Happy July 1st from EB

July 1st update from Elizabeth

Happy Canada Day! I'm wearing my red shirt and white shorts today as I write. There's no national holiday or fireworks here, but I'm in a buoyant mood anyway. Tonight I'm headed to the George (17th c. inn near London Bridge) to raise a glass with some Canadian expats.

Recent developments, personal and political...

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Part of the reason I'm beaming today is that I found out my former manager at CARE UK was 'made redundant' (laid off) about a month after I left. The new marketing director took stock of the department, restructured it to make best use of people's skills, and kept the people he knew he could work with.

Kaye was a nightmare to deal with in person; I'd never met someone so consistently negative in her outlook. It hit me hard when I first moved here, at a time that I needed support and firm direction. This taught me that I can be very sensitive to other people's 'vibes'; their moods can dictate mine, if I don't make a conscious effort to retain my own.

I realised it wasn't me being incompetent or lazy or a poor worker, after I started having crying fits on Sunday nights and Monday mornings, dreading going into work...and then bounced into the office early when she was away. 

In my exit interview, I told the director that I could have done her job. Now the press officer she hired in my place is doing hers.

I know that I'm not supposed to rejoice in the suffering of others; I wouldn't truly wish long-term unemployment on anyone. But sometimes, just sometimes, you feel a bit vindicated, and it's hard not to feel just a little smug.

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My friend Thomas Flamanc (who with his lady wife put me up on short notice when I first arrived in September) has been tapped to become the next kingdom herald for Drachenwald. The current herald will either step down, or be asked to resign, fairly shortly; apparently he hasn't reported to his superior since his initial report when taking the office a year ago.

Thomas was head herald for the principality of Lochac a few years ago, and successfully juggled this job with his PhD at the time. He's not a great court herald, but a very diligent paper/electronic trail guy, and the college here needs him to reinstitute some structure to it.

John in turn has asked me to become his deputy, with an eye to taking on the job in a couple of years, and I've said yes (on condition that I get a job and am staying for the duration).

This is very exciting for me; as geeky as it sounds, I'd hoped to become kingdom herald in Ealdormere before I left. While I still have a lot to learn about how this kingdom does its courts and ceremonies, being a deputy could be a great way to learn, and decide if I really want to do it. :-)

The Drachenwald 10-year event gave me my fill of field heralding; I heralded the beginning of the passage at arms, the end of the Albion tourney and the whole of the squire's tourney, which was well attended by the knights. I also helped organise the grand processional of nobles before the Saturday feast - done without an order of precedence, ooof. I hope it gives me better 'recognition value' from now on. :-)

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Even in our 'dodgy flat', our landlord is diligent about the necessities. We've had a damp patch on the wall for a year, and a piece of molding has fallen out of the ceiling, and we need new kitchen shelves...but when our washing machine finally died of exhaustion on the weekend, we had a replacement on Monday morning.

It was delivered up our narrow fire-escape style stairs and twisty staircase and installed by two geezers of indeterminate Eastern European origin, our landlord's usual choice of workmen.

(Geezers are strongly represented in the building and roadwork trades. In fact, if you were to tour around the nicer neighbourhoods in Chelsea and around Hyde Park, you'd think that only builders lived there, since they're the only people you see during the day. Pickups full of tools and huge multi-story scaffolding systems in the smart neighbourhoods show that homeowners are engaging in the traditional English pastime of 'having a man in to look at it', whatever 'it' proves to be.)

The washer is tiny by N. American standards and it claims to be water-efficient (read: an hour or more per load). It's definitely a step up from the old model, and the spin cycle doesn't rattle the windows anymore.

Lambeth the dumping ground

I've had my first introduction to 'fly tipping' here in London.

In the UK, a 'tip' is a garbage dump, and fly tipping is the practice of illegally dumping your garbage in an abandoned property.

Sounds stupid, doesn't it - why not just put it out for collection? It's shamefully common here.

I can't tell if local garbage service is so poor that people give up on it, or if hauling large items is expensive (not according to the city website), or if the lack of garbage cans in London (from past bomb scares) has made people immune to the sight of garbage in the streets...but if there's an abandoned property or car, it's liable to become an unofficial dump if it isn't policed.

Last month someone has abandoned their ancient pickup truck outside our flat, on the side street. It's a flatbed with a large capacity in the back; the windows are rolled down, the ignition is accessible. It's been quietly asking to be stolen since the beginning of June, but noone has obliged. It has accumulated a number of parking tickets, and a towing notice. But in the meantime the back of the truck is filling with large-item garbage: furniture, appliances, broken stuff.

My housemate Sam and I have both phoned to complain...but it's still there, a week after the tow notice went on the windshield.

England has the worst garbage record in Europe, and has the least space to accommodate it. Most of the boroughs so far only collect glass (separated by colour), newsprint, and cans. No plastics, no composting, no cardboard or packaging or styrofoam.

The city of London website points you to extensive links about making recycling profitable and cost-effective, and this is certainly an important part of getting a recyling program started. But what about consumer demand? What about the crying environmental need? How about the fact that the UK can't afford the space for dumps indefinitely?

I grit my teeth every time I throw out something that would have gone into the recyle bin in Ottawa, and dearly hope that my next UK flat will be in a more progressive borough.

Maybe we're not as high up the chain of intelligent beings as we think, since we seem so set on fouling our own nests.

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'Archeology is rubbish' and Time Team: only in the UK

A TV documentary show called Time Team celebrated its 10th? anniversary this year. It's a group of archeologists who spend only two days on any given dig, usually in two or three test pits, to find new or collaborating evidence of previous occupation on the site.

The format always emphasises speed; a quick test pit, a quick geophysics survey, a quick identification and reconstruction of an object. The host is always running from one pit or site to another, trying to find out the latest news, racing against the clock.

Sometimes their claims are pretty grandiose ('Well Tony, this tiny pot shard tells us that we're on the site of a 14th century monastery that stretched over 10 acres and specialised in vinoculture...'), but I find the show a lot of fun.

This past weekend, they held 'the Big Dig': the public was invited to dig a test pit in their own backyards, to search for...well, anything. Registered participants got a packet of information about how to mark and dig a hole, and how to record finds.

Families, scout clubs, soccer teams, and rabid amateurs joined in and reported their finds over the past two weeks, and on the weekend the TV crews followed three promising sites.

Of course, it helps if your family home is built on a 16th century site; one of the winning digs was in the garden of a Tudor house, and they found evidence from prehistory up to Victorian times.

But many very ordinary people in the suburbs managed to dig up their gardens and find really remarkable stuff just an inch or two down, particularly pottery finds.  One woman found one thousand pieces of pottery in her square metre...must have been a period fly tip.

I was thinking as I watched that this was a very British thing to do, and in some ways very egalitarian and populist. Only in the UK could you encourage amateurs to dig in their gardens and reasonably expect to find evidence of Victorian, Tudor, medieval and Roman habitation.

The project gave the show's archeologists access to hundreds of private sites, and gave armchair enthusiasts a chance to dig a hole just like the experts. The kids get a chance to get muddy legitimately, and the parents get a sense of connection to the property they didn't have before.

The presenters hinted at some criticism from 'serious' archeologists, who apparently despaired of all these amateurs recording finds accurately. I wondered if they weren't actually worried about their jobs.

See if www.channel4.co.uk has any info about the Big Dig.

UK politics

The prime minister's press officer who, before the war, presented an intelligence dossier that was plagiarized from a 1991 PhD thesis online, is trying to blame the intelligence service and the BBC for finding him out.  The intelligence service refuse to take the blame, and the BBC won't reveal its sources that the intelligence was 'sexed up' to make the call to war more palatable.

Makes me wonder if the other news items were released in hopes of distracting the public, a la 'Wag the Dog'.

The government has decided that gay couples can, if not marry, then register their cohabitation status, to gain the same social benefits as straight couples. For England, this seems awfully progressive, in the country where every form starts with the required field of title: Mr. Mrs, Miss, Ms, Dr. OTOH, Britons seem terrified of treading on anyone's civil rights, and the prospect of court cases over benefits and pensions for gay couples would make the gov't look bad.

It's timely, as the Church of England fights with itself over gays in the  congregations and the pulpits (one is ok, the other is ok only if celibate), and still hasn't allowed any women bishops. Apparently women can answer a calling to be consecrated as a minister, but their calling never reaches the upper ranks, past the beautiful stained-glass ceiling.

And in a surprise turn, the MPs voted to completely ban foxhunting - after years of negotiations about licensing, phasing out, and suggesting modified hunts that would be 'less cruel' to foxes, an amendment to the bill was included that just plain bans it. Of course, it still has to pass the house of Lords, the big fans of traditional sports, who have fought for the 'traditional English country lifestyle' for years.

Most astounding to me, though, is that last month Tony Blair decided to restructure the government (including dumping the Chancellor and reorganising the courts of law) and push through a constitution, mostly without consultation. 

When I think about how long Canadians have wrangled over constitutional changes, and how little has changed as a result, I was stunned that the PM introduced sweeping changes and announced them in conjunction with a midterm cabinet shuffle. Can you picture a Canadian prime minister announcing the revamping of the Senate with no forewarning or committee work in advance?

All the opposition parties were caught offguard, and they can't seem to summon up the indignation that you'd think would be suitable for such a major change in government. And, like at home, there are too few of them, and they're too fragmented to fight a change.

I'm now wondering if all the parties were hoping for someone to make needed changes - maybe noone really wants to defend the Chancellor, whose office has a blatant conflict of interest between the lawmakers and law-appliers.

All they're left to argue about is the way in which it's been done, which was certainly clumsy and ham-handed.

I continue to marvel at the parallels and differences between Canadian and English culture - one modelled originally on the other, facing so many of the same issues, people and governments finding themselves in the same binds.

If you read this letter, please write to me, and tell me what's going on in your life. I had a super visit home in May, but still didn't see everyone, and I want to keep in touch. And pictures are welcome!

Your faithful reporter in London,

Elizabeth