Black Plumes

Today is yet another day of having to stay at home to work. I want to have adventures, but stories and chapters need writing, student papers need grading, and I have correspondence with editors to attend to.



And London very courteously shows me a sight that I would not see in Eugene, Oregon. As I sat working in my front room, I heard the clop-clop-clopping of hooves. I looked up to see a horse-drawn hearse passing by at the front of a funeral procession, driven by a man in black wearing a top hat. The horses wore black plumes on their heads. The four sides of the hearse were glass, with gilt decorations on the top. It looked like a giant music box on wheels, except that instead of a spiked cylinder for playing music, it contained a coffin.

And that is today's news from Wrentham Avenue. Now I must get back to work.

Radio Highlights

Sometimes it feels as if my year in London is turning out to be a year of doing the dishes while listening to BBC Four and sitting in my living room, writing. With Internet radio, I could have done the same in Oregon.

Today, as I washed yesterday's dishes, I heard an interview with Clare Short about her experiences in Parliament ever since she quit the Labour Party. Short was a cabinet minister who resigned over the Iraq invasion, and more recently decided to quit the party altogether and sit with the opposition. But the question then was where to sit. There is, as it turns out, an area where independents, rebels, and assorted Parliamentary oddballs sit together in oppositition, and one of these number invited Ms. Short to sit with them.

It strikes me that the U.S. equivalent would be to renounce the other popular kids in high school. But which table will you go to when you're in the cafeteria for lunch? Perhaps those pimply boys in the chess club will invite you to join them.

I can see on the Internet that Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economic effects of global warming has made the news on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., the consequence is predictable. The right lambasts the report as flawed, and the left embraces it as an urgent call to action. And nothing much happens.

I can't say that I like the response here in Britain much better. The Stern report deserves to be considered and weighed, which includes skeptical probing of its assumptions and conclusions. I've heard only one voice saying, quite reasonably, that the effects of global warming might contribute as much benefit as harm. (Globally, that is. Whole countries that end up underwater will likely disagree.) Discussion of how to adjust if dramatic global climate change proves inevitable ought to be part of the debate.

But in Britain, all three major political parties are falling over one another to demonstrate that they are taking the report and global warming most seriously. The Liberal Democrats were way ahead of Labour or the Conservatives in proposing tax structures to encourage carbon reductions, and on the radio show with MPs of all three parties, I heard the Lib-Dem MP trying to claim that only her party was truly serious about the issue. The Conservative was especially earnest in saying that his party would create deep social changes to discourage the burning of carbon fuels and energy generation by other means. The Lib-Dem doubted this.

Said the Conservative: "When Conservatives are in government, you're going to see a policy so radical that the Liberals will have to put their shoes on to get anywhere near it."

I laughed so hard that I alarmed the cats. Sadly, I don't think that my man John McCain will adopt that sentence for his 2008 Presidential campaign.

London From Inside Our Flat

Living in London does not, unfortunately, mean that every day I get to explore London.

Yesterday, I went with Holly to the London Business School for our intake interview at the school's fitness center. Then I walked down Baker Street to a stationer's to buy paper and index cards. It was a crisp and sunny autumn day. I thought, “Wouldn't it be nice to just roam around the city today?”

And, yes, it would have been. But I have mid-term papers to grade, a story to write, and I am behind on writing my novel. I returned to the underground and went home to stay indoors the rest of the day, working.

Odds and Ends

A BBC listener responding to Tony Blair's final address to the Labour Party conference wrote a letter that was read on the air: “When Tony Blair said that his head and his heart would always be with the Labour Party, I hope he meant in a jar of formaldehyde.”

British political discourse differs from the current American version in a couple of ways. The first is that ad hominem attacks in Britain seem always to be clothed in wit, which makes them more palatable to all sides and keeps the discourse civil even when feelings run strong. American pundits attack with such earnestness and so little wit that it's unpleasant to listen to them unless you happen to already share their views. The second difference is that American speech is becoming less free. I would half expect such a joke --- directed in public at a sitting President from an ordinary citizen --- would result in a Secret Service investigation. I certainly don't think that an American “jar of formaldehyde” letter would be read on National Public Radio.

I have a theory that the spare physical distance between MPs in commons may contribute to political civility. The government and opposition face one another across a very narrow space. Back benchers of either side face each other across a space of only forty feet, and the government ministers are only something like a dozen feet from their shadow-government counterparts. Without any amplification, any Member can hear what any other Member is saying, and the close space makes everything rather more personal than the vast expanses in the U.S. House of Representatives. American politics become less civil all the time, and there is hardly any real debate since the two sides simply stake out their positions and then only pretend to debate, playing instead to the cameras and really speaking only to their constituents back home.

Listening to the radio continues to make me feel that I am living in a country of adults here, which contrasts with U.S. culture. On BBC four a few weeks ago, I heard a radio adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It was broadcast late enough to insure that impressionable kiddies would be asleep, but even at 11:00 or midnight in the U.S., there would never be a radio drama that included characters making frank (if romantic) use of the words c**t and f**k in explicit voice acting of sex scenes. (Well, in the U.S. there would hardly ever be radio drama of any kind at any time, but that's another issue.) Even during the day, there's content that would never air in the U.S. During the afternoon play, a character talked about how she used to limit her masturbation to once a week, afraid that her clitoris was like a battery that she could use up.

I'm not saying that such content makes Britain culturally superior. But Britain is less constrained by a Puritanical history, and seen from across the Atlantic, the United States looks like a mild sort of Christian Iran. Brits are both astonished and amused that in America, there is a debate over such a thing as “creationism.”

And speaking of Iran, all during September there was a programming focus on BBC Four, looking at the Islamic Republic from many sides. For one week, all of the afternoon stories were by Iranian writers. A women's show focused on the status of women in Iran, and on other programs there was an extensive history of Iran. If only we even had this available in America! Our perspective on the news is so stunted and simplified, and our ignorance makes it easier for our leaders to manipulate our views.