Comic courtesy of Natalie Dee.com.
…it’s what’s for dinner.
Author: TadMack
Happy Thanksgiving…
Silliness courtesy of Periodically Anachronistic, purveyor of fine magazines.
Cab Tales, Words du Jour, & etc.
The city is wide-eyed in the dark.
On dim afternoons, the lights come on, and the party goes on. Lights are strung across pedestrian thoroughfares, and white lights – fairy lights – are twisted through trees. It’s the same every autumn in every wee town we’ve visited, but it’s all the brighter in Glasgow now, for it being November. Trees are being lit this weekend in city squares, as the great Christmas/Hogmanay countdown begins. Our rehearsals are full-time Christmas revels now, and between the John Barry tributes (who knew there were four-part choral arrangements of the theme from Goldfinger??), the show tunes from Grease and the ABBA/Mamma Mia songs — (we’re “dancing queens” again!) — we are indeed hauling out the holly. Or something. How we wish you could all be there.
We, meanwhile, have had important things to do, which take us to town. T. is scouring out the last of the library’s stock for Cybils reading, as the first of the big boxes from the publishing companies come thundering in. (Though she’s used the library this year more than ever, this past week, she received twenty-eight books from publishers in a single day. Made the UPS man right curious, that did.) We are also sending donations to a few charities who have requested T’s books (it’s expensive from here, and time-consuming, and she’s glad that the last of them are done and dusted, and she hopes the Illinois Dept. of Children & Families has an amazing Christmas party), which has necessitated additional cab trips, and many chatty cab drivers. Because of this, now, Ruth, we know what your man is getting you for Christmas. And it’s even engraved! (Also, T. thinks it’s really cute how your swain refers to himself as”, “Ruth’s man.” T. thinks she ought to take it up, and call herself “D’s wumman.” However, it’s not quite as convincing when she bursts into loud guffaws afterward.)
Meanwhile, at D’s work, there were quarterly reviews – an embuggerance (a nice British military slang word) – and lots of team meetings – a further embuggerance – as they prepare to add onto their staff of four. As the interviews go on – and D. is stuck at work until almost eight at night! – we’ve decided to regale you with Drew’s Collected Wit & Wisdom once again:
Last week’s Phrase du Jour, scrawled on the white board:
“Never test the depth of a burn with both of your feet.”
(Apparently a bit of conventional Fife wisdom our Drew learned as a lad at his Mam’s knee.) For once, that’s something that’s easy enough to understand.)How fortunate we are that Drew’s advice extends to shopping as well! Says he, “If you’re ever in an English shop and they don’t have any thingamybobs, look for duberryfirkins instead. Duberryfirkin is the London equivalent to a thingamybob, which is the Northern England equivalent to the Scottish thingummy.”
Americans are so conventional. We just look for stuff.
Friday’s Word du Jour: shufti. /shuf-ti/
n. Informal, British, military; to take a wee looksee, or reconnoiter.
Usage: “Take a wee shufti at this!”
Now, this one was amazing – it really does date from WWII. The word is of Arabic origin meaning “look!”, and was brought back to Britain by soldiers returning from Arabic lands who had learnt the word from …dudes selling nudie postcards. The peddlers used to keep the postcards hidden inside their coats and would show them to soldiers saying “Shufti, shufti!” – “Look, look!”And now you know.
The great dial of the season spins, searching for its stations between late autumn and the year’s final cold. We remain astounded by the relative mildness of the days. The temps remain in the mid-forties Fahrenheit/ eight-seven Celsius range, and we. get. sun. Almost daily sun. Granted: a thin, weak sun which is reminiscent of a California January, a sun backed by a pale blue sky criss-crossed with high ragged streamers of nearly transparent cloud. It is such a gift, as compared to last year at this time.
Now D. has done the annoying and picky job of the first binding for his 200 + page dissertation (thesis), he continues to await a date for his oral exams (and when he gets one, you’ll probably hear the rejoicing all the way to your house). While he waits, he’s applied to a few promisingly complicated-looking positions in various fields (some of you can imagine him easily in a psychology department. T. just shakes her head in bemusement). Many and long are the discussions about where to land, and now that T’s mother has had a serious bump in her relatively healthy road, some of our plans are being reconsidered, since air travel for her will be severely curtailed (by the entire family, if not just by her good common sense). Meanwhile, as the application process progresses, D. has been seeking to get his grades from the University for the Master’s he completed here his first year… only to discover that the University’s new computer overhaul over this summer has erased his grades, and still has him enrolled. Apparently it’s a time-machine as well as a database, and has reset us to 2009. HOPEFULLY this week upcoming, the nonsense will be cleared up, but T. commented that this doesn’t bode well for getting a job in academia, as it all seems so distressingly disorganized, as compared to the business world. (To which D. replied, “HAH!”)
The wee birds have kept busy, fighting and stealing seeds from one another, and we see bolder — and bigger — squirrels streaking across the green every day. (And bolder cats following rapidly after.) As we bundle up and hunker down for the worst of The Dread Dark, we are surprisingly cheerful, hopeful, and grateful for the graces of having our families alive in one piece, for our warm blankets, books, faux haggis, and of course — you.
Thanksgiving, indeed.
{hangin’ on a shoogily peg}
They’ve hung their jackets on a shoogly peg, these people have.
Oh, what? You have no idea what we’re talking about? Let us fill you in.
A gentleman from the old property management firm we rented from, whom we called Lurk – because he did, though he was a nice enough man – called D. today. “Oh, hello, there,” said he. “This is X from Y Housing. Yep, I’m calling about the old place, on Lynedoch. Could you tell us how to reset that boiler? The new renters say it’s been out for two weeks, and we haven’t been able to get someone in…”
Oh. Good. Grief. Hello, inappropriate and ridiculous. How hard would it have been for the owner to have fixed that before insisting that someone new was shuttled in? How hard would it have been for the property management firm to have insisted on a new boiler!? Of all the stupid things! And then to call us — so we can tell yet another generation how to fish around inside a machine capable of blowing them up, with a wooden spoon, feeling around for one small gray switch that you can’t actually see too well, since there’s no light in the boiler closet…??
Aaaaaaaargh!
Oh. About that shoogly thing. It’s a footballer term, which we’re told has nothing to do with the game. As near as we can tell, it’s a trash-talking phrase that means you’re about the get the sack – your job is in jeopardy. (Maybe you don’t have control of the ball anymore?) All we can say is that “Y Housing” never did have the ball, never were on the ball, and if it were up to us, we’d take the jackets of the whole lot of them, plus the owner of the flat and put them on the shoogliest peg we could find.
And then let all the jackets fall on the floor.
Those poor new renters…!
Autumn & Otherwise
Our friend JoNelle, who lives in upstate New York, told us she was scraping ice of the windows of her car by the fifteenth of September. It only made sense that we had our first frost last week in this little burg. It didn’t require scraping from anything, and it rained the following night, but it was a little kick in the backside that said “the year is ending! Hurry! Hurry!” Suddenly all the things we’ve been thinking we’ll get to “eventually” have a flavor and feeling of urgency.
It’s almost November – and we had so many things we thought we’d be done with by now! For one thing, on paper, D. is supposed to march at the University’s December commencement, but of course that isn’t happening. We are instead tying up loose ends – settling with the Council after receiving our paperwork from the University, “officially” submitting the dissertation/thesis after receiving paperwork from the University; filling out the last of our paperwork for the visa extensions after we’ve gotten an appointment with the University… (sensing a theme here?) The Home Office faithfully promises that we’ll get our passports and new visas back in a month, but we’ll believe all claims when we see them. Meanwhile, no holiday plans in place yet, but we’ll let those of us who are interested know something as soon as we do.
Meanwhile, we continue to learn new things!
And now it’s time for Drew’s Phrase Du Jour:
(You laugh, but occasionally Drew actually writes these up on the whiteboard at D’s work. He’s here to edify, people.)
The phrase D. heard was: I’m going to grass you up as the clype.
Translation: I’m going to rat you out as the snitch.
Clype: To inform on. A person who informs on others. A grass. A yopper. (Of course you know what a yopper is. It’s a clype or a grass. Didna I just tell ya?)A fine Ayrshire phrase D. learned recently was “Gadsa boak.”
Gadsa: a portmanteau which means “gives us a”
Boak: a Scots vernacular word meaning dry heaves or vomiting.
Thus, gadsa boak means “you make me sick.” (In Glasgow parlance, gadsa might be replaced with “giesa.”) This phrase is often shortened to “gads.”
You are now duly edified.
What are we going to do when we no longer have these Vernacular Translation moments? Although, the fact is, anywhere we go outside of our home state, there are words and phrases which briefly bemuse us, and there are tons of people cheerfully mangling and rehashing English and its compatriot languages all around the world. It will probably never end.
Meanwhile, the wheel of life continues to turn. Congratulations to Thor & Helga who have had brought forth their firstborn, and to our friend Jules, who looks to be three minutes away from an event such as this. Autumn babies are great, because they give you a perfect excuse to stay home and bundle up and have quiet visits from friends. Doesn’t that sound great? – good food, friends dropping by, music, a warm house? We love autumn, and we’ll take any excuse for bundling up that we can get.
D. walks home of an evening, and smells the peat fires burning. It is cold and damp these days, but we are, so far, in good spirits. Lots of books and early bedtimes, and far too early of rising, for T., anyway, as she tries to get in an hour of exercise before the day begins, but our endorphins are happy, are moods are pretty good, we’ve got our sunlight lamps on, and we’re doing all right.
We’ll leave you with some of the beauty surrounding us these days:
YES. That is snow on the Campsie Fells (Or the Ochil Hills. Not sure).
Pax.
Drew’s Word du Jour
And now it’s time for another episode of Separated By A Common Language, with our favorite Fifer, D’s coworker, Drew…
Drew helpfully supplied the two of us with a surprise this last week – Halloween “Lucky” Bags we could take with us to sing carols. Since we didn’t go, we didn’t frighten the good people of Glasgow with orange jack-o-lantern pops between our teeth whilst we hummed God Rest Ye, Merry, but we are nonetheless amused and touched that Drew’s trying to get us in the mood for the, er, season. Such as it is. As goes with any packaged food we eat, there’s a lot of squinting at the ingredients for animal bits, things T’s allergic to, and for general information, as in, “What the heck is this?”
Drew’s been delightfully helpful in this respect. When we noted that sherbet was listed on the items in the grab bag, we gave each other a puzzled glance, and poked through the hyper-colored lot. We didn’t see sherbet.
“So, what’s the stuff in the skull?” D. asked. “Well, that’s the sherbet, right there!”
“Not where I’m from,” D. explained. “Sherbet’s a frozen dessert, served in a cone or a bowl. You know, like a fruity ice cream.”
“Naw, that’s sorbet (and hear the pronunciation — SOR-bay). This here’s sherbet. You can snort it, you know.”
*crickets*
“Whoo, though — stings a fair bit, it does.”
o_0
Well, that explains a lot about our Drew.
(Okay, kidding. He’s actually a lovely person – and a big kid, but single, girls, single!)
(Sadly, we are not kidding about that exchange. We’re hopeful he has put sherbet snorting in his past. His distant past…)
So, now we all know! The equivalent of Pixie Stix – in whatever container – is known as sherbet here. And, T. would like to remind those who wish to snort this substance that there are leagues of white-coated professionals who can help with that sort of thing. (Actually, T’s students used to snort Pixie Stix and powdered Kool-Aid, too. And she took it from them, and gave them Holy Heck about it in rather pithy sentences. Sugar and food coloring, directly to the brain? This is a good idea, how???)
Speaking of frozen desserts, we live in a neighborhood with so many weans that the ice cream van comes around regularly – twice a week like clockwork. Unlike when we lived in Glasgow, we believe that there’s actual ice cream involved – and possibly frozen meat! Yes, there are mobile butchers who drive around in vans with music, too, apparently. This leads us to wonder whether this is what was being sold in Maryhill, when our friend Jess’s housemate went running out for an ice cream and the driver told her he didn’t have any. Bovril and a side of beef, please, thanks…
As always, the topic of “where are we going next?” is on our minds. We love it here, and have enjoyed our time, but it’s a bit ridiculous if just the idea of winter makes one need a long vacation! Meanwhile, the visa extension applications are almost away — this is indeed our very last winter here — huzzah. If anyone would like to provides us with the perfect job on a beach in San Diego, we’d be good with that…
In answering the question for ourselves what we’ve loved most about living abroad, we’ve discovered that for both of us, it has been the pace of life. We might complain (mightily) about how long it takes for things to get done (Yes, internet providers, we’re talking about YOU), but even with D’s school deadlines, and T’s constant workload, we’ve appreciated the lack of frantic days. People work their allotted 7.5 hours, and go home. Things close at 5 — because everyone has the right to go home and cuddle with their families or their stool in the pub (!). With no access to a personal vehicle, the number of spur-of-the-moment trips drops to virtually nil, and things are planned out in advance — not that this doesn’t leave room for impulse, but it’s of a different sort now. There are certainly inconveniences in a slower pace of living, but there are ways around them in case of absolute necessity. We’ve just enjoyed living without that necessity.
The question is whether or not we can find that pace elsewhere, in the U.S. or Canada,… or is the pace merely an artifact of how we our personalities have shifted while here? We’re trying to find out…
The wheel continues to turn – last week another of T’s girlfriends buried a spouse (it’s painful and strange to have friends in our age group with that loss), while another became engaged. Just yesterday, one of T’s classmates from grade school wrote to exclaim over the expectation of an additional – surprise! – family member in May. Life goes on, and Autumn draws on as well. No sign of a frost yet – thank God – but the days flow between the low forties and the mid fifties, and it’s consistently breezy – we’ve got scarves out, and gloves for walking in the nippy evenings. The sun rises sluggishly, and light is slow to find us. 0730 is beginning to look like 0DarkEarly, but we’re hanging in so far. And we truly hope that you are as well.
Yep, we did redo the blog. We’re still fiddling with it, so this might not be its last incarnation. Pardon our dust.
Kvetching, Choristers, & Culture Collisions
Into each life, a little rain must fall… or something. It’s not always rain…
As T’s friend Syl is wont to say in times of stress, in a very Pooh Bear reminiscent fashion, “Oh, dear.”
It’s not rare that we Hobbits find things here with which we disagree — the way the Council makes us sort the recycling, for instance, or the way our Tesco carries such flimsy bags. There are many things to kvetch over in the world, and on a particularly bad day, we do go on. Lately, we’ve wondered at the things our acquaintances take for granted, and wonder if we are not responding to things in a specifically American manner.
It is perhaps a cultural peculiarity of Americans that we like knowing who is in charge. If there’s an issue, we are, inevitably, the first people asking to see someone’s manager or supervisor, expecting that the higher one goes up the ladder, the more information — and hopefully intelligence — there will be. We like definite boundaries, knowing what we can and cannot do, and why… we’re big on the why.
We’ve been privileged to sing with choruses before which were backed by a chorus board, a music committee, and/or “choir captains” and section leaders. These people ably took responsibility for the smooth running of their section, the public’s perception of the chorus, and things like fundraising. Lest it seem like we’ve never experienced anything like choral organizations before, we have, which is what makes the following a bit strange.
Since we joined our chorus, we’ve had a question about two of our fellow members. We’ve been told individually that, “Oh, so-and-so is on the board.” We weren’t surprised to have a board – we have a chorus of over two hundred members, and there is money flowing in and out, and decisions to be made. We did wonder when we would see statements (as we as members pay dues, and thus some accounting of our income and expenses is expected), or some kind of minutes from the Board as to their movements, unless the board meetings are closed. We never have received any information on the board, nor have we been asked to put anything to a vote, so we didn’t think that the board actually did anything.
And then this past week, in the culmination of a truly nasty imbroglio of hearsay, hurt feelings, excruciating confrontation, and racist remarks*, one of our members was escorted out of the building – by these two fellow board-attending-members-who-haven’t-been-defined-as-anything-but-board-members – and asked not to return.
Um. We’d like to see their supervisors, please.
Perhaps it is another American cultural peculiarity to demand a specific accounting of what position and powers leadership holds over individuals. Nowhere in our chorus paperwork, which we were given upon joining, with all of The Rules clearly posted therein, were the names of these choral members written out — not as board members, not as henchpersons, not as anything. And yet. It seems that very lack of definition allows for maximum exploitation of their non-position. They seem to move and act and speak as though they can do… anything.
We’ve been involved with internecine politics in a chorus situation before — and in the end, we withdrew from that chorus, and make serious promises to ourselves to never, ever again be so involved with that type of musical group. The current undercurrent of ugliness within the chorus is making us uneasy, and the razor-blade politics are certainly one thing we won’t miss when we go. It’s a bit sad that the bloom is off the rose, and we are troubled that the choral experience that we had put on a pedestal as “most excellent” has fallen. Boo.
(Ironically, we also know it’s an American gene that prompts us to DO SOMETHING about everything. We know it’s a cultural disconnect and something we don’t quite get, which allows this group to go on as is (or else major group dysfunction, like group hysteria) but we’re working hard to learn to leave well-enough alone… it’s not our business, this time.)
It’s just been a tough week – the discovery of the sudden death of a friend at the age of 38 coupled with people fussing and fighting and generally craptastic weather has taken its toll. On a happier note, the music we are doing is beautiful. We are learning Mendelssohn’s Elijah for June in the lovely Wellington Church, and are enjoying it immensely. One of D’s coworkers, the redoubtable ‘Drew, has given us Halloween bags, complete with masks and candy (and T. thrilled to the discovery of a candy bracelet like she had when she was wee) so we are in the proper spirit for the October caroling at Dobbie’s. Frankly, we think we should have candy canes, peppermint pigs and Indian corn… just to be sure and really confuse the season. (And the shoppers.)
Fortunately, our next concert is November 6th, and then our next caroling gig isn’t until the second or third week of November… since the UK has no Thanksgiving, the Christmas season well and truly starts after St. Andrews’s Day, which is November 30, so even the 19th is a bit early, but we’re calling it a warm-up, and we’ll be in an Edinburgh garden center, perhaps standing near Christmas trees, to give us that air of believability. (That would be amusing.) Then it’s on with our two Christmas shows — two performances of the Broadway Musicals show on the 11th, and a single performance at the Royal Concert Hall of our Christmas Cracker the following weekend, and then we’ll start working on our March and June performance pieces in earnest. We’ve already started trying to learn the Polish for the Szymanowski Stabat Mater — and it’s no picnic, as there are multiple consonant blends which make a sound utterly unlike what they appear they ought to be. At least the Berlioz Te Deum is in plain old Latin.
The weather is not quite so frightful as it was this time last year; it’s a bit dull and dreich, but the cold remains mild thus far — and we’re thankful for that! Though the Collective Conventional Wisdom of the Cab Driver seems to lean toward snow in late November “just like last year,” they mostly posit that the weather is much windier and more unsettled than it was last year, and that “it’s going to be terrible.”
However, the weather is never as bad as it was when they were children. Ever.
Our cab drivers make us smile; their grumpy melancholy makes our temperaments seem downright cheery.
And on that note…!
NB: The racist remarks in question were not made by the leadership of the chorus, but by other members who mentioned that someone had been “rather Spanish” in the confrontation. Ironically (or rather, typically, because racists tend to be vastly uninformed as well as just irritatingly ignorant), the chorister in question is Italian.
Autumn in the Village
When Morning Guilds the Skies…
Trekking along to work the other morning, D. stopped and took this picture. It’s been an odd couple of days; we had a… heat wave, which resulted in 75°F temps (23°C) on Wednesday, dropping only by a few degrees for Thursday and Friday. It’s slightly hazy with intermittent clouds, but the warmth is appreciated, even if there’s not much sun.
We’ve had the last ripe corn from the nearby farms, and enjoyed it — it put D. in the mind of San Diego, so you know it was tasty. The big wind storm a few weeks ago during the last East Coast hurricane destroyed a lot of still-green apples and soft fruit so there are no more “plooms,” but bramble berries are ripening apace, and there are raspberries and a few strawberries left. In these oddly humid and dry days, the big combines have come in to slash down and roll up gigantic bales of hay from the fields, and the blackbirds and rabbits are gleaning the leavings. The leaves are yellowed and coming down in drifts, and with exasperation we glower at the birch tree in the back and realize we’re going to have to either buy or rent a leaf vac, or all the neighbors will soon hate us. The chaffinches and the bluetits are noisy and busy, rapaciously gorging themselves on all the ripened seeds. We are actually having a moment of autumn – it’s warmish, with only slightly cool nights and mornings, and even when it rains, it remains in the high sixties. After being cheated out of much of summer, it’s a nice change.
And in the village, we’re hearing and learning new words. This week it was “Umne” and “Er.” These are words used for argument. The second is a phrase “a big girl’s blouse.” These fine words and phrases can be used all together. Like this:
“I’m not panicking, I’m just asking where we are!”
“Not panicking? You’re flapping about like a big girl’s blouse!”
“Umne!“
“Er!”
Do you feel enlightened? Well, neither do we. Umne and Er are, of course the enormously mature, “Am not,” and “Are.” But we’re just not sure why a big girl’s blouse (is it a big girls’ blouse, as in, a blouse intended for all big girls? Or, just a particular big girl’s blouse? And, why are we asking you?!) comes into it… it’s an insult, and it means a man’s not quite being manly, but… blouse? (Would a small girls’ blouse have worked? Is the mockery centered on the size of the girl, or her clothing?) “We aren’t lost, you big girl’s blouse,” would have also worked in this particular exchange. This is apparently the equivalent of calling someone a pantywaist (America, 1943), a milquetoast (America, 1935) or big old baby (Mythbusters, any time in the last ten seasons). All of these things mean to insult a guy.
So, a girl who’s not displaying normative girly-ness gets called a belt loop? A big boy’s undershirt? No? We still find it so very interesting that a bad idea is called “pants,” as in, “What? You want to dance in torn sheets in the rain? Well, that’s pants!” — and remember, that means underwear…And, when the “hens” in T’s circle in chorus want to insult someone (usually a certain bass), one of them has been known to remark, “Ah, he’s all mouth and trousers.”
We’re going to have to ponder that one for awhile.
The end of another busy week. Last weekend’s Policeman’s Memorial Service was a lot like attending a funeral, something we hadn’t counted on. We were glad to know the hymns, since the audience of family members and friends could not sing, and were gratified by how well the chorus performed — we really did John Rutter’s Gaelic Blessing and Eric Whitaker’s Sleep almost perfectly. The service was moving — but at times dreadfully so. Despite the presence of such honored guests as politicians and princes, there was a palpable sense of grief in the crowd. After family members lit candles, the chorus was on hand to do their a cappella piece — and found themselves barely able to sing. The two of us felt like we were attending the funeral service we had missed of another policeman back home… which, in a way, was a kind of difficult and unexpected closure.
While we did indeed catch a glimpse of the Duke of Rothesay, Prince Charles (and noted his absence in the first twenty silent minutes the auditorium of over two thousand people waited for him to deign to come inside – punctuality is apparently not the provenance of princes), we were more amused that the Lord Provost of the city (essentially the mayor) wore a gold chain of office — a really huge gold chain, with massive gold medallion, like an Olympic medal stuck on rapper jewelry. (Yes, we freely admit this amused one of us, and one of us has the sense of humor of a ten-year-old. Moving on.) While not exactly stylish with a suit from Seville Row, the chain of office is left over from Tudor times, and probably looked quite the thing with ruffs, doublets, hose, codpieces and such.
We duly noted that Duke and Prince is a lot shorter in person than he appears to be on television — isn’t that always the case? On the up side, his ears, which have appeared so exaggerated in satirical cartoons, are also positively ordinary. Anyway, we’re finished with concerts and royalty for awhile, and won’t have to don the chorus garb again until nearly Christmas. Since with company or concerts and such, we have been up before eight every weekend for the past three, we’re looking forward to a good wallow of sleep this weekend, too.
Last night began the celebration of Rosh HoShanna for many of our friends, and if you celebrate, L’Shanah Tovah, and may you have sweetness follow you into the new year. The Hobbits welcome any chance to start over at any time, so we’re dipping our apples in honey and trying to catch up with many a neglected project… We’re looking forward to paging through a new cookbook by a gent with the improbable name of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. We’ve been gifted with his Veg! book, just in time for the Vegan Month of Food, in which we strive to participate at least a little each year. We’ll also be joining in with the Bread Baking Babes as Bread Buddies this weekend, and making the tasty looking soft pretzels — and experimenting with roasting flaxseed (linseed) for their tops, as well as trying out nigella and possibly some sweet toppings, too. We’re making a seitan roast with caramelized apples, and carrot cake muffins with coconut frosting. And, we’ll probably find time to clean the house, organize the garage, do a photo hike, and find some more rabbits in there somewhere, too.
And sleep. Did we mention that?
Hope you have the anticipation of something utterly lovely to occupy your time this weekend, too.
Mercy, Clothed in Light
Today is a difficult day, on a variety of levels, even for us, far away. We have sort of cringed from excess sympathy, as our voices immediately mark us as American, and with the news blaring September 11, 9/11, the tragic events of, almost round the clock, we don’t want to attract excess interest. As it is, we’ve only just discovered that we’re singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic at a concert next weekend, in part to mark the occasion (not our director’s choice) of ten years after many died, and for the deaths of the many, so many more were arranged.
In spite of its wrongheadedness, it is not hard to love one’s country. After travel, it is harder to love one’s country to the exclusion of others. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods; we have all suffered. Regime change, war, brutality, starvation; so, so many have died in the last ten years. In this world we have so much pain. Are we today all Americans? Can we be, tomorrow, all Iranian, or Egyptian, or Afghan, or Norwegian, or Libyan, or Nigerian, or Japanese? Today, we will meditate on perspective, and balance. In the name of perspective, then:
Notes from the Other Side
~ Jane Kenyon
I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.
Now there is no more catching
one’s own eye in the mirror,
there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course
no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing
of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.
The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,
and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.
Pax
Life Detritus: Lone socks, Dust & Collapsed Boxes
It is a truth universally (?) acknowledged that things always look better in the rear view mirror. Our Glasgow flat certainly looked better after we left it; empty, most things retain an elegance lacking when stuffed with one’s scruffy possessions. Fortunately, no one can look at this picture and see the coughing boiler, the mowed patches left in the carpet after the moths ate much of it in the corner of the bedroom (OY. We think the undercarpeting must be wool; the stuff on the floor is cheap acrylic like most rentals have), the flaking paint and exposed nails in the windowsills from the damp, and the memory of trickles of condensation down the walls, the stained and leaking kitchen ceiling – which happened a WEEK before we left! – and the still faintly horrific memory of mushrooms beneath the toilet.
All in all, things are better in the country, where T. sits in her tiny and very yellow office, and snickers at the sound of annoyed sheep. Here, we expect spiders the size of the Isle of Man and perhaps the occasional bunny attack (there are at least three of them taking up residence in the hedge next to D’s office), but not much else in terms of soot, water, and dust and molds, thank goodness. We are warned that “well, the weather gets to be… testy,” and the burn rises and floods the road sometimes, leaving only one way in/out of the village (which is fortunately uphill). We’ve already experienced the loudest thunder we’ve ever heard in Scotland here, as storms sweep down the braes from Ben Lomond, but the rain comes on quickly, and goes away just as fast. We’ll see how long that lasts. So far, T. spends a lot of time simply looking out the windows in the kitchen, staring at the wind moving the leaves of the trees and the clouds. It’s not as if there weren’t trees and sky in Glasgow – but not like this…
Meanwhile, we’ve discovered that we have some of the best bred friends and family, ever. We’ve received three “congratulations on the new job/happy new home” cards from some lovely and polite people, and a beautiful plant arrangement that was hand-delivered right to the movers as they unloaded the truck. We have some astounding friends and family – thanks much, Jacque and Graham and Cooper and Anne and Tam!
After a solid week in, during which T. got a new revision request and D. walked to work every day, and realized his tree-lined shortcut wouldn’t work in really drippy weather (which comes about every fourth hour), we finally got back to the bliss of unpacking. The kitchen is almost perfect, and we’ve taken over a small closet and reinvented it as a pantry/dish storage place. We thought, many times as we had to move all the boxes, that we had too many things. A massive “turfing out” trip to Oxfam and we’re still left with the same conclusion: for two people in one wee house, we still have too much stuff.
If there’s a “fault” in all of this, it’s having simply too many loving friends and family members who give us things. (Who’s going to complain about that? Not us. Thank you, Mom and Dad.) Now, didn’t your mother always tell you that you didn’t give away or throw away a gift? (Oh, hush, you regifting people. We already know about you.) We heard and obeyed, just like with that thing about clearing our plates… and, years later, we have, in this country:
- A ceramic watermelon bowl, which the maker said was a just-for-fun Family Camp project twelve years ago (and we never see watermelon here)
- Nine lamps – granted, our first few flats were very, very dim, but… nine?
- Fourteen flour/sugar canisters, a few of which we even bought ourselves,
- Crud Clothes™ – 2 boxes of stained, ratty, holey clothes for cleaning, yardwork, cooking, and everything else. T. recently admitted to our friend Jacque that a couple of good aprons would have eliminated the need for this — but neither of us grew up with aprons, so…
…as you can see, the list goes on. Thus, the sale is on: two futons, a bed, and a kitchen table set is on the auction block, for cheap. We hope the Stirling U students will be interested. Selling is not what we had planned on doing, but realistically (and psychologically), it seems a good idea to go lightly through this world, so that the next (inevitable) move* won’t be so hard.
We’ve even got some aprons, and made plans to get rid of the Crud Clothes™. Eventually.
Cambusbarron is a wee village, and in many ways, Hayford Mills isn’t really even part of it. (As a matter of fact, we were informed of this. We are officially on the outskirts of a village of a couple thousand. We’re our own bedroom community neighborhood.) Anyway, we’ve determined that it was time to meet the neighbors, so we’ve walked around town over the weekend, and visited the library – which is just a little bigger than our living room and kitchen combined — and last week we auditioned to join a local chorale. The auditions weren’t exactly an unqualified disaster from start to finish, but close.
It really doesn’t hit you how precariously your independence is balanced until a bus or train is canceled or delayed — and then you realize that you can’t just jump in your car and go where you’d like. (Well, technically, you could take a cab wherever … but with such a prohibitively expensive price, you’d have to have an amazingly good reason.) We were meant to go to Dunblane Cathedral last week for our audition – and the train was canceled. When we arrived, we found that it was the end of the line, and there was no indication when the next train would be available. We hurried up the quarter mile to the cathedral, grateful it wasn’t raining on us, and then proceeded to walk through the graveyard, around the building… and around… and around… trying to find the church hall. No signs, of course, and the church, where change ringing rehearsal was going on, was locked (not that people yanking on ropes to swing massive bells could have heard us shouting or knocking anyway). T. was practically sweating bullets by the time someone found us – a good half hour late – peering through a glass door into a dim and deserted corridor. While D. gave a creditable showing for himself, singing Faure’s Libera Me with increasing confidence; T. squeaked and cracked through Pie Jesu, knew she was doing dreadfully, and tried to withdraw gracefully. No such luck – she had to sweat it out to the end. A lovely gentleman asked if we’d like a ride home, and we gratefully took it – D. ambivalent (as usual); T. still wringing wet with nerves and unhappiness. Neither of us expected to get in, so did some juggling to our schedules and happily embraced the idea of rejoining our old chorus in Glasgow. Combining that with a biweekly visit to our chiropractor made sense (it’s nice to be able to keep ONE doctor), and we ordered our scores for Elijah and planned accordingly…
…only to discover that we’d made it into the smaller chorale after all. T. is, frankly, shocked.
Anyway, it’s nice to be wanted. The other chorale’s major work this next Spring will be Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, in the original Russian, which will be definitely challenging. The City of G. Chorus’ major work and last concert in June will be Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which T. has been looking forward to singing ever since she was very small and her parents sang part of it at church. Earlier concerts, reference to Glasgow’s large Polish population, will cover Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater in Polish. We’ll have Eastern European languages all around in Scotland next year.
We’ve gotten a lot of really introspective and interesting email about the article on ethics and atheism we blogged about awhile back. You people are seriously deep, and we had fun kind of thinking in tandem with a lot of you. We’ll have to do something like that again.
Meanwhile, we continue to settle in – our internet remains limited, but that just means there’s more time to work, right? Hah, yeah, right.
One last thing we can’t seem to get over: sheep! We can watch them from the windows of the kitchen, the office, the library, and D. gets to walk past them on his way to and from work. We really do live on the outskirts!
-D & T
*The next move is, indeed, inevitable. D’s PhD hasn’t been submitted to committee yet (his supervisors are giving it “one last read-through”), which means that his viva voce exam won’t be until sometime in November or December. That means that any corrections to be made won’t be finished before the end of the year, and that his graduation won’t happen until next June. What that means for us being in Scotland, though, is that we won’t be able to apply for “post-study work” visas, as that program is being cancelled as of February of 2012. Rather, we’ll be extending the student visas for as long as it takes to graduate, and don’t have any idea whether we’ll be able to extend beyond that point because it seems that the UK doesn’t really want people to work here. Chaos, indeed.