"Riots" Revisited and the Surveillance Society

A couple additional reflections on the "riots" (see previous post below). The comparison to the L.A. riots of 1992 may be more apt than I first imagined -- not in terms of the size and scope of the disruptions themselves, but in terms of the impact of the national psyche. As my fellow Des Moines native, author Bill Bryson has noted, this is a small island. Even little riots have a big impact.

I've been quite amazed at how much the Brits think and talk about the "riots." It's a national obsession. Everyone has a story: Riding the bus through what was supposed to be a fire-bombed area but seeing no damage at all, the guy at work with fancy new shoes he looted from a store in Birmingham, etc.

Britons have faced the aftermath with the traditional "stiff upper lip," but they're shaken. They feel as if the fabric of their society is coming undone. It's the topic of Sunday sermons, editorial essays, and daily conversations. It's all politicians can talk about. Of course, some of this is still media-fueled, as the aftermath remained the top story everywhere until this week, when Libya took over.

The other thing that's intriguing is how many people have been caught, charged, convicted and sentenced. Britain is a surveillance society -- there are cameras everywhere. Nearly every store has a sign saying "CCTV in use" (closed circuit TV is the British term for security video). Cameras are seen attached to commercial buildings, warehouses, and factories. Cameras monitor most public areas, including streets and highways. Speed cameras and red light cameras are everywhere.

I have my first traffic citation from our trip to Bath, where a traffic camera spotted my car (and several others) in a bus lane. (I will say, in my defense, that the bus lane was poorly marked, and the camera is clearly a revenue enhancement for the local government. But there will be no defense, because I'm not driving back to Bath to go the court. It's cheaper to pay the fine and be done with it.)

But I digress. The point is that the cameras are ubiquitous, and because there is no Fourth Amendment nor other tradition of a right to privacy, there is little complaint about them -- especially now. Because of the cameras, well over twenty-five hundred people have been arrested for their parts in the disturbances, and with the courts working overtime, there have already been more than a thousand convictions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2011/aug/12/england-riots-police-cctv-video

Both the disturbances and their aftermath have brought about a much different reaction here than I would expect in the U.S.

Cooking with Gas and Other Adventures

From Mary: Cooking in our kitchen continues to be a learning process. First I had to adjust to cooking with gas on a stove top that is too hot and an oven that isn't hot enough. The oven temperatures on all British ovens are set by a numbered dial instead of by temperature degrees, so it is necessary to always consult a chart when using a U.S. recipe.

The ovens are also VERY small. I brought recipes for bars and brownies that use a cookie sheet since we will be cooking for 14 people when the students arrive. However, a 10x15 inch pan won't even fit in the ovens!

The recipes in Britain also are often by weight and in metric measurements. Again, consult the chart and sometimes just guess! In addition to those differences, some products we use in cooking aren't available, so you have to substitute or improvise.

For instance, they don't have corn syrup or pancake syrup in the stores. There is a "golden syrup" that isn't really like either one, but can be used as a substitute. Then there is always the question of what a product is called here.

I was looking for powdered sugar and found it is called icing sugar, but there were several other kinds of sugar to confuse the issue. There are many types of flour here and none of them are called by the names we are used to hearing. There are also many kinds of cream including single cream, double cream, extra-double cream and the delicious (despite the name) clotted cream.

Choosing a favorite yogurt has been positive because every flavor seems to be creamy and tasty, including gooseberry and rhubarb.

Mark adds: Mary has gotten very good at simply walking up to women in the grocery aisles to ask them questions about what is on the shelves. These perfect strangers are often startled at first, but once they hear her accent, are unfailingly delighted to help.

She also forgot to mention that our refrigerator fits under the counter top -- barely bigger than a dorm fridge!

How the Other Half Lived

We've stayed close to home this week, working on course syllabi and arranging upcoming trips and guest speakers (not to mention the constants of cleaning, minor repairs, plumbing, etc. at the student flat). But on a couple of nice afternoons we ventured into the local countryside.

Wednesday we visited Newstead Abbey which was the family home of the poet, Lord Byron. It was originally an Abbey and was converted to a manor house after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1500s.

Even though Lord Byron didn't live there very long (he inherited it from his uncle at age 10, in a very dilapidated state, and sold it in still worse condition when he was in his early 20s), it is still one of Nottingham's claims to fame.

The inside of the home is only open once a week, so people mostly go to enjoy the grounds. The expanse of gardens have walkways and pathways going through trees, flower gardens, lawns and around two lakes.

We went on a weekday afternoon and there were quite a few moms out with their children walking and playing on the grounds.

Newstead Abbey

On Friday we visited Clumber Park. This was another grand estate, used as a hunting lodge by the Dukes of Newcastle. Like many such places, it fell on hard times during the Great Depression and in the period between the World Wars. The manor house was demolished in 1938. Only the stables and some servant quarters remain, along with the chapel (which is quite beautiful).

Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin at Clumber Park

The grounds, which are vast, were used by the British military during World War II as an ammunition dump and weapons testing ground. But today, this wooded expanse is popular for all sorts of outdoor activities. We were surprised at how many people were there on a Friday afternoon, and how much activity there was.

The number of these manor homes all across England is amazing. Each was a community unto itself with a highly regimented hierarchy headed by the lord of the manor, down to the myriad lowly servants. The amount of wealth necessary to maintain this essentially feudal system through the 19th century is quite astounding.

Many of these properties have now been given to the National Trust and/or local governments, because the families who originally owned them can't afford the upkeep.

Wales

I am, by some reckoning, half Welsh -- or at least Welsh and Cornish, both of which point to Celtic roots. Ten years ago our family spent the night in the little village in southern Wales that some ancestors on my mother's side left a 150 (or so) years ago. But we had never been to northern Wales, which is supposed to be the most scenic part. Last week we fixed that by going on a scouting trip in anticipation of taking students on a field trip there next spring.

The weather was absolutely terrible. We seem to have a knack for picking the worst possible weather for excursions (see posts regarding Ireland, below). It was rainy, foggy, windy and cold pretty much the entirety of our trip, so some of the scenic aspects were lost on us. But our B&B in Llandudno, the seaside mecca for geriatric British tourists, provided some nice views of the bay between showers.

Llandudno, Wales

Sheep and mining seem to be major themes of Welsh history: We visited a woolen mill that looked as if it had been built at the height of the Industrial Revolution. It was water powered, though the old belt and wheel system had been replaced by an electric generator attached to the water wheel. I always imagined steam power running these things, but coal cost money and water running down the mountains was essentially free. The actual carding, spinning, and weaving machinery still in use was remarkably ancient.

We visited several slate mining sites. One was commercial, expensive, melodramatic, and made us wait endlessly in line (or "in a queue" as the Brits say). It didn't help that every family in Britain who had come to Wales on holiday was looking for someplace to be out of the rain! The other was a free national museum in which we saw and learned more. It, too, featured water power -- a gigantic water wheel with a belt and wheel system still operating through the facility.

There was significant emphasis on the tradition of the working class Welsh, despite long hours in the mines, to take time to sing, read poetry, discuss sports, or debate politics. It reminded me of my maternal grandfather -- a farmer with an 8th grade education who read incessantly and had an encyclopedic memory for baseball and politics.

Castles are also a big part of Welsh history. Those pesky Celts simply refused to be conquered, so the Romans, the Normans, and the English all built fortifications to try to keep them under control. Conwy and Caernarfon castles were on our list. Both are remarkable accomplishments of Edward I "Longshanks," an English king who had his hands full with both Celtic Scots and Celtic Welsh. The movie Braveheart portrayed him as an evil tyrant, which he may have been. But he was an evil genius when it came to castle building.

Mark (half Welsh) in the rain at Caernarfon castle

The Welsh language is another feature that's held onto with great pride. It's best for those of us who don't speak it to simply understand that nothing is spelled as it sounds, "w" is sometimes a vowel, and we won't pronounce it correctly, no matter how hard we try.

On the way home we stopped in Shrewsbury (boyhood home of Charles Darwin, sometime residence of Charles Dickens, another castle, and Medieval architecture), Iron Bridge (Industrial Revolution again), and Coventry. Coventry Cathedral is quite an amazing site! It was a lot of driving in three days, and it was good to get in touch with my Celtic roots, but even better to get back home.

"Riots"

I had planned the next post to be about our recent trip to Wales. That will come shortly. But so many people have been writing and phoning, asking us if we are OK, and all worked up about the "riots," that I thought I'd best respond to that first.

Apparently, the U.S. news media have made it appear that all of England is in flames. The British media are only slightly less panicked. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, Nottingham was listed among the cities having "riots," but we learned about all this the same way you did -- on TV. Our neighborhood is very quiet, and nothing out of the ordinary occurred here.

I put "riots" in quotes, not to take anything away from what happened in Tottenham or Birmingham, where people actually died. But here in Nottingham, at least, every broken window was being reported in the news as an "incident" related to the "riots."

Now, judging from the number of storefronts that have steel roller doors that pull down over their windows at night, or that pull bars across their windows at closing time, I'd guess that broken windows occur with some frequency here. It might be attempted robbery, vandalism, or just the fallout from a drunken street fight, but a broken window does not a "riot" make.

Here in Nottingham, about 30 people got together in one of the really poor inner city neighborhoods (a place we've heard about but never been), possibly started some rubbish fires in the street (litter is everywhere here, so it wouldn't take long to collect enough trash off the street for a little campfire), then marched to the city centre where they tried to break into a store. At that point the police moved in and arrested the ones who didn't run away fast enough. There were two other "incidents" the next night, even less eventful than this.

Currently, the media here are comparing these "riots" to the LA riots of 1992. I have no first-hand experience of either, but since the LA riots raged for a week across a sizeable area, and these only a few nights in isolated areas, my guess is that this comparison is absurd.

To an outside observer, the political rhetoric is pretty fascinating. There are Tories (the conservative party in power) crowing about law and order, and there are Liberals and Labour (the other two parties) talking about the root social causes, and the Tory government's plans to lay off hundreds of police officers to save money, respectively. It sounds a good deal like Republicans and Democrats at home, but the partisanship is much less divisive.

There are also a number of people in my field of media studies who would really like to get some hard data on the role of social media and cell phones in all of this. That, too, would be fascinating, but is for another venue.

Bottom line: Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers, and believe even less of what you see on TV. We're fine and England is not burning.

The Bank Card Saga

A century or two ago this country ruled a vast, global empire. I think I now understand how they lost it: bureaucracy.

The Luther Center program makes use of one of the large banking conglomerates here for its financial services needs. This corporation will remain nameless here, to protect the guilty.

Students pay tuition in dollars back home. Luther's Center for Global Education buys Pounds when the exchange rates are favorable, and deposits those in an account here. The director then accesses that account to pay the students' tuition at the local university, to buy food, to arrange trips, pay guest speakers, and take care of other necessities.

Britain is a bank card society. People here use their debit cards routinely for nearly everything. The cards are different than those in the U.S., which have a magnetic strip on the back and are pulled through a reader. These "swipe" cards are considered quite archaic over here, and to present one is instant admission of being an American. Many places of business no longer even have the capacity to process a swipe card. Fortunately, ATMs still take them, which is important if the tank was just filled with petrol and it's discovered the station can't take the American credit card (it happened).

The British (and indeed, all of Europe and much of the rest of the world) now use the "chip and PIN" card. This card has a computer chip embedded in the plastic. It isn't "swiped" across the reader, instead it is put in, sits there while the computer in the machine talks to the computer in the card, and then one is asked to enter a 4-digit PIN. This has lots of advantages: No need to sign, much less paper, it's faster, the chips aren't easily damaged as magnetic strips are, and they say it's more secure and less open to identity theft.

So it is vitally important for the Director to have a chip & PIN card to access the program's account. My predecessor and I went to the bank to sign the papers on my first day here, seven weeks ago. In most civilized countries on the planet, the card would be received in the mail within a week.

The bank very efficiently canceled my predecessor's card in about two weeks. This was a mixed blessing, because even though the card was not in my name, I knew the PIN and was still able to use it to access the account -- until I couldn't. Now we were pretty much cut off from all Luther funds. A few weeks after that, the process moved around to where my signature got attached to the account. Now I could go to the bank and sign the old fashioned way to draw cash to pay some bills. Not ideal, but at least the bills were getting paid.

I became an Ugly American at one point when they wanted to charge me £23 (about $38) as a fee to pay a rather large bill because I did not have a card -- the card I didn't have because they were so slow in providing it! The helpful staff at our local branch helped me file a formal complaint. I received no less than four polite letters telling me they were investigating and/or apologizing, but still no card.

When the card finally arrived, it needed to be activated. At home we call an 800 number and the card gets activated immediately. Here one either mails a receipt (the Royal Mail is another story for another time) or one sends a text message from a mobile (cell) phone. Then it takes another 48 hours. Next, one has to have a PIN. It was sent in a separate envelope, as in the U.S., but instead of just being printed on paper, it had "security features." Turn the page over, lift the tab, scratch off the silver stuff, replace the tab, turn it over again, read the PIN. I'm an educated person, I followed the directions. I couldn't read it. Trip to the bank.

So now, after seven weeks of hassle and grief, I am finally the proud owner of my own chip & PIN card for the Luther account in UK. I'm very fortunate. Seven weeks is a modern Olympic record. My predecessor didn't get her card until October last year. And the sun never sets on the British Empire.

Neighbors

We hear there has been a big heat wave back in the U.S. There's a big heat wave over here, too -- it got all the way up to 81 yesterday. It was 78 today, and predicted to be warmer again tomorrow. The natives are sweltering. To us, it just feels like summer -- sort of. I think we're acclimating to the cooler temperatures. I've found myself out in a t-shirt when it's in the mid-60s and not feeling chilly.

We take a walk somewhere nearly every evening. We took a bit longer walk last evening and visited the Halal (like Kosher, but for Muslims) market. Yesterday was the first day of Ramadan, the holy month in Islam, so the place was packed. The Muslims fast all day during Ramadan, from dawn to dark, and then get their big meal, so evening shopping is big.

Fasting from first light until dark is not such a big deal when Ramadan happens to fall in the winter here (it's on a lunar calendar, so it moves around). At this northern latitude the sun is not out long in mid-winter. But since this is summer, it's light here well before 5 a.m., and the sun doesn't set until past 9 in the evening. That's a long day without food!

It was also a national bank holiday yesterday, so many other stores were closed. That also made the Halal market an attractive option, so the place was packed. It was a miniature United Nations, with every ethnicity imaginable jamming the narrow aisles. I lost count of the languages being spoken. And we also couldn't identify a number of the vegetables in the produce section. There were several aisles of products one doesn't see at home -- even things we haven't seen in stores in Africa or China. Fascinating.

By the way, we haven't quite figured out the bank holiday thing. Yes, the banks were all closed, as were many stores (but not all). Mail was delivered as usual, but garbage was not collected. Our neighbor who works for the county had the day off, but some other neighbors appeared to go to work as usual. So it's very confusing to us. There is another day near the end of August, creatively marked on British calendars as the "Late Summer Holiday." Perhaps we'll figure it out by then.