An English Christmas 2: Mince Pies In Royal David’s City

When I lived in the US, Christmas always seemed to start just after Thanksgiving. Sure, there were Christmas displays up in some stores before that, but only to give people something to grumble about. We knew that it wasn’t open season on Christmas until Santa Claus showed up at the end of Macy’s parade.

Here in the UK there’s no national celebration in late November, so there’s no natural or definitive start to the Christmas season; it just creeps up on you. But there is, for many people, an accepted starting point for Christmas itself: at 3 p.m. on Christmas Eve when BBC radio broadcasts the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the chapel of King’s College in Cambridge. (I’ve put a link to it under Featured Links in the column of links on the right-hand edge of this page; the BBC will leave the recording there for people to listen to only for the next seven days, so if you’re interested, don’t wait.)

I listen every year, maybe because singing in a choir is the closest I ever got to playing a team sport, I still love the sound and remember what it feels like to perform, and I don’t have that many opportunities during the rest of the year to hear a really good choir. They usually do some of the medieval carols that I love anyway, but are especially satisfying when sung in a medieval mini-cathedral like this “chapel”, built over a hundred years from the middle of the 15th century to the middle of the 16th. Why start Christmas at King’s? It’s traditional. But if you need more of a reason, you might be interested to find that King’s College is officially named “The King’s College of Our Lady and St Nicholas in Cambridge”, so there’s a pretty good connection to Christmas built in.

Some of the carols everybody knows here have the same words that Americans sing, but set to different tunes, and the British also have lots of Christmas carols I never heard until I moved here. Did any American readers out there grow up singing “Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree”? One of these new-to-me carols, “Once In Royal David’s City”, sung by one choirboy alone, always starts the service. As I understand it, two or three choirboys have practiced the part, but no one knows who will do the solo until everyone is in place, the director raises his hands, and finally indicates who is to sing. That, I’m told, is supposed to stop them from being so nervous.

Right. If I were one of them, the suspense would crank me up to peaks of anxiety I can scarcely imagine. It gives me palpitations just to think about it.

They also include modern carols, some of them commissioned for this Festival, either this year or in previous years; maybe these will grow on me, but they seem dark and muddy. Okay, the words may sound silly, but give me “Ding Dong Merrily On High” any time. Some of the modern compositions seem to have been stripped of any scrap of the joy and goodwill that make some of the traditional songs such a treat.

And speaking of treats—I was in the kitchen making my mince pies while I listened. That’s the second of the three English Christmas desserts. The British serve these little tarts with brandy butter, but that’s going too far for me; I want to taste the joy and goodwill of the brandy and orange zest, sharp and clear, and not muddy them up with cream.

So bring on Christmas. I’ve got the mince pies made and I’ve heard the little boy start the carols; I’m ready.

An English Christmas 1: Christmas Cake

It snowed last week and for a while the world outside my window looked like a Christmas card—well, that is, if your Christmas card picture of snowy English countryside includes a British Telecom engineer up on a telephone pole.

Americans often romanticize England—no BT engineers allowed—and almost everybody romanticizes Christmas. So what is a modern Christmas like in our part of England? I’m going to have to take that question a little bit at a time, and I’ve left it rather late. I’ll start with food—in fact, I’ll start with just one dish.

The three wise men on a Christmas cake.

There are three traditional desserts at Christmas. It’s not that people choose one of the three; they generally offer them all. Many Americans will have heard of the most important one, Christmas pudding (also called plum pudding), even if they’ve never tasted it. The majority of English people would think a Christmas dinner that didn’t end with Christmas pudding was incomplete. Then there are mince pies the size of small tarts, which are more informal and are served not just on Christmas day but throughout the season to guests who drop by, or at teatime—or to guests who drop by at tea time. But the one I hadn’t heard of before my first Yule in England is Christmas cake.

First, you have to realize that the English idea of fruitcake is very different from the American “let this cake pass from me” attitude. British readers may not be aware that fruitcakes are objects of derision in American popular culture, right up there with accordions. (I was living in Belgium when I first saw the Far Side cartoon in which those entering heaven are issued their harps, and those entering hell are issued their accordions. My Belgian colleagues didn’t understand why I thought that was funny—one of the guys even said “My mother plays the accordion”—so I didn’t try to explain.)

Everybody in the US has heard tales of fruitcakes that are never eaten, but that make the rounds from new giver to new recipient every Christmas for decades, Christmas being virtually the only time that Americans eat fruitcake. The British wouldn’t necessarily get the humour in that; on the whole, they like fruitcake. If you’re invited over for someone’s birthday the cake will probably be a fruitcake, wedding cakes are traditionally fruitcakes, and no summer picnic is complete without fruitcake.

An English Christmas cake is a fruitcake topped with a layer of marzipan, then royal icing, and finally decorations, which can be as simple as a ribbon tied around the cake, or very, very elaborate. You can coat holly leaves in egg whites and sprinkle with sugar to look like snow, you can buy special molds to make your own sugar Christmas bells, or you can have another glass of wine and put your feet up, having bought some Christmas cake decorations ready-made and thereby bought yourself some time.

My family's Christmas cake decorations.

Or better yet, if you’re really lucky, someone will give you heirloom Christmas cake decorations. The ones I use were passed down to me from my mother-in-law, who was given them by an English lady when their family lived in Sudan many years ago. Being an American, my mother-in-law hadn’t heard of British Christmas cakes and didn’t realize that’s what the decorations were for, so for decades she set them up as a little Christmas scene on the sideboard. When I encountered English Christmas cakes, we realized what we had, and now I decorate our cakes with those little old-fashioned figures made of plaster, wood, and some kind of bristles (for the evergreen branches): two snowy trees, a cottage, a cockeyed snowman every bit as big as the cottage, and a tiny church over which the little Father Christmas looms like Godzilla.

I made my Christmas cake this year ridiculously late, barely more than two weeks before Christmas. You’re supposed to start about Hallowe’en. You wrap up the cake in grease-proof paper, which is something like American waxed paper, and then foil, and then shut it into a cake tin, which you open every week or so to dose the cake with liquor, which is called feeding the cake.

You’re supposed to feed the cake by trickling a teaspoon of brandy into it, but I was way behind schedule and the bottle had only about half a cup left in it, so I just gave the cake the best feeding a cake ever had and emptied the bottle. A little more never hurt, surely. In fact, I think the problem with American fruitcakes is that they don’t put enough booze into them.

Elaborate Christmas cake decorations to buy from www.cakecraftshop.co.uk. I've never seen a purple Christmas cake, though.

Pretty soon it’ll be time for me to take the cake out of the tin, cover it with the marzipan, and mix up the dreadful icing which, while inedible, does cover a multitude of ills. I read about a lady whose cake came out dramatically lopsided, but she went right ahead and iced it, and decorated it with little figures of skiers, plunging down the slope. Now that’s panache.

So the icing blankets the cake in something like the way the snow blankets the landscape, and that a sort of romanticizing, too. The snow covers, or at least masks, all the imperfections—including the blue bathtub that the farmer across the road has in the field as a horse trough—leaving the viewer to imagine that an English Christmas is just like the ones on the Christmas cards or in the storybooks.

It’s starting to melt, but I’m hoping it’ll hang on. It’s only two days until Christmas.

The Blogger’s New Clothes

Due to a recent trip to India, this blog has taken on a subcontinental flavour for the time being.

I’ve just returned from an afternoon of Christmas shopping in Guildford, but I’d rather do my shopping in Hyderabad. I was more pushed and jostled by other people in three hours in Surrey than in ten days in India.

The most beautiful sari I saw in India. Snapped at Saheliyon-ki-Bari, Udaipur.

And I did shop in India, more than I usually do on vacation/holiday. I’m always more interested in seeing the museums and historical sites than in buying things, but everywhere I looked in India something amazing was on offer: hand-tied carpets, pearls and gemstones, glass bangles sold by the yard, slippers with curled-up toes. But what I particularly wanted was salwar kameez.

The ladies of India wear stunningly beautiful clothing in sumptuous colours, mainly saris or salwar kameez. A sari is one long flat piece of cloth, anything up to 30 feet long, worn over a cropped bodice. It’s pleated by hand and folded cleverly so that it stays where it’s meant to stay, falling in graceful folds from the waist, leaving the end of the cloth to wind around the body and fall over the shoulder.

You see them everywhere, from women working on construction sites or cutting cane in the fields to health workers at the airport screening new arrivals for swine flu, who accessorized theirs with medical masks. The customs officer wore a uniform sari, with epaulettes sewn onto the shoulders. The stewardesses on domestic flights wore them, and lest you think all that cloth might hamper them in an emergency, the cartoons on the safety card showed women jumping with complete composure onto evacuation slides, their saris demurely around their legs, not even ruffled.

Female construction worker in a sari.

The idea of creating your clothing out of a single piece of fabric just by the way you fold and tuck it—there are various ways to do this, generally using a petticoat’s waistband as an anchor—is very appealing and the results are certainly elegant but, alas, saris aren’t for me. I can’t even keep a shirttail tucked in. Never mind that I don’t want to show as much midriff as saris usually leave bare, I’m sure the first time I tried to wear one it would fall around my feet and leave me utterly mortified. The salwar kameez is more my style: a tunic over loose trousers, with a long scarf called a dupatta. That’s what I set out to buy.

I wasn’t sure I would find one in my size. When I say I’m twice the woman I was in college, I’m talking gross tonnage, you understand. But I’d heard that tailors can run up something for you in a day and I planned to set out into Hyderabad, guidebook in hand, to find one.

But my husband’s colleagues said I must allow them to send one of the young ladies from their office along with me—in hindsight a very good thing, because I had no idea what I was getting into. Such a young lady was found, a graceful soft-spoken businesswoman of about 22, whom I’ll call “Meena”. The company put a car and driver at our disposal and off we went.

Girls wearing salwar kameez.

We had some false starts. The first shop wasn’t open yet, but the driver said he knew just the place, and took us way over into Secunderabad, Hyderabad’s twin city. There he led us directly into a department store and upstairs—to the men’s business suits. Er, no. Next a saleslady tried to sell me western style women’s business suits. Clearly they weren’t used to visitors wanting Indian-style clothes.

We finally got to the right department and the clerk said they had tailors available, so I chose material and Meena negotiated a price. That’s when we found out that they didn’t actually have a tailor after all. Meena was embarrassed, but I wasn’t complaining. I was on vacation/holiday, I had all day and it was an adventure; there are worse ways to spend an afternoon than inspecting beautiful embroidered fabrics in all the colours you can name and then some, and I enjoyed Meena’s company; she didn’t mind answering all the questions about Indian life and culture I could come up with.

A woman riding side-saddle behind the driver of a motorbike; I wouldn't want to try it in a sari...

A shop just across the street, it turned out, offered not only bolts of fabric, but salwar kameez in a sort of kit form: the fabric for the top and the trousers plus a finished, coordinating dupatta. It was all very convenient, except that everything was behind a counter and I couldn’t get the salesman to show me what I wanted. He insisted that Meena and I sit on the customer side of things and drink tea while he presented the merchandise.

“Blue,” I would say.

“Blue colour, blue colour,” he would say, scanning the shelves. Then he’d pick out something in yellow and unfurl it extravagantly onto the counter saying “Yellow colour.”

“Blue,” I would say again, “blue colour,” not that it did me much good.

...but some do ride side-saddle on the backs of motorbikes while wearing saris.

The other problem was that my idea of “something for everyday” was different from his, and also from Meena’s. I wanted something simple, in cotton, maybe a block print, and he wanted to show me the best silks. Meena advised me to go for beaded and sequined cloth suitable, she said, for every day or for the office. I do not have an office. I sit at my computer at one end of the living room. I can work in my completely sequin-free pajamas if I want to.

The cloth kept coming: red, purple, pink. The salesman unrolled each length with a showman’s artistry, and as soon as I said ‘no’, whisked the offending fabric away and tossed it into a big wire basket. (A separate staff of women fished it out again and folded it up). Occasionally, in his enthusiasm, he would strike a feminine pose and hold the fabric across his body to show a length of gauzy green or yellow synthetic to full advantage while I protested I only wanted cotton, blue cotton. He clearly knew what I meant, but was determined I wouldn’t get it; if he wanted the sale, why he showed me everything except what I wanted remains a mystery. Maybe he thought if he could talk me into something in pink, I’d buy that and buy something in blue. Or maybe he was trying to save me from myself; maybe blue isn’t my colour and everyone else is too polite to tell me.

A beaded silk-cotton blend for salwar kameez—in blue, apparently a rare commodity.

Somehow I chose a dark red embroidered and sequined in a mango leaf pattern (what we’d call paisley), which came with what Meena thought was a particularly fine dupatta. It seemed easier to take that set—at least it was cotton, and it came with blue trousers—than to keep struggling. Off, then, to the tailor.

We followed a young girl from the shop into an alley. She and Meena, both in nice sandals, stepped daintily and cleanly over construction rubble and refuse, while I stumbled after in my high-tech running shoes. Two skinny cats slunk by—the only cats I saw in India, but then, there are a lot of free-range dogs, which might account for the lack. We seemed to be in the Alley of the Tailors, with shop after shop, all tiny, some of them with windows open to show three or four men in their undershirts/vests, working steadily at sewing machines. We followed the girl into a shop about the size of my bathroom here in England, staffed by a man and a woman and stuffed with other customers. I didn’t have to speak the language to understand that people were specifying what they wanted and dickering over the price.

Fellow-tourists at Agra Fort.

Then it was my turn. They showed me photos of different necklines, I picked one, and the woman took my measurements. Now, most Indians I’d seen were fairly small, so I knew that I wasn’t going to be a typical customer, but did she have to laugh? At every measurement, she would read the tape measure, double over with laughter, and then write the number down on her pad. Not a good start.

Meena opened negotiations, which soon turned into an argument, but I had no idea what it was about. Until then, all the transactions had been in English, but the tailors either didn’t speak English, weren’t willing to, or didn’t want me to know what they were saying.

“They insist it must be lined. You must buy a lining,” explained Meena.

“But I don’t want a lining.” It was 88°F. “A lining will just make it hotter.”

“I know,” she said, “but they say that this will hurt your skin.” She indicated the back of the fabric, full of threads holding the sequins onto the front.

“I don’t think it will hurt me.”

“I don’t, either,” said Meena, and she took up the argument again.

The tailors were clearly insulted, particularly the woman, but quiet, lovely Meena, it turned out, could be stubborn. Things heated up, and I began to be afraid we’d get thrown out of the shop.

Visitors at the Taj Mahal; the man on the right is in the masculine version of salwar kameez.

Being illiterate is a humbling experience. Not being able to read signs leaves you always wondering whether you’re in the right place and how much hassle there’s going to be if you aren’t, but it’s worse when you can’t understand the spoken language. You feel like a child with adult conversation going on over your head, clearly about you, but incomprehensible.

Meena finally gave up. “It will cost 240 rupees,” she said doubtfully.
A quick mental calculation turned that into about 3 quid, or less than 5 bucks. I told her that would be fine, and we left, with the tailor’s promise to finish with the job by 6 o’clock.

Women in salwar kameez at Golconda Fort, Hyderabad.

My receipt showed that 40 rupees of that was for the lining that I didn’t get and that they charged me for anyway. Meena was scandalized. She thought 240 rupees was extortionate. The argument, it seems, had been about their refusal to negotiate. They’d told her that they knew I was rich and could pay it, so she told them that it wasn’t fair to charge me more just because I had more. They told her that I’d never know what they should have charged, and she told them that she would know, but they clearly didn’t care.

And there’s my problem with bargaining. On the occasions when I did try to bargain I did a terrible job, in part because I don’t have the stomach to try to get somebody to let me buy the fruit of their labour for $1.00 instead of $1.25, when that extra twenty-five cents means virtually nothing to me, but a great deal to them. The shopkeepers and tailors and craftspeople of India are not stupid, and as my guidebook said, they know what a ticket to India costs. In India, I’m rich. I know that everything there looks like a bargain to me only because these people don’t get to enjoy the same standard of living I do. They know I can pay more, and as long as I’m not driving up the price for local buyers, I really don’t mind paying more.

The blogger's new clothes!

So I paid up, and picked up my clothes at 6. I won’t be seen in them any time soon, as they don’t particularly fit. I’ll alter them myself; I couldn’t face having the tailor giggling around me with her tape measure again. Besides, I was supposed to attend a banquet that evening, and getting from Secunderabad back to the other side of Hyderabad in the rush hour was going to take forever.

On the ride back I looked more carefully at the women we passed, to see what they were wearing. Having learned a thing or two about Indian clothing, I admired their saris and salwar kameez all the more. If I ever master the art of keeping a shirttail tucked in, I might try a sari, but it seems unlikely. I may someday wear curly-toed slippers and pearls as I walk on hand-tied carpets, but I think I’m destined to admire saris, like I admire India, from afar.

Hindu Worship: The Smoke Above the Fire

Due to a recent trip to India, this blog has taken on a subcontinental flavour for the time being.

Painting at temple of Kali and Durga, Golconda

India is a country of many religions; Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism all grew from Indian soil, and Islam has a long history there, having been brought in by traders not long after it was established and again by conquerors in medieval times. But everybody seems, for the most part, to get along. I admit I’m glossing over the tragedies of Partition and other sectarian violence, but there does seem to be a greater degree of religious tolerance here and even a blending of the thought and figures of major religions here in ways I’ve never seen anywhere else.

The population is overwhelmingly Hindu with Muslims as the largest minority. Tot up all the statistics, and you find that almost 100 per cent of the people claim one religion or another, while in the UK just over three quarters of the population report a religious affiliation. One of the guidebooks suggested that no one you meet in India will hold your religion against you, whatever it is, but what will shock them is saying you have no religion at all.

Snake god shrine, Golconda

I saw temples and shrines pretty much everywhere I looked. After passing any number along the road, the first—and smallest, and most informal—one we encountered up close consisted of a hole in the ground surrounded by paint and powders in auspicious colors, plus flowers left there by those devoted to a snake god. (Snake gods belong to a class called naga, with snake goddesses called nagi or nagini—so J. K. Rowling gets points for another clever allusion, having named Voldemort’s giant magical serpent Nagini).

That shrine was within Golconda Fort, a medieval castle of city size built up and over the crest of either a very big hill or a small mountain. But it was not the only religious site within those grounds. There’s a mosque at the summit; I can testify to that, because I walked up and down all 300 steps to see it. And there’s also a Hindu temple for the worship of the goddesses Kali and Durga. They can be thought of roughly—very roughly, everything I write about Hinduism here is only a rough approximation—as having to do with destruction and creation, respectively. If you think worshipping destruction is strange, it may help to consider the Hindu belief that destruction is required before there can be creation, so destruction is part of creation.

Temple of Kali and Durga, Golconda

We stopped at the bottom of the stone steps to leave our shoes under the trees—temples usually have on their grounds somewhere a neem tree and peepal tree, growing together, intertwined—before we walked up to the temple. It was small, set into the rocks of the mountain, and had only a little platform for the priest to sit on, a table for offerings, and the inner sanctum (garbha griha, or womb-chamber) housing the images of the goddesses, a room so cluttered with decorations and gilt and offerings and sacred items that I couldn’t have identified it all even if I’d been able to stand and gawp. Alas, photos of the garbha griha weren’t appropriate, so I have memories, but no images I can show you.

Following our guide—a manager from a company my husband had gone to India to visit—we climbed the stairs, made a small donation, and put out our cupped hands so the priest could ladle into them a little coconut water. We drank the water and exited, stage right, not entirely understanding what we had done, but struck by the simplicity of the ritual, the brilliance of the paintings on the rocks jutting out of the mountain, and the realization we had just scratched the surface of something truly ancient, almost timeless. (Timeless, that is, despite the large, industrial-style clock at the temple, which you can just see in the photo.)

Painting of Kali, Golconda

At the other end of the architectural scale, the Birla Temple in Jaipur is stream-lined and modern, symmetrically and pristinely beautiful, built entirely from white marble in 1988 by a prominent family of industrialists. The presiding deity is Lakshmi Narayan, that is, a particular pair of gods: Vishnu and Lakshmi, his consort. Vishnu is the preserver (a power in equilibrium with Shiva, the destroyer, and Brahma, the creator) while Lakshmi or Laxmi is the goddess of wealth. Non-Hindu figures such as Socrates and Jesus are said to be among the carvings there, but we couldn’t find them.

The worshippers seemed to be Indian tourists, or perhaps some of them were pilgrims. How do I know they were tourists? Well, they looked like tourists, most of them had cameras, and the only one to whom we spoke was an Indian now living in New York. Back here after the trip, I found that my neighbor’s parents, who live near Mumbai, visited Birla Temple on their vacation/holiday at the same time we did. And a security guard shouted at a young Indian tourist that she must stop taking photos inside the temple; she was standing in front of me, and people turned around and glared at me, assuming I was the guilty one. (Being new to India, I found the security guards, all done up in military-like uniforms with stars and braided cords and caps but completely barefoot, to look a bit silly—not that I’d want them to hear me say that.)

Birla Temple, Jaipur, unfortunately under scaffolding

In any case, Birla Temple seemed sterile. The life-sized images of the god and goddess were flawlessly handsome, their red and gold trappings ornate, and the rituals at times mesmerizing—as when a priest made passes through the air, around first the gods and then over the crowd, with an oil lamp in the shape of a peacock feather, set with flaming wicks all around the edge—but on the whole the worship seemed dull, done by rote. Recorded hymns came from a sound system and only a handful of worshippers sang along. People went forward to receive especially blessed food, in this case sugar crystals, or to bend over a small fire and make motions above the flames with their cupped hands, as if they were bathing in the smoke, but still something seemed lacking, and when the prayers were over, the room emptied and the people became a pushing and shoving scrum trying to reclaim their shoes.

That visit came after we had attended morning prayers to Vishnu at Jagdish Temple in Udaipur, and by comparison, the devotions at Birla Temple seemed to lack emotion, to lack sincerity. Then again the comparison isn’t really fair for all kinds of reasons. The Jagdish temple is 350 years old, for starters, and the people there were not tourists, but what I suppose I’d call parishioners. And the visit to the Jagdish Temple was the highlight of the trip for me.

Statue of Shiva at Birla Temple, Jaipur

Far from the austere white of the Birla Temple, the Jagdish Temple is made of an unremarkable gray stone, but is remarkably carved, with figures virtually everywhere a carving could be squeezed in. Those figures on the outside, we were told, represented the cosmos, with a band of grotesque heads meant to be the demons in hell, followed by bands representing the earth: one of elephants, one of horses (for power), one of dancing people (for joy), and one of flowers. (I’ve forgotten the symbolism of the elephants and flowers, alas.) Everything above the earth, then, must be heaven, and there were ranks and ranks and ranks of carved gods and goddesses. For the first time, I had an inkling of what 33 million gods (that’s 3.3 crores, you know) might look like, though I’m sure there weren’t anywhere near that many actually depicted.

But all that came later, when we had leisure to stroll around. As we first walked up, a bell began to ring and our guide said that if we hurried we could attend the prayers. So we ripped off our shoes and ran at full speed up some of the steepest steps I’ve ever encountered, passing people who were stopping to kiss or touch their foreheads to the steps. And when I say a bell rang, I mean a bell probably bigger than the largest kettle I own, making a near-deafening sound as we passed near it going through the door.

Jagdish Temple bell, Udaipur

Inside we found a crowded prayer hall with the worshippers standing in front of an altar-like table behind which the garbha griha contained a statue of Vishnu, a black figure this time, flanked by smaller figures and standing amid a visual cacophony of offerings and decorations, attended by a couple of priests. Two more priests, standing at either side of the opening to the inner sanctum, shook some kind of feathered fans or pompoms with true vigor. (These turned out to be fly whisks.) Over their heads, a rope strung with coconuts decorated the opening, and just this side of them the table held a bowl for offerings, and piles of grain. Once again, an industrial-style clock held an incongruously prominent place amid the carvings and the colors.

By the time I caught my breath the hymns had started. Everyone stood facing the altar and sang except for those of us who didn’t know the words, and as far as I could tell, we were the only people there who didn’t; even our guide knew them, and he wasn’t a Hindu but a Jain. Eventually the crowd, having brought flower petals (there were flower and petal sellers at the bottom of the stairs outside) threw handfuls of yellow and orange and red petals towards the gods, most of which fell onto the shoulders of worshippers in front.

Bands of carving at Jagdish Temple, Udaipur

A priest stepped forward from the garbha griha with a vessel of water and a seashell, a cone-shaped shell that fit his hand. He used the shell to scoop up water and pour it into the hands of parishioners in front, for them to drink, and then threw his arm out several times as if he were scattering seed, spraying the crowd with droplets of water from the shell as far as he could reach. He didn’t reach us, but that’s okay, we got pretty thoroughly wetted down by the priest at the Birla Temple.

People began to leave, some of them moving to the front first to leave an offering on the table and to make symbolic patterns with their fingers in the piles of grain—suns, moons, swastikas. That Hitler used a swastika doesn’t trouble Indians; they were using it millennia before he did. He’s a minor blip in history compared to Hinduism. And besides, he made his swastikas backwards. Other people stopped by another priest on the way out to get especially blessed basil leaves, while those who stayed sat in a circle on the floor and began to sing again.

Jagdish Temple, Udaipur, including topmost flight of steps

I wish I could describe the songs, but it’s impossible. (If anybody knows who actually first said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, I’d love to know.) One of the priests had a double-sided drum and two of the parishioners had finger cymbals. The guide said it would be okay to sit with them, so I did, clapping along when they did, stopping when they stopped.

And twice during the songs, one woman felt moved to get up and dance. She danced forward and back, towards the gods and away again, moving her hands as though trying to pull the gods or their emanations closer to her. She had henna on her palms, and an expression of ecstasy on her face. She had a solid, womanly figure and didn’t wear a sari, but a full skirt in a dark red block print, a choli bodice, and a scarf tucked into her waistband, wrapped around her torso sari-style and then over her head. Occasionally she’d twirl, making her skirts rise up so that, from my seat on the floor, I could see the henna on her soles, and her ankle bracelet and toe rings.

Painting of Durga, Golconda

I could have stayed there longer, but I had my husband and the guide to think of—and the guide told me later we stayed an hour and a half. I’d sat there, spellbound by the music and the dance, for most of it. I can’t say after 10 days as a tourist that I have any inkling of what “the real India” might be, but my guess is that these prayers and songs are the closest thing to “the real India” that I saw there.

And I’ve spent too long, probably, on these descriptions. Some readers have suggested I should be shorter on words and longer on photos, which I can understand, but I can’t please everyone. Besides, how can you say anything in few words about a religion with such a long history and so many gods?

All I can do is report what I saw, events out of their contexts, rather than describing a belief system, one of the world’s major faiths. I can’t even say I’m presenting the tip of the iceberg, because what I’ve included here isn’t even as big, in relation to what there is to know about Hinduism, as the tip of an iceberg—and an iceberg is entirely the wrong image for the 90-degree days we spent in India.

So I’ll call this the smoke above the fire—the reality of Hinduism is the blaze below, but I did get a divine whiff of scented smoke.

Lakhs of Crores

[I've recently been on vacation/holiday in India and so this blog is temporarily moving rather farther to the East than it usually sits. I had planned to put the India posts on a separate page but can't work out how to do that; please bear with me.]

The Taj Mahal in the mist just after dawn.

Nothing in India is small. With a population of almost 1.2 billion, one out of every six people in the world is an Indian. The Mumbai metropolitan area is the largest city in the world, home to almost 21.5 million. From the air, it looks like a super-city made up of districts the size of whole cities themselves, dozens of far-flung areas each with a clutch of skyscrapers many American cities could envy, and all of it connected by a vast spread of low buildings into one enormous conurbation. I’m glad I started my visit in Hyderabad, a comparatively small town of only six and a quarter million.

Indians speak over 1600 mother tongues, of which 16 or so are official in at least some part of the country. They worship more than 33 million gods. Their forts—really medieval castles, Indian style—are huge compared to their European counterparts, and built to withstand attack by enemy war elephants. India produces tons of gemstones, some gigantic; Hyderabad was the home of the Kohinoor (“mountain of light”) diamond.

World's largest sundial, part of the Jantar Mantar at Jaipur

India is the world’s largest democracy. It boasts some of the world’s tallest mountains (in the Himalayas) and the world’s largest gathering of people (the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage that drew 70 million participants in 2007). We visited the worlds largest sundial (97 feet tall) and, at the other end of the scale, saw lots of large paintings, measuring up to four feet long and three feet tall, called miniatures. To be fair, the designation miniature has to do not with the size of the canvas, but with the incredible detail: a 3×4 foot painting may depict a battle with two entire armies, including dozens of elephants and scores of horses, but if you look at the painted individuals under a magnifying glass, each face is different and you can count the individual eyelashes on each soldier. A single squirrel hair forms the brush, and a miniature of that size can take years to complete. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Having spent a decade getting used to the size of the UK—which is small, despite the textbook for the British citizenship test claiming that the UK is “a medium-sized country”—I find India huge; it’s maybe one-third to one-half the size of the US (depending upon what you include). Despite the crowding in the cities, driving between those cities you see plenty of wide open spaces. Years ago I read a piece by actress and chef Madhur Jaffrey in which she remembered the older boys at her school passing around a forbidden cartoon showing the relative sizes of the UK and India; they were amazed that you could fit the home country of the British ruling class into India several times with room to spare, a comparison that sparked a change in their thinking about the Raj.

Udaipur, from the City Palace--a small town of not even three-quarters of a million

With the vastness of the Indian subcontinent and the masses of people living there, it makes sense that Indians have more words to designate large numbers than we do. We talk about thousands, millions, or billions, changing the word we use once for every three digits further to the left of the decimal point; they change the word every two digits. They count not in thousands, but in hundreds of thousands, not in millions, but in tens of millions.

I first ran into this when trying to read English-language Indian newspapers on the plane. I couldn’t understand much because—as I should have expected—the English was sprinkled with words from local languages. Then there were all of the acronyms and government titles I had no way of deciphering. “The SC…tossed out a plea for urgent hearing on a PIL”—I gather this had something to do with bus fares, but I couldn’t tell you what. The Times of India reported on a couple hounded from their home region by a khap panchayat, which I would guess is some kind of tribunal, their crime being that they were planning to marry, but since they came from neighboring villages considered to have a “brotherly relationship”, the marriage was prohibited. A cobra wandered into the home of a government minister and scared the gaddy. A politician warned against underestimating the Naxals.

An image of Ganesh at Birla Temple, Jaipur

One article said that “almost five lakh pilgrims” attended a particular festival, bathing in a holy river. Not knowing what lakh could be, I assumed it was a type of pilgrim—those belonging to a particular sect, maybe, or those who make a certain type of sacrifice. But how could there be “almost five” of them? Surely that would mean there were exactly four? And wouldn’t it be a slow news day if the papers had room to report on the activities of any group of four celebrants?

Turns out that a lakh is one hundred thousand, so the article reported an attendance of close to half a million people. Not just a slow news day, then. Another article reported accusations against a public official of “illegal transactions worth over Rs 2,000 crore”. Rs stands for rupees, but what’s a crore? Turns out it’s 10 million. Not a trivial accusation, then. (2000 crore is 20 arawb, by the way. I thought you’d want to know.)

Elephant and mahout at the Amber Fort, Jaipur

Later I ran across an advertisement for an investment company that used, as an illustration of how your money can grow even if you have only a small amount to invest, the old story about the king so impressed with a poet that he asked the poet to name his own reward. The poet asked only for some rice, the amount to be calculated using a chess board, beginning with one grain on the first square, then two on the second, four on the third square, and so on. When half the chessboard’s squares had been included, he had “over 214 crores”, or “214,73,83,640 grains of rice.” I thought the punctuation there was a mistake, which just shows more of my ignorance; Indians may put the commas in a large number in such a way as to mark the digits into groupings such as lakhs. In the end, the poet had lakhs of crores grains of rice and the king, to make good his part of the bargain, had to hand the poet his entire kingdom. Great story. If anybody knows of an investment that doubles and redoubles quickly, please let me know.

Laundered saris drying in Agra

There are almost 120 crores people living in India. It was tremendously exciting to be their guest for a while. Guidebooks and old India hands in the west all seem to advise travellers to start slow in India, to give themselves time to adjust to the overwhelming assault on all the senses—we could smell the spices before we were even out of the jetway—but I never felt overwhelmed. Maybe it’s because we started in Hyderabad, which is not on the main tourist route, or because some colleagues in my husband’s industry welcomed us as if we were royalty and took the time to show us around their city.

Street scene, Jaipur

But it’s true: everything about India is superlative. The carvings are more intricate, the traffic louder, the colours brighter, the food more flavorful, the people more varied in their clothing, their religions, their lifestyles, everything. I should really have been writing posts while I was there, but there was too much to see, to taste, to hear. I hope to write several posts in the next couple of weeks about my impressions of India, and I hope you’ll come back and read them.

Penny for the Duck House

Tonight is Guy Fawkes night in the UK, where for over 400 years November fifth has been a day for fireworks, bonfires, and a rather strange symbolic sectarian violence.

I mentioned a week or so ago that British children don’t generally go trick-or-treating. They may, however, hit up adults for spare change in early November, asking for “a penny for the guy” instead of saying “trick or treat”. The guy in this case is an effigy of Guy Fawkes, remembered for his foiled attempt 400 years ago to blow up the houses of Parliament while King James I would be in the building, too.

Children in the UK grow up with the rhyme

Remember, remember, the fifth of November
For gunpowder treason and plot!
I know of no reason
That gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot

The gunpowder treason involved Fawkes and his co-conspirators stashing barrels of gunpowder in the cellars of the Parliament building, which–had Fawkes been around to ignite them–would have cleared out most of the British aristocracy and the royal family in an effort to get rid of the Protestant ruling class and re-install a Catholic monarch. That the explosion would have killed a few Catholics as well apparently gave someone in the know some second thoughts; an anonymous letter to a Catholic nobleman warned him not to attend and so gave the game away. Fawkes was arrested, tortured to confess, and would have been hanged along with his fellows if he hadn’t leapt off the gallows to his death before the hangman got around to him.

People in London set up bonfires in 1605 to celebrate Guy Fawkes’s failure, and people all over Britain and some Commonwealth countries still do–November fifth is also known as Bonfire Night. Children make effigies that are supposd to represent Guy Fawkes and drag them around asking for pennies to spend on fireworks, or they used to do that; I’ve never been asked for my pennies. But somehow, with or without our pennies, a guy is put on top of the bonfire before it’s lit, the fireworks go off, and then, at least if our village is anything to go by, they all eat sausages that are something like hot dogs.

The health and safety regulations that prevent so many forms of fun (or even forms of reasonable ordinary behavior) in the UK these days either don’t apply to Guy Fawkes night, or don’t apply in our village. Everyone who wants to participate meets at the main crossroads where each one can pick up a torch consisting of a can/tin nailed to a long stick, said can or tin being filled with what Americans call kerosene and what the British call parafin. Even tiny kiddies walk around carrying these long sticks, with reservoirs of flaming solvent at the ends, and nobody seems to think this odd. When everybody’s lit up we walk a circuitous route through a little wood and out again near the Boy Scouts’ building, across the main road–where signs have been up for weeks warning motorists that they will experience delays on Nov 5–to the field where the bonfire has been built. We all toss the torches onto the bonfire, and then eat our hotdogs and watch the fireworks.

I doubt that anyone who participates today does so out of anti-Catholic prejudice; this is just another of the winter festivals of fire and light that most societies seem to have.

It’s even possible that what is seen in Britain as a most American expression, to call someone a guy, originates with Fawkes’s name via an intermediate step in which anyone of grotesque appearance was called a guy, as we might say someone is a fright. And if you’re a Harry Potter fan, you might appreciate that Dumbledore’s phoenix is called by the fire-invoking name of Fawkes.

In London this year, Guy Fawkes night is being used to protest the behavior of Parliament once again. The kinds of things that current Members of Parliament have been charging to their expense accounts has created a scandal that seems to have no end, as Member after Member is found to be using public money to support their real estate ventures, pay their families for work that may or may not ever have been done, and buy all manner of bizarre goods and services. One Tory MP paid a couple of thousand pounds to have the moat at his home cleaned out; another paid over sixteen hundred pounds to have a duck house built on an island in his pond.

So this year on Bonfire Night, anti-Parliament protesters will drag an effigy up to Parliament, but it won’t be Guy Fawkes: it’s a duck house. And with the British love of puns I’ve already mentioned, journalists are pointing out that Parliament can’t duck change.

Polite Notice: I’m away on holiday/vacation and there may be no posts for the next week or so.

The Call of the Pun

When it comes to newspaper headlines, the British never met a pun they didn’t like. Some of the subeditors who come up with these are consummate artists; others should be relieved of their responsibilities and set to more constructive work elsewhere—digging ditches, maybe.

The ne plus ultra of the punning headline came from a story about politician Michael Foot being named to lead a group working towards nuclear disarmament, which ran under one of the world’s all-time great headlines: “Foot Heads Arms Body.”

That’s often quoted, but rarely with attribution. The inter-net being what it is, some sites say the line came from the Daily Mirror and some that it’s from The Times; if I looked further, it’s likely every newspaper over here would be mentioned sooner or later. It’s possible that somebody made the whole thing up and that headline never appeared anywhere. (If anyone has the facts, I’d love to hear them.)

That’s an unusual example not only for its multi-level cleverness, but because it headed a serious news story. Punning headlines appear more often in the travel sections or home sections of the broadsheet papers, where it’s impossible to escape puns such as “Goan Inside” (Goa beyond the tourist areas), “Loch, Stock and Barrel” (loch-side property for sale in Scotland), and “Join the Press Gang” (growing your own olives), to list some I’ve run across recently in broadsheets. I won’t comment on the tabloids; British tabloids are another animal altogether, and I wouldn’t put anything past their editors.

Of course you get punning headlines in the US, but not to the extent you do here. And here, there doesn’t seem to be any requirement that the headline reflect the content of the story. Olives, for example, have nothing to do with press gangs. I once saw the headline “Call of the Wild” on a book review when the reviewed book had nothing to do with the novel Call of the Wild, or with Jack London, or with dog-sledding, or with Alaska. The article was about Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole, set in the Texas Panhandle. Go figure. My guess is that an overworked British subeditor either didn’t know anything about Call of the Wild beyond the title and figured that all of these outlandish American places must be similarly uncivilized, or didn’t know that Anchorage is as far from Amarillo as London is from Mecca.

To be fair, I didn’t know that exact distance factoid, either, although I did know roughly how far the Yukon is from northern Texas and certainly knew how utterly different the two regions are. And I knew that Amarillo, biggest city in the Texas Panhandle, is a place that British readers will have heard of. Everybody over here seems to know the Neil Sedaka song “Is This the Way to Amarillo?”, which I’d never heard before my move to the UK.

Some punning headlines leave me cold because they turn on British pronunciations that are foreign to me. A friend had to explain why a profile of Joaquin Phoenix was titled “Joaquin On the Wild Side”. I don’t pronounce Joaquin as walkin’ (in California, it was pronounced something more like whhah-KEEN) but apparently walkin’ is what they say here, or at least it’s something close enough that the pun works for British readers. And obeying the headline-doesn’t-have-to-pertain-to-story rule, the article didn’t refer to any sort of wild behavior by Phoenix, either.

Since puns in headlines usually feature in, well, features, puns in headlines over hard news can make it look as though the newspaper is rather unfortunately making light of serious subjects. I’ll grant them “Foot Heads Arms Body” as being too good to pass up, but when the main photo on the front page of the Sunday Times was of Ted Kennedy’s casket carried by an honour guard, I didn’t expect to see the accompanying article headlined “Four Presidents and a Funeral”. Yes, Bush Sr, Clinton, Carter, and Obama all attended, but is it necessary to make light of the death of an important American politician? I don’t think an American broadsheet-quality newspaper would run such a story under a jokey headline, but these days that may be because major American newspapers are falling like dominos and there aren’t that many left.

Still, when the British get it right, they really get it right. I’ll end with a tremendous example of the punster’s art, even though it takes some explanation: Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club, sometimes known as Caley, played the Celtic Football Club of Glasgow for a Scottish football cup despite the fact that Caley is in a lower league and Celtic is one of the major UK teams in the premier league. Caley managed one of the all-time great upsets, beating Celtic 1-0, and the Scottish edition of The Sun ran the story as “Super Caley Go Ballistic, Celtic Are Atrocious”.

Okay, football doesn’t have anything to do with Mary Poppins, but that is one premier-league pun.

Missing pumpkins

People here sometimes ask me about the things from the USA that I miss. Other than people—you can make new friends, but you can’t make new old friends—I miss a random collection of bits of American life that, before I moved to the UK, I would never have thought would top the list. This time of year, I miss pumpkins.

For the twenty years I lived near San Francisco, I made a pilgrimage each October to the pumpkin farms in Half Moon Bay. You can’t beat the view, with the Pacific on one side—you know Hawai’i is out there somewhere, if you could see just a little farther—and fields of orange pumpkins on the other, with the foothills behind.

A few years ago some friends from England came with us on our annual pumpkin expedition during a year they spent in San Francisco. They said there probably weren’t as many pumpkins in all of England as there were in the first field we saw. Not the first farm, mind you, merely the first single field.

We didn’t give our custom to just anybody. We had our favourites, skipping the ones that offered pony rides and haunted houses and that had invested significant capital in professionally-painted signs. We only went to farms that looked like farms, with the sample pumpkins propped on bales of straw (you match the sizes of the ones you want against the priced samples to figure out what yours will cost) and a farmer in a straw cowboy hat who’d look at your whole wheelbarrow-load of pumpkins and say “Oh, just give me a twenty”.

Those British friends’ children (seen here in photos from our long-ago pumpkin trip), who were already learning at their American school to say garbage can instead of rubbish bin and to say bath the American way, rather than pronouncing it to rhyme with Goth—took to the process of pumpkin selection right away. One particularly liked what she called flat pumpkins—those would be the rotten ones that had collapsed into colourful messes the rest of us did our best to avoid stepping in.

If there is pumpkin picking there will be trick or treating soon after. We knew people in the US who decorated their houses more elaborately for Hallowe’en than they did for Christmas, while we just put out a few pumpkins by way of invitation and then dished out the candy when the doorbell rang. In ten years in the UK, we’ve had a total of about 5 children come by trick or treating. There’s no reason that they should trick or treat here, of course. It’s not a UK custom, as was forcefully put to me by a friend who doesn’t like the idea. “My son wants a robot costume and I have to find something. And buy all the sweets. It’s your fault,” she said. “You Americans, exporting Hallowe’en.”

It never occurred to me to export Hallowe’en. Given that any sweets given out here are presumably made here (or wherever British sweets are made, because surely few British people give away imported American candy) and the decorations, masks, and costumes, if you go in for sto’-bought costumes, are probably made in China, there’s not much in it for the US either way.

Those British children—they of the flat pumpkins—took to trick or treating in a big way. They were pretty small at the time and didn’t immediately understand what was going to happen, so once they got into their pirate costumes, we had them practice once on us. Ring bell; say “treat or treat”; get candy. Once is all it takes. When they’d been to a few places in the neighborhood, and their father had had enough and brought them back, the smaller one informed us solemnly that “real pirates would go to all the houses”.

The pumpkins that we used to buy for display on the front porch weren’t any good for eating. I’ve seen complaints in the UK press about those wasteful Americans who throw away 90% of the pumpkins they buy rather than eating them, but that’s because the varieties grown for decorations aren’t very good to eat. You might as well condemn us for not snacking on the Christmas tree after it comes down.

Over here, alas, I can’t afford many pumpkins anyway. The money that would half-fill the trunk/boot of my car in Half Moon Bay would buy me no more than a couple of small ones here, so I skip the pumpkins most years. I can sometimes find canned/tinned Libby’s pumpkin but only in the latter half of November, possibly a good thing because it costs so much you have to start saving for it in advance.

Pumpkin pie, with a pastry maple leaf on top of the whipped cream

So I’m not too disappointed to find that my new friends tend to say “no, thank you” to my pumpkin pie and opt for the pecan pie I also offer; the idea that pumpkins can turn into a nice dessert is exotic here. That’s okay—all the more for the rest of us! But if my old friends were here, they’d appreciate a good pumpkin pie, and I’d happily share mine with them any day. They’re worth their weight in pumpkins.

Watch This Plinth

One and Other is done and over. Antony Gormley’s installation on the fourth plinth finished Wednesday at 9 a.m. with the last plinther presenting a tribute to those who died in the Hillsborough disaster.

After following the action via the inter-net, I got myself to Trafalgar Square to see it live about 12 hours before the project closed. I arrived to find a woman with an American accent standing under a “Go Phillies” flag, taking digital photos of people on the ground and working them into little figurines of Admiral Nelson (Nelson’s Column is just across the square). People took turns standing on a X chalked on the pavement so that she could take a photo, print it, trim it, mount it onto a lollipop under a paper hat and over a Plasticine body, and launch it down from the plinth with a plastic grocery bag as a parachute.

I didn’t actually elbow anyone aside, but I did make sure I got to participate so I could post a photo here—for which I thank Sarah, the plinther who crafted the little figures.

Next up was a man who held up a flip chart and spoke quietly to the camera, presumably about the contents of the pages he showed to the viewers around the world. He didn’t show them to us. Call me unperceptive, but it hadn’t occurred to me while watching the live feed at home that those who spoke only to the camera were effectively turning their backs on the live audience in Trafalgar Square. That includes the fellow with the chess game I wrote about before. I had a lot of fun watching him and participating in the game, but the live audience looking up at him wouldn’t have had a clue what was happening on the chess board, might not even have known that there was a chess board, though he did throw them conkers.

Plasticine Lord Nelson with my face

Conkers were easier to throw than Plasticine Lord Nelsons. The wind drove a couple of figurines, including mine, in the safety net surrounding the plinth. (The net was needed; at least one plinther fell into it.) Several bystanders offered to jump for our figurines or to poke them out of the net with umbrellas, but security couldn’t allow that sort of thing. The plinther herself tried to rescue my Lord Nelson with her flagpole (you can see it on the video). Eventually a crew member came with a set of pincers on a long pole and rescued our tiny admirals for us.

While the next participant spoke to the camera, I struck up conversations with people in the crowd. I met Captain John, a denizen of the square who was himself a plinther and who seems to have been in the live audience for most of the project, making sure that everyone noticed him. (He was far quieter on the plinth than off.) I even saw Trafalgus, whose nude performance I described before, though he was fully clothed again by then. I chatted with protesters (anti-Sharia law, anti-death penalty). I spoke to people who had skipped work to stand under the plinth for hours, to passersby who thought the whole thing was silly, and to foreign tourists who had no idea what was going on. One Londoner admitted she hadn’t even heard about the event, but only happened to be passing through the square. I even, out of all the people in London, ran into someone I knew.

The security guard, a singer from Manchester (security is her day job), maintained that Gormley’s project is art because it makes you think about people and about art; certainly she’d seen more hours of the project than anyone else, so maybe she had spent more time considering the issue. I had seen her on my computer screen so many times that talking to her felt like meeting a celebrity. On the other hand, Maxime from Italy, who said he was a stylist for fashion shoots and who kissed me on both cheeks before he left, held that One and Other isn’t art at all. Waldemar Januszczak, art critic for the Sunday Times—okay, he wasn’t there, but he did write about this—agreed with Maxime; he seems to have found One and Other worthwhile and great fun, but art? “Of course not”.

Event Horizon

Still, some plinthers based their performances on Gormley’s sculptures, making the kinds of nods to previous artworks that we’re used to seeing artists make. There were various angels having more or less to do with Gormley’s Angel of the North, for instance. And the next participant after Mr Ignores-the-Crowd (it seems that really got under my skin, though he was entirely within his rights to spend his hour any way he saw fit), might have alluded to Gormley’s sculptures—I’m not sure. As the cherry-picker rose into the air it looked as though this next candidate had brought a massage table; using that would be a trick, since only one person at a time could go up. It turned out to be an ironing board anyway. (My housekeeping is such that I am not terribly familiar with ironing, and had no idea there were ironing boards with apertures. Why do British ironing boards have holes in them?) She spent her hour ironing her laundry wearing a long formal dress. Could that have been an ironic—as it were—reference to Gormley’s Iron: Man?

I didn’t stick around to find out, because it was getting cold. I ducked into the National Gallery for a cup of tea. When I came out, a masked man stood on the plinth in a suit painted to look like bronze. He stood calmly, silently, in a relaxed pose, moving every so often to take an only slightly different pose at another position on the plinth. I took this to be a reference to other Gormley works—mainly Event Horizon , for which in 2007 Gormley positioned 31 life-size sculptures of male bodies on top of buildings in London.

Event Horizon was the first Gormley sculpture I encountered and remains the eeriest. To look out of a car window and see, without warning, a man poised on the edge of the roof of the Hayward Gallery was striking to say the least. A quick second take and I realized the figure was a sculpture, but what was it meant to be doing? Was he silently watching us? Was he contemplating a jump? Any way I thought about it, it was disquieting, but the figure itself wasn’t threatening in the slightest; it was simply there. Whatever uneasiness I found in the work, I manufactured myself. Striking indeed.

An plinther's homage to Gormley's previous works. Photo courtesy of Tricia Gilbert.

But what if the correspondences between plinth performances and Gormley’s previous works were all in my head, too? As the cherry picker took the metallic man away (leaving the plinth to another angel, this one a dancer who looked as if her routine would at least keep her warm) I had one last chance to find out. I went running after the machine, causing a crew member to move quickly to block me as if I were bent on violence. There was just enough time to call out to the artist “Was that an homage to Gormley’s other works?” and for him to tell me that it was. Curiosity satisfied, I called it a day.

In the previous post I said this work was a mirror of society, which now strikes me as fatuous in that it can be said of virtually anything society produces. If the mirror metaphor works at all, then I’d have to say that this particular mirror didn’t flatter. For one thing, by the end I felt it reflected far too many people who chose to spend their hour in chit-chat with friends via cell/mobile phones. Surely even sitting and daydreaming would have been more creative and more interesting to watch. Either that many people lacked imagination, or that many people were so nervous about being in the public eye that they couldn’t last an hour without a social umbilical cord, or that many people didn’t see the opportunity as worth any effort.

One step up in imagination, but still well below the threshold of what I’d call interesting, were several people who accepted suggestions for what they should do on the plinth from the audience, although as far as I could tell few of the plinthers taking this approach acted on many of the suggestions. One called back to someone on the ground, “Do you think I’d be up here if I could do a back flip?”, leaving the impression that taking a turn the plinth was something you did if you weren’t capable of much else.

The cherry-picker rolls out to deliver an angel to the plinth. Photo courtesy of Tricia Gilbert.

In the end, there were enough serene, surreal, or sincere presentations to off-set those who didn’t try.
Having waffled long enough about whether One and Other is art that I could probably make a decent case either way, I dropped the question and went on enjoying (most of) the spectacle without trying to analyze it. The mirror isn’t necessary; there was plenty of thought-provoking entertainment and interaction to be had on the ground. But then again, the people providing that were brought together by Gormley’s production.

Next up on the plinth? Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle. Watch this plinth.

‘One and Other’ on the Fourth Plinth

As I type this, a woman is sitting on a ledge high over Trafalgar Square playing English folk tunes on a concertina for the sake of art.

There are four enormous plinths in Trafalgar Square in London, meant to hold four enormous statues. The statues on three of them don’t come into this story; the fourth plinth, which sat empty for over 150 years, is more interesting. It was meant to hold an equestrian statue of William IV, but the money ran out. When the money was found, people had apparently gone off the idea of William IV and couldn’t agree on whose likeness ought to be up there, so the plinth stayed vacant.

Bill Woodrow's 'Regardless of History' on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar square, 2000-2001

In 1999, a variety of artists were invited to take turns putting their works on the fourth plinth. On one hand, this sounds like the kind of nondecision I usually dislike, the kind of wishywashy-ness that results in Time Magazine naming several “People of the Year” instead of nailing their colours to the mast (a suitably Trafalgarian metaphor!) and making a decision. You used to see this a lot in progressive schools in which they wouldn’t reward achievement unless every pupil got a prize. Why bother?

On the other and very much the dominant hand, the Fourth Plinth project has been great. The variety of sculptures up on the plinth was a joy in itself, tickling the public’s interest in art with each new work. Nontraditional offerings—such as Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, a marble nude showing Quinn’s fellow artist Alison Lapper, who was born without the ordinary complement of limbs; and Rachel Whiteread’s Monument, consisting of a transparent Lucite replica of the plinth itself, only set upside-down—spurred debate about what art is and what art should be. My favorite piece until this summer was Bill Woodrow’s Regardless of History, a tree with its roots growing down around a book and then around a human head to grasp the plinth itself. But then, I’ve got a soft spot for Woodrow’s work. His Sitting on History , in the lobby of the British Library, is my favourite piece of public art, bar none: an enormous open book in bronze that doubles as a bench. You sit on the open pages.

This summer, though, artist Antony Gormley has selected 2400 members of the public from a pool of almost 35000 applicants. Each of them gets an hour to sit on the plinth and do whatever they want, together creating a work Gormley calls One and Other.

I only lately found out that there are cameras aimed at the plinth and on the square—where right now, a side of Morris dancers are jingling their bells and flailing their hankies in the time-honoured form—and anyone can watch the action via the inter-net. And I’ve been fascinated for two days, although at the moment, I confess I’m a bit tired of wheedling concertina music played by someone who keeps rushing the tempo, and I’ve turned the sound down.

The variety has been wonderful. Just since I’ve been tuning in, they’ve presented a man eating a picnic made up of the produce of his part of Wales; a woman doing aerobics; a man making Christmas decorations and lowering them down to passersby who had to promise to put them on a Christmas tree; a couple of people who were asked to fill in at the last minute because of cancellations and had nothing to do or say; people singing badly; a man who tried for an hour to convince us that alive among us today is a figure who is simultaneously the second coming of Christ, the fifth Buddha, Krishna and the Immam Mahdi; an MS sufferer handcuffed to a post with a sign saying we must “break the shackles of MS”; a woman in a black robe sitting still in front of a cross; various artists drawing or painting (one in a tricorn hat); protests against war and for personal freedom in a variety of countries, including one all-purpose protestor whose sign read “Stop All Wars”; someone playing “Fairtrade bingo” with the crowd below and giving away Fairtrade coffee prizes; a schoolteacher who made paper statues of students and sat in front of them to work out a lesson plan on poetry about Boadicea.

And since this is England, some of this took place in the pouring rain.

The woman who planned to sit for an hour with a book and read as the ultimate get-away-from-it-all experience might have done better if she’d ignored passersby, left her radio below, and turned off her cell/mobile phone. As she accepted call after call, she complained that she hadn’t had time to read very much. Maybe that was her point, maybe the interruptions were pre-arranged, but I don’t think so. A surprising number of plinthers spent their time up on the plinth talking by phone to people not on the plinth. Maybe that makes a stay on the plinth a metaphor for the isolation of the individual, but I think it’s more a matter of showing, without have planned or meant to show, how modern communication devices have changed our expectations of how much contact we’ll have with other people, as well as illustrating how intrusive and annoying cell/mobile phones can be.

Yesterday morning when I checked in, a man was setting up to play chess with the public by mobile phone, which seemed to me a good use of the technology and the moment. Problem was that nobody phoned him. So I did. As far as I can tell, the only people who called him in the whole hour were a friend of his named something like Kai or Kyle, a guy called John who works for the project and was phoning from the temporary building/portacabin below, and me. He had a plan for what to do if no one phoned, though; he threw conkers (US: buckeyes, I think) down to the people below.

Some things are inevitable. There have been hecklers. There has been profanity. There has been nudity. It was inevitable that some plinthers would take off their clothes. The concertina lady has now gone and a nude man is setting up his presentation now, which seems to involve spreading out an enormous sheet of foil-like silver plastic. He’s taping it down with duct tape as the wind makes it flutter. The wind has been a significant factor, too; one of the schoolteacher’s little paper students blew off the plinth to be caught in the safety net below, after which the teacher said he’d created “suicidal art”.

An open-topped tour bus has just passed the plinth, with all eyes, binoculars and cameras on the upper deck focussed on the nude man, who is still setting out his wares. He’s a third of the way into his time, and we don’t yet know what his project is, other than being exposed to the elements and to his fellowmen.

I said that the concertina lady is gone and the naturist has taken her place, but that’s easier said than done. Just before the hour, every hour, day and night, a cherry-picker rolls across the square, moving slowly and accompanied by ground staff in reflective jackets who walk alongside, like a float or a hot air balloon in a parade. The cherry-picker lifts a staff member and the next participant up over the safety net and makes contact with the plinth, the staff member opens the gate, the players trade places, and the cherry picker makes its stately way back.

Ah, now the nude man has put a sticker reading “Please be nice to each other” on his arm, and has put out his “Stop all wars” banner. As art, it’s been done, but as a message to the world I’m sure it bears repeating.

I ought to hate this project. If I dislike the fact that Time Magazine sometimes can’t pick an individual person of the year, and the idea that every 7th-grader has to be applauded even if they haven’t done anything outstanding because we can’t pick out and honour outstanding individuals, then surely I should abhor this come-one-come-all, talent-optional artwork. But I don’t. I love it. I should probably articulate why, but I’m going to weasel out of that because I want to get this posted so that readers who don’t know, as I didn’t, that they can follow this pageant live on the inter-net get the word before the event closes.

I won’t soon forget the “Free Tibet” lady in the yak mask whose sign said “I’m Mary, the Yak” (and it’s a good thing she had a sign, because I wouldn’t have known what she was supposed to be). Or the plump lady in the prom dress who advocated both preservation of endangered gorillas and research on breast cancer (dramatizing, to some extent, a breast self-examination). Or the man making a diplomatic address from the independent republic of Hay-on-Wye to the UK declaring the deposing of King Richard Booth (Americans: I’ll have to explain Hay-on-Wye another time). Or the woman with a sing-song voice suitable for speaking to kindergartners, setting out small stones in little circles and telling us we should celebrate our individuality;

By this point, I confess I’ve pretty much lost interest in the nude man. He’s been setting out a variety of small objects of unknown purpose, some held together by string—playing cards, small spiky Pilates balls, balloons, bits of coloured plastic. He has now rubbed himself all over with lotion, shaken the entire contents of a large box of white powder over himself—presumably the foil sheet is there to keep the surface clean for the next plinther—and with 10 minutes to go, has tossed the contents of a box of cocoa powder into his face. At least it’s not raining.

The naturist’s individual point doesn’t matter as much as the aggregate, I think. There has been at least one proposal of marriage on the plinth—extremely awkward, involving repeated shouting of “Will you marry me?” into a cell/mobile phone which apparently had a bad connection—and if this went on long enough, no doubt a baby would be born up there, no doubt someone would die. Gormley seems to have turned the plinth into a big mirror and let us look at ourselves. Well, parts of ourselves, but that’s fair enough, since no mirror can reflect everything we are. If you want to have a look into this particular mirror, do it now, because the show closes October 14.

It’s three minutes to 1:00. Here comes the cherry-picker.

(Live feed at http://www.oneandother.co.uk, or click on the featured link on my blog.)