We've got Prince Harry, Princess Diana's youngest son in the news on two fronts: his engagement and planned May 19th wedding to a divorced American actress three years older than him. On top of that, she's biracial. The times, they have a changed.
That alone has kept the media busy on both sides of the Atlantic, but then you've got a BBC 4 radio interview the prince did with former president Obama, his first out-of-office interview. Talk about Scoop.
The interview was apparently in September, and has now just been released worldwide. Thus it was before Harry's engagement. The media, never an entity to let speculation lay dormant, has immediately asked if the former president and his wife Michelle are going to be invited to the wedding. Prince Harry has already declared The Donald is not invited. The prince doesn't feel the current U.S. president is good for the environment. They don't share the same views on issues.
So, is Obama invited? The prince, displaying perfect diplomatic aplomb said that the list hasn't even been developed, and that he wouldn't want to ruin anyone's surprise before it is. The guy is a natural.
The NYT is following the unfolding stories closely. A rhetorical headline asks if we are living in the 'Golden Age of Anglophilia.' If you can name three British shows on PBS, as well the names of the heirs to the throne before Prince Harry (there are four, right now), then yes, you are an American Anglophile, and Ms. Lyall's book is for you. Order now.
Ms. Lyall is the perfect person to comment on the British—she's an American, and a native New Yorker on top of that. She spent 17 years in London as a journalist for the New York Times.
I remember reading stories with her byline and I always assumed she was British, that she just for some reason cut off the usual second name you find after the surname, after a hyphen. Something like Lyall-Covington. I imagined that perhaps this was done for email purposes.
But no, Ms. Lyall is married to a British editor, Robert McCrum, and they have raised two daughters in London. She and the daughters have moved back to the States since Ms. Lyall is still writing for the Times based in New York as an at-large reporter and filing diverse stories on VIP access to the Brooklyn Nets at Barclay's Center, Detroit's Little Caesars arena, along with its missing apostrophe, book reviews, and yes, of course, because why not, the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markel. Ms. Lyall now has a bi-oceanic marriage, with her husband still working across the sea.
In 14 distinct chapters, Ms. Lyall casts a sharp eye at our bibulous, carousing cousins who are, in her opinion, sexually repressed, perhaps latently homosexual, somewhat snobby, living with insufficient sunlight and poor dental hygiene that all together combine to give them their still upper lip mentality.
The chapter on how the British enjoy the seashore is funny to us, but painfully true for the British. They get so few hours of sunlight, and so many hours of rain, that a beach excursion is nearly guaranteed to wind down with their eating their sandwiches and drinking their beverages in the car while the wind blows anything in its way out of sight, and the rain comes "chucking down." A Britisher with a sun tan is someone who obviously got one overseas, perhaps while in Bermuda.
There is a whole chapter on cricket, after which we still do not how the bloody game is scored, because Ms. Lyall doesn't know how the bloody game is scored and bloody well won't try and find out. We do however get a sense of the atmosphere surrounding matches. The most British of games still leaves us shaking our head.
Are there really coincidences in life, or just events that had some low probability of happening, but have now just happened?
I just finished the chapter on the House of Lords and what does a recent WSJ A-HED piece tell us: they're trying yet again to decrease the 600+ size of the legislative boy and get rid of the members who show up just to collect the now £300 daily stipend, get a parking space in the middle of London, read the paper and snore. The £300 is up from the £200 pound stipend described in her 2008 edition of 'The Anglo Files.' It is probably hard to get rid of people if you keep paying them more.
And aside from that story, there is the clipping I came across when I was doing some home office cleaning that tells of the British effort to pare down some of the sillier laws still on their books. Examples were wearing armor to sessions in the House of Lords; that was considered illegal. Add to that was striking the penalty for those who fire a cannon within 300 yards of a dwelling (is getting rid of that one really wise?) and beating a carpet in the street, unless the item can be classified as a doormat and is whacked before 8 a.m..
The United Kingdom (Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England) has a population of 36 million. Their House of Commons has 650 members. The House of Lords, despite some thinning out, still has 1,200 Lords and Ladies. Consider the United States, with 323 million people and a Congress and Senate that totals 535, and it might be understandable how so many screwy laws get put on their books. They are an over well-legislated and probably over-represented nation.
There is a hilarious chapter on pronunciation and their unfathomable (at least to us) British reluctance to use the word "toilet." They positively shake if they encounter it. Loo, or lavatory, not even "bathroom" seems to leave their lips.
And what is the origin of Loo anyway? You hear it a good bit on all those British shows we get. It is almost musical. The OED considers it "unknown, M20, a water closet, lavatory." They won't say bathroom or toilet either, likely because the word is meant to convey the room/facility where the fixtures can be found.
Apparently, Kate Middleton's mother used the word "toilet" when she and William were going out, and it set the British tabloids into calling it "Toiletgate." The use of the word toilet was a clear indication that Kate's parents might be nice, but they were clearly "aspirational middle class."
As much as "toilet" might be held as a solecism by the U-class (upper class), there is an annual competition throughout the U.K. for the 'Loo of the Year.'
This is a true competition and was described in a WSJ A-Hed piece in December 2010. There is a British Toilet Association that organizes the competition with entry fees and nominations coming in from pubs, restaurants, shopping malls and government buildings. There are teams of inspectors who arrive unannounced at the nominated locations to score the facilities against a laundry list of features, including the presence of flowers, pictures, seasonal decorations, and anything that further personalizes the 'loo' experience. One entrant offered their own privately mixed mouthwash for patrons to use.
(There is no evidence that the British Toilet Association ever once considered using the song 'Skip, Skip, Skip, to my Loo' as its theme song. Pity. It would be perfect.)
Britain seems to have shied away from their historical importance in developing indoor plumbing and the "water closet." Sir John Harrington, a writer under Queen Elizabeth I, is credited with inventing the flush toilet in 1596. In the late 1800s, Thomas Crapper built ornate toilets for British royalty and helped develop indoor plumbing.
You would think with a heritage like that the British would trumpet their contribution to human waste disposal and come up with a better word than the musical sounding 'loo.'
The A-Hed piece came a few years after Ms. Lyall's publication date, but it by no means leaves 'The Anglo Files' out of date. There are great asides offered as footnotes, sometimes extensive footnotes, that further amplify and document her observations.
Given the people who are acknowledged by Ms. Lyall in helping her put the book together and accomplish the research needed to find so many parliamentary utterances that offer proof of the unique behavior patterns of the British people, you have to believe there must be Brits who feel these helpers are traitors to their culture for spilling the beans to an American.
But Ms. Lyall continued to live and work for many years in London after the publication of her insight on what it means to being British. The Brits who might have taken umbrage with having an American try and describe them have taken it like Ms. Lyall describes them: They soldier on.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
I have been a closet Anglophile ever since the RAF saved Western Society in the Battle of Britain. But the Brexit was a big mistake.
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