45. I'm Merely Observing!

I got an e-mail from Aidan, a friend of some thirty years. He is originally from Northern Ireland but is now retired and has been living in southwest France for the last six or seven years.  He finished his message by writing this:

Sunday mornings would not be the same without reading your impressions of life now that you are back in London. I use the term ‘impressions' rather than ‘views’ or ‘opinions’ as you say nothing of the 'state of the nation' which I feel certain must be a matter of great debate at the moment in the U.K. (not to mention Ireland which I plan to visit briefly in the Spring.)

Do you have any strong sense of things being ‘different' since you left for foreign parts now that you're back in familiar North London or is that too boring to talk about?

It possibly is.  As I’ve told you before (Half way? click to see), I am not a deep thinker. Any views that I have on life in London today are bound to be pretty superficial and as we live in a relatively prosperous and ethnically/culturally fairly homogeneous part of the city, my experiences are probably not representative of life in London as a whole and certainly not in any way analogous with the rest of the UK.

Caroline accused me the other day of moaning a lot.  “No I don’t,” I protested.  “I make an observation and then sometimes I comment on that observation. That’s not moaning.”

“Doctor Hatch said that you’re a moaner,” she countered, smugly.

“Huh, that’s because he knows more about livers than he does about hygiene,” I said. “When he thinks about it, he’ll agree with me.”

I had gone to the public lavatory at the Royal Free Hospital just before I had seen Dr Hatch, my liver doctor.  I had washed and dried my hands and then, as I hobbled slowly towards the exit, I had been overtaken by a man rushing past me still doing up his zip, who then pulled open the door and left.  He hadn’t washed his hands, the dirty bugger!

That meant that I, with my freshly washed and germ free hands, now had to pull on that same SOILED handle so that I could get out.  The hospital is not alone in this.  Nearly every public lavatory has the same design defect - egression by pulling, not pushing.

“It's ridiculous,” I told Dr Hatch ten minutes later, “that at the Royal Free Hospital of all places, the lavatory doors do not open outwards.   I should be able to lean on the door to open it but instead, I have to pull on a door handle, a door handle that could be and probably is, coated with several dirty buggers’ urine!”  If he is right and that was a moan, then it falls into the “Justifiable” category.

After the check-up, that I have every two months (I was going to write, “After my bi-monthly check-up” but bi-monthly can mean either ‘twice a month or ‘once every two months’. Isn’t that silly?), at which everything was fine, we travelled by public transport into central London and I was able to use my ‘Freedom Pass’.  

This is a wonderful thing that makes London different from virtually everywhere else.  It allows me free travel anywhere within Greater London by bus, tube or train and is available to everyone aged over 60.  It is a remarkably generous benefit and I’m very grateful to the Greater London Council who introduced it and the council-tax payers funding it.

Coming back on the Northern Line tube that evening, we were approaching Highgate.  A beautifully modulated, clear, calm and precise, female voice announces every station as the train approaches it.  “The next station is, Tufnell Park,” she informs us, followed three minutes later with, “The next station is, Archway”.  After Archway comes Highgate.  

Every English speaker in the world pronounces “Highgate” so that it rhymes with “dictate”.  This bloody Tube Voice Woman though, rhymes it with “Hatchet”.  
She doesn’t have to.  It’s an affectation and it drives me mad.  She can say, “Southgate” on the Piccadilly Line properly, so why does she insist on saying, “Highget”?

There you are.  My case is proved, because that was an observation and not a moan.

What follows is certainly not a moan either:

I love the British climate.  It is so much more invigorating and so much more interesting than that in the tropics.  In the five years that we lived on Grand Cayman, the lowest temperature we ever experienced was 68°F/20°C, just before dawn one day. The hottest temperature that it ever reached was 97°F/36°C. 

In most 24 hour periods the temperature would hover around 84°F/29°C during the day and only drop to 77°F/25°C at night.  That’s all right for a month or two but it becomes dull after a time.  

In London, I love looking out of the window first thing in the morning and trying to assess what sort of day it will be.  This morning, when I left the house with the temperature on -1°C, with two inches of snow on the ground and with a stiff breeze blowing, it was bitterly cold.   Dressed appropriately, it was wonderful.

On Cayman, I never drove anywhere without the air conditioning being on but then, I never really drove anywhere because there was nowhere to go.  The longest journey that could be made, from Rum Point to West Bay, lasted 55 minutes but there was a shortcut to be had that would take fifteen minutes off that time.  Here, you can drive and end up somewhere else. You can go places. 

In the UK, over the course of a three-hour car journey, the landscape alters as the bedrock and even the climate changes.  In three hours, you could see the gently undulating slopes of the glacial drift in East Anglia; the flat wetlands of the Fens; the rolling hills of the chalk lands and the bleak moorland underlain by the millstone grit of the Pennines.  In Cayman there is only limestone, no variable relief or climate and one part of the island looks like any other part.

British television is fantastic.   If you are in the UK as you read this you may think that I’ve gone a bit bonkers but you haven’t had to experience five years of Caymanian television which, to all intents and purposes, is American. 

It is dire! What they do, they do very well but the trouble is that they don’t do very much.

They have cop shows, game shows, soaps, movies and sport – and that’s about it.   There are a couple of 24-hour news channels but as all they ever report on is news from the USA, I found them to be fairly boring.  

In May, news of the change of government here in the UK was not reported until after the first ad break.  The ads on American television are another source of annoyance.  A one-hour American drama without the ads lasts just 42 minutes and the ads themselves are dull and lacking any kind of humour or even originality.

I became quite an expert on the storyline of one of the soaps – “The Young and the Restless”.  I wish it could be seen here.  It is wonderfully awful but apparently, very popular.  The fact that I am such a connoisseur is surprising as in five years I never saw more than a minute or two of any episode.  It was on for the half an hour before the Cayman evening news and ‘The News’ was the only TV programme in Cayman that I ever watched regularly and in its entirety.

The six o’clock news, working on Island Time, could begin at any time from 5:58 to 6:03 and I would turn on the television at 5:55 so as not to miss the lead story - usually the only proper “news” story of the day. This meant that I would always catch the last minute or two of, “The Young and the Restless”.

The actors are all ridiculously, physically attractive and the plot appeared to revolve around the fraught relationships between two families, their offspring and their companions. 
My goodness, there were tensions!  No actor ever smiled. They all stood or sat and addressed each other.  There were no conversations, only short speeches. No one ever gestured or interrupted anyone and the only things to move were lips.  Nobody ever walked.  It would have made good radio.  

Every episode ended with one of the actors gazing meaningfully and silently into the far distance or glaring menacingly at another actor for four or five seconds until the closing music started.  Gosh it was exciting.

Mind you, British television has faults. Something that’s been bothering me recently, is BBC Reporters out in the field.

“We’re going to our reporter, Jim Langridge at Victoria Station.”

“Over to John Surridge, who’s at Conservative Party Headquarters.”

“Polly Prior is outside number ten.”

“A report from Cyril Perkins, who’s in a field near Aviemore.”

No, they are not!  Not one of them.  They’re all sitting in a studio in Television Centre drinking coffee and eating vol au vents, waiting until it’s their turn to dress up and go and stand in front of the green screen and make their report.

“No. It’s colder than that Cyril.  Look at the snow on the monitor.  More shivering please.”

You can tell when the report is genuine.  There’s a time lag as the reporter hears the cue and begins to talk and there is always a little camera shake.  When the reporter really is live, the first thing that he or she says after the cue is, “Well George ….,” or, “Yes Sophie ….,” but the green screen brigade, who made the tape earlier in the day, just start to talk because they’ve probably got no idea who’s just introduced them.  

Also, when you are standing outside 10 Downing Street with the temperature -4°C, there is condensation from your breath.   If you’re in a warm studio, there isn’t.  In the same vein, at the end of their commentary, a reporter who genuinely is on location will sign off by saying, “Back to you Nigel,” or just perhaps, “Fiona.”

The biggest giveaway, however, are the people walking past.  You or I, seeing a film crew with lights glaring into the face of a reporter, would at least throw a quick look at it as we walked by. But yesterday, commuters, plodding slowly towards the camera at Victoria Station, never even glanced at it.  

We’ve all seen the attention seekers getting behind the reporter who is just trying to do his or her job (I’m watching protesting students in Trafalgar Square behind the reporter playing to the camera as I write this) but it never happens in some ‘live’ news reports.

I love it.  Caroline braces herself every time the newsreader says something like, “A report from Jim Parks, who’s in Oxford Street,” because she knows that I’m going to shout at the television, “NO HE’S NOT!”   It’s a good game.  I recommend that you play it too.

Basic economics say it isn’t so.  What is the cost difference between sending three people to Millbank in Westminster, compared with getting one person to stand in front of a screen?  Similarly, would it be cheaper to have a team travel to bleakest Scotland or to stay in a nice warm studio in Edinburgh or Glasgow with a wind generator set to ‘breeze’ a few feet away from a blue screen?

In case you’re confused - that was an observation and not a moan.  I never moan.