A politician by any other name

Last week I heard a clip of a recent speech made in Britain’s parliament in which the speaker referred repeatedly to ‘the other place’. To me, this sounded like a quaint euphemism for hell, and I wondered how a speech about parliamentary reform had become so apocalyptic. It turns out that ‘the other place’ is an antiquated euphemism used in British parliament as the favoured way for members in one house of parliament to refer to the other. In fact, the British parliament is riddled with endearingly old-fashioned terms and titles that make their recipients seem like boffins in wigs who peer over their spectacles at hand-written charters and wax-sealed parchment.

To begin with, lots of the most senior politicians are called secretaries instead of ministers, which is confusing. There’s a Secretary of State for everything from Education to Defence. No wonder secretaries proper are called Personal Assistants now. If a Secretary of State has a deputy, these are called Undersecretaries, suggesting a vertical office layout. Then there are the Cabinet Secretaries, who presumably work from a closet.

Other titles make their holders sound more like an instrument used to keep letters closed or a sea creature than a politician, to wit the Lord Privy Seal, currently the ‘Rt Hon Sir George Young Bt MP’. The Lord Privy Seal also sounds like something you would have used to securely close a Victorian toilet. Then there are the Assistant Whips, Lord Commissioner (Whip)s, and the Chief Whip. I had no idea corporal punishment was still prevalent in parliament here. Other titles fill an entire line before you get to the person’s name, such as the Captain of the Honourable Corps of the Gentlemen at Arms (Lords Chief Whip), who follows it with the equally hefty nominer Rt Hon Baroness Anelay of St Johns DBE. Finally there are the Baronesses in Waiting and the Lords in Waiting, who are presumably anticipating a change of government.

Titles aside, there are plenty of amusing names amongst the British government. The ugliest member of the previous Labour government was called Lord Adonis.The current Culture Secretary is called Jeremy Hunt, which is fine unless you are a broadcaster and accidentally swap the first letters of ‘Hunt’ and ‘Culture’ as a senior interviewer did recently on a morning radio programme that has 6.6 million listeners. Ouch.

Fly me to the nicest airport

In early adulthood I had an ambivalent relationship with airports. Whilst my friends found them exciting, associating them with flying off to new adventures and far horizons, I wasn’t so keen. This was probably because I found the whole idea of overseas travel quite daunting as I’ve never been particularly good with diving itno the unknown.

Once I plucked up the courage to put my toe gingerly in the water and tried travelling for myself, things changed. The great unknown Overseas became less unknown and I discovered the wonder and joy of travel. Airports took on the tantalising gleam of being the gateway to the endless possibilities of the rest of the world, so big that I could never run short of new and exciting places to go.

Having lived overseas for several extended periods and done as much travelling as possible during that time I have spent lots of time in airports, and found the quirky and the quaint alongside the tedious and the dull. British airports, for example, often feel more like a trial than an exciting first step on a journey; perhaps if you can survive the grimness of Heathrow or the queues elsewhere you are some way to being prepared for a British winter or English public transport.

Elegant

A weekend in Paris. A sentence to make you swoon. Paris makes Britain look like a spotty, gormless teenager, all gangly legs and glum moods. Paris in one word would be elegant. This is true from the moment you arrive a Charles de Gaulle airport, my favourite airport in the whole world; old but not dated, calm, elegant and easy to navigate.

To begin with it felt as though I’d never escape from England and English speakers in order to immerse myself into the stylish delights of France – I seemed to be haunted by Australia, even though I was travelling from the English Midlands, where Antipodeans are not exactly thick on the ground. It started on the plane, where just in front of my back-row seat was a loud Australian with a very thick accent who inadvertently made herself known to all around her.

What came next was slightly more surreal. Once we were airborn, one of our cheerful flight attendants Flo and Amy did a slightly unusual version of the necessary announcements about drinks, snacks and toilets fitted with smoke detectors. She feigned a strong Australian drawl, only the occasional slip into a south-eastern English accent giving her away. It wasn’t a short announcement, either, after the toilets came an explanation about the currencies that the snack bar accepted, and the exchange rate offered. All in a thick, ocker twang. Weird. It didn’t feel really like a compliment to a pleasantly musical lilt like it might have if they’d gone Irish, and English folk aren’t known for their love of Australian accents. So it felt vaguely insulting, but not enough to bother complaining about. Mainly it was just odd.

And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency

There are warnings of gales in Forties, Tyne, Dogger, German Bight, Humber, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey and Southeast Iceland. The general synopsis at 0600: Low Dover 995 losing its identity.

Mysterious, slightly hypnotic, mostly completely indecipherable to the average listener: this is the shipping forecast is broadcast on the BBC’s Radio 4 several times a day. Despite being of no relevance whatsoever to almost anyone on the British mainland, this 350-word missal has a cult following, and hundreds of thousands of people are thought to listen to it.

Low Tyne 993 expected Sweden 998 by 0600 tomorrow. New deepening Atlantic low expected 350 miles southwest of Iceland 972 by same time.

People are said to enjoy the poetry of the report, its rhythm, the evocative names and its slight air of arcane mystery. When I chance upon it I like its curious grammar, which means it isn’t as smooth as normal speech. It sounds like someone reading a dictionary, or something in another language that they can pronounce but not understand. They have to assume it makes sense.

Viking: Mainly northwesterly 4 or 5, increasing 6 at times, becoming variable 3 later.

Supposedly the 12.48am forecast is particularly popular with listeners who enjoy feeling safe and warm tucked up in bed whilst the careful, slow voice lists gales and rough seas in exotic, faraway places. The report finishes with a goodnight message before the station closes for the night.

North Utsire, South Utsire: Southeasterly becoming cyclonic then northerly 5 to 7. Moderate or poor, becoming good.

The shipping forecast is broadcast on Radio 4, the equivalent of Australia’s Radio National. Radio 4 is a highbrow talk station that broadcasts serious and hard-hitting current affairs and analysis interspersed by all sorts of other things, from a daily radio play to fantastic documentaries and histories, offbeat comedy, a daily radio play (surely an endangered species) as well as programmes on the arts, food and all sorts of other things. There’s also a fifteen-minute daily soap called The Archers that’s been running for seventy years.

Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger: Cyclonic or northwesterly, backing southerly later, 5 to 7, occasionally gale 8 at first.

The Radio 4 audience is mainly well educated middle-class types with a heavy bent towards older listeners. Not surprisingly given its esoteric focus, I love it. This week, for example, there was everything from an interview with the Deputy Prime Minister to pieces on murderous children, the role of classical music in the French Resistance, the largest molecule known to chemistry and a radio play about a 47-year-old pregnant woman.

Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay: Northwesterly backing southerly or southwesterly 4 or 5, increasing 6 or 7 at times. Good, occasionally poor.

Thames, Dover and so on are names for regions of the sea around Britain, some of which have even more curious names that don’t necessarily refer to adjacent land.

Fitzroy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet: northwest backing southwest 5 to 7, decreasing 4 for a time. Rough, becoming very rough except in Lundy. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.

Far from being the pet habit of lonely pensioners, the shipping forecast is something of a British institution. It has been mentioned in songs by everyone from Blur to Jethro Tull and was the subject of a poem by Seamus Heaney as well as several other famous series of paintings, photographs and collected writings. There have been the inevitable string of parodies including predictions of shopping trips and midlife crises and reams of references in film and TV in everything from Keeping Up Appearances to Dead Ringers.

Fair Isle, Faeroes: Northerly veering easterly 5 to 7, perhaps gale 8 later in Faeroes, decreasing 4 at times. Rough or very rough. Wintry showers. Good, occasionally poor.

I love the fact that the presenters could be reading gibberish for all the sense it makes to them, despite the recognisable format and terminology. I’m intrigued by forecasts such as ‘Good, occasionally very poor’, which reads like a school report and makes me wonder how the weather can be good everywhere with a sudden patch of ‘very poor’. Intriguing indeed.

2010 and 2011, thank you and hello

You may have noticed there was something of a blank here at Lucid Ephemera for a few weeks while I went off and did festive things and had a holiday. More details on Italians in puffy jackets and wild boar salami follow in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I hope all of you had a delightful Christmas period, a festive new year and somewhere in between a very relaxing break.

WordPress sent me a summary email about 2010 on this blog (apparently it’s ‘on fire’. Hmmn), which caused me to reflect a bit on where it’s been and where it’s going. Lucid Ephemera is now more than eighteen months old. I started the blog because I love writing and I would write it even if nobody else read it. But it IS wonderful to be read and I’ve been humbled and gratified by the number of you from all over the place who have taken to visiting this blog on a regular basis. Some of you I know personally and it’s been nice to keep in touch (albeit in a slightly one-sided way) with you from the other side of the world; others of you I have got to know, a little, through your comments – thank you.  And many of you I’ll never know at all, save that your visit creates a little dot on a map for me, letting me know only where you’re from, and nothing else. I’m delighted and humbled to be read everywhere from Cape Town to Colorado, from Columbus Ohio to Cyprus, from Winnipeg to Estonia. Thanks for dropping in.

Life for me is going to change radically later in 2011 for a number of substantial reasons, and I’m not sure where Lucid Ephemera will wash up. In the meantime, for those of you that are regular visitors, I’d love to hear what – if anything – you’d like to hear more or less of on this blog, or indeed anything else you want to tell me. My brother once told me he’d like to hear more about people on this blog; perhaps you’re keen on English rhododendrons or the demographics of West Indian communities in the English Midlands. I’ll do my best. Leave a comment, if you have a moment. Happy New Year.

Frozen Solid

I thought that the extreme cold would be like a heatwave and pass after a few days, perhaps a week if we were unlucky. In fact it was almost two weeks before there was any respite. In the meantime, things got more frosty than I could have imagined.

After the blizzards last week, the snow did not continue into this week. But the conditions got worse. Temperatures remained below freezing constantly, preventing any melting of the snow covering the fields, parks, roofs and anywhere else undisturbed. While through roads were regularly salted and gritted to keep them safe, roads like our little cul-de-sac were not. The snow was compacted by foot and tyre traffic and then froze into a thick layer of greyish white ice ribbed with shallow tyre tracks and ruts. It was slippery and I was extremely thankful that it was completely flat. Footpaths became similarly treacherous. I took to wearing runners whenever I was outside, even if only to cross the car park.

It got colder. First there were temperatures of one or two degrees below zero overnight, which were not unusual. Then it got to -7 one night and we shivered with horror as much as cold. The days began to remain frigid, too, with highs of a few degrees below zero. They then dropped again, and there was the morning that the car thermometer hit -8 as I drove to work. I had to take a photo.

Snowed Under

For those of you who have been down a mine for the last week, Britain is in the grip of extreme weather. Five days ago we woke to an unexpected covering of snow, and the temperature hasn’t risen above freezing since. Instead, we’ve had more snow. And more snow. Lots of it. Funnily enough, the British reaction to the cold snap reminds me of how Australians cope during extreme heat. There’s a sense of camaraderie; I find myself chatting with work colleagues I barely know about how they’re coping with the snow and how bad it is where they live (unlike extreme heat, snowfalls vary immensely across small areas). In the same way, I’m sure I would chat about such things to strangers in shops and buses if I wasn’t avoiding all non-essential travel and errands.

As in a heatwave, suddenly the normal rules don’t apply. At work, those who live in more remote villages or on small country roads are allowed to go home when more snowfalls threaten to prevent them getting there. Those senior enough to work from home do so if they have a long journey to the office. We’ve even had the only days of the year (apart from Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve) on which the Chief Executive has excused people to go home early.

A Punching Place

I’m not a gym junkie  – of the lycra-clad, tanned-and-toned variety – but I am rather addicted to going to the gym. And just to make myself clear, not because I want to become a lycra-clad, tanned-and-toned gym junkie, but because it makes me feel good. In my perambulations around the world I’ve signed up to a bunch of different gyms. Girly gyms, university gyms, local council gyms and commercial gyms; fitness centres full of Italian women and others frequented by Australian students. My latest membership is a horse of a different colour. Looking for somewhere closer to home with more flexible membership arrangements than my previous fitness centre, I went very gingerly for a trial at a gym with a very macho, muscle-power name. It was full of macho, muscle-powered types but turned out to be perfectly decent and what’s more a curious insight into a different world. 

To start with, I was apprehensive. The gym itself was in a small, industrial-looking building with the kind of jagged roof with skylights that you find in factories (which indeed the gym seemed to have been in a previous life). It was behind a small supermarket, next to some bins, and had a green neon sign outside with a picture of flexed biceps. Inside there were no frills. Bare brick walls, concrete floor, well-used equipment and fluorescent strip lighting. This bothered me not at all but I was slightly intimidated by the clientele. Mainly because there were almost no other girls. They were all blokes; blokes lifting weights, blokes doing boxing training, blokes running on treadmills. I felt conspicuous. To add to the macho atmosphere there were even some faded, eighties-style posters on the wall of over-muscled women in outdated leotards. They made me feel vaguely uncomfortable.

Statuesque

I’m feeling a bit under the weather this week having been off work with a minor but persistent illness. Inspiration and energy being in short supply, I’m posting some photos instead: a collection of bronze and stone people.

 

This heroic equestrian is Saladin, immortalised in bronze in Damascus for liberating the holy land from the Christian crusaders in the Middle Ages. Seeing history from a different viewpoint is fascinating.

 

Autumn

They say Melbourne has four seasons in one day. In Britain in October we’ve had four seasons in one – or at least three in one month.

This has been particularly welcome because as so often happens, Britiain didn’t have a proper summer this year. At least a proper summer by anybody else’s standards. It started well: in June we had a few days of gorgeous warmth when we basked in the gentle sun and floated about in mild evenings, with the parks full of people frolicking and picnicking. After a couple of days I got excited and bought a couple of items of summer clothing and had a couple of light dresses posted over from Australia. It wasn’t that warm but the humidity made it feel warmer, permitting sleevelessness and blanket-less sleeping. Then the more usual form of British summer weather returned. During June, July, August and September it rarely reached twenty degrees, and it drizzled. A lot. My light summer dresses stayed hanging hopefully in my bedroom, and didn’t get a single wear. Not one.
So by autumn we were hopeful of some Indian summer, some mild sunshine in which to enjoy the last of the long days. That didn’t happen either.

Fortunately, after all this disappointment, October was spectacular. It was clear and sunny and we basked in relief at a break in the gloom.