The Occasionally-Examined Life

 

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.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The London Times reported today that Brian Grazer, Oscar-winning producer of The Da Vinci Code, American Gangster, and A Beautiful Mind, is looking for a new "personal cultural attaché". This from an email advertising the job: “This person is responsible for keeping Mr. Grazer abreast of everything that’s going on in the world, political, cultural, and musical. They’re also responsible for finding an interesting person for Mr. Grazer to meet every week, an astronaut, philosopher, monk, someone who’s made an impression in their field”. My favorite part: “Mr. Grazer may ask you to read any book he’s interested in and tell him about it.” It’s come to this, folks: the rich hiring others to read books for them. A walking, breathing Cliff Notes for the elite. Go figure.

 

The job pays $80K but don’t get your hopes up. You’ll be competing against others such as Ed Cooke, 26, a philosophy and psychology grad student at Oxford University who recently failed to make the cut. Among his other qualifications, Cooke came in 7th in this year’s World Memory Championships (the winner correctly remembered the order of every card in 54 inter-shuffled decks that he had only looked through once), speaks three languages fluently, and studies the "philosophy of Rugby".

 

 

 

 

Three weeks ago the press here went wild with the story of Shannon Matthews, a nine-year old girl from Dewsbury who never made it home after swim practice at school. The story unfolded in the all too depressingly-familiar way of child abductions: CCTV camera footage examined, hundreds of police scouring the neighboring areas and dragging the local pond, door-to-door interviews with locals, and sad televised appeals from the parents. The effort to find her was massive: more than 200 homes within a half-mile radius of the girl’s home were searched, 300 officers were assigned to the case, and half of the police dogs in England capable of detecting corpses were brought in. As the days wore on, grim reminders from “police consultants” that the chances of finding the girl alive diminished with every passing day were broadcast.

 

I got the gist of what was going on (the media coverage was so large you just couldn’t miss it) but didn’t really delve into the details. Last Friday, 24 days after her disappearance, the story took an unexpected by happy turn with the announcement that Shannon had been found alive and unharmed. Wow – a storybook ending?

 

Maybe not. Today, I sat down with the paper and got the details. The first thing that caught my eye was that Shannon had not been joyfully reunited with her parents after being rescued but was instead now in protective care. The second was that the police found her at the apartment of the uncle of her mom’s current boyfriend. The divorced uncle had recently lost the right to visit his daughters, who live with their mother. The authorities decided that returning Shannon to her mother, 32, who lives with the six other children she’s had with five different fathers and is now dating a 22-year old, might not be the best thing to do. Ya think?

 

Let’s hope the child somehow recovers from the trauma of it all.

 

 

 

Before coming across "the pond" I’d read that business behavior in the UK can be a bit more formal that our relaxed US ways. So I was surprised to see that one flavor of business outfit quite common here, especially with younger guys, is a nice suit but no tie. I can understand a sports coat and no tie but a nice pin-striped suit with a dress shirt and then no tie looks really odd to my eye. Not that I’m a clothes horse or fashion hound in any way, mind you, far from it, but the combination of formality (suit) and informality (no tie) seems more relaxed than a pair of jeans, in a business setting.

 

I went over to Windsor (yes, where the Castle is) last Tuesday to meet with our business accountants and put on my own Navy Blue, pin-striped, Evan Picone suit and burgundy tie and felt quite good about it. I fit right in other there with the CPAs and, who knows, I may just do it more often.

 

By the way, and speaking of Windsor, I’ve always been aware of 3 ways to tie a tie (four-in-hand, Windsor, half-Windsor), but I found that Wikipedia says there are 85 possible knots! Who knew!

 

 

I’ve spent a little more time soaking up Pub Life and even did a little research on pub-review web sites. You knew there had to be several of these sites, right? My favorite site is one about local Reading pubs written by a couple of young guys whose ratings are generally worthless but hilarious. Unlike most restaurant reviewers who are meticulous about their facts, these two often get so toasted that they can’t remember what brews or how many pints they’ve had. Achieving this state alone, in their reviews, equates to having had a good time, which means the pub merits a good rating.

 

There are corporate pubs, parts of well-run national chains, which are OK in their way, and there are more traditional pubs: small and homey, with upholstered chairs, a fire in the fireplace, that kind of ambiance, easily allowing you to believe that the publican (operator) and his family do actually live upstairs. Last evening I was in The Red Lion down the street and the owner’s young daughter (maybe 8-10 years old) was dashing around, in and out behind the bar, clearly at home. The whole atmosphere at a place like this is much more relaxed than at a US bar. Relatively recent no-smoking laws have gone into place, so pubs are now smoke-free.

 

Some pubs just serve drinks and do not serve food at all (reminds me of a few dives I used to frequent in Georgetown during my college days). This sounds to me like a recipe for what the Brits call “anti-social behavior”. Others sell tasty pub food that goes down well with your pint. Some serve lagers with names you’ll know such as Coors, Corona, and Stella Artois (did you recognize that last name, by the way? Stella turns out to be the third largest selling beverage in the UK – right behind Coke and bottled water). Some pubs also sell ales, also known as traditional ales or Real Ale. These are the less fizzy brews, served just slightly chilled (not warm or at room temp, as you may have heard), that are “pumped” up from the basement using a long-handled tap. These are also the ones with the nifty names, such as Tanglefoot, Bread of Heaven, and Dirty Tackle, that I like so much. A pint is $3-5 depending on time of day and the brew.

 

It seems that real ales are in retreat in the brew market and so some folks have banded together to create CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) which boasts 85,000 members. They’ve enlisted pubs across the country to run real ale festivals and to promote the traditional brews. You can check out their web site here: http://www.camra.org.uk

 

Pubs do also serve beverages other than beer, including wine (often from taps), soft drinks, lemonade, alcoholic ciders, and mixed drinks. When you order a “mixed” drink, such as bourbon and water, the barman actually puts your shot into a tall glass and, at the bar, you add water from a pitcher to suit your taste. Remember, all of the ordering is done at the bar in pubs, even if you’re sitting at a table across the room, and it’s strictly self-serve.

 

Stay tuned: more fascinating, semi-sloshed pub observations to come later.

 

My kitchen incudes a number of typical British appliances, all small enough to fit below the counter. These include the refrigerator/freezer, dishwasher, oven/microwave, and combo clothes washer/dryer. The microwave is a combination microwave, broiler, convection oven but not really an oven in the baking sense. One sort of roasts a frozen pizza in the convection oven rather than baking or heating it (works OK, though the browning is not all you’d like).

 

The washer/dryer is small (11 lbs. max load wash, 5.5 lbs dry – a pair of my jeans can weigh 3 lbs) and illustrates the European commitment to conserving energy. It allows you to select a variety of water temperatures (in actual degrees, not just Hot or Cold) and even the spin cycle speeds, in RPM. It also uses a lot less water and takes a lot longer to do its job. For example, a recent washing then drying of two pairs of Levis and a few tee shirts took 5 hours to complete. The soap for this and the dishwasher comes in little bricks reminiscent of a giant Pez candy.

 

What we would call the "stove" in the US is called a Hob here and mine is the "ceramic cooktop" type (a smooth surface that heats in four circular areas, with no flame and no exposed heating elements). I don’t know if it’s because this is a rental property or if this is common, but there are circuit breakers along the wall in the kitchen, with red indicator lights, clearly labeled, for each of the appliances.

 

Perhaps the most important appliance in the place is the kettle. How many movies have you seen set in England where someone says "I’ll put the kettle on"? I always imagined them running into the kitchen to put the steel water kettle on the stove to warm it up. I chalked up the fact that the water was always ready so quickly to the application of "Hollywood time" to reality. Whenever I heat water on the stove it takes a long time (or forever, if I stand and watch).

 

But no, that’s not what they meant at all. The Kettle, in my kitchen and I’m given to believe generally here in England, is actually a nice stainless steel appliance the size and shape of a multi-quart water pitcher with a great big electric immersion heater in it. It heats a quart of water to full rolling boil in about 20 seconds (remember that the electricity here is 220V, which helps power the immersion heater efficiently) so water is ready for tea almost before you can get the tea pot and cups out. There are, of course, whole web sites devoted to the proper use and maintenance (regular de-scaling is very important) of your electric kettle.

 

What appliances that I’m used to are missing? Well, for one, there’s no disposal so I’m having to learn about not putting stuff down the drain with the abandon I’m gotten accustomed to in the last 15 years. I’m used to having a gas stove but the hob works just fine (it has the drawback of all ceramic cooktops in that it’s hard to tell if the surface is still hot after use). There’s also no toaster oven; I could buy one but I think I can get by with the toaster supplied with the apartment.

 

Overall, the kitchen is perfect for my small needs and easy to keep clean, too. Besides, with a "Chip Shop" (Fish and Chips) just across the street, where they hand you fresh cod or haddock cooked in a light batter and surrounded by the greasiest fries on the planet, doused with vinegar and wrapped in two layers of butcher paper, how often does one need to cook, anyway? Is that the sound of my cardiologist crying?

 

 

 

It occurred to me today, while walking back from the grocery store, that while I have seen people walking their dogs here, I have seen absolutely zero dog poop on the sidewalks. I’m not sure what accounts for this (maybe the British are more civilized) but it’s very nice. I’ve also seen very few bugs. Yeah, sure, the weather has something to with that and I have seen bug zappers in stores, but I have yet to see any critters without wings.

 

What I have seen a lot of is door stops. Door stops? Yes, those rubbery wedges intended to keep a door open are on sale everywhere. It seems that British fire regulations require most interior doors in homes and apartments built or upgraded since 1975 to be fitted with interior spring mechanisms that automatically close them. So the doors will swing shut on their own all the time. In addition, a door of this kind is required between major spaces and hallways (your living room and front hall, for example).  This turns your home into a dark warren of closed-off rooms and so, door stops have become essential household items.

 

 

My new apartment is very nice and I’m happy with it. It’s technically a serviced apartment which means that I get weekly maid and linen service. What’s not to like? This was intended as a mere way point between a hotel and a normal apartment but the deal proved so attractive that my company (which is footing the bill) just decided to leave me here for the duration. The apartments are actually named "Number 18" and you can see their web site here: http://www.number-18.co.uk

 

Now if my personal goods will just show up! They were shipped Monday from Northern Virginia via FedEx and, with my customary level of preparation, all of the appropriate UK Customs forms were duly filled out and provided. So I was a bit puzzled when the FedEx van pulled up yesterday and delivered just 2 of 12 boxes.

 

After some calls and online sleuthing, it appears that the 10 other boxes are hung up in Her Majesty’s Customs at the Stanstead airport north of London. Why the two boxes that were delivered yesterday passed right on through, no one knows, but apparently it’s not unusual. I’ve left my new mobile phone number with FedEx and hope to hear something from them soon. I can just imagine the FedEx airport staff using my golf clubs right now to whack balls around their hangar!

 

It’s fun to look at the FedEx Tracking web site and see where my stuff went: McLean to Dulles to Indianapolis to Stanstead. Never would have guessed it would go via Indiana in a million years.

 

The new digs are about 5 minutes on foot from our office, a very nice commute indeed. I’ve inserted a little map of Reading so that you can see the general layout. From my place to the train station is about a 15-minute walk, so we’re not talking about a huge area. London is a 25-minute train ride away (under optimum conditions). In case the map resolution isn’t good enough for you, the yellow spot is my apartment and the green one is the office. The Oracle Mall is a large modern retail mall that straddles with Kennett River.

  

As soon as I moved in at the beginning of the week and had an official address, one of the first things I did was go to the Reading Central Library to get a library card. I thought this might be a bit dicey as I had no ID with my address on it and no utility bills (which are commonly used to establish residence in order to get a library card).

 

As I feared, without the requisite ID, I was not allowed to become a Full Member, but I could be come a Junior Member which simply means I’m limited to checking out two books and two DVDs at a time. Fine with me. Ahh, libraries; what great institutions! There is just something so universal about the culture of the book. It has been great to be able to settle down this week with a good mystery book in the evenings.

 

Some of you have asked about the earthquake here the other night. It was a 5.2 strength quake centered due north of London, about halfway to Scotland, at 1:00 am our time but there was little effect here in Reading. I did wake up but it was one of those non-events where you wake up but you don’t know why. So I went right back to sleep. Some other folks here reported much the same: a creaking in their ceiling, a rattle in the yard. No one I’ve talked to here has mentioned the salt and pepper shakers dancing off the table or anything like that. It did cause some damage elsewhere in England (collapsing chimneys and such) and I think a child was killed. It was the strongest quake here in 25-30 years.

 

Next: Mystery Appliances