It’s like groundhog day

If I’m not mistaken, tomorrow is Groundhog Day. In Britain that has no resonance. At least no weather predicting resonance. Instead when folks here say “It’s like Groundhog Day,” they’re not saying today will be a bellweather for the next six weeks, they’re saying “It’s like deja vu – all over again.” It means that the same [stupid] thing happens again and again and again. Based purely on that film.

And each and every year, when I say “Hey, I think it’s Groundhog Day,” they say “Is that for real?”

And I explain about the weather predicting abilities of Punxsatawney Phil and how we’ll have six more weeks of winter – or not. I have to do it every year. It’s like Groundhog Day deja vu all over again.

Funnily enough the origin of Groundhog Day is not some kooky American nonsense, but rather is steeped in European superstition – Candlemas Day -which falls midway between Winter and Spring Solstice according to a Groundhog Day history page. Or as they used to say in England:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.

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I’m preempting the Pennsylvanian rodent and guessing that there will be six more weeks of winter. Blehhh.

He’s an American boy

Today we finally got to the US Embassy to register the birth of an American child. Our child, Buddy. After the calamity of trying to find our marriage papers which we needed (apparently) and requesting a last minute copy of my high school transcripts to prove I’d been in the US for a period of time, we were pretty convinced that we’d be missing something essential. Or that somehow the US Embassy records would be linked the University of Tennessee’s traffic citation section and that Buddy couldn’t get his passport until I’d paid off my brother’s campus parking tickets. And that was before we left the house.

We were only a little bit late leaving the house, but we didn’t reckon on the fact that we’d have to queue up in the rain (stupid really) or that all the sidewalks and the road in front of the embassy were completely torn up as part of a “beautification” effort. The US Embassy is one of if not the ugliest buildings in that area of London, and it takes more than a new forecourt and little bit of window cleaning to beautify that thing. If I weren’t afraid that it might be construed as a terrorist threat, I’d say that only a stick of dynamite could beautify that building. But anyway, why lie? They’re not beautifying – they’re bolstering the security cordon, which does need doing.

Another couple nipped ahead of us in the queue, so we were a couple of minutes late for our appointment, otherwise we’d have been there on the stroke of eleven.

Now, when I say appointment, I assume that means we’ll meet up at the appointed time (or slightly later since I’m punctuality challenged) and we’ll discuss stuff and then we’ll part having accomplished something.

When the Federal Gummint says appointment, they mean that’s the earliest that you should show up to wait in their well appointed waiting room.

I digress:
A few words on the waiting room. It’s oddly transatlantic. The snack machine is stocked with oreos and Hershey bars and pretzels and Reese’s Cups (American snacks not usually found in British vending machines and Scottish shortbread and flapjacks (oaty bars).

The signs say “Please place your rubbish in the bins” and “Please place your trash in the bin”.

There were a few toys in the corner and posters suggesting that we register to vote and a lot of families with small babies who looked they’d already been waiting a very long time. A very, very long time. And if I thought that long waits for officialdom were bad when I had sudoku and a novel to keep me occupied – well, with a little baby they’re that much worse.

We also waited a long time and I had rehearsed my explanation of why I didn’t have the exact dates of my various entries and exits from the US. Like my one evening trip over the border to Ciudad Juarez. I can’t recall the exact date, but the buckets of Corona were mas barato.

Anyway, I don’t know exactly what checks they do – but they didn’t want my high school transcripts (though it was interesting to see how my memories of high school matched up with my permanent record) Nor did they want the sordid tale of the one night in Mexico and the buckets of Corona and goodness knows what else. But they took the papers away and deemed that I qualified as sufficiently American to pass my rights along to Buddy. We swore or affirmed some stuff and paid a lot of money – almost $200 for the paperwork including first passport and £15 for the new passport and social security card to be sent to Master Buddy Vol-in-Law. And then they told us that Buddy was indeed American – and with this finding he had, in fact, been American all along.

We were warned – strongly – by the Consular official not to lose this very important piece of paper. And we tried, very hard, to give him a look like “Who us? Do we look like the kind of people who would lose such a thing?”

And one day, son you could be President

Or maybe not. I had heard that if you got this retroactive citizenship certificate, that meant that your child wouldn’t be denied the opportunity to sit behind the desk at the Oval Office just because that American was foolish enough to be born on foreign soil. On our explanatory paperwork that accompanies the certificate of a Consular Report of a Birth Abroad that proves that Buddy was always American is this nifty little paragraph:

Running for President or for Congress
Legal scholars disagree whether someone born overseas to a US parent or parents is considered a “natural born Citizen” one of the Constitutional requirements to become President of the United States. The courts have never made any definitive ruling on this section of the Constitution. One US Senator introduced a bill in October 2004, however, to clarify what this term actually means. If this bill becomes law, your child would definitively be considered a “natural born Citizen” of the US and therefore could run for the White House. At ay rate, as an American citizen your child can indeed run for Congress, even though born overseas,….

and then the kicker

…but he/she would still have to meet the Constitutional residency and age requirements to run for the House or Senate.

So no matter how well your little tot can press the flesh and work the room and raise money and no matter how bright you think their political future ought to be they still have to wait til they’re way past kindergarten.

But I guess the point is, it’s never actually been tested by the courts. Anyway, I wouldn’t want Buddy to be President. I wouldn’t want those pesky reporters looking into Mommy’s colorful past. And besides, who would want to vote for a guy who said:

My fellow Americans, I end tonight where it all began for me- I still believe in a place called Tooting.

Buddy’s first passport pictures

Traffic

Today we were stuck in a traffic jam. Not really a surprise in a city of over 7 million people with a road system designed in the day of the horse and cart.

But the cause of the jam was a back up of demolition derby cars on their carriers trying to enter demolition derby arena.

I didn’t leave Lawrenceburg, Tennessee and travel across a mighty ocean to live in one the most cosmpolitan (and expensive) cities in the world to be stuck behind a beat up, windowless car with a name like the Spud-a-nator.

Just sayin’.

Sicko crosses the pond

Michael Moore’s film Sicko is finally being shown in British cinemas*. I’m sure many Brits will take this as an opportunity to gloat and to bask in the reflected glory of the sacred status of the National Health Service. Apparently, Mr Moore paints an overly rosy portrait of the NHS.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m like many who can say “At least it’s there.” I’ve used the service for the normal, the chest infections and the sprains. I’ve used it for the stupidly self-inflicted wounds (I got glass in my eye from an art project gone wrong). I’ve used it during my pregnancy and emergency c-section. And through all that, I’ve never paid a penny for services and I’ve paid very little for prescriptions. Although, of course, I have paid. I pay through my taxes.

I’ve probably experienced some of the worst of the NHS. London gets a raw deal from most national services. We really don’t get what we pay for. I could complain a lot about my maternal care. I didn’t have a continuous relationship with any single person on the obstetrical staff. The conditions in the post-partum ward were extremely unpleasant (lack of privacy, noisy, hot and piss-poor decor**) and I rarely saw the same professional twice. But on the upside, they supported my home birth until I passed out of their clinical guidelines (baby was 16 days late). I could have chosen another, prettier hospital. But the hospital I chose was across the street from our house and is a center of excellence for obstetrical emergencies. And, at least, it was there.

And I never had to worry about how I was going to pay or what it was going to cost.

I never had to skip appointments because I couldn’t pay. I never had to negotiate a payment plan with a hospital and hope it didn’t go to c-section because then I’d have a bill I couldn’t afford. This happened to women on the American baby discussion forum I participate in. Some folks on this forum even now have worries about their babies’ health but are putting off visits to a pediatrician because they’re waiting for new insurance to kick in.

We all know that there are problems with American health care, but there are problems with the NHS, too. Just different problems. Problems which Michael Moore didn’t raise: From Peter Bradshaw’s review of Sicko in The Guardian.

By way of contrast, Moore visits those countries with free healthcare: Canada, France and Britain. And this last visit is the one to make us sit up. With much elaborate comedy and saucer-eyed cod-acting, Moore visits the NHS hospital of Hammersmith in London, and deploying many a gasp and double-take, refuses to believe that the sick folks aren’t charged hundreds and thousands of dollars. He doesn’t mention the waiting lists, the filth, the degrading mixed wards and the MRSA that are a staple of all media coverage of the National Health Service. So perhaps he’s got a starry-eyed view of our healthcare.

And he goes on to suggest that maybe Mr Moore has the right idea:

But isn’t it obtuse to focus so excitably on what goes wrong with our health service, when so much more routinely goes right and when, incidentally, there are those with a vested interest in promoting these scare stories as an excuse for privatising it? Isn’t it, for all its faults, exactly the miracle that Michael Moore portrays it?

Actually, no. The NHS is not the miracle that Mr Moore portrays. It’s a system, designed by humans. Humans with good intentions, but humans who get things wrong. Like all systems it has its flaws. And when we ignore the flaws and make the system sacrosanct then we have no chance to learn from other systems and to correct those flaws, to innovate and improve.

The same with the American healthcare system. It’s not the envy of the world any more. It’s inadequate and does not provide the American people what they pay for. It’s the most expensive health care system in the world and it’s no longer delivering the best outcomes.

But yet, there are some really good things about American health care. There are some wonderful things that need to be kept and nurtured. Americans, like the British, need to look with a clear eye to their health care, keep what’s right and fix what’s wrong.

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*I won’t be seeing it – at least not in the cinema. I don’t like the cinema and what with the baby and all, it’s not really easy. But I anxiously await the DVD release.

** You can say that this matters little, but I think that people do fare better in nicer surroundings. Partly things were bad because I gave birth in June – and a new maternity ward was due to open in September.

WWAJD? or spelling made simple

WWAJD? or WWOHD? What would Andrew Jackson do? Always a good way to guide one’s life. Except perhaps in matters of Indian affairs, bigamy and settlements of personal disputes.

But Ol’ Hickory had his own wisdom, that’s for sure.

I once had a very annoying, anti-American colleague who went on and on and (effing on) about the superiority of the English language to the American language. Dumbass. Are you so attached to those superfluous Us? Do you really care if I say toMAYto? Let’s please call the whole thing off, I said.

He would neither cease nor desist. I thought of filing a complaint of racist bullying, but couldn’t be bothered with the paperwork. So I said to myself WWAJD? And since I’m not in possession of a pair of carefully crafted, mother of pearl inlaid dueling pistols, I dragged out this quotation.

“It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.”

And that did it. (Image of AJ’s dueling pistols from the fabulous image blog – Shorpy).

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Mel has an interesting post about spelling simplification. Which attracts some interesting comments. That I couldn’t be bothered with, because the spelling was impenetrable. See:

The unpredictability of ireggular spelling makes lerning to reed and rite unecessarily difficult for menny lerners. Because of repeeted lak of success in thare riting menny kids just giv up.

English societys worldwide hav a 20% plus illitracy rate. Is this what u and your commentators (amung the lucky ones who hav coped with English spelling) reely want?

Argggh… What the hell are you saying?

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Living in England for over a decade has altered my spelling. I do try to keep my spellings separate – American for American audiences, British for British audiences. I rarely manage this. At work, I do my dead level best to spell in a British way. I’m paid from the public pound, writing about English affairs for an almost exclusively British audience. As an immigrant, I feel it’s the least I can do. Thank goodness for spell check – just have to make sure the dang thing’s on Brit spelling as MS Word has an unfortunate tendency to autonomously switch to American spelling and make me look an arrogant language imperialist.

On this blog, regular readers will have noted, that my spelling is all mixed up and I’ll switch back and forth within the same post. I am a poor proofer and I swear trying to spell two ways has made me a far poorer speller overall. I hope no one minds too much.

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There are a number of online communities for pregnant women and new moms/mums. I used one that had both American and British online spaces. It’s been a really interesting experience seeing what people got worked up about on different sides of the ponds. But most interesting of all has been the quality of the posts.

Somewhat surprisingly, British posters overall have far poorer language and spelling skills. Truly appalling. Not the occasional typo or easily misspelled word. But a clear failure to master the bottom line basics of English spelling – particularly around homophones. You know…their/there/they’re – that kind of thing. I don’t know if this represents a clear failure of the British educational system*, a different section of society posting in the UK v. America, or maybe clear evidence in support of the spelling simplification society. After all, those superfluous Us must have a greater effect on:

The unpredictability of ireggular spelling makes lerning to reed and rite unecessarily difficult for menny lerners.

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*I truly suspect this one – see All Must Have Prizes by Melanie Phillips

California emissions standard

I used to love to watch The Price is Right with VolBro – especially sitting in the easy chairs in my grandparents bedroom – but anywhere really. VolBro was a natural – he was usually right – even when he was a little tiny kid with no money or shopping experience of his own.

He was very good on guessing the price of cars – often guessing what I thought was quite high. When I’d voice my doubts, he’d pipe up in his little 6 year old voice “you can’t forget the California emissions – that always makes it higher.” And he was right.

I can’t say that I built my life around TPIR (as my grandmother sometimes did), but I really enjoyed it.

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When I moved to the UK, I had to leave behind TPIR. Well, sorta. There is a British version of the show, but it’s only a half an hour. There’s no showcase showdown – the showcase contestant competes against a randomly selected margin of error (though of course, one can never go over on the price). There’s no reminder to spay or neuter your pets. California emissions do not come as standard – and there’s no Bob Barker.

Sure, there’s Plinko and the other little games I knew and loved. But there’s no Bob Barker. And I can’t but watch the show without thinking “Hey, this guy isn’t Bob Barker.” The show has since been cancelled and I can’t help but think – without the refined dignity of Bob Barker (the British version always seemed kinda sleazy) – it’s no wonder that it didn’t work out.

Now America will have to watch TPIR with the interior monologue running “Hey, this guy isn’t Bob Barker.” Although, there’s some speculation that folks may be saying “Hey, this gal isn’t Bob.”

Bob retired this month – his last show airing on Friday. It makes me a little sad.

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My cousin Blake won a car on TPIR. He gave it to his mother. It had California emissions standard.

Materialistic jubilation and bitter ironies

If you wait long enough, home comforts will come to you. A product line I missed desperately in my early days in the UK has finally arrived from across the Atlantic. Unlike pumpkin pie filling, I found no reasonable substitute (making it from scratch, which turns out to be soooo much better anyway – living in the wilds of Britain has liberated me from the tyranny of branded and pre-processed ingredients). Unlike Karo syrup, I found no exclusive and expensive supply (at Selfridges) or a reasonable, but imperfect facsimile (Golden Syrup).

No, it just wasn’t available and nothing came close.

And no, sadly, it’s not SunDrop – but something almost as good.

The Sharpie. Yes, the Sharpie is finally available in the UK. I haven’t seen it in stores, but I have seen it advertised on tv.

(Image ripped from the official Sharpie site)

Yes, I am a stationery fetishist – but the Sharpie is the supreme permanent marker – it will write on almost anything – as I learned during my undergraduate days as a geology student – marking many, many rock samples with barely a dimunition in flow.

And sure my needs for a permanent marker are less than they used to be, but when you need a Sharpie you need a Sharpie.

And now I can get one here in the UK.

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And then there ‘s the ironic twist worthy of O’Henry

Now that I can get a Sharpie, is just the time when my household may not be best suited for permanent markers.

Image ripped from here

The mountain laurel

Regular readers may know that I’m quite fond of visiting Richmond Deer Park and since becoming pregnant we’ve gone even more regularly. It’s not smoky, focused on drinking and the long walks are healthful and relaxing. And recently, walking is the only thing that reduces the increasingly uncomfortable swelling in my feet and legs.

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In the Spring, the most beautiful part of the park is the Isabella Plantation – a fenced in area (to keep the deer out) known for its magnolias, azaleas and rhododendrons. There are great drifts of azaleas to rival to the most ambitious dogwood-trailer in Knoxville (but of course, there are no dogwoods).

On Sunday, we went a way I hadn’t gone before and I noticed an enormous mountain laurel. It must have been very old, because laurel as extremely slow growing. It wasn’t yet in full bloom.

I pointed it out to the Vol-in-Law. I was pretty excited, because it’s a native of the Eastern US – and a formerly favorite plant of mine (since I worked at a garden center I had a lot of favorite plants) and I’ve always liked the unusual crinkled flower buds. Its latin name is Kalmia latifolia. Apparently, it was once very fashionable among the plant collectors of Europe (probably because it is so slow growing and a little picky about conditions). I don’t know if the variety pictured above is anything special, but you can now buy cultivars which are quite showy and useful in a partly shaded, acidic garden.

Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, himself named this plant after a friend. I told all this to the ViL – and how I’d also read recently that Linnaeus named nasty plants – like stinkweed – after his critics and detractors.

The unsolicted comment

In England, unlike America, the unsolicited comment is frowned upon. You can’t just – as a passer by – say “Nice suit” or “That dog sure is frisky.” (In some circumstances you may make an unsolicited comment about the weather.) I have to admit – I like being free from the unsolicited comment – at least on the receiving side. But like many Americans, I do like to make unsolicited comments. I do my best to refrain.

But as we were still admiring the Kalmia, a couple came upon the shrub and were discussing amongst themselves what it might be. They determined that it was more like a rhododendron than a rose. That’s the right approach to plant ID. What’s it like? What might it be related to? But comparing it to a rose is just ridiculous. I interjected. “It’s a laurel, a Mountain Laurel.” (It did have a tag, but it was pretty well hidden and read only Kalmia latifolia).

They were surprised. They thanked me. I refrained from adding anything else (like it’s native range, growth habit or use in the garden) But as we moved on I asked the ViL if I had been totally out of line. He said no, that he thought they were crying out for information.

Can I get some service?

There are some issues that I have to admit I don’t care about anymore. Issues that I felt quite strongly about at one point, but which have now – like the sands through the hour glass – passed me by.

For example:

Pre-18 voting. It burned me up that I turned 18 in a general election year (May), but was unable to vote in the primary. I really wanted to vote for Al Gore. But I didn’t get my chance, since that other fellow – who was it? – some guy from Massachusetts got the nomination instead. Boy, did that turn out good.

Policy prescription: Those eligible to vote in the November general election shall be able to vote in their respective state’s primary.

How much do I care about this policy now? Not at all.

I kinda got over my disappointment about getting to cast my ballot for Al in 1988. After all, I got another shot in 2000. Sadly, and to my eternal shame, I actually didn’t bother to return my expat ballot that year. I thought Al would be a sure thing in our mutual home state of Tennessee. Nope. And without Tennessee, Florida really mattered. Boy, did that turn out good.

But there was one age based policy that took me years to get over. The drinking age. Just about the time that I could start to imagine turning 18*, states were one by one succumbing to the threat of removal of Federal Highways Matching funds and raising their drinking age. But I thank those legislators. For without their meddling, I might have been a law abiding citizen instead of the scofflaw you know today. ‘Cause – get real – I wasn’t not gonna drink at 18. Thank you for freeing me from any sense of obligation to obeying your petty, arbitrary rules and poorly enforced misdemeanor laws.

Policy prescription: Drinking age of 18 or 19. If you’re worried about deaths on the highways, throw in tougher penalties for drunk driving, including revocation of driving license until 21 for anyone registering any blood alcohol content while in charge of a moving vehicle.

How much do I care about this policy now? Well, the threat of prosecution still stings, and I do think it’s a bit silly to wait ’til 21 – but really I don’t care that much. And I have to admit to a certain kind of schadenfreude – if I had to suffer, so should you.

But I still thought it was interesting when Bob Krumm, Tennessee blogger and political aspirant, suggested lowering the drinking age.

One of the things, that we used to say in our salad days was “Over in Europe, you can drink at 18. Over in Europe, they let children drink a little and then it’s not that big of a deal when you get older and people don’t get so drunk.”

Well, I’m over in Europe now (sadly having moved here well after I turned 21). And that all seems to be true. Well, once you get onto the Continent anyway. The legal age in the UK is 18. And for many years, British people liked to have a go at me for stupid, puritanical American drinking laws (talk about blaming the victim), usually in drunken conversations down the pub.

But kids are certainly able to obtain alcohol from a much younger age (though there has been more emphasis on proof of age lately). And sadly, alcohol is probably not handled well in the Anglo-Saxon family. These kids get stupid drunk and cause problems. They get stupid drunk at 18, too. In fact, the British are pretty well known for maintaining their ability to get stupid drunk well into their majority.

But, now – and rather ironically – folks in the UK are starting to think about raising the drinking age to 21. Well known, think tanks are suggesting a review of the minimum drinking age.

And what do I think about raising the drinking age? Well, I’ve been there done that and I don’t think it makes much difference.

David Poley, chief executive of the Portman Group, said: “What we really need to do is change the drinking culture through education rather than making drinking a social taboo by raising the legal drinking age.”

Sensible talk from the Portman Group (an alcohol manufacturers’ lobby – BTW), but the real tough thing is finding the policy prescription that achieves that aim.

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* bless the City of New Orleans, which kept their 18 limit at the time I was 18. Maybe I shoulda gone to Tulane.

t-28: dual heritage

I’ve got behind on the Cletus countdown posts. I’ve been busy having fun with my friend visiting from San Francisco.

I just hope falling behind doesn’t make Cletus late.

Guess what else was late, the first book the my husband ordered the baby. In fact, it was about four months late.

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The Vol-in-Law ordered a book called Our Island Story – basically British imperial propaganda for small children – in its centenary edition. He ordered it before Christmas for baby Cletus – to make sure that he’s properly proud of his British ancestry.

Unfortunately, the book did not arrive and did not come and there was no sign of it for months. But this morning, there was a knock on the door – and a package was handed over – and it was Our Island Story.

I had a quick flip through, and suggested that we might have to skip the chapter called “How America was lost,” lest there be any conflicting messages for the young boy.

My husband immediately began to read aloud from the book and such phrases rang from my ears:

• But the Americans were not meek at all. They made ready to fight.
• The colonists looked upon Britain as their mother-country…and now for a want of a little kindly feeling and understanding between them, mother and children were fighting bitterly.
• [The war minister Pitt advised] “You cannot conquire America. They are of our own blood. If I were an American as I am an Englishman, I would never lay down my arms – never, never, never.”

And he said, “I don’t think you need to censor this at all.”

Anyway, I guess this was our first cross-cultural parenting “discussion”.

28 27 days til baby Cletus