Trifter

Let’s first address the voices I hear, just in case you thought I am going nuts. The voices I hear are those of my mother at her driest, saying ‘how very British’; the other one belongs to Aunt Pamela at her most defensive, saying ‘but we do things differently than on the continent’. Both comments have become running gags with my friends meanwhile. You may add either or both comments at the end of each paragraph.

My long absence from the net had a reason, too: I had a small problem with the eminently gifted staff at British Telecom to set up an internet connection for me. After only two months, they finally managed to open a line for me. They call it broadband, but it is about a tenth of what in Switzerland was called a private line and was free of charge there. Here it is quite costly, and don’t you think you get refunds for the frequent downtimes that are a daily occurrence at least.

But I do have loads of fun being here and get held up by many time wasting activities. At the start, there was the problem with the leaking shower. My landlord called in the guys to fix it. After 90 minutes they left, but the shower leaked as before. This process was repeated twice, before I had a look at this shower myself. I found the leak and had it fixed in 20 minutes, and this included the time it took me to go to the shop to buy the materials I needed. It took me something longer to fix the heating system because I had to read the manual first. Maybe the guys who came to fix it should have done that as well.

Then snow fell and a white dusting lay on London like sugar on a cake. It was so little snow, there was nothing to worry or even think about. But the eminently able Lord Mayor of London just closed the City down. No buses ran, no railways worked, and the tube was out of order. I am still trying to figure out how that snow got into the tunnels of the tube, but maybe British tunnels work differently from continental ones as well. But my laughing fits only started with that. There were even better jokes to come, and some.

That night as I listened to the radio, there were in calls from listeners about the snow. One woman called and complained that her employer had demanded her to walk to work. She was a typical whiner and quite affronted by the idea, and stated that it took her an hour to get to work by car. Now, any Londoner stupid enough to go to work with his car has at least an hour, even if he drives just down the block. So probably she would have had a ten minutes’ walk, but was to fat and lazy to move like most. But on the continent, this would have been quite normal: If you are too lazy to get your car ready for winter and a lousy driver to boot, i.e. not able to cope with a bit of snow, then obviously you have to walk to work.

Days later, Boris Johnson, the very blond Lord Mayer, actually said that he was proud to have closed down the City because of the snow. ‘As there have been several incidents with buses’ was his explanation for the total and very costly close down. Translated into English, I suppose he wanted to say, as I have only incompetent bus drivers, unable even to learn how to drive buses, I closed down the tube as well, just to be sure. And as city government was unable to foresee such unheard of incidents like cold or snow in winter, they were utterly unprepared.

But the final gong was put on the story when a parliamentary commission actually stated that the preparations for winter were adequate. They had at least the good grace of leaving out the obvious ‘because nobody can expect any snow in winter’. If they had said that as well, I think I wouldn’t have been able to stop laughing for another week. What a perfectly lousy team they make together, all those politicians.

What really hit my eyes was the different ways people dealt with the snow. There were whole stretches where the snow was just trampled down to form a solid sheet of ice. And there were places where the snow was cleared by the shop and restaurant owners. The shops and restaurants that cleared the snow were Arab, Pakistani, Indian, or Turkish; probably because Delhi and Riyadh get so much more snow than London, they knew how to deal with it.

I had other highlights as well. Trying to heat the apartment while the cold lasted was a wasted effort, reminding me of my mother’s dictum: ‘Buy a house in England? If you can find one that is more than a leaky roof with no walls and no windows, we will buy it.’ They never did. I don’t know why the British don’t know how to build a house, but piling brick on each other is not what I call a wall; and leaving openings in these brick piles which are filled with a door or a window that does neither fit nor fill the opening doesn’t help either. But after having helter skelter piled those things together, they are great at whining about heating costs and feeling cold all the time.

I had to get used again to certain typical island traits as well. There is, for one, the way stores or public buildings are marked. Walking along the main road, I saw this huge sign proclaiming that the building to my right is a Somerfield market. It took me several minutes to find the entrance. It was two corners away from either the sign or the marked parking space; it was completely unmarked and huddled in an open market area in between a laundrette and a flower shop. What a way to attract buyers. It comes as no surprise that Britain has so many ghosts; almost everybody must be wishing to be able to walk through walls.

Then, there is the inability to give directions to any place, even if it is right around the corner. I had a paper from Royal Mail asking me to pick up a package which they hadn’t been unable to deliver while I was away. Next morning I walked over to the post office to collect it, where a little man told me slightly aggrieved for having disturbed his tea break, that they do not hold packages and that I would have to go over to the packaging centre of Royal Mail. He then gave me a description of how to get there that left me completely in the dark of where I should start or where on this planet it should be. It went something like this: ‘It is right beside Lidl, there is also a bus stop in front for the number 6 bus; well you just walk towards Whitehall and then there is Burnett Road.’ I decided at that point to go to my Indian friend who runs the kiosk and always sells me the newspaper, and ask him. His information was: ‘You walk down to East India Road, turn right, walk to the next roundabout, and the road going off right is Burnett Road.’ He will never get his British passport as long as he is not completely befuddled when giving directions.

As it was a sunny day (and don’t you believe that it always rains in Britain, I know for certain that it rains more often in Lucerne in Switzerland), so I took my camera along and went on the quick walk. That is where the pictures about spring come from, because spring had arrived over night. (Please click on the picture to get the full view.)

Once there, I was confronted with the usual problem: There was a huge sign proclaiming Royal Mail, but the doors underneath showed ‘fire exit only’. I went round the building twice until I noticed that the ramp going down to a public toilet was really going down to what has to be called the main entrance, but looked like a door to an auxiliary office. The ramp was all British, built for wheelchair users without any steps; but I measured it, and no wheelchair will be able to get round any of those corners.

The same day, I had asked for an interview with my bank manager because of my accounts. I had an appointment for 10 a.m., but had to wait until 10:30 until somebody finally had time to inform me that the manager had called in sick for the week. As this was a Wednesday, this meant they had been turning my phone number in their chubby, lazy fingers for two days and not called me. No wonder Barclay’s will be bankrupt within a year at the latest. While I waited (and decided that I don’t need any account with Barclay’s, but all my accounts with another bank), I watched the typical British scene around me. There was a queue of people running through the bank premises and even out to the pavement. Of six counters, only two were served, while 15 obese clerks had tea in full view of the public. What a way to kill business.

But coming home, I had my daily laugh over the newspaper. As Rowan Atkinson is currently not available as Mr. Bean, playing in Oliver! The Musical, the eminently gifted Prime Minister has taken on the role of Comic Laureate. Incapability Brown has had the laughs on his side for weeks, though I doubt many saw how eminently humorous he is. There was his joke about British workers: ‘British jobs for British workers’ were his words, setting me off laughing, having just come from the bank. If he thinks he can find any British workers, fine, I have seen only British tea drinkers paid for jobs not done, that day.

Then there was his quip about the pound loosing against all other currencies in the exchange. ‘A lower rated pound sterling will be good for exports’ were his words there. Even though I set all my friends to thinking, none of us could figure out what on earth he wanted to export. Well known branded manufacturers are all either bust or in administration, and if you want anything technical that works or any car that runs, you get it from the continent. Which leaves some local specialities like Whisky to be exported, but we couldn’t agree if the lower pound really helped that industry or not.

Or take the rant of Mr. Darling against the CEO of Starbucks. The latter had the guts to say that British economy is in a downturn. Mr. Darling (speaking for Incapability Brown) objected to this, as it would make a bad economy worse. He should rather have thanked Starbuck’s CEO for the compliment for finding any economy at all, because I can’t remember there having been any British economy at all since I lived as a child in Scotland. Of course, if you take into account all the welfare recipients who do not work, such as obese people (excluding the 0.1 per cent of obese people that really are suffering an illness causing the problem) and other imaginary sickies, councillors, MPs, government officials, and state employees, I suppose that Britain has the strongest economy in the world.

But there was a single positive point, as I thought at the time. Using the DLR (Dockland Light Railway) and tube regularly, I have an Oyster Card. Hold it to the contact, and your fare is calculated at your destination, and recalculated again later the same day if you do several trips. At the end, you pay the lowest tariff for your day’s travelling. It is very user-friendly and clever system. As I was walking to the DLR station with my Senegalese friend, I pointed out the screens above the entry, showing the departure time of the next train. They always show 4 minutes to the next train, day and night, weekdays and workdays, blithely ignoring the fact that the train is already at the platform or that they are not running at night. And then I said ‘but that Oyster Card redeems it all’. And he spoilt it all by saying ‘Yes, but that system is from Denmark’.

Finally, there is something that the British definitely don’t do differently than on the continent. Every DLR station is in a permanent state of building site. The information reads: ‘Building for the three carriages DLR’. The DLR is always composed of three carriages, and the platforms are already longer than the train, so please don’t ask me what they are building. Since September, I have twice seen anybody working on any of these building sites. And that is very continental. It is one of the major joys of Alpine transit countries like Austria, Switzerland, and France, to close three out of four lanes of the major Motorways for roadwork at the beginning of the holiday season, and you never see anybody working there.

DLR has contributed another highlight as well: The newly rebuilt Tower Gateway Station was opened with a lot of pomp by the Lord Mayor. And did it do him proud! It broke down within the first hour of service and had to be closed for the rest of that day. How very British.

Actually, this article should have been published on Monday, but thanks to the incompetence of London Transport’s handling of rolling material, I took the long way home from a shopping trip to Bow. I don’t mind the three mile walk, but I would prefer doing it without the shopping bags. At least, you get two bonus pictures out of it.

Coming home, finally, I managed to put up the pictures before the electricity failure; that, too, is a weekly occurrence.