees Denise in her yellow and black spandex of the future and promptly turns his back on all his principles to time-jump with her and a pack of pygmy hippos.  Lady Katherine, having been permanently deactivated by Denise's phaser taser laser gun, is sent to the scrap heap.  Jonas was really a giant weasel, but that is overshadowed by Arthur's awesome ability to be incorrigible in the face of adversity, and the unveiling of ladieswear manager Miss Audrey's secret collection of space monkeys.  Chubby, lovelorn shopwalker Sam was also a space monkey, but as usual no-one noticed.  Fade onto shop girl Clara's cutting sarcasm, which is really because her teeth are made from Unobtainiumumumumumumumum.

Now that's how you write drama.

Away from the Manger

It has been quiet in Airnefitchie this week.

What with darling Sylvie still breaking rocks at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Alistair cooped up on the God-forsaken rock that passes for an ancient university on the Fife coast, and our other child doing whatever it is that she does in the ‘rock scene’ in California, it has lately been quite quiet about the family seat.  Only this time, Henry is also away.

He's gone to Zurich to see about some carp for our loch, the theory being that these sorts of fish will grow to fit their surroundings; Henry hopes they can win a few prizes at the local winter fair this year if they grew to fit our modest twenty-acre water obstacle.  I remain sceptical, but have decided to indulge him – mainly because the battlements need reinforcing, and it'll be better if he is out of the way.

However, when one is wrapped up as the Great White Slug Empress in the goose-feathered duvet on the ol' four poster that's seen more deaths and births than one has had hot dinners, one does feel out of sorts at not having one's lifetime companion nearby.  Patches and Fang (our two Irish Wolfhounds) are all well and good as companion animals, but they're not allowed upstairs, or rather, they're not really allowed in the house beyond the kitchen, which renders them rather useless as the extra heat source one's husband normally is.

I found myself, half way through the week, and quite uncharacteristically, reminiscing about how we met all those many moons ago (Henry and I, not the wolfhounds and I, wolfhounds and Henry and I, etc.).

We are both great fans of beagling.  I tried to ride horses when I was a girl, but turned out to be frightfully allergic to the poor animals.  A small regret, but nonetheless I found other more suitable outdoor pursuits.  When my father had to visit the RN College in Dartmouth, I would drop by the kennels of the Britannia Beagles and generally make a nuisance of myself.  However, I didn't really get into it until I went to the Royal Agricultural College and joined the RAC Beagles.  I was there when they were presented to the Queen and gained the Royal prefix: very proud moment for the pack and the masters, to be sure.

I found the uniform very flattering too.  I always look good in green and though I rode very little when a girl, I still seemed to form the calves, legs and bottom of a hardened rider – all the Hussar blood in my veins I suppose – which tend to stun in the requisite white breeches.  I had a hard time taming my mane under the cap, but wetting it beforehand in the horse trough normally helped.

Of course, after a good day's beagling, my hair would look worse for wear, but I'd have a healthy pink glow about the cheeks.  Back in the student bar, with our spoils (for hunting hare was still legal), we'd all go a bit robust and jolly.  And one day I caught the notice of a young gentleman, visiting a friend for the weekend.

Back in the day Henry was definitely a catch.  He was tall and lanky, absolutely, but had adorable floppy hair parted on the side, a very decent watch and hands so smooth you knew he had carriage.  He wore tweed and a regimental tie, even in the student bar.  He was already drinking his signature gin and tonic (with lime, not a lemon) and offered to buy me a brandy.  He seemed preternaturally mature, even for an undergraduate from Cambridge.

His opening line was, I have since found out, quoted verbatim from The Trinity Foot Beagles 1862-1912:

'Compared with fox-hunting, the taking of the hare must always seem somewhat tame, and the turning out of “All the King's horses and all the King's Men” to chase so small and timid a creature, may seem akin to breaking a butterfly on the wheel: nevertheless it must be confessed that to “Trace the circling mazes of the hare” is truly, though the truth was said in sarcasm, "a highly scientific amusement," and when "Sarah" is hunted afoot with beagles it is more than that, it is good, hard, strenuous sport.'

I think I countered with how to breed goats.

Needless to say, it all went rather swimmingly from there.  I even moved to Cambridgeshire and joined the same pack.  Fodder for plenty of ribald tales ensued during our courtship over the kennel yard full of beagles, ‘blogging’ about which would require more gin than the human body can handle.  One of my favourites involved vast quantities of homemade lemon curd, an outsized pair of corduroy breeks, a tennis racquet and…well, I fear I cannot be more specific.

So, here I am.  Henry comes back tonight and I do find myself rather excited.

Yes, he may be a bit messy.  Yes, he's pickled in gin.  Yes, he moults all over the furniture.  Yes, he can be rather forgetful.  And yes, he's still got smooth hands.  But he does the washing up on the five or six days a week that Jenkins is indisposed; he does the dusting, too, and he likes to light all the fires in the castle before I get home from coaching the new hopefuls for the mixed doubles biathlon.  So without him the house is cold and grey from dust, and the kitchen sink has something living in it.  I hope Zurich delivers him home safely.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is, I've grown rather fond of the silly sod and would rather he stuck around.

Now See Here, Young Man!

The first mobile telephone call was made on 17 June 1946 from a car in the USA.  This was followed by the world's first partially automatic car phone system in 1956, which weighed about 40 kilograms and was made up of vacuum tubes and relays.  The first call on a handheld mobile was demonstrated by John F Mitchell and Dr Martin Cooper in 1973.  The phone it was placed from weighed about one kilogram and retailed at $3,995.00.  The first commercially available mobile phone was released in 1983.  It was in high demand, despite the weight, the low talk time and the shocking battery life.

My mobile phone, which dates from shortly after that time, is useful for holding the dining room door open during dinner parties so that Jenkins can dart through to the kitchen for the next pot of mulled wine without fiddling with door knobs.

Which is probably why I now need to replace it (people kept forever kicking it out of the way by accident, splashing mulled wine over it and generally defeating the purpose).  That, and the local quack says I need to stop hoisting the battery pack around on my shoulder.  My spine is getting crooked.

So, I leave my 'brick' as a doorstop and venture into the bewildering world of the mobile phone market.

I'm currently on a network that has the best rural coverage in Scotland, which means I'm able to ring up the kind folk at the Ambulance Service when Henry's had a little stroll and forgot about the Laws of Physics, and it has now launched 4G.

This makes navigating their website a bit trickier all of a sudden.  I love shopping on the internet.  The Land Rover is not what it used to be, and needs a full service each time we take it out anywhere beyond the bounds of the estate, whereas the delivery man and the postman normally have either a lovely road-legal and MOT up-to-date van, or a bicycle with properly inflated tyres.

However, with the launch of the new 4G network (jolly good technological progress, etc, etc, I'm sure) the website is trying jam their new 4G-ready smartphones down my throat and I was having a hard time finding out which phone would actually suit me and my 'lifestyle'.

So, I decided to go into the nearest shop, in hopes that good old human interactions would solve my problem.

I suppose, in a way it did.

I went in, with strong ideas about what sort of phone I wanted, and I was determined not to be swayed from them.  I was immediately noticed by a cocksure young male employee who sauntered over to me, knowing that he would get a sale no matter what, and was confident he could flog me the most expensive one.

'Now see here…' I started.

'You need a new phone,' he interrupted.

Then he pounced.  Not literally, of course.  That would have been unseemly, but he quickly ushered me over to the new 4G smartphones.

I saw phones labelled after planetary groupings, phones made by pieces of fruit and others named after fruit, ones that forget to use an 'e' before an 'x' and those whose namesakes were places in America.  They were either 'Bold' or 'Black' or 'White' or 'Note', curvy or followed by words in which people missed out the 'o', or followed by just plain numbers.

This was not the world as it was when I first bought my mobile phone.  Suddenly, I missed it terribly.

It came down to two models in the end, both with 'touchscreens' (luckily, I normally wear fingerless gloves about the estate – better grip on the shotgun) and both 4G 'ready' (I can remember when one G was disputed, and now there's apparently four of them).  I told the young man that I would think about it over lunch and come back in the afternoon, having made a decision.

On my way to a nearby tearoom, it came to my attention that smartphones might be able to do almost anything these days, but their users still cannot.

I bumped into countless people who were all obsessively interacting with their smartphones, tapping away at the screen, or browsing the internet, or even playing games and watching videos.  They swerve all over the pavement.  They don't look where they are going.  They walk at a pace slower than a snail's.  They hang about in social groups, but only speak through their smartphones.  Sometimes, they even just stop walking, in the middle of the pavement, and act all affronted when you walk into them from behind.  Well, how the dickens did I know you were going to stop right there in a pedestrian walkway?

Then, I stopped dead (and was, rather ironically, bumped into by a smartphone user, not looking ahead, but at their phone screen).  I turned right around and headed back into the shop.  The tearoom could wait.

I bore down on the young man who’d served me earlier, ignoring his swagger as it turned to fear.

'Now see here, young man!  I need a mobile phone.  I don't need a smartphone.  I want a phone that I can pay for monthly by contract without faffing about with "top-ups", but only about my usual pay-as-you-go rate of ten of your British pounds.  That has the ability to make calls, to send a text and to live more than a few hours on its battery.  And by God, I want it now.'

After an initial moment of shock, the young man led to me to a phone that was more my style.  It was still a mobile phone.  The screen didn't need touching.  The buttons were physical and made a small click noise when you pressed them.  It didn't come with a stylus.  It didn't even have blue teeth.  Although, it did have FM radio, which makes it rather swish in my view.

I walked out that place with my head held high, dignity and freewill intact.  I could choose to ignore my phone.  I could choose to walk properly, look where I'm going and not get 'Gaming/Texting Thumb'.  

Most importantly, I owned a phone that was not smarter than me.

Plummeting

Gravity.  It is a natural phenomenon by which physical bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their masses.  Now that's common knowledge.  Perhaps very common: I read it on Wikipedia.  It also tells me that modern work on gravity began with Galileo in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, so it's not exactly a new concept.

I could bang on about how the Earth (and every planetary body for that matter) has its own gravitational field, which exerts this attractive force on all objects.  I'm also told, at a basic GCSE (as they're calling them now) level of Physics, that on Earth the strength of the gravitational field is numerically equal to the acceleration of objects under its influence, and its value at the Earth's surface is expressed as the standard average of g = 32.2ft/s².  Which means that the velocity increase due to gravity, ignoring air resistance and suchlike, of an object falling freely near the Earth's surface is 32.2 ft/s (or if you're doing GCSE Physics and use metric, it's near-as-makes-no-difference 10m/s, but I've always been partial to a decimal point and imperial).

Therefore, this object will attain a velocity of 32.2 ft/s after one second, 64.4 ft/s after two seconds, and so forth, until the object hits the Earth.

Sound theory, no?  If they're teaching it to teenagers who are still required by law to attend school, then everyone should be completely up to scratch on the ol' gravitational pull of the Earth.

So, imagine my alarm when, whilst researching battlement improvement for the family seat, I saw headlines such as:  'Funeral for Spain balcony fall victim', 'Orphaned on their holiday: Riddle as mother of four boys falls from third floor flat, then father plunges from different hotel balcony days later', 'Father of six fighting for life in Tunisia after falling from second-floor hotel balcony needs £20,000 to get back to UK because he didn't have the right travel insurance', 'Sixth holiday Briton dies in balcony fall whilst on family holiday on Menorca' and 'Balcony fall in Balearic Islands claims life of another UK tourist'.  These are all from October alone.  You know, last month.  2012.  Long after the first studies of the Earth's gravitational pull were conducted.

I am, naturally, now worried about leaving Britain.  Clearly, abroad is no place to go if you're British and your hotel room has a balcony.  Apparently, you completely forget that you were ever subject to gravity in the first place.  As if one had taken one’s gravity vaccination instead of the diphtheria or cholera one.  I know gravity is a worldwide epidemic, but that's one step too hypochondriac for my liking.

Now, I'll admit, they're all tragic stories, not least for their tragic overuse of the word 'plummet', and Henry is a bit partial to ignoring gravity every once in a while as well.  However, Henry has gin for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with a side of gin.  He, quite understandably, just forgets that gravity is below the battlements and still goes off to admire the view a bit more closely, before realising the granite-work has run out.

I would be safe to assume that it is all jolly hockey-sticks whilst playing a particularly exciting game of Monopoly on one’s foreign balcony, ignoring one’s daily recommended units of alcohol (because it all sweats off quicker than one can drink it in this heat, and the evaporation rate out of the bottle is just ridiculous too – hardly touch a drop and the whole lot becomes a haze of red wine over the open bottle neck) and letting one’s children run riot down by the pool.  Next thing one knows, one is (as the papers put it) plunging and plummeting and needing better travel insurance and a new spine.  It simply goes with the territory of having a holiday abroad.

But, oh no!  As Henry so perfectly examples, this happens in BRITAIN too!

I'm reading headlines stating 'Man who plunged 100ft to his death from private members' balcony at Tate Modern was a bank manager' (London) and 'Mother-of-three, 26, plunges 12 storeys to her death moments after "going out for a cigarette"' (Coventry).

The main difference that I can see is that you 'plunge' in Britain and 'plummet' abroad.

You'll also notice that these are all fairly grown-up people, mostly over the age of 20 and with families.  Some were not even high on gin.

People are forgetting the basics of the universe and that makes me sad.

So, next time you're on a balcony, whether it's in Britain or in a foreign county (but mainly the Spanish islands), please think back to that dusty old school room, with your teacher's mortarboard falling off his head, your knuckles being rapped with the chalkboard duster for not paying attention, and try to remember what he told you about gravity. 

Because gravity has clearly not forgotten you.