Apologies for taking so long to get back to you. I have been away, learning to tweet.
Thank you to everyone who supported ActionAid‘s Put your foot down campaign to end violence against women. They have made an art gallery from the real shoes they were sent and there is some fun stuff there (as well as some serious information about the campaign). ActionAid more than made their goal of one signature for each of the 2876 woman who contracts HIV/Aids every day.
I know a few people went from here to the petition, and I am grateful. A few also joined in the fun and sent me a virtual shoe. Here they are, with links to their blogs.
Jan from the Sushi Bar sent me her lovely pink crocs:
Janie from Midlife Slices sent me the boots she covets (I do too):
Inventing Liz had just kicked off her sensible, work shoes
Pseudonymous High School Teacher lives in tropical paradise and never wears shoes when she is at home reading blogs, but she still wanted to put both her lovely feet down.
And here is the Duchess’s favourite shoe, which she admires more often than wears, though it only ornamented the mantel briefly for this photograph
Any comments? Favourites?
Or, if you’ve got a better one, send your shoe to duchess(at)duchessomnium(dot)com
The Elder Daughter is now the digital media intern for a major British charity, Action Aid. She spent 15 months in Uganda working with some of the most vulnerable children on the continent: deaf and blind children and HIV/Aids orphans. Now she is back in England trying to make a difference in another way.
She asked me to help gather support on my blog for a campaign that only has a few days to run. She isn’t asking for money. She’s asking you to put your foot down.
Around the world, 2876 women contract HIV every day. A girl born in South Africa has a higher chance of being raped than of learning to read. Widespread violence against girls and women increases the chances that they will join the 15 million women around the world already infected with the virus.
Action Aid wants 2876 people, one for every woman and girl who will contract HIV tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and every day until we put our foot down to stop it, to sign a petition in support of the campaign. The campaign ends on International Women’s Day on March 8.
The petition asks the UK government to take 10 steps to help prevent violence against women and to help control HIV/Aids. These are simple, achievable steps. One of these 10 steps is to persuade other countries and international agencies to take action. You don’t have to be British to sign the petition and put your foot down.
When you have signed the petition, please forward it to 5 friends. 2876 people to put their foot down is a modest goal. Let’s help them achieve it.
Over the last few weeks, hundreds of people, besides signing the petition, have sent Action Aid a real shoe. The charity has commissioned artist Riitta Ikonen to turn these shoes into art. You can watch her progress on her blog. I especially like the puzzled shoe, though I don’t think I would like to take a hike in it.
It’s too late to send Riitta a shoe, but you can still email the Duchess a photo of the shoe you are wearing (or imagine you might wear) when you put your foot down. Send your photo to me (edited to remove my email address in hope of getting rid of so much spam). I’ll publish all the photos… And then maybe we can have a vote for the best (if I can work it out) or something… and it can be the Duchess’s first contest! Okay, I accept you may not be quite as excited about this concept as I am. Especially as, so far, there’s no prize.
Never mind. Sign the petition. Send it to your friends. Send me your virtual shoes.
It was my project for this weekend. After two and a half years of a combination of fruitless research and fervent hope that someone would bring mobile broadband to my squatting mooring spot in rural Oxfordshire, one company was suddenly boasting absolutely, totally perfect, best of all possible broadband — at least at the pub. I read it on the internet, so I knew it must be true.
Saturday’s task was to go to the shop and buy the magic bit of kit that would connect me. But because Friday was my ex husband’s birthday and today would be my Baby’s birthday, I had first promised to make a cake (in my brand new cooker) for a joint celebration.
I am well known for my cakes. This is not because I am good at baking – I am not – but because a very long time ago in England if you weren’t good at baking everyone soon discovered it. If you were a woman over 21, certainly if you had a child at school, cakes were required. The only mixes available, a fine powder to which you added water, yielded an object designed to humiliate you, flat and tasteless with a cardboard like texture.
Proper women, women whose minor children weren’t on Social Services lists, produced something called a Victoria Sponge. It was plain and yellow and sort of vanillish in flavour and had jam in the middle and, if you were very profligate or very rich, cream or buttercream on top. Though it might be lopsided, it was homemade, and your children would therefore probably not be Taken into Care.
The skill I brought to this market was discovering which over priced specialist groceries in Oxford stocked devil’s food chocolate Betty Crocker mixes in the exotic foreign foods section. Don’t knock them till you’ve tried them. I’ve heard whole classes of children, reared on homemade, smack their lips and sigh longingly at my kids, Your Mum makes lovely cakes!
Saturday I whisked up the usual courtesy of Betty Crocker and rummaged in the cupboard for extras. There were some rather jolly decorative sugar balls in gold, silver, fluorescent green and shocking pink (best before July 06, but believe me, no germ would go near anything quite that metallic) and eight candles. One and seven make eight, so that means eight candles are just right for the Baby, who turned 17 today. And six and one make seven, plus one to grow on, makes eight. So eight is equally appropriate for the Ex, sixty one last Friday.
Sorted, as the Brits say, and I thought the cake looked very pretty.
My children were sceptical about the candle calculations, but the Ex, an economist, was impressed that I had finally acquired the important life skill of making any number mean anything I liked. If I could make 8 candles work for a birthday celebration for a 17 year old and a 61 year old I could definitely be due for a million pound banker bonus.
We planned to meet for brunch, once I arrived with the cakes and the Elder Daughter caught the bus from London. But the Elder Daughter is always a bit of a wild card, and like the Lawyer Sis, invariably has an interesting reason for being late.
This one involved emergency stops, ambulances, evacuation of elderly passengers, and replacement busses. Brunch became early dinner.
We decided on a new restaurant in Oxford so I could do my errands. Even at half past four and even in a recession, there was a twenty minute wait for a table. Meanwhile, since by Act of Parliament shops can only be open for 6 hours on Sundays I was running out of time. I grabbed a takeaway menu to phone in my selection, left the family queuing for a table, and raced around the corner to the mobile phone shop to sign up for technology afloat.
That took a bit of a while and the shop might just have traded over time, what with the Angry Man screaming that his phone didn’t work and it wasn’t his fault that his phone didn’t work and the shop assistant shouting back that it wasn’t his fault either and the customer replying what about his bus fare? and then several more shop assistants plus the manager getting involved and everyone shouting, You are not listening!
It turned out that though I was requesting only a 30 day contract they had to run a full credit check on me and besides had to prove that I wasn’t someone pretending to be me asking for a full credit check for a 30 day contract. In order to prove this they had to ask me some important security questions to establish my identity. Unfortunately I hadn’t the slightest notion of the answer to any of the questions. Although I am me, I promise.
Meanwhile, the police arrived to deal with the man whose phone didn’t work and though I was worried they might possibly arrest me as well for theft of my own identity, in the end neither of us was arrested. He eventually walked out with a new handset (= telephone) and I with a dongle (= expensive thing I stick into my computer that supposedly makes the internet work on my boat).
On the boat it didn’t work. Not at all. Not even a tiny bit. So I trundled up the tow path with my laptop and my brand new dongle and my mobile (=cell) phone to see if it worked at the pub. Nothing at all.
The whole pub took an interest while I telephoned for help and was connected to India and I argued with several helpdesk employees about whether or not a dongle could have a phone number. I maintained it could not. If it had a phone number, I could telephone it. What would that mean? Would it answer? How could it answer? What is the sound of one hand clapping?
They won. A very polite person simply asserted that a dongle must have a phone number and she would go ask her supervisor what mine was. When she came back she suggested I might like to make a note of the dongle’s number. And then, though I did make a note of it, I never made any use of that phone number or entered it anywhere in the computer. Nevertheless, once my dongle was allocated a phone number, it seemed it was happy and fulfilled, and I got connected, first at the pub, to everyone’s entertainment, and then on the boat too.
In the early 90s, when the internet was pretty new, I first managed to get a computer online in the company I ran with my husband (I was always the geek in the family). Those days were before google and even before Internet Explorer. The brand new browser we used was called Mosaic. I don’t even know how we did it, but somehow we, in Oxford England, got connected to an archaeological museum in the University of California. There weren’t any pictures – God knows I didn’t expect any – just a list of what was in their collections.
It was one of the moments when I remember all the details – the time of day, the room, who was there. It seemed so extraordinary to me that I could be connected to a computer 8000 miles away.
These days I am grumpy if I cannot buy a small toy on a Sunday afternoon without the intervention of Her Majesty’s constabulary, or the Indian sub continent, that will allow me to see, hear, and read information, or just chat, all over the world, while I float on the south Oxfordshire Canal, monument to nineteenth century engineering.
It’s nearly half past ten, and my Baby, who honoured me with a visit after I called her up and got really grumpy because she hasn’t been here for weeks, has just gone to bed. We have negotiated a 7.40 departure in the morning, so I can brave Oxford traffic and she can get to school on time (8:45). She tells me that she doesn’t come to my house more often for this very reason: I insist on living in the middle of nowhere (a little village fifteen miles outside the city).
In the morning, besides providing transport it seems I am to supply disposable contact lenses, and before bed we had a little negotiation about what diopters I could deliver. I’m just saying.
And now I have a moment (but only just) to consider today’s important news: researchers at Reading University in the UK have created a computer program to identify the our oldest (most persistent) words and to predict those most likely to disappear.
Some of what they have discovered doesn’t surprise me; the oldest words are rather dull: I, we, two, three. Well, it was always all about us and how much we have got. It seems these words are pretty much the same in every Indo European language as long as you know a few simple sound change rules in order to spot them.
A long time ago, though it wasn’t quite prehistory, I knew stuff about the history of the language. For instance, I knew about words, admittedly younger than those above, but still remarkably stable: mother, father, water. I read once, though I now apologise for forgetting the source, that honey and bee are also words whose forms we can postulate, long before they might have been written.
In the days when I knew about this sort of stuff, I could read, more or less, Old English (Anglo Saxon). My first homework on the subject, after just one day of class, was to translate The Battle of Maldon, a poem about a glorious English defeat (the first of many — Brits are good at losing) in 991.
This is how the poem begins, and if you can read it, and you don’t have a PhD or hang around the language project at Reading, I will give you a six pence:
brocen wurde
Het þa hyssa hwæne hors forlætan
feor afysan and forð gangan
hicgan to handum and to hige godum
Þa þæt Offan mæg ærest onfunde
þæt se eorl nolde yrhðo geþolian
he let him þa of handon leofne fleogan
hafoc wið þæs holtes and to þære hilde stop
be þam man mihte oncnawan þæt se cniht nolde
wacian æt þam wige þa he to wæpnum feng
I couldn’t read it either, of course. But as I was struggling through the poem I eventually came to the line “ofer cald wæter”. That had lasted, and was perfectly coherent, a thousand years later.
For at least a millenium speakers of English have been telling their friends that battle or no battle, if you are going to cross the North Sea the wæter is cald!
Other words, apparently, we are not using enough and they are changing fast. First to go, according to the computer projection, will be squeeze, dirty, stick and guts.
I quite like all those words! Use them or lose them, folks.
I mentioned earlier that on Christmas Day the cooker broke down. It wasn’t unusable, but it was definitely inconvenient and probably unsafe. I finally got tired of alternating between living dangerously — and using the wretched thing while it continuously sparked and one of the ovens turned on and off at unpredictable intervals — or living slovenly and grazing on cold food by the open refigerator door. I bought a new cooker.
After awhile the day came round for it to be installed, and I promised friends and family elaborate gourmet meals. When the Piper’s Son visited a few days later I had to explain that there had been a little hitch in the arrangements.
Oh no, said he, it isn’t one of your gasmen stories is it? At Christmas dinner, while I lamented soggy Yorkshire pudding, I told my children how, as a young bride, I ordered a gas cooker.
In those days the state was the supplier of cookers and you had to go to the Gas Board, rather than a shop, to buy one. They had sample cookers on display and you chose one, and then a nice lady sat you down and filled in many, many forms and then told you how long the waiting list was for your particular cooker.
My waiting list was only two weeks and when I got to the top of the list I was given a delivery date for another couple of weeks later. On the appointed day I waited in the house all morning and all afternoon, but no cooker came. The next morning I telephoned to say that I had been expecting a delivery but nothing had arrived.
The person on the end of the phone explained patiently that unfortunately the cooker had been out of stock, so of course there was no possibility of delivering; surely I could see that. She was, however, happy to report that it was now back in stock.
I said, in that case, I would like to have it delivered as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, she replied, there’s a two week waiting list for that cooker.
I said I knew that, and I had already waited on the waiting list, so please could I have my cooker?
Ah, said she, but when you waited on the waiting list, the cooker was out of stock!
So I duly served my in stock waiting time and the cooker was eventually delivered. When, a few years later, I was moving house, I required the services of the Gas Board again. In those days in England you didn’t leave appliances behind when you moved.
The Outdoor Gasman was booked to disconnect the gas, the Indoor Gasman to disconnect the cooker, and the moving men to take it away.
The Outdoor man duly arrived, turned off the gas, and went away. The moving men came and removed everything from the house — except the cooker — while we waited for the Indoor Gasman. Eventually the moving men had enough. They said they were going home — or they could disconnect the cooker themselves.
After the moving men had driven away with all my worldly goods, including cooker, illegally disconnected, and I was doing final rounds, the Indoor Gasman at last arrived.
I panicked. Thinking that the important thing was to reassure him that everything had been done by a competent person, I said, Oh, don’t worry, the Outdoor Gasman thought he might just as well disconnect the cooker too, while he was here, so he did it.
There was a stunned silence. It was clear he would have preferred me to say that anyone, including my toddler, had done it instead. First he just shook his head in disbelief and then he began to say, over and over, He should not have done that! That was an Indoor Gasman job! He should not have done that! I’m going to have to report this to head office!
And then he went angrily away.
I experienced the Indoor / Outdoor rule again a few years later when my elderly neighbour had a gas leak and alternating teams visted her all night long, the Indoor men came to investigate, turn off her gas, and confirm it was not their problem. After a while the Outdoor men came and fixed it and went away. In the early hours the Indoor men returned to turn the gas back on inside. Nothing could make either team touch a valve on the wrong side of a wall.
Anyone who didn’t live here in the 70s and early 80s might be imagining that the Monty Python new gas cooker sketch is surrealism. I know better.
Well, anyway, these days you go to a store to buy your cooker and they’ll connect it too, for a fee. The Gas Board no longer exists and there aren’t any more waiting lists, though out of stock is, of course, still a hazard.
Less than a week after I had ordered it, a couple of pleasant men arrived with my cooker. They pulled the old one out and examined my electrics. (Even gas cookers need electricity, to run the clock and the ignition switch, but as I am trying to sell up I thought I would buy a more popular dual fuel version, with gas hob and electric oven.)
The men shook their heads in unison. You see this here? they asked, pointing at the wire that fed the electric outlet. This is 4 mm core wire. Regs say you got to have 6 mm core wire. You need an electrician to sort this out. We’re not allowed to touch it.
I questioned them further and finally understood. It wasn’t that all the wiring was wrong. It was just that the the switch had to be wired to the plug using fatter wire. The distant between the two was about two feet.
I said, That’s it? Hell, I can do that wiring myself.
They put their hands over their ears and shouted La la la la la. I can’t hear you!
That’s because it is illegal for me to wire that myself.
It’s up to you, they said, but we can’t touch it. Then they put the cooker back on the lorry. We have to take this back to the depot they said. By the way, have you got any 6 mm core wire?
I said I did not. We carry it on the van, they explained, but we’re not allowed to use it for wiring purposes.
Then they and my cooker drove away, leaving me holding the two feet of 6 mm core wire they had obligingly cut for me.
It was my birthday this week and, as usual, I claimed the day as my own and demanded that everyone pay attention to me and be nice to me and give me presents and cards — which mostly they did. Everyone who knows me knows I take birthdays, especially mine, very seriously.
Nevertheless, when I became a mother I began to think perhaps the wrong person was getting all the birthday attention: exactly who did all the work and had all the bother? So tell me again who deserves the presents and congratulations?
On my birthday I really ought to have telephoned my mother to apologise. But, according to convention, instead she is meant to send me birthday greetings. Her email said, “The sun was shining the day you were born. I remember it streaming in the window of the delivery room. Your hair was red.”
i’ve heard the sun in the delivery room story before. I know my mother tells it when she especially wants me to know that I am loved, because that is the moment she first feels me conjured into being, when all the waiting and the pain focussed, like the sun’s rays, on that wet, red haired, shining creature. That’s me, to my mother, even fifty five years on.
I am not so kind (or brief) in the stories I tell my own children. For example, I usually spare my eldest child, the son who made me a mother, the little details, like the midwife’s firm, raiser poised threat, “Now we are just going to give you a little shave down there.” (Though luckily he emerged so fast after that she didn’t have a chance.) Or the nurse’s next morning careful explanation of neonatal jaundice, “You may have noticed your baby is a little yellow…”
But I do like to tell the story of how hard I had to sue to get out of hospital, and what happened while I was otherwise occupied with learning to be a new mother. In those days in England a “full stay” on the maternity ward was 10 days, a “short stay” was 7, and “early discharge” for a first baby was a mere 5. I had to fight to be out in 4.
While my new baby and I were in hospital my husband helpfully registered our son’s birth, and when we both arrived home he presented me with the certificate. Under mother’s name it had my first name and my husband’s last name. I was furious.
You know I never intended to change my name! I shouted. THAT IS NOT MY NAME!
My husband said calmly that he assumed I meant I wouldn’t change my name in the every day world. Of course I could hang on to my name if if it was important to me. Only he never thought I meant I wouldn’t change it when it came to things that mattered like our son’s birth certificate. How would the boy know his parents were married?
(Reader this was the very beginning of the 80s. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there — especially in England.)
The next morning I bundled up my barely born son and marched smartly into the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages office in Oxford. I presented the perfect child and faulty birth certificate and demanded immediate redress.
The grey haired man at the counter was kindness itself. He understood my unhappiness, but he shook his head sadly. What I asked was in no way possible. The details of the child’s birth had been recorded in the Registers and he was powerless to change them.
At home I telephoned the number that I had eventually wrung out of the grey haired man and I explained my story.
I’m sorry, said the voice at the other end, but no alterations are possible once a child’s birth has been officially recorded.
I asked her if just anyone could record these details. Was she aware that paternity was merely a matter of opinion (these were the days before DNA testing was even thought of), but I could prove that I was the mother of the child? How dare they take a mere putative father’s word? Did they have my autorisation for him to register the birth? They did not!
Her patient explanation made it clear that official policy was that any man generously willing to put his name on a child’s birth certificate was assumed to have the authority and competence to provide all details.
I said, Do you mean to tell me that if my husband had said my name was Humpty Dumpty that is what my son’s birth certificate would say?
There was a very long pause. And then she answered, Well, yes, I guess it would.
Several supervisors later I finally received a concession: if I would swear an oath that the name recorded as mother’s name on my son’s birth certificate was not my name, had never been my name, and never would be my name, they would make the correction. I thought the future covenant was was a little extreme, but at least we would have an accurate record of my son’s parents.
This being Oxford it was all done in a gentlemanly way. One guest night at College, when the women wore long gowns and the men black tie, my husband and I withdrew to the Senior Common Room, along with the College Solicitor, between the main course and the passing of port, claret and sauterne, where I swore the necessary oath, which the solicitor duly notarised.
I posted the notarised oath to Somerset House (which, with good reason, features in British murder mysteries) and in due course I received notice that the error in my son’s official birth certificate had been recognized and that an amended certificate, under these extraordinary circumstances, would be issued.
I returned triumphant to the registry office with my authorisation for correction. In those days birth certificates were written out in long hand with a fountain pen and I watched, astonished, as the grey haired clerk wrote everything as before, including mother’s name with my husband’s surname and not my own.
When he had filled in every box, exactly as before, he returned to the mother’s name box and added an asterix. In the bottom margin he wrote, next to an inky asterix, the words, This is an error.
An elderly British milkman who responded to notes like “5 pints semi skimmed and a half an ounce this week, please” has been given a suspended sentence.
The prosecutor told the court that “word had got out that he could supply cannabis to those of a certain age with aches and pains”. His oldest client was 92.
In choosing not to bestow a custodial sentence the judge decided that the grandfather of 28 had mitigating circumstances, because his wife has Alzheimers Disease and has recently moved to a care home. The 72 year old milkman, married for 53 years, was tearful at the thought of not being able to visit his wife if he were in prison.
In today’s sentencing the Judge recognised that the milkman “misguidedly believed that he was providing a public service”.
My usual boaty visitors, begging bread out the window, do not worry, as I do, that January is the month my boat license comes due. Because the four yearly Boat Safety Certificate was also up for renewal this year (and I could not license my boat without it) I have been scrambling about making sure I have met all the new health and safety regs (like batteries must be strapped in — on a boat whose maximum speed is 4 miles per hour. That’s a fast walking speed for anyone who is paying attention.)
As soon as I was at least hopeful it would pass I booked the pony tailed, earring studded engineer to carry out the formal inspection. In my British way I delivered tea and an obsequious, shrugging incompetence (that I hoped was charming) whenever he asked for further information.
Lately the boat has been nothing but bother, and my engineer friend Pat has hauled the (unstrapped) batteries in and out of the boat trying to work out why I barely have power.
Sunday morning Pat came round with his volt meters and amp meters and other boat fixing paraphenalia in a bucket. I’m not being funny, he said, But I won’t leave my tools on your boat. Security no good. Kettle on?
Then he sat on my engine, and I delivered tea at regular intervals while the wind blew and clouds gathered and we both remarked on just how cold it was, except that he said his bum was nice and warm from the residual heat coming off my engine.
Several nice cups of tea later the engine had cooled down, the fault was found (though not cured), and I was out of milk. If anyone had called on me for lemon and sugar I could have gone on for days. But this is England, and a cup of tea requires a generous splash of milk.
A blizzard was forecast all over the UK, and I was hoping to be snowed in, but not without milk for my own tea, let alone for anyone requiring gentle bribery. Besides, I was bored. The wind was out of Siberia and it was so bitterly cold I didn’t want to take the walk I had planned, and I had few resources to fall back on while I was without power.
I have to admit that on the boat I miss my home electronics. I can sometimes pick up email, but never (so far) internet, and because of an odd ailment (and a long story) my tele will only receive the sports news channel. Luckily I am radio addict — an old technology, well suited to a rural towpath, and only requiring batteries. I didn’t have newspapers, but the radio assured me snow would be general all over England, though it did not yet fall on every dark plain.
I stoked the fire with coal and turned the air vents down so my stove would be safe while I was out, bundled up, made my way up the tow path to my car, and drove the five miles or so to the grocery store. Sunday is early closing and I needed to be checked out by four.
When I had bought my milk, and some Scotch with which to begin more serious bribery campaign (and charm offensive) on the local British Waterways Warden (another story) and more bourbon to smooth Pat’s way, I thought I would take a quick drive into my old neighbourhood in Oxford.
And I couldn’t help remembering that I used to live right around the corner from one of their landmarks. Now that I am a blogger, I reckoned I had a Duty to the Internet to confirm the Truth of the NYT’s recent post. So here’s my Sunday afternoon photo:
Having satisfied myself that not much had changed since I wheeled my first born to the local shops (except never on a Sunday in those days — or Thursday afternoons, because that was early closing — and the milk was in pint glass bottles not litre plastic tubs) I drove back to the boat and waited for the big storm.
In the morning, though the radio was full of travel chaos in London, fifty miles away in Oxfordshire there was hardly more than a dusting. It was cold, though, and it took a while for me to stick my head out of the covers. When I finally did, I snapped the view behind my boat:
Looking towards the lock
And across the fields
I went to work and found the students, ever willing to make the most of whatever they have, at least when it comes to snow, had built a snowman. That’s an undergraduate cap and gown he is wearing.
Meanwhile, my boat passed. I’m certifiably safe until 2013, officially licensed until 2010, and legally moored for just two more months. Then I become a safe, licensed, squatter.
Yesterday was officially Burns Night, but as Sunday is an awkward evening for overindulgence, we marked the 250th anniversary of Robbie Burns’s birth with a supper on Friday instead.
I have never quite understood why the Oxford college where I work is such an ardent supporter of the night dedicated to the great Scottish Poet, but it is, and every year we celebrate it faithfully by dressing up in black tie and eating and drinking a great deal too much.
Friday, after we had drunk a bit in the Senior Common Room, beginning as we meant to go on, we were summoned to the Hall where the students were already seated and waiting. A gavel was banged and everyone stood for the grace. This (as I have mentioned before) is usually two Latin words uttered by the Principal or, in her absence, the Senior Fellow, but on Burns Night we have instead the Selkirk Grace, recited in a gentle Scottish accent by one of the world’s leading experts in wildlife conservation. His day job involves saving the British water vole and other endangered species, but on Burns Night, dressed in his kilt, he is the poet’s voice:
Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit
Moments later we were served with cock-a-leekie soup and a wee dram of 15 year old single malt whiskey.
When that was cleared away the undergraduates began to shuffle and there were sounds of chairs scraping the floor as they turned to greet the piper, preceding the haggis. My office overlooks the College gardens and I had been listening to the drone of distant bagpipes all week — the playing fields on the edge of the River Cherwell were considered the only suitable place for tonight’s musician to practice such cacaphony.
The piper led the haggis in a triumphant circuit of the dining room until the platter was finally placed before our wildlife guy, who each year supplies himself with a dagger, dramatically pulled from his kilt. The BBC website instructions on how to host a Burns Supper are very particular on the protocol at this point:
Warning: it is wise to have a small cut made in the haggis skin before it is piped in. Instances are recorded of top table guests being scalded by flying pieces of haggis when enthusiastic reciters omitted this precaution! Alternatively, the distribution of bits of haggis about the assembled company is regarded in some quarters as a part of the fun…
The recital ends with the reader raising the haggis in triumph during the final line Gie her a haggis!, which the guests greet with rapturous applause.
When our haggis was delivered to the table the chefs and piper stood by as our Fellow spoke:
Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the pudding-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch , tripe, or thairm :
Weel are ye wordy o’a grace
As lang’s my arm.
The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o’need,
While thro’ your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.
His knife see rustic Labour dight ,
An’ cut you up wi’ ready sleight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like ony ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin’ , rich!
Then, horn for horn , they stretch an’ strive:
Deil tak the hindmost! on they drive,
Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive ,
Bethankit ! hums.
Is there that owre his French ragout
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad make her spew
Wi’ perfect sconner ,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?
Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckless as wither’d rash ,
His spindle shank , a guid whip-lash;
His nieve a nit ;
Thro’ bloody flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!
But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed ,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He’ll mak it whissle ;
An’ legs an’ arms, an’ heads will sned ,
Like taps o’ thrissle .
Ye Pow’rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies ;
But , if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer
Gie her a haggis!
If you would like to hear the poem out loud, here it is.)
Our amateur Fellow really does it with great enthusiasm, especially the warm — reekin, rich! And the haggis was duly piereced.
I’m a bit of a fan of haggis, though I admit it sounds quite disgusting. I tried it tentatively, a newspaper wrapped lump of gristle, grease and offal served up in a chippy in Oban more than thirty years ago when I first visited Scotland on holiday with my mother. She and I are both adventurous eaters so we bravely ordered that traditional feast on a night when it was optional (it is required on 25 January).
I’m not sure my mother has tried again, but I can assure you that the version we get in College really is warm — reekin, rich! And I was hungry enough to echo what I take to be, more or less, the translation of that last line of Burns’s address to the night’s pudding: Give us here our haggis!
There were, of course, neeps (=turnips) and tatties (=potatoes), and more drams of whiskey, and lots of gravy, which the Scots at table objected to — traditionally no gravy with haggis, apparently (but I, for one, like my offal well drown-ed).
Later, with another bang of the gavel we adjourned for coffee and yet more whiskey and poetry. And everyone talked about just how long it had been since you didn’t need Latin to get a medical degree at Oxford, and the very best way to study physics, the Prisoners’ Dilemma, moral hazard, Tuscan holidays, World War I, quilting, flute playing, and whether Obama was really President when he signed those first executive orders.
The BBC helpfully reported that the timing of the swearing in was written into the Constitution. It was due at 12 noon (GMT minus 5). BBC coverage would start at 4.30 (GMT).
I was at my desk in the Oxford college where I am currently temporarily employed (and used to be permanently employed, before I had a midlife crisis, failed to sell my house, bought a boat anyway, quit my job, and made an aborted bid to jump ship to the US, small poodle included — but these are other stories).
The Principal (my boss) had gone home early, without a word about the inauguration, but we all knew what she was up to: her partner is the politics don at the college. Other people began to peel away — those with longer commutes saying they would listen on the radio, those with shorter hoping to get home before the moment when W would no longer be President and Obama would take his place. The whole world was watching.
I clicked on the BBC home page and gathered into my office the staff still lingering on my corridor — only the archivist and the development team were left. We saw the fashion parade of VIPs taking their places and responded appropriately: we agreed that Michelle’s dress wasn’t flattering, but possibly sensibly warm.
Next we listened to one of the longest prayers any of us had ever heard (and watched most of the crowd peeking, but not the soon-to-be-President and Leader-of-the-Free-World, who kept eyes piously shut). I remarked that though we are a nation founded on the principles of separation of church and state, Americans are more than usually apt to trouble the Almighty with detail.
After the marathon prayer the BBC commentator said Aretha Franklin was going to sing the national anthem, which she didn’t, but I guess he can be forgiven; in the first place the tune of what she did sing (My Country ‘Tis of Thee) is his national anthem (God Save the Queen), and, in the second place, who could concentrate anyway listening to that voice and looking at that hat?
We laughed at the stumble during the swearing in, and then we all spontaneously applauded and cheered as the new President was congratulated. The whole world was watching.
I don’t think I was the only one in the room moved by the speech that followed. I might have been the only one who needed kleenex.
When the poet was announced, the Brits dispersed lickity split back to their own offices, and soon even the stragglers headed home. Most of them missed altogether the Yella / Mella and the Brown / Stickaround benediction. Say amen.
Later my younger son and I watched the parade together. (He was with the rest of us on the the Dress Issue: it made Michelle look chunky, though she isn’t — but he mentioned that Hillary’s, which no one cared about anymore, was even worse. Poor Hillary.)
Today the newspapers are filled with hope and praise. It is interesting watching American politics from this distance. For eight years there has been little respect for the US abroad, though I think the wish for the most powerful country in the world to do well never went away. Yesterday Obama’s clearest message for me was that he knows we do not have to choose between our ideals and our safety. We can still be the city on the hill.
I admit that our new President was not my first choice. But if I hadn’t been wholly won over to him before, yesterday completed my conversion. The television (= internet; yay internet!) kept showing the crowds — never before such crowds — gathered with their tiny flags in the January chill to watch and to celebrate.
I do not believe any other candidate could have been such a force for unity in our country and in the world. I do not think any of the others would have been met with the simple joy at a new chapter in American history that greeted Obama’s first minutes as President.
At least, no one else would have been applauded, as he was, by a small group of Brits, and one American, crowded around a computer screen far away, hoping for change.
