Hills of the North

 

On Monday a schoolteacher called Dave Clark was killed by cows near Richmond in North Yorkshire. Apparently he was walking his dogs.  Death by cow is always a slightly unbelievable yet surprisingly not infrequent fate. Statistics are dodgy (aren’t they always ?), but supposedly around 74 people died in this way in Britain between 2000 and 2015.  Which, of course, raises the perennial question of how any one herd of cattle, or individual cow, knows to desist once the national annual target has been achieved. And more fundamentally how a docile cow, or even several of them, low on brain power, sluggish and unweaponised, seemingly not highly motivated nor obviously well organised, can trample or kick to death an alert and fully grown man. All too easily, it appears.

As a child, while warned to be wary of bulls, cattle in general were not considered by my relatives to be particularly dangerous. I remember being nervous, though, once while on a walk with Grandad that took us through a field towards a slightly sinister area characterised by wild pigs, patches of black soil, gorse bushes and hidden mineshafts, when some cows blocked our path. I was mildly alarmed that Grandad – a strong but kind man - saw fit to aim his walking stick and gently whack the backside of the nearest animal that was in our way. I couldn’t see the beast being exactly very pleased, and doubted the wisdom of the act, but Grandad knew best and, as a Welshman, would surely be familiar with such situations. We went on our way, and the cow did too.

Cows are probably best when on the other side of a fence. Monday, the same day as  the unfortunate fatality even further north, saw us among northern hills, obtaining a picturesque view of variegated cattle all pointing the same way, more or less due south, towards the sun. If only our fellow citizens could behave like that during a pandemic. Cattle don’t need to undertake complex activities requiring them to poddle off in conflicting directions.  They’re content with one thing at a time. They have no need to go to Ibiza or Zante, or to work in strategically vital industries like fingernail painting. Or even hoof-care. For all that, they don’t appear particularly disadvantaged and in some respects lead a superior existence. No commuting, no miserable boss, no rule of six. Clearly, they have something going for them – even if it’s only an elderly man waving a walking stick. Not only that, but they are instinctively positively heliotropic, natural sun worshippers, or maybe their posteriors are negatively phototropic. Or magnetic. Or something. They are also photogenic, although given their evident homicidal capabilities they’re surely not as butter-wouldn’t-melt as they would have you believe.

 

The British structural psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) - who became a professor at Cornell University in New York State and who in 1909 was responsible for coining the word ”empathy” - claimed to have a fixed mental image for every word. A cow was “a longish rectangle with a certain facial expression, a sort of exaggerated pout”. Looking at the photograph above, how could you possibly disagree? But why are they pouting? Is it just for the camera? Is it vanity or are they just biding their time, planning another lethal ambush, honing their strategy, even scheming how to demolish the fence? They have all the time in the world.

And those northern hills. Magnificent, as was and is the hymn “Hills of the North, rejoice”, always a favourite of school assemblies. When we sang it I invariably felt mildly slighted at having to wait for the fourth verse, for the direction with which I was most familiar, the one leading to my Welsh relatives, including my grandfather with his somewhat cavalier attitude to matters bovine. What was so bloody special about North, South and East ? I hardly ever went to those points of the compass. Why was it that West always had to wait until last? Couldn’t they shuffle the verses about a bit occasionally?

“Shores of the utmost West,
Ye that have waited long,
Unvisited, unblest,
Break forth to swelling song”.

Well, yes, thank you, about time. The tune is by Martin Shaw, and is called “Little Cornard”, after a village in Suffolk. The words are by Charles Edward Oakley, and were published posthumously in 1870.

“Shores of the utmost West”. Fabulous. I don’t think Oakley necessarily had in mind Colwyn Bay pier, the Ukankuminandhavsumfun slot machine arcade in Rhyl, or the pleasures of hurling large stones into the sea at Llanfairfechan, but on a wet Monday morning before double physics it provided a safe geographical focus for daydreaming. Curiously, Oakley died in Abergele, on the North Wales coast, in 1865. Perhaps that’s why he kept that direction until last.

Walking on water

 

“Walking on water” is an implausible but pleasurable outdoor activity that doesn’t get the publicity it deserves. The expression carries religious undertones, of course, of miracles, of achieving the impossible. This connotation was exploited implicitly in the final shots of Peter Sellers in the role of Chance the Gardener / Chauncey Gardiner in the 1979 film “Being There”, where he is seen walking blithely across the surface of the lake of the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina. This film, based on Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 book, took as its bizarrely unrealistic theme the completely absurd premise that a total nutjob with no experience of the real world could become the president of the United States. As if. What a preposterous idea.

Maybe it’s a sense of achieving the – if not the impossible - then the unnatural, that provides one of the reasons why we so enjoy seaside piers, especially the really long ones like Southport, Southend or Ryde, or the one at Llandudno, which is Y-shaped, with one of its branches running parallel to the shoreline. A sense of power-by-proxy that the structure is not only unnecessary, but can go out of its way to prove its engineering superiority to the mere forces of nature. Ruling the waves while waiving the commonsense rules of physics. This sensation is further intensified by deliberately employing such a location for an improbable juxtaposition of activities – watching a theatrical performance, riding a rollercoaster, going ballroom dancing, or having a drink or a meal – while the waves splash and crash beneath, as in Bournemouth, Brighton or Blackpool, for instance. Those gravity-denying Victorians certainly knew how to poke Mother Nature in the eye.

Walking down the middle of a river is a less familiar concept, and one even more pleasurably ridiculous, than the seaside pier. Consequently, perhaps, opportunities for this kind of indulgence, a necessarily inland one, are fewer. Thin islands in big cities – Roosevelt Island in the East River in New York, for instance, or Eel Pie Island at Twickenham - aren’t quite the same thing. They simply aren’t thin enough. The Allée des Cygnes in the middle of the Seine, with a double decker bridge at one end and a mini Statue of Liberty at the other, is perhaps the best you can get in a capital city. It’s dead straight, artificial, and very narrow. However, if you walk the Thames Path through the Chilterns, there is a wonderful section by the weir about a mile upstream of Henley Bridge, where the footpath swings out on a wooden walkway, proceeds down the middle of the river for some distance, and then swings back to land again. It’s like a dream; if only it could go on for ever.

One hundred miles or so to the north of this spot, a few days ago I walked down the middle of the River Trent. Well, not quite the middle, but as good as. The Trent is, of course, a substantial river, even this far from the sea where, south of the Derbyshire village of Sawley, it meanders and falls over a weir, to the west of Harrington Bridge. To avoid this point, a 1200 yard canal, called the Sawley Cut, was dug at the end of the eighteenth century and, much of it now lined with no-nonsense concrete, it features a couple of locks, well used by the narrowboats that are so numerous on the many navigable stretches of water in this part of the East Midlands. Going east, the Cut and the river slowly converge, the county boundary between Derbyshire and Leicestershire being along the centre line of the river itself.

At this point, Sawley Lock, shortly before the confluence of canal and river, is a tiny establishment, the Traveller’s Rest, which is not only a micropub (very micro, and aka the Lockkeeper’s Rest) but it also serves light refreshments on Fridays and at weekends. Currently closed because of the wretched virus, the owners are evidently making the best of things by sprucing the place up in anticipation of normality returning. Continuing eastwards, past a set of lock gates, one walks along an artificial concrete island for some distance, with the river on one’s left and the canal on one’s right. I find this set-up oddly enjoyable. 

 All too soon one rises up a ramp onto an ugly footbridge which crosses the Trent to the north bank, adjacent to the equally unattractive railway bridge which carries the freight line from the superbly named Sheet Stores Junction to Willington, on the Derby to Birmingham line. A line which with a bit of imagination could be used for a fast and direct passenger route from Nottingham to Birmingham, avoiding Derby. Some hopes. The two waterways merge immediately east of the bridge, while the footpath continues along the north bank of the river for about a mile to Trent Lock, on the outskirts of Long Eaton.

But here, at Sawley Lock, one can contemplate being at the centre of a complex of transport infrastructures. Motorways and major roads converge nearby, railways fan out in all directions, confluences of the rivers Trent, Derwent, Soar and Erewash are all adjacent, as is the Trent and Mersey Canal and other waterways. Away to the south the planes – passenger and freight - roar in and out of East Midlands Airport. Predictably, such a transportation focus has proved irresistible to those companies who love to cover our green and pleasant in vast design-free sheds, and to pound our highways with enormous dangerous thundering smelly lorries, or as I understand they are now called - because it impresses some people - logistics solutions. Yet here, right at the heart of all this 21st century ghastliness is this wonderful spot, protected from “reality” on all sides, where one can sit and watch the barges slowly passing through. And where one can also ponder whether, in fact, we are all walking on water.

Philately will get you nowhere

 

In one of my posts a few weeks ago I threatened that before long I would be regressing into childhood, ransacking my past, stealing blog themes from sprog memes, and regurgitating the autobiographically archaic. Not to mention reincarnating the most groanworthy of ancient puns. Well, here we go.

I was a little late coming to philately. Other kids did it, but I couldn’t really see the point. I’ve always been a late adopter, a trait - ironically – which I acquired early on. Collecting little bits of paper and sticking them in a book, knowing full well that I was never going to get all of them; what was the point of that? Impossible and, even if achieved, there wasn’t an album large enough to house every stamp, nor a house large enough - unless it was called Buckingham Palace or the National Postal Museum. Mine wasn’t.

My dad had collected stamps before the war, and he was keen that I should take up the hobby, which would teach me about geography, languages, history, design, and so on. I think it was on my eighth birthday that I was presented with a stamp album, a magnifying glass with a red plastic frame, some stamp hinges, and a packet of unsorted stamps from around the world - I can’t recall how many, but at least a couple of hundred. One Saturday afternoon I took the plunge and started going through the contents, feeling slightly awkward, self-conscious. What, me, doing this?

An immediate problem was that, if you have one stamp from, say, Bulgaria, and you have no idea what it is – how old it is, whether it is a part of a series, or what – and you have a whole page in the album headed “Bulgaria”, where on the page do you stick it? Sensibly, not in the top left hand corner or the bottom right hand corner, because though you don’t really know, you suspect that there might be other items that come before or after in time. Of course, you might never get another stamp from Bulgaria and so the problem may never arise, but what you can be sure of, though, is that before long, in some part of the album, representing some obscure corner of our once-upon-a-time great letter-sending planet, you will miscalculate, and there will be a clump of stamps that need to be squeezed in where they won’t fit.  As with almost any collection of things that you are trying to sort into a sequence, you can guarantee that something like this will happen. A law of nature, evidently, perhaps a variant of Sod’s Law, and not unrelated to those mysterious occasions on the motorway when the traffic slows, then stops, and then slowly starts moving again, without any indication of the cause of the congestion. One of those things, an invisible and unwritten law about stuff … cars, stamps, information.

An educational side effect of which my dad may or may not have been aware, was the mental activity involved in building and structuring a collection, such as the problem described above. Decisions on inclusion and exclusion, on what goes where, deciphering Greek or Cyrillic scripts, knowing what Helvetia, Sverige or Magyar implied, unobvious accompaniments to the main business of acquisition. He would have known of my habitual dyspraxia and therefore of the ordeals with stamp hinges lying just ahead; perhaps he hoped for a philatelic cure, along the lines of the “flooding” technique used for phobias. He also guessed, correctly, that very soon I would be hooked. I began to acquire more stamps, voraciously, from anywhere and anyone I could.

Soon, I was “swapping” with friends during school playtime. I discovered that many of my schoolmates were impressed by large, gaudy items picturing Filipino butterflies, Polish footballers or Czechoslovak steelworks, and by anything triangular and loud. They were less drawn to the more sedate, delicate and even effete designs of the issues from Great Britain and what were referred to as “colonials” – the kind of stamps I preferred. I was attracted by the commonality of imperial design; the same king or queen, always with the same “look”, the same kinds of words, shillings and pence, analogous series, cross-references. An aesthetic sense as much as any other, even a vestigial taxonomic one. Imperialist or not – yes, a vaguely proud sense of ownership by proxy - it was above all this universality of style that I admired; variety within sameness, or vice versa. Some people collect stamps as a financial investment; some, because they have addictive personalities and completist tendencies; my interest was primarily aesthetic – the design of the stamp, the layout on the page, and the overall synergy, the whole greater than the sum of the parts – Antigua, Bechuanaland, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Penang, Zanzibar – the linguistic exotica upon which the sun never set.

There was a little lad called David, whose house I visited, near the bottom of our road. His grandfather had actually been out there in “the colonies”, hunting tigers perhaps, and had obtained incredible sheets of mint stamps from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, from India and the Straits Settlements (subsequently to be renamed Malaya, and then – most of it – Malaysia). They would have been worth a fortune even then, but David didn’t know that. I had plans for David. Wickedly I was leading him on with flashy, low value items from the less artistically restrained parts of the world. Yes, I would trade him these tasty morsels for the seemingly dull little specimens I craved. Extremely annoyingly, however, his mother saw through my devious little game, and I was evicted and banned. The glorious British colonials remained his, or his grandad’s.

I decided that, while I had occasional abstruse cravings for stamps from other countries (Guatemala was one unlikely brief passion) I would focus on Great Britain and its Empire and Commonwealth. That would surely be feasible. But no, not even that. With a little encouragement from my dad, who could perhaps see where all this was going and knew where his surviving philatelic appetites lay, my horizons shrank to Great Britain itself. I was taken on occasional Saturday trips to London, and on at least one visit we ventured into Stanley Gibbons in the Strand, at Number 399 the most famous stamp shop in the world, the holy temple of philately. Here I ogled some Penny Blacks, and was suitably intimidated, not only by the augustness of the premises and its salespersons but by the sheer quantity and expense of it all. How can you be ambitious for the unattainable? We fled, embarrassed and empty-handed, skulking off to munch our tired sandwiches in the Embankment Gardens.

Some people, I knew, went in for very specialised thematic collections, or sought out rare defects and variations. Not many serious collectors tried to tackle the lot. King George V had famously started a royal stamp collection, an endeavour rumoured to be continuing in some remote office under the auspices of the present monarch. If you were the king or queen you could collect “everything”, at least all the stamps from Great Britain, and probably the Commonwealth as well. You could command a personal specimen of everything that was issued, employ a minion to do all the fiddly stuff with the stamp hinges, and every now and then you could just breeze in and have a jolly good gloat. “Mine, mine, all mine”. Well, that wasn’t going to happen to ordinary mortals, and it certainly wasn’t going to happen to me. The National Postal Museum in St Martin’s le Grand, which I once visited, had a “complete” collection of GB. The Tapling Collection in the British Museum, I discovered was similarly  impressive and depressing. So why did I need to be involved? Perhaps I didn’t.

Several factors started to erode my boyhood enthusiasm. Firstly, I was “growing out of” what parents sometimes called a fad, a phase, or a craze, simply because of age. Admittedly, stamp collecting wasn’t in the same ephemeral and vulgar league as hula hoops or bubble gum - no, it was a far more legitimate, respectable and enduring pastime - but interests were changing in more fundamental ways, as the insistent hormonal horrors of adolescence began to intrude.

A second factor was a peculiar feeling of uncertainty about the validity of how the hobby was conducted. I recall going to our local post office to buy an 11d stamp. Elevenpence, what an improbable word, and how obscure an artefact? Well, it’s so obscure that – contrary to the overall trend - mint elevenpenny stamps are not worth as much as used ones. This is because any fool could go into a post office and buy one, but fewer people were in the position of receiving one that had been sent through the post for some legitimate reason. Questions thus arose about collecting stamps in the right way. If you were very rich or, indeed, the monarch, you could acquire the whole lot, easily – but where was the fun in that? What was different about doing it the hard way? Back to the original doubts, and difficult dilemmas for which I now had no time or patience.

The third factor, which pretty much killed off my interest, was that, into the early sixties, the Post Office began to produce special issues to celebrate all kinds of occasions – perhaps most substantively the death of Churchill in 1965 – but many other events and anniversaries that bordered on the contrived and the trivial. Previous to this, most of what could be collected consisted of the regular denominations to cater for domestic and international postage of letters, postcards, and parcels of all shapes and sizes, plus very occasional special issues, typically for a coronation or a jubilee, plus the regional issues from around the UK.

As more and more special issues were released they lost some of their novelty value. Some of the early designs were spectacularly ugly too, such as those for the Red Cross Centenary Congress (1963) and the opening of the Forth Road Bridge (1964). Fairly abruptly my enthusiasm waned. My dad, however, as already implied, had had some of his old interest rekindled by my hobby, and over many years, far into the future,  he routinely went along to the post office and bought all the new issues. By then my fascination had long gone. He stuck them in an album for me, but – churlish and ungrateful - I rarely looked at them.

Wobbling doubts, competing attractions. Why bother? I suppose one day I evolved  an argument something like this: stamps exist, I know they exist, and I can go to various places and look at them for myself, but I don’t have to personally acquire, own, possess or hoard them. They will happily survive under someone else’s care, adequately catalogued and safely housed in temperature-controlled air-conditioned  luxury. I can look at photographs of them, in the Stanley Gibbons catalogues or in other guides. I don’t have to own them myself. I suspect there are wider implications of this insight.

What I think I found was that satisfaction in stamp collecting, as in any other acquisitive hobby, has to be based on an acceptance of limitation, of being less than perfect. The pleasure is strongest when the collection is partial, incomplete, when the goal lies ahead but within striking distance, the analogy being with one of those journeys where it’s more fun to be still travelling towards one’s destination than actually arriving there. Once you’ve got the lot – if you can – then what do you do with it? Visit it, royally, as it were, once in a while? Show it to your friends and relatives, who yawn and ask stupid questions? Live in fear that it will be stolen or consumed by fire? Put it in a bank vault and pay to have the same fears perpetuated?

A few years ago, passing through Singapore, I visited the Philatelic Museum in Coleman Street and bought a small catalogue so I could drool over images of those classics from the Straits Settlements. The old instinct was still there. It still is.  Yes, I think I could be persuaded, the further I pass into my second childhood.

Mine, mine, all mine

A visit to the Café Mundane

 

Around the turn of the millennium an online publication called the Journal of Mundane Behavior was established, with three issues per year. Though – like the Ig Nobel Prize - it sounds a bit of a joke, and may have started out as such, its aims were serious, and pertinent to the minutiae of daily life and commonplace activity. The word “mundane” of course derives from Latin roots meaning “the world”. Intended as a proper, peer-reviewed, academic journal within the field of sociology, it was set up by Scott Schaffer of the Millersville University of Pennsylvania and Myron Orleans at the Fullerton campus of California State University, its avowed purpose being to investigate the seemingly minor, obvious, commonplace and redundant aspects of everyday life and behaviour, those which are routinely overlooked and ignored.

Alas, it survived only three years, ceasing publication in 2004. The typical contents of this journal, were it still flourishing, could have been so valuable during the present corona-crisis, and especially as we try to “open up our world” to return safely to normality. What, in its brief existence, the J. Mund. Behav. excelled in, was the minute examination of how people behave in very ordinary situations – like what Japanese people do in crowded lifts, or the social implications of facial hair. In our current predicament we are discovering that it is useful to know exactly what people do, how they behave – right down to every micro-movement – in the most ordinary activities and transactions, the most mundane circumstances, like buying a parking ticket, boarding a bus, collecting a takeaway, ordering a pint, borrowing a book from a library, playing in a park, or choosing a seat on the train. In the June 2001 issue three authors from UK universities – Eric Laurier, Angus Whyte and Kathy Buckner, presented a paper called “An ethnography of a neighbourhood café: informality, table arrangements and background noise”. Yes, I know, that was my first reaction too, but I persevered, and this article forms the basis of the subject I want to discuss today – understanding everyday behaviours in order to live more adventurously again, more normally again, but in safety. Evidently we need to understand better, at a deeper level, what is normal, so that we can start living again.

The “neighbourhood café”.  Across nations and centuries the precise nature of a café has varied, as the authors describe, but in the present-day British context there are certain norms and expectations that are so familiar as to be almost invisible, lurking around the threshold of conscious awareness. These relate to the physical arrangement of a café, the behaviour of staff and customers, and “what we do” when we go to such a place. Unless we are young children or have some specific psychosocial disabling condition, we probably think that we know how to use a café. Occasionally we will encounter unexpected oddities (“order at the side window”, “trays are behind you”) which we cope with on the spot, and in situations abroad we may be temporarily flummoxed, especially if we don’t speak the language, but by and large using a café isn’t something we need to “think twice” about. The main issues to resolve will be whether it is self / counter / table service, is there alcohol, what’s on the menu, are the prices reasonable, should we sit inside or outside, is there a noisy group we want to avoid, is it draughty by the window / door, is there a table free, and which one? Sussing this out rapidly and intuitively is part of the experience, and generally not too taxing. We go in, or we don’t, and that’s that.

As I say, the Journal of Mundane Behavior is / was serious and academic, and while it is easy to dismiss studies of this sort as pretentious explications of the bleeding obvious, confirming one’s worst stereotypical expectations of psychobabble and sociowaffle, once you start reading the journal – and specifically this paper – it is immediately clear that there is a great deal to study and to think about as regards  aspects of life which are familiar, important, and useful - but rarely reported upon.

When the authors state early on that “cafés are places where we are not simply served hot beverages but are also in some way partaking of a specific form of public life” one senses one’s innate BS-detector preparing to kick in, but to back away at this point would be unfortunate, especially given the present circumstances. Amid a pandemic there are things we need to understand clearly about the very ordinary. When every transaction in the so-called hospitality industry has to be pre-meditated and choreographed carefully in the interests of minimising the spread of a potentially lethal virus, as well as for staying financially afloat, the matter becomes very serious indeed. Which is ironic, because a café should be a place of relaxation, informality and pleasure. Deliberating what should be free and easy, pre-planning spontaneous goofing off, having all the fun taken out of things, are among the many demoralising knock-on effects of this hateful plague.

The café the authors describe is called the Flaming Cup; I’m not sure where it is or whether it is a fictional composite, but they do a thorough job of describing what goes on in the daily life of such an establishment, backed up by an impressive array of references, many of a theoretical nature, or relating to relevant analogous studies. Among their observations of the Flaming Cup are that behaviours are reliably regular despite changes of staff or customers, and that it is important to staff that a sense of informality and intimacy prevail, though in an orderly manner, along with cleanliness and the provision of high quality consumables. The authors describe the signage explaining to customers the rules for ordering food and for taking a table, and they note typical customer behaviours in (literally) “bagging” a table by leaving a bag or coat on it while queueing to order food, and at busy times by standing behind and holding the back of a chair at an empty table so as to pressurise the staff into clearing away and re-setting, and the specific tactics used by larger groups of customers.

To encourage informality, table-sharing is encouraged, it being recognised that  where strangers are involved this necessitates an ability and willingness to engage in small talk, at the same time ensuring that declining to do so is not viewed negatively. The authors note that while all the tables and chairs are of similar design, size and shape, not all the places are of equal value, with a table by the window being the most sought after. Customer behaviour, in terms of table selection, they note, will be influenced in part by the state of readiness of the table, from what is left on it, and from signs that people already occupying tables will soon be leaving. Obvious perhaps, but a recognisably valid observation.

Specific expectations relate to regular customers, in that they are assumed to understand the rules about table reservation, that they may be known to have a favourite table and a regular food and drink order, and that they will arrive at a predictable time; they may also be known by name and by other personal details, and may be on first name terms with other regulars and with members of the staff. Further assumptions refer to knowledge of where the toilets are, of what the best things are to order, reading and writing at the table, the nature of background noise, and the rituals attached to entering and leaving.

Overall, the authors provide a detailed and extensively referenced account of the macro and micro features of using this specific café, and by implication, all similar establishments whose themes are good service, openness and informality.

As one reads, one will relate the description to a recollection of one’s own experiences – good or less so – at cafés one has frequented, and the various observations are likely to trigger questions about deeper levels of detail and other “what ifs” that might arise.  For instance, if the study were updated, what would be discovered with respect to expectations about mobile phone use at the table?

Such circumstances may be mundane, but they are replicated in essence thousands of times across the country, and perhaps millions of times across the world, every day. During a global crisis, a time when eating out and catering for those who want to eat out sometimes feels like conducting a military exercise, such documents provide a valuable starting point for considering how best to operate. This point-by-point unpacking of how a routine activity is performed takes on a new and instructive role during this time, and it deserves wider visibility. It should, dare I say it, go viral, and inspire similar investigations in other commonplace situations.