Remembrance Day Update on London Poppy Day

It’s Remembrance Day here, and at the end of a day full of ceremony and solemnity, I’m pleased to report that London Poppy Day (see previous post) brought in £802,000 (that’s $1,275,000)for needy veterans and soldiers and their dependents.  That’s even more impressive when you consider that last year’s total was £450,000.  As the British say, “Well done, you!”

The Queen touring a poppy factory.

Some poppies are made by hand, in factories set up to employ disabled veterans and their dependents.  Click here to follow a link to a YouTube video of the Queen visiting a poppy factory, and making her own poppy to wear.

London Poppy Day

(I’m supposed to be writing about Blake and Parry and “Jerusalem”, but blogging is a kind of journalism, so I’ve got to consider current events, too—and they don’t stay current for long.  Besides, as Arlo Guthrie says, “You cain’t always do what ya s’posed to do”.  I’ll get back to “Jerusalem” soon, but in the meantime…)

A member of 23 Engineers collects donations and distributes poppies at Waterloo Station in London on Nov 1.  He’s a communication specialist, as my father was in WWII; when I described what my father did in the Pacific, this soldier said it’s much the same task today.

Every year in late October Britons start wearing little paper poppies in buttonholes or pinned to lapels, until by about November 3rd, almost everyone you meet—and certainly everybody you see presenting a programme or reading the news on network television—will have a little red paper flower on show.  And they—no, we—will be wearing them through November 11th, Remembrance Day, aka Armistice Day, aka Poppy Day.

You get your poppy, and a pin to hold it on, from someone collecting donations on behalf of the Royal British Legion.  The money goes to help veterans and serving military personnel or their dependents who are in need; the poppy is meant to remember the fallen in all of the wars, chosen because of the poem, well-known on both sides of the Atlantic, that begins

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row…

(You’ll also find the first line given as “In Flanders fields the poppies blow”.  The Wikipedia page for the poem gives the word as blow right next to an image of the handwritten poem that clearly has the line ending in grow.  Since the handwritten copy is from the poet—Canadian military physician Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae—and has his signature, I’m going to assume the word should be grow.)

Members of the King’s Royal Hussars, a cavalry regiment, gearing up to go collect donations and give out poppies at Waterloo Station. Yes, we still have cavalry units; they deal with tanks and other armored fighting vehicles.  I’m extremely sorry that these pictures are such low quality; you can’t tell that they wear distinctive red trousers (they call them crimson; Americans would call them maroon).  Because of their red finery, they’re nicknamed the Cherrypickers.

I happened to pass through Waterloo Station in London yesterday, and saw more than the usual number of veterans and soldiers out collecting money and handing out poppies.  By their uniforms, they were from all different regiments, too.  There had to be something out of the ordinary going on, so I asked around, and found myself speaking to Jeremy Stephenson, one of the founders of London Poppy Day.

Seven years ago, he and a few friends collected donations outside one London Underground station and raised £500 for that year’s Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal.  The project has grown a bit: this year Mayor Boris Johnson zoomed up the Thames in a Royal Navy RIB (rigid inflatable boat) to kick off London Poppy Day, carrying a plastic poppy several times bigger than his head as he boarded HMS Severn ; military bands played at locations all around London; Military Wives, the surprise hit of a recent reality television programme for choirs, performed; and a real Spitfire aircraft visited Covent Garden.  And over 2000 volunteers from the British Army, the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, and several City firms (you can think of the City as similar to Wall Street) collecting at over 60 railway and Underground stations aimed to raise £1,000,000—in twelve hours.

A member of the London Irish Rifles collecting donations at Waterloo Station. He declined to let me photograph his face, but he did take my pound coin and give me a poppy. I watched while a couple with two small kids came up, and the kids were each given a coin to throw into the bucket and helped to put on their poppies–another generation taking up the tradition. What are the chances we can stop sending kids to war before those two are old enough to go?

I stopped to speak to a couple of the soldiers collecting.  I’m in awe of people willing to put themselves in so much danger on behalf of someone else, though I don’t understand, actually, why we’re still asking people to do that; it’s 2012, and I should have thought we’d be clever enough by now to figure out a way to avoid having to send young people off to shoot at each other.

But the day we work out a better way for all of us to share the same planet is going to be a long time coming, and until then we have to deal with war and its aftermath; this isn’t news, I know, but it’s one thing to see photos of soldiers in Iraq, watch video interviews from army camps in Afghanistan, or cheer for Paralympic athletes who lost limbs while in uniform, and it’s something else again to speak face to face with someone who has been there; who feels that he’s lucky to have come back; who admits that he’s lost friends; who agrees with me, when I say that the job must be terrifying, that it is terrifying; but who’s still a soldier.  It is in fact staggering that people do this at all, and especially when you can see how young they are; I talked to a veteran who, at age 25, commanded men who turned 18 on active duty in Kosovo.

Mr Trevaskis, who comes to my front door every year collecting for the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal.

And that’s why I always get a poppy and wear it.  I’ve read opinion pieces explaining why the writers choose not to wear poppies (which shows you how common it is to wear one; not wearing a poppy is an aberration that requires an explanation): this one believes that the government should take care of veterans and dependents and not leave them to rely on charity, and that one feels that the poppies that once signaled “Never again” have changed meaning over the years, since the warfare we say we don’t want somehow never seems to stop.  But these aren’t theoretical soldiers who shouldn’t have to fight, they’re real human beings who have fought and who I’m sure want to see an end to war more fervently than the rest of us.  And yes, the government shouldn’t leave veterans and dependents out in the cold, but when it comes to needy people and charity– well, saying  “someone else should do it” doesn’t get you much of anywhere.

Young people still put themselves in danger for others, hoping to do good, making huge sacrifices; I respect them, and thank them, and wear a poppy.

A Last Word about Isaac Newton and a First Word about William Blake

Sorry that there hasn’t been a post here for a couple of weeks; sometimes real-world deadlines intrude. I hope to get back on schedule soon.

A peek through the main gate of the British Library in London, where you can just make out the colossal statue of Newton, hunched over, measuring with a compass, or as the British would say, with compasses.

Although I’ve never posted about the British Library in London, it’s one of my favorite places over here. Heck, it’s one of my favorite places on the planet—and while that’s mainly because of the books, manuscripts, maps, and more that they keep inside, there’s also the sculpture outside to consider.

The first thing you see if you enter through the main gate is a statue of Isaac Newton, by artist Edouardo Paolozzi. With a name like that, of course he must be…Scottish. He came from the north side of Edinburgh, but perhaps, given that his parents were Italian, he felt at home in the pedestrian court enclosed by the wings of the British Library, as it’s officially called the piazza.

Paolozzi’s Newton

Paolozzi’s bronze version of Newton is almost 4 metres tall—that’s about 13 feet, and that’s to the top of the curve of its back.  If that hunched-over giant stood up, it would tower over the rest of us. That’s common enough for public statues, but perhaps especially appropriate for Newton, who said that if he saw farther than others had seen, it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants—those scientists and mathematicians who went before—and Einstein presumably stood on the metaphorical shoulders of the giant Newton in his turn.

Blake’s Newton

But the giant Newton in the Library’s piazza isn’t standing at all, nor is it looking out at the world, because Paolozzi based his design on William Blake’s painting of Newton. While Blake would have appreciated the monumental size of the statue, I’m guessing that’s about the only thing he’d approve about the piece. He wouldn’t have found Newton a fit subject for a national institution dedicated to human thought, life, art, philosophy, and more. The Blake engraving that inspired Paolozzi is actually titled Newton: Personification of Man Limited by Reason.

Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Nelson Leading Leviathan

I say he’d approve of the scale of the bronze Newton because Blake lamented, back in the earliest 19th century, that huge civic artworks had fallen out of fashion, because he liked the idea of getting to paint 100-foot-high versions of his works The Spiritual Form of Pitt and The Spiritual Form of Nelson. That would be something like an American artist today saying it’s too bad the country has lost its taste for what Blake called “paintings on a scale that is suitable to the grandeur of the nation” and proposing 100-foot-high interpretations of The Spiritual Form of Obama and The Spiritual Form of General Petraeus. Even in 1805, I think that was probably seriously weird.

Blake was a poet, a painter, a visionary, an illustrator, a prophet, an engraver, and possibly a madman. He began seeing visions at age 9 and saw them all his life, so you can see how, since he thought these were glimpses of something eternal, divine, and true, he’d think that using reason might but a damper on things.

A page from Blake’s America: A Prophecy, typical in that he printed the page from his own engraving, and colored the illustrations by hand.

Blake eventually worked out an entire mythology involving a pantheon of figures you might call demigods, as an illustration of his ideas of the divine and eternal, and of mankind’s place within the grand scheme of things.  He presented his creations in epic poems as well as in artwork, usually in illuminated books which he engraved and then, helped by his wife, painted on the colors by hand.

In this mythology, mankind’s long-ago fall from grace was a fall out of eternity and into time and space, which fractured Albion—the Cosmic man and, while we’re at it, the personification of England—into four parts. Now, here it really gets messy, because everything is overloaded, carrying more than one meaning. But we only need to look at one of the four: Urizen.

The title page of The Book of Urizen. Behind him there’s a tree which has bent over and re-rooted, to grow again. If you read the previous post, you might recognize that as something you’ve heard of before…

Urizen is a creator god (except that he isn’t) and maps in some ways to the Biblical Jehovan (except that he doesn’t; I told you Blake was seriously weird). Urizen is man’s reason, without the stabilizing balance of the three other qualities Blake found essential—emotion, imagination, and instinct—and is an oppressor, an enslaver, of humanity.  His name is a pun on horizon, indicating that his vision is limited, and on your reason.

Urizen as The Ancient of Days

Blake’s painting of Newton casts him as Urizen (compare the illustrations), and shows him measuring and calculating, having turned his back on the beauty and variety of nature as shown in colors on what looks to me like lichen-encrusted rock. Blake despised Newton’s approach; 100 years or so after Newton, when rest of the world venerated Newton in large part for his experiments with light and vision, Blake said Newton brought us night rather than light, and that Newton’s single vision didn’t compare to Blake’s own fourfold vision. Newton might have stood on the shoulders of giants, but Blake suggested that Newton saw so little from his perch that he might as well have been asleep. He lumped Newton, materialist philosopher John Locke, and Francis “Father of Empiricism” Bacon together as what has been called an infernal trinity. They were to Blake ‘the three great teachers of atheism, or Satan’s Doctrine’, though Newton was not an atheist at all, but quite the contrary; he thought the precision and mechanics of the universe was evidence of the Creator.

In this view of the sculpture, the bolts/pivots for the joints show up a bit better–look at his shoulder, and at his ankle

Paolozzi took Blake’s view of Newton as advocating a mechanistic universe and ran with it, making his Newton out of metal and making the features of his body segmented, idealized, and symmetrical; removing the colors, the lichens and the rock entirely; seating his figure on some kind of rectilinear constructed box; and even showing the bolts that hold the body together, the pivots of the joints, making sure we can see the linear divisions between the pieces of the head, suggesting Newton’s head was made of precisely manufactured units. Paolozzi might as well have said “Yeah, Newton gave us a measured, understandable, reasonable, quantifiable view of the world—and isn’t it great?”

In any case, Paolozzi’s Newton provides the perfect segue from the previous posts on Newton to the next posts, which will involve Blake—because it was Blake who wrote the lines of the hymn “Jerusalem” that one little choirboy sang near the beginning of the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and I figured there must have been lots of Americans who, if they understood what the song was about at all, didn’t understand why the English apparently chose a piece about Jerusalem as a patriotic song. It’s just one more basic fact of British life in the collection of elements of Britishness set out in that ceremony, and one I plan to tell you about next time.

Update on Newton’s Apple Tree

A special welcome to new subscribers who came here after seeing the previous post on Freshly Pressed, WordPress’s showcase of selected blog posts. I was grateful that they included my apple-y article, and wonder whether, if that has been freshly pressed, we’ll get apple juice, and eventually cider…

The title card from the section of the Paralympics opening ceremony called “Gravity”

Turns out that the Paralympic opening ceremony was titled “Enlightenment”. Who knew? The section called “Gravity” used a title card (see illustration) , but the name of the production as a whole was never shown or announced. (One of the presenters said something about enlightenment being a theme of the evening and of Professor Hawking’s life; that was about it.)

Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, the Enlightenment brains behind the Declaration of Independence

So what I saw (see previous post) as a tribute to the scientific revolution was really a tribute to enlightenment in many forms, including the capital-E Enlightenment of which Newton was a part—an intellectual revolution in which people turned to reasoning and science to determine how society should work. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson produced the Declaration of Independence as part of the politics of that Enlightenment, although today sometimes it seems we’re living, to go by current US politics at least, in the Endarkenment.

Sir Isaac Newton

Newton dedicated himself to truth, as a good Enlightenment scientist would, quoting in his notebook a sentiment that goes back to Aristotle that loosely translates as “Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend”, meaning he would choose truth over whatever an authority told him. (A loose translation is good enough, not least because Newton wrote it in Latin when Aristotle’s original was in Greek—go figure.)

I would be doing Newton a poor service, then, if I didn’t correct mistakes when they come to light. So, many thanks to WordPress blogger 3arn0wl who suggested that the tree I said was a descendant of Isaac Newton’s original was in fact the original tree itself, still growing after more than 400 years, which turns out to be true, or at least, almost certainly true.

Pity the other trees in the Woolsthorpe Manor orchard. Newton might even have seen apples fall from this tree from time to time, but not on the one crucial occasion.

I spoke with Ann Moynihan, National Trust Support Officer for Woolsthorpe Manor, to get the true story, and found her a gold mine of information. The celebrated tree, the most famous apple tree since the Garden of Eden, was identified by about 1779 as the one from which Newton said he saw the apple fall; that’s less than 65 years after he died. So while we don’t have firm proof, it’s very likely to be the right tree; dendrochronology (tree ring measurements) show that the tree is over 400 years old; and we’re not likely to get any closer to the truth than that.   It’s possible that by 1779(ish) folklore could have pushed in already and marked the wrong tree as the hallowed one, but why, as William of Ockham might have said, complicate the story?

Ten years ago, Newton’s apple tree and 49 others were designated Great British Trees in honor of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.

The tree being so famous, when it blew over in a storm in 1810 the press got the story and ran with it, lamenting the death of the tree in quantities of ink—but the tree wasn’t dead. People rushed to make a profit on boxes and even chairs made of the dead branches, but the remnants of the tree sent up new shoots; there was life in the old fruit yet.

In fact, Ann suggested that the tree regenerated a la Dr Who.  (I’ll have to explain for those who haven’t encountered Dr Who, but with apologies to Ann, because a joke is never funny if you have to explain it; in short, Dr Who is a character in a science fiction television show who, whenever the actor playing the character quits but producers want to keep the show going, is said to have “regenerated”, and come back to life looking like the new actor who will take the character on.)

Key fobs made from branches pruned from Sir Isaac Newton’s apple tree, on sale in the shop at Woolsthorpe Manor.

Ann wasn’t familiar with the story I heard from the staff member in the shop at Woolsthorpe Manor, about the tree having been tested against the DNA of a piece of wood signed by Newton himself, but said that the Royal Society has a piece of wood from the same tree—and here, Americans and other non-British readers might want a word about the RS, which is proud to claim Newton as a former member.

The London premises of the Royal Society

Officially, it’s the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge; the American equivalent would be the US National Academy of Sciences, but the RS is 200 years older than the USNAS. It’s a nonprofit body of eminent scientists who support excellence in science, giving grants for research and education projects and advising the government on scientific issues. The RS has recently made a picture database available on the internet; you can try looking up “Newton apple tree” (see Featured Links), or better yet, read the RS’s blog about the pictures of Newton’s apple tree in their collection (click here).

And in its collections of amazing items from the history of science, the Royal Society has a piece of the original apple tree, a piece that’s been up in the space shuttle. The RS lent the 4-inch chunk to British astronaut Piers Sellers who took it up in 2010, along with a picture of Sir Isaac Newton, for what was meant to be the final voyage of the Atlantis shuttle.  (The Atlantis got a reprieve and kept flying, eventually carrying out the last shuttle mission when the program closed down in 2011.)

Piers Sellers, Anglo-American astronaut, took a fragment of wood from Newton’s apple tree on a space shuttle flight.

If you aren’t a space shuttle astronaut or a Fellow of the Royal Society, and you can’t get to Lincolnshire to visit the tree yourself, you still might be closer to the tree that you might suppose; shoots from Newton’s tree have been sent all over the world, grafted onto different rootstock, and produced genetically identical trees.  In Britain, the tree grows in Cambridge at Trinity College and in the University’s Botanic Garden; elsewhere in the UK they have the ‘same’ tree at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Oxford, the Institute of Physics in York, and—though I haven’t confirmed this one—Kew Gardens in Kew, in London.  With pointers from Ann and some serious Googling, I’ve found more instances of Newton’s tree in the US (MIT), Korea (the Korean Research Institute for Standards and Science, in Daejeon), Australia (Monash University), and China (at Nanjing University and at TianJin University).

A descendant of Newton’s apple tree growing in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, although the photographer, rather unusually, seems to have been more interested in the trunk than in the leaves

I feel very much more enlightened now, on the subject of Newton’s tree, which is presumably not one of the enlightenments the producers of the Paralympic opening ceremony had in mind, but that’s okay; I took their point about seeing disabled people in a new light as well.  After watching Olympic athletes show how far you can push the human body to do amazing things, I thought I must have seen the absolute limit of achievement in sports, but the Paralympics showed me how wrong I was; like the best in any field of endeavor from sports to science, the Paralympians push the boundaries even farther.

Photos of Woolsthorpe Manor orchard are mine, the “Gravity” title card is a screen shot from the Channel 4 coverage of the Paralympics, and all other photos are from Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons license.

Isaac Newton and the Paralympic Apples

Apple dancers at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Paralympics

Olympic sports have continued here; the Paralympics don’t end until tonight. British viewers saw the full Paralympic opening ceremony, and we’ve had 4 channels showing events live all day long. I gather that in the US, NBC showed only about 5 hours of the Paralympic action, total—hard to believe.

A performer enters, riding in her wheelchair on a gigantic apple, which sits on a book. Books made up another theme of the ceremony, representing, among other works, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Newton’s Principia Mathematica

The Paralympics’ opening ceremony, like the Olympic ceremony, tackled a revolution, in this case the scientific revolution. The connection between Newton’s apple—represented in many forms, including the real apples given to each spectator on arrival—and the Paralympics might not be obvious, though when you watch some of the people who run on those remarkable blades instead of feet, it’s clear that science and technology underpin some events. But I’d guess that the choice of theme had much to do with the contemporary world’s most famous disabled person being British and a scientist: Stephen Hawking, who narrated the production.

Professor Hawking, looking very small on the main set in the enormous arena

The UK can’t actually claim that the scientific revolution began here—can’t leave out Copernicus for starters, and he was Polish—but I guarantee you that a good proportion of the population finds that the phrase “scientific revolution” brings to mind that apple hitting Isaac Newton on the head 100 years after Copernicus. Newton wasn’t actually conked on the head, but there was an apple tree, he did watch an apple fall and, watching it, wondered why apples always fall down and never out to the side or something, a bit of daydreaming that led to the universal law of gravitation. Descendants of Newton’s apple tree still grow in the same orchard at his home in Lincolnshire, which I visited just a couple of days before those apple-wielding performers (see illustrations) appeared on my TV/telly, so I’m using that as an excuse to write about Newton in the middle of my streak of Olympic-ceremony posts.

A 430-voice chorus sings Principia , a violently discordant piece by composer Errollyn Wallen inspired by Newton’s work

Isaac Newton was born prematurely at Woolsthorpe Manor on Christmas Day 1642, so small that the nurse said he could fit into a quart jug (in the US we’d have said pitcher; Brits think pitcher is as quaint and old-fashioned as Americans think jug is). Servants sent out for supplies for the baby sat down and goofed off rather than hurry, as they didn’t expect him to be alive when they got back anyway.

Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, where Isaac Newton was born, grew up, and did some of his most famous work.

On the other hand, local superstition at the time held that it was lucky to be born on Christmas Day. It was also supposed to be lucky to be born after the death of your father, as odd as that sounds, and the baby’s father had died a few months before. When his mother, Hannah, remarried, she left three-year-old Isaac at Woolsthorpe Manor with his grandmother. Lots of books will tell you that this meant her new husband didn’t accept his step-son, but the National Trust (historic preservation group that maintains the house) says it’s more likely that Hannah shrewdly left her son in the Newton home to make sure no one questioned his right to inherit the place.

The farm at Woolsthorpe Manor

When he was older, his mother also demanded he do his familial duty and work on the farm—Woolsthorpe Manor sounds grand, but it was really just a glorified farmhouse. Had that worked out, he might have remained illiterate like his father, who never learned to write his own name. (There’s a grid of small cup-shaped gouges on a plaster wall at Woolsthorpe Manor that historians think is an inventory of livestock; presumably that was how you kept track if you couldn’t read or write.) But Newton’s mother found she could lead a scientific genius to the land, but she couldn’t make him cultivate it.

Newton, first scientist ever knighted, was granted a coat of arms; claiming descent from a certain baron, he was allowed to adopt that baron’s ancient symbol. The crossed bones are not uncommon on arms and don’t imply piracy; National Trust staff suggested they are sheep bones, as the family made its money in sheep.

In the end, she allowed him to go to school, and from school to Cambridge, where she expressed her feelings about his choice not to be a farmer by giving him so little money that he had to work as a servant for richer students. It doesn’t seem to have mattered much. The only thing that could keep him away from Cambridge was the plague, which closed the place down in 1665.

As far as is known, this is the apple tree from which Newton said he saw the apple fall, one of several in the orchard that lies just outside the front door at Woolsthorpe Manor. It’s certainly over 400 years old. The variety is Flower of Kent, and it’s a cooking apple.

So Newton went back to the farm and sat there by himself, totally revolutionizing science, later saying “I was in the prime of my age for invention”. He not only saw the apple fall and worked out his theory of gravitation, but developed the three Laws of Motion, invented calculus, worked out principles of mechanics and of planetary motion, and did famous experiments with light. His work always began with observation, and he was such an inveterate experimenter that, rather less famously, he stuck a blunt needle into his eye to see how pressing on his retina would alter his vision.

Performers pull giant apples into the stadium

A trip to Woolsthorpe Manor includes a chance to see the window that Newton covered, leaving only a small opening so that he could direct sunlight through a prism and break white light up into colours. Newton didn’t invent the prism; people knew them from way back. Ships used prisms to let light in below decks, for one thing, and Newton bought his prism at a country fair, maybe sold as toy for children. In any case, before Newton, people thought that prisms added colour to light, and that all colours were mixtures of dark and light, so that (I’m not making this up) one theorist said that red was produced by the purest white light with the least amount of dark mixed in (I know, I know) and black was pure darkness, but if there was just a little light mixed into the darkness, you got a sort of dull blue. Newton used a second prism to bend the light again, merging the colours to produce white light, which pretty much knocked the ol’ prisms-apply-colours theory off the table (and at least it didn’t require any of that needle-in-the-eye business).

A giant apple floats in.  Before Newton, people thought objects contained more or less of properties called gravity and levity, which made those objects heavy or light.  This, then, is an apple full of levity, I suppose.

Isaac Newton ended up the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, an extremely prestigious position. One of his professors had the job, but resigned so Newton could have it; he was that good. Three-hundred and ten years later, Stephen Hawking got the job*, which leads us back to the opening ceremony of the Paralympics, in all its apple-y glory.

Apples floated in on wires. Performers rode in on gigantic apples, dragged in enormous apples on carts, tossed around beachball-sized apples, juggled apples. On cue, everyone in the stadium bit into their free apples for one thunderous communal crunch.

Apples everywhere…

And Professor Hawking told us via his synthetic voice that “There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being”. True, but some are less run-of-the-mill than others, and watching Paralympic athletes you can’t help but be majorly impressed. I’m going to miss the games. (I’ve already looked up a wheelchair basketball team near me and hope to go see them play.) But at the moment, I’m looking forward to tonight’s closing ceremony. Just in case there’s audience participation, I’ve got some apples standing by.

* Lucasian professors are required to retire at 67, so Professor Hawking left the Lucasian Chair in 2009, replaced by physicist Michael Green.

Photos of Woolsthorpe Manor are mine; others are screenshots from the broadcast of the opening ceremony of the Paralympics

The Windrush

Continuing the series on aspects of Britishness that appeared in the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics.

A group of Victorian industrialists, played by a multiracial (admittedly mostly white) cast of actors in the opening ceremony of the Olympics, 2012

After the opening ceremony for the London Olympics, some British political figures said the presentation had been too political, that it had too left-wing an agenda, and reports here seem to show that some Americans agreed.

I’m left (as it were) struggling to see how a production introduced by a Greek chorus of Victorian industrialists can be seen as left-leaning.  Okay, under those top hats and behind that facial hair we saw skin tones not normally seen in British boardrooms of the period, but surely no one could have thought the production was meant to be realistic—the stylized movements of industrialists and workers were a bit of a giveaway.  Any way you look at it, those guys represented the economic powers behind the industrial revolution, which was hardly a socialist love fest.  As right-leaning mayor of London Boris Johnson even said (though not in these words), the Eton Boating Song and the Queen of England are icons, and not ones associated with the proletariat.

Over here, BBC commentators told us the theme of the evening was revolution, from the industrial to the digital, but perhaps change would be a better characterization.  Yes, votes for women was once a revolutionary idea, but surely nobody today would argue that including suffragettes reveals a left-wing agenda.

An articulated model of the Empire Windrush enters the arena in the opening ceremony.

Other countries were free to cut whatever portions of the production they didn’t like, and the USA made some surprising cuts, including a nod to the social revolution British people refer to with the shorthand “the Windrush”.  I sat down today thinking “Surely a good many readers of this column must have wondered why a model ship came into the arena, accompanied by a lot of well-dressed black people carrying suitcases”—but then I read that NBC cut that sequence, so today I find myself answering a question nobody asked: What’s the Windrush, and why include it?

The British vessel Empire Windrush started life as the Monte Rosa, a cruise ship built in Hamburg in the early 1930s.  The Monte Rosa became part of the Nazis’ Strength Through Joy program/programme (the party rewarded deserving members with cruises), and eventually part of the German war effort.  She stayed in military service but changed sides when the British captured and renamed her in 1945, adding her to a series of troopships with two-word names beginning Empire and ending with the name of a UK waterway.

Newbridge, spanning the Thames near the confluence of the Thames and the Windrush (photo courtesy of Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons license)

(The Windrush is a minor river that joins the Thames way upstream in Oxfordshire at Newbridge, a bridge so named, rather unimaginatively, because it was the newest of three built in the area.  By monks.  During the reign of King John.  So it must have been before 1216, though the existing stonework dates only (only!) to the 1300s.  I wonder what people will call the proposed modern bridge that is being considered, which if built would give Newbridge some relief;  its 600-year old stonework is beginning to show wear.  They could instead consider raising funds for bridge maintenance the way people did back then: get a bridge hermit.  It sounds like something out of a folktale, but apparently you built a hermitage at the foot of the bridge, installed a hermit, and got your hermit, when not doing his daily hermiting, to collect contributions from travelers.)

The real Empire Windrush (photo courtesy of Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons license)

But when most British people today refer to the Windrush, they don’t mean the river or even the ship, but specifically the voyage it made in 1948 from Australia to England via Jamaica.  Ads in Jamaican newspapers offered inexpensive berths to encourage relocation to the UK to help bulk up a labour force depleted by the war, and so the Windrush brought what’s generally taken to be the first substantial group of Caribbean immigrants.  Nearly 500 people took up the offer (and at least one stowed away), mostly Jamaicans and Trinidadians, some to join the Royal Air Force, some just to get a look at Britain, some to make a new life, but most to make good and then go home again—though mostly they stayed.  (As my own much less dramatic and completely historically unimportant 2- to 3-year British adventure has lasted 13 years so far, I understand how this can happen.)

Actors playing passengers disembarking from the Windrush

These were mostly skilled people, not the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ who come to mind when most Americans think about groups of immigrants.  Some had places to stay, but authorities found beds for those who didn’t in the Clapham South deep shelter, one of 8 air-raid shelters dug during the war with the idea that afterwards they would be used as tunnels for London Underground (US: subway).  That was prophetic for the many Windrush passengers who eventually went to work on trains or buses. (In the 1950s, the UK held recruitment drives in the Caribbean specifically to hire bus drivers.  That came up on my citizenship test, actually.)  As for the rest, a sizeable contingent went to work for the newly formed National Health Service.

More actors playing more Windrush passengers

The closest Employment Exchange (now Jobcentre Plus; US: Unemployment Office) was in Brixton, so some looked for lodgings in that part of London, which still has strong associations with what’s called here the West Indian or the Afro-Caribbean community.  On the 50th anniversary of the landing of the Windrush, one of the squares in Brixton was renamed Windrush Square.  Scholars, historians, and teachers use phrases such as the “Windrush Generation”, and “pre-Windrush Britain”, and there’s a move afoot to have a national Windrush Day.

Two kids from the choir singing “Flower of Scotland” in the opening ceremony: one a lass with traditional Scottish red hair and freckles, one a lad with dark skin and a charming gap-toothed smile; both adorable, both British.

Everybody here recognizes the Windrush as a symbol of modern, multicultural Britain.  (It’s a shame that NBC didn’t.)  The Angles and the Saxons were after all just immigrants who got here earlier (okay, about 2 millennia earlier). There were Afro-Caribbean communities in Britain by the 18th century; the Windrush passengers weren’t the first, but the Windrush stands for the larger, post-war changes in the complexion and the complexity of the British population, and the contributions of recent immigrants—some from Commonwealth countries, some from non-Anglo-Saxon peoples—to the cultural mix.

Today in British boardrooms you are liable to see some of the different skin tones we saw in the opening ceremony’s group of industrialists (and–gasp!–you might even see a woman).  And if that’s a left-wing agenda, that’s okay by me.

Note: Belatedly it occurs to me that whatever your nationality, if you’ve read Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel Small Island you may know something about the Windrush already.  I hope you feel you know more now, and that it’s worth knowing.

[Images from the opening ceremony itself are screen shots; I'm assuming that as it was a BBC broadcast and I'm a taxpayer, I have the right to use the image for a nonprofit purpose.]

The Shipping Forecast

Rockall by Peter Collyer, from his book Rain Later, Good. Used by permission.
Original caption — too small to be read here and so not reproduced — reads:
Rockall
Southerly 4 backing southeasterly then increasing 6 to gale 8 perhaps gale 9.
Showers then rain.
Good becoming moderate.

I’ve mentioned before how the British see themselves as seafarers; you don’t have to look far for web pages such as “The Importance of Ships to Our Island Nation”  or for lines such as  “As an island nation, [the sea] occupies a special place in our national psyche.”

Admittedly, Britain doesn’t have a good climate for grass skirts, nor exotic native plants for making flowery leis—though we can make a mean daisy chain over here—but the British are islanders nonetheless, and life for many people here depends on what the British call the sea and Americans would more usually call the ocean.  However you refer to it, it can be treacherously changeable.  To keep tabs on what the sea is doing, mariners turn to BBC Radio 4 for the Shipping Forecast on FM or long wave several times a day, but the one I’m familiar with is at 0048 (12 minutes to 1:00 in the morning).  It’s the first one of the day, I suppose, but we landlubbers think of it as the last one.  The Shipping Forecast is like a bedtime story; we go to sleep with it.

So when the Shipping Forecast faded into Elgar’s “Nimrod” at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, I knew that the production that evening was going to be about ordinary, everyday Britain—the real Britain as I know it.  The lines they used were:

…24 hours.  North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth.  Mainly easterly or northeasterly 4, occasionally 5.  Fog patches. Moderate, occasionally very poor.  Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover. North or northeast 4 or 5, occasionally 6.  Fog patches. Moderate, occasionally very poor.  Wight, Portland…

Sea Areas.
(Map from Wikipedia, used under the Creative Commons license.)

The numbers give the strength of the wind on the Beaufort scale, moderate and poor refer to visibility, and the names are the names of sea areas, which I’ll get to in a minute.  The information comes from the Met Office, Britain’s official weather service (a modernized name; it used to be the Meteorological Office), but the Shipping Forecast is more than the sum of its data.

The words themselves, given in concise language for brevity and clarity, come across with the compactness and rhythm of poetry. Taken altogether, they  have the comforting repetitive effect of a litany, even when the announcer is calmly warning craft of a force 10 gale.  Elisabeth Mahoney wrote in The Guardian  of the Shipping Forecast’s “talismanic, haunting power”; a recent AP article  called it a “melodic and soothing chant”, “a reminder that even in the jet age, Britain is an island nation where much depends on the movement of the sea.”

So it’s a litany, a chant, and in at least one context, has been likened to prayer; Carol Ann Duffy, one of several poets who’ve used bits of the Shipping Forecast in their work,  puts words from the Forecast at the intersection of poetry and religious incantation.  Duffy, the current poet laureate and the first woman, the first Scot, and the first out gay person to have the title, ends her poem “Prayer” with:

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer —

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

(Read the full poem by clicking here .)

I first heard the shipping forecast long before I visited England—and must have had no idea back then what I was hearing—when Jethro Tull released the album Stormwatch.  In between verses of “North Sea Oil”, you can hear:

Viking, Forties, Fisher. Northwest backing west, 4 or 5.

Dogger, German Bight. Northwest 5 or 6, occasionally gale 8.

There’s a good map of these sea areas on Wikipedia (click here).    The recitation always begins with Viking and then works its way around, mainly clockwise,  in an established order.  I notice that Carol Ann Duffy disrupted that order for her poem even though the names themselves could be taken, as is, to be found poetry ; scholarly articles have actually been written on the Shipping Forecast as poetry.

If you choose a section of the list of sea areas carefully you can even find, without changing the word order, what I like to call found doggerel:

Dogger, Fisher, German Bight,

Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight

Poets may recite the areas out of order for effect, but other changes creep in that might make you think poets were taking even more liberties than they are, because the names of the sea areas sometimes change.  North and South Utsire (pronounced uht-SIH-ruh) were carved out of Viking in 1984; and as recently as 2002, since I’ve lived in the UK,  the more musical Finisterre was renamed Fitzroy.  Both changes were made to  coordinate the British names with those used by other European countries, though I’d put money on the British versions having been established earlier than others.  (Yes, I should look it up, but I’m tired of entering links into this column, sorry.)

A whimsical painting of a paintbrush-wielding puffin listening to the Shipping Forecast, from Rain Later, Good. Original caption reads “And that ends The Shipping Forecast.  The next will be at…” Used by permission of Peter Collyer.

So those are the Shipping Forecast basics.  There are other intricacies, such as that the shipping forecast, at certain times of day, includes notes about the conditions in inshore waters, meaning areas no more than 12 miles from shore.  These include data from coastal [weather] stations, including buoys that function as lighthouses  in waters too deep for building a stationary lighthouse.  So you’ll hear references to, say, observations taken at Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic.

If you wonder about these places—where they are and what they look like—I can recommend the book Rain Later, Good by Peter Collyer.  Mr Collyer is a watercolorist who has traveled to all the sea areas painting seascapes or landscapes-with-sea-coast of each.  You can find his web site under “Featured Links” on the right-hand side of this blog.

Radio 4 signs off every night with the Shipping Forecast, preceded by an orchestra playing a piece in waltz time called “Sailing By” (though I’ve read that was written with hot-air balloon flight in mind), which is sort of horribly wonderful.  It’s sentimental schmaltz—which is probably redundant, but I think my British readers may not be used to the word schmaltz so I had to add sentimental—but has a nostalgic pull that seems to function in this country something like “Happy Trails” does in the US.  The music is convenient because you can fill up time with it or shorten it if you need to, should the preceding programme run short or long, and it’s distinctive—nobody would broadcast that stuff for any other reason—and alerts seafarers that they’ve found the right radio frequency.

After the music, we get the Shipping Forecast complete with inshore waters, a brief weather forecast for those on land, a quick goodnight from whatever presenter is still on duty in what I imagine to be a studio showing the only light in a darkened BBC building, and then the National Anthem.  It feels like being tucked into bed; all’s right with the world.

I’ll sign off now with a complete list of the sea areas.  God Save the Queen.  Sleep well.

Cromarty by Peter Collyer from Rain Later, Good. Used by permission. The original caption reads:
Cromarty
Northerly backing westerly 3 or 4, increasing 6 later.
Showers.
Good.

Viking

North Utsire

South Utsire

Forties

Cromarty

Forth

Tyne

Dogger

Fisher

German Bight

Humber

Thames

Dover

Wight

Portland

Plymouth

Biscay

Trafalgar

FitzRoy (was Finisterre)

Sole

Lundy

Fastnet

Irish Sea

Shannon

Rockall

Malin

Hebrides

Bailey

Fair Isle

Faeroes

Southeast Iceland

Opening Ceremony 2012:

The ceremony may be old news, but the items director Danny Boyle chose as illustrations of Britishness could easily be a blueprint for a blog like mine, celebrating the differences between US and UK life.  This is the intro to a series of posts treating items in the opening ceremony that foreigners might not have understood.

Official London 2012 Olympics logo in official colors (the one on the left is for the Paralympics). The shapes are intended to read 2012 but to my eye this is…not obvious.

It’s ironic that the Olympics turns so many people into couch potatoes for the duration, sitting on sofas watching the fittest people in sports (UK English: in sport) leap and twist and run and throw.  And it’s also ironic that an event that everyone is at pains to say promotes harmony between nations should be so overtly nationalistic, not least at the opening ceremonies, where the trick is to balance two human impulses: to celebrate the characteristics of your own tribe and to welcome visitors from other tribes.

This time last week British newspaper critics were having a field day (pun intended) with the opening ceremony; almost all of them praised it. Over here, we’d speculated for months.  Could we compete with Beijing’s staggeringly beautiful ceremony?  Would we try?  Should we try?  The  thousands upon thousands of volunteers and professionals who took part had done a medal-worthy job of keeping the secret, and in fact the participants didn’t necessarily know much about what was planned beyond the part they were to appear in.  Director Danny Boyle’s #savethesurprise campaign on Twitter helped, too.

The countdown clock in Trafalgar Square.

In the event (pun also intended), he gave us a tribute to the real, everyday United Kingdom that I know and love.  An ex-pat has divided loyalties;  I’m required once by birth and once by my oath to give 100% allegiance to each of two countries, but on the opening night, I was British and proud of it.

Okay, the giant baby was creepy, I didn’t really need the boy-meets-girl business, and some of the singers had serious problems with pitch (could they not hear themselves properly?), but most of the evening I was smiling, a few times I was cheering, and a couple of times I almost jumped up off the couch, which is the most athletic thing I’ve done since because the BBC is providing 26 television channels showing all the sports.  At our house these days you hear things like “I’m going to the gym this afte—Wait!  Is that the second qualifying heat for the kayak slalom?  I’ve gotta watch that.”

Watching the ceremony, though, I kept wondering what people outside the UK made of it.  I’m sure I didn’t catch all the references myself, and I live here.  Bernadette McNulty suggested in The Telegraph that foreigners might think it was the “strangest episode of Downton Abbey they’ve ever seen”, and a quick canvas of American friends turned up boredom, puzzlement, and outright mystification along with praise–some faint and some with enthusiasm, at least for a few bits of the evening here and there.

Needs no caption.

But as for me, I was hooked as soon as I heard the shipping forecast. Again, I wasn’t the only one; Mick Brown in the same newspaper said “Who cares what [foreigners] thought? This was our opening ceremony and if we want to include the Shipping Forecast…then we will.”

So tomorrow, or maybe even later today, I’ll tell you about the shipping forecast and why I leaped off the couch (okay, maybe I just sat upright, punched the air, and said “Yes!  The Shipping Forecast!”) because this opening ceremony was about my Britain.  And then, in the next few posts, I’ll tell you about other aspects of the UK that the opening ceremony referred to, but that viewers outside the UK might not have understood.  And if any of you are still wondering things like “Who was the guy with the cigar?” or “Why did it say GOSH in the center of the stadium?”, I hope you’ll write and ask.  I’ll give you the best answers I can, but right now, I’ve got to switch the channel from the track and field to the trampoline gymnastics, while the digital recorder captures the equestrian show jumping.  And tonight if I’m lucky I’ll use the BBC web site’s  “catch up” feature to see the archery, or maybe the swimming.
All photos taken from Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons license.

London (but not the one you’re thinking of)

The pleasant eastern Kentucky city of London, proud of its flourishing main street...

Last month on vacation (UK: holiday) I visited London—but probably not the London you’re thinking of, and definitely not the London I normally write about.

London is a town of some 8000 people in Laurel County, Kentucky.  The founders named their new settlement after the famous British capital, but it seems they didn’t record the reason for their choice; maybe they came from the larger London over here and found themselves homesick, maybe they hoped their town would one day be a major player on the global stage.  More likely, they wanted a name that would attract new residents so the town would thrive.

...and proud enough to embed their name in every neatly stamped metal park bench.

I say that London, Kentucky, is a town, and I don’t think any Kentucky Londoners would quibble, but as you can see from its official website, it is a city.  In the US, the term city is used pretty loosely, but in the UK, the designation city is controlled by law; you can’t just decide your town is a city.

Long ago, to call a population center in England a city meant that there was a cathedral there; nowadays the monarch confers the status of city on towns, usually to mark a big occasion—so you’re not a city unless the queen says you are.  For the millennium, she conferred city status on Inverness in Scotland, Wolverhampton in the English Midlands, and Brighton and Hove on the south coast. (Brighton and Hove is one city, despite the name; the two original towns grew together, the way coastal towns often do, until they just joined forces.)  For her diamond jubilee (60th anniversary of her reign) this year, the queen has just elevated three more towns, the new cities being Chelmsford in England, Perth in Scotland and St Asaph in Wales.

City of London (KY) Police Department and 911 call center

In the US, cities tend to be centers of government administration so, if for no other reason, London KY qualifies as a city by virtue of being the county seat (UK: county town). The Laurel County Courthouse seems to be the center of town, with London’s own city hall and police department nearby—though after 12 years in England, I did a double take when I saw signs for these places.  London City Police?  Isn’t that Scotland Yard?

The Metropolitan police headquarters in London (UK)

(Actually, England does have an organization called the City of London Police, but its jurisdiction is only the Square Mile, what locals call “the City”–that is, the financial district, the British equivalent of Wall Street in the US.  Scotland Yard, officially named the Metropolitan Police Service, polices the rest of London UK.)

London KY may not have a cathedral, but it offers worshippers a choice of some 30 churches, plus civic groups from Scouts to Masons (two lodges), and women’s groups of all sorts from groups promoting republican politics to Bass ‘N Gals (women who fish for bass).  The county historical society has a library there, and enterprising Londoners are working to open a museum of local history and genealogy.

Historical marker showing where Boone's Trace forked from the Wilderness Road

There’s plenty of history here—by US standards, anyway.  London is sited, as a marker near the courthouse will tell you, at the junction of the Wilderness Road and Boone’s Trace.  These trails blazed in the later 1700s by Daniel Boone (sometimes by following existing Native American paths, or making use of buffalo traces),  eventually allowed thousands of people from the original British colonies to travel through the Cumberland Gap (a pass in the Appalachian mountains), and into Kentucky; parts of them exist today as part of Kentucky State Highway 229.

The Laurel County courthouse. The marker in the foreground commemorates the civil war Battle of London, in which the Confederates routed Union forces.

But while all that was happening in the new world, the London of the old world was already seventeen centuries old, the capital of the world’s major naval power , and soon to eclipse Beijing as the largest city in the world, (a title it held until about 1925).  Maybe it was that impressive power and history that moved settlers to give their towns the same names; at least eight American states have Londons.  There’s also a London in the Republic of Kiribati (a small Pacific island nation) and one in Ontario, Canada. In fact, some Kentucky Londoners are hoping to establish a sister city (UK: twin town) relationship with London, Ontario, and tell me they’d certainly be open to such a relationship with London, England, too—and why not?

A map of dry counties in the US: the darker the purple, the dryer the counties, green being wet counties. (Gray indicates counties for which there was no data.) Here you can clearly see Texas colored blue, and pretty much see the shape of Kentucky in blue and purple as well, the purple stripe continuing on into southern Virginia.

In addition to churches, clubs, and history, London KY can offer you a drink (at least, if you have it in a restaurant that seats at least 100 people and makes at least 70% of its money from food, not liquor) unlike the rest of Laurel County, which is dry.  My sister used to live in a dry county in eastern Kentucky; the liquor stores just over the border in the next wet county, some of them with drive-through windows, did a thriving trade, and in election seasons cars carried bumper stickers reading “GO WET” or “VOTE DRY”.  (Her county is now classed as moist, meaning there is a wet city within the dry county.)

London (KY) City Hall

It’s difficult to explain dry counties to my British neighbors.  There’s certainly no UK equivalent;  here drinking is considered a part of everyday life and a downright requirement at Christmas.  British people are so shocked at the thought of a place in which you can’t buy liquor that some feel the need to sit down with a brandy or two to get over the shock and get used to the idea.

London (KY) Community Center

London also advertises itself as a place with a moderate climate, though we scooted through the area just hours ahead of a rather immoderate tornado.  If that’s what the locals call moderate, then Kentucky Londoners are sturdy folks!  The wind pushed us on to the place where I grew up; that was only a drive of an hour and a half, but I don’t think I’d ever visited London before.  I’d always thought of it as the site of the famous Mountain Laurel Festival (was probably confused by London being in Laurel County), but I was wrong; the local festival here is the World Chicken Festival, held each September.

And yes, this does have to do with the fact that Colonel Sanders’s original restaurant is less than 15 minutes away, but that’s a subject for next time.

Metropolitan police sign photo and dry county map from Wikipedia, used under the Creative Commons license.  All other photos mine.

Drive Your Own London Taxi

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!