Floating accent, part the first

Vindication!

Scientists – yes, Scientists good and true – conclude Floating Accent Syndrome exists!

I first read about floating accent syndrome in one of Dave Gorman’s books (I have an imperfect memory on this, but I think it was the googlewhack one). Gorman claims to have the tendency of gravitating his accent to align with the person to whom he is speaking, completely accidentally and unconsciously. I think he also mentions it as an especial outcome of being from the Midlands, where we don’t really have much of a distinguishable accent ourselves. Well, Dave Gorman is a wise man, and now Scientists – Scientists! mark you – have confirmed it.

These Scientists say as humans we are likely to imitate those with whom we’re in conversation. It’s an empathetic reflex. I want you to feel I am familiar, so I will try to sound a bit like you and mirror your speech patterns and inflection and even the speed at which you talk.

I’ve said it before; if you live anywhere other than where you were born for any length of time, you probably should start to get a bit of a floating accent. (That is mostly because I have the world’s worst case of it*). Our surroundings should change us. We are supposed to respond and relate to what’s around us.

Unfortunately, in practice, this just makes us sound massively inauthentic. It appears we’re trying to be something we’re not.

It’s funny, because when you're learning a foreign language, mimicking is demonstrably the right way to do it. That’s how you learn it. My French sounds determinedly Québécois. I learnt French in school, but I learnt to use French in Canada. If you use your own accent when operating in a foreign language, you simply sound like someone who doesn’t care enough to try very hard.

My accent these days is an unlovely tattercoat stitched from the shreds of all the places in which I’ve lived. By someone who doesn’t entirely know how to sew. And who doesn’t have time to do much more than vaguely mackle things together relying quite heavily on iron-on hem tape and baling twine. Some things are quite ingrained: I haven’t ever got rid of my glottal stops (Ga’wick airpor’) or my non-rhotic intrusive R (Canada-r-and Australia-r-and New Zealand). Vowels are much less unequivocally nailed down.

The really irritating thing about my floating accent is that sometimes it will float in the opposite direction. Sometimes, with people posher than me – or with Australians/Kiwis – I will hear my vowels rounding out to match theirs (although I’ve never gone as far as grarss or barth). At other times, though, it will send me in the complete opposite direction and suddenly I’m channelling my colliery heritage and asking where ‘ast tha bin since I saw thee last? At what point wanting to belong becomes losing your authenticity, I don’t know.

My question for the Scientists, though, is this: who is mimicking whom? Because if I am trying to sound like you, aren’t you also trying to sound like me? Down what sort of wormhole is that going to end? And...how are we ever going to get out?

*except maybe for Dave Gorman.

social song

Tomorrow, this starts:

A Folk Song A Day

In summary: English folky John Boden does his bit for ‘social singing’ by recording and sharing an unaccompanied song each day for a year. He starts on Midsummer Day (because that’s the sort of thing that is relevant to Our Kind).

Well, the two of you who are still reading, this is undoubtedly A Good Thing, yes?

It is a particularly trad music thing, the preoccupation with ‘social song’. The reason response songs are so bloody long is because it gives everyone a chance; even what my primary school teachers would have called the Slow Learners’ Group can pick up the line after hearing it that many times. If there’s one thing trad music gigs everywhere have in common – England, Canada, Australia, wherever – it’s that consistent effort to make it seem social, as if, ‘well, sure, some of us are up on a stage amid a bunch of heavy-duty sound equipment, having spent thousands of hours honing this talent, these skills, to bring you these sounds, but really we’re all just hanging out together sharing our songs, right?’

Because that’s where it came from, all this, in the beginning.

Coope, Boyes and Simpson have always done unaccompanied singing. Oddly/ excitingly (yes, to me), one song on their new CD As If employs a Québécois style of foot-tapping in a way that pulls the swing of that sound into a really straight, almost Methodist, pure trad English style. It profoundly anglicises it, tames it, makes it something entirely different.

Five very fine Charbonniers do untamed-and-unaccompanied here:

(this is not a recent recording. Aside from anything, they have all apparently discovered scissors and/or barbers these days, which...well, you know how a fairy dies every time we say we don’t believe in fairies? A little bit of my soul dies every time a Québécois musician cuts his hair. Call me Tinkerbell. Anyway, these boys are still purveying The Beautiful like this; hear them more recently (though not unaccompanied) here).

As all of us who have had the misfortune to have ever been trapped around the bad kind will know, the tedium and whininess of unaccompanied English folk singing at its worst can lead you to want nothing so much as to hack your own ears off with rusty shears and feed them to zombie wolves. And never mind ‘social singing’; as far as ‘social skills’ are concerned in that extraordinary brand of fellow whose speciality is the rape-and-pillage ballad, he’s actually the last person on earth with whom you’d want to social-ise.

But at its best?

On my UK touchdown in December, I went to hear the BBC Young Folk Awards, and James Findlay, the kid who won, Had It; the whole thing that ‘It’ is about. He sang and played fiddle, and for the last couple of verses, dropped out the fiddle. In the whole audience, not a timber was left unshivered. He sang again after he’d won the award, and got everyone to join in – in a radio theatre – in the way trad singers all do, to make us feel we’re sharing it, not just being presented with it.

One reason this stuff is important, to me, is that for those of us who live in secular world, we don’t have a good excuse for sharing song. Go to church every Sunday, there’s a reason to lift your voice in the company of other people. In secular world, this is our really good alternative, I reckon, going back to the roots of it like this. One song at a time.

Next week: cake, and the Very Important Question.

extreme weather mayhem

We are currently playing an exciting game of Weather Cliché Bingo in the UK, due to the Extreme! Weather! Conditions! of literally millimetres of snow and hovering-around-zero temperatures. The Eurostar has just limped its first train through in four days, Heathrow and Luton airports seem to be closed indefinitely (if you want to fly anywhere for Christmas, you may do so next March), and roads are closed everywhere. Cue the clichés.

My bingo card is getting full, as it has both ‘chaos’ and ‘mayhem’ on it (though also ‘bedlam’, which I haven’t heard yet). Other family members have crossed off ‘ongoing delays’, ‘heartache’ and ‘families running out of time’ just from one airport alone. Surprisingly, ‘the biggest/worst snowfall in x years’ has yet to make an appearance. But bonus points were scored from a canny spotting of an entreaty to ‘find the Dunkirk spirit’.

There is even an Added Irony round. This covers motorway signs warning about weather problems that are themselves compromised by the weather problems (witness: the ‘Sa preading’ rather than ‘salt spreading’ sign). It also includes a rather brilliant comment heard on tv just this evening that ‘around Christmas is the worst possible time for weather like this to happen’ – mid-July presumably being more convenient.

It seems likely that ‘absolute shambles’ won’t be wheeled out until the aftermath, which could be weeks away at this rate. A twist in the tale tonight might furnish other valuable opportunities, though, as theories begin to be floated on councils being forced to import grit from offshore. (Jury is out on whether importation of pluck and mettle will also be required. Snork).

Please feel free to offer your own suggestions that should be included on the bingo card. Even if you are in Canada, where you will have to stop laughing at the UK’s incompetence for long enough, or the southern hemisphere, where you will have to stop laughing and also come home from the beach.

after three o'clock

The scene: The Seafront Restaurant*, The British Seaside, about 3.10 pm.

ME: (planning to run some errands and then come back later) Hello. What time are you open until?
RESTAURANT LADY: About quarter to five. But you can’t have food.
ME: No, that’s all right.
RESTAURANT LADY: You can have tea, after three o’clock, but no food.
ME: Great! Thank you!

There may be restaurants where the tone of this exchange is begrudging or abrupt, but in this instance (and in most instances of this very same conversation), both participants maintained a jaunty, friendly and pleasant manner.

It is The Way We Do It here.

I would not at all have expected to be served food after three pm in a seafront restaurant at The British Seaside, even though it has the word 'restaurant' in its name, which implies there is food to be had. There is a narrow possibility that at the height of summer and tourist season, allowances would be made for people to eat food in a seafront restaurant after that time, but not always. Thus I was not in any sense disappointed that this was the case.

To Canadians, Americans, and, let’s face it, most people in the world, this is absolutely unfathomable.

But it is one of the many things that makes this The British Seaside. I love it. I don’t love it ironically, or nostalgically, or in a way that implies I think it is quaint or old-fashioned or comical with a side of embarrassing. I just love it, without qualification.

I went back at 4.10 p.m. and had tea, and a scone with jam and cream, and looked out at a wild and wintry sea. And felt very pleased indeed with the whole affair.


*Not its real name. I’ve called it this because I can guarantee you this scene has played out in every single seafront restaurant in the whole of the UK, several hundred thousand times.

bonny green garters. etc.

In England, you will rarely come across so joyous an occasion as Mayday morning, when morris dancers and their cheery musicians welcome the summertime at dawn.

You can see why I miss this riotous, fun-filled occasion.

(They're 'concentrating', I'm told. Presumably on how to escape the sixth circle of hell they apparently feel they are currently occupying.)


Edited to add: Thank you to anyone who dutifully went running for their copy of the Inferno (always on the bedside table, no doubt) and wondered if I purposely picked the sixth circle because that's where the heretics go. I would like to set you straight on this score, because my translation indicates that actually the sixth circle is reserved exclusively for those who play either the accordion or the banjo.

at a folk festival, no-one can hear you scream...

Parental advisory: the following scene contains violence, language, and folk musicians.

Coming to a theatre near you, the summer action blockbuster everyone’s talking about. Skirmishes, silver dagger ballads, and sex, only not really any sex, because come on, who are we kidding?; but if there’s one movie you must see this summer it’s..

FOLK HARD: WITH A MANDOLIN*
*with thanks to First-Eyes Leslie Bee for creative input

Four ancient and bearded men playing assorted instruments are illuminated on a stage beneath a mysterious pergola. At least two of them have their fingers in one ear, enabling them to sing out of tune with themselves. The camera pans back to reveal the raptly attentive faces and strongly individual fashion sense of assorted hippies and academics in the audience, drenched in rain. The last strains of the ninety-third verse of whatever tedious epic the ancient bearded ones were singing die down. The folk festival-goers clap enthusiastically.

THE CHARISMATIC EMCEE: And that was the Neverending Shirtless Barbecue Party Choir with the classic Ballad Of The Buxom Wench Who Was Much Younger Than Me, And What I Did With Her. Next up, Kate Rusby, with…

It is becoming increasingly difficult to hear him over the sounds of approaching helicopters. There is an almighty crash as suddenly the marquee roof is smashed by balaclava-d men in black rappelling from the choppers, carrying assorted firearms.

THE BAND: scattering, yet managing to pick up their beers on the way Eeek!
CHARISMATIC EMCEE: Wha…?
THE MEN IN BLACK: Ha ha! Shoot the motherf***ers, etc.
THE CROWD: Run, run for your lives!
EMCEE: Again, wha…?
THE MEN IN BLACK: We are from the local council, and we are sick and tired of your clogs and your ceilidhs, your tattoos and your tie-dye, your dobros and your didjeridus. We cannot stand by while your unwashed hordes descend upon our nice town and make a lot of noise for a week every year. Folkies out!!

They shoot indiscriminately into the crowd. There is much bloodshed. A grenade is thrown. Plastic cups of beer are spilt upon children. Hippies try to run, but they are wearing flip flops, so they can't, and are gunned down in a merciless rain of bullets. A unicycle wheel rolls forlornly through the confusion.

THE GRENADE: F**k y'all and this mandolin stand! BOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!
BEDLAM: ensues
WOMAN IN FLORAL SKIRT AND FADED TIE-DYE SHIRT, FROM THE CROWD: I’m a teacher! I’m a respectable member of the community and I have been coming here for years to shed my sensible exterior for one stinking week of the summer, wear brightly-coloured leather sandals and sing with my fingers in my ear! I will not be…

She is shot in the face. The camera follows the blood dripping onto her hand-made sandals.

THE MEN FROM THE COUNCIL: surveying the carnage Hurrah! Our town is our own again!

The camera pans across to reveal a cloud of dust approaching from the direction of the pub. We can make out ghostly figures advancing through the haze. Gradually, the figures become clear.

MORRIS DANCERS stride through the bloodbath in bell-pads and slo-mo
THE MEN FROM THE COUNCIL quake in fear
MORRIS DANCERS: chant menacingly One can whistle, two can play, we can dance a Shepherd's Hay! Charge!

The MORRIS DANCERS pitch well-aimed sticks into the vital organs of THE MEN FROM THE COUNCIL, spraying blood and gore over the Neverending Shirtless Barbecue Party Choir's bassist. Some MORRIS DANCERS caper threateningly toward THE MEN waving hankies, and attack Thuggee-style, breaking their necks and leaving THE MEN in crumpled heaps.

KATE RUSBY: Suck my working-class Northern accent, council men!

She winds up and pitches a deadly pair of Northwest clogs, taking out an enormous bunch of THE MEN, who fall backwards into each other in spectacular and bloody fashion. They pile up in a broken heap against a VW camper with a raised-tent roof.

MORRIS DANCERS: regrouping into foot-up formation and singing Oh dear, mother, what a fool I be! Six young men have come a-courting me! Five were blind and the other couldn't see! Oh dear, mother, what a fool I be!

They bring out a set of rapper swords and dance in a circle, weaving the swords together to make a star-shape, which is what rapper sword dancers have done _at the end of every single dance since the beginning of time_ and yet still hold it up high in the air for applause.

MORRIS DANCERS: hold up the star of swords
ACADEMICS AND HIPPIES THAT ARE NOT YET DEAD: applaud weakly
MORRIS DANCERS: toss the star of swords to THE CHARISMATIC EMCEE
THE CHARISMATIC EMCEE: skims the star of swords ninja-style into the last remaining MEN FROM THE COUNCIL.

THE MEN are instantly decapitated by the whirring blades. Their heads bounce across the trampled grass. A lone flip flop sinks into a pool of blood.

MORRIS DANCERS: Time for a pint, then?

call for entries

I'd like to announce my entry for the Most English Saturday Afternoon Competition 2008.

Drove to a small English market town, clocking the traffic jam back in the other direction on the main road and making a mental note to return via small villages with names such as Ashby-de-la-Zouch and Barton-in-the-Beans. Entered car park and drove around for a minimum of 25 minutes looking for a space. Wandered through market street with people shouting "potatoes eighty pence a pound" rubbing shoulders with stalls selling knockoff perfumes and clothing labels. Stopped in a cafe and ordered tea and cake. Gestated a child while waiting for refreshment to arrive. Remortgaged house to pay for refreshment. Returned to car, coming across a real live group of morris dancers morris dancing (while carrying beer).

I think the clincher for my entry is actually knowing the morris dancers personally. It could only have been more English if someone had been filming a BBC adaptation of the Pickwick Papers in the town hall square.

Other entries this year include the entire Tottenham Hotspurs football team performing a pantomime on a chilly East Coast esplanade while eating fish and chips with mushy peas, and Dame Judi Dench singing Land of Hope and Glory as she serves lemon fingers at a Women's Institute tea to raise funds for the Chelsea Pensioners. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I'm in with a good chance.

writer's cramp

If England does one thing well, it’s ecclesiastical architecture. This has got to make the most die-hard heathen want to break into a triumphant chorus of “Hold the fort! For I am coming/ Jesus signals still…” (And then shuffle his or her feet in embarrassment for the outburst, because we are English after all, and anyway we don't know the rest of the hymn).

Most of England oozes centuries of history, but Lincoln has to be just about the ooziest. Cathedral, castle, Edwardian terraces, industrial revolution terraces, mills, Victoriana, Roman mosaics, medieval guildhalls, Magna Carta and all. It's like Historical Pic-n-Mix. The Cathedral’s library dates from 1422 – it still has the original roof and a good proportion of the original (extra comfy) furniture. The reading desks have bars across the top, to which the books could be chained to stop anyone wandering off with them. Of the original 109 chained books there remain 88. There is also a considerable collection of several thousand sort of misc-ish volumes shelved – yes, really – by size. Little ones at the top and big ones at the bottom. The cataloguing system is brilliant – if a book is on the third shelf up and twelve books in, its catalogue number is 3.12. Foolproof. I will be implementing it into the bookselling world post-haste.

Magna Carta is all very well; I mean, it does form the basis of almost every other constitution that exists on the planet and everything, but. The original document was little more than the minutes to a meeting of moneyed thugs who, if King John didn’t agree to their demands, probably wouldn’t have let him get out of Runymede alive. The Pope annulled it more or less right away when King John went to him boohooing that the big mean barons bullied him and it wasn’t really fair (especially as they added a bunch of clauses after he’d gone, one of which I’m pretty sure said “and I’m a big idiot and I smell, signed King John”). It was only reinstated a couple of centuries later, with revisions that made it almost unrecognisable from the original agreement. And it was four hundred years before it was actually meaningful to any other human being in England except for wealthy landowners. And, let’s face it, it has never been meaningful to women, who were effectively legal children up until the 1970s.

But it is very, very old. It has 3500 words, written in ink on vellum. And someone had to write it all out by hand forty-one times – can you imagine? It’s the mother of all after-school detentions: “for pratting about in my class this afternoon, Luke, you will write out Magna Carta forty one times.” “Aww, miss….”

fifteen, love

In another life, I'd be the person who makes the TV musical pastiches at the end of tennis tournaments.

It's the Aussie Open down here right now, and prior to that we had a lesser tournament in Auckland. At the end of each day's play there's a minute or two of shots patched together from the best bits of the matches, accompanied by peppy music. The video is timed such that you see the player smash the ball right on the beat of the music. It's very uplifting.

The ruler of all tennis match musical pastiches is, of course, Wimbledon. Not only do they have daily pastiches, but at the end of week one and then at the end of the whole tournament, they have an uber-pastiche of all the pastiches. There is a subtlety and craft in the Wimbledon pastiches that you simply don't see in the lesser versions down here.

After the Smashing The Ball Pastiche, there is usually one for the loser of the final, patching together their best shots (usually quite good in the men's tournament, though the women's final is always so mismatched that they have a hard time finding good shots from the loser). There is always, always a Rain Pastiche, showing players disappearing into the locker rooms, the umpires and officials looking up at the sky and looking at their watches, spectators wearing stupid hats shaped like umbrellas, and groundskeepers running across the court towing the big green covers, always with one person who trips and falls underneath the cover. Then there is a Didn't We Do Badly Pastiche, where they scrape together the best bits of the British players who all got knocked out in the first round.

There's a Losers' Pastiche In General, showing crummy shots follwed by players throwing their racquets, questioning the umpire, or slumping in their chairs looking depressed with how much they suck. If the tournament has a "character", they warrant their own pastiche - when Goran Ivanisevic was playing, he was good for one practically every day. The doubles tournament is good for a pastiche or two - in fact the pastiche is usually the only time you get to see any of the wheelchair doubles; and the "invitation" doubles are usually good for Henri Laconte doing something outrageous (by tennis standards). This segues nicely into the Comedy Pastiche, which is all the best of pigeons on the court; hilarious at-the-net rallies from the seniors' doubles that go on for a hundred shots with both puffing and grunting and falling to their knees to indicate their unfitness; groups of spectators with "Marry Me Roger Federer" t-shirts; pigeons on the court; someone accidentally bonking a ball girl on the head with a wayward shot and then kissing her and making her day; a shot of the commentators in their booth eating cake; er, and pigeons on the court.

The skill and craft of the Wimbledon Pastiche outshines the skill and craft of the tennis. The Wimbledon Pastiche-makers study at a special pasticherie in the South of France, to create the lightest and most delicate pastiches that nail the feel of the day for those who can't be there to experience it themselves. The graduating final is to create a pastiche match that splices together a current player with someone from the game's past to make it look as if they're playing each other: Sampras vs. Ferreiro; Venus Williams vs. Pam Shriver. The pasticherie's class valedictorian last year was the one who pastiched Navratilova c. 1992 playing Navratilova c. 1982.

Incidentally, police at the Aussie Open yesterday ended up pepper-spraying some spectators whose chanting became "out of control". Tennis hooligans?? That's as likely as knitting hooligans. What is the world coming to?

Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes

September 2nd/3rd commemorates the horror of the Great Fire of London in 1666. It decimated a city of 100,000 people, destroying over 13000 dwellings over an area of a mile and a half by half a mile. The story goes that by forgetting to douse embers in his oven that night, the King's baker set off a blaze that raged overnight through a city built of timber, thatch and pitch - basically a tinderbox - and that was to continue for several days before it was finally controlled mostly by pulling down the buildings in its path until there was nothing left to burn.

It's a relief to know that we could never be the cause of any Great Fire of New Zealand, because despite the many hours we spend kneeling in front of the woodstove, poking and rearranging and joggling and blowing on embers, logs, kindling, copious amounts of firelighters and a publishing house-worth of newspapers, our fire takes at least four hours to even begin thinking about providing actual heat, and mostly instead simply chooses to give up the ghost.

I think our stove is depressed. It just shrugs as we carefully stack the logs, pile up the embers, twist the newspapers, position the kindling and firelighters, as if to say, "look, why bother? We all know I'm going to blaze with the glory of a thousand suns while the newspaper's still in here, and I'll give the impression that the logs are catching fire as the kindling burns out, and after that I'll just sigh and fill up with smoke and eventually suffocate myself. You won't get any warmer, apart from the energy you'll expend in blowing on the embers. Put on a hat and another pair of trousers, grab some mittens, find a blanket, and get over it." Sometimes the blaze gets going, and we get excited, and dance in front of the stove to show our happiness, and say encouraging and loving things to it about knowing it could do it and always believing in its ability, and we tell it it's strong enough to start the next Great Fire of London, and it cheers up for a while, but ultimately it sighs sadly, "but I know I'll never keep this up, and I'll only disappoint you in the end, so just get the blankets out and leave me to wallow in my smoky underwhelmingness."

The trouble is, cold is my absolute worst physical condition. Give me hunger or exhaustion over cold any day. When I'm cold, I have much less patience, and eat far more chocolate, and have a tendency towards tears and despair that I don't ordinarily exhibit. As you can imagine, with both the fireplace and me wallowing in misery Chris is having a fair old song and dance of a job keeping us all going. He's seriously going to have to break out the Songs That Won the Second World War soon.

Luckily The Big Sister of Chris has given to the cause by knitting me the above mitties in a warming blend of merino and silk. Their most important function is keeping my rings on my fingers, because when my hands get cold they simply slide off (the rings, that is, not the fingers). The mitties keep my hands just nicely warm enough for the retention of the rings. And that in itself is a triumph over the Great Lack of Fire of New Zealand.

Oh, by the way, September 2nd is Father's Day in New Zealand. We now have 2 different mother's days (March and May) AND 2 different father's days (June and September). Isn't there some sort of International Council of Observed Days that can sort this out, so that ex-pat children don't end up disappointing their parents?

Londinium

Yes, all right, I was writing an article, okay, I totally was. So I was writing away, tappy tap tap, diligently, writing about national literatures and cultural identity, like you do, when I got to daydreaming about London.

I only have nice thoughts about London, because I have never had to live there and thus hate it with the passion only someone who lives in a place can feel for it. London to me is sparkly Christmas (does anyone else remember the year that Liberty's wrapped the entire building in a big red bow?); showing Canadians around the best bits; doing this great big beautiful long walk that starts at the museums and goes through Knightsbridge and Hyde Park and up Piccadilly and the only thing that sucks about it is that you end up in either Leicester Square or Covent Garden, which I don't like all that much but which are part of the London craziness; eating soup and pudding in the crypt of St Michael in the Fields (it's a cafe; I didn't just take a thermos and a tupperware and sit me down among the dead); visits there with my mum which have always been awesome and memorable days (Royal School of Needlework; the King's Road to shop for the "pretty frock" I was told I'd need for Cambridge); visiting m'big sister when she lived there in a flat whose landlord thought I was her girlfriend; having sushi at one of those conveyor belt places; coming out of St Pancras station after going down on the early train and having to dash across to Euston to get breakfast before you collapse; Foyle's and the British Library and the giganta-Waterstones; having insanely expensive cups of tea in beautiful expensive tea places and giggling about the insanity and the expense...and anyway, I only have good thoughts about London.

If only our internet had stayed "down" (sometimes it kicks us off just to show us who's really in charge). But since I was here at the keyboard, and the modem was flashing its LEDs enticingly, I tappy-tapped in "Victoria and Albert Museum" just to, you know, see if there were any exhibitions about, erm, national landscape and cultural identity in the literature of Canada or New Zealand. Because there might have been.

What I found was a whole section on knitting, which is right and proper for a museum of fine and decorative arts. It's historical and modern and informative and interactive and all the things a museum website, or in fact any website, should be.

Anyway now it's time to go outside and see if the clouds have cleared, because what is a wee bite out of the moon for you tonight in the Northern Hemisphere is nothing less than a Total Eclipse here in the South.

I may write an article about it.

the view from here

Talk about the most bee-you-ti-ful Mayday morning. This is Bradgate Park in Leicestershire just before seven o'clock this a.m., where morris dancers were to be found "dancing in the May" - that is, heralding the coming of summer and maintaining the good order of mother earth and drinking beer (yes, at seven o'clock in the morning).

The odd-looking building atop the hill, in fact the hill itself, is known as "Old John", and morris dancers, hangers-on, dog walkers, and one druid, climb the hill every mayday morning to continue this tradition. This morning was an absolute cracker of a day - very breezy up top but the most wonderful blue sky and bright bright sunshine. I have a fantastic photo of Sarah with 6-month old baby Austin who, in his shades and bunny suit looked fit for a day on the slopes - but you don't just go putting pictures of other people's kids on the web, so you'll just have to imagine how cute. It was very very.

There is much more to say on morris dancers, and very much much more to say on visiting England, including turning up in Trafalgar square to discover the Public Art installation that was "Eat London" - an entire London map made of food. Also there is a sweater, which thanks to some very long car journeys and some understanding friends, was finally completed during an almost impossibly delicious morris breakfast post-Bradgate this morning. I never even showed you the denouement of the wool-dyeing experiment, which seems a very long time ago now and by the time I get around to discussing it, will be all made into funky slippers. Finally, there is the start of a sock, whose genesis is owed to the fact that my nice London friends don't get up very early in the morning and I wasn't at the time carrying the then-unfinished sweater.

However, the exam marking is upon us so I'll be laying low for a few weeks while I get that done. Still, all the pics will still exist after that, and you can use the time to anticipate my further eloquent thoughts.

Oh, I do want to be...

Last night I dreamt of rain. I haven’t seen rain since the start of October. I won’t see it again till April. Of course, I can’t wish for rain, because rain now would be dangerous. If it hadn’t frozen and exploded in shards on your head before it hit the ground, it would freeze into a death-dealing ice rink the moment it did. But oh, I miss it.

“But it’s a dry cold!” everyone says as they breezily throw on another fleece hood that covers nose, mouth and eyes, and then wrap a scarf around the outside and jam a hat on top of the whole precarious construction. “Aren’t we lucky? If it were damp, it’d get into our bones and we’d all be miserable.”

Before I came to Saskatchewan, I was taken in by it all. The heady thought of “dry cold”, that holy grail to island-dwellers who drag themselves through five months of grey skies in winter and four months of grey skies in summer. Oh, the eye-popping blue of the Saskatchewan heavens! Their cloudless, rainless expanse! Aren’t we lucky? Aren’t we lucky?

Comedian and wise man Rich Hall, sometime resident of Montana (Saskatchewan’s neighbour to the south), notes that what we call ‘winter’, “the rest of the world calls ‘the abbreviated glacial age’.” He’s not kidding. (incidentally, comedian and wise man Rich Hall now lives primarily in London, and is probably warm).

Now, a sea coast in winter is a beautiful and terrifying thing. The bashing and swirling of winter on coastal rocks is something to behold; the iron-grey waves give you a satisfying sense of security when you shut the door on them and sit by the fire with a hot cup of tea. Here, I don’t even have amber waves of grain to pretend a sea, due to some freak weather conditions in the summer that ruined all the crops (I am only a newcomer, but through my limited experience of the Saskatchewan agriconomy, it appears that even normal weather conditions are in fact freak weather conditions in disguise, and they still ruin all the crops).

This daughter of a seafaring nation has cabin fever in reverse. I’ve never rowed, sailed, or fished, but nevertheless the sea is calling. And it’s two days’ drive in one direction, and five days’ in the other. Having lived all my life in England, where even the very geographical centre of the country – as far as one can possibly be from the sea – is only a couple of hours from the coast, if I think about how far I now am from a shingle shore and the sound of the tide, and how long it’ll be before I need an umbrella, I get a miniature panic attack.

I don’t know the legend and lore and rhyme that kids have here. They don’t grow up with “Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside” and “rain, rain, go away” as their staple childhood songs. How do you fill the never-ending car journey that it takes to get from here to… anywhere? “Oh, I do like to drive in a straight line for seven hours”?; “rain, rain, come every morning for just about half an hour during the summer, so we can at least salvage some of the harvest and make a half-decent living”?

Of course, should I actually make it to the rain and the sea and the coast anytime soon, here’s what would happen. I would dash into the curling waves, fall on my knees, raise my arms to the slate-grey heavens and declaim “Break, break, break/ On thy cold grey stones, O Sea!” with teary and thankful eyes.

Thereafter, of course, you’d find me indoors bitching about the damp and how it gets into your bones, just like everyone else. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it doesn’t take long to bring a coast-dweller back to her senses. But for that one glorious moment, it will all have been worthwhile.