Snapshots of Life in Reading

Lee Hausman
 
The Sun rose here today at 5:30 and will set today at 8:30 – a pretty long day for April.
 
The Royal Mail Service delivers the post twice a day, the Post Office still sells stamps you have to lick, and I was startled today when the postal clerk began talking me up, trying to sell me auto insurance (yes, the Post Office sells that, too).
 
Ordering a sandwich? Would you like that on a baguette (the mini-French bread), on a Bap (recognized as an “English muffin” in the US), or on sliced bread?
 
I drop in to the local “news agent” pretty often – the mom-and-pop convenience store – and when there I marvel at the 22 different kinds of crisps (that’s “potato chips” to you Yanks) he features. They come in multiple shapes and flavors but my favorite has to be: Tomato Ketchup. Others include the usual combinations of cheese, onion, salt, and vinegar but there are also some odd ones like prawn, caramel, and paprika.
 
They opened a new Starbucks in the city center pedestrian-only zone. It seems as if it took only about 48-hours after work on the retail space commenced before the place opened. The intersection at which it stands now has fancy coffee shops on 3 out of 4 corners and, yes, the place has been packed.
 
My favorite new lunch restaurant: Picnic. This place offers two different signature salads each week. They consist of a bed of couscous and fresh greens (none of your iceberg lettuce, either) and then additional ingredients. Last week, your choice of those was either halved, roasted red peppers, filled with feta cheese and olives, or fresh avocados with cheese shavings and pine nuts. The salard is finished with a light, homemade dressing. This is packaged in a very nifty little box for take-away and costs only 3.50!
 
 

Not So Funny To Some

Lee Hausman

The movie 3 and Out, directed by and starring Mackenzie Crook of The Office, opened here to protests. The movie’s protaganist is a London Tube (subway) train engineer who tries to take advantage of a work rule that allows him an early retirement and nice pension if a third person kills themselves by jumping in front of his train. Two lost souls have already made that jump and so he sets about finding and paying a homeless person to make it three. Dark comedy ensues.

Potentially a dark and funny premise. However, the real Tube train engineers here in London don’t think so. Running someone over with your train, and having a front-row seat no less, is traumatic and scars the drivers for years, they said. The situation was exacerbated by some ham-handed comments by the director on a local TV show. So the engineers protested outside the theatre.

The newspaper coverage produced some interesting stats:

3,000 – the number of drivers employed by the Tube
40,000 GPB – their annual salary (that’s $80,000); they also receive nine weeks annual leave and a pension upon retirement
35 – hours in their work week
50 – people, on average, who commit suicide by jumping in front of London Underground trains each year

There is, incidentally, no such "3 and out" work rule. The whole thing is food for thought the next time I ride the Tube. And maybe that was part of the director’s intent.

 

More UK Driving Fun

Lee Hausman
 
Continuing the tales from my driving lesson experience mentioned in my last post, I wish to share with you a few passages from the Driving Standards Agency Official Guide to Driving, which I bought today, regarding the use of the parking brake:
 
"You should normally apply the parking brake whenever the vehicle is stationary. Apply the parking brake and put the gear lever into neutral when you’re stopped at traffic lights or queuing (lining up) behind other vehicles, unless the wait is likely to be very short. If not, your foot could easily slip off the footbrake if, for example, your shoes are wet, or if you’re bumped from behind. You could then be pushed into another vehicle. The habitual use of the parking brake is even more important in vehicles fitted with an automatic transmission. The parking brake will help avoid the possibility of ‘creep’ or the vehicle surging forward if the gas pedal is pressed accidentally."
 
I couldn’t understand the other day why the driving instructor was going on about me not using the parking brake at every red light where we stopped longer than 30 seconds. Now I do. Are you slapping your forehead in disbelief, too? I have, at times when stopped on steep hills, used the parking break to hold a (manual shift) car steady during start up, but at every light??
 
Now you can appreciate why I was somewhat stressed after my two hours in the car the other day. More of these kinds of tid bits will, I’m sure, be be unearthed and I’ll certainly share them with you.
 
 

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.