Divided by a common language?

Before I forget let me put you out of your undoubted misery over the contents of the International Shelf. Remember, these are grocieries which Americans consider define the British culinary palate. In fact a couple of you made shrewd guesses.

It looks like we're defined by our brands, but not necessarily the ones you would expect. Coleman's is a big one, with English mustard, horseradish sauce, piccalilly and a selection of packet sauce mixes, sausage casserole being the most ironic as it is pretty hard to buy what we would define as a sausage here. Heinz salad cream, soup, beans, spaghetti hoops and that old favourite from your childhood, tinned treacle pudding. McVities chocolate digestives and hob-nobs (surprisingly no custard creams or rich tea biscuits). Cadbury's, although now US owned, was represented by their drinking chocolate but the confectionery wasn't Cadbury's it was Rowntrees; fruit gums, fruit pastilles and Yorkie chocolate. There was Sarson's vinegar and Hayward's pickled onions, Ambrosia rice pudding, Ready-Brek, Hartley's Jam and Chiver's Marmalade (not Robinsons). Branston Pickle and Branston baked beans, Robinson's Barley Water. And yes, there was Bisto and Bird's Custard Powder, although no-one I have spoken to here has ever heard of custard apart from frozen custard, which is really just like ice cream and not like custard at all.

America is a land of surprises; really you must expect the unexpected. Whatever you think it will be like, it will be different - in weather, in topography, in food, in language.

In weather, for example, yesterday was a beautiful, warm, spring-like day, and although there isn't a vestige of green to be seen on any of the trees as yet, it really felt like winter was over. The air was warm and full of bird-song. Two layers of clothing was a layer too many. I seriously contemplated sitting out on the porch in the afternoon, although it hasn't been readied for summer yet. I felt like taking my shoes off.

But in the night we were hit by a  mini tornado which tore round the house and rattled the storm-screens, and threw what sounded like shrapnel against the roof tiles. Today it is wet and miserable, not cold, but the leafless trees are thrashing about and the barely-emerged daffodils are all lying flat, their petals crushed and creased. There is a power cut just up the road.

On our way back from Warren, last week, the temperature was below 40 degrees, a chilly 4 degrees celsius, and as we drove back across the high plateaux of rural Pennsylvania we saw the most amazing sight, once again, surprised by America's ability to produce the unexpected. I am not sure how this occurs, they call it an ice storm, but every tree, every branch and twig and thorn, every leaf and blade of grass on those exposed hilltops was covered, entirely encased, in clear, thick ice. They looked as though they had been dipped in glass. It wasn't frost, or snow, it was transparent ice.

Where the sun shone on them, the trees sparkled and blazed, and when the wind blew we would hear the ice-trees creaking. I am told that at times people wake up here to find their entire gardens, outdoor furniture and cars covered in ice like this, and they have to chip it away in order to open their car doors.

America is like a boastful teenager. Everything is bigger, better and altogether more than it is in the old world and they like to do things differently just because they can; it's a sort of rebellion. Language is a case in point. They are making it up as they go along, inventing new words and new ways of pronouncing old ones for no perceivably good reason other than it establishes them as independent, unrestricted, unhampered by the old-fashioned ways of doing things. It's a bit of a 'not invented here' syndrome; if it wasn't invented here, or at least reinvented, they aren't interested in it.

Here are a few examples. 'Expiration' has replaced the perfectly servicable 'expiry' as in 'this card has no expiration date.' One 'acclimates' oneself to new circumstances or a new situation, as opposed to 'acclimatising' oneself.  I recently heard a gentleman describe his small-holding as a 'farmette.' What we would call a 'mobile' telephone they call a 'cell', but in fact that is just as well as Americans pronounce the word 'mobile' as we would pronounce the brand of petrol 'mobl'. 'Petrol' in any case, is 'gas' here. I will never forget the billboard on a long long stretch of Texan highway which proudly encouraged us to stop and refresh ourselves at the next available service station, (a mere 172 miles distant), called Buc'cees, where we could enjoy 'the cleanest rest rooms in Texas, eat great food and get gas', not, to a British traveller, a great incentive!

While the 'i' in 'mobile', 'tactile' and 'facile' has utterly disappeared from the American mouth, so has the 'h' of 'herbs'. 'Fresh 'erbs', they say, not even with an attempt at a French accent, these are definitely not 'herbes' which might explain the missing 'h', but distinctly American ones like 'baysl' and 'orEgano' and 'cilantro' which is what you and I have innocently called 'coriander' for years. Spring onions are 'scallions', croissants are 'crescents', sausages (if you can find them) are 'links.' A filet is a 'fillAy' but a buffet is a buffETTE. Demi and hemi are pronounced 'dem-EYE' and 'hemi-EYE'. Why? Oh, just because it's different, and it is indicative of the thirst for freedom and new possibilities which this land represented for millions of people who were just sick to death of the old, hind-bound, dyed-in-the-wool habits and attitudes of their original counties.

I'm not knocking it, just describing it. But I worry about it. Are we becoming more and more divided by a common language? Because there are times when, although speaking English, I am looked at here as though I am speaking an entirely different language and while 'Oh you're English, I love your accent' is very gratifying, it isn't much use when nobody understands a word you say.

One Dog Too Many

This is a true story. Actually, it’s by way of being a confession – I’ve had this on my conscience for twenty four years now and it’s time to say – to the woman with the predilection for white – I’m sorry.

In March of 1987 I was expecting a baby; expecting it quite imminently. It is a wearisome time, that last week or so; you have done all you can do in the baking and brewing line and it’s time to see the fruits of your labours. By that stage the anticipation of the new arrival far outweighs any anxiety over the process of its emergence. You’re keen to meet your off-spring and, frankly, nine months is a long time to go without a gin and tonic.

We had a Yellow Labrador, in those days, Ben; an adorable, intelligent, faithful and well-behaved dog who had genially adapted himself to slower and slower walks over shorter and shorter distances, commensurate with my gradually growing girth. He eyed me with a certain doleful foreboding, it is true, a doggy sixth sense, perhaps, forewarning him that his life – his place in the pecking order – was imminently liable to radical review. By the end of February he was lucky to get to the bottom of the Avenue and back, but on this particular day - a pleasant, spring day in March - I had taken him much further than my ever-more Walrus-like waddle had recently allowed. We had gone down the Avenue, through the estate, past the school and into the valley, a wildish strip of green-belt, semi-wooded, with a brisk river and a maze of footpaths. It was pocked with sucking, peaty bogs and had become, unfortunately, a favourite site for fly-tipping, but it was, in that suburban area, the closest thing we had to countryside. We walked for an hour, we walked, to tell the truth of it, too far; enticed by the glint of sun on the water, the shy showing of primroses amongst the trees, the joyful flight of birds across the pale sky. Who knew, I reasoned to myself, when I could enjoy such unencumbered freedom again? (Twenty four years later, I am still wondering. Once you are somebody’s mother, you are never entirely, only, absolutely you again.)

It was time to turn for home. The slog back up the muddy slope, past the school and through the estate suddenly seemed a trek on an epic scale. I was exhausted at the thought of it. The sun disappeared behind a skimming of grey cloud. The wind grew chill. The dull ache in my back got less dull.

That’s when he came bounding out at us. An exuberant Retriever, black, full-grown but in that skinny, skittish stage, with all the manic, bouncing energy of a puppy which has unexpectedly found itself with the size and strength, pace and potential of an adult body. He was gangling and elastic and unpredictable. He took the awkward stile with the ease and grace of a thoroughbred, tore over the tussocky vegetation and raced in circles round  Ben with a wild and frenzied look in his eye, inviting, luring him to join in with adventures of doggy derring-do.

He had clearly had - for a dog - the most deliriously happy of days. He was out for a start. His outness, and his joy at it, were uncontained. Not to be in – in a house, in a car, in a kennel, even in a garden – and the untrammelled exhilaration of it, was manifest in his continual darting and dashing, his springing and leaping, his chasing and racing round and round in glorious, unrestricted, liberated circles.

And he had had, it was evident, the kind of escapades which delight a dog’s heart. He had burrowed, he had dug, he had sniffed and rolled and licked and wallowed until his doggy senses were drunk. He was high. He was a dog in canine ecstasy – consumed by it – any shred of logic, any tiny residue of training he had ever possessed had entirely vacated his remembrance leaving only the sheer, mindless thrill of unalloyed rapture.

His eyes were wild, stupid with amazement; his slack mouth had a permanent, barmy, lop-sided grin with a lolling tongue so surfeited with sensation that he could not keep it contained within the precincts of his mouth. It drooled silvery slobber. One ear was inside out and it was this that lent him the most speaking look of a dog unhinged. The feathery fur on this rakishly worn ear and over that half of his bony, domed head, was thickly smeared with some viscous, green slime, dark and unguent, riddled, probably, with busy bacilli exuding foetid goo. It matted the fur of his neck and down one shoulder and covered his collar - he was not a stray, then - just visible beneath its glutinous glaze. His muzzle and the other side of his face was slick with the greasy remnants of some food residue foraged from a bin-bag and silvered with shining trails of his own saliva. His hindquarters were stiff with a heady cocktail of greenish cow-pat and blackish bog, his belly crusted with river-silt, the feathers of his tail intricately knitted with prickly twigs and long tendrils of clinging weed.

The smell which came off him is almost impossible to describe. At once putrid and brackish, animal and mineral, it was the odour of something long-buried and in the middle stages of decomposition suddenly unearthed. It was the rotting, ancient smell of primordial peat-bog and the ripe piquancy of fresh ordure. It had a sweet, cloying fermenting vegetable tang. It was that sour, stomach-turning, stink of food-gone-bad. It was the feral hum of wet, unspeakably filthy dog.

Ben, with admirable self-control, resisted the lure of the new-comer and padded doughtily beside me as we made our way up the path. The Retriever described bouncing, lunging circles around us. Every so often he lowered his chest and stuck his rear end up in the air, his caked, laced tail wagging enticingly in universal doggish for ‘come and play’. I hoped that if we ignored it, it would go away.

It didn’t. It followed us across the road and through the greenwalks of the estate. Passers-by gave us sidelong, critical glances. ‘It isn’t mine,’ I wanted to tell them. I trudged wearily on. The dog ran boisterously through gardens, it chased a boy on a bicycle, it barked at a rabbit in a hutch, it barked at me, it growled playfully at Ben. It bounded suddenly into the road and caused a man in a car to swerve and sound his horn. The man frowned and shook his head at me through the window of his car, and shouted words to the effect that I should keep my bloody dogs on a lead. Ben was not on a lead, he never needed one. He was perfectly reliable with traffic, walked tightly to heel, and would wear the most wounded, offended expression whenever we used one, his dignity irrecoverably dented by the ignominy of it.

The Retriever responded to no commands; neither sit, nor heel, nor wait nor stay. He just dug up people’s flower beds and savaged the laundry which dangled from their washing lines, leaving livid green and black smears where it brushed his grimy coat. The effort, of just getting home, let alone of trying to control an ill-disciplined dog, was almost too much. ‘Go away,’ I shouted. ‘Go home.’ I pointed, resolutely, in the direction we had come from. The dog looked a little woebegone for a moment, then lay down on the pavement and rolled onto his back. His belly fur was stiff and tufted. He smelt like a drain. I was almost at my wit’s end.

Then a car drew into a nearby driveway and a woman got out. She gave me a knowing, sympathetic look. ‘Got out again, has he?’ she asked.

I could have hugged her. ‘Do you know where this dog lives?’ I enquired, grasping at the possibility of at last getting rid of it.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, pointing to a house two doors down.

I reached down to the dog, still recumbent at my feet, and grasped his oozing collar. ‘Come on,’ I said, hauling him to his feet. His fur was tacky and saturated. He left a dark, dank patch on my coat where I kept him pressed against me. Close to, the stench of him was even worse, pungently evocative of garbage and sucking swamp and manure.

I left Ben sitting at the end of the driveway. It was getting late in the afternoon, by now, the cloud cover had thickened and the spring-like day was quickly reverting to dark, wintery night. There was a car in the driveway and a light in an upper window. I rang the doorbell and waited under the little overhanging porch for the dog’s appalled, grateful, frantically worried owner to open the door.

But there was no reply.

I rang the bell again, and knocked, smartly on the door. The dog, sensing the end of his adventure, began to twist and pull in an attempt to get away. His eye rolled in its caked socket. He was strong, and his resistance to being confined again was stronger still. His collar was spongy and slick; I wasn’t sure how much longer I would be able to hold him.

I dragged him round to the side of the house where there was another door. There was no bell but I knocked on it loudly, actually I pounded on it. The dog, sensing my weakening ability to cope with the situation, began to tug violently. In a matter of moments either my hand or his collar would give way.

It was wrong. I know it was wrong and to this day I am appalled at myself for having done it. I would be indignantly angry at any stranger who did it to me. I don’t condone it, even given the situation I found myself dealing with, I condemn it, strongly. But there it is. I tried the door handle. It was one of those new, pvc doors with a handle on each side and telling myself that the dog’s owner was in the shower, perhaps, or on the telephone, or doing something which prevented them from coming to the door, I tried it and the door opened.

The door opened into the kitchen. It had arctic white units and an immaculately white tiled floor. The appliances were white; the tea towels and the oven gloves dangling from white hooks on the white melamine cupboard housings were white. Through an open, beautifully glossed white door I could see a comfortable living room. A leather suite the hue of palest vanilla ice cream had milk-white cushions scattered against a pearl-white faux-fur throw and sat on an expanse of carpet the colour and texture of raw meringue. The walls were as smooth and white and unblemished as the icing on a wedding cake.

I lifted the dog by the collar and pushed him into the kitchen. His reluctance was very clear; he held his paws out stiffly in front of him; they left twin skid-marks across the spotless floor. I released my grip on his collar and put both hands on his matted, stinking rump. A grey, gritty paste like the scrapings from the most malodorous sewer oozed from his sodden coat and stained my fingers as I pushed him firmly into the house. Keeping one hand in position I reached with the other for the door handle. My hand made a dark smear on its pristine surface. Just at that moment, as I began to close the door, as I released my hold on the wayward dog, when I had, at last, got rid of it for good, another black Retriever appeared in the doorway which led to the living room. 

He was identical to the dog under my hand, the same size and shape and age except that he was glossy and clean and dry. His coat was brushed, his feathers fine silken wisps. He was the yin of the filthy dog’s yang, the positive of its negative, its opposite, a mirror image. It would have been possible, it would have been easy, in fact, to have taken them for brothers. It would have been understandable, forgivable, indeed, to have mistaken them for the same dog.

He looked intrigued and rather surprised.

I closed the door and went home.

No Marmite, Bisto, or Bird's custard powder. But plenty of Spam.

I am writing this from the room of a Holiday Inn Express near Pittsburgh. Business brought us here on Monday, a six hour drive across Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is on the eastern-most extreme of the state, on the Ohio river which gives Pennsylvania's neighbour its name.

Pennsylvania is an intensely forested state, in its interior; mile upon mile of wooded hillsides stretch in every direction as you follow the highway. Amongst the trees, neat farms coax a living from the land. The earliest settlers must have literally hacked their way through the woods until, finding an agreeable spot, probably near to water, they decided to set up their homesteads - or, perhaps, just couldn't face any more hacking. The pastures and meadows we see today are all surrounded by trees and must have been cleared, stump-by-stump, without the benefit of mechanised aid. It would have taken a very special breed of people to have had the dogged determination, resilience and foresight to have done it. Intensely self-reliant, too - there are sometimes many miles between the farms, they must be lonely places to be in heavy snow, and it does, as you can see, get very heavy here. Amazing, when you think about what happens when even a little bit falls in the UK. Do you notice, in the first picture, that the traffic is still flowing?

Now, as then, the people of rural Pennsylvania must be of a very particular sort. The road which goes through the state has few access points. There are hardly any towns of any size apart from Harrisburgh, the state Capital, equitably placed in the centre of the state, miles and miles from the industrial, commercial, residential, cultural and social hubs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Apart from that, there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. They must be content to live in quiet, peaceful self-sufficiency. The Pennsylvania Amish and Mennonite communities have distanced themselves from the modern world, eschewing the combustion engine, the computer, television and even electricity. But I rather suspect that the hoards of tourists who come to gawp bring many millions of dollars, so presumably they don't eschew those.

I perhaps ought to make it plain that I am a Bristish woman who finds herself, about three times a year, spending extended amounts of time in the US. I look at America through very British eyes.

The mechanics of living are very different, here. Cars, here, are king, and although there is public transport, and even a few bicycle paths, there is virtually no provision made for the pedestrian. I have walked many a mile along the 'hard shoulder' (basically, the gutter) of the roads because there is simply no pavement. At junctions, you have to take your life in your hands as there is frequently no pedestrian crossing signal - they just do not expect people to walk. On one occasion, in Michigan, I walked six miles to a book shop but it was across the road and, try as I might, I could not cross. When I asked (not a passer-by, of course, I had to go into a car repair place which was nearby) how I might get to the book shop, I was told, with the kind of patient tone we use to talk to children or people who are a bit weak in the head; 'well, lady, you see, you have to get in your car and drive there.'

There are pedestrian crossings in towns, but towns here are another case in point. Doylestown, where I usually hang out when in the US, is different to most.  It is the county seat and the courthouse is its biggest building, recently, indeed, extended. The town has a plethora of lawyers' offices, including this one, which caught my eye and made me smile.

The perfect practice to handle your divorce case!

It is a pleasant, leafy, rather affluent place, with boutiques and eateries suitable for the kind of shopping you do when you don't really want anything practical; designer clothing, books, antiques, jewellery. You can park your car and saunter along the streets (and across the streets, there are crossing signals). It's an ideal place if you have time and money in your pocket, but not, as I say, typical. Most town centres are rather forlorn, forsaken places, down-at-heel, the businesses eeking a living, providing essential but, shall we say, not very glamorous services ('Father and Son Exterminators' is one of my favourites, although I despair of the so-called professional sign-writer who omitted the essential piece of punctuation.)

The reason that most American town centres have this ghost-town feel about them is that the real shops have all departed for the Malls. Even Doylestown centre has no butcher, baker nor candlestick maker. No post office or hardware shop. No supermarket, no green-grocer, no Boots the Chemist. They've gone, lock stock and barrel, out to the Malls, unreachable, except by car.

In general all food is bought from the supermarket. Acme is our nearest and the one we prefer. It makes buying 'local' a problem as the provencance of the goods isn't displayed. As with most things in America, there is endless choice but no real variety. The shelves are lined with literally dozens of brands of the same kind of food; 28 makes of salad dressing, innumerable shelves of apples - as many as twelve or fifteen different sorts. Ten different kinds of dill pickle. Isn't a dill pickle just a dill pickle? There are things that we are used to that you just can't get - good plain yoghurt is a problem, unless its Greek and you're prepared to pay a fortune for it. Flavoursome cheese - even 'extra sharp' cheddar is disappointingly soapy, a mediocre medium to our palate. Good chocolate - their's is sugar-rich and cocoa-poor, although now they have appropriated Cadburys (they pronounce it Cadberry's) this crisis has been somewhat alleviated. Marmite. Bisto. Bird's custard powder. Corned Beef. But there is Spam - oh gosh yes, shelves and shelves of Spam.

But then we discovered, in a gloomy side-aisle, the 'International Shelf' where, in the 'British and Irish' section, we found, to our pathetically gleeful delight, some heart-rendingly familiar packaging. I do not propose to tell you what there was, I want you to see if you can guess ten typically British grocery items that might have been gathered as representative of the British Storecupboard Staple. Answers in the comments box, by email or on a post-card please..... I will only mention that Tim and I clutched a packet of Hobnobs to our bosoms with little short of ecstacy!

The malls are found every few miles along the four or six lane highways. They all look the same, from the outside, and often from the inside as well. Walk into any CVS pharmacy and you could instantly be anywhere in the country; the layout of the shelves is identical. Pizza Huts, Burger Kings, TacoBells and MacDonalds restaurants are all, down to the tiniest detail,  the same: manufactured somewhere (probably by robots), they are transported by road, unloaded, plugged in and are fit to fry once the straws which fell out of their dispenser en route have been collected off the floor and the servers have got over their travel sickness. They are clones, there is nothing at all individual about any of them, inside or out. It makes orientating yourself very difficult.

'Turn right past Starbucks.'

'Which one?'

'The one with the green roof.'

'They ALL have green roofs!'

By the wonders of modern technology I am now in another hotel room, in Warren, in the far northwest of Pennsylvania, almost on the shore of Lake Erie. But nothing, in the room, betrays the fact that I have moved 130 miles. The furniture, the decor, the facilities, even the mournful sound of the maid's vacuum cleaner outside in the corridor, is exactly the same. It is exactly as though we left the room, drove for two hours and re-entered the same room, which has been tidied up a bit in our absence.

We have come here on account of a hydro-electric power station. It is relatively small, as these things go, operating on a smallish dam, generating only 600 megawatts. But, my poor beleaguered friends in West Cumbria will be interested to know, this small, very unobtrusive, environmentally friendly power generation system would need 6000 wind turbines to replace it.

Food for thought, eh?

Red patent sling-backs, jack-boots and moccasins - I've worn them all

I have been so enjoying the audio book I downloaded to my ipod, The Stars Look Down by AJ Cronin. There is something very special about having a book read to you. I rather long for those bygone days when families used to gather round the fire and read to each other. The soothing cadences of the reader's voice, the freedom to close your eyes and picture the scenes as they materialise before your imaginative eye, the characters, in all their vivid descriptions, emerging from the shadows to populate the hearth-rug.

I am certain that I was read to as a child but I vividly recall the first moment I discovered that I could read for myself. It was bedtime and Dad had been deputed to do the honours.
'Read me a story,' I said.
'You read to me,' he replied.
I turned to one of my favourites, a poem in a large book whose title I forget (but, dimly, I remember blue lettering and the word Storytime) called A bird can fly.
'A bird can fly, so can I,' I read, amazed at myself.
I was definitely less than six years old.

There was no stopping me, after that. By the time I was ten I had read every book in the children's library and Mum approached the librarian to ask if I could begin getting books from the adult shelves 'under close supervision' even though I was not really entitled to an adult ticket until I was twelve. I read my way through Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Norah Lofts, Jean Plaidy and Somerset Maugham. I read Westerns and James Bond and Conan Doyle. Mum started guiding me towards writers she had loved; Elizabeth Goudge, Howard Spring, Mary Stewart and AJ Cronin. She was the big reader in the family. It is impossible to think of her, even now, without a library book on the arm of her chair, by the bed or on the kitchen table.

At sixteen I got a Saturday job at the library. I hated it, but staggered home each week with an armful of books. Living a sequestered kind of life, as I did, as a teenager, I explored the world through books, lived other lives, saw things through other eyes, walked a mile (or more) in every kind of shoe; the down-at-heel, the red patent sling-back, the ballet-pump, the moccasin, the jack-boot. There is nothing you cannot experience through a book; if you have never cried over one, you haven't lived. Books broaden our experiences, increase our learning, extend our sympathies, enhance our compassion.

They can also be dangerous. I have bumped into many a lamp-post trying to walk and read at the same time. I have lost nights' sleep. I have, perhaps, neglected the living for the fictional, on occasion.

You may know that I went on to study literature at University, devouring books, picking them apart, putting them back together. Sometimes it was a bit much, even for me. One week I had to read Anna Karenina, Cancer Ward and The Golden Bowl all in one week. (I never did find out how Anna Karenina finished until I read it again, quite recently.)

The Stars Look Down isn't in print any more but you can buy it pre-enjoyed from Amazon Marketplace, or as an audio book. AJ Cronin is probably more famous for Dr Finlay's Casebook which is still in print as well as available as a DVD and a BBC radio recording. Click here to see what's available Cronin writes realistic stories which manage to be gritty without being sordid, in prose which is evocative without being over-blown. His stories will engage male readers - I plan to engage my male with one very soon - his characters are solid and memorable, mainly men living hard lives in difficult circumstances. But their sheer humanity will make them appeal to women too.  Don't look for heroes here, or derring-do. Cronin's men are like your brothers and your husbands and your sons; flawed, forgivable, faithful, admirable, annoying. Try The Keys to the Kingdom, which is also in print. Or go to your local library.

Let me know what you think. There is nothing  nothing  I enjoy so much as discussing books.

Too much of a good thing

It is still Christmas in Doylestown.

It started in early November, when the Halloween hay-stacks, scarecrows and pumpkins were tidied away and the festive garlands, lights, and inflatables emerged. Trees twinkled, windows blazed. Whole houses were festooned with blinking lights and jerkily enthusiastic robotic elves. Spruce and holly were in abundance. Red berries clustered around candles, pine cones strewed fireplaces. Chandeliers were heavy with gold-leaf and ribbon. Red velvet and gold lamé proliferated on every sill, round every pillar, across every porch.

Doylestown was a winter wonderland, then.

Christmas isn’t so much a festival as an obsession and Americans throw themselves into it with hectic fervour.

It is a sort of a binge, much more so than in the UK. What you can’t buy on a Christmas theme isn’t worth having. Christmas food, of course. Christmas decorations, naturally. But also Christmas crockery, Christmas bed-linen, Christmas clothing. Christmas air-freshener, Christmas toilet paper, even Christmas toilet cleaner (Festive Forest Fragrance – I really saw it with my own eyes).

And here we are in March and frankly they haven’t quite got over it. It lingers, like a hangover, a tatty-tinsel reminder of surfeit. The garlands are drooping, the ‘ever-lasting’ lights glimmer still, but weakly. On most doors the wreath remains, but it is weather-beaten and mildewed. The Christmas cheer is little more than a dyspeptic groan.

As I walked through the residential streets yesterday there was evidence that people are trying to get a hold of themselves. One garden was a bolognese of lights taken from a storm-damaged tree. Dismantled displays waited to be carried down to the basement or taken back to U-Store, storage units rented year-round to house the bulky excess of Christmas paraphernalia.  The municipal authorities have just removed the snow-flake lights from the Main Street lamp-posts. But the Christmas tree is still there, in front of the Court House, lit up every night and each night it remains it diminishes an iota of the excitement it can engender on its reappearance next November.

They love an occasion in the US. Christmas is only one of a whole stream of them; New Year’s Day, Easter, Labour Day, Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day, Independence Day, Presidents’ Day, Columbus Day, Thanksgivings Day and the birthdays of Martin Luther King and George Washington all receive special recognition. (Twelve Night, clearly, is an exception.) No opportunity for a parade, a special meal, a flag-raising, a firework display, not to mention a sale, is ever passed up here.

You can’t knock it; a little of their pride and patriotism would go a long way back in Blighty. They like to celebrate their country and their traditions, and they’re wonderfully inclusive because, of course, their provenance is so diverse. St Patrick’s Day is coming up and there are plenty of Shamrocks and mischievous leprechauns to be seen. What we call Shrove Tuesday is Fastnacht here (or, less prosaically, Fat Tuesday) and doughnuts, not pancakes, are eaten. Even Christmas, (because of course, other winter festivals are available) has largely metamorphosed into The Holidays so as to incorporate Hanukah and the Festival of Lights.

They’re all ‘reasons to be cheerful’ and they pepper the American calendar, accounting for that up-beat, optimistic, ‘cup-half-full’ mentality which we dour British sometimes find a bit hard to stomach.

But it can get a little feverish, a tad too desperate, this manic lurch from one celebration to another, leaving no space between for the normality which would give shade and respite from the glitzy glare of gala, and which would, in fact, emphasise the Next Big Thing. Cup-half-full is in danger of becoming perpetual cups-brimming-over, a recipe for excess. You can have too much of a good thing.

Bother this blinking blogging

Do you know? It all went so well last week. I couldn't believe how easy it all was. Found a blogging thing, signed up, chose a design, wrote some words, pressed 'publish'. Wey-hey! Bob's your Uncle; I was a blogger.
Of course I made some mistakes. I typed the whole thing straight into the 'compose' box without running it past my trusty spell-checker and thesaurus in Word (which accounts for that annoying typo - did you spot it?). And I thought I was entitling just that installment Entering the 21st Century (11 years late) not the whole blog. Certainly my intention is not to witter unvaryingly on topics technical; oh no. I am planning a wide range of wittering. Perhaps a better title would have been One Woman's Witterings.
And perhaps I was a tad cavalier about how easy it would be for you, dear reader, to sign up as a follower. I didn't realise you'd have to have a google, yahoo or twitter account to do it. However, exhaustive researches this week have revealed that signing up, for a google account at least, is easy as pie. It doesn't mean having a new email address or having to check anywhere other than your in-box. Literally you hit that wibbly wobbly googly-woogly thing, that one up there top right - see it? Where it says 'follow'. Put in your usual email address and google does the rest; it will automatically send you a friendly notification every time I publish a new installment.
The reason it was so easy for me (it transpires) is because I already have a google account. I use their on-line calendar to synchronise my Outlook diary between my two laptops; the one I use in the US and the one I use at home. I put in birthdays and appointments and the diary sends me a reminder a few days beforehand. Periodically google lifts the information from one and plonks it onto the other, and vice versa, to make sure I have no excuse for forgetting your birthday even though I am half a world away.
Theoretically, using this tool, it would be possible to synchronise your calendar with your beloved’s (that way he would KNOW when you’d been to the hairdressers without having to resort to any of those tricky visual clues like a completely different hairstyle!). Let me say at once, for my male readers, it could be a handy way of letting her know you’d booked a weekend of golf without having to be brave enough to actually TELL her! You could set a reminder a couple of days before (especially handy if your golf gear needs laundering, although risky.....) or perhaps an hour or two after you’d set off..........?
So, all in all, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself and decided to explore the possibilities of blogging a little further. Big mistake. Delving just a little under the skin of the thing reveals a whole morass of jargon and gobbledegook designed to keep amateurs like me OUT.
Take the 'monetize' option (only an American could have come up with a word like that - of which more, much more, in future installments). Good idea, I thought to myself. Monetize a little - why not? There's no law against it. I signed on as an Amazon Associate, since I do shop there and I do intend to talk about books; what a good idea, I thought, I'll tell you about books and point you towards the right page in Amazon so that you can buy them for yourself. You wouldn't begrudge me 25p commission, would you? No, I thought not.
They made it sound so easy. Click on the thing. Copy and paste the html (hyper-technical-malarkey-language) into your blog, the html (horribly-tortured-mumbojumbo-lingo) becomes a neatly underlined, ready-made link for you to press saying something benign like 'pretty please click here if you'd like to see it for yourself''.
But could I get it to work? Hours of potentially productive time went by while I wrestled with it. All I could get was an interminable sequence of the really off-putting squiggles and ticks and blobs which are html (highly-tense-making-looniness) which I know you would have found too intimidating to use.
So I wrote to Amazon, in words of one syllable, explaining my plight. What did I get back? Reams and reams of such jargon-laden, impenetrable twaddle that reading it was like trying to decifer a foreign language. 'Add context links beta javascript to your blogger blog', they suggest. Excuse me? 'Remove comments tag from your context links javascript'. Sorry? 'Blogger sometimes strips off the javascript...'
Oh forget it!
Do you know what I think? I think it's a conspiracy. I think they make these things more complicated than they need to be to maintain the need for an elite, closed order of techno-geeks who are conspiring to take over the world. As more and more of our lives become digitised we become more and more reliant on technology, to such an extent that many of us cannot now write legible long-hand, use a map, look up a word in a dictionary or remember a telephone number. We'd rather leave a message for a friend on Facebook than give them a call and talk to them. But we're more likely to call them than walk down the road and knock on their door.
There's no doubt that 'they' are watching us. The other day I realised that all the adverts down the side of my Facebook page are targetted at me. Anti-wrinkle cream, belly-fat busting miracle pills and mugs which say 'go away, I'm reading' (actually, I'd quite like one of those!). There was also an 'earn £45ph from home' advert which I idly clicked on the other day, from my seat here in the lounge of this Doylestown home. Spookily, yesterday, on another site altogether, there was this: Doylestown woman investigates 'work from home' scam and finds it's the genuine article. It took me to exactly the same site. Now you tell me that's a coincidence.
So, all in all, my desire to embrace all things etherial has met a considerable set-back. What seemed, last week, to be an opportunity bright and shiny with possibilities now seems shady and a little dangerous.
It's a shame. There is so much here which is potentially good, especially for people like me who have geographical challenges to overcome. This week I have used internet banking to pay a bill; I used Skype to talk to my lovely family; I ordered flowers for a certain somebody's birthday; I downloaded a free knitting pattern and I investigated a dozen prospective honeymoon destinations, all from the comfort of home.
My quest to enter the 21st century continues. But I am proceeding with caution.

So this is me: getting to grips with technology, and if you squint towards the horizon you'll see the mazy cloud of angst I have generated doing it.
I have decided that being a techno-phobe is no way to live in 2011 and so, admittedly somewhat late in the day, I have decided to embrace all things gadget. This blog, which I hope you will enjoy, as an in-box liberating alternative to the interminable emails I usually regale you with, is evidence of my new hi-tech fervour. We'll be streaming and feeding, up- and down-loading, syncing and sharing to our hearts' content in no time.
Trust me.......
So, first of all, in a move unprecedented in my personal history, I embarked on my latest trip to the US without a book. Well that isn't quite true. I had books, of course, packed in my suitcase, but not in my hand luggage (which, here in the US, is known as your 'carry-on', and a right carry-on it turns out to be, sometimes, too). To understand just how cutting-edge this development is for me you'd have to know me. I'm the woman whose nose is almost always stuck in a book, or if my nose isn't stuck in it my finger is, keeping the place where my nose was before you interrupted me.
Travelling sounds so glamorous but in fact all it is a lot of interminable waiting around and paying through the nose for over-priced food and drink. Although the plane is moving you are not; wedged, as you are, into the cripplingly narrow seat, most movement beyong the swivelling of the eyeballs from one side of a page to the other being a physical impossiblity. Reading, I find, eases the ennui of travel (but then again I believe it eases the ennui of life, so I'm probably biased).
Generally speaking I crack the spine of a new novel in the coffee bar at the Terminal; my regular treat this, in recompense for the very early start from home and the stresses of the rail journey to the airport, the long wait in the queue to check in and the ordeal of the security screening. Once the gate is announced I make my way there and read on, and usually I have hardly got myself settled in my seat before I'm at it again, burrowing down into the story so that the hours can pass unnoticed.
But I must say that a bulky book, in addition to the other things I have to carry on in my carry on, has recently felt somewhat unwieldy and so this trip, with my zeal for the new fangled shining an exploratory light I decided to see if technology could provide an alternative.
I reviewed the existing essential carry ons and identified two items which could provide alternative means of fiction-delivery. Firstly my little pink Ipod. I searched Itunes and discovered an audio version of a book which I had recently looked for on Amazon but been unable to find in print. AJ Cronin's The Stars Look Down was available as an unabridged audiobook and only cost a few quid, so I purchased it, downloaded it and sync'd it onto poddie. It was cynch, and would give me hours of aural entertainment.
Secondly I found out (can't remember how, now) that the Kindle app could be downloaded free to any PC and since I always carry my little blue netbook when I go abroad, which is itself not much more size or weight than your average hard-backed book, I decided to give that a go too. Again, it was easy-squeezy, even for an old duffer like me. And then!! Wow! When I came to browse the kindle books available I was spoilt for choice, lots of my favourite classics and some of them even free of charge. Obscure Trollopes and an Elizabeth Gaskell I'd never even heard of. I was in heaven.
Thus, well electronically supplied, I ventured out, my carry-on and my heart feeling light.
All went well. I opted to begin with the audio book and was soon engrossed. I think that the server in the coffee place was impressed to see me, a middle aged woman, so wholeheartedly harnessing the wonders of avant-garde audio apparatus. She certainly almost jumped out of her skin when I placed my order. (Although, in retrospect, perhaps it was just that I yelled my coffee order; one tends to overcompensate when wearing those in-ear headphones). Having my hands free was an odd sensation which could only be rectified by giving them a pain au chocolat to cope with, although I felt bad about this as the characters in the book are all famished due to an on-going strike at the pit.
I must say that, at the gate, having my eyes at liberty even while my imagination was treading the streets of Tynecastle in search of food, was really enjoyable - people-watching is just so entertaining, isn't it? - and I identified those fellow passengers that I really hoped I wouldn't be sitting next to: the very large lady, the very small woman with the yelling child, the freaky man in shorts (in February!), the Benedictine Monk, complete with tonsure, sandals and unspeakably dirty (but no doubt very holy) feet.
I'd just got to a really good bit, where David, the hero of The Stars Look Down had taken on notorious bully Slogger over a sack of coal scavenged from the slag-heap, when it was time to board. I shouldn't have been worried about my travel-neighbour. In my determination to utilise technology I had checked in on line the day before and carefully chosen an aisle seat leaving a single seat vacant between me and the next passenger, the E seat which, along with the D, is the seat which no one wants; the disadvantage of squashed and uncomfortably close proximity unalleviated by the view out of the window.
David is taken home by Wept (so called because he spends two weeks every year parading up and down a local seaside promenade sandwiched between two boards reminding holiday-makers with seasonally inappropriate dolour that 'Jesus Wept') to be given some much needed food and medical attention and I settled myself in my seat, splendidly separated from the hapless occupant of seat D by the vast and pleasing expanse of seat E (quickly appropriated by my jacket and later by my legs).
Paying eye-service to the stewardess as she demonstrated the mechanism of the seat-belt and the location of the emergency doors, I listened entranced as the story continued. The scene had shifted to the opulent residence of the mine-owner, his bed-ridden wife and his poor over-looked son promised to be enchanting companions for the long flight and I was congratulating myself on the success of the whole technologically-driven adventure when a piercing BING BONG penetrated even my literature plugged ears and an illuminated sign dashed my inaugural foray into electronic-only in-flight entertainment to smithereens.
'Switch off all electronic appliances', it said.