Ruminations

Kevin and I are enjoying reading together Bill Bryson's new book The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island--a 20th anniversary book following his first book about an American in Britain, Notes from a Small Island. I had great success using the first book in a travel writing course as students loved it. Bryson has lived in Britain for 20 years except for a brief exodus to US when he wrote A Walk in the Woods.

He says at the beginning of the book about his time in Britain,  "Gradually it dawned on me that I had found a country that was wholly strange to me and yet somehow marvelous. It is a feeling that has never left me."

Kevin and I have spent time in this country and we always have this feeling of strangeness. We always have a huge learning curve. First of all, there are always language problems-- remembering Oscar Wilde's quotation about "two countries separated by a language." We sometimes are in a conversation that we have no idea what is being talked about. The one we remember best is when our friend Matthew said something like this, "Pity me has a tip that is useful---you might be interested." He continued with more and more  specific detail which just didn't help because we didn't know what he was talking about. We didn't know why we should pity him nor why a tip would be useful. Well, it turns out that Pity Me was the name of a local town and tip is the word for a dump--two crucial elements of the conversation that we could not understand.

Just this week in a walk in our neighborhood, we saw this sign and now that we know what a tip is, we had some idea what it what means. However, we did google "fly tipping" which means illegal dumping! So I am wondering, does illegal dumping go on here. I suppose that is what hotspot means. And notice the camera--you get used to the CCTV cameras over here--there is one right outside Morrison House, hovering over the bicycle garage. We understand there is a lot of bicycle theft around Cambridge.

And then walking in our neighborhood, we see a display of jars in front of the house.

Free for the taking, if you make marmalade.

And then there is the question of why the Brits don't mix water. Here in this public space customers (probably mainly Americans) are warned that the water will be hot, often scalding. And, I was happy to get a lovely face cloth (we say wash cloth)  from Helen Bredin as they are hard to find over here. Helen explained that the English fill the bowl up with water and then wash from there--no need for a face cloth or for the water to be mixed.

Anyway, Bill Bryson points out these strange and marvelous differences eloquently with wonderful, mainly gentle  humor.

Something else he talks about is the great body of knowledge that Brits have that we know nothing of. I remember when Helen did O level exams in Durham. These exams were very exacting, requiring much specific knowledge. It was good for Helen and taught her how to memorize.

I am worried about the Brit's great store of knowledge as I have a lecture coming up and I am quite nervous about it as it is out of my field. Many years ago while browsing a 19th-century periodical I found this intriguing picture of a dinner inside a big dinosaur. I saved this image and eventually found use for it in a paper I wrote for a 19th century conference with the theme "Feasts and Famine." It is such a wonderful example of that positive Victorian Can Do spirit. This feast celebrated the first dinosaur theme park which opened in Sydenham in 1853.


The Crystal Palace from the 1851 World's Fair had been moved to Sydenham and these huge dinosaurs were built outside and surrounded by a natural habitat. The Crystal Palace burned but the dinosaurs are still there today.

It is a great story but my paper does go further to discuss the contentious and complicated 19th century argument sparked by Darwin's Origin of Species (1853). So I am doing a lot of swotting these days to get ready for this talk.

I went to a lecture and discussion at the Dickens Society on Monday night. They meet monthly and talk about one Dickens novel every year. This year it is Our Mutual Friend.  I had been sent the schedule awhile back and had been working on reading the novel which is complicated and long. But it did take me back to my younger days and how enjoyable reading Dickens can be.

The meeting was in a smallish lecture room in Wolfson and there were probably 50 people crowded into a big circle. An English professor  (I think the majority of the members are from the community--I met a young woman from St Louis; her husband is a neurosurgeon here) gave a 45 minute lecture on the Headstone and Wrayburn Relationship (characters in novel) and then there was a long discussion (about 45 minutes). Then a fifteen-minute wine break. And then we took turns reading from the book followed by another discussion about another relationship in the book. A long but fascinating evening.

This kind of in-depth discussion, examination, close read is so British and so strange and marvelous! I love being here.

Yes, Cambridge is an intellectual magnet but when we lived in Durham, we attended a similar discussion group on Dante's Inferno.