Sims Reed Rare Books, Duke Street St James at Ryder St. Visit their web site at http://books.simsreed.com

The cover of December 5th’s New Yorker  shows a clerk in a bookstore—at least, the word BOOKS is painted on the plate-glass window—pointing out to a customer the sole shelf of real books, near the floor and easy to miss. The prime selling space offers caps and calendars, e-readers and reading lamps, T-shirts (Shakespeare), paperweights (Twain and Shakespeare), and shopping bags (Hemingway, Woolf, and Joyce).

Last week I visited the antithesis of the New Yorker‘s nightmarishly bookless bookstore: Sims Reed Rare Books in St James in central London.

St James is a district within the City of Westminster—London being made up of two cities, two royal boroughs, and 30-odd ordinary boroughs—filled with upscale shops and traditional gentlemen’s clubs. If you need antiques, art, or indeed antique art, it’s a fine place to browse; if you need bespoke (US: custom-made) shirts or even bespoke shoes, someone in St James can provide them.

"Two Stories" by Leonard & Virginia Woolf, 1917. This is one of at least two different covers in which they issued the book; the one at the British Library has a solid blue paper wrapper.

The gentlemen’s clubs of St James I know only from books, of course, not being a gentleman and not, even as a lady, being the sort the British call clubbable (the class of person to whom clubs would offer membership). If I have anything approaching a club in St James, it’s the London Library, a private lending library, where I can sometimes be found in a red leather chair in the Reading Room with Granta or the Sewanee Review.  But I could read about Bertie Wooster, who belonged to the Drones Club, or about Sherlock Holmes meeting up with his brother, Mycroft, at the Diogenes. When Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective character, Lord Peter Wimsey, tells his man Bunter that he’ll be dining at his club, he could mean the fictional Egotists club or he might mean the Marlborough, not only a real club, but a favorite of King Edward VII. Lord Peter’s (fictional) entry in Debrett’s lists his pedigree and his clubs, but also reminds the reader that “bibliophily” was one of his hobbies, and that he was the author of Notes on the Collecting of Incunabula—which brings us back to the subject of rare books, as incunabula are early printed books (especially those printed before 1501).

An inviting shelf at Sims Reed. There's nothing in the photo to indicate the scale, so you'll have to take my word for it that the tallest books shown here are a good 30 inches tall.

My visit to Sims Reed was sparked by a much later volume, hardly more than a pamphlet really, and published only in 1917. Two Stories was the first book issued by the Hogarth Press, which began with one small hand-operated machine on Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s dining-room table. She set the type, he operated the press itself, and they shared the work of stitching the pages and adding Japanese grass-paper covers. The copy I went to see fell just slightly out of my price range at £18,000 (not quite $28,000), but I wasn’t there to buy, only to do research for an article.

Kew Gardens, by Virginia Woolf with illustrations by her sister, Vanessa Bell. This edition, from 1927, is more lavishly illustrated than the first edition, produced in 1919, and this copy once belonged to Ellen Terry.

Sims Reed specializes in books on art, architecture, and related subjects, which often call for extra-large layouts, so just inside the door I ran into an impressive case of enormous books. People write about the smell of old books and the way light falls on matured leather spines with gold-stamped titles, but there’s an extra intrigue in books (or anything, really) of extraordinary size, whether monstrous or miniature. By luck, the first title that caught my eye, on a red leather spine that might have measured a full three feet, was Architectural Drawings by William Burges—a coincidence, because it was Burges who brought me to Sims Reed the first time, almost a dozen years ago. On that visit I was after a copy of the only book-length scholarly work on Burges, the most expensive book I’ve ever bought, at £175. There’s a copy on eBay at the moment, listed at £450 ($700), but mine wouldn’t be worth nearly so much, because it shows the wear of lots of reading.

An intriguing glimpse of the stock at Sims Reed

And in any case I was in the shop this time in pursuit of Woolfs. I put Burges back on the shelf and followed my guide downstairs to a room without floor space, only book space. That the walls were lined with bookshelves almost goes without saying, but a huge table piled with books took up most of the room itself. My host brought out Two Stories from a cardboard sleeve. The grass-paper of the red-and-white covers wasn’t meant to last through years of handling—it’s sold as wallpaper—and had frayed, but the condition of the cover matters rather less in such an important work. There was the imprint of the Caslon Old Face type as Virginia Woolf had set it, with the eccentric punctuation and rather nontraditional spacing of a novice trying to right- and left-justify the lines; there were the darker and lighter characters where Leonard Woolf inked the type unevenly, in part because he was famously parsimonious and didn’t want to waste a drop. And if the book weren’t rare enough itself, the woodcuts alone—one noticeably crooked on the page—by Dora Carrington would make it a book of artistic interest.

The upper floors of the building, above the bookshop, offers service apartments let by the day or the week. You could come to London and stay just an elevator's ride away from the books you'd come to browse. http://www.ryderstreetchambers.co.uk/

And what of the two stories? They were by the Woolfs, too: Virginia’s “The Mark on the Wall” and Leonard’s “Three Jews”. They produced the entire book, from story ideas to posting the finished book out to buyers, and made a profit (they even made Carrington pay for her copy, which seems a bit much). And Virginia, feeling the power of the press, wrote in her diary “I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like.”

Sims Reed currently has another early Hogarth Press book on offer: Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens. The catalogue may say that it’s illustrated by Vanessa Bell, Woolf’s sister, but it’s not so much that the book is illustrated, but that the lines of the text themselves are illustrated, that is, the lines of the illustrations twine their way right into the words. I’d read Kew Gardens before, but it’s a completely different story when seen with the artwork. This copy, remarkably, is signed by both author and artist, and carries the bookplate of Victorian actress Ellen Terry.

The 1527 Polycronycon

I idly wondered what the oldest book in the shop might be, and a few minutes later a 1527 edition of the Polycronycon appeared on the table. In seconds, I moved from the first pages to come off of the Woolfs’s press, to a book associated with the first known printer in England, William Caxton. The Polycronycon is a history of the world written in the 13th century, in Latin, by a Benedictine monk. Translated into English and expanded by several hands (including those of Caxton, who brought it right up to date—as of 1460) it’s still an important source of information about the Roman Empire, about the Norman conquest of Britain, and about King Arthur (pace our own self-styled post-Thatcher King Arthur). The book itself is a work of art, with ornate capitals and finely detailed woodcuts, including a nearly full-page scene of St George and the dragon. The Polycronycon may not be 30 inches tall, but it’s a good 5 or 6 inches thick, and impressive on all counts: content, construction, illustration, typography—everything.

If I could own any one of the treasures I saw that day—the 1527 Polycronycon, Burges’s Architectural Drawings, or either of the Hogarth Press gems—it’d be a hard call. They’re all books I’d almost class as holy relics. Many, many thanks to Sims Reed; a place that can offer that kind of choice, and all free from calendars or coffee mugs, is what I call a real bookshop.

Many thanks to Sims Reed, and especially to Rupert Halliwell.  Exterior photos are mine, others used by permission.

A quintessential British Christmas card: robin, post box, and snow

It’s Twelfth Night as I write this post, though the article probably won’t go live until the Twelfth Day of Christmas.  It’s lucky for me that the holiday has twelve whole days; it gives me a better chance of getting cards out before Christmas is officially over.

Christmas cards here are a bit different from Christmas cards in the US.  To start with, they are not a species of greeting cards, but (in British English) they are greetings cards.  There’s no logic to back up a choice of which phrase is better; you can easily make a case for either one.

There are plenty of contemporary images, too. Purchase of this fold-out version of the three wise men benefits the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution).

Then there are the images: where US cards show cardinals, British cards show robins.  That strikes most Americans as odd, since every schoolchild in the US knows robins fly south in the winter and reappear when the weather warms, so robins are symbols of spring.  We used to say that the line between north and south ran through our town in Kentucky, and just south of our house, because the robins disappeared from our neighborhood in the autumn, but lived year-around on the campus of a college less than a mile away.  British robins are found here year-round. They look like little round balls of fluff, but are known for being bold–the avian equivalent of those lapdogs who challenge dogs 10 times their size. So in the absence of cardinals, robins provide a red bird that looks nice against a snowy background.

(Not having the same robins here means that the shade Americans call robin’s-egg blue doesn’t exist by that name. British people talk about duck-egg blue, but it’s an altogether different shade, almost a green.)

Cherubim, as conceived by Gothic Revival designer William Burges. (I'm a Burges fan.) This card was sold in aid of English Heritage, which keeps up and manages historic buildings, such St Mary's Church, Studley Royal, North Yorkshire, where these angels feature on the ceiling of the chancel.

And while for-profit companies do make Christmas cards, by far the larger share of the cards I get have been sold by charities.  Maybe I’ve just got a different set of friends here, but in the US I mostly sent and received commercially made cards.  This year I made a list of where the charity cards came from: Riding for the Disabled (horseback recreation for disabled people), the Woodland Trust, the British Heart Foundation, the Multiple Sclerosis Society, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Katherine Mansfield Society, Children in Need, Oxfam, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, English Heritage (preserves historic buildings), Save the Children, the Mastocytosis Society and the London Library.

A scholar toiling away in the reading room of the London Library dreams of Christmas pudding. Sold in aid of the London Library, which commissions a new card each year; this one is by Quentin Blake, famous for illustrations of works by Roald Dahl, as well as many other cartoons and illustrations.

Some ex-pats complain about the British expecting everybody to send cards to everyone, even people you see every day, especially when so many cards are hand-delivered here to save postage.  My writing group’s Christmas party includes a table set up for cards, so everybody can come in and deal out cards into stacks, one stack for each member, and we all collect our cards on the way out.  One immigrant lady never fails to point out how silly this is, when you can say “Happy Christmas!” (more common here than “Merry Christmas”) to the others in person at the same event.  At a Christmas lunch for a different organization (which I won’t name) this year, a member went one better, signing Christmas cards at the table and sending them hand-to-hand down to recipients during the meal.

But the robin is a perennial favourite. Happy New Year!

I don’t mind sending Christmas cards to everyone—in principle.  In practice I virtually never manage to send the cards on time.  In fact everything about Christmas at our house happens later and later these days, so we often end up decorating the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve or even Christmas Day.  (Handy, because by Christmas Eve you can often get a £50 tree for £1.)

We can say that by decorating the tree as late as that we’re upholding tradition, but really we just haven’t gotten our act together.  You can do the same with judiciously choosing which traditional deadline for taking the decorations down you’ll observe: New Years, Twelfth Night, or even Candlemas (February 2).  And in that spirit of Yuletide expediency, we accept January 6 as the twelfth day of Christmas despite a competing tradition that puts the twelfth day on January 5.  Gives me one more day to get the cards out.

Me: “Are you doing anything for the holidays?”

Them: “Yes!  We’re going to France/to Australia/to Venice to stay in a chateau/at a surfing resort/with my stepmother, the Contessa.  Then we’re going back to London/on to New Zealand/over to Rome to see “Mamma Mia!” / where they filmed “Lord of the Rings”/the Pope. What are you doing for Christmas?”

Me: “Um…we’re having dinner with friends at a pub where they walk a horse through the bar on Christmas Day.”

The Fox, Bucks Green, Rudgwick, West Sussex-- a 16th-century country pub

Yes, we chose a quiet close-to-home Christmas this year, venturing no further than West Sussex, but getting in on one of those age-old and inexplicable traditions that crop up all over the UK: they’ve been walking a horse through the bar of the Fox Inn in the little hamlet of Bucks Green for so long that nobody remembers when it started, or why.

Introducing Blue!

Staff at the pub said they believe it may have to do with keeping a bridleway open, though that’s just a guess.  British ramblers (US: hikers) can be fiercely protective of their right to use public footpaths and bridle paths, which can bring them into conflict with landowners when owners and ramblers have different ideas of how extensive the public’s rights really are.

Ordering Christmas dinner

Walkers, often from the Ramblers (a nationwide association), go past my house every once in a while, groups of people wearing plastic sleeves full of maps hanging from straps around their necks.  They traverse all the local footpaths as a hobby, a form of exercise, and a means of asserting their right to keep those paths public and to make sure no one is threatening to close any right of way.  On the other side of the fence (sometimes literally), landowners may close paths over private land a few days a year to remind people that the public has no right to pass.  An old friend of mine in Essex had one of these—they’re called permissive paths—across his land, and used to close the gate on Christmas Day every year to remind people that while he was happy for them to walk across the land, his farm was private property.

Blue in the pub, with lots of people to cheer him. You can just see the take-away menu on a chalkboard behind his head.

Which brings us back to Christmas, and to the Fox Inn where a horse—his name is Blue—visits for lunch at Christmas.  There’s a brick path running right through the building; presumably that’s the old bridleway and at some point—by at least the 16th century, because the present building dates back that far—somebody plunked a pub down right onto it.  So Blue comes in on Christmas day, eats a bag of crisps (US: potato chips), has a bowl of beer, and then walks on out the other side.

Once outside, Blue posed for photos. He seemed to be a very good sport about those antlers.

I followed him out to snap some more pictures because the pub was chock full of people and I couldn’t get close enough to the horse inside the building to get a decent photo, though a very kind (and very tall) stranger lifted my camera up over his head to take a shot over the crowd.  I don’t know where all the people came from; Bucks Green is a small group of houses classed as a hamlet, an outlier of the thriving metropolis of Rudgwick, itself a village that can claim all of 2900 people (if they round up to an nice-looking number).

Okay, this is the south end of a northbound horse, but his tailwas so beautiful I wanted to include a photo. Many thanks to the staff of the Fox, to Blue, and to Blue's handler.

A good proportion of Bucks Green citizenry must have been in the pub that day. In fact, Blue’s handler had to persuade him at one point not to try go back in.  Once is all it takes; even if no other horse ever walks up to the bar at the Fox, the bridleway is (presumably) safe for another year.

This is a very good sign...

The BBC has got me thinking about baking cakes this week, specifically the programme “More or Less” on Radio 4, on which economist Tim Harford talks in a lighthearted way about “numbers in the news and in life”, treating topics from whether we can trust statistics rattled off by politicians, to the odds of buying a carton of 6 eggs (UK: box of 6 eggs, though their box and our carton are identical pressed-paper shapes) and finding that they all have double yolks.  “More or Less” recently asked people to contact them with cake recipes that had some numerical interest, no matter how tenuous the connection, so I told them about the common American pound cake.  And they were interested enough to ring me up and tape me over the phone for their podcast.

It's Christmas all year round at the local bakery.

You don’t get pound cake here; the UK’s version is called Madeira cake, which tastes very like pound cake, but—I assumed—would be made with Madeira, a sweet wine.  I figured they must use that instead of vanilla or something. When will I learn not to assume anything where culture or tradition are involved?  Madeira cake is pound cake by another name, and its British name comes from an earlier century in which it was fashionable to serve it with a small glass of Madeira alongside.

Christmas cakes at the Christmas bakery, that is, they are Christmas's Christmas cakes.

But what makes a pound cake a pound cake?  Traditionally the recipe called for one pound each of flour, sugar, butter, and eggs.  (Yes, you weigh the eggs.)  But since that would make an enormous cake (or more likely, several regular-size cakes), any cake is called a pound cake as long as you adhere to that all-important and beautifully symmetrical ratio—1:1:1:1—for the main ingredients.

Living here, you learn that a cake can mean anything from an extravagant multiple-tiered sculpture to little individual goodies I’d call sweet rolls, and even things that aren’t cake at all in my view, like gingerbread men or custard tarts.  When the head of a social group asked me , not long after I moved to the UK, to bring “a few cakes”–plural–to a meeting, I wondered whether she could possibly mean that she wanted me to come up with several 2-layer, 9-inch, iced cakes.  Answer?  She didn’t.  She meant the kinds of little treats that I will tell you about below.

Because I have, at great personal sacrifice, gone to a popular bakery nearby and filled a tray with one of everything that would fit, so as to introduce you to British cakes.

A Yule log, which is yet another kind of cake eaten at Christmas. This is a very fancy one; it even has a branch. And you can just see, on the right, some rum truffles--decorated to look like miniature Christmas puddings.

It’s just lucky that the nearest bakery has a name that coincides with the season: the sign may say “Rickford Bakery”, but people call it the Christmas bakery, as it’s run by J. A. Christmas and Sons.  I’ve never seen a man behind the counter, though; maybe the men are in the back with the ovens.  The ladies who do work behind the counter are kept on the run, because the place is always so busy, especially at lunchtime—since in addition to cakes they bake Cornish pasties and sausage rolls and curry-filled pastries, and make sandwiches on their own freshly baked rolls—that getting in and out of the car park (US: parking lot) is a cross between a sliding-tile puzzle and a fairground Dodge’ems ride.  When I left today, two cars wanted my parking space; for all I know there was an episode of bakery rage after I left.

Inside the Christmas bakery

This time of year they do a brisk business in Christmas cakes (a treat I’ve written about before), and there’s a photo here of their display.  You’ll have to take my word for that the Christmas bakery offers cream horns, fudge brownies, lardy cakes, jam tarts, rum truffles, and a host of other things that won’t be in my photos, because I couldn’t actually buy one of everything in the shop.  But I can tell you about the ones I did buy (they’re identified in the captions of the pictures):

Iced buns: Kids in British books always seem to be eating iced buns, which sound wonderful.  But as you’ll soon see, traditional British treats tend to be very simple, without a lot of cherries or almonds or sweetened cream cheese or the kinds of things I’m used to seeing at bakeries in the US; there isn’t even a lot of chocolate or cinnamon.  And an iced bun is just that: a bun about the size of a hotdog bun, with a smear of sugary icing on top.  It’s very good quality bread, much, much better than a hotdog bun, but still…it’s just iced bread, though iced buns seem to be really popular.

On the left, from back to front, we've got an iced bun and a filled doughnut; in the next 'column', also from back to front, you see shortbread, an iced Chelsea bun, and a jam doughnut; in the next row, a sugared Chelsea bun, a flapjack, and a vanilla slice

Doughnuts: It is difficult to find a canonical doughnut-with-a-hole in England, except in American chains (Starbucks offers a glazed old-fashioned, and Krispy Kreme has begun opening outlets here).  Other than that, the supermarket will sell you an enormous tub of mini-doughnuts, or you can get filled or jam doughnuts, as shows in the picture.  The jam doughnut would be no surprise to Americans, but the filled doughnut, split and filled with cream, and not even round, as new to me.  Very tasty, though.

Chelsea buns:  I would call these sweet rolls–spirals of dough with raisins or currants and sugar rolled up in the coil.  When someone asks for Chelsea buns, the ladies ask “iced or sugared?”  I’ve shown one of each; the sugared one has the sugar sprinkled on the top, instead of icing.

Along the righthand edge from back to front this shows: a gingerbread man, a mince pie in flaky pastry, a treacle tart, and an Eccles cake; just to the left of that there's a Viennese in the back and a rock cake in the front. (To identify those further left, see the caption for the other photo.)

Currants [please see correction, below!]  are one of the few fruits that will grow well here which also produce a decent amount of vitamin C.  During the war the government encouraged everyone to plant currants; we have some in the back garden.  In wartime, people made blackcurrant syrup and gave it to children like medicine, so as to make sure they got their vitamins; this has left the population with a taste for all things blackcurrant.  I find blackcurrant flavoring–which you get in everything from gumdrops (UK: fruit gums) to cough syrup (UK: cough mixture)–utterly vile, but as dried fruit currants are pretty good.

Flapjack:  These have nothing to do with the American idea of flapjacks as big pancakes; they’re bar cookies made with oatmeal, more like granola bars.

Vanilla Slice: Cream-filled flaky pastry with a thick layer of vanilla icing.

Viennese:  Viennese what?  Presumably Viennese cakes.  The bakery just calls them Viennese–which is an adjective, but no matter.  Two very buttery fluted cookies cemented together with icing and then dipped in chocolate at both ends.

The whole glorious trayful.

Mince pies: A Christmas staple that I’ve written about before. The Christmas bakery offers them in flaky pastry or shortcrust (ordinary pie crust).

Rock Cake: a rather hard biscuity cake studded with currants, rough on the top, with big sugar crystals.  Favorite of my husband, and of Hagrid in the Harry Potter books, although Hagrid makes his own, and–in a joke that is time-worn or time-honored here, take your pick–his are as hard as rocks.

Shortbread & Gingerbread: Much the same as American shortbread and gingerbread, although this gingerbread man is tipped in chocolate so as to clothe him with trousers.  At this time of year they also offer ginger Christmas trees.

Eccles cakes:  Round pastries filled with currants, brown sugar, and a bit of cinnamon.

Part of the hot-food cabinet, with its pies, pasties and pastries.

Treacle Tart: Here we get into a grey area, because if you’re asked to bring cakes, and show up with tarts, no one will think you’ve overstepped your remit even though these aren’t cakes because, well, they’re tarts.  I included treacle tart because it’s my favorite (and Harry Potter’s), and it’s something we don’t have in the US.  It’s also a way of recycling bread crumbs, which a bakery would presumably otherwise be drowning in.  The center is just bread crumbs, lemon juice and zest, and golden syrup (a type of treacle that I wrote about before).  It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s wonderful.

You could say that about several of these offerings, actually.  As you can see from list, the shapes and techniques may vary, but the list of flavorings is very simple.  Bill Bryson says in  Notes from a Small Island:

And the British are so easy to please.  It is the most extraordinary thing.  They actually like their pleasures small.  That is why so many of their treats—tea cakes, scones, crumpets, rock cakes, rich tea biscuits, fruit Shrewsburys—are so cautiously flavorful.  They are the only people in the world who think of jam and currants as thrilling constituents of a pudding or cake.

The Christmas family has (UK: have—I will never get used to that) been making these traditional, simple treats in their bakery since 1860, but there may have been a bakery on the site before that.  There was certainly a mill nearby, in times past, and I’ve heard that the old mill house is still there.

But the Christmases don’t sell Madeira cake (much less pound cake).  And my recording for the BBC’s “More or Less” was left on the cutting-room floor; the producer apparently liked the way I emphasized the ratio (well, it is a show about numbers), but instead used a clip from the other listener who suggested pound cake, because she actually makes her own.

Me, I don’t make my own cakes anymore.  Why would I, with the Christmas family right down the road?

STOP PRESS!  The “More or Less” team decided to use my clip after all.   If you listen to the podcast, which you’ll find at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless (it’s the show for 16 Dec, marked as being about “Higgs boson statistics”, my little blurb on pound cake is at the end.  The very end, even after the credits, just about at the 27:50 mark (out of a 30 minute show!).  But it was fun to do!

CORRECTION: I have confused blackcurrants, the fruit that grows in my garden and that was given to children in wartime, for dried currants, a type of raisin used in baking.  Many thanks to Mary Korndorffer for letting me know.

A post about Thanksgiving, grits, condos, cooties, enchiladas, and other things that my British neighbors don’t quite get.

A Thanksgiving display on the top of a small cupboard in my dining room, which must have been a bad place for it, as not a single person remarked on it. That's a full-sized pumpkin, by the way, not a miniature; don't be misled by the size of the grapes--they were the largest grapes I've ever seen!

On my first Thanksgiving in the UK, I came across a couple of British TV personalities making small-talk on the box (US: on the tube) about the unfamiliar holiday.  When one asked what a Thanksgiving dinner is like, the other one said in a bored, everybody-knows-that tone, “Oh, it’s just like Christmas dinner.  They have a turkey with stuffing…roast potatoes…Brussels sprouts…chipolatas…”

Chipolatas?

I wrote about roast potatoes a couple of years ago, and Brussels sprouts are so canonically a part of a British Christmas dinner that I recently saw an ad for “whimsical” Christmas gifts that included a wreath made out of them.  (Further Googling revealed that lots of people will make and sell you a Brussels sprout wreath, so the one I saw wasn’t an anomaly, but part of a genre.)  But that was the first time I’d ever even heard of chipolatas, which turn out to be sausages.

Long, skinny link sausages, that is.  Sausages virtually always refers to links here; I don’t think I’ve ever seen sausage patties in the UK. British sausage links are generally a lot bigger, a lot more round than American sausage links; chipolatas are as thin as American sausage links but they’re two or three times the length.  In fact I think they look kind of creepy, long and pale, like a dead man’s fingers in a ghost story.

A tray of skinny chipolatas and fat sausages

Pointing out that TV presenter’s chipolata error doesn’t mean I’m out to make fun of the British for what they don’t know about the US.  There’s no reason foreigners should keep up with details of American life—although the English lady about 50 years old who wasn’t aware that US and Japanese troops fought each other in WWII (when the Pacific Theater came up in conversation, she said she hadn’t realized Hitler had ships over there; when I said the ships were Japanese, she was amazed) did shock me.  But for every Brit who’s that blind to the US war effort in the 1940s, there are probably 100 Americans today who couldn’t locate England on a map, so I’m loath to point fingers—even cold, dead, chipolata fingers—at her.

A lot of the cultural assumptions that turn out to be so wrong that they’re funny do seem to have to do with food.  I heard a British chef in a radio interview talk about the time she made dinner at the White House for Bill Clinton.  She said she knew he was from Arkansas, which is in the South, so she decided to give him traditional Southern food, but with her own signature garnishes and so on.  What was the main dish then?  Enchiladas.

Right. Growing up in Kentucky, the only enchiladas I ever saw (until I was 21 and moved to California) were in those cheap TV dinners that came in partitioned foil trays—muy exótico.  Then again, Kentucky is about twice as far from Mexico as Arkansas, Arkansas being a mere 600 miles from the border, about the distance from London to Milan, and you know how similar English cooking is to that of northern Italy.

My writing group is a good source for all kinds of slips because there’s nothing like a group of amateur writers to test a language to destruction.  An Englishman once asked about one of my fictional characters, “If she’s such a successful plastic surgeon, why does she have to live in a condo?”  I really wish I knew what he thought a condo might be, but I didn’t think to ask.

A plate of chipolatas ready for cooking? Or...

Another time, someone who’d run across the word in an American novel asked what cooties might be.  An English lady jumped in with “Oh, I know what cooties are!” and provided an elaborate explanation involving cutting up squares of paper and marking black dots on them.  I think she got this from Canadian relatives, and it sounds like Canadian cooties are very different from the cooties I grew up knowing (and avoiding).

But the best example from the writing group came in a scene populated with what its English author apparently thought to be typical Southern children, getting on with their typically American lives in the present day.  These kids, whose descriptions owed much, I think, to The Waltons, pranced barefoot down to the lake—a typical southern lake, with the typically southern name Lake Wisconsin—to go fishing, while singing hymns and occasionally shouting “Hallelujah!”  (I promise you I’m not making this up; I have witnesses.)

Things took a truly surreal turn, though, when little Solomon, ready to pull in a nice fat trout, baited his hook with grits.  Yep.  Grits.  (For UK readers, this would be something akin to saying you were baiting your hook with porridge and, unless you are Lewis Carroll, I’m guessing you’d be unlikely to say something that off the wall.)

And so we find ourselves back on the subject of food.

...or dead man's fingers?

Why the British have chipolatas at Christmas, when there’s already a big roast turkey, served with a stuffing that usually, in England, has pork sausage meat in it anyway, is a question.  A neighbor said that the chipolatas, wrapped in bacon, broiled (UK: grilled), and set all around the turkey on its platter, are really for the children, but no one else I’ve spoken with thinks that’s the case.  An older friend tells me that when she was a child, chipolatas weren’t the non-optional part of Christmas dinners they seem to be today.  That tradition, then, isn’t very old, although you’d have to look a while to find an ad showing a Christmas turkey being served on a chipolata-free platter.  The earliest she remembers them is the late 1940s, after the war.  (That would be the war with the Germans and the Japanese—and the Italians, for that matter.)

Having learned about chipolatas, do I serve them at Christmas?  No. I don’t see the point, really, despite our when-in-Rome philosophy.  The when-in-Rome approach means we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving unless we’ve got American visitors, so I’m off the hook for cooking a Thanksgiving feast most years (regardless of whether the hook has grits on it).

My iPad and one-of-a-kind notebook

My husband had business in Dublin, and I went along, planning to play tourist while he worked.  But a cancelled event meant we could go to the Dublin Writers Museum together that morning—by taxi, given the wind and the sudden downpours that day.  Being a gentleman, he loaned me his umbrella, which left me dry but guilty.  At least he had a sort of fedora, but he got pretty wet. (Note to self: next time, take your own umbrella.  And ask the hotel to get a taxi for you if it’s raining.)

The night before, I’d counted nine taxis coming through just one cycle of a traffic light as we waited to cross the street, but it took forever to find one that morning, and when we did, I got in thinking “Don’t forget the umbrella.  Don’t forget the umbrella.”  My track record with umbrellas isn’t good, and since my husband had gotten soaked because I was using his, I was determined not to lose it.  When the taxi dropped us, though, the problem wasn’t remembering the umbrella, but fighting a wind that kept turning it inside out, and finding the right money for the fare—a lot of the euro coins look pretty much alike.

Euro coins, showing how some look confusingly similar (especially when they're as old as the copper one-cent coin on the left, so dark that it's difficult to read).

In the kerfuffle I left behind one of those small nylon backpacks that’s not much more than a carrier bag with a couple of strings to go over your shoulders.  But that little bag held my iPad, my notebook (paper, not a notebook computer)—with one-of-a-kind appliquéd cover, a present from my sister—and several months’ worth of irreplaceable notes.  (Note to self: get a fresh notebook for every trip so you don’t lose important stuff.)

Just inside the museum I realized. “I left my iPad in the taxi!”  My husband, ever the optimist, said “You’re not serious!” but really, he knows me better than that.  He dashed back out to try to catch the driver, and the receptionist told me to go check the taxi rank “right there, at the top of O’Connell Street”; the driver might have joined the rank.  She pointed the direction and I ran out, too.

Euro coins again. In this view, you can see how the edges of different denominations have different notches so you can tell which is which even if you can't see them. Would have been handy to know that before I went to Dublin...

And here we have a little difference in American and UK English (the museum receptionist was English, not Irish).  People say “the top of the street”, but you have to know which end of the street the locals consider the top.  I thought that would mean uphill, but she’d pointed downhill, so down I went, top speed, the wind repeatedly turning the umbrella inside-out and me turning it outside-out again, and I didn’t see any taxi rank.  How far away was “right there”?  Surely the “top of the street” couldn’t mean downhill.  I was going the wrong way! And every second wasted lowered my chances.

So I ran uphill again, with an adrenaline boost that pushed me way ahead of my husband.  I stopped in at the museum to confirm I had it right.  I didn’t.  “No, the top of O’Connell Street”, said the lady, with a note of exasperation—and she did mean the lower end, by the river.  Another employee assured me that I could find the driver from the number on my receipt—but I hadn’t gotten one.  Who needs a taxi receipt if the ride isn’t a business expense?  (Answer: people who stupidly leave valuables in taxis.

The Dublin Writers Museum on Parnell Square. (It's the brick building; the fancy tower belongs to someone else.)

Downhill again, fighting the wind for control of the umbrella, this time I found the taxi rank—but not ‘my’ taxi.  I walked up and down, looking at the driver of any cab you might call tan or gold or champagne.  The rain let up and some drivers got out of their cars to be helpful or maybe just for the craic*.  About five of them walked up to me, making a little group, each one asking the same thing as he arrived— “do you have your receipt?”—and all saying I should go to the Carriage Office (which licenses taxis)  except for one who thought I ought to go to the Garda.

The Garda means the police. Ireland can seem familiar—the faces, the names, and even the countryside can look a lot like what I grew up with in Kentucky—but of the zillions of differences, the Irish language is the most surprising.  Most Irish people use English pretty much all the time, but some Irish words, such as Garda, are common in everyday life.

A Dublin street sign showing how lost a non-Irish-speaking tourist would be without the English version. I'm grateful to Pól Ó Duibhir at http://photopol.com for Dublin street sign photos.

I can’t read Irish (Gaeilge)—no surprise there—but I can’t even sound out the words, because I’ve never learned how the unfamiliar combinations of letters and accent marks map to the sounds. You run into a fair few people here in England with Irish names, so I’ve learned a bit—Siobhan is pronounced Shih-vawn, Róisín is Row-sheen, and Ruairí is the name Americans spell Rory—but puzzling out Flemish when I lived in Belgium was easier than Irish.  Thank goodness Dublin street signs show names in English, too; I couldn’t have found O’Connell Street if the signs only said Sráid Uí Chonaill, and that’s without adding Íocht for Lower or Uachtarach for Upper.

Another Dublin street sign by courtesy of Pól Ó Duibhir. To be fair, I should say that he's posted these as bad examples, though the errors he finds are generally in the Irish spellings or translations, and so are lost on me.

There was a Garda station right there on Sráid Uí Chonaill Uachtarach so that’s where I started.  They gave me a number to call in the evening, since day-shift drivers drop off lost property on their way home.  Back at the taxi rank, I asked cabbies who had radios to put out the word for their fellow drivers, and some did, but after that there was nothing to do but wait.  All day.

What to do?  Museums no longer appealed; I could only think about how much of my life was in that bag and how abysmally stupid I’d been, worrying about the umbrella (£10) and not the iPad ($700+) or the notebook (irreplaceable).

And how did this happen?  Having left a hat in a Kiev taxi and a phone in a taxi in Lisbon, my husband always checks the back seat before he even pays a driver, and he hadn’t seen my bag.  It was a mystery.

St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin

He went to work, and I went to St Patrick’s cathedral to sit in a quiet corner and recover, but construction noise drove me out.  I bought a couple of books at Hodges Figgis, Ireland’s biggest bookshop;  I’d had a huge library on the iPad, and had been halfway through Bleak House.  I bought a new notebook and sat scribbling in a café, trying to remember everything that was in the old one.  Hopeless.

Back at the hotel, the receptionist entered my sad tale by hand into the lost-property ledger (yes, a big book, not a database), after first asking whether I had a taxi receipt.  I considered phoning cab companies until I saw how many there were; per person Dublin has 10 times as many taxis as London.  The switchboard at the Carriage Office asked me if I had a receipt and then told me they no longer handle lost property (US: lost-and-found), helpfully adding that I didn’t have to worry about the driver keeping the bag—I hadn’t been—but about whether another passenger would find it—which had been my main worry all day. How kind of her to remind me.  I had to hope that even a passenger who rather fancied a new iPad would at least turn in (UK: hand in) the notebook.

The Records Tower at Dublin Castle is the only part of the structure surviving from the 13th century . Dublin Castle now houses government offices, including the Carriage Office.

I called the number the Garda had given me and the duty officer asked (altogether now) “Did you get a receipt?”, and told me that her office didn’t do lost property; I must go to my nearest Garda station in person.  Hotel staff gave me (wrong) directions to the Garda station, but I found it eventually.

I told my story there, ending with “And no, I didn’t get a receipt”, and then things began to look up, because the Gard on duty took on my case as if it were her mission in life, and I will be forever grateful.  I gather she was supposed to tell me to go check with the five Garda stations in Dublin that handle lost property, but instead she rang them all herself.  No luck.  She asked me all about the place, the time, the circumstances.  Would I recognize the car? Er, no.  Would I recognize the driver? Yes.  She arranged with the hotel to get the security camera footage from the front door; I was to come back in the morning to view it with the officer to try to identify the taxi.

O'Connell Street Bridge, at the end (not the top, then) of O'Connell Street, over the River Liffey. Other Dublin rivers are called the Poddle and the Dodder; I'm pretty sure these names sound better in Gaeilge.

Meanwhile, across town, somebody else left his phone in the taxi he took to the airport, and a radio call went out asking cabbies to look for it.  John, who’d just been to the airport, looked for the phone and found a little black bag under the drivers seat. He took it all the way out to the guy at the airport, where he found it wasn’t a phone at all.

So John opened the iPad and found a photo of my husband, taken when I bought the thing, just to try out its built-in camera. And he was flabbergasted, because he recognized my husband from way back that morning; he’d driven all kinds of people, all day, with the bag under his seat. It was black, like the carpet, and he might not have noticed it for months without a reason to look.

He found my name and phone number in what he called my “copybook”.  I hadn’t included anything to show what country to call, but John (blessings upon him) remembered we’d said we were from England, added the right country code, dialed our house, and got our answering machine.  But the outgoing message mentions my editing business, and he thought he’d reached “a print shop or something”, so he figured there was a mistake in the number, or it was old.  (He doesn’t use email, and my mobile/cell phone number never rang.)  (Note to self: change cell phone provider.  Have already changed outgoing message.)

Dublin Castle again -- wings added in later eras.

But John (may he live long) wasn’t through.  Having recognized us, he knew pretty much where we’d hailed him, so he rang hotels in that neighborhood until he found us, and left a message.  He didn’t find me by my name from the notebook; he found some old boarding passes tucked into the back which gave my husband’s surname (we each have our own), and found him. Unfortunately, the hotel didn’t give us the message, so while I was chewing my nails, John was wondering why nobody returned his call.  Had the hotel given us the message, I’d've gotten a lot more sleep, and I wouldn’t have jumped up in a panic at 5 a.m. to spend an hour on my husband’s laptop changing all my passwords.

My favorite part of Pól Ó Duibhir's web site is probably the gallery of photos of public sculpture. And while most of them are figurative, he's included this shot of Dublin's signature street lights, too. You can view a slide show at http://www.flickr.com/photos/photopol/sets/72157623195774807/show/

At 7:00 a.m. the phone rang and I heard “This is John, the taxi driver.  I have your iPad here.”  He was near the hotel and could be there in 5 minutes.  I was downstairs in 5 minutes to meet him

He said that if he hadn’t found us at a hotel, his next stop would have been the Dublin Institute of Technology because he remembered my husband talking about working there. (Note to self: Always get the taxi with the driver who’s got a memory like an elephant’s.)

So I gave him enough euros—paper ones are easier to count—to cover (handily) the cost of his fruitless trip to the airport, hugged him, got his address, and promised that Father Christmas would remember him this December.  I  stood down the Garda and took a bouquet of tulips to the friendly officer who thought of requesting the CCTV.  Somebody ought to put John and that Gard on a television commercial/telly advert for the wonderful people you’ll meet on a vacation/holiday in Ireland.

I’ve now fixed the iPad so that when you turn it on, it gives complete information for how to contact me, though I doubt that I’ll ever lose it again.  And I’m certain I’ll never forget where I was on 11/11/11 11:11.

*craic means entertainment, fun, a good time.

(Photos without credits are mine or are from Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons license.)

More in a series of London Taxis that aren't black. Here's an ad for British Telecom, a sponsor of the 2012 London Olympics. I regret to say that the squiggle on the read door is the logo of the 2012 games, which is cropping up all over London now.

I wonder how many of the readers who say they like my posts on London taxis imagine themselves tootling around town in one–but behind the wheel, instead of sitting in the back?

The nice people at London Taxi Exports can help you with that; they’ve been refurbishing London Taxis and shipping them around the world for over 15 years.

American readers who want to import taxis will be happy to hear that the US doesn’t have any problem with you driving a vehicle with the steering wheel on the ‘wrong’ side of the car. On the other hand, they won’t allow you to bring in a car that doesn’t meet modern standards having to do with emissions or with reaction to impact. But if you import a classic car–over 25 years old–then your vehicle will be exempt. The cars London Taxi Exports handles are what you might call mature vehicles, but completely rejuvenated, and painted to the customers’ specifications.

Would you be comfortable getting your investment advice from somebody you picked because their name was on a taxi?

The last time I rode in a taxi the driver, who was remarkably spiffy in a camel jacket and a paisley cravat, said he didn’t like the garish paint jobs you see on taxis nowadays; for him, black was the only proper colour. I think I’d prefer a black one as well, if I were going to buy one, but I do like to look at the variety of ads on the taxis going by.

I’m not sure I’d give much credence to that particular driver’s opinion on anything other than taxis, though. When he asked where I lived before I moved to England, I answered “California” and he asked “What part of California? Miami?” Right. And when I said I’d lived near San Francisco, he said he wouldn’t want to live there because of the terribly cold snowy winters. He might have mastered the Knowledge but his experience of the world outside London was…limited.

This one's advertising beer...

And while black may be the only proper cab colour, London Taxi Exports sent a cabriolet version (open top in the back) in pink to a Boston hotel just the other day. Before that, they sent out a couple of taxis to a California vineyard. They’ve supplied cars for celebrities but would never divulge names, of course, and they ordinarily don’t meet the famous buyers in those cases, but only someone acting on a buyer’s behalf. In any case, if you see a London taxi in the US, it’s more than likely that it’ll have a London Taxi Exports plate on the back. (But I’m going to start calling them LTE to save typing.)

And it’ll be more than likely that wherever you do see a private driver tootling around in a London taxi, that the driver will be female. Almost all of LTE’s UK buyers and most of their overseas buyers are women. Their web site reminds prospective buyers that a taxi is “built like a tank and virtually indestructible”; the cars may not have airbags, but they’ve got “acres of solid metal” between oncoming vehicles and the kids in the back–up to 6 kids, too. Or up to six adults for that matter, plus any bulky sports equipment, or maybe one of those enormous jogging strollers (UK: pushchairs). And all London taxis have childproof locks as a matter of course, or perhaps the cabbies think of them as passenger-proof locks. In any case, you can’t open the doors of a London taxi as long as the thing is moving.

Bertolli's Olive Oil advert on a taxi going through Parliament square; the tents in the background belong to protestors.

Another reason women like them, according to LTE, is that it makes a mom look cool “on the school run”, that is, taking the kids to school, which is apparently a competitive sport among the mothers in this country. I’m guessing that this is an outgrowth of the paparazzi habit of snapping celebrities in unguarded moments, such as when taking the kids to school; the tabloids are forever showing this supermodel or that actress looking chic or–horrors!–looking frowsy in front of their kids’ school. A recent study found that 1 in 6 mothers gets a new hairdo–average cost £50 (over $80)–for the first day of school, just to look good in front of the other mothers. One in five buys a new outfit, with the average mom (UK: mum) spending about £60 (almost $100) on “new clothes, shoes or accessories” to look good “at the school gate”. Over half said they wouldn’t dare go on the school run without makeup, and fully three-quarters said they wouldn’t be seen dead dropping the kids off if they were wearing the same outfit as the day before–that’s the moms, not the kids. The kids wear uniforms. I think if I were one of those moms, I’d wish I could just wear a uniform and skip all the bother.

And if I dropped the kids off in a London taxi, it wouldn’t be to impress the other parents; I think the thing I’d like best about driving a London taxi is the turning radius (UK: turning circle): 25 feet. My Volvo’s turning radius is 33.5 ft. If you need more than 25 feet to turn in, then you can’t drop fares off at the Savoy; that’s why London taxis are designed with such a tight turning circle. I’d love to have that kind of maneuverability, and I don’t count on my car to impress other people–which is a good thing, because I drive a Volvo, and Volvos are terminally uncool over here.

Anyway, if you’ve always wanted your very own London taxi, now you know where to get one. And after you’ve made your purchase from the nice people at London Taxi Export, you can join the London Taxi Owner’s Club (website under refurbishment). And if anybody really does buy one, be sure to let me know!

Taxi painted to advertise Vodaphone; within the bands of colour they've printed names of London streets, probably hundreds of them

These days you can’t walk long in London without spotting one of the the famous not-necessarily-black cabs painted with the Union flag made of up street names, an advert (ad) for Vodafone, a mobile (cell) phone provider.  Usually these specially marked taxis whisk by too fast for me to get my camera out, but I saw one sitting in the taxi rank at Waterloo Station, snapped its picture, and asked the driver how many taxis were painted like his.  The answer? 1000.

They painted one out of every 22 taxis in London?  I’m a Vodafone customer, and I’ve long suspected I’m paying too much; if they go around painting 1000 taxis it looks like I’m probably right.

Our Golden Jubilee taxi, on the Euston Road

A while back I rode in a taxi with a much more exclusive livery: a Golden Jubilee taxi. For the queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977—that is, the 25th anniversary of her accession to the throne—a single taxi was painted silver. If you’d spotted that one cab among the 22,000 in London, it really would have been an event.  For her Golden Jubilee—the 50th anniversary—taxi-spotters got better odds; in 2002 London Taxis International built 50 gold-painted taxis, one for each year Elizabeth II had reigned at that time.

The Golden Jubilee taxis are numbered with the years of Queen Elizabeth II's reign; oddly, the number is woven into the floor carpeting, but anyway you can see that this taxi commemorates the year 2002.

I hailed a taxi a while back and found myself in Golden Jubilee taxi number 2002.  I sorry I didn’t get the driver’s name.  He told me that he’d just gotten (got) lucky, that drivers didn’t have to put in special orders or anything; the orders had been placed long before and if your name was at the top of the list when a Jubilee taxi rolled off the line, you could have it.  He didn’t even have to pay extra.  And he got number 2002, the last one they made.

The proud owner.

The next Jubilee (assuming Elizabeth II is, as expected, still queen next year) coincides nicely with the London Olympics: 2012 should be her Diamond Jubilee, her 60th anniversary.  I have no clue how they’ll manage to celebrate that in taxi colours.

Golden Jubilee logo on the underside of one of the flip-down extra seats (which face the regular seat in the back of the taxi). In other taxis you usually get advertising here.

Most of the Golden Jubilee taxis should still be on the road then, and probably most of the Vodafone taxis as well, as long as they don’t change their ad campaign.  So it strikes me that I’ve left out of my equation (the equation that runs something like VodafoneTaxiAdvertMoney  x  1000 = VodafoneIsRippingMeOff) the length of time the ads stay on the taxis.  Maybe you paint it once and it lasts a the useful life of the vehicle.  Maybe it’s a really good deal.

But there’s something else here that doesn’t add up.  News reports at the time of the Golden Jubilee said that London Taxi International would build 50 Golden Jubilee taxis, one for each year of the queen’s reign, 1952-2002.  See the problem?  It’s what we used to call a fencepost error when I was writing software  (because for a fence with 10 panels, you need 11 fenceposts).  If they started numbering at 1952 and ended with 2002, then they built 51 taxis.  The newspapers (or possible the taxi manufacturer) need to check the math (or as the British say, the maths).

I ought to check the math(s) on my Vodafone bill, but such bills aren’t itemized, not unless you pay extra (which is a major irritation and a subject for another post).  But every time I see one of those Vodafone cabs, I wonder what it’s costing me…

When is the Supreme Court not the Supreme Court?  When sitting as the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC).  This post on the JCPC wraps up the series sparked by my recent visit to the Supreme Court building in London.

Court 3 in the Supreme Court building, where the Justices hear JCPC cases. When in use, the little flags--just there to give visitors an idea of the countries which bring cases here--are removed, and a full-sized flag from the country whose case is to be discussed hangs from a full-sized flagpole.

The USA’s judicial system is a streamlined modern marvel compared to Britain’s—unsurprisingly, since the American version was planned and instituted so recently, something over 200 years ago. The British system has evolved over at least ten centuries,  accruing bits as the world modernized and the British empire grew, dropping bits as the colonies became independent, obliged to take into account all kinds of ancient rights and privileges.  The upshot is that the Crown-in-Council—that is, the monarch, aided by advisers called the Privy Council, which was the ultimate appellate court for the Empire—has been left with the final word on cases from a surprising mishmash of jurisdictions, including some in foreign countries.

Today’s Privy Council has 600 members, and all of those who are judges are technically on the Judicial Committee, the body that hears Queen-in-Council cases.  In practice it’s almost always Supreme Court Justices who sit as the JCPC in Court 3 of the building (the first two courtrooms are described here).  These come from some deliciously named lesser-known courts, the most archaic-sounding being the Court of Admiralty of the Cinque Ports, which deals only with naval law as administered along a certain stretch of the south coast.  And the JCPC hears appeals from other military courts, such as those in Sovereign Base Areas, though there are only two of those left, and they’re on Cyprus.  Then there are prize courts, for cases concerning ships or other spoils seized legally (ahem) in wartime; I don’t know when such a court last convened, much less referred a case to the Queen-in-Council, but it must have been a while ago.

The 19th century (but Tudor-inspired) front door.

A few ecclesiastical courts can still send cases: the Church Commissioners, who handle investments and real estate of the Church of England; and the Chancery Court and the Arches Court, which handle disciplinary matters among English clergy. The Chancery Court of York covers the northernmost third of the country; the Arches Court of Canterbury in reality covers the rest although theoretically it has authority over only the Archbishop of Canterbury’s London peculiar—a peculiar being an area not subject to the bishop of its local diocese.  (This particular peculiar consists of 13 parishes in London.)

I can’t imagine cases come up often; I’ve just included all of this because I thought that bit about the peculiar was so wonderfully…peculiar.  The bulk of the JCPC’s caseload comes from Crown Dependencies, British Overseas Territories, and former colonies.

Each Crown Dependency has a different legal relationship to the Crown, but in general they recognize the Queen’s authority and depend upon her for defense and such, but they are not part of the United Kingdom.  The best-known are the Isle of Man and the Bailiwicks (a bailiwick being the jurisdiction of a bailiff) of Jersey and Guernsey, two little clutches of islands off the coast of France.  It remains to be seen whether anyone will take seriously the 2008 claim by the (putative) owner of Forewick Holm that this Shetland island, which he’s renamed Forvik Island, is a Crown Dependency and therefore not subject to laws passed by Parliament.

And here's another door, an interior one, leading to... the coffee shop. This has to be the most elegant coffee shop entrance in London. I peeked in at first, unsure whether I was really allowed to open it. Odd that the only place I felt might be off-limits, and wasn't sure I was welcome, was the coffee shop; that just points up how open and welcoming the Supreme Court is about its work.

British Overseas Territories range from the British Antarctic, inhabited only by researchers, to the British Indian Ocean Area, the world’s largest marine reserve.  (It has no civilian inhabitants except fish, because the UK evicted all the civilians for military reasons, alas.)  There are twelve other British Overseas Territories, all of them small islands: Pitcairn, Montserrat, and so on.

And then there are several independent countries that find it useful to appeal cases to the JCPC rather than to fund and run their own ultimate appeals courts.  On any given day, the JCPC may hear cases from Jamaica (in the Caribbean), the Falklands (off the tip of South America), Mauritius (off Reunion Island, which is off of Madagascar, which is off of Mozambique, in case you need reminding), or Kiribati (32 South Pacific atolls plus one honest-to-goodness island, which I’m tempted to say are in the middle of nowhere except that they are really quite close to the intersection of the International Date Line and the equator, which is—in cartographical terms, anyway—probably the antithesis of nowhere).

It may no longer be valid to say that the sun never sets on the British Empire, but at one time—presumably when India and Canada participated—one quarter of the world could appeal cases to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.  Even drafting in senior judges from the countries involved to help, Justices still had to grapple with legal niceties of (here I can’t do better than quote from the JCPC’s website):

• Roman Dutch law from South Africa, British Guyana and Salome
• Spanish law from Trinidad
• pre-revolutionary French law from Quebec
• the Napoleonic code from Mauritius
• old Sardinian law from Malta
• Venetian law from the Ionian islands
• medieval Norman [French] law from the Channel Islands
• acts of the Oirwachtas from the Irish Free States
• Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu law from India
• Ottoman law from Turkey, Cyprus and Egypt
• Chinese law from British courts in Shanghai
• tribal law from Africa

This is the lawyer's suite, where lawyers can confer and prepare. The room seats over 30 lawyers who are in the building for cases at either the JCPC or the Supreme Court, and sometimes there are that many involved in a single case.

Though some countries listed have now withdrawn from the British system, that’s also not a complete catalog.  It leaves off Brunei, for example, even though the JCPC hears cases for the Sultan from time to time as a courtesy, reporting back to him rather than reporting, as is usual for the Privy Council, to the Queen.

Lastly, in one more improbable legacy of history, appealed cases from the Disciplinary Committee of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons go to the JCPC.  (There must be a good story—possibly a shaggy dog story—of how that came about.)

All of these can have their cases heard in Court 3 by right. The Committee cannot refuse such appellants; unlike the Supreme Court, the JCPC doesn’t get to chose which cases are worth tackling, and there are a lot of cases to get through.  Almost half the cases the Justices of the Supreme Court heard last year were JCPC cases from other countries.

In another strange twist, even though Britain doesn’t have the death penalty, the JCPC rules on points of law which can mean life or death for appellants from countries that do.  In one of the last cases to come from Belize, the Justices decided that a judge there had acted unlawfully in the way he applied the death penalty, and as a result a condemned man’s sentence was converted to life in prison.

There are fewer countries participating all the time; Belize withdrew from the system last year, and before that New Zealand left in 2004.  But even without them, and even without obstinate priests and obstreperous soldiers, dubious veterinarians and debatable spoils of war, it’s unlikely that the Justices will be idle.  Even though the British like to accuse the US of being excessively litigious, plenty of British people do turn up in court. I reckon there’ll be enough homegrown cases to keep the Justices in business for a few more centuries.

The Justices of the UK Supreme Court, gathered for the swearing-in of a new colleague, Lord Wilson, in May 2011. Used by permission (c) UK Supreme Court 2011

Actually the entire British judicial system began a new legal year on Monday, and it opened with a Church of England service in Westminster Abbey—as I’ve mentioned before, there’s no official separation of church and state here.* Afterwards the judges crossed Parliament Square for the Lord Chancellor’s Breakfast, nowadays more of a reception with a buffet.  The  custom began in the Middle Ages when the judges were required to fast before the service,  and had to parade with empty stomachs nearly 2 miles to the Abbey in the first place. Most now arrive by car, but the Justices of the Supreme Court, who only had to cross the street, walked over to the Abbey on Monday in their formal finery: black robes heavily embroidered with real gold thread, generally only worn for this opening service and at the State Opening of Parliament.

You may have seen lawyers in British courtroom dramas on TV wearing black robes and with little white wigs perched on top of their heads, with judges wearing even more elaborate get-ups.  Wearing wigs only dates back only to the 17th century, when wigs for men became the popular fashion; gowns date back at least to the Middle Ages, when they were worn by all students and most educated professional men.  There’s been a lot of discussion in the legal profession here about whether to continue these traditions, but the Supreme Court, being new and making up its own rules, decided to go wigless. Even in the procession on Monday, the Justices wore no wigs, although Lady Hale, the only female Justice, wears on these occasions a hat she had designed for the purpose.   (It is much more usual for women in the UK to wear hats for formal ceremonies than it is in the US. Women’s hats are so common at special events, especially church weddings, that one woman who asks another “Will I need a new hat?” is understood to be asking “Are you getting married?”)

The Supreme Court's front door (with friendly doorman just discernible). The carvings over the door depict Westminster Abbey receiving its Royal Charter in 1560, a suitably medieval subject for the neo-Gothic building (although it's very late neo-Gothic, completed in 1913).

Maybe Lady Hale just felt that the gravitas of the court demanded headgear. That’s apparently what the lawyers felt; given the choice, they decided to continue with wigs and gowns. Our tour guide (see previous post) suggested that the lawyers might feel the gowns and wigs bolster their courage, because speaking in front of the Supreme Court must be pretty intimidating, no matter what the Justices wear when they’re sitting.

These sittings take place during four terms every year: Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter, and Trinity—names used on similar calendars at some of the major historic universities, and all obviously derived from the calendar of the Christian church. Michaelmas—September 29, the feast of St Michael the Archangel—is one of 4 traditional quarter days in England, used at one time as the days rents were due or quarterly meetings held, the other quarter days being Lady Day (March 25, meaning the Feast of the Annunciation for the church, and meaning something else entirely for fans of Billie Holiday), Midsummer Day (June 24), and Christmas Day (December 25).**

The average person on the street in London probably wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly which day is Michaelmas, but they’d know that the word Michaelmas means autumn, so the guide who took us around the Supreme Court building could mention the Michaelmas term and be comfortable that people would know what she meant. Heads around me nodded; I was probably the only one who had to go home and look it up.

Another frieze from the front of the Supreme Court's building, this one showing King John and the barons at the signing of the Magna Carta, 1512. The Magna Carta is the foundation of the British constitution, which is not written, but which you might say is actually made up of history, consisting as it does of case law, conventions, and customs.

In any case, Monday’s procession in full regalia is a rare event. Most days the Justices, in ordinary business clothes (possibly plus one hat), come in, sit down, and get to work—except that they don’t all work at the same time. In the US, all 9 Supreme Court Justices are expected to hear every case, but in the UK, depending on the importance of each case and what areas of the law apply, they assign a panel of 5, 7 or 9 Justices. It’s a good thing they don’t always need all twelve Justices at once, because right now there are only ten; they’re waiting for the independent commission that selects new Justices to come up with replacements. From time to time the Court drafts in retired Justices, or judges from certain lower courts, when particular people have experience pertinent to some case, but that doesn’t have to do with filling vacancies, just with getting the best heads available to work on the problem.  That seems to me admirably practical, but I can’t imagine the US Supreme Court doing it; nobody but the 9 Senate-confirmed Justices is welcome at their deliberations.

Today’s Justices may make up the first court in the UK to be called the Supreme Court, but since supreme is just the name for the highest court that hears appeals, every judicial system has some court that qualifies. Until the 1870s, the highest court here was the House of Lords itself—the whole House, which today has 824 members (I’ve had trouble pinning down how big the House was in the 1870s). The equivalent in the US would be to have all of the Senate hear legal cases—and even if the US Senate were to do that, then the court would have only (only!) 100 judges. With so many Lords participating, it’s no surprise that the system became too cumbersome, so certain Lords were designated Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, more commonly called Law Lords.  The Law Lords met separately from the rest of the House to hear appeals as highest court.

And just for some color after those pictures of monochrome carvings, here's a close-up of the carpet with the motif featuring the rose, flax, thistle and leek of the Supreme Court's logo as designed by Peter Blake of Sgt Pepper's album cover fame.

But that system still allowed conflicts of interest that the US separation of powers prevents.   Our guide cited the controversial 2004 law banning hunting with dogs (widely considered a ban on fox hunting, although many types of hunting were affected). The Law Lords by custom do not vote on legislation, but officially there was nothing to stop them, and two of the Law Lords who felt strongly about hunting did vote. It would have been possible for them to go downstairs to the House, vote on the law, and then walk upstairs to the Law Lords’ committee room and decide cases based on that law.

Almost as much of a problem, using that committee room made it difficult for the public to see what went on.  The room couldn’t accommodate many spectators, it was difficult for the public to get to, and it couldn’t accommodate filming.  (Almost all of the proceedings of the Supreme Court are now filmed, with the footage sometimes aired by major networks or streamed on the web.)

Nowadays the public can go see what happens in all three very public courtrooms in the Supreme Court building—but so far I’ve only told you about two of them. That’s because Court 3 is not for the Supreme Court at all, but for the Justices in their other hats (or other wigs?), when they sit as the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC).

And just like my series on the English habit of drinking tea, in which one post turned into two, and two became three, I’m finding that the tale grows in the telling. I’ll have to let you in on the activities of the JCPC in the next post.

In the meantime, here’s the poem the Poet Laureate wrote for the UK’s first Supreme Court.

Lines for The Supreme Court
Tides tumbled sand through seas long-lost to earth;
Sand hardened into-stone – stone cut, then brought
To frame the letter of our four nations’ law
And square the circle of a single court.
Here Justice sits and lifts her steady scales
Within the Abbey’s sight and Parliaments
But independent of them both. And bound
By truth of principle and argument.
A thousand years of judgment stretch behind –
The weight of rights and freedoms balancing
With fairness and with duty to the world:
The clarity time-honoured thinking brings.
New structures but an old foundation stone:
The mind of Justice still at liberty
Four nations separate but linked as one:
The light of reason falling equally.

– Andrew Motion

* Despite separation of church and state, the Catholic Church has provided a special mass to which all the US Supreme Court Justices and some guests are invited, the Sunday before the term opens in the autumn, every year since 1953. Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously does not attend, but other non-Catholic Justices often do. At the moment, the US Supreme Court is made up of 6 Catholics and 3 Jews, a tally which by no means reflects the religious habits of the country as a whole!

** Scotland traditionally had different quarter days: Candlemas (February 2), Whit Sunday (May 15), Lammas (August 1), and Martinmas (November 11). You get used to hearing “except in Scotland” about a lot of things when you talk about traditions and laws in the United Kingdom.