Olympic Opening Ceremony

We are not a sports oriented family and rarely watch sport on TV, but I have always loved watching the Olympics. When the 2012 Olympics were first awarded to London I hoped to get tickets, but decided against due to a combination of price and the high demand for tickets here in the UK that left pretty much every event massively oversubscribed. Even without the prospect of being able to watch live, anyone living in the UK over the past few weeks would have to live under a rock - and a pretty big rock at that - not to get caught up in anticipation of the London games, and on Friday night all five of us settled down to watch the Olympic opening ceremony.

We had no idea what to expect. Britain is superb at the big royal events - think William and Kate's wedding and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee - but has a decidedly patchy track record when it comes to other public celebrations. The uninspiring "River of Fire" on the Thames to mark the Millenium barely even lived up to the billing of damp squib, for example. So who knew what we might get for the Olympic opening! It was also hard to see what might work. A Beijing style ceremony was never on the cards, both because the cost would be unacceptable in the current financial climate and because the British simply don't do massed ranks of identical performers. Neither was a Hollywood style extravaganza likely - again, too expensive, and that sort of razzmatazz would be likely to leave the British public cringing at the sheer un-Britishness of the spectacle (we might enjoy watching other countries do this type of show, but just can't take it seriously in ourselves). We also tend to be uncomfortable with overt displays of patriotism ... so what was left?

What we got was an opening night romp through aspects of British history and culture which reflected our peculiar national character - quirky, eccentric, diverse and humorous. We are a nation of individuals, yet still value popular institutions (we LOVE our NHS!). We are four countries tangled together into one. All that came through in Danny Boyle's show. The ceremony zoomed from Jerusalem and Abide With Me (which I understand NBC cut from its coverage in the US) to the Beatles and the Sex Pistols, by way of Shakespeare, James Bond, the Queen, the invention of the world wide web*, Mr Bean, and the defeat of Voldemort by a fleet of flying Mary Poppinses. It was weird, crazy, moving, and entertaining, sometimes all at the same time. Tevye and I started watching with a slight feeling of pessimism (see River of Fire above), but by the time the show reached James Bond and the Queen we were shouting "genius!" at the TV set. With all the financial doom and gloom of the last years as a nation we really needed the morale boost of a party we could enjoy, and we got it. We did wonder what viewers around the world wouAkersake of the whole thing, but I did a bit of googling of reviews and they seemed to be mostly positive, if occasionally baffled.

So now we move on to two weeks of indulging in the great British sport of gallantly failing (mostly) to win medals.

Oh, I nearly forgot ... I thought the cauldron was amazing! So different to anything that had been done before, and so effective.

*Did you realise that when Sir Tim Berners-Lee typed "This is for everyone" on the computer in the stadium it was live tweeted. How cool is that!

Whitechapel

Tevye is a true Cockney - born in Whitechapel, within the sound of Bow bells. Before meeting friends for lunch last weekend we had time to take a walk around the area where he lived as a child. Very different now in some ways, most obviously in that the Jewish community that dominated Whitechapel has since moved out to the suburbs and replaced by more recent immigrants, mainly Bangladeshi. In other ways not so different - much of the area is still poor and run-down, sandwiched between the brash, glitzy City (the City is the financial centre of London, think Wall Street) and the up-market renovated areas of Docklands.

We started with Petticoat Lane market, but the road layout at the Whitechapel end had changed so much that Tevye no longer recognised it. The market gets its name from the garments once made there. The Victorians changed the road name to Middlesex Street to avoid public mention of undergarments but the original name stuck to the market.

Next we walked down Whitechapel Road.

The main claim to fame of the area is that it was the stalking ground of the infamous Jack the Ripper, a mass murderer of the 1890s who was never caught and has been the subject of interest and speculation ever since. Posters and memorabilia in this shop window advertised "Jack the Ripper" walking tours.

Running between Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road is the street where Tevye lived. The buildings are divided into units of six flats (apartments), in three storey pairs of two flanking a single entrance. In his day they were owned by the nearby London Hospital and were very basic, without bathrooms and with a single toilet shared between each pair of flats. Since then they have been renovated and bathrooms installed. This end of the road is now social housing run by a housing association. Someone living in Tevye's old block was none too tidy, with bags of rubbish scattered around the entrance. Bizarrely the other end of the street is Georgan terraced houses which sell for a fortune (I googled and found one for sale for £795,000!).

Tevye's flat was on the middle floor. The "No Ball Games" sign was written in English and (I presume) Bengali. In Tevye's day that rule either was not there or was routinely ignored, as he remembers spending a lot of time hitting a tennis ball against the wall!

Heading down to St Katherine's Dock for lunch we passed Tevye's old primary school, a fairly grim Victorian building brightened by a centenary mosaic at the entrance.

More photos from our day out to come later.

Old and New

Last Sunday Tevye and I spent the day together in London. Quite why it has taken me a week to get round to posting pictures I'm not sure! More to come, but as a taster here are two photographs taken from the Thames River path when I realised that from the same spot I had two views separated by a thousand years. I love London!

On the south bank, the Shard, 21st century

And on the north bank, the Tower of London, 11th century

Job Done!

Phew! All assignments completed and in the post (or mail, if you are in the US!). I feel as though I now have some breathing space ... to read, blog, play with Rose, maybe even begin to get the house under control. The clutter levels have risen and I need to start getting rid of stuff again.

A quick update on things that are going on round here:

• The girls are coming to the end of their school year - they finish next Friday, then have six and a half weeks break.


• Helen has her driving test booked for mid-August. She is desperately hoping she will pass, not just so that she can drive solo, but as she pointed out to me yesterday, "if I fail, I'm going to be SO broke!" The deal is that we are paying to insure our little car for her to drive, but she is paying for her driving lessons. She is coming to the end of the money she saved working as a Christmas temp in a department store last winter, so if she fails and has to pay for more lessons, not to mention the repeat test fee, she is going to be scraping the barrel financially. 


• Rose has decided to come to the beginner's sessions at the brass band and is learning to play the cornet. She can just about manage to hold it in her small hands! She tried out Helen's old trumpet but I had to hold the end up for her as it was too big and heavy. 


• Summer is a misnomer. This is what we have had for the last four months, with very little break. Today looks like continuing the soggy, miserable theme. I will be out there, playing the trombone in the rain - under some sort of tent or gazebo, but it isn't likely to be entirely dry.

7 Very Quick Takes

1. The next three weeks are going to be hairy. I have a short piece of assessed work, an essay and a report to write for my course. That is on top of working 4.5 days a week, band stuff and an orchestra concert. And trying to at least feed and pay some attention to my family.

2. Once I hand in that work my current module is done and I am taking a break until February next year, partly because there is only so much I can pack into a week and partly because of the timetabling of the courses I want to take. Then six months more of hard work and the studying will be done.

3. Once this module is finished I will get back to reading. I'm still determined to get through 52 books in 52 weeks and I have some catching up to do.

4. I will also try to get on top of the housework. For now, Tevye is managing to stop us disappearing under a layer of dirt and clutter. Really, the number of hours in a week only stretch so far.

5. I have discovered it is possible to sleep less and survive. Sometimes downtime is more important than sleep. I yawn a lot, though!

6. Menu planning is my friend.

7. I may not blog again until the assignments are done. (Yes, I know I haven't been blogging much anyway!)

Now We Are Six!

Rose celebrated her 6th birthday on Friday. And then again on Sunday with a party for her school friends. We ended up with 13 small people altogether, who were perfectly happy playing old-fashioned party games and picnicking on blankets on the floor. (The weather thinks it is November, not June, making planning anything outdoors impossible). Marie produced beautifully decorated cupcakes for the occasion, and did a great job of helping a couple of small, shy little people. Most of the photos have other people's children in them so I won't share them here, but here is a picture of the cakes:

A few snippets about our new six year old:

1) She reads! Since she got her glasses her reading has improved rapidly (she can see the letters! Duh!) and she now curls up in bed and reads to herself before settling down for the night - a mix of picture books and short chapter books.

2) She is still petite - 108cm (42.5 inches) tall, and I think weighs about 36lbs. I don't have any scales so had to extrapolate from her last weigh in. She is still light enough to pick up and carry fairly easily, which I'm sure her sisters weren't at the same age.

3) She is a bit aggrieved that she is the only child in her school peer group who hasn't yet had a visit from the tooth fairy, and doesn't even have a wobbly tooth to suggest one is imminent.

4) She likes words.Numbers not so much!

5) She is a little homebody, often preferring to stay home and play rather than go places if given the choice.

6) She is still very timid, with a list of things she doesn't do and places she won't go. Sometimes she surprises me though. She has been invited to a horse-riding party next weekend and is full of excitement at the idea of getting to ride a horse, which I thought would worry her.

7) She adores her big sisters, and is particularly close to Marie who loves to spend time with her and lavish attention on her. They often have sleepovers together, usually involving a "midnight feast" - though as experience shows that once Rose is asleep she will not wake on demand, the midnight feasts usually happen around 8.30 before she settles down for the night.

8) She loves Sylvanian Families (Calico Critters in the US , I think) and Playmobil.

9) She is learning to swim, though it is a slow process. She started swimming lessons in September and is just beginning to swim a few yards independently.

10) She hates loud noises. Loud music has her sticking her fingers in her ears, though somehow a gaggle of squealing small girls seems to be tolerable!

Books 15, 16, 17 and 18

You see, I have been reading, just not blogging, so I'm going to shove all of the four books I have read recently into one catch up post. I'm still a little behind on my 52 books in 52 weeks, but not disastrously so.

Book 15: N is for Not Fade Away: the Life and Music of Buddy Holly (John Gribbin)

A Kindle offer which I picked up because I'm a long time fan of Buddy Holly's music but didn't know anything about him beyond the version of his story shown in the stage show. I like John Gribbin too, who usually writes very readable books about science and the history of science. Buddy Holly comes across in the book as a genuinely nice, likeable young man of enormous talent. Such a tragedy that he died so young.

Book 16: Bucks, Beds and Bricks (Jean Blane Flannery)

This one was a local history Kindle find. The title refers to the counties of Buckinghamshire (Bucks), Bedfordshire (Beds) and the brick making industry which has been a feature in this area from a very early date (villages named Brickhill were mentioned in Domesday Book in the 11th century). I was hoping to find out more about the brick industry but that turned out to be essentially incidental to a straightforward childhood memoir - the author's father worked for the London Brick Company during her 1940s and 50s childhood. The book was still an interesting read as many of the places she mentions are familiar to me and it brought back many childhood memories. Life was easier by the 1960s but there was also much that hadn't changed, at least in the homes of older relatives if not our own.

Book 17: O is for Our Man in Orlando (Hugh Hunter) 

I found this searching Amazon's Kindle store rather randomly for a book with O in the title! I think I was looking under a "travel" heading and this one turned up. Hugh Hunter spent a number of years as the British Consul in Florida, dealing with the various crises suffered by Britons abroad, ranging from lost passports to imprisonment on death row for murder - apparently more British subjects get arrested in Florida than anywhere else in the world outside the UK. It was generally and interesting and entertaining read, though the author's style grated at times and I wasn't at all impressed with his casual treatment of his girlfriend!

Book 18: Cockney Girl (Gilda Moss Haber)

Like Bucks, Beds and Bricks this book turned out not to be what I expected. I downloaded it because I am interested in the Jewish East End where Tevye lived as a child and thought this biography of a Jewish Girl growing up in Bethnal Green in the 1930s and 40s would give me an insight into Jewish life at that time. In fact, for most of her childhood the author had little contact with the Jewish community, except through her religiously observant but distant maternal grandparents. Her parents were Jewish but non-practicing, and her family was acutely disfunctional with a mother whose own parents had shown her no affection and who was herself unable to show any affection for her child. Gilda was frequently sent away from home and at one time was abandoned in an orphanage for months with nothing more than occasional letters from her mother. She spent the entire war as a refugee in East Anglia, again with little contact with her family, until she finally found a measure of love and acceptance in a home for displaced Jewish children (all the others were refugees from Hitler's Europe). Overall it was a rather sad book. I read to the end but was left with a sense of unfinished business as there was no real explanation of why the relationships within her family were so cold, or whether they were ever resolved.

Wrest Park

We are having a cold, wet and miserable spring here, but it finally stopped raining at the weekend and Tevye, Rose and myself went on a trip to Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. I had been learning quite a bit about the Wrest Park archives at work which whetted my appetite for a visit. The last time I went there - maybe 15 years ago? - was to an open air classical music concert. Since then English Heritage have done a lot of work restoring the gardens. Now it is a relatively undiscovered gem - one of the most important examples of an early 18th century landscape in the UK. Photos are from my phone, and something has gone peculiar with the sky and clouds between phone, iPad and blogging app. I intended to sort this out, but as I have already been sitting on this post since the beginning of the week I am giving up and posting the pictures as they are.

The house - only a few rooms are open to the public. It has not been lived in as a stately home for several decades. During the war it was the headquarters of a life assurance company, then until quite recently it was used as an agricultural college.

The view from the pavilion to the house - the photo doesn't do it justice. After the long lake there is a huge lawn, part of which was taken up with croquet pitches. We guessed from the layout that they must hold some sort of championships there.




The pavilion. Somehow I didn't take any pictures inside. Narrow doors lead to narrow, steep spiral stairs leading up to two tiny bedrooms and down to a "two seater" bathroom below.




Woodland garden. Grassy lanes lead to statues, follies and summer houses. There is also a cemetery for the family's dogs tucked into one corner.




Chinese bridge. Complete with nesting swan and her mate.




Rose had a lot of fun doing a children's activity trail. Lots of things to draw and to look for.




The orangery.




Rose playing a "help the housekeeper get dinner on the table" version of snakes and ladders. The house has an information area which includes some nice hands on activities for kids.




A view from the edge of the gardens across the Bedfordshire countryside.

Readjusting

Whew! Life is whizzing past at quite a rate! I am settling into working pretty much full time (I get Friday afternoons off at the moment) and after two weeks I'm pleasantly surprised by how well it is working out. Tevye and I are cooking dinner between us - I plan and leave instructions as he is either already home or gets home earlier than I do, or I put something in the crockpot and he cooks veggies. Cherub went to after school club for the first time today and liked it - one of the girls in her class goes on Mondays and they played together. The big girls pick her up on their way home from school, so she only needs to go for about 40 minutes. The rest of the week either Tevye or I can still collect her. And so far I am loving the new job. More about that another time.

I meant to post pictures after Tevye's nephew's wedding - I put some on Facebook but never got round to posting them here. They are only iPhone pictures but you get the idea!

This England: Anthems

I meant to do this neatly and post yesterday to coincide with St. George's day, but it didn't happen. Rather bizarrely for a country that has existed in more or less its present form for well over a thousand years, England does not have an official national anthem. At sporting events where the constituent parts of the United Kingdom field separate teams the English team usually plays God Save the Queen, which is the British national anthem, while the Welsh play Land of our Fathers and the Scottish Flower of Scotland. I was listening to a discussion about English anthems on the radio on the way to work yesterday. They were holding a public vote on the best choice, and there were three very clear front runners. All of them are well known and loved tunes. 

(1) Jerusalem - William Blake's poem based on the supposed visit of the boy Jesus to Glastonbury, set to music by Herbert Parry. This is now used as the English anthem at the Commonwealth Games.

(2) I Vow to Thee My Country - from Holst's Planets Suite (Jupiter)

(3) Land of Hope and Glory - one of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance marches. I already included this in my post about Elgar, but here is another version. Played before England rugby matches.

So which would you choose?

Marmite: Love It or Hate It

This pretty much sums up all you need to know about marmite.

I Went Clothes Shopping!

Fashion is not a topic that comes up often on this blog, but I went on a major clothes shopping expedition last Saturday and can't resist sharing the fruits of the most shopping fun I've had in a long while. The main purpose was to find a dress to wear for a wedding - Tevye's nephew S gets married tomorrow! - and it needed to be something that would double up for our special celebration holiday in the summer. I can't remember whether I mentioned it before, but we are going on a cruise in August to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary. We have never done anything like it before, and it will definitely require additions to my decidedly non-dressy wardrobe. That meant that as well as a dress for the wedding I was hoping I might find other dresses suitable for formal and semi-formal evenings on the ship.

I have never been a dressy, clothes oriented person, but I have found that a combination of getting older and having teenage daughters has led me to enjoy clothes more than I used to and to be a bit more confident in trying new things. I have also lost weight and being able to shop for smaller sizes was definitely fun! I have gone from a size 16/18 to a comfortable 14 (in US sizing I think that is a 10?), which made me feel a bit more adventurous. Also I was shopping alone, which meant I could take my time and experiment without anyone losing patience!

Here are the results of my successful shopping spree. First, for the wedding, a dress from Monsoon. (I had never bought anything in Monsoon before. They wrap the clothes in tissue paper before putting them into the bag. I felt very upmarket!)

Together with a matching shrug. The colour is called "peacock". I love that!


Then another shop where I have only ever looked, but not bought - it rarely seems to have much above a size 14 in stock. This was Jane Norman, which was very considerately having a 25% off day. This is my "wow" dress for formal evenings on the ship. I can't see any other occasion to wear it in my immediate future, but it was very reasonably priced, and I have never had a dress like this before. Yes. It is very pink. I like pink.



Then continuing the pink theme I found this shift dress in Marks and Spencer. Again it was reasonably priced, and I think I will be able to get quite a lot of wear out of this one. It has a scooped neckline at the back with a bow, and an all-over lacy pattern.




And last but not least, shoes ... Marks and Spencer again. These are surprisingly comfy, and I can wear them with any of the dresses.




Really, these are all very unlike my normal dressing style (casual or smart casual) but I'm actually looking forward to wearing them.

This England: Marmite

Marmite on hot buttered toast ...

Marmite sandwiches ...

Marmite flavoured crisps (potato chips) ...

Marmite flavoured cashew nuts ...

Mmmm!!!!!

Does that make you think "yum"? Or "yuck"? Or "huh????"

Marmite is a peculiarly British delicacy, which even here is definitely in the "love it or hate it" category - so much so that there have been adverts based on the "love it or hate it" theme and the official Marmite website has different entry portals for lovers and haters. In our family Helen and I are the lovers and Tevye, Marie and Rose the haters. In my experience Americans tend to be baffled by marmite (basing this on expat homeschooling friends!) as it doesn't come with instructions and they don't know what to do with it. Marmite is a very salty, yeast extract based ... can't think of the right word to describe it ... goo? The consistency is a little similar to chocolate spread, but trying to use it like chocolate spread would be a disaster as it is very strong tasting. The key to marmite is that a very little goes a long way. Marmite on buttered toast is particularly good as the marmite kind of melts into the butter. Marmite is even good for you (if you ignore the high salt content!) as it contains lots of B vitamins. According to Wikipedia marmite was used in the 1930s in experiments which identified folic acid for the first time. Last but not least, the jar shape and labelling is an instantly recognisable iconic design to anyone living in England.

So ... Marmite. Do you love it or hate it?

Book 14: M is for Marigold

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Novel by Deborah Moggach

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One advantage of a long weekend suffering from a cold and mostly spent sitting limply on the sofa is that I have had plenty of time to read!  Tevye and I saw The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel at the cinema last month. We loved it and inspired by the film I added the book to my Kindle. The film was warm, colourful and life-affirming. The premise is that a group of English pensioners travel to India to spent their later years in a ramshackle retirement home known as the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The cast is magnificent, a roll call of some of the best of the older generation of British actors - Judi Dench, Celia Imrie, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, and Maggie Smith as a racist old Cockney sent to India for hip replacement surgery. Some adjust to their new surroundings better than others; one is able to rediscover his past; others find friendship and even romance. A sub-plot involves the young Indian hotel owner-manager and his relationships with his family and girlfriend. India itself forms a vibrant and colourful backdrop to the story.

The book - previously published as These Foolish Things - is very different. This is one of those films that is most definitely not faithful to the original. The book is grittier and more graphic. It is as much about the middle-aged children of the hotel residents and their relationships with their parents, wives, husbands and lovers as it is about the elderly characters themselves. The film writes the children out more or less completely, leaving the spotlight solely on the residents of the Marigold Hotel and the Indian characters. In the book the idea of the retirement home in India comes from the son-in-law of an old man who has been thrown out of several British homes for sexually harassing the staff; in the film it is the enterprising young Indian Sonny who thinks of marketing his hotel to an elderly clientele. In the book Sonny is 30 years older than he is in the film, and that is just for starters - relationships between the characters are quite different, plots have been transferred to different characters or just plain changed, one character who dies in the book survives in the film, and so it goes on. Beyond the basic premise and the names of the characters, the book and the film are really completely different animals. On the whole I enjoyed the book and found it a quick and easy read, though it was disconcerting in that it felt like entering a parallel universe, one where the world of the Marigold Hotel and its inmates was darker and more complex than the lighter, fluffier - and to me more enjoyable - world of the film. I wonder whether if I had read the book first I would have found the film disappointingly light and fluffy?

For more reviews visit 52 Books in 52 Weeks

This England: Edward Elgar

One of the pieces I played in my orchestra concert a couple of weeks ago was Elgar's Enigma Variations, which is one of the best loved pieces in the English classical repertoire. Here is the best of the best ... the ninth variation, Nimrod, played by a military band at the national commemoration of Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph in London.

Edward Elgar was born near Worcester in 1857, the son of a piano tuner and musician. He had little formal musical training and was a self-taught composer. After a short spell as a clerk he became a music teacher, conductor and musician. His reputation as a composer grew slowly during the 1890s until 1899 when the Enigma Variations was first performed to great acclaim. He was knighted in 1904, produced his last great work, his cello concerto, in 1919, and died in 1934. He was one of the first composers to make gramophone recordings of his own works. The house where Elgar was born is now a museum and the statue below stands near the cathedral in Worcester.

Elgar's other best known contribution to English music is the Pomp and Circumstance March No.1, which as "Land of Hope and Glory" has become one of the unofficial national anthems of England along with Blake's "Jerusalem". Here it is played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Last Night of the Proms (a post in itself!) and sung enthusiastically by the Promenaders (the music starts two and a half minutes into the clip).

Finally, here is a short extract from Elgar's Cello Concerto, performed by Jacqueline du Pré.

Book 13: L is for Letters

Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War by Bill Lamin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A quick and easy read, this book is a spin off from a blog on which Bill Lamin posted a series of letters sent by his grandfather during World War I in "real time" 90 years after they were first sent. The book combines the letters with extracts from the war diary of Harry Lamin's regiment and biographical details of his grandfather and his family. The letters were written by Harry to his brother Jack and sister Kate and run from early in 1917 when Harry was conscripted through to his final demobilisation in January 1920. Harry fought at Ypres and Passchendaele before being sent to the Italian front where he remained through the end of the war and its aftermath. His letters were simple and often repetitive, but when set in the context of the regimental diary it becomes clear just how understated they were - he described the hell that was Passchendaele as "a bit rough". Overall, a fascinating insight into World War I as seen through the eyes of an ordinary soldier from a Nottinghamshire village.

For more reviews visit 52 Books in 52 Weeks

This England

Linds suggested in the comments to my England post that I set this series up with a Mister Linky so that other people can join in. I have never used Mister Linky before, but I gave it a go and it looks as though it works! So here is the meme:

• Write about anything you like that you consider typically English - of course some will be equally applicable to the rest of the United Kingdom, but the meme is intended to celebrate England and all things English.
• Come over here and add your post to the Mister Linky. I will aim to put up a new post every Saturday, but you can add yours at any time.
• Put a picture of the English flag either into your post or on your sidebar. I am posting large and small flags below that you can use (they are free clipart downloaded from Aspex Designs).
• The title of the meme is "This England" taken from this speech in Shakespeare's Richard II: 

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, 

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war, 

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall, 

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands, 

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Book 12: K is for Knitting

Knitting Around the World: A Multistranded History of a Time-Honored Tradition by Lela Nargi

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I bought this book with a gift voucher because it looked beautiful. The illustrations of different styles of knitting, both modern and historical, are stunning. But the text! Never has a book been so sorely in need of a good editor. From about 30 pages in I admired the pictures and skimmed the rest.

For more reviews visit 52 Books in 52 Weeks

This England: Evenin' All

A combination of spring and the upcoming Diamond Jubilee made me think it would be nice to do a series of England themed posts about things, people or aspects of life here that make me happy and that I think of as particularly English.

First up ... we have a police force in which it is the exception not the norm for officers to carry firearms (this of course also applies to Wales and Scotland, not just England). While there are designated armed response units and certain specialist forces carry arms - police with machine guns at airports are now routine, for example - most policemen and women do not. Todays police force isn't in the Dixon of Dock Green era any more, but it is one of very, very few in the world that is not routinely armed. The only others I found in a quick search were Iceland, New Zealand and Norway.

Dixon of Dock Green, the lead character in a gentle British TV series which ran from 1955 to 1976. Dixon  fought petty crime in the East End of London armed only with his trusty truncheon! Each programme began with the catchphrase "evenin' all" - which police in certain forces are no longer supposed to say, as apparently the word "evening" is subjective. Huh?

A few English police facts:

• The first English police force was set up in London in 1829 by Robert Peel. The nickname "bobbies" for policemen came from his name.
• Police cars were traditionally black and white, so became known as "panda" cars.
• Some police patrol on bicycles. The Metropolitan (London) Police force has 1500 police bikes.
• The last policeman killed in the line of duty was PC Gary Toms of the Metropolitan Police in April 2009. 
• In 2010 there were 143,743 full time equivalent officers serving in 43 police forces in England and Wales.

Free clipart flag from Aspex Designs

Book 11: Jilted Generation

Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth by Ed Howker

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I felt like a break from my A to Z reading challenge and picked up (can you "pick up" a book on a Kindle?) this book which I bought recently as a Kindle Daily Deal. It looks at the ways in which those aged under 30 in Britain get a raw deal compared to their parents' generation. It is divided into chapters on housing, jobs, inheritance and politics. Some of the points made are interesting and thought provoking, but there were sections where I felt the authors were either misinterpreting the evidence or being over selective in their use of facts to support their points. Overall it left me with as many questions as answers.

For more reviews visit 52 Books in 52 Weeks