September 25, 2008
The Anglo Files: a Field Guide to the British by Sarah Lyall
Back in 1981, we went to England for the first time. We were staying in a bed-and-breakfast on the coast, and I was recovering from a cold I had caught a couple days into the trip. It was a typical English day; that is, the clouds were low, it was raining, and anything not weighted down by an anvil was being blown sideways. The temperature was probably 40 degrees, but factor in the wind chill and it was Frostbite Time in Bristol. We stood gloomily in the doorway and debated about whether to venture forth into the storm. I was all for going back to bed with a mug of tea, some aspirin, and a book, but our hostess, a hearty widow named Mrs. Menzies, appeared behind us, inhaled deeply, and said, “Ah, it’s a fine day! A bit blowy, perhaps, but a fine day!” Her observation has since become a catch-phrase with my family. Whenever we watch the neighbor’s cinder blocks blow into the yard on the spring winds, whenever it’s hailing enough to flood Diamond Drive in front of the hospital, whenever a snowstorm comes over the Jemez and just stops and dumps 80 or 90 feet of snow on us, we say, “It’s a fine day! A bit blowy, perhaps, but a fine day!”
Weather is not the only subject that Sarah Lyall, an American reporter living in London, writes about in The Anglo Files: a Field Guide to the British. She organizes her book around affectionate studies of such British institutions as Parliament, cricket, and drinking and such British traits as love of animals (particularly hedgehogs) and the British obsession with the weather. Those clichés about the Brits? They’re mostly true. Take oral hygiene, for example.
I went with a friend to see the movie Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, and the minute Mike Meyers appeared on the screen with those teeth, I thought, “Holy fright, it’s a documentary about British dental care.” In an unnerving chapter titled “I Snapped It Out Myself,” Lyall describes the teeth of people she met at a party. “The woman in the sexy top describing her racy romantic past? Her teeth were not only gray and mottled, packed at the gums with old unflossed bits of food that had calcified into fixed cementlike structures, but also they pointed in all directions, so that one had carved a permanent indentation into her lip.” And when Lyall described British autoextraction methods, I had to lie down and apply cold rags to my head.
Baseball may seem straightforward to us Americans, but try explaining it to a graduate student from the People’s Republic of China, who has never seen a game before. “What does it mean, ‘out’?” she asked me. “Why do they say the man is out? He is still here.” I finally came up with the word “dismissed,” which seemed to clarify the concept for her. Lyall analyzes cricket, that quintessential British sport, in “More Than a Game.” She spent time at the cricket ground and finally concluded, “Learning about cricket in middle age is, like studying Mandarin, an effort best left to scholars, optimists and members of the Foreign Service.”
Her chapters on the House of Commons (“Honourable Members”) and the House of Lords (“Lawmakers from Another Planet”) make the U.S. Congress seem downright sane. In the House of Commons, the legislators don’t sit in a semi-circle, as the members of the U.S. House of Representatives do; rather, they sit opposite each other at either side of the chamber, two swords’ lengths apart: close enough for heckling but far enough away to prevent actual physical combat. She describes the “byzantine rules, archaic customs, superfluous pageantry and doddering legislators” of the House of Lords, and “if sometimes the debate had the tenor of a late-night conversation in a college dormitory during that precious window of time after the pot has been smoked but before the pizza has arrived—well, that was the Lords’ prerogative.”
The Anglo Files is a gentle, affectionate, vigorous look at our neighbors across the pond.
—PD
