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England Culture Shock

Saturday, February 18th, 2006

The children here are so pale that it gives me a stab to the heart every time I look at them—until I remember that this is normal for England in winter time.

It is strange to be back. I’ve started to notice all the little quirks and peculiar mannerisms of the people around here. I’m currently perceiving the country as if it was a Richard Curtis film (‘Notting Hill’; ‘Love, actually’)—as if England is some kind of fairytale land and I am a tourist here, albeit one who is unusually familiar with some of the locals. But not everything is quaint.

Burried underneath a mountain of free-sheets and flyers from the various estate agents who are circling around lucrative properties in this area like vultures, I found a red envelope which John had dismissed as spam and left on the floor, probably because it screamed: Open immediately! This is not a circular!. Inside was a terse letter, dated over a month ago, which demanded that we get in touch with Thames Water within three working days or bailiffs would ‘visit’ with a warrant of execution. I started to tremble.
[read on]

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Belated Birthday Prezzi

Saturday, November 26th, 2005

OK, so it’s not about travel, but still.

Look what landed in my mailbox on Nov. 24th:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
24 November 2005
—————————–
Anti-nuclear campaigners cheer local councillors
—————————–
Anti-nuclear campaigners cheered local West Berkshire councillors last night, as the West Berkshire Eastern Area Planning Committee voted to defer a decision on whether to support the Atomic Weapons Establishment’s full planning notice(1) for the controversial Orion laser facility (2).

see full press release and pic at
http://www.aldermaston.net/camp_news/articles/articles.php?id=41

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Can we have a new laser facility–pretty please??

Wednesday, November 16th, 2005

The council has sent me a surprise letter re. the Eastern Area Planning Committee meeting on 23rd November when the small matter of the Replacement Laser Facility (Orion) at our Friendly Neighbourhood Atomic Weapons Establishment will be discussed.

As with garden sheds or loft extentions, if you want to build a new laser facility to develop the next generation of nuclear weapons, you must first ask the local council for planning permission. The council will then solicit public opinion and if you write to them, you will be invited to speak at the meeting of the relevant planning sub-committee which deals with the application.

The fact that this facility is in contravention of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty can sadly not be considered by the council, but they might consider that, aside from being a scar on the landscape and potentially hazardous in itself, it also makes our nice little village even more of a terrorist target.

Who knows? I’m away by then, so I’m sending John who still wears the peace badge from the Easter Demo on the collar of his jacket.

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With a Bang

Sunday, November 6th, 2005

Funny how customs change as you move a little down the road. Guy Fawke’s Night is not celebrated in Scotland; if anything people there mourn the fact that the good Guy’s gunpowder plot did not succeeed. Here in England it’s a different story.
[read on]

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Missing Hedgehog

Saturday, October 29th, 2005

There’s no sign of Sonic. Sure, the catfood has disappeared, but the neighbourhood cat looked a bit smug in the morning and there’s no telling who the lucky recipient was. You can smell the stuff from two blocks away; there’d be no shortage of takers.

I started with putting the food out at about 20:00, when it is suitably dark, near the leaf mounts behind the shed where Sonic hadn’t taken refuge and am now moving it slowly across the lawn, a little closer every day, until we can see it from the sliding doors. Or could see it, if it wasn’t pitch dark. The only way to be sure who is actually eating the food would be to lurk all night long observing the bowl, or else install a night camera triggered by an infrared beam as seen on ‘Wildlife on One’.

I should never have let that hedgehog go in the first place.

But let’s be brutally honest here: this thing is getting in the way of my travels. I shouldn’t have worried whether John would take care of it—he went all dewy-eyed and insists I’ll buy only the finest catfood (It’s a hedgehog for cripes sake!) I can see our planned two week holiday in Bali go ‘puff’ if he claps eyes on Sonic again. But I do feel guilty about letting him (her?) go; I’m even considering taking down the little ramp I built so I could trap Sonic again. But I doubt that even hedgehogs are that stupid.

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Prickly Visitor

Thursday, October 27th, 2005

This morning, when I pulled back the heavy curtains from the double-glazed sliding doors facing the garden, I saw a grey, blurry blob moving alongside the wall; quite slowly but with an implied sense of urgency. I squinted: it could only be a hedgehog. I went upstairs to recover my glasses and sure enough, there it was, moving about restlessly in the unaccustomed sunlight. It must have tumbled down the low brick wall and was now unable to get back out onto the lawn. Moving about so much must have cost it a lot of energy and it looked small for this time of year.
[read on]

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Glorious Autum

Monday, October 17th, 2005

This weekend the grey clouds lifted for two days of glorious sunshine, just in time for my sister and her squeeze to finally visit us.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she beamed.

Oh no! The heath is pleasant enough but overly familiar and we would probably sink ankle-deep into the mud.

“Come on, let’s go into the woods!”

Woods? I have seen a few strips of woodland around the Friendly Neighbourhood Atomic Weapons Establishment, but that is miles away and surrounded by busy roads.

John was even harder to mobilise than me, moaning about a cold, but when I saw my sister’s face fall, I relented and pulled him along. He perked up when he looked at the map: there were a number of small footpaths leading into blank areas which might or might not be covered in dense forest where we could get suitably lost.
[read on]

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Time of Reckoning

Thursday, September 15th, 2005

Confidence is supposed to increase with age and experience, but this is just not true.

I have received a letter inviting me to speak [against] the planned developments at our Friendly Neighbourhood Atomic Weapons Establishment which has applied to build a couple of sheds (and—hush!—associated facilities for which it has just received funding to the tune of a few billion quid). Any building work on the AWE site is a matter of local concern, so I duly cribbed a letter from a template supplied by the peace movement and sent it off . The council considered my concerns about the potential noise impact and defilement of the landscape (sadly they can’t take into consideration that Britain, along with the USA, intends to contravene the Nonproliferation Treaty by developing new nuclear weapons) and now I have the opportunity to speak out at the next Public Meeting in Newbury on the 21st of September.
[read on]

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Bright Lights of London

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005

One often-cited advantage of living in London is the proximity of theatres and museums and the many cultural events that take place “on our doorstep”, but for all the yeas that we have lived in the capital this has never mattered either to us or to our mates. We have always been either too poor or too busy to bother with anything London had to offer. At the time even the Natural History Museum charged a £7 entrance fee and the British Library, the only attraction that would draw me to town when I was still a scientist, only opened its doors shortly before I left.
[read on]

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The Sound of Music

Friday, August 19th, 2005

It’s a day of housework in preparation for a belated summer visit to Borth. We are not lucky with the weather: the rain has driven me out of the garden where I have effectively lived during the last three days whenever I wasn’t at the computer. To top that, I have yet another lose tooth and am forced to contemplate dentures at the age of forty and I’m in a ratty mood anyway. So I turn on the radio for some music and an illusion of company. One advantage of living back in England is that the reception for Radio 1 is reasonable, most of the time. I feel a little bit closer to London, not that we get the pirate stations here, but still…
[read on]

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