With some shining exceptions, of which my own local is one, the pub is fast becoming uninhabitable. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the brewing companies began to wake up to the fact that their pubs badly needed a face-lift, and started spending millions of pounds to bring them up to date. Some of the results of their refurbishings have been admirable: more and more comfortable seating, improved hygiene, chilled beers, snack lunches that in general have reached such a standard that, when in quest of a midday meal in unfamiliar territory, you will usually find quicker service and much better value for money in the pub than in the near-by trattoria.
But that is about as far as it goes. The interior of today’s pub has got to look like a television commercial, with all the glossy horror that implies. Repulsive “themes” are introduced: the British-battles pub, ocean-liner pub, Gay Nineties pub. The draught beer is no longer true draught, but keg, that hybrid substance that comes out of what is in effect a giant metal bottle, engineered so as to be the same everywhere, no matter how lazy or incompetent the licensee, and, in the cases of at least two well-known, lavishly advertised brews, pretty nasty everywhere. But all this could be put up with cheerfully enough if it were not for the bloody music — or that kind of uproar having certain connections with a primitive style of music and known as pop. It is not really the pop as such that I object to, even though pop is very much the sort of thing that I, in common with most of the thirty- or thirty-five-plus age-group, would have expected to go to the pub to get away from. For partly different reasons, I should also object to having Beethoven’s Choral Symphony blaring away while I tried to enjoy a quiet pint with friends. If you dislike what is being played, you use up energy and patience in the attempt to ignore it; if you like it, you will want to listen to it and not to talk or be talked to, not to do what you came to the pub largely to do.
Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
August 6, 2012
QotD: The modern British pub
August 4, 2012
British quirks, in brief
To provide assistance to all the benighted foreigners visiting Britain for the Olympics, BBC News Magazine solicited helpful bits of advice and information from their audience. Here are a few of the responses, explaining some of the odd and illogical quirks of Britons:
Avoiding terms of address
British speakers of English try to avoid addressing each other by any sort of title. While speakers of French politely address strangers as “monsieur” or “madame”, the British are tongue-tied at the point of interaction, hoping that simple proximity will indicate to whom they are talking. These days, it’s considered condescending to use “sir” or “madam”, unless the speaker is in a clearly-defined “service” role. To fill this gap, the locals have developed various colloquial circumlocutions. In London, for example, “guv[nor]”, “mate” and “squire” are employed by males (according to complex rules) to address unknown males, with “darling” or “love” (rather questionably) filling the gap for males speaking to females. Further north, “petal” is a possible variant on “love”, while in western Scotland “pal” is used to address unknown males. In south Hampshire, the guv/pal equivalent is the linguistically intriguing “moosh”. What the British never, ever do is follow the American tradition and address those driving taxis as “driver”, those serving at table as “waiter” or those working the hotel switchboard as “operator”. To our ears, this is the height of condescension, verging on rudeness, and will ensure that the cab stops on the wrong side of the road, drinks orders are unfilled and the call is misrouted. Y’all remember that now.
Nick Stevenson, London
[. . .]
Saying sorry
Visitors should be wary of the word sorry — it has endless nuances. For instance, if I inadvertently step on your toe we should both immediately say sorry. I’m sorry for having stepped on your toe — you say sorry to imply it was your fault really, or at least no one is quite sure, so both should say sorry. It also means no hard feelings. But when I say “sorry to bother you, but…” I’m not really apologising, just prefacing a request for some trivial favour, or bit of information. Such as: “Sorry to bother you, but do you have the time?” However, if you hear “sorry?” as a question you’re most likely being asked to repeat something not quite heard or understood. But don’t get carried away with your new knowledge. If someone pronounces sorry a “so-ree” with a strong emphasis on both syllables then that is bad news. They are not sorry at all, just being sarcastic. Maybe someone has mildly offended them — perhaps by accusing them of the unforgivable sin of queue-jumping. Their “so-ree” then means “shut it mate”. But occasionally, very occasionally, sorry really does mean sorry. If someone says: “I’m so sorry to hear your mother has died” they probably are sorry. Not always, but probably.
Mike Pollak, Birmingham
[. . .]
The War
The War — always meaning World War II — is as alive in the collective British consciousness as if it only ended five years ago. A melange of manic cheerfulness, stiff upper lips, atrocious food, doodlebugs, and muddling through. Equally evocative are the sounds of the time — big band dance numbers, and the warbling note of the air raid siren — and ladies’ fashions — severe, economically cut, but with a certain dour style, and neat, off-the-shoulder hairdos, topped (in my mother’s case) with a jaunty WAAF forage cap. It is an awful example of how propaganda can take hold and become history. History is laid down by the survivors – the images we all remember so well were composed with a good deal of thought by the powers that be — the Ministry of Information and the BBC — with a definite end in mind; to endure, to tough it out, to hang on until things got better. Something very similar was attempted during the Cold War, but met with far less success — the Cold War was nasty but theoretical, whereas WWII was nasty but actually happened. As a Baby Boomer, I just remember the post-war atmosphere — grey, tatty, somewhat regimented. We ate baked cod, mashed potatoes and boiled carrots off plates that did not match.
Luce Gilmore, Cambridge
August 1, 2012
July 29, 2012
A brief critical analysis of Olympic merchandise
Stephen Bayley – Founder of the Design Museum – gives the Olympics merchandise a critical mauling.
In ‘Rule Britannia: The Vice Guide to The Olympics’ VICE takes an in-depth look at the British public’s reaction to The Games coming to London this summer and the negative impact it’s having on certain people’s lives.
The six week festival promises to bring a a celebration of unity and sporting achievement, not to mention a huge cash injection to our beleaguered capital. VICE questions the real effects of The Games on a city as complex and tempestuous as London and discovers that they go much deeper, and murkier than the Olympics’ media spin-machine would have us believe.
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
The amusing “real” story of how Percy Bysshe Shelley was inspired to write Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.Percy Bysshe Shelley
Out in a field just off I-27 south, maybe 15 minutes away from Amarillo, our beloved Stanley Marsh 3 commissioned this statue, “Ozymandias.” Of course, being a merry prankster, he pretends on an introductory plaque that these “ancient ruins” in fact inspired Shelley’s poem.
H/t to “Fishplate” Jeff for the link.
July 28, 2012
Feschuk’s Olympic opening ceremony highlights
I didn’t watch the opening ceremonies, but I did enjoy Scott Feschuk’s twitter updates during the festivities. He’s collected some of them along with the appropriate photos for Maclean’s:
Clocking in at three hours and 45 minutes, the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Games featured many remarkable moments and tophats. Here’s a selection of just a few of the images that captivated the world when the world wasn’t busy asking, “Did they seriously just play a song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood?”
[. . .]
[. . .]
[. . .]
July 24, 2012
LCBO sells booze to underaged teen in a burka
I foresee a rush of interest among teenage boys in temporarily cross-dressing as Muslim women:
Three liquor stores in the Greater Toronto Area recently sold booze to a 14-year-old boy whose identity was hidden because he was wearing a full-length burka and face veil at the time.
The teenager, clad in an Islamic female’s traditional garb of a burka, headscarf and facial covering, shopped in three different LCBO stores north of Toronto last Wednesday.
In each location, the Grade 8 student paid cash for a bottle of sambuca liqueur.
[. . .]
The stunt was co-ordinated and video recorded by Sun News host David Menzies, who has made a career out of lambasting Canada’s politically correct institutions.
Menzies said the unopened bottles — totalling just over $80 — were promptly taken from the teen at the day’s end but suggested the fact the boy was never asked to uncover his face or show photo identification at multiple store locations reveals a deeply ingrained reluctance on the part of Canadian institutions to challenge cultural practices, even when they conflict with broader societal goals such as preventing underage drinking. “The reason why you have to unveil is that is photo ID is absolutely useless if you don’t see the actual face of the person,” said Menzies, adding he came up with the idea after an acquaintance told him he had seen this happen at various LCBO locations.
Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, welcomes you to the Olympic Games
H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.
July 22, 2012
QotD: The magical transformative powers of government service
Folks in the government seem to believe that government service is magic and transformative. They tend to view the citizenry they rule as made up of imbeciles and rubes who can’t be trusted to think for themselves. Yet even though they themselves are uplifted from that same crowd of rubes, they think that their governmental position qualifies them to sort out what folks should be buying and doing and saying from what they shouldn’t. Is the electoral process mystical? Does cronyism imbue its beneficiaries with some dark art? Does civil service stamp a lightening-bolt scar on your forehead? I can’t say. When I was with the government, my feelings of superiority were premised on callow youth and sheltered upbringing, not upon my government salary. I must be a born muggle.
Ken White, “You Knew I Was Going To Write About This”, Popehat, 2012-07-17
July 21, 2012
QotD: Canadian Whisky
Canadian whisky is often thought and spoken of as a rye whisky, and indeed rye is used in its manufacture, though corn (maize) normally preponderates. All Canadian whiskies are made with the patent still and blended with a proportion of neutral grain spirit, so that the final result is lighter than any other type, that’s to say with less body and less fullness of flavour, half a step towards vodka. It seems to be benefiting from the recent trend towards light drinks. I can’t help thinking that the Canadians are a great crowd, but are perhaps the only people who could have produced a boring whisky.
Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.
July 20, 2012
July 18, 2012
July 17, 2012
July 16, 2012
We’ll grant this petition, but only one condition…
A French petition calls for the return of the British Crown Jewels to Angers, in compensation for the execution of the last Plantagenet pretender to the throne in 1499:
Angers, in the Loire valley, was the capital of Anjou province and the geographical base of the Plantagenets, who ruled England from 1154 until 1485, providing some of the most celebrated monarchs in British history, including Richard the Lionheart and Henry V.
But when Edward Plantagenet, the Earl of Warwick, was executed for treason in the Tower of London in 1499, the house’s legitimate male line came to an end. “As redress for the execution of Edward, Angers today demands that the Crown Jewels of England be transferred to Angers,” reads a petition posted on the city’s official website.
Recalling 25-year-old Edward’s “unfair and horrible death” at the hands of henchmen working for Henry VII, England’s first Tudor king, the city believes it is owed an apology and 513 years’ worth of compensation.
Tim Worstall explains the one condition under which Her Majesty should accept the French claim:
Happily stick the Crown Jewels in Angers.
Immediately after the union of the Angevin Empire with the United Kingdom.
We’ll have the Duchy of Normandy back too if you don’t mind. And Brittany (they are Bretons after all).
Francois Hollande can keep the Ile de France, the bit we didn’t have back then.
This time around let’s do European integration properly eh?
