Mysteries of Britain, Part I

Even though I've lived in MOE for more than 3 years now, there are still some things about the culture I just don't understand. I encountered one today: It's raining out, and no one has an umbrella. Some people (mostly old men trying to cover their bald patches) were wearing hats, one or two had hoodies up, but no one I saw had a brolly.

Why? Do people here like getting wet? Are they genetically altered to have skin and hair on which the raindrops bead? Mr. W says it's about "toughness." Brits are tougher than we Yanks are. I say they're just wetter than we are. Anyone care to enlighten me on when it's appropriate to use protection when it's raining out?

Thanks in advance,
Ignorant in Islington

I Got Nuthin'

So, in honor of the time of year, I'll post this anthem about planning your wardrobe in changing weather conditions:

Like Frampton, London Comes Alive

Howdy. London has shaken itself of 18 months of March and become a summertime city. After the near-nonstop rain of last summer (I saw my breath on July 31--no joke) nothing could be more welcome. Mrs. Werbenmanjensen and I decided to take a long walk through the city, to the South Bank, and then take a detour through Wapping on the way back home. Photos from it are immediately downstairs.

Among the places we went was the Wapping steps (pictured below) that led to Execution Dock, where pirates were executed. Their bodies were left to hang at the low-water mark, and then the tide was allowed to wash over their heads three times, a ceremony known as the "Grace of Wapping."

Also, as you can see, I've taken advantage of my new iPhone and a ShoZu account to do some mobile blogging. Expect more of this in the future.

Welsh You Were Here

Howdy. The Werbenmanjensens are in Holyhead, Wales, where we've spent the last couple of days. The Rough Guide to Wales describes it as "downbeat," which is true in its own way, but there is a bit of natural beauty out here. We've been to near the top of Holy Mountain to see a couple of dazzling views (we'd give you photos, but we're using internet cafe terminals right now so publishing photos is out of the question). The path up was a good deal easier than those Scottish mountains, and we had bright and clear conditions. We're hopping the ferry to Dublin today, although our fast ferry has been canceled because of rough weather out on the Irish Sea. We're now on the "cruise ferry" leaving at 2-ish. I'm happy to report that we have American-made Dramamine so we don't have a repeat of another rough ferry ride.

April Is The Cruelest Month

Winter ...



Spring ...



It's finally spring in London. On Tuesday and Wednesday I rode my bike through central London in the post-work hours and the tables outside the pubs were occupied by more than just the smokers. We'll know it's summer when some of the beer-gutted men have doffed their shirts--although since we didn't have one last year, who's to say we'll have one this year? Yesterday was sun, rain, sun, rain, sun, rain, sun. In short, typical April.

Random Monday Thoughts

I drank a Budweiser over the weekend. I'm not proud of this. But the pub where I was chatting with friends had lost most of its power (but not all, oddly), so they couldn't serve food and the taps weren't working. Maybe they were just trying to get rid of us. If so, it worked: We decamped shortly thereafter to another pub that had working taps and stoves.

The Metcheck weather web site refers to our weekend storm as "Storm Isaac." Did we start naming extratropical storms? Or is this an English usage with which I am unfamiliar?

Sunday Sunriseblogging

This was about 7:37 a.m. today. What time is your sunrise?

Storm Surge--Not Just For Hurricanes

Well, after a summer of extreme rainfall and flooding inland, this is the next natural disaster:

Hundreds of people on the east coast of England have been evacuated from their homes in advance of potentially life-threatening floods this morning.

The Environment Agency (EA) has warned of "extreme danger to life and property" in coastal areas of Norfolk and Suffolk and parts of Kent and Essex amid signs a storm surge could lead to flash flooding. But it said today that water levels were not as high as originally feared.

Cultural Exchange, The Final Word

The New York Times had this to say about London's NFL game:

For most of the game, a spritzing drizzle fell through the hole, and with some swirling breezes, it sometimes felt like playing in a sneeze.

How About A Weather Post?

Well, this green island has moved its clocks back to Greenwich Mean Time, leaves are leaping from branches, and the ground is taking on the permaslop texture (the tundra has permafrost, but Britain has permaslop), so autumn must have caught us. While I'm a big fan of the secret summer of September, I have to admit this time of year is hardest of all--not for the cold, but for the lack of light. Losing approximately an hour of daylight at the winter solstice compared to Washington, D.C., was even harder than I expected last year. We're about six weeks away from our earliest sunsets (3:50 p.m. from Dec. 12 through Dec. 15), so maybe I should consider getting used to it. At least I can look forward to mince pies, a dish which I believe has its roots in the ingredients a royal chef put by mistake in a pie because his kitchen was too dark in December.

Even More Cultural Exchange

Hi, we're back. Well, uh, that wasn't the best the NFL had to offer its overseas fans ... between the low score, the poor passing, the five or six consecutive plays the Giants were penalized and the last comic onside kick that ended up as a line drive out of bounds, there wasn't a whole lot to cheer about. But some cultural notes:

1. The British were gaga over the cheerleaders. A British spectator sitting one row in front of us (who listened to the 1-1 Arsenal vs. Liverpool draw on the radio as the game was on) said to us, "We don't have these here. Well Wigan Athletic do -- it's two guys."

2. We dressed for rain, but in true British soccer fashion, Wembley Stadium has fairly effective sheltering for the spectators. Not for the players, though.

3. The razzle-dazzle of the NFL was a bit foreign to the British. At Premier League matches, our friend said, "There's nothing before the game and maybe at the half somebody will kick penalties for charity. Nobody watches." Compare that to the loud music thumping from loudspeakers an hour before gametime, the banners, the cheerleaders, and an opening musical act that the NFL put on the field.

4. To hear "Bollocks!" shouted out by a fan disagreeing with a call just seemed strange.

5. Our friend asked, "Fans for both teams sit in the same section?" Evidently, this is not done in English soccer because some rather foul, vulgar, and probably even actionable things happen between opposing fans even when separated by a fence. (It's not restricted to the sectarian-rooted rivalry at Scotland's Old Firm. I did point out, however, that Philadelphia fans are in a class by themselves among NFL fans.) As a side note, I met my rugby enthusiast friend for coffee this morning and he pointed out that fans for opposing rugby fans can mix in the same sections without anything untoward happening.

I'm sure there's more, but it's late.

Brrr!

It's still September. I'm not turning on the boiler no matter how cold my hands are.

Torna-no?

As I've mentioned in the past, we tend to have a mild climate in Great Britain, with extremes being certainly rarer than the continental climate I come from. So it was with an arch of the eyebrow that I greeted yesterday's news that a bunch of tornadoes had hit southern England.

It seems that my skepticism is somewhat merited:

Nina Ridge from the BBC Weather Centre said that the winds reached 60mph.

In a statement, the Met Office said that the gusts were "conducive to tornadoes" and measured T2 or T3 on the TORRO scale (which ranges from 0 to 10), meaning they were "moderate to strong".

It gets better.

Ruth Spaull of Luton said that she saw "a funnel of wind" lift her daughter's trampoline 15ft (4.52m) into the air.

Ma'am, a tornado sounds like a freight train, lifts cars 100 feet in the air, and, if you're lucky, will leave the first floor of your house behind. What you had was high winds, or maybe a dust devil on steroids.

ADDED: I should probably not demean the damage or the injuries suffered by the folks here, but when I think of tornado, I think of this.

Hello, September

September is my favorite month, and not just because of this. About a year ago, I was out for a bicycle ride and struck up a conversation with a fellow cyclist about, as happens here, the weather. I commented on how much I was enjoying the weather. He said, "You're lucky. Usually it's ----ing rain now."

At that point it occurred to me what one cabbie and several people who have lived in San Francisco have said about September in their city: They call it the "secret summer," the month it's most likely to be warm and dry. Perhaps my cyclist friend was wrong, and that in a northern, temperate, marine-influenced climate like London's September is the finest month.

I could go back and link back to all my carping about the rainy, cold summer we've suffered through, but that would be even more tiresome the second time. Suffice it to say, September has been a fine month in London, and I won't even complain about the fact that our boiler kicked on overnight last night and that I had to turn it back on midday because the temperature plummeted when the sun swung overhead ....

Mo' Wetter Blues

Well, for London and the Southeast, we're just five millimeters from a record, with a few days to go. 1903, you don't stand a chance.

UPDATED at 12:33 p.m.: According to the Guardian, it has something to do with a jet stream anomaly.

The Further Adventures Of English As A Second Language

A million points for the enthusiasm with which this writer uses the slang word jammy:

Imagine a huge traffic jam caused by a lorry carrying 10,000 jars of jam crashing and disgorging its sticky load all over the motorway and you have an idea how jammy India were at Lord's.

The context: England and India were in the final day of one of those five-day cricket test matches, with England on the verge of winning, when officials decided to call it a day because of the rain. Instead of declaring the team in the lead the winner, in their British-Continental style, officials declared the match a draw.

(Why do I know this? I, uh, watched the highlights.)

More Weather

The casual reader might run into some recent posts and wonder, "Why's he complaining about rain in Britain?" That's an excellent question, to which I respond, you would too, if you were getting double your normal rainfall.

Even the natives are complaining, and the weather forecasters are already talking about "the year without a summer."

Monsoon Wetting

The good folks at Hampstead Heath post monthly weather totals from the park, including rainfall totals. During our scorcher April, we got 5.5 millimeters of rain. May: 94 mm. June: 69 mm.

Doesn't seem like so much, I suppose ... but the daily persistence gets to be tiresome.

Friday Catblogging

Sleepy Ethel for a filthy Friday.

Rain never kept Ethel indoors.

The Tour Of London, Kent, And, Oh Yeah, France

Those of you who pay attention to sport know that the Tour de France came through London and southeast England this weekend. Mrs. Werbenmanjensen and I went down to look around at some of the festivities surrounding the prologue stage on Saturday and then staked out a spot alongside the road on Sunday in Woolwich, an unfamous part of Greenwich that is undergoing some restoration around its old arsenal and artillery barracks. This is where some friends live, who decided to host a Gallic lunch following the tour's passage.

Some comments:

1. London is probably the biggest town the Tour has ever been in. So the prologue was mobbed on Sunday by a greater-than-usual density of hardcore cycling fans, casual fans, tourists and locals who just wanted to see what was up. After crossing some poorly planned pedestrian routes from St. James Park to Hyde Park and battling crowds along the way, Mrs. W and I more or less gave up. It was better to watch it on TV. This is my basic theme when it comes to cycling fandom: It's better to watch it on TV.

2. This event proves to me that London cannot handle mass events. The foot traffic was poorly managed and inadequate information was given to spectators. When I mentioned this to our Sunday host, a London native, he pointed out that the London authorities were trying to also manage Wimbledon and Live Earth along with the Tour prologue, and that's a fair response. But imagine how many such events will be going on during the 2012 Olympiad. Fair warning to all who plan on coming for that.

3. This weekend may have been the longest extended dry and warm period we've experienced since April. You'd think I'd be happy about that. However, I'm not. Why? The week before Sunday's Stage 1, I cycled essentially the same London-to-Canterbury route in an organized ride with thousands of others. Except the difference was it rained much of the day. I paid £50 to ride in the rain. The professional cyclists get paid thousands, sometimes millions of Euros to do it. It's their job. They should have to do it in the rain, too.

4. The publicity caravan is kind of fun. My favorite bit of swag: A refrigerator magnet from La Vache Qui Rit.

4. Bicycling is much better to watch on TV.

We have a few photos. Maybe we can all talk Mrs. W into posting them.