June 22, 2007
I've read dozens of novels set in rural England and have enjoyed the descriptions of rural life with small villages where everyone knows everyone else. Because of the age of most of the novels, though, I'd assumed that life no longer existed and instead, like the US, village living had turned into either suburban living or the villages were dying out. Both and neither of these things happens to be true.
You can still experience village life, and very pleasant it is, too. Most of our camping in both Scotland and England has been in, or near, small villages. Places where everyone smiles and says hi, asks us where we're from and where we're going, and mostly, places where people apologize for and explain the weather. It turns out April got May's weather and May, as well as June, has gotten all the rain that should have come in April. David's already mentioned camping in the rain, which is awkward, but not really a problem, but I find the British need to apologize for their weather hilarious. They're very polite, the British. It's one of the only countries we've been to in which the natives are more effusive if their politeness than we are. Korea, of course, being the other country. The Scots, in fact, are so polite that I feel as though they're competing with each other to have the last, good, word. At the end of one shopping exchange I overheard, the two people involved progressed from, "Thank you, Thanks, Bye, Cheers, Cheerio" before the young man walked out the door and got in the last, "Ta." The buses are even polite. Instead of reading "Not in Service," they all read "Sorry I'm not in Service."
But there are some things the British seem to do less well, including designing sinks. I recognize that indoor plumbing was a novelty for a country where the buildings are so old and so many of the pipes are on the outside, but how this leads them to continue, several decades later, designing sinks that are almost impossible to use, I'm not sure. The sinks in the hospital where Papa spent far more of his vacation than he would have liked, were so small you had to move your upper body into all sorts of contortions to wash your hands. Sort of like the mating rituals of some of the larger and more colorful birds, but with slightly less purpose in the end. What makes it especially odd is that we have yet to find sinks where the faucet is a pleasant mingling of hot and cold water. Instead, you get to push either the hot handle, so you scale yourself, or the cold handle, where you freeze. Of course, the cold water comes in quite useful when you have to stand with your hand under it for several moments because you've just scalded it using the hot push-tap.
