Category: Living in the UK 2008

Cars in the Roundabout Have “Priority”

Lee Hausman
My company is leasing a car for me in the next few weeks and I had a 2-hour "refresher" driving lesson today; it was incredibly stressful. In addition to having to remember to stay on the correct, if totally foreign, side of the road, I was also working a manual shifter with my left hand. I thought I was going to drive up on the sidewalk half a dozen times! In addition, streets here are narrow, people park all over the place, and it’s legal to parallel park facing any direction. Then there was the whole "roundabout" thing. Do you have any idea how common they are in this country? They’re used for at least 50% of all intersections where we would use traffic lights. And there’s a well-defined (if counter-intuitive to a Yank) process for negotiating them and don’t forget to signal! Shift, shift! Signal!
 
The drivers here are already showing every inclination to all the worst American driving behavior. Road getting narrower? Cars parked on each side? No room for two cars to pass each other? In the oncoming car "Nigel" decides to floor it! You can’t get on the brakes fast enough. I also turned into a residential road with cars lining it, only one lane available down the middle, and encountered a big truck coming towards me a block away. He flashed his headlights, so I proceeded a few cars further along and pulled to the curb at a space to let him pass. Nooo – he wanted into that space at the curb and I eventually had to back up (an event I’m sure will feature in the driving instructor’s dreams tonight). Rule #42 – Never flash your headlights nor believe others when they do.

On top of all that, the driving instructor was, well, a driving instructor. Think you’re a good driver? Forget about being in a foreign country – just get into a car with a real driving instructor and be prepared to have all those little "habits" you’ve developed since 9th Grade Driver’s Ed mercilessly pointed out! I was so depressed afterwards I considered blowing off the leased car entirely. Then I had two pints of beer and felt a lot better. Still, I’m not looking forward to next week’s lesson much. I suppose familiarity with the car and more experience will help, but it was still not a great few hours. 

More driving adventures to come, I’m sure.

 

 

Over The Top

Lee Hausman

You may remember a saying that the British, bearing up under the burden of American G.I. guests during WWII, came up with: the “Yanks” were “Oversexed, Overpaid, and Over Here”.

So it was with some amusement that I saw an article in The Independent entitled “Over the Top, Underdressed, and Over Here”. It was about, of all things, the invasion of the United Kingdom by the Hooters restaurant chain.

The subtitle was “It’s a feminist nightmare: an American restaurant chain whose unique selling point is the vital statistics of the waitresses. Now Hooters is coming to a city near you.” Hooters has had one quiet outlet here, in Nottingham, for about five years but plans to open 41 more in the next 4 years. Apparently, UK feminists are not amused and now politicians are getting involved. Campaigns, demonstrations, and news articles have ensued. There’s even a counter “Hands Off Our Hooters” movement with web sites and petitions. Golly, the English can be entertaining!

Curiously, the article mentioned that the driving force behind the Hooters “breastaurants” was a 69-year old, introverted Christian family man who bought the rights from the founders in 1984 and who passed away two years ago. Robert H. Brooks parlayed his formula: “Beautiful women, cold beer, and food that never goes out of fashion” into a $1Billion-a-year empire of 435 eateries in 46 U.S. states and 23 countries. What a true Capitalist!

The article also revealed some of the company’s exhaustive dress code: “no buttocks showing, no bare midriffs allowed, no body piercings or tattoos, and no exposed bra straps”. That was surprising. Critics call the restaurants little more than glorified strip joints with bad food; maybe so, but the very few times I’ve been in Hooters I haven’t seen anything suggestive. The waitresses certainly smiled a lot but were not flirtatious or salacious. Their outfits were not as revealing as those often worn by women in public. The food was nothing to write home about – mostly deep fried everything – and the atmosphere was 50’s diner–ish.

I’m not for blatant exploitation of women but I wonder if, in this case, the PR strategy has successfully and profitably managed to get our imaginations to go well beyond the reality.

Brooks, who was known as the “World Wide Wing Commander” (that would be for chicken wings), built his fortune with the patent of the Burger King milkshake formula, by selling non-dairy creamer to airlines, and by creating the sauces and salad dressings of the Naturally Fresh Foods brand.

It’ll be interesting to see if Hooters in the UK goes bust.

 

Great Expectations

Lee Hausman
It’s funny how we humans see what we want to see, how our expectations often completely control us. I’m thinking of a recent experience in a restaurant here where the menu said “Mexican Beef Salad”. I’m a big fan of the salads at this place and I thought I knew what I was ordering.

 We’ve all had Mexican-Burrito-Taco-Chimichanga-salad type meals before, right? Yes, the menu said what was really in it and yes, I read it and yes, I paid no attention to what I was reading at all. In my mind I saw a taco salad, with lettuce, some taco meat (seasoned hamburger) and maybe some tortilla chips, salsa, etc. I read what I wanted to read, bowing to my expectations.  

So, nooo, when it was delivered it proved to be a salad with guacamole and cheese, all right, even some salsa, AND a few slices of roast beef! I was kind of startled. No tortilla chips, either, mate.  

I’m not a fan of roast beef but the salad was good nonetheless. Gotta remember to read more carefully and understand what I’m reading. 
 

So, too, were my expectations of The Masters golf tournament coverage last night a little off base. The Masters is covered here on channel BBC2 from about 10 pm to midnight. Having seen no golf in the last few months (!!) I was eager to see the coverage and expected it to be much like the coverage you see in the US. 
Well, not exactly. First of all, the BBC is at the mercy of CBS, the only US broadcaster covering the tournament, for their video feed and, of course, the BBC doesn’t show commercials, so there are all of these breaks in the BBC coverage while CBS is showing commercials. During those breaks the BBC commentators fill the time with chit chat and detailed, player-by-player strolls through the entire leader board, from top to bottom, and other less-than-entertaining observations. 
 
The BBC commentators are also much more interested in the English, Irish, and then European players and tend to focus on them. US commentators generally focus on the players doing the most dramatic playing, regardless of origin. The BBS commentators are also older gents and contemporaries of one golfer in particular and tended to give him a lot of flattering attention. They’re much more personal than US commentators and also less harsh when someone makes an error. 
 
It was great to see some golf, to see The Masters, and I fully intend to tune back in tonight but somehow two hours of BBC-style coverage, not really what I had expected, was enough last night. 
 
How I miss my 42” Hi-Def Plasma TV when it comes to watching golf!  

 

The Grocery Store Experience

Lee Hausman
 
There are two grocery stores I frequent here, both within walking distance. I have not made it to the Emerald City of Tesco yet, as it’s outside downtown. Instead I use the Marks & Spencer and the Sainsbury.
 
Marks & Spencer, the more upscale of the two, is a department store with a grocery store in it. It offers baked goods, fresh fruits, veges, and dairy but everything else is prepared foods. A lot of it is quite nice, not frozen, and pretty tasty. This includes sandwiches and runs to complete multi-course meals. But you won’t find paper towels, olive oil, or cleaning products there. For that you have to go to Sainsbury.
 
Which is a real grocery store but a little bit more down-market. More ingredients, fewer prepared foods. You find the variety of products we see in the US but not the variety within categories of products. For example, there’s the house brand of soup and Campbell’s and that’s it.
 
Both stores use hand baskets or wheeled baskets (kind of like wheeled luggage) but there are no shopping carts. Which works well because you’re lugging this stuff home by hand so the basket serves as an automatic governor on over-buying. Having to carry it home also means you shop more often, buy less than you would if you had a car, and get fresher food. Not a bad approach.
 
The food quality is generally good, though the fruit doesn’t have the curb appeal that it does in the US (i.e. hasn’t been gassed into some unnatural color). Baked goods are excellent and the veges can be good but you have to look carefully. I haven’t really purchased any meat so I can’t comment, although it looks good. The nutrition labels are pretty familiar. They use the same slimy trick of listing the various nutrition values based on an arbitrary weight or volume as a “serving”, of which there are usual 2.3 or 3.7 or some such inscrutable number in the container. Instead of a “Calories” item on the label, though, there’s an “Energy” item, listed in both kJ (kiloJoules) and kcal (kiloCalories). When was the last time you admonished yourself for eating too many kiloJoules?
 
At the checkout, there’s the usual moving belt and some last-minute, impulse-buy stuff (but not the wall of it you see in the US). There are no paper bags and you’re charged 3 pence per plastic bag. You may bring your own bags, of course. The cashier sits facing you and the scale/scanner, then register is between you and him. You bag your own purchases, unless you ask for help. Amazingly, after you’ve paid, the cashier waits for you to finish bagging, put your wallet away, get out your sunglasses, or do whatever you need to do, before starting to process the next order – very civilized indeed!
 

My Encounter with a Pickpocket

Lee Hausman
 
Throughout my travels over the years, I have been in many places where pickpockets are said to be operating. Some places even post signs along the sidewalk saying so. I have been known to carry my money in a small “boot wallet” clipped inside my trousers; sometimes even attached to a retracting steel cable! And yet, I have never encountered a pickpocket until yesterday.
 
I suppose living here and getting out of tourist mode has made me a bit lax. I generally tool around Reading with my wallet in my back pocket and don’t think much about it. Yesterday, coming back from a business appointment, I experienced a fine London subway tradition: the service interruption. Interruptions from fires, maintenance work, equipment failures, electrical problems, etc. are so common that stations have electronic and whiteboard signs that announce today’s failures as they occur. So it was that in mid-ride, finding one subway line suddenly without service, I and hundreds of other riders had to change to an adjacent line.
 
The platform and then the cars when we boarded them were jam-packed! So tightly packed were we that standees, like myself, had no need to hold onto an overhead or vertical bar for balance. We were immobilized against the packing peanuts of our fellow riders. So there I was, Sardine Man, train in motion, when I suddenly felt a quick pat of my back pants pocket where my wallet usually lives. It took me a moment to recognize the sensation and realize, by the time a second and then a third pat had occurred, that this was not a grope but an actual grab for my wallet. But I was stuck: I could not turn my body to see behind me nor raise my arms due to the press. It occurred to me to yell “Pickpocket” but what would that accomplish? It was already too late.
 
My wallet, with all its valuable cards and money, all its irreplaceable pictures and charms, and some really hard-to-replace stuff, like my Virginia driver’s license, remained safely in my front pants pocket with my hand shoved in on top of it. I don’t remember doing it, but I know as soon as I spied a crowd assembling on the subway platform, I relocated my wallet to the front pocket and place a guarding hand in over it. This is another one my automatic traveler’s habits and, in retrospect I’m really, really glad I developed it. How frustrating would it have been to feel someone take my wallet but be unable to even turn around to confront them?
 
I think I’ll inventory my wallet tonight and remove a few non-essential things, then be a little more careful around Reading in the future. Just in case.
 
 

Duchamp, Man Ray, and Picabia Exhibition

Lee Hausman
 
London’s Tate Modern museum is a cavernous, industrial-seeming building on the banks of the Thames. I have never much liked the building itself, both for its architecture and located as it is equally inconveniently distant from three tube stops. Nonetheless, I went to see the Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia exhibit there recently.
 
These three wackos were key figures in the history of modernism. Famous for creating the post-WWI Dada movement in New York and Paris in 1915-20, they became friends and influenced each other’s work.
 
Early on as painters they experimented with cubism and produced strange, scandalous paintings that substituted shapes for flesh, in works that resemble multiple-exposure photography. Check out Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Later abstractions produced blobs of paint on colored backgrounds.
 
One of their signatures was to challenge the prevailing notion of what constitutes “art”. The foundation of Dada-ism is “anti-art”. Duchamp was famous for entering a mass-produced ceramic men’s room urinal, The Fountain, in an art show. Man Ray created rayographs by laying objects on photo paper and exposing them to light. Picabia, collected fast cars and created transparencies, paintings in which multiple images overlay and show through each other.
 
They worked in paint, sculpture, mechanical objects, photographs, and film and their careers spanned decades. No chilly artist’s garret and soul-sapping anonymity for these guys: they were famous and influential and lived and worked into the 1960’s. One of Duchamp’s best-known works is L.H.O.O.Q. – an image of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee added. Picabia’s work even graced the cover of Vogue magazine.
 
And they were fun guys. For example, Picabia wrote a film script, featuring Duchamp and Man Ray playing chess, among other things. The resulting movie was shown during the intermission of a new opera and its stated intent was to get the audience to go home. A lot of modern art leaves me cold but I enjoyed the sheer whimsy and bravado of these works.
 
The Tate show itself was well-organized, with over a hundred pieces, and nicely annotated. The audio guide (a very worthwhile expense) included recordings of comments on the works by the artists themselves – a very personal connection. You can see a lot of the exhibition here.
 
It was interesting to see that some their works, painstakingly created “the old fashioned way” with materials then available to them, are the predecessors (and possibly the foundations) for digitally-created images and videos we see today. “Solarization”, layering, and video scene quick-cutting are but a few examples. One wonders what these artists could have done with modern digital tools or if they would have had any impact at all in today’s visually overloaded world. If the show travels to the U.S., I recommend it to you.
 
Incidentally, one of the principals of the Dada movement in Berlin after WWI was an artist named Raoul Hausmann.
 
 

How to Make a Few Quid

Lee Hausman

 

The bookstores are jammed with books about all things English that oppose, imitate, irritate, or amuse the American sensibility. I have before me one of these (it was a gift); a book that lists supposedly naughty British place and street names. Here are a few examples:

 

A village named Horton Cum Studley and another named Bishop’s Itchington. Making you smile?

 

How about Wigley Bush Lane or the town of Penistone? Surely Green Dick’s Lane gave you a chuckle. No? How about Hardon Lane or Slutshole Lane?

 

Well, they didn’t do anything for me either. I thought the whole book was quite a reach. Or maybe, after two months here, my sense of humor has been Anglicized.

 

More proof that you can make a buck selling just about anything.

 

 

Are You Getting the Message Now?

Lee Hausman

 

I was walking along through town one day and happened to look down at a discarded empty pack of cigarettes on the ground. Something about it struck me as odd, unfamiliar. Ah, yes…

 

Now here’s a picture of a typical US pack of cigarettes. Notice that the tobacco warning label, which I’ve helpfully outlined so you can find it, is tucked away on the edge of the pack, where your fingers will likely cover it when opening the pack. This has not changed in the last 20 years.

 

The text is one of four different messages such as “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy.”  I guess it complies with US law but it’s clearly designed to not get in the way of the important stuff, from the tobacco industry’s perspective: making loads of money while addicting and killing millions.  

 

      

 

But now here’s what the empty pack I saw on the ground looked like. Huge difference. The tobacco warning is simple and hard to miss. 

 

Recent studies seem to indicate that relatively complex and wordy messages in the US warning label don’t have much effect, but the larger British, Canadian, German, Autrailian, etc. warnings do. Many countries, but not the US, have revised and improved their warning messages several times over the last decade.

 

 A 2005 study found that half of all smokers in the US read at the 6th Grade level or below. Now that’s scary all on its own!

  

 

 

 

   

  

 

After August of this year, the UK warnings will be made much more graphic, with actual large, nasty images on the pack, like this one (I decided the image of the rotted teeth was just too horrible to show).

 

  

The UK and other countries are obviously really serious about getting kids and new smokers to reconsider the habit; too bad the US isn’t.

 

 

 

 

  

 

DVD Delivery Services

Lee Hausman
 
Back in the States, I was a big fan of NetFlix and watched a movie from them almost every Saturday night. I was disappointed to find that they have no branch in the UK, but when I arrived here someone told me about LoveFilm, which offers a similar service.
 
Note that it’s "LoveFilm" not "Love Films", so get that idea of an adult movie service right out of your mind. It is, instead, a NetFlix clone in almost every respect but the payment currency. Here are the two web sites:
 
 

    
 
 
So I was keen to sign up! However, it was not to be, at least not immediately. As I may have mentioned before, some UK websites will not take payment using credit cards that are not issued in the UK, and LoveFilm.com is one of them.
 
I talked with their customer support folks but it was no good. I can, however, use my debit card once my UK checking acocunt is ready, which should be in another week or so. Then Saturday night will be movie night once again and I can resume trying to make a dent in my mile-long list of movies to be seen.
 
 

 

St. Patrick’s Day – UK Style

Lee Hausman
 
As a result of St. Patrick’s Day falling on a Monday, it was "St. Patrick’s Weekend" here in the UK. So what was it like, compared to the same event in the US?
 
On Sunday, the very popular rugby team, London Irish, played a match at the local stadium. They brought with them hordes of fans; absolute mobs of them disgorged from the train station and flooded through town, wearing all manner of green clothes, jackets, and hats. I happened to be up at the station and got first-hand exposure to them. Amongst the unusual paraphanelia I noted were little fake leprechaun beards worn by quite a few.
 
Did I mention that this is all taken very seriously? At the rugby stadium, which sold out (22,000+ fans) for this party, something called The Guinness Village is set up and a serious effort is made to set a record for the number of pints consumed. The news reported that a very fine time was had by all (except perhaps the team, which lost the match). Surprisingly, the town was not torn up or damaged as far as I heard, so this was a polite, well-behaved mob of noisy and very enthusiastic fans. 
 
On St. Patrick’s Day itself, I decided to get over to the nearest Irish pub, O’Neill’s, around 2 PM, for a quick pint and a look at the festivities. Just a fast in-and-out, then back to work. As it turned out, however, it was actually around 8:30 PM when I left for home, clear evidence that I had a very fine time!
 
In the US, you order a Guinness and you get this black, bitter stuff that’s never suited my taste. Here, there are three flavors: Guinness, Guinness Extra Cold, and Guinness Red. The latter is smoother and more like my favorite, Cafrees, so I’ve become a Guinness Red fan overnight. O’Neill’s itself is a very nice pub, with plenty of room and a terrific staff. There were a lot of revelers, to be sure, but it never became oppressive and it was never packed wall-to-wall the way American bars are on St. Patrick’s Day. 
 
I met three sisters, Erin, Lorraine, and Katrina, sporting "FBI" badges (Full-Blooded Irish), and Sala, a high-school French teacher from Algeria. The sisters were really wild, dancing and hooting and having quite a ball. The whole place seemed to know the lyrics to all the Irish songs the live entertainers played and everyone sang along frequently. Sala wanted to talk very seriously about the choice between Obama and Clinton!
 
I found it interesting that most name brand draft beer is served to you in a glass with the logo of that brand. So the pub has a stock of glassware dedicated to each brand of beer.
 
Here’s how Guinness is really meant to be served: the bartender draws beer from the tap and stops about 1" from the top, then sets the glass aside to settle for a minute or two. Then he or she puts the glass back under the tap again, and using a very thin stream, fills the glass while drawing a perfect shamrock in the foam. The glass is delivered to you with a stiff head on it and the neat shamrock etched into it. A very nifty presentation!
 
One extremely nice thing about the evening was that smoking is no longer allowed in pubs, so I didn’t get a huge dose of second-hand smoke nor did my clothes reek of cigarette smoke when I got home. Quite an improvement over the old days.
 
St. Patrick’s Day was a lot of fun for me and apparently you can’t go wrong with Guinness because I was fine when I got home and had no ill effects in the morning. Or perhaps it’s my 50% Irish heritage at work? Erin Go Bragh ("Ireland Forever")!
 
 
Here are a few photos of the festivities down at the stadium: