Category: Living in the UK 2008

A Definite Distraction

Lee Hausman
 
One of my favorite local bar/restaurants is Zero Degrees, a brew pub that makes its delicious Black Lager on site. The food and service are excellent as well. I should also mention that they have a rather remarkably decorated men’s loo (bathroom), and I thought I’d share the details with you:
 
   
 
In case the photo details are not too clear, the women in the pictures feature a cell phone camera, a measuring tape, amused looks, a medical chart, and a cleaver!
 
In case you’re wondering if the womens’ loo is decorated with similar creativity, during their visit my step-daughters reported that it’s not. Shameful discrimination!
 
 

They’re Just Crazy About It

Lee Hausman

I thought I’d expend a few bytes discussing the popularity of football (soccer) here. To the non-native observer (me), it’s stupendous. There’s just no way to overstate it. I’m not sure Americans can appreciate it, though, simply because there is no analogous sports structure in the US.

In American football, the NFL basically divides itself into the AFC and NFC for the purpose of faux regional conflict and 32 teams play each other for one season, culminating in the hype-filled Super Bowl. The schedule is set, the teams are known, and the only mystery is who will be invited to the Pro Bowl. The owners collude with each other in a cozy, $7bn club, granted anti-trust immunity by a bought-and-paid-for Congress. Money comes first, sport second.

Here it’s quite different. The team owners don’t look like the Board of Directors of Soccer, Inc. The Brits and Europeans have many different professional leagues and competitions, seemingly lasting year-round, and crossing international borders.

For example, in the UK there’s the Football League, Premiership League, Champions League, League One, and League Two. In Europe, there’s UEFA EURO 2008, UEFA Champions League, and the UEFA Cup. Each European country has its own leagues and then there’s the FIFA World Cup every four years. Talk about rich and diverse competition! It makes the NFL seem down right inbred.

In addition, in the UK (and probably in Europe) there are several lower tiers of semi-pro football leagues. These have a status, history, serious facilities, and local following that’s unlike anything in the American football scheme. It’s a bit like the minor leagues in US baseball, actually. Altogether there are 485 pro and semi-pro teams in the UK alone.

In the UK, as in many sports leagues around the world (but not the US), promotion and relegation is a process that takes place at the end of each season in which teams are transferred between divisions. The best-ranked teams in each division are promoted to the next-highest division, and at the same time the worst-ranked teams in the higher division are relegated (or demoted) to the lower division. Now there’s incentive for you! A local semi-pro team was recently relegated to a lower division and they announced a drop in season ticket prices as a result. Imagine the Redskins doing that after a bad season.

This all breeds a huge interest in football (soccer) here. It often dominates the media, the TVs in every pub and restaurant, and the news. It’s not unusual for an issue of the London Times to devote 12-15 full pages exclusively to football. In the US, the NFL keeps a legal death-grip on the rights to broadcast anything about US football; here, stations frequently broadcast independent coverage of local and national teams. And matches are shown live, in prime time, all the time.

UK acquaintances here have asked why Americans call the Super Bowl the "world championship" of American football, when teams from only one country compete. Good question.

 

Golf in England

Lee Hausman
 
I finally got to play some golf here; it was definitely a case of “be careful what you wish for”!
 
Background: my colleague and I were invited by a customer to join him at his golf club for their Pro-Am Tournament. Sounded like fun. The customer is an older gent, so I envisioned us riding in power carts, having fun, not taking the golf too seriously, and being treated to a nice, private club course. 
 
Two days before the date, our host called in sick due to gout (!) but said he’d arranged for another member to join us.
 
We when arrived, the course turned out to be “one of the longest in England”, designed by Harry Vardin himself in 1922. Left-to-right sloping narrow fairways, bunkers galore, knee-high rough on all sides, and greens as hard and slick as Masonite. Uh-oh…
 
The tournament works like this: the one Pro in each foursome was competing against the other Pros for the 1,000 Pound prize (serious money). We three amateurs were a team, each playing our own ball but recording the lowest of our scores per hole, competing against the amateurs in other foursomes. This team arrangement, however, means if you lose a ball in the wicked rough or hit it out of bounds, you are done playing for that hole. In regular play, you can add a penalty stroke (or two) to your score then drop a new ball and play on, but this tournament rule made you a spectator for the rest of the hole, which is no fun.
 
Our Pro was a 32-year old (did I mention he was a scratch golfer?) and our substitute host was a 34-year old who carried his bag and plays there twice weekly. Both very nice guys. However, merely asking about the availability of power carts was met with the disdain reserved for WWI veterans, “Nancy-boys”, and the French. So, no power cart for us; my colleague and I pulled our bags on trolleys (pull-carts). We all teed off from the rear-most tees, which were so far back that, literally, in every tee box, you could not stand two feet behind the markers and still be in the tee box!
 
The weather was perfectly English: completely overcast, about 55-degrees, and looking all day like hard rain at any minute (though it never did). There was also a nearly-constant 20mph wind, with hat-removing gusts.
 
Our very late tee time, 2:20pm, in a tourney that started at 8:00am, ensured there were no refreshments left by the time we got to the hospitality tents along the course and the snack cart was also cleaned out.
 
Now, do I really need to go into how badly I played, after 6 months off? How much time I spent fruitlessly looking in the rough for my ball? My best hole: a double-bogey. By Hole #5, I was thinking “Bataan Death March” and wondering if I would make it through all 18 holes. We didn’t finish until 8:00pm!
 
We were not in any danger of being competitive, as our host member had a bad day, too. And, our Pro didn’t do so well, either, so everyone was happy. 
 
The following day, I felt like I’ve been massaged all over with a baseball bat. Muscles I didn’t know I had were hurting and I was so exhausted that night that I couldn’t get to sleep.
 
Golf in England: it can only get better next time.
 
 

It’s So Very French

Lee Hausman
I recently switched cars, from a rented Vauxhall Astra to a leased brand new Peugeot 207. The former is an English brand, the latter French. There’s some confusion about it but “Peugeot” appears to be pronounced either “pah-joe” (U.K.) or “pooh-zhoe” (U.S.). Peugeot doesn’t have the best reputation but this year’s model got stellar marks on the car review web sites.
 
The Vauxhall is a medium-sized car, which I got used to despite its size in this country’s small lanes and parking spaces, while the Peugeot is in the somewhat smaller class called “super-mini”. The idea that the back seat of the Peugeot “seats three”, as the advertising says, might be feasible if they mean three 8-year olds. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of room behind the wheel for someone my size and the Peugeot’s a good fit.
 
The pictures above show the Vauxhall, left, and the Peugeot, right.
 
The Vauxhall was an automatic (unusual in England and primarily found on rental cars) and it was very helpful not to have to deal with shifting while getting acclimated to driving here. The Peugeot is a 5-speed manual shift and, so far, I’ve had no problems driving it now that I’m used to English traffic.
 
You may remember that I had hoped to lease a Mercedes A150 but, alas, they were not available for short-term leases.
 
My Peugeot, which is the standard (not luxury) model, does have some interesting features:
  • With an eye again to tight parking quarters, the side mirrors automatically fold in when you lock the car.
  • There’s a dial on the dash to adjust the headlight focus up or down. Imagine how that would be abused in the U.S!
  • The front doors have fancy, automatic up/down power windows; the rear doors have hand cranks.
  • The doors do not have individual door lock plungers or buttons. A button on the dash locks/unlocks all doors.
  • Tire pressures and the engine oil level are electronically-monitored and displayed on the dash.
  • The RDS (Radio Data System) digital radio is the European equivalent of XM Radio in the U.S.
  • Gas consumption averages a delightful 45 mpg. Why can’t they do that in the US?
I’ll be taking a four-hour drive up to Liverpool for The British Open in July and I’m looking forward to the road trip in the Peugeot.
 

Concerning My Apartment

Lee Hausman
Some of you have asked for a few more details about my living arrangements. I live in a “serviced apartment”, which is part hotel, part apartment. That is, I have a fully-furnished two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, including kitchen and washer/dryer, with maid service and linens once a week. The “front desk” is not quite like a hotel’s, though, as it’s only staffed 8-2 and 5-7 daily and not at all on Sundays. The staff is very helpful and pleasant.
 
Most other tenants are here for a week-end or a week, some for a month. I’m unique in being a 12-month tenant. My monthly rent, paid by my company, is more than 3 times my monthly mortgage payment in the US (after making the Pounds-to-Dollars conversion).
 
I’m on the 1st floor (in the UK street level is “Ground”, and the 1st floor is the next one up) of a five-story building, overlooking a fairly busy one-way street, facing Southeast (gets good sun). There’s a hospital nearby, so ambulance sirens are a pretty common occurrence, although I’ve gotten quite used to them and they don’t wake me at night. The building geography is such that there’s no apartment beside or below mine and I rarely hear anything from the apartment above.
 
I’m quite near the city center, the major mall, and a university, so parking is an issue. My building has only nine parking spaces in back. Luckily for me, my year-round status has resulted in one of them being sign-posted as reserved for me (and, some of the time, people heed the sign). The building faces away from the city center so it’s convenient for me to go out the back and through a little warren of alleys and streets on my five-minute walk to the office or mall. I find it interesting that law offices, the local branch of the Quakers, and other businesses are tucked away in the tiny streets out back.
 
The neighborhood is a mixed bag of newly renovated offices and apartments, run-down row houses, and a few abandoned buildings, the old and new freely mixed. I had my doubts about it prior to moving in but it seems fine to me now, and it seems to be quite safe, even very late at night. It’s kind of cool walking in places on cobbles or paving stones and thinking they’ve been here for 100-200 years.
 
Directly across the street is an undeveloped lot with tall bushes – a pleasant green sight each morning – and beyond that, row houses. To the left and down the block: a “news agent” (7-Eleven), takeaway (carry-out) Chinese and Indian restaurants, and The Turks pub. To the right: Sea Spray Fish ‘n’ Chips and The Red Cow pub. So it’s not too commercial along our stretch of road and there’s no curbside parking at all.
 
This is definitely “city living”, very unlike suburban Falls Church, Virginia. There are few trees and the streets are dirty. There’s a fair amount of trash and litter strewn about, pavements (sidewalks) are often littered with cigarette butts near doorways, and it’s rare not to see a discarded beer can or three when walking to work. Some of this stuff shocked me at first but I’ve gotten quite used to it by now. On the other hand, there’s surprisingly little graffiti and few rogue advertising signs (the kind Robert diligently polices).
 
For a country that focuses heavily on “green” issues (you almost feel guilty asking for anything to be put into a plastic bag, and you do have to ask), there doesn’t seem to be any personal recycling in Reading. I’ve noticed an occasional recycling bin outside the backs of retail businesses but it doesn’t appear mandatory and we don’t have it in my apartment or office building.
 

Tales from the Other Side of the Road

Lee Hausman
 
As you may know, I’ve been driving here for the last month and I thought I’d share some of the highlights of the English driving experience with you. That driving on the other (I don’t say "wrong") side of the road is an experience in itself goes without saying, so I’ll proceed to other points:
 
  • The steering wheel is on the left side of the car and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked up to the car on the right side out of habit; once I even opened the door before noticing there was no steering wheel there.
  • There is no "right turn on red" in England.
  • To stop traffic, the traffic lights turn from green to yellow then to red. To start traffic, they go from red to red + yellow to green. Many drivers hit the gas when the red + yellow appears.
  • Outside of downtown areas where blocks meet at right angles, round-abouts, or traffic circles, are far more common than standard intersections. There’s one, for example, beneath almost every major highway interchange. The traffic in the circle has the right-of-way but there’s also a specific etiquette with regard to the use of turn signals when in the circle to let everyone know where you’re going. They’re quite a bit of fun, but on a long trip, negotiating dozens and dozens of round-abouts does get a bit tiring.
  • Speed limits, when they are posted, are often posted on signs the size of a dinner plate, so they’re easy to miss. The rule of thumb is that, if a street has lamp posts, the speed limit is 30 mph. Yes, it’s miles per hour, not kilometers per hour here. Speed cameras, fixed and mobile, are everywhere. I know this because my GPS satellite navigation system comes with a database of them and I can’t believe how often it warns me.
  • The National Speed Limit for motorways (interstates) is 70 mph but people frequently drive 85 and 90. Mix this in with trucks that have governors that limit them to 55 and little old ladies (and me) doing 60, and you have a volatile mix.
  • Dual carriageways (four-lane divided highways) have speed limits of 60 and 70 mph but are frequently bisected by streets at stop lights or round-abouts. Add the speeders and you have people doing 85-90 mph on roads that are not limited access, like a motorway is. Scary indeed.
  • Other drivers are very generous here about letting you change lanes or merge in, which is very commendable. The "zipper merge" is practically a national pastime.
  • I honestly think a lot of drivers here drive slowly to conserve fuel. Yes, there are speed cameras but my observation is that drivers on city streets stick to the speed limit or less. Even on the motorways, I bet those folks driving 60 are counting their fuel savings. It doesn’t take too many $140 fill-ups to get the message. I wonder how soon this will catch on in the U.S.?
  • In a country with very old towns never designed for cars, parking is a national sport. Commercial areas like city centers have multi-story car parks (garages) but when it comes to parking the car at home in the urban setting, well, let’s just say I’ve seen a lot of "imaginative use of space". I’m very lucky that I have a reserved parking space at my apartment building (though that doesn’t always keep it open for me).
  • Pedestrians do not have the right of way by law as they do in the U.S. Crossing the street at a crosswalk means waiting until all the traffic has passed, traffic stops because the light up ahead has them backed up, or very occasionally encountering someone who stops for you. There are multiple types of crosswalks (Pelican, Toucan, Zebra) denoted by road markings and special lights. Only one, the Zebra, requires drivers to stop for pedestrians. My driving instructor frowned on slowing for pedestrians as it "just encourages them to cross". If you come to visit, consider yourself warned!

That’s it for now. More gleanings from my driving escapades will appear later.

A Royal Home and A Sixties Theme

Lee Hausman
 
We went seriously Tourist on Wednesday and went over to nearby Windsor, about 10 miles away, and toured Windsor Castle. It’s the “oldest and largest occupied castle in the world”, according to the guidebook, and figures in “900 years of British history”. Queen Elizabeth is said to go there most weekends during the season when she’s in residence in London. The weather was a dreary and constant drizzle but at least it was warm; good weather to be inside.
 

Inside, touring the “State Apartments”, we agreed it was on a par with a visit to Versailles. The opulence and grandeur of the rooms is stunning. These are the public rooms used for various functions and some of the historic rooms, such as the King’s Bedroom, which are maintained for display only. Alas, no photography is allowed, of course.
 
The art on the walls alone is worth a visit: Rembrandt, Rubens, Canaletto, Gainsborough, and van Dyke, are there, to name but a few. The weaponry on display, arranged in clever patterns on high walls, is also quite amazing, from all eras of the British Empire. A staff of 150 lives in the castle to keep all that stuff well-polished and, no doubt,  to see to every Royal need.
 
What was once the moat around the interior keep is now dry and landscaped with a beautiful garden. The castle is quite a tourist draw, complete with airport-style security, and there were lots of visitors. The girls and I thought it was a marvelous afternoon. Be sure to put it on your list!
 
By popular demand we spent the girls’ last day here back in London. We had a nice, partly sunny day, and our first stop was the famous Abbey Road crosswalk that appeared on the Beatles album cover. Luckily, this is a “Zebra” crossing, which means traffic must stop if anyone is crossing.
 
And there were quite a few people there getting their pictures taken, slow-motion goose-stepping across ala the album cover. The actual Abbey Road Studios are two doors down and surrounded by a white wall that’s covered with graffiti greetings from pilgrims. The neighborhood, Saint John’s Wood, is very posh and seems an unlikely location for a studio.
 
In keeping with our 60’s theme, our next stop was Soho and Carnaby Street. In the 60’s, Carnaby Street was associated with the “Mod” fashion style and was home to many independent clothing designers. It eventually fell out of favor but has made a bit of a resurgence lately as a pedestrianised shopping zone between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus, a block off of Regent Street. We spent the afternoon (mostly) window shopping and enjoying the good weather. The girls reported that the prices for everything were really high.  When we’d seen all there was to see in Soho, we walked down to Westminster to let the girls get some photos of themselves with Big Ben in the background, and then made it back into the tube before the afternoon rain began.
 

Incidentally, if you’ve been following this week of sight-seeing you should know that all of the places we visited charged an admission fee of between 10-15 GBP per visitor (yes, even Stonehenge). Contrast this to the Smithsonian Institution’s nineteen totally-free museums around Washington, D.C. !
 
Back in Reading, we rested up a bit and then went out for a nice farewell dinner. Afterwards, we strolled the Reading City Center, enjoying the warm evening and talking about our week. 
 
The next morning, I surrendered those two wonderful young women to the tender mercies of Virgin Atlantic airlines and sent them home. I started missing them the minute they were out of sight.
 
 
 

The Beauty of Stonehenge

Lee Hausman
 
For those following the Father-Daughters 2008 Tour, we high-tailed it Sunday in the pouring rain for two hours up to Leicester (US English: "Lester") and gave my new SatNav (GPS) navigation unit a test. It insisted on taking us there via the weirdest back-roads route you can imagine, with about 200 roundabouts, but otherwise it worked pretty well and we arrived on time. In Leicester, daughter Lindsay met up with an old girl friend who now attends Leeds University and the girls socialized and went to a few museums for the afternoon. I took myself off to a sports pub and watched some golf and had a fine afternoon with a pint and the Sunday London Times. Visiting over, we drove back in the evening, bullying the SatNav unit into taking the big motorways instead of back country tracks.
 
Monday was a “Bank Holiday” here, corresponding with Memorial Day in the US, and we generally lazed about and visited the local mall (“The Oracle”). We had a change of plans when we found out that the only seats left for new Indiana Jones movie were in the front row. The girls did some window shopping but found nothing they just “had to have”. After the past few days "on the go" it wasn’t bad doing nothing.
 
Tuesday, we fired up the SatNav once again and headed for Stonehenge! The site is about an hour from Reading and the SatNav took us right there. What an impressive sight! The massive stones, their arrangement and hillside prominence, and their mysterious history combined to create a wonderful experience for us. The girls found them enchanting and, even though you can no longer walk among the stones, it’s still a very interesting and engaging place.
 
The surrounding countryside is also impressive, with great open vistas across the Salisbury Plain, dotted here and there with burial mounds. It’s something to think about: the construction and use of this site was going on at about the same time the Egyptians were building their pyramids, yet we know comparatively little about the builders of Stonehenge and so much about the ancient Egyptians.
 
After an hour we saddled up again and headed for Avebury, another stone ring site nearby. It’s much larger than Stonehenge (so large a road goes through it and there’s a little village with a pub and post office within it) but much less impressive. None of its stones are rectangular which somehow makes them less esoterically pleasing and all of them had fallen and were re-erected in 1938 by an English archaeologist. You can walk freely among the stones and touch them, but the experience was diminished by the fact that sheep are used to keep the surrounding grass "cut" and their copious poop was everywhere. We spent most of our time watching our steps rather than enjoying the stones. My advice to you, prospective tourists, is to see Stonehenge but pass on Avebury.
 
We agreed that we enjoyed our day among the stones. The sheer mass of them (up to 100 tons) and the amazing effort it took to transport them to their places 3,000 – 5,000 years ago fires the imagination and it’s inspiring to visit them.
 
 
 

Who Was That Rotund Man?

Lee Hausman
 
We continued our Saturday tour of London by walking up to Piccadilly Circus (the “Times Square” of London) in time for the 4 pm matinee of The 39 Steps at the Criterion Theatre. The 600-seat theater is entirely underground and has been around, in one form or another, since 1874. Our seats were comfy and in a good location. The 1915 novel The 39 Steps has been made into three movies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 classic, and is the story of an innocent man thrown into a spy intrigue, accused of murder, and pursued across England.
 
The play featured a great ensemble of four actors, playing 150 roles, with a minimal set and some wonderfully imaginative direction. And a lot a humor! At one point (the chase across the Scottish countryside) cut-out silhouettes of the characters were projected against a drop – and in the corner was the famous Hitchcock silhouette that used to grace his TV program in the 50’s. It was a very funny show and, we thought, over too soon.
 
We topped off our evening with a nice Italian dinner at one of the ASK branches in London and then went to Paddington to get our train back to Reading. However… the soccer fans we’d encountered in the morning were now returning, too. They were also in a sullen mood because they’d lost. Luckily, special trains had been laid on just for them and a serious number of policemen were there to keep things orderly. After a bit of confusion about which train was going where, we boarded the right train and found police on board it, too, which is pretty unusual. But the soccer fans were pretty subdued, which was a blessing, and our ride home was uneventful.
 
All in all, we had a very nice day out and I, for one, slept quite soundly that night!
 

Bunkering Down

Lee Hausman
 
The Churchill Cabinet War Rooms is the underground bunker from which Winston Churchill and his generals directed the British fight in WWII. It was built, in anticipation of the bombing that was sure to come when Germany declared war on England, beneath an office building near Downing Street.
 
The girls thought it sounded interesting, so we took the tour. The underground rooms have been faithfully restored based on WWII photographs. Some rooms were simply shut up and abandoned at the end of the war and their furnishings and maps are the originals. It’s a fascinating walk through the technology (very low) and trials (chamber pots) of those who led the defense of England during the months of The Blitz, the devastating "buzz-bomb" missile attacks, and the long road to victory.
 
The picture shows The Map Room; notice the heavy timbers that were installed to help support the 6-foot thick cement slab that was hastily poured above the basement rooms. At the time, no one knew if the bunker would actually survive a direct hit on the building above. Luckily, they never had to find out; apparently the location of the bunker was never discovered by German spies.
 
The bunker occupants included Churchill and his wife, his civilian advisors, his generals, military officers and staff, cooks, communications staff, and secretaries. Churchill refused to flee London and even occassionally watched the bombing raids from the rooftop of the office building above! He also went out after the raids into flattened neighborhoods to offer consolation to survivors.
 
The guided audio tour that came with our admission tickets provided all of the details, including the location the secret room that Churchill used for encrypted phone conversations with US President Roosevelt. So secret that most of the staff thought the room was a private flush toilet for Churchill’s personal use! Excerpts of Churchill’s speeches, the wail of air raid sirens, and the sounds of bombs exploding above are all piped in and add to the experience.
 
My daughters found it very interesting and it’s another fine tourist attraction for you to put on your list! P.S. Not for the claustrophobic, however.